Obama the Target

Two noteworthy voices spoke up this week about the character of the animosity toward Barack Obama. First, last Sunday, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times wrote an op-ed column that addressed itself to that animosity, what lies behind all the sound and fury. Today it was former president Jimmy Carter who spoke out about the presence of racism in the current hysteria in town meetings and even congress.
Dowd called her column “Boy, Oh, Boy,” and she deserves credit for calling a spade a spade (pun intended.) I was so impressed with the hard look she took at the implication of Joe Wilson’s shout of “You Lie,” that I sent the piece to several friends to read. I felt it was about time thinking people face the fact that raw racism is once more bubbling up to the surface and we need to examine it and where it might lead. She called her column what she did because she contends that what Wilson was really saying was “You lie, boy!” She then goes on to point out that South Carolina has long been the hotbed of Confederate zeal and pride; the Old South still exist in the minds of many South Carolinians. It has been a state always on the front lines of backward thinking, just look at Strom Thurmond, Senator DeMint, and Joe Wilson, not to mention their misbehaving Governor. DeMint was one of the featured speakers at the rally in Washington last Saturday. Retrograde vision seems endemic in South Carolina. But Joe Wilson has little to worry about in his district which is solidly Republican and white. T-shirts and car tags are selling like hotcakes with “You Lie! “ boldly set forth for all to see. Wilson was very upset when the story broke about Strom Thurmond, the veritable archetype of the Old Segregationist South, confirmed he had a daughter with a black woman in his employ. Wilson thought it brought shame to the state and white people.
The rally last Saturday was billed as a protest over the Administration Health care Bill; but one look at the signs and posters people showed up with indicated the real purpose of the rally was a hate-fest aimed at our first black president. One sign that seemed very popular was “PUT OBAMA IN THE GRAVE WITH KENNEDY.”Other signs linked him with Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, and Castro. Another favorite was the image of Obama as the comic book image of the Joker, especially in the Heath Ledger interpretation—with the slashed mouth. It was all frothing-at-the-mouth expressionism, the trash thoughts of very angry and unhappy people. It was full of nasty comments and threats of violence. The organizers of the rally—corporate operatives using corporate money, like Freedomworks, which is headed by ex-congressman Dick Armey—tried to sell the gathering as positive, but you’d have to be an idiot to see it that way.
Dowd thinks, and Jimmy Carter agreed with her, that a sizable segment of the South has never accepted the Civil Rights Law and Integration and have been laying in the weeds waiting for an opportunity redress the “wrongs” that have been imposed on the South. They are folks who just can’t accept the idea of a black man in the Oval Office. It just ain’t right, and the fact he is a well-spoken, educated, and uppity black man makes all the worse. There seems to be no reasoning with these folks. Accompanying this racial discontent is silly talk about succession from the Union, first mentioned by the Governor of Texas several months ago.
The important thing about Carter speaking up, is the fact it was Carter, an ex-president from the South, someone who is deeply Southern and knows what he is talking about. He said outright that the animosity toward Obama is clearly based on the fact he is a black man. He said there are some people in the South and elsewhere who believe that a black man can’t have the right stuff to be president of this nation. The right stuff is white stuff—period! Black people, it is said, aren’t equipped to do the job. Since the comments come from Mr. Carter, who is respected around the world, they should carry some weight.
I got an email from my brother yesterday who lives in the Midwest. He’s retired now but part of his job was to go down to Nashville where his company had another factory. While he was there he saw a reenactment of the Battle of Lookout Mountain, a battle of the Civil War that the South lost. However, in the reenactment the outcome was different: this time the South won. This is how they work to redress past wrongs—replace reality with fantasy.

Letter to a Friend

Parts of a letter to a friend….
Otherwise I am enjoying one of my drawing streaks. I have never been one to work on some regular, punch-the-time clock sort of schedule; it’s more periodic outbursts with me, an eruption of ideas and energy that can go on for three or four months and then lay dormant for 6 months, while I get into other things of interest to me. For the first time in ages I am working on a horizontal format, me, a strictly vertical guy for decades. I don’t know what got into me. On a sudden impulse I turned my paper because I had an idea to do a three panel triptych, like Max Beckmann was fond of doing. I am also in a more formal frame of mind, which is odd for me, as I am usually focused on subject matter and content. This time I am more concerned about pattern, the black-white-and-gray patterns I am getting by mixing pen and ink tones and shadings with pencil. When I sit back and contemplate what I have done, I am looking at how all the bits and pieces are hanging together; I am asking myself, do they all harmonize? I am getting an overall grey look with white and black accents in the grey field. There is a softness and subtlety to the imagery that I really like.
What is the nature of the imagery? Well, let’s see, how about an explosion in a cartoon factory, or perhaps a kind of intoxicated surrealism, or like the theater of the absurd. One thing is for sure: it is horror vacui taken to an extreme. One drawing I have titled “Merry Mayhem,” and another “Four-square Evolution.” The sizes of the images are small, 12” X 8,” like Paul Klee’s work, diminutive but complex and lively. However, I have not abandoned the figurative/symbolic imagery I am noted for. No indeed. I saw this German film two weeks ago, “Eight Miles High,” starring this incredibly sexy young actress. She inspired me to do two ‘hieroglyphs’ featuring her as a Betty Page retread strutting her stuff on my typical floating stage with symbolic bric-a-brac surrounding her like broken and random pieces of memory, all tokens of my experience more than what belongs to her. I have done 5 things like that which are larger than the other group. All this work is as good as anything I have done in the past. So at 73 I am not slipping or losing any of my power. The one problem that I do have that is connected to old age is the “yips.” Golfers and pool players are familiar with the yips. They are those sudden uncontrollable twitches and jerks, the result of old and tires nerves. They can ruin a putt or make you miscue at the worse time—or make you draw a line you didn’t want there. Such ‘accidents’ can screw up am image.
Interestingly, I sent a bunch of my drawigs to RC, that old friend from college, who I have been communicating with a lot last six weeks. He said he would, unlike Fred Spratt, comment on them. He knows the story how Fred would not comment on them because they were so far removed from what he does; he just couldn’t relate to them. Well, it has been three weeks since I sent those things to RC and so far nothing has been forthcoming. It really doesn’t matter because he has already rendered me a service that I deeply appreciate. Both he and I have had a long time interest in what is commonly called “Outsider Art.” After some back and forth about some Outsider artists, he told me that is how he is seeing me. I am an outsider despite my education, because I have pretty much thrown the baby out with the bath water, which is true. In Primus Rota I characterize this by saying my education “was cargo I no longer needed so I threw it overboard.” RC has given me much to think about. The label does fit with my eccentric and highly subjective imagery, which have been inscrutable puzzles to so many people and, frankly, to me too, although I do speculate about them for the hell of it, to be playful. It fits with my character and what I have experienced in extreme moments of vision and illumination, which removed me from the club of professors at UNLV. My work has been so personal since 1968, that fateful year for so many people my age and younger, and for a long time I have ignored the trends and fashions of the moment and gone my own way, no matter what the consequences. The guy who took my place at UNLV was once a colleague of RC’s. He painted stripes, what Celine liked to call “necktie art.” He is still there, Head of the Art Department now, and probably still paints stripes. God bless him. Some belong there, I didn’t. I work on the basis of inner impulse not external dictates and I have been following that star for four decades, and so I say fuck the art world, its money, games, and galleries, and all the rest of it. Right? Right…
The following is a response to the above from SD, my friend up in Canada.
“Your comments about “outsider artists” don’t surprise me at all except that you think that is a revelation. That’s how I have always thought of you. Beyond the art, it speaks for your integrity. I think of you as one of the few people I know who has stayed with your values all the way through.”