but I guess it's still all Bill Clinton's fault.

Accepting responsiblity is just not an option for this president.

anti-establishment art just makes so much sense somehow.

Or not.

I think Helms did her a favor.

...the slack-jawed public voted for the village idiot twice at least in part because too many liberals appear to think that stuffing yams up ones butt crack creates some sort of meaningful and potent political message. It doesn't and it's particularly egregious that so many liberals expect the slack jawed public to pay for it.

I think a good case can be made that the government has no more business financing the projects of individual artists than it has in financing the sermons of individual preachers. Just as separation of church and state helps to keep both church and state uncorrupted, so too would separation of art and state help to keep both spheres out of areas where they simply don't belong.

This is not to say that the government can't finance national monuments, portraits, etc., or that it can't fund arts education or museums. It's to say the government shouldn't be supporting individual points of view, which is what every piece of art really is.

For instance, which individual points of view should be supported and which not? Why should Karen Finley's butt crack in support of whatever it is she supports be financed while someone else's butt crack in support of the KKK or holocaust denial or some other damn thing be suppressed? The government simply should not be in the business of deciding which points of view are OK to be supported and which are not. Thus the government should not be financing anyone's art.

More generally I believe this points out a fundamental flaw of liberalism today: too many liberals these days seem to want to be edgy rebels with comfy government grants or university tenures. This is a massively self defeating contradiction and I think the public very well senses it.

"...it offers you the experience of an intelligent young writer struggling to think for himself. As Niedzviecki is well aware, this is something that the culture of individualistic conformity has made obligatory, and thereby almost impossible."

This strikes me as nothing but a fancy apologia for not thinking for one's self.

If we really don't want to take charge of our own lives and our own minds, I guess we should just go on blaming the culture for who we are. But I think it's more true that the culture caters to us more than we cater to it. Far from being slaves of the culture, we form the culture more than it forms us. The problem is that many us just don't want to accept any responsiblity for the world we're living in.

What this article is really expressing is plain old libertarian ennui. The deadly and choking disease of the 'invisible hand' has many of us convinced that we are helpless to do anything about anything, from the war in Iraq to gas prices to the dreary and sullen suburbs that most of us live in. Since Americans seem to have a deep and innate fear of truly standing out in any way, many of us are happy to believe there's nothing we can do about anything, not even ourselves. We're happy to just float along and buy stuff from the malls, even to buy our own identities.

Opposed to this libertarian (and fundamentally conservative) notion of helplessness is the liberal notion that we can in fact make choices for ourselves, that we can make choices as individuals and we can make choices as a society and we can make choices through our own democratic government. Hence culture from the liberal point of view is seen as something that we create for ourselves rather than something that creates us.

Once we we are able to see our world as something for which we are responsible, then we can start to make changes and begin to make a better world. But if we're never going to be responsible for anything, not even for ourselves, then we'll never be able to change anything and we'll always remain powerless. Which is exactly what some important elements in this society would like us to always remain--powerless.

...since I'm reminded of another uncomfortable evening long ago: the night Mark Twain's hilarious takedown of Emerson, Longfellow and Holmes was met with shocked silence.

http://www.transcendentalists.com/twain_on_emerson.htm

Of course, Emerson, Longfellow and Holmes were in no way destroying America, but after Mark Twain and that evening, America was just a little bit different from before. It knew better what to laugh at after Twain. And I think that likewise America will be a little bit different after Colbert as well.

Here is a transcript of Colbert's evening:

http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/4/30/1441/59811/