Posted on 01/16/2002 6:35:14 AM PST by Antoninus
On January 10, 1963, Democrat congressman A. S. Herlong, Jr. of Florida read, with unanimous consent, a list of 'Current Communist Goals' into the Congressional record. This prescient list, taken from a book called "The Naked Communist," by Cleon Skousen, has been posted on Free Republic several times.
Perhaps what's most shocking about this list are the cultural items. Goals that would have been considered absurdities 40 years ago are today eerily real. To review a few of the points on the list:
You have an excellent grasp of this secular problem. What you said makes a lot of sense.
Amen! We are becoming right-wing deconstructionists--destroy the left, destroy the left, offer nothing in its place.
LOL!
Painting
Excerpts from the Futurist Manifesto, 1910:
"That all forms of imitation must be despised, all forms of originality glorified... that it is essential to rebel against the tyranny of the terms "harmony" and "good taste" as being too elastic expressions...that all subjects previously used must be swept aside in order to express our whirling life of steel, or pride, of fever and of speed... that the name of "madman" with which it is attempted to gag all innovators should be looked upon as a title of honor."
Slogans of Dadaism, 1919.
“DADA stands on the side of the revolutionary Proletariat. Open up at last your head. Leave it free for the demands of our age. Down with art. Down with bourgeois intellectualism. Art is dead. Long live the machine art of Tatlin. DADA is the voluntary destruction of the bourgeois world of ideas.”
Tristan Tzara “Lecture on Dada”, 1924.
“The acts of life have no beginning or end. Everything happens in a completely idiotic way. That is why everything is alike. Simplicity is called Dada... As Dada marches it continuously destroys, not in extension but in itself. From all these digusts, may I add, it draws no conclusion, no pride, no benefit. It has even stopped combating anything, in the realization that it’s no use, that all this doesn’t matter... Like everything in life, Dada is useless.”
Pablo Picasso, conversation on Guernica, 1945:
“If I paint a hammer and sickle people may think it’s a representation of Communism, but for me it’s only a hammer and sickle. I just want to reproduce the objects for what they are and not for what they mean. There is no deliberate sense of propaganda in my painting...except in the Guernica. In that there is a deliberate appeal to people, a deliberate sense of propaganda...I am a Communist and my painting is Communist painting...But if I were a shoemaker, Royalist or Communist or anything else, I would not necessarily hammer my shoes in a special way to show my politics.”
Jackson Pollock, 1944:
“American painters have generally missed the point of modern painting from beginning to end...The idea of an American painting, so popular in this country during the thirties, seems absurd to me just as the idea of creating a purely American mathematics and physics would seem absurd...the basic problems of contemporary painting are independent of every country.”
Barnett Newman, “The Sublime is Now” 1948:
“I believe that here in America, some of us, free from the weight of European culture, are finding the answer, by completely denying that art has any concern with the problem of beauty and where to find it...We do not need the obsolete props of an outmoded and antiquated legend... We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting. Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or ‘life’ we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings.”
Music
From Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg, the Statement of Aims, 1919:
“The performances must be removed from the corrupting influence of publicity; that is, they must not be directed toward the winning of competitions and must be unaccompanied by applause or demonstrations of disapproval... performances shall be in all respects private; that guests (foreign visitors excepted) shall not be admitted, and that members shall be obligated to abstain from giving any public report of the performances and other activities of the Society...”
From Luigi Russolo, A Futurist Manifesto, 1913:
“The art of music at first sought and achieved purity and sweetness of sound; later, it blended diverse sounds, but always with the intent to caress the ear with suave harmonies. Today, growing ever more complicated, it seeks those combinations of sounds that fall most dissonantly, strangely, and harshly upon the ear. We thus approach nearer and nearer to the Music of Noise. We must break out of this narrow circle of pure musical sounds, and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds.”
Milton Babbit, “Who cares if you listen?” 1958
“Why should the layman be other than bored or puzzled by what he is unable to understand, music or anything else?... I dare suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute, and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private performance and electronic media, with its very real possibility of complete elimination of the public and social aspects of musical composition. But how, it may be asked, will this serve to secure the means of survival for the composer and his music? One answer is that after all such a private life is what the university provides the scholar and the scientist. It is only proper that the university, which—significantly—has provided so many contemporary composers with their professional training and general education, should provide a home for the “complex,” “difficult,” and “problematical” in music. Indeed the process has begun.”
John Cage, “History of Experimental Music in the United States.” 1966
“We know that sounds and noises are not just frequencies (pitches): that is why so much of European musical studies and even so much of modern music is no longer urgently necessary. It is pleasant if you happen to hear Beethoven or Chopin or whatever, but it isn’t urgent to do so any more. Nor is harmony or counterpoint or counting in meters of two, three, or four or any other number... There are people who say, ‘If music’s that easy to write, I could do it.’ Of course they could, but they don’t.”
Literature
Sylvia Plath, 1949:
“I am afraid of getting older, I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day—spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free.... I want, I think, to be omniscient... I think I would like to call myself ‘The girl who wanted to be God.’”
Adrienne Rich, It is the Lesbian In Us, 1976
“Even before I wholly knew I was a lesbian, it was the lesbian in me who pursued that elusive configuration. And I believe it is the lesbian in every woman who is compelled by female energy, who gravitates toward strong women, who seeks a literature that will express that energy and strength. It is the lesbian in us who drives us to feel imaginatively, render in language, grasp, the full connection between woman and woman.”
Quotes compiled from: Herschel B. Chipp Theories of Modern Art, 1968; Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin, Music in the Western World: A History in Documents, 1984; Sandra B. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, 1985.
Charles Ives, Memos.
"Exception has been taken by some (in other words there have been criticisms, often severe) to my using, as bases for themes, suggestions of old hymns, occasional tunes of past generations, etc. As one routine-minded professor told me, "In music they should have no place. Imagine, in a symphony, hearing suggestions of street tunes like Marching through Georgia or a Moody and Sankey hymn!"--etc. Well, I'll say two things here: 1) That nice professor of music is a musical lily-pad. He never took a chance at himself, or took one coming or going. 2) His opinion is based on something he'd probably never heard, seen, or experienced. He knows little of how these things sounded when they came "blam" off a real man's chest. It was the way this music was sung that made them big or little--and I had the chance of hearing them big. And it wasn't the music that did it, and it wasn't the sounds (whatever they were--transcendent, peculiar, bad, some beautifully unmusical)--but they were sung "like the rocks were grown." The singers weren't singers, but they knew what they were doing--it all came from something felt, way down and way up--a man's experience of men!"
Igor Stravinsky, late 1930's.
"What I find revolting in the whole affair is the underlying conception which dictated it—the principle of putting a work of art on the same level as the sacred and symbolic ritual which constitutes a religious service. And, indeed, is not all this comedy of Bayreuth, with its ridiculous formalities, simply an unconscious aping of a religious rite?... It is high time to put an end, once and for all, to this unseemly and sacrilegious conception of art as religion and the theatre as a temple.... But is it at all surprising that such confusion should arise at a time like the present, when the openly irreligious masses in their degradation of spiritual values and debasement of human thought necessarily lead us to utter brutalization?"
Aaron Copland, "Music and the Imagination", 1951.
"What seems to me a waste of time is the self-deceiving 'major' effort on the part of many composers who might better serve serve the community by the writing of a good piece for high school band."
"Negative emotions cannot produce art; positive emotions bespeak an emotion about something. I cannot imagine an art work without implied convictions; and that is true also for music, the most abstract of the arts. It is this need for a positive philosophy which is a little frightening in the world as we know it. You cannot make art out out of fear and suspicion, you can only make it out of affirmative beliefs."
George Rochberg, "Music: Science vs. Humanism", 1971.
"Every possible scientific discipline is ransacked for potential connections with and corroborations of theoretical postulates of how to expand the possibilities of of sound itself and its theoretically limitless arrangements, compositionally speaking. Musicians study computer programming, probe the latest linguistic findings, revel in the communication sciences. They read widely in logic; they take courses in advanced mathematics. All this would be admirable if it were for the personal cultural enrichment of those who feel so inclined; but it is in the name of music and exploring its possibilities in every conceivable direction, regardless of where it lands or what outlandish conclusions result, that this incredible display of misguided diligence is carried on."
You're absolutely right. We obviously can't rely on liberal institutions to let us defeat them. If we play on their chosen field of battle, well, we are lost before we even start. That's why we have to methodically start building the opposition from the ground up--networks, media outlets, artists, composersm, writers. Build up a giant before they notice and then swat them out of the park with the free market. That's exactly what Fox did--that network was laughed at a decade ago, and now they are winning NFL rights and ratings wars from CNN. (Although I admit their conservative credentials are weak, considering the amount of sensationalist trash they put on their network.)
And, like you said, the left has propped themselves up in taxpayer-supported institutions. That also has to be one of our aims--to dry up their pipeline to our money. But of course, we can cut them off all we want, if theirs is the only art out there, they they win the game by default.
FNN's slogan is "fair and balanced." As a former journalist that's the way I want it. Look at it this way: where else other than FNN do you even hear the conservative side presented? Thank God someone is doing it. The only way to present a story is with the best possible blend of both sides of issues so readers/viewers can truly make up their own minds based on real facts -- not one-sided liberal distortions.
I simply have never been able to understand why big-money conservatives like Steve Forbes don't get behind media that will counter the liberal kultursmog. Sometimes I think conservatives are terminally naive, or maybe they simply take Satchell Paige's advice to "never look back, somethin' may be gainin' on ya'." IMO the only person who's really in the game is David Horowitz and his Center for the Study of Popular Culture. He's worked the other side of the street, so he knows they're not only gainin' on us, they've damn' near got us cornered. He's out on college campuses lecturing on reparations for slavery despite being ridiculed and shunned by the elites. He preaches, not to the choir as most of us do, but to people who really need to hear his message. He's actually doing something.
Whether in fine art, popular art or the art of daily survival, we've got to start fighting fire with fire. The first and best thing to do is start countering the evil lies of Political Correctness even if our politicians won't. That means we have to throw off our fears of being called ugly names and start telling the public the truth. That means we need legions of smart, well-educated, articulate, politically conservative people to counter the endless lies in today's media. Someone has to start fighting back, soon.
Oh absolutely!! To quote Monsieur Carville: "DIS IS WAW!!!" If we can't rely on the big money conservatives then us little-money conservatives will MAKE big money, and then pour it into the war effort.
Point taken on FNN. Balanced is the way we want it. When I spoke of the sensationalism I meant more the Fox broadcast network and its penchant for depraved teeny bopper soap operas and cheap thrills programming ala "When Snapping Turtles Attack Part XXII".
Your point taken, too. Still, the media need to make some money to finance important work like FNN. Rupert has a fine sense of human nature and its frailties, which is why he's become so rich and powerful. He knows how to build ratings, and he does nothing the so-called "mainstream" networks wouldn't do first if they thought of it. As an analog, consider that despite its penchant for lurid Page One headlines and pictures, The National Enquirer is doing a much better job of investigative journalism these days than The New York Times.
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