Just to build on my update to my last post– there seems to be a bit of an argument about Joan Rivers and how to talk about her death, given that she called for the destruction of the Palestinian people shortly before her death. It’s the Wagner thing, one more time.
I confess that I find this argument kind of boring. I am firmly of the opinion that bad people can make great art. I always say “Ty Cobb had a great OBP,” which is partially a joke but also a serious point. Nobody would question whether Cobb’s racism (or other character defects) kept him from getting on base; it’s an objective statistic. People also probably wouldn’t question that Robert Lee Moore made important advances in topology. So with certain athletic or scientific or similar accomplishments, we know we have to separate the quality of their work from their character. Art is subjective, but I think we should apply the same basic logic and acknowledge that there’s no magic formula in the universe that keeps bad people from making great art. In fact it seems like they make more than their fair share. Pretty easy question, pretty boring question.
The other side of this is whether you are excused from bad behavior by your historical circumstance. We tend to talk a lot about the racism and homophobia of specific individuals, but the fact of the matter is that a very large portion of human beings in history have been racist and homophobic, given their times. I remember when that college student refused to recite a poem by Walt Whitman because of Whitman’s racism. I promise: a large majority of the poets whose work that kid reads all the time were crazy racist. So is that an excuse? Part of the problem is that there are almost always people who did correctly identify the moral argument who were contemporary of, or came before, the person you’re defending. Yes, Thomas Jefferson held slaves at a time when many people held slaves. But there was also a robust abolition movement with a long history and a lot of writing that Jefferson could have read and been convinced by. Hell, there were anti-slavery arguments in ancient Greece. So too with Joan Rivers and Palestinians: yes, a lot of people of her age are racist against Palestinians, but there’s also plenty of people her age who aren’t. If Noam Chomsky has been able to find a non-racist position on Palestinians as a contemporary of Rivers, why wasn’t Rivers herself?
Here’s what I know for sure: we’re not at all consistent with this stuff. Not even a little bit. Do you need to mention Rivers’s racism every time you talk about her or her accomplishments? I don’t know. Do you need to mention the slaves every time you talk about Jefferson? Do you need to provide the necessary caveats every time you talk about Woody Allen? (Provided you think he’s guilty.) Recently, there was a controversy about H.P. Lovecraft’s abundant racism, with many arguing that we’ve got to start mentioning it every time we talk about him. Is that a general principle? I think the answer to these questions has way more to do with how much you like the person in question’s work than any moral principle. I’ve never known anyone to be particularly consistent on this issue.
So I guess that’s the source of some frustration, for me. If you want to celebrate Joan Rivers, go ahead. I just hope that if you spent time blasting people for still enjoying Woody Allen’s work, you reevaluate how closely you hold onto those principles. And I also hope that, even if you don’t think her statements about the Palestinians belong in her obituaries, you acknowledge the fact that the media’s broad silence on those statements are a product of who she was criticizing. Don’t allow your own silence to be complicit in a culture in which racism against Palestinians is uniquely permissible.
I have a good example of the sort of double standard that exists here, in the world of classical music. Richard Strauss vs Sergei Prokofiev. Strauss was an old man by the time the Nazis took power and he elected to stay in his comfortable mansion in Germany and engaged in some collaborative activity with the Nazi regime. He also had a Jewish daughter-in-law who he managed to keep out of the camps using his prestige as a cultural figure. It’s impossible to read any sort of semi-lengthy gloss on Strauss without ruminations on the taint stemming from his I think halfhearted involvement with Nazi authorities during the 30s.
Sergei Prokofiev lived in the west prior to emigrating back to the Soviet Union in 1936 (!). This move may have been motivated by some career problems in the west. Prokofiev, like all creative artists at the time, was involved in Soviet arts unions and official activity. Any sort of semi-lengthy gloss on Prokofiev involves his denouncement by Soviet commissars after WWII but I’ve never read any sort of apologia (perhaps it exists?) for his decision in 1936 and subsequent activity and collaboration with the communists.
The double standard here is striking. FYI, I listen to both composers (and Wagner) without any qualms.
Freddie – I’ve just begun reading your blog again and have been very much enjoying it. Keep up the good work.
You like to point out when people wildly misrepresent what their opponents have said, so I’ll just correct your wild misrepresentation of Joan Rivers’ comment. She did not “call for the destruction of the Palestinian people.” She excused the killing of some two thousand Palestinian persons. That’s bad enough. Can we at least be honest enough not to accuse her of calling for genocide? Sheesh.
True or false: she said that Palestinians deserve to be dead.
False. She said that “they” deserve to be dead, referring to the two thousand Palestinians who were killed (and possibly referring also to the 100,000 Japanese who were killed at Hiroshima). It’s false to paraphrase that as “Palestinians deserve to be dead,” or as “Japanese deserve to be dead” either, for that matter.
It’s extra false – again, I’ll say dishonest – to crank it up even more to “calling for the destruction of the Palestinian people.” That’s a pretty egregious lie even by Internet standards. First of all, she didn’t “call for” anything at all. She justified events that had already occurred, deaths in Gaza and Hiroshima. So, “called for” is lie number one.
Lie number two is that she was advocating the destruction of the Palestinian people. She definitely blurs responsibility between Gazans as a whole and individuals who were killed, and between Japanese as a whole and individual Japanese who were killed. That’s a big part of what’s so indefensible about her comments. But she was talking about the deaths of those individual Gazans and Japanese, not of the Palestinian or Japanese people. In fact the interviewer gave her a chance at that one earlier, when he quoted a story saying that Israel was trying to wipe out the Gazans, and of course she rejected it.
God, I just love you white dudes that claim to care about racism and then devote all your energy to arguing that specific acts of racism aren’t.
We’re living in an era where there is a group of people who don’t enjoy our protections against bigotry. That lack of protection occurs in a political and legal context in which they are subject to constant surveillance and rampant trampling of their civil liberties and rights. Where we’ve invaded or attacked their countries again and again in the past decade. Where national politicians talk about crusades and holy wars and where national political commentators say we should invade their countries and convert them to Christianity. And on and on. And then this lady justifies these killings in starkly ethnic terms, and the whole world gives her a pass for it, and now you want sit here and get pedantic about what you see as the precise dimensions of her bigotry? That’s your priority? I think this is a con job, and even if not, I think you’re tedious in the extreme.
All I’m saying is, you can condemn that statement of hers as strongly and as self-righteously as you please – and it certainly deserves to be condemned, I’ve made that clear – without lying about it.
You’re a part of the problem of dishonest discourse on the Internet, the problem that you’re always preaching against. But you’ll probably never see that.
She did say on another occasion that in an analogous situation New York would “wipe out” and “get rid of” New Jersey.
Freddie would no doubt describe that comment as “racism” against New Jerseyans. Right?
Are you one of these “there is no such thing as a Palestinian” types?
Nope.
You can call it hypernationalism or whatever pleases you. Wanting to “wipe out” millions of people makes you an evil piece of vomit either way.
I don’t have a problem with appreciating the great art (or athletic skills) of an asshole. These things are easy enough to separate. What I cannot abide is including an unfunny hack like Joan Rivers, who hasn’t been relevant for 30 years, in the conversation. Opinions will differ of course, but if anyone has a youtube clip or other such source that he or she thinks is Rivers at her most “brilliant” or even “mildly amusing,” please let me know. I’ll keep an open mind.
I tend to think Thomas Jefferson is in a different category. To the extent that the man is an artist, it is his political writing, specifically his defense of liberty, for which he is remembered. It isn’t just a question of what Jefferson could have read, it’s a question of letters written specifically to him by Benjamin Banneker. Similarly, slaveholding isn’t just about supporting a particular opinion, it’s an action. As you correctly point out, Woody Allen hasn’t been convicted of anything but I do think that caveats are necessary when it comes to Roman Polanski (who to be clear you don’t mention) who was convicted and is a fugitive.
Thus, I don’t think your larger argument particularly holds up. There’s inconsistency to be sure, but there’s also huge variation in the cases you’re discussing. I think you’re correct that there are things said about Palestinians that get a pass that would not be given a pass in other cases. Similarly no doubt our caveats are inflected by whether we like the person. But you don’t really have a brief here because your calling for consistency across an incredible variety of cases.
Thanks for this piece. What it has me thinking about now is the relationship between biography and art.
I think it’s a mistake to think of the author as separate from our experience of their art. To take an extreme example, Johnny Cash’s performance of Hurt is glued to the larger cultural narrative of his life. That song’s story is more than just its lyrics — it’s the story of a dying country star known for his mistakes, looking back at his life with regret and acceptance.
Even our experience when we don’t know the details of an artist’s biography is relevant. “I was just wasting time on youtube and I found this amazing song” is an experience that’s deeply impacted by the act of discovery, which itself is connected to what we know (and what we can imagine) of the artist’s background. That amazing video is just a bunch of normal folks who are deeply passionate and then without any particular ambition and they’re amazing!
As artists age, their biographies sometimes become less interesting to us. I don’t know why, but I suspect it’s because I don’t expect to know anything about the past. So what’s his name was a 17th century novelist? OK! But this relieves some of the pressure on how his biography impacts my experience of his work. Since I don’t expect to know a great novelist of the past, the author’s details matter less to me.
(Two quick thoughts: this would predict that those more knowledgeable of the history of literature would interact with the art of the past differently than I would. It’s also the beginning of an argument in favor of reading past works, because it’s a substantively different experience than reading modern literature.)
The issue with Joan Rivers, it seems to me, is that we can’t really opt out of her biography. We have no choice but to care about Joan River’s narrative — we just know too much about her. What’s at stake is the nature of that narrative — to see her as a feminist hero or as a feminist hero tainted with racism. Maybe in 20 years (10 years?) the case will be different, but since we currently have no choice but to see her art through the story of her life, we have a responsibility to tell it truthfully.
I’m not sure where this thing of retrofitting Rivers as a feminist hero comes from. Yes, she was one of the first women to break through a barrier. But a major part of her schtick was denigrating famous women on the basis of their looks. That’s a strange feminist hero to me.
May I submit that perhaps one reason that Helen Thomas’s remarks were prominent in her obituary while Joan Rivers’s have not been is that our culture held Thomas, a prominent journalist, to a higher standard of intellectual quality and restraint than it did someone who made her living telling menstruation jokes and making snarky comments on what people wore to the Oscars. Helen Thomas was seen as a serious person and Joan Rivers wasn’t.
No. Joe Scarborough just got promoted to senior analyst on Meet the Press. So, that’s a no.
What you call “the Wagner thing” I call “the Cormac McCarthy problem.” I think he’s a very talented writer whose books I appreciate as literary works, and he seems to have a very conservative worldview (encompassing homophobia and sexism) that really grates on me at times.
I also wish to add that I never liked Joan Rivers (her “little bits” of plastic surgery were hardly endearing) or found her funny, and as a gay man I find it laughable to call her a modern gay icon.
I agree it’s wrong Rivers got a pass on those egregious comments, and I also agree the reason why she got that pass is because there’s no broad social perception of Palestinians (or Arabs in general) of being the victims of racism in this country. We’re all very aware and educated about the history of slavery in this country, and about the Holocaust, so people are very touchy about anti-semitism and using the N word. But people here are a lot less touchy about Islamophobia, and our experiences with Al Qaeda and more recently ISIS reinforce general stereotypes of Arabs as sadists and terrorists. Add that to the fact that images of Arabs as victims, like the horrifying ones coming out of Gaza, for the most part don’t get covered in the mainstream media, and the result is just this terrible dearth of empathy and sensitivity on the part of middle America towards Arabs. But I have hope that that is changing now, though maybe not quickly enough.
I was pretty appalled by what Rivers said, and her subsequent non-apology, and the even worse the fact that she then attempted to claim her comments were taken out of context (not). Then the fact that she died so quickly afterward kind of made me feel petty about being angry. She didn’t seem like a horrible bully anymore, but instead like some pathetic old woman who tried and failed for so long to stave off old age, and went out on a horrible sour note, the victim of her own mental rigor mortis and ignorance, defiant to the end.
Compare the lack of backlash over Rivers to what happened to Donald Sterling recently, and draw your own conclusions about the discrepancy. And Donald Sterling, admittedly a sad clown and an odious person, didn’t even use the N word. I’m sure he’s a racist, like I believe everyone is to some degree, but my take on Sterling was always that his comments were motivated more by insecurity and jealousy, than any explicit aversion to African Americans. He just didn’t want people looking at those photos of his hot girlfriend and Magic Johnson and imagine them getting it on. I think that’s what really bothered him the most. Anyway.