Notes From D.R. | Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene

Are African-Americans still bothered by white involvement in black-oriented music?

The recent hype over Philadelphia rapper Asher Roth reminded me of the controversy over Eminem’s The Slim Shady LP ten years ago. I remember the mainstream press making a big deal over Eminem’s status as the first “credible” white rapper (as opposed to, well, pale imitations like Vanilla Ice) and questioning whether some black hip-hop fans would have a problem with a white dude encroaching on “their” cultural territory. I understood why the press raised such concerns—after all, there are many older African-Americans who believe Elvis Presley “stole” black-oriented music, and it wasn’t irrational to wonder whether younger blacks would likewise conclude that Eminem was out to “steal” hip-hop—but I couldn’t relate to such worries. As far as I was concerned, if younger whites were into hip-hop, wouldn’t that reduce racial tension?

It’s hard for me to regard whites who perform black-oriented music or integrate such music into their general work as cultural thieves. Quite the opposite: it makes those artists cooler in my eyes.

Consider the now-defunct new-wave group Talking Heads, which had a minor hit with “Psycho Killer” in 1977 but didn’t hit the big time until they released a cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River” in 1978. David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz and Jerry Harrison weren’t “stealing” from Al Green; they paid tribute to him, bowed down to him, gave him his props. Their remake is the work of a group that recognizes genius and gives respect to it.

Two years after they honored Green, Talking Heads released Remain in Light, a classic album heavily influenced by African- and African-American music. Light seamlessly integrated “black” and “white” musical styles in a way rarely seen before and, unfortunately, seldom seen since. Byrne and friends don’t attempt to “rip off” African and black American music; they embrace its power, its skill, its depth, its excellence. It’s often been said that in the early-1980s, Michael Jackson and Prince brought “black” music to the “white” American mainstream; while that’s not untrue, one cannot forget that Talking Heads worked hard to musically integrate this country as well. (One also cannot forget the Heads’ later forays into hip-hop, most notably the work of Weymouth and Frantz in Tom Tom Club—“Genius of Love,” anyone?—and the full band’s follow-up to Light, 1983’s Speaking in Tongues. It’s impossible to listen to “Girlfriend is Better” from Tongues without awarding Byrne honorary-brother status.)

While it’s wrong to obsess over the past, it is true that America has a sordid racial history. Considering that history—the history of an entire culture, an entire people, being officially declared inferior—there is something impressive about a person or a group of individuals expressing, openly or subtly, the belief that blacks and black culture are not inferior but equal, not backward but brilliant. From this perspective, people like Roth and Byrne are some of the coolest folks around.

This goes beyond music. When one reflects on the days when the Hays Production Code forbade depictions of interracial relationships onscreen, one can’t help giving a mental high-five to Billy Bob Thornton for making Monster’s Ball. When one recalls the hell May Britt was put through for marrying Sammy Davis Jr. –not to mention the grief Petula Clark received for merely touching Harry Belafonte on the arm on a 1968 NBC special—one can’t help applauding Heidi Klum for loudly proclaiming her love for her husband Seal.

Granted, from a certain perspective, it’s sad that race relations in this country have been so uneasy that a white person earns coolness points for embracing black culture or, in some cases, black people. However, it’s also reality.

Even after President Obama’s election, we still have a certain degree of psychological segregation in the United States. Perhaps it will always exist. However, culture should not be segregated. Excellence ought to be integrated; greatness should not know the boundaries of race, color or creed.

We can debate whether hip-hop currently represents excellence. (How many hip-hop acts today are as good as A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul were back in the early-1990s?) However, if a white person embraces the past and present of hip-hop, that person shouldn’t be considered a cultural thief by anybody for wanting to make music in that vein. Best of luck to Mr. Roth—and everyone, famous and unknown, who recognizes that quality transcends cultural boundaries.

David Brooks on “Obanomics.”

Marc Ambinder is dead-on about the futility (at least for the time being) of efforts by former John McCain adviser Steve Schmidt and McCain’s daughter Meghan to move the GOP in a pro-gay-marriage direction. Like most political parties, the GOP’s ultimate core value is winning elections–and so long as the party believes that supporting traditional marriage is the key to electoral victory, it will continue to declare that marriage is between one man and one woman. (Of course, the moment the party determines that supporting same-sex marriage is more politically lucrative, it will almost immediately become the “more pro-gay-marriage than thou” party.)

UPDATE: Schmidt’s speech.

17 Again tops the charts.

If you want to hear intelligent criticism of the Obama administration’s policies, criticism that rises above the level of merely screaming “Obama sucks!” over and over, always look to Jeff Jacoby and George Will.

Last Sunday, an actress by the name of Marilyn Briggs was found dead in her California home. Ms. Briggs never became as famous as Meryl Streep or Kate Winslet, but she had a profound impact on American society—an impact that will never go away.

That’s because Marilyn Briggs was better known by her stage name, Marilyn Chambers—and Ms. Chambers played a, well, large role in moving pornography into the American mainstream.

Ms. Chambers started off as a traditional actress, appearing in the 1970 Barbra Streisand film The Owl and the Pussycat and modeling for Ivory Snow detergent. Her career stalled, and after some deliberation, she agreed to star in an adult film, Behind the Green Door.

The film, released in 1972, starred Chambers as a young woman who is kidnapped and compelled to perform sex acts in front of on audience. The phenomenon of an “Ivory Snow girl” in an X-rated film propelled Green Door to success. The fact that the film featured a lengthy interracial sex scene also contributed to Door’s profitability.

Behind opened the door to green for the adult entertainment industry through the remainder of the 1970s into the present day. Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones became mandatory viewing for the smart set. “Mainstream newspapers …and magazines… reviewed the more ambitious soft-core movies in the 60s and then hard-core, when it was legally exhibited,” Richard Corliss wrote in a 2005 Time article. ”Why? Because it was sufficiently dangerous, popular, newsworthy and, frequently, ambitious to warrant the interest of reviewers. The opinion of many of them, including me, was that there might be a meeting of pornography, which had quickly established a kind of artistic pedigree, and Hollywood, which was striding toward explicit sexuality. That was also the belief of Deep Throat’s writer-director, Gerard Damiano, who said in 1973: ‘If it’s left alone, within a year sex will just blend itself into film. It’s inevitable.’”

The advent of home video increased the prosperity of pornography, and the Internet led to even more riches. As Corliss noted, “Pornography is big business: an industry that earns an estimated $57 billion worldwide annually —$20 billion just for adult movies in the U.S., where some 800 million videos are rented each year…the phenomenon can’t be simply a big-city, left-wing perversion; a good many of those renters, those consumers of hotel porn, have to be red-staters. Which is why, among all the cries in favor of traditional values and against naughty TV, you haven’t seen many county sheriffs or G-men forcing the old smut peddler do a perp walk. Porn doesn’t affront contemporary community standards. It is a contemporary community standard.”

The success of the porn industry in the United States is, if nothing else, proof that America is not really a “center-right” nation (or, at the very least, it hasn’t been “center-right” in decades). Granted, America was fascinated with sex (to varying degrees) long before Marilyn Chambers was even conceived: Mae West exploited this fascination to become a scandalous household name in the 1920s and 1930s. However, the porn culture has now so thoroughly ingratiated itself into America that it’s difficult to the point of impossibility to imagine it being removed.

Anti-porn crusades have almost always failed, largely because the only way porn could truly be restricted is if the United States morphed from a secular society into a theocracy—and no one, not even the most hardcore of conservatives, actually wants that. Like gangsta rap, ultimate fighting and reality TV, porn is an entertainment form that a “free” society is compelled to tolerate.

It is the official conservative position that porn is detrimental to American culture—that it damages families, objectifies women and triggers sexual obsession in men. As with most warnings from conservatives, those who enjoy adult entertainment gleefully ignore such cautions. Moral scolds, by definition, cannot be popular.

The fact that conservative criticisms of porn have largely fallen on deaf ears confirms how little cultural influence the American right has. America is what it is: a country that seeks and enjoys pleasure, a country that pursues happiness in, shall we say, nontraditional ways. Presumably, with the recent economic woes, Americans are consuming more porn than ever as a means of escapism.

So what are we to make of Marilyn Chambers? Did she destroy traditional American morality? Perhaps traditional American morality was dead long before she stepped behind that green door, otherwise she wouldn’t have been such a success. Did she appeal to the prurient interest? Sure—but there was a market for the prurient interest, as West proved back in the day. Depending on your perspective, what Chambers did was either horrible and foul or harmless and fun. However, one can objectively say that Chambers was, in a very bizarre way, an American success story.

Reihan Salam turns on Sarah Palin.

Rod Dreher on why old-school and new-school conservatives can’t stand each other.

Cal Thomas on the rescue of Richard Phillips.

Charles Johnson says conservatives who are freaked out by the Department of Homeland Security report on right-wing extremism in the US are overreacting. Fox News seems to agree (note the last clip).

Ryan Sager on an odd attempt to generate support for a tax increase in New York.

William McGurn, Meghan McCain and Kristen Soltis on whether the GOP can attract the support of gay voters.

UPDATE: More from New Majority.

The world must be coming to an end: I agree with Paul Krugman!

The former Reagan administration official, now a critic of virtually all things Republican, expressed some inconvenient truths in an April 13 New York Times op-ed piece. “Today’s G.O.P.,” Krugman wrote, “ is…very much a minority party. It retains some limited ability to obstruct the Democrats, but has no ability to make or even significantly shape policy.”

Although Krugman’s wrong to assert that the party “looked as crazy 10 or 15 years ago as it does now,” he is correct that the party seems to be headed inexorably towards rump status. “One way to get a good sense of the current state of the G.O.P….is to look at the ‘tea parties’ that have been held in a number of places already, and will be held across the country on Wednesday. These parties — antitaxation demonstrations that are supposed to evoke the memory of the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution — have been the subject of considerable mockery, and rightly so.”

The folks holding these tea parties regard Obama as a stone-cold socialist. Krugman asserts that “…the charge of socialism is being thrown around only because ‘liberal’ doesn’t seem to carry the punch it used to.” Krugman also notes “…the claims made at some recent tea-party events that Mr. Obama wasn’t born in America, which follow on earlier claims that he is a secret Muslim. Crazy stuff — but nowhere near as crazy as the claims, during the last Democratic administration, that the Clintons were [responsible for the 1993 death of Vince Foster], claims that were supported by a campaign of innuendo on the part of big-league conservative media outlets and figures, especially Rush Limbaugh.”

Krugman concludes, “So what’s the implication of the fact that Republicans are refusing to grow up, the fact that they are still behaving the same way they did when history seemed to be on their side? I’d say that it’s good for Democrats, at least in the short run — but it’s bad for the country. For now, the Obama administration gains a substantial advantage from the fact that it has no credible opposition, especially on economic policy…But as I said, the G.O.P. remains one of America’s great parties, and events could still put that party back in power. We can only hope that Republicans have moved on by the time that happens.”

At least Krugman seems to recognize that the GOP’s degeneration isn’t good for the US as a whole. Without two strong, well-disciplined parties, democracy is threatened.

The Republican Party and the conservative movement have fallen on hard times for many reasons, but one main factor has caused the eradication of the elephants: the best and the brightest of the right are either dead or aging. With no real red-state superstars on the horizon, the right seems to be slouching towards irrelevance. For those of us who remember when the right had some might, this is a deeply distressing development.

Don’t you miss the days when National Review had something fresh to say, when you couldn’t wait to read a new Thomas Sowell column, when Limbaugh was delivering top-notch work day in and day out on the radio? What happened? Everybody got old, that’s what happened.

The left has numerous flaws, but as Krugman suggests, progressives can get away with their errors because there is currently no countervailing political force. Sadly, there’s nothing cutting-edge about conservatism anymore.

There are many Americans who remember the good old days, and who hope for another great conservative uprising similar to 1980 and 1994. Yet it’s hard to find any evidence indicating that such an uprising is on its way. The American people have yet to turn en masse against Obama; perhaps they never will.

Even if the people did turn against Obama, who would they turn to? A Republican Party that (in its current form) cannot be trusted to actually limit how much government grows and how much it spends? Would some Americans turn to a third party? Would some Americans just turn their backs on the political system as a whole?

It will take some time before these questions can be answered. Until then, give Krugman credit for providing such nourishing food for thought. Perhaps conservatives contemptuous of Krugman’s criticisms will work a little harder to remove the ridiculousness from the right in order to shut him up. I used to regard Krugman as just another progressive punk—but I have to salute the man’s smarts, spirit and spunk.

Lee Walker and Joseph Bast on conservatism, the Republican Party and black voters. This article is unusual, to say the least. The authors are correct in their assessment of how conservative policies would benefit blacks, but less so when they address the reasons for the GOP’s inability to attract significant black support. The piece completely ignores the fact that the GOP decided in the mid-1960s that it shouldn’t bother trying to attract significant black support, and that political success lay in attracting as much support from working- and middle-class whites as possible (the incorrectly named “Southern Strategy”). The piece does acknowledge Barry Goldwater’s failure to vote for the 1964 Civil Rights Act (a key event in the split between black voters and the GOP), but doesn’t acknowledge how much damage Goldwater’s act did to the GOP’s image in the eyes of blacks. In addition, the article implies that Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison and Martin Luther King were conservative. Huh? It’s hard to determine how Hughes would be considered a conservative in any way. According to Arnold Rampersad’s biography of Ellison, the author of Invisible Man had some problems with the left, but he hated Ronald Reagan and regarded him as anti-poor. Also, towards the end of his life MLK was anything but conservative: just read his 1967 anti-Vietnam War speech.

The article also fails to acknowledge that, rightly or wrongly, many black voters oppose the concept of supply-side economics, and believe that the benefits of such policies don’t “trickle down” to average Americans (this is one reason why there was so much black antipathy towards Reagan in the 1980s). Until and unless blacks can be convinced of the benefits of supply-side economics, there is no realistic prospect for blacks to join the GOP in significant numbers in the future.

God help us all, George W. Bush is coming back.

As the New York Times reported last week, “Barely 80 days after turning the Oval Office over to President Obama, a tanned and rested Mr. Bush is emerging from seclusion to begin his postpresidency. He has started giving speeches, joined an off-road bicycle club, thrown out the first pitch at the Texas Rangers’ home opener and scheduled a trip to China to speak at an economic forum. More important, Mr. Bush is trying to map out what he wants to do with the rest of his life. Relatively young, at 62, and in good health, he plans to build a library, write a memoir and make some money, but he is also eager to use his time to promote the policies he cared about most while in the White House — and to help define his legacy.”

Why, George, why? What’s so bad about seclusion?

It’s bad enough that Karl Rove, the man whose political strategies were destroyers disguised as saviors for the GOP, has emerged from the shadows to contend for the unofficial title of conservative movement leader. Now Bush plans to show his face again? Is this egotism, or just a lack of sense?

Once the American public sees Bush again, they’ll become even more supportive of President Obama and even more disdainful of Republicans. It will be easier for the left to smear everyone on the right as members of the old Bush club, the same club that was perceived to have wrecked the country prior to Obama’s election.

Conservatives should tell Bush to go home and stay there for the rest of his natural life. Although Richard Nixon was able to rehabilitate his image in the twenty years between Watergate and his passing, it’s hard to imagine Bush being able to pull off the same trick.

If Ronald Reagan were alive and well today, he’d have to restrain himself from spitting in Bush’s face for what he did to the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Bush and Rove exploited conservative anger towards President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore in order to win the 2000 election, then swelled the size of government with “tax cut-and-spend” domestic policies. He refused to secure the border when he had all the political power to do so after September 11. He stumbled through the Iraq War between 2004 and the 2007 surge, costing billions of dollars and thousands of lives in the process.

The list of Bush’s errors goes on and on and on: No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, Harriet Miers, the Dubai Ports World mess, the Armstrong Williams scandal, the failure to anticipate the public’s reaction to the controversies involving Hurricane Katrina and Terri Schiavo, the failure to use his veto pen for five years, comprehensive immigration reform, the Billionaire’s Bailout. Who misses any of this stuff?

Bush is planning to return to the public stage at the worst possible time. When the average American looks at Bush, he or she sees failure, not success. The image of Bush is one of corruption, incompetence, and waste. So long as Bush continues to show his face, it will be impossible for conservatives and the Republican Party to make a comeback: Bush simply reminds people of the “bad old days,” and the folks who defended him during those days.

In an April 11 Washington Post profile, reporter Eli Saslow notes that “…while the rest of the world mulls and debates his legacy, Bush has told friends that he prefers not to use the ‘L word.’ He dismisses analysis of his presidency as premature, regrets little and refrains from engaging in the snippety back-and-forth between the Obama administration and Bush loyalists such as [Rove] and Dick Cheney. Bush feels content with his presidency, friends said.”

Bush may be the only one who feels content with his eight years in power. Intellectually honest conservatives will remember Bush as the man who weakened the immune system of the GOP, leaving it vulnerable to Democrat attacks. They will remember him as a man who did the right thing by removing Saddam Hussein from power, but did the wrong thing by remaining too loyal for too long to hacks like Donald Rumsfeld, a man who had no idea how to effectively wage a war. They will remember him as a man who did so much damage to the GOP that if one were paranoid, one would believe he had accepted bribes from George Soros to make some of the decisions he made.

Bush’s legacy is not a pleasant one for conservatives, and it will never be. He turned the American right into an unfunny joke with a vulgar punchline. The twin towers of the conservative movement were fiscal responsibility and limited government. Bush knocked those towers down.