Is Kermit the Frog a Right-Wing Conservative?

Listen to Jonathan Krohn, 14 going on lost-cause, speaking at the CPAC conference. Listen, in particular, starting around :55. And you tell me.



LOL. Get them while they're young, Evita, get them while they're young.

Sphere: Related Content

Considering the CPAC Convention

As I was swamped with a project, I paid relatively little attention to the recent CPAC conference, although I'm sure it was chock-full of all the same self-aggrandizing, anti-Democratic hatred that we have come to expect from the party of tax-cut-and-spend and back-a-war-rationalized-by-lies.

Still, if the Democrats are ascendant at the moment, surely they won't be forever -- or knowing the history of my party, for long -- so it would be smart if we paid attention to the ways in which the right-wing is trying to get itself together because someday, somehow, it will. As you all know, I am personally sickened by the hyper-radical strain of the GOP -- the side that prays to a God it thinks it knows more intimately than you do for the failure of the current president. But I'm concerned, too, because without a strong GOP, the left is going to push the Democrats too far to the left (the GOP naturally argues that this has already occurred). What we would be left with then is a president ideally hoping to govern from the center, a Democratic party standing all too much to the left of him, and a GOP standing all too much to the right of him. As per tradition, we would have gridlock -- yes, even with 60 seats in the Senate -- and who, then, would lose? Well, the American people, of course, but also Obama himself. If the GOP can hang on and never, ever give an inch, they can deny him the opportunity to turn his attempts at compromise, at solution-building, at conciliation into the same old politics as usual, which would thereby destroy the one thing that sells him better than anything else: his brand. And you can bet the GOP is betting the house that such a tactic will work. It's party above nation, and they're the masters of it.

But at the same time, the GOP does have to take long, inward look at itself in any event -- even if my cynicism about them is completely erroneous. It's almost sad watching them go after some pseudo-cosmetic fixes that would appear to address the changing landscape of our politics in the wake of electing a biracial president without actually changing any of their own. I'm not saying Michael Steele isn't a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, but I think most people in the center and on the left would find it difficult to believe that the GOP's powerbrokers did not think about the ethnicity of Steele as they elected him the de facto leader of their party. At the same time, the CPAC convention revealed, I think, how very uncomfortable -- maybe a better word could be unfamiliar -- the powerbrokers of the GOP are when it comes to race. Take a look at this video:



That was during the campaign, when Bachmann, a representative from Minnesota, continually tiptoed right up to the line of what is acceptable political discourse. However, if you take a look at this video (up until 1:30 is what's most salient):



...Congresswoman Bachmann just spills over into whitey-trying-for-blackness territory, and the effect is just awful. I'm not saying she's a racist. I'm saying she's out of her element, she's trying desperately to figure out what is politically correct. Has she ever thought of, "Michael Steele!" -- in other words, not needing to punctuate her lauding of him without slipping into ebonics?

But the GOP really has bigger problems than this stuff. I am most intrigued by the governor of Utah, of all places, Jon Huntsman. Here's a Feb. 9 piece from the Salt Lake Tribune:

Here is a sentence you probably never expected to read: Utah's governor supports civil unions.

Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., a spokeswoman said Monday, backs Equality Utah's Common Ground Initiative, a legislative effort that would provide some rights to gay and transgender Utahns. Even more, the Republican governor favors civil unions.

It's a position that runs counter to his political party and against the majority of Utahns -- 70 percent of whom oppose civil unions, according to a recent Salt Lake Tribune poll.

"He's long supported many of the ideas that are presented within the Common Ground Initiative," said Lisa Roskelley, the governor's spokeswoman, noting her boss waits to endorse specific bills officially until presented to him in final form. "He supports civil unions."

It's doubtful Huntsman's backing will lead to civil unions getting past the conservative Legislature. And it may not help the rest of this year's gay-rights legislative push, which already has shrunk from four bills to two.

On Day Two of the 2009 Legislature, a measure died in committee that would have allowed financial dependents -- besides spouses, parents and children -- to sue in the event of a breadwinner's wrongful death.

And last week, Rep. Jackie Biskupski, D-Salt Lake City, ditched her proposal, which would have sought the Legislature's and voters' approval to erase the second part of Amendment 3 -- Utah's constitutional gay-marriage ban -- that forbids civil unions.

Huntsman, who endorsed Amendment 3 when he ran for governor in 2004, now favors repealing that portion, Roskelley said.

She said the governor was unavailable to comment Monday.

Jeff Reynolds, spokesman for the conservative Salt Lake City-based Sutherland Institute think tank, which opposes the Common Ground Initiative, said he's "not surprised" by Huntsman's softened stand.

"He had to be dragged to the altar of Amendment 3," Reynolds said in an e-mail, "and everyone has known since then that Governor Huntsman would rather be nice than right."

Notice that last line of what I quoted -- that Gov. Huntsman would "rather be nice than right." To turn that around, the social-issue ultra-conservatives that have driven the GOP would rather preach hate than accept that a majority of the nation does not stand with them. Curiously, by the way, notice how one of the party's not-so-scary new darlings, Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, deftly deals with the question of how to make the GOP more inclusive, even if it means acceding to the center on the question of gay rights:



As for Rush, feh. There's nothing I can add to the discussion of him except to say that I hope his oxycontin supplier keeps him happy.

Sphere: Related Content

Terry Teachout: Water Carrier for the Dramaturgical Right

There's a provocative and, if you read it carefully, profoundly whiny piece in today's Wall Street Journal by that publication's theatre critic, Terry Teachout. I'm always amused by Teachout, who I've never formally been introduced to, when I go to the theatre. For someone who openly revels in the glories of Republicanism (hurt the people, kill the people, lie to the people, starve the people, etc.), he doesn't look like someone espousing conservative values -- he's never in a jacket and tie, for example, or even dress shirt and slacks. Call me Mr. Blackwell, but it seems to me that a measurement of conservatism must be superficial and sartorial -- there is a semiotic connection between maintaining the theatregoing fashions of yesteryear as a reflection of beliefs held far more deeply, and often quietly, inside. Maybe Rupert Murdoch doesn't pay Teachout enough to actually dress like William F. Buckley or Bill Bennett or David Brooks, but somehow I just think that's not true.

But let me get to Teachout's article, which is called "Enter, Stage Right?" and has an intriguing dek: "Why we don't get conservative plays." This subject was dealt with years ago in successive issues of American Theatre magazine, if memory serves, but this is as good a time as any to revisit the subject. Before I talk about what I think are the fatal flaws in Teachout's piece, let me suggest that I think the American theatre would benefit immensely from drama with right-wing points of view; if there can be Christian rock, surely there can be Christian drama.

In his piece, Teachout presents anecdotal evidence as to why the American theatre, or theatre as a whole in the Western world, doesn't get conservative plays, but let's step back for just a moment and, for the sake of argument, talk about what some of the stumbling blocks to creating such works might be. Fundamentally, it seems to me, the conservative movement is about self-reliance and the unstinting, unswerving, unquestionable power of markets, neither of which strike me as particularly fertile avenues for mining drama. You can say Ayn Rand and all of that, but if the theatre's deepest function, to tell stories, is equally about teaching us something about tourselves, to work out disagreements and discordant elements of humanity through conflict and resolution, then how do you reconcile that primal effort with a philosophy that shows aversions to conflict, that expects all to conform, that expects lockstep marching, that expects all to sign on to basic tenets and precepts with a minimum of dissent. How can there be drama when there is no drama within the conservative way of thinking? Indeed, the drama is between conservatism and liberalism -- the conflict between the urgent desire to turn back the clock, to halt and roll back progress, and the equally urgent desire to achieve greater progress for all.

It's telling that Teachout begins his piece by talking about the recent meeting about the problem of not enough women playwrights being produced on Broadway. He glibly glosses over the details of the meeting by noting how the "usual statistics were adduced to prove the point, and the usual male suspects made mollifying noises in a story published in the New York Times, though none promised to do anything in particular about it." Teachout then provides a quote from Oskar Eustis of the Public Theater -- "The issue is best dealt with by consistent consciousness-raising rather than a specific program," which suggests, because Teachout doesn't bother to double source this element of the story, that the Public is the key instrument by which gender equality in producing can be achieved. But the Public, of course, is not Broadway, and just in case everyone has lost their minds, this discussion came to the forefront when Theresa Rebeck wrote in the Guardian about the problem of not enough women being produced on Broadway. So Eustis was essentially the wrong person to talk to. But then, perhaps there's a slimier agenda not bubbling to the surface -- that true conservatism, as strict constructionists would have it, would almost certainly aim to roll back not just civil rights but universal suffrage.

Then again, by quoting Eustis and skewing the topic as Teachout has, he gets to write his slap to the left: "Liberalism, it seems, has its limits, even at the Public." Cue Linda Evans and Joan Collins tumbling into the pool.

Teachout has only just begun, though. He cites that New York Times story on the women-playwright problem to segue to a recent and different Times story about the paucity of plays written from anything other than a liberal point of view. He quotes Alison Carey of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, for example, but curiously, he fails to provide her title. (She's a co-founder will Bill Rauch, the head of Oregon Shakes, of Rauch's acclaimed Cornerstone Theatre Company and she's part of Oregon Shakes' look at American plays; you can read all about her here.)

Then Teachout raises the specter of David Mamet, who announced earlier this year that he was renouncing liberalism, and he somehow connects Mamet's born-again conservatism to, of all people, Tom Stoppard, lamely suggesting that The Coast of Utopia is a "meditation on" -- i.e., a rejection of -- "the destructive consequences of 19th-century utopian absolutism," which is, I think, the most wrongheaded, misinformed and philosophically hijacked reading of those plays I could have possibly imagined.

More to the point, Teachout says he "can't think of a single well-known American or British playwright whose political views are even slightly to the right of center. Nor do I think it likely that such a person would flourish were he or she suddenly to emerge from out of nowhere: Theater is a social art form, and the culture of American and British theater is 99% left-liberal, if not more so."

Who does Teachout think he is to make such a grand, sweeping statement about the political views of an entire creative class? And what, exactly, does 99% left-liberal mean? Is Teachout suggesting -- and I think, God help us, he is -- that 99% left-liberal means we all believe in life in prison without parole (I don't) or gay marriage (I'm not sure)? This is more reflexive Republican reductionism, the kind of babbling commentary that not only reveals what we already knew -- that Teachout carries water for the right-wing as part of a culture war Republicans will probably rev up with the ascension of the Obama administration -- but that his intellectual capacity to advance the arguments of the right-wing are woefully limited.

Now read these two graphs:

Is this lockstep ideological unanimity a problem? Some theater professionals claim to think so. Nicholas Hytner, the artistic director of London's National Theatre, has said that he longs to commission a "good, mischievous, right-wing play." But he gave the game away when he added that what he had in mind was "a play that ended up in a position that, for instance, was highly skeptical about abortion rights. I would like to see a play about the white working-class communities that were completely displaced by waves of immigration. These are the offensive plays we're not doing."

Mr. Hytner, in other words, wants to produce issue-driven conservative plays that are just like today's liberal plays, only in reverse, whereas the problem with today's political theater is that its practitioners see their plays not as works of art but as means to an end. In such tedious exercises in left-wing agitprop as Sam Shepard's "The God of Hell," Caryl Churchill's "Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?" and Tim Robbins's "Embedded," we are presented with a black-and-white universe of victims and villains, a place where every deck is stacked and never is heard a surprising word. Why would anybody with half a brain in his head -- even a fire-breathing McCainiac, if such a creature exists -- want to suffer through their right-wing equivalent?

First, for Teachout to talk about the "problem" of ideological unanimity is hilarious; that's the definition of the right-wing, not the 99% liberal-left. Second, for him to argue that liberal and conservative mean precisely the same things in the U.S. and the U.K. shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the two societies; even that dyspeptic duo, Reagan and Thatcher, did not agree on everything. Third, isn't it interesting how selective Teachout is in terms of the plays he cites to make his argument? He doesn't, for example, show any knowledge of, or interest in, documentary theatre -- yet its that form, in particular, in which the decks really do tend to be stacked; this was my primary criticism of A Question of Impeachment at the Culture Project, as some of you may remember. What we're really discovering in this piece, and it's a shame, is that Teachout's frames of reference are limited, just like his political philosophy.

But perhaps most ridiculous of all is Teachout's final graph:

I don't doubt that the American theater would be a more amusing place if it harbored a few uncloseted conservatives. But when the curtain goes up, I don't care whether the author of the show I'm about to see is a Republican, a Democrat, an anarchist or a drunkard, so long as he's taken the advice of Anton Chekhov: "Anyone who says the artist's field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing. . . . It is the duty of the court to formulate the questions correctly, but it is up to each member of the jury to answer them according to his own preference." That's what great playwrights do: They put a piece of the world on stage, then step out of the way and leave the rest to you.

Certainly I won't argue with Chekhov, but when Teachout confides that he doesn't care whether the author is "a Republican, a Democrat, an anarchist or a drunkard," isn't he negating the point of his story? I mean, if he doesn't care about it, why write about the "problem" of there being no plays from the conservative point of view? All that twisting and turning for that? Oh, good grief, Charlie Brown. At least have full possession of, and take pride and courage in, your convictions; don't boil it down to whether the American theatre is "amusing" or not. Oh, and if we're talking about the American theatre, why quote Nicholas Hytner? Let's get Teachout a painkiller for the contortions he put himself through to write this right-isn't-wrong rant.

ADDENDUM: In the interest of being everything Fox News isn't -- fair and balanced -- I urge everyone also to read this piece on the possible ascendency of intolerant liberalism on Thomas W. Loughlin's blog A Poor Player.

Sphere: Related Content