Archives for July 2010

Roy Zimmerman

(Image below via)

Allen
Ginsberg –  from America

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.

America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.

I can’t stand my own mind.

America when will we end the human war?

Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
I don’t feel good don’t bother me.

I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.

America when will you be angelic?

When will you take off your clothes?

When will you look at yourself through the grave?

When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?

America why are your libraries full of tears?

America when will you send your eggs to India?

I’m sick of your insane demands.

When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good
looks?

America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next
world.

Your machinery is too much for me.

You made me want to be a saint…

America stop pushing I know what I’m doing.

America the plum blossoms are falling…
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the
closet…

Asia is rising against me.

I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance.

I’d better consider my national resources.

My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of
genitals

an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour
and

twentyfivethousand mental institutions.

I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged
who live in

my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.

I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to
go.

My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?

I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his

automobiles more so they’re all different sexes
…
America this is quite serious…
It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision
parts

factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.

America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Norman Rockwell was the great illustrator of mid-20th Century American complacency. His work is a siren call for the right, most recently expressed by Deborah Solomon in the New York Times:

Norman Rockwell’s cheerful America has lately acquired a startling
relevance both inside and outside the art world, in part because it
symbolizes an era when connectivity did not require a USB cable…

Rockwell’s paintings are easy to recognize. In the years surrounding World War II his covers for The Saturday Evening Post depicted America as a small-town utopia where people are consistently decent and possess great reserves of fellow-feeling. Doctors spend time with patients whether or not they have health insurance. Students cherish their teachers and remember their birthdays. Citizens at town hall meetings stand up and speak their mind without getting booed or shouted down by gun-toting rageaholics.

 This is America before the fall, or at least before searing divisions in our government and general population shattered any semblance of national solidarity. Rockwell’s scenes of the small and the local speak to us in the age of the global because they offer a fantasy of civic togetherness that today seems increasingly remote.

America before the fall? Maybe. Eve’s apple came from the tree of knowledge. Our fabled first parents were doing fine as long as they stayed stupid. One bite of reality, and the illusion of a garden dissolved. (As for small-town American utopias, there’s more reality in a page from Babbitt than in a roomful of Rockwell’s.)

To be moved by Rockwell requires a willful narrowing. America in the 1950s was a reasonably decent place if you were middle-class, mentally secure, easily amused and incurious about the lives of others. The Civil Rights Movement and the student rebellions it spawned on university campuses burst those bubbles. A half a century later, the right is still trying to reconstruct them. Despite its efforts, we’ve come a long way since racism, sexism and homophobia were the unchallenged backdrop of American life.

Rockwell painted a celebratory version of ignorance. (If I cannot see you, you cannot be you.) The doctor’s never drunk on a home visit, the priest is not fondling the boys, and the father is never flashing his strap. Above all, women know their place, and black people are content to root around in the shadows.

Image via

Solomon:

It is true that (Rockwell’s) work does not acknowledge social hardships or
injustice. It does not offer a sustained meditation on heartbreak or
death. Yet why should it? Idealization has been a reputable tradition in
art at least since the days when the Greeks put up the Parthenon, and
Rockwell’s work is no more unrealistic than that of countless
art-history legends, like Mondrian, whose geometric compositions
exemplify an ideal of harmony and calm, or Watteau, who invented the
genre of the fête galante.

She’s confusing a search for a root ideal with propaganda. To celebrate a fundamental grace, be it in mathematics or the flounce of a lady’s skirt, is not the same as a cover-up. The first shines, the second rots under its false premises. What Candide concluded about the promises of Pangloss is true of Rockwell’s American Dream: ” It is a mania for saying things are well when one is in hell.” It is an inability to recognize that being born into a favored group is not the same as creating favored circumstances.

Rockwell opens tomorrow at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum.