Capitol Ideas / Stoolies / Art Moderne/ Bond:Senator for the 60s
Bethell, Tom
"Capitol Ideas / Stoolies / Art Moderne/ Bond:Senator for the 60s" The national mood of self-abasement is far from being exhausted, to judge by recent events in Washington. One might...
...One of my favorite spots in Washington is Gravelly Point, a small park located a couple of hundred yards north of the main runway of National Airport...
...One trusts that the tax-paying sticks-dwellers (as Americans are thought of in Washington) will not be duped by this latest lie about "human rights...
...But he will no doubt find that an employee, about to be fired, will publicly reveal some damaging tidbit about his boss (it is easy enough for any employee to come across this kind of thing) and thereby acquire immunity from firing because he now wears the halo of whistle-blower...
...The exhibition consisted of a few rooms of paintings by De Kooning, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Robert Motherwell...
...Now, of course, we know better...
...I had been against drawing up the Protocols from the beginning," continued the Humanist-General with an ever-soslight Colorado drawl...
...Thus he attempted to undermine Carter's campaign...
...One is impressed that so much money has remained in private hands...
...Premature disclosure could have wiped out thirty years of hard work...
...says an explanatory text on the wall...
...Initially famous for being on TV, Bond maintained his fame by being quoted...
...It requires only a modicum of honesty to recognize that a DC-10, or a Boeing 747, is more impressive aesthetically (and in every other way) than most of what passes for "art" in our contemporary museums...
...I would be inclined to agree with William Safire that an American Kim Philby is likely soon to surface were it not for the fact that it is now only too easy to enjoy one's Marxist convictions and express one's anti-American attitudes at a safe distance from the Kremlin...
...It is, surely, an obvious truth of our time —but equally, by tacit agreement, one that is rarely mentioned in polite society—that the creative impulse of man became sidetracked at some point early in this century, away from some of its normal channels and into new ones associated with engineering and technology...
...Well, it is not too difficult to visualize the next scene...
...All the more remarkable, then, was The Institute's continued rise to its position of preeminent World Power...
...The museum space is in fact a perfect place for giving large cocktail parties, complete with "talking points" such as a giant Calder mobile suspended from the ceiling in a style clearly derivative of the Air and Space Museum across the Mall, where it is possible to see Lindbergh's plane, and others, similarly suspended...
...In 1975 Broder visited 12 states, not including Georgia, in search of probable presidential candidates...
...But to date none has, and so it is possible to get a marvelous close-up of these big aircraft in motion...
...The thought crossed my mind the 20 The American Spectator November 1978 last time I was there that a trip to Gravelly Point was in every way more profitable than going to a museum of modern art...
...It was a trying period, the greatest challenge to our doctrine of creative non-momentous philology...
...Follow me to the bright new city on the Hill...
...In the Barnett Newman room, readers of Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word will be amused to learn, viewers were not looking at the canvases (blank except for an occasional vertical stripe), but were reading a prominently displayed "explanation" of them...
...Besides, as the termites have discovered, State's precincts are panelled in wood of a most edible variety...
...Julian Bond is above all else a media creation...
...The future of structural humanism seemed to hang in the balance...
...We didn't need a turgid text...
...What amused me were the photographs of these gentlemen sitting in solemn contemplation of their incomplete canvases—pondering, you are given to understand, a"problem" much as Einstein did...
...Wrong—i should have said the foundry of Henry Moore, as a catalogue provided to visitors usefully " explains...
...Other recent developments, at a much more frivolous level, are worth a comment...
...And he is not the only termite nibbling away at the national heart...
...Besides, everyone knew—or should have known—what we 22 The American Spectator November 1978...
...Take the Carter administration's absurd preoccupation with "whistle-blowers" in government...
...Andrew Mellon's construction of the National Gallery was a genuinely useful, democratic act of philanthropy, but Paul Mellon's building, when the pretension is stripped away, is primarily for the benefit of the Art Crowd, who could easily have held their cocktail parties elsewhere...
...This rapidity may be explained by the fact that in Smith's hands sculpture has been reduced to pieces of metal which imitate what may have once been found in a blacksmith's shop...
...The Executive Secretary was a retiring man who had begun with skimpy resources: two bamboo ski poles, somefrayed bindings, a pair of shabby boots, a rickety chairlift, a small A-frame in Colorado—small, yet well-stocked with the Great Books of the Western (and the Eastern and Southern and Northern and Under) World...
...Now you would have thought that Bond, a black politician from Carter's state, would somehow have been able to capitalize on this achievement, and that having done so he would today be rivalling Andrew Young himself in the prominence and virulence of his denunciations of America...
...I trudged upstairs, past an enormous and really revolting canvas 13 yards long, consisting of nothing but ugly splotches of black paint, and portentously entitled "Reconciliation Elegy...
...No, on balance the vistas of the State Department are more reassuring than the uncertainties of Kremlin corridors...
...Why it is allowed at all is to me one of the great mysteries of Washington...
...In any event, there is no doubt that a fuller account of the Bond-Carter story would make for entertaining reading...
...That's my first seminarist painted on the wall, looking as if he were alive...
...Does one see here the invisible hand of Bond...
...Inviting outside groups to participate in their decision-making is in reality an expression of irritation at the fact that the voice of regulated industry is a legitimate component of the public interest, and therefore an attempt is now underway to drown out industry's voice by enlarging the rival chorus of "public interest"—i...
...This very week, we're celebrating another anniversary of our Fundamental Statute which, not a moment too soon, vested all legislative, executive, and judicial power in the Executive Secretary of the Board of Directors of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies...
...What Bond doesn't seem to fealize is that Washington already has plenty of black leaders, and they are already sitting around the banquet table, napkins tucked under their chins, knives and forks gripped firmly in each hand, awaiting with slavering impatience the feast (Senate seats, House seats or seat) that is about to be placed in front of them...
...so that he could qualify as a resident...
...President Carter is very anxious to proffer some kind of statutory immunity to disloyal employees, and his administration is collectively stupid enough not to have questioned his inclination...
...Bearing this in mind, I decided to pay a visit to the brand new East Building of the National Gallery of Art close to the foot of Capitol Hill...
...And he gestured to the enormous oil portrait on the wall of his study...
...She says that Carter believes Bond did not approve of his candidacy because he, Bond, wanted to be vice president, but realized that an all-Georgia ticket was untenable...
...had his whistle-blowers—lots of them...
...The federal government is now paying people to sue it—an illustration of national dementia if there ever was one...
...An editor in New York would need a quote from an authority in the South, and Bond became everyone's authority, his name reliably appearing on every reporter's Rolodex...
...e. , anti-capitalist—voices...
...With the D.C...
...One used to think of ADA as a political group supported by dues-paying liberals...
...Was there a riot in Birmingham...
...I have always wanted to be a U.S.senator...
...I never had any doubts," the Executive Secretary said when he announced that he would rule with the title of Humanist-General...
...The Kremlin, by all reports, is built of stone...
...ADA's membership has been sagging (ADA World, distributed to all ADA members, only has a press-run of 20,000), however, so now the organization apparently is in the process of switching over to the more lucrative public-interest law field in whichone can win government "contracts" by the simple expedient of suing the government...
...On the contrary, a study of newsmedia reports in 1976 reveals that Bond actually used his Quote Circuit authority to predict that Carter was going nowhere, and so was in fact partially responsible for the news media's early disinclination to believe that Carter was a serious candidate...
...It was Mortimer Adler...
...Naturally, we had to denounce it as a forgery and launch a massive public relations counterattack...
...Down the hall was an_ utterly clownish exhibition called "The Subjects of the Artist," intended "as a preliminary investigation into the themes and subjects in abstract expressionism...
...John Nollson Aspen: The New Rome Iremember well how our current condition of peace, prosperity, and happiness originated in the political malaise of 1978...
...Upstairs, she told me irritably...
...ADA's legal fees resulted from its participation in proceedings dealing with the funeral industry, antacids, over-the-counter drugs, ophthalmic goods, and health spas, all of which seems like a curious departure for the organization which started out 31 years ago as an anti-Communist group bent on defeating Henry Wallace's Progressive Party...
...A prominent beneficiary of this strange government policy has been Americans for Democratic Action, which has received about $150,000 in this way from the government so far this year...
...If Bond does indeed come to Washington, there will be a slight alteration in the menu, that's all...
...voting-rights amendment approved at last on Capitol Hill, Julian Bond displayed both his opportunism and his characteristic lack of political acumen...
...That was the huge commotion caused by the leaking of The Institute's famous ten-year plan, The Protocols of the Elders of Aspen...
...It might have occurred to Carter, for example, that Richard Nixon Tom Beth ell is Washington editor of Harper's and contributing editor of the Washington Monthly...
...What, I wonder, does David Broder of the Washington Post make of it...
...Then there is the curious matter of government-paid legal fees, which has attracted so little attention in the press...
...Will' t please you to sit and look at him ?" he would say to all first-time visitors...
...At the entrance is a large slab of smooth bronze, apparently shaped by centuries of exposure to the elements—perhaps having been retrieved from the foot of a waterfall...
...I shall lead you to victory...
...In those days, we didn't understand the sources of our discontent...
...Thereafter he became a member in good standing of the Quote Circuit...
...But it was the Humanist-General whose earnest glance showed depth and passion...
...Inside one enters a great open space with glass ceiling, indoor trees and plants, escalators, and not a painting in sight, although there is a cretinous crankshaft or two, and, suspended from a wall, what appears to be the exploded innards of a town-hall clock, but turns out to be "by" someone called Anthony Caro who must take himself very seriously indeed...
...The rate at which Smith produced finished compositions while at Voltri was unprecedented in the history of sculpture...
...That is, he is inclined to put morality before loyalty...
...he proclaimed, adding that he was now giving serious consideration to moving to D.C...
...Well they might have...
...A "New South" governor in Florida...
...It strikes me that Bond possibly believes the human-rights rhetoric and so has a vision of black Washington consisting of tired, hungry, yearning masses, huddled on doorsteps, straining for a first glimpse of their new leader—who will be none other than Bond himself...
...But he was on television briefly and everyone remarked how boyish and clean-limbed he was...
...Admittedly, Washington is the wealthiest city in the country, courtesy of the taxpayers, and receives many other benefits as a result of the government's presence, but we cannot be expected to enjoy these fruits without voting rights...
...In the Rothko room (audacious nonsense—a series of horizontally-divided, two-tone canvases of no conceivable meaning or interest beyond that of charlatanry), people were intimidated into whispering...
...My italics...
...One is inclined to believe from this episode that Bond must be uncommonly stupid, politically speaking, but Elizabeth Drew, in her book on the 1976 campaign, offers an alternative explanation...
...It had been a startling development, quite unexpected...
...Mellon would have done better to have invested his money in a steel mill, or perhaps an airplane factory...
...Even hardheaded wargamers had overlooked the growing influence of The Institute, especially after its famous seminar, "Creative Necrology and Preemptive Bioethics," had opened sectarian fissures...
...I think this impresses some people because the "artist" seems to be adopting a superior attitude to technology, rather in the manner of the impoverished aristocrat who manages to reassure himself that he is altogether finer than the uncultured nouveaux riches who press ever closer to his dilapidated castle...
...The Federal Trade Commission, for example, pays out $500,000 a year in legal fees to those "public interest" groups who "participate" in its proceedings...
...You sit there on the grass and these huge jets come lumbering, then racing down the runway straight at you, straining and roaring, with noses tilted upward, at the difficulty of getting off the ground, and finally ripping the atmosphere with a stupendous sound as they slice their way not very many feet over your head...
...Written in Esperanto and containing a preface signed in a near-illegible scrawl (thoughtto be that of Wendell Willkie), the Protocols created a near panic...
...The point is that agencies like the FTC already do represent the "public interest...
...The parking lot is always filled with cars and campers, the grass dotted with picnickers...
...Pei-designed, marble marvel has been gushed over so many times in the press in recent weeks that you will not hear any further praise from me...
...But beyond that, the new building strikes me as being a waste of money...
...This trapezoid-shaped, I.M...
...Later on, the Humanist-General could talk calmly of the sensational scandal that had almost sidetracked him...
...Then came Jimmy Carter, a former governor who decided that he would like to be President...
...The dauber, whoever he is, must be a very good salesman...
...CAPITOL IDEAS by Tom Bethell Stoolies/Art ModernelBond: Senator for the 60s The national mood of self-abasement is far from being exhausted, to judge by recent events in Washington...
...One might mention as a glaring example the White House's toleration, even encouragement, of UN Ambassador Andrew Young, whose recent pronouncements about America would in an earlier and more upright time have been regarded as coming from a kook, if not a traitor...
...Then I entered a room containing pieces of sculpture by one David Smith, apparently a terribly important figure in the history of art,who went to some abandoned factories in Italy where "he found numerous sheets of steel, as well as tools and factory machinery which he incorporated into his sculpture...
...The country was in a parlous state, Bond opined for the benefit of students...
...Maybe our plans seemed a little advanced for their day, but it surely has worked out all right...
...This amendment has, incidentally, ushered in a deliciously piquant development, concerning the well-knowq Georgia legislator Julian Bond, who is generally held to be a public figure of such shining virtue that only an oversight can explain the Vatican's failure to have canonized him...
...The White House people might have had second thoughts when some whistle-blower legislation working its way through House committees was suddenly and unexpectedly unanimously approved by Republican committee members, who undoubtedly relish the prospect of a leaky administration...
...No doubt there is a plausible claim to danger and therefore an opportunity for one or another arm of government to step in officiously...
...This is quite a popular entertainment of a Sunday afternoon...
...Not surprisingly, the new East Wing has already been used to give large cocktail parties, attended inevitably by the likes of Jackie Onassis and Andy Warhol...
...The document was nothing less than a detailed blueprint for the seizure of world power, for the establishment of a new super-government on the ruins of the world system...
...Of course the great problem with encouraging moral stands in government is that there is no longer any general agreement as to what "moral" means, especially with moral relativism getting such a big boost from people like the President's sister, Ruth Carter Stapleton...
...It is worth noting that the original National Gallery was built at the expense of Andrew Mellon, and this addition to it at the expense of his son, Paul Mellon...
...Against all odds, he succeeded...
...These sculptures are, like Calder's mobiles, merely whimsical parodies of technology...
...Just as in the Soviet Union and Cambodia there are human-rights problems, so we in Washington have them too—notably no senators to vote for...
...Note, again, the aping of science...
...And now, just before the first course is brought in from the kitchen, fresh-faced, clean-limbed Bond appears in the doorway and cries out: "Huddled masses...
...Others, to be sure, regard him as a slick opportunist, but they are most decidedly in the minority...
...Now comes the District of Columbia voting-rights amendment—a matter of "elementary human rights," as the Washington Post urged senators on the morning of the vote...
...It was managed with consummate skill...
...In recognition of the unspoken aesthetic of our time, many modern artists and sculptors pay a kind of pathetic homage to technology, as Nabokov here recognizes...
...Why go to Moscow, as Philby did, when constitutional protections, and even government jobs, are offered to those who loudly proclaim their dissatisfaction with America...
...It will be recalled that he first entered the public consciousness during the 1968 Democratic Convention, when an The American Spectator November 1978 21 attempt was made to nominate him for vice president even though he was seven years too young for the job...
...He set forth on the lecture circuit and so increased his fame—and wealth...
...One hears much about how tough life is in Washington these days...
...New first course: Roast Bond...
...The state of Gimme-More will get more if this amendment passes—and as President Carter's futile attempts to reform the Civil Service system have shown, federal workers already have far too much influence on Capitol Hill...
...But he had vision and unshakeable self-confidence...
...I recall that I was chairing our international seminar on the life of Paramahansa Yogananda and its implications for landscape architecture when the story broke...
...As Vladimir Nabokov so well put it, these tend to be receptacles for "crankshaft cretins of stainless steel, zen stereos, polystyrene stinkbirds, objets trouves in latrines...
...I asked an attendant where the art was...
...Carter has also been working toward the (admirable) goal of making it easier to fire government employees...
...A whistle-blower is someone who publicly discloses government decisions or behavior that he regards as insufficiently virtuous...
...But I didn't panic...
Vol. 11 • November 1978 • No. 11
