Culture of Complaint, by Robert Hughes

...Indeed, Hughes tellingly quotes the Helms amendment, which attempted to cut off public funding for artistic displays involving indecency a la Mapplethorpe...

...Bruce was a genuinely subversive (we might now say "transgressive") comedian, for whom the whole point of humor was that it gambled with the unsayable...

...As if to materialize the same point in a different way, Hilton Kramer of the New Criterion has done us all a favor...

...But this impatience is being frittered away and demoralized by ghettoization and by the setting up of separate reservations...

...This is worth excerpting partly because it's funny but also because it conveys in miniature something that Hughes spends slightly too much time proving in general...

...Waugh wrote back from his country house informing the PAC curtly (and as it happens, erroneously) that Azania was a derivation of an old Hellenistic name for a mythical African slave kingdom...

...The "recovery" movement with its alarming humorless narcissism...

...In 1939, Clement Greenberg wrote a mordant essay entitled "Avant Garde and Kitsch," taking a position that derived from Trotsky's Partisan Review insistence that the "struggle for revolutionary ideas in art must begin again with the struggle for artistic truth, not in terms of any single school, but in terms of the immutable faith of the artist in his own inner self...

...The Me Decade has become a sort of Me Millennium, with every tribe and faction awarding primacy to its own cause...

...And why did they wish to know...

...He reminds me, also, that, like him, I didn't come all the way to America in order to watch what I say...

...An urgent task, as we used to say, now confronts us...

...They had, they told him solemnly, read his novel Black Mischief...

...If today Any shock they should to, to stem, 'Stead of landing on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock would land on them...

...All languages and cultures have a version of this, but there may be a specifically American need to take refuge in euphemism and insipid gentility...

...Because of an adored friend with chronic M.S., I myself stopped employing that New Left Review perennial "sclerotic" to describe petrified institutions like the British monarchy...

...Much of Kramer's essay is quite mad ("As we see now every day with the Clinton Administration in Washington, it is the radical Left that is calling the tune...

...George Bush was a good little quota merchant and bean counter, as indeed Bill Clinton is turning out to be...

...Hughes is rightly scornful of the cowardly silence of the American academy, which took refuge in half-baked talk about cultural relativism and the dangers of a Eurocentric view, not of Islam only, but of free speech as an "abstract" principle...

...Hughes hates the Left's politicization of the art scene as much as I do, and now at last he has some very telling things to say about it...

...Insensitive" is the term used by the sort of people prone to announce that they themselves "feel badly...

...The consequences of that rather dubious claim are now all around us, except that personality has deposed politics altogether...

...the Balkanization of the academy...

...It also contains a sort of Utopianism...

...There ought to be neither shame nor surprise in the fact that macho Malcolm X —who wouldn't even own to a "Eurocentric" surname—annexed a good line from the white homosexual lyricist who composed You're The Top, or that African outcasts had to apply for the name of their country to the disdainful author of Scoop...

...My own chosen instance, and the one that decided me on this, was the imposition of a "speech code" at the University of Madison in Wisconsin—a campus with a highly evolved liberal and radical tradition...

...Cole Porter, Anything Goes, 1934 "We didn't land on Plymouth Rock...

...I suppose the survivors could be glad that there was no Hummingbird-on-the-Right...

...Thus, every great battle for the extension of liberty on this continent has had, in the last resort of the Constitution, the law on its side...

...Thus the struggle against slavery was in large part a struggle for the right to challenge calcified statutes about teaching and literacy (Charles Dickens wrote memorably that in many American cities it was more dangerous to teach a black man to read than it was to burn him alive...

...The study of history and society and literature is being atomized and turned into something arid and pointless, a mere clinic for competing resentments...

...But suppose that a quadriplegic now goes to law, demanding to be allowed a job as a firefighter or on a construction site, and demanding furthermore to be referred to as "differently abled...

...This is why I believe that the left is missing an immense opportunity in the PC war...

...Sir, that's not our policy," says an easily fired minder in some store that won't keep its word...

...A man like Leonard Jeffries is not an eccentric variant of a movement with which one can sympathize...

...The American demotic language is a pungent blend of everything from the black pulpit to the Yiddish shrug, from the official emancipatory documents written by English slavers and gentlemanfarmers to the mix of Cajun, Spanish, Calabrian and Gaelic...

...The code was promulgated by an ambitious Clintonoid centrist who saw in it a means of attaching moral authority, in various academic turf wars, to the university bureaucracy...

...The American Civil Liberties Union came into being because free speech was an inseparable aspect of all "rights" disputes...

...He has some sympathy for those who complain (you should pardon the expression) that Africa is omitted from the historical record...

...Groups that at least affirm the rhetoric and tradition of civil rights are openly saying that free expression is not a value in itself, but a contingent and relative thing...

...It occurs to me that Hughes's deftly made point may not have an irony at all...

...In the case of Salman Rushdie, a genuinely multicultural figure whose work and life are a synthesis of peoples and languages and histories, it has been fascinating to hear the excuses and evasions...

...Kramer leaves the political right out of his indictment altogether, as one might expect...

...Who knows what hidden prejudices are incubating...

...Here is Helms annexing the discourse of political correctness...

...562 • DISSENT Books The first thing that happens is that the newly generous perceptions of the majority start to dry up...

...The real tendency of PC is not to inculcate respect for the marvelous variety of humanity but to reduce each group into subgroups and finally to atoms, so that everyone is on their guard against everyone else...

...Those who wished to be "nonjudgmental" had in fact made a very subjective judgment, which happened to set a low value on the Enlightenment...

...a man who can mix it up in saloons and horse fairs as well as in salons and ateliers, and who can be elevated without condescension...

...This is a case where what remains of the left has yet to find what remains of its voice...

...Hughes quotes from a letter sent to a clever young woman student by a university department to which she had applied: On your recent scholarship application, members of the review committee noticed the inappropriate use of the word "chairman" . . . Of course it is especially inappropriate to address a woman as "chairman" unless she has specifically requested such a limiting language...

...This high-toned temporizing just chanced to dovetail nicely with the less scrupulous Western state policy of disowning Rushdie the better to resume trading arms with Iran...

...The movement to ease the lives of the disabled was a classic instance of reformism at its most generous...

...Magnetized toward America by the breadth and liberty and candor of its culture, Hughes has something of the zeal of the immigrant...

...Article Three of this Philistine legislation sought to impose a ban upon: "Material which denigrates, debases or reviles a person, group or class of citizens on the basis of race, sex, creed, handicap, age or national origin...

...Inappropriate" is bad...

...This is amazingly reminiscent of the postulate made in certain correct circles that only those directly victimized have the right to pronounce on a given subject...

...And "demotic," here, has a definite relation to "democratic...

...The whole tendency of American speech and usage has been, often to the shock of fastidious European travelers, one of pith and directness...

...Robert Hughes shows that there is life still in the Renaissance concept of humanist education...

...Politically correct or "appropriate" speech has now become indispensable to businesses and bureaucracies, furnishing as it does many opportunities for authority to demonstrate control, and to pose as the arbiter of manners and codes...

...The Constitution, which is elastic to infinitude about potential expansion of rights (as well it might be, given its inborn constraints against the propertyless, against women, and most shamefully against the descendants of African slavery) is also adamant about free speech and assembly and about the wrongness of an established faith...

...The second thing is that someone writes a paper saying that a specific issue of Cherokee lesbian paraplegics remains to be addressed...

...The midwestern farmer, the Harlem preacher, the blue-collar barman (I have, for obvious reasons, exempted the Manhattan cabbie) are all rightly famous, far beyond these shores, for wanting you to get the point with a minimum of delay...

...Look at an innocuous example...

...Perhaps one should say a brief word in defense of the PC ethos...

...And notice the last sentence...

...Never mind that he balances each story of some "politically correct" atrocity with an example of bluenose McCarthyite zeal, the fact is that we need no instruction in the crimes of the old-style nativist and Prohibitionist censors...

...As soon as it could be claimed that the feelings of a great religion had been in some way "hurt," the euphemisms began to multiply...

...In the Rushdie case, also, the right abandoned its claim to be the defender of what might be called traditional values, such as free expression and opposition to theocratic tyranny...

...Comfortable with" is good...

...How did we ever tolerate elevators without Braille panels...

...It has surely become clear by now that tendencies claiming descent from first principles—first principles such as FALL • 1993 • 563 Books antiracism and the equality of the sexes—have not "gone too far" but have become something else...

...They wished to know where he had found the name "Azania," given in the book to a hellhole of corrupt negritude in what Waugh would never have called the third world...

...There will always be mutual linguistic and cultural exchange, just as there will always be some kind of canon...

...If large numbers of Americans are willing to queue that extra half-hour to see an exposition of Goya or an evocation of the lost symbiosis of Andalusia, it is partly due to Hughes's careful, witty, but not too-popular essays and presentations in, of all places, Time magazine...

...The pressing matter is the defense of free thinking from its false friends, not its traditional enemies...

...I believe that I am right about this...

...The threads of a real cultural critique have been torn apart by every species of sectarian...

...I remember feeling an uneasy premonition when, in the period of defeat and demoralization that followed the 1960s, it was decided that the left could be revived with the assertion that "the personal is political...

...In the great contemporary test of the willingness to uphold literary and scholarly independence, they did not so much run away as actually display some sympathy for the other side...

...Will he know what this is in regards to...

...But in true liberal fashion he simply didn't have the guts to address the subject until he could safely indict the political Right as a co-conspirator...

...However, and largely for reasons of statusyearning and insecurity, there has always been an opposing tendency...

...Not just academics and journalists and publishers, but people of all "races" and genders in all kinds of jobs, are learning the art of watching what they say, and cultivating the line of least resistance...

...The two are Lenny Bruce and Salman Rushdie...

...Hughes rightly describes this aspect of PC as a species of "linguistic Lourdes," where the halt and the lame are expected to feel cured when addressed as "challenged," and where bigots are reformed by going gay-bashing instead of fag-bashing...

...He wants us to know that he has nothing in common with Jesse Helms or with those who would burn books but forbid others to burn flags...

...If a backlash does arrive, we can be sure that it will, like the Helms amendment, cloak itself in the language of victimhood...

...Pity those who imagined that they were waging a terminological war of emancipation...

...Out of the window goes all thought of solidarity, fraternity, and the common good...

...the "national security" babble of the state...

...Robert Hughes, for whom the human tongue is more of an organ than it is a muscle or a tissue, happily combines the no-bull traditions of his native 560 • DISSENT Books Australia and a long engagement with high culture...

...So far, so good...

...For the first time in American history, those who call for an extension of rights are also calling for an abridgement of speech...

...He himself, he wants to make clear in various throat-clearing passages, is not a cultural reactionary...

...And nearer to our own time, the great challenge to imperial authority on all matters FALL • 1993 • 561 Books had its origins in something called quite simply "The Free Speech Movement...

...It is futile to expect, let alone to wish, that only slaves write about slavery, only women about rape, only Jews about the Shoah...

...In an oblique way, it is a compliment to pluralism in the most diverse society on earth: a recognition of the multinational society and a challenge to the hegemony of the WASP ruling class...

...Indeed, those of us who had to deal with strollers got a free ride as a result, with pavements and stairways made easier for all...

...the Prohibitionist and "family values" crowd who watch too much television—he lays about them all, and sees that they are all aspects of the same enervating self-pity and solipsism...

...A foretaste, surely, was provided by the disgrace of the Hill-Thomas hearings, where objective deliberation was made impossible by competing claims of racism and sexism, both of them adroitly manipulated by the right...

...As it happened, he used words that were deemed bigoted or obscene in order to demystify them...

...So should we now say that Hilton Kramer is annexing or appropriating the line of Greenberg and Trotsky...

...Plymouth Rock landed on us...

...An act like his is hard to imagine today, when "comedy" oscillates between the bland, the apologetic, and the defiantly nasty...

...It may not be long, given the cyclical politics of resentment in this country, before we find out...

...The same applies to the resistance to imperialist war and to the advocacy of the rights of women...

...They desired a name for the future liberated South Africa, and this had struck them as a most apt and euphonious one...

...For me, there are two symbolic figures in this swirl of confusion about proper speech, "sensitive" teaching and infmite sub-categorization...

...We have values too, and we need to defend them against the Yahoos, against the ivory tower trimmers and against those who will exploit the politics of PC to reinforce a pseudoconsensus that is paradoxically based on divide and rule...

...Thus, what begins as something ennobling becomes an aspect of those two great American delusions— the faith in therapy and the belief in litigation...

...Times have changed And we've often rewound the clock Since the Puritans got a shock When they landed on Plymouth Rock...

...trills the half-educated and half-paid secretary when you telephone the pseudoposh publishing executive...

...It doesn't take long, either, for the new euphemism to become the most recent insult—which is why "queer" has gone full circle so fast...

...Kramer denounces Hughes for using arguments to which he is not entitled, because many of these arguments and examples originated in the New Criterion...

...He is the revenge upon the Philistines...

...Let us just pause and shake ourselves for a second while the implications percolate...

...In the figure of the persecuted author, the Kramers and Podhoretzes could only see a secular, leftist ingrate...

...But let's forgive him that and pass to his claim of lonely originality in the defense of artistic integrity...

...Without this there is no art...

...To hear the grammar of the 1960s liberation movement being bastardized in this way was a lesson that I decided not to be taught twice...

...And most if not all such contests have necessitated a parallel battle for the principle of free speech and assembly...

...In other words, that there are those in the "empowerment community" who mean business about regulating speech and expression...

...As a result of this bizarre correspondence, while the multiracial and leftist ANC continues to call South Africa "South Africa" as a matter of internationalist principle, the name "Azania" appears on Steven Biko's tombstone and in less lapidary form in the acronyms of separatist and tribalist groups like AZAPO, who are swift to denounce "sellouts" like Nelson Mandela for borrowing the colonial terminology of the oppressor...

...And this is the importance of the Hughes book...

...Who does not say, or get, "Vaya con dios," "donnybrook," "omertd," "For he's a jolly good fellow," "Jacob's ladder," or "What's not to like...

...It is precisely because America is so "diverse" that it is mistaken to make so much of the distinctions...

...Take a piece of garbage like the Jeffries "lectures" on Africa in antiquity, and then take a work of real discovery like Geoffrey de Ste...

...The paltry political skill lies in doing enough bean counting to appease various sectors, while running against bean counting as such...

...And some thoughtless metaphors underwent reconsideration...

...While of course, American bureaucratic and military coinages —"downsizing," "collateral damage," "interdict" —are justly notorious on a world scale for their crude muffling of moral consequence and their subordination to the ends of power...

...Soon you will be entering the corporate or media sector as you begin your career .. . The threatening and the pompous are, in this letter, the same thing...

...At once, the argument ceases to be about society and obligation...

...But these moralistic, idealistic constructs are in danger of metamorphosing into their opposites, if indeed they have not done so already...

...This is one reason among many for considering the enterprise of discrete ethnic discourses and separatist canons to be doomed as well as silly...

...And those are only the clichés...

...There is, obviously, an overdue and justified impatience with the axiomatic identification of "culture" as "Western," and with all the implied corollaries of that...

...it had been so ever since the Aztecs came down from the north, under the command of a charismatic ruler whose name translates as Hummingbird-on-the-Left, and slaughtered or enslaved the resident people around Mexico City...

...he is a sworn foe of all the values and teachings upon which socialism and internationalism depend...

...And would I have dropped "sclerotic" if I had been coerced into doing so...

...It only takes an average machine politician a day or so to grasp this Tammany principle and to find the words with which to dignify it...

...And it will always be particularly pointless and perhaps sinister to expect or demand this in America...

...He found it absurd that his relatives in Australia used such a skewed Anglocentric optic that they alluded to "the Far East" when they could only have meant that "near North" which holds East Timor and Papua New Guinea...

...But there is a perverse logic at work, at least, when he writes that: "Mr...

...public buildings without access ramps...

...In the case of labor organizing, any drive against the open shop or the company town had to begin with a punch-up over the right to leaflet or to publish a newspaper...

...Croix's book on class war in ancient Greece...

...Rather than cite a plethora of examples, I would invite readers to confirm this from their own experience, in the confidence that they will be able to do so...

...Likewise the later war over segregation took the form of a fight for free assembly and the right to demonstrate and publish...

...A common culture, or stock of references, will lead to borrowings and innovations and cross-pollinations much more daring, when deliberate, and much more startling when unconscious, than that...

...a touching if authoritarian belief that behavior and expression, if properly conditioned, will actually lead to purer thoughts...

...Freud wrote a much-too-brief essay entitled "The Narcissism of the Small Difference," which showed how people could be induced to quarrel more and more about less and less...

...In a sulphurous review of Hughes in the National Review, entitled "Stop,Thief...

...Seeing American mores and language being encased in a cocoon spun from blather and drool, he has sprung forward to wake the sleeper before the threads can congeal into a carapace...

...Malcolm in Spike Lee's X, 1992 L the 1960s, while exiled in Algeria from the intensifying ruthlessness of the apartheid state, the leaders of the "black consciousness" Pan African Congress sent a letter to Evelyn Waugh...

...But at whose expense is such an irony: the irony of the equal-opportunity bigot...

...As befits the expatriated descendant of Irish immigrants to the Antipodes, also, he is suspicious of all claims made by those who fetishize the pure authenticity and authority of the indigenous (suppose there to be any such thing in the first place): Aztec culture was messianic and invasive and imperialistic...

...Suddenly, though, and as if to prove that no question is ever finally decided, one finds oneself in arguments over first principles...

...The general consciousness of the majority, respecting the existence of a large minority, was enhanced and nobody was the loser...

...His sympathies are with the Enlightenment and the humanist left tradition (he's written his own hommage to Catalonia...