Some things just aren't pretty

One of the great pleasures in life is picking up a freshly minted copy of the New Criterion and spending the next few days reading it cover to cover. There really is no journal quite like it, containing in-depth criticism of every art-form from painting to theater, while also carrying pieces that touch on politics and the culture wars. And then there is the small but exquisitely selected collection of new poetry it publishes in each issue.

A staple of that periodical is the music criticism of Jay Nordlinger -- it is erudite without being pretentious, and more than anything else it is suffused with an obvious and deep love for the music he covers.

Nordlinger's criticism is also gentlemanly to a fault -- it is hard to think of an example of him being snitty, of him saying demeaning things about performers, or of him showing anything but respect for musicians and composers alike.

To an extent, this tone reflects the New Criterion's founder, Hilton Kramer, long-time art critic for the New York Times. Kramer's work at the New Criterion has been, from the beginning, one of dissent. His journey from the cultural and political left to the cultural and political right was part and parcel of his rejection of what he saw as a deterioration of post-modern aesthetics.

But while the New Criterion was founded in dissent, it was a dissent grounded in the idea that art is something that can be held to objective standards. Because of that, most criticism in that journal is fair-minded, invigorating and fresh -- and rarely dull.

But it is the art that is subjected to criticism, and only secondarily the artist. One won't find art praised or condemned because of the political views of the artist. In other words, it tends to be fair and respectful, even when submitting individual works or performances to sharp criticism.

There is a legendary encounter that Hilton Kramer had with Woody Allen while still at the New York Times. Allen reportedly asked Kramer if he was embarrassed when he ran into artists whose work he had criticized. "No," he replied,"I expect them to be embarrassed for doing bad work."

So when Jay Nordlinger (whose other job is managing editor of National Review) wrote a piece in the online version of NR responding to a New Republic article by Johann Hari that mocked the speakers and attendees of a recent National Review cruise, it sparked particular interest because of the subject matter.

Nordlinger was primarily offended by what he saw as the personal meanness of the Hari's piece:

One of the most reprehensible things about this article is its physical descriptions — descriptions of our passengers and guest speakers. The article is grotesquely mean — despicably mean...

One of the best parts of Nordlinger's comments was what can only be described as a brief history of his moral development as a writer:

Neither do I say that I haven’t written unfairly or shamefully myself, in the course of producing thousands and thousands of articles (including thousands of reviews).

I have taken my shots, gone for the artful, jabbing phrase or description — performed. But you try not to forget that you’re writing about human beings (when you’re doing so). And you recognize that ridicule is the province of adolescents, not adults.

For the last many years, I’ve said, “The older I get, the less I like ridicule.” Do you find the same? And that is true even when “my side” is doing it.

And it’s a pleasure — deeply satisfying — to write fairly. [ ] This does not mean you have to write dully, or neutrally; it means that you have to keep a sense of proportion.

When one reads the original article, it is indeed far more mean-spirited than full of spirited wit. Nordlinger was on the cruise, so he is in a better position to judge if Hari was fairly portraying the event and its participants or not.

The very fact that most of the cruise attendees Hari describes (in entertainingly demeaning terms) are elderly should alone give some pause to any reader. And again, given Nordlinger's track record as a dispassionate critic, one should be inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

One thing is certain, Hari's piece is one designed to preach to a particular choir -- a choir that already believes that conservatives are (as Nordlinger puts it) "a bunch of blithering, bigoted idiots." That takes all the skill of kicking a soccer ball into an undefended net from ten feet away.

For a more thoughtful response from the left, one has to go to James Wolcott's Vanity Fair blog. Wolcott focuses on what is intended to be the grand moment of Hari's piece: his account of a clash between National Review's founder, William F. Buckley, and the bellicose Norman Podhoretz.

Read it for yourself, but suffice it to say that Podhoretz shouted WFB down when the latter raised questions about the wisdom of the Iraq war and confessed his own reluctance to support it in the first place (he recounted that VP Cheney had personally convinced him that Hussein had WMD's primed and ready in Iraq -- one is inclined to believe WFB on this one.)

Wolcott, to be sure, isn't one to require a lot of convincing about conservatives -- his own description of Hari's piece is that they exhibit "fear, prejudice, parochial ignorance, self-delusion, borderline derangement, and sheer inanity." One searches in vain for any indication that Wolcott disagrees.

But on the other hand, Wolcott exhibits a humanity that Hari never does. While Hari portrays WFB as a doddering dinosaur (again playing to his intended audience,) Wolcott puts the affair in perspective:

It pains me seeing Buckley treated so shabbily by readers of the magazine he founded and guided, a magazine that has been hijacked by neoconservatism and has lost all traces of former restraint and self-respect; it's now a war whore like all the others (save The American Conservative).

I have a longstanding reserve of fondness for Buckley personally and professionally. Decades ago, when I was a toxic drip at the Village Voice dreaming of a better tomorrow, I interviewed Buckley on the occasion of one of his spy novels, Saving the Queen. Despite my being a nonentity from a newspaper hostile in almost every shade and degree to National Review, he couldn't have been kinder, more courteous, or generous with his time.

He could have easily given me the buzz-off but he didn't, and neither did his brother James, then-Senator from New York, when I needed to interview him years later--there's something to be said for noblesse oblige when it's gingerly done.

Why Buckley should have to put up with Podhoretz's choleric guff as he lopes into the sunset is beyond me, but then I never understood how Podhoretz wedged his head through the wall at National Review, tunneling into its pages and clearing a big enough hole for unsavory characters such as Michael Ledeen to follow in his wake. The neoconservative colonization of National Review has never been fully documented or explained...

There's more good stuff that follows, but that gives a flavor of the way that Wolcott treats his subject with personal dignity and uses words with a respect for their potentially destructive power.

As a final note, there are some encouraging signs at National Review of late. Editor Richard Lowry seems to be maturing, as evidenced both by his writing in NR and by this snippet from Hari's piece:

(Lowry said:) "The American public isn't concluding we're losing in Iraq for any irrational reason. They're looking at the cold, hard facts...I wish it was true that, because we're a superpower, we can't lose. But it's not."

No one argues with him. They just look away, in the same manner that people avoid glancing at a crazy person yelling at a bus stop.

Mitt Romney's religion

There was a recent major opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal online by John Fund regarding the effect that Mitt Romney's LDS religion is having on his campaign.

Fund lists a number of examples of lower-level Guiliani and McCain supporters trying to make an issue of it, but it is clear that it has been quashed and the subject ruled verboten -- at least at the overt level.

He has this quotation:

"In some ways, [Romney's candidacy] is the best test of whether Americans have really put some of the old religious differences aside," Alan Wolfe, director of Boston College's Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, told the Boston Globe. "And my guess is that they haven't."

Really? What a surprise. All one has to do is think back on how many times one sees things like "Christian fundamentalist fanatics," "Christian wingnuts," "fundamentalist nutjobs," (insert label of choice) when lurking on various websites. One discovers that religious bigotry is alive and well in the United States.

Granted, the progressive forces on the left who use such language or fail to condemn its use can point out that they aren't at all opposed to religion, pointing at their love for the Rev. Jesse Jackson, at the copious religious language in Sen. Obama's speeches, or at the progressive activists in many mainline Christian denominations. And after all, Bill Clinton is often moved to tears when he attends church. They are only opposed to certain kinds of objectionable religious expressions and ideas being inserted into American political life.

True enough. But that is pretty much a definition of religious discrimination: the belief that one kind of religion is more worthy of respect than another, that it is safe for certain kinds of religious belief to influence public life -- while other kinds are viruses in the body politic.

As stated earlier, religious discrimination and bigotry is alive and well, and anyone who thinks otherwise is living in a dreamworld.

It really is not realistic -- or even necessarily desirable -- to disallow religious prejudice (in the strict sense of the word) in the political realm. For a progressive, if someone believes in some version of the traditional Biblical creation account, it is, to be truthful, a fairly good indicator that the person in question won't likely vote for very many progressive candidates who support abortion rights.

Likewise, a conservative knows that if someone attends a church that blesses homosexual unions, the members of that particular religious body are unlikely to vote for his own candidates of choice.

More directly, if one religious expression believes that, say, gay marriage is a positive good while another believes that it is morally wrong and will have a corrosive effect on society -- those two religious expressions are on a political collision course. One can hardly expect either group to have neutral feelings about whether the other is good for the nation.

There are always exceptions, but many of the generalities about religion and politics actually do hold true. They are not, to be sure, excuses for name-calling and slurs -- but we should realize that it took a long time for various racial slurs to become taboo, and we can't expect slurs against traditional Christianity to disappear overnight, either.

So where does Romney's LDS faith come in to all of this?

Just this: Romney's supporters aren't really doing him or his co-religionists any favors by attempting to shame into silence anyone in the GOP who raises questions about how his religion might affect how he would govern.

After all, while the emphasis in this primary campaign has been on evangelical Christians who are wary of Mormonism, this emphasis is precisely because it is a GOP primary. Weekly church attendance (of any kind -- Catholic, Protestant, LDS) has been found in the last few election cycles to be one of the strongest predictors of Republican voting patterns. So these are the kinds of things that will crop up. Before Vatican II, the same would have been true of Catholicism v. Protestantism, but huge amounts of previous differences have been swept away in recent decades -- and Protestants and Catholics always did use the same Apostles' Creed.

While Montana Headlines has been critical of Romney's social policy flips, many observers (ourselves included) have noticed that evangelical Christians are among the fastest to discount the importance of those changes in position. It is as though they have confidence in the inherent conservatism of his Mormon faith, meaning that Romney's current socially conservative positions are the real ones -- back then he said what he had to say to get elected in Massachusetts, but now he's come home and is saying what he really, at core, believes. It is not an unreasonable prejudice to have, and the argument is a fairly convincing one.

If Romney is the GOP nominee (not entirely unlikely if he wins striking victories in Iowa and New Hampshire, as may easily be the case,) then the Romney campaign can expect to deal with the issue of his religion. Not overtly -- but through internet sites, e-mails, blog comments, and other things not traceable to the Democratic campaign. That's politics.

If Romney wants to be the GOP nominee, he is going to have to prove to his party that he is going to be able to take that head-on and win a general election in spite of it. And does anyone really doubt that if the election is on the line, those who don't hesitate to deride fundamentalist/evangelical Christianity -- more likely to be adhered to by one's next-door neighbor than LDS -- will have any qualms about circulating pictures of temple garments and descriptions of some less familiar Mormon beliefs or unsavory bits of Mormon history?

And does anyone doubt that if the election is going to be a close one (for the sake of argument,) the Clinton camp will "condemn" slurs while tacitly appreciating their usefulness-- slurs that might sway enough votes in a given battleground state to turn the election?

And there, in a nutshell, is the contribution that Romney's religion makes to the question of whether he should be the GOP nominee: is it capable of swaying enough votes away from Romney to make what already promises to be an uphill general election battle into a hopeless one?

Only Romney can answer that question -- but he won't be able to answer it if his campaign only uses the technique of shaming GOP critics into silence. In the privacy of a voting booth, a very large number of people vote for the candidate they trust to hold the office in question.

It isn't enough for a candidate to create a climate where no-one will dare say anything negative in public about that candidate's faith, color, sex, marital status, or profession.

Romney has to convince a majority of voters to go into the privacy of that voting booth and choose him. Many of those voters (both religious and non-religious types) will in Romney's case have started out with a basic level of ignorance and/or distrust about LDS -- whether based on its beliefs, its history, its purported tribalism, whatever... it really doesn't matter.

His job isn't the relatively easy one of convincing Americans not to be openly bigoted toward him and his religion -- it is to convince the GOP base to come out in large numbers to crawl over broken glass to vote for him and for a majority of independents to choose him over the Democratic nominee.

Republicans have to be convinced that he can do that. Right now, we're not fully getting the opportunity to find out.