Art or Craft?

The overlap of the Academy Awards and the beginning of the competition of the presidential race offers a reminder of what matters in our existence. The Oscars are worth watching because they celebrate human creativity by actors, directors, writers, and countless craftsman who make the sets, costumes, lighting and so much more causing whole imagined worlds to come to life. 

That fact caused me to recall something the poet and critic Randall Jarrell said: “Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament of our lives, but because it is life itself.” I was also reminded of the scholar Johan Huizinga who proposed the idea of ‘homo ludens’ — man as a playful creator.

These days it is difficult to imagine lavishing such praise on politics or regarding it as an art form, but at its best it also matters and is an important part of life itself in a functioning democracy. Unfortunately, the crude version of our time is often disappointing. 

Each party once had a platform based on competing visions of a governmental ideal. Now, rather than practicing politics as a kind of art form and using it to sell their utopian vision, party politics is largely divisive and antagonistic, designed less to attract and unite an audience and celebrate excellence than to denigrate the opposition, divide and conquer. 

Thus politics becomes not a playful art but a form of warfare or a species of hypocrisy. Republicans, who have tended to promote legislation that panders to high earners and the investor class, pretend to represent working class voters though Democrats are more likely to legislate in their favor.

Donald Trump represents a vicious version of the politician. He calls his rival for the nomination “a destroyer of democracy” which is rich coming from a man who praises such ruthless, barbarous, and anti-democratic leaders as Vladimir Putin and Victor Orban. Trump also frequently apes the Nazi playbook by characterizing his opponents as vermin, promising to prosecute rivals, and to seek retribution. 

Polls show that Trump’s crude style has tended to erode the support of educated voters and of women. Biden beats Trump in appealing to white registered voters with college degrees by 60% to 34%. The pollster Whit Ayres sums up Trump’s divisive messaging as anti-immigration, anti-expertise, anti-intellectual, and anti-establishment. 

There’s an audience for such bile, but pandering to an antagonistic minority threatens to create a yawning class and geographical divide between urban and suburban, small town and rural voters. Not surprisingly Trump’s appeal tends to be to people unlike himself. His business and tv careers were always based on exploiting suckers. Like his voters, he counted on conning them before they could wise up.

The annual rating by historians of all American presidents from worst to best suggests that Trump may appeal to a base but that he is so out of the mainstream and divisive as to be widely unacceptable. The most recent ranking of presidents identified the best as including Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and Truman while the worst included Warren Harding, Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan, and in dead last place Trump: twice impeached, facing criminal trials in Florida, DC, and Georgia, increasingly polarizing, and less likely to be regarded as an artist or a political idealist than as a clear and present danger.

Show Business

This Sunday will bring us the annual Oscar awards for films that we failed to see when first released or that we are now catching up with on various streaming services on television. Many nominated films include a round up of the usual suspects while others are odd one-of-a-kind entries. 

Among the contenders is “Killers of the Flower Moon” directed by Martin Scorsese and featuring a cast that includes Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. It concerns the murderous exploitation of Native Americans whose land sits atop oil wealth in Oklahoma in the 1920s.This story was first filmed as part of “The FBI Story” starring Jimmy Stewart in 1959.

Two huge box office blockbusters are also among the nominees. “Barbie,” whose target audience is probably not geriatric gents, tells the tale of toys come to life starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken. “Oppenheimer” is the story of the race to create an atomic bomb to bring World War II to an apocalyptic end. The scientists, including Oppie played by Cillian Murphy, who unleashed the power of the atom realized once the first nuke was tested in the New Mexico desert that “the world was headed for sorrow.” 

Ever since, we have lived under the looming threat of thermonuclear extinction. Robert Downey Jr. plays the malign Lewis Strauss who embraced the era’s Red Scare and smeared Oppenheimer as a communist fellow traveler despite having been the mastermind behind the arming of America with nuclear power.

Another film that deserves the recognition it has garnered is “The Holdovers” staring Paul Giamatti as an under-appreciated  prep school classics teacher. It owes its power to writer/director Alexander Payne whose previous films include the dark comedies “Election,” “About Schmidt,” “Sideways,” “The Descendants,” and “Nebraska.” 

I have yet to see Emma Stone performing a riff on the Frankenstein theme in “Poor Things” directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. Several more foreign films also gained recognition including a pair from Japan. I have yet to see “Perfect Days,” but found “Past Lives” a touching tale of a reunion between childhood friends separated years earlier when the parents of one, played by Greta Lee, moved the family from Tokyo to New York. 

This year also introduced American audiences to the work of the German actress Sandra Huller who has starred in Europe on stage and in films. She is nominated for an award for “Zone of Interest.” She plays Hedwig the wife of Nazi commandant Rudolf Hoess. Grotesquely they raise their children cheerfully just outside the walls of the Auschwitz death camp over which he presides. 

Huller also starred in “Anatomy of a Fall” nominated for several Oscars and winner of the Palme d’Or. She is the wife of a professor who falls to his death from their mountain chalet near Grenoble. She is accused of his murder and a trial ensues in which she declares her innocence. 

Other films I have not yet caught up with include “May December” starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore, “Nyad” about the long distance swimmer which stars Annette Benning and Jodie Foster, “American Fiction” with Jeffrey Wright,  and “Rustin” with Colman Domingo as the civil rights activist. Finally, the animated manga master Hayao Miyazaki came out of retirement long enough to direct another masterpiece: “The Boy and the Heron.” 

Justice Delayed, Injustice Guaranteed

The notion that justice delayed is justice denied is ancient wisdom that can be found in the Bible’s book of Exodus. It is also found as early as 1215 in Magna Carta, and was demanded by England’s Lord Chancellor, Francis Bacon in 1617, a century later  by William Penn, again in 1868 by the Prime Minister William Gladstone,  and in 1963 by Martin Luther King in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” 

This list makes clear that justice is rarely delivered as fairly and promptly as desired. In Victorian England, Charles Dickens devoted an entire novel, “Bleak House,” to denouncing the failure of his era’s judicial system to provide swift justice. And in our time, the innocent are often still victimized by a justice system that proceeds too slowly. And, conversely, the guilty often manage to delay justice for as long as possible, to drag out cases, to make endless appeals, to obfuscate, dilly dally, and try to run out the clock.

Those less well off often lack the ability to delay a case from coming to court while individuals and corporations with great financial resources can put off court cases, delay trials, deploy phalanxes of legal professionals to make endless appeals to wear down the system, and avoid prosecution for months and years

The poster boy for such blatant abuse of the legal system in our time is Donald Trump. He faces one trial after another and has made a career out of delaying justice. From 1970 to 2016, Trump’s businesses were involved in 4,000 legal cases in state and federal courts and 100 business tax cases. 

The list of Trump crimes include sexual harassment and sexual assault, a misuse of classified documents case is on the docket in May 2024 in Florida, a guilty finding in the E. Jean Carroll sexual assault case brought with a defamation charge and a fine of $83 million. 

In 2023 Trump and his sons were fined $364 million for fraudulent over-valuation of assets. In 2024 the crime of an insurrection designed to steal the 2020 election and the conspiracy to defraud the United States will be adjudicated and could result in a penalty of 20 years in prison. 

A plot to steal the 2020 election using fake electors may also lead to charges of electoral obstruction and criminal interference with an official proceeding in states including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and New Mexico. 

A classified document case is also scheduled for May 2024 in Florida. And Trump faces 34 felony counts before a Manhattan jury in March 2024 for falsifying business records and paying hush money to a porn star. The disgraced former president’s criminal plots cost the Republican National Committee two million dollars in attorney fees from October 2021 to July 2022, and many millions more are ahead for the trials scheduled for the rest of the year. Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive. And how expensive it is to try to corrupt the working of a democracy.