The vertical invasion

National Interest, The, Summer, 1993 by Michael Lind

CULTURE OF COMPLAINT, by the art critic, Robert Hughes, is one of a number of contemporary jeremiads lamenting the fragmentation of American society and the sterility of outmoded partisan debates.(1) It is also a hoot. Unlike most of his targets and many of his critics, Hughes is capable of being intentionally funny. Hughes on academic studies of Madonna: "There is a Lacanian Madonna, a Baudrillardian Madonna, a Freudian Madonna, a Foucaultian Madonna--rather as, in Mediterranean Catholic cults, one may pray to the Madonna of Loreto, of Fatima, or of Lourdes." On anti-Eurocentrism: "Those who parrot phrases like 'dead white male' might reflect that, in writing, death is relative; Lord Rochester is as dead as Sappho, though by no means as moribund as Brett Easton Ellis or Andrea Dworkin." On native Americans: "Aztec culture was messianic and invasive and imperialistic; it had been so ever since the Aztecs came down from the north, under the command of a charistmatic ruler whose name translates as Hummingbird-on-the-Left, and slaughtered or enslaved the resident people around Mexico City. I suppose the survivors could be glad there was no Hummingbird-on-the-Right." On Afrocentrism: "If, as H. Rap Brown once observed, violence is as American as apple pie, then slavery would seem to be as African as yams." On government-subsidized Dutch art: "So there it all sits, democratic, non-hierarchical, non-elitist, non-sexist, unsalable, and, to the great regret of the Dutch government, only partially biodegradable."

The left is not amused. David Futrelle, writing in the left-wing newsmagazine In These Times, attacks Hughes for his undemocratic belief in artistic standards: "Unfortunately, Hughes moves from a spirited, entertaining attack on the timid middlebrow multiculturalism of the contemporary NEA to an unabashed defense of old-fashioned artistic elitism. Who needs that? Let's hear it for art with no redeeming social value"--like the art of Robert Mapplethorpe, which Hughes believes inspires "the kind of exhausted and literally demoralized aestheticism that would find no basic difference between a Nuremberg rally and a Busby Berkeley spectacular, since both, after all, are examples of Art-Deco choreography."

Though the chief target of his polemic is the multicultural left, Hughes has a sharp eye for the hypocrisies and fatuities of the contemporary right. Some of his criticisms of conservatism fail to persuade (his defense of public funding for PBS leaves me skeptical), and when his strained effort to lampoon the Christian right's "fetus chic" falls flat, it does so with an appalling thud. At his best, however, his eye is as sharp as his tongue. On the opportunistic substitution of gay-baiting for red-baiting by the right after the Cold War: "Having lost the barbarian at the gates, they went for the fairy at the bottom of the garden." On Republican business leader Charles Keating:

Keating co-founded the National Coalition

Against Pornography, with the intent of saving

the innocent from Satan, and became a major

agitator for "traditional moral values" in the

Midwest. Only later did it appear why Keating

was so interested in preserving American inno-

cence: he cheated thousands of innocent people

of hundreds of millions of dollars in his manip-

ulations of Lincoln Savings and Loan...

Hughes is correct in thinking that today's far-right nativism is not so much a reaction to the excesses of the Sixties as it is the latest reincarnation of centuries-old Anglo-American nativism and puritanism. "Today, America is not 'heading back' to the 1920s or to the McCarthy years of the 1950s," Hughes notes. "Like fungal spores in the spoil, these repressive tendencies are always there, always latent, and capable of fruiting overnight given the right conditions." At the moment the "cultural elite" and homosexual citizens, as scapegoats and hate objects, have replaced the former subjects of nativist demonization and conspiracy-mongering: Jews, High Finance, Darwinists, immigrants, Catholics, Freemasons, Illuminati. The basic themes of American nativism, however, are unchanged from the days when Protestant preachers warned that giving civil equality to Catholics, Jews, black Americans, or women would bring about moral ruin, a war against Christianity, and the end of the nuclear family. Hughes paints a grim picture of the likely consequences of fundamentalist success in revamping American education: "Intelligent Americans have no grounds for complacency--not unless they want to hear their kids chirping about the Sin of Sodom and parroting the inanities of 'creation science' after school a few years from now."

Until quite recently, neoconservatives might have agreed. Some, unfortunately, now appear to endorse a strategy advocated by Patrick J. Buchanan, that proponent of "religious and cultural war," in a memo to his master Nixon that Hughes quotes: "If we tear the country in half, we can pick up the bigger half." This strategic logic, perhaps, explains why James Bowman, reviewing Culture of Complaint unfavorably in The New Criterion, criticizes Hughes for not limiting his attacks to targets on the left. According to Bowman, Hughes is guilty of intellectual draft evasion, of trying