Liberals and the Arts

To make profound art, I think it’s necessary to be partly or completely liberal. A real, bleeding heart liberal, unentitled and at one with the people. Can you do a poor job of stepping into another’s shoes and be a decent actor or writer?

There are some out there making “liberal” out to be a dirty word – such as gay Republican consultant Arthur Finkelstein – and those people are sitting on Satan’s lap playing with whatever’s nearby. I don’t believe in giving the poor a blank check – no one gave me one when I was scraping by – but liberals as a whole don’t believe in ignoring them. It’s simple compassion, and if you weren’t born with it, you’re broken. It’s the glue that holds communities together by literally making us care for each other to a greater or lesser degree. The ability to step into another’s shoes, which is the very definition of compassion, is a common character trait nurtured and taught by all faiths, and one assaults it at the risk of becoming a bore, a robot, and a devil worshiper. I would think that to assault this trait after seeing a loved one slip between the cracks of a society that calls itself compassionate is, if not impossible, a thing that requires a profound dedication to something deadly to the soul.

I don’t mean to say that if you vote conservative you have no compassion; I don’t believe that for a second. My wife is surrounded at her job by wealthy conservatives who are good people. There is certainly such a thing as a compassionate conservative, and I’m sure they can be found in the arts. I’ve heard of them.

For example, I think one can have the compassion necessary to write songs or poems of depth while having a preference for Republican economic theory – the granting of boons to Big Business with the belief that little people will prosper thereby. If I squint hard enough, I can see the sense in this. One can be compassionate and still believe that the proper response to 9/11 was to send our sons and daughters to attack Iraq. I can’t squint hard enough to see that, but enough to see that this particular belief and compassion can live side by side. One can be compassionate and view our president as a godly man of Chrisian character who can step into the shoes of commoners like you and me, and that he follows the three thousand admonitions in his own well-thumbed bible to help the poor, and lastly, that he seeks to find a meaningful and dignified solution to poverty and the systems that create it as much as he seeks to line the pockets of those who devise and refine those systems.

You can believe all that and be an actor, writer, painter or any kind of artist of great depth.

But in my thirty-plus years of doing this, I’ve never met one.