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April 14, 2013 by Rachel

Tokenism 101

Last week, whether you parked at the 50 Yard Line or rolled on the Informative Avenue, the GOP’s much-vaunted new Latino outreach efforts did not appear to be going well. Even Senator Don Young’s non-apology apology for casually tossing out a racial slur – “in my day, the word meant something different,” which, no it didn’t – indicated a much deeper problem.

Similarly, when Rand Paul went to Howard University last week, he offended the audience by assuming that they – elite students at a top university – did not know that Frederick Douglass was a Republican, while appearing to forget entirely about the Republican Party’s more recent racial history. According to Jamelle Bouie,

At no point did Paul acknowledge Nixon’s Southern Strategy, Lee Atwater’s racial demagoguery, or Ronald Reagan’s decision to denounce “welfare queens” and embrace “states’ rights” while campaigning in Philadelphia, Mississippi—where three civil-rights workers were murdered by white supremacists. Instead, he focused his time and attention on the 19th-century history of the GOP…I’m not sure Paul deserves any praise for his performance. It would be one thing if Paul had gone to Howard eager to listen as well as speak. Instead, he condescended with a dishonest and revisionist history of the GOP. “He didn’t say anything I didn’t expect,” said one student, a senior majoring in sociology and economics. I couldn’t agree more.

The modern Republican party believes that the only kind of racism that truly exists is reverse racism, and that affirmative action exemplifies this. However, this point of view results in considerable cognitive dissonance, as it requires overlooking basically any statistical or objective form of measurement (income levels, educational achievement, professional advancement, incarceration rates, political offices, and so forth) in favor of more…dubious explanations. Mitt Romney, in addition to his infamous 47% comments, offered one such insight after he was booed by the NAACP: “…if they want more stuff from government tell them to go vote for the other guy – more free stuff.”

“They,” meaning considerably more than 47% of the country (including 93% of black voters, 71% of Latinos, 73% of Asian Americans, 69% of Jewish voters, 67% of Native Americans, 76% of gay voters, 60% of youth under 30, and 55% of women), were not buying what the Republicans were selling. Due to these staggering deficits, Republicans find themselves with a particularly shallow bench of minority talent. Yet somehow, the powers that be within the GOP have decided that it is not their product, the actual policies, that voters have rejected; the problem lies only in the packaging.

However, with this dearth of qualified conservatives of color, over and over again Republicans have pulled up unripe backbenchers (Bobby Jindal, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson) who promptly embarrassed themselves on the national stage – because if you don’t believe in affirmative action, chances are you won’t execute it very well.

If Republicans intend to win over any voters outside of their core white male demographic, simply re-wording their mission statement more politely won’t cut it. Nor will sprinkling in a few Spanish words, or having them read by a person of color; it’s a form of condescension that is both blatant and deeply offensive. According to reporting by Buzzfeed,

One former RNC field staffer, who is Hispanic, described a culture of cynicism among his predominantly white colleagues when it came to minority outreach. He said that in his office, whenever they were notified of a new Republican outreach effort, they would pass around a Beanie Baby — which they had dubbed the “pander bear” — and make fun of the “tokenism.”
“Any kind of racially specific campaign activity was often treated with skepticism by white staffers,” he said.

I know that feel, bro.

Posted in Existential Crisis, Ideology, Public Square, Reform, Side-eye · 2 Replies ·

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March 17, 2013 by Rachel

The Divine Comedy: Habemus Papam edition

Italy’s recent elections featured the return of legendarily corrupt, thrice-indicted bunga-bunga enthusiast Silvio Berlusconi in a three-way tie with a comedian and a career politician – only a few days before his conviction and sentencing on a corruption charge. The juries are still out on his other pending charges of sex with an underage prostitute and tax fraud.

Berlusconi and Benedict, 2009. Image: ALESSANDRA TARANTINO/AP/Press Association Images

Zooming into the country within a country, Italy’s legally distinct Siamese twin the Vatican also is roiled by sex-and-corruption farces and tragedies that have led to the first and only Nazi pope clicking his red Prada heels as he relinquishes the divine right to pontificate.

Because the Italian state has proven so adept at self-governance, Milanese archbishop Angelo Scola was the pre-conclave frontrunner for the papacy – until his offices were raided by anti-mafia police over corruption charges in the hours leading up to the first vote. The candidacies of Brazilian and Angolan clergy also raised the tantalizing possibility of a pope who more accurately reflects the modern, global south oriented face of Catholicism; but in the end, the cardinals split the difference and chose an Italian from Argentina, 33-to-1 dark horse Jorge Bergoglio. Beyond the personalities, however, lie deep-rooted structural issues of modernity and morality, wherein the horrific abuse of children and demonization of women has led to a subsequent global collapse of both authority and funding that must be resolved if the Holy See is to survive.

Significantly, the College of Cardinals who made up the conclave are themselves implicated in many of the worst of these abuses. Bergoglio, who took the name Francis I, also has his share of quickly unearthed skeletons, both individual and systemically shared with his brethren. For instance, per reporter Marco della Cava,

“The word that spread Friday was of Pope Francis’ actions during Argentina’s “dirty war” between 1976 and 1983, when the ruling military government abused and killed countless citizens suspected of being Communists. At issue is whether Jorge Mario Bergoglio, then a young priest in his 30s…was complicit in allowing two Jesuit priests, Orlando Yorio and Franz Jalics, to be apprehended and tortured for five months.”

Rumors swirled, fueled by different agendas – from glowing reports that the new Pope had hidden and perhaps saved the priests’ lives, to sinister assertions that he had not only given them up, but had actually participated in their brutal “interrogations.” Father Jalics, the lone survivor, issued a statement that forgave Francis, but declined to exonerate him, closing the investigation in a disconcerting but presumably final manner.

Pope Francis – because when you need to hide a German, hire an Argentinian. #conclave

— John M Palmateer (@JohnMPalmateer) March 14, 2013

As troubling as the shadowy allegations from the Dirty War are, however, non-war-crimes related revelations pose an even greater existential threat to both his papacy specifically, and the Catholic church at large. Though the 76-year old Bergoglio’s history of advocating for the impoverished in Latin America shows great promise, his conservative approach to other issues of social justice are closely in line with his demographic and peers. His attacks on gay marriage as “destructive to God’s plan” in 2010 were so vitriolic, they were widely considered to have backfired, boosting the efforts of pro-equality activists in Argentina.

Similarly, a range of experts from Bergoglio’s biographer to Vatican insiders have unanimously affirmed that when the Cardinals say they want ‘reform,’ they are not referring to ordaining women into the priesthood, green-lighting contraceptive use, or prosecuting those within the Church who covered up abuse and shuffled child-rapists from parish to parish. In other words: the anachronistic, doctrinal cancers that are currently rotting Catholicism from the inside will remain firmly in place, at least for the 5-10 years that the elderly Francis is likely to serve as the infallible mouthpiece of God.

Pope Francis waves to the crowd from the central balcony of St Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican. Photo: AP

If he can tackle the hornet’s nest of Italian politicians in priest’s robes within the Vatican – and that is a very large if, both in terms of sheer historical difficulty, and in the face of mounting evidence that Benedict intends to play the Putin to Francis’ Medvedev – there is a significant chance that Bergoglio can at least lay the groundwork for genuine reforms within one of the world’s oldest, richest, most corrupt and most influential institutions. If he is successful, perhaps he will allow the Italian Senate to copy his homework as they attempt to institute a prime minister who is not both a convicted criminal and a global punchline. And if not, at least Rome and the Vatican are conveniently located for access to non-stop bunga-bunga parties.

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March 2, 2013 by Rachel

We’re all being trolled


Much has been made over the past few weeks of two of the younger, more attractive members of the Phelps clan publicly splitting with their mother and grandfather, Fred Phelps, and deciding that maybe God doesn’t hate dead soldiers and gay people so much after all. Per Westboro Baptist Church spokesman Steve Drain:

“‘We can’t control whether or not somebody decides, when they grow up, that they don’t want to be here,’ Drain said. ‘Those two girls were kind of straddling the idea that they wanted to be of the world but that they would also miss their family, the only thing they ever knew. If they continue with the position that they have, those two girls, yeah, they’re going to hell.'”

The girls, Megan and Grace, understandably take a less brimstone-oriented tone in their own statement, a blog post, natch, titled after a lovely song by earnest indie darlings the Avett Brothers, which begins with a Batman quote. Megan asserts that, “At WBC, reciting lines from pop culture is par for the course. And why not? The sentiments they express are readily identifiable by the masses – and shifting their meaning is as easy as giving them new context.”

And this brings home a long-held suspicion: the Westboro Baptist Church is performance art.

I have only one piece of evidence to support this thesis, but it’s quite compelling:

This video is amazing and amusing on multiple levels, but it’s at the 4:37 mark that the jig is up. The upside down Canadian flag. It’s too perfect, right? Think about it: if a very clever pro-equality activist were to design the most offputting, ludicrous straw man to make the opposing case, could they improve upon the Phelps family? Sure, you could make them Nazis, but having them be Baptists is just much more elegant. And for a group as media-savvy and well-funded as they are (tens of thousands of protests in dozens of cities ain’t cheap), they are cognizant of the affects of their actions, and that they are widely considered to be the most hated family in America. That’s not a title you earn by accident. I’ve encountered a number of true believers in my day who are committed enough to engage in many acts well outside of general social conditioning, like plastering graphic full-color photos of mangled fetuses on the side of their vehicle, or gleefully describing their certain doom to strangers. But the one thing that none of those diehards would ever in a million years do, is to laugh at their own beliefs. The way these WBC members are giggling at the absurdity of the lyrics as they sing them? These people are in on the joke, y’all.

Furthermore, if you take into account the degree to which gay rights have advanced since 1991, when WBC first started waving fluorescent signs reading “Fags Eat Poop,” and how they have stepped up their game at crucial moments (advancing from picketing the funerals of AIDS casualties to picketing the funerals of dead soldiers, for instance, a move both designed and guaranteed to alienate even their natural allies), it’s pretty clear that they are demonstrating the reductio ad absurdem endgame of homophobia with absolute self-knowledge and clarity of purpose. What makes it art, you ask? The little touches, as when they made a weekly target of a local hardware store which sells Swedish vacuums. The reasoning behind this choice is every bit as convoluted as you might expect, because the choice itself is completely arbitrary. The sole purpose, I believe, is to discredit a specific point of view with a scorched-earth thoroughness and a delightful soupçon of whimsy.

Have you ever seen Andy Kaufman and Shirley Phelps Roper in the same place? I REST MY CASE.

Take notes, Joaquin Phoenix: this is how it is done.

Posted in Existential Crisis, Ideology, Public Square, Side-eye · 2 Replies ·

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February 24, 2013 by Rachel

The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things: the Unconscious Roots of Conservative Ideology

fox red tie

The ideal of democracy – a well-informed public engaged in good faith in a passionate, yet reasoned debate – has never truly existed. Still, if one removes the qualifiers from the previous statement, it is relatively close to the actual American practice of self-governance.

Yet, the gulf between almost-universally endorsed political abstracts and specific policies becomes painfully apparent when the polity attempts to apply them in the real world. For instance, when Herbert McClosky and John Zaller examined attitudes towards “capitalism” and “democracy,” principles which are theoretically linked, they found that “The evidence on this point is unequivocal: people who are most firmly attached to democratic values tend to exhibit the least amount of support for capitalism,” and vice versa.

With an inherent but invisible conflict brewing beneath the generalities that the public widely agrees upon, heuristics can be an extremely useful tool to develop a sort of mental shorthand for both diehard ideologues and the politically unsophisticated masses. Rather than becoming an expert on every subject, most citizens necessarily rely on a combination of personal experience and cues from elites. Nonetheless, as scientists are fond of noting, the plural of anecdote is not ‘data,’ and a reliance on one’s own standpoint and social group alone often results in problematic inconsistencies. This incoherence between abstract idealism and functional reality is particularly evident within the extensive research into the operational-symbolic paradoxes of conservative ideology. Analysis into how psychosocial predispositions act on political ideology assists in identifying errors in forming policy views, and ultimately in determining how occasionally contradictory political beliefs can be simultaneously held.

Continue reading →

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February 18, 2013 by Rachel

“Alright then, I’ll go to hell.”

In honor of the publication in 1885 of “Huckleberry Finn,” let’s talk about how ahead of the curve America’s Favorite Ginger Mark Twain was on practically every serious issue facing the country.

Samuel Clemens came of age during a period in American history marked by problematic moral questions, from the spiritual devastation of slavery to an explosion of scientific advances that upended the known world. As the literal and metaphorical borders shifted, traditional Judeo-Christian values failed to address these new questions. Reflecting on the meaning of this failure, Twain observed that “the altar cloth of one eon is the doormat of the next.”

He was almost obscenely prolific; the Mark Twain Project at the University of California received approximately one million handwritten pages from his daughter Clara. Additionally, more than 5000 new letters have been discovered since 1960, although some experts believe he wrote at least 50,000. Like Tom Sawyer spying on his own funeral, Twain gleefully anticipated the scandals and fanfare which he hoped would accompany his posthumously released works, many of which were scathingly heretical. Harold Bush and William Phipps, who wrote “Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of His Age” and “Mark Twain’s Religion” respectively, tried to solve the problem of how Mark Twain could be on the one hand this sharp-tongued social critic, while Sam Clemens was deeply in love with his devoutly religious wife Olivia, and close friends with Reverends Joe Twichell, and Thomas and Henry Ward Beecher. In fact, the heresy trial of Henry Ward Beecher greatly alienated Clemens from organized religion. Additionally, the massive (and growing) inequality of the Gilded Age, along with the rise of scientific thinking, contributed to a widespread spiritual malaise which he both helped to create, and was deeply affected by.

More compelling than the national mood, however, was his own personal history. Half of his family, 3 of his 6 siblings and his father, were dead by the time he turned 12. He held himself responsible for the death of a fourth sibling, his younger brother Henry, and later for the illness and death of his infant son Langdon. He lost 2 more daughters in their 20’s, and he outlived his wife Olivia as well. He made and lost several fortunes, including Olivia’s inheritance, and was forced by bankruptcy into exile for almost a decade. There is little consensus on his religious perspective – Bush called him an adherent of the social gospel, Phipps labels him a “tolerant monotheist,” and many scholars believe he was an atheist –Twain was such a skilled satirist that sifting genuine beliefs out of the exaggerations and tall tales can be difficult. However, the string of personal tragedies he experienced must surely have called to mind the much put-upon Job. He wrote in The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, “All say, ‘How hard it is that we have to die’ – a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.”

Clemens’ personal heartbreak coincided with the national upheaval of the Civil War. His slave-owning mother Jane was a proud confederate, while his brother Orion joined the Union Army. Sam himself briefly joined a militia composed of childhood friends, but his wartime experience was limited to camping in the woods for a week. The Clemens family’s split clearly mirrored that of the country at large; the moral compass provided by the church spun wildly as both abolitionists and slave-owners used opposing interpretations of the Bible to support their claims. He recalled how literal biblical interpretations were used by the clergy as evidence of God’s approval of slavery; later, he wrote that in the years leading up to the war, “There was no place in the land where the seeker could not find some small budding sign of pity for the slave. No place in all the land but one – the pulpit.”

Like the country at large, he would wrestle with issues of race and slavery for the rest of his life, returning to them again and again in his writing. The church’s claim to moral authority was catastrophically damaged in the wake of abolition. He wrote that:

“In all the ages the Roman Church has owned slaves, bought and sold slaves, authorized and encouraged her children to trade in them. Long after some Christian peoples had freed their slaves the Church still held on to hers. If any could know, to absolute certainty, that all this was right, and according to God’s will and desire, surely it was she, since she was God’s specially appointed representative in the earth and sole authorized and infallible expounder of his Bible. There were the texts; there was no mistaking their meaning…she had no word to say against human slavery. …. The texts remain: it is the practice that has changed. Why? Because the world has corrected the Bible. The Church never corrects it…”

For Twain, like many Americans, the Church’s place on the wrong side of such a serious and clear issue as slavery irreparably damaged her credibility as an ethical leader.

While the church was failing to correct the world, Twain discovered a group of European social critics and scientists. He had left school at the age of eleven, and instead of attending college he devoured the newly published texts of Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Arthur Schopenhauer, Sir Charles Lyell, Friedrich Nietzsche, and many others. In a letter to his brother Orion in 1865 he wrote, “I have a religion – but you will call it blasphemy. It is that there is a God for the rich man but none for the poor. You are in trouble, & in debt – so am I. I am utterly miserable – so are you.” Twain had grown disillusioned with the traditional teachings of the Christian church, and began to look towards scientific fields for answers. He found that the principles of secular humanism (belief in science, ethical naturalism, a focus on fulfillment in this life rather than a possibility of an afterlife, rational moral principles not predicated on supernaturalism, rejection of religious dogma, and critical assessment of ideologies) made far more sense in assessing reality. For all practical purposes, he had begun the process of conversion from a good Presbyterian boy to a secular humanist.

Throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, a tide of scientific advances were challenging religious dogma – and winning. Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” sent shock waves through society when it was published in 1859, inspiring an immediate and vicious denunciation from the religious community. Twain found the evidence more convincing than the rebuttal. In his biography, he remarked that “[t]he Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition.” In 1887, Twain crystallized his shifting spiritual views in a letter to his dear friend William Howells, writing:

“People pretend that the Bible means the same to them at 50 that it did at all former milestones in their journey. I wonder how they can lie so. It comes of practice, no doubt. They would not say that of Dickens’ or Scott’s books. Nothing remains the same. When a man goes back to look at the house of his childhood, it has always shrunk: there is no instance of such a house being as big as the picture in memory and imagination call for. Shrunk how? Why, to its correct dimensions: the house hasn’t altered; this is the first time it has been in focus.

Well, that’s loss. To have house and Bible shrink so, under the disillusioning corrected angle, is loss–for a moment. But there are compensations. You tilt the tube skyward and bring planets and comets and corona flames a hundred and fifty thousand miles high into the field. Which I see you have done, and found Tolstoi. I haven’t got him in focus yet, but I’ve got Browning…”

But the reactionary hysteria of religious institutions towards science was not the only area ripe for criticism; Twain would become increasingly more incensed by the symbiosis of imperialism and missionary zeal.

The turn of the twentieth century marked a very public political awakening for Twain. He underwent a 180 degree change regarding colonialism and interventionism in the one year period between 1898 and 1899. Formerly an ardent supporter of the Spanish American War, he had believed that US involvement would help to free Cuba from Spanish abuse. However, the very next year, when the US expanded operations to the Philippines, Twain sided with the Pilipino nationalists. He explained that he had been a “…red-hot imperialist. I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific … But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of Paris, and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines.” Although his ire was primarily directed against the political powers, he would soon come to believe that the Church bore as much, if not more, of the responsibility for military and economic devastation of resource-rich lands.

Twain referred to himself as “The American,” but when he made his definitive stand against religionists, it was in China. The violent Boxer Uprising which kindled and raged throughout China for three years was directly traceable to imperialistic policies of western nations, who forced the importation of both opium and millions of missionaries, seized Chinese land and exempted foreigners from many laws (a scenario that would play out again, with similar results, in 20th century Iran). Because many Christians had been targeted and slain in the rebellion, a prominent missionary named William Scott Ament, along with a number of missionary organizations demanded indemnities. Ament led both Chinese and foreign Christians to retaliate against the Boxers with looting, murder, extortion and arson on a massive scale. Twain, aghast at a Christmas Eve newspaper report of Ament’s actions, was inspired both to join the Anti-Imperialist League and to write a scathing indictment of imperialism, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” which refers to Kiplings pro-colonialism ode “White Man’s Burden.” Twain laid the sarcasm on thick, claiming that

“Mr. Ament’s financial feat of squeezing a thirteen-fold indemnity out of the pauper peasants to square other people’s offenses, thus condemning them and their women and innocent little children to inevitable starvation and lingering death, in order that the blood money so acquired might be ‘used for the propagation of the Gospel,’ does not flutter my serenity…”

The venom dripping from his pen is palpable. Although the sharpest barbs were aimed at Ament’s jugular, Twain used the essay to broadly criticize European and American imperialism in not only China, but the Philippines, Cuba, and South Africa. In another venue, a speech to the Red Cross, Twain said:

“I bring you the stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored, from pirate raids in Kiaochow, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and towel, but hide the looking glass.”

Clearly, his political and religious views had radicalized from the weak neutrality of his Civil War days; he had come to believe that detachment in the face of oppression was a luxury no moral person could afford. But Twain’s most stylized and eloquent response to the tide of American military actions was kept under wraps while he was alive. “The War Prayer,” written in 1904, describes an unnamed country that has just declared war. The excitement and righteous fervor of the citizenry is palpable, as young volunteers prepare to leave for the front to fight for God and country. In church, the pastor prays “that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory…”

An old man claiming to be a messenger from God appears to complete the “unuttered” second part of the prayer, for suffering, chaos and death in the land of the enemy. The flock of the faithful concludes that he must be crazy. When Twain’s publisher refused to print the essay, he sent it to Harper’s Bazaar, who also declined. It was eventually printed in Harper’s Monthly in 1916, six years after his death, only months before the beginning of US involvement in the First World War.

The body of Twain’s nonfiction writing illustrates the deeper problem that the American public had to contend with. Governments have always been corrupt in their pursuit of power. However, a major role of religion has always been as a moral arbiter, resolving conflicts and maintaining social cohesion. Throughout Twain’s life, the church failed to properly serve their clear purpose, instead sowing greater seeds of discord and confusion as her grip on power slipped away. He was not merely disappointed by this spiritual failure; he feels righteous fury at the church for her betrayal of an ancient covenant. This anger is illuminated somewhat by his description of his own place in society. Upon receiving an honorary degree from Yale, Twain explained that his job as a humorist is

“…a worthy calling; that with all its lightness and frivolity it has one serious purpose, one aim, one specialty, and it is constant to it – the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities, the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence; and that who so is by instinct engaged in this sort of warfare is the natural enemy of royalties, nobilities, privileges and all kindred swindles, and the natural friend of human rights and human liberties.”

Twain had made a lifelong good-faith attempt to understand and improve religious piety. Because she either could not or would not do the same, he judged the church to be a bankrupt institution. Today, studies show that religious adherence in the United States has massively declined since Twain’s lifetime. Despite the strength of his denunciations, Twain did maintain hope for religion – derived, ironically enough, from the premise of evolution. In “Europe and Elsewhere,” after he excoriated the church for needing to be dragged behind the moral arc of the universe kicking and screaming, he closed the chapter with a hopeful prognostication: “It does certainly seem to suggest that if man continues in the direction of enlightenment, his religious practice may, in the end, attain some semblance of human decency.”

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February 15, 2013 by Rachel

The art of selling out

fiddlehead

In an op-ed today in the NYT, Lance Hosey makes the pragmatic case for beauty:

“Take color. Last year, German researchers found that just glancing at shades of green can boost creativity and motivation. It’s not hard to guess why: we associate verdant colors with food-bearing vegetation — hues that promise nourishment. This could partly explain why window views of landscapes, research shows, can speed patient recovery in hospitals, aid learning in classrooms and spur productivity in the workplace. In studies of call centers, for example, workers who could see the outdoors completed tasks 6 to 7 percent more efficiently than those who couldn’t, generating an annual savings of nearly $3,000 per employee.
In some cases the same effect can happen with a photographic or even painted mural, whether or not it looks like an actual view of the outdoors. Corporations invest heavily to understand what incentivizes employees, and it turns out that a little color and a mural could do the trick. Simple geometry is leading to similar revelations. For more than 2,000 years, philosophers, mathematicians and artists have marveled at the unique properties of the “golden rectangle”: subtract a square from a golden rectangle, and what remains is another golden rectangle, and so on and so on — an infinite spiral. These so-called magical proportions (about 5 by 8) are common in the shapes of books, television sets and credit cards, and they provide the underlying structure for some of the most beloved designs in history: the facades of the Parthenon and Notre Dame, the face of the ‘Mona Lisa,’ the Stradivarius violin and the original iPod.”

Bill Hicks took this line of reasoning to its logical extreme decades ago; it ends with a beautiful woman, preferably nude, in fully saturated color, selling Coke. And the truth about whether sex really sells, or if it just angries up the blood is, of course, more complicated than the conventional wisdom might admit. But the way the question is framed is problematic. Does beauty in art or nature need justification, a practical purpose, an angle to exploit? Is the ultimate measure of everything whether or not it can be used to turn a profit?

Jackson Pollock, “Number 8”

Now. Some people become very fidgety when, for instance, their favorite song turns up in a car commercial. I have little patience for the sort of purist who prefers their idols starving and struggling; as Nitsuh Abebe wrote in a very good profile of Grizzly Bear last year, artists have mortgages to pay and heroin to buy, like the rest of us, and while I personally would never always illegally pirate music even though it is easier and faster as well as free-er, you know. Kids these days. However: egregious brand clashes between band and product are certainly cringe-inducing (remember that painfully awkward Iggy Pop ad for a Royal Caribbean cruise?). On the other hand, the use of Walt Whitman in this Levi’s ad makes me want to high five Don Draper.

It is certainly a marvelous side effect for an artist to have his paintings featured in a movie, or a song used to sell iPods. There is, in fact, a compelling argument to be made that the demands of marketing can make one a better writer or visual artist. There is undeniably a fertile, profitable overlap between commerce and creation. Still, the concept that the value of not just one’s work, but even physical or natural beauty is market-based…that freaks me out. Maybe it’s just because nobody ever pays me for my paintings.

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