Hey, Hey, LBJ....

[poliphilo]

I've been around a while and I've seen hateful politicians come and go.

They arrive, they block out the light, they depart.

The first American President I really hated was LBJ.

"Hey, hey, LBJ
How many kids have you killed today?"

Actually Johnson wasn't all bad. He pushed through civil rights legislation. Sometimes the biggest monsters do the most surprising things.

Like it was Nixon who went to China. And maybe (as the old Vulcan proverb says) he was the only one who could.

Then there was Margaret Thatcher. I hated her with a passion. And she just seemed to go on and on and on. But she's stepped down now- and I find it hard to remember what all the fuss was about.

Politicians are less important than they/we think they are. Who was in charge in the 1890s? Which American Presidents? Which British Prime Ministers? I don't know. I'd have to go look it up. But everybody's heard of Oscar Wilde.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I would so like to prove you wrong.

But...

Well, take the long-term view. I'd want to argue that the effects of of the Land Acts will have petered out long before The Importance of Being Earnest ceases to be performed.

But I know what you mean.

I comfort myself by thinking in terms of thousands of years, but I concede that- as far as our lives go- the politicians are pretty damn important.

[archyena.livejournal.com]

Then take comfort from the fact that they are products of precisely the same culture, at least in vaguely democratic societies. They are slaves to the same social forces and are reacting just as anyone else.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes. We have to resist the temptation to see them as somehow other than ourselves.

Of course the classic technique is to imagine them in the nude.

[glitzfrau.livejournal.com]

Just for a spot more sunshine and light: yes, the Importance of Being Ernest may be played in a thousand year's time, but what are the chances of a subversive play by a queer playwrite being given funding or a school production in Bush's America, as he would like to have it?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Wilde flourished in a more repressive era than our own. He was a licenced jester, continually flirting with danger. And in the end he got swatted- though not for anything he had written.

The queerness is coded in his work. He said as much as he thought he could get away with. Pushing up against the boundaries of what is permitted is what artists do even in the most liberal states.

If censorship is tightened artists will find ways of subverting it- as they always have done.