Arts Council luminary and devout Guardianista Dame Liz Forgan, of whom we’ve spoken previously, has had a rather grand leaving do costing just north of £8,000. A mere bagatelle compared to the £50,000 spent on two Arts Council Christmas parties. However, the Telegraph’s Stephen Pollard isn’t overly impressed:

There could be no clearer demonstration of the contempt that Dame Liz, who exudes the haughty sense of self-worth and entitlement that typifies the arts establishment, has for the rest of us that she chose a drinks party funded by the taxpayer to attack the Government for cutting the arts budget.

A budget that’s been slashed by a hair-tearing 2.6%. Yes, our insufficiently leftwing and therefore evil government is, we’re warned, practically “robbing a generation of its birthright.” 

It’s fair to say Mr Pollard is none too keen on the Arts Council, and not entirely without cause: 

The Arts Council is a body set up specifically to ignore the public’s wishes and provide an income to organisations that they would not receive through the free choices made by consumers… Arts Council England makes sure that “street artists” (buskers is, it seems, a derogatory term) are well looked after: in the recent past, Zap street art in Brighton has received £25,000 a year; Circus Space (a leading provider of “circus education”) has been given £70,000 a year, and Circomedia has been handed £80,000 to train street artists. One might have thought that buskers got their money from passers-by, depending on whether or not they were any good. Apparently, it is much more sensible to take money from taxpayers and simply hand it over.

Those familiar with the assumptions of our official taste-correcting caste will not be altogether surprised, and the readiness with which the Arts Council sets fire to public money is hard to overstate. In 2006 – to take a year at random – the following artistic projects were beckoned to the taxpayer’s teat. £20, 470 was handed to a “participatory photography and self-advocacy project” for East London’s “female sex workers,” while £15,000 found its way into the hands of those hosting “Malian mudcloth and DJ workshops.” A more modest amount, a mere £4,950, was felt necessary for “research and development to explore the writing of a poetry and music show examining issues of cultural identity and sexuality.” Despite the funding, no poetry or music need actually be produced and no show need materialise. The five grand was merely to facilitate the exploration of such things. 

Joshua Sofaer’s artistic project Meeting the Public is described thusly: “A range of initiatives which combine production, research and professional development. They are brought together as a body of work in a collaborative relationship with a producer and a particular kind of active engagement.” All very cryptic and no further explanation is offered, but evidently the project served some pressing cultural need, thereby receiving £31,889. Also funded was the “research” of “live art practitioner” Helena Bryant, whose mission was to “establish the performance persona of Sally Bangs, through an inquiry into intimacy and engagement in performance encounters thematically based on love-sickness and exploring the pathology of erotic love.” When not funding “research” trips to Mongolia, Cuba and the frozen poles, the Arts Council uses your money to bankroll Greenpeace, whose no doubt unbiased “programme of educational activities” coined the handsome sum of £66,795. I could, of course, go on. But such are the mighty talents deemed deserving of your money – which is to say, obviously, more deserving than you. 

My local publicly-funded galleries of contemporary work, one of which is a glorified coffee shop for two dozen middle-class lefties, can be relied on to disappoint – and to go on disappointing precisely because there’s no obvious mechanism for correction. No box office takings to fret about, no bums on seats, no ghastly commercial metrics need be considered. And so the featured artists, or pseudo-artists, can expect taxpayers to serve as patrons, whether they wish to or not, while being immune to the patron’s customary discrimination between promising art and opportunist flim-flam. The expectation that one must be exempt from base commerce, and by extension the preferences of one’s supposed audience and customers, is an arrangement that rewards and encourages the peddling of drek. Yet Liz Forgan and her associates would have us believe that an interest in visual culture, music, etc., should coincide with an urge to make others pay for whatever it is that tickles you, or for whatever is deemed to improve the species by Liz Forgan and her colleagues, i.e., People Loftier Than Us. Though one might still wonder how the coercive public subsidy of fatuous posturing and god-awful tat became a permanent function of the welfare state. One might also ponder this. The unspoken ethos of the Arts Council is, and always has been, We Have Your Wallet And We Know What’s Best™. And yet somehow they’re the victims.

Theodore Dalrymple on tax, altruism and Gérard Depardieu:

Suppose that Gérard Depardieu were to undergo a conversion experience and see that his wealth was not unjust but unseemly in view of the difficulties or hardships of others, and that as a consequence he decided to give it away to those most in need (as determined by him) in exactly the same proportion as he would have been taxed. Would that be acceptable to all those who criticised him for refusing to pay his tax? I suspect not: for in the modern world, the state claims the monopoly not only of force, but increasingly of compassion as well.

Dalrymple refers to a Libération article by Marcela Iacub, who tells us, “a rational and just society must prevent the accumulation of capital by individuals above a certain level.” Presumably Ms Iacub is much less troubled by an accumulation of power by the state – say, to limit what an individual may lawfully earn.

KC Johnson on the politicised narrowing of American history:

If, in fact, there’s nothing to be ashamed of in purging “traditional” approaches to the American past, why don’t we see departments and colleges boasting of the fact? Departmental websites could explain how the study of U.S. history must occur through the prism of race, class, and gender; or how the university eschews such old-fashioned topics as political, diplomatic, or military history. But with rare exceptions colleges have followed the opposite approach, doing everything they can to obscure just how one-sided their approach to U.S. history has become. For those parents, students, or alumni who don’t have the time to drill down and comprehensively examine curricula, the assumption remains that all elements of the American past continue to be taught.

Related, this report by the National Association of Scholars:

The root of the problem is that colleges and universities have drifted from their main mission. They and particular programmes within them, increasingly think of themselves as responsible for reforming American society and curing it of prejudice and bigotry. When universities and university programmes consider it necessary to atone for, and help erase, oppressions of the past, one way in which they do so is by depicting history as primarily a struggle of the downtrodden against rooted injustice. This pedagogical conception may be well-intended, but it is also a limited and partisan one, and history teaching should not allow itself to become imprisoned within a narrow interpretation… The dominance of race, class, and gender themes in history curricula came about through disciplinary mission creep. Historians and professors of United States history should return to their primary task: handing down the American story, as a whole, to future generations.

Apparently it’s all too easy to conflate education with political activism, especially among those educators who see themselves as “critical thinking change agents” – as gadflies and rebels, “enlightened leaders” – for whom the classroom is a place “to transcend the negative effects of the dominant culture” and where “education is a political act.” Which is to say, the act of describing the world through a Marxoid filter of rhetorically convenient oppressors and victims, while “speaking on behalf” of those they, our self-appointed leaders, deem oppressed. A much more glamorous and flattering function than merely teaching history or literature as commonly understood. And we’ve seen what happens when these “change agents” are challenged by students and peers on points of fact, probity and rudimentary logic.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments.

Matt Welch on Obama’s fantasy economics:

Democrats are in denial about the true cost of their ideological commitments. If we taxed Americans enough to cover the cost (or even 90 percent of the cost) of what Democrats consider the minimal level of government, the result would be recession. That should, but won’t, give big-government apologists pause.

Somewhat related: “Tax revenue has been falling despite a sharp increase in the rate.” Despite?

Jonah Goldberg on imaginary opponents:

When will [the left] accept that they aren’t all that stands between a wonderful, tolerant America and Jim Crow? I was in the room when, during the Democratic convention, civil-rights hero John Lewis suggested that Republicans wanted to “go back” to the days when black men like him could be beaten in the street by the enforcers of Jim Crow. I thought it an outrageous and disgusting bit of demagoguery. The audience of Democratic delegates cheered in a riot of self-congratulation… To watch MSNBC is to think the hosts see themselves as the official newsletter of the Underground Railroad.

And Victor Davis Hanson on the ‘progressive’ aristocracy:

The medieval concept of offsetting your sins through public penance is back in play: The more loudly you talk about helping the proverbial people, the more you are allowed to live quite apart from them without guilt… Hollywood still seeks hundreds of millions in tax breaks unavailable to small businesses without shame because it is so manifestly compassionate. Occupy Wall Street does not camp out in Beverly Hills or Malibu, although the likes of Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio make more per year than do most Wall Street fat cats… For the overpaid and pampered Hollywood movie star, calling for raising taxes, banning guns, ending global warming, and legalising gay marriage means never having to feel too bad about living on the beach and making, under our capitalist system, more money in a month than do many Americans in a lifetime.

For some, professions of egalitarianism and socialist belly fire are a kind of rhetorical chaff – a way to elevate oneself as More Compassionate Than Thou, while deflecting envy from below. (“Please don’t hate me for being richer than you. Look, over there – they have even more, or almost as much –  let’s all hiss at them!”) Vicarious philanthropy – giving away freely other people’s earnings – is a remarkably effective ruse, so much so it seems to encourage a certain disregard for dissonance, as demonstrated, for example, by the Guardian’s editor Alan Rusbridger in this comical exchange with Piers Morgan. And by the Guardian’s imperious class warrior Polly Toynbee, whose rhetoric was contrasted with her actual lifestyle and was promptly reduced to indignant spluttering on national television. Similar obliviousness is also displayed by the millionaire actor Jeremy Irons, who denounces consumerism and asks, “How many clothes do people need?” All while owning no fewer than seven houses, one of which is a peach-coloured castle. No, you’re not allowed to laugh. Because his wife is also very Green and “deeply socialist.”

Feel free to add your own links and snippets in the comments.

In which the Guardian’s George Monbiot encounters the underclass and shows how his worldview is quite different from yours:

A group of us had occupied a piece of land on St George’s Hill in Surrey… Our aim had been to rekindle interest in land reform. It had been going well – we had placated the police, started to generate plenty of public interest – when two young lads with brindled Staffordshire bull terriers arrived in an old removals van. Everyone was welcome at the site and, as they were travellers, one of the groups marginalised by the concentration of control and ownership of land in Britain, we went out of our way to accommodate them. They must have thought they had died and gone to heaven.

Almost as soon as they arrived they began twocking stuff. A radio journalist left his equipment in his hire car. They smashed the side window. Someone saw them bundling the kit, wrapped in a stolen sleeping bag, into their lorry. There was a confrontation – handwringing appeals to reason on one side, pugnacious defiance on the other – which eventually led to the equipment being handed back. They wound their dogs up, making them snap and snarl at the other occupiers. At night they roamed the camp, staffies straining at the leash, cans of Special Brew in their free hands, shouting “fucking hippies, we’re going to burn you in your tents!”

We had no idea how to handle them without offending our agonised liberal consciences. They saw this and exploited it ruthlessly. Eventually the police solved the problem for us. Most of the cars parked at a nearby attraction had had their windows smashed and radios stolen, and someone had followed their lorry back to our site. As they were led away, my anarchist beliefs battled my bourgeois instincts, and lost.

Do read the whole thing. It brings a tear to the eye. And tune in next week when George tries to reason with the tattooed Neanderthal burgling his house.

Update, via the comments:

What’s almost – almost – touching is the implied revelation, i.e., that members of Designated Victim Groups, with which Guardianistas feel obliged to side whatever the particulars, can in fact be obnoxious and predatory scumbags. Apparently this thought hadn’t previously occurred to George and, by golly, the news troubles him. All of which suggests a well-rehearsed imperviousness to reality. One Guardian reader praises Mr Monbiot for his “refreshing honesty,” which rather gives the game away.

Maybe George wrote the article to show us how difficult it is to be virtuous, indeed heroic, at least as he conceives such things. I suspect, though, that any moral lesson is quite different from the one intended. You see, George believes in sharing, by which of course he means taking other people’s stuff. Yet he’s remarkably unprepared for that favour being returned. Say, by two burly chaps with neck tattoos and ill-tempered dogs. And as these burly chaps were members of a “marginalised group,” and therefore righteous by default, George was expecting noble savages. Alas, ‘twas not to be.

For more of George’s ideological crises, see here and here.

Update 2:

Oh dear. Mr Monbiot is now being assailed on Twitter for writing such a “racist” article. However, the people doing the chastising – including an indignant, self-described “agitator” – have yet to explain exactly why the article is racist, despite being asked. One of the chastisers is a “Marxist, knitter and student of critical theory.”

Our moral and intellectual betters, obviously.

A librarian replies to a comment piece in the Daily Californian:

Please don’t fuck in the library. I work here. My staff works here.

The piece in question is by UC Berkeley student Nadia Cho, who seems to believe she’s very edgy and progressive. In fact, it’s difficult to overstate just how edgy and progressive our columnist believes she is:

We decided that, out of the millions of books in the library, the shelves full of books on religion seemed like the best place to fuck.

How incredibly, desperately transgressive. Ms Cho gleefully explains that she and her companions are “desecrating” buildings with their “perverse ways.” You see, the sex she’s having is much more radical than yours, and therefore more important.

The risk of getting caught is what makes having sex in public so exciting. Without that, there wouldn’t be any novelty in doing it.

Indeed. And what’s the point of exhibitionist psychodrama without an audience? We’ve been here before, I think.

Thankfully, the author also obliges with some practical tips:

It’s best to have some empty shelves toward the bottom so that you can climb them and feel like Spider-Man while your partner penetrates you standing up.

And,

It’s probably not a good idea to ejaculate in public places — just saying.

Of course it’s not just a matter of sexual abandon and incriminating evidence. It’s political too. Very political:

Berkeley is the best place to explore your sexuality. Our school is a predominantly safe and accepting space with many places, people and resources to help you discover your sexual self. It is the place where I learned what it means to be queer, to recognise the presence of patriarchy, to attempt polyamory and to become more confident in my sexuality so I could go ahead with new experiences — attending naked parties and orgies and writing a sex column, just to name a few.

Tuition fees well spent, then.