Angry White Men Need Not Apply
Everyone in the intellectual world and the arts would love to receive one of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius grants.” They are no-strings-attached gifts, usually in the $250,000 to $350,000 range.
One of this year’s geniuses is Susan McClary of UCLA, cited as “a musicologist who explores the relationship between human experience and music and relates the creation of musical works to their social context.”
There’s a plainer way to say this: She is the feminist in charge of discovering that classical music is chock-full of phallic themes, patriarchal violence, “assaultive pelvic pounding” and “the necessary purging or containment of the female.”
One of McClary’s breakthrough ideas is that the “pelvic pounding” in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony adds up to non-orgasmic rape. She hears “the throttling murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release.”
This is a far more serious charge against Beethoven than the one made by 1994 MacArthur winner Adrienne Rich, the radical lesbian poet, who believes Beethoven wasn’t thinking about rape in the Ninth Symphony; he merely was fretting about impotence. One of her poems describes him as “a man in terror of impotence/or infertility, not knowing the difference.”
Not all MacArthur winners write about penile problems in Beethoven symphonies, but in the current intellectual climate, it doesn’t seem to hurt. In fact, it probably helps.
The truth is that the MacArthur Awards, launched in 1981 to reward high achievement and high promise, are not what they once were. The science awards still seem to be given out fairly, but other selections pretty clearly have much more to do with politics than with achievement or potential. A lot of the award winners are ideologues like McClary or low-luster laborers in the traditional vineyards of the left.
One winner is a lawyer-activist who is trying to launch a progressive political party. Another is a Latina journalist who showed that the Salvadoran government was guilty of a massacre. Others include the editor of a leftish news service, a lawyer who tries to find flaws in the trials of inmates on death row and a feminist professor who lobbies for worldwide abortion rights.
Two of the winners are revisionist historians of the American West.
One, Patricia Nelson Limerick, is author of “The Legacy of Conquest,” a book arguing that the settling of the West was essentially one long spasm of greed, racism, sexism and violence that isn’t over yet. If any history book ever has argued that Western history is an uninterrupted triumph by totally fair-minded Anglos, Limerick’s book is certainly its mirror image.
In its 349 pages, I don’t recall reading about anything done right by white males. Even the act of keeping so many journals and diaries seems to have been a flaw of white pioneers and settlers. Limerick calls them “compulsively literate.”
Because I don’t keep up with experimental theater, I asked Donald Lyons, theater critic of The Wall Street Journal, about theater selections by the MacArthur Foundation. He said two of them are “unusually tawdry awards for selfpublicizing radicals rather than achievers of any kind. There are many avant garde people working today who deserve it more.”
The best-known of this year’s winners is Cindy Sherman, whose photographs regularly appear in shows around the world. The citation says her photographs of herself in different costumes and poses challenge the way we think about identity, social stereotypes and artistic representation - one way of saying that her work is profitably compatible with the politically correct deconstructionist philosophy of folks who give out $300,000 prizes.
As Newsday reports, a photo in a recent Sherman show “takes on family values. The twisted body parts of a blindfolded woman and a child apparently have been brutalized by the blue-eyed man-doll who is turning his back on them. His fingernails are blood-red.”
Perhaps the murderous man-doll was just worried about impotence. Or maybe it was a pounding-pelvis problem.
The political turn and the heavy emphasis on gender issues (15 of the 24 winners are female) are partly traceable to the leadership of Catharine Stimpson, who became director of the MacArthur Fellows program two years ago.
She has complained that “under the guise of defending objectivity and intellectual rigor, which is a lot of mishmash,” neoconservative critics of diversity programs “are trying to preserve the cultural and political supremacy of white heterosexual males.” And she once wrote that “men, because they are men, have been false prophets, narcissistic and perjuring witnesses.”
Stimpson is a former dean at Rutgers University and former head of the hemisphere’s looniest politically correct group, the Modern Language Association.
The MacArthur Foundation is free to finance political activists and gender ideologues who believe in symphonic rape. It’s their money.
But it’s a shame that a program set up to honor achievement and excellence among creative people of all political persuasions has deteriorated so quickly into narrow partisanship. Lay the money on your political cronies, MacArthur, but let’s have no more prattle about “geniuses.”
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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Leo Universal Press Syndicate