Club Vulgus

Any perusal of comment sections on such public forums as CNN.com leads one to the inescapable conclusion that there is a vast sunless sea of people united by the conviction that their incomprehension results, not from some inability on their part, but from the stupidity of those they identify as a Liberal Elite. Being uninhibitedly glib in the facility of self promotion through Liberal bashing is a cheap initiation fee and all the dues they deed pay to belong to the only club that will have them as a member.

Reading this morning, for instance, of a rather uninteresting Van Gogh floral arrangement having been stolen from a Cairo museum and about suspects having been apprehended trying to flee Egypt, I encountered the predictable comments amongst which are:

"I am starting to think that Americans are the most entitled, dumb people on this planet. Are all Americans as dumb as this post implies? Or are you just the dumb liberals- who we always knew were dumb? If you are not happy with living in the USA then I will pay for you to move somewhere else. "

What an ugly picture! 50 million? covet much? Oh look, shiny baubles!!!! I MUST OWN THEM AT ALL COSTS!!!!"

More copy book comments followed in quick non-sequitur: about Republican lobbyists, the foolishness of art in general and other populist drivel scarcely worthy of having been scribbled on the walls of the worst toilet in Scotland, although I suspect the grammar, spelling and logic might be better in that venue. The rabble are only to happy to pay their dues.

Of course it is indeed a most uninspiring painting and it's proposed value would have been more appropriate to the late 1980's when Japanese corporations were buying up Western art and Van Gogh in particular, as part of a scheme to transfer money illegally between corporations. I doubt it could be sold at nearly that price today, yet still; one of the uncountable things that mystify the untaught crowd is art and it's monetary value. That which is not understood needs to be denounced as worthy of only fools -- and of course Liberals. If you want to belong to the Vulgus Indoctum after all, you need to pay your dues.

I wonder if one could earn life membership by offering to finance the expulsion ( as a Liberal elitist parasite ) of anyone who might distinguish between Van Eyck and Van Dyke or perhaps have a nice little solution for Fermat's theorem. I might in fact, apply for the deportation so kindly offered, but that any of these folk-slingers could afford the sort of place in Monte Carlo I have in mind, I have serious doubts.

THE NOBEL LITERATURE PRIZE

This is a quick post to honor Herta Mueller, who just won the 2009 Nobel Prize in literature announced today. She is a member of Romania's ethnic German minority who was persecuted by the Ceausescu regime for her critical depictions of life behind the Iron Curtain. Peter Englund, spokesperson for the Swedish Academy, said this about her work:

"At the same time she has something to tell, partly from her own background as a persecuted dissident in Romania, but also her own background as a stranger in her own country, a stranger to the political regime, a stranger to the majority language, and a stranger to her own family," he added.

What especially caught my attention was this back story swirling around Horace Engdahl, Englund’s predecessor, who told the AP last year that "Europe still is the center of the literary world" and the quality of U.S. writing was dragged down because authors were "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture."

A curious statement indeed, one I would NOT dismiss casually. My only reservation surrounding Engdahl’s remark is: Why mass culture? It seems Vladimir Nabokov profited from our adolescent reveries in his finest tribute to America, Lolita. These days, maybe what holds us back is the anti-arts, anti-science, and anti-intellectual rabble who have turned our fair land into a cultural wilderness. Maybe Mr. Engdahl has the right idea but merely misses the mark.