Modes of Philistinism

It’s nice that my gym’s renovations are finally done, but the downside of the snazzy new TV sets is no CD players, so I was stuck watching MSNBC in the noonhour. Five minutes of Michael Medved going on about how John Lennon encouraged someone to smoke pot and he was therefore much worse than McCartney, though, and it was over to the Weather Channel. Roy, however, points us to this, which takes what one might call the “Althouse approach“: continuing to evaluate artists politically, but projecting your politics on artists that you like so you can still like them. I dunno, I think I prefer my philistinism in the straight-up Medved variety, which is at least honest.

But, hey, maybe the latter school is onto something. Let’s imagine the Althouse-approved “Right-Wing Bob” model applied to the left. Anybody want to start “Feminist Phillip Roth?” “Philo-Semitic T.S. Eliot?” “Agnostic Van Morrison?” “Progressive Humanist Dostoyevsky”? “Liberal Democratic Eisenstein?” “Labourite Evelyn Waugh?” God forbid that art be evaluated in aesthetic terms, or present ideas that challenge your worldview in any way…Sweet Fancy Moses, this kind of argument drives me crazy.