The political intent of an opera that romanticizes Chou en Lai of Red China confirms the surrender of all American Arts to Marxism.

From Hollywood to “The Met,” from sheer entertainment to the pastimes of the privileged, the Elite of the Ivy League find themselves in the driver’s seat.

Whoever has gotten to the White House

In the last twenty years

Has  either an Ivy League diploma

Or a Rhodes Scholarship.

These enlightened despots,

As Voltaire might call them,

Have dragged America into slavish indebtedness to Red China.

According to “The Progressives” in both political parties, Sarah Palin needn’t apply for The Presidency.

Why Not?

She is blatantly and unforgivably not among “The Chosen”!

Now, as a Dartmouth graduate, I could apply for the job of President if I were still drunk enough… but I quit adorning barstools seven years ago.

My ambitions, however, aren’t entirely modest. My grand desire now is to continue composing for symphony orchestras and chamber groups.

I have a new Concerto for Orchestra looking for a world premiere, if any top-notch conductors or orchestras are interested. I could toss any interested maestros a PDF of the first movement’s score. The remaining four movements depend upon the listeners seriousness.

“Seriousness.”

Now I have never doubted either Sarah Palin’s seriousness nor her command of not only America’s traditional values but also her ownership of the political cunning to see those values re-instituted!

The know-it-alls underestimated a country boy named Abraham Lincoln. Doris Kearns Goodwin set the record straight with revelations about “The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.”

Sarah Palin had the mainstream press chasing after her for days and were she President of the United States they’d approach her with that memory firmly in their minds.

“Wouldn’t that be a double-edged sword, Michael?”

Yes, but Sarah’s side of the sword bestows upon her an equal advantage which she never  had until the MSM learned how quick she actually is.

No, the majority of Americans are not particularly interested in opera nor the disturbing depths of Marxism erupting in all of the American performing arts.

Only Big Hollywood readers are being informed on a regular basis just how owned by Marx and Lenin the American arts, all of them, actually are.

Why would an opera about a couple of conservative embarrassments called Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, not to mention some really villainous Communists in the Mao Zedong entourage, be of any interest to film buffs?

I have no doubt that a great movie or film documentary will be made about the Communist and mainly Soviet invasion of American culture and how all-pervasive it has become throughout the nation.

Progressives own “The Cultural Edge” and consequently hold the powerfully influential seats of American Royalty.

How can any President talk to the likes of Putin and the Beijing Politburo if he or she doesn’t know the European and worldly influence of artists upon Communist Russia and The New World Order.

My advice to a prayed-for President Palin: The less you know about Progressively Elite Presumptions the better. Utter disinterest is all they deserve. They’ve used such privileges for no other purpose than to look down on all of us.

I should know. I was surrounded by their contempt during my so-called “higher education” and forty years in the American performing arts.

My own personal and enjoyable interests in the Arts were whetted by the dissident histories of some of Russia’s greatest talents: composer Igor Stravinsky and ballet greats, Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov. The Nobel prizewinning poet Ivan Bunin who emigrated in 1918 and eventually settled in Paris. Then, of course, the scientists such as Andrei Sakharov and the legendary symbol of Russian dissidence, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

In light of so many well-known Russian dissidents, this documentary film I pray for, exposing the Soviet invasion of the American arts and sciences, dwelling places into which numerous gifted Russians sought freedom? That film will be made; and by then it will receive an Academy Award nomination.

Why?

Sarah Palin will have already been a great American President for eight years!

This is a regular survey done by the National Endowment for Obama that measures public participation in all areas of the arts. We hear a lot about Hollywood’s “record-breaking years” and will again this year, but the overall trend line for film attendance is headed only one way and an increase in ticket prices and a few monster hits each season like “Dark Knight” and “Transformers” are usually the difference between a record year and panic:

A new study from the National Endowment for the Arts finds a notable decline in theater, museum and concert attendance and other “benchmark” cultural activities between 2002 and 2008 for adults 18 and older, and a sharper fall from 25 years ago. The drop was for virtually all art forms and for virtually all age groups and levels of education.

The NEA’s senior deputy chair, Joan Shigekawa, listed a few possible reasons: The rise of the Internet; less free time; and cuts in arts classes.

“These numbers definitely represent a challenge,” Shigekawa said.

Released Thursday, the NEA’s 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts is the sixth such report to come out since 1982, when 39 percent of adults attended a “benchmark arts activity” at least once in the previous year. The percentage peaked at 41 percent in 1992, just as the Internet was taking off, and dropped to 34.6 percent in 2008.

Between 2002 and 2008, percentages fell for moviegoing from 60 to 53.3, for jazz from 10.8 to 7.8, for museums/galleries from 26.5 to 22.7. Other categories with lower attendance include ballet, opera, musical and nonmusical theater, and art/crafts fairs and festivals.

Yeah, “cuts in art classes” is why movie attendance is down. Good heavens, these people are stupid out of touch. 

As with all things NEA and AP, both the study and the article blame everything but the growing disconnect between artists and their customers, not to mention the diminishing quality of the product.

As to the first, we have reached a tentative answer: A combination of temperament and values in the conservative mind combine to make the writing life both less suitable for, and less attractive to, conservatives.  The question remains:  What is to be done?

Let us state the obvious first  – conservatives who are so inclined must write, write often, and write well.  But that is not enough.  They must submit their work to literary magazines, publishing houses and agencies, large and small, again and again if need be.  Getting your work to market is a long, disappointing slog, with no guarantee of success for even the best of work.  Liberal writers know this and engage the process nonetheless; conservatives must do likewise.

But what to write?  Some will argue that conservatives should write material with explicit conservative themes.  This, I think, would be a mistake.  While explicit themes have their place, over-reliance on them would make conservative authors niche artists who preach to the converted only (or at least mostly).

Far better, in my view, to write the best stories possible without worrying too much about politics – a good story, told well, will garner readers from across the political spectrum.  Conservative values will nonetheless naturally shine through, and will be all the more powerful for their subtlety.

And finally, conservatives who despond over the lack of conservatism in the arts need to look to the next generation:  Do we teach our children that conservatism and the arts are not incompatible?  Were we so taught by our parents?  Do we encourage artistic gifts in our kids when and if they arise?  If values are at the heart of the matter, then the only way conservatives will compete in the literary world (or any art) is if we change how we view and value the arts, and that kind of change can only begin in the home.

In closing, I would like to thank the readers that stuck with me through the end of this series.  And I would especially like to thank John Nolte, Andrew Breitbart, and Big Hollywood for taking a chance on this long and discursive journey, and for all their efforts to advance conservatism in the arts.

For conservatives to triumph politically, we must compete culturally.  That means not just commenting on art – but making some.

Let’s get to work.

[Ed. note: You can read a new chapter of this eight-part series every Saturday and Sunday morning. Previous chapters –Part one, two, three, four, five, six. and seven.]

Matt Patterson is a columnist and commentator whose work has appeared in The Washington Examiner, The Baltimore Sun, and Pajamas Media.  He is the author of “Union of Hearts: The Abraham Lincoln & Ann Rutledge Story.”  His email is mpatterson.column@gmail.com

My musician friend Martin has similar thoughts.  He feels a vast gulf separates the liberal and conservative mind.  He describes conservatives (again, generally) as serious in thought, and more apt to value personal responsibility and spiritual-based morality, while artists, he says, tend to have, and maybe even need to have, more lax work and personal ethics.  Creative people, he tells me, want to push the envelope, move beyond the status quo, an attitude which they tend to apply to all aspects of life.  Again, it comes down to messiness.  Conservatives don’t like a mess; liberals love ‘em.

The lifestyle of Bohemia is a prefect example – late nights, sundry substances, many partners; these and other staples are less likely to tempt the conservative temperament by definition.

But even granting that conservatives are temperamentally less inclined to participate in the Bohemian lifestyle, it is a vile (and destructive) myth that Bohemia and artistry necessarily go hand in hand.  Many writers and artists, many great writers and artists, have lived stable, relatively tranquil lives consistent with the conservative temperament.

There are no tales of debauchery or overindulgence surrounding Virgil’s life, for example.  Instead, the man who authored the Aeneid seems to have been a shy man given to study and composure.  Then there is Shakespeare.  The scant evidence of his life, mostly legal and church documents detailing births, baptisms, financial transactions, etc., show zero taste for Bohemian recklessness (leaving aside the question of the autobiographical nature of the sonnets, on which topic there is much disagreement).  By all appearances, the Bard seems to have been an eminently stable and sensible family and business man, who by his death had managed to amass a healthy sized estate to bequeath to his children and grandchildren.

And it is important to remember that, while conservative temperament and conservative politics often go hand in hand, they do not always.  Nor do liberal politics necessarily flow from liberal temperament; there are those rare souls who contain within them both the philosophical love for the free market as well as a liberal temperament given to personal messes and artistic extravagance.

So temperament, while a factor, need not be a determinative one.  Perhaps the rest of the puzzle comes down to values.

Conservatives do not value art less than liberals.  But it does seem that they value art in a different way.  Conservatives tend to put art in perspective,  putting it quite sensibly after things like family, God, and country.  In other words, conservatives are less likely to value art in that all consuming fashion necessary if one is to devote one’s life to the pursuit.  The result, of course, is fewer conservatives than liberals gravitating towards a profession in literature and the arts generally.

Tomorrow we will examine possible solutions to this conundrum, and conclude the series.

[Ed. note: You can read a new chapter of this eight-part series every Saturday and Sunday morning. Previous chapters –Part one, two, three, four, five and six.]

Matt Patterson is a columnist and commentator whose work has appeared in The Washington Examiner, The Baltimore Sun, and Pajamas Media.  He is the author of “Union of Hearts: The Abraham Lincoln & Ann Rutledge Story.”  His email is mpatterson.column@gmail.com.

First, the point about closet conservatives.  They come in one of two breeds: 1) those who hold conservative views but keep them quiet, preferring to avoid discussing politics altogether for fear of being sniffed out, and 2) those who not only hide their political views, but openly and falsely profess liberal views.

My good friend Martin, a professional musician, admits to me that he is among the former.  “When I’m at social events, or any gathering of entertainers, and they start talking about Bush is evil, blah, blah, blah, I just bite my tongue, because I know that even if I say something, I’m not going to have time to correct all their stupid errors and assumptions, and even if I did, there’s no damn way they’re gonna listen to me anyway.”  It sounds like you think artists are dumb, I say.  “They are,” he answers with a sigh.  “Incredibly.”

For Martin, and those of his breed, I have genuine sympathy.  An artist in his position is surrounded constantly by people with whom he must work, with whom he must get along for work to both keep coming and run smoothly.  Many of these co-workers are personal friends.  This last is no small matter – artists are intensely clannish, and form tight personal bonds.  So in my friend’s case, why jeopardize friendships?  Why jeopardize income?  Perfectly understandable, it seems to me, that he lets his friends and co-workers prattle on.

The latter breed, however, the ones who affect a liberal bias, projecting a false beard to the world, are a different matter.  This is truly insidious, because the aim here is not just to protect one’s income by muting beliefs, but to gain income (and friends, I suppose) under false pretense.

(Mr. Blowhard thinks there may be a fair number of these folk, this, “go along” crowd.  I hope he’s wrong.  I can’t say that I know any myself, and for that, I am quite glad.)

Mr. Blowhard also brings up the New Formalists, a topic which nearly everyone I speak to about this subject mentions, and so we will turn to that subject tomorrow.  But first, I want to address the last of Mr. Blowhard’s comments.  You know – advising people, both on the right and on the left, to steer clear of a career in literature or the arts altogether, because  “It’s likely to be a very hard one…. Money is scarce, success may never arrive, frustration and disappointment are inevitable, breakdowns and suicides aren’t uncommon.”

All true.  But I wonder.  Does one really have to be an author or artist to have a tough time in life?  There are lots of waitresses and dock workers and miners who have it tough.  Money is scarce for many people, in and out of the arts.  Success, the definition of which varies from person to person, may never arrive for anyone, regardless of chosen profession.  Frustration and disappointment are indeed inevitable…to any person living on planet Earth.

Mr. Blowhard asks why anyone would opt for the hard way in America, and I must say I was little surprised by that (entirely rhetorical, I presume) question.  The artists who have surrounded me my whole life – authors, musicians, magicians, actors – didn’t opt for their life.  They do what they love.  No, that’s not true.  There’s less choice than that, even.  They do what they do because they can’t not do it.

Think of Poe.  Living in squalor his whole life.  Why didn’t he just become a grocery clerk, one might ask?  Or a banker?  At least then he would have been able to pay his rent.  But that’s precisely the point.  Poe, like any real artist, loved being an author, loved his macabre visions and his ability to spill them onto paper, more than he loved his rent.  More, in fact, than he loved anything else, including his life.

Likewise, Ovid loved his verse more than he loved the Eternal City which nourished him.  Loved his art more even than his freedom, which he lost when Augustus banished him to Tomis on the Black Sea for some mysterious crime perhaps relating to his verse.  We owe a debt to every artist, who, like Ovid, chooses their art over their own comfort.

When I asked Philip Terzian, a Pulitzer finalist, if he would have any advice for an aspiring conservative author, he had a very different view than Mr. Blowhard.  “Art is about struggle – use the friction,” says the Books and Arts editor for The Weekly Standard.  Then he pointed out that, even if the literary establishment is repressive from a conservative standpoint, great literature can, and often has, emerged from repressive circumstances.  “Comfort spoils the creative impulse,” says Mr. Terzian, who then points out that a lot of the literary set who toe the liberal line and get all the right grants and tenure end up producing junk.

In the end, advises Mr. Terzian – “Do what you love.”

[Ed. note: You can read a new chapter of this eight-part series every Saturday and Sunday morning. Part one can be seen here. Part  two here.]

Matt Patterson is a columnist and commentator whose work has appeared in The Washington Examiner, The Baltimore Sun, and Pajamas Media.  He is the author of “Union of Hearts: The Abraham Lincoln & Ann Rutledge Story.”  His email is mpatterson.column@gmail.com.

Do you think that there are fewer conservatives (artistic, political, or both) in the arts generally, and literature in particular?

A two-part answer.

Part one is that I have a super-inclusive view of “culture.” We’re all immersed in culture whether we know it or not, and whether we want to be or not. We clothe ourselves, we watch TV and movies and flip through magazines, we eat, we listen to stories and jokes, we drive cars and have opinions about airports and restaurants … That’s all culture. So from that point of view we’re *all* “in the arts.”  

Part two … Deeply-held Zen bullshit to one side … Yeah, in my experience there are far fewer righties in the arts than lefties, and that holds for writing and publishing as much as the other arts I’ve come in contact with. Lefties dominate, and in most ways they dictate the terms that the arts discussion takes place on. At its worst you could say that a common, unspoken assumption in the arts is that being a lefty is a prerequisite for even getting into the field.

All that said, I should add that I’ve always wondered about something, which is how many of the people in the arts who go along with the general-leftie-ism of the the field do so only for public consumption. In other words, how many of them dissent privately? I’d guess that a fair number do. But how will we ever know?

I should add as well that one of the reasons my fellow Blowhards and I blog is to demonstrate that it’s possible to be arts-guys without being party-line lefty. We developed a pretty good-sized readership pretty quickly, so I have to believe that there are numerous people out there who like the arts but who find the official art-world’s leftie-ism off-putting.

Give some examples of conservative novelists/essayists.

Probably the most famous contempo conservative American literary writers are Tom Wolfe and Mark Helprin. Dana Gioia, a terrific poet…is also a conservative. The conservative magazine world is swarming with rightie journalists and essayists. Bruce Bawer and Andrew Sullivan are two of many examples.

Is it some temperamental quality in the conservative mind that pushes away from a literary career? Or is it institutional liberalism in the lit community?  Some combination of the two?

Let me take the opportunity to introduce another one of my Zen-ish points, if I can. I think it can be a mistake to over-focus on the self-described “literary” wing of the reading-and-writing worlds. So far as fiction goes, for instance, there’s a huge and dynamic non-literary world of narrative genre writing out there: sci-fi, crime, romance, erotica, and more. In my experience these writers are often far more free-thinking and far less doctrinaire and party-line than the literary crowd is. They’re also just as smart and often far more talented. They create works in modes that everyday people can understand and enjoy, and they do so in what’s often a friendly, accessible, and even businesslike spirit. And it’s a far larger world than the literary world is.

The literary world? Feh — who needs ‘em?

What about politically conservative literary authors throughout history?  Did there use to be more?  If so, why?  What are the historical factors you think would have caused the shift?

You’ll probably want to speak to a real scholar about this. But I can’t resist taking a swing at it anyway. I see three main stages:

- In the late 1800s some writers (Henry James was one) started treating the novel not as a big sprawling entertainment form but as a work of art that needed its own artistic unity.

- Modernist writers responded to the challenge presented by the movies by focusing ever more on “writerly” concerns.

- The post-WWII American boom produced, along with everything else, a boom in colleges and universities. As more people watched TV, book-fiction lodged itself ever more in academia. Eventually what’s often joked about as “the creative writing industry” seized command of the serious-writing wing of fiction-writing.

In other words, where “serious writing” goes, elitism, snobbery, radicalism, and academicism came to prevail.

What advice would you give a political conservative thinking about a career in literature, or the arts generally?

Honestly I’d advise anyone, rightie or lefty, to avoid a life in the arts, at least the arts as conventionally understood: literary-fiction, gallery art, etc. It’s likely to be a very hard one. I’m very serious about that. Money is scarce, success may never arrive, frustration and disappointment are inevitable, breakdowns and suicides aren’t uncommon. And in a country as full of money, space, and opportunity as the U.S., why opt for the hard way?

That said … If your righty is going to persist in his ambitions despite my warnings … I’d first urge him or her to consider how leftie-dominated the traditional arts are. Do you really want to fight that in addition to all the other battles you’ll inevitably be fighting? Perhaps you might want to think about the new media instead. Website design, for instance, is wide open — you can set up shop, do work, publish, get paid — and there’ll be no institutional crapola you’ll have to wade your way through. I’d also suggest looking into the entertainment business instead of the more highbrow wings of the culture world. If you can do work that connects with a sizable audience, you can work in TV or movies whatever your politics. You’ll also be able to make a decent living.

If your righty persists in his/her interest in the higher-brow arts … I’d suggest finding your way to the righty rebel groups that do in fact exist in at least some of them. In painting, for example: the New York Academy of Art runs a 19th-century academic-style program, and there are people like Jacob Collins (a real giant, as far as I’m concerned) who are the suns around whom many “conservative” painters circle. In poetry, the New Traditionalists and New Formalists (who gather once a year at West Chester College outside Philly) are reviving traditional poetic forms. Frederick Turner is a giant here — a great critic and poet both. In architecture, there are New Classicists at work, and the New Urbanists are tradition-oriented too, though some of them get kind of NPR/PBS soft lefty. Only a few architecture programs (Notre Dame, University of Miami) base their training on tradition, but “a few” is better than none, god knows.

So far  as literary fiction goes, I wish I could come up with decent advice. There aren’t any conservative or traditionalist schools or circles around, to my knowledge. Like I say, most fiction writers who care about traditional values go into narrative-fiction fields: movies, TV, or genre fiction. Which leaves lit-fiction almost entirely to the lefties, the schoolmarms, and the radicals. So I’d venture three thoughts: 1) Keep your rightieness to yourself if you can. Or 2) Make a deliberate choice to flaunt it. Make a statement of it. Identify yourself as Mr. or Ms. Defiant Literary Righty right at the outset. There’s a reason why Tom Wolfe wears the White Suit! Or 3) Start up a school or circle of writers and editors and readers who prize traditional literary values and craft, and then endure decades of neglect and abuse.

Thank you for time, Mr. Blowhard.

In the next week’s installment, we will analyze Mr. Blowhard’s response, as well as check in with Pulitzer finalist and Weekly Standard literary editor Philip Terzian.

Read Mr. Patterson’s “A Conservative Journey Through Literary America — Part 1: Introduction”

Matt Patterson is a columnist and commentator whose work has appeared in The Washington Examiner, The Baltimore Sun, and Pajamas Media.  He is the author of “Union of Hearts: The Abraham Lincoln & Ann Rutledge Story.”  His email is mpatterson.column@gmail.com.

While the best tactics to achieve this goal are open to debate, its ultimate worth and necessity are indisputable – for too long, conservatives have ceded the most influential segments of society, from academia to Hollywood, to the Left with nary a fight.  The current sorry state of our movement is in no small measure the result of this refusal to engage the battle of ideas where it impacts people the most- the culture that they absorb every day through radio, Internet, television, and movies.

The piece which will appear in eight installments, one chapter each Saturday and Sunday, over the next four weeks, however, will deal more specifically with the literary world, and the conservative’s place therein.  For contemporary literature (by which I mean drama, poetry, and written fiction) is also more or less the exclusive province of left-wing thinkers and practitioners.

Some may argue that literature these days is not nearly as influential as movies, say, or television, and therefore perhaps not as worthy of conservative efforts to engage.  On the face this is true – far more people watch Sex and the City, for example, than read The Kenyon Review.  But in a larger sense, this argument misses the point and dangerously underestimates the influence of literature as a vehicle for poisonous ideas to enter the cultural mainstream.  

Let us say that a talented young person, whose passion is film-making, enrolls in an elite educational institution.  At that institution, he is exposed daily, both directly and indirectly, to the works of left-wing literary authors; in his university writing class, for example, he is given an essay by Susan Sontag to analyze and exemplify.

Let us suppose as well that this person is not inherently opposed to conservative ideas; nevertheless, having studied film and literature for four years without having been exposed to any conservative authors, he enters the film-making profession steeped in liberal thought.

Let us next suppose that this film-maker goes on to make a powerful movie which becomes a hit and is enjoyed by a wide audience, every member of which now exposed to the left-wing thought present in the subtext of the film.

This scenario, the trajectory of countless artists, illustrates the complex intersection between literature, art, education, and entertainment – all too often, it is on campuses and in literature where artists of all stripes are first exposed to left-wing ideology, to which they then give form in their work, some of which inevitably becomes popular and therefore a part of “pop” culture.

And it is precisely because literature has a foot in all of these worlds that I feel it is both worthy and fertile ground in which conservatives may stake a claim – if they are willing.

It seems, however, that by and large they are not willing.  There are terribly few conservative poets, fiction authors, and dramatists working in America today.  The aim of the following essay is two fold; 1) to discover why this is so, and 2) to explore ways in which this atrocious state of affairs may perhaps be corrected.

Tomorrow we will start by interviewing blogger, critic, and publishing expert Michael Blowhard.

Read Mr. Patterson’s “A Conservative Journey Through Literary America — Part 2: A Conversation With Michael Blowhard”

Matt Patterson is a columnist and commentator whose work has appeared in The Washington Examiner, The Baltimore Sun, and Pajamas Media.  He is the author of “Union of Hearts: The Abraham Lincoln & Ann Rutledge Story.”  His email is mpatterson.column@gmail.com.