Gary Stein The Sun-Sentinel

August 17, 2011

Gary Stein
The Sun-Sentinel

RE: “Artwork Isn’t the Best Use Of $610,000 In Public Funds” – Your column on the uses of public moneys, “what were you thinking?” the rule of “de gustibus”, and, perhaps, a sublimely teachable moment.

Big Stein:

Before revealing two things about public money and public art and the unspoken nexus between them and modern American Liberalism full disclosure demands that I reveal that I spent much unhappy time in a Federal Courthouse in lower Manhattan. It was the one made famous by Tom Wolfe’s comments on “Tilted Arc”. It was a 4 inch thick, 10 feet high, and 25 feet long parabolic hunk of rusted metal plopped down in the interior courtyard. Too bad the construction couldn’t have waited until we borrowed the money from the Bank of Wong to finance it. If enough nouveau riche Mandarin or Hunanese tourists saw it they might have gone home and tossed their inscrutable rascals out for wasting their money.
#1 – Broward County Mayor Sue Gunzberger, a title sometimes worn by the smartest bear in the zoo or the county’s tallest midget, says, with absolutely no hint of wryness or absurdity, says “beauty and solitude” are important in front of a to be built courthouse because sometimes the day inside will be “heavy”. If the day inside includes the possibility of the Judge asking if you brought your tooth brush it could be very “heavy”. If it involves something as mundane as the Judge saying that contracts are not only binding at parties it still could be “heavy”.
Commissioner Gunzberger, being one of the legion of mush brained modern American Liberals nesting in Broward County, not only proselytizes such “balloon juice”, she votes her conscience in such matters.
She confirms one of the unassailable truths of contemporary American life. Giving a modern American Liberal access to any check book other than her own is like giving your hormone raging 17 year old the keys to your car, said car having a case of beer in the front seat. I was going to say firewater to the Indians but I can’t risk a nocturnal visit from the PC speech squad of the Perpetually Outraged Sons of Cochise.
But then I got to #2. I quote in its entirety
“Conservatism is not my one of my favorite words.”
That’s what my copy said. Honest. Have the proof reader flogged. A dozen well laid on will suffice if it’s a first offense.
It wasn’t as bad as Al Sharpton saying that adjectives can double as gerunds and snarling that the subjunctive is racist. Any use of litotes by him is absolutely and positively unintended. It wasn’t as bad as Barney Frank’s televised eructation. It wasn’t as bad as Senator Stabenow [D-MI] saying that if you want proof of Global Warming fly from Utopia to the Land of Rainbow Stew and feel how hot it is at 35,000 feet.
It wasn’t as bad as the Quixotic quest of Lord Barack the Beneficent to find a rare first edition of “The Ivy League Guide to English/Austrian Grammar and Composition”. I hope he won’t have to go to all 57 or was it 58 states to find it. His Death Star Debt Laden Bus – Ken Kesey would have loved it [Tom Wolfe, yet again] – gets an MPG rating not as bad as an F-16 but not as good as an Abrams A1A tank. As an alumnus of the Concorde I am pretty sure that it is as good as that proud bird. Talk about carbon footprints! It’s about the same as Chicago. Perhaps he can find the “shovel ready” jobs promised in last year’s “Summer of Recovery”. Perhaps not. Can I mention the inconvenient fact that the Damn thing was made in Canada? I can’t? Drat.
I spent a big part of yesterday reading yet more about Russell Kirk.
You can’t read Kirk without bumping into Edmund Burke. Fast forward and you find yourself arm wrestling with T.S.Eliot. Kirk without Burke or Eliot would be like Damian without Pythias or Achilles without Patroclus.
One of the mental warm ups I do when any name from the above paragraph enters the arena is to construct a parallel universe that has but one free flying Death Star; modern American Liberalism.
Who is the counterpart to Edmund Burke in the writings, assuming there are any, of modern American Liberalism?
Which 20th century modern American Liberal poet speaks to modern man like T.S.Eliot? Please don’t say Rod McKuen.
Is there a modern American Liberal chronicler like Kirk?
Kirk can draw from Johnson, Madison, Randolph, Wadsworth, Tennyson, Brownson, Newman, Disraeli, Kipling, Chesterton, Yeats, Babbit, Faulkner, Orwell, von Mises, Tate, Koestler, Dos Passos, Warren, Chambers, Friedman, Hayek, Bradford, Nash, Dulles….the list goes on and on.
Waiting to be summoned are Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Aquinas. Do you agree that we can call that a deep bench?
Let’s assume a modern American Liberal chronicler was to appear.
Saul Alinsky, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, John Dewey, Margaret Sanger, Margaret Mead, Rachel Carson, Charles Reich, Alvy Singer, Paul Ehrlich, Alpha Gump….an absolute Murderers’ Row, no? I know that when you strike the pitcher out it goes into the scorebook as a K. Shouldn’t it be asterisked?

KS