The Campaign Cleanup Crowd; The Power of van Gogh; Journey's End: Bad Blood

Listening to exultant coverage on NPR last week of the Senate battle over McCain and Feingold's campaign finance bill, I found myself wishing I could take campaign finance reform seriously. But I can't. In the good old days we dreamed of shooting the bankers, routing the money power and ushering in the golden age. Now we propose to change the world by telling the bankers

they can't bribe politicians. What a silly plan! As long as there are politicians in need of a bribe, and the money available to bribe them, a way will be found. The present system has the advantage of being relatively easy to monitor, thus providing a pleasant livelihood for the Good Government outfits like the Center for Public Integrity or Common Cause, also for the journalists to whom these outfits impart their findings.

Why not simply rule that all television and radio stations have to run an hour's worth of free political commercials every day? Then the politicians would require slightly less money. But no politician would ever dare offend the broadcasters in this manner.

Truth be told, I'm always struck by the tiny amounts of cash necessary to sway Congress. Many's the time I've found myself writing indignant sentences like "Rep. Nancy Johnson took in $176,000 from Health PACS between 1991 and 1994," while thinking that she sold her vote cheap, while suffering the indignity of being called a "whore" for the insurers by Rep. Pete Stark of California.

The way things are going, the big loser will be organized labor, which is now quivering from the grim news that the carpenters' union is quitting the AFL-CIO, the first such defection since 1968. There should probably be a floor, rather than a ceiling, on the amount of money needed to bribe a congressperson. Let's say $100,000. Politicians would have to spend less time on the phone and in consequence their productivity would marvelously improve.

Campaign finance reform has the same relationship to politics as arms control did to the nuclear arms race in the high days of the Cold War. For decades a vast industry of policy wonks, negotiators, diplomats, experts of every kidney toiled in the great enterprise of strategic and tactical "arms limitation." Every few years there would be the drama of a down-to-the-wire tussle over a Comprehensive Test Ban or SALT II, requiring that the U.S. and the SU limit themselves to the power to blow each other up 500 times over instead of 1000. Then, just as the treaty was being tuned to final form, the arms manufacturers would invent another gap and off we'd go again, on another spending spiral. The function of arms control was to lend the pretense of rationality to the profitable business of churning out weapons of mass destruction for private gain at public expense.

With Cold War's end came big layoffs from the arms control industry. Unemployed wonks rattled their tin cups outside Brookings and Carnegie, mumbling about CEP ratios. I suspect many of them have now found employment in the modern-day equivalent of Arms Control, which is the Weather Control Industry, aka the greenhouse gas/global warming lobby, similarly espousing lousy science and vacuous politics.

The Power of van Gogh

A friend saw three Chinamen tumble out of a nightclub at 353 Broadway, each with bandages around one ear. One white man was similarly styled. She asked what was up. "We are celebrating Vincent van Gogh's birthday," they chorused. True, it was March 30. All three Chinamen were artists, one of them recently graduating to that state from a previous career in investment banking. It turns out the party commemorating Vincent's birthday was put on by those wonderful Russian artists, Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid.

Melamid landed me in a big row in the mid-1990s when he looked at photos of some newly discovered French cave featuring paintings of prehistoric wild beasts and pronounced them of recent vintage. The perspective and anatomical treatment, Melamid asserted, were entirely modern. I wrote a column in The Nation giving supportive coverage to Melamid's point of view, suggesting that the cave art had been prepared by villagers long jealous of the profitable tourism surrounding Lascaux. This drew torrents of scholarly abuse from The Nation's art pundit, Arthur Danto. But as Melamid points out, the French authorities have closed the cave to the public ever since.

Komar and Melamid have been promoting van Gogh as an icon with restorative spiritual properties. Travelers in upstate New York will find a roadside shrine in a little shed, with van Gogh's dour visage peering out at them. Its precise address is 911 Damsonville Rd. in Kerhonkson. This touting of the curative powers of art recalls earlier work by the Russians when they lived in the Soviet Union. Back then they assembled a set of 215 color plaques under the title Color Is a Mighty Power.

The overall sales pitch was, "Free yourself of all your ailments through colored plaques." Drinking problems could be allayed by gazing for three minutes and seven seconds at a dark green plaque. Impotence took a little longer, requiring six minutes and two seconds looking at the color orange. Five minutes and nine seconds gazing upon rust would banish the existential complaint known as alienation quicker than reading Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, which first posed alienation as the spiritual consequence of wage slavery. If Komar and Melamid had tried to sell their plaques over here, the FDA would have clapped them in irons.

Not long ago the World Health Organization contacted Komar and Melamid, seeking their services for the "European Partnership Project to Reduce Tobacco Dependency." Another mission for Vincent. They gave the WHO a self-portrait of the neurotic Dutchman, bearing the message "Look at Vincent Van Gogh and Do Not Smoke." Melamid took up smoking shortly thereafter.

The birthday party for Vincent was a big success, with a band playing a blend of Polish and Irish music, plus mushroom soup with slabs of good bread and absinthe dispensed in huge cups. I'm planning to make absinthe myself at some time in the not-too-distant future, and have planted a couple of wormwood shrubs toward that end.

Journey's End: Bad Blood

Back in Northern California, just in time for the opening of spring turkey season, I find myself missing the days on the open road, Ford 350 one-ton humming along Interstate 40. Peter G, my mechanical adviser, reviewed the Ford and pointed out that the flexible coupler on the steering column was broken. If at any time during my 3000-mile drive I'd leant back and pulled up on the steering wheel the column would have disengaged. I see it as a tribute to my essential optimism, leaning forward in eager anticipation of each new vista instead of pulling back in apprehension or dismay.

They talk of the melting pot, but there are very definite regional physical types. I hate to say it, but in the Appalachians I did often note in rural parts the type of physiognomy one associates with the word "inbreeding." Maybe I was still influenced by the photographs in a good little exhibition I looked at in early March at the International Center of Photography called "Perfecting Mankind: Eugenics and Photography." It featured material on the malignly bogus discipline of eugenics, pioneered by Darwin's cousin Francis Galton, also a major player in the development of fingerprinting.

Photography was invaluable to Galton and his disciples in showing worrisome cranial and physiognomical types connoting "the imbecile," supposedly the consequence of unrestricted immigration of Irish, Jews, Slavs and other genetic riffraff. There was one striking snap of a traveling exhibition of the 1920s or 30s, featuring a contraption of lightbulbs, plus admonitory signs, prefaced by the menacing statement, "Some people are born to be a burden on the rest.

"This light flashes every 15 seconds. Every 15 seconds $100 of your money goes for care of persons with bad heredity, such as the insane, feeble-minded, criminal and the defective.

"This one flashes every 16 seconds. Every 16 seconds a person is born in the U.S.

"Every 48 seconds a person is born in the U.S. who will never grow up mentally beyond the stage of a normal 8-year-old girl or boy.

"Every 50 seconds a person is committed to jail in the U.S. Very few normal people ever go to jail.

"Every 7 and a half minutes a high grade person is born in the U.S. About 4 per cent of all Americans come within this class."

The consequence of this bosh was mass sterilization of the supposed imbeciles, often most assiduously practiced by states with liberal governors like New Jersey's Woodrow Wilson. In the 20s the newspapers regularly featured photographs of "Fitter Families," a notion that grew out of a "Better Baby" competition at the Iowa State Fair in 1911. In her introduction to the exhibition's brochure Carol Squiers writes that these "Fitter Families" contests were featured at seven to 10 fairs yearly and were held in the "human stock" sections. To compete, the applicants had to provide a family history, plus medical exam, syphilis test and psychiatric evaluation. Professional photographers would take portraits of beefy Midwestern families at about the same time photographers working for the Office for Racial Politics of the National Socialist German Workers' Party were glorifying the Nordic ideal.