Well, “artists”, pick up the damn cudgel on behalf of the West. You’ll probably find your art improves the less alienated you position yourselves to be. Sophocles was probably the greatest poet of Ancient Greece and he was a hero among the Athenians and seems to have genuinely loved his country. Let him be your model instead of whoever it is now (Jack Kerouac? Or, in the case of this guy in the article, Milton Berle?) Change the way you think about the relationship of the artist and the state because obviously this whole cult of the adversarial artist isn’t really working out for either artists or the audience.
That’s the optimistic side of me talking. The pessimistic side echoes Nietzsche’s statement that the democratization of Europe is merely the stage for its descent into tyranny. Part I of that tyranny was obviously fascism and Nazism. Part II appears to be the “soft tyranny” of the welfare state. Part III could easily be the resurgent Islamic caliphate.
