Recognizing Talent And Lack Of It

Lots of talent goes unrecognized. After Tom Brady played what was probably his last game as a Patriot last Saturday, most believe he is (was?) the best quarterback ever, but few saw that talent early in his college career. Coach Belichick saw it though, and it has paid off handsomely for football fans all over New England. It’s been quite a run for Patriots, but it couldn’t last forever.

Maine's Dave Mallett

Often I’ve observed musicians playing locally who are very talented, but had to continue struggling with small gigs here and there while working other jobs to support themselves. I’d see others on television with great notoriety but lacking the talent locals demonstrated. How did they gain widespread fame when the locals were unknown beyond a fifty-mile radius? Marketing? I suppose it’s all good so long as the performers and those listening are enjoying themselves. 

Museum of Fine Art Boston

There are those to whom talent is ascribed but who seem totally lacking in it. Wandering through art museums, for example, one must question the judgement of curators who display absurd objects purported to be “art.” As a boy, my mother would take my siblings and me into Boston to the Forsyth Dental Clinic where fillings and braces were free. Some days I’d have hours to kill and I’d spend it at the Museum of Fine Arts just across the Fens. Most of what I saw was amazing work but in other stuff I could discern no artistic merit. At only eight or ten years old, I knew it was junk.

Alleged Art at MFA Boston

It’s been a half century, but I see about the same proportion of art and junk hanging at the Portland Museum of Art today. A fine museum, it has collections by truly great artists including Winslow Homer, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and many others. And then there’s alleged art by others whose names I cannot recall because I am profoundly unimpressed when viewing their stuff. I felt they were trying to con me. As a kid I trusted my instincts — never thinking, as some others did, that there must be something there I just wasn’t bright enough to see.

Are art “experts” only pretending when they claim to see talent others cannot? Are they like the adults who pretended to see beautiful clothes on the emperor? In that iconic children’s story, the tailor who created the emperor’s “clothes” knew he was a con artist, but the emperor and his subjects on the street who watched him process in the nude didn’t trust their instincts. When they pretended to see beauty, it was out of fear of being seen as stupid because they couldn’t see what they believed everyone else could.

And then there are poets. No doubt there are many talented ones out there, but I’m not sure they comprise a majority. All through elementary school, high school, and college I was encouraged to “appreciate” many different poets. Some I actually did appreciate, but not many. As an undergraduate I had a leftist professor of English who declared Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” the best poem of the age. Drifting leftward myself in those days, I tried hard to see the genius he insisted was there, but never could.

My parents sent me to a Catholic prep school in Lowell, Massachusetts when Lowell native and writer Jack Kerouac was at the height of his fame. Several times I tried to read his books, but just couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. I quit reading after about forty pages into three or four of them. Seeing a drunken Kerouac in 1968 on William F. Buckley’s PBS program “Firing Line,” didn’t impress me either. That Allen Ginsberg and he were close friends only made it worse.

Ginsberg and Kerouac

Very recently, however, I got another insight into Kerouac from an unlikely source. On the 50th anniversary of his death, The American Spectator did a tribute to him. A quote: “On the Road was really an autobiographical expression of Kerouac’s longing and searching for something — that something was God. Historian Douglas Brinkley, the editor of Kerouac’s diary, reported that nearly every page carried a prayer, an appeal to Christ for mercy, or a sketched crucifix. ‘Kerouac was trying to make everything holy,’ said Brinkley.

In its obituary, the New York Times quoted Kerouac from one of his last interviews in which he declared: “I’m not a Beatnik, I’m a Catholic.” Uncomfortable with his literary fame and its cooption by sixties leftists, his drinking got worse. It killed him in 1969 at 47. Lately I’m seeing Kerouac as a conflicted soul who, if he had been able to reconcile his tortured life with his understanding of God and achieve sobriety, might have displayed a more authentic genius than the world had hitherto witnessed.

Beware The Mob

Up to now, we have been a nation of laws and not of men, but I fear we are becoming unhinged. I fear the mob is gaining power and rule of law is diminishing. Nazis and the KKK are certainly evil and if they existed in any great numbers they would be a threat to our republic, but they don’t. They have a web presence that exaggerates their influence and media coverage that magnifies it further.

Whenever they hold meetings, FBI infiltrators likely comprise a quorum. The [Jewish] Anti Defamation League, or ADL, estimates membership in the KKK at five thousand. In 2011, The New York Times estimated membership in the National Socialist Movement [NSM]: “…the largest supremacist group [is NSM], with about 400 members in 32 states, though much of its prominence followed the decay of Aryan Nation and other neo-Nazi groups.”

It’s much harder to find out the size of “Antifa” which is perhaps the largest violent left-wing group, but it is international in scope with chapters all over Europe and the United States. Unlike the KKK and neo-Nazis, it tries hard to be anonymous. One USA Antifa web site called itsgoingdown.org declares: 

“We strongly recommend against [emphasis in original] antifa groups being organized using the open, public model of most contemporary activism… that you stay anonymous both while forming and until your first action. Anonymity is your best defense, and you should keep it intact as long as you can.”

They dress in black and wear masks when they use violence so police cannot easily identify them from video. Antifa advises:

“Build a culture of non-cooperation with law enforcement…The cops will be Trump supporters; do not collaborate with them.”

And Antifa is universally leftist. From the same site:

The anti-fascist movement has come from multiple theoretical currents; it is based on an agreement on tactics, not ideological uniformity. In the U.S., most activists are anarchist, although a few are Maoist or anti-state Marxists. In other countries, the movement is predominately Marxist.

If Antifa targeted only the KKK and neo-Nazis I might even applaud them, but their scope is much wider. They’re against capitalism in whatever form and have violently disrupted G-20 meetings around the world. They’re emphatically anti-Trump and violently disrupt his rallies wherever they can. If you’re against illegal immigration, Antifa is against you and will try to take away your free-speech rights as columnists Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos discovered in Berkeley.

I watched an Antifa organizer interviewed on Fox News last week who claimed his organization received no money from outside groups or individuals. However, The Daily Caller investigated the Antifa riot at the University of California Berkeley last February and shed light on its camouflaged money trail: 

The left-wing group that helped organize the violent shut down of the Milo Yiannopoulos event at the University of California, Berkeley on Wednesday is backed by a progressive charity that is in turn funded by George Soros, a major labor union and several large companies. The Alliance for Global Justice, based in Tucson, is listed as an organizer and fiscal sponsor for Refuse Fascism, a communist group that encouraged left-wingers to shut down the Yiannopoulos event. The call to arms succeeded. Yiannopoulos’ talk was cancelled after demonstrators lit fires, vandalized businesses, and assaulted Donald Trump and Yiannopoulos supporters.

On Antifa, Anarchist, LGBTQIA+, Black Lives Matter, Muslim, and other sites, I’m seeing calls for “Intersectionality.” It’s a word I didn’t understand when I first heard it in January during the lead-up to the Pussyhat March the day after Trump’s inauguration. It’s a strategy to bring all self-identified victim groups together in one political movement against conservatism.

Elizabeth Corey, writing in "First Things" described a conference she attended last March at the University of Notre Dame entitled: “Intersectional Inquiries and Collaborative Action: Gender and Race” at which the keynote speaker was an angry black woman named Patricia Collins — a sociology professor at the University of Maryland:

At the end there was a question and answer period. I asked whether and how Collins would suggest that intersectionality engage with its adversaries, the ­hated conservatives. Given the polarization of ­America right now, did she see some way for the two camps to communicate or find common ground? The vehemence of her answer was startling. “No,” she said. “You cannot bring these two worlds together. You must be oppositional. You must fight. For me, it’s a line in the sand.” This was at once jarring and clarifying.

The Free Speech rally in Boston last Saturday was disrupted by the Intersectionality groups including Antifa and police arrested 27 of them. It was not white supremacist as far as I could see but it became a target for 40,000 protesters who shut down speakers. Free speech rights and rights to assemble were trampled. The mob ruled. Monuments were destroyed or defaced in other cities. What’s next? Book burnings? This is getting scary.