Just to build on my update to my last post– there seems to be a bit of an argument about Joan Rivers and how to talk about her death, given that she called for the destruction of the Palestinian people shortly before her death. It’s the Wagner thing, one more time.
I confess that I find this argument kind of boring. I am firmly of the opinion that bad people can make great art. I always say “Ty Cobb had a great OBP,” which is partially a joke but also a serious point. Nobody would question whether Cobb’s racism (or other character defects) kept him from getting on base; it’s an objective statistic. People also probably wouldn’t question that Robert Lee Moore made important advances in topology. So with certain athletic or scientific or similar accomplishments, we know we have to separate the quality of their work from their character. Art is subjective, but I think we should apply the same basic logic and acknowledge that there’s no magic formula in the universe that keeps bad people from making great art. In fact it seems like they make more than their fair share. Pretty easy question, pretty boring question.
The other side of this is whether you are excused from bad behavior by your historical circumstance. We tend to talk a lot about the racism and homophobia of specific individuals, but the fact of the matter is that a very large portion of human beings in history have been racist and homophobic, given their times. I remember when that college student refused to recite a poem by Walt Whitman because of Whitman’s racism. I promise: a large majority of the poets whose work that kid reads all the time were crazy racist. So is that an excuse? Part of the problem is that there are almost always people who did correctly identify the moral argument who were contemporary of, or came before, the person you’re defending. Yes, Thomas Jefferson held slaves at a time when many people held slaves. But there was also a robust abolition movement with a long history and a lot of writing that Jefferson could have read and been convinced by. Hell, there were anti-slavery arguments in ancient Greece. So too with Joan Rivers and Palestinians: yes, a lot of people of her age are racist against Palestinians, but there’s also plenty of people her age who aren’t. If Noam Chomsky has been able to find a non-racist position on Palestinians as a contemporary of Rivers, why wasn’t Rivers herself?
Here’s what I know for sure: we’re not at all consistent with this stuff. Not even a little bit. Do you need to mention Rivers’s racism every time you talk about her or her accomplishments? I don’t know. Do you need to mention the slaves every time you talk about Jefferson? Do you need to provide the necessary caveats every time you talk about Woody Allen? (Provided you think he’s guilty.) Recently, there was a controversy about H.P. Lovecraft’s abundant racism, with many arguing that we’ve got to start mentioning it every time we talk about him. Is that a general principle? I think the answer to these questions has way more to do with how much you like the person in question’s work than any moral principle. I’ve never known anyone to be particularly consistent on this issue.
So I guess that’s the source of some frustration, for me. If you want to celebrate Joan Rivers, go ahead. I just hope that if you spent time blasting people for still enjoying Woody Allen’s work, you reevaluate how closely you hold onto those principles. And I also hope that, even if you don’t think her statements about the Palestinians belong in her obituaries, you acknowledge the fact that the media’s broad silence on those statements are a product of who she was criticizing. Don’t allow your own silence to be complicit in a culture in which racism against Palestinians is uniquely permissible.