The summer remains bare of high-end cultural pursuits, so excuse me while I finish this bottle of Mogen David and write an essay about the oil spill and the misguided conservative libertarianism that’s sprung up in its wake.

Now I apologize.  The main purpose of this column is so plainly two-fold that it could dare be written by a toddler barely versed in its simple task: to inform you of the (currently off-season) classical arts in the local area; and to be funny and sardonic and cynical and get you through your lunch breaks with a laugh.  The last few weeks we’ve been passing the time through a broad and satirical overview of the history of ballet and opera, and I had originally intended to do a piece this week about how classical music has influenced a great deal of the modern music you might enjoy (things like Canada’s Godspeed You! Black Emperor or Sweden’s Moto Boy).  That bit was meant to include quite a few hilarious one-liners about Conor Oberst, but we’ll have to allow that to fall off the agenda as, in the spirit of Liz Phair having lost the ability to self-edit, I too have some things I’d like to get off my chest and a forum in which to do so.  This weekend’s celebrations and certain groups’ attempts to monopolize what it means, coupled with the situation in the Gulf, have given me reason to pause.  (You should already know I have a history of these sorts of things.)

This oil spill is horrific.  Two months and some change into this thing, it has turned into the greatest environmental disaster in American history, and depending on when the final chapter on this whole situation ends up being written it is likely to become one of the very worst man-made disasters in human history.  That it happened to America, a country that is one of the world’s greatest consumers of petroleum while also being also being a country which is woefully slow on the uptake with regards to climate change and environmentalism, is of course ironic.  That it came as a result of the oil industry, one of the greatest lobbying forces in American government and a huge sponsor not just to local political campaigns but even to those of the president of the United States, is painful.  But whatever shallow humor might be derived from this catastrophe is not deserved- not by the people working in vain to keep shop in waterfront communities; not by the vast fisheries (largely apolitical) which help to keep stable our local economy by those both locally born as well as the vast immigrant population which makes our community so wonderfully diverse; and certainly not by any number of the ordinary southerners who don’t subscribe to such a flippant disregard for our environment that comes alongside the empty sloganeering of a person who would so callously use the phrase “drill, baby, drill,” without considering for even a second the repercussions of such a task.

Now you might be wondering what in hell high culture has to do with politics, aside from the knowledge that Janet Napolitano has been known to get a kick out of some Gershwin in her downtime.  Last week I briefly touched upon The Marriage of Figaro, a Mozart-composed Italian opera that told the story of a roguish Count trying to sleep with his servant’s fiance, to the chagrin of his wife, the Countess.  The whole tale is one of the close intermingling of the aristocracy and the working class, and how the working class attempts to embarrass those in positions of power in order for them to see the error of their ways.  In a similar way something oddly prescient has been happening in the subtext of American politics over the last two and a half years which finds its roots within this beloved story of class struggle and scandal.

Unless you live under a rock, or don’t receive forwarded emails from a family elder’s racist friends, or are lucky enough to lack a white male sibling who is college age, you will be blissfully unaware that there is a supposed libertarian uprising in this country right now.  It is a fringe movement, but it’s a vocal one and wildly entertaining, and as a result cable news channels give it more weight than it deserves because it stirs controversy and brings in viewership and that is how the news industry works in the year 2010 I’m afraid.  The purpose of this libertarian movement, nicknamed the Tea Party, is that it is here to usurp the ruling political class through a pragmatic, fiscally conservative, bare bones political ethos which will thus herald in a new era of political idealism and honesty.  They use the name Tea Party because they are under the assumption that their loose collective (and only them) have the Framers’ best interests at heart, that they see America as it was seen by those who founded it, and are here to uphold such a thing (never mind that most of the framers were slave-owners whose courtesy for human rights extended only so far).  Naturally, naivety plays a huge part in this (as it does any political movement in American history), and those involved tend to not realize that a lot of the key players in this “rebellion” are actually key proponents of the cyclical political system they so want to tear down.  A person might suppose they are finding a key Everyman ally in these folksy leaders, but in reality they are just being led by the same type of dystopian leadership they hope to overthrow.  The emperor has new clothes, etc.

When the Count makes advances on Figaro’s fiance Susanna, while he simultaneously (and hypocritically) banishes one of his wife’s servants who has fallen in love with her, Figaro, Susanna, and the Countess conspire to reveal to the Count how corrupt he is.  The play is satirical and barbed and its popularity within France obviously born of the pre-Revolutionary period of that country’s turbulent history, and it is in this analogy where we find ourselves today.  An oil spill at the hands of a corrupt and indebted government far too friendly with corporations, and a group of people who think that we must stop this despotic setup in order to establish some new sense of order.  Obviously we’re already in the opera’s later acts, as the libertarian movement thinks they’ve caught the corrupt leadership in some kind of a trap.  And while it is true that those in charge helped to create this situation by soliciting the checks of those companies in charge, the story doesn’t end with Figaro killing the Count and taking over the house.  Instead he and his cohorts reveal the Count for the charlatan he is, and he humbly reforms and apologizes to the wife he has spurned.  She accepts his apology, and we’re led to believe that harmony is restored.

The truth of the matter is that this default libertarian back-step that’s arisen in the wake of this disaster is a wrong-minded instinctive reaction to the crisis.  The Tea Party itself is very much like a great many characters at the end of The Marriage Of Figaro: running around in disguise as something they are not.  The crux of libertarianism is a free market.  Free of restraint, free of restriction, free of regulation.  And the fallacy of their view of the free market is that it works within a vacuum, or that it will right itself independent of outside interference.  It’s the very deregulation they support on the base of their beliefs that led to the accident on board the Deepwater Horizon and the resulting deaths of eleven men.  And whether conservatives might want to admit it or not, while the Democratic leadership may have stupidly continued these policies of not making sure a giant oil well wasn’t in danger of blowing the hell up and completely destroying an entire aquatic ecosystem, there were eight years of conservative leadership that preceded it which put into act this take down of rules and regulations and allowed these conditions to exist in the first place.  Where, then, were these Tea Party members?  Where, then, was their sense of righteousness in the rule of the Constitution, in fiscal restraint, in setting America right?  While President Obama might have taken the place of the Count, he wasn’t the first person to occupy that role; why, then, was the last occupant free of such derision?

I wish I had a more eloquent thesis and conclusion.  Something less messy, something less foggy due to the effects of kosher wine on a holiday weekend, but that’s the political reality of the world we live in today: it’s an absolute crap chute without any definitive lines for us to work inside of, and one must be inebriated to even bear it.  But my main point is the same as Figaro’s: that you needn’t believe that a take down of the entire system is going to fix it.  If anything, it would open the industry to even more lacking standards, and the greater opportunity for disaster, under a Palin or Paul or who knows what other alliteratively named administration might end up in power.  Figaro understood (perhaps stupidly, but perhaps also practically) that taking out the Count wouldn’t accomplish what he wanted.  So he changed the system from within.  He shined a light on what was wrong with the help of others, and the burn of embarrassment caused things to become better.  In reality, France did no such thing in the years after Le nozze di Figaro’s popular success; they chopped all their heads off and put their genitals on pikes and then went through the most turbulent period of unrest in their modern history, followed by the ascension to power of one of the most ruthless leaders in the western world that side of World War II.  So here is my half-drunken plea: don’t listen to the catcalls of governmental take down, of libertarian utopia.  Because it’s an illusion.  And don’t listen to their derision that those who might want to reform the system by being involved with it are somehow weak, that Figaro was somehow wrong.  These same people who want less government in our private lives are suddenly upset at the lack of regulation of a private industry?  Where were they during the Bush presidency, and why was it alright then?  These same people who want less government in our private lives, why would they also support government intervention and a change of the Constitution in instances regarding women’s reproductive rights and the marriage rights of homosexuals?  These same people who want less government in our private lives, why did they have no problem with a massive debt, two plunderous wars, and the largest expansion of the American government since that liberal to end all liberals Lyndon Johnson was in office, all of which was on our tab?  These are people who think it is fiscally irresponsible to spend money on healthcare and public education, but had few qualms about the massive spending of the administration preceding this one which gave few benefits to the tax-paying public.  While there is no doubt that our country’s leadership are but idiotic charlatans, so too are those that would wish to change all of that who stand on the sidelines with calls for anarchy.

The most pragmatic course of action is the one that will likely lead to the change we need: of the system, of the regulatory restrictions necessary to make sure such a thing doesn’t happen again, of the environmental legislation that will make it so that such oil dependence doesn’t drag on until there is none left, when we’ve obliterated the environment and denied our descendants of a clean future.  It won’t come easily.  And it likely won’t come from either of the major parties or the idiotic strands of niche insanity their rejects proffer to us.  But we have it in all of us, just like Figaro, to do our community and environment the best job we can of spotlighting what is wrong, without falling prey to the machinations of yet more political groups with an agenda and something to gain.  Go look at Gulf Shores, and ask yourself how that got there, and what things could’ve prevented it from doing such a thing.  Great change won’t come in the form of political expediency.  It will come from each and every one of us doing what is right: being kind to each other, being kind to our environment, electing leadership which espouses such traits, rejecting politicians who have in the past acted against such ethics, and ignoring the idiotic and divisive banter of those who have no agenda but to make money off of us and find their way into higher office on the backs of our tragedy.  That is what the Framers envisioned when they sought to create this country.

And anyone arguing otherwise is probably just trying to sleep with your woman.

Next Week

We return to your normally scheduled column with an in-depth look at the productions that will be performed in our enclave when the fall season begins, and the MS Paint follies necessary to laugh at such a thing.  In the meantime, illegitimis nil carborundum.  I’ll see you nerds in seven days.

Artwork: Sand Lake Algoma, Arthur Lismer (top); The Long Leg, Edward Hopper (center); Bay Of Islands, Franklin Carmichael (bottom)