I’m glad to be part of the “reality-based community.” After reading this article, you will be too. Which country are you going to move to if Bush wins the election?

In the Oval Office in December 2002, the president met with a few ranking senators and members of the House, both Republicans and Democrats. In those days, there were high hopes that the United States-sponsored ‘‘road map’‘ for the Israelis and Palestinians would be a pathway to peace, and the discussion that wintry day was, in part, about countries providing peacekeeping forces in the region. The problem, everyone agreed, was that a number of European countries, like France and Germany, had armies that were not trusted by either the Israelis or Palestinians. One congressman — the Hungarian-born Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress — mentioned that the Scandinavian countries were viewed more positively. Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall.

‘‘I don’t know why you’re talking about Sweden,’‘ Bush said. ‘‘They’re the neutral one. They don’t have an army.’‘

Lantos paused, a little shocked, and offered a gentlemanly reply: ‘‘Mr. President, you may have thought that I said Switzerland. They’re the ones that are historically neutral, without an army.’‘ Then Lantos mentioned, in a gracious aside, that the Swiss do have a tough national guard to protect the country in the event of invasion.

Bush held to his view. ‘‘No, no, it’s Sweden that has no army.’‘

The room went silent, until someone changed the subject.

…

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ‘‘in what we call the reality-based community,’‘ which he defined as people who ‘‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’‘ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’‘ he continued. ‘‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’‘

Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community? Many of the other elected officials in Washington, it would seem. A group of Democratic and Republican members of Congress were called in to discuss Iraq sometime before the October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to move forward. A Republican senator recently told Time Magazine that the president walked in and said: ‘‘Look, I want your vote. I’m not going to debate it with you.’‘ When one of the senators began to ask a question, Bush snapped, ‘‘Look, I’m not going to debate it with you.’‘

…

Every few months, a report surfaces of the president using strikingly Messianic language, only to be dismissed by the White House. Three months ago, for instance, in a private meeting with Amish farmers in Lancaster County, Pa., Bush was reported to have said, ‘‘I trust God speaks through me.’‘ In this ongoing game of winks and nods, a White House spokesman denied the president had specifically spoken those words, but noted that ‘‘his faith helps him in his service to people.’‘

A recent Gallup Poll noted that 42 percent of Americans identify themselves as evangelical or ‘‘born again.’‘ While this group leans Republican, it includes black urban churches and is far from monolithic. But Bush clearly draws his most ardent supporters and tireless workers from this group, many from a healthy subset of approximately four million evangelicals who didn’t vote in 2000 — potential new arrivals to the voting booth who could tip a close election or push a tight contest toward a rout.

This signaling system — forceful, national, varied, yet clean of the president’s specific fingerprint — carries enormous weight. Lincoln Chafee, the moderate Republican senator from Rhode Island, has broken with the president precisely over concerns about the nature of Bush’s certainty. ‘‘This issue,’‘ he says, of Bush’s ‘‘announcing that ‘I carry the word of God’ is the key to the election. The president wants to signal to the base with that message, but in the swing states he does not.’‘

…

And for those who don’t get it? That was explained to me in late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. ‘‘You think he’s an idiot, don’t you?’‘ I said, no, I didn’t. ‘‘No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don’t care. You see, you’re outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don’t read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it’s good for us. Because you know what those folks don’t like? They don’t like you!’‘ In this instance, the final ‘‘you,’‘ of course, meant the entire reality-based community.

Since I last wrote about Peter Hort’s campaign for Congress, I also learned about an “Arts Committee for Peter Hort for Congress.” I have also started looking at information on donations to his campaign.

Among those listed as members of “Arts Committee for Peter Hort for Congress”:

• Carolyn Alexander, Alexander and Bonin
• Marty Eisenberg
• Nicole Eisenman, artist
• Barbara Hunt, executive director of Artists Space (remember when they got in trouble over David Wojnarowicz?)
• Anton Kern, gallerist
• Nicole Klagsbrun, gallerist – hosting an event on the 26th with Peter Hort
• Marilyn Minter, artist
• Matthew Marks, gallerist
• Jack Tilton, gallerist
• Joel Wachs, president of the Andy Warhol Foundation
• Diane Wallace
• Simon Watson, curator/art consultant, Scenic
• David Zwirner gallerist

My list of names came from an email Simon sent to James, which was also forwarded to me by several people who thought I might be interested in this particular mix of arts and politics. There are additional people mentioned in a press release on Peter Hort’s web site.

It’s hard to fit all of this into a single post, but I’m going to try.

Item 1: A vote for Peter Hort is a vote for the Republican Party. That means you are supporting the following agenda:

• anti-gay
• anti-choice
• pro-Iraq War, which diverted resources away from hunting the perpetrators of 9/11 and has wasted so many lives and billions of dollars
• anti-immigrant
• anti-cities
• anti-culture

Item 2: A vote for Peter Hort is a vote to strengthen the power of the right-wing House leadership. The de facto leader of the House is Tom DeLay (R-TX), the Majority Leader. Were Peter Hort to defeat Jerrold Nadler, it would increase the GOP’s margin in the House. Here are some links on Tom DeLay:

• Why no American should vote for Tom DeLay
• Taking on Tom DeLay weblog
• Discussion of a Paul Krugman column on DeLay
• DeLay on ‘only Christianity has the answers’
• DeLay on homosexuals as un-American

Another member of the House leadership is Speaker Dennis Hastert. Yes, the one who said New Yorkers were too greedy after 9/11.

I can think of two explanations of why people in the art world would support Peter Hort.

The first one is that they are being naive. They buy into the idea that politics can be about individual politicians, and not their parties. I wish that were the case, but to support someone running on the Republican and Conservative Party lines for Congress against a Democratic incumbent is a vote to empower Tom DeLay and his ilk. I wish there were moderates in positions of power in the GOP, but there are none.

It doesn’t matter if Mr. Hort professes decent positions in person. I am told by several people that I should talk to him personally, and that he is pro-choice and pro-gay marriage. It doesn’t matter. A vote for him is a vote for the GOP agenda.

The second explanation is the cynical one. Mr. Hort’s parents, Susan and Michael Hort, are among the most important collectors in New York right now. Peter Hort runs a foundation named after his late sister, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, which gives grants to artists.

When important collectors ask people in the art world to support their son’s candidacy, many of them feel they have no choice but to do so. To do otherwise would be bad for business or bad for one’s artistic career. Maybe most of them realize that he is unlikely to win, so “no harm done” is their rationale. Besides, in general they are privileged enough to feel that the GOP agenda won’t directly cause them any harm, while opposing Peter Hort’s campaign may do quite visible harm to a career or business.

I find it inconceivable that any person who cares about culture or the state of our nation and planet would vote for a member of the party of George W. Bush.

This is my last post on this subject unless something really big comes up. It’s giving me an ulcer.
—

My previous articles on Peter Hort:

• Peter Hort, stealth Republican candidate for Congress
• On Peter Hort, a clarification
• Peter Hort: A ‘progressive’ running on the Conservative Party line?

My mother sent me an article from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette (state paper, article not online) about Michael Moore’s appearance in her town of Conway. The Billionaires for Bush have an Arkansas chapter now! Article excerpt:

During his speech on the campus of the University of Central Arkansas in Conway on Sunday night, filmmaker and Bush antagonizer Michael Moore encountered so warm a reception that even the onstage deaf interpreter clapped along at the more robust applause lines. The only opposition encountered by Moore – who had been roundly booed a month earlier in his press seat at the Republican National Convention – came preshow, from a mass of young protesters gathered outside Reynolds Performance Hall. The group was dressed though it was bound for the gilded box of an opera hall. The sentiments of their protest signs were over the top, even for the farthest reaches of political activism: “Four More Wars!” demanded one, waving out from the dust cloud of pearls, crushed velvet and cufflinks. “It’s a Culture War,” sneered another, “And We’re Winning.” Besides the incongruous extremism of the messages – garish, decoded and impolite slogans delivered in the noblesse obligest of packages – there were other clues that these protesters were not as out of step with Moore’s incredulous liberalism as they seemed on the surface. For one thing, the protesters were awfully young to be seriously going around dressed like Thurston Howell and his wife, Lovey, from Gilligan’s Island. And then there were the hairstyles: a fauxhawk here, a rockabilly pompadour there, to tip the groups’ whitegloved hands.

In fact, the protesters were Hendrix College and UCA students who had taken up the banner of Billionaires for Bush, a group that first came to notice during the Republican National Convention, when they staged a mock tea party in Central Park. Satirizing what they see as President Bush’s favoritism to corporations and the super-rich, the Billionaires show support for John Kerry by espousing their interpretations of the most craven and policy-embroidered positions of conservatives : Irony as activism – which, when you think about it, might be the natural evolution of dissent in an age when collegians trust Jon Stewart of Comedy Central’s Daily Show more than Dan Rather.

“With the straightforward protests, you get these grimaces and it’s unapproachable,” Michael Inscoe said later. Inscoe, a navy-suited Billionaire, is also a 22-year-old English major from Maumelle. “The entertainment factor of this makes people pay attention to it.”

“Each one of us has a different target audience we’re going for,” explained Nick Stinson, a 19-year-old economics and business major from Houston. “My role is some sort of CEO, or an executive at Halliburton or Enron.” Before becoming a Billionaire for Bush, Stinson organized a similar protest of what he perceived as the crass consumerism driving MTV’s Rock the Vote bus tour, which made a stop on the Hendrix campus last month and, in addition to registering new voters, set up an expo of booths with marketing promotions. “They don’t care whether you vote,” said Stinson. “They care whether you buy Cingular or Ben & Jerry’s.” To get his point across, Stinson and some friends dressed in suits and staged a “business luncheon” in the Hendrix cafeteria. “We just went in and sort of made a ruckus,” he said.

Afterward, they realized their movement was similar to the approach of Billionaires for Bush, and Stinson and several like-minded friends spent the Thursday before Moore’s visit brainstorming caricatures of right-wing values and scrawling them on cardboard placards.

Then, there was the wardrobe wrangling. How do you affect Brooks Brothers polish on a Gap budget? You do what movers in the counterculture have always done, which is to subvert and co-opt the style of the mainstream by using what’s on hand, then augmenting your resources with thriftstore finds. “It was definitely easier for some people than others,” said Seth Baldy, a 22-yearold environmental studies major whose previous act of political protest was organizing STARC, Students Transforming and Resisting Corporations. “One guy had a full tuxedo,” he marveled. “He even had… what are those things that wrap around your stomach?” We ventured that he was perhaps describing a cummerbund. “That’s it,” he said. “A cummerbund. All I had was this raggedy old blazer and this tie.”

“I was nervous that people weren’t going to get the irony,” said Kate Lloyd, 19, a philosophy major from Huntsville, Ala. Lloyd wore a button-front shirt with a necktie and a big Hello! My Name Is name tag, on which she had written “Prescott.” “I’m a trust fund kid,” she explained. For the protest, Lloyd brandished a sign that read “Warning : Affordable Health Care May Result in Dangerously Low Profits.” “A lot of the girls are supposed to be trophy wives,” she said of her sisters-in-arms, many of whom had zipped themselves into satiny evening gowns. Then Lloyd sighed the universal lament of the underwardrobed college girl. “I didn’t have a formal dress.”

Emboldened by the response Sunday night – Moore’s camera crew told them they were the best Billionaires for Bush they’d seen – the group will be reconvening for weekly demonstrations outside Conway’s City Hall at 5 p.m. every Friday until the election. The Billionaires realize that the move will place them before a possibly less supportive audience than was gathered for the Moore event, and one with an extra layer of insulation from the group’s irony: their cars. “We’ll have to make bigger signs,” Stinson said. “And the slogans will have to be shorter and more precise.”

I learned about Compare|Decide|Vote from Cory Arcangel (warning – web page with sound).

They do some great side-by-side comparisons of Kerry and Bush positions, but I went to see the ad by Ben Jones and Paper Rad. Click on the “see the ads”, then “Play the Game” to see it.