Charlie Bertsch

Although these days I mostly focus on music and film for TheBattleground.eu, I covered a wider range of topics during my eight years of writing for Souciant. This piece, on the popular conservative painter John McNaughton, is one of my favorites for my last year there. Link in first comment:

"Since the vast majority of my friends, Republicans included, dislike Trump, I first experienced the painting through a framework of mockery. I joined in, too, sharing it on Facebook with a brief note stating that I was “delighted to see a resurgence in Anti-Socialist Realism”. However, I also felt compelled to add that, 'those faces in the flag-trampling crowd on the left are ably rendered.' Because I’m not very talented as an artist – and perhaps because my daughter is – I recognise how difficult it is to paint a face so that it’s easy for people to recognise the subject, particularly when many figures a grouped together. Whatever else could be said about National Emergency, it seems important to acknowledge that its creator Jon McNaughton spent many hours working on it, demonstrating his dedication and technical skill. But to what end?

A quick perusal of the responses to his own tweet about the painting and various reposts in conservative subreddits showed just how many people endorsed his vision. The ironic consumption I had witnessed in my own social media circles, with numerous individuals declaring how badly they wanted a copy of the work, was mirrored by the sincere consumption of those who believe that Donald Trump has a historical mission to make America great again. It was also clear that, while many of those people no doubt pass on the 'news substitutes' that pass for political information in these extremely polarised times, they make a distinction between that kind of socially mediated communication and the work of someone like McNaughton. In their minds, the time he put it into the painting, that fact that it came into being independently of internet hot takes, imbues it with a gravity commensurate with the seriousness of the dispute it depicts.

My high-school art teacher came to mind. Even back in the 1980s, I could tell that her political beliefs diverged from mine. But I loved the caring atmosphere she created for misfits and outcasts like myself and learned a great deal from her about both art and life. A decade ago, when Facebook made it possible for me to reconnect with former classmates and teachers, I soon realized that she had either become more conservative over the years or had always been that way. Until the 2016 Presidential campaign, though, our differences were largely inconsequential background to the sort of personal interactions the platform was created to prioritise.

The ascendancy of Donald Trump changed all that. Although I try to 'like' her posts from time to time or leave a friendly comment, the percentage of polemical MAGA-type content in her feed is making it increasingly difficult for me to interact with them in a positive way. The sole exceptions, really, are photographs of the grandson she is raising and posts she shares advocating for the preservation of arts education. Depressing as this situation is, it makes me feel a little better that, despite her repetition of Fox News talking points as if they were incontrovertible facts, she hasn’t abandoned her belief that the work teachers do matters in ways that can’t be readily quantified.

Her example makes me hesitant to sustain an ironic posture towards the work of artists like Jon McNaughton. So do the comments of a great many Americans who earnestly believe that paintings like National Emergency represent important contributions to political life. Deriding them for being out of step with current trends in the art world, when anyone who actually pays attention to the gallery-museum-biennial circuit knows that there isn’t any clear way forward being articulated, seems insincere, if not outright dangerous."

I had the privilege of interviewing one of my favorite authors Dennis Cooper for Punk Planet Magazine. Link in first comment:

"Our whole culture is all about s*x and violence. You have to dare yourself to go in there. Strangely -- or maybe not so strangely -- a lot of my readers are really young.

It's like I have a weird division between readers who are really young and readers who are academics. Everybody in the middle doesn't know what to do with me. Kids seem to get it because they relate to the whole thing about the inability to express feelings and about having feelings for people and hating yourself for it and hating them for it and then trying to connect with them."

This is one of my favorite pieces I’ve written for TheBattleground.eu. I’m grateful to Global Voices for republishing it in a few different languages:

“Despite the pace of change in the world’s most developed nations, which has made many things from that decade seem very far away, the neoliberal mindset championed by Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and other conservative leaders continues to dominate everyday life.

Although we might not have as many ugly concrete buildings to remind us of the latter stages of the Cold War as they do in Minsk, we confront its legacy in the conceptual structures that prevent us from making meaningful political or economic progress.

The long 1980s have been very long, indeed.”

The long 1980s: Belarusian dark wave band Molchat Doma takes its music to the US "Even though the band hasn’t felt safe declaring their political views directly, their music seems like an oblique commentary on the persistence of totalitarianism."