On Hoaxes, Performance Art, and Crazy Liberals

A news article was recently making the rounds on the Internet. The news article concerned a senior undergraduate at Yale University who majored in art and who apparently has a penchant for causing a scene. The headline: "For Senior, Abortion a Medium for Art, Political Discourse." The article went on to discuss a girl whose senior art project was "a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself 'as often as possible' while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these of forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process."

Of course, the Intelligent Independent was absolutely disgusted and mortified that anyone would do this. We remembered from our undergraduate days that there are some fairly crazy, wacky liberals out there, but this absolutely took the cake. A friend emailed us: "I don't know what to say. That may well be one of the worst things I've ever heard. I think she's a vile human being, unfit for -- and undeserving of -- that title."

We forwarded the article around, and the expression of disgust was universal. Liberal or conservative, nobody could believe that she would do this, or that Yale University would allow a public exhibition of the project, as the newspaper article stated.

The Drudge Report picked up the student newspaper article, and from there it spread like wildfire. The Washington Post, CNN, the London Times, every major news outlet throughout the world picked it up. And so the shock and outrage spread internationally.

But something didn't quite sit right with the Intelligent Independent. After our initial emotion-fueled sadness and shock and anger, our rational side kicked in, and we sent the following e-mail to some colleagues:

I was thinking, and I cannot imagine this is real. This has to be a hoax. I cannot believe even Yale would okay a public installation of her blood and videos of her miscarriages. And I find it very hard to believe that she could successfully pull off these miscarriages (come on, let's call them what they are, abortion) multiple times with herbs, without either being unable to abort the child, or without causing major damage to herself.

"The to pull off a hoax, all she really had to do was trick the Yale student paper. From there all the other media would pick it up and it would take off with very little additional verification. She'd simply get some cohorts to corroborate it via e-mail, and Yale would be silent for a while as they tried to figure out what the truth was. If you look at the original Yale article, they weren't even able to talk to her adviser.

"She will probably justify the whole thing as performance art, or ' hoax art in cyberspace' or something.

"Then again I could just be rationalizing all this because I don't want to believe anyone is that evil."

Well, my friends, it appears our Bullshit Detector is functioning properly. Yale University later released a statement:

"Ms. Shvarts is engaged in performance art. Her art project includes visual representations, a press release and other narrative materials. She stated to three senior Yale University officials today, including two deans, that she did not impregnate herself and that she did not induce any miscarriages. The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguities surrounding form and function of a woman's body. She is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art. Had these acts been a real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns."

We are glad that we were right. It brings some level of satisfaction and even some vindication among friends who claimed that as much as they wished it were a hoax, they feared it was real. It also makes us feel relieved that such a horrible, heinous person does not exist in reality.

That said, Ms. Shvarts is still a vile human being. Not quite as vile as she was, but anyone who would purposely try to mislead the world about such a sensitive and delicate matter, and be so cavalier about the whole thing, all in the name of "her art," deserves only marginally more respect than one who would purposely and repeatedly impregnate and abort.

Moreover, we are dismayed that the Yale University office of public affairs is so quick to defend this woman, under the flimsy rationale that "she is an artist" and she has "the right to express herself through performance art." Calling oneself an artist does not give a free pass to act as irresponsibly and insensitively as one desires, all in the name of art. It does not free one from the bounds of civility and decency that characterize a healthy society.

The Intelligent Independent is all for artistic expression, but pulling a massive hoax and calling it "performance art" meant to "draw attention" to the function of a woman's body is disgusting, and reminds me why we joined the conservative student newspaper while at college. Academia is a crazy place, and they believe some messed up things inside those ivory towers. We are glad to no longer be a part of that, but dismayed that the insanity continues.

Which punishment works best on the cruel and vicious?

In law school, the Intelligent Independent learned the theories of punishment: what we, as a society, hope to accomplish by punishing people for crimes. I remembered the list with a handy little acronym I made up: "Criminals are DIRRD"

• Deterrence, both specific (deterring the criminal from future crimes) and general (deterring society from criminal behavior)
  
• Incapacitation (while they're locked up, they can't hurt anyone else)
  
• Rehabilitation (might as well try to fix them while we've got 'em)
• Retribution (Biblical punishment -- Old Testament style)
  
• Denunciation (think Scarlett Letter -- most people don't want to be thought of as a criminal)

All five of those apply to the members of a high school cheer-leading squad who lured a girl to someone's house and then beat her senseless for a half hour while the video camera rolled.

The Intelligent Independent's position? Try these animals as adults.

We have no mercy for the cruel and the vicious. They'll likely get probation and lots of community service -- maybe a few days in jail. The Intelligent Independent would give them all jail time, and lock up the ringleaders until their 21st birthday.

Obama SHOULD have stuck to basketball

Barack Obama is a worse bowler than we are. That is very sad. Also sad is that fairly innocuous statements by certain pundits are being criticized as terribly racist by the politically correct crowd.

On March 31, MSNBC's Chris Matthews noted that "the fact that he's good at basketball doesn't surprise anybody," but the fact that he has horrible bowling form "makes you wonder." Analyst Howard Fineman added, "He should have stuck to shooting hoops!" Leftist watch dogs got their panties in a bunch over these statement and cries of racism were heard throughout the Interwebs -- even Jon Stewart took the opportunity to criticize the comments as racist.

The statements were not racist. Let's look at this rationally, folks: First of all, would anybody really be surprised by the fact that a black man is good at basketball? Of course not! Lots of African-Americans are great at basketball -- and pointing that out does not make one racist.

African-Americans are not inherently good at B-ball, any more than Asians are inherently good at playing the violin. (I am going to get so much hate mail.) The fact remains, however, that different ethnic groups tend to enjoy different recreational pursuits. Why is it racist to state that black kids like to play basketball? As Mr. Matthews said, it might be an "ethnic" observation, and yes it's a stereotype, but sometimes stereotypes have a ring of truth. Just look around: basketball is a traditional recreational pursuit for many African-Americans. That is not a racist statement.

Barack Obama is a good basketball player, but not because he's black. Obama rocks at basketball because, like many African-Americans, Obama has played the game for years. On his high school basketball team, he was known as "Barry O'Bomber" for his kick-ass jump shot. At Harvard, he routinely played pick up games with friends, and even today he squeezes it in to unwind. As the New York Times reported last year:

“He didn’t know who he was until he found basketball. It was the first time he really met black people.”

Now, Mr. Obama’s friends say, basketball has been his escape from the sport of politics, but also a purer version of it, with no decorous speeches, no careful consensus — just unrestrained competition.

“He can be himself, it’s a safe haven, he can let his competitive juices flow and tease his buddies,” Mr. Nesbitt said. “It’s just a relaxing respite from the every-moment and every-word scrutinization that he gets.”

So, well-versed on Obama's basketball history, Chris Matthews and Howard Fineman made the comparison between his rancid bowling score (37??!!!) and his storied days as Barack O'Bomber, noted he "should have stuck to shooting hoops," and the Left instantly -- and wrongly -- called foul.

If the Intelligent Independent were wont to throw around the racist term, he might find it just a little racist in itself for the MediaMatters crowd to accuse white commentators of racism for simply pointing out that Obama was a better basketball player than a bowler. Intelligent Independents know that anyone who is so eager to cry Racist! has got some issues of their own. (And Intelligent Independents know that were black commentators to have made the remarks, no one would have had a problem with it.)

It just so happens that we happen to agree with Messrs. Matthews and Fineman: Obama should have stuck to basketball, or at least practiced before attempting to play a game which he had clearly hardly played in his life. Luckily, one's bowling score does not necessarily indicate the quality of one's leadership. That said, the Intelligent Independent would at least hope that, if he becomes president, Mr. Obama would practice on the White House bowling alley until his average score is at least as high as the number of presidents America has had. Is that too much to ask?

*

I have been meaning for a while to talk about Hillary Clinton's now infamous misstatement that she had to run from an airport 12 years ago under sniper fire. Of course, this was later proven untrue -- damn those CBS news cameras! -- and Hillary chalked it up to "a misstatement."

It is hard to imagine how anyone could make a misstatement of such proportions. It is equivalent to me claiming that, when I landed in Tel Aviv after a 13 hour plane ride in 1992, I had to run from the plane to the tarmac while dodging suicide bombers. As exciting and adventurous as my Israeli bar mitzvah was, I'm afraid the only dodging I did was from overzealous vendors in one of Israel's many outdoor markets. ("You would look marvelous in this hijab! Please, please, just come here and we can try it on. And please, taste my hummus! You will love my hummus!")

It appears to the Intelligent Independent observer that Hillary Clinton was, if not outright lying, then at the very least playing fast and loose with the facts. It reminds me of another famous prevaricator, the brilliant William Jefferson Clinton. The difference is that Bill was much better at spinning yarns.

On the campaign trail, he often told stories of his youth -- complete fabrications -- meant to get the audience to shed tears as they empathized with him. Not only was Bill Clinton far more adept at deception, but also, he had the good fortune of not having been videotaped for the last several years. There is something about the cold, hard light of archival footage that tends to get in the way of exhilarating yet fabricated stories.

Charles Krauthammer had an interesting column in the Washington Post yesterday discussing Hillary's gaffe. Like me, he finds this less of a moment of "confabulation" -- the phenomenon of actually believing the stories we tell -- and more outright "pathological" lying on a "Clintonian scale."

Whether or not Hillary's half-truths will become as prevalent and frequent as Bill's remains to be seen. Regardless, if Hillary wants to have a chance of unseating front-runner Obama, she will have to be incredibly careful with what she says, now that everyone is on the lookout for fudging. This is difficult enough for a scrupulous politician. I cannot imagine how difficult it might be for a Clinton.

(NB: Intelligent Independence does not mean refraining from pointing out the foibles of any particular side; on the contrary, it requires you to do so of all sides.)

Breaking News: Many Americans are Ignorant

Apparently these days writing a New York Times column requires little more than A) reporting the obvious and B) hurling insults about Dubya's intelligence. (Wait, was the previous sentence redundant? Hmm...)

Anyway, Nicholas Kristoff has taken it upon himself to set the record straight: "conspiracy theories and irrationality aren’t a black problem. They are an American problem." According to Kristoff, it's not just African-Americans who believe silly things like government creation of HIV to destroy the black community, or deliberately opening the levees to wipe New Orleans minorities off the map. Nope, apparently Americans of all colors think the government had a hand in the 9/11 attacks, and a majority of Americans do not believe in evolution.

As much as the Intelligent Independent wants to disbelieve Kristoff's statistics, they're probably fairly accurate. But we disagree with Kristoff's closing words: "Maybe, just maybe, this cycle has run its course, for the last seven years perhaps have discredited the anti-intellectualism movement. President Bush, after all, is the movement’s epitome — and its fruit."

Say what you want about Dubya's anti-intellectual tendencies; even after the man leaves office, I highly doubt the trend of blatant ignorance will subside anytime soon.

*

ON THE OTHER END of the intellectualism scale, the NY Times magazine ran a piece this weekend that looks at the phenomenon of dumping somebody because of the kinds of books they read. Instead of backwoods country-bumpkins thinking evolution is a scam, or White House country-bumpkins thinking evolution is a scam, we now examine yuppie intellectuals who cannot be with someone because they have never heard of Pushkin, who Wikipedia assures me is one of the greatest Russian poets ever to have lived. I've never read him. (Intelligent Independents know that you needn't have read Pushkin to be intelligent.) In fact, at the risk of sounding like a poor steward for this blog, I must admit that I too would have been dumped by the breathless girl in the opening paragraph.

I find it fairly pretentious that some people would reject others based on their taste in books. (NB: This appears to be more of a female hang-up, according to the article.) But I do understand that one's taste in books is often a proxy for deeper beliefs and compatibility issues -- such as the importance one places on reading in the first place.

For instance, the Intelligent Independent once dated a girl who was fun and perky and possessed many of the qualities prized by the Superficial Man. However, as you will see, the mental connection wasn't all there. One day in an online chat I engaged her in a dialog about her favorite book. Luckily for Intelligent Independent readers, her responses left me so shocked, so incredulous, that I saved that little snippet of chat for posterity. Now I will share it with you:

Intelligent Independent: what's your favorite book?
Lindsay: y
II: I'm trying to get to know you
II: We have little to talk about because we don't know each other
II: And we don't have a base of experiences to talk about
Lindsay: i dont read
II: I don't read either. But I have a favorite book. Have you ever read a book you enjoy?
Lindsay: no
II: You've got to be joking
Lindsay: nope
II: has everything you HAVE read been for class?
Lindsay: yes
II: and i take it none of that has been interesting. 1984?
Lindsay: whats 1984?

That was the last time we spoke.

So in conclusion, rejecting someone based on their different taste in books? Pretentious and small-minded. Rejecting someone based on their complete ignorance of the written word? An intelligent move!