Politics And Occupation
The Art of Telling Parties Apart. (WaPo)
But for Helprin, the divide remains. “The arts community is generally dominated by liberals because if you are concerned mainly with painting or sculpture, you don’t have time to study how the world works. And if you have no understanding of economics, strategy, history and politics, then naturally you would be a liberal.”
That cracked me up when I read it this morning.
You know, this MAY be the article that I am looking for that explains the leftwing leanings of the tech community. With the obvious qualifier that Microsoft is their big bad corporate wolf, many techies—especially among the open source peeps—consider their work artistic creations and tend to apply this paradigm unto the rest. Debugging, testing, rewriting code tends to involve so much time and effort that little time is left to actually learn the things that make us lean away from the leftist slant.
But that’s just me…
Helprin weils a heavy bat.
One thing I (a Republican) learned many years ago was to not expect enlightened conversation from artists on any topic other than their art. They can talk about a competitor’s art, their own art, or art in general, but if you try to take the train into another direction… well, that’s what the tracks for are, to keep the train on a single line of thought.
For many years I was puzzled how a person who is obviously brilliant in one field could be so obviously dumb in all others. It’s because it’s a form of autism, where nothing outside one’s immediate interests is of any interest.