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Times Watch for April 16, 2004

Iraq Worse Than Vietnam; Budget-Balancing LBJ?

     Paul Krugman doesn't think Iraq is Vietnam--in some ways, it's worse. That's according to his Friday column, "The Vietnam Analogy."

     Krugman opens: "Iraq isn't Vietnam. The most important difference is the death toll, which is only a small fraction of the carnage in Indochina. But there are also real parallels, and in some ways Iraq looks worse."

     After three paragraphs of making that case, Krugman then shifts to the economy, and leaves out some vital information to burnish President Lyndon Johnson's (!) image as a responsible budget-balancer: "A fiscal comparison of George Bush's and Lyndon Johnson's policies makes the Vietnam era seem like a golden age of personal responsibility. At first, Johnson was reluctant to face up to the cost of the war. But in 1968 he bit the bullet, raising taxes and cutting spending; he turned a large deficit into a surplus the next year. A comparable program today--the budget went from a deficit of 3.2 percent of G.D.P. to a 0.3 percent surplus in just one year--would eliminate most of our budget deficit."

     Treasury Department figures indeed show the budget went from a $25 billion deficit in 1968 to a $3 billion surplus in 1969.

     But, as economist Bruce Bartlett pointed out in 2001, it was a bookkeeping change instituted by LBJ that year that allowed him to show a federal budget surplus: "…it turned out that the Social Security surplus in fiscal year 1970 was just enough to push the unified budget into the black. The Social Security surplus was $3.9 billion that year and [President] Johnson proposed a budget that would be in surplus by just $3.4 billion. Thus, without the inclusion of Social Security, his final budget would have been in deficit, not surplus."

     Krugman doesn't mention that.

For the rest of Krugman's column, click here.

• Columnists | Gaffes | Paul Krugman | Social Security

Portrait of the Artist as "Right-Wing Crank"

     The Times generally eschews hard-edged criticism of art exhibitions, with some commentators arguing that the paper supports them out of a sense of civic responsibility. But on Friday it makes an exception for "right-wing crank" painter Thomas Hart Benton. Ken Johnson's review calls a seventy-year old mural from Benton (now on display at Manhattan's Whitney Museum) "ugly" and sometimes "outright offensive."

     He opens his review of "The Arts of Life in America," the recently reinstalled mural painted by Benton in 1932, in harsh terms unusual for the staid section: "The ugliest paintings at the Whitney Museum of American Art right now are not in the Biennial. They're on the fifth floor, where the first half of the museum's permanent collection is kept. Recently installed in their own room, they are the five panels of a mural painted in 1932 by Thomas Hart Benton called 'The Arts of Life in America.' It is a roiling, luridly melodramatic panorama populated by a cast of rubbery, grotesque stereotypes: the giant Indian doing a war dance, hillbilly musicians, gambling and bronco-busting cowboys, a Bible-waving evangelist, slatternly dance hall girls, urban criminals and more….as ugly as it is both visually and spiritually, it remains an interesting historical artifact. Anyone who thinks about [painter Thomas Hart] Benton today probably imagines the regionalist, right-wing crank who, unaccountably, was Jackson Pollock's beloved teacher and unwavering supporter."

     Of course, the art world has never had its fair share of left-wing cranks.

     Johnson calls the works: "…stridently heavy-handed on every level. The nonstop, undulating choreography of narrative action is enough to give you motion sickness, and the simplification and exaggeration of every person into a stereotypical caricature is tediously monotonous when not outright offensive. Sometimes Benton idealizes, sometimes he satirizes, but his mannered style makes it hard to tell the difference."

     One of Benton's apparent sins? Satirizing left-wing magazines: "Finally, the half-round panel offers a painted political cartoon called 'Political Business and Intellectual Ballyhoo,' featuring ghoulish personifications of the magazines The Masses, The Nation and The New Republic, Benton's leftist ideological enemies."

     Johnson concludes with backhanded praise: "Benton undermined his cause by painting a reactionary polemic and a mythic vision too crudely simplistic to generate any fresh thinking about art in America. You can't say he didn't put a lot of energy into it, though, and 'The Arts of Life in America' remains impressive for its bumptious urgency."

For the rest of Johnson's review, click here.

• Arts | Thomas Hart Benton | Ken Johnson

E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org