{"id":1267,"date":"2009-09-29T15:36:15","date_gmt":"2009-09-29T20:36:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=1267"},"modified":"2010-07-19T00:19:00","modified_gmt":"2010-07-19T05:19:00","slug":"why-artists-defend-roman-polanski","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=1267","title":{"rendered":"Why artists defend Roman Polanski"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In 1977, Roman Polanski drugged, raped, and sodomized a 13-year-old girl.  When he believed a sort-of-plea-bargain was about to come unstuck, he took it on the lam.  He lived the high life in this self-imposed exile for thirty years, until busted in Switzerland recently.  Now various of the usual suspects on the right wing&#8217;s enemies list are campaigning to block his extradition.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a good deal of perplexity being expressed about this, and some predictable chuntering from right-wingers about lefties being moral degenerates.  But this flap isn&#8217;t really about politics at all &mdash; it&#8217;s much simpler than that.  It&#8217;s about people who think of themselves as &#8220;artistes&#8221; reserving themselves a get-out-of-jail card when <em>they<\/em> feel like behaving like repellent scum of the earth, too.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I could claim to be an &#8220;artiste&#8221; myself, even leaving out the computer programming and the writing; I&#8217;m a capable musician who&#8217;s done session work on two records, and I&#8217;ve composed songs that other people have sung. So I understand the temptation artists feel to position themselves as a breed apart to whom ordinary rules should not apply by reason of their specialness.  Who wouldn&#8217;t want some of that immunity, if they could claim it?<\/p>\n<p>If you want to make that argument, Roman Polanski makes a great stake in the ground &mdash; not in spite of the heinousness of his crime, but <em>because<\/em> of it. If even a child-raper can invoke the all-purpose artiste excuse for  scumminess, than the merely ordinary transgressions of artistes become trivia to be airily dismissed.  And if the Polanski case becomes a &#8220;teachable moment&#8221; whereby people can be talked into feeling like boors or philistines for even  <em>thinking<\/em> that artistes should be held to civilized standards of behavior, so much the better!<\/p>\n<p>None of this is more than tenuously connected to leftism, and I have to say the the right-wing efforts to gin up indignation on that score sound quite contrived and stupid to me. This dispute isn&#8217;t about politics, it&#8217;s about privilege &mdash; not just whether Roman Polanski is above the law, but about whether his defenders can claim to be too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 1977, Roman Polanski drugged, raped, and sodomized a 13-year-old girl. When he believed a sort-of-plea-bargain was about to come unstuck, he took it on the lam. He lived the high life in this self-imposed exile for thirty years, until busted in Switzerland recently. Now various of the usual suspects on the right wing&#8217;s enemies&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=1267\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Why artists defend Roman Polanski<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1267"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2302,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1267\/revisions\/2302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}