Andrew Klavan Show - Klavans On The Culture Ep. 3: Michael | Should This Movie Be Made?
Aired: 2026-05-07
Duration: 44:28


=== Why Fans Idolize the Broken (15:22) ===

[00:00:00]  Taylor Swift is the only person you can compare it to, right?
[00:00:02]  And he was so famous.
[00:00:04]  And they make a big deal in the movie out of getting Billie Jean on MTV.
[00:00:08]  They didn't do black artists.
[00:00:10]  There are many reasons, I think, why people connect so powerfully to his music that I get and I understand.
[00:00:17]  What I don't understand is why people who love him that way are so attached to him as a person.
[00:00:26]  It's a really interesting thing.
[00:00:45]  We are back with Clavens on the Culture.
[00:00:47]  Hello, yeah.
[00:00:47]  I am Andrew Claven, and this is S with an S on the Claven.
[00:00:51]  That's right.
[00:00:52]  No apostrophe.
[00:00:53]  That's right.
[00:00:54]  We just stick it on.
[00:00:55]  That's right.
[00:00:55]  Yeah.
[00:00:55]  I actually haven't left this room.
[00:00:57]  You went out and did your own thing.
[00:00:58]  I said, just keep me in here.
[00:00:59]  Just keep me in here.
[00:01:00]  Between episodes.
[00:01:00]  You're out of trouble.
[00:01:01]  Exactly.
[00:01:02]  And as you may know, now, if you're reading Candace Owens' tweets, we are now the last two employees in the Daily Club.
[00:01:08]  It's just a broom closet.
[00:01:09]  They're actually going to start carrying the microphones out as we go.
[00:01:12]  Wait, you're reading Candace Owens' tweets?
[00:01:14]  I don't know.
[00:01:14]  What's wrong with you?
[00:01:15]  You're saying that we were all fired, so here we are.
[00:01:17]  Okay.
[00:01:18]  But, uh, We should explain to people that we've been contracted for six episodes.
[00:01:23]  This is our third episode.
[00:01:25]  And people seem to really be loving it, but the numbers fluctuate.
[00:01:28]  And so if you like the show, you should send it around.
[00:01:32]  Tweet it from the rooftops, man.
[00:01:34]  Tell your grandma.
[00:01:35]  But it's just to say, yes, watch the show because this is a proof of concept.
[00:01:40]  And also tell us what you like and don't like seriously, right?
[00:01:44]  Obviously, we love your praise and we bask in your adoration, but we genuinely would like to hear what's good.
[00:01:50]  And we started out with Project Hail Mary, which everybody was interested in.
[00:01:53]  And then we did Exit 8, which was more obscure, but it was really a great conversation about ghost stories.
[00:01:58]  That was a really good conversation.
[00:02:00]  So go and watch that.
[00:02:02]  Today, we're going to do one of the biggest hits in the last, in a long time Michael.
[00:02:07]  Do you know what I'm after?
[00:02:15]  You want to be the biggest star in the world?
[00:02:17]  Yeah.
[00:02:17]  The story of Michael Jackson, which has so far made over four, it's obviously moving to $500 million.
[00:02:23]  I think it could be the most.
[00:02:24]  The highest-grossing biopic ever in the end.
[00:02:28]  And it is, it's directed by Antoine Fuqua, who is a really good action director.
[00:02:34]  He did two films that I really like: Tears of the Sun, which he was attacked for because it has a white man, Bruce Willis, helping black people.
[00:02:41]  And that was very, very no-no.
[00:02:43]  I'm reliably informed that never happened.
[00:02:45]  Never, never happened.
[00:02:47]  Never once in the history of humanity.
[00:02:49]  In fact, the people in the movie should have been going, What is that?
[00:02:52]  What's going on?
[00:02:53]  Yes, I've never seen such an event.
[00:02:55]  How could it be?
[00:02:56]  And then he made Training Day, which is a one, I think it's his best film, actually.
[00:03:01]  He made Training Day with Denzel Washington.
[00:03:04]  Good movie, yeah.
[00:03:04]  And it's funny because a picture based on one of my books, Don't Say a Word, was the first hit after 9 11.
[00:03:12]  Huh.
[00:03:13]  And this was a coincidence?
[00:03:18]  I think not.
[00:03:19]  And I had to write an article for the New York Times, the only time I've ever done this, I felt so bad about myself, explaining that violence in movies doesn't really hurt anybody and it doesn't cause violence elsewhere and all that.
[00:03:29]  What?
[00:03:29]  But then Training Day.
[00:03:30]  What's the fun?
[00:03:31]  What's the point of it?
[00:03:31]  That's the point of watching it.
[00:03:33]  But then Training Day came out, and it was also a hit, and it was a better movie.
[00:03:37]  Oh.
[00:03:37]  It's like, it's a really fine movie.
[00:03:39]  And so he didn't make that, he made the Equalizer films.
[00:03:41]  But now he's done something really different, which is this is a musical biopic, as they used to say.
[00:03:46]  And it stars Michael Jackson's nephew, Jafar Jackson, who does a spectacular.
[00:03:52]  Totally.
[00:03:52]  I mean, almost.
[00:03:52]  He was great in Aladdin, too.
[00:03:55]  This is kind of more cartoony in that one, but he was the villain in that, he's the hero in this.
[00:04:03]  Sorry.
[00:04:03]  It's a terrible start.
[00:04:04]  He can be animated.
[00:04:04]  He can be a cartoon.
[00:04:06]  He can have a little parrot.
[00:04:07]  Sometimes he's got the socks.
[00:04:09]  He's got the jacket.
[00:04:10]  It's like a whole thing.
[00:04:13]  However, the film is also incredibly controversial.
[00:04:17]  Not among the audience.
[00:04:18]  Talk about making a hornet's nest.
[00:04:19]  Yeah, it really is.
[00:04:21]  And the reason is there's no hint whatsoever of the charges of pedophilia that came up toward the end of Jackson's life.
[00:04:31]  Let me just say three things and then we'll get down to what you thought of the film and then I'll talk about what I thought of the film.
[00:04:36]  Three things I just want to point out.
[00:04:37]  One, the word pedophilia does not mean people I really dislike.
[00:04:40]  It's not, you know.
[00:04:42]  Aww.
[00:04:43]  That's a bummer.
[00:04:44]  I've been using it all wrong.
[00:04:45]  Go on.
[00:04:46]  It's like we say Jeffrey Epstein is a pedophile.
[00:04:48]  Ah.
[00:04:49]  An evil man.
[00:04:50]  Very bad man.
[00:04:50]  Very bad man in hell deserves it.
[00:04:53]  So long is Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:04:55]  Not a pedophile.
[00:04:55]  A pedophile is somebody who sexually abuses or wants to abuse children who have not yet hit sexual development.
[00:05:03]  Pre pubescent.
[00:05:04]  Pre pubescent children.
[00:05:05]  Right.
[00:05:06]  And that is, to me, a grave, grave evil.
[00:05:08]  I think it's a form of soul murder.
[00:05:09]  Twerve better that a millstone were hung about your neck.
[00:05:12]  Yes.
[00:05:12]  Yes.
[00:05:12]  And I would actually like to see that as the official.
[00:05:15]  I'm just kidding.
[00:05:16]  I'm just kidding.
[00:05:17]  Front row seat.
[00:05:17]  Okay.
[00:05:18]  Yes.
[00:05:19]  So, no sign of this.
[00:05:22]  The other thing I want to say is that they did try to put it in, put the charges in, but it turned out that one of the many settlements that he had with these children who accused him of this, one of the rules was that they couldn't do anything about it.
[00:05:37]  And this film is produced by the Jackson people, it's produced by the Jackson family.
[00:05:41]  So, they were going to make it sympathetic to him, whatever, but the fact that there's no mention of it, they actually filmed it, and then they had to cut it out when they found out legally they were bound not to do it.
[00:05:50]  And then I just want to say that we have to.
[00:05:53]  I'm taking a personal stand, and I don't know what you're going to say about this.
[00:05:56]  He was never acquitted.
[00:05:57]  He was never convicted of anything.
[00:05:59]  First, they even refused to indict him.
[00:06:02]  I feel that the evidence against him is very, very large.
[00:06:07]  He said he admitted that he liked sleeping with children, but said it was innocent.
[00:06:12]  I don't believe that.
[00:06:12]  People have sexual lives, even people as weird as he was have sexual lives.
[00:06:17]  The one guy he made a settlement with of over $20 million, between $20 and $25 million.
[00:06:22]  Is said to have described weird markings on his penis because of the skin disease that he had.
[00:06:30]  Vitiligo, right?
[00:06:31]  Yeah, vitiligo.
[00:06:32]  And it was on the basis of those drawings that they paid out so much money.
[00:06:36]  I really believe that O.J. Simpson wasn't convicted either, but that doesn't mean you're innocent.
[00:06:41]  And in this case, I think the evidence is very, very strong.
[00:06:44]  However, before we get going, we just have to say that on the one hand, one of the journalists who covered this for Vanity Fair wrote a scathing piece in the Wall Street Journal saying that this is a cover up.
[00:06:56]  On the other hand, my friend and one of my favorite people, John Nolte, over at Breitbart, is making fun of anybody who thinks that we shouldn't be going to this movie and not even think.
[00:07:06]  He's calling them scolds, anybody who thinks it's.
[00:07:08]  Now, I have to say, Nolte is a salt of the earth guy.
[00:07:12]  But the one thing we always disagree on is whether celebrities are guilty of it.
[00:07:16]  Always.
[00:07:17]  Sure, sure.
[00:07:18]  So let's just start with a review, if it's possible, to review it without those issues.
[00:07:22]  Well, okay.
[00:07:23]  It's very difficult, but I'm going to try.
[00:07:26]  I will say that I share basically your view of.
[00:07:29]  The evidence against him.
[00:07:30]  That piece in the Wall Street Journal is very strong and horrifying.
[00:07:34]  And so it's impossible.
[00:07:36]  It's going to be impossible for us to talk about it without that.
[00:07:39]  But I'm going to try.
[00:07:39]  Let me just try to bracket that for a moment and consider this as an art object.
[00:07:44]  This was a tough one for me, man.
[00:07:46]  I mean, even leaving aside the ethics of it, I don't think it's a very good movie.
[00:07:53]  I mean, the good thing I'll say Jafar Jackson is his last name, Jackson?
[00:07:58]  Jafar, yeah.
[00:07:59]  Incredible dancer.
[00:08:00]  And the dancing.
[00:08:01]  Really, for me, is the thing about Michael Jackson.
[00:08:04]  There's many other things, many hit songs, you know, a lot of catchy tunes and so on and so forth.
[00:08:09]  Not exactly my favorite kinds of music, but obviously one of the Motown greats.
[00:08:13]  And the dance, which he worked on meticulously, like a kind of Fred Astaire type, was electrifying and remains electrifying to see footage of.
[00:08:22]  And Jafar gets it really well.
[00:08:25]  Everything else, it's like this is what I fail to understand.
[00:08:30]  And I'm actually kind of curious about with the veneration of Michael is that if you.
[00:08:36]  Just totally leave the pedophilia accusations aside for a second.
[00:08:40]  Second, I also find that his whole persona really unappealing and creepy.
[00:08:44]  And this is such a puff piece.
[00:08:46]  I mean, it really is.
[00:08:48]  I gather that the version of it, which included the pedophilia accusations, included them only to kind of make out what a harrowing experience they were for him, for Jackson.
[00:08:59]  And his whole attitude is that he's this wide eyed, childlike.
[00:09:03]  He didn't have a childhood himself, and he's sort of like blissfully a conduit for divine ideas.
[00:09:10]  And isn't he?
[00:09:11]  And I just like, I find that kind of gross to begin with.
[00:09:14]  There's also, I have to say, a scene in this movie where, you know, in every biopic, there's a montage where the guy is about to have his great new idea.
[00:09:23]  And so you see him kind of pacing the floor and he's like writing things out.
[00:09:26]  And this happens in the Michael movie.
[00:09:28]  And it's with Billy, no, not Billie Jean, it's with Beat It, which is the one about gang violence.
[00:09:32]  And so here, saintly Michael is gathering the Bloods and the Crips together.
[00:09:36]  He sees on TV that there's this problem and he wants to get people together.
[00:09:39]  And at one point, he's like writing and scribbling and thinking and receiving ideas from God.
[00:09:43]  And he pins up this, like, Post it like note on the bulletin board, and it says, Mama say, Mama sa, Mama sa sa.
[00:09:54]  It's not exactly John Uptight.
[00:09:58]  So I wanted to be open minded about this, and I understand that people, he was an enormous star.
[00:10:05]  His music is electrifying, which is something you have to contend with also as you're thinking about the ethics of it.
[00:10:11]  But I don't know, this is kind of like, am I missing something?
[00:10:15]  What do you think?
[00:10:16]  Well, you're only missing one piece of context.
[00:10:18]  Okay.
[00:10:18]  Because I, too, I thought it was a bad movie in the sense that it's corny and it's ridiculous and it ignores things that are in the movie.
[00:10:27]  Like, as you say, the fact that he's a really weird little man.
[00:10:31]  Yes.
[00:10:31]  And obviously, at some level, mentally ill, and they blame everything on the father, which maybe is true.
[00:10:37]  I don't know.
[00:10:38]  I will say I could relate to the part where the father was a piece of garbage and was feeding him.
[00:10:41]  Yeah, he feed him a heart attack.
[00:10:43]  No, let me show you how to do that.
[00:10:44]  Believe me.
[00:10:47]  But it's a bad movie.
[00:10:50]  In a genre of bad movies that Hollywood used to do all the time and that I kind of enjoy.
[00:10:57]  The biopic.
[00:10:58]  The musical biopic.
[00:10:59]  Right, right.
[00:10:59]  Which you particularly, yes.
[00:11:01]  I mean, well, no, I'm talking about movies from the 40s, like Words and Music.
[00:11:05]  Words and Music, which happens to be remembered because it's the last film in which Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland were in together.
[00:11:12]  I'm remembered by you.
[00:11:13]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:11:15]  There's no one else.
[00:11:16]  Who's doing this remembering that you speak of?
[00:11:18]  Well, there's nobody left.
[00:11:19]  Right, right.
[00:11:21]  But it's about Rogers and Hart.
[00:11:22]  Yeah.
[00:11:23]  And Hart is played by Mickey Rooney as kind of a goofball.
[00:11:26]  I can't even remember what it is that he's a little bit odd.
[00:11:29]  But, you know, Hart, as we now know, I always knew, but we now know from the movie Blue Moon, the same guy was a gay, self destructive alcoholic who ruined everything he touched.
[00:11:41]  And in this, he's just kind of a funny guy.
[00:11:43]  And he keeps saying to him, Well, you should get married.
[00:11:45]  You know, yeah, I'll do that.
[00:11:47]  Oh, yes.
[00:11:47]  It's on my list.
[00:11:49]  And it's Mickey Rooney who's screwing every woman in Hollywood.
[00:11:51]  So, you know, it's like, so, and then there's Night and Day with Cole Porter.
[00:11:56]  With the most uncomfortable performance Cary Grant ever turned in is Cole Porter because there were all these rumors about Cary Grant's sexuality, but Cole Porter is straight in the movie.
[00:12:08]  Oh, so you're saying that basically covering over weird sex stuff is part of the point of this movie?
[00:12:13]  It's part of the point of it.
[00:12:15]  And to get to the music.
[00:12:16]  I mean, I was in, I believe you were as well.
[00:12:18]  I went in the middle of the afternoon on a Sunday.
[00:12:20]  The place was packed.
[00:12:22]  I was one of three white people in the audience.
[00:12:24]  And the audience, I won't say there were like, you know, Screaming, yelling, dancing, not at all.
[00:12:29]  But they were clearly riveted, and it was clearly their guy, and they were really entertained by it.
[00:12:34]  So, I think the movie is bad in the tradition of bad cover up, weird.
[00:12:40]  Bio picks.
[00:12:41]  Yeah.
[00:12:41]  Okay.
[00:12:42]  That's totally fair.
[00:12:43]  I do think that the veneration goes very wide and deep.
[00:12:47]  And there's an element of it that has to do with race, I think.
[00:12:52]  But it's not only that.
[00:12:53]  So, it's like it does seem that this kid, which, speaking of parts of it that are creepy, if you go back and listen to ABC and some of the stuff he did when he was a child star, that is also a little bit weirdly sexualized.
[00:13:05]  Like it's this young part of the The gig was that it was this young kid singing songs that were obviously meant for an older vocalist.
[00:13:13]  But anyway, he became a megastar.
[00:13:17]  I mean, it was a little bit before my time, but I don't even know.
[00:13:21]  Taylor Swift is the only person she's compared to.
[00:13:23]  Yeah, she's compared to.
[00:13:23]  And he was so famous.
[00:13:25]  And they make a big deal in the movie out of getting Billie Jean on MTV.
[00:13:29]  And they didn't do black artists as much.
[00:13:32]  And so there are many reasons, I think, why people connect so powerfully to his music that I. Get and I understand.
[00:13:40]  And music, like, you almost can't talk about it.
[00:13:43]  It's kind of inexplicable the way that music just transcends everything, right?
[00:13:48]  Famously, it's the universal language.
[00:13:50]  I studied it a lot in school, and you can see, like, things that are just every culture has song and dance.
[00:13:56]  And when somebody can do it at that level, it almost lifts off logic.
[00:14:02]  It almost, like, departs from the world where people are thinking rationally.
[00:14:06]  And so I think that that's, like, totally, totally fair.
[00:14:10]  What I don't understand, and this is.
[00:14:13]  What gets into the kind of can you separate the artist from the art part of it is like why people who love him that way are so attached to him as a person.
[00:14:26]  It's a really interesting thing.
[00:14:27]  Because, like, surely, even again, leaving the pedophilia accusations aside, this is a damaged, a terribly damaged and broken person who was.
[00:14:40]  They do make a big deal out of the father's.
[00:14:42]  Villainy in this movie, which by all accounts, he was a piece of work.
[00:14:47]  And being a child star in general is kind of a harrowing experience.
[00:14:53]  But none of that, like, there are other child stars who have grown up in, like, to be much more put together or even sometimes to carry on a, you know, a second career, a second sailing.
[00:15:04]  This guy, like, between the kind of the 80s and the 90s, like, progressively descended into a very dark place.
[00:15:13]  And it was like, Papered over with some kind of this weird, like childlike wonderment routine that he did.
[00:15:20]  Yes, and they, I mean, everything was excused.

=== The Danger of Perfect Acts (07:47) ===

[00:15:22]  I mean, he died of a drug overdose, and they show him taking drugs for pain after he's in this terrible accident, and that's the addiction.
[00:15:31]  But they can't even show the addiction.
[00:15:32]  There's one scene where he's dancing on stage, he comes off, and he goes into this little sparkly person.
[00:15:36]  I missed this, I didn't even realize.
[00:15:38]  He goes into this sparkly person, and he looks at his bodyguard who's become his friend.
[00:15:41]  His bodyguard kind of nods knowingly, and that's supposed to tell us that he's still taking.
[00:15:45]  Pills, but the guy was a drug addict, and you know, and that's you know, what's funny about it to me, yeah, at this level.
[00:15:52]  Because there's two questions we should talk about one is the dancer and the dance, you know, what does it mean when an artist does bad things?
[00:16:00]  Do we now have to stop, you know, looking at his art?
[00:16:03]  Do we now have to stop enjoying his art?
[00:16:05]  But the other thing is, is this movie a bad act for covering up this thing, even though they had to do it?
[00:16:12]  And we're not gonna, I'm not blaming any of the people, but but is it a bad act to make a movie hagiographizing this guy?
[00:16:18]  And is it wrong to complain about that?
[00:16:21]  And I think my feeling about it was this that I understand that they couldn't do it for legal reasons.
[00:16:28]  But the evidence is very strong against him.
[00:16:32]  And I felt that leaving it out at a time, we're in a time when there is an actual movement and it's now subterranean, but it's still growing and it's still showing its head, trying to normalize what I consider one of the worst crimes to use a child's body for your personal pleasure and essentially ruin that kid's childhood.
[00:16:53]  No, it's like there aren't words to describe.
[00:16:55]  To describe it.
[00:16:55]  One begins to sputter.
[00:16:57]  Yes.
[00:16:57]  And we should also say that it's not simply this movie, which again, it's not like they tried to deal with it.
[00:17:05]  Kind of well, and then had to stop because of legal reasons.
[00:17:09]  They tried to deal with it by defaming the accuser, right?
[00:17:12]  I mean, that was why they had to stop.
[00:17:13]  So there's that.
[00:17:14]  And they also used a contract with HBO to pull the documentary Leaving Neverland, which is now not of.
[00:17:22]  You can't stream it in the US, I don't think.
[00:17:24]  So it's clearly a wholesale campaign by the estate to just scrub this from the record.
[00:17:34]  And I do think.
[00:17:35]  That is wrong.
[00:17:36]  I actually think that that's.
[00:17:37]  And you know, the thing about Neverland is it's from Peter Pan.
[00:17:41]  And Peter Pan was written by J.M. Barry.
[00:17:43]  I think I'm getting that name right.
[00:17:45]  Yes.
[00:17:45]  Yes.
[00:17:46]  And they made this film, Finding Neverland, with Johnny Depp playing Barry.
[00:17:50]  And Barry was a stone pedophile.
[00:17:52]  The children who were put in his charge killed themselves.
[00:17:57]  He was almost certainly a pedophile.
[00:17:59]  Reading the book, never mind the play, but if you read the book, Peter Pan, it's an icky book.
[00:18:04]  It's very icky.
[00:18:05]  And the show, Alien Earth.
[00:18:07]  Actually, it makes a lot out of this.
[00:18:09]  Yeah, you would really like this show, by the way.
[00:18:11]  It's like one of these spin offs of Alien and whatever, but it centers around these kids that are basically made eternally young.
[00:18:19]  And Peter Pan, the book and the comic kind of plays into it as this very weird, creepy thing.
[00:18:25]  So that's absolutely the case.
[00:18:27]  And the thing in this movie with Johnny Depp is the last scene in the movie goes into his room and he opens the door, and behind him, instead of his room, is a blue sky as if he's living in this fantasy world, which is essentially the same argument they're making.
[00:18:40]  From Michael Jackson, living in a zoo.
[00:18:43]  It was always the Michael Jackson thing.
[00:18:44]  And it was the way that when he did his interview with Oprah, he kind of portrayed himself this way as just this wonderful, dreamlike kind of show.
[00:18:53]  And here's what I want to say about this because it seems that we do kind of agree that this part of it is like there's something morally wrong about it.
[00:19:03]  It's also artistically a failure.
[00:19:05]  That's right.
[00:19:06]  Dishonesty is morally wrong when it's about moral subjects.
[00:19:11]  It's always artistically bad, right?
[00:19:13]  Like, there's a certain degree of just like part of what makes this movie empty and somehow corrupting, I think, is like the fact that there's a big, unstated reality.
[00:19:26]  And it's not just the abuse stuff, it is the pretending that this guy is some perfect, like, dreamy creature, you know, some weird, like.
[00:19:36]  And it doesn't make sense.
[00:19:37]  I mean, name another rock bio movie that has no sex in it.
[00:19:42]  You know, I mean, and name another life that I, you know, I mean, lives have sex in it.
[00:19:46]  Name another one that doesn't deal with the fact that rock stars routinely get addicted and have to work their way back from addiction.
[00:19:51]  I mean, all of the, you know, standard rules of the genre disappear.
[00:19:56]  It's true.
[00:19:56]  It's protection of the.
[00:19:58]  That's a good point.
[00:19:58]  No, it was supposed to be, I mean, like walk the line, play.
[00:20:01]  Like there's a million of these where it's like, it's almost a cliche.
[00:20:04]  You can make a joke about it.
[00:20:06]  Yes, yes.
[00:20:06]  Yeah.
[00:20:06]  And I think, and my question to the people who angrily say, and John Nolte, again, one of my favorite human beings.
[00:20:14]  But he says, you know, there's no proof of this.
[00:20:16]  And he was acquitted at trial, which is true.
[00:20:18]  And they even refused to indict him one time.
[00:20:21]  But the people who say that, my question is if that weren't true, would this be a bad movie?
[00:20:26]  Because I believe that it's not true.
[00:20:28]  It's not true.
[00:20:29]  And then I think it's a bad movie in the sense that it's a musical biopic from the old days.
[00:20:35]  But is it a wrong movie?
[00:20:37]  And should we have said, hey, I have to add this.
[00:20:43]  I feel for black people.
[00:20:46]  You get O.J. Simpson, you get Michael Jackson, you get Bill Cosby, especially Bill Cosby, who's my hero.
[00:20:52]  Yeah, you loved Cosby.
[00:20:53]  I loved Cosby.
[00:20:55]  And it must feel to them like all their guys get shot down if they get too big.
[00:21:00]  I don't blame them.
[00:21:00]  You can't blame my people being paranoid.
[00:21:03]  Given the history, I see what you mean.
[00:21:04]  Yeah, sure, sure.
[00:21:05]  Yeah, that is true.
[00:21:07]  Although, there are many extraordinarily high achieving black people who do not suffer from this kind of problem, right?
[00:21:16]  You know, and and so, like, to defend some, especially in the music business, especially in the music business, but in sports, I mean, like, there are scandals like this that exist.
[00:21:25]  And, and you know, Clarence Thomas was the subject of a sex scandal, but like, is in fact an excellent high achieving person.
[00:21:33]  And if you go back and look at that sex scandal, even if he were guilty, which he was.
[00:21:37]  Probably not, but even if you were, it was nothing.
[00:21:39]  Well, that's the other thing.
[00:21:40]  And so, this is, and again, as you point out, like pedophilia is its own distinct thing.
[00:21:46]  I mean, other things are also bad, but this is extra bad.
[00:21:49]  This is like bad on some profound spiritual level.
[00:21:53]  But let me ask you this then, because, like, as you say, you were a huge Bill Cosby guy.
[00:21:58]  And that was also, that was sort of more in the Me Too domain, I guess, which is adjacent to this conversation that we're having.
[00:22:08]  Do you still like listen to Bill Cosby routines?
[00:22:11]  I mean, has it ruined him for you?
[00:22:13]  It's a good question because I loved him as a character.
[00:22:17]  When I was 11, I think, when iSpy came out and he was so cool and so hip and in a clean, you know, his clean, so I'm an 11 year old guy.
[00:22:26]  I mean, I thought, wow, you know, how cool can you be, you know, and still live, you know?
[00:22:31]  And so I just, you know, had his picture on my wall and I just idolized the guy.
[00:22:36]  And so when I heard about this, I did deflate a little bit.
[00:22:39]  Now, look, Some of his old routines are still hilarious.
[00:22:42]  They're just hilarious.
[00:22:43]  I mean, some of Michael Jackson's songs are still great.
[00:22:45]  And his songs are great.
[00:22:47]  And there I have to start to draw a line.
[00:22:49]  It is one thing to look at a movie like this and a movie like Finding Neverland, which actually are lying to me about something.
[00:22:57]  And even if they're doing it well, I feel it's a bad act.
[00:23:01]  So just because a work of art is good doesn't mean it can't be committing a bad act.
[00:23:06]  I mean, the famous example is Lenny Ravenstahl, the famous.

=== Drawing Lines on Legacy (06:06) ===

[00:23:09]  A filmmaker for Adolf Hitler who made a film called Triumph of the Will, which is beautiful.
[00:23:14]  Yeah, it's a beautiful film.
[00:23:15]  Birth of a Nation is like a major thing.
[00:23:17]  It's an amazingly good movie.
[00:23:18]  Right, right, right.
[00:23:19]  But just horrendous.
[00:23:19]  It's a bad act.
[00:23:21]  So that is one thing.
[00:23:23]  But the fact that an author or an artist has done bad things is really different because the art exists on its own.
[00:23:34]  I know.
[00:23:34]  And like, you know, I think of Darkness at Noon, a wonderful anti communist novel by Arthur Kessler.
[00:23:40]  There were charges against him.
[00:23:41]  And again, not proved, but they were fairly intense that he was a.
[00:23:44]  A serial rapist.
[00:23:46]  Norman Mailer, a very fine novelist who was the big novelist when I was a kid.
[00:23:50]  Again, you're talking about.
[00:23:51]  No, no, no, I know who Norman Mailer is, but right.
[00:23:53]  But he stabbed one of his wives in a drunken rage.
[00:23:55]  And it's like you do, Heidegger, the famous philosopher who followed Hitler, you do have to say at some point, there is this work and there is this man.
[00:24:05]  And what is it, the T.S. Eliot line, the man who suffers and the mind who creates, something like that.
[00:24:11]  And the mind who creates is different in some ways from me.
[00:24:14]  Well, you're talking.
[00:24:14]  I mean, so previously we were talking about the fact that.
[00:24:17]  Art exists in a moral universe, which is something we can lose sight of.
[00:24:20]  We think it's just this floating object.
[00:24:22]  No, it actually does have a moral effect on us, whatever.
[00:24:25]  On us, whatever.
[00:24:26]  Now we're talking about the fact that artists exist in the moral universe, and the moral universe they exist in is one of profound human brokenness.
[00:24:34]  And this is something that I have to say, I don't have squishy answers about this.
[00:24:39]  Because on the one hand, yes, I saw a tweet recently because I'm not on Candace Owens' Twitter.
[00:24:47]  I'm on weird backroom Twitter.
[00:24:50]  And some person was saying something like, every novelist I like is problematic.
[00:24:55]  And I'm going to stop reading because everybody I.
[00:24:58]  I read, it turns out to be this.
[00:25:00]  And I thought, gosh, you're actually kind of almost there.
[00:25:03]  You almost get it because, like, cancel culture and Me Too and all of this, like, part of its excesses had to do with, like, you start out going after Harvey Weinstein, a genuine bad actor, and then it's like anybody who's ever looked at a pretty girl gets canceled.
[00:25:19]  So there was some of that.
[00:25:21]  But there was also this naivete and this selective outrage, right?
[00:25:25]  Of, oh, we're going to find only the pure, Artists.
[00:25:29]  And then gradually, those sorts of things always turn out.
[00:25:32]  People start to realize it's like the guillotine, right?
[00:25:34]  People start to realize, oh, everybody is broken in some way and use every man after his desserts and who should scape whipping.
[00:25:42]  And so, like, so we do, and we recognize that out of these kind of fragile messes that we are, there kind of moves this divine breeze and art emerges.
[00:25:54]  That's like what's going on, right?
[00:25:56]  It is like this anybody who creates, I think, knows that you are like.
[00:26:03]  To use a metaphor that Michael Jackson uses in this movie, kind of to me disgustingly, but truly, like you are opening yourself to some divine.
[00:26:12]  There's no question.
[00:26:13]  You know, it's ancient.
[00:26:14]  There's Plato's Ion, it's all about this.
[00:26:16]  And so then the thing itself takes on its own life.
[00:26:19]  We see in it something bigger than the broken person that makes it.
[00:26:25]  However, however, right?
[00:26:27]  Like, isn't it also made of the person?
[00:26:31]  Like, art is so intensely.
[00:26:33]  Personal that like well, it's an interesting question.
[00:26:36]  Yeah, it's an interesting question whether you know you do go back.
[00:26:40]  You know, you talk about Bill Cosby, that too is a sickness.
[00:26:43]  I mean, obviously, pedophilia is a sickness, it becomes evil when you act it out.
[00:26:47]  If a guy's suffering from it, but he doesn't do anything, you know, then that's that's to be pitied, right?
[00:26:52]  But that's not evil because he hasn't generated, you know, it's an evil urge that he hasn't lived into.
[00:26:58]  Um, but the thing with Bill Cosby, that's also kind of you know, he knocked women out.
[00:27:03]  And that's not even a fantasy.
[00:27:06]  As you pointed out at the time, he didn't, like, not that it would have been fine if he did, but he didn't have to sleep with people.
[00:27:12]  He was famous and powerful.
[00:27:14]  So it was obviously about the violence, about the aggression.
[00:27:16]  Completely.
[00:27:17]  Right.
[00:27:17]  So, like.
[00:27:18]  So, you know, you look at that and you think, like, yes, this is a terrible thing, but I can't.
[00:27:23]  And they did find some small things that he said here and there that they tried to link to that.
[00:27:27]  But in fact, most of his routines are very innocent and funny.
[00:27:30]  And they would even make fun.
[00:27:32]  Guys like Richard Pryor would make fun of him for how clean he was.
[00:27:34]  And he would call Richard Pryor up and scold him for.
[00:27:37]  Cursing like that and all this stuff.
[00:27:39]  And he opened the door.
[00:27:40]  He was the guy, the first through the door, the first guy in a star of a dramatic series who had that in color, you know.
[00:27:46]  And these are things that I think are admirable, but you know, you rape women, you go to prison.
[00:27:51]  That's where you go.
[00:27:52]  You know, that's why we have prisons.
[00:27:54]  And like, I do think, look, the one thing I've noticed all my life talent is blind, it goes where it will.
[00:28:00]  And people say, like, oh, you know, so many American novelists are alcoholics.
[00:28:05]  There must be something about alcohol in writing.
[00:28:08]  The only thing about alcohol and writing is if you do it enough, you stop writing.
[00:28:11]  When you're about 50, you lose your time.
[00:28:13]  And also, they're both things that you do if you are an open nerve, right?
[00:28:17]  Yes.
[00:28:17]  If you're kind of a raw.
[00:28:19]  I keep coming back to this thing in the movie, actually, that at the time was really.
[00:28:23]  The whole movie with Michael did creep me out, and I just find his whole demeanor really creepy.
[00:28:29]  Yes, it's creepy.
[00:28:30]  And when he says, like, I'm a conduit for, at one point, he says something like, I'm waiting for ideas, and if I'm not here, God might give them to Prince or something.
[00:28:37]  It's a funny line.
[00:28:38]  It's a funny line.
[00:28:39]  And now that I'm reflecting on it, I'm like, part of what's so creepy about that is that there's a truth in it somewhere.
[00:28:45]  Like, it is the case that these broken vessels receive kind of something transcendent and divine.
[00:28:54]  There's also, though, isn't there, there's this thing where, like, Somebody said writing is easy.
[00:28:58]  All you do is sit down at the keyboard and open a thing.
[00:29:00]  Well, I'm a sports writer.
[00:29:01]  Yeah.
[00:29:02]  Yeah.
[00:29:02]  And even I do creative work that is nonfiction, but it's still creative.
[00:29:06]  And you know that you take parts of yourself and you kind of like refurbish them and rearrange them.
[00:29:12]  And so, I mean, maybe it's that that would be the health.

=== Separating Sin from Beauty (03:25) ===

[00:29:16]  Maybe it's like even our most ugly and broken parts can be sanctified by being made into art.
[00:29:21]  Yeah.
[00:29:21]  Whereas if we act them out.
[00:29:22]  I think there's truth to that.
[00:29:24]  Many, many people have said to me, many, many people have said to me, this villain you wrote in this book.
[00:29:29]  It's so evil, there must be something in you that went into it.
[00:29:32]  And I always say there must be, but I notice that nobody ever says of the heroes, this guy is so wonderful.
[00:29:37]  It's never once happened.
[00:29:39]  That has never once happened.
[00:29:39]  That's funny.
[00:29:40]  But look at it this way, too.
[00:29:42]  You know, we remember the Islamists who blew apart beautiful thousand year old statues because they offended them.
[00:29:52]  You remember that?
[00:29:53]  Oh, yes.
[00:29:53]  Statues of the Buddha.
[00:29:54]  Very vividly, yeah.
[00:29:55]  And the Lamassu and all of that.
[00:29:56]  Because they offended their sensibility.
[00:29:59]  Conversely, if you go back to, say, England around Shakespeare's time, where you could get burned at the stake for saying, you know, I'm not sure the bread and wine actually turn into.
[00:30:10]  And then the next week you get burned at the stake for saying they did turn into the body.
[00:30:15]  It just depends.
[00:30:15]  They just needed entertainment.
[00:30:16]  They were so bored.
[00:30:18]  They were like, this week.
[00:30:19]  They haven't even invented television yet.
[00:30:21]  You're not wearing the right funny hats.
[00:30:25]  This week it's popcorn.
[00:30:27]  But if you went to college, if you went to university, You read Ovid, one of the filthiest of the Latin poets.
[00:30:37]  You read Plato's Socrates, who frequently talks about his love for boys and things like this.
[00:30:43]  And what the teachers would tell you is learn how to write like that.
[00:30:47]  Not learn how to write about that, but learn how to write in that clear, brilliant, beautiful prose that the Romans and the Greeks, and especially the Greeks, had.
[00:30:57]  And they would say, so in other words, they were capable, possibly because they were Christians.
[00:31:03]  Capable of separating what they saw as sinful from what they saw as beautiful in that work.
[00:31:10]  And I feel that way about art.
[00:31:12]  I feel like art, to some degree, is a playground.
[00:31:16]  You go in there, and nobody's getting hurt, nobody's getting killed, people are going to get shot, and you somehow just think, okay, here I am, I'm going to let my mind run free.
[00:31:26]  I mean, Stephen King says, everybody has dogs chained up inside, I take them out for a walk.
[00:31:32]  And I think there's validity.
[00:31:34]  Yeah, and we should say that we started out talking about this.
[00:31:38]  Michael Jackson biopic, which has a special relationship to reality because it's about people who actually exist, right?
[00:31:43]  Like fiction is actually different, and the works of art that we're now talking about do exist in the playground of the imagination.
[00:31:51]  I mean, as you're talking about the ancients, I'm thinking about Augustine and Confessions and City of God and his relationship to Virgil.
[00:32:01]  I mean, all the great Christian, early Christian thinkers had this intense relationship to Virgil because he seemed almost to be like knocking on the door.
[00:32:09]  The door of Christendom.
[00:32:11]  He was like right before the great transformation of the world.
[00:32:15]  And they thought he was damned, right?
[00:32:18]  I mean, Dante puts him in hell, you know.
[00:32:21]  And so, in some ways, like this problem of separating the art from the artist kind of begins there.
[00:32:27]  It begins with, like, there is this, the whole world has been under judgment and now it's being redeemed.
[00:32:36]  And so, what do we do with all this stuff that was obviously good about the thing that is now having to be, you know?

=== Virgil and Christian Thought (03:50) ===

[00:32:41]  And so, you definitely have, like, that.
[00:32:45]  Element of it in, say, the way that Augustine is like weeping over the death of Dido in the Aeneid while still saying like Rome was a disaster.
[00:32:55]  Dante has Virgil say something like, I was born in the time of the false and lying gods.
[00:33:00]  And you mentioned Ovid, right?
[00:33:02]  Like that he famously was exiled for a poem and a mistake.
[00:33:07]  So there it's like his sex life and his art are kind of intertwined.
[00:33:12]  A lot of the ancient biographies of the classic authors.
[00:33:16]  Kind of assume that there's no daylight between the author and the art.
[00:33:20]  There are a lot of biographies of Euripides where it's clearly a commentary on his plays in the form of a biography by somebody that doesn't really know that much about his actual life.
[00:33:30]  And so maybe there is something, I'm just spitballing, but maybe there is something distinctively Christian about teasing these two things apart, right?
[00:33:40]  And understanding the world is very broken, people are very broken, and something about art is like, You know, we get to siphon it off.
[00:33:51]  It's sort of where we do this.
[00:33:53]  Yeah.
[00:33:53]  You know, we're talking about John Nolte and one of the arguments we've gotten into, and these are always very friendly arguments because I love the guy, but like, you know, we're both huge Frank Sinatra fans.
[00:34:03]  Yeah.
[00:34:03]  I mean, Frank Sinatra may be my single favorite entertainer that I experienced directly.
[00:34:09]  I just, the guy's voice, first of all, it took me through adolescence so I could brood over love and love and this beautiful music.
[00:34:16]  It kept me away from rock music, which I still hate.
[00:34:18]  Yeah.
[00:34:18]  And he just had an amazing way of reading a lyric.
[00:34:23]  Which, as I've told you a million times, has to do with his holding the consonants.
[00:34:26]  His consonants.
[00:34:27]  Yes, I have heard about the consonants and the elephant sterile, and then we have to sort of do this whole routine.
[00:34:32]  But no, it's true.
[00:34:32]  And this is also your fault that I don't really like Michael Jackson's music all that much.
[00:34:36]  It's true.
[00:34:36]  Because, like, you know, it raised me on, like, the other people.
[00:34:38]  Yes, I know, I know.
[00:34:39]  And my father raised me on this whole music before my time.
[00:34:42]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:34:42]  But the thing about this guy was he idolized the mob.
[00:34:47]  Yeah.
[00:34:47]  He had bodyguards who beat up a guy because he wanted to get the guy's girl.
[00:34:53]  He was, you know, he slept with like two hookers a night.
[00:34:55]  And then at the end of his life, And he also did good things.
[00:34:58]  He stood up for Sammy Davis Jr. when Sammy Davis married a white woman.
[00:35:02]  The Kennedys, because he was a Kennedy supporter, said, Look, you've got to get out of this.
[00:35:05]  And he said, No, I'm not going to do it.
[00:35:07]  It's time for America to grow up.
[00:35:08]  And so he had a really good side to him and an enlightened side to him, but he did a lot of bad things.
[00:35:15]  And then he got old and he got married.
[00:35:17]  And so Nolte said to me, Well, you reformed.
[00:35:19]  He reformed.
[00:35:20]  He aged out.
[00:35:21]  He was priapic.
[00:35:23]  The guy was priapic.
[00:35:23]  He was sleeping with everything that moved.
[00:35:26]  And my feeling was, You know, you talk about a way that comes into your art.
[00:35:32]  I think it helped them to understand these songs of sorrow and loneliness and love and being carried away by love.
[00:35:40]  And so, in some ways, things that he did that I don't approve of fed this music that I love more than any other popular music there is.
[00:35:48]  Listeners, this is my entire childhood just stories about Frank Snodgrass, Sammy Davis Jr.
[00:35:54]  So, congratulations, you're getting a preview of.
[00:35:57]  But this actually.
[00:35:58]  Amazingly, we've achieved my personal goal for this episode, which is helping me to understand why people want Michael Jackson to be innocent.
[00:36:09]  Because we've been talking about this way that we've learned to separate out art from people, right?
[00:36:19]  And it's tragic what we're saying, right?
[00:36:22]  We're saying that we're these treasures in clay jars and the jars can be really hideously broken, as we both think Jackson was.

=== Oscar Wilde's Shady Wisdom (07:57) ===

[00:36:31]  And yet, that.
[00:36:32]  Even though the art is separate from the person, it's also like the best of him somehow, right?
[00:36:38]  It's like the ideal, it's the version that we wish could be the redeemed, you know.
[00:36:43]  And so then we connect to the art.
[00:36:46]  All of us who love art connect to it so profoundly.
[00:36:49]  Yeah.
[00:36:50]  And so then I think the relationship starts to work the other way that people want the source of that art to be redeemed.
[00:36:57]  It's like they're actually sad for the fact that this, you know, that we don't live in that magical art world where.
[00:37:05]  Like, there are no stakes, and it's and everything is just beauty because that's how it was made to be.
[00:37:10]  Like, art is almost this angelic glimpse, you know, music, especially.
[00:37:14]  That's it, it is a glimpse of what the soul could be.
[00:37:18]  And you know, that wonderful line that I identify with so much in C.S. Lewis, where he talks about not just wanting to see beauty, but to want to enter it, yes, go further up and further in, you know.
[00:37:28]  And like, I think that what you find is that there's a person in there, and uh, the person who does it is always going to be broken.
[00:37:34]  Some look, they're good, they're.
[00:37:36]  Perfectly wonderful people who make art.
[00:37:38]  I know.
[00:37:38]  It's like nice entertaining people that kind of putter about their gardens, right?
[00:37:41]  No, no, but they make great art who are also great people, you know.
[00:37:45]  And I think that, but everybody's flawed and everybody has a problem.
[00:37:49]  And I think that it is a beautiful thing to say, I mean, one of obviously my favorite writer is Shakespeare, and we don't know anything about him, which I love.
[00:37:57]  I don't want to know.
[00:37:58]  He might have been a jerk, you know, who knows what he was, but he was just wonderful on the page.
[00:38:02]  And that I think is what art leaves us.
[00:38:05]  And look, even though I'm not a guy who likes pop music after the 50s, Even I went to see at Disneyland, there was a 3D thriller film, and I went to see that, and it was amazing.
[00:38:16]  And his dancing was Fred Astaire esque, which you cannot say lightly.
[00:38:23]  We're coming to the end of this, and we want to talk about stuff I like, but one thing I should just repeat that if you like the show, obviously, I don't even know if there's anybody working at the Delaware anymore.
[00:38:36]  Shout into the void.
[00:38:38]  Send us recording equipment.
[00:38:39]  There may be one guy whose job is to say, Yes, we'll keep that stuff.
[00:38:45]  So, right to that guy.
[00:38:46]  Whoever that is.
[00:38:46]  Yeah, we'll let you know, I guess.
[00:38:49]  We shouldn't be laughing.
[00:38:50]  All these people were laid off and we love them and I hope they're doing well.
[00:38:53]  But laughing is what we do.
[00:38:56]  That's true.
[00:38:57]  But stuff we like.
[00:38:58]  Stuff we like, yeah.
[00:38:59]  Yeah, okay.
[00:38:59]  Well, I was thinking about artists and art as we dealt with this.
[00:39:03]  And I was thinking about, as you say, even if Michael Jackson music is not my thing, but whenever I see it, I'm like, oh, yeah, I mean, of course.
[00:39:12]  And so I was thinking about.
[00:39:14]  Artists that I am kind of connected to, that I do like, who nevertheless have kind of difficult, shady lives.
[00:39:22]  And I came up with Oscar Wilde, who interestingly, like, so Oscar Wilde is sometimes represented as like this gay icon.
[00:39:28]  Yeah.
[00:39:29]  Who is so cruelly maligned by society and its backwards laws, and we're not yet enlightened.
[00:39:34]  And like, I mean, it's true that gay people weren't very well treated in like 19th century England.
[00:39:40]  But it's also true that if you go and look at what was up with Oscar Wilde, like, he was a creep, you know, like, so.
[00:39:44]  So it's not actually, he's not the gay icon that people want him to be.
[00:39:48]  He's a bit of a shady character.
[00:39:50]  And you could say he was forced into it by society, whatever.
[00:39:52]  But it's like, no, the guy was not handling himself well, was behaving poorly.
[00:40:00]  The portrait of Dorian Gray, his famous novel, is sometimes remembered because it is sort of the victim of its own concept, which is so good.
[00:40:08]  The elevator pitch guy has a portrait that ages while he stays the same.
[00:40:12]  It's so much better than that.
[00:40:14]  I had an occasion to read it recently, and all of this stuff that we're talking about is in there.
[00:40:20]  The portrait of Dorian Gray is about being Oscar Wilde, it's about the horror of aging, it's about.
[00:40:26]  It's about being disgusted somehow with your own self and becoming a villain because of it.
[00:40:33]  And Wilde himself was just much more tortured and tormented and opens a vein in that novel, I think, in a way that really, even if his life didn't reflect it, his art certainly does kind of elevate it to this higher level.
[00:40:49]  And it made me think that actually to sanitize Wilde as some kind of perfect hero.
[00:40:56]  It is to do a terrible disservice to the sophistication of his art, right?
[00:41:01]  Like, he knew of himself that he was broken.
[00:41:04]  And that novel puts it on display in a way that, like, Michael Jackson never had that kind of self awareness, you know?
[00:41:09]  And it's a great book.
[00:41:10]  And I like that book because I am the portrait of your mother.
[00:41:13]  I get older and older, and she just stays at the table.
[00:41:15]  I was wondering how that works.
[00:41:17]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:41:18]  You're going to come in, she's going to be 17.
[00:41:20]  I'm going to bring that.
[00:41:21]  I thought that had happened already.
[00:41:26]  Thank you.
[00:41:26]  Sorry.
[00:41:26]  I appreciate it.
[00:41:27]  Right, right.
[00:41:28]  I guess I opened myself up.
[00:41:29]  Yeah, you did kind of.
[00:41:30]  So I picked.
[00:41:31]  That now you'll like this.
[00:41:32]  I picked the symposium.
[00:41:34]  Ah.
[00:41:34]  Because of what I was talking about.
[00:41:35]  Because of the weirdness of the.
[00:41:37]  So, the symposium, the first time I read the symposium, my eyes welled up with tears because it is the most beautiful philosophical illustration of what the Bible talks about when it says, you know, love is, you know, the love is between God and the church.
[00:41:53]  It represents that sex represents something other than itself, which is the anti Freudian wisdom of Christianity.
[00:41:58]  Yes.
[00:41:58]  And that it's not that everything represents sex, it's that sex represents other things that are deeply, deeply important and spiritual.
[00:42:05]  Yes.
[00:42:05]  But the symposium is basically about a gay drink.
[00:42:07]  It's a hard place in the world.
[00:42:09]  Yeah, and there is a, and because it's the Greeks before Jesus came, so everybody was gay.
[00:42:15]  People don't know this, actually.
[00:42:17]  It's a little understood.
[00:42:17]  You think it's bad now?
[00:42:23]  So, and there's even a guy who stands up.
[00:42:25]  It's about different guys at this party who give speeches about love.
[00:42:29]  And everybody waits for Socrates, and then Socrates does it.
[00:42:30]  There's no wrong there.
[00:42:31]  Here comes the answer.
[00:42:32]  We can see why they killed him.
[00:42:33]  But there's one guy who stands up and basically says, you know, the best love is love.
[00:42:38]  Little boys, you know, and you know, it makes it does, it made my gorge rise.
[00:42:41]  It does, yeah.
[00:42:42]  But the wisdom that comes out of the book is separate from a society that had an entirely different way of looking at sexual matters than we do.
[00:42:52]  So it's so alien to us, yeah, that we look at it.
[00:42:55]  And look, Percy Shelley wrote a translation of it, one of the many translations I've read, including one by Spencer Clavin.
[00:43:02]  He may be related to you, I've heard of him actually, he's a celebrated class, a beautiful translation.
[00:43:07]  Percy Shelley wrote one where he had to edit out all that stuff.
[00:43:10]  So he just totally changed genders and all this stuff.
[00:43:12]  Yeah.
[00:43:13]  And like, I just think that we lose something if we cancel art because of the artist.
[00:43:18]  Yes.
[00:43:19]  And yet we also lose something if we don't tell the truth.
[00:43:22]  Completely well said.
[00:43:23]  I mean, you know, they used to translate Greek poems into English, but they would put the dirty bits in Latin.
[00:43:31]  Or they would do the Latin into English and they would put the dirty bits in Greek, which is just too.
[00:43:35]  Yeah.
[00:43:36]  No, it's completely true.
[00:43:37]  I mean, Plato's work of genius in that.
[00:43:40]  Among his many works of genius in that dialogue is that he puts the central insight into the mouth of a woman.
[00:43:45]  The whole thing is a boys' club.
[00:43:46]  And then a woman uses pregnancy as the metaphor for.
[00:43:50]  And so he obviously understood that there was something missing from this, like, all male vision of love.
[00:43:56]  But it is, nevertheless, it's just not a world that we live in.
[00:44:00]  It's not a set of assumptions that we share.
[00:44:02]  And yet, the wisdom of it is universal.
[00:44:04]  We have to stop there.
[00:44:05]  I know.
[00:44:05]  Another episode of Clavin's on the Culture.
[00:44:07]  That's number three.
[00:44:08]  We have three more contracted for, and hopefully, more than that.
[00:44:13]  If you show up and like it, and if you have comments and things, send them to us.
[00:44:16]  Let us know what you think.
[00:44:18]  And anybody can contact me through my website, andrewclavin.com.
[00:44:21]  Or you can send it to ClavinClapbacks at dailywire.com and we'll get it.
[00:44:25]  Perfect.
[00:44:26]  It's good to see you.
[00:44:26]  Yeah.
[00:44:27]  Bye.
[00:44:27]  We'll do it again.
[00:44:28]  Yeah.