It takes some kinda guy to brag that he doesn't go to museums -- it's "Silly Billy" Donohue!

Yes, it's Bookman (Philip Baker Hall)! You remember, the library cop from the Seinfeld episode "The Library."

"The Dewey Decimal System, what a scam that was! Boy, that Dewey guy really cleaned up on that deal."

-- Kramer, to Jerry, in "The Library"

by Ken

I'll explain in a moment why this amazing line is echoing in my head at the moment. It's one of my all-time favorite lines to begin with, one that crosses way over the line into the sublime, a joyous demonstration of the sort of muck with which most of our heads are filled, just a bit muckier in Kramer's case. All right, a lot muckier.

Surely you recall the setting. It's from the legendary Seinfeld episode "The Library," in which Jerry faced the wrath of that righteous warrior for library law 'n' order, the "library copy" Bookman. (Was it my imagination, or did Philip Baker Hall, who played Bookman, and had clearly been around awhile, suddenly start appearing all over the tube? Seinfeld did often have that effect on actors' careers, but usually it was younger actors making their way. By the way, there are "embedding disabled by request" clips from the episode here and here.)

Jerry has informed Kramer that he's been ordered to appear at the New York Public Library over a copy of Tropic of Cancer its computers claim he failed to return in 1971. (Kramer's response? "Do you know how much that comes to? That's a nickel a day for 20 years. It's going to be $50,000." Or, possibly: "If it's a dime a day it could be $100,000.") Just then George rings the buzzer from downstairs.

JERRY: It's George. Wait 'til he hears we're going to the library.
KRAMER: You know I never got a library card.
JERRY [into the intercom]: Coming down.
KRAMER: It's all a bunch of cheapskates in there anyway. People sitting around reading the newspaper attached to huge wooden sticks Trying to save a quarter, ooh,
JERRY: I gotta go to the library. You want to go?
KRAMER: Yeah.

So what's got me thinking about Kramer and the Great Dewey Decimal System Scam? It's a recent declaration by an even sillier sillypants than Kramer, the Catholic League's pride and joy, Bill Donohue. We've had numerous occasions to deal with Sillypants Bill, going back to a 2007 post of Howie's, "Who's The Ugliest Bigot Of Them All, Mr. Donohue?." Not content with establishing himself as America's leading purveyor of religious bigotry and intolerance, Silly Billy is now staking out his ground as the nation's leading apostle of culture-hating cretinism.

The other morning on the radio I was startled to hear some lug positively bragging, "I don't go to museums," adding, "Most people don't go to museums." I was less startled when I realized it was Silly Billy, the world's tattiest attention queen, milky the latest orgy of phony-baloney right-wing outrage for, well, attention -- and maybe the extra bucks it's always possible to shake out of deluded right-wing stooges when you get them whipped up.

I'm sure you remember the latest tissue of lies, delusions, and obfuscations perpetrated by the usual perpetrators, over the expect everyone recalls the recent right-wing hissy fit over 15 seconds out of what L.A. Times art critic Christopher Knight described on his blog as "the 13-minute video 'A Fire in My Belly' from 1987 by David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992)" which "is in part a terrifying shriek against the shocking social indifference to the AIDS crisis then engulfing the United States."

Part of the traditionally orchestrated orgy of right-wing outrage included ritual denunciation of Silly Billy on behalf of the Catholic League of America. If you wanted to argue that the Catholic establishment is made up of hopeless dimwits, you might suggest that the angriest, most die-hard Catholic-hater in history couldn't have drummed up the tiniest fraction of the anti-Catholic sentiment that Silly Billy does whenever he opens his mouth or pounds away at his word processor. What person with a shred of self-respect could fail to be reviled by an outfit that preaches the kind of crap Silly Billy does?

As Chistopher Knight, who has provided spectacular coverage of the incident, explained in a blogpost yesterday:

Donohue's earlier claims about the art exhibition at the Smithsonian's museum have been variously debunked, denounced, proven false and shown to be a case of manufactured outrage. They have also led museums and galleries across the United States and in Europe to hurriedly display the censored video, which is also widely available on the Internet, bringing it to a huge public.

[Note that, contrary to my general practice of directing readers to the onsite posting for internal links, here I've gone to a good deal of trouble to replicate the links, because they're important.]

Now Silly Billy is apparently never happy if he isn't the dumbest, most vicious, and most primitive blowhard on the media runway, and so he went beyond the other right-wing demagogues, who were demanding a cutoff of all federal funding of the Smithsonian (though actually no federal funds had been involved here) to arguing for a cutoff of all federal funding for the arts. In his post yesterday, Christopher Knight flagged the very paragraph from Silly Billy's statement that I had been planning to write about:

In a large survey of museum-going households released in April, it was found that they are significantly better educated and affluent than the U.S. population; they are also overwhelmingly white. The time has come, then, to stop funding the leisure of rich white people: all public monies for the arts should cease. Quite frankly, to make the working class pay for the leisure of the rich amounts to class discrimination. In the spirit of social justice, a better case could be made to fund professional wrestling -- it's what the working class enjoy.

Now I'm guessing you could hardly get farther from the average working-class stiff than Silly Billy, but it's part job description of a raging demagogue to know which buttons can be pushed via lying and obfuscation for maximum effect. This is, of course, the sleaziest kind of class warfare, and as usual with right-wing demagogues it's perpetrated on the pretext of denouncing the supposed class warfare of, well, people with working brains (who appear to be, as a class, the Catholic Church's most feared enemies).

It's also what got me to thinking of Kramer's maniacal denunciation of the Dewey Decimal System. If you've seen the Seinfeld episode, you recall that it's a total non-sequitur, following from nothing that's been said except the general subject of "libraries." All it comes from is the detritus cluttering Kramer's brain, in which it has somehow been worked out that "that Dewey guy" somehow cooked up and perpetrated his infamous Decimal System scam and then managed to "clean up" on it. It's all I could think of when I heard Silly Billy announce, in effect, that he's here to tell us that he's seen through the whole museum scam.

Christopher Knight, bless his soul, rather than engage that tired anti-culture argument, took Silly Billy on on his own terms in that post yesterday, titled "Are you ready to rumble? The Smithsonian vs. WWE." Referring to the paragraph of Silly Billy's statement I quoted above, he wrote:

The source of the data is not identified. But, like earlier claims, it too turns out to be false. Attendance at Smithsonian museums is 15 times larger than attendance at World Wrestling Entertainment shows.

According to a spokesman for WWE, the largest corporation in the pro wrestling field, attendance at 342 live events in 2009 (74 of them international) totaled just over 2 million. During the same time period the Smithsonian, which oversees 19 facilities, had attendance of 30 million.

The cost for museum visitors was far less too: Most Smithsonian museums, including the National Portrait Gallery, are free to the public. Tickets for WWE shows range from $15 to $70, depending on the venue and seating.

Why do right-wing demagogues always lie? It's tempting to answer simply, "Because they draw breath." But it may just be that lying is the only intellectual function they're capable of performing.

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