Franken: Art, or just what you like?

Ooooh, interesting. The commentary on yesterday’s Al Franken post (see below) has focused, not on the question of Franken’s Senate win helping or not helping to open the doors of America’s power enclaves to more artists, but on whether or not Franken is, in fact, an artist.

I was actually trying to avoid making that judgment, although I probably tipped my hand by referring to those few performer-types who had so far won elective office as “entertainers.”

But as far as I’m concerned, Franken’s relative artistry is pertinent only in consideration of  the degree to which the public sees entertainers as normal-ish (despite the bunny ears), fairly simple people and artists as strange and rarified beings who think too much and avoid sports. I sense that, so far, America generally finds entertainers less threatening and more vote-worthy and artists as more, well, icky and not like themselves. 

So much for my scientific evaluation. The important point here, to me, is that the more familiar Americans get with the presence of performers, writers and visual artists in positions of civic responsibility, the less likely they’ll be to regard all artists as discomfitingly different and the likelier they’ll be to just accept the idea that artists are citizens entitled to run for public office like the rest of us.