I’M WILLING to be proved wrong, but I already have a sense of foreboding about Sam Shepard’s new play, due to receive its European premiere at the Donmar next month. Why am I so pessimistic? Well, for one thing, there’s the author’s own description of The God of Hell as a “take-off on Republican fascism”. Some writers just love throwing that F-word around, don’t they? Perhaps it gives them a frisson as they swap stories about the dark belly of the American gulag. (Yes, it can be really tough in Hollywood.)

The other reason for my pessimism is that, some weeks ago, I happened to read a first-rate essay on political art by the only New York reviewer I really trust, the Wall Street Journal’s Terry Teachout. (He’s also a superb classical and jazz critic, and has just published a biography of Balanchine. Oh, and he also used to be a bass player in Kansas City — damn him.). Teachout happens to be an admirer of Shepard, but this time he was, let’s say, underwhelmed by a work in which, as he wrote, “a smirking prancing fellow made up to look like Paul Wolfowitz invades the house of a Wisconsin farmer and his wife, festoons their kitchen with American flags, hooks up the genitalia of the man of the house to an electric torture machine, and administers painful shocks until he agrees to surrender his heifers to the government for use in an unspecified but self-evidently nefarious secret project”.

Yes, very subtle. The point is that Teachout wasn’t particularly surprised by the play’s Manichean worldview. The melancholy truth is that 95 per cent of the arts “community” is so committed to its party line that the notion that others might hold a different view on the great issues of the day barely registers. I can’t think of a sweeter irony than the fact that people who devote so much energy to condemning the conformism and dogmatism of Middle America often turn out to be the most conformist and dogmatic folk of them all. There’s a school of thought that George W. Bush has been a blessing for artists, shaking them out of their inertia and forcing them to confront daily realities. Sadly, the opposite is the case. What looks like radicalism is actually the most tired form of complacency. If I didn’t know better, or if I were Sam Shepard, I’d say it’s all a CIA conspiracy to neuter the arts —and the Left in general.

• ALTHOUGH I’VE never actually met Terry Teachout, I feel as if I know him thanks to his indefatigable blog “About Last Night”. I’ve been addicted to blogs for the past three or four years, and started my own arts and politics site last October. Lazy journalists like to portray the “blogosphere” as a hive of cranks shouting at each other. True, there’s no shortage of intrigues, yet there’s also a lot less of the inbred quality of the British media. (Don’t you sometimes get the impression that 90 per cent of our broadsheet journalists live on the same three streets in NW1?).

  As yet the British side of cyberspace doesn’t have the depth of its older American counterpart. One element we lack is a weighty academic presence. (“Stormin” Norman Geras, the sage of Manchester, is still a rarity.) In the States you find no end of tenured professors offering polished opinions on all sorts of subjects. For a journalist, that’s quite a humbling spectacle. The barriers between academe and the everyday world are starting to crumble. Fine minds may be sidetracked into ephemera as a result, but the culture as a whole will benefit.

• THAT LITTLE controversy over the Rolling Stones anti-Bush polemic was amusing, wasn’t it? Was it just a PR stunt, or are there really people out there who take Sir Mick Jagger seriously? Some of us gave up on all that when the Maysles brothers made Gimme Shelter, a cinéma-vérité account of that dismal day at Altamont in 1969. Promoted as the Stones’ answer to Woodstock, the free festival turned rancid when the Hell’s Angels — hired by the band to take charge of security — ran amok among concertgoers. The fatal moment when a black spectator is killed is grainily captured on celluloid. I never really cared for Jagger, but seeing him strut his Satanic Majesty stuff and then panic like a schoolboy amid the violence that broke out was a chastening experience. Funny, no one much talks about Altamont any more.

  The film ought to be compulsory viewing for anyone who still thinks Sir Mick has anything interesting to tell us.

  www.clivedavis-online.com

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