Why artists defend Roman Polanski
<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>
<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>
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<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>
<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>
<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>
