Bad art is not a crime

Roger Waters sucks but, no, he wasn't "glorifying" the Nazis in his Berlin show.

“Dear Mr. President: There are too many Jewish states these days. Please eliminate the only one. I am not an antisemite.”

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: an unhinged public figure goes out of his way to offend normies through obnoxious, ahistorical performative activism, whines about how he’s being persecuted because of the inevitable backlash, and contrarian par excellence Matt Taibbi jumps in to defend him.

Another Brick in The Absurdity Wall

That’s the dog-bites-man part of the story. The man-bites-dog part? Taibbi is right.

Well, partly right, at least. I think he gives this old drunk way more credit than he deserves for his art, such as it is. As far as I know, the paywalled section could argue that dressing up as a Nazi in Berlin¹ while comparing Anne Frank to the Palestinians is good and also The Wall movie is watchable while sober.

And I long ago stopped giving Waters any benefit of the doubt about whether he’s just an “anti-Zionist” opposed to Israel’s policies alongside his strident opposition to the actions of aggressive dictatorships. Because that opposition does not exist.

“Next, Poison’s Bret Michaels with the latest on the debt-ceiling negotiations.”

But you can be an antisemite without being an actual Nazi . Hatred of the Jews, unfortunately, is a virus with many different mutations, and the Venn Diagram between the “punch Nazis” crowd and the “death to Israel” crowd has a surprising (and depressing) amount of overlap.