Keeping Abreast of Ashcroft's Prudery

By: Cragg Hines

At least he didn't blow them up. I guess that's a sign that even the most antediluvian reaches of Western civilization are modestly more advanced than the Taliban.

Where do you start to dissect the tale of John Ashcroft's Justice Department draping over two semi-nude statues in its headquarters building?

Unfortunately, you can start at any point in the sorry story and end up with the same conclusion: Ashcroft almost certainly should not have any decision-making role in the display of art in public places and (this is not new) definitely should not be the nation's principal law-enforcement officer.

Let's jump right in where the Justice Department claims that Ashcroft had no role in the blue-nose excess.

"The Attorney General was not even aware of the situation", a DOJ spokesman told the Associated Press. "Obviously, he has more important things to do."

Well, obviously, he should have more important things to do. And maybe the actual decision to drape the offending niches was made by toadying DOJ sycophants without Ashcroft signing off in blood. But here we may be moving again into plausible deniability, because a Justice Department source reports Ashcroft specifically objected last fall when a devilish photographer snapped a shot from an angle that juxtaposed the bare female breast of the Spirit of Justice in a, shall we say, jaunty relationship to the Attorney General's mouth.

Photographers have been at this bit of dimensional delusion for years. Some of the best shots of the genre came in the late 1980's when Attorney General Edwin Meese, while releasing a report excoriating pornography, seemed to have Ms. Spirit's chaste aluminum bosom bumping his backside.

But photographers are not to blame. As one less-than-amused White House official said last week: "Why didn't they just move the podium?"

Let's say Ashcroft didn't know about the $8,650 draping job. What's to stop him from putting a halt to the silliness once he hears about it? Nothing.

Spirit of Justice and the matching male statue, Majesty of the Law, are the main pieces of art in Justice's Great Hall (or "Sometimes not so Great Hall" as one department attorney put it last week). They are original with the 1930's building and utterly in keeping with the clean-lines, art deco style of the place.

The two 12-1/2 foot statues are by Carl Paul Jennewein, a German emigre sculptor whose work is a perfect evocation of the period between the wars. Perhaps that's their problem, they remind Ashcroft of the late 1920's-early 1930's, a time when people were almost certainly having too much fun. You can just see Ashcroft's nose crinkle as he considers Gatsby and Daisy. The louche Cole Porter may even be playing the piano in the background.

And the Justice building itself is a product of the Works Progress Administration, which we're almost certain was a godless socialist front of some kind.

All the hoo-hah would have been not new but still very tiresome to Jennewein, some of whose other works at Justice headquarters also may be too scantily clad for their own good. When Jennewein's Nymph and Fawn was unveiled at Washington's Judiciary Park in 1923, there were complaints about the ingenue's buck nakedness. Suggestions were made that she needed a gingham frock, said Robin Salmon, vice president and sculpture curator at Brookgreen Gardens, the nation's oldest public sculpture park, on the coast north of Charleston, S.C.

Jennewein was properly scornful: "She was straight from the hand of God, not from the hand of the dressmaker."

The draping business could not have played out in a more symbolic week. There in the House gallery for President Bush's State of the Union address was Hamid Karzai, the interim Afghan government leader who represents his embattled nation's best hopes to recover from the scourge of the Taliban. That recent unpleasantness included the order from Mullah Mohammed Omar to destroy the giant, centuries-old Buddhas carved into the cliffside at Bamiyan northwest of Kabul.

"These idols have been gods of the infidels", the mullah said.

Seated on the floor of the House, was Ashcroft, to whom religious zealotry is no stranger. How appropriate Ashcroft has a spokeswoman named Comstock, an ideological if not direct descendant of Anthony Comstock (1844-1915), founder of the Society for the Suppression of Vice and author of the penetrating exegesis Morals versus Art. That's what we need in the Great Hall, a big bust of the old geezer Comstock.

Just after Ashcroft lost his U.S. Senate seat in Missouri to a dead Democrat in 2000, I described the defeated incumbent as a "sanctimonious, right-wing Neanderthal". A reader, who said he knew Ashcroft, objected. I wonder if I'll hear from the guy again.