fundamentalists are the new avant-garde

Like "excellence" and “diversity," creativity has become a catchword in contemporary business management and government policy-making. It may at first appear that any appeal for greater tolerance (especially of homosexuality) even if it is perfectly mercantile should be welcomed and may in fact create some leverage for Democrats in the depressed cities of the heartland, where gay marriage proved to be such a divisive and decisive issue for voters in the heartland.

The argument for remaking heartland cities into gay friendly cities would go like this: if we cannot convince the residents of Ohio to support gay marriage on the basis of civil rights, perhaps we could convince them by showing how greater tolerance of homosexuality leads to more vibrant urban economies.

Neo-liberals would like us to embrace the ethos of market-driven capitalism with reckless disregard for the values of social justice while heartlanders, over-stimulated by talk of moral values and the Rapture can assume the heroic posture of the nineteenth-century martyr to art or avant garde– and reject commercialism and profit for Jesus instead of art. The justifications that Florida offers for a more tolerant social polity mask a politics of economic expedience against which we would all like to rebel. (from an article I'm writing on "Creative Industries" that will perhaps appear in the Baffler.)