It's a shame that the only time most Americans hear about works of contemporary art is when an artist who's gotten public money does something inflammatory -- usually involving sex, or religion, or politics.

How many people had heard of the performance artist Karen Finley or the photographer Andres Serrano before they got into a fight with Washington demagogues? How many people had heard of the artist Chris Ofili before the mayor of New York launched his dumb crusade against the picture of the Virgin Mary at the Brooklyn Museum of Art?

The poet Amiri Baraka has been well-known for a long time - 30 or 40 years. But once again, people are talking about a work of art -- a poem, by Baraka -- only because it offends. And in this case, people are entirely right to be offended. I'd say they have a duty to be offended.

Baraka's poem is called Who Blew Up America? It was inspired by 9/11. And it's a rant about the evils of America and of white Anglo-Saxons in particular -- in other words, the evils of The Man. It's a litany of facts and factitious arguments about capitalism and slavery and genocide and persecutions of various kinds.

Baraka is an excellent performer.

And then he gets to the really problematic stanza:

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away?

"Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers to stay home that day?"

The true answer, of course, is no one. Baraka's rhetorical question is, of course, a grotesque lie…as well as a completely implausible, insane lie. A lie apparently launched last September by an Arab TV news channel in Beirut a year ago, and spread like a virus through the Internet ever since.

Baraka is the poet laureate of New Jersey. The debate in the press has focussed on whether the state governor or legislature should have the power to remove that laurel.

To do so would set a bad precedent, but sure, they should be able to fire him -- although maybe they should have looked more closely at his extensive anti-Semitic output before they appointed him poet laureate.

Baraka says this poem is not anti-Semitic -- and for evidence he could point to his stanza that accuses The Man of complicity with the Nazis in the extermination camps.

Whatever. The larger point is that assertions of big historical truths, even in a piece of "art," are not relieved of their obligations to be true.

I'm close to being an absolutist when it comes to freedom of speech. Let anybody say -- or write or paint or film - almost anything they want. But then let them live with the consequences. Because "art" does not provide some kind of blanket immunity for big lies.

This is Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.

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