The Lullaby of Doomsday

...in which Mr. Nice Guy gets canceled.

Since our friend, the social media algorithm is designed to deliver the most comfortably familiar of irritations, it has informed me this week that yet another art gallery outrage has taken place. That is, once again, some notable artwork has been affixed with a price tag realistic only to those whose yachts have their own football stadiums. In this case, ten million dollars is being asked for a painting by America’s favorite somnambulistic landscape painter, Bob Ross.

I don’t have to explain who Bob Ross is, seeing as he long ago replaced Norman Rockwell as the one painter anyone’s grandma can name. Or rather, who Bob Ross was, his death in 1995 elevating his legend to immortality. Everyone loves Bob Ross, he of the white-boy fro, who coaxed us into peaceful naps with his whispered monotone on his long-running PBS television show. Bob’s Zen-like placidity has made him a perennial marketplace fixture, his likeness duly lunchboxed and bobbleheaded into the new millennium. He is to the TV kitschmeisters what Maradona is to the fútbol faithful, a pop culture messiah on par with Dolly Parton and Saint Oprah herself.

To acknowledge that his paintings are laughably amateurish is a sinful transgression, and those malcontents, like me, dark enough in their tainted souls to speak such blasphemy shall be tried in the Tumblr Tribunal. Ross, forever sanctified in Chia Pet form in our cubicle shrines, would inspire such a violent defense not because his artwork is superior, but because he himself was a fine and dandy fella. His TV persona exuded empathy - calm doses of attaboy for the differently-talented and insomnia-prone, reassuring us that the creative act is a panacea for our troubled minds, a form of meditation with happy little trees as mantras. We love him because he seemed to care about us. Bob Ross was Nice.

That Americans value niceness more than ever today is completely understandable, even to a heartless monster like me. Not only as a bulwark against the nonstop cultural shitstorm of jackbooted, gun-blazing, pedestrian-slaughtering, democracy-killing, MAGA-era aggressions propelled at us every day, but also because, well, niceness is nice. It would be as seemingly inhumane to question pleasantry in a world on fire as to find fault with band-aids at Guantanamo. As we’re drowning in the upchucking sewers of the modern hellscape, we all appreciate a lifesaver. Butterscotch, preferably.

But I am suspicious of niceness. This may be because I was raised in the American South, where the impulsive, sugar-coated niceness of the indigenous population is usually laying the groundwork for a virtual backstabbing, if not an actual gun butt to the brainstem. In my upbringing, niceness was reserved for the neighbors, a ruse to mask the true malice lurking in our family’s murderous hearts. Within my household, niceness was neither expressed nor desired. Nor did I prioritize niceness as a virtue in the dysfunctional blackguards I accepted as my boyhood peers, something made obvious by our constant insulting, grifting, and stabbing of one another. If anything, niceness has fallen even lower on the list of characteristics I value in a person as I have mellowed into contemptuous old age. Niceness, nice though it is, is boring. And for the true Southerner, the real crime of being nothing but nice is that it gives others nothing to talk about.

At the same time, Southerners, in keeping with their church rearin’, consider docile, toothy-grinning niceness, whether authentic or hambone, as the purest manifestation of Godliness. From my experience, this usually means that niceness overrides concerns of total incompetence and/or absolute evil. Too often have I been forced to endure disastrously unqualified coworkers, unable to save a computer file or turn a door handle, who kept their jobs by virtue of their niceness (and because firing them wouldn’t be a nice thing to do). This is the Southern tradition by which dangerous insufficiency remains systemic. “Well, yeah, Luther burned down the funeral home and backed his tractor over the Whitmire girls, but look at him. He’s a really nice guy. I played ball with his daddy.”

Ballplaying with someone’s daddy may be all well and good, but is niceness really the best we can expect from Luther? More to the point, can niceness alone be worth ten million dollars? Don’t misunderstand; I am not suggesting that the apparent gentility of Bob Ross was a cover for his secretly advocating eugenics or collecting corpses in his basement. I accept that Bob really was, by all accounts, one of the few earnestly righteous dudes to ever groove terra firma, a true Sidhartha of the Sunday painters, a television rarity worth cherishing in our fully Limbaughed mediasphere.

But Bob painted like a toddler chimp. And his life’s mission was to encourage us, in all our obvious ineptitude, to emulate his fan brush wigglings to fill the nation’s thrift stores with ruined canvasses. His beloved television program, mesmerizing in its lack of production value, not only promoted little or no practical art instruction (which would involve actually traveling outside and looking at the happy little trees instead of inventing them) but advocated the full acceptance of mistakes. He just wanted us to feel good, regardless of our blatant and potentially catastrophic failings.*

All of which makes the posthumous promotion of Ross to sainthood appropriate for the modern age, whose softer participants not only demand (and receive) full-time coddling for themselves and their emotional support lizards but condemn their impure contemporaries to cancelation limbo when their standards of optimum niceness are not fully met. Bob Ross’s program, an ASMR isolation chamber of murmured boosterism, created exactly the sort of Safe Space that makes Mike Lindell bite his pillow with rage. Today, niceness isn’t simply the ideal; it’s often mandatory. Because, for the Bedwetter School of social engineering, anything less than Bob Ross’s snuggletime refuge is now intolerable.

So goes Dr. Methuselah's diagnosis of These Damn Kids Today. But I’ll also counter that along with their ninja-taut alertness to potential violence from the word “stewardess” comes a general tendency among today’s youngsters to affirmate the shit out of each other. Unlike the mutual affection my boyhood peers and I expressed with bloodthirsty ridicule and punches to the crotch, modern middle schoolers deliver hugs and high-fives in recognition of each other’s achievements and essential awesomeness. I’ve seen this gang therapy in action. “You rock,” they tell each other, instead of suggesting to their very best friends, as we did once upon a time, that they should choke on some dicks. I will concede that this is a positive development.

Because I ain’t mad at Nice. The ambition to establish a world based on kindness and humanitarian compassion can make me go all Peter, Paul and Mary with the best of them. As a veteran of public service jobs, I’m adept at distributing niceness, and life is made easier when others return the favor, all smiley and cheerful and all that crap. I’m sure I’ve happily watched as much Bob Ross as anyone, and I too find comfort when I encounter his exalted image, emblazoned on air fresheners and mouse pads, radiating positivity from his enormous hair. Encouraging the housebound to paint badly for fun is not, on the whole, a prosecutable offense.

But neither is niceness by itself, independent of a measurable act of assistance, a notable accomplishment. In fact, as the bare minimum to expect of someone, being nice is defined by its near-total lack of substantive attributes. It is the “just sit there and look pretty” of human endeavor. Most damning of all, niceness is the last refuge of the humorless. It’s what you’re left with when all else fails.

And meanwhile, let’s not forget that the assholes have achieved some illustrious things in our great human comedy. Contrary to what modern correctives suggest, Thomas Jefferson accomplished a few things beyond diddling the help. Henry Ford, a full-time antisemite, managed a few automotive innovations in his spare time. Ted Kaczynski played a mean trombone. Bob Ross's paintings can’t be worth ten million bucks, based solely on his chipper demeanor, while Picasso’s work gets stern reevaluation because he was a raging douche.

It's not likely Ross’s painting, the first one he produced on his TV show, will fetch the asking price anyway. If it does, it will be its sentimental value that seals the deal. Because Ross was not a tortured genius, crafting masterworks in a solitude between gin jags; Bob was right there in our living rooms, happy as a Moonie, sharing his process and assuring us that what he was doing was something anyone could do. Bob Ross invited each and every one of us to paint that ten-million-dollar landscape right along with him.

Which is why it’s so terrible.

- A.H.

*Consider also Bob’s PBS contemporary, Fred Rogers, likewise exalted as a high priest of magnanimity. Mister Rogers, poster wuss of the Seventies’ self-esteem movement, assured each and every child that they were special, despite all evidence to the contrary, cementing his legacy as a mass-marketed holy man for generations. When it came time for the Rogers biopic (as inevitable as death and taxes), popular consensus demanded that the lead role go to the actor universally agreed to be the super swellest of the nicey-nice. Box office was tepid, but the niceness metric was stratospheric. This Hollywood hallelujah for Roger’s piety, as well as the downright weirdness of the man’s genuine kindness, completely overshadows the essential butt-awfulness of the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood television show. Bad songs, bad puppets, tedious condescension – Fred Rogers was bad at his job. The Land of Make-Believe made me really believe I could change the channel.

(And let’s not forget Ashley’s website, jam-packed with portraits and other drawings, his highly-affordable prints and books currently available, his eagerness for your portrait commission, and his contact email, thrdgll@gmail.com, where he longs to hear from you.)