Middle American Values - Yea Or Nay?
Leadership begins with doing little things decisively.
Republicans don’t understand this. Since the election of 1994, they have not cut taxes, pared spending, saved Medicare, rescued Social Security, amended the Constitution (thank God!) or even pulled the plug on the most inconsequential of federal agencies, the National Endowment for the Arts.
The last may be more important than you realize. The NEA has become a living affront to Middle American sensibilities. It earned a spasm of notoriety during the 1980s by underwriting such things as Robert Mapplethorpe’s occasionally homoerotic photo exhibition or Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” which consisted of a beaker, some not-so-vital bodily fluids and a submerged crucifix.
Today, it still underwrites tasteless dreck, but most of its stuff is merely mediocre.
The $99 million endowment caters primarily to two audiences - rich folks who attend fine arts events and dullards whose chief creative genius lies in their power to suck in federal money.
In its quest to educate unlettered rubes, the NEA has become the Mecca of Waste. One-fifth of its budget vanishes in administrative overhead. Another third goes to six cities - Boston, Chicago, the District of Columbia, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco.
For those who believe in ideological bias, check this out: Four-fifths of all grant dollars go to districts with Democratic representatives and 143 congressional districts get nothing.
No one knows what happens to the cash, however. The NEA’s inspector general reported last year that 79 percent of the projects audited between 1991 and 1996 couldn’t document their costs properly. In 63 percent of the cases, the books didn’t add up; 53 percent failed to get help from outside auditors; and 21 percent had no system to prevent grantees from going off to Bimini.
But there’s more. The NEA is just a bug on the windshield of the arts industry. It accounts for less than 1 percent of the $10 billion Americans will spend this year on fine arts - galleries, opera, symphonies, theater, etc.
Haute culture doesn’t need Uncle Sam’s help. The fine-arts business - which does not count the movie or popular-music industries - hauls in nearly as much ticket revenue as all spectator sports combined. It employs nearly 2 million people, and its practitioners, far from starving for the sake of their work, earn 10 percent more than the labor force generally. If you toss Hollywood and music into the mix, the arts biz sweeps away all other forms of diversion, with the exception of TV.
The arts will thrive without the NEA. Americans are positively ravenous for good books, music and film, and we’ve enriched or exalted most of the truly gifted artists. The NEA has no choice but to hurl money at second-rate dreamers whose ambitions outrace their talents.
These folks would be doing something edifying, like bagging groceries, if it weren’t for the fact that the NEA gets its money through coercion.
That exaction would represent a grotesque abuse of federal might, even if it produced the next Dickens. But we’re not subsidizing the muses. We’re getting dunned for Larry Flynt wannabes. Our wages go for such stuff as “S and M” by Jeffrey DeShell and “Blood of Mugwump: A Tiresian Tale of Incest” by Doug Rice. We fund flicks from Women Make Movies Inc., which among other things has produced cinematic renderings of children’s sexual fantasies.
Although GOP leaders promised two years ago to kill off the NEA, there remains some question of their resolve. House Speaker Newt Gingrich opened his office and arms last month to actor Alec Baldwin - who in the past has called for a Democratic Congress, referred to the GOP as a “virus” and called NEA critic Rep. Peter Hoekstra a McCarthyite.
Gingrich hinted during the meeting that the NEA might survive, whereupon a grateful Baldwin jetted to New York for a fund-raiser featuring Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mario Cuomo and Geraldine Ferraro.
That journey may have turned the tide. This week, Reps. Dick Armey, Tom Delay and John Boehner promised to finish off the endowment. Hoekstra hopes they’ll follow through. “Democrats are going all out, equating the end of the NEA with the end of American democracy. They understand the stakes much better than we do.”
Indeed, this one symbolic vote could decide the fate not just of the GOP revolution, but of Newt Gingrich himself. After all, says Hoekstra, “If we can’t do the little things, we’ll never be able to do the big things.”
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