What's In A Symbol?

The election is over; pundits are winding down their post mortems; the country is heaving a sigh of relief if not at the outcome, at least at the fact that it’s over; and our lives are returning to normal. Much has already been written about what happened on November 6, from the really interesting analysis by researchers at University of Michigan describing how “red” and “blue” break down across the country, to the extraordinary confrontation between Megyn Kelly and Karl Rove on Fox News shortly after Ohio was called for President Obama.  Historians and political analysts will spend a generation (at least) pulling apart every single moment of the 2012 Presidential campaign to try to pinpoint exactly what happened and why.

   

Let me make it easy for them.  I can tell you EXACTLY when Mitt Romney lost the election.

Let me first state that I am not a professional politician, nor do I possess a degree in political science.  I think of myself as a student of human nature as well as a reasonably observant (and very minor) participant in the political process.  Several weeks before the election, I ran into my friend Gerry, a lobbyist who has a much broader view of how politics works than I ever will. I asked him how he thought the election would go.  At the time, he was pretty sure the President would serve just one term.

And then the debates happened. 

Most agree that Romney won the first debate (by a lot) and that both candidates acquitted themselves well during the last two debates.  Maybe Obama won one or both, or maybe Mitt Romney did.  As far as I was concerned, however, Mitt Romney lost it about halfway through the first debate.  I don’t mean he lost the debate (I actually agree with the prevailing sentiment that Romney won the first debate). 

I mean he lost the election.

In response to a question about what he would do to lower the deficit, Romney took on Big Bird.  He said that among his first items of business would be to “defund” the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and fire (my word) the debate moderator, the especially wounded-looking PBS news host, Jim Lehrer, from his “day job.” And yes, that would probably take care of Big Bird as well.

To me that was as telling a moment, as big a turning point, and as colossal a mistake as the Howard Dean scream at the end of the Iowa Caucus in 2004.  The difference, however, was that Dean’s scream was more the result of a unidirectional microphone he held himself during a crowd roar and thus an accidental, or circumstantial mistake that could have happened to anyone.  Romney’s mistake was deliberate and therefore both cruel and unnecessary.

While everyone commented about this gaffe at the end of the debate, and several articles were written, few pundits took it seriously.  Despite the surge of Big Bird’s popularity on social media of all kinds (I won’t pretend to understand exactly what a meme or a trend is in this context; all I know is that Big Bird took off like….well, a VERY big bird on Twitter and Facebook), most traditional reporters and pundits were treating the comment like what it was—a symbol for the presumed "cold, business-like efficiency" of the Romney Presidency.  What they didn’t understand was that it wasn’t just a symbol. 

It was a SYMBOL, dripping with kids, and education, and mom ‘n’ pop and apple pie; of afternoons spent playing on the living room floor in front of the teevee, waiting for Mom to come home to fix you a snack, or dinner—pretty much everything, in short, that makes life for a preschooler in these United States a grand adventure.

Firing Big Bird, dismissing it, in effect, as being an inconsequential piece of Americana that is not deserving of our collective support, quite possibly appealed to the ultra-right, tea-party base of the Republican Party.  But it awakened the sleeping beast inside every man, woman and child under the age of 40 who, I assume, grew up with Big Bird and his (her?) buddies on Sesame Street.  If Romney could so casually fire Big Bird, who or what would be next?  And if this is what he is like as a candidate…how much WORSE will it be if and when he becomes President?

The work of an artist, any artist, is to capture Life’s meaning in symbolic languages.  Whether articulated in music, sculpture, painting, poetry, prose, dance or film, the symbolic meaning of art tends to be far more profound than the sum of its parts.  Big Bird is not just a yellow and orange collection of cloth and feathers.  Big Bird is not just a big, goofy-looking puppet with a kindly voice providing guidance and comfort to legions of kids who need something constructive to do after 3 pm and before Mom and Dad come home from work.  Big Bird is not just one of several dozen large puppets that cost several hundred thousand dollars a year to put on television for a couple of hours a day, every day.

Most people don’t care a lot about candidates’ positions for or against the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, or the Institute for Museum and Library Services.  These are the Federal agencies whose combined $1.5 billion budget, if cut, will drastically harm the arts and cultural sector across the country, and will save only a tiny tiny fraction of one percent of the US deficit this year.  CPB, NEA, NEH, and IMLS are, in short, just a bunch of initials to most people.

Big Bird, however, is different.  Big Bird is a symbol of how precious life is, especially the lives of our pre-school aged children who are hungry to learn their ABCs, to count to 20, and to share.  Big Bird symbolizes the potential that we all have within us to aspire, to be more, to be better, to live a fulfilling life, and above all, to learn the basic rules of civic behavior.

Fire Big Bird?!? Take away Big Bird’s funding?!? Not a chance. Not for my kids.  Not for their kids, either. And certainly not if my vote has anything to say about it.

March Madness

In mid-July, 1964 a 40-year-old Jim Oakes (who would later be appointed to the Second Circuit Court of Federal Appeals) was a New England organizer for the Rockefeller presidential campaign.  As a delegate to the 1964 Republican Convention he was one of many “socially liberal” Republicans who believed in the Republican Party’s historic stands on equality, social justice, and minimal government interference in the lives of its private citizens even while advocating for fiscal responsibility.

 The 1964 Republican Convention was no picnic—despite its being held in San Francisco’s rustic-sounding Cow Palace.  It is generally accepted that it served as the coming-out party for a new kind of political conservatism, one that would eventually appear to abandon most, if not all, of the lofty ideals that first imbued the party of Abe Lincoln.

Judge Oakes described to me what happened to him at the conclusion of Barry Goldwater’s acceptance speech that warm July 16th in San Francisco.

“I had to leave the room—that huge room with its thousands of young Goldwater Republicans roaring their approval for the turn to the right the party had just taken.  I just couldn’t believe it.  I walked out into the vestibule at the Cow Palace and stood leaning on the rail overlooking the lobby.  After a moment, I became aware of a well-dressed black man, about my age, who was clearly as upset as I was.  I asked him what he thought of Goldwater’s speech.  He replied ‘my party has abandoned me.  It has abandoned my people.’

“I introduced myself to him.  He was Jackie Robinson.”

Goldwater lost that election and it would be 16 years before the Conservative Revolution inside the GOP would succeed in finally elevating one of its own, Ronald Reagan, to the White House.  And it would be another 16 years after Reagan’s election that neo-conservative political values would touch my profession—the cultural sector—with devastating results.

In the mid-1990s the first campaign of the so-called Culture Wars ended, and the Arts and Humanities were its first major casualties.  A significant budget reduction at the Federal level in 1996 placed on the states the extraordinary burden of carrying forward the valuable work of the tiny Federal agencies charged with supporting the cultural legacy of America’s vast creative output.  What was at the time considered a near “death blow” reduction of 40% to the National Endowment for the Arts was a significant step in the neo-conservative effort to reshape American culture.

Today (nearly 16 years later again) we find ourselves in the middle of another attack on our cultural support system.  Not only is it the clear intent of the conservative Right to deal crippling, if not fatal, blows to the NEA and its sister agencies (the Humanities Endowment and Institute for Museum and Library Services), but also to National Public Radio, National Public Television, and to the “Nation’s Attic”—the venerable Smithsonian Institution.

This time round, however, these attacks from the Right are no longer confined to our Federal institutions.  At least a half a dozen states have been trying to cope with similar efforts to disband their public cultural institutions under the guise of “balancing the budget.” For many of us, this effort has resulted in a whole new definition of “March Madness.”

While basketball fans everywhere are savoring (or cursing) the sweet runs of Butler and Virginia Commonwealth University, folks in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Kansas, Nevada, Washington and elsewhere are realizing that a cultural March Madness has gripped their State Houses or Governor’s Mansions.

Despite reams of data showing the positive effects of participating in/studying the arts at school;

Despite hundreds of independent studies showing the significant state and local revenues generated by the arts sector;

Despite literally thousands of independent sources clearly providing credible anecdotal evidence that the arts create and sustain community life; and

Despite the easy-to-verify fact that in most states the total budget for all things “cultural” (Arts, Humanities, Historical Societies, Libraries, etc.) are a tiny fraction of 1% of a state’s General Fund,

NEVERTHELESS, arts and culture are the unequivocal “first thing to go” in our schools and in our state house corridors.  It is only a small comfort to know that Vermont is, for now, one of only a handful of exceptions to this trend.

Last week, while New Hampshire headlines were blaring the late-night, closed-door House vote to disallow collective bargaining by state employees, an equally insidious bill succeeded in passing in the House Finance Committee (20-6) to eliminate the New Hampshire Council on the Arts.

Yesterday the paper reported that of the more than 5 million people who filled out their NCAA brackets, only TWO predicted that the final four would include Butler and VCU and not include a single #1 seed.  Two people are happy today, while all the rest tear out their hair and tear up their brackets.

Is the same thing going to happen in the arts?  Is the conservative Right going to wake up tomorrow happy while millions of Americans from all walks of life will wake up to the despair that results from no longer being able to access the arts and humanities?

Sure, the comparison here is a little bit false. With respect to the NCAA tournament, two people are happy now, but in a few more days, a new basketball champion will be crowned and everyone else on college campuses and communities across America will get back to business as usual. 

I only wish I could assure the arts sector (and everyone else, for that matter) of a similar outcome.