President Obama should consult another President on the importance of the arts

JFK: "Art is the great democrat."

By Barry Johnson

So far, no word from President Obama on the Open Letter yesterday, which argued against his proposal to trim the National Endowment for the Arts budget. And no sign that he's going to restore the cut and continue to fund the endowment at last year's pitiful level. On the other hand, the Republicans in the House of Representatives flexed their muscles and wiped out several string sections in orchestras around the country by adding another $20.5 million in cuts. That's if the cuts were confined to string sections, of course. (We should point out that Oregon's lone Republican representative, Greg Walden, voted against the additional cut -- his district has lots of great arts groups in it and he did the right thing by them. All of Washington's GOP Representatives were full-fledged arts cutters.)

In the grand scheme of the budget, $20.5 million is nothing, of course. This is all for show -- muscle flexing, remember? But then so was the President's original budget number.  The editorial board of Arts Dispatch thinks that the President is far more open to good arguments than the Ideologues of the House, however, and that's why we addressed the letter to him.

And so far, no word. We understand. The President has never heard of Arts Dispatch. "Art who?" we imagine him saying. "Dispatch? Which syllable is accented, anyway?" So, we've decided to give an alternate argument for the arts from someone he's heard of. He's even read the first part of that argument.

"The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is very close to the center of a nation's purpose—and is a test of the quality of a nation's civilization."

Dear President Obama, don't cut the National Endowment for the Arts

The arts "preserve and protect the union" too.

Dear President Obama,

In this letter, I'm going to make the argument that cutting the budget of the National Endowment of the Arts (and the other two major federal cultural programs, for that matter) is a big mistake. It's not as big a mistake as funding the arts at their current level, though. That's a massive mistake, and one of the reasons I think we've reached our present sad state as a democracy.

The NEA budget is small enough to be more symbol than substance. And it's on that symbolic basis that I'm making the argument. How small is it? Less than three "Spiderman Units," a term that a theater wag came up with to emphasize the cost of the new Broadway musical. A "Spiderman Unit" is $65 million. I also suspect it's just a couple of pallets in one of those trucks of U.S. currency (I imagined they were full of $100s, right?) we used to corrupt the tribes and officials of Iraq and Afghanistan. We were acting pragmatically, I know, horsetrading, buying influence.  We were not modeling good democratic behavior, though, and our punishment for this will continue, I'm afraid.  But don't leave me! This connects to the arts, I promise!

What I admire about your Presidency so far is its belief in another sort of pragmatism. I call it Capital P Pragmatism, American Pragmatism, the pragmatism of William James, John Dewey, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Jurgen Habermas (not really American, I suppose), Richard Rorty, even Cornel West. I view it (as Dewey did) as intimately connected to democratic processes. The difference between small p pragmatism and Capital P Pragmatism is argument. Your administration at its best has argued for its policies in the fairest possible way: You've carefully constructed arguments built on the most accurate descriptions of reality you could muster, articulated them so that anyone with a functioning rational mind could understand them, invited others to test those arguments and descriptions, and offered to improve them where they were found wanting, even give them up altogether in the face of better information or better arguments. By doing this, you showed that you understood that America's biggest problem didn't involve specific policy questions, even important ones like health care: It's the democracy itself and its ability to function in a rational and effective way.  That has been your greatest gift to us, in my opinion.

Of course, there's been a lot of small p pragmatism going on, too. Yes, the same sort of horse-trading  and trucks of money (tax incentives! subsidies!) that corrupt Iraq and Afghanistan corrupt us, too. And then there's that inherent enemy of rational argument -- ideology. The stew of ideology and horse-trading -- I'll act in the public interest on this, if you'll act against the public interest on that -- has undermined democracy here in the most profound way. Just listen to us for a moment. How many Pragmatic arguments do you hear? I know; you're going to say it's not that bad. That's another thing I like about you, and I'm not just trying to butter you up! But come on, the wildest three minutes of the Mahler 9 (I'm personally thinking of the part that sounds like the soundtrack to a French Foreign Legion movie) makes more sense than any of the 5-4 majority opinions of the Roberts court. Now I AM digressing.

You're getting impatient: What about the NEA? I think your budget is small p pragmatic when it comes to the NEA. We're dealing with something symbolic here, and you've decided to cut it a little to show your opponents that you're serious about this budget trimming business. That won't appease them. They need to eliminate it for their own symbolic reasons. We're going to run a $3 trillion+ budget next year and the 2+ Spiderman Units we're spending on the arts aren't a matter of substance (they weren't in Kansas or Texas, either, remember?). I think maybe you're horse-trading, though, because you don't have a good argument for the arts in general or a good public policy reason for supporting them.  I want to give you a Capital P argument.  It's one I've made before, and I've already begun it by describing things the way I have.