WITH A VIEW of culture more befitting the Third Reich than the Third Millennium, reactionaries in Congress set out in the mid-1990s to kill the National Endowment for the Arts.
They took a program largely responsible for bringing music and dance to public schools and tried to demonize it, cherry-picking a few controversial grants to such folk as the late homoerotic artist Robert Mapplethorpe.
Efforts to smash the NEA were eerily reminiscent of the famous statement by Reichmarshal Hermann Goering: "When I hear the word 'culture,' I reach for my revolver."
Seattle became a hotbed of resistance to the knuckle draggers of the late 20th century. Corporate Council for the Arts (now ArtsFund) boss Peter Donnelly and Seattle Opera Director Speight Jenkins were leaders in a national battle that preserved the NEA, albeit as an agency parched for resources.
A decade later, the NEA is back on its feet. Its chairman is Dana Gioia, a former General Foods executive turned poet, critic and American Book Award winner. Gioia is a first-rate Bush appointee who knows his portfolio. He has championed such programs as Shakespeare in Communities and a "Big Read" effort designed to reacquaint America with the classics.
"He has made it impossible to vote against the endowment," Jenkins joked Monday, after Gioia spoke to ArtsFund's Celebration of the Arts luncheon.
Nearly 1,000 people turned out to hear Gioia. With its sculpture garden and expanded downtown digs, the Seattle Art Museum has local scribes mouthing and penning this-puts-Seattle-on-the-map platitudes. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was performed, and quite well, last weekend in Bremerton.
What is misleading with this rosy picture? Answers came from Gioia in a sharp, blunt speech deserving of a hearing beyond the Westin ballroom.
"Across the country, school district by school district, arts are being removed from our public education," Gioia warned.
As well, he added, "The arts don't live in the media. ... Our society has chosen not to make arts part of our public culture." By contrast, pop culture is glorified. Our schoolchildren can name NBA stars and contestants on "American Idol." But, asked Gioia: "Can they name a living American poet, a famous architect, a classical musician, a philosopher or a theologian?"
It wasn't always so. In the 1950s, CBS broadcasts of the New York Philharmonic "Young People's Concerts" under conductor Leonard Bernstein popularized classical music for baby boomers.
Gioia is not just concerned with cultural literacy. The United States has experienced "a universal decline in reading" over the past 20 years, argued the NEA boss. "The problem is worse among young Americans."
That which the gods would destroy, they must first cheapen. What Gioia was warning about is not just the country becoming a cultural "dustbin" -- to use Sir Thomas Beecham's World War II-era description of Seattle -- but of a broader threat to citizenship.
In his 1968 campaign that challenged the Vietnam War, poet-politician Eugene McCarthy loved to evoke an ancient Celtic poet, Cadoc the Wise.
To love his land, a man must love justice, intoned Cadoc. (This was pre-gender equality.) To love justice, a man must love learning. To love learning, a man must appreciate poetry and song.
Gioia put it a bit differently Monday. With children, he said, the arts awaken a sense of the world. With teenagers, arts and culture help provide an understanding of what their adult identity will be. With adults, arts and culture "keep us alert and alive to the potentials within us."
In real spending, the NEA's budget topped out at $170 million in 1994. The "Gingrich Congress" cut it back to $99 million. The endowment budget has climbed back to $124 million.
With help from Congress' newly empowered appropriator, Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash. -- "the most steadfast champion the NEA has in the House," in Gioia's words -- the endowment hopes to climb back to '94 levels. President Bush's budget proposes a small increase to $128.4 million.
OK, such is the good news. The bad news is that education budgets in schools are getting whacked across the country. The Bush budget would eliminate the Department of Education's $35 million arts-in-education program. Chancellor Joel Klein announced early this year plans to discontinue Project ARTS, which has funneled more than $680 million into New York City schools. In Florida, a House budget recommended cutting state arts grants from $32.6 million to $9.6 million.
Cadoc was wise without opinion polls. Nowadays, we have evidence of the value of arts to young and old alike.
Surveys show that kids who participate in the arts are four times more likely to be recognized for academic achievement. They're three times more likely to be elected to class office. They are four times more likely to join in a science or math fair.
And adults? "People who read are overwhelmingly more likely to participate in civic life at every level," Gioia said. "They do charity work at more than twice the level. If we lose this in a democracy, we lose the most positive foundation for participation in American society."
Or as famed jazz musician Wynton Marsalis warned on a recent trip to Capitol Hill: "Our kids are uncultured and culturally ignorant all over this country. It's important for us, in this time, to set another tone for what our nation is about."
