Given that the artistic muse of the Clinton administration was Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, the creator of the sitcom "Designing Women," President Bush's appointment of Bo Derek to the board of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts could hardly be faulted for breaking with tradition. Ever since Abraham Lincoln overruled his advisers to attend "Our American Cousin," culture has been considered ladies' work in Washington — first ladies' work. It was Jacqueline Kennedy who brought Pablo Casals to the East Room, not her husband, who celebrated his inaugural with a command performance by the Rat Pack. It is Laura Bush who invites writers to the White House, not the president, whose inaugural concert featured Andrew Lloyd Webber, Ricky Martin and Wayne Newton. (Where was Barry Manilow when the country needed him?)
But at a certain point Washington's tenuous, often tacky connection to culture ceases to be a joke, and that point is now. Almost two months after the world first heard of America's failure to protect Baghdad's museum from looters and thieves, Iraq's treasures are still being pillaged — this time at the source, the archaeological sites themselves. According to The Economist, the Italian diplomat the United States put in charge of Iraq's cultural holdings is obscuring the dimensions of this new fiasco by refusing to allow reporters to accompany him on helicopter visits to the scenes of these crimes. Meanwhile, the plundering continues, and each day that it does, we lose more of our collective memory of our religious, literary and artistic roots in the centuries before Christ. Visit "Art of the First Cities" at the Metropolitan Museum — an exhibition of delicate Mesopotamian artifacts safely held by non-Iraqi museums — and weep for the many comparable pieces that are being destroyed or stolen as our occupation forces fail to secure the peace.
Another derogation of cultural duty by Washington, and one hitting closer to home, is likely to become official on June 2. That's when the Federal Communications Commission is expected to hand media giants like Viacom and News Corp. more power by letting them grab still more notches on the TV dial. The fix has long been in. The Center for Public Integrity revealed 10 days ago that the FCC regulators and staff members making these decisions had taken some $2.8 million worth of free trips (some 2,500 junkets in all, many of them to Las Vegas) from the very industry they are supposed to be regulating. Michael Powell, the agency's Bush-chosen chairman, has alone freeloaded 44 times to rendezvous with show-business moguls even as he has largely disdained public hearings on the issues at stake. The template for this kind of stacked, behind-closed-doors policymaking is Dick Cheney's secret energy task force, to which Enron executives got entree while environmental advocates received short (if any) shrift.
As one critic puts it in the new issue of The Hudson Review, "Our commercialized, entertainment-oriented television-based culture has cheapened and trivialized all forms of public discourse." He points to a recent study showing that the average American spends 24 minutes a day reading — "not just books but anything," TV Guide and diet tips included — as opposed to "over four hours daily of television and over three hours of radio."
The author of this grim indictment of the cultural state of the nation, as it happens, is himself a member of the Bush administration — Dana Gioia, who took over as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts during the runup to the war in Iraq.
Gioia does not subscribe to the ugly culture wars that the likes of Lynne Cheney and William Bennett embraced during the Gingrich revolution. Many of those battles were in one way or another about NEA grants to artistic projects with sexual content, especially homosexual content.
He does reserve one cheer for the cultural marketplace — he's not a Republican for nothing. "If you create a system where the marketplace doesn't operate in the arts," he says, "it breeds a kind of institutional stagnation, which you see in a lot of European countries." But he knows the perils: "If you put the marketplace entirely in charge of the arts, you see them very endangered" — as they are now. Like virtually all of his predecessors, Gioia's antidote is to increase the NEA budget and expand arts education. But at a time when arts programs of all kinds, in and out of schools, are falling prey to the worst fiscal crunch in the states since World War II, the endowment would not make a difference even at three times its minuscule current appropriation ($117 million). Add the catastrophic money woes at American cultural institutions to the growing grip of the media giants that are sucking up the air in their stead, and you've got a crisis.
What can Dana Gioia do about it? He could shake Washington — and the Bush administration — with the same asset that has made him successful as a writer, the power of his ideas. A legendarily contentious essay he wrote for The Atlantic in 1991, "Can Poetry Matter?" started a debate over the merits of the academic poetry establishment that raged for years. While he sees clearly the cultural lay of the land, including what he called the "heartbreaking" destruction in Iraq, his duty must be to convey the urgency of his vision to a larger audience, within and beyond the White House.