We Have Already Lost
Dunkirk NY -
“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be! We know things are bad – worse than bad, They’re crazy! It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone!’” -Howard Beale (Peter Finch), Network, 1976 (Paddy Chayefsky, screenplay)
You may think that there is no connection between the events going on in Madison WI and the arts. If you thought that, you would be very wrong. What’s happening in WI as Gov. Scott Walker attempts to break the unions is intrinsically related to the arts, because it has its origins in the same right-wing corporate agenda as attempts to zero out Panned Parenthood, the NEA and NEH, the CPB and PBS, and all other causes held dear by liberal thinkers and activists. Powerful multinational corporations, using right-wing Tea Party “populists” as their cover, are hell-bent on making sure that every facet of American life, including the arts, is connected to making the US a totally consumerist culture (which makes corporations more wealthy), and making sure that every American becomes totally dependent on Corporate America (whether in the guise of private business or government) to provide them jobs and entertainment (bread and circuses, if you prefer), thus robbing them of their ability to think for themselves and making them totally dependent on corporations for their livelihood. And Americans are falling for it in a big way.
Perhaps the most stunning thing coming out of Wisconsin is the fact that Gov. Walker, as Corporate America’s political surrogate, has managed to turn Wisconsin’s population against itself. He has managed to pit neighbor against neighbor, non-union worker against union worker, as Corporate America sits on the sidelines and grins, watching the little dogs each each other up. Corporate America has managed to convince everyone in the private and public sector that it is not the enemy, but rather the solution. Wisconsin is “open for business,” and Gov. Walker has given them tax breaks that expand the deficit in WI in 2012-14 considerably. This despite the fact that these corporations pay next to no taxes (and in many cases no taxes at all). By finding out and bringing to the forefront what jealousies and fears Americans have against each other, they have managed to pit Americans against each other, keep them busy with a great deal of infighting over trivial issues, then walk right in and rob the candy store. Not satisfied with merely taking the people’s money and goods, they are now on a campaign to make sure that the rights they do have – such as collective bargaining – are also reduced to ashes. They wish to keep us in thrall to their need to make ever larger profits.
You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immune, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. -Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty), Network
The need to make profits is so rampant and ravenous that it has clearly affected us in the arts. How so? Well, we are so frightened of being “zeroed out” economically and culturally that we now try to make the argument that we ARE a business, that we are A PART of the economic engine, that we produce jobs, etc. In short, we are now using THEIR language and THEIR ideas in a feeble attempt to show “we belong.” What the arts community has failed to grasp, of course, is the fact that Corporate America is not interested in “the arts” as an economic engine. We are too small and insignificant, rather like an appendix; you don’t really need it for anything, but if it gives you trouble, remove it. Rather, Corporate America is far more interested in absorbing the arts, in turning all the arts into “entertainment,” which is a much larger part of the economy, and a much more necessary one to Corporate America’s goals.
The “entertainment” field serves a two-fold purpose for Corporate America. First and foremost, it produces huge profits. If it did not do that, it would not be allowed to survive. Secondly, it keeps American’s minds consumed with trivial matters. What could be better? Here’s a field where not only do they reap great profits, but they keep Americans dumb at the same time, too busy arguing amongst each other about insignificant things (blown up large by the info-news-entertainment segment of American media), too engrossed in who’s the next American Idol.
They have already done this with the news industry. At one time in this country, news outlets felt it their duty to root out important news and keep America informed of what was going on in politics, in government, and in the world. Now it’s just another branch of entertainment, and Corporate America plays both sides against the middle. Rachel Madow and Keith Olberman, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert keep the left entertained, while Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney keep the right entertained, using each side to feed the other. And of course, Corporate America keeps the profits from both.
Look, I sent you all a concept analysis report yesterday. Did any of you read it? Well, in a nutshell, it said: “The American people are turning sullen. They’ve been clobbered on all sides…; they’ve turned off, shot up, and they’ve fucked themselves limp, and nothing helps.” So, this concept analysis report concludes, “The American people want somebody to articulate their rage for them.” I’ve been telling you people since I took this job six months ago that I want angry shows. I don’t want conventional programming on this network. I want counterculture, I want anti-establishment. I want ideas from you people. This is what you’re paid for. And by the way, the next time I send an audience research report around, you’d all better read it, or I’ll sack the fucking lot of you. Is that clear? -Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), Network.
Need evidence that the arts have already been absorbed and will continue to be absorbed by Corporate America? One, of course need look no further than to the history of Broadway. No need to re-write here what everybody knows. Spider Man: Turn Off The Dark will eventually become the most frightening example of this phenomenon. Critics panned it, but nobody in the populace will care one iota about that. Created by a huge conglomerate of people who are fanatically dedicated to the notion that spectacle at its extreme is profitable, the entertainment industry is hell-bent on making this show the pinnacle of its drive to kill off all semblance of art on Broadway. Success on Broadway has for years now been defined, not by artistic standards of any sort, but by box office success. It is now irrelevant that, on occasion, something even remotely artistically interesting makes money. If it makes money, it’s good; if it makes money and someone actually calls it “art,” even better, because it will provide cover against those who argue that art is vanishing, and that will help make more money. And if it’s spectacular and amazing enough that even sacrificing human bodies to the cause seems worth it for the thrill value, well then, all bets are off.
These realities make Rocco Landesman’s recent talk of “supply and demand” in the arts both dangerous and, strangely enough, irrelevant. First off, let’s remember that Rocco came from the business end of “the arts,” and as such he has a Corporate America mentality. He got into Broadway to help it increase profits – no other reason. So when he talks of cutting “supply,” he is automatically framing the argument in corporate terms, thus shaping the conversation to serve the corporate agenda. “Art Works” is a corporate slogan. The debate is now framed around corporate terms. “Cut supply” means letting unprofitable segment die to funnel money into profitable segments. “No demand” means we have no product to sell in a market that is demanding entertainment, not art. If we want to increase demand we should be more entertaining. So Landesman is trying to use the language of Corporate America to get buy-in from artists fearful of losing their livelihood. He is trying to to get artists to use the language of Corporate America – and by extension to shape their thinking into corporate thinking – in an effort to fully absorb the arts into American corporate culture. But this whole discussion is irrelevant because the NEA is really a small outpost in the overall strategic plan. When you look around at the artistic scene in America you realize that the lion’s share of the work in this regard is already accomplished: Broadway is fully commercialized, regional theatres are either dying off or desperately buying in, Shakespeare festivals are economic Disneylands entertaining the well-to-do, and television rules them all.
You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that… perfect world… in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. -Arthur Jensen, Network
Perhaps most depressing of all, we will have a hard time fighting against this phenomenon, because the American people are not on our side. In fact, it’s worse than that – they are not even remotely aware of the issue. Nowhere in this country is there any great outcry, any great demand, for the arts other than from artists. Worse yet, you can be sure that if the demand is coming only from artists, there will be a significant segment of the population ready to beat back the demands of a “self-interest group” (cf. as noted the Wisconsin situation, where unions have been successfully portrayed as lazy, selfish and self-interested people by “hard-working” Wisconsinites who don’t get such lavish benefits).
Can we create demand? I don’t think so. Whatever demand we might be able to create, Corporate America will, sooner or later, find a way to absorb it into its corporate structure. Nor do we possess the tools necessary to create demand. In terms of thinking about theatre artists as a community, I don’t even think we have the will, or the interest. As in Wisconsin, we are too busy sniping at each other to see the real enemy stealing our ideals. I distinctly remember the day I was riding up an elevator in some skyscraper in New York City in the late 70s, and realizing that I was listening to Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” coming over the Muzak system. “The revolution is over,” I remember mumbling out loud to no one in particular (that is, if there every really was a revolution in the 60s). Muzak had absorbed Bob Dylan, and the die was cast (no coincidence that my experience happened just about the same time Network was released).
As artists, we lost this game many years ago, when we initially failed to sustain a connection with the average people of this country (something Shakespeare and Molière never forgot to do). We have no culture to speak of in this country, not as they do in India, and we never bothered to create one. We have a consumerist culture, and as a result we now have a consumerist theatre, all too willing to buy into the “corporatespeak” of the free market. It may be all but impossible to build a “grassroots movement” in theatre simply because there is nowhere to plant the grass. And we never had “grassroots theatre” in this country to begin with, not in the same manner as we had a bluegrass or folk tradition in music. At every level, our attempts to “save the arts” are being beaten by our willingness to try to engage the enemy on their terms, with their language, and our almost total lack of interest in connecting with our neighbors and communities.
Theatre is an art that has, at its very core, the notion of humans connecting with each other to tell stories that help us establish meaning to our existence. But is that very act even possible when we seem to have become what Howard Beale describes?
What is finished… is the idea that this great country is dedicated to the freedom and flourishing of every individual in it. It’s the individual that’s finished. It’s the single, solitary human being that’s finished. It’s every single one of you out there that’s finished, because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals. It’s a nation of some 200-odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter-that-white, steel-belted bodies, totally unnecessary as human beings, and as replaceable as piston rods… Well, the time has come to say, is dehumanization such a bad word? Because good or bad, that’s what is so. The whole world is becoming humanoid – creatures that look human but aren’t. The whole world not just us. We’re just the most advanced country, so we’re getting there first. The whole world’s people are becoming mass-produced, programmed, numbered, insensate things…
So, you listen to me. Listen to me: This company is now in the hands of CCA – the Communication Corporation of America. You’re never going to get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you want to hear; we lie like hell. We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear. And when the twelfth largest company in the world controls the most awesome God-damned propoganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth?
-twl
This is rather brilliantly articulated, Tom. Perhaps you should submit it to the Huffington Post, where Michael Kaiser just a week ago posted a much less politically active yet accurate assessment of how the performing arts are not irrelevant because of lack of available creative talent, but because committees in arts organizations all over the country filter out risk and audacity in favor of what is seen as safe, marketable, and done before.
It’s a very odd time for the arts in America. With every passing year there is less of a sense that any of us can hope to “make a living” creatively in America unless we attach ourselves to a corporate-sanctioned agenda. There’s a lot of honest work out there, but mostly from people who just manage to keep themselves afloat and self-fund. We’ve all worked on projects that seemed to have a glimmer of genuine individuality in them, only to see the specialness ironed out in workshops which strive to make them appeal to big money. The sad result of our cultural crisis is that we have lost any moorings by which to judge what is worthwhile or not, what work is meaningful, what traditions we grow out of and what shared values we work toward. The only sanctioned shared-value in America is profit, and if that value-over-all-else makes us as nervous as it deserves to, we feel adrift within the increasingly benighted culture of our own nation.
You’ve hit the nail on the head, in terms of the larger picture, when you point out that most Americans aren’t even aware of the problem — and I think this is true not just in the arts but in the larger arena of “what kind of America” we are living in. As I posted somewhere else earlier today (in response to an article about Wisconsin), it’s as though we are currently in a temporarily nonviolent civil war between those who believe government should do nothing but grease the wheels of big banks and multinational corporations vs. those who believe that government should actually provide social services, safety nets, child care, health care and a sense of overall citizen and consumer protection for the average person.
Sadly, there is an enormous number of Americans who have bought into 30 years of a Republican-driven corporate message that government shouldn’t do anything but help the rich. They have been seduced by buzzwords like “entitlements” and other mischaracterizations of the citizen-oriented goals of a compassionate and functioning government into thinking they are reinforcing their own individual freedoms by supporting candidates and political movements who have wholly hoodwinked them into electing exactly those politicians who seek to destroy the American system of “liberty and justice for all.” Why so many people can’t see through this corporatist scam is beyond my understanding, but there’s no denying that way too many Americans have exhibited a frightening blindness to realizing that, under the guise of “taking our country back,” they are handing it over to powerful interests who have no interest in giving individual poor and middle-class Americans any representation.
The “Citizens United” Supreme Court decision paved the way last year to a a new America where the highest bidder increasingly gets to buy the government he wants. And corporate interests will always have more money than even a large collective of actual grassroots citizenry, because the corporate side has a 30-year headstart in denying us a voice and economically disempowering us while gradually turning the government into a wholly-owned apparatus for streamlining their acquistion of wealth. Plus if there is any challenge to corporate hegemony that gains a foothold, those corporations and wealthy interests can pool together and either buy that person off or destroy the movement with decades of experience of propaganda and “marketing.” Thus a Senator like Russ Feingold, who could not be bought out as a representative, was systematically destroyed by a corporate-funded campaign to demonize him and, voila, we now have the Wisconsin we are seeing this year.
Ironically, this is a time when the right kind of arts, pointed and satirical, moving and honest or compassionate and community-building might help people to understand how they have lost their country to oligarchs and a cabal of large banks. But because a new generation has grown up with the trivial entertainment you point out (not to mention that people below a certain age have no memory of how banks used to give you a decent interest rate for saving with them, local institutions were geared toward customer service, or how politicians pre-Reagan were actually concerned with helping and appeasing their electorate — to the point where Richard Nixon seems like a triumphant progressive compared to our spineless, corporate-shill president currently), they are no longer looking for the nutrition that comes with investing yourself in longer forms and arts with ambition.
The Right has also been feeding the gullible a steady diet of anti-intellectualism, to train too many Americans to reject any cogent social criticism as “elite” and unAmerican. As a result, in order for a young person today to develop an interest in larger forms, abstract structures or even merely the patience to invest in absorbing creative work on its own terms, rather than as easily-digestible entertainment, that young person either has to have fairly intellectual parents or an unusual teacher or mentor in his or her life. We now live in a culture that systematically seeks to “punish” or at least ostracize those who can think, unless that thinking is tied to generating profits. The culture also weirdly turns Christianity and compassion on its head, as huge groups of supposed Christians have led a crusade against compassion for the less fortunate in this country.
The need to aspire for a higher calling in a creative life is not going to go away, because it’s an essential component of many of us who found ourselves with it, whether it’s a blessing or a curse. But with the passage of time, there is absolutely no question that America is turning into a place where creative aspirations that are not corporate-driven (or corporate-assisting) are not only not encouraged or funded, but often vilified and accused of elitism.
It’s a dangerous time in America, and my only vague hope is that the kind of shameless chicanery that is unfolding in Wisconsin might actually wake more people up to the true agenda of the rampant movement afoot dedicated to suppressing the rights and dignity of working people in this country. We’ve already lost America to big banks, multinational corporations and a veritable shadow government of moneyed interests. But if we also lose the soul and dignity of what it is to be Americans, we will wake up one day finding that, years after the fall of the Soviet Union, we are living in a strangely circumscribed Gulag made in the image of “democracy” and “freedom.” If the concerted lying agenda of the corporate conservative movement gets any more successful in this country, we may yet have to follow the lead of Egypt and take to the streets to re-establish the principles that most of us grew up with in that strangely distant America which existed before Reagan took office.
You have really said a great deal above, Tom, which is precisely true, frighteningly true, and needs to be heard. I urge you to submit this essay of yours to Huffington Post, or Slate, or some other forum for ideas.
Hi Mike,
Thanks for your comments. To be honest, I have no idea how to submit to Huffington Post or Slate or high-powered sites like that. If you have a tip let me know. In the meantime, we will see if Twitter or other such distributions sites link here or ping back. PS – You response is pretty thorough as well! -twl
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Dennis Baker, Michael Seel. Michael Seel said: MT @dennisbaker: MUST READ: post by @apoorplayer demonstrating how events like Wisc show we have already lost. http://bit.ly/icgSt5 #LAThtr [...]
I’ve been having a hard time with this argument for a long time. Shakespeare created art, we say in retrospect. At the time, I think he was much more focused on providing entertainment. Hence, the Globe. Hence, cheap seats on the stage. Sophocles was trying to entertain. If you’re of the opinion that Gilbert & Sullivan, Sondheim, or Weber and Rice are “high art”, then I don’t know how to approach an understanding. Heck, the term “Broadway” comes from Vaudeville (entertainment, not art) and unions (workers, more than artists).
The argument that it’s hard for an artist to make a living making art is a silly one, from my perspective. I make art, and don’t expect audiences. If I expect audiences, I create entertainment. Worked for Michelangelo. Works for me. If I want to create art, I don’t expect to get out of a 35-seat black box theater. If I want to make a living at it, my ambition turns toward Broadway, where entertainment is king. And I expect to need to join a union, because investors in entertainment have proven again and again that they’re not concerned with the rights of workers. Of course they’re not concerned with high art. If high art and a living is the goal – get a Medici and stop whinging about the “average American”.
Art for art’s sake has never been a reasonable way to make a living without patrons. And patrons have rarely “understood” the art – they patronize, and that’s a concession artists are willing to make so they can make art for themselves. If the audience matters, it’s entertainment, not art. Right? Isn’t that the point and counterpoint you’ve made above? American Idol isn’t art, because it’s for the masses. Give them what they want. If they didn’t want it, they wouldn’t tune in. Ben Stiller proved that with his talk show.
It’s a silly premise that art has suffered because its standards have lowered to the common denominator. Art still exists, but it’s never been a living when it dealt with the hoi polloi. That’s the nature of the beast. But more relevantly, the concept of art as opposed to entertainment is a very modern one. Art isn’t about the audience. If that audience is massive, or only the artist him/herself, it’s still art – because of the intention that went into creating it.
Art hasn’t died. If it did, there would be no entertainment, which is typically derivative of art. But art without patronage has never been a viable living. Ask Van Gogh, Eiffel, Gehry, Shepard, Ibsen, Feiffer, Vonnegut, Hugo, Da Vinci, Moliére, Warhol, Sophocles, and every name you can come up with, regardless of discipline. You don’t like the entertainment options available. OK, you’re special. You don’t want to suck the corporate teat. OK, you’re going to have to find another way to make a living. If you’re bothered that you may need a day job, then you have absolutely no connection with the Average American.
With every Medici check that was cashed, each artist at the time either felt like they were making a living, or they were selling out. Which perspective was correct? Centuries later, I’m loathe to call them sell-outs.
Dave, I can’t really argue with your point, which is essentially “Art is created for ourselves, entertainment for others and for profit.” But the concept of art-being-valuable-to-a-society has been gradually eroding in a culture which tends to reinforce that profitability is the only value. One of the things that keeps certain types of art vital in a national community is the teaching of art to the young, familiarizing them with the traditions and disciplines of music, dance, visual arts and theater, even though those values are not necessarily related to a profit motive.
I do think that there will always be people who deeply value art over mere entertainment. Some certain minority of the populace will always seek out art for a deeper kind of nourishment to the spirit. Apparently it’s a drive deep within the archetypal aspects of the human condition, so I doubt that we will ever completely run out of audiences for personal creative work informed and driven by aesthetics.
As far as today’s entertainment being tomorrow’s art, that is nowhere more true than in the film industry, where (despite lots of crap being released all the time), sometimes the most effective achievements of universal storytelling are successfully told, in ways that qualify as art via every possible criteria. I also think that a lot of straight theater (i.e.: nonmusical theater) still achieves a good percentage of the requirements of true Art.
I’m not against entertainment, because a society needs that too. But I do agree with Tom that something like the Spiderman musical seems to embody a kind of apotheosis of the potential banality of a Broadway in which brand names and spectacle trump story or content and in which actors are put enormously at risk for something that seems a totally emptyheaded piece of theater.
Sophocles didn’t create art to entertain. Sophocles created arts as part of a government-subsidized religious festival with socio-political overtones. The medieval mystery plays were not created to entertain, but to provide a religious celebration that strengthened communities. There are a lot of theatre people in the past who were businessmen, so it isn’t necessary to portray a history that wasn’t. Shakespeare was an entertainer, but he didn’t make his money from being a playwright — he made it from being a shareholder in the company and being an owner of the Globe stage. The problem contemporary artists have is that they don’t look back at theatre history to see that narrowly specialized artists are a contemporary and not altogether successful invention. Yes, Leonard da Vinci was a painter — but he also was an inventor and, if I remember correctly, had something to do with designing armaments. Let’s look back at the history of the arts with a little more accuracy — there are plenty of things to learn there.
Hard Rain by Tony Hoagland
After I heard It’s a Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
played softly by an accordion quartet
through the ceiling speakers at the Springdale Shopping Mall,
I understood there’s nothing
we can’t pluck the stinger from,
nothing we can’t turn into a soft drink flavor or a t-shirt.
Even serenity can become something horrible
if you make a commercial about it
using smiling, white-haired people
quoting Thoreau to sell retirement homes
in the Everglades, where the swamp has been
drained and bulldozed into a nineteen-hole golf course
with electrified alligator barriers.
You can’t keep beating yourself up, Billy
I heard the therapist say on television
to the teenage murderer,
About all those people you killed—
You just have to be the best person you can be,
one day at a time—
and everybody in the audience claps and weeps a little,
because the level of deep feeling has been touched,
and they want to believe that
the power of Forgiveness is greater
than the power of Consequence, or History.
Dear Abby:
My father is a businessman who travels.
Each time he returns from one of his trips,
his shoes and trousers
are covered with blood-
but he never forgets to bring me a nice present;
Should I say something?
Signed, America.
I used to think I was not part of this,
that I could mind my own business and get along,
but that was just another song
that had been taught to me since birth—
whose words I was humming under my breath,
as I was walking through the Springdale Mall.