The Advantage of Controversy: Angels in America and Campus Culture Wars

The Advantage of Controversy Angels in America and Campus Culture Wars James Fisher In an essay in the Nation called “Fighting the Art Bullies,” a response to controversy over the premiere production of Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi at the Manhattan Theatre Club, Pulitzer Prize–winning dramatist Tony Kushner nails it. He wonders, “Would a God who gave us powers of creation, curiosity and love then command us to avoid the ideas and art these powers produce?”1 The response of any reasonable person is no, of course, even though the censorious, mostly on the political right, seem to think otherwise. As Kushner explains , they are apparently “too shallow and too fragile to encounter any interrogatory spirit,” and the war against art in the name of God, decency, and civic stability that they are waging “isn’t decent; it’s thuggish , its unconstitutional, undemocratic and deeply unwise.”2 Hardly a week has passed in the last two decades without media reports on yet another arts controversy. Supporters of free expression in a democratic society point to the inevitable progress and human growth inherent in challenging works of art, while worrying, often appropriately so, that carefully orchestrated attacks in the name of morality could have a permanent impact on the ability to create. Pat Buchanan’s 1992 assertion that a seismic struggle is in progress for “the soul of America . . . a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself” was certainly prophetic, but it is a struggle that I believe is not ending as Buchanan envisioned.3 How did this culture war begin? Was it a product of the Reagan era? Or did it truly begin with Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, a 1987 best seller in which Bloom asserts that “[c]ulture means a war against chaos and a war against other cultures.”4 Conservatives like Buchanan and Bloom are ¤xated on a vision of a once ho- mogeneous past (real or imagined) and deny that society is in a continual unstoppable process of change. Buchanan, Bloom, and their followers condemn the presentation of what they refer to as “deviant” or noncanonical texts and art; they claim, as Lawrence W. Levine explains in The Opening of the American Mind, Levine’s counterattack on Bloom, to control a monopoly on the canon.5 Artists, like academics, are rightly in the business of attempting to understand and depict cultural evolution and the progress toward a more democratic, more diverse social fabric; taking strong and controversial positions is, in fact, a well-worn tradition for artists and scholars— and it is a tradition to be defended at all costs. When the overheated hyperbole of the censorious condemns artists and scholars as immoral or as leading a war of aggression against Western culture, they merely underscore that changes are, in fact, occurring and will inevitably reshape the American moral and intellectual landscape. The fear of change—which to the censorious means a loss of control and power over society—has led to organized, well-funded assaults on selected artists and academics presenting or teaching controversial works. The result has inspired genuine threats to everything from the survival of the National Endowment of the Arts to freedom of speech on college campuses. Jane Alexander, former chairperson of the NEA during its struggle for survival, suggests that controversy is the price paid for democracy .6 If Alexander is right, and I think she is, artists are paying much of the price and will, I suspect, continue to bear the costs of vitriolic and increasingly desperate attacks. I learned about all of this from personal experience. In 1995 I found myself caught up in a culture wars skirmish that has caused me to consider both the constructive and destructive aspects of controversy to moral debate. Choosing to stage Millennium Approaches, the ¤rst play of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, at Wabash College, a small (825 students), all-male, liberal arts college in a rural midwestern town in a decidedly red state, may suggest that on some level I was courting controversy , but I went into this experience with no idea...