The Tip of the Iceberg: Creativity and Repression in the U.S.

The Tip of the Iceberg Creativityand Repression in the US Leonardo Shapiro This continent is haunted by the ghosts of the cultures, peoples and animalswho lived here when the Europeans(now "Americans")arrived. They are in the trees and lakes and rivers. They speak to us with the voices of the birdsand animals. We pretend there are no ghosts. We are realistic.To insure the triumph of realism,we cut down the trees,poison the lakes, dam the rivers, exterminate the animals, tar the birds. We do notbelieve in spirit,we believe in money. We arescaredof nature,women and art. We don't want to look at the world outside store windows. BECAUSE OF CONGRESS' recent retrenchment on freedom of expression some attention is finally being paid to the arts in this country. Perhaps the end of the Cold War, the shifting alliances in Europe and the strengthening of the United Nations will finally shake America out of its narcissistic isolationism and open us up to seeing ourselves as one among many world cultures; we may even start to become aware of the superficiality and cruelty of our popular culture and its dependence on commercial imagery. Unfortunately, the writing I have seen so far about the NEA has been reactive and narrowly focused, either celebrating or attacking the initiatives and agenda set by the radical right. The compromise reauthorization bill extending the NEA for three years at slightly reduced levels with "moderate" restrictions is meant to be seen as a triumph of common sense over extremism. Only a few in the arts community have had the courage and clarity, (thank you Joe Papp!), to stand up and reveal the duplicity of the newly centralized ministry of culture. 25 Why must we continue to play their stupid game? Granted they own the ball and bat, but we've got the players, the creativity and imagination. What we need is the intelligence and courage to use them. I believe the time has come to review the NEA question-not from the point of view of how to justify censorship, or split hairs between censorship and funding, or divide the more marginalized from the less marginalized-but from the point of view of what the NEA should be, what we could be, and why it matters. NEA and Culture Is America a nation without a soul? Why don't we have a functioning culture-ora web of cultures-anetwork of stories,dramasandrituals through which we discover the human values andaspirationsthat make us valuable to each other-a cultural language that honors and celebrates our life together? As a society we have no clear non-governmental or non-competitive view of our relationship to each other, no non-military or non-marketplace view of our relationship to the rest of the world. We have no vision of the future and little grasp of the past. We don't know who we are or who we want to be. We know how much we make and what we can get for it. We know what we want and what it costs. We don't know why we want it or what to do with it once we've got it. Without a meaningful cultural or religious heritage, we pay exaggerated attention to anyone who seems to stand for human values, however antiquated. That's where Helms and the fundamentalists, evangelists and the Reagan Right come in. They know what's wrong (we all know what's wrong), and they know what's right: Father knows best. But the values represented by Helms and company, however appropriate they might have been to late eighteenth-century farm life, are useless to most Americans today. We are an experimental society. More and more of us are living alone in cities, without extended family or kinship structures . We have to create cultural institutions, traditions, rituals, and symbolic vocabularies to help construct meaning and interconnection for life as we are living it. TV is the glue that holds us together, but it is a substitute culture, manufactured for us by our keepers. It has the same relationship to real culture that the sanitized "environments" in modern zoos have to natural...