Obama, the NEA and Artists: Artists need to learn history or it will repeat itself

I look out my window and everything looks normal. I drive around or play with my kids and everything is still normal. I watch my local news, again, nothing unusual. But then I go online or read the Wall Street Journal and know everything is not normal. And watching Glenn Beck reminds me that not only are things not normal, they’re out of control. At least for anyone who wants to preserve this republic and our freedom.

Tonight after Glenn Beck delivered even more documentation of what a radical psycho Obama advisor Van Jones happens to be, he spoke to Patrick Courrielche (videos below) who writes for Big Hollywood. The topic was a conference call with the National Endowment of the Arts that Corrielche sat in on and recorded. He wrote about the call at Big Hollywood not long ago.

On Thursday August 6th, I was invited by the National Endowment for the Arts to attend a conference call scheduled for Monday August 10th hosted by the NEA, the White House Office of Public Engagement, and United We Serve. The call would include “a group of artists, producers, promoters, organizers, influencers, marketers, taste-makers, leaders or just plain cool people to join together and work together to promote a more civically engaged America and celebrate how the arts can be used for a positive change!”

I learned after the conference call that there were approximately 75 people participating, including many well respected street-artists, filmmakers, art galleries, music venues, musicians and music producers, writers, poets, actors, independent media outlets, marketers, and various other professionals from the creative community. I suppose I was invited because of my work in creating arts initiatives, but being a former employer of the NEA’s Director of Communications was probably a factor as well.

Backed by the full weight of President Barack Obama’s call to service and the institutional weight of the NEA, the conference call was billed as an opportunity for those in the art community to inspire service in four key categories, and at the top of the list were “health care” and “energy and environment.” The service was to be attached to the President’s United We Serve campaign, a nationwide federal initiative to make service a way of life for all Americans.

It sounded, how should I phrase it…unusual, that the NEA would invite the art community to a meeting to discuss issues currently under vehement national debate. I decided to call in, and what I heard concerned me.

The people running the conference call and rallying the group to get active on these issues were Yosi Sergant, the Director of Communications for the National Endowment for the Arts; Buffy Wicks, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement; Nell Abernathy, Director of Outreach for United We Serve; Thomas Bates, Vice President of Civic Engagement for Rock the Vote; and Michael Skolnik, Political Director for Russell Simmons.

We were encouraged to bring the same sense of enthusiasm to these “focus areas” as we had brought to Obama’s presidential campaign, and we were encouraged to create art and art initiatives that brought awareness to these issues. Throughout the conversation, we were reminded of our ability as artists and art professionals to “shape the lives” of those around us. The now famous Obama “Hope” poster, created by artist Shepard Fairey and promoted by many of those on the phone call, and will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” song and music video were presented as shining examples of our group’s clear role in the election.

Obama has a strong arts agenda, we were told, and has been very supportive of both using and supporting the arts in creative ways to talk about the issues facing the country. We were “selected for a reason,” they told us. We had played a key role in the election and now Obama was putting out the call of service to help create change. We knew “how to make a stink,” and were encouraged to do so.

Throughout the conversation my inner dialogue was firing away questions so fast that the NRA would’ve been envious. Is this truly the role of the NEA? Is building a message distribution network, for matters other than increasing access to the arts and arts education, the role of the National Endowment for the Arts? Is providing the art community issues to address, especially those that are currently being vehemently debated nationally, a legitimate role for the NEA? I found it highly unlikely that this was in their original charter, so I checked.

The NEA published a book entitled National Endowment for the Arts: A History 1965-2008 early this year. Combing through the 40+ year history of the NEA, I could not find a single instance of the agency creating or supporting a national initiative that encouraged the art community to address current issues under contentious debate.

The NEA was created by the Congress of the United States and President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 as “a public agency dedicated to supporting excellence in the arts, both new and established; bringing the arts to all Americans; and providing leadership in arts education.” The issue of health care is curiously absent from this description on their website.

There’s much more to the story and I encourage you to follow the link above so you can read the whole article. It’s very enlightening.

This brings to mind something I read a few weeks ago. My local paper surprisingly published an op-ed praising Budd Schulberg, who recently died, for his heroism. Schulberg was a novelist and screenwriter who testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951. He was a liberal who committed the ultimate sin against his fellow liberals: he named names. Apparently he wasn’t forgiven even upon his death by the left. But as the op-ed writer, John Meroney points out, there was much more to the story.

“Naming names” was the least significant aspect of what Schulberg said at the witness table on that spring day in 1951. Going after individuals was not the point or the focus of his testimony, nor was it what dominated the news reports at the time. (In fact, those who were named as party members in the course of his testimony were for the most part already known.)

Instead, the key message from the vivid story he told was how aggressively communism was at war with individual creativity — and how the last thing a true writer, liberal or labor man would want to be is a communist.

Schulberg, who joined the Communist Party in the mid-1930s, learned this truth the hard way when party operatives castigated him for not clearing his writing with them. They bedeviled him for writing stories that were considered destructive to Soviet ideology. So, late one night, he had declared to a comrade, “I’m out.” As Schulberg told the congressional committee, “I felt I had to get away from control if I were to write at all.”

He was also running from a shameful discovery about writers and artists in the Soviet Union, where he had traveled in 1934 when he still idealistically believed communism had the solutions to unemployment and fascism. Initially encouraged by what on the surface appeared to be a flourishing of freedom for Russian artists — “a new silver age of writing,” he called it in his testimony — Schulberg was stunned to learn that by 1937, “every one of those writers had been shot or silenced” for not adhering to the party line.

Decades later, Schulberg would still talk openly about the Communist Party and how he saw it seize lives in Hollywood. “The discipline of the party took over and remade the person,” he said in a 2000 interview in the Paris Review. “The Stalinist influence was so pervasive that, subconsciously, people would model themselves after Stalin. People spoke in that ridiculous syntax of Stalin’s, asking a question and then answering the question, the most boring kind of syntax in the world.”

“Today’s liberals,” he added, “talk about the communists almost romantically, as if they were just the rebels of their time, like the hippies of the 1960s.”

It looks like history is repeating itself. Only this time we aren’t allowed to call them communists or socialists. How does statists sound? Collectivists works just as well.

Below are videos from Glenn Beck’s show tonight. He exposes the communists in our government today. Budd Schulberg would be proud of Beck. Regardless of a boycott, Beck continues to speak out. And anyone brave enough to advertise on his show will get a lot of bang for the buck since his ratings are through the roof. Something about the truth seems to catch people’s attention, especially when the truth is in such short supply. It’s worth the time to watch all four videos.

In this video Glenn Beck brings you the words of Van Jones, from March of this year! He didn’t have to dig that far back to find that Van Jones is a radical communist. And he’s not the only one.

The next videos are Beck’s discussion with Patrick Corrielche about the NEA.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 at 8:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.