1. Beware the justice of Nature.
2. Understand that there can be no successful human economy apart from Nature or in defiance of Nature.
3. Understand that no amount of education can overcome the innate limits of human intelligence and responsibility. We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale.
4. In making things always bigger and more centralized, we make them both more vulnerable in themselves and more dangerous to everything else. Learn, therefore, to prefer small-scale elegance and generosity to large-scale greed, crudity, and glamour.
5. Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made.
6. Put the interest of the community first.
7. Love your neighbors–not the neighbors you pick out, but the ones you have.
8. Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us.
9. As far as you are able make your lives dependent upon your local place, neighborhood, and household–which thrive by care and generosity–and independent of the industrial economy, which thrives by damage.
10. Find work, if you can, that does no damage. Enjoy your work. Work well.

Discovered via Scott Walters.

Hello world! I’m pissed.

Today a Senate panel rejected both proposals for a public option for health care.

As they did so, you could hear the health care industry breathe a collective sigh of perverted relief. It puts those douchebags one step closer to keeping their current business model: providing health care only for the healthy.

Because you know what? No health company will ever make money off my wife. Why? It’s not because she’s made herself unhealthy. She takes excellent care of herself. She exercises regularly. Eats right. Sees a doctor. She does everything right, and has for a long time. But for mysterious reasons no one understands, as a teenager her body stopped producing insulin. And because her body can’t do it for her anymore, she must cut her body open every day to test her blood and then inject an appropriate amount of artificially generated insulin. She does this many times a day, every day. Has done for years. And will do it for, most likely, the rest of her life. It’s not a perfect system, but it lets her live relatively normally. Without modern medicine she would have died long ago.

No company can make money off my wife’s health. Insulin, test strips, needles, insulin pumps, pump supplies, and doctor visits: they cost a lot of fucking money. And a pure free market system will leave her to die.

I mean, let’s not fucking beat around the bush here, right? I know they will leave her to die because I called them and asked. Two years ago I was trying to start working for myself full time. Tried and, initially, failed. Because there exists no private health coverage for someone with type 1 diabetes. After several calls, one nice lady was at least honest enough to put it bluntly: “Honey, no one is going to sell you a plan. No one.”

Shall I pull out that old political phrase everyone likes to use? Shall I? Shall I at least put some English on it? Sure thing. Can do. Here you go:

LET’S BE FUCKING CLEAR.

The free market would kill my wife. And the point of a public health option is that, presumably, we think my wife might actually be a nice person to have around. You don’t even have to love her to think that. She’s a highly educated, productive citizen, and a registered nurse. She works every day to save and care for the lives of others. She’s pretty fucking handy to have around.

When we’re talking about health care, we’re talking about a problem that the free market can’t solve. Can’t do it. Sorry. Can’t.

Do I think the public option is the only solution? No. Thank god, no. We could, for example, set some better ground rules for the private market. We could say:

1. You have to accept everyone who applies.
2. You have to offer your plans across the entire country.

Or something like that. The point is that those of us who are healthy need to shoulder some of the cost for those of us who are sick. And to all you pure-blooded libertarians out there I say: pack yourself a backpack, move to an unclaimed island, and best of fucking luck to you.

We need to fix health care. I love me my conservative friends, and, seriously, I genuinely respect your discomfort with a large government program. But. The government has got to get involved here. Somehow. The free market doesn’t cut it this time. And if you guys stand for nothing but tweaking the current system, I am telling you now: I take that very, very, personally. And it is not okay.

P.S.: By the way, I was eventually able to start working for myself full time. The result? My company saw massive growth and hired during the recession. It would have been nice to contribute that productivity to the American economy earlier, but hey, I wouldn’t want to get in the way of the profits of the fucking health care companies.

We’re not all a bunch of dirty hippies out here in the arts world. I know that. There are conservatives, libertarians, LaRouchites in the arts world. So, maybe, your political philosophy is that the government shouldn’t be involved in the arts. [...] The thing I hate the most about the conservatives in the arts is their cowardice. I know it seems like you’re outnumbered and that’s a sucky place to be. Ask any liberal how it feels to be different. But stand up for your fucking selves and speak up. I make no bones about about a dyed-in-the-wool liberal and I know it shows up in my work. I’m okay with that. It drives me crazy that the conservatives in our community hide what they think and believe, hide behind a facade. If you think that government involvement in the arts is bad, then say so. Upfront.

Well, see, here’s an odd thing. By most measures, I’m an undoubted liberal. At my former place of employment, my coworkers regularly (but, I like to think, affectionately) called me the “dirty hippie”. It was practically my title.

The thing is: I think that government involvement in the arts is bad.

I’ve mentioned this in the context of other arguments, but it’s worth stating more directly: I think fighting for the NEA is probably the wrong fight. I think government support for the arts is, under most circumstances, a bad idea.

The reason boils down to this:

The arts are not necessary.

Yeah, I went there: Not necessary. Water? Necessary. Food? Necessary. Medical care when we’re sick? Necessary. Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck? Not necessary. Awesome play, but not necessary.

At least, not necessary in a way that anyone has ever been able to make clear. Even when really smart people try really hard, the most they can say is that the arts might provide some instrumental benefits sorta kinda like other things that probably do the job better, but we’re not really sure.

Most of my life I’ve wanted the arts to be necessary. I had it in my little American heart that, since all necessary things are also worthwhile, all worthwhile things must also be necessary. That’s a big mistake. For deeply worthwhile human activity (like the arts), it obligates one to build arguments that may not be true, in order to prove the connection back to “necessary”. At the very least, it puts you in the unforgiving position of pitting the necessity of the arts against the necessity of, say, roads.

Here’s the breakdown as I see it:

It’s obviously an idealization, as it shows the government doing only necessary, worthwhile things. Chuckle chuckle. But this is why I think the government’s role in the arts should be relatively small, to the tune of that little red rectangle up there. It is super hard to argue that government should be traipsing off into “worthwhile but unnecessary” territory, when there is so much necessary territory left unmet. It’s more than super hard; it’s a bad idea.

These conclusions are, for me, a recent development. I’ve only come to them in the last six months or so. In some ways it was a scary jump. But the result was both liberating and, unexpectedly, empowering. Liberating because suddenly I have no obligation to trace a torturous path back from “the arts are incredibly important” to “the arts are incredibly necessary”. The former can be true without the latter, and boy does it feel good to drop the dead weight of trying to prove the latter.

The result was also empowering, because necessity carries a price: the price of inevitability. A necessary act is an inevitable one. You will eat today because you must eat today. You will sleep tonight because you must sleep tonight. Necessary means inescapable, and inescapable means the universe is imposing itself on you.

But art! Oh, but precious, unnecessary art! It is escapable, and that is was makes it so special. If you sing today, it is not because you had to sing. If you dance today, you did not have to dance. You have the power to impose on the universe. You may do the unnecessary. That’s where things get human, and that, in an ironic way, is where things start to matter the most: right past the line where I’m comfortable arguing for government funding.

The ensuing conversation is great fun to read, although a little difficult to follow; coherency suffers in the age of aggregated essays. Clarity also suffers: “Is this sentence addressed to me? To a different blog? To a previous comment?”

I have to say, though, that compared to other aggregators this discussion on MetaFilter has a downright respectable signal-to-noise ratio. The thread is full of good comments, but I was especially curious to find the critiques. One of them that caught my attention was from Alexandra Nelson. Not all of her comments are directed at me, but some of them are, and they’re the valuable kind that make me a little uncomfortable with what I’ve written. (Discomfort: the sure sign that someone is making a point that matters.)

Xan takes me to task as follows:

You cannot find a poorly written grant proposal and then use it to condemn an entire industry. Every single grantwriter worth her salt knows that “It’s not about me.” That’s grant writing 101. The people writing the navel-gazing proposals are not getting the grants, because the philanthropic community also knows that.

Is the proposal I focused on particularly poor? Sure. But is it particularly unique? I’d say no. It is unique only in the clarity and severity of its shortcomings, not in the fact that it exists. It was easy enough for me to cite four other proposals infused with fragments of the same core problems in the space of two sentences, and I stopped there because there didn’t seem much reason to belabor the point. These weren’t all proposals culled from the hidden cracks of the artistic landscape, they’re samples of a national dialog. Proposals found in Newsweek are not, unfortunately, just a case of “bad development directors whin[ing] on poorly written blogs”. It’s an interesting point that the grant-writers themselves, if they are to be successful, will be the least vulnerable to these notions. But the cultural conversation is not, apparently, dominated by the enlightened grant-writers.

If I have insulted the innocent by lobbing the “self-centered” label at an industry that is not entirely self-centered, it’s because I see enough of it blabbing in a self-centered way to make me feel the spillover can be excused.

In a later comment Xan says:

Artists have been asked to save public education, rehabilitate prisoners, stop drug abuse, revitalise the cities and for all I know, fill potholes. So many funders, public and private alike, insist that the art itself must pay for itself, and that social uses of the arts are the only acceptable uses of public or tax-supported dollars. There needs to be some understanding that while these very worthwhile uses of the arts do not happen without artists who are trained to be artists, and who are willing to accept low salaries and lousy hours. But you have to train the artists. [...] The artist will work for love (up to a point), which is great for those who want them to do prison reform. But you’ve got to pay for them to be artists, too.

And after that:

The contortion that the business model pulls us into, is convincing the source of 20 to 40% of a our revenues, the donors and foundations, that there is a larger societal good from putting this on a stage (in a gallery, wherever art happens). I think this is one of the places where [Chris Ashworth] goes wrong. The policy value of the arts can be exactly a good reason why “it’s not about me.”

With due respect (and I mean that), I don’t think Xan read my post through to the end. All of this is a reasonable defense of tax-funded art—even tax-funded art created for its own sake. But it assumes the premise that the arts are a particularly good way to accomplish all these things. That they are directly, evidently, and uniquely essential to a healthy human community in a way comparable to other government services. My explicit argument in the post Xan objects to is that that’s a really hard argument to make¹. That doesn’t necessarily mean I think it’s false, it just means I think that right now, in America, that argument is poorly supported in the public discourse. It is axiomatic in the minds of artists, worthy of deep suspicion in the minds of non-artists, and is for that reason a kind of self-centeredness on the part of the artists who refuse to allow for the possibility that the axiom may be poison.

Public funding for the arts may be a morally and practically supportable function of government. It may not. But if we’re not convincing big swaths of our country about the value of, say, the NEA, I’d much rather we spend the energy on other important things, because it’s getting between us and the community we’re trying to animate. Which is to say it’s getting between us and ourselves.

1. I figure I can confidently assume that Xan has successfully made some of those arguments in her 30 years in the indusrty, and as such has been a force for good in her community. To that I would say: awesome, well done.

Welcome to the Recession, I’ll be your Impending Sense of Doom for the evening.

In a year of deep financial crisis the theater community—never far from financial crisis even in healthy years—has understandably begun to fret. They nervously remember the banker’s gift that funded half their season last year, they stare unhappily at their empty seats, they witness the food-stamp existence of their workers, and they’re scared¹. Then they look at Congress passing a bill to pump 790,000,000,000 ever-loving dollars² into the American economy, of which a measly 50 million went to the NEA after the Democrats managed to hold off the art-hating Republicans (causing the art world to hold their collective breath until the “win” could be confirmed), and they think to themselves (and I paraphrase here): Holy shit. We’re screwed.

When the going gets tough, the tough write public policy proposals.

It’s ever the duty of a citizen to participate in their republic, but it sure as hell doesn’t hurt to have 790 billion dollars on the table to encourage you.

For the theater community, that means we start talking very seriously about how much the arts are underfunded. And in a new age of The Change We Need, we get fired up to make it happen. Witness, for example: The New New Deal, Part 2 – A New WPA for Artists: How and Why, wherein Arlene Goldbard makes her case for funding culture on the tax-payer’s dime. And Arlene isn’t alone. Calls for government investment in the arts are popping up all over. Some with celebrity endorsements.

Here’s the problem: They all suck.

Artists Dig Themselves

Why do these proposals suck? Let’s look briefly at Goldbard’s proposal, “A New WPA for Artists: How and Why”. Almost everything you need to know about why that proposal sucks is in the title: A) it’s a proposal for the artists, and B) why comes after how.

Skim through the first half of this proposal and you’ll see things like:

“Including artists in the stimulus bill.”

“One percent for artists. [...] a petition calling on Congress to dedicate one percent of the stimulus package to support artists [...]

“Ballparking this at $50,000 per artist per year for stipend and associated costs, $125 million would support 2,500 artists.”

If you’re looking to sound tone-deaf and self-centered, hey, you win. If you’re looking to make a case for cultural investment in American society, please present this proposal to an American who may or may not know any actual artists, and may or may not have enough money to heat her home this winter, and let’s just see how that goes over.

The second half tries to answer “why” and claims to give “strong public policy arguments” for why the government should spend big bucks on art. The first one starts like this:

1. Things are changing in a way that elevates culture’s role. We are on the cusp between two cultural eras. The old system treats everything like so much material that can be weighed, measured, assigned a number and dismissed. The new system is grounded in…

At which point I stop reading because I want to shoot myself. She gives nine multi-paragraph public policy arguments, and they’re all about that good.

I’m Aiming for A Constructive Point Here, but Not Quite Yet

The fact that these proposals are self-centered and ineffective isn’t news. The theatrical community itself has started to point it out. Tony Adams said it nicely and Scott Walters puts it even better. They observe: don’t make this about the artists, make it about the people the arts will serve. The people who are, incidentally, funding the damn thing.

That’s fine as far as it goes. But I want to push even farther than that. I want us to seriously consider: should the arts get public funding at all?

A Digression: “No Wait, I Actually Love Theater I Promise”

I am a stakeholder in the arts. My livelihood is built upon them. I don’t eat without a healthy theater scene. And it’s more than that: Theater is the closest thing this atheist has to a church. (A truth which cannot be quickly summarized so I’ll leave it for another day.)

So Why Such a Hata?

I care about this because I want our culture to value depth and breadth in our arts. I want more people going to theater. And I think that appealing for public arts funding may not only be morally questionable, but may also be counterproductive.

Back to the Arguments At Hand

At the core of these appeals to fund art with taxes is, almost invariably, the simple belief that the arts deserve public funding. Nearly every conversation between two artists accepts this premise. Sometimes it is explicitly asserted, but often it’s just the accepted wisdom. It is a conviction of the deepest kind.

Why would artists commonly share this conviction? Because artists are, almost by definition, those who have directly experienced the power of art. Therefore they jump to the more expansive premise: “the arts are essential to a healthy human community, and therefore deserve public funding”.

The idea that the arts are essential can take different forms. The most common form I’ve seen is where arts are equated with education:

[...] if it’s public funding for the performance of the arts, or their exhibition, or education about them—if it’s public funding for the arts audience, who can disapprove? Except in the deepest reaches of the glibertarian right, we’re beyond debating whether education should be publicly funded, and making arts displays and performances available to the widest possible audience is simply public education on a grand scale.

— The Nonprofiteer: Second (and third) thoughts about public funding for the arts

I happen to agree about publicly funding education³, but the leap from “everyone loves funding education!” to “everyone will love funding Alvin Ailey tours!” is an awkward lunge from point A to point B. Theater and dance are not education. Theater and dance can bring important and unique elements to educational programs, and to be clear I consider truly educational arts programs to be a separate category in this whole discussion. But I simply do not buy that “art” is just another name for “education”. It’s not, and it does both these important human endeavors a disservice to smoosh them together into a muddy goo in the name of public funding.

After we discard the education argument, laying claim to “essential” gets difficult. The utilitarian arguments ring hollow⁴, and the spiritual ones are closer to the point but give us very loose ground on which to build public policy.

Perspective

Go find a nurse and ask her about her day. Or go read “Mountains Beyond Mountains“. Or go have a chat with a social worker advising single mothers, or a middle school teacher trying to teach students who can’t read. Then come tell me our new president should spend a million dollars on dance tours instead of any of those other things. That’s not just a tough argument to make, it’s a ridiculous argument. But we in the arts community not only make that argument, we feel we’re being ignobly and ignorantly snubbed when a teacher or a police officer or a nurse tells us to stuff it.

I spend my days wondering how people I know and work with in the theatre are surprised that the rest of America doesn’t care about them.

— A close friend who is completing an MFA/MBA in theater management at the Yale School of Drama and Yale School of Management

Theater is not central to our culture. I wish it was, but it’s not. The relationship theater forges with society must be aware of that fact. With the exception of a few rebellious voices, the conversation in the theater community today is dangerously out of touch. Our schools peddle MFA degrees without acknowledging their true worth. Our artists lose touch with the rest of the world and instead of re-investing in a relationship with a community they want to serve, they spoil for fights they can’t win on the merits of poor arguments. And in the process, they leave the rest of the world with a bitter taste of their own self-importance.

It’s Worth Doing This The Right Way

I’m not stupid. I know I’m taking a risk in saying these things. We’re at a vulnerable moment. Not all of our institutions will make it through the fire. We’ve watched multiple theaters reach the brink of insolvency in the last few weeks. For me to argue against the funds that could save them is, to put it mildly, not in my self interest. But I’m doing it out of the fervent belief that theater and the arts are important and are worth fighting for, and I’m more scared that if we do it like boneheads we’ll be worse off than we were before.

So what’s the right way?

Jeez, I make no claims about being that smart. But I’ll take a stab, since I promised to be constructive.

The first step is to spend some time getting away from the bubble. To hear how our own voices sound to the rest of the world, and to make an honest assessment of our current role in the cultural conversation. You’ll flop if you don’t understand your audience, right?

The next step is to be adults, and engage in the broader conversation about the breadth of our society, not just our myopic piece of it. When we do that, we start to notice interesting things:

If [Obama's] health-care plan gets enacted in anything like its current form, it’ll be the government’s greatest gift to culture in a generation.

— Newsweek: Obama and the Arts

“If Obama could create a program for universal health care—the effect on artists of that single change in their lives would release more creativity than any increase in NEA funding could ever do.”

— Scott Walters @ Theatre Ideas

Huh. There’s an idea already. Instead of fighting about NEA funding, why aren’t we all fighting even harder about health care? Yes, it’s a big problem, but it’s a big problem that matters to all of us. Imagine: artists might suddenly find themselves on the same team as the people they were previously battling. And the results of winning the new fight could be—probably would be—more important than the old fight.

What else can we find if we’re willing to deconstruct our assumptions? I don’t know. That’s what we need to figure out as a community. That’s what we desperately need to not avoid talking about. Will some of us get burned in this process? Yes. It’s already happening, and we can’t stop it. It sucks. We all know it sucks. But our system is feeble. It relies on trucking in New York talent, scoffs at any real connection with local communities, and churns out a bunch of moderately entertaining shows about which audiences need not feel much investment. We’ve set it up this way and we can’t prop it up indefinitely with old ideas. Take a cue from our new president: a moment like this is a time to think big, not small. A moment like this is a time for a huge investment for our long-term health. It’s time to build a new vision, and to beat a new path.

[1] I’ve met nationally known, award-winning, full-time playwrights who live their life without health insurance. And that was long before the current recession.

[2] That’s B7EFAB5C00 dollars in hexadecimal, in case you were wondering. Maybe the government should start reporting deficits in hex; it looks smaller that way.

[3] I also happen to have friends I respect who are deeply opposed to publicly funded education and can make an articulate argument against it. I strongly disagree with them, but I don’t dismiss them out of hand.

[4] As the great Clive James said: “The utilitarian view doesn’t work.”

This interview made me furious.

Here’s the thing: I used to be happy about the possibility of voting for either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. In January and early February, I listened to her in the debates and thought: “You know? Either way this goes, I’m thrilled.”

But then Obama racked up a commanding lead in delegates, states, and the popular vote, and the Clinton campaign got desperate. Desperate because Clinton would need 62% of the vote (it’s now increased to 64%) in every remaining contest to overcome Obama’s lead. And in their desperation, they shamelessly flipped the fear-monger switch.

Thanks Hillary. That’s what we need right now. More blind, mindless fear.

It stayed down in the gutter after that, and I was rapidly losing patience. When I heard this interview, I lost it completely.

Excerpts of breathtaking political double-talk follow, along with my reaction¹ in the car while driving to work that day. I think I transcribed it accurately, but there may be mistakes.

So, when you say “No” here, what you actually mean is “Yes”.

Wait, I have to butt in here. Are we mixing apples and oranges here? Really? Could you point out what is the apple and what is the orange? Or is this just a generic, completely inappropriate rhetorical technique to vaguely insert the general notion that the fairly obvious point Inskeep has raised is somehow illogical?

Are you kidding me? Who do you think you’re kidding here? You offered him the V.P. position. Stop treating me like an idiot.

Let’s take a look at what you said then:

“I think that I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002.”
— http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/04/clinton-mccain-has-more-_n_89758.html

Yes, I see that you did not use the word “qualified”.

And if you think that statement has any other interpretation than “Obama is not as qualified as me or McCain”, you’re a moron. While you apparently think I am a moron, I do not share the same opinion of you. Which leaves the equally unappealing conclusion that you’re the standard political word weasel.

I. AM SO. TIRED. OF BEING TREATED. LIKE AN IDIOT.

My willingness to give you the benefit of the doubt on this one has degraded substantially at this point.

And while I’m at it, shut up about experience already. I’m tired of hearing that Obama has no experience. And I’m tired of it being your number one argument. ‘Cause you know what? Experience counts, but it’s not everything. Or…oh horror…could it possibly be that experience might not even count at all?

…wait, what? I thought this was a simple yes or no question…

Translation: Nice try, please answer my question.

And, as Inskeep mentioned, statistically it is extremely improbable that you will gain the delegate lead by the end of the contests. So this is a pretty reasonable question to answer now.

Translation: Um, again, please answer the damn question.

Right. Because who could possibly imagine a charismatic, effective communicator winning more than a tiny majority of delegates in a general presidential election?

…

(Chris pauses for a moment to take a few deep breaths.)

…

Look, if Hillary gets the nomination, I’ll vote for her. As Chris Johnson reminded me,

1. John Paul Stevens turns 88 next month
2. Ruth Bader Ginsburg just turned 75

But dammit, Mrs. Clinton, just…STOP!

1 – What? So I think in hyperlinks, is that weird?

If pop stars singing a stump speech isn’t…substantive enough for you (sheesh, you people with your “standards” and “analytical minds”), then maybe some details are in order.

Back in 2006, hilzoy at Obsidian Wings wrote a detailed article discussing Obama’s record. He She writes:

…But I do follow legislation, at least on some issues, and I have been surprised by how often Senator Obama turns up, sponsoring or co-sponsoring really good legislation on some topic that isn’t wildly sexy, but does matter. His bills tend to have the following features: they are good and thoughtful bills that try to solve real problems; they are in general not terribly flashy; and they tend to focus on achieving solutions acceptable to all concerned, not by compromising on principle, but by genuinely trying to craft a solution that everyone can get behind.

— http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2006/10/barack_obama.html

Give it a read. It’s got some good meat. The guy can get stuff done. See also this Washington Post article discussing his “heart and soul” bill in Illinois, and this New York Times graphic providing a handy summary for what the guy has worked on in the past.

And finally, if you’re not in the reading mood, why not let Lawrence Lessig make his case to you. He made a whole presentation for you! It’s easy! It’s hip! It’s full of geek references! I don’t agree with everything he says in this presentation, but it’s well organized, engaging, and he makes some compelling points.

Happy Votin’, Maryland!

Working backward:

• American popular opinion is driven by the media.
• The media is dominated by image.
• A candidate’s appearance is their primary image.
• A candidate’s appearance is, briefly, under the complete control of the person who cuts their hair.

Somewhere in America are a handful of men and women, holding scissors and shears, that could single-handedly reshape the American political landscape in under two seconds without the use of a weapon.

The potential for superdelegates to play a critical role has some party leaders worried that the situation could lend the appearance that the nominee will be selected by insiders rather than by rank-and-file voters.

“Could lend the appearance”, eh? Damn straight it could lend the appearance. One might even say that is exactly what would happen.

I’m getting real nervous this is turning into a train wreck.