Having chronicled my adventures in online dating in this blog series, I’ve become an object of curiosity to certain readers. They are waiting for my positive orientation toward this curious enterprise to cool off. “Are you still enjoying it?” they ask, and I can see that they don’t entirely believe it when I answer “Yes.”

I understand, of course. The enjoyment is akin to other pleasures that require a certain level of preparation and determination. Maybe it’s analogous to running or weight-lifting: it definitely helps if you are willing to play through a bearable level of pain, because your playing field is the human heart, and the potential for injury is great.

But how you hold it helps a lot. The women who dislike online dating—and they are legion—often see it as a referendum on their worth, which is, of course, how women of my generation were trained to see dating in general. They recount the insults and disappointments they’ve experienced, and with straight women, the bottom line, as so often in our grand narrative of romance, is a litany of the other gender’s deficiencies. Men!

I’ve mostly avoided this by seeing it in what seems to me a more sensible light: as something like an elimination process, where I expect to meet a great many perfectly nice and kind men before encountering the one whose heart sings in time with my own. Along the way, I’m liberated by understanding that I don’t have to pay the slightest bit of attention to the directives I absorbed in my teen years. It isn’t my job to make the man like me, but to learn if we like each other; it’s about mystery and compatibility and luck, not worth. You show up as yourself, hoping your date does the same, and at the very least, you’ve encountered another human being and learned something.

The general outlines of online dating are simple: you make contact via a website, responding to each other’s photographs, self-description, vital statistics, and email communication. You arrange to meet for a walk, a coffee, a glass of wine, and from there, you either agree to meet again or shake hands and wish each other luck. The charm is that it gives you permission to skip over some of the more banal aspects of getting acquainted. If it quickly becomes clear that a deep connection will not be possible, you might resort to small talk to play out the time it takes to finish whatever you are drinking. But almost always, there is tacit permission to talk about things that matter, which makes online dating a kind of perfected version of all social intercourse: face each other, see who’s home, exchange truths, keep your eyes open. I’ve met so many men whose lives I would never have otherwise intersected; in the aggregate, it’s enlarged my sense of the possible and my appreciation for human diversity. Mostly, it’s been fun.

Lately, though, I’ve had a different glimpse into the emotional universe of online dating. The luck of the draw brought a large number of missed connections and challenging moments. I felt myself start to slip into that familiar song: Men! What was up with men? But before long, I began to see the other side of the story: the war many men fight between the desire to open their hearts and the terror of being exposed; between wanting to be known and fearing rejection; between showing themselves truly, and wearing a mask that has started to pinch.

I was on the road so much this spring that I over-booked my too-brief times at home. It was like one of those montages in an old movie where the rapid transit of calendar pages symbolizes time’s passage: coffee, walk, drink, coffee, walk drink. At the end of that run, I felt sad, and tried to understand why. Nothing truly terrible had happened; no hearts were broken, no ultimate terrors broke through the barrier between imagination and reality. But I’d been exposed to an intensity of anxiety, loss, and dread—wearing a disguise as bravado or humor, perhaps, but still visible at the seams—and by being over-exposed, I’d absorbed some of it, despite my determination to take it lightly. I realized that it is much better to pace myself, because compressing multiple dates in a short span of time—while maximizing serendipty—also maximizes the potential for missed connections, the potential for tender vulnerability to tip over into brokenness. But I also realized I’d been given a glimpse of the type of challenge that dogs many men.

For instance, within a single week, two men wrote to me, pitching their comments as altruistic, to tell me that the description in my profile of what I am seeking was unattainable. “The person you describe walks a path somewhere between Jascha Heifetz and the Dalai Lama,” wrote one, “and the chances of your finding this person online is statistically insignificant.”

For instance, one man took one look at me and began a monologue about his ex-wife, old girlfriends, and family of origin that lasted for the hour it required to make our way back to the parking lot. Another man tumbled into a premature revelation of intimate information, and then, appalled at the vulnerability he felt, went through an agony of regret. Another man pursued me energetically, broadcasting a lavish commercial for his commitment to emotional honesty, then ran like the wind the first time I took him up on it. Another was so desperately sad—though clearly kind, bright, and persistent despite it—that his sorrow created a sort of black hole no conversation could fill. Another, having obtained my email address, added me to a long recipient list for a series of screeds indicting his friends and family for failing to rescue him from the consequences of a manic episode. He listed his demands: food, shelter, money, sex.

(I also had fun and interesting encounters. I’m slowing down the pace and looking forward to the next—but that’s not my subject today.)

I have to think it was the compression of so many interactions into such a short time that threw so much misery into high relief, because this is not typical of my experience. I’m sure I could cast such stories as comic anecdotes about an off-kilter week in online dating world. But in truth, the intensity of it has made me see something clearly: how easy it is for many men to get lost in gap between desire and vulnerability; how often the opening to possibility is followed by a loud slam of the heart’s door, how often a feeling of exposure leads to a barricade, to regret and self-recrimination at allowing it to be breached.

I didn’t create these responses, but something about my presence triggered them, and I think it is often the same thing, which is my decision not to abide by the old rules, but to be forthright and patient in seeking what I desire. The men who tell me they are performing a public service by explaining that my quest is hopeless have compared themselves to my description of the qualities I am seeking in a partner, and judged themselves so harshly they were compelled to inform me that no man—not just themselves—could measure up. The man whose hour-long monologue insulated him from having to ask me anything about myself sensed some threat to his well-being and erected a wall of words to stave it off. Something about the way I look, perhaps, because he didn’t take time to ask me a single question; indeed, I barely spoke at all. The man who let himself relax into self-revelation with me wanted a response I couldn’t give, and felt betrayed by himself and me because of that. The man who needed to advertise his honesty was clearly expecting that the sizzle alone would sell the steak. I see his point: a good line of patter can sometimes carry you a long way; but perhaps not far enough.

I’m not minimizing the comparable challenges for women who venture forth in online dating world. But when I put myself in the place of these men, I feel the tectonic pressure between a lifelong prime directive to wear the armor and an emergent desire to be seen, known, and loved despite past disappointments. Compassion lubricates the friction of such encounters. I send each man silent blessings, the same ones I send myself and my sisters: may we see and be seen, love and be loved, open our hearts and minds to embrace in the place of fear. May we risk showing up in the service of love.

I adore this beautiful and sad Bon Iver cover of Bonnie Raitt songs, “I Can’t Make You Love Me” and “Nick of Time.”

You see, during the last gig in this stretch, I facilitated a multi-day retreat for a group of colleagues. Their work focuses on the transformative story, the one that turns a corner in the life of the teller. In order to align the group with that energy, I asked every person to share a moment of transformation, whether in their own lives or in their work with others. Then I began to think about the moment I might share if I’d been prompted in the same way.

Not one, but five different moments tumbled into awareness. I have been privileged to know many people who’ve influenced me, to be surprised by opportunity and grounded by defeat, to respond to world changes and shifts in my personal weather. I know the angels of transformation can take any form, appearing as objects, forces, or living beings. But my truth is this: that each and every one of the five aha! moments that flapped their wings and stood at attention in my mind took the form of books. I guess this trumps any remaining doubts that I belong to the category “intellectual,” hm? But categories aside, nothing has blown my mind like books, demolishing certainties; driving wild, green questions through the crusts of knowing; making the world new.

I’ve written about all five of the authors mentioned below; if you’re interested in more, go to my blog, scroll down to the search box on the right, and enter a name. All the blog essays referencing that name will come up.

The first book began life as a pamphlet, actually. Paul Goodman’s essay “Drawing The Line” was given to me back in the sixties when I worked as a draft counselor, helping young men apply for conscientious objector status and otherwise pursue alternatives to killing people in Vietnam. (It’s collected in this volume and you can also find used copies of the 1962 original, Drawing The Line: A Pamphlet.) This was my first encounter with Goodman’s work, and with the idea that “Free action is to live in the present society as though it were a natural society.” Enacting that principle could bring one into what Goodman called “the ‘crimes’ which it is beholden a free man to commit” (as, for example, refusing the draft); but it also illuminated the aspects of life that are not coerced, in which the only brake on exercising true freedom is the one we self-install.

For me, this realization shattered the political orthodoxy I’d accepted as a given in my young life as an activist, that we had to wait for freedom until some presumed prerequisite had been achieved. The person who chose to live as if freedom were an ever-present possibility would be asking for trouble—sometimes very serious trouble—but in between the trouble was something else I wanted, and I have kept on wanting it ever since. All of Goodman’s essay collections are good places to start, and you can get used copies for a song.

Lots of people told me to read Paulo Freire, and time after time, I struggled through a few pages of Pedagogy of The Oppressed before giving up. I’m certain the book is dense in the original Portugese, but the English has a flavor of having been first translated into German, perhaps by a computer. I read it aloud to my then-partner on a long car trip up the Pacific coast. We were on our way to work with a group of community artists who needed help, having fallen into internal conflict that threatened their organization. Spoken aloud as the countryside whizzed by, comprehended sentence-by-painstaking-sentence, Freire’s core ideas etched themselves into my brain: how we take in ideas that diminish us (“internalizing the oppressor”); how these ideas prevent us from acting in our own interests (from ceasing to be “objects of history” and becoming its “subjects”); how they make us credulous, easily prey to “magic thinking,” rather than the “critical consciousness” that enables us to break free, to speak our own words with our own voices, and thus to exercise our rightful power in the world.

On the drive, we realized that the best way to help the group we were traveling toward was to construct a story—”a generative theme”—that enabled them to explore the dynamic that had snared them, rather than sinking into it like quicksand. It worked perfectly, and ever since, Freire’s ideas have been a key that unlocks power dynamics for me. Reading him also led me to Fanon, Senghor, Cabral, Boal, and others who helped to articulate the emergent polycultural realities of the post-colonial world.

At a certain point in my life of activism, I lost heart, and Isaiah Berlin helped me find it again. I found myself mouthing political platitudes that rang false, but not knowing what I did believe in their place. I saw that there was a certain dynamic among progressive activists, that you had to be hip and cool in a way that required allegiance to an orthodoxy that was somehow supposed to smash orthodoxy. Who was in, who was out? I noticed how much my own words reflected the desire to answer those questions in a way my friends perceived as correct. I remember when Susan Sontag made a hugely controversial Town Hall speech in 1982 in which she denounced communism as actually practiced on Planet Earth (rather than the Platonic ideal cherished by leftists as a necessary antidote to the damage done by capitalism): “Not only is Fascism (and overt military rule) the probable destiny of all Communist societies—especially when their populations are moved to revolt—but Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful variant, of Fascism. Fascism with a human face.” She was vilified, but she persisted, and I respected that.

I moped and talked and read and finally, someone gave me Isaiah Berlin’s essays collected in The Sense of Reality. Although liberal in spirit and a lifelong advocate of liberty, Berlin was anything but a darling of the left, because he refused to toe an ideological line. Berlin brought to his writing a profound awareness of the dangers of trying to conform the human subject to some ideal (i.e., if you want to produce a “New Man,” you will almost certainly wind up killing a great many of the old ones who seem to stand in the way); and a profound appreciation for the emotional, irrational elements of seemingly rational domains. Reading him granted me a huge rush of liberation: instantly, I was entirely freed from any sense of obligation to toe an ideological line; to pretend that any theory about human beings could be superior to close, nuanced observation of our species in action; to prove loyalty to a party-line of any kind. I’ve never felt an instant of regret, just profound gratitude.

I came up in the world as culturally Jewish, but without any particular spiritual practice—until I read Adin Steinsaltz. (There’s a Jewish joke that describes all the holidays as expressions of a single assertion: they tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat. Imagine it as an uninflected description of my family’s spiritual life.) This led me to an existential despair in which the trials of my life seemed like punishment for crimes unnamed. Mired in suffering, rained out on vacation, I visited a bookstore, where a particular book called to me like a beacon in the darkness. Every time I picked it up, I thought, “Why do I want to read this?” But I literally couldn’t leave the store without buying it. I read Adin Steinsaltz’s The Thirteen-Petalled Rose it in a single sitting, and for me, it was exactly the right medicine. In an instant, I understood that the way I had been seeing my life was only one of many choices; an equally plausible idea was that what I had seen as punishment was instead preparation for whatever unique task life was calling me to perform. Making that switch, despite its reliance on a mystery that can never be fully comprehended, changed the texture and scope of my life in more ways than I can count.

Reading the book launched me into a decade or so of spiritual seeking in which I learned a great deal about mystical Judaism and its multiplicity of contemporary expressions. For a time, I was completely immersed in a Jewish world, but that desire has receded, partly out of a deeply democratic and ecumenical wish to connect with people of many faiths and none; and partly out of disillusionment. I began to question why some spiritual leaders, whose lives were permeated by the teachings and practices that were supposed to align us with the Golden Rule, continued to behave so badly toward others. I’m still very involved in Jewish social action; I still gain a great deal from the celebrations and practices I choose to observe; and my way of being is still shaped in many ways by my heritage culture, which still rhymes with the beating of my heart. But mostly, I try to live an honest life without labels: the universal is embedded in the specific, shining through the cracks in any spiritual container we humans construct.

A friend introduced me to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the “epistomologist of randomness” who wrote The Black Swan, an endlessly interesting book that repays multiple readings. Taleb is arrogant, elitist, not a wonderful writer, and yet such a brilliant thinker and piercing observer, you don’t want to stop reading. He showed me the extent to which our society has fallen prey to a specious scientism that maintains faith in our ability to predict the future, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary; and the price we have paid for our hubris. He introduced me to the cognitive biases built into the structures of our own minds, and led me to develop awareness and the capacity to discriminate what is predictable and measurable from what is not. I’ve since read a great deal more on the subject, most recently Daniel Kahnemann’s wonderful book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. The impact on my work and life has been profound, in that I now see understanding our biases and reactivity as a vital key to sustainable social change, and almost all my talks and writings urge others to investigate these factors too.

These five aha! moments have shaped my perspective and world-view. If I had to sum them up in a single sentence, this would be it: avoid ideologies, interrogate your assumptions, cultivate awareness, and whatever stands up, that is the truth you live.

What is the truth you live, and how did you learn it?

I’m feeling like a little Mighty Mo Rodgers today: “There But for The Grace of God,” the Golden Rule writ large in Haiti.

Recently, I heard several arts leaders describe their experience in presenting controversial art. Two were from small towns: one decided not to show a piece that featured nudity, fearing disapproval. The other tried to insulate visitors from happening onto challenging work and taking their shock out on the organization; in the event, though, no one got upset. The third was a panel of officials from a major institution. They described the mutlifaceted campaign they’d created to prepare supporters and visitors for challenging material, undertaken to protect the institution from anticipated reaction. Would the program lose them donors? Would certain community members boycott, agitate, even disrupt? They pulled out the stops, adding security measures; preparing meaty educational materials; taking pains to frame the program as congruent with the institution’s ongoing aims; organizing house parties; raising new funds for an impressive array of ancillary talks and forums. The anticipated reaction didn’t arise, and they put this down to their extensive preventive measures.

I’ve been privy to many such cases. Two things often emerge. First, significantly heightened efforts to build community relationship generally pay off: more donations, more members, more goodwill, more engagement with the life of the institution—more or less the opposite of what was feared. Second, when fears don’t materialize—when major, disruptive reaction doesn’t arise—institution leaders are seldom moved to interrogate the intensity of their original anxiety.

Yes, there are reactionary forces, and of course, they sometimes seize on artworks as flashpoints for their reaction. But much more often, the fear of denunciation is most vivid in the minds of those planning to present controversial material; actual experience seldom comes close. That makes censorship our most decentralized public-policy sphere: certain that they are about to be attacked for excess freedom of expression, many people censor themselves preemptively.

I applaud when institutions take both creative risks and real steps to connect with people beyond their usual circles, even when their initial impulse is defensive. What they learn is transferable to the rest of their work, but that realization doesn’t always dawn. In the Q&A period, I asked panelists how they thought it might change their institution if they carried out a comparable level of outreach and relationship-building with every program. “If money were no object,” I added, knowing that would entail an expense their existing budget couldn’t cover.

None of the panelists were willing to engage my question. Despite my stipulation, they said they couldn’t afford it, that it wouldn’t be appropriate to every program, that it would over-tax staff. They refused to even imagine it.

That failure of social imagination reveals the way fear leads to suppression of both desire and a sense of possibility, which leads to missing opportunities that offer great positive potential. The institution leaders who actualize a year-round dialogue with the community, maintaining the same intensity and conviction even when controversy isn’t looming, are likely to find resources to support those efforts. But a disinclination to get their hopes up may keep them from discovering that.

Here’s an excerpt from the talk I gave later that day:

Let’s break it down. “I don’t want to get my hopes up.” I hear this sentence or some variation on it a lot from arts advocates, and people involved in many other types of transformative work. I find it sad for three main reasons:

First, those who feel this way have allocated a big piece of mental real estate to fear of disappointment. Ironically, they are so afraid of disappointment that they pre-disappoint themselves, paying the penalty without ever having taken a chance at the prize. Look how much advocacy starts with the notion that the best we can hope for is not to be cut too much. Of course, it hurts to be disappointed. But I think it hurts much more to shut your hopes down as a way to avoid that fate. Wanting to protect your heart, you end up hardening it.

Second, those who feel this way have internalized a deeply disempowering message. Without intending it—perhaps without even knowing it—they are carrying water for the powerful, short-sighted minority in our society who want the rest of us to get out of the way so they can continue shaping things to their own specifications. To be controlled by a fear of disappointment is to believe, in some deep place, that even though we greatly outnumber those who benefit from the status quo, we are powerless.

Third, hopes and expectations aren’t synonymous. My personal spiritual practice is to hold desire without expectation. I want a lot: love, health, the experience of beauty, the ability to make meaning, community, planetary healing—it’s a long list, I admit. The way I see it, to be alive is to desire. If I stop wanting to take the next breath, my life ends. If we subside into resignation, ceasing to allow ourselves to want whatever nourishes our collective well-being, we cede the territory of desire to people who are greedy for themselves alone, and community ends.

Sometimes people tell me that making so much of hope and desire is un-Buddhist. I plead guilty, since I am not a Buddhist. But even my slight acquaintance with that spiritual path tells me there is acceptance of the fact that desire is intrinsic to the human subject. The suffering comes with attachment, with the belief that if you don’t attain the object of your desires, your life will be less; and the belief that if you do, all will be well. They say you can make an object of anything—true, obviously—but to me, desire has power that shouldn’t be wasted on mere material. Instead of wanting the biggest house or the fastest car, what I want isn’t about comparisons, but about congruence, connection, beauty, and meaning.

Whether it’s in the political realm, where I want strong democracy, human rights, planetary healing, and vibrant community; in the realm of personal ambition, where I want my work to resonate and influence our collective conversation and action; or in the most intimate realm, where I want be know and be known, to give and receive love that is nourished every day—I haven’t the slightest idea whether my hopes will be realized. Who knows what will be? But as I said in my talk:

There is one thing I am absolutely sure of when it comes to future: people who don’t get their hopes up will never see their hopes realized. Nothing can be created that has not first been imagined.

I am far more willing to risk the pain of not getting what I want than to murder desire or allow fear of disappointment to resign me to a diminished imagination.

So, I am: Here to get your hopes up.

With all this talk of desire, I owe you a seriously sexy song—or two: here’s Cat Power’s version of, “Wild Is The Wind”; originally written for a 1957 film of the same name; and Nick Cave, a genius of longing, doing “Are You The One That I’ve Been Waiting For?”

There’s a man who spoke wonders though I’ve never met him
He said, “He who seeks finds and who knocks will be let in”
I think of you in motion and just how close you are getting
And how every little thing anticipates you
All down my veins my heart-strings call
Are you the one that I’ve been waiting for?

To a people starving for meaning, the only acceptable form in which God can dare appear is art.

I’m writing this in a hotel room in St. Louis, where I will be speaking at a conference this week. I should be making serious efforts to go to sleep on Central Time, but instead, I am sitting here feeling like an egg about to hatch. It is not restful, but it is exciting, and given that option, I usually choose door number two. (“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” my grandfather used to say. Please bless me that I don’t get to test the truth of that for a long, healthy time.)

I’m excited about my speech, because I’m going to lay out my vision of cultural transformation in a new way, based on the writing I’ve been doing for my new book.

But what I’m most excited about this very second are the gathering signs of emergence. Pick your metaphor: hatching eggs, seeds sprouting, sun rising. The signs are gathering. I’ll just mention one right now: the growing awareness of music’s power to heal, connect, and expand awareness.

Earlier this week, someone directed me to this YouTube clip from the about-to-premiere film, Alive Inside. The clip shows Henry Drayer, a man whose usual state is nearly somnolent: day after day, he sits in his nursing-home wheelchair, staring and unresponsive. Everything changes when he is given an iPod filled with music he loves, largely Cab Calloway and his cohort. The music awakens him, he sings, he responds to questions. Before our eyes, he transforms from an avatar of resignation into a fully dimensional human being, crackling with life.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks, who features prominently in the film, describes the man as “restored to himself. He has remembered who he is, and he has reacquired his identity for a while through the power of music.” The man is asked what music does to him. “It gives me a feeling of love,” he says. “Right now, the world needs to come into music, singing. You’ve got beautiful music here…. I feel a band of love and dreams. The Lord came to me and made me holy. I’m a holy man, so He gave me these sounds.” The film showcases the Music and Memory project.

Another friend told me to watch the feature film, The Music Never Stopped, which is based on a Sacks story, “The Last Hippie.” I streamed it on Netflix. It is about a young man, a musician, who has lost the capacity to make new memories due to a brain tumor; and who reawakens and reconnects with other human beings—including his estranged father—through the mostly sixties-psychedelic music he adores.

When I say we are starving for meaning, here is what I intend: these days, we are drowning in data and analysis. The rising tide of information and misinformation threatens to swamp us. But it doesn’t add up to meaning, the kind that rings a bell in your heart and mind, resonating with a truth you perceive in multiple ways, one you are aching to hear spoken. Pile up data forever, it doesn’t matter: as an old friend of mine used to say, “you can never have enough of what you don’t really need.” But hear just a few words of your deepest truth, and the world comes into focus.

It can be hard to get to that truth now with words alone, because there is so much background noise. But music cuts right through the noise. I’m sure that even as I write, scientists are “explaining” why this is. I am not saying the scientists’ version is inferior or untrue; it is one true story that can and should be told. But it can never encompass the entire truth: does naming brain chemicals and electrical charges and memory mechanisms convey all there is to say about a parent’s love for a child? Or the thing that makes you know that someone you have just met will be important in your life? We are animals whose physical mechanisms conspire with unparalleled genius to generate emotional states. But we are also much, much more.

The people depicted in these films have hitched a ride to their true selves through music. Their experience expresses it better than anything else could: by braiding beauty and meaning, by simultaneously activating all four realms of experience—physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual—music permits us a glimpse of wholeness, and when we give that glimpse its true weight, it can be sustaining.

This has always been true. It is not new. What is new is the emergence of this deep and ancient truth into the realms of science, disrupting the old paradigm’s certainties about so many things. What is healing? How are the body and spirit connected? What happens when beauty and meaning are understood as medicine, when we remember that reaching the whole, fully dimensional, fully sensual person carries a power that can never be equaled by the mechanistic, dry-as-dust interventions of the old paradigm?

The emergent truth is dawning, I have no doubt. I only hope we have eyes to see and ears to hear, and hearts to understand.

Thinking about this, I’d say we need a couple of archetypal tracks from the hippie quadrant of the sixties, “For What It’s Worth,” by Buffalo Springfield, and “Touch of Grey” by the Grateful Dead. But the clip I’ll embed is another kind of sixties flashback altogether, Richie Furay singing “Kind Woman.” I can’t even unpack the aesthetics, erotics, and politics of this one. Just paddle around in it for a few minutes.

To prepare for our partnership, I’d already interviewed staff members, read a mountain of history, and watched a remarkable range of first-person stories sculpted from individual narratives, photographs, letters, home movies, music, and other bits of visual and auditory information. But until now, I’d never had the experience of making a digital story myself.

Over the course of three busy and stimulating days, I met other workshop participants, read aloud the brief script I’d drafted a few days earlier, received others’ responses and suggestions, revised it and recorded my narration, uploaded photographs, home movie clips, and music to cobble together a rough version of my two-and-a-half-minute movie. With bottomless generosity, the individuals tasked with facilitating stories helped me to clarify my intentions and to execute the technical moves—transitions, special effects, titles—necessary to a finished product.

Six other participants were doing all the same things at the same time, generating at atmosphere thick with intentionality and concentration. From the first instant, I felt as if I’d been planted in a nursery full of seedpods bursting with the will to germinate.

In the last hour of the last day, when all the stories were screened and appreciated, I understood how entirely apt that feeling had been. We all have many stories to tell, of course. In fact, at least half the people present in this workshop were experienced digital storytellers, now learning how to help others tell their own stories. I considered many subjects before I hit on my choice for this first outing. But whether we are talking about someone like me, constructing a very first story, or someone devising the hundredth in a personal series, the same feelings are engaged: the intimacy and vulnerability of unearthing a seed from which some aspect of your character or passion has sprouted, of shining a light on your truth; the pleasure of telling in exactly your own way precisely what you wish to share; the pride and risk of self-revelation; the delight when what is so particular to oneself resonates with others.

I can think of a million situations, a zillion contexts, in which exactly this experience of germination could initialize a process of self-directed healing, or build connections between people, or aggregate what might otherwise be dismissed as “mere anecdote” into a powerfully coherent message that needs to be heard. And I’m not the only one who sees this potential: spend some time on the Center’s website to see for yourself.

When we open ourselves to see and be seen, something remarkable happens. Trivial likes and dislikes fall away. The surface of things ceases to matter so much, and whatever is most important—most true, most real, most beautiful—occupies center stage. Mostly, these days, I’m a bit of a workaholic: so many deadlines, so many reasons to complete just one more task before I rest. But finishing my digital story left me with such a strong sense of having arrived at a destination (and that delicious fatigue you feel when attaining the summit at the end of a long hike), I actually took a day off!

Here’s my story. I hope you enjoy it. (The photos of a dandelion puff and leaves are by Jennifer Williams; the lake and trees by Eugene Beckes.)

As you’ll hear, a pivotal piece of the story unfolds when I was eleven years old. That was also the age when boys and girls started noticing each other (probably boys and boys and girls and girls too, but that took place beyond my budding awareness). I’d just turned ten when my father died, so the whole prior year was swamped in misery: in my memory, it’s one long stretch of waiting to glimpse a little light beyond the darkness and chaos of my family. But by the time I’d turned eleven, my horizons had begun to expand beyond the little world at home.

One of my strongest memories of that age is dancing—or at least pressing my body close to a boy’s body and moving while music was playing—in someone’s darkened living-room, while that someone’s parents retreated to the another room to watch TV. In that memory, this song is playing, the original, by the Teddy Bears (Phil Spector, Marshall Leib, Annette Kleinbard, just to put the ethnic cherry on the doo-wop sundae). But really, doesn’t it have to be the version by Amy Winehouse, avatar of excessively sad little Jewish girls everywhere and in all times?

Yes, readers, you guessed it. My topic today is race relations in the United States. Take a deep breath and follow me in. I promise you will be able to find your way out again.

In the past few weeks, two stories turning on race have occupied our collective attention.

In the first story, a massively viral video portrayed a campaign to arrest and prosecute Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a Ugandan guerrilla group infamous for abducting thousands of children and forcing them to serve as soldiers and sex-slaves. Despite being indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Kony has eluded capture and the LRA has spread its activity to a wider swath of central Africa. The video tells a very simple story, but in reality, the long and winding saga is extremely complex.

The video was made for the group Invisible Children by a cofounder, Jason Russell. Four weeks after its release, with more than 100 million views on YouTube and Vimeo, it was expected that Invisible Children would mobilize a massive turnout next month for its worldwide united front demanding Kony’s arrest. But things changed as more and more people reacted to Russell’s decision put himself and his young son at the center of a story that turns on American power and heroism, framing it as a tale of white saviors.

Ugandans’ reaction was strongly negative, and many activists, artists, and intellectuals have spoken out, along the way raising questions about Invisible Children’s intentions, fundraising practices, and governance. In a bizarre twist, a few days ago, Jason Russell was hospitalized after a stripping off his clothes for a wild outburst on a San Diego streetcorner.

If you haven’t seen the Kony 2012 video, I urge you to wait a little longer and watch it only after reading this beautifully nuanced and truthful piece by novelist Teju Cole, whose tweets about the video campaign triggered tremendous reaction, pro and con. (You’ll find the original video link inside Cole’s piece, as well as links to several virtuoso analyses by Africans, all providing vital information, and all essential reading if you want to begin grasping this issue.) Here’s a sample of Cole’s penetrating insight:

But there’s a place in the political sphere for direct speech and, in the past few years in the U.S., there has been a chilling effect on a certain kind of direct speech pertaining to rights. The president is wary of being seen as the “angry black man.” People of color, women, and gays — who now have greater access to the centers of influence that ever before — are under pressure to be well-behaved when talking about their struggles. There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner: newspapers love to describe words or deeds as “racially charged” even in those cases when it would be more honest to say “racist”; we agree that there is rampant misogyny, but misogynists are nowhere to be found; homophobia is a problem but no one is homophobic. One cumulative effect of this policed language is that when someone dares to point out something as obvious as white privilege, it is seen as unduly provocative. Marginalized voices in America have fewer and fewer avenues to speak plainly about what they suffer; the effect of this enforced civility is that those voices are falsified or blocked entirely from the discourse.

Cole’s comments on Kony 2012 became even more apt and essential as a second story arose to seize the headlines: by last week, the 26 February murder of Trayvon Martin had exploded into national consciousness, expressing the most recent refusal of people of awareness and goodwill to go along with the charade that racism is over.

Here, too, the thoughtful, feeling-full, informative commentaries are multiplying. Charles Blow’s 16 March New York Times column spread everywhere, helping to ignite response. In a New Yorker blogpost, William Finnegan aptly compared the case to the killing of 14 year-old Emmett Till in 1955, which also triggered national outrage, and which helped to turn public opinion against legalized discrimination. Both celebrities and ordinary people have had themselves photographed in black hoodies to stand in solidarity with the murdered young man. Even President Obama spoke out.

As time passes, people drill further into the nuances of the situation and response to it. For example, Davey D featured a guest editorial from Thandisizwe Chimurenga, a young Los Angeles writer, responding to the twisted accusation that African Americans ignore violence that isn’t inflicted by white people.

One piece that, for me, attains the same power and truth as Teju Cole’s was written by H. Samy Alim, director of the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Language and the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University. Alim tells stories from his own personal experience, then explains:

For many of us, the Trayvon Martin case has reopened the scab on our souls created by the continual experiences of racial abuse at the hands of our “fellow Americans” and institutions designed to protect us. Every Trayvon Martin case triggers the trauma, reminding us of the fear, pain, suffering, and humiliation that we have long silenced and suppressed. Some of us may share our narratives of racial abuse in private spaces where we feel safe. But far too many of us remain silent, especially in the public sphere. How do we challenge individual acts and systems of racial abuse if we remain silent? Moreover, how do we do so in a society that tells us that we are “overly sensitive” about race? Or that we talk too much about it? Or worse, that we are the racist ones because we “insist” on seeing everything through the lens of race? Or worse still, that we brought the violence upon ourselves because of the way we were dressed?

Sadly, the hoodie now occupies the same space racially that the mini-skirt occupies in gendered narratives that blame the victim of sexual violence. In a society that tells us that we deserve the violence because of our fashion choices, or that we need to stop “crying wolf” over racial injustice, or that we “complain” too much about racism, the tragic irony is that you ain’t even heard the half.

To most observers, I belong to the category “white,” based on my skin color, which I would describe as light olive. Not to hardcore white supremacists, of course, who clump Jews with other “mud people.” (If you want to get a glimpse of what’s crawling around under that rock, google “George Zimmerman,” Trayvon Martin’s killer, and “Jew.” Zimmerman is Catholic, but that is no disincentive to anti-Jewish commentators of all colors.) But to most people who might see me walking down the street at night, say, returning from the store with an iced tea and a bag of Skittles, the label would be “white,” and the odds of my surviving the journey, excellent.

And that label, apart from my age, gender, or other characteristics, would confer a deeply entrenched benefit of the doubt. If the category were “black,” it would confer the opposite, a presupposition of danger. In American society, these meanings are holographically encoded in racial categories. Many things can intensify them, as our recent national conversation about hoodies has shown. Many things can disrupt them: a black man in an expensive suit getting out of a chauffered limousine is not going to be viewed with alarm; neither is a black woman wearing the authority of a teacher as she shepherds her second-grade class into the museum. But strong or weak, the meanings endure, infecting the lives of all who are perceived to fit maligned categories.

There is not a single dark-skinned resident of this country who has not had experiences like those H. Samy Alim describes—challenged by authority figures, invidiously stereotyped by strangers, subjected to assumptions that falsify and contaminate reality—experiences that can easily escalate from discomfort to persecution to terrorism, as Trayvon Martin could testify if he had not been murdered.

There is no woman who has not been objectified, condescended to, infantilized, frightened, or harmed on account of her gender. There is no Asian American, Arab American or Latino American who has not been treated as a stranger in his or her own home community. There is no Native American who has not been addressed and handled as a living artifact.

Reading Cole’s tweets about Kony 2012, Nicholas Kristof seemed to feel that his own good motives as a humanitarian were challenged by Cole’s characterization of “The White Savior Industrial Complex.” Teju Cole wrote this in response: “I want to tread carefully here: I do not accuse Kristof of racism nor do I believe he is in any way racist. I have no doubt that he has a good heart. Listening to him on the radio, I began to think we could iron the whole thing out over a couple of beers.” Cole is walking the razor-thin line that separates a categorical statement from a personal one.

And here is a big part of the challenge. Not one of the commentators who’ve weighed in recently espouses a crude form of racial thinking that equates good or evil with the color of one’s skin. Unless blinded by prejudice, how could they? As individuals, we learn very little about each other from our outward appearance, while even a brief acquaintance with the news shows countless examples of people in all shades extending themselves in kindness and compassion to those of other colors; just as it shows the opposite, people in all colors victimizing those different from themselves.

But there is a big difference between our individual choices, behaviors, and relationships and the aggregate, structural impact of that complex of conscious policies and unconscious habits that has woven racism through our social fabric. Here is Cole’s second tweet in the Kony series: “The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.” It speaks a truth that is not nullified by the existence of many individuals who reject the behaviors it describes. Nor is it nullified by the fact that not all those do who fit the description are white.

It doesn’t matter if Jason Russell’s promulgation of the myth of America’s power to heal the history it has helped to make is grounded in naivete or knowing cynicism: the effect is the same. Just so, George Zimmerman has to be called to account for his self-appointed role of executioner whether he was in the grip of a fear rooted in his own damaged mind or the embedded racism of our culture.

Nothing is simple. But at the center of the labyrinth, it all comes together. All of the truths about race and power that have been told with special vigor over the last few weeks co-exist. All of this is happening at the same time, and none of it cancels the rest. And we have to let it in. I don’t know of anything other than truth—lots of it, in many voices, spoken from whole and broken hearts into the open ears of hearts willing to hear—that can heal the supporating wounds of race in this nation. I don’t know of anything else that can lead us out of the labyrinth, into a place where no one feels authorized to judge a person’s value by race, ethnicity, gender, religion, orientation, ability, and all the rest of the categories.

Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, said it beautifully: “The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?” Every faith offers the same answer. In the Hebrew bible, Chapter 10 of Deuteronomy contains an account of what is asked of human beings, including the exhortation to love the stranger. There is a curious phrase at verse 16, “circumcise your heart.” As a spiritual intention, this means to cut away the membrane of ego and defense that restricts the flow of love into the world and back. Just so, both the Qu’ran and the Confessions of St. Augustine contain the entreaty to “open the ears of my heart.”

I don’t see this revolution as comprising only a turn toward compassion, although the Golden Rule would go a long way toward putting things right. It also has to include that act of self-surgery, removing the impediments of narcissism and ignorance that keep us from seeing how often our own indifference has enabled the actions that later acts of charity are intended to fix. Listening is hard, but it’s only a first step. At long last, can we take it?

Ruthie Foster’s version of John Martyn’s “Don’t Want to Know” can help align the spirit with that intention, but I couldn’t find a video. Richie Havens’ version is worth hearing too.

I’m waiting for the planes to tumble
Waiting for the towns to fall
I’m waiting for the cities to crumble
Waiting till I see you crawl.

Yes it’s getting hard to listen
Hard for us to use our eyes
Cause all around that gold is glistening
Making sure it keeps us hypnotized.

And I don’t want to know about evil
I only want to know about love
I don’t want to know about evil
Only want to know about love.

Please read, forward, and comment!

Clout: A Blogfest on Art & Political Power. Part 7: Wrap-up from Arlene.

I’m grateful to everyone who took part in this blogfest, here on my website and through their own blogs, and especially to my cohost, Barry Hessenius. It showed me that there is considerable energy and imagination to bring to questions of cultural policy and political power, and that this resource isn’t being tapped enough to support the ongoing, vibrant dialogue that should be front and center in public discourse.

It also surprised me to be charged with excessive pessimism by two of the participating bloggers—Roberto Bedoya and Diane Ragsdale—as I usually field the opposite charge, having to deny being a mindless optimist (or an optimist at all, since I prefer to think of myself as an agnostic with her eyes open to enormous potential).

The blogfest made me realize that for me, this is not one topic, but three, and my thoughts and feelings about each are very different: (1) Cultural development: What is happening? What does it all mean?; (2) Public cultural policy and funding; and (3) What’s needed now.

(1) Cultural development: What is happening? What does it all mean?

Every culture develops; the question is how. Many influences come to bear on the cultural landscape: technologies; changes in population; interventions by institutions and funders; and all of the forces that affect every social sector.

Here in the United States, we’ve seen remarkable changes in the past few decades, as digital technologies have expanded our capacities for artistic creation, dissemination, and interaction. Culture is now at the center of civil society to a much greater extent than at any time in our history. We conduct our national conversation about even the most crucial issues through music and media. Consider how much of our political discourse is now shared in video clips comprising performances of dialogue, music, and accompanying images. I get up to a dozen short movies every day via email from people who are trying to alert me to important issues and occurrences, or engage me in public campaigns. They are now our primary form of public discourse.

Nobody made this happen through the application of conscious strategy. But it is self-evidently the new cultural reality, and all indications are that it will grow and evolve for some time. I’ve written often about the ways scientific research is converging with what many of us know about art through lived experience: how artistic capabilities have been survival traits for the human species; how art can heal the mind and body; how culture can create the container for social healing; how movement, imagery, and music can help us access important cognitive functions and promote understanding far better than old-style dry data, by providing a human context for information and connecting ideas and emotions.

When a new reality emerges, not everyone perceives it. It takes some time to filter up and trickle down. The most important question is whether some of those who don’t yet get the new reality are in a position to impede it. Right now, among those who don’t yet understand the centrality of human creativity—especially artistic creativity—to life as it is now lived and to a sustainable future are many of the operators or our existing social institutions, including policymakers. They are still so strongly attached to an old mechanistic model of value that they simply cannot perceive what is otherwise evident everywhere.

Unfortunately, living as we are—camped out on the bridge between paradigms—those gatekeepers get in the way. But the signs are strong that it’s only a matter of time. The public and nonprofit sectors tend to be behind the curve when it comes to social innovations. So right now, foundations and government agencies are particularly enraptured with metrics and benchmarks, insisting that numbers are the best language in which to convey value, even social value.

But take a look at the most exciting thought leaders in the business sector, and you will see something very different: a growing recognition that the obsession with metrics distorts perspective, pushing people to serve the numbers (the business equivalent of pervasive “teaching to the tests” we see in education); and that success is all about relationship, which is subtle, fluid, human, and subjective. Business thinkers are urging businesses to tell stories; to hire people with the skills of improvisation and imagination; to learn how to listen and cultivate connection; to privilege meaning over metrics. It only a matter of time before nonprofits and government catch up.

When they do, my guess is the first thing they’ll see is that culture can no longer be neatly divided into for-profit/non-profit, nor into the traditional disciplines (this is dance, that is theater; this is painting, that is sculpture)—or rather, there is no point in insisting on all these boundaries unless you’re a resource-provider who wants a convenient set of gates to keep. Culture is an ecology, as I perpetually insist, in which each element interacts with, supports, and influences the others. The sooner the guardians of our official policymaking see this, the better. It exhausts arts advocates to keep coming up with even halfway plausible arguments to rope off the subsidized arts from the commerical ones, and in their exhausted state, absurdities abound. You get advocates bemoaning the state of music, for instance, when music—considered as whole sphere, from community choirs to elementary music lessons to symphony orchestras to Broadway musicals to salsa dances to jazz clubs to the top of the hip-hop charts and beyond—permeates practically every waking moment of almost every life. (Several guest bloggers alluded to this, including Diane Ragsdale, taking off from a framework proposed by Bill Ivey.)

(2) Public cultural policy and funding

But I don’t want to wait around for that to happen in its own good time. Bureaucracy moves at a snail’s pace, resisting anything that might disturb its well-worn rut. And the nonprofit and public sectors belong to the public, both literally and figuratively. We pay the taxes, grant the tax exemptions, elect the decisionmakers who employ the regulators. In return, we get institutions and agencies charged with responsibilities that the marketplace can never effectively perform: ensuring human rights; investing in social well-being through education, health, housing, conservation, culture, and other social goods; providing a buffer zone between the marketplace and the citizenry, so that those who lack power and privilege do not succumb to the war of each against all that is unbridled capitalism.

I applaud the DIY energy that Diane Ragsdale described in her blog, grounded in nonprofit sector resilience:

Is it a stretch to think that such resilience might very well go hand-in-hand with our decentralized, indirect subsidy system? When government closes a door, quite often some wealthy individual opens a window (and doesn’t attach strings to funding like expectations of ‘access’ or ‘education’). And should no benefactor open a window? Well, there’s always the market (after all, it’s in the DNA of many in the sector).

But I can’t just say, “Oh, well, that’s going great, so let’s leave government to the people who are now calling the tune and focus our attention elsewhere.” Those window-opening wealthy individuals are a lot less thick on the ground for arts work in rural communities, low-income communities, immigrant communities, and communities of color, for one thing—and I don’t want to live in a public culture shaped by a sort of social Darwinism that privileges the taste and clings to the comfort zone of wealthy donors. Of course, many artists and groups are resilient and resourceful in finding ways to stay afloat. But I can’t help wanting to see what they could do if subsistence didn’t take so much time from creative thinking and practice. Watch out, world!

Even more than that, it appalls and nauseates me that we have let this country become a wholly owned subsidary of Corporation Nation. I can’t just sit blithely by while politicians fund the planet’s largest prison system, subsidies for Big Oil, a war industry that every day makes living more dangerous and deadly, and tax breaks for the wealthiest, then stand with straight faces to say we can’t afford decent education, healthcare, or the kind of cultural development investment that even the poorest nations typically make. The surrealism of that big lie, and evident ease with which so many people swallow it, indicate a cultural crisis of epic proportions. I know mine is a minority voice in holding the public sector to a full measure of public responsibility, but so what? On this, I know I am right, and some guest bloggers see it similarly, including Dudley Cocke:

This raises the question of how, in our democracy, the majority of us have become subjugated to a wealthy minority of us. When we talk about the arts gaining political power, I think this is the bigger problem we need to address, and I’m worried that we’ve lost the democratic infrastructure to pursue a solution.

Roberto Bedoya said it well in his blog: “So advocacy for me is not about arts advocacy, it advocating for and defending the very meaning of public—of the public good embedded in civil society.”

Just so, Ra Joy and others advocate artists’ involvement with civil society in its entirety:

My second recommendation for building political power for the arts is to position cultural organizations as centers of democracy. I believe deeply that democracy is a verb—it’s not something we have, it’s something we do. And I think more artists and cultural organizations should “do” democracy.

With artists and cultural organizations involved—as good cultural citizens—in the full range of public discourse and deliberation affecting their communities, support for cultural development also spreads across the public and non-profit sectors, rather than being sequestered to a few small arts agencies. Under Rocco Landesman, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has been moving this way, creating pilot partnerships with other agencies of federal government. This is a good beginning, but too often gets sidetracked by the arts agency being the weak partner, which ends up distorting democratic cultural values in favor of conforming to the language, values, and bureaucratic structures of the larger, stronger partner agencies. Ultimately, the public interest in cultural development has to be encompassed by a comprehensive cultural policy that mandates across-the-board involvement and cooperation. If and when that happens, it will be both top-down (a policy directive from some future White House) and bottom-up (the public sector finally integrating what has long been evident to many of its citizens).

(3) What’s needed now

In my writing and public speaking, I’ve mentioned the NEA more in the last couple of years than during the two previous decades. Why?

It’s because the agency’s funding is such a rich and handy symbol for everything that’s wrong with our current cultural policy and national advocacy. First, there’s the absurdity of spending only 50 cents per capita on the public interest in art: 50 cents to balance the excesses of the marketplace, make space for marginalized voices, water the roots of creativity!?! Second, there’s the fact that though the FY 2012 NEA appropriation is only $8 million less than FY 1980′s $154 million (68 cents per capita), the real value of the appropriation has dropped by over 60 percent. In the same period, our spending on prisons and associated costs increased by 500 percent in constant dollars, more than a doubling of real value! (This chart only covers 1982-2007, but is still worth a glance.) Do you need the numbers to know that the story has been the same with respect to war (if you do, we’re still spending more than two annual NEA budgets a day, seven days a week, on war), and on subsidies to Big Energy, Big Pharma, and Big Guns?

Who are we as a people? What do we stand for? How do we want to be remembered? Most advocates never mention our egregiously distorted national priorities when they drum up support for the NEA’s appropriation. Most never mention that if they succeed in helping another $10 million to be restored to that appropriation, they will still be far less than halfway to securing even the paltry value of 1980′s appropriation. I suspect that my feeling about these realities is the reason why a couple of bloggers felt I was too pessimistic.

That’s why I talk about the NEA: I have the idea—perhaps mistaken—that the starkness of the contrast between conventional discourse and hard reality will help to awaken the urgent sense of cultural citizenship we need. Otherwise, sure: the agency is still minuscule compared either to its counterparts abroad or to the landscape of need and opportunity here in the U.S. Diane Ragsdale is ready to consider letting it go: “What if the NEA were disintegrated and its components set free to be recombined (with other components) into an agency to fund the realization of Ivey’s Cultural Bill of Rights?” Politically, I don’t see much wisdom in jettisoning the NEA at a point when our national cultural policy dialogue is so anemic that its replacement is likely to be nothing. But neither is it the centerpiece of my vision for the future, as you will see below.

It isn’t a lack of good ideas that keeps things stuck. Instead, I think it’s three factors:

• First, pervasive resignation to the status quo. This still allows for creativity in wiring around it, finding pathways to success that bypass a stultified system, as Diane Ragsdale pointed out, instead of trying to change it. But it keeps this conversation from enlarging to engage a much broader group of those who are affected (which is to say, everyone). I’d like to see a lot more people pointing out what our current spending says about public priorities, for instance, contrasting culture to incarceration, and demanding that change.
• Second, too many artists and arts organization reps are hanging onto old barriers and boundaries within the cultural landscape. What do they get out of pretending there’s some guarded frontier between not-for-profit land and Hollywood? A sense of specialness, often, that is some kind of compensation for feeling marginalized. The public has to be the main beneficiary for any good public policy. Stand down the border patrol and invite the public in.
• Third, there’s a puzzling resistance to articulating cultural goals that serve the entire body politic. We should adopt the overarching cultural policy goal of an active, engaged citizenry, participating in a rich public cultural life.

There are many private actors whose funding choices influence the cultural landscape: foundations, corporations, collectors, investors, and so on. They have no obligation to adopt public goals, or indeed, any conscious goals at all. Some are interested in publicity, some in beauty or innovation or prestige or the expression of personality or a hundred other things that can be pursued through art, and all of this is part of the landscape.

But the public sector should and must be shaped by the principle that there is a public interest in cultural development, that should be guided by democratic values of pluralism, participation, and equity (often summarized with the rubric “cultural democracy”). As distinct from private actors, our overarching public purpose should be to balance other forces, the ones that tend to consolidate cultural privilege, power, and wealth. It is an essential and uniquely public role, and most of the deficiencies on our own cultural landscape can be traced to the fact that we have abandoned it.

Instead, I propose four governing ideas that can sweep across the cultural landscape, sending ripples in all directions.

Encompass the whole landscape: If you look at the entire cultural landscape as an ecology, you see some parts that are very richly fed and others that need nourishment. The instant we begin to consider how they can be conjoined (the way everything in the forest, dead or alive, supports something else), ideas spring up for new revenue streams to underwrite cultural development. Some commenters on the blogfest proposed ways of doing this, such as a small tax on commercial events to subsidize noncommercial ones. My favorite is a tax on advertising to support new creation.

We have an excess of passive, capital-intensive entertainment, and limited exposure and accessibility to diverse voices: it should be a public goal to pursue balance; let’s tax video games to support youth arts learning and participation.

We should adopt the goal of a vibrant, multi-directional media landscape. We have an excess of authoritative voices broadcasting from the center to the margins, and limited exposure and accessibility to other views of the world, other ways to tell the story; let’s require commercial news and public affairs providers to tithe to a fund for independent media and community broadcasting. We should adopt the goal of full cultural citizenship. We have an excess of museums and public monuments enshrining a white-father view of U.S. history; let’s support a much fuller story that acknowledges everyone’s contributions to our common culture, not as an add-on during Black History Month, but all year round.

To implement this policy of cultural ecology and cultural democracy, we need a nuanced, decentralized system that stresses relationship over metrics, where multiple, diverse actors can collaborate or act independently, in a fluid dance of development that mirrors the process of art-making: skillful, experimental, story-based, humane, aware.

Total arts integration: We should push for artists and arts work to be an integral part of every public- and nonprofit-sector agency and activity. This is already beginning to happen organically in the private sector, with a few inroads into government and nonprofits. Education is better with teaching artists in every classroom; communications are better when artists are devising creative ways to place data in human contexts; health care is better when storytellers are part of every clinic and hospital intake process, helping patients to discover the roots of their own resilience and healing; and so on. Similarly, artists are functioning more and more as citizens, bringing their gifts to public forums, to organizing projects, and to street-level campaigns.

This is a snowballing phenomenon: everyone can work on it in any local, state, or national context, and the aggregate of all our efforts will shift the weight toward culture as the container for our national conversation about values, identity, democracy, and community. Right now, at the agency level, existing allocations for public information that no one reads and public hearing processes no one trusts can be repurposed for artists’ work in community engagement. In future, a new public service employment program can create jobs for artists and creative organizers, helping to address our epidemic unemployment through investment in cultural development.

Give culture standing: In the first installment of this blogfest and elsewhere, I proposed a cultural impact report:

We need to institute something like a “cultural impact report,” analogous to an environmental impact report, assessing the cultural impact of public actions such as leveling historic neighborhoods to build sports stadiums. If a community’s cultural fabric has no legal standing, we’ll just keep on making those same inhumane and short-sighted “urban removal” decisions over and over again. The environmental impact report was one of the first innovations of the environmental movement to infuse daily public decisions with environmental awareness. I’m not saying it would be easy to institute a cultural counterpart, but campaigning for it would do a lot to raise cultural awareness.

Maybe that’s the right device and maybe something else would be better, but however it is implemented, the goal is essential: to give culture standing in our public and private deliberations. Right now, there are grounds to stop a freeway or sports stadium from decimating a well-established community and shredding its cultural fabric: officials and regulators may discover an endangered species habitat, or run a cost-benefit analysis that calls the allocation into question. But there’s no basis for taking cultural life per se into consideration. We’ve seen the results of ignoring it, such as neutron-bomb urban removal that creates downtown wastelands no one visits unless there’s a stellar attraction at the shiny new peforming arts complex. Virtually every public and private action has cultural impact. Just imagine what would change for the better if we started taking it seriously.

Achieve cultural equity: This is a public-sector responsibility, to regard all members of our national community with the same respect, and to take action to remedy the structural racism and embedded privilege that have skewed cultural funding toward the haves. Everyone has the right to full cultural citizenship, the sense of belonging in one’s own community, the sense that one’s cultural contributions count, the unequivocal invitation to be an equal contributor in shaping cultural life. As I wrote in the first blog in this fest:

We need cultural equity, in which access, funding, and other social goods are distributed fairly among all groups and categories. There’s always been a contradiction that funding is skewed toward the haves—mostly white, urban institutions—but when advocacy time comes around, the have-nots are expected to be good sports and rally to the cause. In my dream, the most powerful spokespeople for the subsidized arts—the heads of the major institutions and agencies—stand up to advocate in no uncertain terms for equity for communities of color and others without the same access to capital. That would attract some attention!

Contending ideas are out there, but they don’t get much play. Bill Ivey’s alternate framework, which still seems sound to me, although it does not encompass a complete range of policy issues. At her Creative Infrastructure blog, Linda Essig proposes four priorities for public funding.

These are not special pleading for artists, but broad public-benefit policies that incorporate acknowledgement and support for the public interest in art and artists. Culture precedes politics, as my friend Jeff Chang is fond of saying. By the time new laws and appropriations happen, innovations are embedded across the cultural landscape. The next step to real political clout? Democratic ideas of culture need to be in much, much wider circulation: written about, debated, blogged about, filmed, sung, danced, and staged, feeding the rich soil in which cultural democracy can take root.

Thanks to everyone who took part in this iteration of the needed conversation, Clout: A Blogfest on Art & Political Power.” Can’t wait to see what’s next!

Gregory Porter, an almost a capella version of “Feeling Good.” “You know what I mean.”

While this limited dialogue may not be representative of the whole field, in reviewing the entries by Roberto Bedoya, Diane Ragsdale, Ra Joy and Dudley Cocke, plus the comments from readers here at and Arlene’s blogsite, I am left with several impressions:

1. There simply is no consensus on what approach “advocacy” and the development of real political clout for us ought to take. We are all over the map without focus and a united front. It would seem we remain unable to, or even incapable of, agreeing on a conceptual context for how we ought to approach the development of political power (or even if we should), and how that power might be best obtained, managed and manifested. I suppose it’s hard to agree on how to fight for who and what we are, when we haven’t yet agreed on who and what we are about. Power is about leveraging strengths and consensus.

That’s a problem for us.

2. Within the various threads of what might be the best approach, there seems to be an overarching exclusivity bias. Those who think we ought to take this or that approach, seem not to want to embrace any other approach. While as Roberto pointed out what works in one place at one time, might not work in another place at another time (and one is reminded of former House Speaker Tip O’Neil’s famous maxim: “All politics is local”), what I continue to argue for is a quiver with lots of arrows in it, and we don’t seem to agree on that need. As Arlene pointed out there are two principal means to exercise real clout—either by amassing people power by organizing volunteer, grassroots foot soldiers to carry the message forward and demonstrate an active and concerned constituency (whether the result of a true ‘movement’ or otherwise), or a deep pockets war chest to buy the best lobbying effort one can afford. Most special interest groups don’t have even the potential to develop both people and money. We do. So why does if have to be one or the other? The most powerful and arguably successful group with real political clout in the country is the NRA—and they combine a highly organized and sophisticated army of volunteers ever at the ready to fight for their agenda, with a successful fund raising apparatus to pay for that organization and one of the better federal and state lobbying efforts. It remains a mystery to me why anyone would opt for one at the exclusion of the other.

This too is a problem for us.

3. As several people pointed out, we have thus far failed to develop any successful strategy or process to involve artists in the advocacy matrix. We remain without one of our very likely most promising and powerful assets in the failure to organize and mobilize the vast number of artists in this country. Unquestionably this is a major challenge and obviously (given our lack of progress in this area) one that is daunting.

That is a continuing problem for us.

Some other reactions:

1. If I inadvertently created the impression by echoing Arlene’s Oliver Twist observation that I thought our advocacy work is characterized by the ‘bleakness’ Roberto points out—then I want to correct that. While I am continually disappointed by our advocacy work, and often frustrated by our failure to move towards political power and clout, I don’t consider this work to be ‘bleak.” I am buoyed by and deeply appreciative of the dedication, passion, and hard work of the many who fight the good fight. I heartedly endorse the kind of action Roberto cites in having artists “testify” via their art to secure local City Council support, and equally applaud his efforts at enlisting effective coalitions to support the arts agenda. My position is that we might not have to continually have that fight if we had more effective political clout via the access and power one gets by amassing money, and that all of this goes hand in hand. Many arrows in the quiver—none at the exclusion of any other.

2. Further to Roberto’s analysis of the past and current culture wars, I have a different take on that. In large part what we call the culture wars have little to do with the arts. Rather they were principally a fund raising tool by the radical right. Nothing works so well for that element than to raise the specter of gays and pornography and that is precisely why they zeroed in on Mapplethorpe. We have to be more sophisticated I think in understanding why our enemies attack us. It is a conceit and far too easy to think that we are always actually the target. Often times we are simply the “easy” means to a greater end. Those who ply power in the political arena are almost never one-dimensional, nor are they unsophisticated. We underestimate what we are up against by thinking too simplistic about what our opponents do.

3. I disagree with Diane’s opening two paragraphs. I believe the vast majority of arts organizations do indeed want more government support (and every other kind of support they can get), and that our failure to get it is precisely because we lack the clout necessary to compete in the lobbying marketplace. I do agree with her that we lack the will to do what is necessary to get that power—and the chief problem there is that it takes time, people and money to organize on that level. Yes, we pride ourselves on our resilience and that we are survivors—perhaps fooling ourselves in the process that our ineptitude is a good thing. We are reactive, not proactive. Again, I don’t see that the failure to secure more government support opening other doors necessarily means those doors might not open anyway (with government support), and I honestly believe fundraising too ought to have every arrow in the quiver that might be helpful.

I don’t know if Diane’s postulation that the arts may be consciously (or subconsciously) shunning the tactics I espouse because it is ambivalent about the benefits of public funding is correct or not. My gut tells me she is wrong. But perhaps she is right. If she is, I think that is unfortunate for us. And I think it a mistake to characterize the reason for being political as only related to funding. There are all kinds of government decisions that impact what artists and arts organizations do. I do think she is right in asserting that some of the larger institutions in our field perceive there is little for them to gain outside their efforts to work the system for their own direct advantage. Arlene made the same point. Territoriality and “in it for ourselves.” I have seen this over and over again. I think that situation is also tragic for us. If we can’t somehow see that we are all in this together, then it will very likely always be that we are divided and the development of real political power will remain axiomatically difficult, if not impossible.

4. To Diane’s query: “A different, but perhaps related, question is when will those artists and arts and culture organizations that are not benefitting from the current ‘arts system’ (that is, the large majority of them) take control of and reframe the conversation around culture?” I can only echo: When indeed? (And I would also point out that the overwhelming lion’s share of government support for the arts isn’t at the federal NEA level—it is local money—and so it is a mistake to characterize the need for political clout to be about the endowment. It is only partly about federal funding. It is much more about local funding—that’s where the real money is.)

5. I have long agreed with Bill Ivey’s assessment and analysis and Diane’s thinking that we need to reframe cultural support in terms of “citizenry.” The challenge is how to go about addressing that challenge—and alas it seems to this reporter that we have made precious little progress since Bill’s thoughts first surfaced some years ago. How is the real question that we seem never to get to.

Finally, Diane’s thinking on a new role for federal support and questioning whether or not the NEA might better be reconstituted is something I have wondered myself for a long time. Though I suspect my priorities for the agency (spending more money, time and effort on improving the ability of the field to succeed—the sustainability, capacity-building aims we are all too familiar with by now—in doing such things as convening more national summits to address such issues as the development of a national arts policy, exploring a national data policy, addressing the need of the field for professional development, etc. etc. etc.) is different from hers and likely different from other people’s thinking too. I don’t want to be glib in commenting on Diane’s thinking, so I need more time to think about the very important issues she raises. I had hoped that last year’s multi-week blogfest on the NEA would raise the issue of whether or not the agency ought to be re-thought from top to bottom, but it never did. As 40% of the agency’s budget goes to the states on a per capita basis, I suspect there is an entrenched group that would not want to entertain any rethinking that would threaten that revenue stream unless their interests were protected. There are a host of other problems with reinventing the agency including the reality that in Washington DC it is hard to replace something with something new.

6. With respect to my esteemed colleague (and I personally think one of the best advocates the arts have in America) Ra Joy’s thoughts, again I would argue for both people power and money power to go hand in hand (ala the NRA). Please folks let’s learn something from the NRA: we have the same potential power to raise both a foot soldier citizen army and a huge war chest (as I have previously suggested if every performing arts organization and museum in the country were to hold one benefit performance or exhibit—the proceeds of which went to fund advocacy/lobbying and the development of political clout—every two years (just one), we could raise millions and millions of dollars.) And we can do it within our own resources without recourse to having to necessarily mobilize and incentivize the wider public. We control our own destiny. Again it would take far less than most people think it would take to garner some real political clout. Alas, it would seem Arlene is right—the passion and commitment to do that don’t seem to be there.

7. There is no bigger fan than I for what Bob Lynch, Nina Ozlu Tunceli and the whole AFTA team has done with the Arts Action Fund and building an effective state advocacy network—but I wait patiently for that network to spearhead an effort to create local Action Fund PACs on the state level. And the fact is that once a year arts advocacy days, at either the national or state level, while valuable, are hardly enough. Advocacy is a 24/7/365 job and we need a far more sophisticated network than what we have and the only way to develop that network is to pay for it. It cannot be a wholly volunteer effort. And you don’t build relationships with a once a year visit. Sorry that’s the fact.

I like Ra’s thinking on developing the arts as center hubs for democracy, and I think his specific suggestions are excellent (“We should provide cultural organizations with the training and support they need to register voters, provide easy-to-use voting information, and play a more active role as catalysts for community engagement. By strengthening the connections between cultural organizations, community members, and civic issues, we can bolster the arts and build bridges across sectors”) And I might add we should run arts people for public office.) And as to Ra’s idea that: “We need to invest more time and resources around formulating winnable policy goals. We need to do a better job of sharing best practices and innovative ideas for both the public and private sectors. We need to think about how our policy initiatives can empower individual artists and be meaningful for for-profit arts business.” I can only agree wholeheartedly. But that will cost money. THAT is the kind of thing I think the NEA ought to be doing.

8. Dudley Cocke, I think accurately asks the bigger question when he observes: “in our democracy, the majority of us have become subjugated to a wealthy minority of us. When we talk about the arts gaining political power, I think this is the bigger problem we need to address, and I’m worried that we’ve lost the democratic infrastructure to pursue a solution. After these past 30 years of intense privatization and the rise of a pervasive proprietary culture, we all seem to be living in boxes defined by class, race, age, politics, sexual orientation, religion, etc. Where are the commons (neutral grounds in New Orleans’ parlance) to meet and think together, regardless of difference?”

I don’t know Dudley how the wider society (let alone us) will deal with that issue—which is not new to the world. I only know that in terms of political power and clout those with money carry a big stick, and the daily grind of trying to defend one’s position, let alone move forward, is a slow, laborious step by daily step process fought in the trenches and those that aren’t engaged in those small battles invariably lose the war. We are only peripherally engaged in those battles.

9. Finally, I hope somehow the movement Arlene dreams of takes off. Again, far greater minds than mine will have to weigh in about how to make that happen.

I am very grateful to our four participants in this small experiment of Arlene’s and mine and want to thank them and those who took time to comment for adding to the dialogue. I am humbled to be in their company. I especially want to thank Arlene. I hope somehow we can figure out how to move this discussion forward on a larger stage than the isolated, piecemeal private conversations that pass as our attempt to develop some real policy on political power. And I hope that somehow we can soon begin to answer the question; “How”—specifically how do we make some of these things happen?

Have a great week.

Don’t Quit.

Barry

Stay tuned tomorrow for my final post in Clout: A Blogfest on Art and Political Power, and be sure to comment!

This fifth installment in a weeklong blogfest on art and political power I’m cohosting with blogger Barry Hessenius was authored by Dudley Cocke, Artistic Director of Roadside Theater, a stage director, teacher, writer, and media producer. He has taught theater at Cornell University, the College of William and Mary, and New York University, and often speaks and writes as an advocate for democratic cultural values. His policy remarks and essays have been published by the Urban Institute, Yale University, American Theatre magazine, Americans for the Arts, Grantmakers in the Arts, and the Community Arts Network/Art in the Public Interest, among many others.

Thanks, Barry and Arlene, for inviting me to join your Blogfest. I accept with some trepidation, not about the topic per se, but because of my tendency to get on the high horse when a subject this broad appears. I’m sure I’ll not be able to completely avoid this habit, but perhaps I can spare the reader until the conclusion.

I’m a member of a rural theater company that for 37 years has been writing, producing, and touring plays. About midway through our nearly 40 year journey crisscrossing the country performing, we became interested in helping other communities create their own local plays. It was another way to test our idea that local art is a good way for local life—and local democracy—to become more aware of itself.

Roadside Theater’s home audience in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, southern West Virginia, northeastern Tennessee, and southwestern Virginia has always been low income and working and middle class people from all walks of life and of all ages—families of coalminers, government workers, small business men and women, and hill-side farmers. On any given night, Roadside’s crowd looks like the hard scrabble Appalachian communities of which the company’s artists are a part. By cosmopolitan standards, these are wildly spirited audiences who don’t hesitate to arrive early and stay late—and to spontaneously banter with the actors performing on the stage. They understand the evening is as much their cultural creation as it is the theater’s.

When we started touring nationally in 1978, we unexpectedly found ourselves looking out at a very different audience, one that appeared to represent only the wealthy slice of the host community. It didn’t bother us too much at first—we were full of ourselves—but as the 1980s rolled on and the nation’s income gap widened, we found ourselves facing a life-threatening artistic problem: now with no low-income and working class people in the house, our plays were becoming something we didn’t recognize as ours.

I’d seen something of the same phenomenon in San Francisco years before at a performance of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Tickets were going for $140 a pop, and by the end of the comedy’s first act it was plain that the actors playing the low parts were dying right there in front of us for want of any response. In live theater, the audience is responsible for half the magic.

So the question is: What would it take for a theater like Roadside to have real political clout? Part of the answer: For low income, working class, and middle class audience members like ours to have real political clout.

This raises the question of how, in our democracy, the majority of us have become subjugated to a wealthy minority of us. When we talk about the arts gaining political power, I think this is the bigger problem we need to address, and I’m worried that we’ve lost the democratic infrastructure to pursue a solution.

After these past 30 years of intense privatization and the rise of a pervasive proprietary culture, we all seem to be living in boxes defined by class, race, age, politics, sexual orientation, religion, etc. Where are the commons (neutral grounds in New Orleans’ parlance) to meet and think together, regardless of difference?

Clearly, our public institutions, like Congress, are failing us, and our civic and religious organizations are not meeting the challenge. This is bad news, because maintaining their integrity correlates with the integrity of our democracy. To this point, yesterday I received this e-mail from an artist friend in Arizona: We are fighting two new proposed laws, one to allow weapons on college campuses (which defines “public” space as any space with an armed guard, btw) and one to allow guns within 15 feet of K-12 schools.

Roadside Theater, whether performing in a tent up an Appalachian hollow or at the Manhattan Theatre Club, has always aspired to be an unarmed, democratic meeting place; art, as a manipulated expression of culture, invariably has the potential to help create the conditions for animating democracy. But rag-tag groups of nonprofit artists are, obviously, insufficient. Something more is needed.

What are the prospects for a broad based social movement of the type Barry and Arlene advocate? Barry cautions Arlene that such movements often take decades, if not generations to grow and succeed. But isn’t the stirring for such a movement for justice and equality already present in each of us? I think so, if only in our better half.

What would it take to catalyze this potential, and how do we develop the public spaces where together we can work at it?

Stay tuned on Monday and Tuesday for the final posts in Clout: A Blogfest on Art and Political Power, and be sure to comment!