I find myself thinking this morning of the concept of “transcending race,” a strange and knotty idea. To begin with, race doesn’t inhere in the person: there aren’t any objective tests to scientifically assign us to races, because race is a social category, not a biological one. As more people undergo genetic analysis, they find their heritages far more mixed than the application of our current categories would suggest. I’ve had an evidently WASP friend write to say, “Apparently, I’m Jewish,” an apparently African American friend report the presence of more European than African ancestors. Geneticists tell us that there is far more variation among members of these racial categories than between groups. So “transcending race” really means confounding the social categories that exist in our minds, such that they no longer overdetermine others’ response to ourselves.

When used in relation to President Obama, this notion suggests a figure who has somehow severed the connection to aspects of otherness—in his case, Blackness—deemed threatening by non-Black players in our national racial opera. In his persona, the barriers between racial categories have become so permeable they almost might not exist: regardless of complexion and heritage, millions of Americans find they can love, admire and invest him with their hopes. Most of the fear that has so long animated racial stereotypes slides off him without getting snagged in the cracks of our collective inability to see each other truly and connect deeply. In the space thus created, love flows.

Michael Jackson wanted this, and to a remarkable extent, on a stage as global as President Obama’s, he got it. But because his path was the opposite of Obama’s, he lost it too, provoking public repulsion and derision almost equal to the adoration he had once taken in with each breath.

As anticipated, I find frequents reasons to disagree with this or that policy position or action of President Obama, the elected official—although overall, I remain deeply grateful that he is president and want to support all that is positive in his administration. But without reservation, I continue to admire and appreciate his essence as a human being, the way it animates and connects to his public purpose. His strategy is beautiful: he has taken on the supremely simple yet astoundingly difficult task of bringing one’s life into alignment with one’s essence, so that people perceive (sometimes without knowing it) the shining, integral energy of a whole person, and want to move toward him. This is the strongest and deepest type of leadership, seldom seen.

In contrast, Michael Jackson tried to bring his body and spirit in line with a fantasy image of perfect beauty and acceptability. He attempted to “transcend race” by surgically and cosmetically altering the signifiers of race present in his body. By the time adoration had turned to repugnance, he had somehow removed himself from nearly every category that allows us to sort human beings into our comfort zones: race, gender, age—sometimes he seemed most real as a cartoon, transcending humanity altogether. I cannot begin to imagine the torments of self-selected mutilation and recovery, the King Midas-like isolation of Neverland, the uncertain, unsettling efforts to manufacture family, the living nightmare that—surely—no amount of lavish amusement could dissipate.

So much of the early commentary on Michael Jackson’s death focuses on complicity: because popular adoration was conditioned on his remaining the object of so much ambiguous and undifferentiated desire, “we” the people were the prime movers in his suffering and ought to be feeling guilt and regret.

This is a knotty idea too. Inside it is coiled the silly but popular idea that the commercial cultural industries are shaped by consumers, that Hollywood et al are just neutral vehicles, passively giving us what we want. This large assertion conceals a partial truth, in the sense that if people didn’t want to consume enough of what the consumer cultural industries produce, they’d go broke. But in fact, many failed recordings, films, games, and other cultural artifacts are manufactured for every one that succeeds even in recouping its costs. The consumer cultural industries are flinging product out there in the hope that blind luck with cause some of it to stick. This is akin to my taking you to a birthday dinner and ordering the entire menu so that in the end, I can say, “See! I knew what you wanted.”

What those industries’ operators have surmised is that, at least temporarily, they increase their chances of profit by repeating, in amplified form, whatever succeeded before. If one male-bonding comedy does boffo box office with a melange of bachelor parties, binge-drinking and barfing, the next one will broaden the comedy and amp up the gross-out factor until a few iterations down the road, market research suggests the tide has turned to neo-Westerns. What drives this is the blunt instrument of Hollywood’s appetite for profit twinned with its willingness to stimulate any appetite likely to lead to a purchase, not some canny ability to decode our collective desire.

But neither Michael Jackson nor those who also profited from his music invented the notion that the way to “transcend race” was to remove its signs from his body by any means necessary. A life isn’t a lesson, but if we learn something from his sad end, I hope it is this: that the lingering legacy of racial oppression, the fear and hatred lodged in the corners of our hearts, has the power to distort lives and societies, and that transcending isn’t even conceivable unless we acknowledge and face right into it first.

I’m old enough to remember when “Little Stevie Wonder” popped onto the scene with his remarkable harmonica solo in “Fingertips,” a number one hit in 1963, when Michael Jackson was five years old. People love child stars, in part because the purity of our devotion is mostly free of sexual desire, replaced by admiration for early achievement, the shining light of unsullied talent, the sweetness of a piping voice and unformed face suffused with the pleasure of creation. Perhaps early influences or inbuilt resilience enabled Stevie Wonder to inhabit and express his essence without falling prey to the distortions that seized Michael Jackson. Who can claim to fully understand another human being’s path?

Michael Jackson, 1958-2009, rest in peace. May his memory be a healing for us all. Listen to his sweet spirit now, in this 1960 Smokey Robinson song, “Who’s Lovin’ You,” recorded by the Jackson 5 in 1969.

I’ve just moved back to California, part of a big life-change for me. Whenever I come here, I touch down with three friends in Mendocino County, where I used to live. We have been meeting regularly—monthly when I’m in the state, less often otherwise—for fifteen years. One is a theater-maker like yourselves, another a healer, the third an environmental activist and steward of the land. We are very different, but taken together, our worldview is pretty wide: from the tiniest details of these amazing human bodies with their interlocking complex systems; to our imaginations, both personal and social; to this beautiful blue-green planet, home to an astounding variety of life-forms, including our own infinitely surprising species.

When I arrived on Sunday, the healer was getting ready to leave for a meeting to plan a memorial service for her dear friend, who had died in an accident. As she told me the story, her eyes filled in that way that evokes an ocean of sorrow, all the tears that have flowed through human history. Shaking her head, she posed a question, “How can they still have war?”

It took me a few seconds to leap across the conceptual gap between the highly personal and particular conversation we’d been having and this eternal conundrum.

“They couldn’t,” I told her, “if they felt the loss of each life the way you are feeling this one.”

How could that happen? How could those who make and profit from war be given the opportunity to experience the fullness of loss created by their enterprise? How could they be drawn to reflect on their choices? You could force-march them to the frontlines, or hold their children hostage, but as we have seen in the vast quantity of blood human history has spilled trying to make the other side feel our pain, as often as not such tactics backfire, creating a thirst for more blood and further distorting the lives of those who seek vengeance.

Yet when my friend asked her question, the answer seemed obvious. I invite you to think about it all day. I doubt you will come up with a better way to create imaginative empathy—to remove the Other from the category of inconvenient object to the category of human subject—than through art.

When we play a character on stage, or seated in a darkened theater, surrender ourselves to empathy with a heart and mind remarkably different from our own, in some sense, we momentarily inhabit the other’s place. Everyone in this room knows this with the absolutely certainty of having lived it. We also have ample scientific proof for those who need it. Ever since scientists have been able to capture images of the brain in action, they have told us that when we imagine or pretend, we light up the same neural pathways as when we actually have those experiences, first-person, in real life. This understanding has become so solid that athletes are now advised to train in their imaginations for the races or leaps they want to win in actual competition.

Now it’s up to us to apply this knowledge to the problem of national recovery and the challenge of building a humane, sustainable civil society right here in the United States. Now is the time for a radical re-understanding of the social role, the critical importance, the public interest in creativity, specifically artistic creativity. We can close the gap in understanding that has prevented so many people from seeing that artistic and cultural creativity is not just a nice thing to have around, and a really special amenity when you have the resources to invest in something extra, but a necessity for recovery, survival and sustainability.

How do we do that? We have to begin by enlarging our own thinking, speech and action.

I estimate that I have been in about a trillion conversations, read about a billion arguments, that end in the slogan, “support the arts.” Accustomed to long-term deprivation, conventional arts advocates tend to think small, focusing on saving the tiniest government agencies, on hoping not to lose too much more this time around. Many conventional arts-support arguments are silly; for example, the “economic multiplier effect” of buying theater tickets: people who go to the theater may eat in a restaurant or pay to park their cars, they may have a drink after the performance. Each additional expenditure multiplies the economic impact of a dollar spent on tickets. That’s the economic multiplier effect, and, yes, it all adds up to jobs. But so what? Going to a dog show or a football game or lady mud wrestling has the same economic impact. And that’s one of the strongest conventional arts-support arguments! After decades of this stuff, conventional arts advocates have worn themselves thin stretching a point, with almost nothing to show for it. Adjusted for inflation, even the recently expanded 2009 NEA budget is worth only a bit more than half its value in 1981, the year of Ronald Reagan’s first budget cuts.

In a time of economic crisis, when people are worried about surviving, when it is hard to fund schools, housing and medical care (but still not so hard to finance war, unfortunately), arts-support arguments become even more half-hearted and desperate, and therefore even less effective. You don’t need me to tell you what’s happening to your own organizations and your own communities right now. I am reminded of the dream of right-wing crackpot Grover Norquist, who said, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” That is what has happened over the last three decades to the arguments for arts support, which are circling the drain as I speak.

The remedy isn’t more shrinkage but the opposite, to think big. Conventional arts advocates claim art enriches, beautifies, expresses and entertains. These are important social goods. But the elephant in the room right now, the large, unacknowledged truth that we had better hurry up and shout from the rooftops, is that in a uniquely powerful way, art can save us.

(Click on the link at the beginning of this post to download the full talk.)

On May 12th, we heard from 7 officials: Mike Strautmanis, Chief of Staff for the Office of Public Engagement; Buffy Wicks, Deputy Director, Office of Public Engagement; Joseph Reinstein, Deputy Social Secretary, Trooper Sanders, Deputy Director of Policy and Projects, Office of the First Lady; Mario Garcia Durham, Director of Presenting at the National Endowment for the Arts; Tina Tchen, Director of Public Engagement; and Kareem Dale, Special Assistant to the President, who serves as liaison for both disability and arts.

It was an extremely interesting event. As I wrote immediately after, most of us were buoyed up just by being there. Having been dissed for so long by the Bush administration (and many of its predecessors), being invited to enter what those who briefed us called “The People’s House” seemed a remarkable indication of the potential for change. As the report explains,

Overall, we came away feeling that there would be room at the table for artists and creative organizers to take part in conversations about relevant policies and programs; and that we were being challenged to come up with promising and attractive ideas about how artists can work for the administration’s agenda and how artists’ work can be integral to national recovery.

I don’t underestimate the challenge. People who understand community cultural development work firsthand know the remarkable power of well-prepared and skilled community artists to contribute to any public initiative that needs to engage people deeply and help them see themselves as part of positive change. We were hoping this knowledge would precede us to the White House, that we would be met there by key policy people in community development, green jobs, rural and urban affairs, and so on. But the prevailing definition of art was far narrower: as it turned out, the longest presentation (and the most sophisticated in terms of understanding culture as a crucible for change) came from the White House Social Secretary’s office, the people who create parties, ceremonies and celebrations.

This is not negligible. The White House figures large in the symbolism of our cultural life. The air of Camelot that gathered around the Kennedy administration nearly fifty years ago was due in no small part to the appearance of stellar high arts figures such as cellist and conductor Pablo Casals at state dinners. The evening after our briefing, the White House hosted its first-ever poetry jam, with spoken-word and musical performances unlike anything those hallowed halls had previously experienced. During the briefing, some participants suggested that such events could resonate with allied local activities explicitly linked to the White House (e.g., a national poetry jam timed for the same night), creating a symbolic cascade. I’m even planning to write to the Social Secretary to suggest an event!

But in comparison with what we know we can do, even in the Obama administration, the dominant idea of the public interest in culture is underdeveloped, and now is our opportunity to enlarge it. There’s always a fine line between ambition and grandiosity (I keep driving over it myself, feeling the bump as I cross the white line). But whichever side of the line you place the current mood among activist artists, we are feeling the moment. Here are the final lines of a poem Carlton Turner read to bring our day to a close:

In the womb of the mother spirit of creation we gestate

On this occasion of engagement she gives birth to us
the evolution of possibility

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for
Movers in the spirit
Lovers of justice

We, the soul stirrers
The magic makers
The pulse takers of an ailing nation

This is our charge

That started out sounding like a fairly narrow charge, but like almost any question you stare at long enough, it expanded to fill all the available conceptual space. It become evident that addressing the conditions that induce caregivers—whether at home or in facilities—to end up parking elders like abandoned cars, interventions are needed at every level: relieving the burden on families who must care for aging relatives with diminished capacity, bringing about “culture change” in services for older adults, from indifference and warehousing to “choice, dignity, respect, self-determination and purposeful living.” The chain of need extends all the way up to a transformation in our collective awareness, reframing aging as a universal human process rather than a medical problem.

Even in the think-tank’s specialized company, there was no consensus on what that human process entails. Some people thought there was too much denial of age, too many gray-heads swallowing Viagra when the calendar indicated it was time to eat lunch at the senior center instead. I’m inclined to the opposite view, that our definition of “old” has been superseded by changes in life span and lifeways, as I wrote last year.

But do we really need a consensus? I’d be satisfied with honoring all people’s right to decide for themselves what it means to act one’s age. But even to achieve that commonsense aim entails a huge paradigm shift, away from the privatization of suffering that typifies our public policy and toward humane acceptance of collective responsibility.

I like to use C. Wright Mills’ formulation to characterize where we’ve gone wrong: treating public issues as private troubles. You can’t pay the mortgage, you’re worried about losing your house? So what if the reasons have much to do with bad economic policy, with an economic crisis that affects people whether they have been personally prudent or not? It’s your private trouble, not a public issue. Good luck!

You say your father needs help even taking care the basics—food, hygiene, safety? And it’s all you can do to work full-time and look after your kids, but you do your best, hoping you won’t die of sleep deprivation? That’s your private trouble, even though many people you know will face similar circumstances, and whether or not they make it through without cracking will depend on their having been lucky enough to draw the right family fortunes or the right employer in the lottery of life. Good luck!

In the short term, of course, there are many things that individuals and organizations can do to ameliorate unnecessary suffering, even if they don’t address the root causes. People talked about revising personal priorities toward the humane, relational and spiritual: for instance, give your family cheese and crackers for dinner one night each week, devoting the time saved to telling stories or making music with grandma or grandpa. It was fun to watch the artists at the think-tank unspool a ribbon of good ideas about how to create moments of beauty and meaning even in restrictive environments, to see that sink in, to see that ah-ha moment when some of the dedicated, sensitive people involved in long-term care recognized that artists had to be integral to their work, not some sort of luxury option.

This was all extremely interesting and useful. But for me, the most enlightening takeaway from the think-tank came when people who work directly with elder care talked about obstacles and resistance to making even such immediate, doable changes. Too many people in charge of elder care are habituated to what they are already doing, they said, to what is familiar. They don’t want to accept the risk of changing. By the time this part of the conversation had arrived, we’d been talking long enough and in enough detail to make clear that the familiar way was often a path of failure: it demoralized care workers, neglected and increased the suffering of the people in their care, left a wake of exhausted, frustrated souls.

Flash! That’s when the realization dawned: they were describing people who are willing to go on failing in familiar ways—maybe forever—rather than take the risk of failing in new ways!

Scholars of cognition attribute this in part to the “status-quo bias,” our tendency to prefer whatever is familiar, the devil we know. But I keep finding myself appalled by how strong that bias seems to be, how much surplus suffering we are willing to bear before the incentive to change becomes compelling.

Is there a social sector in which this dynamic does not appear? Education, health, environment, economy, culture, transportation, employment and on and on? Is there one in which persistent failure and the fear of failing in new ways are not constant companions?

I’m having trouble wrapping my head around the full implications of this insight. You see, risk is defined as “the possibility that something unwelcome or unpleasant will happen.” When we repeatedly fail in familiar ways, risk becomes a daily guarantee: something unwelcome and unpleasant occurs over and over again, day after day. If logic had anything to do with it, risking any feasible new approach judged to have a 50-50 or better chance of succeeding would always be a sensible choice, since the alternative guarantees failure.

Right now, I’m putting my shoulder on the side of awareness, in part because I don’t know what else can help. I guess I’ll just point it out wherever I see it, in myself or in others: “Excuse me, but why not risk failing in a new way for a change?”

I have no idea if this will have any effect, but to quote Kurt Vonnegut, I am certain it will keep me “Busy, busy, busy” (which is what a Bokononist—Bokonism is the religion he invented in Cat’s Cradle—whispers when thinking about “how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is”).

The first event of the think-tank was a wonderful concert by David Greenberger and Paul Cebar, spoken word based on interviews with memory-challenged elders set to jazzy, funky, bluesy music. I’ll close with the last lyrics of this great clip on YouTube:

My mother always said,
“You’re gonna get in trouble some day, you talk too much.”
I said, “No, Momma, that’s how you get to be smart!”

The full recording is due out in August. In the meantime, click here for some more samples.

In case he reads this, I’ll summarize my advice up front: Rocco Landesman, the intelligence, risk-taking and independence for which you are admired on Broadway will be of little use to this country unless you recognize how much you have to learn about the public interest in culture and democracy, committing to educate yourself, pronto. I sincerely hope you accept this challenge.

It’s funny about the NEA: this teeny-weeny federal agency, which invests well under a dollar in the arts per capita, packs a powerful symbolic punch. Think about all the headlines the NEA garnered during the Congressional debate over the stimulus bill back in January: as I wrote then, whenever Republican strategists seek a way to defeat social spending, the arts come easily to hand. Major print outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post have also followed speculation over the new head of the NEA with the obsessive attention. As the most visible symbol of American cultural policy, a little public arts funding for the NEA goes a long way.

And a very little funding is all the NEA has. In 1981, Ronald Reagan’s first year in office, the NEA budget was $159 million. Adjusted for inflation, it would take $372 million in 2008 dollars to equal that allocation. The 2009 NEA budget is$155 million; add to that the $50 million supplement that was part of the Recovery Act, and three decades of inept arts lobbying have produced a net loss in real value of nearly 45 percent!

Ever since the late 80s, when the organized right drummed up huge outrage over NEA funds going to artists whose work had challenging sexual or religious content, the primary political goal animating the agency has been to avoid controversy. Dana Gioia, who stepped down as Chair right after the Obama inauguration, distinguished himself by out-stupefying every other NEA leader with soporific programs such as touring Shakespeare to small towns and inducing high school students to compete in memorizing and reciting poems chosen from an official anthology. Fortunately, the Endowment continued to give some grants to exciting projects, so he wasn’t able to wring every drop of life out of the agency. But it was a close thing.

So whenever there is NEA news, I have half a mind to ignore it. If the goal is to support the types of cultural development I care about—community arts, innovative arts, arts work that give voice to ideas and aspirations, that illuminates what lies beneath the surface of ordinary reality and opens a window into possible futures—then in the long run, there is likely to be much more funding available through other public spending, foundation grants and money earned or contributed by community members.

But the other half of my mind can’t deny what a powerful symbol the NEA is, and that makes me want to care. Perhaps you now comprehend the ambivalence with which my friends and colleagues have received the news of Landesman’s ascension: the calls and emails have ranged from mystified to cynical to hoping against hope, with not much in between. You see, in choosing Landesman, President Obama has made an appointment that encompasses all that is puzzling in his own subtle ambivalence about democracy as a practice rather than a principle: an intoxication with celebrity that overwhelms his populism, a taste for the grand gesture that overwhelms his attention to its aftermath.

Indeed, what President Obama did may turn out to be the 2009 equivalent of President Clinton’s 1993 appointment of Jane Alexander as NEA Chair. Four clumsy and discouraging years later, she resigned without fanfare or comment. In between, just about every anecdote I heard about Alexander highlighted the downside of the Let’s-Appoint-A-Celebrity Strategy: according to one reliable source, well into her tenure, she continued to need last-minute help to comprehend even the basic terminology of the field. You know what I mean: I’m not an expert in the public policy field I was appointed to oversee, but I play one in the halls of the NEA.

In his own universe of commercial theater, Rocco Landesman is a hero to many for his successful productions of important plays like Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” and for the remarkably inflationary effect he has had on box office with his introduction of the “$480 premium ticket.” (This was justified as a device to combat scalpers, as Landesman told the New York Times’ “Freakonomics” blog: “When we instituted the $400 ticket for The Producers, we started to address this problem. In the new system, the price is printed on the ticket, and the money actually goes to the people responsible for the show — the investors, the creative team, etc. — instead of to the ticket brokers.”).

For Kushner, a ferocious talent who has benefitted mightily from his relationship with Landesman, “It’s potentially the best news the arts community in the United States has had since the birth of Walt Whitman,” he told the New York Times. “He’s an absolutely brilliant and brave and perfect choice for the job.”

The people who feel this way see Landesman as an intelligent and independent risk-taker, a no-nonsense entrepreneur whose remarkable commercial success will somehow translate into an era of thriving expansion for the NEA. The people who are dismayed by his appointment see the yawning gap between the skills, values and expertise of a Broadway producer and the qualities and abilities needed in the person appointed to nurture and safeguard a cultural democracy encompassing the entire arts ecology:

• A commercial producer needs to know how to convince investors to risk their money for the possibility of big returns; the guardian of our most powerful symbol of national cultural policy needs to understand the public interest in culture, to know how to convince voters to invest in work that advances the public interest, where the return is not measured in dollars and cents.
• A commercial producer needs a keen eye for what is likely to earn money; the guardian of our most powerful symbol of national cultural policy needs to understand that it is in the public interest to correct the imbalances of our over-commercialized cultural industries, creating protected public space in culture in much the same way we create protected public space in nature, such as national parks.
• A commercial producer needs to understand the stakeholders in his own corner of the for-profit economy; the guardian of our most powerful symbol of national cultural policy needs to understand the entire cultural ecology, from the informal arts to independent artists to small, largely volunteer groups in rural or urban settings to the largest nonprofit and commercial institutions. He needs to understand how culture-makers who don’t generate profit feed the wellsprings of our collective creativity, how they help us to know ourselves and each other, to find the source of our resilience and dynamism, to say what needs to be said but cannot find adequate expression in a marketplace dominated by the bottom line.
• A commercial producer needs a talent for spotting what will appeal to the greatest number, because the marketplace turns on economies of scale and thrives on selling the same product to the largest number of consumers; the guardian of our most powerful symbol of national cultural policy needs to love diversity, to recognize and love the fact that what’s good for one sector is not necessarily good for another, to love the fact that we have a public sector precisely to support the social goods that do not turn a profit, and that even in this moment of economic crisis—especially in this moment—the market cannot create or sustain a cultural democracy.

I have no doubt that Rocco Landesman has the intelligence to grasp these points, and certainly, a person of his intellect can do the reading, talk to the wise people, integrate the insights and ideas that animate the public interest in culture. But will he? It remains to be seen. To my knowledge, he has never published or declaimed from a podium a single word about community arts, independent media, the movement for cultural equity for artists and communities of color, rural communities or much of anything outside the largest cities, or dozens of other aspects of the arts ecology which will be his purview. Landesman reportedly loves country music, baseball and betting on horse races; he was a brilliant student, people say. I hope he can enlarge both tendencies to encompass the entire cultural landscape and all we know about public stewardship within it.

When I heard of his nomination, I searched for a 1994 New Yorker profile on him (“Betting On Broadway” by David Owen, June 13, 1994) that I vividly remembered reading not long after “Angels in America” rocked Broadway, winning a flock of Tonys and a Pulitzer. If you subscribe to the New Yorker, you can read it online. Two things especially stuck in my mind. First, his advice that “You should never carry less than ten thousand dollars in cash at any time….Walking around with anything less than ten thousand dollars is completely unacceptable. It’s a necessity of life. It gives you freedom. The most important thing in life is a sense of possibility, and you simply can’t have it with less than ten thousand dollars in your pocket.” Populism, anyone?

And, second, the lead paragraph:

“I am fundamentally a dilettante,” Rocco Landesman says. “My attention span is too short for me to do anything for very long, and I have done a bunch of quite different things in my life. But I am not one of these people who say, ‘Well, that’s best for me, and maybe other people should just become corporate lawyers for the rest of their lives.’ No. I think that what’s best for me is also best for everyone else.”

Having had fifteen years to reconsider these statements, perhaps this new job will offer Rocco Landesman a welcome opportunity to show that he can sustain a sufficient quality and duration of attention to questions of cultural policy and real cultural diversity to show us all that at long last, the NEA can symbolize something fully worthy of a true democracy, the public interest in culture. Here’s hoping.