[Futurework] Kill Culture and Community and you have nothing

[Karen Watters Cole]

I suspect cousin Ray has been busy drafting a letter in response to this from today’s NYT.   How to Kill Orchestras @ http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/arts/television/29HOLL.html?8hpib I also have this in word doc but it is 53KB and won’t clear the FW filter.  Please contact me if you want a word version.   This is not just about orchestras or the arts.  It’s about loss of culture and a confusion of priorities.     What the author didn’t address was the loss of arts education that has precipitated the audience loss and narrowed available donors.  Even if the philanthropic wealthy were still the primary source of revenue, rather than corporation sponsorships now so prevalent, you have to have a new audience being turned on to listen, enjoy and contribute by patronage and ticket sales.     It has been a generation now since the funding wars began on the NEA, by ideological conservatives who objected to “good money after bad”.  I just wish they had thought about the long term consequences of taking the arts out of the public schools.  We might recover from funding issues by themselves but if children growing up don’t know great art from pop culture, how are you supposed to recover from that?    How foolish, and unnecessarily tragic, especially now when pop culture and cookie-cutter development is taking a toll on what people see when they take a hard look around cultural and social America.  Look at how popular unreality is: those survivor shows incorrectly labeled reality TV, set in exotic locales with preposterous premises, and then all the recreated docudramas of contemporary people living like their ancestors did.  It’s no wonder, too, that many, many towns are turning to ‘heritage tourism’, such as the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial hopes to do for many out West, when the family-supporting jobs have left town and every town is beginning to look like the last.  Or review the sales for renovation retailers, old homes.  Ever notice how many people go to the re-enactment fairs?  No wonder Harry Potter rules, all the adults have lost their sense of creativity and imagination.  Or too many of us.   So it should not come as a surprise that people are looking inward, asking painful questions, and talking about more than the loss we experienced after 9/11.  People are intrigued by the return to local living economies and taking a family vacation to visit the past, when they see just an endless parade of sameness coming at them from corporate mergers and big box retail, where they are told that the great American republic is dependent on how much consumers spend, not on ideas, or creativity, or innovation or sheer gumption to carve out a new country, a new life.  What about that loss of individuality?    While I hope we can practice a humane globalism, because global trade and the exchange of ideas and minds will not disappear, nor should they, it seems imbalanced and willfully blind to ignore the slow suicide we are committing economically and culturally.     We are making great strides in science and technology, and its diabolical byproduct, the military industrial technology complex; however, it certainly seems that the days of American greatness have peaked and passed in dynamic economic growth and cultural creativity and/or great political innovation.  We are, sadly, already in a state of decline and not listening to the voices in the wilderness warning us.     -  KWC