Trump Betrays the Bards of Hard Work

By Maggie Doherty, New York Times, Feb. 16, 2018;
original article contains links.


Image from article, with caption: A performance of Hamlet at the
Matthews Opera House and Arts Center in Spearfish, S.D. in April.
The Matthews receives funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

This week, President Trump announced his proposed budget for the 2019 fiscal year,
calling for deep cuts to public arts and media funding. In addition to essentially
eliminating the Institute of Museum and Library Services and slashing the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s budget to $15 million from $445 million, Mr.
Trump wants funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National
Endowment for the Humanities reduced by almost 80 percent.

These cuts would spell the end of the agencies. That is the point. Mr. Trump
wants them to “begin shutting down.”

This isn’t the first time the national endowments have come under fire from the
right since their creation in 1965. In the late-1980s, Senator Jesse Helms led a
crusade against the arts agency for funding “obscene” art like the photo “Immersions
(Piss Christ).”

As the times have changed, so, too, has the right’s rationale. Now, the issue for
conservatives is that the agencies are just another example of federal bloat in need of
a starvation diet. The TV pundit Tucker Carlson, supporting Mr. Trump’s proposed
cuts last year, called the arts spending “welfare for rich, liberal elites.”

The truth is the National Endowment for the Arts is the exact opposite: It
amplifies the voices of Americans who aren’t the so-called coastal elite, or the
aristocratic, or the advantaged. It seeks to diversity the stories we tell and the lives
we see. This diversity can take many forms. It can be seen in racial difference and
regional difference, in terms of gender and in terms of class.

Take the case of a white, 32-year-old man who in March 1970 returned home to
his wife and two kids from his day job, opened the evening paper and saw that he
had won a few thousand dollars from the National Endowment for the Arts. The
grant changed his life. This man had lived in red counties in blue states all over the
Pacific Northwest, pumping gas, sweeping corridors, even picking tulips. His wife
waited tables and sold book digests door-to-door. The arts grant was not much at all.
But it was enough.

His wife quit her job to become a full-time student and homemaker, and the man, an
aspiring writer named Raymond Carver, completed his first collection of short
stories, “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” Thanks to that tiny grant, Carver began
an influential career writing about working American men and women, members of
what he once discussed as the “desperate” class.

Carver wasn’t the only chronicler of the desperate class to receive what Mr.
Trump might call a handout. Over the course of the last 50 years, through Creative
Writing Fellowships alone, the endowment funded the work of Tillie Olsen, who
wrote stories about the deep fatigue of working-class mothers; Philip Levine, a
Detroit-born poet and the “Whitman of the industrial heartland”; Ernest J. Gaines,
the descendant of sharecroppers who wrote fiction about rural Louisiana; and
Bobbie Ann Mason, a short story writer from rural Kentucky who, along with Carver,
brought “dirty realism” into vogue — a working-class counterpoint to the fictional
worlds populated by rich, liberal elites.

Looking back on his early days working menial jobs, Carver once said that “if
this were just a peaceable kingdom, writers wouldn’t have to work at all. They’d just
get a check in the mail every month.” For a period in the early 1970s, in this country,
Carver lived in such a kingdom. He wrote fiction that told how hard it was to live
otherwise.

Mr. Trump often speaks about the “forgotten people,” Americans whom he
promised, if he was elected president, to remember and to honor. Yet his proposed
budget cuts reveal, once again, the hollowness of this promise. While claiming to be
the voice for working-class Americans, Mr. Trump is doing all he can to ensure that
they themselves will not be heard, and that their stories, unrecorded, will be
forgotten.