Updated: When I wrote this, the funding for the NEA in the economic stimulus package appeared to be DOA, but it’s since been included in the version the House of Representatives passed. I’m not sure how this squares with Senator Tom Coburn’s amendment refusing to fund “museums and art centers,” but am happy to be proved wrong. Still, pay attention to what your leaders say.
The $50 million that had been appropriated for the National Endowment for the Arts is gone, deleted from the final version of the economic stimulus plan, a victim of the cuts necessary for the plan to pass Congress. Still, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is set to pass, which is ultimately a good thing, and the NEA and all the other appropriations deemed “wasteful” and not actual stimuli will soldier on as best they can, as they always have. Unsurprisingly, the knives that had been turned against the NEA from during the early 1990s were unsheathed again, and waved in our faces by people as lofty as Senators and as lowly as bloggers.
George Orwell wrote an essay in 1946 called “Politics and the English Language.” It’s a brilliant document, and the point is that as language becomes defrauded, so does thought. The more our vocabulary shrinks, the less we are able to express, and the less we are able to express, our writing becomes less capable of expressing our ever more meager thoughts. Meaninglessness sets in like rot, and the termites follow.
But Orwell spotted an important addendum to this, which was the flowery, ornate, almost rococo phraseology that accompanies these impoverished language. He called it “inflated,” and summarized its pernicious effects:
“The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism…The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”
We’ve all heard it, we’ve been hearing this doublespeak our entire lives from politicians, along with its emptyheaded cousin, corporatespeak. “Morning in America,” “War on Terror,” “synchronicity,” “outside the box,” “trending up,” and on and on, they’re all miserable shorthand for ideas barely deserving of the name, hardly worth discussing.
I was reminded of Orwell’s essay as I thought about how President Obama repeatedly tried to compromise with the Republican members of Congress. He was negotiating with them flat-footed, I think it’s safe to say now, despite having won the election and brought millions of new voters into the contest. He was entering the room with his back against the wall for one simple reason: public relations.
The President was arguing for the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. No catchy acronyn—the ARRA? Are we pirates?—no fake hope embedded in the bill’s name, just a title that states who the target is (Americans) and what is going to be done with/to them (help them recover and reinvest in them). Someone could argue that “reinvestment” is a tad disengenous, since it implies that an “investment” has already taken place, but we’re all beneficiaries of the taxes we’ve paid, so I’ll allow it.
No, the President was going into this without a weapon to wave around. He didn’t have a PATRIOT Act in his pocket. The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act—it’s actually the USA PATRIOT Act—gave President Bush all the momentum he needed to get the thing passed. The subjective connotations raised by that contrived acronym rendered any objection immediately suspect, and automatically moot. President Obama’s bill had no such name, and a nickname of two words—economic stimulus—that doesn’t lend itself to easy summary.
You have to give the President credit for not calling it the Get America Working Act, or Help Over Problematic Events (HOPE) Act, or some other equally stupid name. Still, I think President Obama basically got schooled on this, and probably for not playing the game as it’s been played. Because if people can’t understand your plan, then someone else is going to step in and tell them exactly what “economic stimulus” means, and they may not agree with you. They may actually be opposed to everything you stand for.
“I wanted to spend some time to make sure the American people know what is in this bill. I think once they know what is in this bill, they are going to reject it out of hand.”—Senator Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma, speech “highlighting wasteful spending, February 4, 2009.
When you don’t set the terms of the debate, you allow folks like Senator Coburn to set them for you. And more damagingly, they get to set them in the language of their choosing, which in Coburn’s case means a calculated mix between someone with the mind of a doctor with the ability to out-Okie Ma Joad.
The speech quoted above set the stage for Coburn’s amendment which disallowed stimulus-plan money to be spent on “any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, art center, and highway beautification project.” The conflation here is jaw-dropping: Casinos with museums? Aquaria (non-profit) with stadia (for-profit?) “Other gambling establishment? Was someone seriously arguing for off-track betting to be included in this plan? (Because I’m feeling charitable, I’ll point out that the Senator’s amendment didn’t originally call for art centers to be included [What's an art center, by the way?], but that it was added to go along with some House language. He’s not a philistine.)
But threaded through the entire speech, which makes for incredibly depressing reading, is this folksy rant against taking on debt to get out of this recession. Where Orwell comes roaring back into the picture is through Senator Coburn’s incredibly canny, amazingly well-placed, anti-liberal, bitterly partisan buzzwords that seem completely innocuous until you realize they’re gang-raping his speech.
“We got here…because we said we were going to socialize the risk on mortgages so people in this country could buy a home who really could not afford a home, and we were going to put that risk on the rest of the American taxpayers.”
This takes your breath away. A list:
- “We got here,” as if we are collectively at fault for the greed and risk-taking of the financial industry. And by the way, we got here while you were in the Senate, Senator
- “socialize the risk on mortgages,” as if the bankers creating credit-swap defaults and credit-default options were closet Marxists
- “and we were going to put that risk on the rest of the American taxpayers,” as if that risk was placed on taxpayers and banks who hadn’t bought the CDOs
The entire speech is infuriating, and reflects exactly the level of cleverness that President Obama is up against.
Or how about my favorite line-item the Senator opposes, STD prevention?
“There is $400 million in here to prevent STDs. I have a lot of experience on that. [Have you told your wife?] I have delivered 4,000 babies. [What?] We don’t need to spend $400 million on STDs. [No one said we're going to spend it on STDs!] What we need to do is properly educate about the infection rates and the effectiveness of methods of prevention.[AND THAT COSTS MONEY]“
I won’t even get into the dubious claims of conservative bloggers about funding for the NEA. It’s too depressing to point out, again and again and again, that the NEA funds institutions and arts organizations, and only rarely gives artists direct grants. $50 million to the NEA wouldn’t have been buying aluminum for Jeff Koons to melt and pour on an inflatable bunny, it would have gone to keep the lights on at a theater company, and give them enough cash to send out some fliers and emails to market their show. Maybe even shows, if the grant were big enough.
The moral of the story is pay attention to what your elected leaders are saying, on both sides of the political spectrum. These people know what they’re doing, and they are committed. Some of the best advice I ever had was: If you can’t be smart, be clever, and these people are very, very clever.