Bush sucks up to NEA

Some readers may find the content of this column objectionable, as it deals with federally funding sexually explicit art.

Remember Karen Finley?

She's the "performance artist" who smeared her naked body with
chocolate, inserting produce into her private parts.

You paid for Finley's pornographic antics. For years, your tax dollars,
via the National Endowment for the Arts, funded her sordid version
of art. And lots of other lewd "art" that would make the local strip
club look like church.

Thanks to President Bush, you could be paying Ms. Finley's salary
again. This time, she's graduated to honey, a mattress, and an
"enthusiastic and ungainly striptease to moaning disco," according to a
perverse, gushing New York Times review of her sexually explicit,
raunchy "one-woman wrestling match," dubbed "Shut Up and Love Me."

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In her disgusting show at New York's "Performance Space 122," Finley
"wriggles and thrusts various body parts into the faces of her
audience," followed by monologues "in which Ms. Finley portrays women in
pursuit of sex. These range from a stalking urbanite in a fishnet body
stocking to a whiny rich girl who decides to resolve her Freudian
obsessions by bedding Daddy. There is also, most memorably, the
incantatory creature given to picking up homeless war veterans,
preferably amputees."

And she qualifies for NEA grants. It's enough to make Hugh Hefner and
Larry Flynt blush.

But not Bush.

At a Washington gala on Sunday, Bush pledged his support for the arts,
including the NEA. "It is right for our government to support such
causes," he said.

Wrong.

While NEA should be eliminated entirely, Bush's proposed budget for the
agency mirrors Bill Clinton's. NEA's Fiscal Year 2001 funding is $104.8
million, mostly outright grants to various organizations with no
accountability and a very elastic definition of art.

In 1998, the Supreme Court ruled against Finley, saying that the NEA
could consider decency and respect in denying funding to applicants.
But despite claims it cleaned up its act, the agency continues to fund
organizations and institutions that fund obscene "art," like Finley's.

In 1999, the Family Research Council and Sacramento Bee cited several
instances of NEA funding, like the California Arts Council, which got
$890,000 from NEA. It spends the money on things like "Outfest," the
Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, that promises "graphic in
your face sex, and some violence – [a] vivid palate of sensuality and raw
sex." The lurid movies, like "Skin Flick," can't be described here.

And these NEA grantees: Magic Theatre of San Francisco, a nude gay
men's performance; "Women Make Movies, Inc." an explicit lesbian
documentary maker of films like "Girls Like Us"; and New York's
Franklin Furnace Archive, which sells "erotic art" and videos of Finley,
in case you missed out, and porn queen Annie Sprinkle.

Other NEA projects aren't perverted, just ridiculous. NEA spent money
teaming up with the Recording Industry Association of America (Eminem's
and gangsta rap's best defender) to create the "top 365 songs of the
20th Century" list. Isn't Rolling Stone or MTV supposed to do this?
There are silly "Artist in American Life Colloquia," in which no-name
"artists" rant against capitalism and talk about the "entitlement"
theory of their "innate moral claim" to government funding, claiming the
marketplace is not an accurate measure of their high value to American
society.

There's a 2001 grant to the David Taylor Dance Theatre in Littleton, Co.,
to present rural communities with its production, "A Children's
Rainforest Odyssey." Rainforest? That's code for, "Daddy, your SUV is
killing the rare trees and animals." Other politically laden grants
include one to the El Puente de Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, N.Y., to
"develop an arts curriculum to explore issues of wages, labor, the
global economy and fashion as those issues relate to local and
international sweatshops." Is this art or a protest against Nike and
Kathie Lee? Many grants to inner city groups resemble Midnight
Basketball programs – and seem equally wasteful and ineffective. Not to
mention a grant to the "San Francisco School of Circus Arts."

At Ford's Theater, Bush – in support of the NEA and government funding for
the arts – quoted Abraham Lincoln: "'Some think I do wrong to go to the
opera and the theater. But it rests me. A hearty laugh relieves me and
I seem better after it to bear my cross.' Well, I think many of the
politicians here in this audience would agree with me that we all need
hearty laughs around Washington."

No, Lincoln would be ashamed to tax the citizenry for any politician's
"hearty laughs around Washington" or for NEA's idea of "art." But
unlike that humble, regular guy and son of poor folk, today's upper-class
politicians enjoy the high-class, tax-funded trappings of Washingtonian
life a little too much. Statistically, more Americans patronize bowling
alleys than theaters or museums. Yet, out-of-touch politicos never
clamor for a National Endowment for Bowling, an equally ludicrous, if
more worthy pursuit.

Hanging with ABC's Sam Donaldson, Bush commented that "the success of
Ford's Theater is a testament to public and private partnerships ... a
model for the blueprint of how government, corporations and individuals
can cooperate to support the arts." Who ordered that blueprint? Not
Lincoln, whose government was small and never funded such endeavors.
Then, Ford's Theater was a private enterprise, but now it slops from the
federal trough – maintained by the Interior Department. Lincoln would be
horrified that the site of his death is now used to justify millions in
government waste and taxpayer support for lewd or politically laden
nonsense pretending to be art.

He'd also be appalled that, while Bush is kowtowing to the arts crowd,
his newly appointed FCC Chairman, Michael Powell, is kowtowing to the
hip-hop crowd. Doing penance for fining a radio station that broadcast
obscene Eminem lyrics, Powell is attending gangsta rap billionaire
impresario Russell Simmons' "Hip-Hop Summit," where he'll share the
stage with misogynist thugs like rapper Jay-Z, and racist, anti-Semitic
thugs like Louis Farrakhan and Benjamin Chavis Mohammed.

It's strange that Bush would pick Ford's Theater and President Lincoln
to bolster his administration's "cultural enlightenment." Watching John
Wilkes Booth was a lot different than the naked, food-encrusted Karen
Finley. But support for the arts wasn't such a good thing for President
Lincoln. He paid dearly for supporting the arts, that night in 1865, at
Ford's Theater.

And now he's turning over in his grave.