Some truly horrifying shit this week from Phillip Jeffery, writing in National Affairs and calling for a new national cultural agenda. Like a lot of us, Jeffery thinks that the free-market modernism pushed covertly by the CIA and then openly by the NEA was a bad thing, both for the world and for the arts. Where we part ways, though, is why. I think that government sponsorship of the arts tends to make sure that the arts aren’t ever going to be revolutionary, either aesthetically or politically. Jeffery’s problem with the NEA is, instead, that it’s ended up enforcing a kind of “cosmopolitan” (with all the nasty connotations that word now carries on the far right) high culture on a small-town America that, basically, knows better.
The absolutely deranged solution that Jeffery proposes (with an obligatory lib-bating nod to the WPA) is that the NEA start directing its grants explicitly toward small-town artists, artists whom Jeffery expects to produce an anti-cosmopolitcan art that’s in line with Donald Trump’s agenda of American renewal. You (and he) are already imagining the national nightmare that would ensue: bookstore shelves stocked with Mitch Albom fanfiction, art museum walls decked out in nothing but patchwork quilts.
Can we have a reality check or two? First, America already produces a whole bunch of not-exactly-nativist but surely not cosmopolitan artwork. Americans make weird music and write weird books, both pitched to a domestic audience but enjoyed abroad because the USA (and not France, pace one of Jeffery’s weirdest claims) still leads the dance of global culture like it has since the fifties. The vast majority of this art comes from cities, because that’s where the vast majority of Americans live.
Second, there’s not actually any small-town culture to support. I say this as someone who was born in one small town and has lived in a bunch of others. Locally, there’s absolutely nothing but dinner theater and cover bands; the vast majority of the culture that small-town America consumes gets beamed in from above; the monoculture is a tall tree that’s already killed all the rural saplings struggling in its shadow. Jeffery notes that the WPA focused on rural culture because that culture already seemed to be disappearing in the 1930’s, but doesn’t draw the obvious consequence that rural culture is, by now, long-disappeared. What’s replaced it is mostly Fox and Sinclair Media and Clearchannel; if you asked small-town America to make art now, that’s about what you’d get.
I suspect that’s also what Jeffery wants, and that this plea for the revivification of small-town culture actually disguises a right-wing project for propaganda from below. Even thus conceived, though, it won’t work: the impulses that Jeffery wants to capture are already getting expressed on Facebook, and posting is a lot easier than making art.
Still, it’s worth asking what a left culture policy to counterbalance this one would look like. A good start would be to adopt an idea mooted by the late Paul S. Martin, a distinguished Cenozoic paleontologist. In his final book, he suggested that the midwest and great plains regions of the USA should be re-wilded, first with buffalo and then, when technology catches up to our ambition, with cloned wooly mammoths. I propose extending this policy nationwide and just bulldozing every town with a population of less than 30,000 that isn’t also a near exurb of a major city. With that range of habitats, we could probably bring back the full range of quaternary North American megafauna. Giant armadillos, giant sloths, cute little horses. Doesn’t that beat going on a family vacation to York, Nebraska?
The cultural angle here is twofold. First, of course, paintings of mammoths, but then also the idea that getting rid of small towns would at this point be doing artists a big favor. Small towns are a repository for the most atavistic, backwards ideas in the national discourse; because one of those ideas is that small towns represent “real America,” they also get assigned an importance in the national conversation (why does Iowa get to have the first presidential primary?) that’s totally out of proportion to their share of the national population, which is around 10%. The always apparently looming threat of small-townism has the effect of making really radical socio-economic transformations of the sort that most Americans actually support seem impossible, so we end up stuck with a neo-liberal compromise formation that, even if it doesn’t help most urban residents, at least holds back the fascist tide.
But what if we could see that the fascist tide was really more of a trickle? What if small-town ideas had a place in the cultural conversation that actually matched their place in American demography? People would feel freer to experiment, I bet, in art as well as in politics. We might get more novelists like Thomas Pynchon, writing imaginative grand Americana, and fewer mediocrities like Jonathan Franzen stooping to the prejudices of an imaginary small-town audience.
That’s maybe not too practical a recommendation in the current political climate. On the other hand, the actual climate is changing in ways that make what I’m suggesting (minus the megafauna) basically inevitable. The small towns of the southeast, midwest and great plains are going to be uninhabitable by the end of the century, and small towns in the deep south are going to be a lot more unpleasant to live in (where they’re not underwater). At least the end of the world comes with a small silver lining.