Fwd: Re: Enola Straight

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Andrew Butrica:

>We are missing the point entirely if we believe that the attack
>on the Enola Gay exhibit represented the entire battle front.
>This attack was a single skrimish in a war being carried on
>against the humanities and arts.  (Skrimish should be spelled
>skirmish; sorry.)  The attacks against the NEH and NEA, not to
>forget PBS, are not unrelated.  The Right seeks to eliminate
>"politically incorrect" values from U.S. society; the Enola
>Gay exhibit represented those values and had to be eliminated.
>I suspect that any and all humanities and arts projects
>will undergo similar scrutiny in the future, and that anything
>tainted with "politically incorrect" or (shall we resurrect
>the term?) degenerate art (for example) values will be
>subjected to public censorship.

Right on, Andrew! I agree entirely. Not only are folks like Rhodes and
Sherwin under attack for offering their interpretations, so are myriad
artists, etc. I wonder, however, if this is the consequence of
state-supported arts & education. Maybe we've been lulled into a sweet
myopia because we've had a relatively open-minded regime in this country
for so long. Our "national endowments" and "national foundations" risk
becoming arms of a closet Ministry of Culture.

We know the consequences of this as taste becomes politicized. Grants to
performance artists get replaced by grants to Garth Brooks and Kenny G
clones, and historical agencies get replaced by publically-subsidized
Disney-Americas.

The furor over national history standards bears out this problem. Gary
Nash, et al did fine work, but a politically-correct rightist Ministry of
Culture sort of body would have conducted a similar effort to enforce an
American-Legion and 700-Club history of the US. It's the risk we take with
gov't funding, I fear. We managed to block the Newt's appointment of a
subnormal "historian" to the post of House Historian, but we'd be fooling
ourselves to believe that such appointments, like those to the task force
Gary Nash headed, are inherently political.

So are we thus inevitably locked into being subjected to the shifting
political tides if we advocate and accept public funding? I think not. We
can well make use of the current Republican rhetoric about autonomy,
responsibility, block grants, and delegation of authority in insisting on
our greatest guarantee of intellectual soundness, peer review. Gary Nash's
group went through it and the result can be politically defended. The
Newt's "historian" didn't, and we were all aware of her patent incompetence
for the job.

In short, insistence on peer review is our best source of security in these
matters.


**********************************************************************
*   Robert L. Frost                            frost@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx  *
*   Department of History                            (518) 442-4810  *
*   University at Albany                        fax: (518) 442-3477  *
*   Albany, New York  12222                                          *
*                                                                    *
*      European social & economic history, history of technology     *
*                   women's history, French history                  *
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