Arts: a safe haven that must be fought for
Language, art and free expression are the existential enemies of those who wish to instill fear in others, so I wasn’t particularly surprised by the Trump administration’s announcement that it will seek to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and privatize the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Even if a public outcry manages to rescue these tiny, crucial, long-hated institutions, don’t be fooled. The culture wars are back, and they will be brutal.
As always, there’s history to heed and guides to follow.
I happened to be at City Lights, San Francisco’s venerable bookstore and publisher, where I overheard the staff talking among themselves about making preparations for “a climate where we’ll be under attack.”
Eager to learn more, I followed up with Peter Maravelis. Maravelis is City Lights’ events programmer, a title that belies his importance as an employee of that institution for 26 years.
First he reminded me that City Lights has never taken this country’s First Amendment rights for granted. They’ve gone to battle with officials over their material on no fewer than three occasions.
Many people know about the precedent-setting 1957 case when Lawrence Ferlinghetti beat obscenity charges for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s long poem “Howl,” but City Lights won legal tussles in the 1960s and the 1970s too — over material like Zap Comix.
“Because of our history, we know that the rights we take for granted are not a constant,” Maravelis said. “We’ve always been waiting for the next shoe to fall.”
I asked him what they were worried about this time around. “This time we’re concerned that it’ll be over more overtly political material,” he said. “Something that would be labeled as fake news. That’s the kind of buzzword you can use to discredit someone without qualifications.”
City Lights publishes and promotes radical literature, so it didn’t take me long to visualize the potential for trouble. I asked Maravelis if there were any plans to rethink their offerings. No way, he said. “You have to stand up to bullies. What we stand for is pretty clear, and we’re not going to back down,” Maravelis said. “We believe in equal access and giving voice to people who are marginalized. In the worst of times, our mission becomes more clear and more important. We will be a safe haven for the body politic in all of its forms.”
“Give me joy like it’s a weapon!” shouted Zahra Noorbakhsh on Wednesday night, Jan. 18.
Noorbakhsh, a self-described “feminist Muslim, Iranian American comedian,” was the emcee for Litquake’s “No Shadow Without Light: Writers Respond to Trump” event. Despite the howling weather, she had a full house in the Koret Auditorium in the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library. But the audience’s laughter was thin and nervous.
Fear and uncertainty ruled the land. Everyone had his or her own dose of it — that’s why we were all there. We were handing ourselves over to the power of literature, hoping to find a way out for at least an evening.
There were wonderful poems by Devorah Major and Elmaz Abinader, some of which had been written specifically for the occasion. Sarah Ladipo Manyika read a particularly thoughtful essay about traveling to the “so-called” Third World in the days after the U.S. election, and being offered sympathy from the residents there.
But I was still preoccupied by my conversation with Maravelis, still worrying over the cultural battles to come. Then T.J. Stiles, the Berkeley historian who won the Pulitzer Prize for “Custer’s Trials” last year, took the stage and spoke directly to my fears.
“The rights I have today were given to me by freed slaves,” Stiles said. He explained how what Americans now understand as universal civil liberties came our way not because of the founders, but through the organized actions of freed slaves after the Civil War.
“In order not to be re-enslaved by white Southerners, they took on great personal risks to petition for equal rights and equal protection under the law,” Stiles said. The legality of these rights, he went on, was underscored in 1923 — “in a case, taken on by the ACLU, of a radical who wanted to overthrow the government.”
These are the kinds of Americans who will advance all of our civil rights, Stiles told us.
“The most oppressed, the most hated people in society — these are the ones who push us forward,” he said. “Our rights and our liberties aren’t given to us by the comfortable. They’re given to us by the dissenters.”
Stiles left the stage to loud applause. When Noorbakhsh returned to the microphone, the audience laughed fully at her jokes, not in the halfhearted way we had begun.
The words had done their job: A roomful of San Franciscans was ready to fight for our culture for another day.
Peter Maravelis, City Lights bookstore “Because of our history, we know that the rights we take for granted are not a constant.”