The Nation : Artists Must Declare Sides and Fight in the Bush-Quayle Culture War : Personal Perspective

As one who vividly remembers the local preacher throwing Elvis Presley and Little Richard records on a bonfire in 1958, watching Patrick J. Buchanan beat the drums of a Cul ture War was distressingly familiar.

But an oddball event in 1958 has now been given legitimacy by the Bush-Quayle campaign. When Vice President Dan Quayle declared war by attacking a fictional character, the creative community could laugh it off as more fodder for the Tonight Show writers. But since those dark nights of the GOP convention, attacks have turned more vitriolic. Now is not the time for artists to sit on the sidelines. I say let the battle begin.

If you’re gonna have a war, you’d better have an army. Commander-in-Chief George Bush is marching into battle with a rag-tag band of cultural figures behind him. His generals are the “Splattermeisters”--Arnold Schwarzenegger and Chuck Norris. They command a small regiment of washed-up country-Western has-beens, such as Glen Campbell, Tanya Tucker and the Gatlin Brothers. Conspicuously absent are any of the modern country stars like Garth Brooks or Travis Tritt. Every army needs a propaganda minister, and Bush has Rush Limbaugh.

The opposing army is made up of all the significant cultural figures of the postwar generation, starting with every important musician of rock ‘n’ roll, rhythm & blues, rap and new country. Every major artist in theater, modern art, photography, dance and fashion stands opposed to the dominant right-wing of the GOP. On television, “Murphy Brown,” “Rosanne,” “Cosby,” “The Simpsons” and MTV are willing to take on Quayle’s favorite, “Major Dad.” In film, Francis Ford Coppola, Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee and Steven Spielberg are ready to do battle, while Bush has yet to find a director who will join his jihad.

What Dan and Marilyn Quayle fail to understand is that the American people have already taken sides in the culture war. The public casts its vote each time it turns on the TV, buys a record, reads a book or sees a movie or a play.

Until now, the vast majority of people who vote for the culture that the Quayles hate never thought they were making a political decision. But now they must.

What Marilyn Quayle fails to realize is that the counterculture she mocked so strongly at the convention has become the mainstream. After Robert F. Kennedy was killed in 1968, the counterculture pretty much divorced itself from politics. Before that, most cultural decisions were political. If you were for Bob Dylan, you were against Barry M. Goldwater. But the ‘70s and ‘80s changed all that. Politics and culture got so divorced that the Beatles’ “Revolution” was used to sell sneakers, and Ronald Reagan wanted to play Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” at his rallies.

As the counterculture came to dominate the popular culture, many artists became reluctant to take sides in presidential battles. Instead, they confined their political involvement to less polarizing causes like the environment.

But now the Republicans have tried to fight the election over culture. If Bush and Quayle are reelected, their plan for the extermination of our cultural freedom is clear. The ax will surely fall on Public Television and National Public Radio--it’s in the GOP platform; and it would not be out of character for Buchanan to be appointed chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts. The Republicans would then step up the legal attacks on art and culture, under the smoke screen of obscenity and sedition laws and backed by the right-wing Supreme Court. The arrests of record-store owners for selling 2 Live Crew or gallery owners for showing Robert Mapplethorpe are the tip of an iceberg that would freeze out the cultural vitality that was one of the major forces that brought down the Berlin Wall.

I lived in Berlin in the summer and fall of 1989, working on a film with the German director Wim Wenders. We traveled into East Berlin often during that summer and spent many a night there watching pirated MTV and talking about Lou Reed and Springsteen with the kids who, four months later, would topple the communist regime.

Popular culture is America’s most important export. What do people around the world want to buy from us? Not our cars or refrigerators. They want our music and films.

But now Quayle declares war on this most vital of American products. When Buchanan screams “Take back our streets. Take back our culture. Take back our country,” it is not only ugly racism; it is antithetical to everything unique and wonderful about America. Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) may pine for an Ozzie-and-Harriet fantasy, but even Ozzie could boogie to young Ricky’s rock ‘n’ roll. The Republicans want a cultural cleansing and it is no less terrifying than the Serbians’ “ethnic cleansing” or even Adolf Hitler’s “Kultur Kampf.”

Now is the time for artists to speak out. On the simplest level, every artist must urge his or her audience to register and vote against Bush-Quayle and any Republican who willingly takes up the banner of their “family-values cultural war.” While Bush is cynically trying to use country music as his cultural bastion, singers like Brooks and Tritt will have to choose sides.

From this day forward, artists from all disciplines are going to have to tell their audiences which side of the Culture War they are on. The audience has voted for the culture that Bush wants to kill. They must now connect that vote to a political vote in November, and put a stop, once and for all, to this Culture War.