Waiting for Bush to Set a Beat

By the time the toothy Pepsi shill Ricky Martin pulled our president-elect--”the president of everybody,” as George W. Bush put it the other day--onto the stage with Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber and Sir Wayne Newton during Thursday’s pre-inauguration party, America got a sense of this new administration’s taste in the lively arts.

Bush and company want to kill us, softly, with songs about livin’ la vida bipartisanship, and inclusion. Fresh starts, under a big tent.

Later Thursday on “Hardball,” the pundits tried to explain it all for us. They tried to relate the country’s apparent shift in cultural sensibility--traditional values, backed by country-western twang--to this week’s confirmation hearings for Atty. Gen.-designate John Ashcroft.

They tried, but Chris Matthews never stops talking.

Bush the Younger has yet to get going with his agenda, so it’s too early to say what the next four years--or eight--will mean for the nation’s cultural life. But certain signs this week, certain blasts from the past, may provide a clue or two.

During Thursday’s Lincoln Memorial bash, Lloyd Webber introduced an excerpt from his latest musical, “The Beautiful Game,” a show about rival Catholic and Protestant soccer teams in Northern Ireland. Lloyd Webber, whose biggest hits all happened during the Margaret Thatcher-Ronald Reagan years, already seems like a nostalgia act. The “Beautiful Game” tunes were sung in part by Jessica Simpson, who is to Britney Spears what Buddy Greco is to Frank Sinatra. The lyrics referred to love, and live and let live, and respecting God’s law.

“Anywhere there is conflict,” Webber said, these songs will sing, sing, sing.

And for any ol’ inaugural, apparently, Ricky Martin will dance, dance, dance. His appearance prompted advance cries of treason from his “La Copa de la Vida” (“The Cup of Life”) collaborator Robi Draco Rosa. Post-performance, Martin called out to Bush--”Mr. President? Mr. President!”--and hauled the amiably terrified Texan up to the stage. (You could see Bush’s interior wheels spinning: Will it be better for me politically to appear comfortable or uncomfortable with this guy?)

It wasn’t Marian Anderson, singing “America the Beautiful” in approximately the same location back in 1939. But you could dance to it.

Meantime, all week, another act warmed up in the wings. Ashcroft appears headed toward the post of America’s top cop. We’re told by his champions that we will have a ramrod-straight, even saintly moral authority in a highly visible job. And Ashcroft will be willing, he says, to turn his back on the pesky political activism dotting his resume and enforce the laws he has, in some cases, fought to dismantle.

Ranking just behind Jesse Helms in sheer zealotry, Ashcroft has proven a key foe of the National Endowment for the Arts. He authored legislation to kill the federal arts agency on the grounds that it has knowingly financed “pornography, obscenity, attacks on religious faith.”

As a Missouri senator, Ashcroft once complained: “The average guy [who] wants to go down and see Garth Brooks at the country concert, he doesn’t get a federal subsidy, but the silk-stocking crowd wants to go to watch the ballet or the symphony orchestra, they get a subsidy.” What, is there a drive-through subsidy window next to the opera box office for the highbrows who passed on Garth?

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Ashcroft’s proud enemy-of-the-NEA standing hasn’t come under fire this week. His attorney generalship may not run into politically unpopular arts grants of any kind. Janet Reno wasn’t so lucky: She had to contend with the “NEA 4” group of controversial performance artists, whose grants were awarded and then rescinded. (The NEA 4 controversy began in 1990 but still was in the appeals process through 1998.)

Ashcroft’s feelings about federally funded unpleasantness, in any form, aren’t isolated. While running the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lynne Cheney--another cultural arbiter with some reacquired influence these days--tried to abolish her own agency. Texas Rep. Dick Armey, among others, has tried to kill the NEA, the NEH’s sister body, since the agency was a pup.

Despite such cronies, Team Bush may well leave the NEA be. Under Gov. Bush, the notoriously weak Texas Arts Commission increased its budget to a current $4.7 million. That’s low, but an increase is an increase.

The NEA managed an increase of its own recently, when Chairman Bill Ivey--a savvy moderate who used to run Nashville’s Country Music Foundation--brokered a $7-million bump, up to the current $105 million. That’s less money than most major European cities spend on the arts and culture in a year. But it’s $105 million more than many prominent Republicans want to spend on ours.

All of which is a million miles away from Planet Ricky, or Wayne Newton’s World. The post-inaugural question for our new White House resident: When the cultural shift is done shifting, where will it leave the culture itself?

Laura Bush answered a straight question last month on ABC-TV. “I think national funding for the arts is important,” she told Cokie Roberts. Hear, hear. Let’s hope folks like Ashcroft, the Cheneys and their various cohorts in ascendancy realize the first lady isn’t the only one.