Welcome to the New Philistinism!It’s got everything: an indifference or hostility to any arts, culture or community endeavour that might require government funding (except if it’s an NFL team), a tendency to engage in mean, dismissive public discourse, pitched battles that become operatic (Ford vs. Atwood) and an overweaning pride in being ignorant and uninformed.
It’s the Tea Party in the U.S. insisting on zero funding for just about anything that moves, but especially Planned Parenthood. It’s presidential candidate Michele Bachmann consistently getting her history and other facts mixed up and not even apologizing. It’s pouty-lipped Sun Media television host Krista Erickson conducting a laughably aggressive interview with award-winning Canadian dancer Margie Gillis, lambasting her for the grant money she’s received, then declaring proudly: “I’m just a cultural Philistine.”
And, of course, it’s Toronto Mayor Rob Ford allowing his consigliere brother, Councillor Doug Ford (the Bob and Doug McKenzie of our time) to flip off novelist Margaret Atwood after she raised concern among her thousands of followers about the potential closing of libraries; and even agreeing, as Doug Ford did on one CBC radio show, with the startling notion that corporate funding of public spaces such as parks and pools could possibly extend to Hooters.
Help! I have a headache and I’m crawling under the duvet, so please wake me when it’s over. No, wait, it’s never going to be over. This is the new reality of down-and-dirty public life.
You can be on either side of the political ledger, or in the middle, but if you’re in the silent majority – which to me means if you’re not a cultural philistine – you need to wake up and smell the latte. If you believe in art and culture enriching your environment, now is not the time to stay subdued.
Hundreds of people with this in mind lined up in a small committee room last week to advise Toronto's stop-the-gravy-train Mayor on his prospective budget cuts, a process that from the get-go was designed to be inefficient, alarming and divisive. Even though not everyone came off as compelling and well documented, the point was still made that a great city – or country for that matter – isn’t all about cutting taxes to the bare bones and giving up on funding cultural and community initiatives.
Why should “more cops” be pitted against “more reading?” Why can’t libraries and the police force be run with better efficiency?
When you reduce, in any political environment, a conversation about budget and culture to a set of mutually exclusive competing values, you patronize people, you make them one-dimensional.
You assume that someone who loves to go to the ballgame on a Saturday afternoon isn’t the same person who sits enthralled in a Toronto park, as I did one night this week, watching Dusk Dances, a community-oriented festival that draws hundreds of people on these soft summer evenings to watch dance pieces come magically alive in an outdoor setting.
Even if I didn’t have a family member involved in this year’s production, I would have recognized the value of this event. It drew young and old, with a self-satirizing host who threw in mentions of Paula Abdul and So You Think You Can Dance as he introduced such pieces as a send-up of a high-school prom, a romantic contemporary pas de deux, and a blood-tingling African coming-of-age dance.
Imagine living in a community where such events are not on offer because no one finds them necessary. It reminds me of the time during the 1990s when Bob Rae, then NDP Premier of Ontario during a fiscally disastrous time, was being pressed by his own people to give up on building a new opera house because not everyone had enough food to eat. “Nobody ever died of too little opera!” was the snickering battle cry.
Cities and communities die precisely when they are not alive with art and culture and services. I’m for smart people, elected and otherwise, entrepreneurial and artistic, putting their heads together to figure out how to pay for such vibrant communities.
I’m for paying my fair share of taxes but calling out the waste and redundancy, whether it’s in the council chambers or on the street.
The New Philistinism isn’t for anything like that. It’s reactionary, it’s small-minded, it's short-sighted and it’s declaratively ignorant. It's also very loud. Sounds like the kind of person you don't want to sit next to – at a ballgame or a ballet.
Origin
Source: Globe&Mail
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