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MORALS, RELIGION, AND CENSORSHIP

—PLAYBOY NEEDS YOUR HELP

JULY 13, 1985

 

I have here a form letter (“Dear Bill”) from the editorial director of Playboy magazine, Arthur Kretchmer (“Art”), asking me to authorize the use of my name in an advertising campaign aimed against groups who, protesting those features of Playboy that made it famous, have urged boycotts here and there against stores that sell the magazine.

The letter is wonderfully complacent in tone, and, in its choice of words, rather more vulnerable than it might have been. Its tone is that of the fraternity president addressing his brothers. “You may not be aware of it, but there are some people out there who don’t like Playboy.” Well, if you are not aware of this, it may be you are not aware that Washington was our first president, and that Congress is a bicameral legislature. The letter goes on, “I’m not talking about those Effete Literary Snobs that you’re occasionally forced to drink with in the Hamptons” (the allusion is to New York Review of Books types who feel that you don’t really need to run a brothel in order to lure people into good reading). “I’m talking about right-wing groups and—because zealotry makes strange bedfellows—some left-wing groups as well.” That the editorial director of Playboy should cavil at any two people meeting in bed (indeed, in Playboy, as often as not the stranger they are to each other, the better), is newsworthy, though not newsworthy enough to make it into the next issue of Playboy.

But the letter goes on to complain against “a kind of moral terrorism” via boycotts, and “on-site harassment.” Mr. Kretchmer reminds us that last year his magazine won an annual fiction prize and says that “the best writers in the world publish in Playboy.” This is quite true, though it begs the point, which is that the protesters aren’t protesting the best writers in the world, they are protesting, to say it again exactly, those parts of Playboy that made it famous. Another way to put it is that if one were to take the whole of the serious content over the last ten years of Playboy, segregate it, and stick it between the covers of, oh, The Atlantic Monthly, or Harper’s, these publications would not be enjoying a circulation of 5 million. More like 200,000, 300,000. About what they have without the sex.

What Mr. Kretchmer et al. don’t like to face up to is that Playboy is also a cultural statement. And not a cultural statement obliquely presented. The first decade or two of Playboy contained a protracted monthly essay by its founder, Hugh Hefner, in which he tirelessly deplored, assailed, and mocked traditional moral views involving licit and illicit sex. The proposed Playboy ad for which signatures are being solicited begins, “The American Experiment, after more than 200 years, is working out just fine. Americans are still free to speak, to write, to think and act as they choose. That’s what the American Experiment is all about.”

But you see, the American Experiment is not working out just peachy-keen. The current issue of Newsweek magazine announces that by the end of the decade as many as one half of the children of America will be raised by single parents. Between 1970 and 1980, illegitimate births in the white community rose from 6 percent to 11 percent, and in the black community, from 38 percent to 55 percent.

Because they all read Playboy? Of course not. But it is unquestionably the case that self-indulgence (“The Me Decade”) has a great deal to do with the fragility of personal relations. Wanton sex, like wanton booze or wanton idleness or wanton thought, breeds undesirable things, among them bastards, but also broken homes. And broken homes breed things like violence, neglected children, and drug addiction—the stigmata of modern America. Most emphatically not what the American Experiment is all about.

It is hardly Playboy’s exclusive responsibility that this should be so. But we have traveled a long distance from Nathaniel Hawthorne, who awarded a scarlet letter to adulterers, to Hugh Hefner, who thinks adultery is good plain American wholesome fun and takes pride in his magazine as the principal architect of the sexual revolution.

I add this, that I have frequently written for Playboy, as I would write for any journal that addressed five million readers. And I gave a straightforward answer to the question why I did this, feeling as I do, in a Playboy interview published fifteen years ago. I write for Playboy, I said, because it is the fastest way to communicate with my seventeen-year-old son.

—SEX AND PARADOX

APRIL 10, 1986

 

Last Sunday night the CBS program 60 Minutes devoted attention to the problem of teenage pregnancies. The narrator, Ed Bradley, stressed that although the program featured black promiscuity, the rise in white teenage pregnancies was very nearly as startling as that among blacks. The protagonist of the documentary was a bright and articulate woman in her thirties who looked a little like Lena Horne. She and a black doctor had a well-developed thesis. It was as follows: a) Promiscuous teenage sexual activity is no greater in the United States than in Europe. b) We have many more teenage pregnancies than does Europe, however, because we are a “prudish” society. c) Evidence of our prudishness is the difficulty local school boards have in instituting sex education programs, which are opposed by many parents. d) These programs are absolutely necessary because of the failure of parents to undertake such teaching at home.

It all sounds very neat, notwithstanding that the camera goes on to show children who a) have taken the sex courses, but nevertheless b) have borne, and continue to bear, children. But what strikes the viewer most is the sudden switch in the orthodox line of liberal argumentation.

Whenever the subject of religion comes up, whether we are talking about a common prayer recited in the schools or the discussion and treatment of religion more seriously than merely as an opening ceremony, the First Amendment rampart-watchers rise to declaim that religion is a matter for the home. It is never asked whether, in fact, children are receiving religious instruction at home. But with respect to sex, the moment you get pregnancies or venereal disease, it is quickly inferred that desirable sexual habits are not taught at home, and therefore it is the responsibility of the public schools to teach sex.

If you ask: Why does it not follow, then, that it becomes the function of the public schools to teach religion?

Ah, the rejoinder is anticipated, because, don’t you see, public problems are the result of casual sex habits: Last year it cost the public $17 billion to look after illegitimate children.

But there is of course an appropriate counterrejoinder. It is that instruction in religion diminishes promiscuous sexual activity. If a child is taught to believe that premarital sex is “wrong,” and if the conscience is cultivated and trained, among other things by invocations of divine sanction, illicit sexual activity is by no means eliminated, but it is reasonable to suppose that it diminishes. If a conscience is to develop among young people, then they will ask themselves not merely utilitarian questions (Is sex fun? Answer: Yes), but also corollary questions (Is sex without regard to other factors OK? Answer: No). It is impossible to deny, however secular the spirit of the age, that the activation of the conscience by religion is an important factor in the development of character. Why should a society concerned with the sexual explosion not be asking itself these questions, and exploring the absence of religious training in the schools and its possible relationship to abandoned moral sanctions?

It is difficult to take seriously the notion that the problem focused on is the result of the “prudishness” of our society. In the first place, it is hard to think of a society as “prudish” in which Penthouse and Hustler and Screw are available at the local newsstand, in which the local movie theater specializes in R-rated films and the local kiosk rents out X-rated films for a dollar a night, and rock ’n’ roll lyrics urge instant capitulation to the libido.

But then, also, what is it that has caused a rise in illegitimate children by a factor of 600 percent during the past twenty years? Our slide toward prudishness? The opposite, of course, is clear as the nose on the face of Pinocchio. During the past twenty years, we have had a) diminished religious training in the schools, thanks to the Supreme Court; b) a sharp increase in federal care for dependent children, thanks to Congress; and c) a sharp rise in the availability of sex-oriented material, in song, in movies, in television, in books and magazines, thanks to our entrepreneurs. The notion that a thirteen-year-old girl wise in street wisdom can’t learn that the ingestion of a pill suffices to prevent pregnancy, or that a boy can’t master the intricacies of a condom without elaborate instruction at school, is as laughable as the proposition that you need classroom instruction in order to teach children how to smoke cigarettes or drink beer.

Our thought leaders have got a lot of paradoxes to face. To avoid doing so, they have developed near-perfect prophylactics.

THE STRANGE USES OF TOLERANCE

JANUARY 26, 1985

 

Do you agree that opponents of abortion ought not to threaten the lives of men and women who operate abortion clinics, or their property? The answer is presumably that yes, you agree. The overwhelming majority of Americans believe in the rule of law, and that means that you take your protests not in hand, but to your legislature or court. But all morally dynamic societies are accustomed to externalized forms of indignation, and these are often ugly, though their motivation isn’t always ugly.

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote an American classic about how women were treated when caught in adultery. The Scarlet Letter [as already noted] was a visible stigma, designed to draw perpetual attention to one woman’s breach of matrimonial faith. It was society, speaking at that time, finding its own voice, declaring its solidarity behind monogamy. The branding of an adulteress strikes us now as infamous and cruel, but it was better than what was routine a few hundred years earlier and still is in some societies, namely the execution, often by torture, of the adulteress.

Defenders of white supremacy during a long and ignoble period of American history adopted a variety of means by which to signify their displeasure at ruptured social conventions. These included flogging, tarring and feathering, and occasional lynching. The idea of racial integrity was very big in America, and the law recognized it as integral to the social structure, forbidding, as was done in many states, interracial marriage.

John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave because he decided to take into his own hands his battle against slavery, and this he did by itinerant attacks and killings of targeted slaveholders and their spokesmen. Nat Turner, like John Brown, was also hanged because he led a rebellion against slavery that resulted in considerable carnage.

But have you noticed? John Brown and even Nat Turner are slowly making their way back into the kinder passages of history books. At worst they are called zealots. It is not held in any question that their cause was just. It is only specified that they should have turned their energies not to different causes, but to different means of achieving their ends.

And so we see that societies tend, eventually, to judge the exertions of prophets on the basis of current attitudes toward right and wrong. Adultery is no longer an offense people get excited about. Racism, on the other hand, is, and from any cosmopolitan gathering of civic-minded citizens one could put together enough volunteers to crew a man-of-war to set out against Capetown, armed with letters of marque and reprisal from the Black Caucus of Congress.

“How do societies resolve conflicts between two opposing moralities?” The New York Times editorial asks, confessing its disappointment with President Reagan’s handling of the abortion rally in Washington. What did Reagan do wrong? He did ask for “a complete rejection of violence as a means of settling this issue,” to be sure. But the president reiterated his commitment to “ending the terrible national tragedy of abortion.” That is what upset the Times, because it views the abortion decision of the Supreme Court as one that “gives practical, even brilliant voice not to abortion and not to its foes but to tolerance.”

But what does that mean? Would the appropriate answer to the opponent of slavery have been that he should be tolerant toward those slaveowners who disagreed? What defenders of tolerance appear incapable of understanding is that there is a school of thought that makes it not a mark of moral jingoism to assert responsibility for protecting the lives of the unborn, but a mark of fraternal obligation. If it is true that an infant is on Day Minus One for all intents and purposes as human as an infant on Day Plus One, then it is something other than mere passage through the womb that confers on that child the protections we grant under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which derive from the Fifth Commandment of the decalogue that specifies that thou shalt not kill.

—ARE YOU “RESPONSIBLE”?

APRIL 10, 1990

 

At a public encounter the other day at Lynchburg College in Virginia, a student asked former Senator George McGovern what was his position on abortion. He replied that in his judgment American women could be counted on to behave responsibly on the question whether to have an abortion, “so let’s leave it up to them.” This brought uproarious applause from most of the crowd, and the air was thick with the incense that hovers over a Solomonic statement, hallowing the moment.

The trouble with Mr. McGovern’s statement is that it is palpably wrong, misleading.

The current argument is on the question whether a woman should be permitted to abort a fetal pregnancy. Now whether your answer to that is yes, or whether your answer is no, clearly we are talking about an unwanted child. But if the child is unwanted, why did it materialize? We all know the answer to this, do we not? The woman who became pregnant either a) was ignorant of the paraphernalia by which unwanted pregnancies are avoided; or else b) she was not ignorant, but recklessly failed to take the proper precautions; or else c) she was carried away by passion, perhaps in an inebriated state, and simply hoped she would not become pregnant; or else d) she was raped.

Now with the exception of the last category, which accounts for one half of 1 percent of the pregnancies that are terminated by abortionists, is it correct to say that the woman in question was behaving “responsibly”? Presumably not: If you don’t want a child and have the option not to have one, then it is not behaving responsibly to become pregnant. And if one behaves irresponsibly in the matter of conceiving, why should George McGovern assume that responsibility sets in between the moment of conception and the moment of abortion?

Most people don’t think it entirely responsible to bear illegitimate children, right? This is so notwithstanding that many moralists would admire more the woman who bore the child she mistakenly conceived than the woman who aborted it. But illegitimate birth is nevertheless, viewed on the whole, an act of irresponsibility. Children are supposed to have legal fathers and mothers. If they do not, their parents can be said to be behaving irresponsibly.

Well, in 1970, 10.7 percent of all births in America were illegitimate. In 1986, that figure had more than doubled, to 23.4. That adds up to a lot of irresponsibility. Broken down by race, white illegitimacy in 1970 was at 5.7 percent. By 1986 it had tripled, to 15.7 percent. Comparable figures among blacks were 37.6, rising to 61.2 percent. That would seem to be irresponsibility on a massive scale.

The point, then, is that women who go to an abortionist, or who procreate illegitimate births, are not the best judges of right and wrong, even if society agreed that they should in their own situation be the executors of the critical decision, whether to give birth or to abort.

Theology teaches that the conscience is supreme. This means only that you cannot commit a moral wrong unless you know it to be wrong or believe it to be wrong. It does not mean—anarchy would be the result—that all the decisions an individual arrives at are morally correct because he fails to recognize that they are morally wrong.

And this is the nature of the quarrel between those who believe in the woman’s “right” to abort and those who do not. If abortion is objectively wrong, a society may nevertheless wish to abide by the woman’s right to pursue her own conscience and proceed to abort. But latitudinarian activity by the society does not sanctify the uses to which such activity might be put. If society licenses the sale of liquor, it does not derivatively license drunkenness. And of course the great divide between the two camps has to do with such questions as do not affect the drunkard, who for the most part damages only himself and his own reputation—if while drunk he attacks someone else, he gets hauled up on assault charges.

Leaving us, then, with the obvious question, the source of the intellectual and moral difficulty: Is a mortal assault on a fetus something on the order of assault and battery? Or is it no different from stuffing a tomato in a blender?

These perplexities may continue to confound us. But really, one shouldn’t designate the class of people who have this problem as the class of especially responsible people.

—SEE NO GOD?

SEPTEMBER 3, 1992

 

The business about co-opting God as a Republican brings a smile —or it should. Especially when the rebuke that attracts the most attention comes in from the National Council of Churches.

It isn’t all that surprising, come to think of it, that the council should be shocked by the reference to God. Some observers of its declarations over the years would be shocked to hear “God” mentioned by the council, whose concerns are overwhelmingly secular. Its position reduces to: If the National Council of Churches doesn’t mention God, candidates for the presidency have no right to mention God.

And then the council’s letter takes one or two strange positions. “We believe it is blasphemy to invoke the infinite and holy God to assert the moral superiority of one people over another, or one political party over another.”

What? God’s bodkin! We are not talking about whether God is on the side of a higher or a lower minimum wage. Was it indeed blasphemous for the abolitionist parties to claim God’s sanction for their cause against slavery? If the Soviet empire was evil, as Ronald Reagan finally persuaded Mikhail Gorbachev et al. to agree, by what standards was that evil judged to be so, if not God’s? Professor B. F. Skinner’s?

“As our Pledge of Allegiance affirms,” the council went on, “we are ‘one nation, under God.’ Not ‘over’ God or in any other way owning God.” Surely nobody at the convention in Houston superordinated the GOP over God? If so, the networks weren’t watching, nor the press.

“Any partisan use of God’s name tends to breed intolerance and to divide.” This condemnation is as sloppily thought out as it is sloppily worded. It is the business of politics to cultivate intolerance—of those ideas deemed hurtful to the republic. Was it wrong for the speaker to ask for intolerance to those who are indifferent to the epidemic of AIDS? Or of poverty? Or of discrimination? If the Republican and the Democratic parties are not engaged in trying to divide the American people, they are not doing their duty.

The specific offense, one gathers, that brought all of this on was the line by President Bush in which he called attention to the word missing from the whole of the Democratic platform, namely: God. Practically all thought on the matter is stillborn because of our superstitious adherence to the notion that separation of church and state requires us to ignore God in the formulation of policy.

But 85 percent of the American people believe in God, and if so, we naturally wonder in what direction God would move us, when dealing with public questions that have a moral dimension. On the question of abortion, for instance, what is “right” is of major concern—to those who believe that a belief in God is also a commitment to explore divine postulates.

A century ago the fight against slavery became (finally) a palpably Christian mandate. And in our own century, we most confidently asserted that God could not consider as equal a government whose primary philosophical commitment was the rejection of God and, in his non-name, the rejection of any notion that we are created in his image, and are therefore equal and born to be free.

On the matter of political agenda, it is plain that the Democratic Party more or less officially endorses that construction of the First Amendment that tells us that it is unconstitutional not only to permit common prayer in the public schools, but—witness the most recent decision of the Supreme Court—also to permit a rabbi to pronounce a blessing at a commencement ceremony of a state school.

Those who believe that public education oughtn’t to be hampered by a dogmatic see-no-God, hear-no-God secularism have every right to denounce the reasoning of the Supreme Court that treats the Founding Fathers’ thought like Silly Putty and, in doing so, to call attention to the acquiescence of the other political party to this distortion.

Republicans can’t, with piety, plead that God is among their constituents. But they can argue that it is not idle to raise the question of the compatibility of certain public policies with what we know of God’s will.

—THE SURRENDER OF THE CORCORAN GALLERY

SEPTEMBER 21, 1989

 

The critics of those who (along with Senator Jesse Helms) protested the use of public money to finance the “art” of Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano did a hell of a job of caterwauling over the provincialism of the booboisie who protested the exhibitions. And now we have the final gesture of abject surrender: an official apology by the Corcoran Gallery in Washington. An apology for having elected to feature a display of homoerotic, sadomasochistic photographic art? No no. The Corcoran’s director, Ms. Christina Orr-Cahall, apologized to the public for canceling the exhibit. Here was a modern auto-da-fé: not for countenancing heresy, but for denouncing it. I swear, the critics are going to end up convincing the trendy of this world that a crucifix immersed in human urine is an expression of spiritual joy, an insight of artistic penetration, the new stupor mundi of the artistic soul.

Listen carefully, because we need to distinguish as a very first step two phenomena. The first is the historically redundant failure of the literati of the world to recognize genius. Examples abound. Van Gogh sold one canvas during his lifetime. Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” was used as wallpaper. Joyce’s Ulysses was not admitted into the United States until 1933. Those who wish to add to this list can do so at telephone-book length.

Which tells us what? Tells us that every other day the work of a great artist is being neglected. The problem in the current case is that that is all that is being told us. What is not being told us is that when every other day the work of an artist is neglected, this neglect may be well earned.

Mapplethorpe can be said to be an accomplished photographer, but this does not mean that everything he chose to photograph became great art. Picasso commanded perhaps the greatest technique of the century, but this does not mean that every use to which he chose to devote that technique resulted in great art. This would be so only in the collectors’ sense, which would attach considerable value to a “mediocre” building sketch drawn by Adolf Hitler, because Adolf Hitler was a considerable historical character. Mapplethorpe is not yet in the Picasso league. And assuming that he were, the sponsors of a collection of his work in which objects protruding from a male rectum were a feature might be presented as examples of conceptual and perverse failures by great artists.

That an artist should dominate the language, or the paintbrush, or clay, does not mean that he will use that skill for aesthetic, let alone exalted, purpose. Artists can profitably use their skills to demonstrate the despicable side of life, which is often tied to the poignant side of life. The New York Times asks rhetorically whether Lautrec’s depictions of prostitutes are “obscene,” to which the answer isn’t necessarily the spastic of-course-not. Much depends on what the artist intended. A painting of a detail of the Holocaust is one thing executed by an artist who seeks to convey the horror of it all, something quite different executed by an artist whose intention is to celebrate a historic attempt at genocide.

The whole quarrel over art has in recent weeks tended to overlook the utterly important negative critical function, which is the right of the critic to say, No: this isn’t something to which I wish to devote the half-acre’s space in my gallery during the month of May. There is competing work by other artists which is of wholesome interest, by which is meant not photographs of Little Orphan Annie, but photographs and statuary by artists who do not seek to outrage convention, in the case of Mapplethorpe by celebrating the kind of activity that caused him to die of AIDS; in the case of Serrano, the kind of infantile antinomianism that thinks it amusing to paint swastikas on the walls of synagogues.

Enter, now, the political dimension. We seem to be hearing the critics say: No guidance of any sort is tolerable in the course of conveying public money to the support of the arts. Let the dispensers of that money proceed immune from official public scrutiny. To which the answer is, surely: Why? It requires artistic nescience to take the position that anything presented by the Corcoran Gallery with public money ought to be absolutely immune from scrutiny by the public agency that conveys that money. Why should the art critics, themselves the historical practitioners of artistic neglect and misjudgment, alone be responsible for passing judgment?

Senator Helms erred, in my opinion, in failing to qualify his suggested criteria by exempting any art work over fifty years old, since that passage of time can season the judgment sufficiently to distinguish between pornography, for instance, and eroticism—the work of Rodin is an example. But a failure by Senator Helms to react against the excesses of Mapplethorpe and Serrano would have represented a far greater indifference to artistic sensibilities than is being shown by his critics.

UNDERSTANDING MAPPLETHORPE

I was in Cincinnati the other day with a couple of hours to spare, so I went to the Contemporary Arts Center to see the provocative photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, about which so much has been written. It was these photographs, alongside a work by Andres Serrano (“Piss Christ”), that stirred up first Senator Jesse Helms, who introduced a bill to bar the National Endowment for the Arts from giving money to exhibits that include blasphemous or obscene art/creations, and prompted the sheriff of Hamilton County, in which Cincinnati sits, to indict the director of the gallery that is displaying the Mapplethorpe photographs.

The curator of the Center spotted me and offered to give me and my companion a professional tour of the exhibit. Mr. John Sawyer, we soon discovered, knows more about Mapplethorpe than Boswell knew about Johnson. And he does not disguise his enthusiasm for the photographer’s work. He points out details in the photographs we might otherwise have missed, speaking about them with the voice of a coroner dictating his findings to a stenographer, whether he is talking about the irradiations of subtle light, or about the foreskin of the subject’s penis. I think it is fair to say about Mr. Sawyer that he is no more “shocked” by what Mapplethorpe photographs than a laboratory technician would be shocked by a microbe he spotted. As far as he is concerned it is work that is done by an artist, and that is all that matters. The flyer you get with your ticket might very well have been written by the curator. Under the heading of “Still Lifes,” one comes across the line, “The convergence of both sexes in the flower is emphasized by Mapplethorpe’s careful positioning of lens and light to reveal the powdery stamens and the translucent orifice created by the petals.” Fuss around with that just a little bit and you could be reading Henry Miller or Frank Harris.

The Center proudly points out that fifty thousand people have come to see the exhibit in the first month. One restrains oneself from commenting that fifty thousand people went to see Deep Throat every day. Unfair, perhaps, but the most wayward photographs of Mapplethorpe were in fact bunched together at one end of the room, and that was the only corner of the exhibit where a line formed. To see anal sex, you have to stand in line.

The utter sincerity of John Sawyer is not ineffective. You could liken exposure to him to START talks dealing with the goal of total disarmament. He speaks—again, like a pathologist reporting on body tissue—about Mapplethorpe’s models. Mostly he liked the black male.... “There had been practically no photographic studies of the black male until Mapplethorpe” ... “About one half of his models shown here died of AIDS” ... “That model over there didn’t permit his face to be shown, and later he thought the picture showed his member distractingly large” ... “The little boy (filmed nude at age six) was embarrassed by the photograph when he reached his teens. But now he is in college and likes it. His mother always liked it” ... “You say she’s ‘dykeish’? I see what you mean, but come over here and see the picture of her coming up from a swim in the sea. There. She looks totally feminine” ... “You notice the total evenness of the color?” (a male fist is inserted into a rectum) ... “The colors are really quite extraordinary” ... “Some people find that picture [of a flower] the sexiest in the exhibition.”

The mind keeps returning to the world of science, which is like the world of art in that the professional prescinds from the surrounding world the object he is assessing even as the scientist would do. The curator looks at a picture and sees in it only the skill of the artist; the effect of the picture on ambient values, conventions, feelings is simply extrinsic to his concern, rather like asking the doctor doing a biopsy whether the patient has provided adequately for his forthcoming widow—hardly the scientist’s concern. The John Sawyers of this world, gazing at some of the pictures of Robert Mapplethorpe, see colors and form and conformation, and are truly astonished that other people are seeing: kink.

It is very difficult for the two worlds to understand each other. There are 150 pictures in the Mapplethorpe exhibit, and by retiring twenty-five of them the public would be left to see the extraordinary work of an extraordinary artist without being asked to suspend the operation of conventional sensibilities. But to withhold these, in the eyes of the Sawyers of this world, would be to perform an act of bowdlerization. They should realize that just as non-artists do and say things that do not merit publication, so artists produce work that may include some best left for study and worship in artists’ laboratories.

 

The ongoing quarrel over the role of the National Endowment for the Arts suffers, as so many quarrels do, from a lack of focus. This is sometimes the doing of the ignorant, sometimes the doing of polemical opportunists. These last would have us believe that those Americans who have been alarmed by a few excesses of the NEA in the recent past are crypto-fascists who favor a general censorship.

Mr. Anthony Lewis of The New York Times is not ignorant, and therefore must be set down as behaving opportunistically. The technique is hoary: one associates the opposing argument with unseemly people. As in, “The other side, which one might call the fascist side, favors ...” Consider, for instance, the matter of the photographs by Mr. Andres Serrano. You will remember the crucifix immersed in the urine of the artist, photographed with the caption “Piss Christ”?

Now I think it entirely candid to say that there is a community of people in America, among whom Mr. Lewis is comfortable, who are quite simply unoffended by such a photograph. For one thing, they think of Christ, if ever they do, as a distracting historical superstition responsible for all sorts of human misbehavior including wars and persecutions; and if some artist wants to express his feeling about Christ—and about Christianity, derivatively —by urinating on a crucifix and calling it art, who are we to object?

Thus Mr. Lewis begins his column—entitled “Fight the Philistines” —“A small band of religious zealots and right-wing political opportunists is trying to show the world that America is an intolerant Puritan country, contemptuous of artists.”

How is that for target-bombing those who believe that something is functionally wrong with an agency that begets Piss Christs, and circulates photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe that celebrate (the exact word) homoeroticism and sadomasochism?

The technique, then, is to denounce those who state their objections and to associate them with a great historical pageant of all things horrible. Thus the Protestant minister Donald Wildmon who has objected to some of the work of the NEA “would no doubt prefer to live in the Spain of Torquemada, the Massachusetts of Cotton Mather, or the Soviet Union of Stalin.”

Sometimes it is painful to be made to think, but at the risk of inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on Mr. Lewis, one needs to lead him, calmly, through a child’s garden of syllogisms.

• Censorship, of a generic kind, is exercised every day by myriad authorities. The New York Times, which is the most authoritative newspaper in the country, exercises a benevolent censorship by, for instance, declining to publish pictures of the Mapplethorpe photos under discussion. In declining to do this, it can be denounced for exercising narrow censorship; or it can be praised for exercising good judgment.

• If the word “censorship” is appropriately used to describe a refusal to back a particular exhibit, then it is also appropriately used to describe the very act of selection. For instance: last October the NEA first pulled back from, and then reinstated, its funding of something called, Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing (an exhibition of AIDS-related paintings and photographs). When the agency decided to reverse itself and renew its backing, it did so with one qualification: it declined to supply the money to pay for the accompanying catalogue that was designed to go with the AIDS exhibit. The catalogue was an explosion of anti-Christian odium (the Catholic Church is a “house of walking swastikas”). That catalogue was “censored” by the NEA, we are free then to say.

• But in that case, censorship goes on at a feverish pace, given the discrepancy between the number of applications for NEA money and the money available. For every dollar of the $170 million spent by the NEA, one assumes that an application for two or three dollars was turned down.

On what grounds? Well, maybe the peer committee didn’t think that other photographer was as “good” as Mapplethorpe.

Using what criteria?

Well, er ... the composition wasn’t as good, nor the lighting, nor the... subject matter as interesting?

Writes Mr. Lewis: “The critics of the NEA, when they want to sound reasonable, say that after all it is only a question of making sure that Government money does not go for objectionable art. But that argument begs the real question: Who decides?”

But that isn’t the most interesting question. The real question: Whoever does decide, and somebody must, is what issues from that decision something that critics can call censorship? Censorship, used in this way, goes on every day, in every way, in a free society—and should.

Recently the columnists Evans and Novak published that an application for a grant from the NEA had been tentatively approved. The idea was to encourage a “solo theater piece.” This kind of thing is known generically as “cutting-edge” art, by which is designated what used to be merely the avant-garde with the difference that new forms are currently sought out, the idea being that music, canvas, photography, dance, and sculpture do not exhaust the artistic dimensions of the mind’s eye. Anyway, this cutting-edge solo theater piece was designed to feature Karen Finley, an “actress” moved on to cutting-edge art in which she appears nude on stage, having smeared with chocolate “those” parts of her body, after which she engages in acts that are designed to “trigger emotional and taboo events.”

Some guardian angel blew a little whistle into the ear of Chairman John Frohnmayer just in time, and Miss Finley was shown the door, and will now need to get backing for her show from, oh, the Rockefeller Foundation. But the episode brought great administrative turmoil to the office of the NEA. A reason for this tension is given in the wonderful calm of Samuel Lipman, the publisher of the New Criterion, writing in Commentary (“Backward & Downward with the Arts”).

Essentially, the difficulty lies (writes Mr. Lipman—who is by the way a professional musician, and music critic) in that the United States doesn’t have a culture policy. “In 1981, a chairman, Frank Hodsoll, was chosen for the NEA who lacked a background in art or the arts; the battle for his replacement in 1989 was marked by unseemly competition among various old-boy networks, with the final section of John Frohnmayer being made on the basis of pure political patronage. From the beginning, during Hodsoll’s regime from 1982 to 1989, a series of wise and far-reaching administrative reforms—all, now, under Frohnmayer, a thing of the past—were unfortunately wedded to a refusal to make distinctions between programs and grants, between transience and permanence, between high art and entertainment. As was true in the first fifteen years of the NEA, it was felt in the 80’s that public support could only be achieved by yoking the agency to the wagons of the glamorous, the famous, and the successful. The White House has abetted this tendency by sponsoring on its premises a mixture of glitz and gloss, Michael Jackson, and now country music. ”

Lacking a central vision, the NEA has been easily distracted, and has been hospitable to grants that lead to the kind of notoriety brought on by the exhibitions of Mapplethorpe and Serrano. These were for a long time defended on the grounds that the NEA subjected applications to “peer panel review” and that therefore the NEA was not itself responsible for its grants. “This response was so weak, and ultimately so lacking in philosophical weight, that even seasoned arts administrators-including leading voices at the NEA itself—were soon panicked into claiming that in making provocative grants the NEA was only fulfilling its proper function, since art itself was in its essence provocative. This line of argument, so far from improving matters, merely had the effect of reducing not only the NEA but art itself to being the handmaiden of anger, violence, and social upheaval.”

Mr. Lipman shrewdly ties it together. Artists like Mapplethorpe and Serrano aren’t, in their seizures, engaged in making art, but in making polemics. “That being so, it was inevitable that cutting-edge grants would come to be defended by the arts establishment not in terms of artistic achievement but in terms of free speech.”