NEA chair delivers commencement speech

Thank you President Rodin, trustees, alumni, family and friends. It's a privilege to come before you today to witness the graduates of the class of '95 receive their degrees. Surely an education here at the great University of Pennsylvania is fulfillment of part of the American dream. You graduates, your parents, and those at the University have worked hard to bring you to this point in time. These past few years have been ones of camaraderie in shared endeavors: in the classroom, the cafeteria, the playing fields, the dorms -- in cramming for exam, in blowing off steam on the weekends. There's nothing quite like it in life, and the friends you've made will be yours forever. You now move on to new dreams and the commencement of a way to achieve them. This is your beginning. Thank you President Rodin, trustees, alumni, family and friends. It's a privilege to come before you today to witness the graduates of the class of '95 receive their degrees. Surely an education here at the great University of Pennsylvania is fulfillment of part of the American dream. You graduates, your parents, and those at the University have worked hard to bring you to this point in time. These past few years have been ones of camaraderie in shared endeavors: in the classroom, the cafeteria, the playing fields, the dorms -- in cramming for exam, in blowing off steam on the weekends. There's nothing quite like it in life, and the friends you've made will be yours forever. You now move on to new dreams and the commencement of a way to achieve them. This is your beginning.The American dream is composed of a few basic elements hammered out here in Philadelphia, the cradle of liberty, over 200 years ago. They include: opportunity, freedom and family. We ask, as Americans, for the opportunity to be able to achieve -- which means, whoever we are, that we get our fair shot. Freedom means that we are guaranteed to live the life we so choose, respecting the rights of others to do the same, and playing by the golden rule: doing unto others as we would have others do unto us. And the realization of family is the recognition of our need for community, for food, shelter, health and the pursuit of happiness. It seems like a lot of folks have had their dreams deferred lately. There's a spiritual unease, a discontent, and there's a violence, violence unprecedented. There is violence that attacks the innocent as in the Oklahoma City bombing, and violence that numbs the senses through daily immersion in the tragedies of the world through the media. There is violence in the treatment of our children, our women, and in the neglect of our aged. There is violence in the treatment of ourselves through abuse of our bodies and our minds. There is violence in the treatment of the land, from waste in the water to junk in our cities. When people begin to arm themselves, it is fear, not trust, that rules the day. Everyone longs for a more tranquil time, but time itself is inexorable: it moves forward, not backward. The hope then lies with the new generation, with you students here today, rather than with those of use who survived our own troubled decades. For all decades are unhappy in their own way. You hear the '50s cited often as a time to return to in order to restate family values and quietude. But in fact, there were teenage pregnancies and divorces then as there are today, and the drugs just went by different names -- like valium and speed. The so-called happy days of the '50s were a cover, and the lid blew off in the '60s. The '60s were a seesaw of triumph and despair: idealism like the Peace Corps, civil rights and the Great Society coupled with the assassinations of our major leaders. There were riots and marches and the War in Vietnam; there were love-ins and be-ins and happenings. And finally, as Don McLean sang, there was a "day the music died." For all the activity, we seemed in worse shape than ever: 55,000 dead on foreign soil, the incarceration and death of our African American heroes, the non-passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and the lies of our politicians. The '70s and '80s brought a sense that perhaps the only force that could be relied on was oneself. We sought the good life some how, some way, "Me-tooism" was the rule. We chased the buck, we bowed down to Mammon. Consumerism was rampant, and we overspent as a country and as individuals. We find ourselves now in the mid-'90s with a fragmented American Dream. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting more marginalized. We are all working harder for less: less peace of mind, less rest, less time with loved ones. The machinery invented to ease our lives has made us more harried. The phones, faxes, computers -- the TV, the video games, the Internet -- all seek to transmit information so rapidly that we run faster and faster just to keep up and then collapse exhausted. We rush the time of our lives in order to squander it. But as human beings we are gregarious. We seek each other's company, in fact we depend on it. A voice on the other end of the telephone or an encouraging word on the Internet is better than none. Best of all, however, is the physical closeness that is found with another human being. Do not abdicate your power as individuals to design your own time, to insist upon human conversation, and to keep your faith. We are all connected to one another through the immutable human condition of birth and death, despair and joy, and recognizing the soul of one another is the first step toward healing as individuals and as a society. As a society, we create our own country. Let us begin by acknowledging the value of our Federal government, as the Congress here in Philadelphia over 200 years ago, "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union ? [and] promote the general welfare," they wrote in the preamble to the Constitution. In order to form a more perfect union, the states came together as one nation, to protect and enhance the lives of each and every citizen. I have worked in the Federal government, as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, for a year and a half now, and I can tell you that some of the very best people in our country are in Washington in public service. They have fine minds, and they are trying to make things better. Is government too big, too expensive? In many areas, yes. But you don't throw out the baby with the bath water. And you don't cut valuable programs or agencies in a rush to balance the budget come hell or high water. Programs like National Service or student loans, and agencies like the Department of Education or the National Endowment for the Arts. The Arts Endowment was founded just 30 years ago in order to make the arts accessible to all Americans, not just to those living in places like New York or Los Angeles. We award about 4,000 grants a year to arts organizations large and small in every pocket of America from the most rural areas to the inner cities. For every dollar we award, these organizations are able to attract, on average, 12 other dollars from private and public sources. We are the stimulant that says, "Yes, this group is excellent, it's worth putting your money on." We fund non-profit arts groups only -- not the commercial sector. We cost the American taxpayer just 64 cents per year -- the cost of two postage stamps, and the non-profit arts groups return $3.5 billion to the government every year from the people who work for them. But Congress seeks to eliminate us in order to balance the budget. It's as if, because you needed to tighten your own household budget, you decided not to buy one cup of coffee this year. In the grand scheme of Federal funding, we at the NEA don't seriously register. No, the attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities are for an entirely different reason. We are seen as corrupting the morals of society and are therefore unworthy of Federal support. I maintain just the opposite. We are a vital force in society and worth of as much support as can be given. Let's look at the facts. The Arts Endowment has awarded over 100,000 grants in 30 years -- about 40 of them have caused some people some problems. Have we made mistakes? Yes, sure -- sometimes we don't fund the best art around, and sometimes new art forms are very difficult to understand. ANd much of the art today is defiantly nihilistic, particularly some of the music you hear on commercial radio or some of the movies or TV shows where the spectacle of murder replaces plot. Or in the world of visual art, the coldness of some postmodernists. The very nature of nihilism, to tear things down, to deconstruct would indicate a hard, non-feeling state. In fact, it is a ,mirroring of much of society today. And when you tear things down, you must begin to build up again. Think of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, an early NEA Design grantee, and what a force that has been in the lives of all of us, a way of coming together, of healing the wounds of the war. A simple black gash in the earth with the names of the dead, a highly polished facade which reflects the image of all of us who pass by and pay homage. This is art that serves the highest purpose: community, recognition and ritual. Many thousands of years ago, art began through ritual, and rituals began with art. Thirty thousand year old cave paintings were recently discovered in France. The ritual of their creation long ago was so important that the paintings were buried in the deepest, most inaccessible parts of the cave, hidden from all except the artists and the mysterious society that created them. Greece, in 500 B.C., had ritualized their mysteries through the arts of dance, song and spectacle. The mystery and magic and majesty of something far greater than ourselves is what we celebrate in ritual. Art is the conduit. Picasso said, "Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange hostile world and us, a way of seizing power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires." Does art have the power to influence, to change hearts and minds? Absolutely, for good or ill. But we should not fear it. Art asks only that we think and respond. An artist solves many problems in fulfilling his or her theme -- it is creative thinking at its highest. The audience, the reader, the viewer of art is asked to do the same. But art is only as great as its audience. We get what deserve. Education and experience are the key. If we do not have arts education in our schools, we will continue to be a culturally illiterate nation. Let's not slip into the dark ages. It would be exceedingly destructive to turn our backs to art as a nation now, when we need it more than ever. When we are so fragmented, art seeks community -- in theaters, in galleries, at festivals. Outside of our places of worship and our sport events, it is at art events that we gather together most, and community satisfies not only our need for ritual but our need for belonging. All great nations have supported artists throughout history. It is no accident that the great past nations of Africa, Asia and Europe were those where the arts and sciences flourished together. We are spiritual beings, and what separates us from the animals is the ability to create symbols that have meaning for us -- from the alphabet and language to the Star Spangled Banner or the flickering images on a movie screen. Joseph Campbell, the mythologist, said that each of us lives our own life as a poem, that we are active in its making, aware of the power of image and word, symbol and metaphor, cognizant of its transcendent meaning as our life unfolds. I believe in the power of the arts to help us think how we should live. I believe in their ability to connect us to one another through myth and stories, images and sounds. I believe they can soothe the disconsolate, embrace the disenfranchised, and bring out the best in the spirit of all of us. As we approach the millennium, let's celebrate ourselves through the arts, the humanities and the sciences and reinvigorate the sense of community that is at the heart and soul of our American Dream. Thank you.