“A cry of absence, absence in the heart.” --William Faulkner (Absalom, Absalom!)

Way back when, Willie Nelson had a song about his heroes always being cowboys. For me, at least from my teenage years, they were writers, painters, sculptors, composers. They were the kind of people who wouldn’t take guff from anyone, and who would tell it like it was—and is. Hemingway, for example, at the height of his fame, taking a principled stand against Franco, addressing a New York audience of progressives at a pro-Spanish Republic event organized by poet Archibald MacLeish. The writers’ works would lead me to their lives—and much as they tell you now to forget about the bios, much as this 1930’s New Criticism still gluts the academic milieu, so much do I know in my viscera that the life and the work form a whole: one informs and completes the other.

But a strange thing has happened. Almost half my lifetime—some thirty years-- ago, the kinds of people who became artists began to change. While Kerouac was dharma-bumming the country, Ginsberg reciting to his harmonium, Baldwin speculating brilliantly with those darting, exophathalmic eyes, and Sylvia—my God, It still hurts!—sticking her beautiful head in an oven—a lot of my contemporaries were exercising their gluteus maximus in writing workshops while postulating visions of tenure-track sugar plums.

And now, when we need those clarion voices of dissent—voices like Paine’s or Jeffers’ or Patchen’s; when we need a Ferlinghetti to tell us that Christ has climbed down; or a Denise Levertov to tell us what the people we have slaughtered were really like (Did the people of Vietnam have music?), we have a battalion of careerists who dare not eat a peach.

What the hell happened here?

Of course, there’s Sam Hamill. During the lead-up to Oil War II (or War Ad Aeturnum), a voice cried out in the wilderness, asking writers to send poems. Thousands answered the call, and Hamill and his group were good enough to give them all electronic voice at poetsagainstthewar.org, and to distill a few for publication in a handsome book. Big Media gave its usual glancing attention and then moved on. It’s so much easier to deal with Janet Jackson’s boob, Michael Jackson’s certain weirdness and alleged pederasty, Martha Stewart’s double-dealing (or was it Martha’s “double,” who was “dealing”?), Britney Spears’ superhips, lesbian kisses, Governators and other mutants, than ponder the outpourings of thousands who take the time to think about subjects like war, beauty, death, the meaning of life, the purpose of government, and moral constraints on the use of power.

God bless Sam Hamill, but why aren’t there many more like him and why aren’t the universities exploding in protest, passion-fired by the great thinking-feeling artists who have infiltrated the politically correct, alabaster halls during these past 30-odd years?

As Krishnamurti used to say, the answer’s in the question.

Back in my day (I’m an old-timer now), there were a handful of schools with Creative Writing programs. The University of Iowa and Stanford had the best of them. As often as not, writers were invited to universities by student unions. These student unions were full of young writers and writers manque, and the writers they invited were fire-breathers. Around 1971 I was a young Instructor at the University of Florida. I got to hear Norman Mailer declaim to a restive, antagonistic crowd about the “conspiracies” surrounding Marilyn Monroe’s and JFK’s deaths, as well, of course, about Vietnam.

Back in 1968, I was in a seminar taught by Robert Lowell, perhaps the best poet of his generation, and generally acknowledged by the mass media to be so (making the cover of Time for his verse-drama, “Old Glory”). One week he cancelled his classes in order to attend (many said “lead”) an anti-war rally against the Pentagon. Mailer, who was at the same massive demonstration, wrote about it in “The Armies of the Night.” Even the advertisements-for-myself Mailer-mentch-persona was humbled by the steadiness and integrity of Boston Brahmin Lowell’s quiet determination to lend the weight of his reputation to an anti-war movement.

Sometimes, as Mario Savio said, you just have to throw your body on the machine.

Lowell had established his pacifist credentials back in World War II; as a Conscientious Objector, he’d put in some time. As in, incarceration time. That was supposed to be another one of those wars “to end all wars,” and CO’s were about as warmly embraced as Al Qaeda sympathizers are today. Robinson Jeffers, the most popular and critically acclaimed poet before that titanic struggle, also took an anti-war stance, warned his countrymen against the excesses of their own empire in “Shine, Perishing Republic” and elsewhere, and got bashed and knuckled in the press and never regained his pre-eminent position. Had he been a good careerist, Jeffers would have learned the lessons of Edna Millay, whose star rose meteorically after her second-place teenage win with “Renascence,” but petered out just as rapidly after her very public opposition to the Sacco and Vanzetti-Palmer-raids-anarchist-witch-hunts and executions.

All of which makes me just a tad suspicious when I hear the recent announcement that the National Endowment for the Arts is going to receive an additional $18,000,000 largesse from our beloved national government. Which arts, you say? And it’s a point worth pondering.

In a few short years we’ve gone from artist-as-recreant, miscreant, Colin Wilson-outsider, to artist as consummate insider: slick, snake-oil salesman Administration-shill, able to hobnob with D.o.D. Secretary Cohen at bigwig party events the night the bombs start raining over Kosovo, or do a two-step Uncle Tom-thank you Massa’ Daddy Warbucks, jes’ keep the money flowin’ an’ I won’t bring up the W.M.D.’s, the C.E.O. robberies, the child-bashing-education-stealing, the health-care-environment-depleting, multi-multi shenanigans and depredations that would break the hearts of stone-cold statues had I the courage to open my mouth and wail about what I see so clearly around me day by day by day.

It’s a damn shame. It’s a goddamn, crying shame. No doubt there are first-rate artists out there, struggling to put it down in verse and drama, painting and sculpture, immortal music seizing the energy of creative change that Stravinsky captured in “The Firebird,” that Giacometti welded into screeched-out bronze, that Arthur Miller sizzled to perfection in The Crucible, All My Sons, and Death of a Salesman. When we bewail the loss of our public airwaves to the pirates of Faux News, the Conservative Bullshit Service (CBS) or Clear Channel, we go only halfway if we fail to recognize how we have lost our Arts—highbrow and populist—over these past thirty years.

Question: As fifteen million people marched against the War Ad Aeternum last year, can anyone remember one good, anti-war, English-language song? Shouldn’t there have been at least one? God bless the Dixie Chicks, but where was the Lennon, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and Dylan and Baez of our generation?

I’m going to suggest something radical now, so let’s take a deep breath. I’m going to suggest that we stop supporting all this b.s. crap out there, this know-nothing art that’s afraid of its shadow. We live in the shadow of the nuclear bomb and it’s time we stopped pussy-footing around the death-stalking machinations of our CIA-NSA-FBI-DEA-Pentagon-PNAC and whatever, Clear Channel—military-industrial-academic-organized crime complex that has been draining the lifeblood of our country and our culture for so long now we can hardly remember that it wasn’t s’posed to be this way. It is time students demanded that their politically-correct tiptoeing, tap-dancing writer-teachers give them socially-conscious work—Euripides? Sophocles? Shakespeare? Milton? Of course! And teach them how the great thinker-artists throughout the millennia have wrestled with the angels and demons of war and peace, kindredship and xenophobia, the usurpations of power, and the enfranchisement of the masses. (“The multitude of the wise,” wrote Solomon, “is the welfare of the world.”) It’s time to put social consciousness back in the Arts and Arts Education.

It is time to stop thinking of the mass media as the boob tube (Janet Jackson notwithstanding)--pretty much lost now--and focus on what’s been happening to the Arts in America. “There is some shit I will not eat,” e.e. cummings wrote in one of his infamous anti-war poems, but we’ve been eating so much pre-digested, mad-cow, cannibalistic burgermash pap-Art, we can hardly discern the real thing when it bites us in the jugular. We need a Munchian cry-out for Snyder’s “real work,” something with pit-bull tenacity that won’t let go, art that shows the bone-diamond-studdedness of our common humanity, the tears and the blood and the laughter that never go away.

Gary Corseri's articles, fiction, poems have appeared in the New York Times, Village Voice and over 100 other publications/websites/venues in the U.S. and abroad. He has published two novels, two collections of poetry, an anthology (edited), and his dramas have been produced on Atlanta-PBS and elsewhere.

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