News that the Portsmouth officials have decided to save money by shutting public-school art programs follows on the heels of the Bristol School Board's decision to deal with its budget problems, in part, by letting go a sixth-grade band director.

Zorro has struck again.

Why do American school officials in fiscal binds always target art and music programs? Why is enriching kids' cultural tastes always vulnerable to the ax?

The answer is not straightforward. To cite just one oddment, sitting safe, high, and dry in most schools are The Untouchables: the football coach, the basketball coach, and the baseball coach.

For most mothers, support for girls' competitive sports has little to do with winning or losing. It's part of the long-delayed restoration of womanhood to equality, and I'm for that.

The motives of many dads is quite different. They think that they are launching their sons on the glory road. They expect to see a big "V" outlined in school colors on their lads' jackets.

When the boy child is still in the nursery, Dad takes an advance payment on a fantasy; he anticipates the golden moment some years downstream when his chest swells with pride as Tommy takes the field for his high-school team. He can hear the cheers of the fans for his kid; he envisions collegiate scouts lining up to sign the strapping youth to a contract encrusted with juicy scholaships and still more glory without sweating the grades.

If Junior turns pro, there'll be a lifetime supply of parental gratification and dollar signs -- and plenty of "comps" on the 50-yard line.

Never mind the odds against that happening. But politicians will never economize on athletics. Of course, competitive athletics here has served as the favorite ritualized substitute for military combat though the romantic allure of aggressive super-powerdom seems to have lost its charm lately.

What we need is more brainpower. But that never plays as well with the American common man as bigger, taller, more muscular brawn, even if it's juiced on steroids.

Just check the beer ads.

By comparison, I recall standing in line trying to get my hands on a ticket to the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow. The queue was made up largely of working-class types, pushing and shoving to get a rare ticket to the ballet. In Russia, one of the worst labels you can lay on your enemy is nykulturny -- uncultured.

In America, a kid who desperately wants to make a life and career sketching or painting or playing the piano or trumpet is a "sissy" at worst, and "impractical and unrealistic" at best. The rhetorical rants of Spiro Agnew against "effete," "sniveling" elitists reverberate still.

Dad has inherited an attitude about art, one long imbedded in the cultural DNA of the American male. He worries how the kid will make a buck as an artist. It's not like steady work, he instinctively fears, not "something solid" like being a lawyer, a doctor, a computer engineer, CEO, or even a politician.

But art isn't about being rich and powerful. It's about personal enrichment.

Whatever happened to the joy of caring, creative work, which is what art teaches?

Humans are imbued by nature with the appetite for sensual beauty. Whether one winds up being okay with art is largely a matter of nurture. Music in the home. Lovely pictures on the wall. Lots of books. Visits to the museum, concert hall, or theater. When that child grows up to be a school board member, he'll fight for the right of all children in the community to have their eyes, ears, and soul opened to the arts.

But, for the most part, we've been conditioned to the idea that visual images are largely about selling things. Americans are bombarded by a blizzard of images daily. In the consumption economy, art is something on a T-shirt or in an advertisement, or it's a noise at top volume that we dignify as music.

"Art" in this society is a commodity, something too expensive for most of us, something we customarily see well-heeled collectors scrapping over for millions of bucks at auctions. The problem of our social separation from art in this country isn't helped by artists who have lost touch with reality, creating ego-driven content so far out that their stuff never touches human heart or mind.

Fine art (without the million-dollar-signs) has a story to tell. It speaks to the soul about our ideals and values. The artist makes meaning about life and times. He/she tells us who we are, why we love and suffer, what our civilization stands for or against, what is important and what is not.

Art is something that graces a tedious life with joy, beauty, taste and, yes, a critical eye. It speaks to the past and the future of who we were and are, and who we ought to be. It elevates us to personhood.

Art finds splendor in an uglified world.

Without being reared to know art, we will simply be a very tired, bored and boorish people. We will look but rarely see, listen but rarely hear. That's what the parents and high-school students of Bristol decided when they raised a hulabaloo about the the dropping of the band teacher.

Result: The cut has been reversed. We still have a voice, if we will only use it.

Jerry M. Landay, a writer, has taken up photography, and belongs to art and photo guilds in Bristol, Portsmouth, and Newport. He is a former CBS News Washington and foreign correspondent.

© 2006 The Providence Journal

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