Hey, remember the culture wars?

For Emily, at the Pittsburgh Fringe

Please allow me a moment of sincerity before we get on with the usual self-righteous buffoonery.

By now, you've most likely heard about the Germanwings flight that crashed in the Alps last week. We may never know exactly what happened, but as news investigations try their damnedest to make wild speculations about the psychology of the co-pilot who apparently crashed the plane, we shouldn't lose sight of the 149 other people on board.

Included in that number was Emily Selke, the manager of the newly-formed Pittsburgh Fringe Festival. Emily spent a year getting the Pittsburgh Fringe off the ground, and only got to see the festival she helped create run once in 2014 before this crash took her away. She had planned on being on board again as the festival geared up for its second run in 2015.

Like any arts organization, the Pittsburgh Fringe runs off of the talent and energy of a small group of incredibly dedicated people, people who give the better parts of their lives year-round to make sure other people get a week or so in the summer to be both amazing performers and audience members. We may take our own giant decades-old festival for granted, but running a Fringe, and especially starting a new one from scratch, is an incredible endeavor.

I imagine the good people left to run the Pittsburgh Fringe need all the help and support they can get right now. While we can never fill the void that they now have, at the very least we can help alleviate some of their worries. You see, the Pittsburgh Fringe has a modest Indiegogo campaign running to help fund their second year, and since they are members of the Unites States Association of Fringe Festivals alongside our own Fringe, I decided to consider them our sister Fringe for the year and make a donation to help them on their way. I hope you'll consider it as well.

My culture can beat up your culture

I remember the culture wars of the 1990s. The confusion. The hatred. The destruction.

Three billion human lives ended on August 29th, 1997. The survivors of the nuclear fire called the war Judgment Day. They lived only to face a new nightmare: the war against the machines. The computer which controlled the machines, Skynet, sent two Terminators back through time…

Wait, I think I'm confusing this with Terminator 2. Listen, they were both pretty big in the '90s, OK?

Culture wars… What was that again?

Oh yeah, wasn't that when we found out the godless commie pinko liberals were giving our hard-earned tax dollars to so-called "artists" to dump buckets of AIDS blood on unsuspecting people, because they hate America?

Or, was it when those fear-mongering conservatives made up a bunch of lies about art that they had never even seen so that they could scare the ignorant masses into blindly following them into their fascist theocracy?

Actually, it was all of those things, and so, so much less. It's difficult to recap the years of fighting and infighting over who had the right to decide who could fund what art with whose money, but it's worth delving into, because it has directly affected the funding regime we live under now (For example, the NEA Four debacle that started in 1990 is the main reason the NEA turned to funding large, safe institutions instead of funding individual artists.) It's also the reason that the T-1000 can't form complex machines, and… oops, sorry, more Terminator 2 leaking in.

A certain little performance with a little bit of blood performed right here in Minneapolis became Exhibit A for activists who wanted to cut or eliminate the NEA. 20+ years after these events, it's easy to look back and see the bad information and diagnose what went wrong. We can have nice academic symposiums on the events of the mid-90s. Ron Athey, the guy at the center of the "AIDS blood" performance, has had no shortage of interviews lately.

Boy, isn't it nice that we can look back at that silly time and laugh at how silly we all were? Thank goodness that's all in the past and no longer affects us.

The past doesn't go anywhere

Unfortunately, we don't need to study the "culture wars" as if they are some distant past. Even though a quarter century feels like it was so long ago, need I remind you that this only takes us back as far as the original release of Terminator 2.

The world of fear created by politicians trickled down to arts funders, which trickled down to arts organizations, which trickled down to the programming decisions that continue to supply us with a safe and conservative art form that is becoming detached from its own culture. The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug… Sorry, that was T2 again… yet in a way that was, um, actually almost relevant…

Why does it now take enormous effort to create diversity onstage and in the audience? Why is the theatre world beset by so many dour classics instead of developing new work? Why do we spend so much of our time having snarky, insidery bitch sessions over the stupid minutiae of how we make our plays?. It's precisely because of that fear of "weird performance art" ginned up in the 1990s.

You can even trace the coming storm over LA's fabled 99 Seat Plan to our legacy of fear. While everyone involved is expressing elaborate, eloquent and passionate defenses of either keeping or discarding the Waiver plan (and, frankly, both arguments sound like well-reasoned plans for the fastest way to race to the bottom), the fact that it exists at all may be due to some gross inequities in the way that arts funding is distributed.

Remember all that stuff about "the 1%" that a bunch of slightly smelly people were yelling at you from a public park recently? Turns out, it's also kind of true in the arts world. Recent research shows that, in the US, the top 3% of arts organizations by budget size receive 60% of all arts and culture funding. But this isn't about some greedy bunch of people in monocles and top hats guffawing through cigar smoke and brandy as they engineer the financial takeover of our sector. It's about a series of panicked decisions made decades ago and the institutional inertia that has kept them in place.

So, what do you do about it?

People are always asking me that, and I never have an answer that seems satisfactory without at least two glasses of bourbon. Unfortunately, this country just won't accept an arts sector that is run mostly on decisions made while drunk. So, it's up to you sober, responsible people to make yourselves heard. And, hey! Here's an opportunity: Jane Chu, the new head of the NEA, will be speaking in a public forum in St. Paul on April 8. There's a Q&A session afterwards. If you want to speak directly to the powers that be, you don't get many better chances than this.

The culture wars never ended, friends. So get out there and get on the front line! The unknown future rolls toward us. I face it, for the first time, with a sense of hope. Because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too…

OK, I should just break down and watch Terminator 2 again.