Partisan Passions

From the Executive Director

By Ben Cameron

In the small town where I live in New Jersey, there's an explosion of lawn signs reading "Support Our Troops: Vote Bush Out" and a plethora of bumper stickers critical of the current administration. There are rainbow flags in most neighborhoods—indeed, our town made the New York Times in July when more than 400 gay and lesbian partners converged on our city hall to register as domestic partners—and the racial diversity of residents is a particular source of civic pride. The lines at Fahrenheit 9/11 are record-breaking, and many residents see our area as a bastion of liberal activity.

In the larger but still relatively small city where I grew up in North Carolina, the displays are markedly different. It's pro-Bush/Cheney bumper stickers that dominate the parking lot at the local Target store, and no one thinks twice about proclaiming "God Bless America" at civic meetings, or even in casual business conversation. Red, white and blue adorns houses on almost every block, with nary a rainbow banner in sight. The local bookstore proudly displays Anne Coulter front and center, while it's Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ—not Michael Moore—that's setting records at the local multiplex. It's a town where no gay couple would be seen holding hands in church, much less marching on city hall, and the races remain too clearly segregated in housing and social circles.

We are living, it seems, in a deeply divided nation—in a landscape of red states and blue states, as the pollsters note, with liberals clustering in Minnesota and Massachusetts while traditionalists claim Oklahoma and Utah. We can choose our homes not only by climate and by professional opportunity but by political compatibility, it would appear. Would that it were that simple.

In every city I visit these days, I am struck by a rising edge of anger that hovers when politics enters the public arena. It is in "liberal" New York that the conservative press—whether the New York Post or the Fox Network—adopts its most virulent strain of liberal-bashing and where the Republican party will convene even as these pages hit the street. In conservative Tennessee, I read an editorial that questioned the Iraq war and asked when Barbara and Jenna Bush might ship out to foreign shores. Liberal gays and lesbians often reserve special vehemence for Log Cabin Republicans, and conservatives have particular disdain for defectors from the emerging Anybody But Bush Republican groups. I have seen civil discourse yield to uncivil confrontation on my commuter train more than once; and am I the only one with a family that has declared politics off limits at gatherings for fear of unhealable breaches of relationships?

As a nation, we are deeply, angrily divided, not merely one state from another, but often one neighbor and one relation from another, with a degree of passion I cannot remember in my lifetime.

How do we program seasons for our communities in these times? How do artistic leaders think about these issues? These questions inform several of the articles in the magazine that you hold in your hands at this moment. Cultivating diverse audiences has not prepared us for managing politically divided ones. There are financial stakes, critical dynamics affecting our staffs and boards, and—not incidentally—fears of dividing the very audiences we have nurtured. In a climate where provocative scientific material is greeted with the de-funding of grants; where dissent is increasingly monitored through Patriot Act provisions; and where major cities disallow protest in public spaces, what do we dare and not dare do? Reminders that the purpose of the Bill of Rights was to protect the minority, not entitle the majority, fall on deaf ears in many quarters, and we seem to have lost sight of the visionary firewall protecting content and free expression in the enabling NEA legislation—a recognition that a culture is actually strengthened, not undermined, by dissent and diverse voices, and that lockstep political conformity is the first step toward cultural demise.

Indeed, in the provocative new book Dark Age Ahead, author Jane Jacobs writes: Cultural xenophobia is a frequent sequel to a society's decline from cultural vigor. Someone has aptly called self-imposed isolation a fortress mentality....a shift from faith in logos, reason, with its future-oriented spirit "always seeking to know more and to extend areas of competence and control of the environment," to mythos, meaning conservatism that looks backward to fundamentalist beliefs for guidance and world view.

Theatre, always that odd oxymoronic field of lies and truth, often embraces logos and mythos, to use Jacobs's terms. Even while many of us glory in entirely new work, others of us look to the past in a living dialectic, not of retreat, but of curiosity, faith and future orientation. How we will display our comparable convictions—regardless of which side of the political aisle one calls home—will be a question for the coming months. As Augusto Boal once said, every play is a political statement, whether it challenges or implicitly supports the status quo. Never has that seemed more true than now. Never has it been more important to take stands on the issues that divide us.

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