Ben Franklin, made out of pennies
All the hand-wringing and caterwauling over modest user fees at some National Shrines leave me deeply puzzled. Suddenly, ideologues of the free market pivot 180 degrees in their pooh-poohing the alleged sacrilege of charging admission. Bizarre expletives like blasphemy are rolled into place as the ultimate howitzer.
The way I look at it, what's sacred sauce for the goose of McDonald's and Disneyland ought to be secular sauce enough for filiopietistic stopping-off places. Are you telling me that folks who can pit stop as often as we do for Big Macs can't afford to pay as they grow, studying our political origins? Have you checked lately what families have been paying, exclusive of food and lodgings, to line up for the privilege of seeing our de facto shrines in Orlando and Anaheim?
I suspect a hidden agenda motivating the National Park Service bureaucrats who are weeping crocodile tears about the horrendous exclusion of the under-classes from their birth-rites. Phooey. Those canny administrative survivors have learned how to deal with the annual Congressional budgetary fan dance and rightly infer that the turnstile counts they use to justify modest increases will plummet once thrown on the mercilessness of the marketplace.
As an American who deplored for 30 years our countrymen's preference for Walt Disney rather than Walt Whitman, I am perennially depressed by the slumping medians of popular taste. And I admire the professionalism, by and large, of the NPS guides and display makers who are attempting to upgrade American consciousness on the hoof--the hardest pedagogical assignment there is.
But I think the long-run purposes of the intellectual renaissance I expect to see in America before I park my portable for good would be better served by modest user fees than by freebies.
I love, for example, that marvelous statue of Ben Franklin on Arch Street made of millions of pennies donated--after a teacher's sales pitch, no doubt--by thousands of Philadelphia school children. Don't you think there's an extra-special tingle in the heart of now-mature Philadelphians as they remember with pride their act of philanthropy back when they were in grade school?
There verily is no free lunch in the cultural sector either, and our children and their families ought to feel pride, not pressure, in helping to swell the beleagured resources of the local shrines. I would even "taint" the cloistered experience of looking at the Liberty Bell by positioning Salvation Army-type canisters so that the better-off can give until it hurts to help foreigners, street people and the underclassies we treat like foreigners, who should not expect to be taxed where they're not represented.
The high dudgeon of the editorialists in the local media, whose daily life blood is infusions from a market economy, is simply bad, unthought-through thinking. In fact, their imputation of a certain religiosity to our Sacred Place is an impediment to any sophisticated understanding of our true origins as a country--and therefore a threat to its continued evolution in difficult times.
It is essential that more Americans have a decent minimum comprehension of how our country arose from economic disputes between the creditor class of England and the debt-ridden merchants and planters of what was to become the United States. Later on, when these local gentlemen had secured their fiscal apple carts, some rowdies from out West and in the industrializing cities wrested some of their perks for a wider class in what we know as the Jacksonian Revolution.
The Civil War pitted two diverging economic systems against each other, and as Howard Beach--not to mention Frankford and Southwest Philly--remind us, are still liquidating those war debts. Paying for the privilege of looking seriously at our past, going beyond bland Disneyfied assurances that all is well in Mickey Mouse's House, will be a tiny step forward for the American part of mankind.
The larger questions, of course, remain: How should we finance the shortfalls in our cultural life? Is it meet and just, for example, that the S.O.B. Syndrome (symphony, opera and ballet consuming the lion's share of our cultural subsidies) exclude "less prestigious" artistic genres form the public purse? Why can't the Main Line subsidize its own cultural life?
Indeed, I find very beguiling the fresh notion of Mobilvision's chief cooker-up of new ideas, Herb Schmertz. Last summer, he lobbed the aesthetic stink bomb of "cultural vouchers" on a not-yet-alerted public. One person / one vote. It would surely swell the kitty for jazz, that most-neglected American art form. Pay as you grow, folks, it's the Amway!
The price of patriotism in America can be pondered for the next fort-night on Channel 6. First Phil Donahue broadcasts five takes from the U.S.S.R. commencing February 9th, then the hypercontroversial 14 1/2-hour maxi-series Amerika starts to unreel February 15th.
According to the Inquirer's new Moscow correspondent, Steve Goldstein, Donahue had his Phil. Refuseniks and contentniks declined to sit down in the same studio. And red teeners sat mute when Phil tried to get them aroused with frank sex talk (what if you throw an intellectual orgy and nobody wants to come?). The whole shebang ends with a visit to lovely Leningrad, my favorite Soviet city.
One Sunday afternoon there, o.d.'ed on the Hermitage, I was cruising Nevsky Prospect when I saw a humongous line forming. I decided to fall in, in a bit of consumer detente. Longer than I like to remember, I found out they were lined up for--a crack at canned peas! Yipes!
In Amerika, they've run short on tomatoes in a small Nebraska village in 1997, ten years after the Soviets have occupied the good old U.S. of A. As WPVI's Prose puts it: "Against a background of aging autos, propaganda posters and people increasingly dressed as refugees, those who deem it prudent to cooperate with the occupying forces make the best of it."
Rightwingers faulted ABC for The Day After and the network responded with this docu-opera that's riling everybody! How we're taking over is vague. Probably the Russkies wanted to boost their weakening economy by assuming our trillion-dollar national debt.
from Welcomat: After Dark February 11, 1987
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