Second stimulus should include arts programs

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It seems clear to me that sometime next year, if not sooner, the Congress is going to have to come up with a second massive stimulus plan to re-goose the economy.

The first stimulus was too narrow in its belief that funneling huge amounts of money to the banks would encourage them to lend again, but having been burned so badly in the runup to the recession, the chances of them handing any money out to anybody but the healthiest corporations and individuals is slim.

So a second stimulus is going to have to happen, and it’s going to have to be much more creative than the current one, which is far too narrow. The new one is going to have to rejuvenate many more sectors of the economy, from retail to infrastructure, and it’s in line with that idea that I would like to make a call for the revival of the federal arts programs of the 1930s: the Federal Music Project and the Federal Writers Project, among others (the Civilian Conservation Corps, too, which would be plenty busy down here in South Florida ridding the Glades of Burmese pythons, for one).

I’m sure this isn’t a fashionable idea, and some research into the history of these programs shows that they basically were fairly short-lived, as yahoo Congressmen of one kind or another let their grumpy glands inflate as they saw artistic expression suffused with the red glow of Communism. But leaving aside all that, there is some merit in the idea of giving work to underemployed writers and musicians, actors and painters.

In the Federal Music Project, for instance, according to this valuable precis of the New Deal arts programs, the government-funded musical ensembles reached about 3 million Americans each week in about 5,000 separate performances. That’s a lot of music, and for a country whose population was little more than a third (125 million) of what it is now. Music instruction was widespread, folk music was extensively catalogued, and there was a Composers Laboratory in which composers could try out their works.

Unsurprisingly, I like all those ideas, and not just for the laudability of a country taking care and pride in the artistic powers of its citizens. I like the idea in particular because, like so many of the New Deal make-work programs, it offered a real boost to the self-esteem of the people who worked them.

One of the most damaging things that happens to people who fall out of the day-to-day bustle of the working world is the one that’s hardest to see, and that’s the damage to the psyche. One day you’re virtuous and hardworking and bringing home the bacon, and the very next day you’re unwanted, unneeded and a drain on society.

A country that lets formerly productive people who lose work through no fault of their own and then does not allow them the wherewithal to recover, either through rational unemployment benefits (unlike Florida, which forces you to file a claim against your former employer, a hideous and vicious idea obviously dreamed up by a lobbyist) or temporary make-work as they look for new labor in their own fields, is not a country that is organized to help most of its people. It is a country designed to benefit people and institutions that already have plenty of money, and that’s true of the majority of our country’s history.

Tax dollars spread out through the economy, with national projects that need doing — environmental cleanup, infrastructure — and cultural projects that enliven our nation outside commercial channels, would at the very least give millions of people, at least temporarily, a feeling of usefulness once again, and that’s crucial to making them do what needs to be done to return to the regular workforce. And since Congress has no trouble allocating a first-class health plan to its members, the revitalized New Deal programs could include a government-run health plan, too.

No, government is not the answer to everything. But government often spends its money on things that don’t benefit enough Americans. Here is a chance for Congress to do the right thing and come up with some temporary work and economic recovery programs whose benefits will be immediate in putting people back to work and long-term in rebuilding infrastructure and encouraging all forms of cultural expression.

The Federal Music Project, for one, could reinvigorate music education, which has disappeared across the nation’s public schools. Learning how to read a simple line of notated music, for instance, is invaluable for churchgoing people confronted with an unfamiliar piece of group music to sing. But our culture now encourages musically minded people to use their ears alone, and technology helps them record even the minutest effusion of their muses.

But it hasn’t improved anything; it’s just made people more comfortable in making only their kind of music in a hermetically sealed technological shell. That’s not good in the long run, and just as being able to read words on a page helps open up the rest of human experience to anyone at all, reading simple notation does the same for the vast world of music, too.

I would further argue that in the 1930s, before industrialized agriculture seized the nation’s food supply, that it was still possible for people who bombed out in the big city to go home to the soybeans, sadder but wiser. Now that avenue is almost completely gone, and the jobless urbanite’s position is far more precarious thereby.

So let’s bring back government-provided work in the second economic stimulus, and in particular the arts projects. Sure, there were plenty of problems with the programs the first time around, but their legacy seems to me today to be overwhelmingly positive. Today’s jobless American workers are just like those of the ’30s generation: They don’t ask for permanent government help, just a little bit of help and useful work until they can get things back on track.

And in the meantime, we’ll also get a much better picture of how creative a people we are. The Internet is ostensibly a democratic medium, but the people whose voices are heard loudest there are the best marketers, and there are millions of worthy people out there whose work deserves to be heard and seen, but who will never be able to market themselves effectively.

Here, too, my tax dollars would help level that out. A second stimulus is inevitable, so let’s have one that really does the work that the banks will not do, and that’s dig deep into all the layers of our economy and get them going again.

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Filed under Literature, Music

Tags: classical music, economic stimulus. Federal Music Project, New Deal