Franken: Art, or just what you like?

Ooooh, interesting. The commentary on yesterday’s Al Franken post (see below) has focused, not on the question of Franken’s Senate win helping or not helping to open the doors of America’s power enclaves to more artists, but on whether or not Franken is, in fact, an artist.

I was actually trying to avoid making that judgment, although I probably tipped my hand by referring to those few performer-types who had so far won elective office as “entertainers.”

But as far as I’m concerned, Franken’s relative artistry is pertinent only in consideration of  the degree to which the public sees entertainers as normal-ish (despite the bunny ears), fairly simple people and artists as strange and rarified beings who think too much and avoid sports. I sense that, so far, America generally finds entertainers less threatening and more vote-worthy and artists as more, well, icky and not like themselves. 

So much for my scientific evaluation. The important point here, to me, is that the more familiar Americans get with the presence of performers, writers and visual artists in positions of civic responsibility, the less likely they’ll be to regard all artists as discomfitingly different and the likelier they’ll be to just accept the idea that artists are citizens entitled to run for public office like the rest of us.

A Portrait of the Artist as an Elected Official

Al Franken is only the latest to make the leap.

Not there have been many. And so far, they’ve all been white males and pop-culture entertainers: Sonny Bono. Jesse Ventura. Fred “Gopher” Grandy. Ronald Reagan.

But whether or not voters thought they had brains and depth and governing ability – whether or not voters even thought they had genuine performance skills - these show-biz celebs managed to convince fellow Americans of at least one important thing: That being some (or any) kind of artist shouldn’t exclude a person from civic responsibility and leadership.   

Their success in this may not have the same stirring significance as electing a black man president, but it still marks progress in the struggle to rid Western culture of its self-cheating prejudices. 

For many centuries, artists in the Western world were outcasts. ”Respectable” people lumped actors and dancers with vagrants and prostitutes; painters and composers and jesters toiled as mere servants in the courts of the ruling class. Writers  may have had more luck exerting political influence, but only indirectly - and probably not with poetry and novels.

One artist did rise to absolute power: the Roman emperor Nero. The result? He committed suicide just before he was to be executed. Europe probably didn’t see another artist become head of state until dissident playwright Vaclav Havel was chosen president of Czechoslovakia in 1989 and then of the Czech Republic in 1993.

And in the U.S.? A lot of leaders have had some artistic talent – there was  Thomas Jefferson and, um, Thomas Jefferson – but none were professionals until Reagan. And however you want to compare them as political leaders, artistically, Ronald Reagan was no Vaclav Havel.

That’s because Western societies still regard serious artists not just as lowly, but also as weird and unwholesome - creepy intellectuals or (just as bad) head-cases, flakes, limp-wristed idlers, spendthrifts, dipsos, druggies, wastrels and general losers. To get elected in this country, artistic people have had to closely resemble regular guys (and I mean guys literally) who enjoy a laugh and a beer, the kind of people we always seemed to elect until very recently.      

So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Franken, a former Saturday Night Live comedian, seems more of an amusement than an artist. But his making it to the Senate has pushed the door open a little wider for less mainstream creative people whose brains, inventiveness, determination and understanding of human nature  America can ill afford to discard. The more citizens of great imagination we have among the powerful, the faster we’ll find fresh ways of handling our problems – and the sooner our society will stop thinking that an artist’s place is in the garret.

Congress needs your creative input

Suddenly, change-course policies are a-borning all over the place. Interesting legislation of many kinds has finally got U.S Senate and House members struggling to address some of the most enormous and urgent issues facing the nation, and it’s clear that laws adopted now are going to have direct and probably immediate effects on whether or not the U.S. forcefully steers away from the brink of disaster or skids over the edge while pumping the brakes.

It feels as if we’re entering one of the greatest creative eras the country will have ever undergone - one, as in other times of great national crisis, in which we all have an active and measurable part in determining our own future.

We all need to pay attention, be informed and push for what we think will work best, so lawmakers will listen.  Here are a few of the most important bills to get familiar with:

American Clean Energy and Security Act, addressing global warming (and jobs); passed last week by the House, it’s now heading for the Senate 

Employee Free Choice Act , addressing business-managements’ anti-union tactics (and jobs), which may pass the Senate now that Democrat Al Franken has been officially declared the winner of Minnesota’s Senate race, giving his party the 60 votes needed to block a Republican filibuster 

Health bill, addressing health-insurance reform (and job benefits), is unnamed and still being constructed by members of Congress on committees including Education and Labor, Energy and Commerce, and Ways and Means. 

 Educate yourself. And then, whatever your position on these bills, call your Congress members and Senators – early and often.