Brats vs. Obama

I’ve about had it with a large part of the American public.

Recent news stories have reported that U.S. President Barack Obama’s approval ratings have dropped considerably. Apparently, growing numbers of citizens are unhappy that the economy isn’t all better yet and have decided that the country is moving in the wrong direction.

Could we please have a survey that determines how many of us think these particular citizens are actually petulant two-year-olds?

They must think Obama is a wizard who has only to wave his wand (Reparo!)  to put the banks and the real-estate market and all the lost jobs back in place, good as new, instead of a regular human being who’s having to undo at least eight years’ worth of avarice and criminal irresponsibility on the part of financial institutions, as well as all the hideous mess of the environment, the energy crisis, health insurance, decayed infrastructure and, lest we forget, a two-front war.

They want it fixed right now, and because it can’t be fixed right now, they’re cranky and bored and have let their flea-like focus hop elsewhere, looking for the instant gratification they’ve come to expect from their electronic gadgets, credit cards and 6,000 available stores.

A lot of people in this country have gotten used to easy fixes. They have no patience for anything that requires them to think or labor or deny themselves. They’re used to having someone stick the bottle in their mouths or hand them a new toy the moment they start wailing. They have no self-discipline and, frankly, no sense.

They’re the ones who are going to endanger the effort to bring about the serious, creative changes this nation desperately needs. Creative change takes time. You can’t give it five minutes and then throw up your hands when nothing’s happened yet. It’s not magic – it’s hard work, some of the very hardest, and it has to be done properly and fully or it won’t hold up, the same way a building that’s rushed into being with a poor design and cheap materials will end up collapsing. 

Obama and his administration are trying to do that work. They won’t do it perfectly – no one could. But they will be able to do it much more effectively if the nation’s legions of oversized toddlers grow up for once, stop demanding immediate results and help the rest of us think through the problems we face.

Besides, even in worlds where wizards are possible, we’ve seen that magic can’t reverse what indulgence, greed and impatience have spoiled.

Innovator-in-Chief

It’s hard to change things. Particularly if the things you’re trying to change are huge.

Part of what gives me some hope for the future – in spite of how grim life is at the moment for most us, financially – is the fact that the United States has an executive leader who’s actively trying to improve the nation and the world by changing what we do and how we do it.

  Though he faces enormous tasks, from our hurting economy, environment and international standing to our ailing infrastructure, educational and health-care systems,  Barack Obama seems eager to get going and restructure all the desperately tangled, outmoded policies and procedures that make the U.S. inefficient and less successful in some ways than other advanced nations.  

I’m hoping Obama’s example will encourage the rest of the population to be brave, too, and stop clinging to ways that don’t work. If the U.S.’s long, long season of social and economic paralysis changes to one of imagination and daring, our entrepreneurs of all kinds will step up and supply the ideas we need to redesign the poorly functioning parts of our country. 

One thing’s sure: If we’re going to become innovators ourselves and understand what needs changing and why, we’re going to need a lot of information. Take a step in that direction with us and visit Geniocity.com’s blog pages on Thursday, April 16,  to find out how the growing revolution in wind energy may be one way to remake America and Earth.

A Silver lining

       Ron Silver died Sunday.

Even for an actor, he had an unusual range. In his art, he stretched from Broadway productions of gritty David Mamet plays to silly TV sitcoms such as “Rhoda” and from film versions of true-life characters such as ferocious lawyer Alan Dershowitz and learned Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on one end to showoff tennis champ Bobby Riggs and ’60s rock-concert promoter Bill Graham on the other. In his active political life, he headed the stage union Actors Equity Association and helped out on Council on Foreign Relations committees. Supported Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama … and Republicans Ronald Reagan and Rudy Giuliani.

So it maybe it makes sense that he also co-founded The Creative Coalition, a nonprofit social and political advocacy group dedicated to educating arts-community leaders on public issues related to First-Amendment rights, arts advocacy and education - and mobilizing them.

Actors know that creative people  need to speak the truth, no matter which side of the political line or what unnerving  human experience it comes from. They know it because they play all of us – all the tangled, dark, bright and blithe characters that we humans are - and find something that matters in every one of them.

So I hope they and the rest of us can carry on Silver’s work and keep creatively crossing the lines between opposites until we find we have linked the encampments with our daring steps.

President plugs creativity

From Barack Obama’s address to Congress last night:

“The answers to our problems don’t lie beyond our reach. They exist in our laboratories and our universities, in our fields and our factories, in the imaginations of our entrepreneurs and the pride of the hardest-working people on Earth.”

And in our studios and rehearsal halls.

Divided we go bankrupt

The United States is big on individualism. In this country, we’re all raised with the idea that going our own way is our birthright, our mission – part of the iconic American dream in which we each create our own destiny, follow our own conscience and answer to no man. Or woman, especially the little kind. 

Hollywood movies have burned this into our brains as if our memories were DVDs: We aren’t supposed to follow. We’re all supposed to go out there, stake our own claim and start our own business, community, political movement, religion, band, micro-brewery, website.

Of course, you could well argue that all of us obeying this imperative is following, and major following of a particularly clueless, cowlike nature, too. But for the sake of a larger point, let’s say that we really are a nation of  god-damned independents.

So what happens when that irresistible, entrepreneurial spirit runs up against an immovable financial crisis like the one we’re in? The first thing to give out (besides our income …) has to be our vaunted go-it-aloneness.

That’s a hard fact the nonprofit world has been learning in recent years as subscriptions have fallen, along with corporate and private support. There just aren’t enough resources anymore to sustain the old way of operating solo, so nonprofits have started – suspiciously at first, but with increasing urgency – working together and sharing expenses.

The rest of us are going to have to do the same.

It’s not going to be enough just to pull together in spirit – though that would be helpful, too, and Barack Obama is good at engendering sentiments of unity, as he did again last night in his first official address to Congress. We Americans, who fancy ourselves as uncompromising hero-leaders along the lines of John Wayne and Iron Man Tony Stark, have got to start teaming up our efforts on all levels.

Look how much duplication exists in the marketplace and in government and in private life. The nearly obscene range of goods in our supermarkets ( 75 kinds of cereal?) makes immigrants from less indulgent lands cry. Our towns and cities pay enormous costs for separate services, from water and sewer to schools and security. About every third person – including me – wants to build his or her own little business empire or good-doing foundation.

How many individual film-production companies and clothing lines do we have in this country? How many people  separately collecting shoes for needy kids or money to cure particular diseases? How many software developers and yard-care companies and pizza parlors?

Doesn’t it seem like we could streamline some of  this bloat by joining forces with each other? Some efforts at efficiency have already begun – fusion marketing, (half-hearted) regionalism, shared office-supply purchasing - but we’re going have to get a lot more serious about it if we want to improve productivity, trim government waste, reduce our national debt and increase the success rate of small businesses.

I’m not talking about us surrendering our identities and becoming part of some unspeakably huge conglomerate. Just sharing and collaborating where that makes sense and strengthens us individually and collectively.  I don’t think we can afford not to anymore.

I mean, even John Wayne collaborated with other cowpokes once in a while – especially in a tight spot.

Washington (not D.C.) and creativity

Abe’s been getting all the attention.

Not that he doesn’t deserve a great deal, especially in light of Barack Obama’s election. And his birthday does come first in the chronological  list of  February presidential anniversaries.

But George Washington, who would be turning 277 next Sunday, Feb. 22,  is due for some notice now.

Many historians imply that Washington’s greatest contribution to the founding of our nation was, in effect, his character. A man of great dignity, resolution and incorruptibility, his determination to do the right thing by his countrymen in all situations – war or peace – made him a uniquely awe-inspiring hero, a unifier of factions and a quiet reproach to malcontents more concerned with self than service.        

But he also had creative nerve that was second to none. If he had been playing chess instead of fighting an actual war, you could say he won with only a knight, a castle and a handful of pawns against the full forces of his enemy.  

Take, for example, his execution of the plan at Dorchester Heights, outside the city of Boston, at the beginning of the American Revolution. Frustrated by the impasse he had been facing for months there because his generals repeatedly vetoed a direct attack by the ill-supplied and -trained Continental Army on the strong British force trapped in the cul-de-sac of the city, Washington took his counselors up on another plan they suggested exactly 233 years ago today: fortifying a series of hills directly across a narrow stretch of water from Boston, a position that would directly threaten the British and provoke them into leaving the city to attack the fortifications.

(George Washington. Charles Willson Peale (1776); Washington on Dorchester Heights after the siege of Boston. The White House Collection,  Washington, DC) 

  As Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough recounts in his 2005 chronicle, “1776,” Washington moved with a speed and canniness that may be unequaled in the annals of war. In two weeks and two days, he mustered 2,000 extra troops from the Massachusetts militia, rounded up wagons and 800 oxen, had his army’s hospital over in Cambridge stocked with extra beds and thousands of bandages – miraculous for such an impoverished and amateur army.

Most important, he had fortifications built offsite, including multitudes of dirt- and rock-filled barrels that could both fool the British by looking, from a distance, like stout barriers, and also serve as deadly bowling balls when rolled downhill at the enemy.

And then, in one night, from the fall of darkness on March 4 to dawn on March 5, Washington moved all of it – men, materiel, animals and large cannon brought down from Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain in a perilous, two-month-long winter mission led by a 25-year-old colonel with a maimed hand, Henry Knox - and got it set up under cover of a diversionary bombardment of Boston proper.

When the sun came up the next morning, the British essentially took one look at what was looming over them and – after a potentially suicidal attempt at attacking the American position that was thwarted by a terrific storm – fled, frantically provisioning their fleet and sailing away.

Most Americans of school age or more also know about Washington’s creative cunning against enemy forces at Trenton on Christmas night of that same year, when he dared – in the worst possible conditions of frigid winter, storm and big, loose chunks of river ice – to cross the Delaware in three places at midnight with a total of 4,600 men and surprise the holidaying Hessians who were holding the town.

But perhaps his most imaginative and effective tactic was the very opposite of  ambush: evasion. With an army so outclassed by the British in resources and training, Washington realized his best bet was not to worry about taking territory, but to keep his army as intact as possible and pick off parts of the opposing force as he could . By avoiding battles in which the Americans were likely to suffer great losses, the general was able to prolong the war and, with some talented officers, score a few key wins, finally convincing the French that the nascent United States was worth a bet and bringing them in on our side. 

His strategy of keeping his army alive to fight another day with better odds would be taken up four score and less than seven years later by a U.S. president who won the Civil War with it and so kept together the nation that Washington helped create.

And so we’re back to Abe, an immensely capable leader we perhaps know better and identify with more. But without George’s creative courage, we would have had no nation for Lincoln to lead.

Metropolitan Museum of Art Photograph Studio

Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, American, 1816-1868
George Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851

How Obama can help America create a better civilization

The most important word in that title? ”Create.” It’s the key to our success. And the United States needs to be more successful in many ways.

That’s why at this moment – with a president in office who embodies the nation’s new attitude toward difference and change – I think America is, at long last, ready to begin the creative revolution it must go through to become the thriving, peaceful, stimulating, wise, caring and accomplished society that its citizens have always hoped it would turn out to be. 

I call it a revolution because a culture of creativity will turn the U.S. completely around, away from narrow, outmoded perspectives and failed ways of operating and toward a broader view that encourages people in every field of endeavor to imagine and experiment, discuss and collaborate – and then innovate. When we can embrace fresh ideas and support each other’s efforts, we will be able to solve a lot more of our problems.

How can President Obama lead us through this fundamental makeover? Americans for the Arts has made official recommendations to the new administration; what follow are the suggestions of other arts leaders, as well as some of my own. 

Education. As with any lasting change, education matters most.  But our educational system itself – what it teaches and how it teaches - desperately needs the same transformation as the rest of our culture. So it must be both the agent and the subject of change.

Like the military-style, 19th-century factories and workforces on which they were modeled, U.S. public schools still aim to turn out masses of identical products through a rote process. They largely emphasize conformity and uniformity - children stand in line, sit in rows, raise their hands to speak and are made to repress their natural inclinations to move around, explore and question.  They generally learn identical lessons in large groups, take identical standardized tests and are often strongly discouraged from deviating in any way from a predetermined norm. 

That may have been effective learning in an age when most people ended up working on assembly lines for rigidly structured corporations, but it doesn’t prepare today’s students for the flexible and adventurous thinking demanded by our 21st-century’information and service economy, where competition requires constant  reinvention of complex processes and products.  Even more important, a tool-and-die schooling makes most people bored, restless and miserable.

Our system ignores “the fundamental truth about how young people learn,” says Steven Tepper, associate director of The Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University.  “Clearly, refocusing U.S. education around creativity and creative engagement is central” to improving educational results.  

Studies, including the RAND Corporation’s significant 2004 Gifts of the Muse report, have shown that creative teaching methods and creative subjects help people learn better, enjoy themselves more, stay in school longer and develop the creative skills they need to lead successful, productive lives including, but not limited to, better employment. Creative disciplines such as the arts can provide the inspiration, stimulus and opportunities for discovery and self-expression that students often miss in standard curricula. Arts-related teaching methods - movement, building, illustration, composition, acting a role – can also help students better understand the concepts of their academic subjects.

In just one example cited by the Cleveland-based Community Partnership for Arts and Culture (CPAC), young people attending Cleveland’s School of the Arts  – part of an extremely troubled public-school system – last year scored higher than Ohio statewide averages in eight types of Ohio proficiency tests; 100 percent of them passed their Ohio graduation tests. (Full disclosure: I work with CPAC as a free-lance writer and editor.) 

America needs more arts in its schools and more creative teaching methods. We also need better teachers.  Here’s what Obama could do to help:

•  As Robert Lynch of Americans for the Arts suggests, create a Secretary of Arts and Culture position, or the equivalent, to oversee and coordinate U.S. arts and creativity policy and initiatives
• Direct that official to work with the U.S. Department of Education on a task force to develop what Tepper sees as needed curriculum standards for creative instruction, to give state education departments guidelines for what methods to use, what to achieve and how to measure success 
• Fund and foster teacher training in creative classroom methods through community consortiums of arts, science, technology and arts-education organizations similar to Cleveland’s annual Summer Teacher Institute  
• Encourage, through Department of Education funding for teacher salary enhancements, the abandonment of tenure and the adoption of merit-based pay determined by administrative, peer, parent and student review 
• Establish an Artists Corps, as Lynch recommends, to provide jobs and job-training to artists of all ages in the effort to improve America’s infrastructure – but make it one section of a permanent  Service Corps offering environmental, technological, educational and entrepreneurial services to communities, and jobs and job-training for retirees, students between high school graduation and college enrollment and adults in career or life transitions in need or desire of employment, new skills or contributing to society. Coordinate the different sections’ initiatives to encourage collaborative programs, such as having artists and environmental workers provide creative and green-practices training to businesses

Which brings us to the next area of change …

Organizational culture. Like our schools, our other organizations – from bureaus and agencies to companies and unions - tend be structured like the  Army: highly regimented, top-down outfits with their own strict class systems, ingrained operational methods and culture of absolute power at the top and absolute obedience everywhere else.

The Army is not known for its creativity. Neither is the Navy, where insiders describe their institution as “over 200 years of tradition unimpeded by progress.”  But they have missions vastly different from civilian groups, which must use the imagination and knowledge resources of all their members or risk being ineffective, inefficient, outmoded and – in the case of business enterprises – uncompetitive and eventually bankrupt. 

If American education becomes more creative and sends more inventive, unrepressed people into the world, chances are that our other organizational structures will change, too. But with all this bailout money being handed to dangerously flawed corporations and the president reevaluating the usefulness of government entities and programs, now seems a good time for Obama to urge some new organizational creativity by:

• Making a bailout contingent on the internal restructuring of receiving companies, to allow greater employee input, eliminate reprisals against whistleblowers and create transparency in communications and reporting
• Ditto for government departments and agencies, which can be made more creative and open while being streamlined to reduce spending and waste 
• Making creativity a goal for all government departments by directing them to work with the new Secretary for Arts and Culture and/or an expanded National Endowment for the Arts on incorporating arts, design and cultural heritage components into U.S. transportation infrastructure, health and human services programs and education, as Americans for the Arts director Lynch and CPAC president Tom Schorgl recommend (for more on the NEA, see Matt Charboneau’s Geniocity blog)
• Capitalizing on the unions’ delight at being included in the national agenda once more by urging a creative modernization of their missions and rules, especially as regards teacher tenure and arts unions’ restrictions on the ways their members’ work can be used. Theater companies, for instance, would be able to support themselves more effectively if Actors Equity Association permitted to them record their own professional stage performances for sale as CDs and DVDs       

Which leads to a final creative area …

Entrepreneurship. This country will never get anywhere if creative individuals and their endeavors don’t get more support of all kinds. As things stand now, people with ideas that will innovate society and the economy face a desperate struggle to get noticed and encouraged with advice, seed money and start-up resources. Whether they’re one-person projects, nonprofit organizations or for-profits, smaller enterprises generate billions of dollars in economic impact, create jobs, provide needed services and products and inject fresh energy and ideas into communities. But only if they don’t die a-borning.

To help, Obama should:

• Encourage public-private partnerships among banks, credit unions, foundations, industry associations and private investors to seek out creatively promising individuals and embryonic projects and provide them with grants, loans, mentoring, resources or combinations of all four. These services should not be open to the high-growth-potential tech start-ups exclusively favored by venture capitalists and incubators (See Will Limkemann’s Geniocity blog for more on this)
• Change any tax restrictions preventing nonprofits, including arts groups, from supporting themselves by selling products derived from, or related to, their own work and missions
• Support revisions to intellectual property law, especially copyrights, which can discourage creativity by preventing entrepreneurs, artists and others from sharing ideas and work, Tepper suggests (See Peter Friedman’s Geniocity blog for more on this)
• And because creativity depends on the even bigger and wider flow of ideas that comes from intermixing peoples, Tepper says, change American immigration policy to permit greater freedom of cultural exchange and increase entrepreneurship

We and our president have a big job ahead of us, revolutionizing America. It’ll be hard. But because it’s creative, it’ll be fun, too.

Americans for the Arts working with Obama team on policy

Not just a place at the table, but an office in the halls of power.

Robert Lynch envisions this for the arts. For months, he has worked with Barack Obama’s transition team to pinpoint the ways in which arts and culture can help and be helped in the new president’s plan to rescue the economy.

He thinks change is coming.

 “I feel like we’ll be listened to, and we’re not going away,” said Lynch, president and CEO of Americans for the Arts, a research and advocacy organization. “I’m very pleased with the access we’re getting. It gives me optimism.”  

Not groundbreaking, but “groundsaving” is how Lynch described the recommendations that he and his organization have made to the Obama team – a set of practical tactics that would stabilize and strengthen the arts and cultural sector while drawing on artists’ expertise to improve education and community life around the nation.

The nine recommendations aim to: provide community teaching and mentoring jobs for artists, as well as arts-job training, affordable health care and unemployment insurance; increase development grants for neighborhood cultural projects, art districts and cultural facilities; boost funding for federal cultural agencies such as the National Endowment for the Arts that support local arts agencies and their grants and services for local artists; and encourage state transportation departments to work with state arts agencies on providing more artist commissions for creative design, public artworks and historic preservation-projects in transportation infrastructure.

The point of increasing government funding for arts and culture is not to make the sector more dependent on federal money, Lynch said, but to give it an important tool: the lever of official approval. Being deemed worthy of a grant by the government helps artists and cultural groups persuade audiences and private donors to support them, too.  

That’s not a new idea, but the last recommendation comes close. It calls for the creation of a senior-level post in the Obama administration for an arts official, someone who would coordinate arts and cultural policies and guide arts-related initiatives stemming from federal agencies that deal with such issues as tourism, education, economic development, cultural exchange, intellectual property and broadband access.

To have for the first time a senior policy person in the White House “who can connect the dots … and truly represent the breadth and strength of the arts that is already there,” would be pretty close to groundbreaking, Lynch said.

Though he’s most concerned right now with restoring arts and culture to better health, Lynch does have an eye on the arts frontier. He sees new and creative ways for nonprofits to sustain themselves by being more entrepreneurial and blending their nonprofit mission with for-profit activities, as the Metropolitan Opera has by video-recording its performances to screen for paying audiences in local movie theaters.

He also sees an “explosion” of artworks that will take advantage of new technologies, and the development of new art forms based in folk culture and crafts that will increase the public’s consumption of art.

“I think that’s going to be what really helps the arts through this economic downturn,” Lynch said.

But a sympathetic president can’t hurt. Said Lynch of the transition team, “I’ve really been impressed with their receptiveness.” 

Fostering creativity from the top down … and the bottom up

In another week, a new era will begin in the United States. When Barack Obama is sworn in as president next Tuesday, most Americans will likely be hoping that our economy, international relationships, educational and health systems, environmental policies and transportation system will all improve.     

 On top of that, a lot of us will be looking for signs that our professions are priorities for elected leaders – and worrying when we don’t hear our own trades mentioned in the grand plans.

Well, no president, governor or mayor can have public-policy goals on everything from dental hygiene and dog-toy manufacture to baking and bicycle repair. But they often do try to affect the larger sectors those occupations belong to, such as health care, the chemical industry, food production and green business.

Arts and culture, on the other hand, have a legitimate gripe with government. Many leaders never seem to think about culture at all, much less regard it as an essential part of our economy and social infrastructure. When any do give it thought, they tend to see it as merely a factor in areas of larger concern – education or tourism, for instance – rather than as another kind of major system without which our nation could not function.

The truth is, no nation can function without arts and culture, for the very reason that so many other aspects of our lives depend on it.  What aspects? First and foremost, the arts are a medium of information crucial to the ongoing national dialogue required by a democracy. Think about it: We all glean ideas and facts from books, television, movies and videos, music, art and photography, plays and dancing (with the stars or without) and we talk about them with our families, friends and co-workers. They help us create emotional and social bonds, one-on-one and in big groups, from the Jane Austen Society to the Deadheads. They move us to take interest and take actions, just as news stories do. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” anyone?

They also provide the best, most effective basis we have for communication with other countries and peoples, promoting empathy and understanding through shared emotional experiences.

And they offer the most indelibly memorable and enjoyable means of teaching information and critical thinking that humans have yet invented, as increasing educational studies show.

Arts and culture also represent a huge portion of the economy – $166 billion of it, to be exact. According to Arts and Economic Prosperity III, a study released two years ago by Americans for the Arts, those billions sum up the economic impact of just the nonprofit arts. Try to imagine how much greater that figure would be if commercial arts – galleries, Broadway tours, rock-band concerts, CD sales, Hollywood movies, network sitcoms – were factored in, too. 

Arts and culture have always deserved better representation in government. For a nation with so much depending on those industries, it’s hard to justify having cabinet officers and secretaries for commerce, transportation and education, but none for culture.   

Fortunately, our next president does at least have a policy plan for it – or did when he ran for the office. Obama’s arts and culture plan spells out a number of his intentions, including reinvestment in arts education and cultural diplomacy, creating affordable health insurance for artists and supporting the NEA.

But local officials across the country may have some explaining do if they don’t start including arts and culture in their own agendas. Though they can grow in scope to represent a nation, individual artists and arts and cultural groups almost always begin locally, serving the immediate community with enriched lives, jobs, tourist dollars, more effective schooling and growing prestige.

 That’s why it’s strange to find that, here in economically staggering Cleveland, where the arts remain close to a $1 billion-per-year industry, the mayor’s plan for next year includes no mention of arts and culture at all. Read Frank Jackson’s Urban Agenda 2009 and see for yourself.

How many more American communities and leaders are like this one?

Or does it explode?

Yes – in joy, when the dream’s deferred no longer.

Congratulations, America. Change has already begun.