Mom

My mother died at 92 about 18 months ago, almost 20 years after my father succumbed to complications from Alzheimer’s Disease (see "Dad," 20 June 2010).  My Dad died almost exactly one month after my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, though he didn’t know that and Mom wasn’t in much of a disposition to celebrate.  Mom’s death came about seven months before what would have been their 70th anniversary. 

Officially, Mom died of pneumonia, sepsis, and something called metabolic encephalopathy, a catch-all term for general brain malfunction.  In truth, Mom died of dementia, from which she’d been suffering increasingly severely for about two years with milder symptoms extending back several years earlier.  By the time she went to the hospital for the last time, she’d become entirely non-verbal and I don’t know how much of what was going on around her she perceived.  In essence, my mother had become a living ghost, a vacant shell.  Even before that, she’d lost any pleasure she might derive from life because, I believe, she knew she was becoming separated from everyone around her.  She couldn’t keep up and didn’t understand why—or maybe she did and that contributed to her sense of separation. 

One by one, she stopped doing all the things she had enjoyed, even taking walks around the grounds of her assisted-living residence, Maplewood Park Place in Bethesda, Maryland, and though her neighbors were unfailingly solicitous and attentive, delivering invitations to dinner or coming by for visits, she began blowing them all off.  I couldn’t even get her to go down to the dining room with me; she preferred to eat in her apartment—when she ate at all.  Mom had been a wonderful cook all my life—my dad had taught himself to be a gourmet and Mom kept up with him in the kitchen as well as at the table.  She was known as a terrific hostess and good food was one her greatest pleasures—both partaking and serving.  She had stopped cooking a year or more before the end—what few meals we prepared at home, I made for her.  By the final months, food meant almost nothing to her—not even sustenance. 

I suppose this isn’t an uncommon tale.  As Bette Davis is supposed to have said, “Old age ain’t for sissies.”  Only the very luckiest among us escape its ravages.  But what for me has been the hardest blow is what precisely my mother—I—lost in her descent into mental oblivion.  My family had fun, from my youngest memories to my most recent, and Mom was a fundamental part of that—if not as the instigator, then as an avid participant.  My parents were polar opposites in many respects: Dad was an intellectual, a thinker, a raisonneur—Alzheimer’s destroyed an essential part of his persona, too—and Mom was a romantic, a sentimentalist.  Dad experienced the world through his mind; Mom navigated it through her emotions.  (I inherited some of both, which is a helluva conflict.  I thought it’d make me a better actor, though, but apparently it wasn’t enough.)  Together, however, they always knew how to make fun.  I’ve been missing that lately.  I mean, I’ve been thinking how much I’ll miss that from now on. 

It’s shortly before Thanksgiving as I write this, and my parents and I, and later just Mom and I, were always together on that day.  When my brother and I were little, it became a family tradition to spend Thanksgiving and sometimes Passover with my father’s family, rotating among our house in the Washington area, Aunt Kris and Uncle George’s home in Trenton, and the house of my dad and Kris’s baby sister, Mac, and my Uncle Herb in Haverhill, Massachusetts.  In the past couple of decades, it was our usual practice to spend Turkey Day with the family of Aunt Kris, who was one of Mom’s oldest friends, going back to the World War II years (Kris introduced Mom to my dad).  That visit was always a chance for them to be together and catch up and reminisce.  My folks, and later just my mom, would come to New York on Tuesday or Wednesday, we’d cross the river on Thursday to the house of either my aunt and uncle (who’d moved by this time to Princeton) or one of my three cousins for the holiday meal, and then my parents would spend the rest of the weekend with me in New York City.  Mom continued to follow this routine after Dad died, and last year was the first time I went over to Princeton alone.  This is one of the times when the now-missing piece of my life is perhaps most palpable.  (The other is my birthday, which falls on Christmas.)

Our family fun wasn’t all just brief incidents, an hour or a day of planned pleasure like a party or an outing.  Some were, of course—and some were pretty mundane, too, as you’ll see—but others were whole chunks of our joint life.  The biggest was the period we lived in Germany, a grand adventure that lasted from 1962 to 1967 about which I’ve written more than once on this blog (see, for example, “An American Teen In Germany,” 9 and 12 March 2013).  Dad initiated this, certainly after discussions with Mom, when he joined the Foreign Service in 1961, leaving his private-sector job as an executive at District Theaters Corporation in Washington.  I’d always known that Dad had been inspired to make this move by President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, particularly the famous plea to “ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”  What I hadn’t known until he told me many years later was that he and Mother had long harbored a dream that they could take the family to Europe to live for a time but hadn’t figured out how to accomplish that.  Now here was an opportunity for Dad both to answer JFK’s call and to fulfill his and Mom’s hope for the four of us. 

Early in Dad’s training he was informed that a Foreign Service Officer’s spouse was 50% of the job—and he imparted this bit of wisdom to all of us.  Thenceforth, Mom became “Mrs. Fifty Percent” among the three of us boys (one of several nicknames she acquired during our European sojourn)—and she threw herself wholeheartedly into the process of moving us abroad, supporting my father’s work in Germany, and making the whole undertaking a momentous experience for us all.  Whatever success my dad had as a diplomat in Germany was due in large measure to Mom’s entertaining and socializing talents.  Her graciousness as both a hostess and a guest ingratiated her—and thus, my dad and, by extension, the United States, which he represented—to all strata of the community around Koblenz, the small Rhineland city where my father was posted in 1962.  Her gameness to try to speak German, even haltingly, delighted our German hosts, and her willingness to go anywhere and try anything prompted the people among whom we were living to seek us out and welcome us into their homes.  (Socializing was part of my dad’s job and Mom hosted lunches and Kaffeeklatsches at home as well as going to Frauennachmittage at Koblenzers’ homes.  My folks also occasionally arranged what I’d have to call “play dates” for my brother and me with the sons of some of the people they were meeting.  Our hosts, both the parents and the boys, were always welcoming and sometimes an acquaintanceship grew out of it.)  They wanted to show off their town and their country, but Mom made it easy for them.

My brother and I made our first trip to Europe at Christmas vacation in 1962 and our parents surprised us with a trip to Paris for the holidays—and my 16th birthday.  We returned to Koblenz in the summer of 1963 to live and the Paris trip was only the first of many we’d make over the next five years, from day trips to sights near Koblenz and later Bonn or overnights in West Germany; to holiday trips to places like London (my 17th birthday), the Austrian Alps, and Copenhagen; and three-week driving tours of Italy and Spain.  In Italy, where we saw so many paintings and statues of Mary everywhere we went, usually named the Madonna of This or the Madonna of That, Mom obtained another of her family names: the Madonna of the Blue Shoes—or, often, “die Madonna von den blauen Schuhen”—because she bought a pair of teal-blue low heels for walking around the narrow and often cobbled streets.  (Dad, by the way, got a nickname in Spain—based on the official signature of the kings of Spain, “Yo, el Rey”—but it’s too silly to enshrine here.)  

One of the most fun places we went was Zermatt, Switzerland, for skiing at Christmastime.  We loved that so much—the little train up the mountain, the pension where we stayed (with the miniature chalet that was the room of my brother and me and where we all gathered for our morning cafés complets), the view of the Matterhorn looming over the town, walking around all day in ski togs, and the way the village looked at night like a giant Christmas tree because of the lit-up chalets and hotels climbing up the mountainside—we went back year after year.

These trips were the products of joint conception and planning by both my parents, of course, but Mother was always right at the center of almost everything my family did.  Oh, sure, there were the usual father-son things—scouts and school stuff mostly—but most of what we did was a foursome.  After Dad’s death and my brother’s permanent move to the West Coast, Mom and I continued to do things together either in New York or Washington, and we traveled together at least once a year, including another Christmas/birthday trip to Quebec City in 2000, until Mom couldn’t manage it anymore.  Our last trip together was a six-day visit to Istanbul in May 2010 (on which I blogged on 24 June 2010).  Mother was 87 when we went to Istanbul, by far the oldest in our group, but despite being slowed some by age and a persistent heart problem, she still derived great pleasure from the sightseeing—which involved considerable walking and even a little climbing—and indulging in the foods and drinks of Turkey, just as we always had back in Western Europe more than 40 years earlier.  Only the flights and the airports were stressful, nearly ruining the experience altogether, and Mom declared as we trekked across Kennedy Airport on the return voyage, racing to make the connection back to D.C., “This is the last time I’m doing this.”  I don’t think she meant it quite the way it turned out, but it was indeed the last time she traveled farther than New York City. 

I said that Mom was an excellent cook, and planning meals and entertainments at home were an immense pleasure for her.  With deference to Perle Mesta, my mom was the ultimate “Hostess with the Mostest.”  Food and drink was a pretty important issue in our house: as I said, Dad had taught himself about good food, wine, and beer so Mom learned as well.  (Like people used to say of Ginger Rogers that she did everything Fred Astaire did except backwards and in high heels, Mom did everything Dad did as far as food and drink were concerned, but she also learned to make it.) 

In addition, my brother was a picky eater all his life, and I was an adventurous one, an incipient foodie, I guess.  (I reported in “Pulling Wagons and Playing in Sand,” 31 August 2013, a post derived from some pre-school evaluations I found among Mom’s keepsakes, that I was deemed above average “in trying new foods” even at 4 years of age.)  So accommodating all our culinary needs and quirks was Mom’s challenge.  She would say that while it was tough to get my brother to try something new, she could get me to eat anything just by giving it a fancy-sounding name.  It must have worked because half the fun we had in Europe, and later when we traveled anywhere else, was trying all the local specialties from the kitchen, brewery, and distillery wherever we went. 

Many of the things we discovered that way became part of our own cuisine; Mother even learned to make her own taramasalata after our trip to Greece in the ’70s (when we also acquired a taste for ouzo).  She found a store in Washington that specialized in Mediterranean foods and tried several recipes to get the best results for our taste—until, violà, we had a new hors d’oeuvre for us and for guests.  I daresay that you could introduce Mom to almost any dish and she’d eventually figure out how to make it at home, as she did with venison in Germany, where game is readily available in restaurants and at butcher shops.  A Spanish housekeeper in Bonn also volunteered to teach her how to make paella for which Mom had brought back paella pans from Spain.  (Mom never figured out how the Germans made those tiny, crispy fried onions that came with Leber und Zwiebel, though.)

Exciting meals at our family dinner table were only one thing Mom was great at.  She knew how to make terrific parties, too—both for us kids and for her and Dad’s grown-up friends.  Children’s parties, teen parties, adult parties, formal or casual—she was clever and innovative at all of them.  I remember one party for my friends and me when I was pretty young—middle school, as I recall (making it sometime in the late ’50s).  Mom came up with the idea to lay out a table with all the fixin’s for ice cream sundaes for our refreshment and we all made our own.  It was such a huge hit that Mom, who’d volunteered to chaperone one of my middle school hops, did the same thing there to even greater appreciation.

For Dad and their friends, Mom was no less inventive.  At one get-together, instead of the usual cocktails or even a bowl of spiked punch, Mom came up with the idea to scoop out a watermelon, make melon balls of the flesh, serve the punch in the hollowed-out rind, and freeze the melon balls to replace ice cubes.  I can still picture the mob of guests engulfing the table set up in the living room with the cups and the napkins and the booze-filled watermelon!  (My brother and I got to hang around parties like that sometimes.  We served as greeters, coat-checkers, and cocktail waiters until it was time for us to have our dinners and go to bed.)  Other parties were costume do’s and come-as-you-are’s.  (Dad went to one costume party dressed as a baby doll in a pink silk-like dress and bonnet, carrying a huge lollipop.  He was a big hit, of course, and that outfit hung around the house for years; I even wore it for something years later—but I don’t remember what for.  I also remember a couple who got the invitation for the come-as-you-are when they were in bed . . . so they arrived at the party dressed in pajama and nightgown with cardboard beds on their backs.)

I went to college at my dad’s alma mater, Washington and Lee University, so Mom and Dad were both avid W&L Parents during the years I was a student.  Dad was a popular visitor at my frat, of which he’d also been a member, because he recounted tales of the pre-World War II days, but Mother was a favorite in her own right . . . because she’d almost always arrive with a stash of “Judy K***** Brownies” which were coveted by my brothers.  (She also used to send care packages which included the brownies and since I got my mail at the frat house, everyone knew when a new batch had arrived.) 

At the end of my senior year, my apartment mate and I threw a big party for all our frat brothers, school friends, and professors.  (We had a rep for throwing really great parties—a knack I may have picked up from Mom.)  When I told my parents of our plans, Mom asked, “Would you like us to come down and cater it for you?”  My roommate and I readily agreed and on the day of the party, my folks arrived from Washington with a carload of hors d’oeuvres, party food, chafing dishes, platters and trays, and so on.  After we set up the apartment for the party, my folks disappeared upstairs, and I thought they’d just come down later and join the party.  What we hadn’t anticipated was that my folks also drove down with black slacks and a white jacket for Dad and a black dress and white apron for Mom and just before the guests arrived, they came downstairs dressed as a butler and a maid and proceeded to serve the party as if they were a waiter and waitress!  People who didn’t know my folks thought my roommate and I had sprung for professional help for the affair—as if we could have afforded that!  

After most of the guests had left and we began cleaning up, Mother suggested she could make a meal out of the leftovers (which included Swedish meatballs, a very popular hors d’oeuvre in those days), so we agreed to do that rather than go find dinner somewhere.  After Mom fixed up the leftovers and we were all sitting in the living room, eating off plates in our laps, Mother and Dad joined us.  One of the remaining guests who didn’t know my folks leaned over and whispered, “Why is the help eating with us?”  She still hadn’t tumbled to the fact that these were my parents!  We all cracked up and finally told her who the mystery couple were.  Our farewell party, which may have been the best-catered student party ever held in Lexington, Virginia, became the talk of the town until we graduated.  
(Speaking of “mystery couple”: back in June 1959, Dad had purchased a part-interest in a radio station in Little Rock.  It was transitioning to a top-40 rock ’n’ roll format and doing a lot of publicity, including PR stunts.  On one visit to Arkansas, Dad brought Mom along and the station manager recruited her to be the Mystery Shopper for a day.  Mom said she had a ball spending the day downtown in Little Rock as the radio broadcast her  whereabouts, until someone finally spotted her and identified her as the Mystery Shopper.  Mom said she was as thrilled to be discovered as the contest-winner was to find her!)

Later, there were also special and unique parties for Mother’s benefit that she didn’t plan—Dad wasn’t a slouch when it came to fun ideas.  For Mom’s 50th birthday in 1973 (while I was still in the army in Berlin), Dad, who by this time had become the volunteer development director of the private Museum of African Art on Capitol Hill, arranged a surprise party for her among the exhibits after hours.  Talk about your Night at the Museum . . .!  (I wrote an article about the MAA for ROT, published on 19 January 2015.)  Ten years later, when Dad had become a member of the advisory board of the Folger Theatre Group (forerunner to Washington’s current Shakespeare Theatre Company), he once again arranged for a special accommodation—this time for Mom’s 60th birthday (and I was present this time).  After the performance of John Dryden’s Marriage a la Mode that evening, the cast and production company, theater staff, and Dad’s invited guests were ushered into a long, oak-paneled Tudor hall (the Paster Reading Room, I believe) of the Folger Shakespeare Library, then the home of the theater company, for an elaborate buffet accompanied by music from a small ensemble. 

I even occasionally got into the act, on a much more modest scale.  For instance, at Christmas 1985, which was my 39th birthday, my parents drove up to New York and then we all drove over to New Hope, Pennsylvania, for the holiday.  We stayed in New Hope for several days and then drove down to Washington for New Year’s.  Now, my parents’ anniversary is 6 January, but I was in grad school at NYU in ’85-’86 and also teaching undergrad writing, and I had to get back to New York City before then.  So I worked out a little celebration on me in my absence.  I’d bought a bottle of Perrier-Jouët Champagne in New York and had lugged it across New Jersey and down to D.C. hidden in my suitcase, keeping it out of my parents’ sight for the week or so over Christmas.  In D.C., I went out one afternoon just before I left town without telling my ’rents where I was going and bought some fresh caviar.  Now, my folks lived in a townhouse in Georgetown then and there was a wet bar with a small refrigerator off the living room and family sitting room on the second floor.  I stashed the caviar and Champagne in the fridge and left my parents a card with instructions not to open it until the 6th.  Inside was the first of a series of clues leading to the “hidden treasure” where there was a final note instructing my mother and father to invite a couple of their choice to join them in their 40th anniversary celebration.

I said that seeking out interesting food was one of the enjoyments we shared, and one of the things we always did when I came for visits over the years, along with seeing shows and going to art exhibits, was try out new restaurants Mother would find and save for my trips to D.C.  I did the same for her visits to New York.  I still have dozens of reviews I clipped for her.  A particular favorite was trying out new places that offered mussels.  (These restaurants weren’t necessarily in Mom’s immediate neighborhood.  One place she wanted to try after reading about it was in Alexandria, Virginia, about 9 miles and a 30-minute drive south along the Potomac.)  Mom had a couple of spots in Washington we liked, such as a Belgian restaurant on MacArthur Boulevard that also served waffles at Sunday brunch, but we were always on the look-out for new ones.  Unfortunately, the last place we tried, a new bistro that had mussels as a weekly special on Mondays, had opened in my Flatiron neighborhood in New York in 2006, but was a great disappointment (and ultimately closed in 2013).  There were other cuisines we liked, too, such as Greek and Indian, but mussels were a treat we savored especially.

After Mom became a widow, she got closer to several women around her age, most of them also widows.  They’d make a game of going out to eat, often connected with taking in a movie together as well.  Mom and her friends played several bridge games a month—not all the same foursomes.  Within each regular game, the practice was pretty much the same: they’d play for a few cents a point for each hand, but instead of the afternoon’s winner taking the pot at the end, it would be pooled.  When there was enough in the kitty, they’d find a film they all wanted to see, go to a late-afternoon showing, and then go to dinner somewhere interesting afterwards.  The bridge-winnings paid the tab for dinner for all four ladies—either at someplace new one of them wanted to try or a favorite spot they all liked.  (Not all the ladies were as adventurous as Mom, of course, so there were always plenty of restaurants Mom kept in reserve to try out when I came down.  Plus, we had our faves, too, of course.)

Unlike play-going, I seldom joined Mom and her friends for these dinner-and-a-movie jaunts—though Mom and I and often a friend of hers would take in flicks once or twice during my visits south.  (We went to movies in New York City, too, of course; my neighborhood has grown into a restaurant-theater-entertainment zone over the past couple of decades and we could walk to several moviehouses near Union Square.)  Mom liked movies in general, but she especially enjoyed old movies.  She was a devoted fan, for instance, of Turner Classic Movies, the cable channel; the week before we saw She Loves Me, the 1963 Jerry Bock-Sheldon Harnick-Joe Masteroff musical, at the Arena Stage, Mom and I sat and watched both the 1940 Jimmy Stewart-Margaret Sullavan movie Shop Around the Corner, on the source of which the musical’s based, and then the 1949 film musical adaptation, In the Good Old Summertime with Judy Garland and Van Johnson, on TCM.  

Then on a visit to Washington in 1998, I took Mom to see the theatrical re-release of MGM’s Gone with the Wind, which had been digitally restored and its sound remastered so that it resembled the original print of almost 60 years earlier.  Part of the treat was that the theater where the restoration was playing in D.C. was the old Avalon on Wisconsin Avenue near Chevy Chase Circle, our neighborhood moviehouse when my brother and I were growing up in Chevy Chase and Barnaby Woods—just up Western Avenue from the circle.  It was sort of a double step back in time: a movie Mom first saw when she was 16 in a theater we all went to when she was still in her 30’s.

Something else Mother enjoyed was browsing in new or fun stores.  Not necessarily buying, mind you—she was not a shopaholic and shopping for necessities like food or household goods was an errand not a pastime.  (Dad liked to do this, too, but his browsing inclined to bookstores and hardware stores.  Given his proclivities, the books were an obvious choice, but his interest in tools wasn’t.  Dad was the least handy person I’ve known—even I’m better at home repair than he was.  He used to say of himself that even after changing a light bulb, he’d have parts left over!) 

In New York, I took Mom over to the Chelsea Market, which is directly west of my apartment, just so she could poke around in some of the kicky food-related outlets.  (We didn’t actually waste the visit on just sightseeing: one time we bought dinner in the large seafood store in the market, the Lobster Place, and on another trip, we compiled an Italian antipasto meal—Italian tapas, you might say—from Buon Italia to take home.)    More recently I took Mom to another new shopping experience, this time a different food market: Eataly, hyped as the largest Italian marketplace in the world.  Opened with a lot of press attention in 2010, Eataly happens to be located on the ground floor of 200 Fifth Avenue, across from Madison Square.  Not only is this just up the street from my home, but 200 Fifth, known as the Toy Center South, was the headquarters of my maternal grandfather’s doll company—Mother’s family business.  (The company’s gone now: it was sold it in the ’70s and the buyer eventually liquidated it.)  So I knew Mom would love to see the place: great food on display, right nearby, and at a family-connected address!  What’s the downside?  Not a thing.

Another store I thought Mom would get a kick out of because it was truly unique at the time, was Shanghai Tang, a flashy new department store from the People’s Republic of China.  It opened on 61st and Madison, to considerable hoopla, in 1997 and closed, after 19 months, in 1999.  I took Mom up to the East Side mid-town location soon after the November opening—maybe it was over the Thanksgiving weekend that year—as a detour on our way uptown to the Met, as I recall.  That visit was just for sightseeing, needless to say; not only wasn’t the merchandise much to Mother’s taste—the clothes were pretty gaudy—but they were outrageously priced.  But it was well worth a gander.

Mother loved going to Trader Joe’s, but for actual buying.  She introduced me to the store in the Washington area more than half a decade before the California chain opened its first outlet in New York City—in 2006 on East 14th Street in my own neighborhood.  Mom got such fun out of shopping at TJ’s that I gave her gift cards a couple of times as one of her birthday or holiday presents.  (A related treat I used to buy for Mom was a box or two of TJ’s Pfeffernüsse Christmas cookies.  We liked the kind with powdered sugar, not icing, which I used to be able to find in a few stores, but they all stopped carrying them.  When I discovered that the Trader Joe’s brand, only available between Thanksgiving and New Year, were the same spice cookies we loved in Germany all those years ago, I started bringing a box or two with me when I went to D.C. for my birthday.  TJ’s Pfeffernüsse were one of the last treats I bought for Mom, for the 2014 holiday, but by then I don’t think she knew what they were anymore.)

As I said, Mom and I continued to travel together after our family dwindled down to just the two of us.  That was because we were each the best travel companions either of us knew.  We shared mostly the same tastes in not only food and restaurants, but what we were interested in seeing.  We liked almost everything—the traditional tourist sights, local cuisine, out-of-the-way curiosities, historical spots, cultural focal points, museums, shops, natural wonders; we were pretty much omnivorous when it came to sightseeing, and we could never be certain anyone else would indulge us in that pursuit.  (The same was true of restaurants, movies, and plays, which is why each of us often saved some of those kinds of things for a visit by the other.)  In addition to places like Istanbul; Taos, New Mexico (May 2002); the Inside Passage, Alaska (August 2003); San Antonio, Texas (April 2005); or San Juan and Ponce, Puerto Rico (January 2008), we did other kinds of trips as well. 

I took Mom for a long late-birthday/early-Mother’s Day weekend in May 2003 to Staunton, Virginia, to see the Shenandoah Shakespeare perform in their new reconstruction of the Blackfriars Theatre, Shakespeare’s indoor winter home (see “Blackfriars Playhouse in Virginia,” 18 November 2009, and “Shenandoah Shakespeare,” 21 November 2009).  At Mom’s behest, we took another long weekend in July 2004 to attend the Contemporary American Theatre Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia (“Contemporary American Theatre Festival (2004),” 8 July 2015), and we traveled together for a week in August 2006 to the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada (see “The 2006 Shaw Festival,” 8 and 11 December 2015, plus “Design for Living (Shaw Festival, 2006),” 29 March 2012, and “The Heiress (1976 & 2006),” 24 November 2012).  Other jaunts included Winterthur, the DuPont family estate museum near Wilmington, Delaware, combined with a visit to the Brandywine River Museum, the showcase for the art of the Wyeth family of painters in nearby Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, in April 2004 (“Winterthur & The Brandywine River Museum,” 15 June 2014), and, in August 2007, the Barnes Collection in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania.  The Blackfriars visit was my idea and I made all the arrangements, but the others were based on Mom’s suggestions and initial research, after which we made the plans together or divvied them up.

Of course, we traveled when my father was still alive and there were wonderful trips and outings then, too (Christmastime trips to New Orleans and Mexico, a Caribbean cruise, a stay in the Yucatán).   And Mother and Dad took many voyages together after Dad left the Foreign Service, both around the U.S. and abroad.  (Mom and Dad went on not a few art trips as members of the Smithsonian Associates and even organized a trip to “Shakespeare’s Italy” for the Folger Theatre Group.)  In fact, several of the trips Mom and I took after my father’s death were to revisit places he and Mom had gone and which she wanted me to see as well.  That was the impetus for the visits to both San Antonio and the high desert of New Mexico.  (The target for that last trip, which included stays in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, was Taos and the art community that’s developed there.  My own interest, though, also included the Taos Pueblo, about which I’d read extensively in the years before that visit and on which I blogged in “Taos & Taos Pueblo,” 24 and 27 May 2012.)  Sometimes travels combined both, such as a trip to Greece in fall 1973, while I was in the army in West Berlin, when I flew to Athens to join my folks.  We toured the peninsula together for a week, after which I returned to Germany and they boarded a Greek cruise ship for a journey around the Aegean.  On another occasion, my parents came to visit me in Berlin for several days and then continued on their own for a visit to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

Some trips were just day-trips to sights near Washington.  For instance, even though I grew up in the Nation’s Capital, I’d never been to Theodore Roosevelt Island.  (The island wasn’t actually dedicated to TR until 1967, years after I no longer lived in D.C.)  So Mom and I drove over there one fall afternoon in the early 2000’s and walked around the little (less than 90 acres), forested island in the Potomac River near the Virginia bank with its Theodore Roosevelt memorial and views of the D.C. skyline across the river.  A favorite drive was farther down the George Washington Memorial Parkway to Alexandria to roam around the old city.  One place Mom liked to wander through was the Torpedo Factory, a local art center (converted from an actual torpedo factory) near the Potomac that opened in 1983.  Today, the Torpedo Factory Art Center is home to nearly 200 artists who create, exhibit, and sell their art in little shops and studios that are fun to poke around in.  Other times, we’d just go over for lunch in one of the many restaurants and taverns in Old Town (18th- and early 19th-century buildings) and then stroll along the old streets.  We were even known to go over in the evening for dinner at some restaurant Mom knew or had read about—including one that served goat on one day  month.  (Remember I said we were adventurous and curious eaters.  Mom had had goat before, but I never had.  It tastes like gamey lamb or mutton, by the way.)  

We used to do this back when Dad was still alive and I had a dog, whom we’d take with us on our strolls through Old Town Alexandria—much to his delight.  We occasionally varied our day-trips to Alexandria with visits to Leesburg, Virginia (about an hour west northwest of Washington), and Frederick, Maryland (1¼ hours northwest), both colonial-era towns of some historic note—but mostly just pleasant places to walk around on a nice day and have a meal in an old tavern.

Mother had other interests in addition to food and travel which I shared as well.  I guess it’s pretty obvious that she, too, loved theater—otherwise why make those trips to so may theater festivals?  (Mom and Dad had also traveled to the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario.)  My own love of theater was certainly influenced by—if not entirely derived from—my folks’ interest.  Theater was one of the interests my mother and father had in common when they met.  (Mother told me more than once about the time her father wanted to take her to see Pal Joey, considered a risqué play in 1940-41 when Mom was 17 or 18.  The ticket broker with whom my grandfather did business refused to sell him a ticket for my future mom because he deemed her too young to see such a scandalous play!  Dad also told me often that one of his first dates with his eventual bride was to Oklahoma!, which was still running between their first meeting in January 1945 and their wedding a year later.) 

My folks took me to my first performances as a child in Washington, including Shakespeare plays and Gilbert and Sullivan operettas at first and then Broadway fare, in either post- or pre-New York tours.  (I’ve written about my early theater exposure in “A Broadway Baby,” 22 September 2010.)  We went to lots of shows together over the years and my parents subscribed to several theaters in D.C. along with concert and ballet series.  By the time my mother was a widow, she and I went to the theater often either when I came to Washington or she came to New York.  (In the days when I was trying to become an actor, my folks came up for every show I was in—even if I said I’d rather they’d skip this one or that one—including my grad school performances.  When I taught in middle school and high school, they even attended the school shows I directed.)  If Mom had a subscription show while I was visiting, she’d always get an extra ticket so I could join her and whichever friend with whom she regularly went to that theater. 

But one of our particular theater practices was at New Year.  Neither of us much liked New Year parties and the enforced merriment and often heavy drinking on which those gatherings usually centered.  So we looked for a play that was running on New Year’s Eve and went to the theater that evening, returning home in time to lay out a small celebration—occasionally a friend of Mom’s or two would join us—and uncork a good bottle of wine (we also weren’t fond of Champagne), and saw in the new year by watching the Times Square ball drop on TV.  If there wasn’t a suitable play on that night, we’d look for a good movie, but going to a show was our favorite activity for the evening of 31 December and we did that most New Year’s Eves.  It was a wonderful way to see in the new year.  (If you troll through my blog reports of shows I saw in Washington, you’ll find that a number of them were New Year’s Eve performances.)

I took Mother to several special stage shows when she visited me in New York, too.  In 1999, when she was coming up between her 7 April birthday and Mother’s Day on 9 May, I decided that she’d really enjoy seeing the wonderful puppets and masks of Julie Taymor’s stage adaptation of Disney’s The Lion King.  It’s not that we frequently went to family shows aimed at pre-teen audiences—neither of us had seen the animated film—but I knew a little about Taymor’s work (The Green Bird, Juan Darién) and I was sure Mom would appreciate the theatrical spectacle of the production irrespective of its origins.  I was dead-on right, and when Mom got back home, she couldn’t stop talking about this fantastic show and even took several of her friends to the National Museum of Women in the Arts to see Julie Taymor: Playing With Fire, a retrospective of her designs that opened at the Washington, D.C., museum in November 2000.  She spoke of these experiences for years to come, which gratified me immensely.  (As part of the Mother’s Day treat—we went to the show at the New Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd Street on the 9th—I took Mom for dinner at a new restaurant on Restaurant Row, 46th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues: the FireBird, a recreation of the splendors of a Romanov-era St. Petersburg mansion. The lavish restaurant débuted in 1996, but closed in 2014.) 

Later, when Mother’s mind began to deteriorate, she had trouble following complex stories or challenging productions—which I discovered in September 2014 when I took her to the Round House Theatre in Bethesda, Maryland, to see Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love and then, most pointedly, Belleville by Amy Herzog at Washington’s Studio Theatre, the last theater to which Mom subscribed.  (I had renewed her subscription to the Studio for 2014-15 over the summer without then realizing that by the fall, Mom wouldn’t be able to manage theater.)  At Belleville, I was sitting across the small thrust stage of the Studio’s Metheny Theatre from Mother, and she got agitated near the end of the performance and had to be calmed by her neighbors, who were kind strangers, until I got over to her.  That was the last show Mother attended in Washington, but I had taken her to two shows in New York that year: Disney’s Newsies in February and, our last theater outing, A Gentleman's Guide to Love & Murder in September, a week after Belleville.  I chose these plays because I didn’t think they’d be challenges for Mom—Newsies because it was an old-fashioned musical based on a children’s movie and Gentleman’s Guide because it was just for fun, all silly nonsense with no subtext.  Both were delightful and perfect shows for our needs and circumstances; I guessed right and Mom seemed to enjoy both performances.  I suspect, though, that her pleasure was more because I took her to the theater than because the shows themselves were especially meaningful to her.  That’s all right, though.  (I reported on all these later performances on ROT, though I didn’t discuss Mom’s difficulties.  Fool and Belleville were posted on 6 and 11 October 2014, respectively, and Newsies and Gentleman’s Guide on 26 February and 16 October 2014.)

Art shows were just as special to us as theater, as you may have gleaned.  My mother and I always tried to check out the local art museums when we visited new cities, and we often also made the rounds of the commercial galleries as well.  (More than once, my souvenir of a trip was a piece of art.)  We used to have a regular benchmark for art shows we especially liked: we’d judge the exhibit from the perspective of how many pieces we’d come back for on a “midnight shopping trip.”

One of the last large exhibits Mom and I saw before she had descended too far into dementia to enjoy going to a museum or gallery was Washington Art Matters at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center on Ward Circle, near where Mother had lived before moving to Maplewood.  We used to go to AU frequently when there was anything of interest because it was so close and we could essentially drop in on the spur of the moment, but Washington Art Matters (reported on ROT on 5 September 2013) was entirely focused on the art scene of my hometown from its inception after World War II to the 1980s and included works by a number of artists my parents had known (Lila Oliver Asher, a printmaker my mother had known since they were children; Sam Gilliam, a member of the Washington Color School of whose work my parents owned three pieces) or art they’d been familiar with for years (Jacob Kainen, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis).  Mother was still capable of experiencing art this way, though when we weren’t focused on the exhibit, like at lunch beforehand or on the drive back to her Bethesda apartment, she slipped into a sort of netherworld where my father was still alive, along with Mom’s parents (who had died in the ’60s and ’70s). 

(In addition to the blog report on Washington Art Matters, I’ve reported on exhibits of many of the other artists mentioned above: “Morris Louis,” 15 February 2010, and “Picasso, Bearden, Gilliam, and Gauguin,” 26 June 2011, which also contains a passing mention of Noland.  I posted a profile on Rick On Theater of Lila Asher on 26 September 2014, prompted by a small show at Maplewood the previous year in which Asher’s prints were featured.) 

The last art showing to which I took Mother outside her building was The Washington School of Color at the Marin-Price Galleries in downtown Bethesda in 2014, nine months before she died.  The gallery’s proximity to Maplewood suggested that she could manage the outing and the subject of the art meant she might still get some pleasure from it, and she did (see my article posted on 21 September 2014).  She engaged the staffer on duty that August Monday afternoon in a conversation about Gres Gallery, the gallery of which my parents were part-owners in the late ’50s and early ’60s, and the art she collected with my father.  Mother used to know modern art, especially American painters and sculptors, pretty well for an amateur all of whose knowledge was accumulated by going to exhibits, reading reviews, and assembling a small collection (about 40 paintings and sculptures). 

She and Dad got interested in modern art when Dad made the impulse-buy of shares in Gres in 1959 and they both threw themselves into the operation of the gallery—though Mother was the principal activist (Dad had a day job, of course).  Even I got into the act, going with Mother to the R Street gallery near DuPont Circle to help stuff envelopes or hang paintings.  (I was only 12 when all this started so I was too small actually to hang the often huge canvases, but I stood back and guided the women—it was the wives of the couples who did this work, plus Beati (Mrs. Hart) Perry, the managing partner—to get the frames straight and the heights right.)  Most excitingly, the partners shared entertainment duties so that the vernissages rotated among the six or so households, and Mom, as hostess-in-chief at our house, was in charge of this.  As always when my folks had parties, I assisted and since the décor had to include displaying some of the artist’s (or, sometimes, artists’) work in our home, once again I “directed” the set dressing.  So not only did I get to see “real” art at the gallery, courtesy of my Mom and Dad, but I got to have this art in my home, at least temporarily—it was like actually having taken one of those imaginary midnight shopping trips—and what’s more, I got to meet actual artists.  This whole venture was an art education for all of us and an adventure for me, and it lasted well beyond the demise of Gres Gallery to the end of my parents’ lives.

It also branched out.  Trips to China, Thailand, India, Nepal, and Japan spawned an attraction to Asian art (China: Dawn of a Golden Age, 200-750 A.D. at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art over the Thanksgiving weekend in 2004) and Dad’s stint as Director of Development for the private Museum of African Art on Capital Hill, precursor to the present Smithsonian Institution museum, generated an enduring affinity for sub-Saharan African art.  Visits out west and to Mexico and Central America resulted in an interest in Native American and pre-Columbian art, too.  (My folks’ art holdings included a bronze by Fritz Scholder, whose two-part retrospective, Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian, we attended at the National Museum of the American Indian both in New York City and on the Mall in Washington in 2008; see my post on 30 March 2011.  Due to our pre-Columbian attraction, Mother and I took in The Aztec Empire at Manhattan’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and The Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya at the National Galley of Art in Washington, both in 2004; see “Theater & Art,” 14 August 2014.)  But modern Western, especially American, art remained my parents’ main focus and Mother continued to explore this area after my father’s death, even though she stopped buying art then. 

The last exhibit to which Mother and I went was Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe at the Guggenheim in June 2014.  I arranged for a wheelchair at the museum (which, you may know, is a giant inverted cone accessed by a spiraling ramp) and we took a cab directly from my corner to the Goog’s entrance so Mom wouldn’t have to take her walker and navigate the ramp on her own.  (I maneuvered the chair from the top level down to the lobby.)  Like attending Newsies and Gentleman’s Guide, I think what pleased Mom more than seeing the art, although Italian Futurism is fascinating and provocative (see “Italian Futurism,” 15 July 2014), was that I took her.  I didn’t fully recognize it yet, but Mom was already beginning to feel left out and lost and when I brought her to New York City for a visit and took her out to do things—eat at a restaurant, see sights like the High Line Park, take in an art show or a play, or even just go to a movie—she would tell all her neighbors for days afterward.  It was always “Rick took me to an art show” or “My son’s taking me to New York.” 

My parents and I had a few exciting experiences together.  (One or two were even a little frightening, like the time I almost didn’t get out of the Soviet Union in 1965 or the cruise in the Mediterranean in 1973 when my folks nearly got caught in the middle of the Yom Kippur War.)  But most of our times were uneventful as far as high drama is concerned.  But we had fun together.  A significant facet was lost when Dad died; he always supplied the historical, academic, or intellectual perspective to our experiences.  (I was always astonished how he could connect history—sometimes pretty ancient history, too—current politics, and local culture together to make a coherent narrative explaining why something is the way it is.  He’d have made a terrific teacher.)  Mom always went with her emotional response, and that continued while she could still sort out her perceptions.  Right up till then, we were still each other’s best travel, theater, museum-, and restaurant-going companions.  Even when each of us did those things on our own, we could share the experience with one another; I always knew Mom or Dad would understand it the way I did, see the same specialness, and vice versa.  That’s gone now.  We used to talk regularly a couple of times a week, and I’d tell Mom about the last play I saw and she’d tell me about a new restaurant she’d discovered.  I don’t know anyone else who’d be that interested.  Perhaps predictably, the thing I missed most palpably right after Mom died and I returned to New York, was the regular Sunday-morning telephone call, a ritual that went back to my college days.  It was a sort of echo of the pleasures we shared and can’t anymore.

Culture War

[When Hilton Kramer, New York Times art critic from 1965 to 1982, died on 27 March 2012 at 84, he was nearly universally lionized as a perceptive and knowledgeable commentator on the art of the 20th century.  He was also acknowledged as a fierce fighter for conservative views in the culture war of the 1980s and ’90s.  William Grimes put it this way in the Times, a paper the critic spent decades denigrating as a bastion of liberalism in its rival New York Post: “Admired for his intellectual range and feared for his imperious judgments, Mr. Kramer . . . was a passionate defender of high art against the claims of popular culture and saw himself . . . as a warrior upholding the values that made civilized life worthwhile.”  (In the New Criterion, the opinion journal Kramer started, editor Roger Kimball eulogized his mentor: “Hilton called things exactly as he saw them.  He did not temper his disapprobation—nor his praise, come to that—to suit the politesse of any establishment.”)  While the art critic championed the work of artists he liked (David Smith, Milton Avery, Arthur Dove), he had little tolerance for work or movements he thought were unworthy or which didn’t meet his standards.  With only a few exceptions, the critic dismissed much art that came after, say, 1970 and even some of the more popular styles of the decades before such as Pop Art, which he called “a very great disaster”; Op Art; Conceptualism, labeled “scrapbook art”; and, especially, Postmodernism, described as “modernism with a sneer, a giggle, modernism without any animating faith in the nobility and pertinence of its cultural mandate.”  He saw those movements as mere graphic design and interior décor or nonce fads which cheapened the appreciation of good art by both artists and viewers.  Kramer accused Andy Warhol, for instance, of making spectators “less serious, less introspective, less willing or able to distinguish between achievement and its trashy simulacrum.” 

[Kramer’s was the opinion that conservative politicians and activists cited to legitimize their disapproval of art they didn’t like. One example is the uproar against Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment in 1989, part of the battle that launched the modern culture war.  When Revs. Donald Wildmon and Pat Robertson; Sens. Jesse Helms, William Armstrong, and Alphonse D’Amato; Reps. Dick Armey and Dana Rohrabacher; and columnist Pat Buchanan launched a campaign of opposition and condemnation against the National Endowment for the Arts; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati; and Mapplethorpe (eventually among other radical and controversial artists), Kramer labeled the artist “the most overrated photographer of our time.” 

[The esteemed critic was an opponent of public funding and government support of art, which he declared had politicized and bureaucratized art by creating an “immense superstructure of art advisers, art consultants, art lobbyists, art activists, and other non-artist art professionals, working in close conjunction with a vast network of arts councils, offices of cultural affairs, public art projects, minority and ‘community’ arts groups, and other special-interest cultural organizations, both in and out of government,” to exert “enormous influence in determining public policy as well as private patronage in the art world.”  Kramer asserted that “this bureaucratic leviathan” was “completely captive to the political Left,” intent on advancing “the radical Left’s agenda for the cultural revolution.”  The theater and film fields had already been coopted, Kramer believed, and classical music and “serious literature” were under threat.  He wasn’t above calling on the funding agencies, however, to deny sustenance to art of which he disapproved.  He saw no contradiction in using the art support system for political purposes or allowing political considerations to invade the granting process—as long as it was his kind of politics that did the influencing.  In the pages of The New Criterion, which he co-founded in 1982 and edited, he campaigned for not just high standards of art and art criticism but for conservative artistic values—art that reflected what he deemed to be “the highest achievement of our civilization.”

[Though it’s taken me longer than I planned to work this all out, Kramer’s death provoked me to write about the culture war that reached its height of vehemence in the 1980s and ’90s and which reappears, sometimes not so subtly, from time to time.  The critic wasn’t alone, of course: he was among a cohort of public figures, including elected officials like Republican Congressmen Henry Hyde of Illinois and Rohrabacher of California, conservative clergy like Jerry Falwell and Robertson, other writers and commentators such as George Will and Buchanan, and even some curators and museum administrators who agreed with Kramer’s positions and views.  Here’s a brief discussion, biased, I’ll admit, of some of what went on in those decades.] 

In the cultural war, which encompasses many fields including art and theater—on which I’ll be focusing here—both the liberal and conservative viewpoints can be argued persuasively.  Wikipedia innocuously defines “culture war” as “a struggle between two sets of conflicting cultural values,” while Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, James Davison Hunter’s 1991 exegesis of the struggle, more ominously defined the conflict “very simply as political and social hostility rooted in different systems of moral understanding.”  Hunter predicted, “The end to which these hostilities tend is the domination of one cultural and moral ethos over all others.”  Instead of calling the opponents “conservative” and “liberal” or “right” and “left,” the University of Virginia sociologist designated them “orthodox,” who are “adherents to an external, definable, and transcendent authority,” and “progressivists,” whose moral authority “tends to be defined by the spirit of the modern age, a spirit of rationalism and subjectivism. . . .  From this standpoint, truth tends to be viewed as a process, as a reality that is ever unfolding.”  

The orthodox, Hunter explained, support art that “serves [a] high public purpose” and reinforces the values and tastes of the community at large.  For the progressivists, art is “a statement of being,” for “[t]o express oneself is to declare one’s existence.”  The stakes, Hunter asserted, are the very standards by which we “determine whether something is good or bad, right or wrong, accepted or unaccepted, and so on.”  In other words, the struggle is over nothing less than “the power to define reality.”  As stage director Leonardo Shapiro, a progressive, asked shortly before his 1997 death: “Who makes culture?  Is it too late?”  At the 1992 Republican National Convention, on the other side of the battlefield, conservative columnist Patrick Buchanan gave a primetime speech declaring, “There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America.  It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.”  The problem, Hunter concluded, is that the two sides speak different languages.  Since, as Hunter analyzed it, “the culture war emerges over fundamentally different conceptions of moral authority, over different ideas and beliefs about truth, the good, obligation to one another, the nature of community, and so on,” the likelihood of compromise or accommodation is nonexistent:

The real significance of such sentiments is that they reaffirm the basic characteristic of the contemporary culture war, namely the nigh complete disjunction of moral understanding between the orthodox and progressivist communities—in this case, on what constitutes art.

As recently as February 2012, conservative columnist Ross Douthat wrote in the New York Times that “the culture wars are still inevitably significant, for the very simple reason that there’s no common ground on which to call a truce.”  Hunter concluded, “Our most fundamental ideas about who we are as Americans are now at odds,” and conservative art critic Hilton Kramer expounded in 1993 on his claim that it wasn’t the forces of totalitarianism who were mounting “the gravest assaults on art and its institutions” as they maneuvered “to impose an absolute and remorseless control over every aspect of life and thought.”  His perceived threat was coming from the political left which was applying and enforcing political tests on “virtually every field of artistic and intellectual endeavor.”  Kramer, who insisted that “the arts have been effectively strangled in the interest of a radical political agenda,” warned:

Artistic criteria of value and achievement are supplanted by claims to preferment made in the name of group rights, racial justice, sexual equality, minority empowerment, and other politically correct petitions for advancement on the basis of extra-artistic interests.  Art that is not explicitly enlisted in the service of some approved social, sexual, racial, or similar political mission is now an interest that dare not speak its name in the councils of the new arts bureaucracy.  Nor are distinctions between high art and popular culture permitted in the kind of bureaucratic discourse that is specifically formulated to eradicate such distinctions lest the dreaded demons of “elitism,” “excellence,” “quality,” and other challenges to a radical and leveling egalitarianism persist in reminding us that in art, as in life, some things are by their nature discernibly superior to others. 

“While advocating greater public access to the arts so that more and more people may enjoy their pleasures and benefits,” argued Kramer, “the new cultural commissars carry on an unremitting campaign to strip high art of everything but its name in order to render it more appealing to larger numbers of people.”  As this makes clear, his attack on progressivism reverses the arguments the left makes against the orthodox when they try to restrict funding and support for work outside “the traditional fine arts.” 

The conservatives oppose support for art that’s a “symbolic presentation of behavior and ideas that test the limits of social acceptability.”  The state, Living Theatre co-founder Julian Beck cautioned us, isn’t really interested in bringing art to its citizens, however; it wants “diamonds in its crown” and cultural propaganda for its causes and tenets.  In the 1960s, for instance, when my father was with the agency responsible for cultural propaganda abroad, the State Department wouldn’t sponsor tours of West Side Story, arguably one of our greatest achievements in musical theater, because it showed our society in a violent and unflattering way.  (Strictly speaking, this wasn’t censorship because privately-financed tours were free to travel abroad and there was no attempt to suppress productions at home.  The rejection was purely a matter of officially sanctioned art that supported the authorized depiction of the establishment.) 

The distinction is parallel to the one George Bernard Shaw described in his 1913 revision of the essay “The Quintessence of Ibsenism,” the contrast between the real and the ideal.  In “Eric Bentley – An Appreciation,” a profile on this blog about the critic, essayist, and public intellectual (published on 4 December 2012), my friend Kirk Woodward characterized the dichotomy this way:

In “ideals” . . . Shaw sees generalities that take the place of understanding the real . . . nature of the world.  What sort of ideals?  Love . . . patriotism . . . nationalism . . . fatherhood . . . motherhood . . . any high-sounding, well-meaning generality can conceal an ideal that takes the place of serious analysis and comprehension.

The orthodox want art that depicts this ideal and don’t want to support art that explores what’s really happening in our society—what artists (and their subjects) really see, experience, think, and feel.  The progressives see this exploration as not only the legitimate focus of art and artists, but an important benefit that art provides to society and one we can’t do without if we’re going to keep, much less advance, our democracy.  Theater director Shapiro warned that “this seems to be a self-perpetuating cycle so that audiences are less and less able to deal with any kind of emotional complexity, relational content, in fact with any of the great themes and subjects of art and literature” rather than what he saw as “anti-relational propaganda,” his take on Shaw’s generalized “ideal.”  Artist David Wojnarowicz, who declared, “People should witness things.  They should, at the very bottom level, be witnessed,” explained that for him art

can produce images of authenticity that break down the walls of state-sanctioned ignorance in the forms of mass media/mass hypnosis and stir people to do what is considered taboo and that is to speak.  Breaking silence about needs or experiences can break the chains of the code of silence.  Describing the once indescribable can dismantle the power of taboo.  Speaking about the once unspeakable can make the invisible familiar if repeated often enough in loud and clear tones and pictures. 

“Images,” Wojnarowicz added, “can be used as tools of alert, or tools of organization.  [An] image can be a disruption of previously unchallenged power.”  In the view of the progressivists, this is a threat to the forces of orthodoxy.

Though Vincent van Gogh wrote that “officially recognized art [is] stagnant-minded and moldering,” art that reinforces accepted sentiments, celebratory art that “reflects the sublime,” is important, and some of it is good.  (Oklahoma! is celebratory theater, as is South Pacific, two other great works of the musical stage.)  A question to be asked, however, has to be, Who defines “sublime”?  Who sets the standards for “high public purpose”?  To many progressives, certainly, testing the limits of social acceptability is an American and democratic virtue—it’s how many expansions of social, artistic, and political boundaries have occurred.  In a few cases, dissenting art has been instrumental in defeating, or at least spotlighting, systems of which even the most orthodox American establishmentarians disapproved: dramatists like Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia and Janusz Glowacki of Poland constantly reminded the rest of the world what life was like under Soviet communism; Athol Fugard’s and Mbongeni Ngema’s pointed opposition to apartheid in South Africa helped isolate and ultimately bring down that regime.  Artists like these, today recognized as important figures in world culture, were frequently harassed, oppressed, jailed, or exiled because they tested the limits of social acceptability in their countries.  In fact, in the very days when Soviet communism was toppling, Havel declared: “An artist must challenge, must controvert the established order.  To limit that creative spirit in the name of public sensibility is to deny society one of its most significant resources.”   

The United States isn’t indemnified from such prodding and goading from its artists, either.  Consider this passage from the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965 (P.L. 89-209), the law that established the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities:

An advanced civilization must not limit its efforts to science and technology alone, but must give full value and support to the other great branches of scholarly and cultural activity in order to achieve a better understanding of the past, a better analysis of the present, and a better view of the future.

Avant-gardist Shapiro, who viewed the arts as oracular, echoed this sentiment: “The point of an oracle—you support the oracle, you don’t support what it says.  It doesn’t always give you good news.  When Oedipus went to the oracle and it gave him essentially his death sentence, he didn’t say, ‘Well, I’m not going to fund you anymore.’”

Hunter asserted that what the orthodox activists support is art as a celebration of mainstream American patriotic and religious values and sentiments that make the viewer or listener feel good and cheer.  (Consider Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware or Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull.)  There’s art—even good and great art—that’s celebratory; a lot of the world’s classical art comes from that impulse, and most sacred art falls into that category.  (In the latter category, consider Michelangelo’s Pietà, arguably the most sublime piece of marble ever carved, and Sistine Chapel frescoes, and Salvador Dalí’s Sacrament of the Last Supper.)  In fact, the orthodox forces put an awful lot of their efforts into putting religious—mostly Christian, but not exclusively; conservative Jews occasionally get into the act, too—tenets and practices into particular fields at issue.  One significant non-arts issue in the culture war is, of course, the place of prayer in the schools—along with the teaching of “values,” which almost always means, in this debate, religious values—or, put simply, God—in the classroom and schoolhouse, the courthouse, the public square, and so on.  While I agree that the progressivists have often gone overboard banning religious expression in the public forum, even in schools, no amount of argument will ever make it seem all right to me for any public function to include religious observance for the very simple reason that it’s impossible to invent a form that doesn’t exclude someone’s faith (not to ignore those who have no faith).  It can’t be inclusive, and therefore it’s exclusive—and, therefore, privileges some faiths over others.  By the most basic interpretation, that’s un-Constitutional. 

While the progressives want to make their definitions more inclusive and open, however, the orthodox want to restrict access and acceptability.  What the progressives want to do allows everyone to choose what they see, hear, do, enjoy, and so on, but the orthodox want to deny everyone the right to see, hear, et cetera, anything that they decide is unacceptable.  Short of that, they want to make it as difficult as they can to see, hear, et cetera, stuff of which they don’t approve by denying it funding, a venue, airtime, publicity, sponsorship, or whatever.  That strikes me as fundamentally undemocratic and un-American, and no matter how sincerely you feel about the offensiveness or vileness of some art, movie, book, show, or song (or any other creation), I get hung up on the restrictiveness and denial of access—and who makes the decisions in all our behalves.  If the progressivists win, then everything is accessible and we get to decide for ourselves if it’s offensive, vile, blasphemous, unpatriotic, obscene, or nasty—and we don’t go see it.  And you can preach, write, demonstrate, protest, and persuade against it—but you don’t get to shut it down for me.  If the orthodox win, no one gets to see anything someone decides is objectionable.  You can opt out under progressivism; you can’t opt in under orthodoxy.

Ironically, Hilton Kramer turned this principle on its head, too.  “‘[A]ccess’ often means nothing but censorship in the service of ‘diversity,’” the art critic insisted.  It “is now instantly recognized as a signal to ‘dumb down’ the arts in order to make some approved substitute qualify as the real thing,” he declared.

Not coincidentally, the very authorities who legislated the agency intended to support American artists, the NEA, addressed the issue of art as the canary in the mineshaft.  In “Establishing a National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities,” the Senate Special Committee on Arts and Humanities, chaired by Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, wrote in a section entitled “Freedom of Expression” of the Senate Report which accompanied the 1965 Arts and Humanities Act:

It is the intent of the committee that in the administration of this act there be given the fullest attention to freedom of artistic and humanistic expression.  One of the artist’s and the humanist’s great values to society is the mirror of self-examination which they raise so that society can become aware of its shortcomings as well as its strengths.

Those radicals in the Senate wanted to support art that challenged the status quo, criticized the culture, made us see the wrongs as well as the strengths.  They also wanted to support art that was innovative and challenging in style and form as well as content, as they further stated in “Freedom of Expression”:

Therefore, the committee affirms that the intent of this act should be the encouragement of free inquiry and expression.  The committee wishes to make clear that conformity for its own sake is not to be encouraged, and that no undue preference should be given to any particular style or school of thought or expression.  Nor is innovation for its own sake to be favored.  The standard should be artistic and humanistic excellence.  While evaluation in terms of such an abstract and subjective standard will necessarily vary, the committee believes such a standard to be sufficiently identifiable to serve the broad purpose of the act and the committee’s concern with the cultural values involved.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see that the arts that celebrate the status quo, the collective mythology of the nation—the Shavian “ideal,” if you will—will be vastly more popular overall than art that tests the boundaries and challenges the received wisdom of the culture.  The one needs less official funding because it attracts support on its own merits.  The other, though, needs the midwifery of organizations and foundations because its appeal—though by no means its significance or potential impact—is narrower.  Furthermore, as Tom Schaefer, a columnist with the Wichita, Kansas, Eagle-Beacon, wrote in 1989: “. . . [I]f art teaches us anything, particularly religious art, it’s that shocking new images can become, in time, conveyors of meaning for people who are struggling to make sense of life.  That’s worth a pause before rushing to judgment.”  The same body that called for support of outlier art recognized that history has shown that what one generation dismisses as junk and trash is embraced by a later generation as great and important art, asserting:

Moreover, modes of expression are not static, but are constantly evolving.  Countless times in history artists and humanists who were vilified by their contemporaries because of their innovations in style or mode of expression have become prophets to a later age.

Think Ibsen for one example, the production of whose realistic plays was banned in many countries (Ghosts) or caused near riots (Doll House), or van Gogh, whose work was dismissed in his lifetime and now brings millions.  Both artists today are highly esteemed in nearly everyone’s estimation.

Unsurprisingly, when those like the late Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Pat Buchanan worked to subvert and lessen access to government support of the arts, which artists and others deemed a sinister form of censorship, many among the arts community opposed them.  “Where do you derive your authority?” asked playwright Mac Wellman of their conservative adversaries.  “You’re not mentioned in the Bible, so where do you get your authority?”  Stage director Shapiro contested that “because some Buchanan, or whoever the latest loudmouth is, can mobilize some superficial opposition to one or more arts or arts groups, that that means that they are more representing the American people than the artists.”  Frequent New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis proclaimed “that this is a grown-up country, that we want no pecksniffs here, that we are not going to let a few self-appointed bluenoses decide what all the rest of us are allowed to read and see.”

The argument over funding and censorship involves both money and motivation.  As for the funding, those who want to restrict access to public money for art of which they disapprove say with Richard Bernstein in his New York Times article “Subsidies for Artists: Is Denying a Grant Really Censorship?” that withholding tax money from an artist such as performance artist Karen Finley, one of the so-called NEA Four, isn’t censorship because she’s still able to perform or exhibit where she wants, she just can’t do it on the public’s check.  “It would seem to be one thing to deny some artists Federal funds on the ground that what they do is offensive to some taxpayers,” posited Bernstein, “and another to deprive them of their freedom of expression.”  In response, director Shapiro, a pacifist, quipped, “I am against the government using my tax money to kill people . . . .  And yes, I would also be against the government using my money to fund artists to kill people, no matter how elegantly.”  Shapiro pointed out that someone well-known like Finley may be able to find funding and a venue by other means, but what about artists and groups of whom we’ve never heard?

Where are the thousands of Black, Latino, Inuit, Korean, Polish, Native American, Chinese, Arab Karen Finleys?  Where are the thousands of multi-cultural groups celebrating the rebirth of their vision in communities across this huge country?

In his defense of freedom of artistic expression, director, teacher, and producer Robert Brustein wrote that government support of art “means acknowledging that, yes, every artist has a First Amendment right to subsidy.”  Hilton Kramer, however, voiced the conservatives’ position on such a response, explaining that “‘pluralism’ . . . is now merely a euphemism for multiculturalism and enforced ‘diversity,’” despite the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act’s declaration:

The arts and the humanities belong to all the people of the United States.

The arts and the humanities reflect the high place accorded by the American people to the nation’s rich cultural heritage and to the fostering of mutual respect for the diverse beliefs and values of all persons and groups.

It is vital to democracy to honor and preserve its multicultural artistic heritage as well as support new ideas . . . . 

It heightens the conflict, of course, that the progressivists saw the attempts to silence individual artists or groups as skirmishes in a campaign to decimate the avant-garde and experimental art world entirely.  Indeed, Paul Mattick, author of “Arts and the State” in The Nation, warned of a truly devastating potential:

It is the right-wing agenda itself—the call for austerity and the distrust of creativity in all spheres of life other than those of corporate profitability.  Opposing this means the effort to explore, in analysis and, where possible, in practice, the complex relations of art to present-day society and to the possibility of changing it.

The atmosphere across the country was poisoned by what Mattick dubbed “Helms and Co.” and other promoters of cultural orthodoxy like Pat Buchanan and Hilton Kramer who’d been condemning public arts funding.  Dominating the airwaves and the press with their version of the situation, these spokespeople for the right defined the issue for the public and the “mainstream moved right.”  Contrarily, William J. Bennett, President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education and President George H. W. Bush’s director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, maintained in a 2012 commentary called “Republicans lost the culture war,” “For decades liberals have succeeded in defining the national discourse . . . .  They have successfully set the parameters and focus of the national and political dialogue . . . .”

Poet Robert Browning declared, “Art remains the one way possible / Of speaking truth,” and Congress, noting that one of an artist’s responsibilities is to point out society’s shortcomings, addressed this issue.  At the establishment of the NEA and the NEH, legislators explicitly directed that grants be made with principal consideration of the freedom of expression and that artistic quality alone be the criterion.  Congress affirmed that the NEA’s purpose must be to encourage open inquiry and ordered “that no undue preference should be given to any particular style or school of thought or expression.”  Nonetheless, in 1990, the leadership of the NEA succumbed to external pressure from conservative activists and politicians to deny grants to artists who offended orthodox sensitivities, resulting in the infamous “NEA Four” incident.

While Kramer asserted that “the radical Left . . . knew how to exploit liberal sentiment for its own illiberal causes” and “was far more expert than [conservatives] about the many ways in which the resources of both the government and the private sector could be made useful to the cultural revolution,” Shapiro cautioned, “The system has already learned to exclude, efficiently and quietly, art that doesn’t support ruling class ideology and values.”  In Bernstein’s Times article, poet Alan Ginsberg announced, “We are in a dead-end totalitarian ecological trap,” and Karen Finley claimed, “A year ago I was in a country of free expression; now I am not.”  Though Bernstein himself demurred on whether denial of federal money is censorship, many artists, as he reported, feel not only that it is but saw the efforts to rein in the NEA as the beginning of a conservative offensive against free expression and thought of which they disapprove.  The artists feared, furthermore, that the move was an overture to more widespread efforts at suppression.  Impresario Joseph Papp cautioned, “There’s no genuine repression yet, but there are little brush fires that are happening at the same time.”  Leonardo Shapiro affirmed, “The few tokens” being fought over in the press and in Congress “are significant not only because they show the new boldness of the right in wanting to mop up the left-over freaks and dissidents, but also because they show how few tokens are available to be censored.”  Shapiro asked, “If we haven’t censored the creators of our contemporary culture, where are they—on vacation?”  The director concluded:

The repression in America has been so successful that we accept it as the way things are, and are not able to identify it as the consequence of deliberate policy decisions made by a ruling class as part of an overall plan to keep and consolidate power and wealth.

After Dennis Barrie, the curator of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, was indicted on 7 April 1990 on obscenity charges for mounting Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, a touring exhibit of the artist’s photographs, producer Papp, who was one of the most prominent arts people to refuse a grant rather than sign an anti-obscenity pledge, issued a direr warning: “It’s a serious thing when people are arrested and charged.  This is where the weather vane could be pointing.” 

What the arbiters of public taste and culture are looking for, Peter Brook said, isn’t a theater that reveals hidden truths, a “Theatre of the Invisible-Made-Visible,” but “the tame play where ‘higher’ only means ‘nicer’—being noble only means being decent.”  It’s what dramatist Mac Wellman called “the Theater of Good Intentions” and “the theater of the non-event” in contrast to a chaotic and complex poetic theater.  Antonin Artaud said that conventional Western theater confuses “aestheticism” with “art,” and that theater’s goal should be “to express objectively certain secret truths, to bring into the light of day . . . certain aspects of truth that have been buried under forms in their encounters with Becoming.”  The kind of theater that Artaud envisioned, Wellman writes, and Brook produces has little respect for establishment values, and little patience, Wellman pronounced.  “[P]oetic theater,” the playwright avowed, “takes impossible and ridiculous shortcuts; makes a mockery of the Aristotelian, better class of narrative.”  Julian Beck, depicting avant-garde artists as those “who took the risk of exploring strange lands and of bringing back the unfamiliar things they had created out of their discoveries for all to see,” perceived that

[b]ecause he makes this voyage, he is mocked as an alien is usually mocked.  Because he rejects the popular way of doing things in favor of new forms that may aid him to make his discoveries, he is regarded with hostility. 

But the forces of orthodoxy viewed this special mission as a danger—much as Plato saw it in The Republic in which he condemned poets—and Hilton Kramer, who believed “that while winning the Cold War with the Soviet Union abroad, the conservatives in Washington lost the culture war to our own commissars at home,” expressed the consequences:

The cultural revolution, which had its origins in the antiwar movement and counterculture of the 1960s, now presents this country with the gravest domestic crisis it has faced since the end of the Vietnam War. It has already gone a long way toward destroying our institutions of high culture and our institutions of higher learning. It has made every serious artistic pursuit more problematical than it has been in this country within living memory. And because the cultural revolution has turned every aspect of family and sexual life into an arena of political combat and made every problem deriving from race and ethnicity a battle zone, the culture war is also a moral and social crisis of vast dimensions.

The culture war battles which dominated the political landscape of the late 1980s through the middle 1990s, including congressional and presidential campaigns, subsided somewhat, or at least were no longer headline material at the end of the 20th century into the start of the 21st.  There were flare-ups, especially over gun laws and abortion, and same-sex marriage laws and court cases became high-profile subjects for action, debate, and commentary in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama presidencies.  The war itself, however, is still in progress in pockets around the country and occasionally on the national field.  In 2004, Buchanan declared that “the culture wars have been reignited.”  In the same year, Dr. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, warned, “We're in this for the long haul, and the people on the other side had best understand, this is not for dilettantes, not for weekend warriors.”  In 2006, Bill O’Reilly published Culture Warrior, in which the conservative TV commentator, assailing the “secular-progressive movement,” pronounced that a culture war “desperately needs to be fought, because today the stakes are as high as they get.” 

The Spring 2011 issue of Censorship News, the newsletter of the National Coalition Against Censorship, included an editorial called “Culture Wars Returning? Or Did They Ever Go Away?” which declared: “In the fall of 2010 culture wars rhetoric seemed like a thing of the past . . . .  And then the firestorm hit.”  And New York magazine seemed to respond in a 2012 article entitled “The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy Is on Your Screen” which found “a pervasive, if not total, liberalism” all over the TV dial.  In 2013, the flare-ups included the charges of racism against Paula Deen, host of a popular TV food show, when she confessed to the casual use of the word “Nigger”; Megyn Kelly’s declaration on Fox News that “Santa just is white”; and the firing (and subsequent rehiring) of A&E’s Duck Dynasty’s star, Phil Robertson, after he expressed his anti-gay beliefs in GQ magazine.  That same year, Pat Buchanan, himself a Catholic, berated Pope Francis, whom he accused of “moral relativism” for seeking “to move the Catholic Church to a stance of non-belligerence, if not neutrality, in the culture war for the soul of the West.”

This year we’ve already seen the legal battles over the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate waged by organizations affiliated with the Catholic Church and former Arkansas governor, and one-time Republican candidate for the party’s presidential nomination, Mike Huckabee chimed in on the alleged “war on women” in the Republican Party at an RNC meeting.  Just as I was writing the final version of this article in late January, the New York Times ran a front-page, above-the-fold headline that read, “Parties Seize on Abortion Issues in Midterm Race,” predicting that that conflict would be an important election question in the coming campaign, but it looks more like the continuing controversy over gay marriage, becoming legal in more and more states, will be the paramount culture issue—unless, of course, there’s a new chocolate Jesus in someone’s studio.

While some analysts insist that the culture war isn’t what American voters really care about, being more concerned with issues of leadership and security rather than the moral questions the political elites and media pundits tell us are important (Morris P. Fiorina, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, 2010) others, like columnist Ross Douthat, point out that while “politics is mostly about jobs and the economy and the state of the public purse,” the pocketbook issues that affect voters’ daily lives, “the arguments that we remember longest, that define what it means to be democratic and American, are often the . . . culture war debates,” possibly because they are fights over symbols embedded deep in our psyches in a way that bread-and-butter issues aren’t.  Political observers conclude that the electorate may say it’s fed up with these conflicts, that they’re nothing but tiresome distractions from the important matters, but the activists on both sides see them as truly life-and-death issues that affect every citizen at the most fundamental level.  When push comes to shove, inside the voting booth or the caucus room, even the weary voter is loath to give up his or her fervently held social convictions.

[Most of “Culture War” has been devoted to discussing and examining the politics and activism of the 1980s and ’90s, but the cultural struggle has never gone away.  It flares up and hits the headlines every few months or even weeks over issues like abortion; evolution; guns; religion in the public square; education policy and curricula; art, literature, and censorship; gender issues and sexuality; and a host of other topics.  Elections are catnip to the culture warriors, and so political campaigns, whether presidential, congressional, or local, become fields for new battles and skirmishes.  We saw it in 2012 and we will again in 2014. 

[Like Hilton Kramer (1928-2012), some of the other main figures of the last big battle of the culture war have departed—Paul Goodman (1911–1972), Julian Beck (1925-85), Joe Papp (1921-91), Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97), Alan Ginsberg (1926-97), Jerry Falwell (1933-2007), Jesse Helms (1921-2008), Claiborne Pell (1918-2009), Robert Novak (1931-2009), Anthony Lewis (1927-2013), not to forget artists Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-89) and David Wojnarowicz (1954-92)—but others are still fighting as new voices, such as Lynne Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Rick Santorum, and the Weekly Standard on the right and Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Corey Booker, and the Huffington Post on the left, join them.  One thing seems certain: whenever someone declares the culture war over and won, it turns out to have been a short-term cease-fire as the ammo’s restocked and the weapons are cleaned and oiled.  Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are few conscientious objectors in the culture war.]