Hellenism in Peril in Public Broadcasting

JAMES WW ADDOMS

Ive always felt Gore Vidals vitriol and iconoclasm a bit calculated. Im currently re-reading his splashy Julian and his subtle liberalism and the persuasion of the brilliance of the material is working at me admittedly a fairly standard representative of his fan base as I find myself completely invested in fighting the creeping forces of the 4th Century church sweeping away the last blooms of Hellenism as embodied in the unlikely Roman emperor Julian. Why should I care about an ancient fight between dogmatic certainty and a Hellenism comprised of the beautiful detritus of our coming to terms with facets of the human conditions such as love, hatred, aesthetic tastes, numinous experiences and the isolation of the self?

While re-reading Vidals novel a Dionysian pleasure spread over weeks as necessitated by the Apollonian demands of work, school and cultural adhesion I have been considering the impending drastic reduction of federal funding for public broadcasting. Forces in both parties are fighting for the reductions on the grounds that the economic situation in America can no longer support such unessential cultural programs. The two parties claim opposing ideological positions predicated on the concept of the correct relationship of the individual to the whole and to the state. This ideology often predicts and informs an adherents view of the states role in the advancement of culture. Vidal, however, has often said that we live in an essentially one party state. An article from the 1970s states this view: There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party...and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corruptuntil recently... and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties. Knowingly if grudgingly influenced by my reading of Julian I was reflecting on this quote today as I listened to NPRs Talk of the Nation. Bipartisan contributors stated hopes that public broadcasting be completely de-funded on the grounds that if a local population cannot afford to support local public broadcasting with donations then market forces are making a clear judgment about the desirability of this programming. Solutions ranged from a new paucity of federal support to a redoubled effort at private funding coupled with or supplanted by commercial funding. The host of the program responded that public television and public radio were conceived as an oasis from a diminution to corporate sponsorship and lamented the necessary degradation of quality and objectivism that must be the result.

Corporate sponsorship of public broadcasting has been present for some time, but a complete reliance on self-interested corporate monoliths rather than self-interested individuals for funding of the majority of widespread and free outlets for cultural expression, reflection and criticism not only degrades the integrity of the journalism, creativity and independent views of public broadcasting, it swings us ever closer to becoming the recipients of programming dictated by the mere economic, Apollonian passions of our nature. I asked myself why I should care about an ancient fight between the certainty of economic imperialism and the messy, unpredictable and beautiful Hellenism of two millennia ago. I have answered myself that it is as important a question today as it was in Julians time, even as popularized by a polemic like Gore Vidal. Vidal, always thrashing, often calculated, too easily admired, has often said that Americas education system is the joke of the world. It is this joke the persistent meme of a republic built on the concept of the periodic struggle of individualism and collectivism that is partially counterbalanced by public broadcasting funded collectively and enjoyed collectively for its own sake that a state must strive to deflate. The joke is made more barbed when we consider that our success as a nation is now judged almost entirely in materialistic terms not only by the majority of the world but, profoundly, by the machinery of state created and perpetuated to ensure our cultural as well as economic wellbeing; the bipartisan institutionalized ideology of the free-market no longer the apparatus and workhorse of cultural sustenance and growth, but that institutions only hagiography. The true Dionysian once again fights for relevance in a mock bi-polar world of secular materialism now interwoven with the overlapping spheres of solipsistic and inferior religious cults as a manifestation of the numinous and the dogmas of nationalism, exceptionalism, and freemarket capitalism. Surely I, and hopefully others, can spare a few dollars a day per capita in federal and personal spending on the arts to ensure the celebration of at least their parity with cultural mediocrity and materialism in American culture. Julian, it is widely assumed, was made a martyr of the state along with the Hellenism he so admired. Public broadcasting and the commercially unviable cultural and educational programs it creates and nurtures - direct inheritors of that Hellenistic ideal - are very much in danger of the same fate.

http://www.npr.org/2011/02/17/133842355/Public-Broadcasting-Funds-Caught-In-Budget-Battle