
          Letting Loose of Liberalism: Some Thoughts on Cultural Work and
the Limits of Polite Discourse
          By Whisnant, David E.David E. Whisnant
          Vol. 12, No. 3, 1990, pp. 1-11
          
          IN Walker Percy's story "The Last Donahue Show," the topic of the
day is "sexual preference." Midway through, the show is interrupted by
three intruders: a black-cloaked Calvin-like spokesman for the old
culture of Puritan New England, handsome Col. John Pelham, a paragon
of the gallantry and chivalry of the Old South, and a Cosmic Stranger
from another planet. Calvin finds the concept of "sexual preference"
completely incomprehensible, and Pelham considers the discussion
unnecessary because "a gentleman knows how to treat women."
          Looking for all the world like Harry Truman, the Cosmic Stranger
sees the self-indulgent maunderings of Donahue's guests and audience
as a symptom of a profound cultural disorder. Earthlings, he says, are
"D.D.s" (dingalings, deathdealers, and deathlovers) who face an
imminent apocalypse--explicitly atomic but implicitly historical and
cultural. He confides that the only place of refuge is a cave in Lost
Cove, Tennessee, which is stocked with corn, grits, collard greens,
and sausage. The story ends with a question ("If you heard this
Donahue Show, would you head for Lost Cove?") 

and a box to check yes or no.
          This story may seem an odd point of departure for thinking about
the arts and humanities in the public sector. But to me it seems
usefully provocative in this second (Bush-Quayle) phase of an era
characterized on the one hand by Reagan's narcolepsy, William
Bennett's meanspiritedness, the Valdez, fading ozone, and 82nd
Airborne democracy, and on the other hand by Walesa, Mandela, Havel
and falling walls everywhere. A bit less cosmically than the Cosmic
Stranger, I read the story partly as a parable about vital small-scale
vs. alienated mass culture--about soul food and straight talk vs. lean
cuisine and Donahue drivel. In any case, you should know that the
voice you are hearing comes to you as much from Lost Cove as from
anywhere else.
          I was raised, after all, not on what is usually called "good
literature" and "good music," but on the Reader's Digest, late-night
country music shows from WLS, WCKY, and WWVA, and the gospel music of
the Southern Baptist church. Later, scouting the margins of elite
culture, I spent years singing German lieder and Italian art songs in
a thousand voice lessons, Monteverdi in madrigal groups, and Bach and
Mozart and Brahms in oratorio societies. Still later, in my first
timorous return to Lost Cove, it was Carter Family and Blue Sky Boys
songs in a string band, and more recently it has been romantic and
political songs from Latin America. I count myself fortunate to have
realized in a few blessed moments of clarity that I can love it all,
that I do not have to choose.
          MY most transcendent cultural experiences have ranged across many
boundaries: one was standing as a Georgia Tech freshman in an
illfitting rented tuxedo in the top balcony of the Fox Theater in
Atlanta and hearing the humming chorus from Madame Butterfly during
the annual spring visit of the Metropolitan Opera to the Sahara of the
Bozarts; another was hearing Cajun music for the first time as the
Balfa brothers and Nathan Abshire sailed into "Pine Grove Blues" at
the University of Illinois where I was a seared new assistant
professor; another was hearing six aged black men from Port Deposit,
Maryland, sing "I Don't Care Where They Bury My Body" on the
thirty-fifth anniversary of their performing together as the Little
Wonders gospel 

quartet; still another one was watching my daughter and
a Peabody Conservatory classmate perform the Bach double violin
concerto on two violins I had built; another was feeling myself almost
literally lifted from my seat when I heard "Dove song" from The
Marriage of Figaro at the Staatsoper in Vienna; and--having grown up
as monolingually as one possibly could--I was moved beyond words in
any language when at the age of forty-eight I was finally able to read
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Cien anos de soledad in Spanish.
          Thus whatever I have come to think about the politics of culture or
about cultural programs and policy is grounded in my sense that all of
this is good, that all of it is evidence of the magnificent creativity
of the human spirit, and that if we are to keep our bearings, we have
to read both Garcia Marquez and Faulkner, and to listen to both Mozart
and Merle Haggard--not the "Okie From Muskogee" Merle who fascinated
Nixon, but the Merle of "Mama's Hungry Eyes," who beneath the jingoism
knows the cultural score.
          My own work during the years I was stumbling through to learning
these things has focused on the social and cultural history of the
southern Appalachian region, on the music and culture of marginalized
people, and upon the politics of culture, first in Appalachia and more
recently in Nicaragua. In the public sector I have worked with
folklife festivals and museums, state humanities commissions and
national endowments, Foxfire and Highlander, film makers and record
producers.
          Through it all, my own evolving cultural politics have drawn from
the most disparate of sources: from a San Francisco carpenter and
shipwright; from a powerful Appalachian composer-singer who learned
about Percy's D.D. culture by watching family members being killed in
coal mines and her sister becoming a prostitute on the streets of
Baltimore, and who wrote songs about both; from Shaker cabinetmakers
and Cremona violin makers; from a Sardinian who worked out much of his
politics in a Fascist jail cell; from a North African psychiatrist, a
Nicaraguan poet, a Uruguayan novelist, and a Quiche woman from the
Guatemalan highlands. That is to say, I have learned in the first
instance from those who have scribed indelibly the line between good
work and poor work, but beyond that from those who have engaged with
the 

politics of their circumstances, faced the contradictions,
defiantly asserted their otherness, risked speaking their outrage, and
crafted beauty and made sense out of their pain.
          So how do things look to me in this arts and humanities sector of
the public policy arena? Whose lips are really worth reading, whose
tunes worth dancing to?
          Obviously it is a good news/bad news situation. The good news is
that the past twenty-five years have witnessed a long-delayed but on
the whole healthy legitimation of the arts and humanities in the
making of public policy in the United States. That process has
paralleled a global resurgence of culturally energized political
movements of both a progressive and a reactionary character: in the
middle east, in the Baltic republics, in northern Ireland, in eastern
Europe, in Tibet, in Latin America, in Africa, in the United
States. Those movements have resonated to the rhythms of rockabilly,
of Tex-Mex and nueva cancion, of rap and reggae, and more recently of
long-forbidden national anthems.
          All of that is good. But if you will permit me, I will focus--like
the Cosmic Stranger--more on the bad than on the good news, for that
is where the most vexing problems and demanding challenges lie, both
conceptually and programatically.
          One has to say at the outset that the social, political, and
economic climate is not especially hospitable for our work, and that
in some important respects it grows less so daily. At the same time
that the data show increasing social and economic inequality, distress
and dislocation, we find ourselves in the second Reagan-Bush decade of
dramatic reductions in public expenditures for social programs of
whatever character. The entire social infrastructure has been
decimated. Sliding SAT scores, rising infant mortality, ugly racial
incidents, a slew of toxic waste dump controversies, and new brands of
cigarettes aimed at vulnerable young women and the Third World poor
remind us that many of the promises of the sixties--relative to
education, civil rights, the environment and women--have been deferred
or reversed. Here in North Carolina, a university system that has no
money to buy library books or xerox paper can afford a six-figure
buyout for an arrogant, sleazy basketball coach, and a nation that
can't afford a few billion to feed or house the homeless can afford to
buy out savings and loan sharks to the tune of hundreds of
billions. In U.S. foreign policy we see a resurgence of culturally
based jingoism, bellicosity, self-deception and simple-mindedness (in
Grenada, Nicaragua, and Panama), of arrant cynicism (in China), of
penuriousness (in eastern Europe), of timidity and temporizing (in
South Africa and Lithuania).
          In the cultural arena, public funds are drying up. Changes in the
tax laws (as in the Tax Reform Act of 1986) are reducing private
donations at the same time that the fact (and necessity) of increased
dependence upon such donations threatens to make cultural institutions
responsive primarily to well-heeled constituencies and corporate
donors.1 Most public cultural programs are operating on bakesale
budgets, and finding their work increasingly complicated by rising
Helms-style censorship and intimidation, as was evident in the recent
National Council for the Arts board meeting in Winston-Salem. An era
in which the reactionary wife of the reactionary Secretary of Defense
is head of the National Endowment for the Humanities is an era of
serious threat to the work we are trying to do.
          So what can and should we do in these hard times? I suggest that as
a first step we admit that the liberal analysis and strategies we have
long used to guide and shape our work are unequal to the tasks we
face. What do I mean by "liberal analysis and strategies"? What are
their limitations, and why are those limitations unacceptable?
          At the risk of caricaturing rather than characterizing fairly, I
will try to put it briefly: Within the usual liberal paradigm,
cultural policy amounts principally to obtaining, allocating and
monitoring direct public subsidies for established cultural
institutions, which in turn build public collections, mount public
exhibits and produce public 

programs. Characteristically, culture is
thought of as a more or less self-contained sector, or as a
superstructure. "Culture" means "the arts" (or more restrictedly, the
"fine" arts), which are produced by "artists" and consumed by a
listening/viewing/reading public. This public needs to be given
information about, have "access" to, and "learn to appreciate," the
arts. Providing that information and "access" and engendering that
"appreciation" is assumed to have a soothing, enlightening and
together bringing effect--producing a unified public sensitive to and
unthreatened by its own "rich cultural diversity." Tacking on "the
humanities" alters the paradigm only slightly, especially if by the
humanities one means anything close to the National Endowment's bland
Shakespeare-Columbus-and-the-Constitution, great- works-and-great-men
version of them.
          It is no wonder that except for the Jesse Helms fringe, legislators
don't worry themselves unduly about the culture crowd. We can be
thrown a sop; we can be tricked into scrambling for a few scraps; we
can be depended upon not to challenge or upset the status quo in any
serious way. Meanwhile, our low-budget exhibits and programs cast a
comforting and legitimizing glow over business as usual.
          So I suggest that the bland, essentially credulous liberal paradigm
is pitifully unequal to the task if one conceives of the task in even
moderately broad and sophisticated terms. Much tougher-minded analysis
is called for if we are to get beyond these limits--even within our
customary theaters of operation, to say nothing of within some larger
and quite unfamiliar strategic arenas into which events are thrusting
us.
          So how do we get beyond these limits? What clarifications are
possible?
          In the first place, I submit that the arts (or fine arts) and
humanities conception of culture has long since outlived its
usefulness as an oasis for policy formulation, if indeed it ever had
much. Culture is how people hold their babies, plant a garden, cook
their food, answer the telephone, sing and dance. A little less
palpably but even more importantly, it is how people love and raise
their kids, and what they think is worth explaining to them. But most
importantly, culture is also the basic orientation people have with
respect to fundamental questions, the terms they use to make sense 

of
things--like, for example, what they think it means to be male or
female. Even more problematically, it is how people recognize and name
what they love and hate and fear. It is how they decide who is us and
who is them.
          So why does this matter to us? It matters because if this is what
culture is, it is therefore as productive of conflict as of harmony,
as likely to divide and engender conflict across borders as to unite
within them. We must therefore subject to serious scrutiny our
habitual liberal confidence in the various forms of polite
discourse--our touching confidence that multiethnic festivals and
roundtable discussions and got-together "community dialogues" will be
very serviceable. We must question our naive liberal expectation that
when people come together to discuss their differences they will
discover that they really don't have very many, or that the ones they
have aren't very important, or that there are some low-cost solutions
to them. Music may in some vague way be a "universal language," but
Pinochet killed Victor Jara for singing his songs nevertheless.
          What I am saying--to take an example closer to our political and
social realities here in the Southeast--is that the world of textile
managers and their superiors in the boardrooms of the multinationals
is not the same world as that of textile workers; the world of Alaska
fishermen is not that of big-oil CEOs who build single-hull tankers
because they are cheaper. And neither is their culture. The world of
Bill Bennett and Jesse Helms is not our world, and we are not going to
dialogue it out--not in a weekend seminar, and not in a thousand
years.
          Hence given the choice between arranging a "public dialogue"
between any group of haves and any group of have-nots, or figuring out
some way to help the have-nots understand the structural (and
therefore inescapably cultural) relationships between the two, I would
always choose the latter. There is no way of avoiding, it seems to me,
the possibility that serious cultural work will sometimes lead to
divisiveness, tension, and conflict. And the probability of conflict
is directly proportional to the seriousness of the work.
          Part of what this means, in turn, is that the familiar and
reassuring walls between cultural and "noncultural" policy sectors
must come down, and we must recognize that nearly all policy is
cultural policy at some level: because it increases or decreases the
life chances of some sector of the population, reinforces and affirms
some and destabilizes and shames others, privileges and empowers some
and marginalizes and disempowers others. Hence we must make ourselves
cognizant of every area of policy, concern ourselves with it, and
bring a culturally informed perspective and analysis to bear upon
it. We must therefore conceive of our work as consisting at least as
much in monitoring the cultural implications and impacts of policy in
the noncultural sectors as it does in operating programs in the
explicitly cultural sector itself.
          Conversely, we must bear in mind that any analysis of or
policymaking about culture has inescapable structural implications,
and therefore must be consciously conceived in structural terms. A
decision to fund a certain cultural form, practice, or sector is an
inescapably social and political decision. If one funds elite culture,
one inevitably legitimizes and solidifies the social position, values
and selfunderstanding of the elites who mainly patronize it. If one
funds a black performance or Hispanic folk arts exhibit, one
inevitably affects public understanding (or misunderstanding) of
structural inequality and marginalization.
          Thus we must for example entertain the possibility that the
time-honored practice of busing kids to symphony concerts or exhibits
of oil on canvas may have shaming, alienating and disempowering--as
well as affirming and liberating--effects. In the same way, we must
think about the extent to which folklife festivals or exhibits of
exotic and idiosyncratic folk art--if they present a simplistic and
sanitized version of traditional culture--may confuse and mislead a
naive public about the intensely conflicted and inescapably political
dynamics of cultural survival and change.
          A corollary to what I have just argued is that we must resist and
subject to serious public scrutiny the increasingly prevalent argument
that public funding for the arts and humanities may (or must) be
justified in economic terms. It is common to argue these days that
when one funds culture there are desirable "economic multiplier"
effects--that for example museums and symphony orchestras make an
attractive climate for new industries. Never mind that many of those
industries are runaway ones looking for low wage, nonunion, female
labor in the right-to-work sunbelt.
          The economic justification argument for arts funding is dangerous
and insidious. It concedes the legitimacy of the established economic
and political order and turns culture into its uncritical
handmaiden. It ratifies the facile assumption that economic
considerations are primary and central, and culture superordinate and
peripheral. It predisposes us to define culture in the terms preferred
by managerial elites. Worst of all, it coopts and frustrates the
transformative power of culture. It denies that the most vital culture

is always critical, and more often than not insurgent and
subversive--that it is precisely what scares the Bill Bennetts and
Allan Blooms of the world to death.
          I would go on to argue, moreover, that at the very center of the
cultural policy and programming agenda must be the larger agenda of
social critique and reconstruction. The time for quaint or pretty
diddling around has passed. We are in a serious game, and the sooner
we face that fact, the better. The primary question is not whether
this or that exhibit is going to be mounted, concert held, play
staged, or genteel "dialogue" arranged, but whether we can prove the
Cosmic Intruder wrong.
          We know in our guts that nation states as we have conceived of them
are anachronisms--that they are not necessarily some universally and
transhistorically functional mechanisms. We know in our guts that war
is not a useful or acceptable instrument of policy, and that the
environmental vector points toward disaster. We know in our guts that
present gender definitions are not serviceable (for women or for
men). What we may have less of a gut sense of--but which is profoundly
true--is that all of these assumptions, forms, and issues are at their
deepest level cultural. To the extent that that becomes clearer to us,
our thinking and strategizing about cultural policy will get more
sophisticated and our programming more effective.
          It seems to me to follow, then, that in order to commit ourselves
seriously and effectively to such an agenda of critique and
reconstruction, we must think strategically and globally even as we
plan and act tactically and locally. The days of fortress America are
past; the myth of American exceptionalism has lost all
credibility. After so many years of living mostly outside it, history
has finally thrust itself upon us. Hence our work is not to "bring the
arts and humanities" to people--or vice versa--but to help people
shape and sharpen the analytical tools that will assist them in
understanding their own historical and cultural circumstances.
          Our work, I am suggesting, is about a kind of enlightenment that is
neither conceptually nor practically separable from empowerment. Our
work should be much less to provide essentially rarified aesthetic
experiences for a small elite than to help the great majority of
people come to an awareness of their own insight and knowledge, and of
the links between knowledge and power.
          Consequently our work is not mainly to "provide access"--as in the
old liberal paradigm--but to push toward cultural equity and democracy
in a period of intensifying social/political/economic conflict and the
increasing consolidation of power. It is to demystify in a period in
which obfuscation and public mystification have become such central
functions of government that Dan Quayle signs a Jesse Helms
fundraising letter one week and goes the next as an envoy for
democracy to a Latin America already wracked by years of CIA-style
democracy.
          Finally, we must focus policy and programming increasingly upon
cultural production rather than consumption, upon cultural action
rather than passive "appreciation" or exhibition. This is necessary
because for the culturally marginalized, actively making and doing culture are empowering, while passively appreciating is likely to have
at least the secondary effect of rationalizing, legitimizing and
solidifying the culturally marked boundaries of established power.
          And so if we do all of this--or even some bits of it--will it be
dangerous? Yes. Inescapably. If they begin to think that what we are
doing will really change things very much, they will stop funding
us. Period. It is that simple, for they may be meanspirited, but they
are not stupid.
          If they do stop funding us, there will be some real losses. But
there would be gains, too, so that it is not at all clear to me that
absent the public dollars the situation would necessarily be
hopeless. Our own structural position as well as that of marginalized
cultural groups would at least become clearer. The discourse might

become sharper, more honest and sophisticated, and less bland, genteel
and polite. Some limits would be recognized, and some more apt
analytical paradigms might be discovered and employed. The inescapable
politics of the cultural enterprise would be on the table for
discussion, and we might get through to some further clarity about the
operation of power in the cultural arena. We might even create some
autonomous structures less subject to reactionary political
pressure.
          As we contemplate the risks, we should also bear in mind that
public funds are by no means the only resources available to us. In
the first place we have our own experience and knowledge--the
knowledge we have gained from having conceived and put together scores
of institutions and programs, as well as the negative but useful gut
knowledge that makes us from time to time look up from writing yet
another grant proposal and say (to no one more than to ourselves)
"this is crazy." The latter sort of knowledge tends to be mostly
inchoate, but we have it nevertheless, and we can attach it to some
energies that are also trying to move within us and amongst us.
          There is also some extraordinarily pertinent analysis out there,
bunches of books to be read that will tell us more that we need to
know than shelves full of NEA and NEH annual reports or shamelessly
elitist and ethnocentric tracts like Cultural Literacy and The Closing
of the American Mind. The most useful analysis has been advanced, at
least in my estimation, not by the too frequently alienated and
elitist "theory" crowd, but by grounded, passionate, frequently
self-educated intellectuals: by Paolo Freire and Frantz Fanon, by
Rigoberta Menchu and Domitila Barrios, by Roland Bartes and Raymond
Williams, by Carlos Fuentes and Eduardo Galeano, by Maxine Hong
Kingston and Gloria Anzaldua, by Will Campbell and Vine Deloria.
          We also have available to us the clarifying experience of
marginalized subject peoples all over the world who are showing us how
to use culture for purposes of challenge and liberation: Lithuanians
and Estonians, the mothers of la Plaza de Mayo, blacks and Chicanos
and Native Americans in the United States, Chinese students and
smalltown working people in Michigan. We may end up grantless and on
our own, but so are they. And they are teaching themselves to form
organizations of their own, to stop dancing to the tourist industry's
tune, to talk straight to their opponents, to substitute lawsuits and
injunctions for tediously polite discourse.
          If we begin to do even part of what I have suggested, we will above
all need a lot of historical and political perspective and
considerable wit. Fortunately, there is a lot of it out there. One of
my favorite country singers has the unlikely name of Kinky
Friedman. Kinky is the son of a University of Texas psychology
professor, and his shortlived band was called The Texas Jewboys (after
the legendary Bob Wills's Texas Playboys). Kinky spent a couple of
years in the Peace Corps in Borneo just after college, and when he
came back, he said that "Everybody needs to go to Borneo, wherever
it is for them. A lot of wiggy things happened to me in that jungle,
it anchored my mind to the past." 2
          During his short stay in country music, Friedman wrote some
marvelous songs like "Wild Man From Borneo," "They Don't Make Jews
Like Jesus Any More," "Top Ten Commandments," and the incomparable
"Ride 'em Jewboy," which synthesizes the historical agony of cowboys,
the American West, and the United States itself, as well as the Jewish
diaspora and the Holocaust. All of it is viewed--refreshingly
wiggily--from Borneo:
          
            Now the smoke from camps a-risin'
            See the helpless creatures on their way.
            Hey, old pal, ain't it surprisin" 
            How far you can go before you stay....
            While ponies all your dreams were broken,
            Rounded up and made to move along.
            The loneliness which can't be spoken
            Just swings a rope and rides inside a song.
          
          My own Borneos have been the mountains of the Appalachian South and
Nicaragua--the former of which I was born in but had to learn my way
through almost as if it were some Borneo. Nicaragua I wandered into
after having begun to learn the language beyond the age of forty-five,
and I came to recognize its cultural history as more Appalachian than
I ever would have believed. So I close with a little cultural parable
about my two Borneos, written belatedly from Lost Cove.
          Like many of us who are from the upland southeast, I grew up about
as monoculturally as one could. In those tranquil preintegration days,
the relatively few blacks who lived in that most un-Faulknerian part
of North Carolina stayed docilely in Asheville's small black ghetto
and attended the all- black high school. Most of the city's
substantial Jewish population lived in Biltmore Forest and other
upscale neighborhoods we had no occasion to go to.
          I heard and spoke only English, of course, as did all of my white
Protestant fundamentalist neighbors, and none of us had lived or
traveled abroad. The only other cultural group we knew were the Dutch
who had come over in 1929 to build and operate the rayon plant where
my father worked: the Vanderhoovens, Schilthuises, and Vanderkaadens,
who lived in the bigger houses of the mill village where we lived,
sent their kids to private and parochial schools, and hired us to mow
their lawns. I remember a vague sense of fascination with the way they
talked and the things they had in their houses that we didn't have,
but mostly what I felt was confusion and inferiority.

          Not all the Dutch people in the village belonged to the elite,
however. The Schoonderwoerds lived next door to us, and he was a
mechanic in the mill. While certain theories might predict that our
family would have felt some class solidarity with our working class
neighbor--and indeed my parents were friends with Mr. and
Mrs. Schoonderwoerd--culture appears in retrospect to have been a
decisive (though completely unconscious) factor among us children in
the streets. Their son Pete, who was our playmate, was Dutch,
different, and the conflict between him and us was relentless. Hence
our habit of making lightning guerrilla raids to bombard the fish pond
and fountain his father had built in their front yard--a touch which I
now recognize was for them an expression of their northern European
habit of meticulous and artful custodianship of one's own tiny bit of
landscape, but which for us rowdies of the neighborhood was an alien
object and thus an irresistibly magnetic focus for our resentment.
          Since the white Protestant fundamentalist bubble in which we were
encapsulated kept us apart from all other cultural systems except
those safely remote African countries to which we vaguely referred
when in Wednesday night prayer meetings we prayed that the Lord would
"bless all the missionaries at home and overseas," and about whose
eternal salvation we solemnly strategized in the Baptist Training
Union, I recall no other serious contact with or awareness of another
cultural group throughout my school years.
          My first adult encounter with a culturally distinct group was with
the Hispanics who lived in my freshman dorm at Georgia Tech--Cubans
whose wealthy pre-Castro fathers had sent them there to study. I
didn't know a single one personally, and recall feeling no desire
to. We called them "spics," and virtually all we knew about them was
that they shouted to each other down the halls of the dorm in a
language we didn't understand. We eyed them from behind the cultural
ramparts of the Baptist Student Union and the First Baptist Church of
Atlanta, where ushers with a special color of carnation in their
lapels were stationed as lookouts for any black worshippers who might
try to force their way in in those tense days of the earliest bus
boycotts and sitins. Hence although I spent five years in one of the
biggest and fastest growing cities in the southeast, the cultural
system in which I found myself was still about as parochial as might
be imagined.
          It was in fact nearly twenty-five years later, after many changes
in my life, ideas and politics before I began studying Spanish, which
turned out to be one of the most culturally useful and clarifying
things I have ever done. Why did I start? At some deep level, I think,
my passion to 

do so came out of the same threatened and anxious sense
of cultural inferiority and encapsulation that had made me such a
willing participant in our little hillbilly blitzkrieg raids on the
fishpond. It seemed to me, I guess, that becoming bilingual might be
an appropriate next step in what had by then become for me a
multifaceted effort to deconstruct my own cultural world and break
through to others of which I had previously known absolutely
nothing.
          In any case, I did start to study Spanish in the fall of 1984, and
a little more than three years later I found myself in Nicaragua on a
Fulbright, working on a book on the politics of culture there. During
these past half-dozen years, I have immersed myself as much as I could
manage in Latin American language, history and culture. It has been
the most compelling, totally involving and joyful process of learning
and change I have ever known, including the prior one that paralleled
my Appalachian work.
          More to the point here, it also has had a great deal to do with how
I now think about working with culture in the public sector. Looking
at things from this new angle has brought me to some poignantly ironic
realizations. I will content myself with mentioning only one.
          In 1851 Cornelius Vanderbilt secured an effective monopoly on the
Nicaraguan canal route, turning himself into a power to be reckoned
with in the national economic and political arena in Nicaragua and
helping to shape the first major phase of U.S. intervention into
Nicaragua's affairs. About forty years later, his grandson George
W. Vanderbilt came to western North Carolina, and in a similarly grand
and imperial spirit bought 125,000 acres of mountain land and built a
300-room French chateau which he appointed with the finest European
furniture, tapestries and paintings. His guests approached the estate
through a half-timber and tile English village he built, named
"Biltmore," and outfitted with his own Episcopal 

chapel and curate.
          Shortly after the Vanderbilt mansion opened in 1895, my grandfather
and his brother left their small farm in Rutherford County and went up
the mountain to Asheville looking for work. They found it driving
streetcars--work my grandfather continued to do for the next fifty
years, never returning to the house he had built with his own hands on
the farm and had always meant to go back to live in some day. Many
mornings when he arrived at the "car barn" at 3:30 a.m., he set out to
make the Biltmore run.
          About the time my grandfather died, my high school classmates and I
were taken on a "field trip" to see the cultural wonders of the
Biltmore House-to "expose" us to "great art," of which we in our
culturally benighted hillbilly ignorance presumably knew nothing. All
I remember is feeling dwarfed by the scale of the place, and ashamed
of my clothing and my ignorance. Whether that prepared me in any
specific way to comprehend the concept and the realities of cultural
imperialism years later in Nicaragua--to resonate with them in my
gut--I do not know, but I have a feeling that it did.
          When I was seventeen, however, my awareness of the Vanderbilt link
between Asheville and Nicaragua, and of its significance in some
larger political and social schemes--still lay years in the
future. Standing in the carved walnut, multi-tiered library of the
Biltmore House at that moment, I couldn't have pointed out Nicaragua
on the elegantly mounted globe if my life had depended on it, nor had
I ever heard of the New York and Boston banks and corporations which
had one firmly controlling hand on Nicaragua and were dabbling with
the other in real estate and timber in the part of the mountains I
could see out the window of my house. I didn't even know the name of
John Hill Wheeler, the North Carolinian whom President Pierce
appointed minister to Nicaragua, who presided approvingly over the
outrageous William Walker filibustering episode, and who declared that
"the race of Central Americans have conclusively proved to all
observant minds that they are incapable of self-government."
          I am embarrassed to admit that I began to make these connections
only after spending a dozen years writing about the Appalachian
region, exploring and mapping like a fascinated traveler in Borneo,
and coming to understand it as something of an internal colony whose
patterns of development were after all not that different from the
Nicaraguas of the world. One of my most poignant moments of
clarification occurred when I read that the vessel that carried
U.S. troops from the Canal Zone and landed them on Nicaragua's east
coast to move against the rebel general Sandino in April 1931 was
named the U.S.S. Ashville.3
          Why have I reminisced about my wanderings through this
personal-political landscape? To try to suggest that the dramatic
political and cultural changes of the past little while in Latin
America, in eastern Europe, in South Africa, are presenting us with
yet another opportunity to make the politically and culturally
clarifying connections C. Vann Woodward told us thirty years ago are
there and have to be comprehended: connections between ourselves as
southerners and the majority of the world's people, who have also
known poverty, exploitation, defeat, occupation, submission,
humiliation, and cultural stigmatization. If we can admit and
comprehend them, these connections offer us a splendid if psychically
threatening opportunity for reconsideration, for clarity, and for
realignment.
          Until we get through to that, however, bland liberal strategies
will continue to confuse us, confuse the public, and waste precious
time and energy. Polite discourse with those in whose interest it is
not to be persuaded (and within whose world views our reasons and our
values do not compute) will continue to be at best ineffectual, and at
worst obfuscating and depoliticizing. Unmonitored "noncultural" policy
will continue to wreak its cultural havoc. Such status as our concerns
and activities are grudgingly accorded, they will acquire by virtue of
their perceived usefullness to whatever tawdry local versions of
Trump-like boosters and "developers" happen to be on the scene. And
most troublesome of all, the overarchingly important matter of social
critique and reconstruction will remain outside our orbit of concern
and work.
          I submit, however, that such a scenario is not unavoidable. We know
some things and have some skills and have developed some networks
amongst ourselves that can help prevent it. We do have to question
many of our fundamental assumptions and accustomed paradigms. We do
have to seek new working alliances, thinking systemically and
globally. We do have to accept some risks, and trust our
resourcefulness. And we must continually re-ground ourselves in the
lives of those whose labor and pliant acquiescence have heretofore
been purchased far too cheaply by others who understand all too well
the sector of culture in every equation of power. To the extent that
we ourselves can remain clear about that, we will encounter a whole
array of strategic and tactical possibilities we heretofore thought
closed to us.
          
            NOTES
            
              See for example, Grace Glueck, "Gifts to Museums Fall Sharply
After Changes in the Tax Code," New York Times, May 7, 1989, pp. 1,
17; and William H. Honan, "Arts Dollars: Pinched As Never Before," New
York Times, May 28, 1989, pp. 1, 28.
            
            
              Larry Sloman, "Kinky and the Money Changers," Crawdaddy, April
1975, p. 31. I am grateful to Molly P. Rozum for calling this article
to my attention.
            
            
              Neill Macaulay, The Sandino Affair (1967; Durham: Duke University Press, 1985), 193-97.
            
          
          
            David E. Whisnant is on the faculty of the university of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has published widely on traditional
culture, the politics of culture, and the history of the Appalachian
region. Currently he is working on a book on the politics of culture
in Nicaragua. This essay was prepared for the southeastern regional
meeting of the state humanities councils, May 19, 1990.
          
        