Once more, with feeling.
It is time to haul out my plan to save the National Endowment for the Arts again. It may finally even be the right time.
For the third time since the early culture-war days of 1989, I'm suggesting a way to take the arts away from the politicians without abolishing the NEA altogether.
Let's have a checkoff on our IRS forms for "unrestricted funds for the arts." Anyone who wants to participate in a no-strings government subsidy could check a box for $1, $2, $5, $10 or more. People who don't want their tax money to go for art they may not like can keep their pennies and shut up about it.
This is not so far-fetched. We already have a voluntary checkoff for federal campaign contributions, and more than 30 states offer taxpayers the individual option to support wildlife. Some states also have checkoffs to combat child and family abuse, or to help pay for the Olympics.
Each taxpayer now gives a mere 64 cents to the $167.4 million NEA budget, which is down from 68 cents when we began this conversation in 1989 and is shrinking as we speak. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, recently equated our princely individual contribution to the cost of two postage stamps a year. He could have added that we each pay considerably more for military marching bands.
Some may perceive the checkoff as a cave-in to the anti-NEA forces. Why, you may well ask, should the cultural life of the country be reduced to an individual option when we do not have a choice about bombers and tobacco subsidies?
My answer is that you are right, of course. The moment the arts became a censorship circus, however, they were put in a different category from other supposed necessities of civilization. Despite all the impressive data from economic-impact reports, all the surveys that say a majority of Americans support government arts funding, the NEA has become the focal point -- and probably the sacrificial lamb -- of the powerful thought police.
If the NEA is allowed to exist, its pathetic cut of the nation's $1.5 trillion budget will be further decimated under the smoke screen of the balanced-budget amendment. What remains will continue be tainted by pressure groups.
So I say we should take the NEA out of play and let the taxpayers decide. I'm betting we'll do at least as well -- and probably better -- without the insulting and distracting debates in Congress. For those still searching for other possibilities, however, I offer a brief rundown of current plots and opportunities:
A new bipartisan group called America for the NEA is inviting people to come to Washington March 14 to join their states' delegations to lobby both houses of Congress. The drive is co-chaired by Mr. Nadler and Rep. Amo Houghton, R-N.Y. Call (800) 862-1113 for information.
If you want to send Mailgrams to your legislators to express support for cultural agencies, call the Emergency Committee to Save Culture and the Arts at (900) 370-9000. The call costs $1.99 a minute and cost of the Mailgrams will be billed to your home phone.
Then there is William F. Buckley's idea. You may be surprised to learn that the conservative Mr. Buckley recognizes that all arts audiences are not sitting pretty in Newt Gingrich's "sandbox for the affluent cultural elite." Mr. Buckley would like to preserve the NEA, but with a "fresh mandate" to grant only to art that has stood some test of time. He finds 50 years an appropriate test.
Thus, he proposes in his New York Post column of Jan. 11 that money go "only to qualified symphony orchestras, ballet and opera companies and museums to help pay the cost of bringing to the public acknowledged classics in art created 50 or more years ago." How we'll get classics for the next 50 years is clearly not his concern.
Finally, there is Robert Brustein's idea on how to "privatize" the NEA with a genuine endowment, "along the lines of a private American university."
In the Jan. 23 issue of Newsweek, the producer and critic envisions this endowment "substantial enough to make arts subsidies once and for all immune not just to the censorious opprobrium of the religious right and its supporters in Congress but to foundation trends, corporate self-interest and individual capriciousness."
Money for such enviable activity, he believes, could come by changing copyright laws to extend the period that artists' estates collect royalty payments. Currently, publishers and performance groups pay royalties until 50 years after the death of the artist, after which the work goes into public domain. Mr. Brustein proposes that payments continue after that date, but ,, go instead to the NEA, which would mean "those providing primary support for living artists would be dead artists."