Opinion
Battle lines
Money needed at home to fight drugs
rn a city far, far away, the latest installment of “Drug
Wars” concluded Thursday. An apt title for President
George Bush’s so-called drug summit would be “Empty
Rhetoric Strikes Back.”
Bush met with six Latin American leaders this week in San
Antonio to renew pledges to combat narcotics, a problem very
much on U.S. voters’ minds this election year.
“Make no mistake — defeat the traffickers, we will,” Bush
said in a Yoda-csque grammatical style.
But so far, Bush appears to have been able to do little to stop
those evil drug lords, who, much like American tobacco
growers, make their living by producing addictive substances
others choose to use.
The president said there had been significant progress on the
drug problem during his administration. He claimed drug use
among young people was down 60 percent and cocaine use had
declined 35 percent.
We’re not sure where Bush got his figures, but looking at
the alarming rise in drug-related crime over the past few years,
it’s difficult to believe that any substantial gains have been
made. Even if his numbers are right, obviously the drug-use
decline isn’t enough.
Bush apparently agrees, although the Yale graduate put it
better than we ever could.
“We’ve got lots to do,” he told reporters.
Bush said that he and the other leaders talked about improv
ing their efforts to develop alternative crops to give Latin
American coca growers an economic incentive to stop growing
drug-related crops.
banners who once grew coca in Bolivia arc exporting pine
apples and bananas,” Bush said.
While this may be true for a few model citizens, pineapples
and bananas just don’t have the street value in America that
crack enjoys. As long as that is the ease, the coca fields will
continue to dot the landscape in Bolivia and elsewhere.
What Bush seems to neglect while he fights the drug prob
lem on other continents is that the people who use the drugs arc
right here in America. Voters may like the idea of passing the
blame to some faceless Columbian, but as long as Americans
arc willing to pay the outrageous amounts of money they waste
on drugs, little will change.
Instead of giving more money to Latin American govern
ments such as Peru, whose human rights record is far from
perfect, efforts should center on this country.
Education and money should be spent on groups most likely
to fall to the temptation of dnig!s back home. When drugs aren't
profitable to raise, they won’t be grown.
Meanwhile, Bush has people such as Ecuadorian President
Rodrigo Borja lining up for funds America simply can’t afford
to waste. In what almost sounds like a threat, Borja said his
country did not produce coca but he must have additional U.S.
funds to keep his country from becoming a drug producer.
Instead of focusing voters’ attentions on the trafficking he
calls “a new kind of transnational enemy,” Bush should face up
to the true enemy and use the force he commands here at home.
Saved life worth less freedom
As a father, I feel 1 must respond to
Brian Allen’s column on the manda
tory scat belt law (“State tries again to
strap us in,” DN, Feb. 25). While
acknowledging that scat belts make a
driver safer (i.e. save lives), Mr. Al
len considers seat belts an “inconven
ience” and believes he should be able
to make the choice to wear or not to
wear seat bells.
What is a life worth? Is the “slight
decrease in the highway death toll”
worth the mandated seat belt law?
How about if that life is one of your
future children? My wife and I have
chosen to wear seal belts our entire
adult lives. By selling the example,
my teenage daughters now automati
cally wear theirs when they drive.
They are not sheep, but they have
formed a life-saving habit over the
past 17 years. Adults who “choose”
not to wear seat belts set a life-threat
emng example lor ihcir children. Mr.
Allen stales that people are supposed
to follow their own preferences as
long as they do not interfere with the
rights of others. The state has a right
to protect our children — no one
argues with child abuse legislation.
Those who do not use scat belts and
teach their children not to use scat
belts fall in the same category.
I couldn’t care less whether insur
ance rates change because of this law,
if the end result is one less death. Mr.
Allen would have all Nebraskans held
up as freedom-loving and the conse
quences be damned. This is one per
sonal freedom I would happily see
eroded in the name of our future
generations.
Britt Watwood
graduate student
education
-EDITORIAL POLICY
Staff editorials represent the offi
cial policy of the Spring 1992 Daily
Nebraskan. Policy is set by the Daily
Nebraskan Editorial Board. Its mem
bers are: Jana Pedersen, editor; Alan
Phelps, opinion page editor; Kara
Wells, managing editor; Roger Price,
wire editor; Wendy Navralil, copy
desk chief; Brian Shellito, cartoon
ist; Jeremy Fitzpatrick, senior re
porter.
Editorials do not necessarily re
flect the views of the university, its
employees, the students or the NU
Board of Regents.
Editorial columns represent the
opinion of the author.
The Daily Nebraskan’s publishers
arc the regents, who established the
UNL Publications Board to super
vise the daily production of the pa
per.
According to policy set by the re
gents, responsibility for the editorial
content of the newspaper lies solely
in the hands of its students.
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MARK FAHLESON
Federal funding of arts lunacy
Chalk one up for the American
taxpayer.
Last Friday, thanks in part to
the prodding of Republican patriot
Patrick Buchanan, John E. Frohnmayer
was sacked as chairman of the Na
tional Endowment for the Arts. In a
tear-jerking ceremony, Frohnmayer
announced his involuntary resigna
tion to his staff by singing the old
Shaker song “Simple Gifts” and re
citing poetry.
“I leave with the belief that this
eclipse of the soul will soon pass and
with it the lunacy that sees artists as
enemies and ideas as demons,”
Frohnmayer said.
“Lunacy” is correct. However, not
with regard to this so-called hatred
towards artists and the avant-garde,
but rather the lunacy in how far our
federal government will stretch the
Constitution’s mandate of providing
for the “general welfare.”
Thanks to Frohnmaycr’s belated
removal, the time has come once again
to debate the lunacy of government
funding of the “arts.”
i nc endowment was created dur
ing Lyndon Johnson’s frce-lunch
“Great Society" as a way of paying
homage to that exalted patron of the
arts, John F. Kennedy. Its staled goal
is to educate and foster an apprecia
tion for the arts. Since its inception,
the NEA budget has grown exponen
tially, now hovering at more than
SI70 million annually.
For years, the NEA survived with
little or no scrutiny, quietly going
about its business of doling out lax
dollars to innocuous arts such as
symphonies and operas.
However, as the NEA began de
voting greater amounts of attention,
and with it, cash, to “performance
art” and photography, cries of indig
nation spewed forth as the taxpayer
funded projects began trampling upon
the religious, moral and cultural con
viclions of Americans. That is, the
NEA’s patrons.
The endowment has come a long
way in how far it would go to provoke
anger. Originally, those projects
deemed “controversial” were, although
wasteful, relatively harmless.
In 1977, for example, Sen. Wil
liam Proxmire gave one of his famed
Golden Fleece awards to an NEA
sponsored event in which artist Le
Anne Wilchusky went up m an air
plane, threw out colored streamers of
crepe paper and filmed them as they
gravitated to earth.
Such “art” pales in comparison to
the garbage that is given governmen
tal sanction today.
Recent NEA disbursements include
the now-infamous homo-erotic, bull
whip-up-lhc-anus photographs of
Robert Mapplethorpe, the urine-sub
Censorship is when
the fovernment savs.
“You can’t sav that.”
not. “We won’t pay
for that."
merged crucifix of Andres Serrano
and the pom star who inserted the
speculum into her vagina for the
audience’s viewing pleasure.
Whatever happened to Norman
Rockwell?
There arc some other real doozics
as well. Little of what our state-ap
pointed connoisseurs have chosen on
our behalf with our money has to do
with art as much as it docs with poli
tics and the deconstruction of the
Western, Judco-Christian values upon
which this country was founded.
Some funding is purely political.
The Dance Theater Workshop in
New York City received $530,700 in
NEA funding last year. It ended the
year with a display by artist Lee
Brozgold.
His show, entitled 40 Patriots/
Countless Americans,” consisted of
skull-like “death masks” of such
conservatives as George and Barbara
Bush, Cardinal John O’Connor, Gen
eral H. Norman Schwarzkopf, Justice
Clarence Thomas and even Bob Hope.
Behind each mask hung the flags
of groups such as Queer Nation, the
Green Party and the Prisoner Rights
Union to represent “the countless
Americans offended or maligned by
the particular patriot.”
Said Brozgold to the Washington
Times, “They represent the old order.
... They’re outdated_They should
be dead.”
Some funding is plainly profane.
Herd at the University of Nebraska’s
Sheldon Art Gallery, one could view
“Tongues Untied,” part of the “Point
of View” series that received $250,000
in taxpayer funding.
I wasted a Friday evening watch
ing this stomach-wrenching porno
drama about the “African-American
gay community.” The film featured
such sordid topics as homosexual
sodomy, buggery and the joys of cross
dressing.
Other funding is simply racist. The
straw tnat DroKC rronnmaycr s duck
came in the form of “Queer City,” a
magazine that recently received a
$5,000 NEA grant. Within this feder
ally subsidized publication was a rap
poem celebrating a black gang rape
of a white woman in Central Park.
Any challenge to NEA funding
evokes the fallacious cry of censor
ship. As far as I know, no constitu
tional right exists for artists to have
their work paid for out of the public
kitty. Where critics fail is in their
inability to recognize the gargantuan
difference between censorship and
sponsorship.
Censorship is when the govern
ment says, “You can’t say that,” not,
“We won’t pay for that.”
As author Tom Wolfe has observed,
“I think the National Endowment for
the Arts is one of the great comic
spectacles of our time. You only have
to imagine some poor, rejected for
mer NEA artist going to Voltaire or __
Solzhenitsyn, and saying, ‘They’re
attaching strings to my money! 1 went
to the government for money for my
art and they’re attaching strings to it! ’
The horse laugh that even Solzhenitsyn
— who is not given to horse laughs—
would have given them would be
marvelous to hear.”
The problem goes far beyond me
fact that such “art” can be considered
racist, profane and pure political
propaganda. Art has become what
ever anyone calling himself an artist
wants it to be.
I could take off my clothes, rub
chocolate all over my body, run around
naked and sing “I Am Woman” and
declare that I am an “artist” deserving
of NEA funding. And that, my friends,
is ludicrous.
Recently, with the predictable
bellowing of censorship, the NEA
actually began scrutinizing its appli
cations.
The Endowment killed a $25,000
grant to Franklin Furnace, a New York
performance group. Franklin’s appli
cation included a videotape of one ol
its performers, Scarlet O, whose per
formance opens with a discussion ol
gender, followed by a disrobing and
an invitation to the audience to rub
lotion on her.
Art critics such as Christopher
Knight have warned that the NEA, by
delving into the validity of grant
applications, is evolving into a U.S.
version of a Ministry of Culture, a
parochial instrument of government
policy.
He suggested that if artists could
not exert greater control over the public
purse, then the government should
put an end to the National Endow
ment for the Arts as we know it.
So be it.
Fahleson Is a third-year law student and a
Daily Nebraskan columnist.
