The Year of Young Leaders

Arts and Politics converge on this blog, as they did in my life today, when I worked on putting together a spring symposium on young/emerging leaders in the arts and thought about that Young Fella Barack Obama's big victory last night. At 46, he's just beyond the reach of the Boomer generation, in which I'm solidly entrenched. Barack doesn't remember Robert Kennedy or Martin Luther King or the Beatles pre-breakup; the explosion of psychedlic art, of Andy Warhol's heyday and underground media and art happenings and Poets Against the War and Allen Ginsberg levitating the Pentagon -- he doesn't remember any of it.

Nor do any of my students, young artists all, who will be the next generation of artistic leaders and policy makers in this country. To them, the battle of academe vs. the "real world" will be as quaint and inexplicable as was the Korean War to my generation. Last night, their generation voted in numbers far exceeding anyone's expectations, and they voted overwhelmingly for Obama.

I don't really know who Obama is, or what directions they will choose to lead America's arts infrastructure toward, but I feel the convergence. They're bored with the culture wars, except as a piece of interesting history; they see the National Endowment for the Arts model as creaky and impractical, and they figure there must be a better way to generate the funds artists need rather than fighting the Right over them in the musty halls of Congress. Like Obama, they seek a new path that gets beyond the old distinctions. I hope they find it, and more immediately, that if he is to be the nominee for President, that he really does have a path and a plan and is ready to take us there.

A part of me thinks -- these young people are kids, and Obama doesn't understand what a rough game partisan politics in DC is and how much the Right will do anything to stop him. Another part of me thinks, go for it -- let's all hope the New Way works better than the broken-down old one.

As to Mike Huckabee, well, he's very funny, but I'd rather watch the movie I Heart Huckabees any day than have to listen to him try to bring Jesus even closer to the center of our national public square.