Money Fer The Arts

Henry Jakubowski was grumbling about bail-outs at Hanaan's Diner. I said that he'd be singing a different tune if he were in a leaky boat. He looked at me and did the golem-smile thing: what a golem would smile...if a golem were to smile...sort of...not all there. Or perhaps like Graham Greene says of Captain Segura: his smile came out of the wrong place, much like a toothpaste container with a rip in it. But what was important was that I could no longer get him mad. Hank had been down so long, that my feeble quips were nothing but flies looking for a soft spot on his great, pachydermous bulk...and not having much luck at it. That's what happens when you steal a little retirement money from people; the starch goes out of their shirts, and they all sit around looking like that unhappily hot jury in Twelve Angry Men. So I decided to try my best shot, trying to raise him from his slough of despond du jour. I started talking about money for the Arts. Hitherto, money for the Arts for Hank was an ominous collage of sacred objects and bottles of human waste products, sort of a Max Ernst assemblage of Marcel DuChamp's Urinal in an unholy conjunction with Fra Angelico. To be fair to Hank, the objects he was recalling were not much by the way of Art by any definition of Art...other than Art as the process by which one bugs the hell out of straight, white folks. Far be it from me to let him know I felt this way. What really is the value of having a blue-blooded, FOX watching rightie in your midst if you cannot indulge in a little "bear baiting" of the old, ugly brute? I mean, really? Some of them become quite apoplectic. The ones with fair skin get all red-splotchy. I know one specimen with rosacea who becomes neon in his indignation. Very amusing for an indolent drone like myself. So-o-o, I reached back into memory and pulled up something about money for the Arts.... No! No! That wasn't how it went. No. I remember now. First, he was moaning and groaning about bail-outs, then drugs and Mexico. Then he said that it had been proved that any country like Denmark or Holland ( which he calls - I kid you not- Dutchland!) which had adopted a liberal attitude towards drugs discovered that the costs down the road cost more than a good, old-fashioned WAR on drugs in the first place...so put that in your let's-decriminalize-drugs-and-tax-it pipe and smoke it! I said that the reason that Denmark and Holland found this to be true was the fact that Denmark and Holland were Socialist! and did stuff like provide safety nets and thing, so of course they would find that it cost them dearly. However, I said, in this country, we have abolished all those safety nets, so we could legalize drugs and get off on the cheap! I truly baffled him at this point. Then I sequenced into the Artsy-Fartsy topics of conversation. Since we were talking about how much stuff costs: Arts 50 million, Banks 1 trillion, I decided it was time. So, then I did that reaching back in time and grabbing a memory about money for the Arts in the original Obama stimulus package, and said we needed that mazuma for the Arts. For pete's sake, operas were being cancelled as we spoke! I said: wasn't the original stimulus inclusion for the Arts gutted by some Know-Nothings and Nativists and America-Firsters and the KKK??!! Silence. He said, yeah. Then he said 50 million wasn't all that much...if they could keep from putting religious objects into containers of urine, why not? Even artists should be able to run their own shop well enough to do that. I nodded and heaved a sigh. I could not get an argument going. Peace would reign here today. True, it was a peace of the bitterly disappointed, the exhausted, and those that despaired of the future, but what the heck? Hanaan was standing behind the lunch counter giving me the evil-eye, much like FDR gave Kramer in that Seinfeld episode. I had not ordered anything to eat. I had just been sitting there sucking down a glass of water. Perhaps today was the day I would stand up to her bullying. Hanaan insists upon herself too much. Yes, Lois. She insists upon herself.