The cost of living where I reside is relatively low, drives to needed amenities or one’s job tend to be short. For over a decade I could more or less roll out of bed and into my office chair since my commute was ten minutes, tops. Now I’m more or less across the street from shopping and hospital.
The downside of this small city ease is a relative paucity of entertainment and culture. Yes, colleges and universities within a sixty minute radius offer plays, musical performances, classes and speakers. Road shows of big city drama and name brand musical acts come to call, though some names never darken our doors.
Still, the general level of the work is a cut or two below professional and the choice is limited. No major league playhouses, for instance, safe choices rather than classics or edgy fare, and only one major league sports franchise within 100 miles. We are in farm team territory.
Perhaps I was spoiled by growing up in a small college town that a river ran through and corn fields abutted, with its coziness, that was also only 20 minutes by car or rail from what was then one of the ten largest cities in the country. And in those days, the great engine of the robber baron’s industrial belt was going full stream, before the rust set in. And they supported cultural institutions.
So, we had at hand the Cleveland Playhouse, the Hanna Theater, a couple of art house movie theaters during the heyday of the New Wave, Fellini and Bergman, The Cleveland Symphony, The Cleveland Art Museum, a kid’s paradise in a Natural History Museum with planetarium, fine libraries, a fantastic park system, and pro hockey, football, baseball, you name it.
We were rich and didn’t know it. Especially since many of the museums were free to the public, or available at very low prices, as befit a blue collar town. I miss all that, but life is trade-offs unless you can afford to have it all. In this regard, the narrowness of a creature like Donald Trump is astonishing.
If I had a fraction of his dough and could take the elevator to Broadway, Off Broadway, Lincoln Center, clubs, cabarets, Madison Square Garden, The New York Public Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MOMA, the Guggenheim, and on and on, I would. Day after day.
I am willing to bet he’s never attended a cultural event or contributed to the arts or sciences in his life, unless you count the discos of the 1970s where he picked up women who valued money over self-respect. But this is nothing new. I quote from memory, a mot by some wit, Shaw or Wilde perhaps, to the effect that many a duchess is born with the taste of her scullery maid and many a scullery maid with the taste of a duchess.
I console myself for the privations of Podunk by the new world in which we live. Today, even hermits living like the Unabomber can order a million books online that will be delivered to their hut in days or to their e-reader instantly. We can now stream videos from hundreds of channels. At our fingertips are classic films or the latest releases, documentaries, news, instruction.
I await impatiently pay-per-view access to Broadway Live, National Theater Live, concerts from far-flung venues featuring performers who will never put a toe near my town. Even a browse through the latest blockbuster art exhibits ought to be possible, though the picture quality may not match being there in person. But it will be a lot less wearying and costly than a trek to the nearest world-class venues in Washington or New York. The rural Planation aristocracy of the South did not leave the region as well endowed as the robber barons did the cities of the North and Midwest.
One dark cloud overhangs this scene of abundance. Public Television, which was supposed to provide food for the country’s soul, in the sense argued by Ellie Dunn in Shaw’s “Heartbreak House.” She said, “Old fashioned people think you can have a soul without money.” The literal-minded Captain Shotover thinks this is absurd. How much can her soul eat, he asks. “Oh, a lot. It eats music and pictures and books and mountains and lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people to be with. In this country you can’t have them without lots of money: that is why our souls are so horribly starved.”
In my state, at least, Public Television may be slowly subjected to deliberte starvation. It appears to be less well-endowed than before. The Republicans nationally have long opposed subsidizing a service that they regard as subversively liberal. And now that my state has been captured by anti-government forces, funding may be reduced.
As a result, Public Television offers less than it used to, has begun to drift to pop culture offerings and to provide less art or science. Gone are the days of classical music, dance, the complete plays of Shakespeare, “The Ascent of Man,” and the like. We know artists are politically suspect, but science programming may also trespass on political verboten territory — climate change or evolution.
As a result, the quality of original programming has suffered and the quantity also appears under threat. More and more weeks a year are given over to reruns and fund-raising, accompanied by middlebrow fare never seen on Public TV except when trying to attract infrequent viewers long enough to beg for alms.
Much of the content of Public TV is imported from Britain, either because there is no budget for creating the equivalent of Masterpiece Theater, with its Dickens, Trollope, Conrad, Waugh, for the works of Hawthorne, Melville, Cather, Twain, Howells. Thus, a great institution, created to use the power of government to bring the riches of the big city to thousands of small towns and urban dwellers without the price of a ticket, is at risk of slowly dwindling away.
Our people and the survival of our heritage are the potential losers. Podunk may be off the beaten path, but it doesn’t have to be a cultural backwater. Trump is like the almost-literate man — can read, but won’t. He’s starving in the midst of plenty. Kids awakened to all the world has to offer are the richer for it, but if not exposed early and often may be culturally illiterate for life. A soul is a terrible thing to starve.