Jesse Helms knows as well as anyone in Washington how strong the know-nothing streak in America is and how to focus its rancor -- which is, in essence, what he has done with the National Endowment for the Arts. Only this can explain why thousands of people who don't utter a peep when the President pulls billions from their wallets to bail out crooks and incompetents in the savings and loan industry start baying for the abolition of an agency that indirectly gave $30,000 to a now dead photographer. When Robert Mapplethorpe, that much overrated lensman, posed with a bullwhip stuck like a tail in his anus, he was parodying the image of the devil. He could not have foreseen how literally it would be taken by folk who have never clapped eyes on the photo itself.
The Donnybrook over the continued existence of the NEA began last year with the funding of an exhibition of Mapplethorpe's photographs, has ramified immensely since then, and is now coming to a head. Helms' pressure has already forced the NEA to make arts-grant recipients pledge that they will do nothing obscene or indecent on Government money. Sometime in June the NEA's reauthorization and funding bills go to the House floor, where a vocal ultra- conservative rump, led by California Republican Dana Rohrabacher, will attempt to abolish the agency. Since the House will probably not go along -- George Bush has declared that he would not support such a bill -- the issue will come down to a fight over the further restriction of "obscene" content in NEA-funded work.
Leading the NEA's defense is Democratic Congressman Pat Williams of Montana, who wants to reauthorize the NEA for another five years and leave questions of obscenity to the courts. "As long as the Federal Government can support the arts without interfering with their content . . ." says Williams, "government can indeed play a meaningful part in trying to encourage the arts . . . We know pornography when we see it, but the freedom to create is invisible."
There has been plenty of method in the anti-NEA demagoguery. At its root lies a sense of lost momentum, a leakage of power, in the far American right. The cold war thawed out after 40 years and left its paladins standing with wet socks in the puddle. "And now what shall become of us, without any barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution." The words of the poet Constantine Cavafy -- shh! a Greek homosexual! -- apply quite well to the right's dilemma in 1990.
But if there is no longer a clear-cut Enemy at the Gates, a useful if more diffuse one can still be found at the bottom of the garden: a fairy. Such is the insight on which Jesse Helms is banking his political fortune in this Senate election year of 1990.
Helms is on the losing side of most issues, and little legislation of his own gets passed, but no one could accuse him of a lack of raw populist acumen. His National Congressional Club remains one of the richest political-action committees in Washington, a direct-mail operation that pulled in $1.4 million in 1989. The strength of its mailing list, combined with those of right-wing religious groups like Donald Wildmon's American Family Association and Pat Robertson's 700 Club, has kept the bombardment of the NEA going strong.