…until, of course, the catalyst event happens, at which point you’ll probably think to yourself, “How did Alan know?”
I’m not prescient. In fact, there is still a naïve part of me that hopes that people have discovered that, in fact, war is not healthy for children and other living things. But first…
My new book is now available everywhere, even as an eBook. And if it’s not, please let me know.
Scene Change: Why Today’s Nonprofit Arts Organizations Have to Stop Producing Art and Start Producing Impact is now on the shelves, be they internet shelves or real ones, in the UK and the US. Maybe even Australia by now. If your bookstore isn’t carrying it (yet), please let them know that you want a copy and that they should stock up for the thousands more behind you. Okay, hundreds. Okay, dozens. Okay, your dad.
Just give them this ISBN: 978–1–80 341–446–1. If it’s still not listed, contact me directly at alan@501c3.guru.
If you teach an arts management program, work at an arts school, or want to buy a bulk purchase (25 or more) for your board of directors and staff, just shoot me an email: alan@501c3.guru. I can get you a substantial group discount.
Here’s the cover. Click on it to order your copy:
And now, this week’s column.
Last week, we discussed the literal, actual, real-live, people-dying war that is on the way sometime between now and 2026. If you didn’t read last week’s column, this column might not make a whole lot of sense to you. But then, that’s not unusual, or so I’m told.
Tim Alberta, author of The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, said on a recent episode of Deadline: White House regarding why American evangelicals might follow the same path as German Nazis in the 1930s (about 90 years ago):
“It is this sense of aggrievement, the sense of persecution, a very real sense of cultural and political displacement… When you think about a voting group that believes that they are losing something, that they are forfeiting a status in society that they have enjoyed and that many people believe that they’re entitled to, and when you think about it in sort of an us versus them, good versus evil, ‘The enemies are at the gates! How do we fight back against them?,’ suddenly, that relationship with Donald Trump seems to make a lot of sense.”
Hitler didn’t lead German White Christians in a populist movement. It would have happened anyway. In other words, it wouldn’t have mattered if you went back in time and killed baby Hitler. Someone else would have gathered the self-described downtrodden, populist, everyone’s-against-me, victim society of racist bastards that took over Germany then and threaten to take over the US now.
We often discuss a bygone war through a current lens. M*A*S*H, one of my favorite television shows, may have taken place in Korea, but it was filmed in the Santa Monica Mountains and was about Vietnam. M*A*S*H’s virulently anti-war sentiment was part of a 1970s society that had endured years of senseless killing in a foreign war that the US ultimately lost.
And yet, historically speaking, how can war — a real, dangerous, all-Americans-at-risk war, one in which the outcome is not solely about oil, communism, vengeance, or some other issue that affects the bottom line of the military industrial complex and the wealthiest 1% — positively affect a society? And where do nonprofit arts organizations fit into all this horror?
World wars happen when a critical mass within the dominant social group (in recent centuries, White Christians, many of them falling under Tim Alberta’s description of evangelicals) feel as though their supremacy is under threat. There may be catalyzing events, but ultimately, an entire society won’t go to war until that takes place. This isn’t a question of the morality or immorality of war; just a statement of sad observation.
In the US, this is part of the reason why DEI programs at your nonprofit arts organization have become so easy to jettison when the money runs dry. They don’t appear to positively affect the dominant social group (to that social group, that is). With so many organizations and government agencies choosing instead to have meetings, talks, discussions, and the worst culprit, “Listening Sessions,” White Christian society has proven correct the kind of allyship Dr. Martin Luther King wrote about in his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail.
“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”
Until a sphere can’t fall off the table, it inevitably will. Performative DEI statements (the ball in that metaphor) from major arts institutions have proven to fall off all significant tables by undermanned nonprofit arts organizations. Actions are considered riskier, more expensive, and thornier than talking about actions.
DEI requires the kind of self-sacrifice among those in the numerically dominant society that they are currently loathe to offer, even among those who “mean well.” And so, it happens slowly, if at all.
War changes all that. This next one — like the one that occurred about four score ago and the one four score years before that and the one that was famously “four score and seven years” before that — will require self-sacrifice actions from that dominant society. The only difference between those wars and this one is this: for the first time in American history, the US will be fighting a war while its population has only a slight White majority (roughly 51%, according to projections) and likelier, a White Christian plurality, but not a majority. It will behoove that group to join hands as “Americans” in order to defeat evil (even if that evil is internal). Only in that way, Americans will come together as they haven’t since the end of World War II.
For a nonprofit arts organization, the stakes are unusually high. If you work now to engage in the lives of those who need the help (as your charitable status and your funders increasingly require), your organization will be best-placed for a seat at the community table. And when that war happens, it will be those who helped their communities in the fight that will benefit, not those who put on art for its own sake.
So, before your child asks you, “What did you do in the war, Daddy?” consider that your acts of self-sacrifice will mean much more than those of artistic purity. No one will care about your brilliant production of Hamlet, no matter how good a play it is. They’ll care about the steps your organization took toward bringing people together and winning the peace.
Ironically your comments are VERY much reminiscent of Nazi Germany but YOU might be the perp not the victim, whether you intended so or not. .A simple quick read about the Fine Arts in the Third Reich easily reveals a number of parallels to today.
The early-on orchestral quotas were not advertised as reducing the numbers of Jewish players. Of course not. Instead they were billed as as ” making the ensembles ‘ more representative’ ” . Sound familiar ? Then composers were on the griddle. Mendelssohn , Goldmark, Bloch, Toch. Weinberger. Et al et al. On and on. Replaced in the repertoire by , it was said, ” more representative” composers. ( Stalin and the Boys pulled the same thing in persecuting Shostakovich et al , using hacks, Quislings , tools and fools Zhadov, Khrennikov, Khatchaturian , Kabelevsky et al to “denounce” – publicly shame – the unfortunate Dima on the grounds that he was ” not representative”. )
Then they went after the conductors.
I as a former paid orchestra player, beg of all of you, put aside your self-loathing grievances and nursed hurts about Mommy and Daddy and the kids who beat you up at school ! This is madness. You ” celebrate” political preachers Jessie Jackson and M. L King , and the mainstream denominations lobbying government on political issues about environmental regulations , gun control , integration etc. but vilify White evangelicals ?!
You will have a better old age, which comes WAY sooner than you expect, if you repudiate this madness now. Millions of arts careers were destroyed overnight when the Good Guys eventually won WWII and a young American military fellow late of the Music School in Ann Arbor, was put in charge of purging countless musicians, conductors, arts administrators , et al who previously went along with purging artists who werent ” representative enough”, or were of the ” wrong” religion.
If you havent remembered the pathetic story of Dr. Hans Pfitzner, one of the World’s most admired living composers until he started penning stuff like ” A Cracow Greeting” for Hans Frank, Read It Now !
Wow, whatever have you been smoking, Alan? I’ve always thought that your take on the role of non profit arts organizations was bizarre, but now all of this coming war stuff is just too much. I’d rather stick my head in the sand. Best wishes…