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MAKING CULTURE AN ISSUE
Herschel Hardin Leadership Campaign
Policy Circular 11B • May 25, 1995 |
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Culture directly and indirectly affects sensibility and how we see the world. Film and television production, books, magazines, popular music, and the performing and fine arts touch us in an infinite number of ways. Above all, they give us a sense of community, not because we all watch and read the same things, but because we recognize together that we have voices of our own. Like our humanity and the environment, cultural self expression is primary. Yet, although we all know the biblical aphorism that people do not live by bread alone, we fail to make our besieged cultural expression an ongoing electoral issue, crucial as the matter is.
The impact of culture is less direct than the impact of mass media news coverage, but it is more pervasive, rooted, and personal. Moreover, while cultural self expression is a basic value in its own right, it also has political implications. Politics is an expression of ourselves, and if we see ourselves only through American cultural eyes, our politics is going to be distorted accordingly.
The core issue is Canadian self expression. I need not go through chapter and verse of how, in film production and distribution, television drama, books, and magazines, we are overwhelmed by the United States. This is less so for French speaking Quebec, but even they are not immune. Each component, moreover, reinforces the other. Television and magazine coverage of entertainment, flooding over the border, supports and popularizes American movies and television programs. Outlandish television advertising budgets support American films in this country.
The end result is that American values and reference points superimpose themselves incrementally on Canada, undermining our indigenous imagination and our sense of separate identities.
As long as cultural activity is left largely to market devices, this will continue, simply because the American market is so much larger than ours. This is perhaps the most graphic example of economic devices dictating to us as social and cultural beings, rather than being made to serve us instead.
This brings us back to the bedrock of democratic socialism: that people, their communities, their environment, and their cultural self expression are primary. Part and parcel of this, in turn, is re establishing the legitimacy of public funding for culture generally. We have to take on the wrong headed, American inspired dogma about political economies, inside which our cultural life is being downgraded. Unless we do so, the recent cuts to the CBC's appropriation and to Canadian publishing will be just the beginning. Specific pleas not to reduce funding will be taken as a form of begging will be seen, in our current ideological drift, as abnormal, an unnecessary burden on taxpayers, and at odds with the future.
Ironically, in the most expensive of cultural sectors, television, the American commercial model is extraordinarily wasteful whereas public financing is economical (see Policy Circular 10, "The Post Propaganda Society"). We not only have to contend against the weight of the United States, we handcuff ourselves by duplicating their waste as well. Even were public financing of television not necessary for Canadian reasons, it would make sense for its own sake.
So would public underwriting of cultural activity at large. It adds to individualism and variety. It gives writers, publishers, and producers more latitude against market forces. It allows localism to flourish. It allows poetry to co exist alongside of how to books. It makes our society whole in a way that market exchange by itself cannot do.
Above all, it counteracts the dictates of heavy handed commercialism. It is based on a different and independent principle that cultural self expression is not a matter of exploiting fads, copying what others are doing, or concocting whatever can best be packaged by aggressive and expensive marketing machinery. It is created freely, is rooted, and has integrity, even when aiming for broad appeal. This is well understood in the long fight to defend public broadcasting in this country, but also applies to other cultural sectors.
In the mass media particularly, like television and film making, this cultural principle also assumes an artistic or journalistic responsibility to others that one doesn't pander, sensationalize, resort to gratuitous violence, or falsify real life simply to increase ratings or sales and make a buck. Ultimately such "dollar television" and film making is destructive. It debases the audience. It makes for a harsh, superficial society.
Cultural self expression, again, has its own values, and the political economy should serve those values. One of those values is that everyone has a voice in our case, that the Canadian voice be given room to sing out.
For all those reasons, making culture an issue, and making it an issue in our own terms, is crucial to what we are trying to achieve. |
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