America's Pizza Culture

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 6, 1999 | by Woody West

A timely initiative by one of the big-bucks foundations -- the Pew Charitable Trusts, with the bounty from a $4.7 billion endowment -- is launching a crusade (as a news report puts it) to formulate a national policy on pizza.

Absolutely. Variations in crust thickness, quality of tomato sauce, quantity of cheeses and the range of toppings need to be intensively studied and debated. It is scandalous that anyone, regardless of sex, race or place of national origin, with an appropriate oven can whip up something and call it a "pizza."

The Pew foundation already is energetic in causes such as global warming (which may not exist), campaign-finance reform (the most tedious of wonkish issues) and what is called "civic journalism" (a New-Agey notion of news that permits editors to evade responsibility for judgment). Thus, it is splendid that there's a proposal to focus on so consequential a topic as pizza, and ...

Whoa! Big mistake -- it's a national cultural policy the Pew foundation is embarked on, for heaven's sake, not a pizza policy. One should never write on a serious subject when hungry, especially when the little guy on TV has been subliminally hollering, "Pizza, pizza!"

Well, let's ponder a national cultural policy. "Over the next five years," the New York Times reports with evident exuberance, "the Pew plans to devote about 40 percent of its culture budget, some $50 million, toward getting policy-makers to focus on issues like arts financing, intellectual-property rights, zoning in historic areas.... The effort will involve academic research and more media coverage, among other things."

Also on the Pew drawing board is "an information center" to collect and publish data, conduct polls and organize conferences. Ah, the conferences. Doubtless these will be held in seasonally appealing four-star hotels where voluble professors and administrators of little theater groups, who nattered together at the last conference, will continue their conversations. More fun than stomping on snakes.

Straw-bossing this delightful drill is Stephen K. Urice. The term "cultural policy," he concedes, "jars" people. "They think you are talking about centralized authority or regulation." Not so, avers Urice. The Pew is suggesting discussions, say, about grants to individual artists, about mandatory arts curriculum and the like. Oh.

But let's ruminate here about a jim-dandy "cultural policy" that will be announced with hosannas and brass bands by the Pew. It presumably would be coherent, extensive and -- dare we say it? -- highly prescriptive. Policy does suggest doctrine -- and doctrine usually implies action.

In short, it would be odd if the Pew poobahs labor to bring forth a policy that does not urge a significant government role, that is to say, a very political component. Marion A. Godfrey, duchess of the Pew's culture programs, told the New York Times that she hoped that a case for more government money for the arts can be made with data the policy crusade packages.

For years, there has been fuss and furor on the political right over tax money that supports art projects. Individuals and groups on the left adamantly defend federal financing -- though for some reason, a consistent quotient of government-sponsored arts and crafts takes as its mission to bash traditional values and sexual and social norms.

Only a corporal's guard of congressional conservatives have had the nerve to risk being tagged as aesthetic Neanderthals as they labor to get me feds out of the arts game. Even though the appropriation for the National Endowment for the Arts has been cut in half, it still has a handsome $98 million this year to play with and is unlikely to be banished from the bureaucratic hive.

Liberals howl censorship whenever there is a volley about the inappropriateness of federal money to keep the cultural fires burning at high flame, as they see it. Nonsense. Politically engaged artists can turn out as many crucifixes in bottles of urine as delight them -- but not on the taxpayers' dime.

A national policy is thought necessary by the Pew and other foundations because the great mass of Americans apparently are too boobish to realize that culture is intrinsic to the well-being of the nation. Culture, they lecture, represents more than an occasional visit to a museum. This country historically has done handsomely in privately supporting cultural institutions.

Actually, a national pizza policy might be a better focus for a "crusade."