Artists Are Not The Problem
Some thoughts about living a creative life of opposition in the year ahead
As a creative type—a guy who tries to write every day, and publish his writing—I’m very worried about 2025.
I think many of us will find ourselves embroiled in a new kind of conflict in the year ahead.
I’m not especially concerned about the current flashpoints: the over-hyped assault on “free speech,” the specter of “cancellation.”
There’s nothing new about any of that.
Creative folk have always faced hostility of one kind or another. They’ve always fallen in and out of fashion and favor. They’ve always had to change with the times. And they’ve always been banished from the kingdom for offenses both minor and major.
The only difference between 2025 and 1525, in this respect, is that the balance of judgment has shifted slightly from the patrons—the wealthy, the state, the pope—to the people.
Nor am I particularly shocked by the new iterations of the “culture wars.” They’ve been “raging” for my entire adult life and we’ve seen them play out again and again with numbing regularity. The consequences can be devastating—currently, trans people are bearing the awful brunt—but the battle between progress and white men is nothing new in America. We’ve been here before.
I’m not even losing sleep over the future of the First Amendment. In fact, I relish a good First Amendment fight and look forward to the next one. It gives me a raison d'être as a writer.
No. What worries me most, for 2025, is how the establishment—our institutions, corporations, economy—has become entirely dependent on a culture of opposition…and especially an opposition to “cultural elites”…in order to sustain itself:
how the corporate marketing, advertising, and social media machines stir up fake controversy, and thrive on lies and endless conflict, for easy profit;
how corporate media baits culture warriors and fans the flames of distrust, in order to remain “relevant,” despite an ever-shrinking market share; and
how our politicians foreground these trumped-up “wars” while continuing to make catastrophic policies and wage real wars, quietly, in the background.
As we’ve seen again and again, most clearly during the pandemic, the results have been murderous.
This trend—this angry assault on “cultural elites,” orchestrated by the corporate and political elites—goes back at least as far as the Nixon administration. But the hostility has certainly intensified in the last eight years or so.
As we crawl into 2025, the hostility has become so intense that we can’t even have a reasonable, national policy discussion about anything else.
Which is my real point.
In effect, the actual elites with actual power have figured out a way to demonize the “cultural elite”—including writers, critics, historians, philosophers, visual artists, musicians, comedians, dancers, and actors—in order to divide, distract, and confuse We, The People.
It’s an ingenious plan, really. To denounce our culture’s artists and thinkers—who are, by definition, creators of alternative realities—so that they can continue to make greed-driven, environmentally-catastrophic, dehumanizing, and destructive policies in this reality, with impunity.
So what should we do in the year ahead to resist this misappropriation? How do we avoid becoming either targets or pawns of the powerful.
This is something I think about constantly and all I can say, so far, is that silence is not an option.
I suspect that we will face even more intimidation in 2025. And I suspect that creatives of all kinds will have to resist in some way, at some point.
Until then, we should continue to make our art, write our stories, offer our criticisms, and create our alternative realities, as we always do. And then we should use whatever eloquence we have left, and whatever platforms we have left, to remind anyone who will listen that our art, our stories, our criticisms, our alternative realities—no matter how “political” they may be—are not the same as policy.
Human possibility is OUR job. Humane policy is THEIR job.
Don’t let them get it twisted.
Writers, critics, historians, philosophers, visual artists, musicians, comedians, dancers, actors…humanists, thinkers…are not the problem. And we never were.
Be True, Episode 71: A Poem About Hard Work and Weekends
John reads his poem “Sunday After Church” from his collection Sometimes I Still Pray. He also discusses “old neighborhood” characters, blues man John Lee Hooker, and what makes a poem a poem.
Luna speaks…
Thank you once again John for saying it as it is .
Rumble and roar .
The carrot is not infront of us anymore it is definitely up our tail .