Director’s Statement
The 2008 Presidential Election

In 280 B.C. Aristarchus proclaimed the sun, not the earth, to be the center of our universe.  It would be another 17 centuries before this truth could be accepted by the reigning culture, proving that dark ages can’t last forever.

Global free-market capitalism, which posits that supply = demand = price in a self-regulating mechanism that will float all boats, is suffering a series of massive strokes.  How much movement it will regain is uncertain, but few expect the U.S. to return to the Gilded Age ushered in by President Ronald Reagan. 

While middle class people are losing their retirement savings – and some their jobs and their homes – it is important to remember that Reaganomics began punishing poor and lower-middle class people 27 years ago.  Now, we have the widest wealth gap in our country’s history.  As if this was not worry enough, presently one of every ninety-nine Americans is locked-up behind bars. 

Here in central Appalachia, the present economic problems have been a long time coming.  (Click here for my 2006 essay, “Progress.”) For those nonprofit organizations which stand with non-elite audiences and for the core values of pluralism, participation, and equity, deregulation and the privatization of all aspects of our public life have had devastating economic effects – many have closed their doors, and those still open are operating at significantly reduced levels.

In Peter J. Boyer’s October 6, 2008 New Yorker article, “The Appalachian Problem,” Virginia Senator Jim Webb calls attention to his 2004 opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, in which he argued:
The greatest realignment in modern politics would take place rather quickly if the right national leader found a way to bring the Scots-Irish and African-Americans to the same table, and so to redefine a formula that has consciously set them apart for the past two centuries.

This was exactly the point of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, which was effectively killed by the assassination of its leader, The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.  When asked why he wanted to help whites from places like the Appalachian Mountains, King answered: “Are they poor?”

In its 1991 musical play, Junebug/Jack, Roadside Theater and its long-standing African American collaborator, Junebug Productions, took up Dr. King’s challenge.  Here’s the play’s character Junebug Jabbo Jones analyzing social justice in the antebellum South:
They saw that in spite of the terrible conditions most of the colored people were living up under, in most sections it was more of them than there were white folk. Then again there was a whole bunch of white people that might as well to have been slaves for all they could get out of life.  They seed that between the colored slaves and the poor white people didn't hardly nothin' get done around there unless they were the one's to do it.  But everybody was so busy trying to keep their own little head from getting cracked that they didn't take the time to stand back and look at the big picture that had everybody in it.”

Junebug/Jack toured nationally for nine years, never failing to attract a black and white working-class audience.  Given that black and white working class people typically do not go out together (or separately, for that matter) to the professional theater, here’s how they were enticed to attend.  We asked each local sponsor of the play to pull together a group of singers from different parts of their community – for example, from their white Methodist church, from their black AME Zion church, from their integrated public high school, and from their women’s chorus.  With a local musical director of their choosing, this ecumenical community choir would rehearse Junebug/Jack’s music over the course of several months, and then, in final rehearsals, I would stage them into the production.  Junebug/Jack would swell from a cast of our six to fifteen or twenty-five.  And let me assure you that the artistic quality of the production was raised.

Out of support for their church, family, and friends, as well as curiosity about the new sound reported to be going down, large numbers of people, who would not otherwise have attended, showed up for the performances.  And not only did the broader community’s presence onstage and in the audience make the play more vibrant, the rehearsals brought seemingly unlike people together around their common passion for singing.  In the rehearsal process, relationships naturally formed, bringing with them insights into the universals that we share, and the social differences that divide us. The disparate parts of each community came together to sing and only then began the journey – a journey which Roadside has the cultural residency methodology to support –  of understanding each other emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually.

Prior to 1981, the nonprofit arts community, led by the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, was on the path to cultural democracy.  This journey was hijacked by the culture war started by the Reagan administration and most recently prosecuted by Karl Rove and company using a divisive political strategy.  Now President Obama has the opportunity to get the arts back on track in support of the durable pluralism upon which the world’s bright future depends.