Wednesday, April 17, was Arts Advocacy Day in Illinois. I hope yours was pleasant. I celebrated in the traditional manner. As president of a small advocacy group called the Evanston Performing Arts Coalition (EPAC), I traveled down to Springfield to lobby my elected representatives for more money for the Illinois Arts Council–the state agency charged with “cultivating the arts in the lives of all Illinoisans.”
As it happened, the library was lousy with librarians. Scores of them, identifiable by their top-of-the-line, plastic-covered, hand-printed name tags, streamed out of the building as I walked toward it, having just rallied in preparation for their own day of advocacy. They were hyped and ready to make their case to 59 state senators and 118 representatives–or more probably, given that a good many of them seemed to be headed away from the legislative offices in the Capitol Complex, to get some lunch.
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And on and on. This sort of stuff never ceases to fascinate me. I mean, for me the arts are so self-evidently good and profound, ennobling and essential–and then there’s this proof, this objective verification that, yes, in fact they’re all that and an economic engine, a catalyst for social harmony, and a way to ace the SATs as well. Does it make me a good advocate or a bad one if I don’t understand how anybody faced with these facts could consider the arts anything but uncuttable?
Senator Parker arrived, trailing clouds of glory from her tollway triumph. Compact, exceedingly well-groomed, and gracious even after a morning spent fighting with people, she had us wait a bit while she received an old man whose lack of a hat, message T-shirt, and buttons made him seem terribly dignified and mysterious. We were joined meanwhile by David Burden, a professional lobbyist–complete with credentials strung from a lanyard around his neck–who has done work for the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, in which the Northlight Theatre is housed. Burden’s avuncular presence should have been reassuring–with his white hair and ready smile he looks like one of those semiretired actors who sell supplemental health insurance to seniors on TV. But it had the opposite effect on me. Around him, I felt like the outsider I truly was.
The elegant Hamos used the inelegant image of cockroaches to explain how elected officials evaluate letters from their constituents. That is, just as ten roaches on the kitchen floor suggest swarms behind the baseboards, so politicians figure that ten letters from constituents portend an as yet unseen groundswell of feeling in the broader population. Getting heard, in other words, is easier than one might think.
