MR. HACKNEY’S OPUS

This was two years ago. Hackney called for “a conversation in which all voices are heard,” grappling “seriously with the meaning of American pluralism” as we “look in the National Mirror” to reflect on how people are included — or, as he put it in drama-queen dialect, “How wide the circle of we?”

His plan was to fund town-hall meetings across the country to discuss multiculturalism and national identity and civic virtue. These are the kinds of conversations Hackney believes America should be having in church basements and neighborhood bars — except instead of everybody being Methodists or Cubs fans, participants would come from diverse backgrounds, however homogeneous their opinions.

With the project thus framed in blatherskite that could test the abdominal lining of even the most grizzled war correspondent, the media elite began its drubbing. On the Right, George Will said subsidizing diversity talk was “akin to subsidizing crabgrass: the problem is a surplus not a shortage.” On the Left, the Nation’s Katha Pollitt wrote, “If we’re all so bewildered about our national values, what is it we will learn from sharing our ignorance in library basements?” Even the New York Times and Washington Post took their shots, with the latter’s Jonathan Yardley suggesting a cost-effective alternative: Read Invisible Man, then pass it around your block.

Originally to be funded in the “high six figures,” the largely unmonitored Conversation has by now cost $ 4.9 million in grants to applicants throughout the country, plus a little-noted $ 10,000 stipend to each of the 56 state and territorial humanities councils above what they already draw in NEH funding. There have now been 1,540 conversations in 224 cities in 41 states.

Hackney has stressed that this is a nonpartisan, or perhaps pan-partisan, effort. And it’s not for elites, as the condescending suggestions in NEH’s starter kit for local organizers prove: “Consider the size and temperature (not too hot or too cold) of the room. . . . Serving simple refreshments is a good way to put participants in a relaxed and sharing frame of mind. . . . Chairs should be comfortable.”

In a March 1994 meeting in Chicago, 21 scholars were invited to plot the reading materials and parameters of the Conversation. James Q. Wilson and two other neocons were the only non-leftists; the rest of the diverse group ranged from liberal academic Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to liberal academic Amy Gutmann to radical academic Ronald Takaki. Though Hackney concedes conservatives were outgunned by about a 6-to-1 margin, “there was still a wide range of Left,” he told me. It’s impossible to know what went on, because NEH has not turned over the tapes of these meetings to interested journalists. This is surprising, since ordinarily the endowment’s meetings are required to be open by federal sunshine laws. But because the MacArthur Foundation picked up the tab for the planning stage, NEH was able to skirt the federal requirement. Asked why the discussions were never made public, Hackney told me that privacy ensured participants “could have a much freer conversation.”

The reading lists that emerged from the meetings have a blind-spin-through- the-card-catalog feel, ranging from Madison to Cravecoeur to Lani Guinier to bell hooks (the arch-feminist critic who insists on lower-casing her name). Also included is neo-Marxist philosopher Jurgen Habermas, whom (we learn from Comint magazine’s Lawrence Jarvik) Hackney cited as a primary influence on the Conversation during a gathering on Martha’s Vineyard.

Hackney told me he has no recollection of this, saying he hadn’t read him until after the program commenced, but perhaps Habermas arouses some of Hackney’s more aggressive collectivist verbalizings: “We think of ourselves as a practical and self-reliant people, but we have been host to more utopian experiments in communal living than any other nation on earth.” This was just one of many justifications he offered for the Conversation in a speech last November.

Which is not to suggest Hackney’s a Marxist; more a selective libertarian. During his tenure as president of the University of Pennsylvania, he prided himself on being a rabid guardian of free expression, decrying the Helms amendment and supporting Andres “Piss Christ” Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, and all the maverick artists who, through their brave work, pushed the bounds of rectal elasticity.

Meanwhile he enforced a strident p.c. speech code that led to a rare Boner Trifecta. First, Penn decided to punish a Jewish professor who had the audacity to point out to black students that both he and they were descended from slaves. Second, the school sought punitive measures against a Jewish student who called a group of black students “water buffaloes” — a translation from Hebrew that had no racial connotations.

And when black students removed 14,000 copies of the Daily Pennsylvanian in protest of a conservative columnist, free expressionist Hackney’s initial response was: “Two important university values, diversity and open expression, seem to be in conflict.” Though Hackney for the most part denies culpability in the series of incidents (he told me he was simply enforcing the school’s constitution), and though he later hardened his line against the destruction of the school paper, a former newspaper staffer says, “He told me that “stealing papers was an act of free speech in the great liberal tradition” on several occasions.”

With this shaky legacy, it’s small wonder that Hackney’s idea for a National Conversation took fire from both the Left, who contended he was harking back to troglodytic, patriotic flim-flam, and the Right, who weren’t exactly eager to join hands and lift voices in “The Circle Game,” with Hackney serving as the nation’s multicultural facilitator.

But in fairness to Hackney, most of his early detractors were teeing off on his promotional literature and grant lists. They had yet to hear the Conversations firsthand. Last year when Hackney testified before a congressional committee, he threw down the gauntlet, saying: “We are a quiet agency, one might even say unglamorous, but we take comfort in the Biblical promise, “By their fruits ye shall know them.'”

Here then, are Hackney’s fruits.

At the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History’s .$ 40,000 Conversation on the subject “Who represents whom?” those of us in attendance sidled after hours up a darkened stairway and around Tyrannosaur skeletons to observe an ” Indians Before Columbus” display. In all my Eurobliviousness, I walked through the rather straightforward and benign exhibit with a musty academic group of ortho-soled gawkers in too-tight ski sweaters and student-union widewales worn in the unkempt manner one perfects from rolling out of dorm bunks, past the shower, and straight into American Studies class.

We perused Arapaho and Crow fieshing tools, saw a Cheyenne biography of a warrior, were informed that “we learned to smoke and chew from the Indians,” and saw displays on tubular effgy pipes, Southern Death Cults, and all manner of accoutrements from birthing gear to burial smocks.

Then it was off to a conference room for the fabled Conversation. University of Chicago professor Terri Strauss, in her opening salvo, bludgeoned us in impenetrable academese about a “crisis of representation” in this “commodified culture” because as “mainstream experts collect, study, classify, interpret, and exhibit others, their work being consciously or unconsciously an act of dominance, . . . the act of collection performs a semantic shift, . . . and the semantic career of objects as they are placed in different contexts is itself fertile ground for museum study.”

With the same stultifying effects as one of your better antihistamines, the speech had the gentleman behind me sawing logs into my microrecorder before she could reach her only discernible point, which was: “We could spend a whole evening picking apart this exhibit, but the most important criticism is that there is no First Voice.” Message: Exhibiting the fieshing tools of the Arapaho should be done in consultation with them or in their “voice” — as much as anyone knows what that sounds like, since there aren’t too many of them kicking down the door of the Field Museum during story time.

Fred Hoxie, head of the Newberry Library’s centers on Indian history (playing the part of the bumbling apologetic white guy in the manner of Tom Willis on The Jeffersons), christened the night a success before it even began: “This meeting is a rare event in modern life, and that is a civic gathering without a pre-set ideological agenda.”

Someone should have told that to the panelists, like Chicago State University’s Murry DePillars, a Yaphet Kotto lookalike who harped on having documented evidence that Aristotle and Herodotus studied in Africa. He also assured us that Africans were the first builders in this country and that they were here before Columbus because the Indians had presented gold-tipped spears from Africa. “We have to break down the myths,” he told us.

Craig Howe, the bolo-tied director of the D’Arcy McNicholas Center for the History of the American Indian, said that even attempts to incorporate inclusiveness in museum exhibits were just transparent. “What it does is just perpetuate those who are in power to stay in power,” Howe postulated, “while giving the impression that we’re including more people.”

Another trippy, pony-tailed Ph.D. student and self-described Wiccan (a witch) said the museum wasn’t a total loss. He’d often go upstairs to the Pawnee Earth Lodge when nobody was around so “the stars could scream at me through the hole. I don’t see, but I feel.” Howe gave his prescription for the interactive museum of the future: “We have to get away from the idea of something behind glass — some way where we can make a comment that I can spray-paint on that glass or write on a chalkboard, or something where we can create some kind of dialogue between the users, rather than the users and the exhibitor.” God forbid, in Hackney’s world, that even a minute lapse without an act of self-expression.

For self-expression is what it’s all about; Hackney told me so himself: ” People want to feel that they’re being heard.” That’s why he’s provided these opinion forums for “the layman,” as he never ceases to remind us. Never mind that a good many of the participants aren’t laymen at all, but professional victimologists associated with places like the Center for Cultural Understanding and Change — overly conscientious people who find it useful to fritter away public dollars to justify their research and thus grow ever more conscientious.

Put a question to anyone expressing actual diversity of opinion and you’re likely to get responses as nebulous as Hackney’s. I asked moderator Alaka Wall if problems with the exhibit weren’t actually aesthetic more than race- based. And how, for the love of Mary, are you supposed to bring the Amazon to Chicago for a living, breathing exhibit?

Her answer: “That’s a good question.”

But as Hackney has said, we’re not here to be provided answers or to achieve consensus. Based on two L.A. Conversations I heard — “The Multicultural Debate: Language and Labels” and “Shades of Law: Liberty and Justice for All” — the consensus is this: Everybody’s getting the shaft!

First, the Multicultural Debate. In a radio studio packed with 31 or so citizen panelists, who were then analyzed by expert panelists, one citizen named Sandra said, “I hate to be called a girl or lady.” Citizen #2, Maria, laid bare the duality of her Mexican heritage as “the rape of the European father of my Indian mother.” Citizen #3, Belle, complained that entertainment power brokers “are white males. . . . I want to see my race portrayed equally, because my children are going to suffer. If they turn on the TV and see negative stereotypes, that’s all they think they can be.” Citizen #4, Dave, had a recipe for finding Hackney-like commonality: “Instead of saying “Asian- American,” maybe ‘American-Asian’ is a better description.”

Playing the stock Hackney character of the graceless “I’m-white-but-all- right” boot-licker was Citizen #1, the aforementioned Sandra, who went into over-compensation mode: “But we love our black friends. We love that our street has Mexicans.” Why, she even dances at B.B. King’s joint, attends Native American fairs, and eats at Mexican restaurants because “there are so many things that are more fun than whitebread culture, which is actually pretty dull.”

And about her daughter’s black boyfriend, Sandra was rhapsodic: “Ricky’s a great guy! I love him. I know he’s black. He’s 6’4″ and very dark. It’s not like I look at him and see a white guy, but it’s great!”

If there was one lesson to be gleaned from this Conversation, it’s that Caucasians yearning to relate can be painfully awkward. There was the example of one conciliatory citizen trying to draw a distinction between independent West Indian blacks and American or “home-grown” blacks taught self-hatred by a white dominant majority.

This caught the attention of “expert” panelist Maulana Karenga (best known for inventing Kwanzaa and doing time for torturing a young woman, respectively), who pounced in his Cosby-meets-Yoda gurgle. “Can you imagine somebody saying “home-grown white folks’?” he said. “How do you grow blacks? That kind of language imprisons and degrades. You can’t do that to black people talking about you domesticate them as if they were animals.”

Karenga also took over the “Shades of Law” Conversation. He bemoaned the ” blue code of silence” under “the state of siege” to “ensure and perpetuate the domination” of blacks, many of whom are not imprisoned but “in captivity.”

This caused South Pasadena police chief Thomas Mahoney to get his Irish up, at least until he let it be known he had an Asian-American (American-Asian?) wife. Citizen Pam experienced “a major paradigm shift” when Mahoney explained his matrimonial orientation. She had first viewed him with skepticism but now realized: “No, he made an intimate commitment with this cultural diversity.” The result? “I could listen to him better.”

This seemed like the kind of breakthrough Hackney had anticipated. But when I asked Hackney why he’d allowed a noted bomb-thrower like Karenga to intrude on his Conversation, in violation of Conversation Kit ground rules 2 and 3 (” All participants will show respect for the views expressed by others” and ” Speakers will be brief, no one will monopolize the conversation”), he convincingly pled ignorance about the entire project. After all, he said, those holding the Conversations in localities across the nation have near- complete autonomy once NEH’s grant money is in hand.

Could this be the same Conversation Hackney K.described in November as having “the integrity and currency that draws people along across the tiger pits of discord and suspicion”? It seems instead to illuminate the oxymoronic cross-purpose of exploring our collective identity as individuals. In Hackney’s Conversation this is the coming together of people to exacerbate our differences, celebrate our slights, rail against perceived injustices — all of which should help us harness the ephemeral quality of collective identity, moving us forward as a cohesive unit.

But even with this garbled objective aside, the Conversation is often lacking even as intelligent discourse “enlightened by the humanities.” Consider this exchange during one of the L.A. panels:

Citizen: “When you say “American” because we are North American, there are also South Americans. Mexicans are Americans because they live on the continent of South America, so if you really want to throw a monkey wrench into what is an American, deal with that.”

Host Larry Mantle: “Perhaps “United Statesians’ would be a better term.”

Of course, one must make allowances for human frailty and shortcomings. Such are the pitfalls of free-wheeling discussion. Tolerance is part of the package, and although it is virtuous to love all God’s children, two things are certain: a) You wouldn’t want any of these children operating on you, and b) any epiphany harvested from contact with said children should probably be discarded immediately.

This truth became self-evident after examining the Tucson writing project at the University of Arizona (funded by a $ 30,000 NEH grant), of which Hackney had no recollection. This was a crying shame, since it strikes at the very essence of his notion of a collective identity: a collaborative writing project whereby the author has to incorporate thoughts of other group members and spit them out in their own unique narrative.

Funding publication of such a project yields all the negatives of an undergrad creative writing program (bad prose, self-indulgent prose, vomit- inducing prose) while negating the only positive: making sure it stays within the confines of a university campus.

Here’s a passage from the pilot program from which the grant was received: ” ! am committed to our special family. And so are my friends. That’s why we hang out in the parks and do drugs. To share in the experience together. To talk. Before the days are gone.”

And here’s an offering from a college-bound flower after having her first sexual experience with her boyfriend, “a gifted artist and a pot smoker”: “I went to kiss my mother goodnight and she remarked about my flushed cheeks. Without thinking, I practically flung my arms around her neck in preparation for a passionate kiss. I managed to reverse the impulse in time to make it a mother-daughter peck but wondered whether she had noticed the unusual duration and strength of my embrace. This new kind of kissing was quickly becoming second nature.”

If one is struck by a sort of pre-teen sheen permeating the Conversation, like a remedial civics class, it gets even more elementary. Take the Occidental College Conversation, where participants from mixed Caucasian and low-income Latino neighborhoods outside Los Angeles sat in groups at round tables covered with construction paper maps and 64-pack Crayolas.

At one table, a Kiwanis club retiree grilled three Latino high-schoolers attending for extra credit, asking each, “Are you in a gang?” Reuben, with his goatee, hoop earring, and too-cool-for-the-room grimace, shrugged, “No.”

One elementary-school teacher in a phlegm-colored V-neck, thick glasses, and macrame hair piped in: “Gang members are regular people, it’s not like they’re from another planet.” This, after her candid disclosure that she chose to live in the neighborhood because it “had great diversity.”

“But hey, you don’t have to go bad,” said the Kiwanis guy. “You turned out all right, so did Juan and Miguel and everybody here.” This was a testament to his acute instincts, considering he’d just met the youths minutes before.

The teacher and an Occidental College student concurred that all these kids and adjoining neighborhoods were victims of negative media stereotypes. The teacher moaned that they never picked up on positive images at her rough-and- tumble school: “In December we had a poetry reading, and there wasn’t one camera there.”

Another bubble-headed teacher from a better school district chimed in: “Our cheerleaders were on T the other day,” to visible flinching from her tablemates. And then they mapped, drawing crayon lines to their most visited spots: friends” homes, Thai restaurants, hardware stores (this was the Kiwanis guy).

As the macrame-haired teacher strained to draw her school route, the cheerleader-loving teacher asked, “Do you want me to draw for you?”

Macrame (snidely): “No, I have a feeling you don’t know the area.”

And then they surveyed their work. Cheerleader: “I see some definite intersection here.”

Macrame: “Gee, we’re so close to each other.”

Success! And it’s not the only one. There are other reports of similar successes in the NEH propaganda, such as this testimonial from a retired West Virginia school teacher: “I left so revitalized by the sincerity, frankness and respect among participants that I wish I were 20 years younger.” Another project director claimed he was fortunate enough to hear a woman remark as she left, “This is how I want my tax dollars spent.”

That can be arranged. With only one more official grant cycle left for the National Conversation (in March), Hackney’s formal initiative will officially end. “But if other grantees apply and say we really like what you guys are doing, like the American Library Association,” says NEH spokesman Jim Turner, “we may well determine the projects they ran were so successful that, hey, let’s do it again.”

Odds are the American Library Association may want to give it another go, since the first Conversation grant to this estimable group cost taxpayers $ 383,000. Indeed, it appears most people are receptive to receiving free money from Hackney. Many of the project directors I spoke with, when asked about Hackney’s concept, said, “I was skeptical at first, but . . .” Amazing how that skepticism unanimously receded after the grant checks had been cashed!

This year, the NEH’s budget has been cut to $ 110 million, a 36 percent reduction. That puts a crimp in the inarguably productive functions of the National Endowment for the Humanities, tasks like historical and newspaper preservation and the collection of presidential papers. But because each state has a humanities council, and because the percentage of the endowment’s budget that goes to the state humanities councils remains the same, a formal initiative by Hackney is not necessary to continue the Conversation if people desire it.

One of the Conversation’s few congressional critics, Ralph Regula of Ohio, hopes that won’t happen. Bringing people together, he says, “is nice, but I could do that without spending a dime. I don’t think you need to formalize it. And after you’ve had it, what do you do with it?” Hackney knows what to do with it: He’ll write a report sometime in the fall, and is almost certain it will be published.

And between now and then? Conversationeers will collude in fits of metaphoria. Because as Hackney said in November, the Conversation “is at flood tide now, so I invite you to launch your own deep-draft vessel, either with or without flotation devices. . . . The harbor is big enough for many ships.”

Metaphors are an integral part of Hackney’s American identity. He’s given great thought to the subject, since “the melting pot . . . doesn’t account for the cultural persistence of pre-American identities” and “‘mosaic’ or ‘quilt’ imply ‘sharp and permanent boundaries between groups.'”

One of the Conversations was titled “Educational Melting Pot or Salad Bowl?” Hackney once toyed with “salad” as a metaphor because he said the flavors ” bleed over” and because, according to him, the phrase e pluribus unum comes from a Virgil poem about salad. But which is the right salad? There are so many: taco, Jello, pasta, three-bean.

An Ames, Iowa, panelist thought it useful to think of America as a “tossed salad,” while another described it as “a stew, sitting on the stove for a long time, and some of the little parts you don’t know what they are anymore, but some of the things stay in as chunks.”

And then it struck, right there in a Hackney piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Jazz! Why of course — with its indigenous non-hierarchical structure, born as a disdained expression of a marginalized group, jazz was the answer all along. Not salad. Jazz.

Thus the fruits of the National Conversation: pedantic multicultural blasts from rancid academics, ethnocentric turf-spraying all over your Sunday suit, and a $ 6 million quest for the appropriate American metaphor.

By Matt Labash