There has been collusion between the White House Office of Public Engagement and the National Endowment for the Arts (the other NEA) to produce works that supported the Obama administration’s agenda. The 44-page transcript is posted on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood and newly launched Big Government site. “We’re going to need your help, and we’re going to come at you with some specific ‘asks’ here,” said Buffy Wicks, deputy director of the White House Office of Public Engagement. “But we know that you guys are ready for it and eager to participate, so one we want to thank you, and two, I hope you guys are ready.”
None of this surprises me. In an April 5, 1982 interview with Francis Ford Coppola, director of the masterful Godfather trilogy (actually, just the first two), he describes the “artist class” as “the nation’s headlights”:
“My dream is that the artist class—people who have proven through their work that they are humanists and wish to push for what Aldous Huxley called the desirable human potentialities of intelligence, creativity and friendliness—will seize the instrument of technology and try to take humanity into a period of history in which we can reach for a utopia. Of course, it is possible for the technology to be misused—we could end up with a Big Brother—but we could also have a balanced society, with an artist class leading the culture toward something approximating a happy family or tribe. At the moment, the nation is in a fog, and we’ve got to put our headlights on. Artists—those who rely on their intuition—can be the nation’s headlights.”[1]
Endnote:
**[1]**Francis Ford Coppola, “A Conversation with Francis Coppola,” U.S. News and World Report (April 5, 1982), 68.