A funny question, isn’t it? Lots of countries in the world have a Ministry of Culture, yet the United States doesn’t. Is this shrewd or senseless? Probably neither: It’s just the way it is. While the current American government operates with the help of sixteen departments, George Washington’s cabinet included just four: state, treasury, war and justice. As time went by, the number of departments grew, but it seems that nobody ever thought that America needed a governmental body in charge of cultural matters.
I am an American citizen, and I have been on the air in the States for quite a while, working as a TV reporter (with considerable national popularity, to put it without any feigned modesty). Hence, I had numerous chances to ask such questions publicly, and I would get a hundred different answers, either tongue-in-cheek, or serious, or marked with the h’m-type perplexity: “Why should we bother ourselves with a department of culture if we have no culture?” or “Culture doesn’t need to be controlled by the administration,” or something like this: “Good question, never thought about it, could be a good idea!”
Most Americans hate big government, but they can’t help it. There were attempts in the past to get rid of the department of education, but they still have it on a certain level of operational indispensability, like general enlightenment methodology or overall trends and directions in the field. An administrative body in the field of culture has never materialized in the over four-hundred-year history of the nation, and so surely there are reasons for this attitude to culture as such. The predominant thought in American society is that culture is well taken care of without need of special departments in the government. For instance, the national monuments are preserved by the National Park Service; to take care of museums and libraries, they have the famous Smithsonian Institution; the National Endowment for the Arts vigorously promotes the fine arts; linguistic standardization is managed by special patterns and services in unison with the demands of the market. America does all these things without syndicating them into one official body.
If a stray question is asked all of a sudden, as to whether America even has a culture to protect, Americans will forthwith provide a prompt answer to the affirmative: “Jazz, blues, rock’n’roll, disco, rap, country, hip-hop, swing and boogie are all ours; we gave the world blue-jeans, T-shirts and miniskirts, bikinis and short shorts; we fed them cheeseburgers and rib-eye steaks; we let them read into the most valuable literary pearls by the giants like Poe, Twain, Melville, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald and Hemingway; we let the world youth be educated at formidable enlightenment shrines like Harvard, Stanford and Yale; we supplied to the planet our constitutional democracy and sharp feeling of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness; we had the humanity enjoy god-and-goddess-like artistic figures like Audrey Hepburn, Clark Gable, Catherine Hepburn, Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, John Wayne, Paul Newman, Jack Nicolson, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Brad Pitt, Dustin Hoffmann and Meryl Streep, to name a few” – all of which have had an extraordinarily influential and unfading global effect since the turn of the last century.
Frankly, Americans would not be exaggerating in being so openly proud of all the above, and still, they have never needed any ministry of culture to keep all the enumerated assets in place and well taken care of. They believe that keeping up and maintaining national culture needs money, not the administration, and America is providing its outstanding culture with a huge amount of raised and charitable funds. It is good people, patrons of arts and culture, that do the outstanding, using their own money to keep the matters of American culture up and running, attaching no painful strings to their contributions as any governmental body would do.
Actually, this type of treatment of culture is an old Western tradition. Any royalty or nobility of even a lower rank in the past in Europe, or anywhere else, for that matter, understood well the value of literature, music and art, keeping up the idea of patronage over them by creating various endowments and foundations. The tradition is still ongoing. Incidentally, a governmental department of culture would only get in the way to benefit the beautiful. At least, this is how they conceive taking care of their culture in the United States of America. Is this what we should be doing in Sakartvelo, too? Not necessarily, but it makes a lot of sense to give a tolerant thought to what others are doing with excellence.
Op-Ed by Nugzar B. Ruhadze
