Culture wars a comedy of errors

By RICHARD HORN

Sometimes in your merrier moments you must sit back and marvel at how our nation, collectively, is going out of its gourd.

Nowhere is this more evident than in two current skirmishes in our unending culture wars - the de-closeting of Ellen and the continued castration of the National Endowment for the Arts.

There's precious little left to be said about "Ellen," other than to congratulate conservatives for ensuring a huge viewership - far larger than the tired sitcom has enjoyed in many months. (It hasn't been truly funny since Martha Stewart turned up as Ellen's surprise dinner party guest two years ago, an episode that had zilch to do with the lead character's sexuality.)

Just two quick points about tonight's episode: First, the world will not change. Social critics fear this show in effect is recruiting gays and lesbians, but homosexuality has thrived for centuries without any help from American television.

"Ellen" need not even lead to more homosexuality on television had it not been for the efforts of conservative religious leaders. TV will only program more gay and lesbians if tonight's ratings are through the roof, and that's now been ensured by the vocal "Ellen" critics.

So Jerry Falwell, who already over the years has unintentionally done more to embolden gay activists than any other political leader, may now have helped bring more homosexuals to your screen.

Second, while the appearance of a gay lead character on a TV show is supposedly shocking, on another channel "The Shining" leads a bloody Blitzkrieg through American homes and nobody bats an eye.

This story was overlong when Stanley Kubrick told it in 2-and-a-half hours 17 years ago. Now we get six full hours over three nights to watch Jack Torrance terrorize and try to pulverize his family.

We see Jack's little boy being stung by wasps while he's asleep in bed, thrown across a room and chased by Demented Dad who's wielding an oversized croquet mallet. We see Jack crack his wife on the head and use the aforementioned mallet to pound her on the arms, legs and abdomen. We see her, among other things, smash Jack in the face with a croquet ball and slice him with a razor blade.

No one has complained about this family fun. No sponsor boycotts have been threatened. Even without any controversy it will be a ratings blockbuster. And yet "Ellen" is an outrage. Folks, we are one weird country.

Further evidence of this is on display up the road in Washington, where the annual battle over funding the National Endowment for the Arts has begun again and will soon conclude with the certainty all will live to bicker again next spring.

For several years, I have been one of the lonely liberals believing the NEA should be axed and fully funded by wealthy donors.

I don't know why I'm so lonely; liberals are supposed to want rich people to pay for more stuff. And in today's political climate art is one of the last things that should be left to our federal government, which is about to pull millions of children from its welfare rolls.

Thanks to politicians angry and scared about a small amount of controversy, the NEA's budget was cut last year from $170 million to $99.5 million and it can no longer award grants to individual artists. But the NEA has done plenty of damage to itself, as well.

To counter the flack, NEA leaders have turned almost exclusively to funding warm and fuzzy, middlebrow community projects. Or as Jacob Weisberg points out in Slate, the endowment's "survival strategy has been to slosh a thin gruel of artistic mediocrity around the country."

Other writers and artists have complained that as a result, many of the NEA's strongest supporters in communities around the country are establishment Republicans. The patrons who benefit the most are generally GOP voters.

Meanwhile, national Republican leaders continue to make the NEA their favorite whipping boy. Arts supporters are being played for chumps.

So while we're arguing about Ellen and watching a gruesome six-hour horror movie remake, we're spending $100 million of good money on an agency that's making no one happy except the people whose party wants to kill it.

Few sitcoms can offer better laugh lines.