WILLIAM PHILLIPS
175
not employ any African-Americans on its staff, and because there were no
African-Americans on its Advisory Board. As for the Advisory Board, it is
made up of people who agree with the policies of the magazine and
help support it financially.
(It
might be noted that the magazine has only
two paid staff positions, and that no African-Americans have ever applied
for any staff openings at
Partisan Review.)
To break the hold of the politically oriented cultural administrators,
the question of personnel is of prime importance. Therefore, I would
like to suggest a number of names of leading artistic and intellectual
figures, who do not represent political interests, for the councils of the
two endowments. In many cases, they could make the grants on their
own; in others, they would choose the members of the panels.
For the NEA, I would propose such figures as Saul Bellow, Philip
Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Robert Alter, Denis Donoghue, Hilton Kramer,
Karen Wilkin, Daphne Merkin, John Hollander, Norman Manea, Susan
Sontag, Joseph Brodsky, Czeslaw Milosz, Richard Wilbur, Edward
Rothstein, William Meredith, Rosanna Warren, Dana Gioa, John
Simon, Robert Brustein, and Jules Olitski .
For the NEH, a comparable council could be formed. Of course,
both endowments would have to be chaired by a distinguished artist and
an intellectual who are not part of the p. c. network and are also immune
to its pressures. Perhaps the transformation of the NEA and the NEH
would also influence legitimate and illegitimate opponents of the en–
dowments to support their continued existence.
Given the wide publicity the more flagrant missteps have received,
it seems that only a complete overhaul could save the endowments.
Defenders of the status quo claim that there have been only a few
questionable grants and that most of them have been perfectly accept–
able. This is simply not true, as anyone who has seen the list of grants
can testify. Public funding cannot be justified for grant projects that
not only are trendy and offensive but are also of low quality .
w.
p.
The Jewish (1) Film Festival
How do we draw the line between
artistic films that help us undercut the taken-for-granted, make some
sense of the incomprehensible chaos that surrounds us, and the portrayal
of this chaos in popular movies, sit-corns, and in documentaries? In other
words, how do we step outside of our own milieu and the pieties we
