Press
Arts Attack
What if the creative class governed? Emerson Dameron - May 19, 2005
"Jazz is a good metaphor for democracy," says Tom Tresser,
lead organizer for the Creative America Project. His Saturday
morning conference begins with poet Eileen Cherry Chander's rousing
selection from Langston Hughes' "Jesse B. Simple" stories, which
suggests that any good symposium needs an infusion of "jazz" and "jam." For
its part, this session's first act is punctuated with inadvertent
bursts of experimental noise. Mics feed back brutally. The Orange
and Green Lines rumble overhead. A few audience members, whom
the free Dunkin Donuts coffee hasn't fully awakened, give Tresser
skeptical backtalk. At one point, he leads us in a mumbling reading
from the Declaration of Independence. "Maybe we'll need some
rehearsal," he quips.
But Tresser's a slick speaker. In his earlier days, he managed
Chicago's Pegasus Players and performed Shakespeare. When his
PowerPoint presentation gets off to a rickety start, he recites
some classic monologues as he clicks away at his laptop. Soon
enough, his vision of political power for the "creative class" gains
steam. At his behest, the crowd channels its pride and Bush-era
frustration into hokey slogans.
We get "Create a New USA." We get "Creativity Is American." We
get "We are ImagiNation," a favorite. We do not get "Create Change," the
slogan for Columbia College, on the campus of which this talk
takes place. Many crabbier Columbia pupils flippantly interpret "Create
Change" as a promise of deadening barista-dom. Tresser wants
to squish that strain of thought.
He gravitated toward Creative America in 1990, in response to
philistine rabble-rousing from Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition,
which still taints discussion of large-scale arts funding. Tresser
encourages creative types to run for public office, to put their
hearts and ingenuity into innovative decision-making writ large.
His stats show how radical this is: While 38 million Americans
toil in what author Richard Florida calls "creative industries," their
representation in government is infinitesimal. Functional illiteracy
flourishes like kudzu, and recent legislation shamelessly encumbers
the First Amendment.
By the time Tresser steps aside, we're invigorated. He passes
the mic, allowing each attendee a brief introduction. James Hill,
a veteran organizer from Harold Washington's day, is perhaps
the most humble person here. Washington's ragtag mayoral campaign
comes up repeatedly, as does the Vietnam War, although the conference
skews young. One dry, purposeful speaker says he recently read
a few quotes from his boss in a local paper. "Almost everything
he said was a lie," he remarks. The boss appraised the company
at double its worth. "I wish that had been reflected in my bonus," says
the employee who showed up today, he explains, because "I still
believe in people."
