Jim McDermott
United States Congressman JIM McDERMOTT
TCG National Conference, June 18, 2005
Jim McDermott
INTRODUCTIONS:
JOAN CHANNICK, Deputy Director, TCG; Director, International Theatre Institute/U.S.
We talk about the general theme for each day being a little different. The first day was about context; the second day was about understanding. Today, our final day, is about mobilization and action. Today’s sessions are intended to help us focus on what we as a field and what TCG as a service organization can do to move our art form and our society forward. I want to introduce Gary Anderson, who is TCG’s vice president and the artistic director of Plowshares Theatre Company, to introduce our first speaker. [applause]
GARY ANDERSON, Producing Artistic Director, Plowshares Theatre Company; Vice President, TCG Board of Directors
Good morning. It is a challenge to really understand the process of what a public servant is. In many cases, we have examples of them who actually don’t serve the public but expect the public to serve them. We’re very fortunate today to have a speaker who understands the necessity of doing service to the public: Jim McDermott.
Here’s a man who, after 15 years serving the State Legislature here in Washington, decided to end a career so he could actually go to Africa to assist in working with psychiatric services in Zaire, dealing with AIDS, in the Peace Corps. Here’s a person who understands the importance of being a citizen in this world, not just in this country.
We’re very fortunate to have him here today to talk about not only issues of public policy but also issues of advocacy. So I want this group to make some noise today when he comes up on this stage, you hear what I’m saying? I want you to make him aware of the fact that his time invested here is important, not only to us, but to the policies that we need to make action on in Washington, D.C.
So, without further ado, I want to thank Honorable James McDermott. [applause]
JIM McDERMOTT
Thank you. Thanks you very much, Gary, for a warm introduction in my own hometown. This is a nice place, isn’t it? I mean, if you haven’t had a good time here, there’s something the matter with you. [Laughter]
When you come up to give a speech like this, I often think of the story of the young man who graduated from one of the eastern colleges in 2000 and couldn’t find a job, so he went down and got a job at the census. And he was sent out to a rural area of the United States and went up to a little house off the road somewhere and knocked on the door. And the door opened about three inches. And a voice inside said, “What do you want?” And this young man said, “Well, I’m here to take the census.” And the voice inside said, “What’s that?” And the young man said, “Well, sir, once every 10 years the United States government goes out to find out how many people live in the United States.” And there was a long silence, and then finally the voice inside said, “You came to the wrong place.” [laughter] And the kid, not to be put off, said, “What do you mean I came to the wrong place?” And the voice inside said, “I don’t know how many people live in the United States.” [laughter]
Now, when you came in here this morning, I don’t know what you came in here to hear. But I’m going to talk about what I think is an extremely important role that you play in this society.
This is a city where arts are very important. It has got arts at every level, from the community level right up on to the best, the world-class things at the top of the heap. And we have ACT, and Intiman, and this theatre, the Seattle Rep, which has been there for as long as I’ve been here. These are theatres that are well-established, well-supported and have long histories.
And we owe a debt of gratitude to people like Peter Donnelly, who has done with the corporate council for the arts what needs to be done in getting the support from the community. There are people like Judith Whetzel, who was the woman who put—through her husband who was a Republican senator, Republican senator in the state legislature—they put in the One Percent for the Arts program. I mean, these kinds of things have happened in this city because single individuals have done it.
And a lot of times people say, “Well, I’m only one person.” Well listen, Margaret Mead said that nothing happens in a society except a very small group of people decide, “We’re gonna do it.” That’s the only way it ever happens. It isn’t some mass movement that starts out of nowhere. It starts with one person, whether it’s a Gandhi or a Judith Whetzel or a Peter Donnelly or whatever.
And I think you have to keep that in mind when you’re really thinking about your whole question of advocacy. This is an absolutely critical time for you to be advocates. In case you missed it, the Republican majority running the House of Representatives voted a few days ago to replace PBS on your television with a test pattern. It’s going to be a two-year program; the committee voted to eliminate the federal program so that those radical left-wing programs like Sesame Street and Clifford the Big Red Dog won’t be on there anymore—I mean, they’re such a threat to our society we have to get rid of them. They also voted to slash the money for PBS in terms of digital programming and the whole upgrading of the system. They really want PBS to wither and die.
Now, it isn’t all bad there: They didn’t go after the NEA this year. They actually added $10 million. So there are some rays of hope. And that’s why you have to hopeful and optimistic and push.
They really, however, believe that there is no place for the public money to be spent in the arts sector and it really is a fundamental belief that you have to understand when you go to see them.
You’ll listen to George Lakoff shortly after me; he’s good at talking about how to frame talking about what you want, when you go and talk to these people. Now, they really are pushing to commercialize public television, to make it a wasteland like all the rest of television is. And this is a basic theme of what they’re doing: The privatization is not just in this area, it’s all through the government. Everything should be privatized, everything should be done through the private sector, there’s no role for government.
But if you look back at things, how did things get started, without a government? Without the support of the government, most of the things that happen in this country would not have happened.
PBS has always relied on the good will and the political neutrality of Congress. In other words, its funding has been at the mercy of an ongoing appropriation. And I make that distinction, because I’m going to talk about something a little later. This is a year-by-year thing where you have to come in and say, “Please, give us some more money for this year.” That process is one that has gradually got less and less mercy shown in it, and in fact they really are out to get rid of it.
I hope that there’s enough outrage in this country among people like yourselves and the rest of my constituents and the country generally that they will discover that the American people treasure PBS and don’t want it to go away. Because clearly, in my view, under this kind of administration, this radical right government, there is no artistic endeavor in the United States that is safe. As far as I’m concerned, this Republican act toward PBS is just like book-burning. They don’t want alternative ideas to be put out there. They don’t like guys like Bill Moyers, who talk straight to power, they don’t like anything that doesn’t go down the company line. And they are working very assiduously in many different places to make that happen.
If we let that happen, the bright light of reason and free speech in America will grow a lot dimmer. While PBS is a target, many of your organizations are mere casualties in the ongoing world of perpetual funding. And it’s not, I don’t think, that America doesn’t care about the arts or adequate funding. Rather I think America expect the leaders to figure it out and come up with something more reasonable and safe from the extremists who are now in Washington and in control.
As varied as America is, I don’t know that one solution will fix the whole country. One size doesn’t fit all—you know all your theatres are different. They’re funded differently, you have different audiences, you play to different aspects of your community, so us putting out one program from Washington simply would be nonsense. It would never work. We need the variety and the diversity that you have.
I did something, which I want to talk about, when I was in the state legislature. I don’t usually blow my own horn, but there aren’t many people from Seattle here so I can tell you what happened.
This is about 20 years ago, 1985. And arts organizations all through this country were struggling. You remember, those were the Regan years, when business was not doing well and the interest rates were up and it was a whole big mess and we held a lot of hearings. I was the longest sitting member of the arts commission, the Washington State Arts Commission. I was there 15 years.
I told somebody earlier that one day the majority leader came up to me and said, “Doc, do you go to plays?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “You’re on the arts commission.” [laughter] That’s how those decisions get made, by the way.
And as I listened and watched for those years that I was on the commission, it was clear to me that we needed a really stable form of funding. As you know, the most important thing that happens in any city is not the arts. It’s sports! I know you know that. You try to deny it, I know you do it all the time, you deny, no no, the Mets and the Yankees and the Kansas City Royals, no, they’re not as important as we are—but you’re wrong. [laughter] So the legislature decided one day, we’re going to give King County—King County’s where you are right now, that’s the county Seattle sits in—it’s Martin Luther King county, by the way, and that’s changed from the other king, whoever he was, I don’t know, we changed the name. [applause] But this county decided they were going to have a King Dome. So they put together a bill in the legislature for bonds.
And we were going to have a hotel/motel tax. So we put a hotel/motel tax. Now, the reason you have a hotel/motel tax—I’ll tell you the secret. Russell Long from Louisiana, who was the Senate finance chairman, when he talked about tax policy always said: “The basic thing is this. Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax that guy behind the tree.” [laughter] And we’re always looking for the guy behind the tree. Well the guy behind the tree is the guy who arrives in a jet airplane, or drives into the state unsuspecting, and there we are we pounce on him. [laughter] With the hotel/motel tax. You look at your bill tomorrow when you leave here, and you’ll know what I’m talking about. [laughter]
And that money ultimately, when they started this thing, there wasn’t enough money in the hotel/motel tax to pay off the bonds. So we had to subsidize it with state money so we could keep paying off the bonds, and we went a long ways and we got a new owner for the baseball team. And he was from southern California and didn’t have the same views we have in Seattle about some things. And he came to me in the state legislature and said, “I see there’s a little excess there. I need it for my baseball stadium.” I said, “What do you need?” He said, “I need $5.4 million. I need a rug and I need a new scoreboard and I need skyboxes. Otherwise this baseball team’s gonna fail and we’re gonna move it out of Seattle.” Well, you know, the ways and means chairman can’t be in charge of letting the team get away, right? I mean, everyone’s going to say, what kind of guy are you? So I said to him, finally, “Okay, I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you the excess of $5.4 million. But all the rest goes to the arts.”
Well, at that point, there was no excess to give to the arts. So it didn’t look like much of a problem to anybody. And I talked to the arts organizations and they said, “Yeah yeah yeah, someday, someday.” And didn’t believe it would really happen—because they never believe a politician.
But what I did was I started something in ’85 that by about ’87 or ’88, suddenly King County Council winds up with $30 million. And they’ve got to decide what to do with it. Well, you can imagine if I threw $30 million up here and said, “All of you can come up and grab a bit of it, if you can.” [laughter] I would be run over! I mean, I’d have to get back off the stage for fear I’d get stamped to death. And that’s what happened in the county council.
Some interesting things happened. Obviously, schools had been cutting out art and music and so forth, so some of the money that would have gone to the opera and to the arts and to the various things went to the schools, and that was quite a push-pull in the community around that time.
Time passed, and that King Dome became, obviously, passé—I mean, we’d had it for 20 years, right? So, one day we had a grand and glorious day where they blew the thing down and imploded over here. But we’re still paying off the bonds. We’re paying off the bonds, and in fact the bonds are going to run out here in about two or three years.
Now, the legislature is going to have to extend the hotel/motel tax. And what I’ve said to the arts community in this city is: Get mobilized and don’t lose it all! Because everybody’s looking at that pot of money and saying, that’s what we need!
I know you’ve all done a study—there isn’t a single one of you in here who hasn’t done a study in your city on how much it brings in to have the arts in the community. That it actually brings in probably more than the Cincinnati Reds or the Chicago Cubs or whatever. And you know that. But getting legislatures to believe and understand that is the trick.
You probably have a hotel/motel tax. Everybody has one. And one of the things that I’ve always told people is, don’t go for the whole banana, for heaven’s sake. Just get a little piece of it. You’d be surprised how little pieces grow and grow and grow and grow. That’s how we got $30 million. I don’t know what the actual figure is, you could find out from somebody from King County here, today, but they are distributing a huge amount of money on a regular basis, in basically what’s a King County Endowment for the Arts. It is not subject to appropriations every year, and I make this distinction. The reason you want it from a dedicated source is it comes in and goes to you. You don’t have to go down and beg for it.
And you could get, if you would work on your legislatures, you can get them to put a small amount in there for the arts and you know, some of you will get more than others, because you’re a little bit more aggressive, aren’t you? I mean, some of you are! I know some of the people in my city are more aggressive. [laughter]
But the arts, as you know, are the soul of a society. They are what stimulate us to think, to feel, to see something in another way. To broaden us. And they are essential in a society which is being dumbed-down, if you will, by looking at television, and the conglomeration of the media to one way, and everything is pushing us down to a narrower and narrower view of things. And the arts are the explosive part of the society that allows us to continue to think and create and think about things that we never thought were possible.
Every one of you in this room can do this. There isn’t anyone in here who isn’t capable of it. First of all, you’re not wallflowers, for heaven’s sakes. And you know how to go out and meet people and talk to people. What you have to do is think about who you’re talking to. Me, right?
George will help you a little bit in the next hour—I don’t know if he’s here, he may be listening—but the fact is that, I said to somebody down here, we all like celebrities. You’d be surprised how far I would go to put my arm around some beautiful person and have a picture taken with her, or him. So that I could put it on my website and say, well, today Congressman McDermott...
I have a good relationship with Bono. [laughter] I got that going for me, right? Bono and I have worked together on a number of issues around Africa, and around debt relief and around the AIDS epidemic. When I was in Africa in ’87, ’88, I saw the epidemic exploding and came back to the Congress and have been involved in that whole issue. He and I got together because he is a very very honest advocate for Africa and for the huge problems of the continent. But you’d be surprised, I’ve been with him when people just elbowed you out of the way to get next to Bono so they can have a picture on their website.
You have celebrities who come into your community at all times, some are resident there. They are well-known. And they are putting on shows and doing things in your community. And there shouldn’t be a show that you don’t get a member of Congress or a member of the State Legislature to come and see it.
The best ones, I’ll tell you the best ones, not only for the older folks—I mean, people look and say gee, what about, I could have him come in the evening and we’ll introduce Congressman so-and-so’s down in row three, blah blah blah—but the ones you do in schools. Now why do you go to schools? I go to schools all the time. Especially high schools, but I also go to middle schools. Because they are going to be voters. [laughter] And I want them to know who I am so that when they get there—and they’ll go home and tell their parents they saw Jim McDermott, Jim McDermott told them about this or talked about this or that. And you can get a wonderful... You remember that famous thing in Fahrenheit 9/11, where George Bush was in that school reading to those kids, right? [laughter] While the towers were going down? Why was he there? Well, let me tell you why he was there. Everybody wants that image—and you have the power to put them there.
You have the power to put them there. You’re the one that says, please come into my theatre and stand over here, or would you like to say a few things before we start the play tonight? Or whatever. You have that power. And if you don’t use it—well, you know, go ahead and do the bake sales, and you’ve all been to the auctions. [laughter] I mean, Lord knows, we’ve all been to auctions. [laughter]
I’ve been to so many auctions where I’ve auctioned myself off for a bag lunch or a tour through the Capitol or whatever. I finally, recently—something I started back in the ‘70s and I’m totally self-taught, but I started doing Sumi art. Brush-and-ink painting. And I know it’s not very good, but when I married my second wife I was throwing a bunch of stuff out and she said, ‘Oh, let me see what that is,” and she found one she liked and put it on the refrigerator door. [Laughter] You know, children’s art. [laughter] Well, it stayed there for six months and I framed it. Because I thought, if she really likes that, I’ll put a frame on it. We hung it up in the dining room. People said, “Oh, that’s an interesting... who did that?” And I began to realize that I may have a little talent occasionally, you know; even a blind pig occasionally finds an acorn. [laughter] And so now the Wing Luke Museum down here, which is the museum of Asian cultures in this city, has an auction every year, and I gave them one of my paintings and I sold it for $1000. I don’t know if it was the picture or it was my name, or whatever, but it was a thousand bucks and it was easier than having lunch with people. [laughter]
You are creative people. You are creative and you think and you set design and you come up with ideas. I was listening this morning on NPR to a story about Neil Simon and Sarte and No Exit and all these things, and I’m thinking to myself, I’m going to talk to people like that! [laughter] And you’ve used your creativity, but not in the way of affecting the public arena where we make decisions about money. Dirty old money. And you can do that.
My first tip to you—if you don’t remember anything else I say today—I want you to remember this. Never, never, never give me the opportunity to say, “Nobody ever told me about that.” If you don’t talk to me, I don’t know about it. I represent 690,000 people. They’ve got all kinds of things on their mind, and they come to me all the time. If you don’t come, I won’t know you have a problem. I won’t know that you have an idea. I won’t know that you might come to me and say, “You know, could we get a tenth of a cent on the hotel/motel tax maybe, to help the arts? We’ve got some experimental theatres in our area where we’re doing stuff with kids from the inner city, but we’ve got to get some money for this.”
We’ve got a program in Seattle called Tribes. Done by one actor who goes out to one school and puts up signs in all the English classes and says, “If you would like to act in a play about interracial questions, come to room 301 at 4:00.” And these kids come, and you know, this society today is: some like me, some white, some black, some white and black, some yellow, and yellow and white, some brown... And kids put on the most interesting plays about what it’s like to figure out who you are. What tribe do I really belong to—am I one of them, or am I one of these? And this guy has an endless problem of getting money to run that program.
And I’m sure you’ve got, that story is a Seattle story, but I’m sure you’ve got the same kinds of things going on. But no way to have any kind of stable funding. But you could go to your education chairman in the state legislature, or you could go to somebody who you know.
And let me say one other thing. I understand there’s some—I can’t see anybody, so I’ll just say—I know out here there are some Republicans. [Laughter] And I’m not going to point any fingers. Not, most of them, in my district, because I win by 80 percent, but... [laughter]
Don’t not talk to Republicans. Okay? Some of them have money. [Laughter] Comes as a surprise, right? Some of them do have money. Some of them actually know members of the legislature. Some of them even belong to clubs with them, like the yacht club or the golf club or the Rotary club or whatever.
And you have to think about how to use your board of directors. You ought to sit down with them and have a meeting and say, how many of you know a legislator? I don’t mean, not know their name, I mean know them. You’ll find there’s two or three or four in your board that know somebody who’s sitting in the state legislature who can be your point person. But you’ve got to find them. I mean, that’s the whole thing that is really there. And I think that if you will go after them, and then not give them the excuse of never being asked, you can have a huge impact.
And Rollo May said, there’s three steps to change. First step, got to be able to imagine it. If you can’t imagine skiing, you’ll never ski. If you can’t imagine putting on the Ring Cycle, you’ll never put on the Ring Cycle. If you can’t imagine someday going to Paris, you’ll never go.
Most people move to the second step, which is dreaming, wishing. They wish and they wish—I wish I could go to Paris, I wish I could do this, I wish I could do that.
The stage that counts—I mean, let’s take skiing. You can wish, and you can buy skis and poles and all the clothes, actually drive out to the ski lift, buy a ticket, ride to the top, and you are still wishing.
And then you enter the stage that matters: the stage of willing. That’s when you put your feet together and you lean forward and you start down the hill.
Now, a lot of things can happen to you going down the hill. I mean, some of you know about that because you’ve started companies. But this is the same thing with affecting the political process. You can affect what happens to PBS; you can affect what happens to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. You can affect how you are funded in your community, if you will take the challenge.
Lean forward—and good luck. Thank you. [applause]