The Ecstasies of John Frohnmayer

IT IS not often that one hears a high government official depart on wings of song. But John Frohnmayer, when he was sacked as head of the National Endowment for the Arts, burst into a rapturous rendition of the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts,” first at a farewell meeting with his staff, and again during a farewell speech at the National Press Club. This was all the more curious in that Frohnmayer sang this hymn of the Shakers—a now extinct Christian sect—as part of his attack on Senator Jesse Helms and the “fundamentalist religious Right” that he claimed was driving him from office. The departing NEA chief warned ominously that the deadly hand of the religious Right would soon fall on public broadcasting, then on government funding for universities, then on science. Who knew where it would end?

In Frohnmayer’s imagination, the Shakers appear to have been an altogether free and easy lot. But it is doubtful that this sect, perhaps the most puritanical to emerge from the early nineteenth century’s Great Revival, would have shared his appreciation of Andres Serrano’s NEA-funded photograph of a crucifix immersed in the artist’s urine, or of Ramona Lofton’s rap poem ‘Wild Thing,” celebrating the exhilarating rape of the Central Park jogger, which appeared in an NEA-funded publication. Frohnmayer might, of course, have heard from feminist colleagues of Mother Ann, who in Shaker theology was worshipped as the female element of the godhead. But the feminists would probably have relished as little as the Shakers seeing Mother Ann’s picture immersed in someone’s urine. After all, some things are sacred.

RG

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Richard Grenier

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IT IS not often that one hears a high government official depart on wings of song. But John Frohnmayer, when he was sacked as head of the National Endowment for the Arts, burst into a rapturous rendition of the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts,” first at a farewell meeting with his staff, and again during a farewell speech at the National Press Club. This was all the more curious in that Frohnmayer sang this hymn of the Shakers—a now extinct Christian sect—as part of his attack on Senator Jesse Helms and the “fundamentalist religious Right” that he claimed was driving him from office. The departing NEA chief warned ominously that the deadly hand of the religious Right would soon fall on public broadcasting, then on government funding for universities, then on science. Who knew where it would end?

In Frohnmayer’s imagination, the Shakers appear to have been an altogether free and easy lot. But it is doubtful that this sect, perhaps the most puritanical to emerge from the early nineteenth century’s Great Revival, would have shared his appreciation of Andres Serrano’s NEA-funded photograph of a crucifix immersed in the artist’s urine, or of Ramona Lofton’s rap poem ‘Wild Thing,” celebrating the exhilarating rape of the Central Park jogger, which appeared in an NEA-funded publication. Frohnmayer might, of course, have heard from feminist colleagues of Mother Ann, who in Shaker theology was worshipped as the female element of the godhead. But the feminists would probably have relished as little as the Shakers seeing Mother Ann’s picture immersed in someone’s urine. After all, some things are sacred.