There’s a reason authoritarian types go after the arts first. Fragile, underfunded, subjective as hell—it’s easier to remove the arts rather than reckon with culture.
Sure, we won’t miss the silenced songs, shuttered theaters or unshelved books that we never liked anyway. But we’ll also never know the ones we were denied—the voices throttled before they reached us, or the ones we forsook while yoked to an algorithm that insists resistance is futile and bingeing sophomoric TV is self-care. That’s not culture; that’s hospice.
What we’re really watching is culture atrophy in real time. Perspectives narrow, appetites for resistance wither and before long even dissent goes out of print.
Which is why producing and supporting new, original local art isn’t a pastime—it’s a civic necessity. Freedom of expression is a 236-year-old covenant, radical in its insistence on the new, conservative in its insistence that free speech, press and assembly remain intact. And that’s all one needs to put on a show.
Art keeps the contract current. Stop making new art and one surrenders the very premise of freedom.
I’ve entered the “best defense is a good offense” period of my creative life. And in culture, that means making more art, not less—even if it offends. Especially if it offends authoritarians. Local art is harder to censor because it’s everywhere and nowhere: the mural on the café wall, the band at the bar, the poem at the open mic. It’s guerrilla defense—decentralized, abundant, unpredictable and impossible to silence. Whac-A-Mole meets Moleskine.
With libraries under siege, curricula gutted and funding stripped, it’s on us to buy the ticket, go to the show, toss a few bucks in the guitar case—or make something. Capture an imagination, free a heart. Every act of original creation is a line held against cultural amnesia and political erasure.
In this moment of suppression, local art is both shield and sword.
Sharpen up. The nation depends on it.
Daedalus Howell is editor of this paper, a filmmaker and host of ‘The Drive’ on 95.5 FM.
