Decentralization: New Frontiers And Old Dead Ends

Extract

“The problem, of course, is money.” As they used to say on the old radio program: Arthur J. Goldberg said it. The trouble is that everybody else has said it too, and though Arthur J. Goldberg was then Secretary of Labor and now Justice of the Supreme Court, he was a little out of order. For he ought to know that anything everybody is saying is true enough to be suspect. Money is a problem, let me not discount it; and the unions, and the movies, and the Play of the Week, and the mass media, and the proscenium arch, and fear of creeping socialism, and Minority Leader Dirksen (who helped kill the Federal Theatre by calling its plays “salacious tripe”), and the fire laws, and the decentralized hangover of Puritan morality, and “the youth of our country's culture,” and the fact that there is only one shining knight in tweeds, Tyrone Guthrie, to go around, and so on and so forth—but the true surd, the one vermiculate problem remains the people in the American theatre, those self-sacrificial lambs, who tell themselves that all the other problems are the main problem.