In the film Max about Adolf Hitler and his art teacher, there is a scene where a brilliant thought occurs to Hitler and he thunders “Politics is the new art!” He had just been exposed to performance art at a time when his own painting was stagnating.

In our own day, the political conversation in America deals with art in two different ways. Liberals generally allow for an artist’s right to exist, to be supported and to express her or himself freely. All too often, however, Democratic candidates themselves remain aloof from the subjective, sensory, emotional language that art uses. Meanwhile, the Republicans would cut funding for arts in the name of “fiscal responsibility”, as if the arts were impractical and inessential extras.

It would be a mistake to call that the end of the story. While Conservatives and Republicans tout the merits of simplicity, of non-frivolous practicality, they nevertheless use the tools of sensory language ruthlessly. Despite their public disdain for the “frivolity” of it for common people, they would never themselves choose to go without the power that it offers.

The result is that the majority of heartland Americans are caught in a snare. A no-nonsense practical people have no use for pink tutus on rocks and ponds. Many consider art and art education extra-curricular and inessential. They do not understand and don’t have time to learn the mechanics of it. And so generally speaking we, as a nation of the conservatives who elected the current administration, don’t understand the kind of manipulative power that emotional language, the province of the arts, can wield when it is in the hands of those who would have us believe that there is no such weapon. All the while the human hunger for significance – for the mythical, the archetypal, the emotional nature of the most powerful integrated art which is religion with its own emotional, sensory language – leads us by the gut when we catch scent of these things.

George W. Bush is good at playing the part of a simple, straight talking and uncomplicated man. He is the perfect mouthpiece for the grammar and color of a poetic vernacular that invokes religious and archetypal signifiers and concepts. In other words, George W. Bush is effective because he has co-opted the arsenal of inter-disciplinary performance art in the service of politics, the same way that marketers co-opt it in the service of sales, utilizing subtle esoteric details like how many plants in a restaurant will make us order the most expensive steak. Many of us would be surprised at the comprehensive and complex state of the “art” to which this science has reached.

Ironically, the wide berth that many Democratic and Liberal leaders and candidates give the artist and the creative modes of communication results in insulating themselves, and the artist, form relevance in the real world and from a political discourse that nevertheless crave emotional content. This makes radical course corrections inevitable, like the choice of Howard Dean to chair the Democratic Party. It is as though Liberals were self-conscious of the label “bleeding-heart liberal” to the degree that they veer hard away from emotional language in the direction of overly objective ways of promoting the liberal agenda.

Another reason liberal and academic language may be awkward with emotional content is that academic research sources are considered suspect and are often discredited when the writer’s bias is evident. At best, educated Democrats like John Kerry assume that people share this perspective, that they know the difference between subjective and objective language, and that they can tell when they are being manipulated by their emotions.

So during Kerry’s campaign he spoke from the intellectual standpoint that compartmentalized the language of art and poetic grammar in its own wing of the Ivory Tower. He underestimated two things. First, he underestimated art’s power to seep into life; to become all the inter-active and inter-disciplinary things that the avant-garde artists and scholars currently discuss. If liberals are going to be educated, they should keep up. Secondly, Kerry underestimated the people’s hunger for emotional, mythical and archetypal concepts; and that this unfulfilled hunger makes people susceptible to manipulation. Combine this with a lack of education about art – about how art and metaphors work to deliver the things we crave – results in a population that is easily controlled. A population educated in how art works cannot be manipulated by savvy marketers and politicians to the degree that this is happening today.

Art as a tool is a way of accessing forgotten and unconscious parts of ourselves so that we can re-integrate and re-assimilate them back into our conscious selves, into healthy, whole individuals. But we now live in an economic climate that tears most of us away from the leisure time that would provide us our rightful access to those tools. What we call practicality is a kind of new American subsistence living, an anorexic condition of a malnourished soul. We are malnourished of arts, quality culture, and the deep resonance between metaphors encountered there and the fundamental concepts in our religions. These are far from being “nice-to-haves”: it is dangerous to be without them. The sensory, poetic grammar and subjective, emotional language of the arts are like the useless Doberman Pincher puppies in George Orwell’s Animal Farm that disappeared early on in the story and later showed up trained to do the evil bidding of a tyrant. But we are actually worse off then the terrorized characters in Orwell’s book: we don’t realize what has happened and we think these dogs are here to guard us.

The reason we as a nation don’t realize what has happened is because what we crave has become repressed and unconscious. We consider art useless, yet we don’t know that we are incomplete without it. So when art-lanugage delivers something we have been doing without; the promise of time with our families, the American way of life if only we give up this or that “useless” thing, we gobble up the message raw. We do not pause to choose, to evaluate the facts or the evidence. In this political arena there is only one delivery mechanism for this drug. We ingest it and suddenly we feel like ourselves again, like some essential mineral has been replenished, and now back to normal we feel whole for a while.

What is happening is that we are being assimilated into a larger organism that does the decision making for us. As long as we don’t know that we crave something, as long as we don’t know how the delivery mechanism works for this something, we will always be manipulated by those that do. We will essentially be led around by the gut; by the unconsciously starved part of ourselves that longs for the trans-intellectual -- for art, for faith, and for the leisure to enjoy them.

It is perhaps the falseness of this promise of leisure that we will see through first. When the family is made to be the stopgap for everything, yet that family finds itself increasing on it’s own, on the run and strapped for time, be it quantity or quality, then the no-nonsense, practically-minded American people will begin to stir and consciously crave that universal access key to life as well as to art: having the time.

Alexandra Olenka Gadzik is a music and inter-media artist. She can be contacted through www.olenka.com.