of Representatives, because Oklahoma needs more of this kind of thinking in Washington. But it wasn’t just legislators who missed the point. The Superintendent of Schools, Janet Barresi, somehow managed to foul it back. (What’s new?) While saying the rally was “very impressive,” she added, “Like all the educators and parents who rallied at the Capitol, I believe Oklahoma’s public education system needs more money going to the classroom and not administration.” Yeah, that’s what the rally was about. Top-heavy administration. Even still, Blatt was upbeat and heartened by those who came to the rally, impressed by their very presence on a windy, chilly Monday. He heard from many who said they’d gladly give back the $29 they’d get from a proposed tax cut if it meant better schools. “I opened the speech with a Will Rogers quote,” he told me the day after the rally.
“Why?” “Because that’s what you do in Oklahoma.” “When you’re in a hole,” he told the crowd, quoting Rogers, “stop digging.” Problem is, not everyone sees the hole. From his prepared remarks: “Some of the plans in the legislature would tie a tax cut to a trigger, so that whenever revenues grow, there will be automatic tax cuts. But that’s the wrong trigger. How about we decide that we won’t cut our income tax until per pupil funding climbs back to where it was in 2008? How about no tax cut until our teacher salaries are no longer among the lowest and teachers no longer have to dig into their own empty pockets to buy school supplies for their students? How about no tax cut until our college graduation rate reaches the national average?” Yes, tax cuts. Always tax cuts.
They are the salve legislators put on everything. “So, the state has this roads fund and every year, come hell or high water,” he told me, “we increase the funding to roads—this year, something like $57 million— until the fund reaches something like 600-million. So, my thinking is doing the same thing for kids. But how do you actually get the legislature to fund kids as well as they fund roads? Well, maybe if you just paint a yellow stripe down the center of these kids.” Considering the expediency with which the rally’s goals were dismissed by the legislature, who knows if even that would work? As it turned out, the teachers who came to OKC that last day in March might as well have come with harpoons and tilted them at the Capitol like 25,000 Don Quixotes for all the good it did. With the tax cut approved, teachers will, in fact, get that $29 (maybe they can use it to buy school supplies
for their classrooms), the state legislature will keep making their job more difficult, and Mike Turner will continue talking about whatever it is Mike Turner is talking about. Still—still—March 31 was a good day, all things considered, for there were 25,000 who stood together in Oklahoma City, yelling, as one, about the future, about education, about children, and yelling at the right building.
(continued from page 6) McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, in their provocative new book, “The Second Machine Age,” argue that unless we start to think very consciously about what a job really looks like and radically expand our concept of what gainful employment actually is, we will suffer a job shortage of epic dimensions. The two asked, “the Industrial Revolution produced machines that required humans, but is the digital revolution rendering labor obsolete?” Late 19th-century America was a nation populated and defined by farmers. Fully 70 percent of the U.S. population was engaged directly in farming in 1870. Now, the metric is well under 2.5 percent of the working population. A change just as dramatic may be afoot in the not-too-distant future. The number of people working in art and the creative professions may—no, must—multiply very rapidly, and towns that have the tools, the atmosphere, the creative policies to buttress this transition will be, as Carol Colletta of ArtPlace, a collaboration of national foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts argues, among the most successful metros in the land.
We need to create a Kickstarter-like project in which Tulsa-area people contribute, together with our philanthropic community, to an “Annie Fund;” that is, a variation on the important Raymond & Nancy Feldman artist prize here in Tulsa, too small for this purpose. Kickstarter and a tiny set of similar ventures online manage portals to secure small donations from interested folks to finance small art, film, music, and other creative efforts. Our new Annie Fund, if it succeeds, would be used to identify and support promising new and maturing artists and creators, with a strong preference for artists who are already here. It’d be helpful during this process to use a broad idea of what a creative professional is and does. Included could be industrial designers, architects, filmmakers, writers, fashion designers, video-game developers, chefs, craftspeople, and visually inclined software engineers, plus visual artists, performing artists, musicians, and other folks we already think of as artists. We need to create and provide access to next-wave tools. Tulsa’s still-new Community Supercomputing operation should be readily available for the members of our creative community. Video-game
Our new Annie Fund, if it succeeds, would be used to identify and support promising new and maturing artists and creators, with a strong preference for artists who are already here.
communities across the country. Mid-career artists, like too many Tulsa professionals, rarely get an opportunity to take extended leave; in the case of creative professionals, it’s the roaring art enclaves that are calling, such as the ones in New York City, Austin, or San Francisco. Nationally renown painter P.S. Gordon, in a extended conversation I had with him and a colleague recently, reminded me that he left the state for NYC about a decade ago; he returned some months ago with the intention to remain here permanently. He said his long stay away from T-Town had helped him immensely. He told me that financing extended stays away for local artists might be an effective way to secure their return, and a grand way of exposing a large body of area artists to new techniques, styles, dealer and artist networks for the benefit of our artists and our status as an arts city.
THE TULSA VOICE // Apr. 16 – May 6, 2014
developers, special-effects pros, and digital-animation wizards could make fantastic use of high-performance computing; they’re already doing so across the country. Providing Tulsa-area artists with this kind of juice would be a retention and attraction tool of the first order. While we need more affordable rental units in Tulsa’s downtown, north Tulsa, and midtown, there may be a need to use public/private resources and Tulsa’s philanthropic community to craft new housing devoted to retaining and growing our creative community. Perhaps we should re-examine Tulsa’s salestax-fueled, Downtown Revolving Housing fund. Members of Oklahoma’s art community can learn loads from other places and other arts
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Horizontal drilling tax breaks unnecessary, The Collegian at The University of Tulsa, Jan. 27, 2014
“News from the Plains” appears each issue and covers Oklahoma politics and culture—the disastrous, the unseemly, the incomprehensible … you know, the day to day stuff. Barry Friedman is a touring stand-up comedian, author and general rabble-rouser.
Ray Pearcey, a technology, public policy and management consulting professional, is managing editor of The Oklahoma Eagle and is a regular contributor to The Tulsa Voice. NEWS & COMMENTARY // 11