The argument has to begin here: what is art? All of history tries to answer, a vast belch of theories and counter-theories.

How about this definition? Art is a way of thinking (out loud).

Of course, we all think all kinds of thoughts. Based on the public problems of noted moralists such as Jimmie Swaggart and Bakker, we all think "dirty" thoughts, too. So, why shouldn't art take on all thought?

Because we're scared, and like to be so. We used to be scared of Russia, but the Big Bad Bear of Communism turned out to be splotchy-headed, lovable Mikhail Gorbachev in a tattered, rented bear suit.

So now our permanent war-time economy needs a new war. Drugs work pretty well, because we can demonize funny-looking foreign folks like Noriega, and we're afraid of Latin Americans anyway (they don't want to speak American).

As for real drug users, they're poor and black and other minorities, so if they all OD, the rest of us -- the real of us -- will be better off.

Now, if there was only some way to do in the naysayers, the women who want to have their say with what we do with their bodies, the men who only want other men. Come to think of it, many of them feminists and faggots, they're artists (so they say). Why not put them out of work?

That's why we are told we should kiss the NEA goodbye. Robert Mapplethorpe, with his beautiful photographs of himself with a whip up his ass. Karen Finley, turning her naked body into a chocolate sundae, something you both want and refuse to devour. Andres Serrano, putting a cross in urine and photographing it, and calling it "Piss Christ."

Horrors! We (white, straight, moneyed males) are scared again, and having something to hate (besides ourselves) keeps us too busy to lock each other up for subverting the Constitution with the Iran-Contra Scandal and for selling the country into deeper debt with the S & L Scandal.

Well, white men of money, life is scary. Sorry. Art wants to admit that. The art that has Congress in an uproar throws all of sexuality, power, gender, commercialism, tradition, and morality into the air and makes those words up for grabs. It makes you think.

Oh, modern-day pure ones, don't be afraid to be afraid. The man who foresaw the end of freedom in 1984, George Orwell, had this to say: "The controversy over freedom of speech and of the press is at bottom a controversy over the desirability, or otherwise, of telling lies. What is really at issue is the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias, and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers."

So, while Mapplethorpe and Finley may be deluded, they are true to their truth. Mapplethorpe knew what it meant to be gay, to be ostracized, to be a pariah. His stunning photographs make what we most fear about homosexuality beautiful. Finley knows what it means to be a woman, an object. She takes her body back, and does more to it than we (us white, moneyed males) could ever dream to do.

Neither lets us be sure of ourselves, both make us question. Are we that insecure in ourselves, our sexes, our faith? Maybe that's the fear.

Yes, art is a moral issue -- it helps us make morals. Maybe Jesse Helms and Dana Rohrabacher should check some art out. In the meantime, don't let them speak for you, don't let them say, "The average taxpayer doesn't want money going to this." We spend $89,500 yearly to keep each of these men in office. That's four literature NEA grants, plus $9,500 change, for each Congressman. Anybody up for a trade?