We seem to have room even in our very best outlets for news and information about art, science and culture for one and only one expert about anything. 

There's room for one serious documentary film maker, Ken Burns. Famously, in his series "Jazz," he relied on one Greatest Living Jazz Performer, Wynton Marsalis, one official jazz historian/theorist, Gary Giddens, and one official African-American contrarian, Stanley Crouch. (The topic of how many educated African-Americans white America can hold in its collective short-term memory is another, although closely related, issue. You're on in five minutes, Prof. West.)

There's room for one great cellist, Yo-Yo Ma. Poor Mr. Ma has to serve as the Ambassador for classical music as a whole so much of the time that I wonder he hasn't run away from home and taken up harmonica. 

In the last few years, we have room in our TV screens and prefrontal lobes for one official public scientist, Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Dr. Tyson seems to be kept so busy shuttling between NPR and LPB sound stages, Congressional hearings, and public events where he's expected to be the Face of American Science. He does a fine job, and is an appealing fellow to boot, but I bet he gets lonely in the green room.

History seems to be relatively well off. It is represented in by a Ray Milland/Rosie Greer composite of Doris Kearns Goodwin and a rotating cast of male historians. It's almost as if our own history were, you know, relevant or something. (Naah.)

John Adams has stepped willingly into the role of The Only Classical Composer (Opera Division) You'll  Need. His recent, quite entertaining autobiography helped quite a bit. But I can name another dozen living American composers that deserve the public's attention, and so can Adams.

The uniqueness property of America's public intellectuals and artists is a symptom of our historically  uneasy relationship with education and anything that requires an education to appreciate and enjoy. The first American composer (non-sacred music division) to speak American, Charles Ives, suffered a great deal of anguish over his commitment to, and talent for, an art that most Americans of his time and place (small-town New England in the last several decades of the 19th century) felt was OK at church services or county fairs, but no job for a decent, self-respecting family man. In those pre-Elvis years, musicians were looked down on as marginal characters (and marginal wasn't yet cool), possibly unsavory and certainly producers of nothing useful. Some of Ives's own misogynistic and homophobic fulminations result from a life of defensiveness about his talent and passion for music; in fact, he was a "closeted" artist for most of his adult life, living the life of a (phenomenally successful) insurance agent during the week, then writing music in the evening and on weekends. 

The Ives case aside, it didn't used to be quite this bad. In the post-Second World War era, we were actually proud of being an urbanizing, world-connected nation, one that had given shelter to many performers, artists, scientists and scholars who had fled the destruction of Europe. Energized by the Americanization of so much European art and culture, we produced Leonard Bernstein, a native-born great conductor, composer, performer, and (most importantly, for present purposes) music educator. His "Omnibus" broadcasts (later collected in his book The Joy of Music) proceeded from the assumption that knowing something about high art was a good thing. And this was shown on commercial TV. 

But now we seem to understand only vaguely that the arts have any value whatsoever, and science is only valuable when it churns out drugs that can be fed into the maw of our obscenely dysfunctional health care system, netting preposterous sums  for whichever corporation holds the patent. (As a friend of mine in biology once explained to me, most drugs are developed and marketed well before the basic research that explains how they work is done.) Right now, even in Louisiana, we have this insane notion that public funding for the arts, which amounts in total to something in the low seven digits, is a waste of money; meanwhile, the state is buying into a chicken farm that may or may not open sometime in the near future with an eight-figure subsidy.

 I can't help but think that the singularity of spokespeople for our arts and sciences is a troubling sign. If music, astronomy, drama, etc. were actually held in high esteem, we would need more than one spokesperson for each. Notice how Madoff is only the most reviled of the many Captains of Non-Industry that now decorate our TV screens, but we have only one astronomer, one cellist, one jazz trumpeter...An American composer I know who has lived in Italy for many decades once told me that the U.S. has plenty of great ingredients, but doesn't know how to use them. We were discussing food at the time, but I think his point is valid for many other fields of worthwhile human endeavor as well.