USA Today’s Andrea Mandell’s email account must be burning up with panicky press releases from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting – each reminding her of all the “great cultural works” those agencies have brought us.
She’s combined them into an article in Tuesday’s USA Today to show us the kind of great art and culture we’ll have to do without after Trump’s Philistine budget cutting. And it isn’t just Sesame Street and PBS’s other insipid kids’ fare. We’re talking important art.
Did you know your taxes have underwritten Quentin Tarantino’s torture-porn flick Reservoir Dogs? Or the seminal tranny agitprop Boys Don’t Cry?
You bought The Color Purple (and given that it launched Whoopie Goldberg’s career, you may want your money back.)
Did you know, asks Mandell, (or maybe it’s the NEA talking points):
… that the NEA has provided early and critical funding for 18 Tony Award-winning plays and 15 Tony award-winning musicals? Those hits include Fences, Annie, A Chorus Line, Rent, War Horse, Into the Woods, Angels in America, Rent and Lin-Manuel Miranda's pre-Hamilton hit, In the Heights.
A Chorus Line and Angels in America? Worth every penny to the coal miner and auto mechanic and rancher who helped foot the bill. Same thing with American Film Institute alumni who studied on the taxpayers’ dime to make movies nobody watches.
It’s not just entertainment. King Tut made it to the States in 1976 “with help from a $300,000 NEH grant. For that kind of cash, I hope he enjoyed himself.
Mandell seems never to have given thought to whether there might have been other ways to fund these projects, or whether the government should be in the business of subsidizing art. Ironically, there’s a parade of names throughout her 10 items – Spielberg, Tarantino, Morgan Freeman, Terrence Malick, Hillary Swank – all capable of funding their own projects.
And that gets to an important point: if projects are worth doing, they’ll get done. Do we need more experimental films about lesbian bondage enthusiasts prison among the Gulf Coast shrimping community? Or art installations that force viewers to contemplate the power relationships that impact urinal design? Maybe. And people are free to invest in them.
There’s a sucker born every minute.
