Word: elitists
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...young velociraptors in Congress--freshman ideologues, mostly, squeaking with Newtish zeal--buried it three weeks ago. These boys and girls aren't even cultural Neanderthals. They're Jurassic. On culture, the limbic forebrain can hold one sound bite at a time, courtesy of Rush Limbaugh or George Will. PBS? "Elitist welfare for the rich." The NEA? "State-subsidized porn." The NEH? "P.c. revisionist history." By a vote of 230 to 194, driven by a rump of dozens of junior members, the House voted to "zero out" all funding for the NEA by October 1997 and phase out the agency...
...question is," said NEH chairman Hackney in a speech in San Francisco last April, "who are the real elitists? Isn't it insultingly elitist to assume that ordinary Americans are not interested in the humanities? Isn't it the ultimate arrogance to believe that 'culture' should be the private property of those who can pay for it? The NEH is, in fact, our best guarantee that our cultural heritage will be available to all Americans, regardless of how much money they make or where they live...
...conservative rhetors in Congress, whatever is not blandly or angrily populist is elitist. In their resort to this weasel word, the patriotically correct on the right are as bad as the politically correct on the residual left--worse, in fact, because they have more power. How all these folk would hate Thomas Jefferson if he walked back in with his idea that democracy was meant to foster a "natural aristocracy" of talent and intelligence. Naked elitism...
...concerned, there's nothing public about [PBS]," Gingrich crowed to a roomful of like-minded enthusiasts in Washington's Capitol Hill Club last February. "It's an elitist enterprise. Rush Limbaugh is public broadcasting." Yeah, and so is Howard Stern--and Jenny Jones is Ken Burns, and Tom Clancy is Toni Morrison. The fact is that no system with as broad and loyal an audience base as PBS repeatedly garners can be called elitist. A national poll conducted for PBS by Opinion Research Corp. indicates that fully 84% of Americans want to see PBS funding maintained or increased and that...
...bogus democratic criteria, the therapeutic fustian of "self-esteem" and "empowerment" through art for this locality or that minority. Leave that to state arts councils (if they still want it, which they shouldn't either); in art there should be no such entitlements. The NEA should be more elitist--rigorously so, in fact--and should hand out more money to fewer projects. It should wholeheartedly embrace the dreaded Q word: quality...