Word: nea
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...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 in two years...
This blitzkrieg reached the Senate last week. The Appropriations Committee sided with the House, voting to cut next year's NEA budget 40%. But there are still plenty of Republican voters (and not a few legislators) who would like to see their local symphony orchestra, town theater or children's art-education program survive, and know that the prospects of their survival are bound up with continuing, if modest, support from the NEA. Though the NEH and CPB will prove much harder to kill, the prospects of the NEA's survival in the long...
...government currently spends less than five-hundredths of 1% of its national budget on all forms of cultural subsidy--the equivalent of maybe five cups of diner coffee per citizen per year. In fiscal 1995 the NEH got $172 million, the NEA got $162.4 million, and the CPB got $285.6 million. Still, these modest sums exert large leverage on private and corporate patronage through "matching grants" (to qualify, the recipient must raise as much as $3 from the private sources for every federal dollar) and by the vitally important role played by the NEA and the NEH as Good Housekeeping...
...Ballet, generate more than $2 billion a year in tourist revenue. Not-for-profit arts, local and national, support 1.3 million jobs, yield $37 billion a year in economic activity and return $3.4 billion a year to the federal treasury through tax--some 20 times the budget of the nea. It is ludicrous to pretend that the NEA is a drain on the American purse...
Ultimately, culture reflects society -- for a violent nation, violent amusements. But if Senator Dole and his fellow conservatives are serious about elevating American tastes, they'd do better to encourage greater variety in culture than to seek to homogenize it even further. Let them increase the NEA budget until it at least equals that for military bands. Let them restore to the public schools the art and music and performance programs that have been cut in the name of "getting back to basics." Let them support public radio and television -- or not complain when the kids watch Beavis and Butthead...