Word: nea
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There has been plenty of method in the anti-NEA demagoguery. At its root lies a sense of lost momentum, a leakage of power, in the far American right. The cold war thawed out after 40 years and left its paladins standing with wet socks in the puddle. "And now what shall become of us, without any barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution." The words of the poet Constantine Cavafy -- shh! a Greek homosexual! -- apply quite well to the right's dilemma...
...political-action committees in Washington, a direct-mail operation that pulled in $1.4 million in 1989. The strength of its mailing list, combined with those of right-wing religious groups like Donald Wildmon's American Family Association and Pat Robertson's 700 Club, has kept the bombardment of the NEA going strong...
...nice diversion: a punitive hullabaloo, casting the NEA as the patron, if not of Commies, then of blasphemers, elitists and sickos. The arts grant becomes today's version of the Welfare Queen's Cadillac. And if the NEA is trashed or even dismantled in the process, so much the better: it only shows that the post-Reagan right still has teeth...
Last year the U.S. Government gave the NEA $171.3 million to support theater, ballet, music, photography, painting and sculpture throughout America. Compared with the arts expenditures of other countries and with the general scale of federal outlays, this is a paltry sum. In 1989 France, with less than a fourth the population of the U.S., spent $560 million on music, theater and dance alone...
...abolitionists like Rohrabacher, isn't that the point? "If the NEA disappears, art would still prosper. If funds for the NEA are cut, the private sector will surely fill any holes and gaps that remain...