Word: neh
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...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. The NEH and CPB are also in peril...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...bravely pledged to put a stop to this. They promise, for example, to eliminate such federally subsidized beachheads of the academic left as the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. (The nea, you will remember, funded Piss Christ and the Mapplethorpe show. The neh, more recently, helped fund U.S. history standards that contained 19 references to Joe McCarthy and McCarthyism, and not one to Robert E. Lee or Thomas Edison or the Wright brothers.) The endowments' grantees of progressive and independent vision live, of course, at the teat of the taxpayer, a parasitism...