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| JFK: "Art is the great democrat." |
So far, no word from President Obama on the Open Letter yesterday, which argued against his proposal to trim the National Endowment for the Arts budget. And no sign that he's going to restore the cut and continue to fund the endowment at last year's pitiful level. On the other hand, the Republicans in the House of Representatives flexed their muscles and wiped out several string sections in orchestras around the country by adding another $20.5 million in cuts. That's if the cuts were confined to string sections, of course. (We should point out that Oregon's lone Republican representative, Greg Walden, voted against the additional cut -- his district has lots of great arts groups in it and he did the right thing by them. All of Washington's GOP Representatives were full-fledged arts cutters.)
In the grand scheme of the budget, $20.5 million is nothing, of course. This is all for show -- muscle flexing, remember? But then so was the President's original budget number. The editorial board of Arts Dispatch thinks that the President is far more open to good arguments than the Ideologues of the House, however, and that's why we addressed the letter to him.
And so far, no word. We understand. The President has never heard of Arts Dispatch. "Art who?" we imagine him saying. "Dispatch? Which syllable is accented, anyway?" So, we've decided to give an alternate argument for the arts from someone he's heard of. He's even read the first part of that argument.
"The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is very close to the center of a nation's purpose—and is a test of the quality of a nation's civilization."
