Sarah Palin trashes National Endowment for the Arts

From the Los Angeles Times courtesy of the Huffington Post news wire:

"NPR, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, all those kind of frivolous things that government shouldn't be in the business of funding with tax dollars -- those should all be on the chopping block as we talk about the $14-trillion debt that we're going to hand to our kids and our grandkids," Palin told right-wing host Sean Hannity. "Yes, those are the type of things that for more than one reason need to be cut."

Palin did not elaborate on what the other reasons might be for chopping the NEA budget. But the government of every major civilization in world history has also prominently funded the arts.

More here.

"Frivolous" indeed. Can't spend money on luxuries when we're having trouble finding ways to pay for billion dollar tax breaks to placate our corporate overlords. Luxuries...

It's been some years since we've heard any prominent conservatives reciting their traditional scorn for the NEA; I had kind of forgotten how much it pisses me off. If you want some reasons why funding the arts is important, click through the link, ditto if you want to see why cutting funding is irrelevant in terms of deficit reduction. I'm not even going to try to make such arguments myself because they're self-evident, and really, the burden of proof belongs to the inbred redneck anti-art crowd, as far as this debate goes.

Instead, I'm just going to make one statement:

The arts, the kind that don't make any money, are deeply embedded in our culture, a very large part of who we are as a people, as Americans. In the constant cacophony of mass media continually rammed down our throats, the arts serve as a quiet but vitally important reminder that we Americans are about much more than simple commerce and material riches, about much more than narcissism and self-gratification. The arts are our national soul. If anything, we should be discussing how we can increase arts funding. By a factor of about a thousand.

Anybody who doesn't understand that is either ignorant or stupid or both. I guess that's why Sarah Palin is the perfect person to pitch this bullshit.

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