PULLING THE FUSE ON CULTURE

THE CONSERVATIVES' ALL-OUT ASSAULT ON FEDERAL FUNDING IS UNENLIGHTENED, UNECONOMIC AND UNDEMOCRATIC

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But in the more civilized parts it will. And to many Americans--who are by no means the "cultural elite" that conservative rhetoric invokes with such shrill banality--it already does. Of course, the defunding of the endowments isn't going to kill off the arts in America. Painters, dancers, actors are tough as weeds and can grow in cracks in the concrete. There was great art, drama, writing and scholarship in America before 1965, when the endowments were founded. Dedicated people create ingenious strategies of survival for themselves. But why should they have to? By what meanness, through what smug Philistinism--and, above all, on what actual evidence--do our Jacks-in-office decree that the arts and humanities are beneath the interest of the American people and unworthy of their collective support?

To conservative rhetors in Congress, whatever is not blandly or angrily populist is elitist. In their resort to this weasel word, the patriotically correct on the right are as bad as the politically correct on the residual left--worse, in fact, because they have more power. How all these folk would hate Thomas Jefferson if he walked back in with his idea that democracy was meant to foster a "natural aristocracy" of talent and intelligence. Naked elitism!

Hypocrisy reigns. The right complains (with reason) about the dumbing-down of American education and then wants to kill one of the essential means of its spread and improvement, the National Endowment for the Humanities. It laments the depravity of network and cable TV, especially in the stew of commercial gunk it serves up to children, then wants to cut all federal funding for PBS, the only source of decent educational programming for children and of intelligent documentaries for grownups.

"As far as I'm concerned, there's nothing public about [PBS]," Gingrich crowed to a roomful of like-minded enthusiasts in Washington's Capitol Hill Club last February. "It's an elitist enterprise. Rush Limbaugh is public broadcasting." Yeah, and so is Howard Stern--and Jenny Jones is Ken Burns, and Tom Clancy is Toni Morrison. The fact is that no system with as broad and loyal an audience base as PBS repeatedly garners can be called elitist. A national poll conducted for PBS by Opinion Research Corp. indicates that fully 84% of Americans want to see PBS funding maintained or increased and that 82% of them--79% Republican--feel PBS programming content is "neither too conservative nor too liberal."

But Newt and his -oids resent PBS's small measure of independence from "market forces"--from corporate and hence, ultimately, political control. More important still, the Republicans want a carcass they can toss to their extreme right. The Christian Coalition and other Fundamentalists, such as the Rev. Donald Wildmon's religious hit squad, the American Family Association, believe PBS is a factory of pinko, homosexual, you-name-it agitprop and want to see it abolished for love of censorship.

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