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Some lefties they have there on PBS: William F. Buckley Jr., Ben Wattenberg and that far-famed enemy of capitalism Louis Rukeyser. Like Pat Robertson's views on "creation science," this belief hinges on ignoring the fossil evidence. Sure, PBS has run programs exposing business fraud, supporting homosexual and other minority claims to rights, satirizing religion (however mildly) and questioning some government practices. Sometimes it has been guilty of "imbalance," but at least it hasn't completely succumbed to the emasculating belief that every assertion in a given program should be at once neutralized by its opposite. Compared with public television anywhere else, from England's BBC to state broadcasting outfits in France, Germany, Italy or Australia, PBS has been cautiously middle of the road in its political alignments, and its major source of funding, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, has been dominated by conservatives ever since it was created in 1967 by the Johnson Administration.
The conservatives' thrust against PBS, therefore, seems to be faltering. On this Gingrich is too extreme for his own troops. The Speaker of the House, when he speaks on cultural affairs, is truly a wonder. Here he is, prating and preening like a parrot on a stump about the need to renew American civilization. This is the guy who hates the '60s but reincarnates them in his 40-acres-and-a-laptop Utopianism; who thinks kitsch "futurologists" like Alvin and Heidi Toffler are gurus and that a fund-raising cultist like Arianna Huffington is an intellectual. He filled his cable-TV sermons about "Renewing American Civilization" with brazen plugs for corporations that contributed to his funding operation, GOPAC. He wants to destroy the national endowments while promoting tax breaks for developers on Mars. There are times when "American civilization" should be defended against its renewers, and this is one of them.
To put matters in perspective, one must first remember the comparative triviality of the sums involved--the shallowness of modern America's official commitments to culture.
The U.S. 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 seals of approval on projects.
Besides, culture is business. Serious business. The splendid offerings of New York City, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the New York City Ballet, generate more than $2 billion a year in tourist revenue. Not-for-profit arts, local and national, support 1.3 million jobs, yield $37 billion a year in economic activity and return $3.4 billion a year to the federal treasury through tax--some 20 times the budget of the nea. It is ludicrous to pretend that the NEA is a drain on the American purse.