{"id":4086,"date":"2009-01-26T09:03:29","date_gmt":"2009-01-26T14:03:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4086"},"modified":"2009-01-26T09:03:29","modified_gmt":"2009-01-26T14:03:29","slug":"someday-ill-be-undersecretary-of-guitar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4086","title":{"rendered":"Someday I&#8217;ll Be Undersecretary Of Guitar"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Democracy can only survive until people discover they can <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/01\/26\/arts\/26nea.html?ref=business\">vote themselves largesse from the public treasury:<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>We wanted to make sure arts were not left out of the recovery,\u201d said Robert L. Lynch, president of Americans for the Arts, a national lobbying group. \u201cThe artist\u2019s paycheck is every bit as important as the steelworker\u2019s paycheck or the autoworker\u2019s paycheck.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>To the artist?\u00a0 Perhaps.<\/p>\n<p>As a &#8220;public good&#8221; &#8211; the sort of thing the government is supposed to concern itself with?\u00a0 They <em>should <\/em>be equally unimportant.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>For the moment eyes are largely turned to the National Endowment for the Arts. Dana Gioia, the outgoing chairman, officially stepped down on Inauguration Day and President Obama has not yet named his successor.<\/p>\n<p>In Congress the American Recovery and Reinvestment bill, approved last week by the House Appropriations Committee, includes a $50 million supplement for the N.E.A. to distribute directly to nonprofit arts organizations and also through state and local arts agencies.<\/p>\n<p>The bill is expected to go to the full House for a vote on Wednesday before proceeding to the Senate. It could reach the president\u2019s desk as early as mid-February, an N.E.A. spokeswoman said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>They&#8217;re pushing for a cabinet-level\u00a0 &#8220;Secretary of Culture&#8221; post.\u00a0 Orwellian overtones aside, sure &#8211; <em>why not <\/em>do all the wonderful things for arts that having a Secretary and an Executive-branch bureaucracy has done for Education, Housing and Energy?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Democracy can only survive until people discover they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury: We wanted to make sure arts were not left out of the recovery,\u201d said Robert L. Lynch, president of Americans for the Arts, a national lobbying group. \u201cThe artist\u2019s paycheck is every bit as important as the steelworker\u2019s paycheck [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-socialism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4086"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4086\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}