Get ready for the Right flank to reinvigorate their long-standing effort to eliminate federal funding for the arts. I just saw this on Huf-Post and all of the alarm bells went off in my head:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…
Since the eighties, there has been steady pressure on the NEA not to fund controversial projects no matter how valid peer review found them to be. They already reduced public television to a shadow of its former self. I predict that in the anti-intellectual furor that has overtaken the Right, the next big target will be any remaining public funding for the arts. This is just the opening salvo.
I have taken a personal interest in this because my sculptor husband was the target of censorship efforts by right-wing groups in 1970’s Toronto. In both of those cases, the law finally came down on the side of freedom of expression, but not before it cost us all a lot of time, money and anxiety.
We may be approaching a dangerous time for arts and artists in fully-armed America, where apparently one may now carry an assault weapon into a crowded room.
We treat all this constitutional stuff like it was handed down by God on a mountaintop. Sorry; I don’t buy it. The document is fallible, as were the men (exclusively MEN) who framed it. They used the best language and foresight available to them at the time; but the last word, it ain’t. After all, it was an ammendment…AKA: a second-thought.
Okay, two points here.
First, Kestrel, this is for you (and your cohort of scifi geeks). Go find in a library or a used bookstore the 2005 reprint of F. Paul Wilson’s 1980 novel An Enemy of the State, wherein he argues that a fully armed and competently trained citizenry is necessary for freedom in a state collapsing under its own debt. His other major thesis in this particular book is on monetary policy (“honest money” metal coinage vs. “fiat” money printed by the Federal Reserve). He’s some kind of rightwing Libertarian, and that’s the only book of his I ever read.
Second, now that a 63-year-old anti-abortion protester has been shot and killed, all the rightwing gun-nuts (not you Kes, you have flashes of rationality) will feel that their sense of victimhood has been affirmed. Them (us) “libruls” are out to get them. Despite the fact that no one has yet described the alleged shooter as holding any particular brand of political views.
President Obama issued a statement “deploring” the shooting, as he did when Dr. George Tillman was murdered in his place of worship.
There were two shooting victims in Owosso, 20 miles west of Flint, on September 11: a gravel pit owner and Jim Pouillon. There allegedly would have been a third, but police got to 33-year-old truck driver Harlan Drake through a license plate number noted by someone who saw the first shooting.
Pouillon was a retired autoworker (GM) with emphysema who wore leg braces.
I am truly sorry Mr. Pouillon was murdered. And yes, part of my sorrow is about the ammunition his unfortunate death will give to the rightwing gun-nuts to justify going armed everywhere in public because they are so sure the “libruls” are out to get them. With the guns we’re supposedly confiscating, I guess.
I don’t know what to do about their fear — but I do know they are afraid because they are not in charge any more. Dogs bite when they’re afraid and cornered.
Not all gun owners are gun-nuts. Or right-wingers. I own a gun. And I still think guns don’t belong in churches or public meetings or shopping malls, among other places. And assault weapons don’t belong anywhere but maybe in the military.
NanuqFC
Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable … ~ George Orwell, Politics and the English Language