Feinstein joins Senate majority in excluding arts from stimulus package (Mike Boehm/Los Angeles Times blogs)

I’m not sure I quite believe that we are already in the worst financial crisis in my lifetime, but if we aren’t there yet, we’re damn close to it. At times like this it becomes hard for artists like myself to push for increased arts funding, especially those of us who live in the part of the country getting hammered the most by the collapse of the automobile industry. People in the arts community are used to being undervalued by society at large, from the moments our negative teachers/parents start telling us "there’s no money in art" when we show our first serious interests in it, to when we get out in the real world after completing our education and learn that lesson first-hand. Although we may complain about this, though, we try to pursue the arts to the best of our ability because it is, in every sense of the phrase, a labour of love. We’re used to the hardships, so when another group that’s used to comparatively stable conditions gets hurt, many of us feel that the right thing to do is to rush aid to the other groups first, and hold off on asking for support until a time when our pleas are more likely to be heard.

Right now, however, is no time to be silent on this issue. The Republican assault on the arts began long before I was born, but I was in high school when schools began en masse to eliminate arts classes (music, the visual arts, dance, and so on), and then Newt Gingrich and congressional Republicans began a sustained campaign to bankrupt the National Endowment for the Arts and destroy PBS when I was 18. Under the iron fist of Republican rule of the legislative and executive branches earlier this decade, PBS was forced to carry right-wing propaganda like Journal Editorial Report. George W. Bush was undoubtedly a zeitgeist of the post-Clinton years, as he has been described from people of all persuasions as a profoundly incurious man, the most dominant politician from a political family where, as has been noted so many times, introspection is seen not as a healthy part of rational decision-making, but as a character flaw. Even now, efforts to restore arts programmes in schools are often stillborn, while we artists clench our teeth as the National Football League and its behemoth of a marketing arm flood the airwaves with commercials to stop physical education programmes from meeting the same fate. This is the absolute worst time for the arts community to have our needs stymied by Democrats in Congress and the White House, no matter how well-aware we were that their promises of handling things differently were no more than the usual Democratic lip service to progressives and liberals.

That funding for the arts would be verboten in the stimulus bills is, by itself, hardly newsworthy, and not entirely unexpected. However, to call funding for the arts "wasteful" and "non-stimulative," and to lump in it with gambling establishments, is a profound insult to the arts community. The financial merits of a strong arts community have been debated for generations, and I doubt any arguments I might make will swing popular opinion on the subject in one direction or another. However, when we, as a community, are so deeply insulted and belittled, particularly by those who pledged to make things better than they were for the previous eight years, we must respond. President Obama may have removed his campaign platforms from his Website, but his campaign pledges to resuscitate the arts community are archived forever. More than ever before, the arts community must speak up, to politicians in Washington and to the American people, and stand up for the good things we do for this country, and the resources we need to keep doing those good things. We cannot afford to remain silent when we are so insulted and denigrated. If we do not speak up now, when we are already so enfeebled from the last decades’ assaults on the arts, will we ever have the opportunity to speak up again?