So many have written so well about the misguided Coburn Amendment (e.g., Parabasis, Culture Shock) and its discouraging implications that I won’t reproduce our collective jeremiad here. But fundamentally, what irks me personally about the whole business is this ongoing assumption that the arts are frilly extras that somehow exist outside the American economy.
I can think of no better refutation of this persistent belief that Penelope Burk’s recent post on Burk’s Blog. In short, she refers to a dialogue in which an interviewer expressed how important a physician’s life-saving work was, while all she had ever done was work in the arts. His quiet response to her was: “My job is to save lives; your job, working here in the arts, is to make those lives worth saving. We are both equally important.”
Question now is: what can be done about the proposed changes to the stimulus package, and both aforementioned sites will assist you with that. As they point out, it really does just take two minutes to make your voice heard.
