Save The Arts: End the National Endowment for the Arts
Dear Artist:I urge you to consider this argument for the dissolution of the National Endowment for the Arts.The United States was founded on the principle of individual rights: life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. Everyone has a right to pursue the arts or enjoy them, provided he does so with his own time and money. To force an individual to pay for someone else’s art is a violation of the individual’s right.I have acted, and I have written and produced plays; nothing would be more shameful to me than to force others to pay for my work whether they valued it or not.We will never know the great and revolutionary creations in art, science, and all other fields that were aborted by the government’s looting of the creators of wealth in the name of the looters’ idea of creativeness. We will never know what private joys every hard-working individual was forced to forego to finance someone else’s notion of good art.Confiscating individuals’ hard-earned money to finance the welfare state is bad enough when the money goes for material goods such as food and shelter; but to use the money to subsidize intellectual products is especially destructive of freedom, because it destroys our means of preserving freedom: it destroys the freedom of ideas. Government funding of the arts is as deadly as government funding of religion or the press.Not by rational persuasion but rather through the physical threat behind the tax collector, the NEA has enforced a nationwide orthodoxy of thought in the arts; and it has suppressed ideas that are not favored by that arm of the government.A theater company, for example, that is not “endowed” by the NEA is at a competitive disadvantage in the marketplace. The “endowed” companies can charge less for tickets, have more elaborate facilities—while bidding up the prices every company must pay—and offer more to its actors. Taxpayers, who are already paying for the “endowed” companies, are less able to pay again for the unendowed. Is this the way to safeguard freedom in the arts?I have written a play that shows the evil of government funding of art, science, and medicine. Will my work be considered fairly by the NEA, or by theater companies that receive NEA funding; or by producers, who nowadays—to siphon subsidies their way—try to have their projects presented by subsidized theaters before beginning a commercial run?NEA Chairman Jane Alexander recently told Congress, “We are jumpstart money, the only national measure of recognizing excellence. We exist to leverage the other public and private monies, and we do our job well—on average, leveraging $11 for every dollar we award.” (Testimony on April 5, 1995 before the House Appropriations Committee, quoted in Backstage.) Thus, an agency of government force presents itself as the only means available to private funding sources for selecting the best art nationwide. And the NEA’s goal is to “leverage”—that is, to direct, to direct lots of—private money in the direction the NEA chooses. Is this the role of government in a free society?The introduction of force always has insidious and far-reaching destructive effects too numerous to catalog. The money spent by government on art may seem like a relatively small amount to some, but this “leveraged money” has gone far toward making artistic funding a matter for political edict rather than freedom.Most people recognize how destructive it would be for the government to “endow” the Catholic Church or some fringe religious group—or The New York Times or some political newsletter. It is just as destructive for government to endow Lincoln Center or some Off-off Broadway troupe.Advocates for the NEA claim that its opponents are fanatics for censorship. But the NEA, funded through government force, is itself by nature a censor. Any work of art that does not meet the NEA’s criteria—whatever the criteria, stated or implicit—is to an extent censored. Moreover, advocates for the NEA are the most useful—though often unwitting—intellectual allies that any would-be book-burner could have prayed for. The NEA established the premise that government can decide what art is good and will be forcibly supported. It is merely the logical extension of that premise to claim that government can decide what art is bad and will be forcibly shunned. Government propaganda and censorship go hand in hand.Because it is the only arts ‘advocate’ with the power of force behind it, government thus becomes the only means of recognizing art as good or bad, and the NEA Chairman gets her wish. Advocacy by force is a contradiction in terms. Force preempts advocacy. Government is an arts enforcer.Art and force do not mix, just as force does not mix with any kind of thought. Art is addressed to the mind; a mind must be free to think, to evaluate, to respond emotionally—or not. An artist can show, persuade, evoke; he cannot force. You cannot hold a gun to someone and command him to enjoy your idea of beauty.Some ‘artists’ argue that once people are exposed to their work, even if by force, then these people will realize how good the work is. This argument is the rationalization of a rapist: “My victim does not yet realize how desirable I am, and so I will have to take the matter into my own hands, for my victim’s own ultimate good and enjoyment.”That individuals today are forced to pay for art they abhor is a moral outrage. It is spiritual rape.It is no wonder that so many of the new works awarded NEA money are expressions of nihilism. Mind-hating motives are consistent with mind-killing means. Government did not cause nihilism in art, but government has helped spread nihilism from the pseudo-intellectual fringes of a few cities to the mainstream of every American community. And government has made it more difficult for real innovators in art to reach an audience. The best artistic minds—the minds that understand and respect the creative potential of every mind when not forced—must struggle even harder, if they stay in their bureaucratized profession at all, or go into the profession in the first place.Please help save the arts by restoring artistic freedom. Fight for the artist’s freedom by defending freedom as a universal principle, which holds for every individual mind. Speak out for the termination of the NEA and every other means of government force in the arts, including state and local arts agencies, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and government licensing of television and radio stations.Sincerely, Ron PisaturoP.S. To anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of individual rights, freedom, and art, I recommend the work of arguably the greatest artist in history: novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand.The above is a slightly edited version of an open letter written by the author in May, 1995, and was first published on the author’s blog. Ron Pisaturo is a writer and philosopher. He has written a screenplay, The Merchant of Mars and is author of Masculine Power, Feminine Beauty. Visit his blog at ronpisaturo.com.That individuals today are forced to pay for art they abhor is a moral outrage. It is spiritual rape.
I’m a Muslim, a woman and an immigrant. I voted for Trump
Asra Q. Nomani, has written an interesting perspective in The Washington Post on how “… a 51-year-old, a Muslim, an immigrant woman ‘of color’ — am one of those silent voters for Donald Trump. And I’m not a “bigot,” “racist,” “chauvinist” or “white supremacist,” as Trump voters are being called, nor part of some “whitelash.”Writes Nomani:
Days before the election, a journalist from India emailed me, asking: What are your thoughts being a Muslim in “Trump’s America”?I wrote that as a child of India, arriving in the United States at the age of 4 in the summer of 1969, I have absolutely no fears about being a Muslim in a “Trump America.” The checks and balances in America and our rich history of social justice and civil rights will never allow the fear-mongering that has been attached to candidate Trump’s rhetoric to come to fruition.What worried me the most were my concerns about the influence of theocratic Muslim dictatorships, including Qatar and Saudi Arabia, in a Hillary Clinton America. These dictatorships are no shining examples of progressive society with their failure to offer fundamental human rights and pathways to citizenship to immigrants from India, refugees from Syria and the entire class of de facto slaves that live in those dictatorships.We have to stand up with moral courage against not just hate against Muslims, but hate by Muslims, so that everyone can live with sukhun, or peace of mind, I finished in my reflections to the journalist in India. [I’m a Muslim, a woman and an immigrant. I voted for Trump.]
How Did Hillary Clinton Lose The Election?
Every poll except the IBD/TIPP one predicted a Clinton victory. From Why Hillary Clinton Lost: An Election Post-Mortem: 1. Eight years of President Obama operating dictatorially by executive order and edict
[Obama] signed ObamaCare into law without bothering to get even one Republican vote. He almost entirely ignored GOP input on the Dodd-Frank bill that he signed into law — and it’s now blamed by many prominent economists for the worst recovery since the Great Depression.Even after losing control of Congress in 2012, Obama chose not to work with Republicans, despite his comments to the contrary. Instead, he issued edicts, executive orders that enabled him to act in some cases like a petty dictator without consulting Congress at all.
2. Hillary went from a centrist position against Bernie Sanders in the primaries to the Left in the general election
The typical pattern for a Democratic candidate in a presidential election is to run to the left in the primaries, then move toward the center in the main campaign. Hillary reversed that — and alienated millions of potential voters by doing so.She talked about tax hikes, about a war on coal and other forms of cheap energy, about a complete government takeover of health care, about further regulating the financial system, and about making the top 1% “pay their fair share.” She promised to hit the American industrial economy hard with new rules to halt the hypothetical evils of climate change.
3. She was the darling of the media the his held in contempt by the average America.
…recent polls [show] that the media is now the most loathed national institution in American civic life. The media are perceived as filled with people who have contempt for average people, along with a profound liberal bias.
4. A history of corruption and scandal
… the Clinton email scandal, the Clinton Family Foundation scandal, and the weird goings-on with former Congressman Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Hillary Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin, who was found to have thousands of official emails from Hillary’s server on his own unprotected computer.
5. Women voters did not fully support Hillary
What was interesting was how it broke down. Men overwhelmingly supported Trump, 46% to 38% for Hillary. But even women, supposedly Hillary’s most ardent base voters, supported her by just 48% to 44% for Trump. She never really closed the deal.
Read the full article: Why Hillary Clinton Lost: An Election Post-Mortem.
Creating Christ: How Roman Emperors Invented Christianity
“In this book, we will reveal how and why the calamitous clash of civilizations between the Romans and the Jews brought into existence a new religion. For the first time, we will present astonishing new evidence proving beyond any reasonable doubt that the Roman government, in direct response to this bitter clash of cultures, created the religion known today as ‘Christianity.’Exhaustively annotated and illustrated, this explosive work of history unearths clues that finally demonstrate the truth about one of the world’s great religions: that it was born out of the conflict between the Romans and messianic Jews who fought a bitter war with each other during the 1st Century.The Romans employed a tactic they routinely used to conquer and absorb other nations: they grafted their imperial rule onto the religion of the conquered.After 30 years of research, authors James S. Valliant and C.W. Fahy present irrefutable archaeological and textual evidence that proves Christianity was created by Roman Caesars in this book that breaks new ground in Christian scholarship and is destined to change the way the world looks at ancient religions forever.Inherited from a long-past era of tyranny, war and deliberate religious fraud, could Christianity have been created for an entirely different purpose than we have been lead to believe?Praised by scholars like Dead Sea Scrolls translator Robert Eisenman (James the Brother of Jesus), this exhaustive synthesis of historical detective work integrates all of the ancient sources about the earliest Christians and reveals new archaeological evidence for the first time. And, despite the fable presented in current bestsellers like Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Jesus, the evidence presented in Creating Christ is irrefutable: Christianity was invented by Roman Emperors.Order Creating Christ: How Roman Emperors Invented Christianity“Although we will in the course of this book agree with nearly all of the accepted factual conclusions of historians who have covered the subject of Christianity’s origins, we will require no conspiracy-theory-like leaps of faith or logic to establish what we are suggesting—quite the opposite. The theory presented reconciles all of the seemingly contradictory evidence of Christianity’s origins for the first time with none of the convolutions employed by scholars and historians for centuries.” –– James S. Valliant and C.W. Fahy, Creating Christ: How Roman Emperors Invented Christianity
Revolutionary for Education: Maria Montessori
From EXTRAORDINARY WOMEN: Maria Montessori | KPBS:“Maria Montessori was a woman of vision. In a remarkable life spanning eight decades, Maria Montessori, challenged convention to pioneer a radical new system of education; one which focused on the child as an independent learner and which spread to all corners of the world, affecting the schooling of millions. Her visionary method of education has helped produce some of the most creative and successful people on the planet including the founders of Amazon.com, Wikipedia and Google. But Montessori’s revolution might never have occurred had she not had the tenacity to confront prejudice head on.”
You can watch the full video of her life here: http://bbcbentomatics.lunchbox.pbs.org/extraordinary-women/