This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
It has finally come to fruition. For months there has been a rumor that President Donald Trump might eliminate the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts.
On March 15 he released a preliminary federal budget which calls for defunding the endowments for the NEH ($140 million) and the NEA ($140 million). This would cut support for National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
The rationale for this is puzzling. The economic savings from removing these programs from the federal dole are minuscule. Trump, as far as we know, is not a lover of American culture: He is addicted to television news and the occasional Saturday Night Live. It is unlikely that he has ever watched anything on PBS.
The question remains — because he is not interested in either the humanities or the arts — why should we suffer?
Novelist and Columbia University professor Marie Myung-Ok Lee provides a succinct answer in a recent essay.
"But more insidiously, the NEA and NEH are in Trump's sights because they promote the expression of the messy, complex American spirit. Art is not tractable, containable, or even easily defined. That makes it the very opposite of what autocrats want: propaganda."
Louis Borgenicht
Salt Lake City