S3e6- Gone Quiet ("By and large, I'm not wild about musicals.")

Gone Quiet.  An apt metaphor for my blog over the last month.   Challenging times for blogging, dear reader.  My apologies; I can't promise that I'll get more consistent, because my summer teaching is crazier than my rest-of-year teaching, and that's pretty crazy to begin with!  Thankfully, "The West Wing" will always have my back- unlike nature, which, according to Oliver Babish, "is to be protected from. Nature, much like a woman, will seduce you with its sights, its scents and its touch. And then it breaks your ankle. Also like a woman."

The main focus of this episode is that there's a nuclear sub that's gone quiet- and Secretary of State's Grumpiest Old Man, Albie Duncan(played beautifully by Hal Holbrook) is around to tell the president that he's lost a sub.  However, as is so often the case in these episodes, the side plot is more interesting than the main.

Toby get's word that the National Park Service will be getting an additional $105 million in the budget, and while that seems like a good thing, he soon realizes that number represents the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts, and Congress wants to de-fund it.

Connection to reality?  For 2016, the $148 million budget of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) represents just 0.012% (about one one-hundredth of one percent) of federal discretionary spending.

At this point, I feel like President Bartlett listening to Albie Duncan list submarine-related disasters:

Here's a chart displaying discretionary spending for 2015 that pretty well demonstrates the problem:

That's right- you can't find the NEA on there, can you?  That's because it only accounts for 1/10th of the space occupied by this period:  .

So why does this have me in a tizzy?

Because currently, a great deal is going around the internet about Military Bands, and the cuts proposed in the Pentagon's 2017 defense appropriation bill.   Just the facts?  We're talking about musicians who are soldiers- they go through boot camp, training, and perform incredibly valuable service with regards to relations and morale.   More importantly, the Pentagon spends about $437 million annually on 137 bands and their 4,350 buglers, fifers, strummers and drummers. That’s only 0.09% of the military’s annual budget.

While I have no doubt that their processes could be streamlined and the budget could be trimmed, it should be noted that I just read an article bemoaning the ridiculousness of the Army purchasing a $26,000 Tuba last month.  It sounds ridiculous because the Tuba is inherently a funny instrument- but if you're trying to recruit the best musicians, you need the best instruments; and $26k isn't that much to spend on a tuba.

The truth is that this type budget attention is nothing more than pruning low-hanging fruit.  For each of the last four years, the Department of Defense has requested that several military bases be closed at a potential savings of over $2 billion dollars for maintaining unnecessary installations: this proposal has been rejected by the Armed Services committee on the basis of the damage to local economies, usually located inside the congressional district of the plan's most vocal detractors.

The truth is that this isn't smart saving of money- it's convenient.  Unfortunately, it's short-sighted.  Research has shown time and time again that the Arts play a critical role in just about everything good, and despite the examples used in this episode of "The West Wing," most of the grant money from the NEA goes to projects directly tied to building community or serving the underserved.

Worst of all, a New York Times article  published on 7/1/16 noted that the budget of the Military Bands was almost three times that of the National Endowment of the Arts.  It failed to note that compared to most other industrialized countries, funding for the NEA is a paltry sum- in 2013, Germany spent nearly $1.63 Billion- yes, with a B- on the arts- France spent nearly $10 billion on its Ministry of Culture- a 2% drop in funding that prompted strikes and protests.    The NEA is given 41 cents per person for the arts- compared to Northern Ireland, which spends $11.67, while Finland spends $8.42.  Amazingly, Australia spends $311.77 per person between both the National and State government.   So you see, criticizing the Military Bands for having 3 times the budget of the NEA is a bit unfair, considering if is massively, critically, embarrassingly underfunded.

To quote Toby:

"There is a connection between progress of a society and progress in the Arts. The age of Pericles was also the age of Phidias. The age of Lorenzo de Medici was also the age of Leonardo Da Vinci. The age of Elizabeth was the age of Shakespeare."

Despite all that wonderful prose, what made me the most upset in watching this episode?  The fact that Aaron Sorkin allows this plotline to die with the revelation that Congress just wants the White House to get rid of the NEA's director, some poor sap named Oakenwood: show him the door or we de-fund the NEA.  That's it.  We learn of this endgame, and then all of a sudden Toby's figuring out how to use soft money to air issue ads.   There's no defense of this man Oakenwood, there's no outcry for more funding.  Just an acceptance that this is clearly how it is.

In this instance, Sorkin went quiet, and it couldn't have been at a worse time.

What's Next?  S3e7- The Indians in the Lobby

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