Department of Culture/The Okie-From-Muskogee Stimulus Amendment

Ed Ruscha, Public Stoning, 2007.

In the Guardian this week I'll be outlining my case for a U.S. Department of Culture, focusing on putting the purse for public arts funding in a place where conservatives can't get to it. You'd be much more likely to see Congress pass a cultural jobs bill, for example, if you had significant input on the the stimulative aspects of cultural spending from the Cabinet.

You might also find Sen. Tom Coburn, for example, less able to pass an amendment saying that stimulus funds should not go to any casino or "casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, art center, and highway beautification project." You see the trick: His amendment tacks a poison pill (gambling) onto positive targets for stimulus funds that bear no relation to casinos.

(How positive? Quite positive, says Ben Adler: "Every year nonprofit arts organizations generate $166.2 billion in economic activity, support 5.7 million jobs, and send almost $30 billion back to government.")

Of course, you might also find Sen. Coburn less able to pass such an amendment if Congress understood how infrastructure spending works. Stimulus spending was hardly going to fund casinos in the first place. Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman had suggested the possibility of using stimulus funds to build a $50 million museum on mobs and gangsters—which set off conservatives, although I don't understand why. Coburn conflates this suggestion—nevermind that mob-museum funds were never written into the stimulus bill—with funding a casino.

A representative in the office of Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) explained over the telephone that upstate New York state tribes, for example, would like to use stimulus funds to build a new casino. But because the stimulus bill is an appropriations bill, it can't authorize a casino, which requires approval from the Department of the Interior. In theory infrastructure spending might be used, say, to retrofit a casino—but in that case it is a different kind of infrastructure spending, isn't it?

And that is the sort of work that a Department of Culture could help: working, say, with the U.S. Green Building Council to advise the Department of Energy. Further I would like to know which of the notorious projects on Sen. Coburn's list—"aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, art center, and highway beautification project"—represents the best option in terms of (economic and cultural) stimulation.

Now, I suspect that this zero-gravity chair to which Sen. Coburn darkly alludes is some kind of nefarious imported Finnish construct. Again, you'd want to see a Department of Culture collaborating with the Department of Defense to stop this menace.