Fox News Vs. Pig Iron

No one with integrity who cares about the arts should have a relationship with this propaganda channel. 

Seriously tho, here's the deal... Pig Iron theatre (besides being awesome!) employs X number of people.  If they cannot continue to do shows up to the standards of quality their audience expects, they will close, and employ 0 people.  Money that allows them to do their shows up to the standards of quality their audience expects enables them to stay open which saves jobs.  If they can't employ good people (the grant went to save a job), they won't be able to do good work. What Pig Iron does is hard, and involves special skills, not everyone could do it.

Furthermore, it's worth noting that the $25K that the Minneapolis Puppet Theatre got might sound "silly" to a grandstanding blowhard like John McCain, but that money wasn't for actor salaries or operating costs.  It was for manufactured goods like paper. What that means is that $25K goes immediately into the local economy.  $25K of paper is a lot of fucking paper.  It will help save someone's job.  It will help keep local GDP up.  And in the meantime, theatre companies will be able to stay open and in business partially because of the grant, which in turn will spur more economic activity. In Pig Iron's case, it did, in fact, save a job.  Which is what it's supposed to do.

Now Arts Council Philadelphia: Can you get someone with a spine to appear on Fox News?  When the first thing out of your mouth is "We had nothing to do with this" you've conceded the opposition's point immediately. He seemed completely unprepared! 

Comments

[malachy walsh]

I didn't think he did all that badly. Plus, at least he had the cajones to defend the expenditure on a network that he probably thought wouldn't even let him speak without ridiculing him.

I do wish he had spoken about some of the other benefits created by arts organizations beyond being "entertainment." Like creating and strengthening community bonds, for one. And then there's this: often when an arts organization moves into a neighborhood, they move into one that is having trouble economically and where real estate is depressed. When they make the move into this kind of neighborhood, it often signals the beginning of that neighborhood's renewal economically - which is good for everyone in the area, including property owners and neighboring small businesses.

And, I believe, there's solid evidence that involvement in the arts correlates to higher test scores for kids and fewer problems with drugs and alcohol.

[Ken]

Boy, a world run according to the "ideas" on FOX News would be a hellish, barren place indeed. And Steve Doocy is a Grade-A moron who is more than happy to parrot the talking points. "Of course," the conservatives think, "government money for theater is stupid, because it [the world of theater] is filled with lefties and queers and minorities and probably a lot of other types of people who will never sign on to our agenda, never vote our way, never donate to our candidates and think tanks. In other words, a meaningless blip of anti-matter [that last phrase stolen from Adam Rapp's "Red Light Winter"--Ed.]."

I just love the tack that Republicans take on a thing like this, where they paint the arts as a bastion of elitism, siphoning much-needed stimulus money away from depressed downtown areas across the nation, and their hard-hit blue collar work forces---the people the Republican party normally couldn't give a shit about.