Defunding the Art Nazis

If today's U.S. House budget votes occur as advertised, I'll be especially attentive to the proposed cuts for the National Endowment for the Arts, a credentialed batch of snooty federal busybodies whose job it is to elevate your sense of beauty.

Whatever else art may be, it is intensely personal to the artist and to his followers. Divergent tastes gave us Grant Wood and Jackson Pollock.  Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali.  Robert Frost and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Less happily,  we also have the guy who took your money to support himself as he slaved to write a poem which, in its entirety, reads: "ligght."

Robert Mapplethorpe found success taking pictures of himself with a bullwhip up his butt and of a Crucifix soaking in urine. The NDEA took your money to support him,  too.

If you wished to personify absolute evil vis-a-vis the arts, you would need two characters. The first is a government thug who refused Mapplethorpe permission to create or display his penetrated butt shot. The second is the government thug who can and does make you pay for them.

cf. Oceania, Minitrue

 

No, Dan

The Washington Post  is praising congress persons for going out in public  despite their  Tucson panic.

(Personally, if I was a congress person I would be reluctant to show my face in public, but for reasons of embarrassment, not fear of getting shot.)

The critters are looking for a little better home defense, too:

Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) wants another layer. An aide said Burton plans to reintroduce a bill that would enclose the House's public galleries in something like Plexiglas, the kind of arrangement that shields liquor-store clerks.

Dan, don't you understand that liquor clerks are different from you and your colleagues?  They serve a useful social purpose.
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Folks Shouldn't Mess with Sam's Mom

I have my doubts about single-action revolvers as basic home defense guns, but in Bea's case I'll keep them to myself.

Bea weighs 110 pounds and keeps a .45 Black Hawk convertible handy around the house. She's proficient, and I'd hate to be the clerk who eyeballs her svelte frame bent over the handgun case and volunteers that she needs that lady-like .32.

It's a delightful read, over at Stranded in Iowa's place. 

EDIT: In case you didn't  follow the links (BAD Reader. BAD.Go to your kennel.)  Bea happens to be 77 years old.  When she needs a little more .45 ammo, she polices  the firing line and reloads the cases.

I'll clean the house when it gets cold again.

At least the new plastic Ruger  22/45  goes bang every time you pull the trigger, and the rounds hold in a couple-three inches at 50 feet from a semi-steady braced position.  (Leaning on the truck is our bucolic version of bench rest shooting.) Thirty rounds of el cheapo 36-grain hollow points were fired. Not counting two trigger jerks, all but three or four of them punctured a beverage can of my choice.

The same trip to a piece of DNR land a couple of miles west of Camp J gave me the excuse to run New Dog Libby and see how she  works the brome and cattails. Not bad, but she did let a winter-killed deer distract her.

It isn't spring yet, but the sun is becoming slightly more arrogant, and a chinook  wind is aiding the illusion that winter at 43 North is tucking himself into the history books. It is a day when the Lords of Blast and Fire would not be denied.