Nurturing culture is a noble pursuit

The subtext of the “Iowa Arts Council's funds helping others at expense of Iowans” (Feb. 7 guest column) opinion sounds like the sourness of a rejected grant applicant, offering a reverse-NIMBY plank: If the art isn't put in our backyard, then we shouldn't pay for it. How great it is, actually, that the Arts Council facilitates the spread of Iowa's art worldwide.

While we can look at any model to engender core human enterprises, and so the free enterprise model could definitely be valuable, art and culture – like education, health, meaningful employment, community, relationships – are human endeavors that always supersede any conformities or protocols that free enterprise fetishists would like to place on them. They belong to celestial spheres higher than an accountant's Excel spreadsheets.

And while thinly disguised anti-expression ideologues narrowly define a government's interest in the well-being of its people to include only national defense, this interest can be defined with enlightenment to include concern for the people's healthy, educated, meaningfully employed and culturally robust lives. The noble pursuit to nurture and celebrate a society's cultural treasures cannot be equated with the bottom line pressures, also noble albeit in a different way, of a hot dog vendor.

Patrick Muller

Hills