All that lovely money makes us bad and rare

I would have preferred we just ignored anything coming out of the Pelican Institute since we'd pretty much pegged them as a dishonest right-wing propaganda house some time ago when we read about their ties to the krewe of clowns James "Lil' Liddy" O'Keefe assembled to execute his botched break in to Senator Landrieu's office last year.

But as the New York Times Magazine reminds us, no degree of dishonest punkery goes unrewarded these days... well at least none that emanates from the right anyway. So I guess it shouldn't surprise us very much to see Tulane graduate and Pelican Institute founder Kevin Kane published in The Lens espousing some bone-headed tripe about getting gubmint out of arts funding.

Luckily we have Lamar White around to slap that shit right back down.

Kane’s misunderstanding of the interplay between public and private investments is never more obvious than when he posits the Frenchmen Street club scene as a pure case of cultural capitalism.

In fact, the Backbeat Foundation and the Let’s Be Totally Clear campaign for smoke-free bars and nightspots have utilized funding from the New Orleans Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to foster innovative arts and music programming and community based events and projects in and around Frenchmen, Kane’s showcase of purely “private-sector innovation.”

Is this complex weave of public and private funding streams having the desired impact? As Sarah Palin might put it: You betcha. In New Orleans, according to a report issued by Mayor Landrieu’s office, the cultural economy accounts for 28,000 jobs, over $1.1 billion in wages, and hundreds of millions of dollars in additional economic impact. Festivals, which are heavily subsidized by the city, attract over 3.2 million tourists annually.

Of course, most Louisianans don’t talk about our “cultural economy;” we talk about our culture. Culture imbues and defines Louisiana identity. “There are many reasons why Louisiana has ‘generations-old traditions like jazz, second lines, Mardi Gras Indians, zydeco and parade floats,” Kane writes. “Our state’s unique history, geography and demographic diversity have all had a hand.” And government support for arts and culture? Kane wants to rule that out — no matter that it is a long and well-established part of our “history.”

Note also that, in 2011, the City of New Orleans spent about $3 million on Mardi Gras related expenses including police, sanitation, EMS and various other serivces that make this "generations-old tradition" possible. The Times-Picayune seemed to think that was quite a bargain, in fact.