You can take my domestic cultural industry from my cold, dead hands!!

I am both pleased and puzzled that it is cuts to arts and cultural funding, of all things, that finally seems to be riling people against the cynical consortium of dim-bulb yokels and privilege-fattened weasels that is the Harper government.

Pleased because, putting aside my deep loathing for the amateur pose-striking, laughably corrupt cliquishness, promotion of friendly no-talents, and desperate clinging to trivial privilege that constitutes our "culture," I happen to think that the arts are genuinely important – no, make that Important – and that funding their creation is a perfectly good and virtuous use of public dollars. Whatever quibbles I have about the way those dollars are spent are beside the point. Governments spend enormous amounts of money on a dizzying variety of crap. It is perfectly legitimate to demand they spend some money on things that are potentially not crap, like the arts. (Oh, and a stable cultural industry is a crucial element in a mature civilization, etc., etc....)

Puzzled because this government has done things much more heinous than this, with only minor grumbling as a result.

You never know what will send people to the barricades. (And yes, I realize that much of that barricades-manning is likely being done by those same clingers, but Premier Danny Williams, in promising to make up for lost cultural dollars in his province, must believe this one has traction even outside the Writers Union of Canada.)