Showing posts with label LA Endowment For the Humanities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LA Endowment For the Humanities. Show all posts

Monday, June 27, 2011

WHAT GOVERNOR JINDAL AND HIS HELPERS DID FOR LOUISIANA

From the Editor's Column in the summer issue of Louisiana Cultural Vistas:
Inventing America and Destroying Louisiana

It was Washington's generation that had to invent America and all its institutions and envision what a great nation ought to be. It was Washington and his contemporaries, foremost among them Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, who understood that a national government had to secure revenue for its institutions, and was obligated not only to provide for the national defense and the delivery of mail, but also to found libraries and universities, and to promote exploration, learning, and a civil society.

So how bitter it is for us to descend to the present political movement in Louisiana, of an infantile populism that imagines it can have a democracy and not and not have taxes adequate to provide for the commonwealth, that would savage by a loss of $300 million a year to a higher education system that had just barely gained the ranks of respectability, that incarcerates its own citizens at the highest rate in the free world, that has a high school graduation rate of of 59 percent, that slashes its arts programs 60 percent in a single year and completely eliminates funding for humanities? It is a barbarism we are imposing on ourselves, a dark that descends from the head of the stairs.

To put it in more colloquial terms, imagine that Louisiana was a football team in a 50-team league and finished perennially, year after year, in 49th or 50th place. Would we not be firing its coaches and running them out of town rather than even contemplating re-appointing them? Would the citizens really care that the tickets cost only a nickel and clamor to see such a team play? And yet politically, that is the low bar we have set for ourselves: in education, in health care, in literacy, in the humanities and culture. And it is not being imposed by Washington or people from New Jersey; we have done it to ourselves.

The complete loss of the state appropriation for the humanities, just recently at $2 million annually, will cost the state $14 million annually in economic impact, increase our illiteracy...and diminish the quality of life incalculably. I could delineate this in detail but I will suffice to illustrate the result as Laurence Sterne might have in his prescient post-modern novel "Tristram Shandy":

as a black hole.

Martin Sartisky, Ph. D.
Editor-in-Chief
There you have it. We have done it to ourselves. And Bobby Jindal is very likely to be reelected on his platform of no new taxes and ridding ourselves of the old taxes. Governance by slash and burn. Unfortunately, if I said, "Only in Louisiana!" I would not speak truth. We are surely at the extreme of the spectrum, but the same sort of madness is spread throughout the land.

Saturday, March 6, 2010

HOUMAS HOUSE, DARROW, LA

 

Grandpère and I attended the awards luncheon for the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. In a later post, I'll tell you about the people who won the awards. We did not. Above is Houmas House on the East Bank of the Mississippi River, where the ceremony was held. We headed up Bayou Lafourche, then over to cross the river on the Sunshine Bridge, and - miracle of miracles! - we arrived early and had time to tour the grounds.


 

Grandpère standing next to a large oak tree. Does he see a spaceship or a vision in the sky? Something up there seems to have captured his attention. He looks good in his suit, doesn't he?


 

Today the weather was mild and sunshiny, a lovely day for an outing and for walking the beautiful grounds at Houmas House. Usually, I don't like photos of myself, but this one I like. Of course, I'm wearing my old, out-of-style blazer, but so what? I'm old and out of style myself.


 

Spanish Moss in the oaks.


 

Do you know what is shown in the picture above?

Since I have more good pictures of the grounds, I'll probably do another post.