Trump: Double down on NEA!
Dear President Trump, You have a busy inaugural weekend, so I’ll be quick. Your team wants to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Sad! You should double down on them. Why? In a word: leverage!
For such a featherweight agency, the NEA punches way above its weight class. One tremendous program is its annual literature fellowships, the only federal funding for individual artists. I’m superbiased because I was granted one back in 2014, but hear me out.
I’ve never been a starving artist, but that’s because, like most artists I know, I have multiple jobs on top of my creative work. When I received a phone call in December 2013 that I’d won a creative writing fellowship from the NEA, I shouted into the phone and dropped to my knees. Twenty-five thousand dollars to help me get my writing project off the ground! It might not sound like much to a really, really rich guy, but I leveraged it big league.
At the time, I had three jobs: working at a nonprofit, tutoring English students who found me on Craiglist, and writing web-
site copy about treated wood for a timber company in Oregon. Before sunrise, I worked on my novel and wrote very fair stories for newspapers and magazines. But I was super-low energy. A real mess.
With the support of my NEA grant, I cut those two side jobs loose to focus on what I do best. As you know from marketing the Donald J. Trump Signature Watch Collection, time is money. Plus, a super-classy award is very, very strong for your brand. Just as you wrote in “The Art of the Deal,” “I set out to leverage my credibility.” Even though the crooked media was cutting its spending on freelance writers, I could finance my own travel to research my novel and write long-form journalism that was even fairer than before.
Now just three years later, I’m winning. I have a book coming out, and I can teach writing at a university instead of at a Burger King near a subway station. And I’m still just a small fish. NEA literature fellowships have supported 2,940 writers over the years. Tremendous, A++ people. Since 1990, 60 percent of the winners of the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prizes in poetry and fiction have won an NEA fellowship, usually before they got huge. I’m talking the best of the best. Millions of books sold, supporting thousands of good U.S. jobs.
If the NEA can turn one loser into a winner, imagine what it can do for arts organizations. One example: A literary magazine kindly published my work over the years with support from the NEA and Amazon. Don’t listen to the haters and the losers. Yes, the private sector can support art, but just as great companies support art, great countries support art, too.
I know you’re not a total book nerd like President Obama, but the NEA supports all kinds of art like the super-classy stuff your daughter Ivanka collects. Even better: It takes care of our veterans in partnership with the Department of Defense. Service members who participated in the Healing Arts program reported multiple benefits, including “the ability to process trauma, and increased capacity to address issues related to identity, frustrations, transitions, grief, cognitive skills and memory.” In 2016, the NEA received a $1.98 million budget increase — specifically to expand that program for our amazing heroes.
All that for $150 million per year, only about .003 of the federal discretionary budget. That’s a deal for an organization that benefits thousands of people in every state. I know you want to drain the swamp, but consider this: The Federal Bureau of Prisons budget is $7.5 billion. As you once wrote, “If you’re going to be thinking anyway, think big!”
Chris Feliciano Arnold is the recipient of a 2014 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the author of “The Third Bank of the River: Blood, Power and Survival in the Twenty-First Century Amazon,” forthcoming from Picador USA. Email: books@ sfchronicle.com