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Eight years ago, as President Obama was about to be sworn in for his second term, I noted that in the crush of inauguration activities he had forgotten something. Obama inadvertently omitted naming a new Cabinet member to be sent to the Senate for confirmation. Where was his secretary of Culture?
You might question whether I was the one who had forgotten something. Oh, right, we don’t have a Cabinet-level post for culture like they do in England, France, Germany, Albania (yes, Albania) and more than 50 other countries that count themselves civilized.
My proposal for creating such a post was not new: The arts were of enormous economic benefit, and the country was still recovering from the Great Recession of four years earlier. A shared culture is supposed to be what unites us as Americans, but we were increasingly divided. The National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, through which the U.S. government supports arts and culture, have pitifully ungenerous budgets and had become dishearteningly large political footballs. Standing outside politics (at least in principle), a Secretary of Culture could bring a broad social, economic, environmental and human perspective to the discussion of national policy in Cabinet meetings and in public forums.