All Worship, No Dissent

Pity the documentary filmmaker: A job already replete with near impossibilities—impossible to secure funding, impossible to get distribution, impossible to find an attentive audience—has just become even more difficult. The Trump administration cut funding last week to nearly all of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ current grants—1,200 of them—including one to Yuriko Romer’s decade-in-the-making project. She was working on a film about baseball’s role in American-Japenese relations over the past 150 years. Donald Trump has decided instead that the NEH’s funds would be better spent on his own dream project: a sprawling sculpture garden with 250 likenesses of people he deems “American heroes.” Romer may one day look up at the stony faces of Daniel Boone or Betsy Ross in their patriotic splendor and decide that her sacrifice was worth it. But I doubt it.

Effectively killing the NEH in its current form and then reallocating its money to build the National Garden of American Heroes—the centerpiece of Trump’s plans to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States (thus, 250 sculptures)—is yet one more missile launched in his administration’s ongoing cu...
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