The U.S. government will run about $2 trillion in the red this year, but the record budget deficit hasn’t stopped the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (President Obama’s “stimulus” bill) from funding a number of less-than-essential projects for America’s economic recovery.
Among the many wasteful grants in the “stimulus” bill was a $50,000 grant by the National Endowment for the Arts to Frameline Film House, which is currently promoting the film Thundercrack as “the world’s only underground kinky art porno horror film, complete with four men, three women and a gorilla.”
Insert your tasteless “stimulus” joke here, one might say. But it’s not funny. Frameline promotes the film as a film that will “arouse, challenge and question you through every torrid moment of solo, gay, bisexual and straight couplings, voyeurism and more. You will be seduced into accepting this orgy of sexual liberation!”
Frameline is not the only example of a recipient of federal aid under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) that could be viewed as pornographic. The “stimulus” law allowed the NEA to give a grant of $25,000 to the Jess Curtis/Gravity, which is currently promoting a “Symmetry Project.” Jess Curtis/Gravity describes its symmetry project as:
Two naked bodies interact through a highly structured improvisational score, constricted in a specific physical habit; that of moving symmetrically, relative to themselves or to each other. In this space of temporary “habitus”, the two bodies are constantly tuning, reformulating the perception of the self and of the other. In the sharing of a central axis, spine, mouth, genitals, face, and anus reveal their interconnectedness and centrality in embodied experience. Limbs entangle and intertwine creating an inter-corporeal kaleidoscope of flesh. A kind of uber-intimacy develops.
Waste and pork is not new to the “stimulus” bill. Last month, CBS News reported that “tiny Purdue University Airport got $800,000 to help keep animals off the runway. That’s even though they’ve reported just one incident: a plane ran over a skunk in 1996. In Alaska, $15 million dollars went to build a bigger, better airport for the town of Ouizinkie — population just 165. That’s roughly $90,000 dollars per resident.” The Washington Times and Citizens Against Government Waste have also railed against other obviously unnecessary projects that would have no impact on the national economy.
The NEA grants for self-identified pornography or an “inter-corporeal kaleidoscope of flesh” takes the affront to taxpayers to an entirely new level. Pornography is objectionable to most Americans, and Thomas Jefferson once correctly observed: “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.”
Shortly after signing the stimulus bill, President Obama pledged to the American people that he would not tolerate waste or pork in the stimulus bill:
So I want to be clear about this: We cannot tolerate business as usual — not in Washington, not in our state capitols, not in America’s cities and towns. We will use the new tools that the recovery act gives us to watch the taxpayers’ money with more rigor and transparency than ever. (Applause.) If a federal agency proposes a project that will waste that money, I will not hesitate to call them out on it and put a stop to it.
Thus far, Obama has yet to call anyone “out” for waste in ARRA funds. He hasn’t called out the Federal Aviation Administration for its pork, and he hasn’t even called out his National Endowment for the Arts for its funding of openly pornographic organizations. With this leadership, does anyone need to wonder why the U.S. government will run a $2 trillion deficit this year?
