Harry Reid and the Cowboy Poets

[The Northerner]

Congress is debating budget cuts, and it’s been a tough day for public funding of culture and the arts. First, James O’Keefe, a conservative activist, released a tape that shows the former NPR executive Ron Schiller saying just the kind of haughty nonsense about “white, middle America, gun-toting” folks that critics imagine predominates the organization’s programming. Later, Harry Reid denounced a budget proposed by Republicans that would eliminate the National Endowment for the Humanities, among other programs, by calling attention to a certain, decidedly odd Nevadan arts project. Reid explained:

The National Endowment of the Humanities is the reason we have in northern Nevada every January a cowboy poetry festival. Had that program not been around, the tens of thousands of people who come there every year would not exist.

And cue Internet derision. First of all, Reid misspoke when he suggested that tens of thousands of festival-goers would cease to exist should the event get the axe. But more generally, a “cowboy poetry festival” is just the kind of snark-bait that the Web loves, and also sounds like the kind of program that conservatives have long cited as examples of frivolity enjoyed by society’s artsy outliers at the general public’s expense.

But hold your—well, fine, hold your horses. This festival of cowboy verse, officially known as the “National Cowboy Poetry Gathering,” which just held its twenty-seventh annual event in January, does in fact bring thousands of people to the town of Elko, Nevada. And from the looks of it, the five-day festival put on by the Western Folklife Center seems to be just the kind of thing that even Schiller’s gun-loving white folk would enjoy. (Poets in hats and ranchwear are surely preferable to skinny city-dwellers in turtlenecks, or whatever they wear these days.) The festival’s Web site features a great video of writers telling stories about heifers, bulls, and colts—a cowboy version of the Moth.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/03/harry-reid-and-the-cowboy-poets.html#ixzz1G3YnIXYs

[tularetom]

1. I blundered into that cowboy poetry festival one year

It was late, it was snowing and I didn't want to drive any further.

And I'd have to say I was less impressed by the humanities aspect of the event than the sheer gallonage of beer consumed.