Toby Likens NEA Cuts to Nazi 'Degenerate Art' Purge
Plot Beats
The narrative micro-steps within this event
Toby confronts Tawny with a scathing Nazi Germany analogy, criticizing congressional funding cuts for the NEA.
Toby counters Tawny's objections by drawing parallels between societal progress and artistic achievement.
Toby challenges Tawny to justify diverting NEA funds to allegedly safer national park security.
Tawny proposes eliminating the Oakenwood program as a compromise, shifting the debate to specific budgetary trade-offs.
Who Was There
Characters present in this moment
Composed defensiveness laced with firm conviction in fiscal priorities
Tawny steadfastly rejects Toby's Nazi analogy as bad taste, affirms $105 million arts cuts as appropriate, shifts focus to national park security enhancements, and proposes eliminating Oakenwood program as a pragmatic funding source alternative.
- • Secure NEA and Oakenwood funding reductions
- • Redirect savings to national park security needs
- • Arts funding is indulgent compared to security essentials
- • Budget cuts represent responsible stewardship over extravagance
Righteously indignant, fueled by evangelical zeal for cultural preservation
Toby aggressively confronts Tawny with a provocative Nazi degenerate art analogy for NEA cuts, counters her rebuttal using international spending stats and historical cultural progress links, and skeptically questions her national parks pivot, his voice rising in principled fury.
- • Defend NEA funding against cuts
- • Persuade Tawny of arts' societal indispensability
- • Cultural funding mirrors societal progress, as in Periclean Athens
- • NEA cuts risk echoing Nazi-era artistic purges
Location Details
Places and their significance in this event
The Mural Room confines Toby and Tawny's explosive verbal duel over NEA cuts, its presidential murals bearing witness to the ideological fray where Toby's cultural firebombs collide with Tawny's budgetary blade, amplifying the intimacy and stakes of their partisan standoff.
Organizations Involved
Institutional presence and influence
National Parks are thrust forward by Tawny as the superior funding priority over arts, with calls for bolstered security framing them as pragmatic public good amid NEA skirmishes, crystallizing conservative reallocative logic.
Oakenwood program is singled out by Tawny for termination to generate funds for national park security, emerging as a sacrificial bargaining chip in the NEA debate and underscoring pragmatic cuts within arts funding structures.
Nazis are weaponized by Toby as a historical analogy for Congress's NEA cuts, referencing their 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition that mocked and defunded 'sick' progressive works, heightening the moral stakes of the contemporary funding purge.
US Congress drives the conflict as the body proposing drastic NEA cuts to $105 million, lambasted by Toby as culturally regressive and defended by Tawny as fiscally sound, positioning it as the epicenter of White House budget trench warfare.
Narrative Connections
How this event relates to others in the story
"Toby and Tawny's debate over NEA funding intensifies from a confrontation to a Nazi analogy."
Part of Larger Arcs
Key Dialogue
"TOBY: You guys should charge money for this, Tawny. You should sell tickets and charge money and call it "Journey Back to Germany." Where, in 1937, they held a show of degenerate art, vilifying art they deemed sick, art that featured insolent mockery of the divine, art that wasted the taxes of the German working people."
"TAWNY: I think it's in incredibly bad taste to equate the US Congress with the Nazis. TOBY: Me too."
"TOBY: There is a connection between progress of a society and progress in the Arts. The age of Pericles was also the age of Phidias. The age of Lorenzo de Medici was also the age of Leonardo Da Vinci. The age of Elizabeth was the age of Shakespeare."