Let's see. First you wrote:
All members of this board fully agree that our government should not decree by law the spelling of the words we use
And then you rewrote:
(a) Most Americans do not want their government legislating their use of words.
Yeah, I agree. So?
Next you wrote:
yet conversely, we meekly agree to let pseudo-intellectual governmental bureaucracies declare to us that which is Art.
Before emending it to:
(b) We Americans continue to pay taxes to a tiny "effete corps of intellectual snobs" who haphazardly spend our hard earned dollars on their personal choices in public displays of what they decide is universal Art.
A language academy would tell us what consitutes the English language. The NEA, (I think you mean that with your tiny "effete corps of intellectual snobs"), gives money to artists based on their works. They do not legislate what art is. Nor does Congress. If the US government wanted to start a language academy that sponsored poets and other writers, I'd be all for it. What's the problem? In the end it's up to me and the rest of my fellow citizens to decide whether we like the works, but that doesn't mean I would want to stop funding artists. They're quite cheap compared to other things that my woney gets squandered on. And I get a lot more bang for my buck. (For the record, I own property, work for aliving, and pay taxes.) If you don't like it why not get the expletive out of Dodge? Move to Albania or Liberia.
