A silly comparison

Reader comment on: The Grateful Dead Subsidy

Submitted by Craig Schroer (United States), Oct 5, 2009 16:37

It is extremely silly to compare government funding for archiving of the materials of the Grateful Dead to goverment funding for archiving one's own personal memorabilia. The exception would be if you happened to be a person who had exerted a major cultural influence over a significant swath of the American public for a span of decades.

As a librarian at one of the largest academic library systems in the U.S. I can assure you that collections such as that of the Grateful Dead are typically _sold_ not given away and usually require substantial grants to put the material in order, catalog it and create finding aids for it. For the Grateful Dead to donate these materials was an act of generosity. To use a pittance of government funding--from an agency tasked with precisely such historical preservation work, no less--is an act of common sense.

There is plenty of egregious reverse-Robin Hood going on, as you know, with Wall Street, the banking industry, the auto industry, etc. that there is hardly need to fabricate such dubious instances of the practice.

Sincerely,
Craig Schroer

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