Putting the Country-Western Back in Government-Funded Art: Lame Duck Bush Appoints Lee Greenwood to National Arts Council

Who says Bush is a lame duck!?! According to a press release I just received, Pres. Bush has just appointed Lee Greenwood, the country western music star best known for writing and performing "God Bless the U.S.A." to the National Endowment for the Arts Council to serve a six-year term. Dubya's appointment really sticks it to Obama, with his known affection for Stevie Wonder, by leaving the new president a lethal injection of red state musical culture before departing the Oval Office.

According to the release, the 14-member council advises the NEA chairman, and reviews and makes recommendations on grant applications to the $145-million a year agency. Greenwood is the only member of the council whose tenure won't be up during Obama's first-term, making the "musician" a permanent fixture in Washington D.C. for the next six years – as if our nation's capital suffered from a lack of saccharine, patriotic symbolism.

Greenwood, who has built a career around one song and whose discography includes "American Patriot," "God Bless the U.S.A.," and "The Wind Beneath My Wings," will be serving alongside some of the nation's preeminent contemporary artists, like poet Dana Gioia and painter Makota Fujimura. According to the NEA's Web site, Fujimura, "explores a combination of contemporary American abstract expressionism and traditional Japanese art of Nihonga. Born in Boston and educated both in the United States and Japan, Fujimura creates semi-abstract paintings and installations bridging medieval methods and aesthetics with contemporary expression." I bet he and Greenwood will have lots to talk about!

Chalk Greenwood's appointment up as one more irritant Obama will have to grapple with upon assuming the presidency, though it's probably not as pressing as the global financial crisis.