Saturday, April 24, 2010

A sense of enitlement? (Updated)

The Canada Council is an organization that steals from the poor and gives to artists. They celebrated their fiftieth anniversary two years ago and produced some promotional material for the occasion featuring, among other things, material from their beneficiaries.*

Here is Margaret Atwood displaying her sense of entitlement:
Being short of funds and knowing that I needed to be in another country if possible in order to write, and that I needed not to be teaching in order to write a novel, I applied for and received a Senior Arts Grant of $7000.
Emphasis added by me.

Later in her blurb, Atwood writes:
... the taxpayers' investment in me through this tiny $7000 grant is possibly the best investment they ever made.
According to the Bank of Canada's inflation calculator, $7000 in 1969 had the buying power that $41,927.46 does today.

Earlier in the piece Atwood discloses that she was only working part time at the time.

The novel she produced with the help of this grant is Surfacing. One of the themes of that novel is emerging Canadian nationalism. That Atwood needed to be in another country to write about Canadian nationalism tells you just about all you need to know about it. ("Canadian nationalism" by the way, really means Canadian anti-Americanism".)

* Update: I originally wrote this based on a magazine article I found at a coffee shop in Rockliffe Park. I assumed the magazine was new but  I now see that it is a couple of years old. That doesn't make Ms. Atwood any less foolish.

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