Romancing Uncle Sam: Column

• The government-funded project aims to %22explore the ... origins and influences of popular romance.%22
• As much as I%27d like to know what the ancient Greeks thought about popular romance%2C I wouldn%27t pay to find out.
• The aggregate cost of the project so far is %24914%2C000.

Unless I'm talking about Bill Clinton or Anthony Weiner, I rarely use the words "government" and "romance" in the same sentence. But these words are integral to the Popular Romance Project, a government-funded initiative about romance novels.

Itsaim is to "explore the fascinating, often contradictory origins and influences of popular romance as told in novels, films, comics, advice books, songs, and internet fan fiction, taking a global perspective — while looking back across time as far as the ancient Greeks." As much as I'd like to know what the ancient Greeks thought about popular romance as told in comics and advice books, I wouldn't pay to find out. And, I'm guessing, neither would you.

But this isn't about us. This is about folks who want to have "an entertaining, substantive, lively discussion about how popular romance is created, who consumes it, and how it helps shape private lives and public cultures." The Popular Romance Project will enable them to do so, supposedly, by providing four things: an "interactive" website, a two-hour documentary about romance novels (to be released, fittingly, on Valentine's Day next year), an academic symposium, and a series of highly unromantic library conferences — the aggregate cost of which, so far, is $914,000.

This is a trifling sum of money — 0.00000024% of the federal budget — but money isn't the issue. The PR Project would be just as unwarranted if it cost $1000 instead of nearly $1 million. Just because the government can do something (relatively) cheaply, it doesn't mean it should. The burden of proof is on those who want to take money from other people in order to fund their pet projects. This is an enormous burden.

The powers of the federal government are, as James Madison noted, "few and defined." People who read the U.S. Constitution instead of Fifty Shades of Grey may recall the 10th Amendment, which states: "The powers not delegated to the United States [Congress] by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." If the people want romance, they have to pay for it themselves, as they already do in Nevada.

The National Endowment for the Humanities, which is funding the project, purports to be "about the democratization of ideas." Presumably, the democratization of ideas — a conveniently abstract phrase — means making ideas more accessible to the public. But what is the point of making available ideas that are already available to the public?

In the case of popular romance, there already are forums for the study of it, such as the Journal of Romance Studies and the Journal of Popular Romance Studies. There's the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance, not to mention numerous blogs and a listserv called RomanceScholar. People don't need a government program to talk about romance novels. They're already talking (and reading and writing) about them. Why pay them to discuss something they're already discussing?

NEH chairman Jim Leach sort of answered this question when he said, "Just as we need an infrastructure of roads and bridges, we need an infrastructure of ideas." No, we don't. Albert Einstein didn't need an infrastructure of ideas (whatever that is) when he came up with the special theory of relativity. To say we need an infrastructure of ideas is to say that panels of experts should organize and hierarchize our thoughts, and to give license to the government to pick and choose some ideas over others. Not all can be accommodated.

Given the NEH's fuzzy criteria, there's nothing to stop it from funding a study about "the fascinating, often contradictory origins and influences of" hardcore porn, aside from public outrage. It is, after all, a big industry and immensely popular, more so than romance novels. Some might even call it art.

Theoretically, the NEH could fund a study about anything, whether it's Marxist perspectives on socks, the metaphysics of Garth Brooks or the sociopolitical ramifications of Big Johnson T-shirts. Everything is an idea, and no idea is too stupid for the government to democratize and subsidize.

Windsor Mann is the editor of The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism.

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