Exhibit A: Mick Mulvaney, the director of the federal Office of Management & Budget, recently suggested that arts funding is a welfare giveaway to coastal elites and that it was unfair to ask a “a coal miner in West Virginia or a single mom in Detroit to pay” for things that apparently only latte-slurping liberals care about.

Put aside the insult and condescension inherent in the notion that a coal miner or single mother is somehow incapable of appreciating art. My map suggests that Knoxville is smack center in the Bible Belt and nowhere near the coast. I’d like to invite Mulvaney to travel to Strawberry Plains, population 4,667, and tell Josie that her music lessons aren’t worth four bits a year in the grand scheme of things.

Fifty cents.

Cast an eye across history. The cultures we remember, study, and look to as exemplars are the ones that embraced creativity in the arts. Nobody looks to the Visigoths or the Mongolian hordes for clues to creating a vital commonwealth. The Dark Ages are not fondly recalled, to say the least.

Fifty damn cents.

We find ourselves at a significant moment in the history of our commonwealth, this grand and noble experiment in self-governance that has had a pretty good, yet imperfect run of nearly 250 years. The enormous debate over how much (or little) we intend to do for one another in the areas of health care, education, and infrastructure upkeep are defining debates as to what kind of society we will bequeath to the future. They strike at the very question of whether we will continue to self-govern at all.

Vigilance on any one of these fronts is exhausting. Why worry about frivolities like the arts?

It is unsurprising that people who deride universal public education and affordable health care for our citizenry are often one in the same as those who dismiss the arts as unworthy of public support. The further overlap with those who rail against the dangers of racial and sexual equality — or who openly advocate for purging our society of these less-than humans — is also tragically predictable.

It might be too much to suggest that art is the last line of defense against the prevailing wave of know-nothingism, but it at least provides a framework in which to cultivate critical thought and imagination that can fire that defense. As such, “Art” — and the universe of possibilities that word holds — is dangerous and, as at all times throughout human history, an inherent threat to conformism and tyranny.

From 1895 to 1897, Oscar Wilde sat in jail for the crime of homosexuality. While there, he wrote “De Profundis,” his meditation on prison, spirituality, and the place of the arts in a robust civilisation.

People point to Reading Gaol and say, “That is where the artistic life leads a man.” Well, it might lead to worse places. The more mechanical people to whom life is a shrewd speculation depending on a careful calculation of ways and means, always know where they are going, and go there. They start with the ideal desire of being the parish beadle, and in whatever sphere they are placed they succeed in being the parish beadle and no more. A man whose desire is to be something separate from himself, to be a member of Parliament, or a successful grocer, or a prominent solicitor, or a judge, or something equally tedious, invariably succeeds in being what he wants to be. That is his punishment.

Art compels people to ask questions, to challenge assumptions. Art can lead a young man to wonder “what if?” or a young woman to believe “I can be more.” Art can encourage someone who thinks “I have no idea where I am going” to revel in the terrifying freedom and possibility that realization entails. The answers these pioneers come up with might not change the world. Then again...

In 10, 30, 50 years, will people look back on this time in American culture as an age where we just said to hell with it and surrendered to the easy distractions of Duck Kardashian Dynasty? Or will our descendants look back at artists like Josie Jurkovak and enterprises like Big Ears and communities like Knoxville and say, “Damn, those people had a thing going on.”

Here’s my bet, and I am all in:

In the end, art wins.