Reply #7: No country, no life, devoid of its creative arts can maintain its soul

[frazzled]

Even if we're only talking about Hollywood. Cinema, painting, sculpture, music, dance (high and low culture included)... all these things are a part of our individual and collective spirits as a nation. Woe unto us when we cannot sing, or laugh, or create. Even during wartime.

Even the inmates of the concentration camps in Nazi Germany understood this: they played music, and made sure their children drew and wrote. This is what kept them going. Do not belittle the place of the arts within our national agenda: without them, we perish.