Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

A news clip about the august Smithsonian caught my attention last week.  It seems that, with a film due for imminent release about an electric car called the EV1 that General Motors developed, then killed, the Smithsonian has suddenly found it necessary to whisk the model it had on display away from public view:

The National Museum of American History removed the rare exhibit yesterday, just as interest in electric and hybrid vehicles is on the rise.

Unsurprisingly (or surprisingly for those who heretofore held the Smithsonian in high regard as the nation’s valued repository):

GM happens to be one of the Smithsonian’s biggest contributors. But museum and GM officials say that had nothing to do with the removal of the EV1 from display.

Unapologetically, and apparently blind to the glaring irony,

A museum spokeswoman says the museum simply needed the space to display another vehicle, a high-tech SUV.

This isn’t the first time in recent memory that the Smithsonian has caved in to powerful economic and political interests.  In May, 2003, a stunning exhibit of photographs from the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge by a Bellevue, WA photographer was set to open in the museum’s main rotunda.  However, with the consistent drumbeat by the Bush administration and Alaska development interests to sponsor oil-drilling in the Refuge,

… it came with little surprise to many, but with great disappointment to the photographer, when Banerjee’s Smithsonian exhibit was moved from the museum’s prominent first-floor rotunda gallery to a exhibit space in the basement just before it opened on May 2. Other last-minute alterations include:

• Reducing the educational captions to one-line descriptions of photo subjects;
  
• Removal of the book from the exhibition;
  
• Demands from Smithsonian lawyers that The Mountaineers Books disassociate the museum from current printed editions with an inserted errata sheet, and remove all references to the Smithsonian Institute in future printings; and
  
• Editing of the exhibit’s introduction, which Banerjee and Smithsonian staff composed last March, including the expunging of a quote from former President Jimmy Carter that read, “It will be a grand triumph for America if we can preserve the Arctic Refuge in its pure, untrammeled state.” (article here)

Upon learning of this, we dropped our membership like a hot potato.  It was reminiscent of the moment I quit supporting public television.  In 1994, we had enjoyed a series on public TV based on Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, a sort of maudlin, but generally spot-on, set of stories about a group of young people coming of age in mid-70s San Francisco.  Because it had sympathetic gay characters, and showed people smoking pot, enjoying it and not inevitably becoming strung-out drug addicts, the culture police and their newly-elected House majority howled and threatened CPB’s funding.  As a result, CPB suppressed the production of a sequel series.  I’ve never given public television another cent.  I’m sure that’s why public television has slid into silliness and irreverence in the years since.