Rhythm & Booms grudgingly allowed to continue

After some discussion and a push to cancel the event, Rhythm & Booms is moving ahead for this summer. The city agreed to contribute $55,000 in police and other services, but will require organizers to cover costs above that amount.

To provide some context, that is 3% of the subsidy Madison taxpayers provide to the Overture Center, for an event that draws as many people in one night as Overture's free community events do over the entire year.

Even if you include all its revenue-generating programming, Overture still gets over 7½ times the per-person public support that Rhythm & Booms will receive this year! How's that for Madison's attitude toward the hoi polloi?

I'm not arguing against government subsidizing the arts. What I am saying is that Madison's political class is too often blinkered by its aesthetic preferences, and one of those preferences is revealed by the huge disparity in support between an event that serves 'both' Madisons and a facility built by and for the well-to-do.

This notion of aesthetic preferences extends to the environmental activists pushing to kill the event. Despite the overheated rhetoric from Jim Carrier of Wild Warner, the city's test results showed that (1) there was -- unsurprisingly -- fireworks residue near the lagoon shortly after last year's show, (2) samples taken just before the show demonstrate those residues don't persist, and (3) the lagoon's ecology is so dominated by stormwater runoff that it's impossible to find residues in the lagoon itself. Since Mr. Carrier sees no aesthetic value in the fireworks, it's easy for him to dismiss any possible benefit from the event.

God knows this isn't the most important aspect of the political-economic-racial divide that the Sarah Manski fiasco thrust into the spotlight, but the controversy over Madison's community Fourth of July fireworks display is a symptom of how out-of-touch our political elites are.