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By Margaret Renkl
Ms. Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, reports from Nashville on flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South.
“It’s like you’re sitting in a bar, and there are all of these fights going on all around you,” the novelist Ann Patchett is telling me. “You look over, and you think, ‘Not my fight.’ And you look down the bar, and you think, ‘Not my fight either.' And then someone comes into the bar, and this horrible fight ensues, and you think, ‘Oh, God, that’s my fight.’”
Ms. Patchett is not sitting in a bar when she tells me this story. She’s sitting in her family room explaining how she got involved in trying to save Humanities Tennessee, an independent affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, at a time when the future of humanities programming looked very bleak. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency had just defunded the N.E.H.
