No sympathy for the creative class | Scott Timberg, Salon.com

In this article, Timberg notes that taxpayers bailed out Wall Street and Detroit. But there's no help, or Springsteen anthem, for struggling creatives, like artists, architects, musicians and writers. He writes that:

the struggles of the creative class in the 21st century – a period in which an economic crash, social shifts and technological change have put everyone from graphic artists to jazz musicians to book publishers out of work – [have] gone largely untold. Or been shrugged off.

Timberg senses that either manufacturing or the agrarian economy are what people think "this country is really about." But, he writes, people thought for awhile that culture was "what America did best:"

We produce and export creativity around the world. So why aren’t we lamenting the plight of its practitioners? Bureau of Labor Statistics confirm that creative industries have been some of the hardest hit during the Bush years and the Great Recession.

Timberg's articles explores this issue from various angles, such as the impacts of celebrtity and technology on attitudes toward the "creative class." And near the end of his article, almost as a concluding statement, he writes:

The final irony is that these are times when we most need the arts but seem the most resistant to culture and the people who produce it.