If you’ve ever been picked out of a gaggle of speeders by a state trooper and ticketed, then you probably understand what the supporters of the Sparta Teapot Museum are feeling right now.

“Why me?”

In the case of a speeder, the explanation is simple: When a bunch of drivers are exceeding the speed limit, a trooper can’t pull them all over. So he selects one, in the same way that a cheetah picks out a certain antelope from the herd. It was just the speeder’s bad luck. Railing about the unfairness of it is a waste of breath and energy. The speeder is toast, just like the antelope is dinner.

In the case of the teapot museum, which was planned for the small town of Sparta in the high country of western North Carolina, the explanation is equally simple, and just as painful: The proposed museum caught the attention of the pork-barrel watchdogs in the media. Once that happened, the museum became a combination of punching bag and punchline. Every story or broadcast either used the museum as an example of government waste, or made a joke about teapots. Usually both.

The museum was conceived a few years ago after a wealthy collector of teapots teamed up with Sparta officials — who, like municipal leaders everywhere, are alert for any development that would bring money and visitors to town. Once the plan was rolling, around $1 million in government grants was thrown in Sparta’s direction for the project. And with the money came attention of the wrong kind. The result was predictable. The museum has now been scaled back and the rich guy with all the teapots says he’ll take his collection elsewhere.

I won’t make the case that Sparta got a raw deal. But I can sure understand if the people there feel that the process was arbitrary and capricious. After all, the amount of government money wasted on other silly projects is literally too much to count. Taken in context, the public grants given to Sparta for the museum were a pittance. A million bucks is roughly one minute’s worth of spending at the Pentagon. You could have the military take a 60-second break one night at, say, 2:36 a.m., give the savings to Sparta and everybody would come out even. But it doesn’t work that way, of course. Wasted tax dollars at the Pentagon is hardly news anymore. But tossing a taxpayer bone to a quirky little museum in a rural town is an intolerable waste of public money.

The teapot museum wasn’t going any faster than the other pork-barrel projects. It’s just the one that got caught.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 1:01 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.