A day of many small accomplishments. Also, meetings. No one regards a meeting as an accomplishment; at best, it is a shared interval of endurance. One of the meetings was a big company-wide all-hands type, bringing everyone up to speed on all the initiatives sprung since last month's confab. Sixty-plus. Wrote outside in the gazebo. Feels like late April - but when I talk to people no one really knows what month it is. If we had to say, we'd say "Technically March."
Back is a little better - thanks for asking! I did not torture it on a machine today, which helps.
Nice day! So (cue David Bowie song) let's kvetch.
It had to advance to the next step: actual destruction. In this case, an "activist" hacked and painted the portrait of Balfour, because, well, Balfour.
We’ve seen destruction of monuments, as the remnants of the past are found wanting when examined in the pitiless light of modern enlightenment. Statues pulled down, throw in the river, plinths splashed with red. Their existence caused harm. They represented a psychic wound. They are gone now, and no one feels better about anything. The wound is pulled open daily, because healing was never the point. Payback was the point.
But at least they left the paintings alone. The moronic “Just Stop Oil” children splashed their dyes on paintings that were protected, as if some remnant sense of respect kept them from murdering the works of art in the room that weren’t shielded from vandals. But now we’ve moved to the “destruction” phase of paintings, as they had to; attention must be paid, and nowadays it takes more than a pail of paint to get the world’s attention for a half an hour. It takes a knife.
Balfour, of course, is guilty of all sorts of colonialist sins, and as an enabler of the creation of a Jewish state, his image must be torn apart. It says something about the times that you know the person who did this was left-wing. There’s plenty of stupid anti-semitism on the new Right, but they’re generally worms who wriggle around in the vermiculite of Twitter. The people who go into the streets and yell JEW and demand ethnic cleansing of only liberal multi-cultural polity in the sinkhole of the Middle East are usually leftists. Or fevered imports.
The destruction of the painting will probably go unpunished. News report:
“Cambridgeshire Police said officers were “attending the scene to secure evidence and progress the investigation,” a statement added, noting that no arrests had been made.
The young woman who did this - if we may presume its gender - could probably be identified easily, but she has a get-out-of-gaol card: all the stories describe her as an “activist,” which drapes a certain mantle of virtue over the shoulders of someone who throws a bomb or stabs a Jew. She probably won’t be sentenced to five years in the pokey, or charged with a hate crime; that only goes in certain directions. If she is charged, we’ll probably learn she comes from a well-to-do family, lotus-eaters who floated in the moneyed world without much thought or connection to the vast effort that had created the world that made them effortlessly rich.
You’re also certain that if someone had seen what she was about to do, and given her a stiff body check, and knocked the camera from the hand of the other Activist, that person would be taken into custody and charged, since a civilized society does not condone vigilanteism. A civilized society permits the barbarity to run its course while the bobbies are summoned. The price of letting the barbarians wreck what they wish is considered fair, when the alternative is people just knocking people down. We can’t have that. It’s not your job to interrupt the vandals.
Except, of course, that it is everyone’s job. It is the duty of every Englishman worth the name to see someone attempting to destroy a work of art, and knock her on her ass.
But what if she got a concussion? What if she really hurt her head on the hard marble floor?
(Whispering) I don’t particularly care.
It’s just a painting! There’s a genocide going on and you’re worried about a painting!
Yes, because this is the rationale that permits driving a truck bomb into St. Peter’s for, oh, fill-in-the-blank. This is the rationale that permits taking a sledgehammer to the Pieta because it reinforced the gender binary. This is the rationale for shooting an artist who drew a blasphemous picture. This is the rationale of the mad and impatient, the lunatics who attend a bedside with a skeleton on the sheets and tell themselves they are midwifing the future.
You may write. You may vote. You may argue. You may take a box at Speaker’s Corner and declaim your beliefs. You march, peaceably. You endeavor to enact the change you wish through persuasion and organization. But if you take a knife to art, your head may clang on the marble floor, hard.
So art is more important than this person’s ability to live a life non-concussed?
Oh, absolutely. It’s not just the traditions and history it represents, the value it has to its location, the lessons it teaches, the arguments it can inspire - it’s everything in the cultural tradition that led up to its creation, the fact that it fits in a grand storehouse of human aspiration to beauty, to make more of ourselves and our world than we honestly deserve sometimes. We elevate the notable and prominent into the realm of aesthetic admiration, but that doesn't mean we can't interrogate the truth of the person, or find in them the usual poles of good and regrettable, uneasily conjoined. I guarantee you that every museum has a portrait of some Dutch fellow who sat for the painter one day, and was possibly a knave. We don’t know which of them was actually bad.
So best slash the lot, eh?
As long as history hangs on those hallowed walls, all that privilege, all that Euro-supremicism, there’s a message of cultural preference. It doesn’t matter that every museum attempts to compensate with some empty gallery of modern art with the canvases blaring out whatever -ism was en vogue at the day. The museums are mausoleums of cultural hegemony, pictures from a time of great sin, and they stand in the way of the future.
You have been unshackled from the unjust obligations of beauty! If events do not transpire as you believe they should, well, there’s always the pail of red paint, and the knife.
As for the vandal:
You morons are fixated on a vandal with a thousand-pound purses. She does not possess true wealth. The issue is not the destruction. The issue is the existence of people who have five-thousand-pound purses.
Once they are dealt with, the world will be find, and we promise pinky-swear not to bother the people with thousand-pound purses.
Update: people with thousand-pound purses are superrich parasites whose existence prevents the establishment of the just society we all know we can build.
Update: everyone shall be issued a twenty-pound plastic backpack
Update: due to wreckers and kulaks, production of plastic backpacks has been temporarily affected
Update: anyone caught selling a plastic backpack and making a profit shall be imprisoned for no less than five years in a social reeducation facility
Update: the lottery for plastic backpacks will commence on Tuesday for ration-card holder numbers 236 - 349.
It’s 1936.
I remember when people in the newspaper industry pitched a fit because USA Today put an ad on the front page. It violated all the holy norms of journalism!
The new-moany carried off a lot of people in those days. The old man’s friend, it was called.
The census says there was a William Wallace Haralson born in Ft. Payne in 1939. And that his father was William J. Haralson, 34 at the time.
