Anti-war protesters demonstrate in Times Square October 7, 2001 in New York City. Thousands of marchers participated in the rally on the same day that the US and Britain commenced air strikes against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. [Huffington Post caption]
It could have gone much differently.
I was in the streets eight years ago today, but with a characteristic mid-western idealism continually renewed without any justification, I didn’t believe we were actually going to war. It was just so stupid and wrong, so eighteenth century.
Today some of us mourn the eight years (and still counting) of the wars without end begun by George W. Bush and embraced by Barack Hussein Obama.
They are all Obama’s wars.
Woodrow Wilson’s war, announced as the “war to end all wars”, lasted 19 months. Our participation in the Second World War lasted a little over three years and eight months. Our current series of insane, counter-intuitive, self-destructive, illegitimate, racist, imperial, immoral, and finally perpetually self-propagating wars, waged under the rubric, “Operation Enduring Freedom“, have been programmed from the very beginning to go on forever.
[image, otherwise uncredited, from Huffington Post]
Category: Cults
Iran’s people just might win this one
some of the hundreds of thousands of Mousavi supporters marching in silence today in central Tehran (green was the signature color of the opposition’s campaign)
I think they’re going to make it. There will be more demonstrations tomorrow, and the protests are likely to be more broadly-based and increasingly countrywide. A general strike has been called for the same day.
Iran’s twentieth-century political history is a complex story, and the second half especially includes a far-from-innocent involvement on the part of the U.S. [fed first by our lust for oil and Cold War hysteria – okay, it was actually pretty disgusting], but today it suddenly appears that the people who created and maintained one of the greatest civilizations in human history just may be about to emerge from the tyranny of a crude religious fanaticism which had briefly hijacked both their own best hopes and the world’s admiration for their magnificent culture.
I’d like to add that I wish that ordinary U.S. citizens had the kind of political courage being displayed on the streets of Iran today; We could certainly use it. Beginning last November I’ve been expressing my doubts about whether we were going to get what we had voted for. I should be writing more about my increasing fear and disgust, but I’ll wait for another occasion.
ADDENDUM: I just saw this Ted Rall cartoon. Although I said I wouldn’t go into Obama’s failures now, I couldn’t resist the adding this note. I do this even though Rall doesn’t address our hope-and-change President’s equally disturbing failure to address the economic meltdown (instead handing over the government to Wall Street), and his cynical reversals on gay rights issues.
[image, from the Guardian, by Abedin Taherkenareh/European Press Photo]
time is frozen in the stone poetry of St. John the Divine
the fire this time: the towers are are forever collapsing up above 116th Street
Each time I head uptown for something going on at the Episcopal Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, almost always with friends who haven’t been there before, I look for this capital above one of the massed columns surrounding one of the formal entrances on the West Front. I had come to assume that almost everyone had probably heard about this treasure, and its various companions, but after a look around Google-land just now, I found that they may not be as well known or photographed as I had thought.
Barry and I went up to Harlem once again last week with friends from the East Bay area on the other side of the country. They were former New Yorkers, visiting the city for the first time after an absence of seven years. We had decided we were all interested in a concert of ancient and modern Spanish choral music being offered that afternoon inside the cathedral’s crossing.
Naturally while we were there I showed them one of my favorite things, this stone capital, which had been completed well before September 11, 2001. It and several others were carved by workers who were a part of an apprenticeship program proposed in 1978 to serve urban youth but also intended to preserve the stone mason’s craft. During its existence one of St. John’s own twin towers managed to grow fifty feet (still 100 feet short of the height intended for both). The money ran out in the early 1990’s, and both structural and decorative work on the Cathedral was once more discontinued, for the third time in that last, very messy century of ours.
For more images of the stones, and more on the church and its Close, see Tom Fletcher’s New York architecture site, or that of the church itself.
Ostara’s eggs
I hope this image doesn’t make the blog look too sentimental, especially coming after my last post (a picture of some yellow spring flowers in front of a blue wall), but today, or some other day close to it, is a big holiday for a lot of people – for many different reasons, some of them even related.
Easter was one of my favorite holidays growing up. We were observing Catholics, but my obsession with the holiday was more about the return, finally, after another interminable Lent, of lots of smells and bells: colorful church vestments (including pink!), fresh flowers everywhere, lots of music, and candy of course (even before church).
The ancient Germans, who seem to be behind all of our biggest holidays, revered a fertility goddess called Ostara (there are many spellings), who was associated with the rising sun and spring, but who was also a friend to all children. She had a pet bird that for some reason she had to change into a rabbit to produce brightly colored eggs, which the goddess gave to the children as gifts.
None of this makes sense to me now, and I’m referring to the yarns spun by both Catholic and pagan cults, so the fact that once every year at this time I pull out of the cupboard an opaque nineteenth-century glass egg (made for darning socks?) which has sat forever on some dry grasses inside a two-inch-round antique splint basket from the same era would seem to represent as much nonsense as its inspirations. Maybe it’s my way of freely rendering an astronomical calendar, but I do know it makes me feel good.
We have another very old basket which I also set out early this morning, this one in the living room. It’s a bit larger. Inside its ancient woven splints rest three hollowed-out and brightly-decorated real eggs. The eggs have grown old themselves since the day they were purchased at a Ukrainian holiday fair decades ago, although they don’t look like they’ve changed a bit. Although These curios are real, and they definitely have color, I think I’ve always preferred their glass replica, and it’s the one I’m looking at now as I type these lines.
Happy spring!
Solmi’s “il vilipendio di cose destinate al culto”
Federico Solmi’s “crucifix” [my punctuation], related to his 2008 hand-drawn animation video, “The Evil Empire“, a satirical look at the outrageous exploits of a fictive pope, and a part of his “ongoing desire to satirize tyrants” [as quoted in both ARTINFO and ArtNet].
I suppose this artist’s work may look to some like heady stuff, but only if you’re Catholic, unwholesomely deferential toward superstition, or just dysfunctionally prudish.
The object shown at the top is a little provocative, but it’s also very beautiful, and I think his red knob is cute. Still, Solmi’s crucifix, while being shown at Bologna’s Arte Fiera this past January, so aroused local judge Bruno Giangiacomo (Judge for the Preliminary Investigation (Giudice per le Indagini Preliminari or G.I.P) who appears to have only heard about it second hand, that he had the Carabinieri seize it from the booth occupied by Naples’ Not Gallery and the artist charged with, essentially, blasphemy (“il vilipendio di cose destinate al culto“/”contempt for an article of worship”) and obscenity (“l�esposizione di oggetti osceni“/”the display of obscene objects”). The crucifix had already been sold to a collector, and Solmi first heard about the charges after he had returned to his home in New York. The blasphemy count was later dropped, when someone realized that the statute had been rendered null by a constitutional court in 2000.
No, sadly, this wasn’t a publicity stunt, but when I was first told about the confiscation and the charges I did think that someone was pulling my leg. Actually I was almost stupefied, since the great city where this occurred has the reputation here of being Italy’s most politically and socially radical. The artist’s own home town and the capital of Emilia-Romagna, Bologna led the country�s socialist movement early in the twentieth century, was extremely active in the revolt against the fascists in 1944, and after the war, until the last decade, the city consistently voted for communist governments. I had assumed its fiery, secular, non-conformist political history would have supported an artist’s right to his creation, however provocative. Now it’s up to the lawyers to decide how much liberty is too much liberty.
drawing used in Solmi’s “Evil Empire” video
Our own art fairs last week didn’t produce anything like this kind of excitement. It almost makes me nostalgic for Rudy Giuliani’s imbecilic tantrum over the Brooklyn Museum show, “Sensation“, ten years ago. Just kidding; maybe we should think of censoring little boys and she-goats as more than enough excitement.
For more information see these ArtNet and ARTINFO articles.
[image at the top from the artist’s New York gallery, LMAK Projects, via ArtNet]
going to be a little grumpy here: about all that god talk
1917 poster* by J.C. Leyendecker, successful, closeted [homo] designed to sell war bonds
Although I took huge delight yesterday in Rev. Joseph Lowery‘s contribution, because of his own history and the fact that its grace transcended religion, my experience of the joy of yesterday’s inauguration of Barack Obama was marred by the number of genuine sour notes, all related, that piled up all day long and even into the night at the inaugural balls: Watching the glorious events of the day being soaked in all that god talk made me very, very uncomfortable. You probably know what I’m taking about.
By the way, after all the uproar over Obama giving the nod to Rick Warren’s to deliver that, whatyamacallit, “invocation“, I thought it was some “revelation” to hear the fat gentleman finally speak yesterday. As he rambled on like a Sunday school teenager in “church-speak” mode, Barry and I looked at each other, dumbfounded. Just then Barry saw on his feed that at 11:49 EST justinph had tweeted:
Wow, Rick Warren prays like shit.
I say, amen.
And I want to interrupt myself here with a point of information: In spite of what we have been led to believe, and contrary to the [Justice Roberts-flubbed] administration of the oath of office we witnessed yesterday, the Constitution includes a precisely-worded, prescribed text which absolutely does not include the phrase, “so help me god”. Also, our founders made it very clear that you don’t have to swear an oath, but merely affirm. [Article II, Section 1.]
As a part of all mankind I share the joy of people of every color in the triumph of Barack Husein Obama, but, as an American who knows and serves no god, today I probably feel more excluded than ever before. A black man can become President; we had already discovered that we can have and probably soon will have a woman as President; we can expect some day to find that it isn’t necessary to be a Christian to become President; if absolutely nobody else shows up at the hustings, we might eventually elect a queer; The office is now open to every citizen [if natural-born, at least 35 years of age, and 14 years a resident in the U.S.], yet from where I’m standing it looks pretty certain that, if faking belief isn’t an option, an atheist can never become President of these United States. She or he is more likely to be stoned in the public square.
When I look at the historic talent pool represented by that distinguished class of skeptics, I find that truth to be quite tragic, and I’m very sad for all of us.
*
When I first saw this image, on the About.com site, the medallion at the bottom had been altered to read “For a Christian America”, and the sword was edited to bear the inscription, “Bigotry, Discrimination”. I put at the top of this post before I realized that as originally published and as shown here the picture doesn’t have anything overtly connected to a deity, but I’ve decided to keep it at the top, for the Boy Scouts of America’s connection to god, country and straight-acting-boys – and men.
[image, in which the artist’s male lover {they were to live together 48 years} modeled for “Liberty”, from Library of Congress]
Vatican calls Gaza a concentration camp
Jews captured during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising led by German soldiers to deportation
I’m normally not inclined to pay attention to the Vatican when it comes to statements on morals, but this BBC bulletin is hard to ignore: The Pope’s justice minister, Cardinal Renato Martino, has sharply criticised Israel’s actions and likened the Gaza Strip to a “big concentration camp”.
The developments of the past two weeks make me want to pose a question closely related to that analogy: Can anyone say, “Warsaw Ghetto uprising”?
After the horrors committed in our name (and with the active or passive support of most of us) by our own government these past eight years, Americans of conscience can’t easily point fingers at any of the peoples who suffer under immoral regimes whether these systems were historically discredited in the middle of the last century or are very much active in the present. However I still think it’s fair to ask, where are the “good Germans” today [using the phrase sincerely, not sardonically], in both Israel and the U.S., and also in those countries which continue to support and enable the disastrous policies pursued by both.
My thanks for the news tip go to a friend who is with a group, “We are Jews who say ‘Not in Our Name’ to the Israeli Government”, assembling at 5:30 pm this Monday, January 12, in front of the Israeli Consulate at 800 Second Avenue between 42nd and 43rd Streets.
[image from JewishVirtualLibrary]
baby Jesus with eye shadow
This is a seasonal post – but with a twist.
Although I’m a refugee from a Roman Catholic youth, a steadfast atheist for almost 50 years, I suppose I may still be somewhat conflicted about the baby Jesus.
For some reason, when I saw this delicate little ceramic infant a number of years ago inside the gift shop at New Mexico’s ancient El Santuario de Chimayo, I couldn’t resist snapping it up. At first the priest didn’t want to part with the pale-skinned hand-made figure, even though it was on the merchandise table, but he eventually agreed to sell it. It turned out to be the last one in stock, and he wasn’t sure they’d ever get another. Maybe he had fallen in love with it himself, and maybe he sensed I wasn’t going to use it for conventional devotion.
Okay, it was the eyes that got me.
I lay him down carefully in some raffia on the cherry tea table every December 24th; it’s always the most Christmas-y thing in our apartment. We’re actually both pretty devoted to this child, even though our own convention is that he gets packed away in a few days until his return appearance next year.
When the kid looks up at us through that fantastic eyeshadow, I like to think he’s trying to tell us something we already know.
the Obama/Warren mutual annointing thing: total wack
Hieronymus Bosch The Mountebank 1475-80 oil on panel 21″ x 29.5″
I’m going to close my eyes and count to ten, and when I open them I want to find that fat mountebank gone.
I’m very much in and of this country, but I’m not a member of Rick Warren’s wacky faith-based syndicate of dupes. I’m not a Christian of any description, and I’m also not a Jew and not a Muslem or Bah�’ist. I’m not Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddist, Confucian, Taoist, Shinto, Zoroastrian, Druze, Shamanist, Unitarian or Yoruban. I’m also not a part of the Prince Philip Movement.
In fact I’m not a member of any magic cult, and I’m not a part of any other kind of club. I like to believe that I can think for myself. It’s a competence I continue to hope I might share with every American adult, in spite of all the sad evidence to the contrary. At the very least I’d like to think that the person chosen to occupy the office of President of the United States of America can and does think for himself. Yet it now seems pretty clear, as he’s about to be anointed on the steps of the Capitol, that even our latest almighty one doesn’t think for himself, or at least that he doesn’t want us to think that he thinks for himself.
It’s not only that I am appalled by Obama’s choice of Rick Warren to deliver an “invocation” at his, no, . . . our truly-epochal January 20th inauguration ceremony. No, it’s much bigger than that: I object to the fact that even in the twenty-first century, in order to get a proper send-off into the most important secular office a nation can award to one of its citizens, the President-elect of my country feels he has to enlist the public help of any crazy sky pilot to formally summon the private imaginary friend the two of them share.
NOTE: If I were to object only to the specific choice of Warren as the next American high priest, I would hope I could come up with more reasons than those connected with his vocal opposition to gay marriage, comparing it to incest, pedophilia and polygamy. This seems to be all that most people find appalling about Warren.
I would add, and this is just for starters, that he does not believe in evolution; that he would deny women the right to their own bodies, comparing abortion to the Holocaust and those who defend a woman’s right to choice as no better than Nazis; that he has said that women should submit to their husbands; that he believes that Jews who do not convert will surely roast in hell; that he has advocated the assassination of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; that he has said that Christians who advance a social gospel (the religious crusade against poverty and inequality) are Marxists; and that he opposes stem-cell research.
But enough. �crasez l’inf�me!
[image from Web Gallery of Art]
Dalai Lama and John McCain
two cult leaders, getting along famously
Why does this photo of McCain’s meeting yesterday with Tenzin Gyatso not surprise me? But then, maybe it really should have surprised me:
“I hate the gooks,” McCain said in 2000. “I will hate them as long as I live.”
This trip down memory lane was brought to us by Eyeteeth.
[image by Carolyn Kaster from AP; and thanks to Barry for the Eyeteeth citation]