Policy and Poetry

Policy makes Society, Poetry makes the Soul.

Gay in Art

We shall soon have a black president with California putting him over the 270 mark by giving him a sixty-percent plus plurality. At the same time, the voters of California passed a ban on gay marriage. Senator Obama’s election makes a statement that skin tone or ethnic background are no longer barriers to attaining the highest office in the land. Wonderful. Now, how long will it be before we elect an openly gay president?

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November 21st, 2008 Permalink No Comments »

Policy

Goose-Stepping Gays

November 19th, 2008

Jörg Haider is out of the closet now that he’s in the grave. “He was the man of my life,” said Stefan Petzner, a former fashion and cosmetics reporter who was Haider’s number two at the far-right political party, Alliance for the Future of Austria, and apparently number one in his boss’ heart before the xenophobic politician died in a car accident last month. Homosexuality and fascism are seemingly anathema, two polar opposites, but like magnetic fields, they attract.

Unsettled

November 16th, 2008

Old Testament morality has returned to the Holy Land. The updated version however, comes with a twist: eye for eye retribution by Jews is exacted on Jews. Such frontier justice is how some West Bank settlers settle matters. It’s called the “price tag policy.”

The Five Fundamental Axioms

November 14th, 2008

Below are the five fundamental axioms, or self-evident truths, that govern our existence on this planet: Axiom I (upon which all the others are based): The bounty of our planet is limited. There are only so many raw materials that can be drawn from it and only so much air and land to provide for its inhabitant’s needs and to absorb their waste. To surpass these limits will bring about catastrophic results.

Election Masks

November 12th, 2008

Shelby Steele is one of the country’s most trenchant observers on race. In his most recent book, the conservative scholar discusses “masking,” an “almost automatic” false identity assumed by blacks around whites to offset the power differential and historical baggage that tangles social interaction between the races…

Pluralism in Peril?

November 10th, 2008

In this vibrant, pluralistic country, a member of a minority managed to reach the pinnacle of political power, demonstrating that, however messy and unwieldy democracy may be, it can make a glorious virtue of those religious, ethnic, and racial differences that so often divide societies. That country is India, a sprawling subcontinent led by a Sikh, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. But pluralism may be in peril in the world’s largest democracy.

Crossroads

November 6th, 2008

Jeff Flake gets it. His party’s in trouble. Deep trouble. Flake is an earnest, reform-minded Republican congressman from Arizona who, if his party mandarins are wise, represents his caucus’ future. With characteristic bluntness, he summed up the state of affairs following the election. “Let’s face it,” he wrote in the Washington Post, “we Republicans are now, by any reasonable measurement, deep in the political wilderness.” Flake knows that of which he speaks.

A Gore Counterfactual

November 5th, 2008

It’s Election Day and polls indicate a blowout. The Republican nominee, Colorado Governor Bill Owens, has a large lead over Congressman Richard Gephardt, whose party association has cost him dearly. The country clearly wants change. It’s hardly a surprise. Never before in the nation’s history has one party controlled the White House for four consecutive terms, much less five.

Culture

Jesuits and Spacecraft

November 9th, 2008

Right after the arrival of the Spanish in the Americas there came the Jesuits. Their role was not conquest in the usual sense but convert the savages that they would encounter. Deep in the jungles of what was to become Bolivia in 1691 they established the San Javier Mission among the Chiquitano tribe. This was the first of many in the realm of the now-displaced Inca Empire. Their mission was to turn the natives into docile, hard working slaves in the service of the plundering Europeans.

A Christian Nation?

October 12th, 2008

As an art student, one quickly learns that the roots of Western art are Christian. The major art museums are rich in scenes of crucifixions, saints, martyrs, and virgins. Our great books of literature include Dante’s Inferno, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and thousands of religious references from Shakespeare to TS Eliot…

A Modest Proposal

October 3rd, 2008

As of this writing we are being told that we stand at the edge of our economic system’s most dangerous precipice. Bubbles, economic flights of fancy, have been blamed for this crisis, but they are in the very nature of a “greed is good” society. In less threatening situations, cutting social services, investment in infrastructure, and health benefits for the less fortunate have solved these problems…

Monumental Blunders

September 27th, 2008

America’s rugged individualism shines through in its de facto national motto, “land of the free, home of the brave,” the climatic finale of the otherwise incomprehensible “Star Spangled Banner” that stirs the spirit even of those normally immune to patriotic sentimentality. Why, then, does a country with such a deep-seated democratic ethos produce monuments so thoroughly devoid of humanity?

After Nine Eleven

September 14th, 2008

Beside rubble, what resulted from this attack in the economic core of Manhattan? Over 2,500 innocent people died, terrorism became a key word and our president used it for political purposes resulting in our involvement in a senseless war, the additional deaths of over 4,000 of our soldiers, as well as perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis.

Guernica

September 7th, 2008

Is Picasso’s 11 foot by 25 foot painting titled “Guernica” a great work of art or only a political statement? Many consider it an icon but an icon of what? In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, German aircraft on behalf of the fascist General Franco and his supporters bombed the Basque town of Guernica with the sole purpose of terrorizing its non-military inhabitants.

Memories of a Golden Age

August 26th, 2008

When in Washington DC not long ago, I visited the exhibit in the contemporary art wing of the Smithsonian. It was a selection of works from the Fifties and Sixties, the golden age of Abstract Expressionism. Here were those famous pieces of the past, the pinstriped canvases by Frank Stella, Motherwell’s pretentious “Elegy to the Spanish Republic,”…

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