Art and freedom

My day is done. I’ve read the one quote that makes me happy, so now I can buckle down to grading. It’s from Ai Weiwei, the artist and dissenter the Chinese government would love to silence.

My definition of art has always been the same. It is about freedom of expression, a new way of communication. It is never about exhibiting in museums or about hanging it on the wall. Art should live in the heart of the people. Ordinary people should have the same ability to understand art as anybody else. I don’t think art is elite or mysterious. I don’t think anybody can separate art from politics. The intention to separate art from politics is itself a very political intention. I definitely know people who are shameless enough to give up basic values. I see this kind of art, and when I see it I feel ashamed. In China they treat art as some form of decoration, a self-indulgence. It is pretending to be art. It looks like art. It sells like art. But it is really a piece of shit.

There’s more about his politics: China keeps trying to control the free expression of the people on the internet by shutting it down. They argue that they’re better than they were in the days of the Cultural Revolution — which is setting the bar rather low, I think — but it’s still a restrictive police state.

I’d argue that the US is better than China, but still, especially considering the record of the last few weeks, is likewise a police state.

The United Kingdom must be awash with cash

Isn’t it wonderful that they’re so flush that they can start spending buckets of money on frivolities and casual whims for the school system? No shortage of teachers, the teachers all well-paid and satisfied, the schools all well-supplied, and such a surplus that the government can publish and send out a special little present to every school.

The Times Educational Supplement is reporting this morning that the Prime Minister is planning to send a King James Bible to every school in the country, complete with a foreword by Michael Gove, the Education Minister.

Mr Gove is quoted as saying that the King James Bible was the most important book written in the English language. “It‘s a thing of beauty, and it‘s also an incredibly important historical artefact. It has helped shape and define the English language and is one of the keystones of our shared culture. And it is a work that has had international significance.”

Man, I wish the American educational system was so well-funded that we could start dumping random books on school libraries like that.

Although…aren’t there plenty of other books of historical and literary significance that could benefit the schools a little more? I suspect that the Christian schoolchildren already have access to copies of the Bible, and the non-Christian ones aren’t going to be very interested.

Oh, hey, what am I saying? I’m sure the government has already provided all the schools with all the science books and history books and literature and art and other such wonderfully useful works, so I shouldn’t cavil at them generously adding one more text to the bounty, right?

Good to know in case you’re on the #OWS lines

I’ve heard of the Scoville scale, which measures the potency of spicy peppers. Those boring green bell peppers get a 0; habaneros get a score of 350,000.

The stuff those UC Davis police officers so casually hosed into the faces of peacefully demonstrating students? between 2,000,000 and 5,300,000 Scoville units.

But we’ve taken to calling it pepper spray, I think, because that makes it sound so much more benign than it really is, like something just a grade or so above what we might mix up in a home kitchen. The description hints maybe at that eye-stinging effect that the cook occasionally experiences when making something like a jalapeno-based salsa, a little burn, nothing too serious.

Until you look it up on the Scoville scale and remember, as toxicologists love to point out, that the dose makes the poison. That we’re not talking about cookery but a potent blast of chemistry. So that if OC spray is the U.S. police response of choice – and certainly, it’s been used with dismaying enthusiasm during the Occupy protests nationwide, as documented in this excellent Atlantic roundup – it may be time to demand a more serious look at the risks involved.

Their goal is to cause intense pain. Where has the police gotten this bizarre idea that somehow inducing agony in protesters is somehow humane or reasonable?

(Also on FtB)

Vileness on display

After watching this video of the events at UC Davis, I can only conclude that the police are cowards and thugs. THe only lesson they’re teaching is that we can’t trust them, and they’re not on the people’s side.

There is something worse, though. Ann Coulter has weighed in on the OWS movement, and she has an answer for UC Davis:

Remember the lesson from my book: It just took a few shootings at Kent State to shut that down for good.

Without any hint that the irony registered, she also made this comment.

I guess it’s fun to destroy stuff. As they found out during the French Revolution, it’s lots of fun to just start randomly murdering people – this is the way it always is with mobs.

Coulter is the one advocating random murder. She is a creature beyond the pale: I would hope the media would finally see the light and ostracize her, but I don’t expect it to happen. Especially in a Breitbartian world where eliminationist rhetoric is something to be giggled over.

(via Charles Pierce)

(NOTE: As is usual when I mention Coulter, if you can’t focus on the hate and stupidity in her words, and instead dump a load of sexist, misogynist comments here, I will delete your words and in extreme cases will ban you.)

I have a little sympathy for the Seattle police

It’s got to be rough, becoming the villain in a Joe Hill protest song. Think of it; years from now, they’ll have a grandchild on a knee, telling them stories of their glory days when they served their civic duties by hosing pregnant teenagers and 84-year-old women with pepper spray, and it’s going to be hard to spin that as courageous work. They were dangerous, you know, great vicious brutes with slender limbs or fragile hearts, all mad-eyed and tainted with idealism, and somebody had to play the role of faceless uniformed thug and beat the proles down.

Here’s to Dorli Rainey, 84 and still fighting with the tears streaming down her cheeks.

I think this does call for a Joe Hill song.

There are women of many descriptions
In this queer world, as everyone knows,
Some are living in beautiful mansions,
And are wearing the finest of clothes.
There are blue blooded queens and princesses,
Who have charms made of diamonds and pearl;
But the only and thoroughbred lady
Is the Rebel Girl.

That’s the Rebel Girl, That’s the Rebel Girl.
To the working class she’s a precious pearl.
She brings courage, pride and joy
To the fighting Rebel Boy
We’ve had girls before, but we need some more
In the Industrial Workers of the World.
For it’s great to fight for freedom
With a Rebel Girl.

Yes, her hands may be harden’d from labor
And her dress may not be very fine;
But a heart in her bosom is beating
That is true to her class and her kind.
And the grafters in terror are trembling
When her spite and defiance she’ll hurl.
For the only and thoroughbred lady
Is the Rebel Girl.

That’s the Rebel Girl, That’s the Rebel Girl.
To the working class she’s a precious pearl.
She brings courage, pride and joy
To the fighting Rebel Boy
We’ve had girls before, but we need some more
In the Industrial Workers of the World.
For it’s great to fight for freedom
With a Rebel Girl.

Rainey is interviewed here.

OCCUPY SPARTA!

We all know that comic book artist Frank Miller is an arrogant macho jerkwad, but I didn’t know the magnitude of his jerkwadiness. He’s written an angry diatribe against the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The “Occupy” movement, whether displaying itself on Wall Street or in the streets of Oakland (which has, with unspeakable cowardice, embraced it) is anything but an exercise of our blessed First Amendment. “Occupy” is nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness. These clowns can do nothing but harm America.

And then he gets really cranky.

Apparently, us liberals are hurting America, because we’ve got a war to fight against al-Quaeda and Islamicism, and we need to get out of the way so the investment bankers can fight it for us. I guess wrecking the economy was all part of a secret plan to defeat terrorism.

Anyway, ol’ Frank lives in a cartoon fantasy world where violence solves everything, and all it takes to solve a problem is a bigger gun and the will to use it indiscriminately, which I think we all could have learned from his graphic novels and movies without reading his blog. And now that we’ve read his blog, we don’t need to pay for his commercial products anymore! Miller’s simple-mindedness stands exposed even further.

Which is funny if you think about it. Could anyone take 300 seriously? I giggled through it all — it was hysterically campy, all macho homoeroticism energetically portrayed with a complete lack of awareness of how over-the-top it all was. It fervently espoused an elitist right-wing view of the world, where only kings ruled divinely and the peons were all slaughtered off-stage.

David Brin has sallied forth to smite the lunacy. He takes an interesting approach: he discredits Miller’s authority on history by utterly demolishing the pseudo-history of 300. It seems hardly worth doing — didn’t we already know that 300 was a great goofy ahistorical joke? — but there’s a nice analogy to be drawn. The contempt Miller shows for the 99% protesting American economic inequality is paralleled in the contempt he shows for everyone other than royalty and professional killers in his work.

Frank Miller rails against effete, pansy-boy militias of amateur, citizen soldiers. But funny thing, none of his Spartan characters ever mentions those events, just a decade earlier! How bakers, potters and poets from Athens – after vanquishing one giant invading army, then ran 26 miles in full armor to face down a second Persian horde and sent it packing, a feat of endurance that gave its name to the modern marathon race. A feat that goes unmatched today. Especially by Spartans.

That Athenian triumph deserves a movie! And believe me, it weighed heavily on the real life Leonidas, ten years later. “300″ author Frank Miller portrays the Spartans’ preening arrogance in the best possible light, as a kind of endearing tribal machismo. Miller never hints at the underlying reason for Leonidas’s rant, a deep current of smoldering shame over how Sparta sat out Marathon, leaving it to Athenian amateurs, like the playwright Aeschelus, to save all of Greece. The “shopkeepers” whom Leonidas outrageously and ungratefully despises in the film.

It just goes to show you can’t trust a fascist thug to recognize reality.

By the way, is it required for comic book artists to be crazy, or does it just help? (Uh-oh, I know Melissa Kaercher…what dark secrets lurk beneath her superficially normal (OK, mostly normal) personality?)

Hitch on the Mormons

Christopher Hitchens takes a moment to highlight the weird and sinister beliefs of the Mormons.

I have no clear idea whether Pastor Robert Jeffress is correct in referring to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more colloquially known as the Mormons, as “a cult.” There do seem to be one or two points of similarity. The Mormons have a supreme leader, known as the prophet or the president, whose word is allegedly supreme. They can be ordered to turn upon and shun any members who show any signs of backsliding. They have distinctive little practices, such as the famous underwear, to mark them off from other mortals, and they are said to be highly disciplined and continent when it comes to sex, booze, nicotine, and coffee. Word is that the church can be harder to leave than it was to join. Hefty donations and tithes are apparently appreciated from the membership.

Whether this makes it a cult, or just another of the born-in-America Christian sects, I am not sure. In any case what interests me more is the weird and sinister belief system of the LDS, discussion of which it is currently hoping to inhibit by crying that criticism of Mormonism amounts to bigotry.

He makes the point that the LDS church is certifiable lunacy of undeniably fraudulent origin, and that “I don’t think I would want to vote for a Scientologist or a Moonie for high office” — and there’s a dilemma. I don’t want to vote for a Catholic or Lutheran or Baptist for any office, either. Mormonism and Scientology and the Moonies are simply one other kind of religion, the only difference being that those strange recent cults are snuggling nicely in the uncanny valley of faith — we’re accustomed to the absurdity of Christianity, it no longer makes most of us blink in astonishment that someone actually believes that, but Mormons? Alien crazy ideas, instead of Grandma’s comfortable crazy ideas.

The dilemma is that Hitch’s preference would mean that none of us could actually vote for any candidate who has a chance of winning. At least not until we achieve our majority in the future.

I have a resolution, though. We acknowledge that everyone has some weird ideas in their heads, and that we can’t practically exclude people from office for thinking crazy thoughts. What we can do, though, is refuse to vote for the ones who are proud of their insanity, who brag about believing in space ghosts, and who think their dotty dogma actually provides useful policy advice.

I know, there goes the entire Republican slate, and Obama is skating on awfully thin ice himself.

Minnesota Republicans have very low standards

Mitch Berg is a fairly prominent Republican blogger here in Minnesota — he’s generally thought of as a more or less mainstream Limbaugh-style, pro-Tea Party Republican, which tells you right there that he’s a few meters shy of sane.

He’s also rude. That in itself is not a mark against him, obviously; I’m rude myself. But there are some limits, you know. Berg has endorsed a guy named TJ Swift, who goes by the pseudonym Swiftee, and is one of the earliest denizens of the Pharyngula dungeon. Berg doesn’t just endorse the guy, he gives him high praise:

TJSwift remains the single finest editorial cartoonist in the Twin Cities blogosphere.

@mitchpberg

Like I say, I have a reputation for sharp invective; but I don’t think I can match Swift’s peerless artistic talents and cogent pithiness. If you’d like to see what is regarded as the high water mark of the Minnesota GOP’s wit, talent, and insight…all you have to do is look at the latest work of the single finest Republican editorial cartoonist in Minneapolis/St Paul.

Perhaps we’ll someday see his work in the Minneapolis Star Tribune…or dare I suggest it, the New Yorker or New York Times.

Let’s just please not see any Minnesota Republicans anywhere near an elected office.

He and Bachmann could be BFFs!

The crazy Minnesotans keep crawling out of the woodwork and onto the political stage — it’s a little embarrassing. We’ve had a professional wrestler, a vampire, a crazy Jebus lady, and now…Gary Boisclair, an anti-abortion fanatic who’s running against Keith Ellison, our Muslim representative in the Fifth Congressional District. Here’s his ad (which he has no money to air, so only put it on youtube, where it got pulled for violating their terms of service), which makes a big deal of the fact that Ellison swore his oath of office on a copy of the Quran, which is full of bombastic Islamic tribalism and sectarian exclusivity, and threatens unbelievers with violence and horrible fates.

It’s a “book that undermines our Constitution,” says Boisclair. So what book would he take his oath of office on? The Bible, which is just as bad?