Tuesday January 28, 2020
280 Days until the 2020 election and 356 days to the Inauguration
I’ve been thinking a lot about the impeachment and dancing – specifically, dancers for singing acts. I think Sia started it. She had those dancers who did movements that had nothing to do with her song. It was bizarre. Now, everyone seems to be copying it. Of course, people are still copying Janet Jackson’s troop from Rhythm Nation. I guess I should have said troupe as in dance group, but I used troop as in army, because she was talking about a nation and hence it’s army. It made sense. Now? Do a bunch of people moving in unison for no particular reason make sense? And this brings me to art, as in institutional art, as in paintings and sculpture. It has been said that art imitates life, that it reflects the society within which it was made. If so, God help us. I was in the Pompidou Center a few years ago and couldn’t help but think they got sold a bunch of shlock by the same guys who sold the emperor no clothes. It took the wisdom of a child to point that out.
This brings me to a brief tableau of life that happened when my kids were quite young. We had gone church shopping and were at the local Catholic church. The service had just ended and it was early spring, just before Easter. A priest with a lovely Irish accent was recounting to the amusement of the adults that one of his pupils in Sunday school had fallen asleep while he was giving the lesson about Jesus and his crucifixion. The child awoke just as the priest got to the part about Jesus rising from the dead.
The kid said that no, you don’t rise from the dead. When you’re dead, you’re dead.
The priest and the adults all twittered in laughter. Poor child. But wait a second, who has the better sense?
I think about the 4,500 year history of Egypt. Of their burying their dead, and mummifying them, and all the other stuff. What evidence did they have that it worked? You would have thought that at some point someone would have held up their hand and said, “Hey, wait a second.”
Or the Maya, who did similar things with the idea that their dead would live among the stars.
Or – you name it. What religion that has a belief in the afterlife has any proof that it exists? Yet, they go on with their prayers, ceremonies and arguments.
Then I think about Greta and how one person I know referred to her as “a poor deluded child.” Really? She’s pissed off. The house is burning down and she’s screaming because she knows she’s going to be left with the mess and the adults are twittering around saying poor deluded child. She’s not the one deluded.
This brings me to the impeachment and art. After the High Renaissance of Italy came Mannerism. This was art that wasn’t trying to be picture perfect. The colors were slightly more garish, the limbs elongated. Things weren’t quite right in the sense that the pictures being painted didn’t reflect the reality that everyone saw. But put it another way, if you were an artist and you had seen Michelangelo’s work, I think you’d be tempted to ask yourself, “Who wants to follow that?”
So new directions were taken. This evolved into various kinds of art: landscape and portraiture became regimented. historical and Biblical scenes predictable. All that changed with the invention of the lead painting tube and artists could now go outside and paint because they were no longer constrained to their mixing bowls and therefore their studios. The plain air movement which became the Impressionist movement was born. Another invention changed the art world – the moving picture. By 1907, it was clear to the artists in Paris that they had to change because people could now watch reality in the form of movies. They didn’t need pictures like that. The split faced figures of Picasso were a direct result of his going to the museum in Paris that featured such masks from Africa. The idea of being a savage, of rejecting the old norms (while embracing the modern comforts) had become the new art struggle. This terminated in absurdity of the Dada movement, “It is art, because I say it is art,” can only go so far.
Yet, many artists today still are trying that. Most of it is crap and will be washed away with time.
So this brings me to the impeachment trial. I have to ask, “Is art imitating life or is it the other way around?”
There’s a third player in that question. There’s a new world out there. While movies show these futuristic worlds where war has wiped out once great civilizations and they have been replaced with sand swept ruins the reality to come is that we may be facing such a life intellectually and it may, in time, lead to a wind swept desert.
This new world is the world of alternate facts and gas lighted reality. “It is what I tell you it is. Don’t heed your senses. Don’t use reason. Don’t use logic. Listen to me! I know the truth!”
It is the world of propaganda and disinformation.
You can’t have a conversation with a religious fanatic, because they believe. Likewise, you can’t have a conversation with a political fanatic for the same reason. When the religious and political fanatics get together with the monied interests that want to hide their real motives and use these people for their own ends we end up with the world you see now. This wacky world that was on full display during the Republican defense of the president.
Where to begin? Jay Sekulow and his argument that the president was interested in corruption, which he is – but not in stopping it, and that Ukraine was in on the rigging of the U.S. 2016 election? (Which they weren’t.) I like the part where he said he could prove the Ukraine bit because their were papers in the White House with the word Ukraine on them.
Or what about Pam Bondi? The woman who was bought off by the twenty grand bribe to her election campaign, arguing all kinds of crap that the right has been dredging up from its own echo chamber, none of which is true.
Or that old time lawyer of Trump’s saying Obama should be impeached. I wonder if the Republicans would vote for that?
Or Alan Dershowitz arguing that the Constitution only provides for a few crimes as high crimes? I mean this guy takes on the most notorious of high crimes of famous and rich people and here he is again, spouting nonsense and contradicting his former arguments. This guy used to teach at Harvard Law.
OMG! This is where we are. In this weird twisted distorted and discolored world.
Reality. Who needs reality?
Meanwhile a virus is spreading throughout the world and no one seems to know what it is and how to stop it. There are a few places left in the world that can fight this sort of thing. A few places that the zombies haven’t broken into and eaten the brains of the people doing real work, but the bulwarks are thinning and the oceans are rising.
280 Days until the 2020 election and 356 days to the Inauguration
PS The Red Pyramid, The Bent Pyramid, a tunnel inside a pyramid leading down*, and the stairs taking you up to a tunnel to another chamber (once you walk up other stairs to this first chamber.)
*Imagine walking backwards, arms spread wide to grasp the hand rails, bent over. It’s like doing a backwards walking chest press. This is probably the entrance tunnel to The Bent Pyramid. Notice the Red Pyramid is build at the same angle as the top part of The Bent Pyramid. They weren’t going to screw up again!
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