Category — Art

Have you ever felt like THIS in the company of Progressives?* Enlarge the image.  You’re the conservative guy in the red leotard undergoing the liberals’ trepanning of your skull.  A tin-smith, trust fund grad of Middlebury is doing the nasty work.  He’s watched by a squishy, activist, humanist cleric and a bookhead - a journalist or an academic, no doubt. 

They’re looking for evidence of learning and native intelligence.   They assume you have neither, but they can’t resist the investigation or the effort to test you with esoteric compost.  They use expressions like “existential threat” incorrectly, like Mudslide Face, Charley Gibson in his interview with Sarah Palin. 

He thinks his weighty usage somehow describes Israel’s “right to exist”, and is entirely clueless that he’s wrong, that he’s dispensing jargon.  To modify an old insult, a journalist like Gibson is an intellectual in the same way that a mechanical rabbit is a quarry.  You can catch him, but what’s the use?  With bozos like Gibson, it’s “I Verbalize, Therefore I Am”, and liberals everywhere agree. He won’t get this treatment from The Boston Globe.  The Left doesn’t indulge in this kind of self-analysis. 

Liberalism today is a silly union of elite leftist ideas absorbed in ”higher education” with the old populist issues revealed in the fields and on the shop floor.  But that doesn’t explain the epidemic of smugness and snoot on the left.  Nothing in Progressivism automatically turns its adherents into diletantes, poseurs or colorful, but small-brained song birds.   That comes from something else.  Egalitarianism.

Egalitarianism undermines every pecking order.  Distinctions are impossible; maybe even sinful.  When pent-up liberal vanity is discouraged in terms of ownership or income or any of the other ways people express distinctions, it then leaks out in information-as-knowledge, and the chronic competition of my brain against your brain, and my fact against your fact.   Ridiculous.  They have no other outlet for their conviction that they compose a meritocratic ruling class, and it’s driving them crazy. 

  * “The Cure of Folly (Extraction of the Madness Stone)”  - Hieronymous Bosch

 How is this different from today’s taggers gaily altering public space in the modern world. What would the archaeologists of 2230 say about the current trash spray painted on various surfaces by so-called artists du jour.

One man’s art is another’s graffiti.

Thousands of prehistoric rock carvings and paintings of bighorn sheep and other wildlife, hunters wielding spears, and warriors engaged in hand-to-hand combat.

Now, a dramatic increase in natural gas drilling is proposed on the plateau above the canyon, and preservationists fear trucks will kick up dust that will cover the images. They also worry that one proposed solution, a chemical dust suppressant, could make things worse by corroding the rock.

“They’re irreplaceable,” said Steve Tanner, a member of the Nine Mile Canyon Coalition, which wants industrial traffic to be funneled away from the canyon to protect the art on the sandstone walls. “When they’re gone, they’re gone.”

The more than 10,000 petroglyphs have been a source of fascination and speculation since their discovery in the late 1800s. The art is thought to be the work of the Fremont people, who lived in present-day Utah, Idaho, Colorado and Nevada from 700 to 1300 A.D., and the ancestors of modern-day Ute Indians. [snip]

This graffiti lauds war, animal torture and defaces public property. These antisocial individuals hacked and scraped soft stone, permanently transforming the natural beauty of the area.

Don’t you prefer your sandstone outcrops unfettered by bad childish art?