Free Speech and Fast Saints

Winter                                                 Waxing Moon of the Cold Month

Cameras and inks and papers, oh, my!  Then, new glasses and seven bags of groceries.  We’ve been gone and the larder was bare of important items like milk, turkey slices for the dogs, veggies and fruit, bread and bagels.  Now it’s not bare.

JPII is on a fast-track for sainthood.  Just like today.  Fast foods and fast saints.  Just can’t wait, can we?

JPII’s successor, the German Shepherd, has taken on major moral issues recently, like, the right name for your kid.  No weird ones.  He’s also cranked up the heat, already at record highs set by JPII, on theologians teaching at Catholic schools, gays at mass and those pesky liberation theologians.  Whoever said the divine right of kings is dead?  It lives on in its last bastion, Vatican City.  (pic.  Yikes!)

The whole Gifford/Tucson shooting controversy.  We have rule of law and one of those rules is no prior restraint.  This means that we cannot stop someone from committing a crime until they’ve actually committed it.  This gives us big trouble with at least two categories of persons:  pedophiles and psychotics, especially paranoid psychotics.  We know the probability of their offending is high, but until they act out there’s nothing we can do.  Anyone who has dealt with the seriously mentally ill knows the difficult line walked in their care and treatment, a line between limiting freedoms and giving the individual a realistic chance at living in community.

Does this mean that the gaseous explosions protected as free speech had no affect on Loughner?  I doubt it.  Some peoples minds are more porous than others, more open to outside influence.  It’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which a paranoid psychotic decides that Rush Limbaugh actually knows what he’s talking about, that Sarah Palin is a respectable political figure.  O.K.  Maybe only a paranoid psychotic would think either of those things, but it only confirms my point.  His actions did not exist in a vacuum.  Neither did lynchings in the rural south nor do gay hate crimes in many (most?) parts of our country.

Can we or should we stop Limbaugh, George Beck, Sarah Palin, the tea party gas bags from using inflammatory rhetoric?  Regrettably, no.  Part of the idea of free speech is that discerning citizens will tell the demagogue from the statesman, the propagandist from a public servant.  It does appear that discernment may well be at an all time low in the current US, but it’s not the first time.  Those of us with other views must speak, too.  And act.

Expressionists

Winter                                          Full Moon of the Cold Month

A cold stretch coming up.  The night of Kate’s retirement party predicted to be -22 with a high of 3 during the day.  I have disposable cameras to buy, chipboard for small signs and a couple of things to print out.  That last may be a problem.  My HP laserjet printer, one I’ve had since the late 90’s, you know, back in the last century, seems unwilling to accept a new toner cartridge.  I’ve changed these out many times over the last 10-12 years, so this is a puzzle.  My other printer, a Canon color printer, is also down right now.  I’m going to take a stab at solving those while I’m out buying cameras and chipboard.

I’ve got my tour for tomorrow morning patched together.  We’ll start with Monet, the impressionist Haystack, to ground our further adventures in expressionism.  Where the plein air impressionists wanted to show just what their senses saw, color as created by light bouncing off of objects and received by painterly retinas, the expressionists gave up the senses to the camera and tried to depict that cavern measureless to man, the human mind and human feeling.  Using the formal aspects of painting in new and unusual ways, color, bright color, chosen for its expressive nature rather than its sensory veracity, flowing lines not always stopping at the borders of one object, compositions set flat against the canvas, shoved up toward the front with all the Renaissance experiments in perspective abandoned, the expressionists wanted to evoke feeling and the swirling inner life of the individual.

Some of my favorite pieces in the museum are in our expressionist collection:  Beckmann’s Blind Man’s Buff, Kandinsky’s Study for Improvisation V and the Egon Schiele painting to the right.

Well, back to the tour work.