2010-12-08

Goar: Unease grows over inequality - thestar.com

Goar: Unease grows over inequality - thestar.com

One of the appeals of Canada and also Australia (more there than here), lies in its seeming social levelness (not just level-headedness). But, as in Japan, and as in other places touting that post-WWII character, the truth is more complicated and less egalitarian. And in Canada, in particular, as the writings of Atwood have long pointed to (and she is not alone among Canadian authors), grotesque economic inequality is there, simply under the surface, but probably not even that.

What we see is the evolution and maturation of both new-generation old wealth and simply new wealth, born of extraordinarily pro-individualistic/business programs put into place over the last 40 years.

2010-12-06

Hide/Seek: Too shocking for America | Art and design | The Guardian

Hide/Seek: Too shocking for America | Art and design | The Guardian

Sigh. The US-ians still seem to recall the pang of Puritan birth: the Ps were as bad as or worse than Platonic Republicans and could not reconcile the proper life to art. And though they did write poetry it was in the service of religious conviction, and plain efficiency over pretty rhetoric was the point. So now, 400 years later, that which seriously questions the logic of the relation between matter and spirit, flesh and soul--the matter of a lot of Christianity--is thorned

(NB: I'm an atheist and have difficulty recalling even what Christmas is about, let alone Easter and the rest. But I did study the religious history and narrative while in grad school, and in particular, the Puritans, though I am afraid I surely missed much. My apologies therefore if I needlessly offend.)

During the days of Serrano's Piss Christ, we saw similar misguidedness. But think: the point of human matter--why, according even to the Puritans, our soul is housed in an (imperfect) body (it has desires that deviate from the will of the soul) and not, like the angels, in no body (they're all soul, no body like ours, and unpossessed of desires that deviate from their soul's)--is that it is a body, filled with body's contents, including its wastes, desires, glories. And the Christ was of a body born and in a body lived. What then, is the relation of the body to the soul, in particular, His? I find Serrano's work quite brilliant, as I do much of the other stuff in the Smithsonian, for these raise really important questions about the body itself and its place in the narrative we call modern--in particular, in the US.

2010-12-05

Truth Speaks--

… all this comes nearly exactly 100 years since Twain's death. Twain, who denounced the Philippine War, the grotesque (and still reverberating, albeit in silent murder) Belgian colonization of the Congo, and the egregious sloth and silence of so many, too many—to find that the effort to pry open the relentlessly shutting doors to public and private sector accountability is so—once again!—reviled by the same as always….

WikiLeaks debate with Steven Aftergood - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com