Daily Archives: September 27, 2008

Paul Newman has died. I will be going Blockbuster and will put some Paul Newman in my Queue. Great Actor and a good human being. A liberal but a good liberal. Wish more of ‘them’ were like him.

I’ m setting here thinking about things/stuff. Among other things/stuff I’m thinking is that I am politically and socially somewhere to the right of center. On any given day, how far to the right of center I find myself depends to the degree of how good or bad day I am having at the time. I know I should be reading something on the left politically if for no other reason than to challenge my on views so they are more grounded in reality. I do that on occasion, no much but I try. I went to Orion Magazine http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/3211 because I sometime Camilla Paglia and she had an article there. I read an article titled ‘The Art of Dying’ and not too far in came these paragraphs.

My feet are a few inches away from the feet of the Flamingo, a
four-story-high Alexander Calder sculpture in the middle of Federal Plaza. It
has always looked like a big chicken to me, as if it should be titled Big Red
Chicken Stalks Inner City. Since I have covered myself with a white sheet and am
pretending to be dead, I can’t see the red chicken. But I imagine it looming
over me, coming to life, pecking at my soft flesh and at the other bodies lying
around me. Given the tenor of the moment—pretending to be dead and all—I should
be more serious, but the chicken keeps scratching around in my brain.

I dream of the president making an emergency announcement on nationwide television
that the Calder chicken and the equally worrisome Picasso sculpture in the Daley
Plaza are terrorist robots that are electronically connected to a Henry Moore
sculpture in the Art Institute of Chicago. Reportedly planted long ago by a
sleeper cell of starving artists, they can be simultaneously activated at any
moment. “We are all vulnerable to such attacks,” the president might say. “The
enemy is everywhere. Even in modern art.”

And it goes downhill from there. This might be my own fault, I know I should stay with the leftists who are a little more rational, a lot more rational.