The Bleat: The Wednesday Review of Modern Thought

The Bleat ^ | 13 Mar 2024 | James Lileks

[Rummyfan]

It had to advance to the next step: actual destruction. In this case, an "activist" hacked and painted the portrait of Balfour, because, well, Balfour.

We’ve seen destruction of monuments, as the remnants of the past are found wanting when examined in the pitiless light of modern enlightenment. Statues pulled down, throw in the river, plinths splashed with red. Their existence caused harm. They represented a psychic wound. They are gone now, and no one feels better about anything. The wound is pulled open daily, because healing was never the point. Payback was the point.

But at least they left the paintings alone. The moronic “Just Stop Oil” children splashed their dyes on paintings that were protected, as if some remnant sense of respect kept them from murdering the works of art in the room that weren’t shielded from vandals. But now we’ve moved to the “destruction” phase of paintings, as they had to; attention must be paid, and nowadays it takes more than a pail of paint to get the world’s attention for a half an hour. It takes a knife.

Balfour, of course, is guilty of all sorts of colonialist sins, and as an enabler of the creation of a Jewish state, his image must be torn apart. It says something about the times that you know the person who did this was left-wing. There’s plenty of stupid anti-semitism on the new Right, but they’re generally worms who wriggle around in the vermiculite of Twitter. The people who go into the streets and yell JEW and demand ethnic cleansing of only liberal multi-cultural polity in the sinkhole of the Middle East are usually leftists. Or fevered imports.

[Rummyfan]

...this is the rationale that permits driving a truck bomb into St. Peter’s for, oh, fill-in-the-blank. This is the rationale that permits taking a sledgehammer to the Pieta because it reinforced the gender binary. This is the rationale for shooting an artist who drew a blasphemous picture. This is the rationale of the mad and impatient, the lunatics who attend a bedside with a skeleton on the sheets and tell themselves they are midwifing the future.