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Bonfire of the Anarchists
It was just after the Second World War, so the story goes, when former Congresswoman (future US Ambassador to Italy and Brazil) and wife of Henry Luce (who launched Time magazine, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated among others) Clare Boothe Luce visited Winston Churchill at Chartwell. “I tried to be especially ingratiating because Harry (Henry) wanted US rights to Churchill’s war memoirs for Life magazine,” Ms. Luce later recalled.
While walking through one gallery in Churchill’s home, Luce remarked on the “wonderful paintings” hanging therein, prompting Churchill to reply, “I’m glad you like them, but only one of them is painted by me.” “I asked which one was his,” Luce said, “and he pointed to a pastoral scene, a field of some sort.” Well, she didn’t want to sound sycophantic. In fact, she seized on the opportunity to, “…establish my critical independence.” And so with a sly smile, Clare said that she liked Churchill’s painting well enough, but that she thought it was “too — placid; lacking in movement.”
“Three weeks later,” Clare recalled, “in New York that painting arrived, but on it were three sheep bouncing about. His [Churchill’s] note read, ‘Is that any better?’” Henry Luce observed that Clare’s effrontery likely cost Time $1 million more than they might otherwise have had to pay for Churchill’s memoirs.
Of course, it’s one thing for Churchill to playfully splotch three bouncing sheep on an otherwise peaceful and solemn landscape. It’s quite another for legions of malicious and ungrateful halfwits to go marauding through the country setting fire to police precincts, police cars, federal courthouses, historic churches and private businesses assaulting and murdering innocent business owners, cops, bystanders and motorists, all while stealing everything they can get their grubby hands on. One is mischievous fun. The other is mindless mayhem and vile destruction.
But surely I’m being stodgy here, right? As Martin Luther King., Jr. said, “No justice, no flat screens.” Which, come to think of it, was roughly the same time frame during which he said that statues of Jesus are a form of white supremacy and that, “All murals and stained glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, and their white friends should also come down.” Wait. You mean he didn’t say that? That’s okay, because odds are that the lunatics tearing down the statues of anyone who died before they were born haven’t the foggiest idea of what Dr. King said, and wouldn’t understand it if you showed it to them in a comic book.
No, that was Black Lives Matter spokesman Shaun King who said that white churches and depictions of Jesus have to go away now. I didn’t hear any of my progressive friends in social media or anywhere else disagree with him, so obviously we’ve turned a corner here. In fact, when I mention the black lives who are lost to black criminals, or the black children who are shot by black criminals, the same people who will shout “Black Lives Matter” from the rooftops (or as far as Facebook will carry them) suddenly develop laryngitis and grow as silent as a graven image.
I’m afraid Dr. King would have been a disappointment to them and to the rest of the current crop of “justice” warriors, who have discovered that the essence of a person’s soul and character can be defined by their pigmentation. You do know that, don’t you? Just ask Mensa Society member Nick Cannon, who said of blacks, “That’s the melanin that connects us, so the people that don’t have it are — and I’m going to say this carefully — are a little less.” Professor Cannon went on:
When they were sent to the Mountains of Caucasus, they didn’t have the power of the sun. The sun started to deteriorate them. So, they’re acting out of fear, they’re acting out of low self-esteem, they’re acting out of deficiency, so therefore the only way they can act is evil.
Thus spake Nick Cannon, whose message was greeted with silence (except for one brave soul who wrote that she feels this statement has validity, “but people don’t want to check their history.”) Am I being facetious? Only partially. Because of course, Cannon isn’t a professor of anything, though God knows he should be in the running at any number of former institutions of higher learning, since they are quickly sinking to a level that Dr. King would have deplored just as much as the geniuses now ransacking the country would deplore his words, if only they could understand them.
But as the old saying goes, we’ve come a long way baby! Gone are the days of judging people by the strength of their character instead of superficial and immutable characteristics like skin color. In fact, we’re so enlightened now that we’re right back to segregating people from various organizations and efforts precisely by skin color and making sweeping generalizations about entire ethnicities on that same basis. This would be the Plessy vs. Ferguson level, for those keeping score at home. Which means we’ve regressed back to 1896. Those who do not study history…. but who needs it anyway, right?
For that matter, who needs decorum, decency, or the rule of law, since they are evidently signs of a melanin deficiency and systemic racism (which basically means whatever the daft accuser of the moment wants it to mean). As long as we’re defunding the police, we appear to be aiming for intellectual bankruptcy as well.
There’s one problem, though. Not all of us are going to go merrily into the abyss with these spoiled brats. There are still a few of us who don’t bow to idiotic mobs, and who know our history. We understand the genius of this nation’s Founders, and we know that the fools who think they are protesting against it are unknowingly justifying their actions with appeals to the very moral code that was outlined by the people whose statues they now destroy.
Bereft of understanding, they rage against things they cannot comprehend, in ways that are unfathomably stupid and suicidal. They’re made a pact with evil. But many of us know better, and we know what happens when good people finally have enough of this foolishness. America’s history is written not on the backs of the oppressed, but in the hearts of those who have fought oppression since 1776. Something tells me that these miscreants are writing the script of their own demise.
Published in General
And whether or not we reach this point by early November is going to greatly impact what form that “what happens” takes. Interesting times, indeed.
Dave,
Yep.
Regards,
Jim
With that, there’s nothing left to be said.
I would recommend that Professor Cannon stick to what he’s good at, but that assumes that he’s good at anything and there’s no evidence of that.
I pray to God you’re right, Dave.
I just know, right now, I wish both my children and their spouses and my grandchildren lived out in the middle of nowhere, instead of just one of those two families living that way. I’m scared.
Today, Friday July 31st, 2020, the people on the Left are mesmerized by the nepotism existing between Pres Trump and son in law Kushner. They are focused on how Kushner did not encourage the President to quickly implement an across the board, immediately effective game plan to deal with COVID. According to them, this should have been up and running by March 14th. (Never mind that the President has been insistent that HCQ is effective and its implementation as a treatment for COVID would short circuit the killer virus,while the Dem agency heads, Dem governors and Dem state agency heads are all belittling HCQ and making it hard to even find.)
According to the rank and file Dems, the idea that anyone should be referring to anything that happened between May 31st and June 12th is proof of the antiquated outlook of those of us in the center. And Martin Luther King Jr is prehistoric!
Go figure!?!
I don’t get the Churchill reference Dave starts with. How does it connect with the riots?
Was he saying that Churchill was defacing his… own… property… before gifting it?
Was that really a defacement?
I don’t get the connection.
1776 >>> 1619
I don’t get it either.
I think he’s pointing out that Churchill’s altering of his own painting is a sort of a “bonfire of vanity”. It is related to something Churchill controlled… his own property as @alsparks says. It cost the “offending party” another million dollars or so–maybe, though I’m skeptical of that claim–because Churchill may have felt offended by Luce. It shows a sense of humor. It’s not done out of real spite… just a little wounded pride. Churchill’s reaction to the wounding of his feelings was a tiny poke at someone else, and a poke that would inspire laughter, not anger.
The bonfire of anarchists, however, is also based on people being offended, but they destroy things that are not theirs to destroy. They lash out with violence, not humor. They create a raging, out-of-control ferno that burns all around them until it consumes them, too.
I am not the writer of the piece, but that is how I read what he was saying….
Right. It’s so much easier and more gratifying to make up new history.
Make sense to me. Thanks, Lois.
Not knowing history is the default state.
Learn about it. Reinterpret it. Argue about it and the reinterpretations. Then other people will learn about it.
Tearing it down because of “micro-aggressions” is the aberrant behavior of sub-literate morons.
I may have to post this on my online bulletin board when classes start in a few weeks.
Yes, Lois totally “gets it.” It was meant to illustrate how far low society has fallen; from someone willfully altering his own work of art in a gesture of self effacing humor in reaction to a perceived (though gentle) slight, to the wholesale destruction of art, lives and livelihoods in a gesture of dumb brutality in reaction to things they neither understand nor wish to learn about. One is civil and gentle, the other barbaric and savage.
The fact is that I enjoyed telling the Churchill story so much that I clean forgot to go back and reinforce the connection between that story and the balance of the piece. I should have been more clear on that score.
Well, this is off the subject, but I wish I could see before and after pictures of the painting. I wanna know if I think the added sheep improved it.
I first learned of this story many years ago, and have wanted to see the painting ever since. Hope springs eternal.
Unfortunately, this mostly describes old people. Demographics is not freedom’s friend in this moment.
“so obviously we’ve turned a corner here.”
I don’t know if it’s a corner or a milestone on our country’s present path, but when political leaders approve of, encourage, and even participate in the mayhem, things have gone way beyond historical norms.
Dave, glad you can approach our current morass with humor and aplomb. Me, not so much. I’m not going to say that I’m foaming at the mouth (yet), but my legendary calm and equanimity is a wee frayed at the edges.