--They Might Be Giants

To sum up really briefly, I went to the eye doctor, and it turns out that while the two eyelashes I noticed yesterday are, indeed, grazing the surface of my eye, that's probably okay, 'cause they're long and soft. The actual problem were two other eyelashes, which were short and scratchy. And were almost certainly the regrowth of the two that got yanked out last time. It seems I can look forward to getting them yanked out again and again and again in the future.

In the meantime, I'm still not remotely ready for my midterms, and spending much of the day commuting didn't help matters any. I suppose I'll finally be able to test my claim that my GPA doesn't really matter to me... 'cause I'm pretty sure it'll be going down after tomorrow. Sigh.

Anyway, in lieu of an actual entry, I present this week's column for the college newspaper. It's not actually going to see print until Thursday, so you can think of this as a sneak preview. Even if it's mostly covering old news. <wry smile>

In actual fact, it's a collage, made of several components. This includes a stylized painting of a black woman, intended to represent the Virgin Mary. She's seemingly intended to be seen as organic; in fact, she looks as if she's made of leaves. And, yes, the work includes a small lump of glazed elephant dung, carefully placed on one breast. Not "smeared" or "splattered," and, from all indications, not intended to represent degradation in any way. The artist in question uses elephant dung in quite a bit of his work, in fact.

Less frequently reported on in the media is the fact that the picture is dotted with pictures of female genitalia, cut from pornographic magazines. What, precisely, that's supposed to symbolize, I won't presume to say; all I will say is that any number of possibilities come to mind, not all of them negative.

At any rate, despite having been told about the exhibit some time back (and giving no reaction), Mayor Giuliani was shocked -- shocked! -- when it actually opened at the Brooklyn Museum about a month ago. And after they refused to get rid of the painting, he's been trying to cut off their funding from the city and/or get them evicted.

Anyway, y'all may be familiar with this already, but not knowing how much media attention this has been getting outside of New York City, I figured I ought to play it safe. Plus, there are future readers of this journal to consider, I suppose.

Which brings me to the whole Brooklyn Museum brouhaha. It seems to me that it is a mistake to look at this in a vacuum, arguing over whether the painting has artistic merit, whether it can fairly be interpreted as being a pro-Christian image, whether it's covered by the First Amendment, and whether museums ought to be publicly funded in the first place. The answer to all four is "yes," if you ask me, but all of that is utterly beside the point. Quite frankly, I don't think our esteemed mayor gives a tinker's dam about the actual content of the painting; he's just using it as a tool to widen the sphere of his direct control over the city.

For, above all, our mayor wants to be the one man calling the shots. Actually, that's not completely true; in individual cases, the mayor is sometimes content to let others control the actual shooting, as with Amadou Diallo. But on the institutional level, there's only room for one boss in this town, and he's it. Like Yertle the Turtle, he considers himself king of all that he sees, and expects the city to conform to his every wish. Even when those wishes happen to be against the law.

Which explains why he consistently refuses to allow demonstrations by people that he doesn't approve of, from pushcart vendors to cab drivers to the Nation of Islam to the KKK, while conjuring up parades on a moment's notice for anyone he does like, like the New York Yankees or John Glenn. Which explains why he's been running roughshod over the school systems, and doing everything in his power to "blow up" CUNY, as he put it in his State of the City address earlier this year. Which explains why he tried to stop the New York ad campaign that claimed the magazine was "the one good thing in New York that Rudy hasn't taken credit for," or something to that effect; apparently, they hit a raw nerve.

Now, I'm not about to suggest that our mayor feels insecure. Just because he appears to be obsessed with having direct control of everything in the city, and just because he's installed his own little bomb shelter while making it illegal to loiter around City Hall, in the belief that there are lots of dangerous people out there, and the mayor is going to be their first target... well, I think that's perfectly normal, don't you?

But getting back to my point, when you look at the overall pattern of what Giuliani has been doing ever since he came to power, the museum thing falls right into place. He doesn't have direct control of the museums. He wants control of the museums. So he grabbed onto the first exhibit to come his way as an excuse to exert his control on the Brooklyn Museum, while showing everyone else in town who's boss.

Of course, it is not generally the mayor's job to make direct decisions regarding the funding of museums. There is a chain of command; there are committees; there are regulations. Does he care? Get real. He's the all-powerful Mayor Giuliani. He may not know art, but he knows what he doesn't like, and what he doesn't like is people thinking that they can do things without him. And so he feels compelled to stop it. It would be pathetic, if it weren't so frightening.

It's frightening because, on the whole, he's been getting away with it so far. It's frightening because he has a really good shot at graduating to the Senate. And what frightens the hell out of me is that he just might move on to the presidency some day, if we let him.

Either way, mandatory trigger locks are the least of the proposed changes, a mixed bag of wildly unrelated amendments to the city's charter. The only options given are to take them all or leave them all, and some of them aren't too good, and the way it's all being rushed through -- by the Mayor, natch -- is appalling... so I'm voting "no." See the Guide for more on all this; if you're registered to vote, you should have gotten it in the mail by now.