His practiced pose makes him look positively beatific, doncha think? Here he is at the Pentagon pushing the notion of building a wall in space with missile-defense technology that has never really worked in the past, doesn’t exist now, and isn’t likely to “for decades to come,” as one expert put it.
I wonder about the standards we use to measure Presidents. Due to the Iraq War and its consequences, G.W. Bush has about a million unjustifiable deaths on his administration’s hands. So far Trump hasn’t done anything even remotely that bad. We accept our government initiating mass slaughter if it is given even a thin facade of dignity, but we abhor and vociferously protest tackiness such as Trump’s in any form.
Does this murderousness-behind-the-facade-of-respectability have a relationship with our arts? Do the arts help create a facade that frees us to be immoral? Was this illusion of civilization as a balm a notable characteristic of the Holocaust? Has it been a part of human cultural history as a whole? Do we wear the arts in the same way a cannibal might put on a certain headdress before a special meal? Or have I completely lost my mind?
And BTW, I think no one tried to express this idea more than your acquaintance Boris Lurie with his No!Art.
No, Bill — You haven’t lost your mind. Not completely. Not even a little. For anyone interested in Boris Lurie and No!Art, here are a few references:
http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/2008/01/boris_lurie_rip.html
http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/2005/01/boris_luries_noart_and_the_hol.html
http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/2016/06/remembered-depths.html