| The State of the
Arts: The avant-garde, or what might be called the cutting edge of
the arts, is no longer the purview of painter or sculptors, nor of the
galleries and museums that show their work. It has been taken over (at
least partially) by the producers of TV commercials, the rock stars and
their music videos, and even by fashion designers. This means that,
for better or worse, the dominant artistic influences in the culture today
are to be found among the popular arts, no among what used to be called high
art. -from Visual Faith --- by william a. dyrness
Then there's... The State of the Union: The primary entity of
democracy is the individual, the individual for whom society exists mainly
to assist assertions of individuality. Society is formed to supply our
needs, no matter the content of those needs. Rather than helping us to
judge our needs, to have the right needs which we exercise in right ways,
our society becomes a vast supermarket of desire under the assumption that
if we are free enough to assert and to choose whatever we want we can defer
eternally the question of what needs are worth having and on what basis
right choices are made. What we call 'freedom' becomes the tyranny of
our own desires. We are kept detached, strangers to one another as we
go about fulfilling our needs and asserting our
rights... And... We are quite literally a people that morally live off our wars because they give us the necessary basis for self-sacrifice so that a people who have been taught to pursue only their own interest can at times be mobilized to die for one another.
In short, there is nothing wrong with
America that a good war cannot cure. |
Th
reap apart your consequences and string barbed-wire between your fences