Portrait of the First Lady as a Young Slave

To see the article with the images in question, you must go here.

Spanish magazine Magazine Fuera de Serie has courted controversy by digitally altering an old portait of a breast-bearing Janet Jackson slave so that she has the head of Michelle Obama.  Or digitally-altered the head of Michelle Obama so that she has the body of a breast-baring slave.

Or both.

Some people are not impressed. 

According to the first the article I read about this artistic kerfuffle, this is one in a series of portraits of famous personalities' heads superimposed onto nudes.  Others will include Princess Di and beer-swilling Barack "the Red" Obama, as well as fearless vampire killer and broadsword duelist Abraham Lincoln.  As for this latter, we have it on good authority that this so-called "President" was in fact the real Abe's doppelganger!  Honest.

I don't know the intentions of the artist who did this po-mo montage; certainly controversy stokes curiosity and sales, but it makes me think of the evolution of African-American status since the abolition of slavery a relatively short 150 years ago, through the harsh years of Jim Crow and the failure of "separate but equal."  America is still rife with racial tensions, but hey, what other non-African nation has elected a black President or Prime Minister?  You've come a long way, baby.

It's not hard to see why this will offend, even if the article itself (10 Oct.) begins with a reminder of the old proverb "behind every great man is an even greater woman."  It's not the whole text, but it appears from my crooked Spanish to be a prelude to a positive examination of the First Lady.  Which may only exacerbate objections that she be depicted as a slave.

Then again, perhaps some credit can be given for the choice of which original painting to manipulate.  Marie-Guillemine Benoist was a rarity for her time, a woman artist respected enough that this portrait was exhibited in the Louvre's annual Salon in 1800.  Both she and her sister, artist Marie-Élisabeth Laville-Leroux, studied under Jacques-Louis David beginning in 1781, just after he'd been made a member of the Royal Academy and been privileged by the King with lodgings in the Louvre.  According to Wiki-wack, the painting "became a symbol for women's emancipation and black people's rights."  Portrait d'une négresse was purchased by King Louis XVIII in 1818, despite the fact that the artist had been commissioned for an official portrait of Napoleon, defininitely persona non grata among the Bourbons, a few years after it was painted.  These were good times for her, as she won a gold medal at the salon in 1804.

The good times of didn't last long for Benoist (nor for most women in France, who only gained suffrage in 1944), whose image of emancipation, as evinced by the King's purchase, was more acceptable than the fact that the medium in this case, was the message; that is to say, a painting by a woman..

Wikipedia: 

Her career was harmed by political developments, however, when her husband, the convinced royalist count Benoist, was nominated in the Conseil d'État during the post-1814 monarchy come-back called the Bourbon Restoration. Despite being at the height of her popularity, she had to abandon her career, both painting and exposing, due to her devoir de réserve [duty of reserve] and the strongly enforced conservatism of the reactionary regime. 

Somehow that seems a twisted-to-fit metaphor for what many liberals fear about a Romney/Ryan presidency.  Maybe this discredits the choice, or maybe it is a warning of sorts by the Spanish editors of Magazine.

As had been the case with most women artists working at the time, Benoist fit the middle and upper class ideal of "womanhood" in her conforming to the social expectations of women to marry, raise children, and forego a career.  (See link below).

A cautionary tale?  When the negresse was painted, the artist was at the height of her powers and recognition.  A decade or so later she had to put aside her career to be the dutiful wife.  For Benoist, the clock was turned back on progress towards womens' equality.

So we present this here, a bit befuddled, in the tradition of our series of posts about odd political imagery.  Our most recent entry here also includes links to previous photos.

For a lengthy examination of this painting, have a read of: Slavery is a Woman:  Race, Gender, and Visuality in Marie Benoist's Portrait d'une négresse (1800) by James Smalls.

Confirmation Bias

In what seems to tragically echo too many other stories from Canada, the news is reporting that "A severed human head and foot have been discovered in a park near Toronto."

We've been reporting on cases of human feet washing ashore in western Canada for sometime now (see our previous posts here).

Now this particular case is, it should be noted, over 2600 miles from the feet that have been washing up on the Canadian shores.

So what's the link?

We have, as I keep saying over and over, given up speculating on source of the feet that keep washing up on Canada. Is it a mass murder? Is it weird drift patterns? Is it an area drawing suicide victims? These are questions others can ponder. We've given up.

But wait--I do have a new theory to consider involving this most recent news.

With highly publicized "events", there's always the possibility of copy-cat crimes. In the case of the Canadian feet, for example, there was at least once case of someone stuffing dead animal feet into a pair of shoes and leaving on the beach. Sick--but that's the kind of stuff that clog up the search for patterns.

What I'd like to ponder here, however, is the possibility that the media are making unrelated events seem related. A sort of selected attention. An unusual pattern starts--severed feet washing up on beaches--and then people start looking for more cases, further confirmation of the pattern. It's in our nature.

I'm perfectly guilty in perpetuating this right now. Surely this case has nothing to do with what's happened 2600+ miles away. But once we start looking for further evidence of the pattern, we start to focus on the similarities and not the differences of new pieces of evidence. Take the case of the severed body parts found in Montreal. That also, almost certainly, had nothing to do with the feet washed ashore. But once you start looking for the pattern, the pattern seems to stretch itself up more and more events...

So what do you think? Confirmation bias -- or a series of grisly connected events?

Barack Obama: Hogwart's Alumnus

AP photograph

This apparently undoctored photo will probably raise some hackles.  I'm going to give it a few days, make some web searches and see if anybody seriously suggests this is proof of Satanism and or Illuminism in the White House.  I'd be willing to wager a large sum there are forums where this is already being discussed.

My take is that the photographer is playing on the fact the election is a few months away and that Obama and his strategists would love to have a crystal ball to tell them what lays in store for the future, but then again, I'm only a sheeple.

If this is Twilight Language (as opposed to good old-fashioned symbolism, metaphor and artistic intent), what do you suppose the message is supposed to be?

Previously:

• Obama as Jesus, or Hippocrates?
• An intellectual regarded disparagingly, as being impractical, officious, pedantic, etc.
• The Royal Obamas: personally blessed by Christ the Redeemer
• "Barack Obama is the Antichrist!"

We'd like to stop being reminded of this quote now, please

He who bestirs himself is lost.

 L'acte surréaliste le plus simple consiste, révolvers aux poings, à descendre dans la rue et à tirer au hasard, tant qu'on peut, dans la foule.  Qui n'a pas eu, au moins une fois, envie d'en finir de la sorte avec le petit système d'avilissement et de crétinisation en vigueur a sa place toute marquée dans cette foule, ventre à hauteur de canon. 

[C]et acte que je dis le plus simple, il est clair que mon intention n'est pas de le recommander entre tous parce qu'il est simple et me chercher querelle à ce propos revient à demander bourgeoisement à tout non-conformiste pourquoi il ne se suicide pas, à tout révolutionnaire pourquoi il ne va pas vivre en URSS. 

--André Breton

The simplest Surrealist act consists of hitting the street, revolvers in one's fists, and firing wildly into the crowd as much as one can.  He who hasn't felt, at least once, a desire to thus end the petty system of abasement and cretinization in effect clearly belongs in this crowd, with a gun-barrel at his gut.

A footnote adds:

This act I call the simplest, it is clearly not my intention to recommend it from among all others because it is simple, and to look for a quarrel with me about this is like condescendingly asking every non-conformist why he doesn't commit suicide or every revolutionary why he doesn't go live in the USSR.

--André Breton 

Getting lost in Mexico City after nobody had turned up to meet him at the airport, Breton famously declared:  "I don't know why I came here. Mexico is the most surrealist country in the world". This was in 1938, so he can be excused for not predicting that in 2012, by his own definition, this dubious honor would clearly belong to the United States of America.

This despite the curious time I  saw two wild dogs, like something from a film by Buñuel or Jodorowsky, fighting over a severed burro's head in the unpeopled desert somewhere between Monterrey and Matehuala.  But that's another story.

For a bit about the Francis Picabia quoted on Breton's sandwich board.

Cold, dead fingers

This is a follow-up to 20 rosy fingers, which included a brief, less-than-half-serious post-script about the famous "Obama as Joker/Socialist" poster, riffing a bit loosely, just tossing some ideas about....

I thought of the gun control debate immediately upon hearing about the Aurora shooting, as I do with any mass killing, and wondered if this event is in some way a kind of political "bonus" for people who might not go out of their way to exploit this tragedy, but who wouldn't feel too concerned if at some level, even if subconsciously, people made the connection between Obama/Joker and Holmes/Joker.

Well, someone has made the connection, explicitly....albeit without the whiteface.

The text says:  "Kills 12 in a movie theater with assault rifle, everyone freaks out" next to a photo of Obama with the words "Kills thousands with foreign policy, wins Nobel Peace Prize."  It appeared in Caldwell (cold well) Idaho, a state with its fair share of firearms enthusiasts.

The CCTV camera is a nice Orwellian touch which in it's own way adds fuel to the fire heating up libertarian rhetoric these days.  I wonder if this electronic sign was chosen precisely for that reason; the Smeed Foundation, the billboard sponsor, is a libertarian think tank.  Are they implying that as you watch Obama pilloried, Big Sis is watching you? (Big Sis being Drudge's nickname for United States Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano.)  Or maybe not.  I've just read they actually own the sign

Of course, the Smeed Foundation has a point and a right to express it as they wish.  Maurice Clements, president of the board, is quoted as saying:  “We don’t want to offend people....We’re trying to gain friends for our message.”  Apparently the sign has been almost universally panned in Caldwell.

The billboard has angered many, but Smeed is certain to get some positive feedback from the large and vocal anti-Obama crowd. Be that as it may, the Smeed people seem to have had a change of heart, or perhaps realized the sign is a bit too much; either way, the sign is coming down  Not to wag fingers, as with some liberal responses I've read; plenty of people who detest Obama don't approve, and the left certainly doesn't shy away from shock-value tactics and cries of "fascist" and the like.  Being offensive in politics is not the exclusive domain of one political stripe or another.

I also realize full well that LoS could be seen as exploiting the events in Aurora, another reason I won't point my finger and cry "poor taste"....not too loudly anyway.  I don't have to.  Seems pretty evident that the billboard is a bit over-the-top.  Not the sentiment necessarily, but the context.  A private dialogue or even a speech allows one to  elaborate, nuance, contextualize, set an argument up correctly.  A billboard just knocks your eyeballs for a loop with an offensive bit of jingo.  I actually agree with the sentiment expressed here.  Why isn't there more universal anger at the ongoing death and dismemberment in Afghanistan, for instance?  Why is that 12 American lives are a tragic and senseless murder, but literally thousands of Iraqi civilians are acceptable collateral damage?  Yeah, I know, out of sight out of mind and all that.  But hell, I don't think it takes a bleeding heart to decry the death in great numbers of people halfway around the world, especially when your tax dollars are at work.

I'm not surprised by this billboard at all and said as much in my original post about Aurora; here though, someone has actually gone and explicitly made the connections media outlets such as Drudge and the Examiner were making implicitly (much as other right-of-center media indirectly linked Obama to the recent spate of cannibal attacks!)  Usually they do in such a way as to have plausible denial, to make the very accusation seem absurd.  Kind of like the way Drudge headlines stories about crime and corruption in Chicago.  They can reasonably deny they're targeting Obama....they're merely reporting on outrageous evidence of US decline.  But they're most certainly doing it to tarnish Obama.  Guilt by association. 

This time, there is nothing subtle about the tactic at all.  And although I'm obviously not a rabid anti-Obama fan, I would add that for me, his Nobel Peace prize is as an absurd and offensive bit of propaganda as this billboard; the Nobel had very little to do with peace and everything to do with something else entirely.  I disapprove of Obama in a lot of important ways, I just don't share the ad hominem vitriol.

Despite mentioning the war, I believe this sign actually revolves around the politics of guns.  The Smeed Foundation didn't even bother use the NRA's preferred use of the word "firearm".  Here it's "Assault Rifle," a term which to me is so loaded (no pun intended), so evocative of the gun control debate that it's hard for me not to think the billboard is as much about gun control as it is about Obama's foreign policy--which is after all essentially a re-hash and prolongation of Bush's, just with happier allies (hence the Nobel).  But the Tea Party and the libertarians, the Republicans and other assorted political partisans lined up against Obama probably don't care too much about that.  They're more concerned with guns, taxes, immigration and creeping socialism.  The wackier ones wonder whether or not Obama is a secret Muslim or foreigner bent on destroying America from within, guns of course being the necessary defense against the coming dictatorial state, perhaps led by the minions of the Antichrist.  Not to unfairly imply everyone against Obama is an extremist or a lunatic, though they're out there too.

Bottom line is that we're in an irreconcilably polarized political culture, and the tone will certainly only get worse as November draws nearer.  This billboard is just another questionable bit of propaganda in a recent string of violent rhetoric and images.

Meanwhile, the bullets are actually flying and everyone keeps wringing their hands and asking, "why"?

Addendum, appx. 13:00 Paris time.

The day after writing this, I learned of  the Sikh temple shooting in Milwaukee.  Six victims, three wounded.  The killer is described as an Army veteran, heavyset, white, with lots of tattoos, including perhaps, a "9-11" themed tat.  I remember the hue and cry when a Homeland Security report listed disgruntled vets as part of a restive potential demographic from which domestic terrorism could arise.  Vets and conservatives had a field day denouncing Janet Napolitano, but I think against the background of Timothy McVeigh (Gulf War, bronze star), John Muhammad (Gulf War), even Oswald (US Marine), there's some interest in researching whether or not there's some merit to this analysis, which was at the time characteristically distorted and simplified by the conservative press as an accusation against all veterans and the entire military establishment.

Given my recent exchange with Loren Coleman about what it means to be a Fortean synchromystic, that the suspect lived on Holmes Avenue is very startling indeed.  One thing which has struck me about this case is the local police position--Oak Creek police chief John Edwards has said the FBI will lead the case because it's being treated as "domestic terrorism".  This is why, exactly?  Because the alleged shooter was a vet or because the victims, Sikhs, are often confused with Muslims?  I don't recall the phrase "domestic terrorism" used for John Holmes.  Odd that terrorism is evoked here and not in other contexts....although I do seem to recall that when Jared Loughner shot Rep. Giffords, there was some discussion of whether or not it was "terrorism".  As in the Oak Creek shooting, there is some talk of a "hate crime".  How the media gels around a label is an interesting process and we'll soon see what the consensus opinion regarding Oak Creek will be.

A little later, 20:30 Paris time.

Wade....is the English name for a common Germanic mythological [personage]...His heritage is uncertain - he is referred to as giant, dwarf, demi-god....or king - but he is always associated with water.    [As in a Creek?]

These references [from Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde] show that the tale of Wade and his boat were well-known at Chaucer's time and it has been suggested that Wade and his boat were synonymous with trickery.

Wade (folklore)

In medieval times, a page was an attendant to a knight; an apprentice squire. A young boy served as a page for about seven years, running messages, serving, cleaning, and even learning the basics of combat, and the lord he was working for would usually treat him fairly but they went through intensive training. The lord sometimes gave the page private combat training from the age of seven until he was fourteen. At age fourteen, he could graduate to become a squire, and by age 21, perhaps a knight himself. 

Page (servant)

Synonymous with trickery?  A knight's attendant?  As in a Dark Knight?  Note the 7 and its multiples, numbering three.  Both significant numbers, with a multitude of Biblical association.  Including Pages, there were seven deaths as a result of the Milwaukee shooting, and three wounded.  There were 12 victims of Holmes' attack, yet another Biblically significant number.  I'll repeat that Page lived on Holmes Avenue.  Add to that a name of a trickster, or Joker, and the name of a servant to a Knight....synchronicity galore.

Page was a singer in a Neo-Nazi band called End Apathy.  Source:   He served part [of his military service] in "psychological operations," [!] but left the military with a Less Than Honourable Discharge, shortly after having been mysteriously demoted from sergeant to specialist. 

Source:  At a news conference at 10 a.m., authorities said they were attempting to identify another person, a white male, who they described as "a person of interest."

A man matching the photo officials showed was seen by Journal Sentinel reporters at the scene of the temple Sunday, possibly video taping what was going on. 
...
Heidi Beirich, director of the [Southern Poverty Law Center's] intelligence project, said her group had been tracking Page since 2000, when he tried to purchase goods from the National Alliance, a well-known hate group.

The National Alliance was led by William Pierce, who was the author of "The Turner Diaries." The book depicts a violent revolution in the United States leading to an overthrow of the federal government and, ultimately, a race war. Parts of the book were found in Timothy McVeigh's getaway car after the bombing of the federal building Oklahoma City in 1995.

A lot to digest.  I'd had a lot of doubts about the validity of this post, which up to the adendum was written before I learned of this event, but sadly, these revelations only add weight to my speculations and musings.  The circumstances will certainly add grist to the conspiracy theorist's mill, but with facts such as these, who can blame them?