dagblog - Comments for "Labor Murals in Maine are Gone. Labor is near death. Long Live the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy."

AA, I have never seen that

Ramona — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 13:10:13 +0000

In reply to Garry Wills has chimed in on

AA, I have never seen that wonderful E.B. White poem before. Thank you so muuch! I wonder how many others will make the connection between the Vermont murals and the Rockefeller Center murals? Not the same conclusion, of course, but the same narrow-minded mind-set.

I've always been proud of the people in Detroit who wouldn't allow Rivera's grand murals to be tampered with. They are the crown jewels of the DIA and when we were kids and had no money we could still take the bus downtown and wander around the art museum for free. The murals are almost the first thing you see when you enter the front doors. There are always crowds in that court. They expressed with such exuberant force the dignity and sacrifice of the American worker. Those murals touched my soul, even when I was still in elementary school.

What a great poem! I'd thank

jollyroger — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 05:57:33 +0000

In reply to Garry Wills has chimed in on

What a great poem! I'd thank Gary if I could, but instead, thanks, Artie.

Garry Wills has chimed in on

artappraiser — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 04:40:05 +0000

In reply to Labor Murals in Maine are Gone. Labor is near death. Long Live the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.

Garry Wills has chimed in on it with an entry at the New York Review of Books blog:

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/mar/29/art-destroyers/

I'm reminded of the

Flavius — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 01:46:36 +0000

In reply to Labor Murals in Maine are Gone. Labor is near death. Long Live the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.

I'm reminded of the iconoclasts -perhaps more understandably- defacing statues in middle age cathedrals. And Nye Bevan's defending their construction on the grounds that middle age resources were so disproportionately low compared to the overwhelming needs that it made sense to build these soaring edifices that gave pleasure to vast numbers.

What has happened to us ? We've taken a wrong turn some place.

How can someone be elected to the highest office of a sensible state like Maine who doesn't instinctively realize this was deeply inappropriate. Or just plain wrong. For a whole series of reasons. A calculated rejection of the values of a group of his fellow citizens for whom these murals were meaninful ( as a catholic might feel deeply about a station of the cross); an attack on the basic artistic aspiration to enter into an involvement with the viewers :and finally a casual-or worse, a calculated insult to the artist(s),

Sad.

In my defense I don't check

emerson — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 23:04:36 +0000

In reply to Living wage and salaried

In my defense I don't check my po box except once every few months. So in answer to your question, no, I have not received that memo.

Note to self: Be on the lookout for memo stating that hard workers making a decent wage are out of fashion.

Note to self (continued): While waiting, come up with ideas as to where I can stick this memo when it comes.

Living wage and salaried

AmericanDreamer — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 22:34:57 +0000

In reply to I don't understand what is

Living wage and salaried labor are out of fashion in the US these days. Or hadn't you (and maybe 290 million plus other Americans, me included) gotten that memo?

I don't understand what is

emerson — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 21:30:37 +0000

In reply to Labor Murals in Maine are Gone. Labor is near death. Long Live the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.

I don't understand what is wrong with these pictures. It looks like a group of illustrations of people working (although one of them looks like someone about to hit someone else with a stick). Does the governor have problems with people working?

Editorial from yesterday's

AmericanDreamer — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 14:50:29 +0000

In reply to Labor Murals in Maine are Gone. Labor is near death. Long Live the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.

Editorial from yesterday's NYT on the mural take-down at:

http://maineinsights.com/perma/he-dreamed-he-saw-kim-jong-il

Thanks, Ramona, for writing

AmericanDreamer — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 14:42:23 +0000

In reply to Labor Murals in Maine are Gone. Labor is near death. Long Live the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.

Thanks, Ramona, for writing this up. The pics make it especially vivid. I should learn how to do that one of these days.

What you're describing reminds me of Orwell's novel 1984. Seriously. Albeit obviously this incident represents one relatively small scale effort. But here we see Big Brother move to use its power to erase societal memory through, in this case, the control of art and the thought and feelings it generates.

It's getting very, very naked these days, isn't it? The brazenness of the various power grabs by the unaccountable, out of control plutocrats and oligarchs who are banking on US citizens not noticing until it's too late, or in any case not rising to the moment to halt and reverse this major audacity, coming as it is in full view entirely from the emboldened U.S. Right.

One of our friends at Cafe

Richard Day — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 02:43:00 +0000

In reply to Labor Murals in Maine are Gone. Labor is near death. Long Live the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.

One of our friends at Cafe told me a year ago to watch The Cradle Will Rock and I have watched it several times--as background while I blog of course.

The Diego Rivera Mural is musical!

I said before that when I was a little boy I was thoroughly confused to see the Sickle and Hammer on the Farmers & Mechanics Bank building in dt Mpls.

This new gov of Maine pisses me off so badly that I have trouble writing about him. The man has no social redeeming value and I sincerely hope the saner people in his state vote him out of office so he can begin his own talk radio show.

The only reason, absolutely the only reason for him to take down that mural was to spit in the faces of liberals and workers everywhere.