God, Government and Going to the Bathroom

I'm going to step on my high horse once again, so I beg your kind indulgence as I get back into the saddle.


Saw Wei was arrested on January 2, 2008, after his poem “February the Fourteenth,” an eight-line verse about Valentine’s Day, was published in the Rangoon-based weekly magazine Love Journal. An acrostic poem, when the first letters of each line are put together, they read “General Than Shwe is crazy with power” in Burmese. The magazine quickly sold out as word of the coded message spread. Here's an article about it.


This is a rough translation I found.

February the 14th

Saw Wai

Aaron Beck, the psychiatrist, said
Only if you know how to suffer painfully
Only if you are crazy – crazy
Can you appreciate a great work of Art
Dear little photomodel who makes me dizzy
They say it is a broken heart disease, a great and terrible one
Millions of those who know how to love
Laugh and clap those gold-guilded hands






What blows my mind is how silly and slight the political propaganda is, and how overblown and out of proportion the retaliation was. The poet was imprisoned for two and a half years. For an ACROSTIC which had a mild rebuke of the current leader.


I've seen billboards that beg for someone to take out the leader of the free world. I've seen bumper stickers demanding the White House be carpet-bombed. There's even a name for a loose coalition of people who believe our current chief executive is a foreigner ineligible to hold his office.


It's the beauty and the tragedy of free speech. Once somebody decides that one particular expression is speech that's a little too free, there's no stopping it. Compare this to a recent incident in Moscow...






"A judge in Moscow could send two prominent art curators to jail tomorrow as a 14-month trial that has provoked fears of rising intolerance and attempts at censorship in Russia comes to an end... The exhibition was designed to highlight censorship and included many exhibits that had been banned from display at other art shows the previous year."




And what was the hideous offense which could land these art curators in jail for the next FIVE YEARS?




"...[S]everal doctored images of Jesus. In one, his head was replaced with an Order of Lenin medal and in another he was depicted as Mickey Mouse."

Another exhibit included a Coca-Cola logo with Jesus's face shown next to it, with the words: "This is my blood."

Let's leave aside for the moment that this all sounds both silly and completely a-DOR-able (and something that would probably trend very highly on Digg). I'm having trouble finding how that could be obscene. The gallery was a private exhibition space (open to the public), under the auspices of no religious organization. 

Here's some more from a different article:

"Oleg Kassin, a representative of Council of the People, which filed the complaint with the court, told the AFP news agency that he had been disgusted by the exhibition which contained 'anti-Christian' images. 'If you like expressing yourself freely, do it at home, invite some close friends,' he said. But when it's on public display 'especially if it contains insults, it's no longer art but a provocation.'"

Not art but provocation - this seems to indicate that provoking somebody else is not only something reserved for the private sphere but that it's incompatible with art.

Just to make sure the comparison is clear, wasn't there a portrait of Jesus soaked in urine that the US government paid for? Why yes, indeed: American photographer Andres Serrano received $15,000 from the NEA for Piss Christ, a photograph depicting a plastic crucifix floating in the artist’s own urine.

Actually kind of beautiful. I think there's a lot here to enter into dialogue about, to talk about why we think urine is so bad when it can look this pretty, whether it's a sign of disrespect or a sharing of the common human bond between "normal human beings" like us and Jesus. To my mind, putting a crucifix into a jar of urine is far from the worst thing you could do with it. (See the original "Bad Lieutenant" for the worst thing you could do with it.)

While this causes many to cry out at the moral decline of America, I think I would prefer the decline of morality to the decline of free expression. We have no control over someone else's morals. But I'm seeing plenty of situations around the world where people are attempting to  exercise control over other's expression. Not to go all Glenn Beck on you, but it does scare me. 

If offensive art is the price we have to pay for the ability to speak our minds, I say bring it on. Can we have a Buddha statue made from donkey poop?