Random: March 2008 Archives

The San Francisco Art Institute just decided to close down one of their exhibits because of death threats.

The exhibit in question sounds, well, not like my cup of tea to say the least (my family would shrug and say, "It's art!" as we always do when faced with the pretentious or obscure.)

Along with a variety of other elements, the show included a series of video loops of animals being bludgeoned to death with a sledgehammer in front of a brick wall. The animals killed included a pig, goat, deer, ox, horse and sheep.

The circumstances of the filming are never fully explained (what was the artist's role? was he a passive observer or an instigator?), although the claim is that the footage was taken at a location in Mexico.

Art Institute officials said Saturday that Abdessemed had shot the videos at a farm in rural Mexico that routinely slaughters animals in the way he depicted. They said the videos were part of a social critique. "One of the things this exhibition was pointing to was the difference in production of food resources between industrialized production in the U.S. and in poorer countries," said Bratton.

It seems like an unnecessarily violent, degrading, and frankly unimaginative way to get the point across. Still, does it warrant this response?

Abdessemed's show, one of about a dozen public exhibitions that the 650-student school hosts each year, had opened fairly quietly. But as word spread among animal rights groups, more than 8,000 people sent e-mails to the institute slamming the show. Institute officials temporarily closed the show Wednesday and scheduled a public forum for Monday.

But then the tone of some of the e-mails turned violent, Bratton said, with threats against individual staff members, such as, "We're going to gather up your children and bludgeon their heads." Officials decided to shutter the exhibition permanently, the first time in the institute's 137-year history that a show was closed for safety reasons. They also canceled the forum.

"Some of the people who said the most threatening things said they would be present at the forum," Bratton said.

I mean, it's not like the employees of the Art Institute actually killed any animals themselves.. And even if they had... threatening their children? WTF? If this is supposed to teach some message about how we should protect all living beings, consider the point being totally lost.

And of course various leaders are falling over themselves to condemn the show, with quotes that sound not at all out of place coming out of the mouth of some rabid troglodyte right-winger.

McHugh-Smith of the SPCA said she is glad that the exhibition was canceled, particularly because it received some of its funding from San Francisco hotel taxes. The Art Institute gets about $80,000 in hotel taxes each year, which help pay for its public exhibitions and visiting artist programs.

"The San Francisco Art Institute used poor judgment in supporting 'shock art' in San Francisco," McHugh-Smith said. "To take this type of brutality against animals, call it art and use tax money to support it is deplorable."

O.K. Parents should have the right to raise their kids as they see fit, right? We should be supportive of each others' choices. The kid who was sleep trained at four months is probably as likely to come out all right as the one who slept with his/her parents until age 4.

Fine. But when it comes to medical issues, I draw the line. In particular, people who refuse to vaccinate their children because of vague scare stories, and people who believe they can heal their children with the power of prayer, drive me right up a wall.

O.K., that latter story is just too ridiculous, and obviously has immediate tragic consequences. If your child is seriously ill, you take them to a doctor, schmucks. Pray all you like, but your child needs you to do what's best for them, not go off into la-la land. And la-la land it is, as this open letter from the family's pastor makes clear.

The day after I first spoke with the Neumanns they called me again from their car, very concerned as they followed an emergency vehicle with Kara in it. They told me that she had stopped breathing and asked if I would pray that The Lord would spare her and raise her up, which I did. I called on our prayer ministers and elders to pray for her too. The next thing I heard from them was that they were being investigated, which is sad since they don't investigate the people who put their trust in doctors whose family members die by the hundreds of thousands from medical mistakes every year, according the AMA's own admission. We know that the doctors do the best they can with what they have and we do not condemn them. We would like the same consideration.

O.K., so applying that same "logic" to other areas... sometimes people get seriously ill because they get food poisoning. Therefore, the logical thing to do is never buy food for our children, because they might get sick. After all, they put their trust in the food production industry!

The vaccination thing is a bit more subtle, because, after all, shots hurt, there are definitely side effects, serious ones in a few cases, and after all, most people don't get the illnesses anymore that the shots are meant to protect against.

To your average anti-vac person, It looks like the choice is "Gee, I could take my kid to the doctor and she'll get shots and scream and feel yucky, or even have something worse happen, or I could not get the shots, and she'll be fine!" But that's NOT the choice. The real choice is, "Take a tiny risk now, versus a larger risk of my child getting seriously ill from a contagious disease that could have been prevented, and others getting sick too." I have a relative who still lives with the after-effects of contracting polio as a child. I bet she wishes the vaccine had been around then.

Sure, some people cannot safely be vaccinated, whether because of allergies or serious immune system problems. All the more reason that the rest of us should take our shots, because then we can protect those who can't protect themselves. It's called herd immunity, people.

Is the medical system imperfect? Yes. Nobody should unquestioningly pop pills without doing some research. But vaccinations have been proven to work many times over the years -- perhaps too well. Are the plagues that killed children in previous centuries going to have to return to make that point?

Call me harsh and judgmental, but I firmly believe that people that won't seek medical treatment for their children, or refuse to vaccinate them, are, despite the best intentions that they have, acting selfishly. They are imposing their beliefs on their children -- which, while it may be their prerogative in other areas (dragging their kids to church, homeschooling or sending to Catholic school, making their kids listen to Billy Joel, etc.) in this case, it is in a way that is likely to do them long-term harm -- and possibly harm other people too.

OK, what was up with:

• The aging hippie guy riding his bike in the Mission today who: 1) wasn't wearing a helmet, 2) was wearing headphones, 3) was bobbing and weaving merrily along... almost into the side of a bus? Trying to win a Darwin award, much?
• The beautiful but sullen young woman on BART, also with headphones on and wearing sunglasses (in the tunnel?!?!) sitting in the seat under the sign that says very clearly, "THESE SEATS RESERVED FOR PEOPLE IN WHEELCHAIRS, SO MOVE YOU DUMBASS", who, when approached by a man with crutches and his friend in a wheelchair, pretended not to notice them, then said "WHAT?" a couple of times very loudly when they tried getting her attention, and then said sulkily, "Well I guess I'll have to move then!" (By the way, there was no shortage of other seats she could have plopped down in.

I shouldn't be overly cranky though. It was beautiful weather, lots of people in festive attire for Easter, and most of them were very nice. I just couldn't resist pointing out these two cases of egregiously bad behavior. Is it just the headphones? Or something more sinister?

I guess most people just use their ATM/credit cards when traveling these days, but I am still quite unnerved by the fact that currency exchange booths in Amsterdam won't take dollars anymore.

Crisis? What crisis? Nothing to see here. (Whistles.)

Many years ago I went to Morocco with some other friends; two of us were from the U.K. and two from California. We were expecting an exotic landscape like nothing we'd seen before. What we saw was partly that and partly strangely familiar. The Brits were much amused (and still are; the subject comes up to this day whenever we reminisce about that trip) by our propensity to point out similarities between, say, the nastier parts of Casablanca and some of the grittier streets in Oakland; the dry landscapes and crazy highways of the countryside versus those found all over Southern California; etc. etc. And doesn't the view from the Atlas Mountains of those farms down there remind you of coming out of the Grapevine into the Central Valley on I-5?

So my friends will probably be particularly tickled to know that, when I was shopping at Costco yesterday, as I walked among the food demo stands with the employees touting the virtues of their tempura-encrusted shrimp and their fine ravioli in alfredo sauce, dodging shopping carts, precariously stuffed shelves of boxes teetering above my head, when I suddenly had to scramble to get out of the way of the heavy machinery driven by a man yelling "Forklift! Forklift!"...

I was immediately transported back to the narrow alleyways of Fez, where men on donkeys warned you to move it or be squished with calls of "Balak! Balak!"