Friday, July 5, 2019

Something San Francisco This Way Comes

Our nation is most definitely NOT in good hands.

High School Considers Removing George Washington Murals That Are ‘Traumatizing’ Students
The Spectator  "The San Francisco School Board last week authorized $600,000 in spending to destroy a mural depicting George Washington at a high school named for him.
“ 'It’s rude and disrespectful to people’s cultures,” a junior at the school told the San Francisco Chronicle. The school board president agrees. “I think the images are really harmful,” Stevon Cook explains. “But I do understand the sensitivity about it being art. It’s a difficult position to be in.” The board’s vice president, Mark Sanchez, maintains, “Painting it over represents not only a symbolic fresh start, but a real fresh start.”
"The censorship follows the removal of an “Early Days” statue, which depicted an American Indian lying at the feet of a Spanish cowboy and Catholic missionary, outside the San Francisco Public Library in September. The city’s Historic Preservation Committee voted unanimously to remove it, and the Arts Commission dubbed the 2,000-pound sculpture “disrespectful, misleading, and racist” in unanimously voting to censor it. The school board similarly found no opposition in its ranks in voting to paint over the Washington mural — despite a New Deal program funding it, a Communist artist painting it, and its message in depicting slavery and a dead Indian as clearly critical of Washington.
"The Free Speech Movement called the Bay Area home in the 1960s, and a decade earlier, Allen Ginsberg published his racy poetry through the City Lights bookstore’s publishing arm. A place that once imagined itself as a safe harbor from censors now looks to Savonarola and Mullah Muhammad Omar as guides. Unsurprisingly, Google, Twitter, and other tech companies headquartered in the area follow, and lead, the intolerant zeitgeist." . . .

No comments: