What next? Environmental fanatics peppering a museum somewhere with chunks of steak?
In case you haven’t heard, days ago German Police arrested a pair of “Last Generation” protesters who decided to bring attention to so-called climate change perils by throwing mashed potatoes at Claude Monet’s painting “Grainstacks” on display at Potsdam’s Barberini Museum. The video shows the duo then kneeling in front of the oil landscape and gluing their hands to the wall.
If this news stirs a familiar chord, you’re likely not alone. These kinds of “save the planet” antics are becoming exasperatingly commonplace.
CNN’s Christian Edwards and Duarte Mendonca, for instance, report:
Two anti-fossil fuel protesters who were filmed throwing tomato soup on Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” in a London gallery … [October 14] have been charged with criminal damage offenses. The two young women from the campaign group Just Stop Oil threw the contents of two tins of Heinz tomato soup over the painting. … Just Stop Oil … represents a coalition of groups working together to stop the U.K. government from committing to new licenses concerning the exploration, development and production of fossil fuels.
Just last spring across the English Channel, another enviro-radical targeted an even more famous masterpiece. Over at artnews.com Alex Greenberger writes:
The Mona Lisa was smeared with cake at the Louvre on Sunday in a stunt that went viral on social media on Sunday. … The suspect, who has since been identified as a 36-year-old man, was reportedly arrested and placed under psychiatric care. … “There are people who are destroying the Earth,” the man says in the video, speaking in French. “All artists, think about the Earth. That’s why I did this. Think of the planet.”
Soup? Mashed Potatoes? Cake? Good grief, shower some beef at an exhibition somewhere and you’ll have your anti-art entrée too.
Heartening news is that none of the canvases suffered any meaningful damage — thankfully they’d been kook-proofed and so emerged unscathed from these indignities.
Regrettably, this trio of art-assaults aren’t the complete recent tally. CNN adds:
In July, at London’s Royal Academy of Art, members of the “Just Stop Oil” crew glued themselves to a copy of da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” and to a masterpiece held in the National Gallery. Also mid-summer, in Florence, agitators in an Italian climate activist organization did the same to Botticelli’s “Primavera”. The same day as the Monet/mashed potato incident, environmentalist shock-troops from “Extinction Rebellion” were arrested at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria for gluing themselves to Picasso’s “Massacre in Korea”.
Quite the edifying bunch, aye?
Close observers might notice these episodes are routinely accompanied — à la the would-be Mona Lisa mauler — by appeals to the earth’s well-being against the predations of modern man. One of the London Lovelies, while stressing she and her tomato soup-slinging confrere did no damage to the Van Gogh, explained: “Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people? The cost of living crisis is part of the cost of oil crisis, fuel is unaffordable to millions of cold, hungry families.”
Props to this particular anti-oil-activist for at least mentioning the p-word (“people”) — that’s strikingly farther than many a climate firebreather gets in her/his public orations.
That said, color lots of us dubious. These folks routinely labor under a pagan-like passion for the environment, Gaia, this “Third Rock from the Sun” or Mother Earth — whatever name for the biosphere they prefer. Human beings? They consistently rate way down — if at all — on these renegades’ vocalized scale of priorities.
The contemporary Left is simply not that crazy about homo sapiens.
It’s unconvincingly precious listening to the above-quoted protestor kvetch about the “cost of living crisis” and fuel “unaffordable … to millions of cold, hungry families”. It so happens the efforts of groups like hers hobble fossil fuel production — ironically contributing directly to these unendurable conditions.
Sure enough, individuals and their loved ones are hurting right now, but climate-zealots’ myopic fantasies of a world operating without gasoline and oil immediately are intensifying those straits: Powering twenty-first century existence on the most fundamental levels (heating, transportation, manufacturing) has gotten rather more challenging the past many months as the enviro-obsessed demand fossil fuels become scarcer and scarcer.
And to get ruthlessly practical: all those wasted edibles dribbling down the face of Van Gogh’s and Monet’s late-nineteenth-century masterworks could have helped fill the bellies of “hungry families”. Instead they ended up doing duty as a prop in a nutty, self-indulgent photo op.
What’s conspicuous is that for many of these eco-hardliners the priority is the planet — not the actual people for which the orb was created; terra firma in and of itself.
Neither is it mere happenstance that the hyped-up shenanigans of the earth-worshipping mob so often involve the literal trashing of human achievement – which makes a kind of twisted sense. If you consider progressives’ explicit policy prescriptions, it becomes inescapable they broadly deplore tangible flesh-and-blood people. So, why wouldn’t we expect them to deplore their handiwork?
Mankind has been constructed after the image of God; to reflect the Creator’s imaginativeness, inventiveness, ingenuity. In an iconic piece like Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa we bespy this dynamic: a sixteenth-century polymath echoing the magnificence of the Divine Artist of all existence. The same could be said of the Dutch impressionist’s flowery still-life briefly defaced with soup two weeks ago; or his French counterpart’s more recently potato-splattered painting.
For the record, that reflection applies anytime individuals generate artistic beauty, handy gadgets, solutions to problems. These are expressions of LIFE — specifically human life bestowed from a Universal Life-Giver Who is the Source behind everything good.
This is another nettle for the Left. Since they’re typically secularist in their orientation they have a reflexive allergy to all things Theistic. The philosophical materialism which drives them doesn’t mix well with any allusion to Heaven’s involvement in earthly matters. It’s one reason their policies are so reliably sterile: Consider their abortion-mania — the active killing of human beings, the anti-propagation of the species – and their contraception fixation in general (sex minus child bearing). Homosexual couplings? Barren by design. The current frenzy to erase male/female distinctions? The muddy mess which is the transgender movement? All contribute to fewer children, fewer descendants, a blighted future for mankind.
It also provides partial accounting for Progressive’s patently bizarre animosity toward so much of Western Civilization. Not only has the latter been the product of persons, they’ve tended to be men and women operating from a “religious” – i.e., biblically informed – worldview. That combo? It’s garlic to the Left’s God-phobic vampire.
Bluntly, Leftist hostility for, it seems, just about anything that makes living better, more comfortable, more prosperous, more secure for the human race is rooted in a sulphurous misanthropy. They’ll object they want to come to the aid of people in the short run, but the results usually blossom into catastrophe in the long run (think: today’s welfare state.) Then they’ll ululate about the survival of the masses one-hundred years from now (dubious climate cult propaganda), but gut hard-working people right now.
Climate firebrands view people as a wearisome burden; an alternative perspective counters there is vast potential in the resource that is called humankind.
I’m minded of a statement — probably a paraphrase — frequently attributed to eighteenth-century satirist Jonathan Swift: “I hate and despise the animal called Mankind, but I like the occasional Tom, Dick and Harry.”
Humanity-scorning, people-loathing Leftists couldn’t do much better than that if they’re looking for a pithy motto to advertise their cause.
Progressivism, it turns out, is one big, nasty can of soup endlessly heaved on people and everything salubrious they accomplish.
The views here are those of the author and not necessarily Daily Surge
Image: Screen shot: https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/ybn9uy/german_climate_activists_throw_mashed_potatoes_on/
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