OSTRAKONS AND IMBECILES

Ostrakon is the Greek word for a shard of broken pottery. The Athenians would write on them the name of someone who had become unacceptable - sometimes by simply being too full of themselves (museums are chock-a-block with ostraka bearing the name "Pericles") but most often for individuals advocating actions that threatened the well-being of the state. If their name was scratched into a majority of the ostraka they were summarily expelled from Athens for a period of years. They were ostracized. Rejected.

Today short of murder, rape - or, of course being dark-skinned - we find few acts of sedition, treason, few incitements of attacks on humanity so singularly unacceptable as to justify ostracism. We have dressed ourselves in a mangy "who among us has not sinned" relativism that allows for virtually any degree of incitement to brutality. We even find droll amusement in watching dull-witted publicity whores broadcast pictures of political foes with sniper crosshairs imposed upon them. We roll our eyes as they wink and smile shouting "Hey, you becha. Don't retreat, reload!" to salivating mobs at public gatherings that are just half a-step from lynching parties. Some of them pretend thoughtful moderation by furrowing their brows and using phrases like "may require 2nd Amendment solutions" to negate legal election outcomes they find unacceptable.

Quite simply they advocate armed insurrection. They actually, absolutely suggest the slaughtering of philosophical or political opponents and the violent overthrow of a justly elected government or aspect thereof. And from the rest of us - hardly a murmur of dismay, let alone broad, flat condemnation and a vehement demand that these subhuman goons be rejected, labeled seditious, made outcasts.

Alaskan imbeciles, clowns, lunatics and borderline sociopaths are treated as if they may, gosh darn it, have a valid point. Or that they at least deserve a "respectful hearing" without the undue intrusion of being "refudiated'"(sic) by harsh questioning by some subversive, elitist, ivy-league media pawn.

And, so, this afternoon a decent young woman, a congresswoman serving her country, Gabrielle Giffords, listening to the needs and hurts of her constituents in difficult days, has been shot in the head. One of her staff members was killed. A nine year old little girl is dead. Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court is dead. Three other people are dead and with them 12 more people shot.

She wasn't conservative enough. The others were just in the way.

This is not an isolated incident. Nor can it be dismissed as the random act of a lone loon. This is the natural outcome of the nexus between frequently published, persistent insistence that violence against those who differ politically or socially is now a righteous act and of otherwise conscious, decent people's mewling failure to reject and ostracize the feral, noisome vermin who advocate such madness - in society at large OR in your own circle of friends.

For artists, the chroniclers of and witnesses to their times, it is imperative that we include, in text or subtext, as an aspect of at least some of our work an unequivocal rejection of this era's slovenly devolution of human social intercourse and commerce. If we can not ostracize them and actually remove them from among us we can certainly ostracize them for all of art history.

Artists, first and last, cannot fail to scratch the names of the brutish and seditious into the ostraka of our record of the age.