danajohnhill.org | Hard Times Come Again No More

I am not a painter, nor do I possess any skill at drawing or sculpting. But I appreciate good art as much as anyone. So it never ceases to disgust me when masterpieces are stolen, and whisked away by masked brigands.

With 2004′s daylight robbery of the Munch Museum in Oslo fresh in my memory, this week’s theft of four Impressionist works from the Bührle Museum in Zürich has me enraged. A Cézanne, Van Gogh, Monet and Degas were snatched from the walls and tossed in a waiting van while the robbers held staff at gunpoint. Meanwhile, two Picassos were swiped last week.

Thank god the Munch masterpieces turned up relatively safe in the end, but you can never be sure what will happen to stolen art; these paintings are in danger.

What I don’t understand is how this can happen. Certainly, I do not wish that any bystander should risk their life fighting off an armed robber, but don’t these museums have any sort of security? The average Wal-Mart deposits less than a hundred thousand dollars per week, but they still send two armed guards in a bulletproof truck to pick it up. These paintings are worth over a hundred million dollars. Do you think that if a museum had a hundred million dollars in cash sitting on a table they wouldn’t have armed guards standing right there?  It’s not a difficult risk-management assessment to make.

Filed under: Art, Current Events on February 13th, 2008 | No Comments »

I’ve got to hand it to Miriam: she called the Republican primary race for John McCain last summer when his campaign was at its nadir; today his nomination seems assured.  I remember saying to her at the time that his operation was in disarray, and he was polling in the low single digits.  But she had a simple rationalization for why she felt he’d rebound, and she was right.

Meanwhile, I continue to be pleased with Barack Obama’s success versus Hillary Clinton.  As I have said before, I don’t dislike Senator Clinton personally, and I acknowledge that she’s intelligent and capable.  But in a national election against someone as admirable as Senator McCain, she’s a guaranteed loser.  Indeed, the surest way for Democrats to wrestle defeat from the jaws of victory would be to nominate Hillary Clinton.  The reason I am not surprised by her recent losses is that, whereas Obama continues to draw voters with his message, Clinton, by virtue of her status as a known commodity, has a built-in peak of support.  People know her well.  Those who like her are already on her side, and are going to vote for her.  But they make up no more than about 45% of registered Democrats in most states.  She’d never do better than that nationally against a Republican challenger like John McCain.  I know dyed-in-the-wool liberals who would vote for McCain before Clinton.

Obama, on the other hand, continues to increase his level of support, and I think stands a much better chance against McCain.  First, Obama has credibility on the Iraq issue.  He opposed it from the beginning, even before he was a U.S. senator.  John McCain can certainly be respected for walking the walk on Iraq: he has children in the military who have been to Iraq, so he isn’t the typical Republican chicken hawk à la Romney, Giuliani, and everyone else in the House and Senate, plus the president and vice-president.  For that he deserves our attention when speaking about the war.  But it doesn’t make him right, and I think selling voters on his position will be difficult, especially since we’ve been in Iraq longer than we fought in WWII.  And while McCain is certainly a cut above the crooked Republican scum in Congress–people like Tom Delay who took pride in their criminal behavior–I sense that Americans’ distaste for the party that so warmly embraces that ethic has reached the tipping point.

Finally, I am not buying the “America isn’t ready” warnings against Obama.  There is no denying that there are racists in the United States.  But much the same way I think it’s pointless for Democrats to try and court the NRA crowd, so, too, do I think it makes little sense to worry about the bigots.  They wouldn’t vote for a Democrat anyway, white or black.

Filed under: Current Events, Politics, Rantings on February 13th, 2008 | 1 Comment »