Sebastiano del Piombo, Salomè con la testa del Battista, 1510, National Gallery, London.
"A look at the world around us, seen through the windows of perception and feeling."
"...réputé juste et diplomate, il est régulièrement sollicité par les différentes monarchies d'Europe qui font appel à lui en tant que juge. Il mène un règne inspiré des valeurs du christianisme qui contribue à fonder l’idée que les pouvoirs spirituel et politique peuvent être incarnés par un seul homme."
En 1248, deux mois apres l'inauguration de la Sainte-Chapelle, il mene la 7e croisade (d'ou la couronne d'epines)...sept ans au Moyen-Orient, qui finit en echec total, le roi s'etant fait prisonnier en 1250 pas les musulmans.
En 1297 le roi louis IX a titre posthume a ete canonise par le pape Boniface VIII comme "Saint Louis de France."
...le seul roi francais canonise.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_IX
outside, St. Louis Art Museum (St. Louis, Missouri)
"Now, it is true that Louis IX's particular book-burning, not to mention the expulsion of France's Jewish moneylenders and the Seventh and Eighth Crusades, are only four entries in the catalog of misery that constitutes a lot of Jewish history and tend to be overshadowed by larger events, like the destruction of the two Temples. But at the top of Art Hill, there's that big statue of St. Louis, a physical entity toward which Missouri's Jews can direct their misery.
And so, this Tisha b'Av, members of Washington University's Chabad will be gathering at the base of St. Louis' statue at 5:30 p.m. to recite liturgical poems memorializing the misery he wrought." http://blogs.riverfronttimes.com/dailyrft/2009/07/down_with_king_louis_ix.php
The Communards pulled down the statue of Napoleon in the Place Vendôme.
The Paris Commune of 1871 was one of the four great traumas that shaped modern France. It stands alongside the 1789Revolution, the ascent of Vichy, in 1940, and (odd though it seems, given how nonviolent and small-scale they were) the Events of May, 1968. Other, more outward-bending crises—the Napoleonic campaigns, the two World Wars, the battle for Algeria—made as much noise and cost far more lives, but they now belong to the settled, archival past. That Napoleon was a bad man but a big figure, that the Great War was a valiant folly, that the war in Algeria could have ended only with Algerian independence: these are easy to assent to now. The four civic crises belong to the available, still contested past, the one that hangs around and starts living arguments. People ask whether the Revolution, with a little luck and better leadership, could have avoided the Terror and Bonaparte’s subsequent dictatorship, just as they argue over whether May of ’68 was a long-overdue assertion of liberty against hierarchy or the beginning of an infantile appeal to pleasure over value.
The what-exactly-happened of the Commune can be summed up briefly. In 1870, the French Imperial government—the Second Empire, under Louis-Napoleon, Napoleon’s posturing, dandyish nephew—stupidly provoked a war with Bismarck’s rising Prussia for the usual reasons that demagogic governments stupidly provoke wars: because bashing the nasty next-door neighbor seemed likely to boost the boss’s prestige, and because the government’s generals assured the government that they would win, no sweat. The Prussians were happy to have the war; Bismarck thought, correctly, that it would help further unify the German states, while his generals were, correctly, reassuring him. The war started, and the German generals routed the French ones, capturing the Emperor himself at Sedan and besieging Paris. What was left of the French government retreated to Bordeaux and accepted terms of surrender from the Prussians; the terms are always called “humiliating,” but all terms of surrender are humiliating—that’s what makesit a surrender. (They at least excluded the occupation of Paris.) The Prussians eventually retreated with their war loot, having reclaimed the northern regions of Alsace and Lorraine as German territory.The what-exactly-happened of the Commune can be summed up briefly. In 1870, the French Imperial government—the Second Empire, under Louis-Napoleon, Napoleon’s posturing, dandyish nephew—stupidly provoked a war with Bismarck’s rising Prussia for the usual reasons that demagogic governments stupidly provoke wars: because bashing the nasty next-door neighbor seemed likely to boost the boss’s prestige, and because the government’s generals assured the government that they would win, no sweat. The Prussians were happy to have the war; Bismarck thought, correctly, that it would help further unify the German states, while his generals were, correctly, reassuringhim. The war started, and the German generals routed the French ones, capturing the Emperor himself at Sedan and besieging Paris. What was left of the French government retreated to Bordeaux and accepted terms of surrender from the Prussians; the terms are always called “humiliating,” but all terms of surrender are humiliating—that’s what makes it a surrender. (They at least excluded the occupation of Paris.) The Prussians eventually retreated with their war loot, having reclaimed the northern regions of Alsace and Lorraine as German territory.
Then, in February of 1871, new legislative elections were held throughout France, and a majority returned in favor of an as yet ill-defined form of republican royalism. The Assembly, led by the aging statesman Adolphe Thiers—a politician under the Second Republic, who had been don’t-poke-the-bear wise about the war with the Germans before it started—soon declared itself the Third Republic. The people of Paris, always farther to the left than the rest of France, feared that the new republic would be republican in name only, and began organizing their own, alternative regime in the capital. A confrontation between what remained of the regular French Army, the Versaillais, and Paris’s popular militia, known as the National Guard, ended with the death of two generals, and the royalist-minded government fled Paris for Versailles, the old seat of the French kings. In Paris, a left-wing Communard government, protected by the National Guard, rose up and seized power, and for about two months that spring tried to rule on radical principles. It made various feints at self-organization, and offered statements of purpose that still seem prophetically advanced—particularly the boldly feminist ones. It also insulted the clergy and the few remaining rich people, and committed mostly disorganized acts of looting and reprisal against its ancient political enemies, including tearing down Thiers’s house and toppling the Place Vendôme column with its statue of Napoleon. (It’s back.)
The Versaillais then invaded Paris and, with minimal military difficulty, though at maximal human cost, reconquered the city. The Communards, as they were crushed by the advancing and brutal Versaillais, set fire to much of the city, including the Tuileries Palace, which burned to the ground, though whether all the fires were the result of a deliberate nihilistic policy set by sinister female “pétroleuses,” proto-suicide bombers, or a largely accidental result of the general chaos and violence is one of the many things that are still, violently, debated.
Latino, Asian, and White Lives Matter, Too. So do the lives of police officers.
We all, whatever our political leanings, need to ask ourselves some hard questions, namely (I don't the media is):
Why hasn't the cold-blooded, racist murders of Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos recently in New York City aroused as much national outrage as the killing of Michael Brown? Why no Ferguson-style protests, either in New York or in the rest of the nation?
"He, Brinsley, made statements on social media suggesting that he planned to kill police officers and was angered about the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases." -The New York Times
Why do African-Americans, of any racial or ethnic group, have more problems with their local police? Given how African-Americans are idolized as sports heroes across this nation, does it make sense that police officers would want to, for no reason other than racism, kill black men?
Do white police officers kill white suspects in comparable situations?
And,
Why do African-Americans disproportionately commit more violent crime than other demographic group, even when income disparities are factored in?
2 N.Y.P.D. Officers Killed in Brooklyn Ambush; Suspect Commits Suicide
Two police officers sitting in their patrol car in Brooklyn were shot at point-blank range and killed on Saturday afternoon by a man who, officials said, had traveled to the city from Baltimore vowing to kill officers. The suspect then committed suicide with the same gun, the authorities said.
The officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, were in the car near Myrtle and Tompkins Avenues in Bedford-Stuyvesant in the shadow of a tall housing project when the gunman, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, walked up to the passenger-side window and assumed a firing stance, Police Commissioner William J. Bratton said. Mr. Brinsley shot several rounds into the heads and upper bodies of the officers, who never drew their weapons, the authorities said.
Mr. Brinsley, 28, then fled down the street and onto the platform of a nearby subway station, where he killed himself as officers closed in. The police recovered a silver semiautomatic handgun, Mr. Bratton said.
Mr. Brinsley, who had a long rap sheet of crimes that included robbery and carrying a concealed gun, is believed to have shot his former girlfriend near Baltimore before traveling to Brooklyn, the authorities said. He made statements on social media suggesting that he planned to kill police officers and was angered about the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases.
Investigators at the scene where Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were shot and killed on Saturday.CreditJohn Minchillo/Associated Press
Authorities in Baltimore sent a warning that Mr. Brinsley had made these threats, but it was received in New York at essentially the same time as the killings, officials said.
The shootings, the chase, the suicide of Mr. Brinsley and the desperate but failed bid to save the lives of the officers — their uniforms soaked in blood — turned a busy commercial intersection on the Saturday before Christmas into a scene of pandemonium.
The manager of a liquor store at the corner, Charlie Hu, said the two police officers were slouched over in the front seat of their patrol car. Both of them appeared to have been shot in the head, Mr. Hu said, and one of the officers had blood spilling out of his face.
“Today two of New York’s finest were shot and killed with no warning, no provocation,” Mr. Bratton said at Woodhull Hospital in Williamsburg, where the officers were declared dead. “They were, quite simply, assassinated — targeted for their uniform and for the responsibility they embraced to keep the people of this city safe.”
“Officer Ramos and Officer Liu never had the opportunity to draw their weapons,” he continued. “They may have never even seen the assailant, their murderer.”
Mayor Bill de Blasio, standing beside the police commissioner, said, “It is an attack on all of us; it’s an attack on everything we hold dear.”
Mr. de Blasio said he had met with the officers’ families, including Officer Ramos’s 13-year-old son, who “couldn’t comprehend what had happened to his father."
Photo
Officers Rafael Ramos, 40, left, and Wenjian Liu, 32, were killed on Saturday.CreditNew York Police Department
Late Saturday night, President Obama condemned the “murder of two police officers in New York City,” noting that officers who serve their communities “deserve our respect and gratitude every single day. Tonight, I ask people to reject violence and words that harm, and turn to words that heal — prayer, patient dialogue, and sympathy for the friends and family of the fallen.”
The double killing comes at a moment when protests over police tactics have roiled the city and other parts of the nation. Since a grand jury declined to bring criminal charges in the case of Mr. Garner, a black Staten Island man who died after a police chokehold in July, protesters have filled the streets on numerous occasions. Those protests followed more violent ones in Ferguson, Mo., after there were no charges in the police shooting of Mr. Brown, an unarmed black teenager.
The mayor has taken care to praise officers’ work repeatedly since the grand jury decision, but he has stressed the rights of protesters to express themselves and spoken of his personal experience instructing his biracial son, Dante, to “take special care” during any police encounters.
Some union leaders suggested the mayor had sent a message that police officers were to be feared. Cries for the police to use more restraint have been buttressed by historic drops in violent crime. The city has seen roughly 300 killings so far this year, a number so low as to be unheard-of two decades ago.
But the shooting on Saturday seemed reminiscent of decades past, when the city was mired in an epidemic of drugs and violence and, in 1988, a police officer was shot while he sat alone in his patrol carguarding the home of a man who had testified in a drug case. That killing shook the city, sparking an escalation in the war on drugs and an aggressive crackdown on violent crime. Mr. Bratton said that the attack on Saturday was the seventh time since 1972 that partners in the Police Department had been killed at the same time.
The killing seemed to drive the wedge between Mr. de Blasio and rank-and-file officers even deeper. Video posted online showed dozens of officers turning their backs to the mayor as he walked into anews conference on Saturday night.
“There’s blood on many hands tonight — those that incited violence on the street under the guise of protests, that tried to tear down what New York City police officers did every day," the head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, Patrick Lynch, said outside Woodhull Hospital. He added, “That blood on the hands starts on the steps of City Hall, in the office of the mayor.”
Marcy
Houses
Tompkins Houses
Myrtle-Willoughby
Subway station
MYRTLE AVE
Site of shooting
50 Feet
WILLOUGHBY AVE
East River
Williamsburg
East Williamsburg
BROOKLYN
G Train
BROOKLYN-QUEENS EXPWY.
MYRTLE AVE.
DETAIL
Clinton Hill
Bedford-StuyvesantMr. Brinsley, whose records indicate that he was born in New York, had been arrested several times in Georgia and Ohio. He was arrested on accusations of carrying a concealed weapon and stealing in Georgia, and in Ohio in connection with theft and robbery, among other run-ins with the police. His last known residence was in Georgia. Mr. Bratton said the suspect also had ties to East Flatbush, Brooklyn, but would not be more specific.
Earlier on Saturday, law enforcement officials said, Mr. Brinsley shot his former girlfriend in the stomach near Baltimore. She survived.
Mr. Bratton said investigators believed that after the Maryland shooting, Mr. Brinsley posted to an Instagram account that he was headed to New York to attack police officers and that the posting might be his last. Mr. Bratton lamented the timing of the warning from authorities. “The tragedy here is that just as the warning was coming in, the murder was occurring,” he said.
Mr. Bratton said that the Instagram posts reviewed by investigators, which he said had been widely circulated and may have been on the account of a girlfriend, revealed a “very strong bias against police officers.”
In the Instagram posting that was apparently written by Mr. Brinsley, he called the attack retribution for the deaths of Mr. Garner and Mr. Brown.
Below a photo of a firearm, the Instagram posting, which misspells Mr. Garner’s name, reads: “I’m Putting Wings On Pigs Today. They Take 1 Of Ours......Let’s Take 2 of Theirs #ShootThePolice #RIPErivGardner #RIPMikeBrown.”
Mr. Brinsley’s sister, Nawaal Brinsley, said on Saturday that she had not seen her brother in two years. “Oh my goodness, oh my goodness,” she said when told of the attack. She said she did not remember hearing her brother express anger at the police.
Photo
The double killing came at a moment when protests over police tactics have roiled the city.CreditKevin Hagen for The New York Times
Mr. Bratton said that Officer Liu had been a seven-year veteran of the force and that Officer Ramos had been an officer since 2012. Officer Liu, he added, had been married two months.
The shootings seemed poised to cool the protests of recent months. The Rev. Al Sharpton, who has been an outspoken backer of the protests in recent weeks, condemned the attack.
“Any use of the names of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in connection with any violence or killing of police is reprehensible and against the pursuit of justice in both cases,” he said.
The Brooklyn borough president, Eric Adams, worried that the attack would “tarnish” the campaign against police brutality that has swept the city.
“It’s horrific to have someone intentionally shoot a police officer; it’s the wrong message,” he said. “And that is not the message that many have been calling on when they talk about reform.”
The intersection where the shooting occurred, which is dominated by the Tompkins housing project across the street, is a spot where residents often see police keeping watch. The officers had been assigned to patrol the Tompkins Houses in response to an uptick in violence there this year, Mr. Bratton said.
The increased police presence had improved the neighborhood, some said. “It’s changed and gotten better through the years,” said Felix Camacho, 40, an airport ramp agent who has lived for eight years on the block where the shooting happened. But other residents worried that the episode on Saturday would inflame relations.
More than 100 officers lined the hospital’s exit ramp as the bodies of Officers Liu and Ramos were driven out in ambulances.
As a racial minority--but not an African-American--, I have views on liberal white guilt that recently I have discovered cause no small anger and resentment among those very same liberal whites.
When I explain to them that I don't believe in liberal white guilt or white privilege, they are upset.
They--the entire white race--have to atone for what "they" the entire white race, as in anyone whose skin is "white"--did to to black people.
Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Arab-Americans may not have exactly the same take on this issue, although they are definitely encouraged to by liberal whites, who, in fact, may be disappointed and angered if those groups do not.
I find it, indeed, "racist" to assign collective guilt to entire races, religions, or ethnicities, as if they were monolithic wholes.
And for that I am damned, or at least a heretic, in the minds of many white liberals.
But I thought they thought they were damned.
I would be better off, perhaps, if I simply guilt-tripped white liberals whenever possible: they would be happier that way. They can no longer do without guilt (and atonement). It's manna for their spirit.
...with the Stranger who knows how to strip away appearances and ill-fitting disguises, cut wide open
An open letter to the downtown YMCA in Seattle
A woman who tries to beat off a man's insistent lewd glances (or gestures)...a man's uneasiness with and/or fury at another man's persistent, intrusive stares...a child's terror at the sight of...
"Dear S.,
Thanks for meeting with me this morning informally and offering to intervene to communicate with this member.
I apologize for appearing quite stressed out. It's just that for the past three years I have been on the receiving end of unwanted advances disguised as (over)-friendliness from one particular member.
He has accosted me more than two dozen times in an overly familiar manner, including two occasions in which the smiles became intense, unblinking, protracted Hannibal Lecter sneers, jeers, and leers, which really spooked me.
Since then, he has never really let up.
(A few years ago he had exploded at me in the swimming pool because I had accidentally kicked him. Standing up in the middle of the pool he screamed over and over again, at least a half dozen times "Do you know you KICKED me?!!" I apologized profusely each time. The lifeguard did nothing).
I know that he will be clearly on his best behavior you and staff as well as most other members. But just the fact that he persists in doing something that clearly annoys me is and explicitly asked him not to do is reason to believe he is intentionally harassing me.
Persistent, unwelcome overtures, social or otherwise, should not be acceptable behavior at the YMCA.
Obviously, something about my being small, a racial minority, and "different" (e.g., solitary, quirky, timid, politically incorrect...) is triggering predatory behavior on his part.
(Pseudo-) Friendliness pushed to the limits is aggression and, it goes without saying, inappropriate and unhealthy behavior.
It's a variation similar to the situation where kids (and occasionally adults) on the sidewalk will walk right into another smaller, more timid kid who is walking not in a straight line but but diagonally to avoid the first kid.
O.K., so I've been the victim of aggression before, so predators can smell "it" as if it were deeply scented musk, no matter hard I try to mask "it."
This member--pun intended--, I surmise, has a personality disorder, perhaps even psychopathic tendencies (compulsive lying, etc.). Although he appears to be effortlessly "normal" to most people, he saves the other side of his personality to show only a select few.
I don't know his name; he knows mine; I have no idea who he is. And I have never had a real "conversation" with him. Yet he acts as if he knows me well.
My sports don't include playing cat-and-mouse--while this member, on the other hand, obviously relishes stalking me as long as he can get away with it so easily.
He's playing a (mind) game, as if, "What's up with L. anyway? No idea why she's acting this way. I'm just trying to be friendly. I smile and say 'hello' (O.K, for the 40th time) to L, what's wrong with that? I get along with everybody here. L. really must have a loose screw somewhere, ha-ha-ha."
(O.K., I admit I've somehow gotten the talent for attracting all the wackos).
Sad to say, bullying in various forms occurs at all levels in our society. And sometimes lives are lost, people are broken as the victims' complaints are often not taken seriously, ignored or even derided, their suffering not believed, all while the bullies get their way. Psychological bullying of this kind involves being able to instill terror into the victim that no one else will detect, observe, or believe because the bully will be able to find a moment alone, even if it's a few seconds, with the victim. The leer of cruelty, the savage God will then appear like the moon from behind the clouds and then pass away. The bully will make others skeptical of the victim's "version" of the "facts," his "sanity." And others, well-meaning, will assure the victim that the bully harbors no ill will and that the victim is "mistaken," that it was really "just miscommunication." Maybe, after all, the victim was "imagining" those "malicious looks." Or "Isn't s/he being a bit paranoid? The guy gets along well with other people, after all." The bully knows the victim's "secret" very well, and uses that knowledge to exact and extract psychological pleasure. I do trust my gut instincts on this one. The problem is that, unless the victim is actually psychotic him- or herself, human beings possess "gut instincts" about what is safe and when there is a danger. Of course, an association might trigger the victim's inner-wired sense of self-survival--as in the case of a rape victim who might after the incident associate all men with potential (rapists). I don't think this is all the case the case. Nature provided the human species also with what is known in the jargon today the faculty of "cognitive reasoning," as a corrective and as a balance to the associational triggers developed in the primitive centers of the brain. The disbelief of others undermines the victim, who is often advised to see a psychologist, etc., which is not a bad idea in itself. The problem with this approach is that we're talking about "a relationship" between two parties, two "strangers" who, oddly enough, "know each other" in that familiar/unfamiliar way that predators/victims do.. The bully meanwhile will revert, at times on- and off-again to his previous behavior towards the victim, almost a way of "flashing himself" in front of the distressed, if not hysterical, victim.
Anyway, I do hope you had a chance to talk to him and persuade him to respect my boundaries since I have not been successful in that regard.
I am not sure what constitutes the legal definition of "malicious harassment" is. Nor am I sure of whether this man has a past history of similar behavior or what his psychological profile is. But I am concerned.
In any case, if something should happen to me as a result of my attempts to get him off my back once and for all, I would hold the YMCA responsible.
Sincerely yours,
L.
Member of the downtown Seattle YMCA for the past 14 years."
The story had to be told.
To be liked by those whose opinions counted in a very real, practical sense, or to have my own self-respect was a difficult choice that I had to make. Going along in agreement with things, just because supposedly "everyone else" had joined the bandwagon, was not something I could do without injury to my sense of autonomy and decency.
