It wouldn’t happen here

The truth is stranger than fiction, especially when it comes to events in Sin City (New York). They get away with stuff over there that we’d never tolerate over here.

Consider the case of the publically funded Brooklyn Museum of Art. It recently made the headlines for displaying a picture of the Virgin Mary defiled with, amongst other items, elephant doo. It was a clear, vulgar, and cowardly slap in the face to Christians, and a slap funded by– ready for this?–$7.2 million in annual museum support from the city government.

A flap ensued when sin city mayor Rudy Giuliani announced his intention to yank public funding from the museum. Then El Presidente himself, Bill Clinton, weighed in, throwing his support behind the museum.

When the government funds expression, then it’s the government talking, be it overt propaganda, speeches by officials, press releases, official documents, or, in this case, “art.” Government funded anti-Christian expressions–obscene and insulting, at that–are an ominous sign.

I’m a free speech kind of guy, and if some loser so-called artist wants to produce vulgar garbage, that’s his business. He’s free to produce it, and I should be equally free not to fund it, look at it, or buy it. But I’m at a loss to understand why the government would become a partner in it, and make the taxpayers unwilling partners as well. Talk about arrogance and a total disconnect from the people.

Can you imagine such a twisted outrage occurring here in the CNMI? I can’t. It simply couldn’t happen. If some government nebish was caught using public money to fund obscene insults to the religious community, he’d be out of a job real quick. And–more to the point–there’s not a single person working for the CNMI government who would ever contemplate such an act in the first place. Yet, in New York, it’s all in a day’s work.

For all the sanctimonious slander aimed at the CNMI from certain U.S. elements, you wonder why they don’t take a look at the moral swamp they’re sinking in. American society has gone bonkers. Seemingly everyone has had their soul sucked out through the eyeballs by the television. Kids are armed Nazi geeks shooting up school yards, half of marriages are winding up in divorce, and most people consider it a normal government function to fund obscene “art” displays.

I haven’t been to the states in over three years, and from the perspective of distance, it’s easier to see the big picture changing. It’s downright weird. Over the span of a few decades they’ve moved from Norman Rockwell to sacrilegious elephant doo? That’s quite a change.

It’s a word worn into banality, but the term “decadent” really does spring to mind. I can’t imagine having to endure the sleezy pukes in the New York artsy crowd. When they’re the ones who pass for normal, something is sorely amiss.

We’ve got our share of problems in the CNMI, but we don’t thumb our noses at God. Only a New Yorker would do that.