Teh One Who Knocks
03-02-2017, 01:21 PM
By Jay Strongman - Heat Street
http://i.imgur.com/pIBoUt4h.jpg
They say every picture tells a story. That’s certainly true of the painting at the centre of a recently announced lawsuit by Missouri Democrat, Rep. Lacy Clay and his ongoing legal battle to have the picture, depicting police officers as pigs, go back on display in a Capitol Hill hallway.
And if it’s true that one look is worth a thousand words, then the uproar around this picture would currently generate enough words to fill a whole novel.
The story began last year when Clay sponsored a local art competition. The winning entry, by then-high school senior David Pulphus, was displayed in the hallway near Clay’s office in the Capitol complex.
Ordinarily this would be a nice artistic touch honoring a local constituent. But Pulphus’s painting was inspired by the 2014 anti-police riots in Ferguson, Missouri (part of Clay’s district) and depicts a street protest with people holding signs including “racism kills”, while police officers portrayed as pigs are pointing their guns at protestors.
The painting hung on public view in the hallway until Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter, disgusted by its anti-police imagery took the painting down in January of this year and had it removed to Clay’s office.
Hunter was by no means the only person to take exception to the teen’s picture. Clay had frequently been asked to remove the painting by callers to his office and law enforcement organizations. The St. Louis County Police Association called the painting a “punch in the mouth.”
Washington D.C.’s Fraternal Order of Police told the Daily Caller: “This piece of art, which depicts officers as pigs, is both offensive and disgusting. During a time in our society when tensions are so high that someone can be offended by a single word, this painting does nothing but attack law enforcement to its core.” And police associations from San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and other cities wrote a letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan asking him to remove the painting.
After the painting was removed, Clay put it back up in the hallway. Hunter removed it yet again before the Architect of the Capitol (who has the final say on the maintenance and preservation of the Capitol complex) decided that the painting was not appropriate for its location.
There the matter should have ended. After all Clay doesn’t seem like he’d have much spare time to worry about the fate of a painting what with Missouri just being ranked 44th among US states on crime and correction according to recent findings from U.S. News & World Report.
Despite the Architect of the Capitol’s ruling, the widespread condemnation and the negative publicity the painting generated, Clay and Pulphus claimed in a 19-page lawsuit against the Architect, Stephen T. Ayers, that its removal from the hallway violated the young artist’s right to free speech.
The Missouri Democrat is intensifying the fight to hang the painting— entitled Untitled #1—and seems determined to turn the issue into a constitutional flashpoint. “This case is truly about something much bigger than a student’s painting,” Clay said. “It is about defending our fundamental First Amendment freedoms which are currently under assault in this country.”
He also told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “Yes, some people find it offensive. I don’t find it offensive. I find it to be an expression of what one of my constituents is feeling about what he has experienced.”
The Capitol is refusing to cave and is presently preparing its legal response to Clay and Pulphus’s lawsuit.
Now, far be it from me to claim the police are all angels or that art can’t be controversial, but someone has to ask: what is Clay thinking?
At a time when police officers are being gunned down in almost record numbers and the forces of law and order are facing weekly protests in the streets, do Clay, and presumably the entire Democratic Party, really want to be seen as championing a painting that portrays cops as pigs?
Sure art has its place, and the artist can have his free speech in a private art gallery, but in the case of a painting that depicts public servants in such a bad light, that place is pretty obviously not in a government building. Especially in a building protected by the very police officers that are being insulted in this painting.
Now whilst it may not be surprising that Clay and his supporters in the Democratic Party (the Minority Leader of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi appealed unsuccessfully to have the painting rehung), are blind to the optics of this controversy, it does seem surprising that the media aren’t giving this story more coverage.
I’m pretty certain that if a Republican congressperson were fighting to have a painting depicting IRS agents as leeches or Muslims as suicide bombers hung in a government building, the media would be rightly haranguing every Republican spokesman from local party officials up to the White House to denounce it. And yet it seems nobody in the media is interested to ask Democrats why their minority leader in the House and one of their congressmen are determined to insult the men and women of law enforcement in this way.
Back during the turbulent “days of rage” protests of the 1960s when demonstrators were chanting “Off the Pigs” there was no doubt that the Democrat Party and mainstream media’s support of the police mirrored that of the general public.
Fifty years later the public’s support for the “thin blue line” is, according to recent polls, still extremely high. But what does Clay’s lawsuit and the lack of media condemnation of it say about the current attitude towards the police of today’s party of opposition and the media?
The incident speaks to some of the litany of reasons why Donald Trump won the Presidency.
http://i.imgur.com/pIBoUt4h.jpg
They say every picture tells a story. That’s certainly true of the painting at the centre of a recently announced lawsuit by Missouri Democrat, Rep. Lacy Clay and his ongoing legal battle to have the picture, depicting police officers as pigs, go back on display in a Capitol Hill hallway.
And if it’s true that one look is worth a thousand words, then the uproar around this picture would currently generate enough words to fill a whole novel.
The story began last year when Clay sponsored a local art competition. The winning entry, by then-high school senior David Pulphus, was displayed in the hallway near Clay’s office in the Capitol complex.
Ordinarily this would be a nice artistic touch honoring a local constituent. But Pulphus’s painting was inspired by the 2014 anti-police riots in Ferguson, Missouri (part of Clay’s district) and depicts a street protest with people holding signs including “racism kills”, while police officers portrayed as pigs are pointing their guns at protestors.
The painting hung on public view in the hallway until Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter, disgusted by its anti-police imagery took the painting down in January of this year and had it removed to Clay’s office.
Hunter was by no means the only person to take exception to the teen’s picture. Clay had frequently been asked to remove the painting by callers to his office and law enforcement organizations. The St. Louis County Police Association called the painting a “punch in the mouth.”
Washington D.C.’s Fraternal Order of Police told the Daily Caller: “This piece of art, which depicts officers as pigs, is both offensive and disgusting. During a time in our society when tensions are so high that someone can be offended by a single word, this painting does nothing but attack law enforcement to its core.” And police associations from San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and other cities wrote a letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan asking him to remove the painting.
After the painting was removed, Clay put it back up in the hallway. Hunter removed it yet again before the Architect of the Capitol (who has the final say on the maintenance and preservation of the Capitol complex) decided that the painting was not appropriate for its location.
There the matter should have ended. After all Clay doesn’t seem like he’d have much spare time to worry about the fate of a painting what with Missouri just being ranked 44th among US states on crime and correction according to recent findings from U.S. News & World Report.
Despite the Architect of the Capitol’s ruling, the widespread condemnation and the negative publicity the painting generated, Clay and Pulphus claimed in a 19-page lawsuit against the Architect, Stephen T. Ayers, that its removal from the hallway violated the young artist’s right to free speech.
The Missouri Democrat is intensifying the fight to hang the painting— entitled Untitled #1—and seems determined to turn the issue into a constitutional flashpoint. “This case is truly about something much bigger than a student’s painting,” Clay said. “It is about defending our fundamental First Amendment freedoms which are currently under assault in this country.”
He also told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “Yes, some people find it offensive. I don’t find it offensive. I find it to be an expression of what one of my constituents is feeling about what he has experienced.”
The Capitol is refusing to cave and is presently preparing its legal response to Clay and Pulphus’s lawsuit.
Now, far be it from me to claim the police are all angels or that art can’t be controversial, but someone has to ask: what is Clay thinking?
At a time when police officers are being gunned down in almost record numbers and the forces of law and order are facing weekly protests in the streets, do Clay, and presumably the entire Democratic Party, really want to be seen as championing a painting that portrays cops as pigs?
Sure art has its place, and the artist can have his free speech in a private art gallery, but in the case of a painting that depicts public servants in such a bad light, that place is pretty obviously not in a government building. Especially in a building protected by the very police officers that are being insulted in this painting.
Now whilst it may not be surprising that Clay and his supporters in the Democratic Party (the Minority Leader of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi appealed unsuccessfully to have the painting rehung), are blind to the optics of this controversy, it does seem surprising that the media aren’t giving this story more coverage.
I’m pretty certain that if a Republican congressperson were fighting to have a painting depicting IRS agents as leeches or Muslims as suicide bombers hung in a government building, the media would be rightly haranguing every Republican spokesman from local party officials up to the White House to denounce it. And yet it seems nobody in the media is interested to ask Democrats why their minority leader in the House and one of their congressmen are determined to insult the men and women of law enforcement in this way.
Back during the turbulent “days of rage” protests of the 1960s when demonstrators were chanting “Off the Pigs” there was no doubt that the Democrat Party and mainstream media’s support of the police mirrored that of the general public.
Fifty years later the public’s support for the “thin blue line” is, according to recent polls, still extremely high. But what does Clay’s lawsuit and the lack of media condemnation of it say about the current attitude towards the police of today’s party of opposition and the media?
The incident speaks to some of the litany of reasons why Donald Trump won the Presidency.