Many years ago now, I interviewed Renaissance man Gordon Parks — photographer, composer, writer and film director (“Shaft”), a man whose photojournalism in the 1940s through ’70s captured both the civil rights movement and Hollywood.
Parks had grown up poor and Black in Kansas. I asked him what kept him from being embittered by poverty and racial prejudice. He said something that has stayed with me ever since and that I have thought about a lot in the past few weeks of war and other violence: “It’s easier to pick up a paintbrush than a gun.”
Certainly, that’s what those of us who created “Framing the Female Gaze: Women Artists and the New Historicism,” at Lehman College Art Gallery in the Bronx through Jan. 20, think. For my part, I was thrilled to be able to see my idea about women interpolating themselves into the art historical canon, reclaiming their bodies and their sexuality and depicting men come to life. Seeing the works in a gallery in conversation with others — instead of flat and distorted on a computer screen, made me think differently about their scale and their cleverness. As a usually solitary writer, I learned more about the collaborative, patient nature needed to nurture an art show. I am grateful to gallery director Bartholomew F. Bland and his team for the opportunity.
Not everyone is a Bart Bland or Gordon Parks, however. The U.S. Army reservist who killed 18 people in Lewiston, Maine, had severe mental health problems for a long time. Many Americans have mental health issues. They don’t go around murdering people. Virtually all mass shooters in the United States are relatively young White men with a disproportionate rage at what they feel is some rejection. They are the apex predator in a society in which White people are rapidly become the majority-minority and in which the rise in status — in power — of any other group is seen as a diminution of themselves. It’s a zero-sum game made more horrific by assault weapons.
Yes, we need to address mental health problems in this country, but let’s not use then to obfuscate the real issues in mass shootings — the rage at the perceived loss of White male power and a gun culture that refuses to ban assault weapons.
The Israel-Hamas War, another zero-sum game, doesn’t have the excuse of mental illness, although it’s causing plenty of mental anguish to go along with the loss of life. Hamas made a cold-blooded calculation — drawing Israel into a conflict that will make it look as barbarous as Hamas — and it has been met with a cold-blooded Israeli response. Why else would Hamas not only kill people at a music festival but rape women, drag around their dead bodies and behead babies?
Now Hamas has brought death and destruction to Gaza, a siege that began with bombardments and a stranglehold on supplies, which in turn will lead to a ground offensive that will be block by block, building by building, floor by floor, room by room. And no, the technology will not make it easier or somehow abstracted. Indeed, it will only make it worse. Sieges have not changed since ancient times. You do what you can to destroy as much as you can from above and then go in, taking whatever you can, piece by piece. At this point, the some 200 remaining hostages and the scores of foreign nationals, including roughly 600 Americans, have to be considered collateral damage. There are few more chilling and despairing statements than that.
In the end, Israel will take Gaza, and all will be quiet rubble until Hamas 2.0 rears its Hydra-like heads. (If you think not, ask yourself: Who was in charge of Afghanistan when we Americans blundered in 20 years ago? The Taliban. And who is in charge since we made our clumsy, premature exit engineered by the Trump administration and executed by the Biden Adminstration? The Taliban.)
Badly begun is badly done. You have in Israel two peoples with ancient claims to a land who want to be the sole occupant of that land. The time for a real two-state solution was at the end of World War I and then after World War II, but the colonial powers were more interested in just that, power, and Middle East oil money at the end of World War I and the Allies at the end of World War II wanted to assuage their guilt for having done nothing about the Holocaust that killed six million Jews. The United Nations was set up to be a talky aid organization with no real teeth.
The further ramifications of the debacle are twofold — a possible larger war between the United States and Iran that compounds the stupidity of the U.S. leaving Afghanistan and not having a strong presence in the region to begin with and distracts Americans from the proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. (Already, the new House Speaker, “MAGA Mike” Johnson, whose qualification for the job is that he’s a Trump acolyte, has said Israel first and Ukraine second. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is right to be worried as the U.S. has a reputation for loving a cause and leaving it.)
The other ramification is the public relations war already being played out on American college campuses and in cultural institutions, with leftist students protesting what they see as Israeli oppression of the Palestinians and Jewish business leaders canceling them while cultural organizations cancel Palestinian speakers.
What students, what everybody, needs to understand is that the First Amendment protects your right to free speech against government censorship. It doesn’t govern how corporations or cultural institutions can respond. How much better it would be if we could entertain a variety of viewpoints in civil discourse. That’s how students learn, Mitch McDaniel, former governor of Indiana and Purdue University president, told Margaret Hoover on an Oct. 27 edition of PBS’ “Firing Line.”
The students have a point: Israel has oppressed the Palestinians. But that’s because the elected and imbedded Hamas has terrorized Israel. There are those looking to break the cycle of violence. Most, however, are playing the zero-sum game.
For them, the sword is mightier than the pen, and a paintbrush is less powerful than a gun.