From the San Francisco Chronicle:
The painting was part of a larger show of Colwell’s work that mostly featured pastel-colored abstracts.
Two days after the painting went up in a front window, someone threw eggs and dumped trash on the doorstep. Haigh said she didn’t think to connect it to the black-and-white interpretation of the events at Baghdad’s notorious prison until people started leaving nasty messages and threats on her business answering machine.
“I think you need to get your gallery out of this neighborhood before you get hurt,” one caller said.
Even after she removed the painting from the window, the criticism continued thanks to news coverage about the gallery’s troubles. The answering machine recorded new calls from people accusing her of being a coward for taking the picture down. Last weekend, a man walked into the gallery, pretended to scrutinize the art work for a moment, then marched up to Haigh’s desk and spat directly in her face.
It’s disgusting how much some people hate free speech. How much some people hate, period.
what gets me is these people will then turn around and talk about being persecuted because liberals turn out in the hundreds of thousands to protest the war in iraq. or because a handful of us show up with anti-war or anti-bush protest signs when they’ve got one of their events going on. and they will spit on us, threaten us, take away our signs, strike at us, even arrest us–but WE are persecuting THEM.
i will never, ever, ever, if i live to be two hundred, EVER understand right-wing “logic.”
oh yeah, i forgot–they ban musicians from the radio who are sympathetic to our side of the argument, too. and humiliate our comedians by turning off their mics and escorting them off the stage. and, y’know, stuff like that.
I live a few blocks from the gallery. I’ve been heartsick about this.
It is disgusting how much some people hate.
The hate is born from fear, I think. The fear that the society is unalterably changing from how it used to be, and that is very hard for those to accept who liked it just fine the old way. Not that I condone the hate, but it helps to understand why it is so fierce and so unreasoning.
The people who attacked the gallery owner are terrorists, plain and simple.
Terrorism is defined as “…the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives” according to the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, via Wikipedia.
The assault on the gallery owner was an unlawful use of force and violence (assault). It was against one person in furtherance of the political objective of muting discussion of the allegations of U.S. forces’ torture of prisoners in the Abu Ghirab prison through intimidation.
I wonder if John Ashcroft is going to go after the guy who did this with as much zeal as he’s gone after Muslims guilty of technical immigration violations…
What is really telling to me is that the owner of the gallery was shown on the local news, quite bloodied and battered about the face, and when asked if she would re-open the gallery, replied that she didn’t know and that “I am afraid to live in America”. We must do everything we can to get people to vote in this election. If the current administration wins another 4 years, the path from democracy to corporate/right wing dictatorship will be very short indeed. We are already well down that path, unfortunately.
“The greatest price of refusing to participate in politics is being governed by your inferiors”
-Plato
I’m visiting Germany right now. Reading things like this makes me want to just stay here.
In Berkeley of all places!
very very sad.