There have been, and always will be, a handful of people who believe with all their heart and soul that the world is coming to an end. Eventually, someone will nail it, but in the meantime, there will be a lot of people who are determined to re-enact Chicken Little with the utmost gusto and sincerity. And they may not be entirely wrong in their cause or assessment, even if actions are guided by an existentialism that they can see but others can’t. And that makes them crazy.
As a rule, I tend to think sabotage is most effective when it is precise and gritty. When activists from the same group smashed gas stations in April this year, they hit the nail on the head. Gasoline, unlike a van Gogh painting, is a fuel of global warming. There is a whole planetary layer of stations, pipelines, platforms, derricks, terminals, mines and shafts that must be shut down to save humanity and other life-forms. When governments refuse to undertake this work, it is up to the rest of us to initiate it. That is the rationale for sabotage: to aim straight for the bags of coal.
The author, with the claim to fame of having written “How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire.” which certainly seems like the work of a normal person, initially reacted as poorly as sane people to the throwing of soup on Vincent Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers.”
Vincent van Gogh is not responsible for our climate breakdown. He was not the C.E.O. of an oil and gas company or a coal merchant. In fact, van Gogh started drawing and painting while living amid the smoke and cinder in a Belgian coal district. Besides “Sunflowers,” one of his most famous paintings is “Miners’ Wives Carrying Sacks of Coal,” their bodies bent under the weight of the bags; art history knows few works that so powerfully capture the fossil economy’s intolerable burden on the living.
So my initial reaction to the news that two activists from the group Just Stop Oil had tossed tomato soup on “Sunflowers” at the National Gallery in London was: Oh, no, not another attack on some object with no causal relation to the climate emergency, something innocent and beautiful.
Not quite a rational reaction, as it begs the question of the efficacy of destruction as a means of accomplishing what she believes to be a public good, but at least one that recognizes that “Sunflowers” didn’t do anything to harm the environment, was “innocent and beautiful,” and had no causal connection to the cause. But as the thought processes of a sick and twisted mind play out before your very eyes, you can begin to see how the unduly passionate contort their rationalizations to justify their bad and dangerous acts.
As an aside, many defenders of the crazy emphasize that the painting was covered by glass, so those who were outraged by this utterly futile act of narcissistic stupidy are “pearl clutching,” one of those cute phrases that, once uttered, makes idiocy disappear. The problem is that this glass excuse hasn’t been true of numerous other attacks on paintings, even if true here, and it remained quite possible that the glass, while adequate to protect the painting from nasty, dirty fingers, was not suited to protect it from a can of tomato soup. Oops. As god in my witness, I thought turkeys could fly, which didn’t do much for the turkeys no matter how sincere.
But the author’s momentary embrace of sanity swiftly ebbed into the abyss.
But as the scattershot from the National Gallery ricocheted across social media, eliciting everything from mockery to admiration, I had second thoughts. There might be room for this kind of action, too. As one of the young activists cried out before gluing herself to the wall beneath the painting, “Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people?” Just Stop Oil’s actions seem to have offended establishment sensibilities at a time when a third of Pakistan has been underwater.
Does that argument, that people care more about the protection of a painting than the protection of our planet, justify the action?
You loved Muppsy your kitten? Well we love planet Earth!
— Carl (@HistoryBoomer) October 21, 2022
The argument is that if I believe my problem is life or death, the most important problem there is and one that must be fixed (how is another story, but I digest), then anything I do, anything, any harm, any destruction, anything, is justified as a lesser problem in the service of a greater problem. Of course it would be terrible to ruin a Van Gogh, but if it saves the planet and humanity, isn’t it worth it? Same with cutting up babies or killing kittens, or anything else no matter how awful or conceptually unrelated.
This is the sort of rationalization that can capture the minds of shallow and passionate, and lead them to engage in any matter of insanity that, to their twisted way of thinking, makes their cause (and incidentally them, our saviors even if we don’t know it yet) pre-eminent.
Unlike others, this act of utter idiocy doesn’t make me want to burn oil or throw tomato soup at any object. I’ve long been an environmentalist, going back to the smog days, the filthy litter along our roadways and the elimination of open natural space so another strip mall can exist. I lack the knowledge to offer any serious thoughts about climate change, but am willing to accept and believe those I trust that it’s real and exceptionally bad.
But none of this suggests that there exists a serious plan to address it. Instead, we have smug little shits throwing tomato soup and their similarly simplistic defenders in the New York Times. Sucks to be you, Muppsy.
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Among the many many things these zealots fail to consider is where we would be economically AND environmentally if we had never replaced coal, wood, and dung with cheap, reliable oil and gas.
We’d still be sustenance farmers with a massive carbon footprint because the skies would be black with soot.
He could go back and live like that right now, but it serves him better to use energy to pound out bs on his plastic filled device from the comfort of his air conditioned home.
If you want to punish the carbon emitters you need to be burning down the homes of ordinary folks. Gas stations weren’t the burners of carbon based fuel. It’s customers were.
They won’t try to burn down houses, arson of an occupied dwelling is a felony and in most of the US justification for use of force in self defense. They are cowards who fear actual risk and they like their comforts, as shown by the plaintive tweets of the people who glued themselves to the floor at Volkswagen and complained when they weren’t provided vegan food and chamber pots.
Of course these “activists” don’t want a solution they want attention and power and the possibility that a magic wand could lower global temperature in seconds would have them aghast as their rice bowl is broken
It will do zilch for the cause but it’s sure good for the media companies. Sometimes the trick to late stage capitalism is using a middleman.
https://i2.wp.com/www.interesly.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Natlamp73.jpg
It all makes sense, if you stop trying to have it make rational sense. “One of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism”, Michael Crichton reminded us in 2003, just before Sam Harris pointed out in “The End of Faith” how religious beliefs can be used to justify heinous crimes. What we are seeing here is the synthesis of those two ideas: eco-terrorism as secular jihad.
History very well may absolve the soup throwers–just all saboteurs of the ultimately-winning sides get absolved. The only saving grace here is that (in my limited understanding of history) winners usually act with serious plans that tactically advance their cause (eg, Irgun, New England colonists). Nihilists tend to be less effective.
I enjoy helping others in reducing their ‘carbon footprint’…but y’all never seem very thankful…
The stupid, spoiled, hypocritical rich kids who jet to Bali or the Amazon for “enrichment” and then return to glue themselves to paintings are a nuisance, and most art will now have to become encased in glass like the Mona Lisa. I will note that the tomato soup damaged the frame, which was probably itself an antique although the frame comes a very distant second to the painting in its value to humanity.
Malm is a much different creature than the rich kids, closer to Stavrogin and the younger Verkhovensky from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel Demons, neither of which hung about to deal with the consequences of their goading others into action. Malm, who hilariously claims to be a Marxist and a materialist, will remain safe at his sinecure at the university where he teaches if others take his words to heart and begin attempting to destroy civilizational infrastructure. Contrary to Malm, the real Marxists built one of the world’s longest pipelines from the Yamal Peninsula in the Arctic to a distribution hub near Dresden.
In a healthy civilization, those screaming about the end of the world are relatively harmless, such as James Thurber’s Get-Ready Man, who wandered into Act III, Scene 4 of a production of King Lear in Columbus, Ohio, and, by interacting with Lear, the Fool, and Edgar from the gallery, managed to improve the play.
I am beginning to conclude that we are not living in a healthy civilization. I suppose that the world is coming to an end.
“If you want to end war and stuff, you’ve got to sing loud!” – Arlo Guthrie
If you want to build a movement, you have to do stuff your sympathizers are willing to do, like singing and marching. Stunts like gluing yourself to a wall aren’t attractive to the general population. Listening to Pete Seeger is less of an ask.
Pete Seeger was an enthusiastic supporter of the Hitler-Stalin pack. When Adolf tried to stab Joe in the back Pete changed his tune overnight.
All those oil-on-canvas paintings are part of the problem, and now there’s even a line of “Van Gogh Oil Paints.” Clearly, he was culpable in the oil-precipitated destruction of the children’s happiness. They need to tear down his statues, find the ear, and burn it. At a gas station, if possible.
Meh, next time one of these fools superglues their hand to a painting, just leave them there for a day or two. Give em time to better contemplate the foolishness of their actions as they decide how much their hand is really worth.
[Ed. Note: I’ve trashed quite a few comments that brought up the VW protest because it has absolutely nothing to do with this post. That said, it deeply concerns me that so many readers failed to grasp what this post was about, and that maybe I’m wasting my time here.]
SHG: You probably should have trashed BB’s comment as well, as it was that baby step onto the slippery slope that gave others a reason to slide into the cesspool. Then again, if there were comments before or unrelated to BB’s, then I guess there’s no saving them.
This wasn’t about BB (whose comment I let slide but probably should have trashed) or Hal (who had the misfortune of being the one on whom I dumped). There were others with no connection to BB. This was for all of them.
It might be that the many lurkers who sensibly comment the least share the bulk of the proper understanding. Perhaps that thought will give you the strength to carry on!
Thanks. I needed that.
Whoever these people are, they fundamentally misunderstood that National Lampoon cover with the headline “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog.”