"She said she realized that the craft risked dying out when the only person left in her village who knew how to make a blouse was an 87-year-old woman."

"She asked the woman to help teach local youngsters embroidery and started a class at her home. On a recent afternoon, 16 girls sat in rapt attention as they stitched away for hours.... Teaching teenagers to stitch, Ms. Uta said, not only keeps traditional handicrafts alive, but also helps wean young people off their cellphones, at least for a few hours.... Politicians 'are all wearing fake blouses and setting a bad example for everyone,' she added. 'We need to go back to traditions but real ones, not traditions deformed by politics.'"

From "A Blouse Gets Entangled in a Political Tussle in Eastern Europe/Nationalists in Romania have adopted an item of clothing traditionally worn by villagers, particularly women. Liberals say it’s an appropriation of a cultural identity that belongs to everyone" (NYT).

1. Does it matter exactly what this blouse looks like? Here's how Henri Matisse painted it in 1940:

2. Will embroidering keep the kids off their phone? It will keep them from looking at their phone, but not, I think, from listening. What music/podcast/audiobook would you listen to if your were doing some time-consuming, detailed embroidery? Here's a playlist of Romanian popular music. 

3. What item of traditional American clothing could a political movement adopt and cause you distress like that experienced in Romania over this blouse — something you or people you like want to keep wearing and now feel that to wear it is to express support for a cause they oppose?

4. When I was young, I used to worry that various items of clothing (or jewelry) had symbolic meaning that I didn't understand and I worried about unintentionally associating myself with a cause I didn't know or understand. 

5. "Though Henri Matisse’s prolific career as an artist greatly inspired numerous pieces and collections designed by the creative legend Yves Saint Laurent, it was Saint Laurent’s interpretation of Matisse’s illustrated and painted Romanian folk blouses that became an iconic house staple for generations to come...." These days, the elite won't do that. They are controlled into submission by the phrase "cultural appropriation."

"Ukraine has worked for years.... to contain a fringe far-right movement whose members proudly wear symbols steeped in Nazi history..."

"... and espouse views hostile to leftists, L.G.B.T.Q. movements and ethnic minorities. But some members of these groups have been fighting Russia since the Kremlin illegally annexed part of the Crimea region of Ukraine in 2014 and are now part of the broader military structure. Some are regarded as national heroes, even as the far-right remains marginalized politically. The iconography of these groups, including a skull-and-crossbones patch worn by concentration camp guards and a symbol known as the Black Sun, now appears with some regularity on the uniforms of soldiers fighting on the front line, including soldiers who say the imagery symbolizes Ukrainian sovereignty and pride, not Nazism. In the short term, that threatens to reinforce Mr. Putin’s propaganda and give fuel to his false claims that Ukraine must be 'de-Nazified'...." 

From "Nazi Symbols on Ukraine’s Front Lines Highlight Thorny Issues of History/Troops’ use of patches bearing Nazi emblems risks fueling Russian propaganda and spreading imagery that the West has spent a half-century trying to eliminate" (NYT).

"Mr. Bolsonaro was supposed to pass Mr. Lula the presidential sash... an important symbol of the peaceful transition of power..."

"... in a nation where many people still recall the 21-year military dictatorship that ended in 1985. Instead, Mr. Bolsonaro woke up Sunday thousands of miles away, in a rented house owned by a professional mixed-martial-arts fighter a few miles from Disney World. Facing various investigations from his time in his office, Mr. Bolsonaro flew to Orlando on Friday night.... Mr. Bolsonaro had questioned the reliability of Brazil’s election systems for months, without evidence, and when he lost in October, he refused to concede unequivocally. In a sort of farewell address on Friday, breaking weeks of near silence, he said... 'Within the laws, respecting the Constitution, I searched for a way out of this.... We live in a democracy or we don’t... No one wants an adventure.'...  [At the inauguration, a] voice then announced that Mr. Lula would accept the green-and-yellow sash from 'the Brazilian people,' and Aline Sousa, a 33-year-old garbage collector, played the role of Mr. Bolsonaro and placed the sash on the new president."

The NYT reports in "Lula Becomes Brazil’s President, With Bolsonaro in Florida/Brazil inaugurates its new president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, on Sunday. Facing investigations, former President Jair Bolsonaro has taken refuge in Orlando."

Sash presentation at 1:00:

"When a single ceramic cockerel, sitting atop a kitchen cabinet, survived a bombardment of Borodianka, it became a symbol of Ukrainian resistance."

"So when Boris Johnson and Volodymyr Zelenskiy were given one each as a gift as they walked through Kyiv, it carried an added significance."

From "Ceramic cockerels surprise Boris Johnson and Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Kyiv walk/‘I’m from London’ says British PM. ‘I know, I’m from Kharkiv,’ says bystander proffering traditional jugs that in the war have come to symbolise Ukrainian resilience" (The Guardian). 

You can see the presentation of the cockerels at 0:57 here:

The video footage of the Cockerell. https://t.co/4DDeXOhQzT

— John DC (@manysmilesgod) April 9, 2022

"Graphically, the 'Z' is clearly closer to the swastika than to any prominent Soviet symbol, such as the five-pointed star, the hammer and sickle, or the red flag."

"Its use seems to require a double inversion: first, the people of Ukraine—a nation that suffered some of the greatest losses at the hands of Nazi Germany and one that is currently led by a Jewish President—are rendered as Nazis; then, the Russians, who claim to be fighting for peace and 'de-Nazification,' adopt a visual symbol that appears to reference the swastika.... It took only a week for the 'Z' to become the symbol of the new Russian totalitarianism. But totalitarian symbols are usually created at the top. The red flag and the swastika—the two main visual symbols of twentieth-century totalitarianism—emerged from years of ideological, aesthetic, and even spiritual movement-shaping. The 'Z' is a different animal, a ready-made symbol picked up by a society that has already reconstituted itself as totalitarian."

Writes Masha Gessen in "'Z' Is the Symbol of the New Russian Politics of Aggression/In the days following the latest Russian invasion of Ukraine, the letter came to stand for devotion to the state, murderous rage, and unchecked power" (The New Yorker).

"A Russian gymnast has been placed under investigation for wearing a 'Z' symbol linked to support for President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on his leotard while sharing a podium with a Ukrainian rival...."

"[Ivan] Kuliak wore it in place of the Russian flag, which had been banned by the governing body of gymnastics.... The symbol, which has been used as a designation on Russian military vehicles deployed in Ukraine, has become a symbol in Russia of support for Putin and the war.... The Russian Defence Ministry has previously issued a statement saying that 'Z' means victory."

The London Times reports.

If would be trivial and not worth saying, but because we are talking about symbols and victory, I will add that the Ukrainian gymnast, Kovtun Illia, won the gold. The Russian was on the podium to pick up the bronze. 

Is "Z" supposed to be the Roman letter Z? It doesn't look any of the letters in the Russian alphabet. If you were using that shape to mean something other than a letter, what would you be trying to say. Perhaps it means "anti-Nazi" — half of a swastika.

At the London Times link, there's a photo with the caption: "In Kazan, Russia, terminally ill children and their parents made a Z formation at their hospice to show support for the invasion."

"For years my mother bought me perfectly nice sweaters of a kind that I never wear: sweaters with patterns, 'Cosby Show' sweaters, suburban dad sweaters."

"I felt she was attempting to dress me as a big sexless teddy bear rather than a man living in New York City and still hoping, in middle age, to attract a mate. The most memorable of these was bright red, with a gold crest on its breast, like the sigil of the kind of hoity-toity prep school I did not attend, and drooped so hugely on me I looked like a small boy dressed in his father’s clothes. My girlfriend charitably suggested that I 'loomed large' in my mother’s mind.... My friend Boyd and I have an aphorism: All mothers live in palaces built of lies. When Mom gave me a gray-and-white snowflake-pattern sweater one Christmas, I took it across the country with me to Seattle, where I staged photographs of myself wearing it with friends.... Later that afternoon, we returned the sweater to Macy’s.... A few years ago, I finally wore a sweater that Mom gave me 10 years earlier to visit her in the memory care unit at her retirement home. Although she no longer remembered the sweater, she did go out of her way to admire it, and I got to tell her that it was from her...."

From "The Unbearable Sadness of Your Parents’ Bad Holiday Gifts" by Tim Kreider (NYT).

1. "All mothers live in palaces built of lies" — Ironically, that's a lie that the son is telling himself. The mother in his mind lives in a palace made of lies he's telling himself about what must be in her mind. 

2. He doesn't even have his lie-palace built straight. He won't commit to whether his mother wanted him to look unlovable ("sexless") or lovable ("hoping... to attract a mate") or go too deeply into whether he's thinking of the interior of his mother's mind or his own. 

3. Maybe his mother was playfully participating in the Ugly Christmas Sweater meme and waiting for him to overcome his politeness and call her out. He's a humorist. Did he not get some/any of his humor from her? 

4. Do sons stereotype their mothers as Mothers? I won't say all sons stereotype their mothers as Mothers, but the ones who begin sentences with "All mothers..." certainly do — unless they're just kidding.

5. I learned a new word: "sigil."

"Similar to the 5-inch inseam short craze that took over the video-sharing app in the summer of 2020..."

"... TikTok users are now getting all hot and bothered over men sporting another simple, unpretentious piece of garb: the backwards baseball cap. In a recent viral trend, users are sharing videos of their boyfriends and husbands in baseball caps backed by the popular TikTok sound called 'I like you have a cupcakke,' which is used to share a user’s personal preferences. The format goes like this: words flash across the screen indicating things that a user likes as a child’s voice repeats the words, 'I like you, have a cupcake.' Then, abruptly, the sound is interrupted by the rapper Cupcakke’s song 'Vagina,' at which point a final phrase appears on the screen, this time indicating the thing the user likes most of all, trumping all else. In the baseball hat videos, women film their significant others wearing normal, forward-facing caps and then no caps... then...  wearing their caps backwards."

 
From "The Hottest Way to Wear Your Baseball Cap? Backwards. A recent TikTok trend highlights the enduring sex appeal of backwards baseball caps" (Inside Hook).

The relevant TikTok videos are embedded at the link, so I won't put them here. I don't know if I noticed the shorts craze last summer. Maybe not. Was I using TikTok then? It's something I like to look at these days. But whatever. I had never heard of the rapper Cupcakke, nor of the song "Vagina," which sounds rather obvious, but I will read the lyrics. 

Okay. I've accomplished the task I assigned myself. I was surprised to see that it was by a woman. Isn't that weird? I thought a man was contemplating the mysterious genitalia of the other, but it turns out Cupcakke is female, and it's another one of those songs bragging about one's own genitalia. And really, it's absolutely mere chance that I've got 2 posts in a row with prominent genitalia.

As for hats... did you know that Freud thought hats were a phallic symbol? From "The Intepretation of Dreams":

"Staff... have been encouraged to... wear rainbow lanyards on campus to show solidarity with the transgender community."

According to "Edinburgh University lecturers given list of ‘microinsults’ and guidance on transgender issues" (London Times). Rainbow lanyards! 

FROM THE EMAIL: Lloyd points me to this:

A strange image, from Joe Biden: "We got to stop pouring flames on the fire."

Pouring flames? On fire?

The context is his remarks yesterday to the US Conference of Mayors (transcript):

This moment we’re facing now, isn’t a partisan moment. It’s an American moment.... It’s a chance for us to overcome anger and division that has hold [sic] us back of late for far too long. We can emerge from these crises.... If I’m elected, you will have direct access to the White House. I want to thank you all because we need you to build back better. You are the foundation stone, not a joke. You’re the ones leading away.... We got to stop the hate and the division now, we got to stop pouring flames on the fire, we got to start talking straight to the American people.... I’ve never been more optimistic... The blinders have been taken off the American people. They understand what’s going on now. They understand.... They want to get things done... and I want to make sure that your ideas are the ones that are funneled up. They don’t have to go through a state legislature, go through a governor. They can go straight to the federal government, straight to me....

Funneled up? I'm trying to picture that. Don't funnels work only downward, through gravity? Oh, I don't know!



That's a detail from the Hieronymus Bosch painting "Cutting the Stone," which appears at the Wikipedia article "Funnel." There, I learn something about the idea of a funnel working upward instead of downward:

The inverted funnel is a symbol of madness. It appears in many Medieval depictions of the mad; for example, in Hieronymus Bosch's Ship of Fools and Allegory of Gluttony and Lust....

And in "Cutting the Stone." Michel Foucault, "History of Madness," had something to say about that doctor in an inverted funnel hat: "Bosch's famous doctor is far more insane than the patient he is attempting to cure, and his false knowledge does nothing more than reveal the worst excesses of a madness immediately apparent to all but himself."

There's also inverted funnel hat worn by the Tin Woodman in "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz."  It's not mentioned in the text of the book. It comes from the imagination of the the first illustrator,  W. W. Denslow:

"They'd rather talk about thimbles."

On "Morning Joe" this morning, Elise Jordan, a former aide to George W. Bush, criticized Trump supporters for talking about symbols (slurred as "thimbles") instead of substance. The symbols in question were statues, which was the topic of discussion as a result of this news report yesterday (I'm quoting the DCist):

A new D.C. committee recommended renaming, removing, or contextualizing more than 50 different government-owned spaces in the city, after studying the history of racism and oppression behind the namesakes. The working group, known as DCFACES (District of Columbia Facilities and Commemorative Expressions), was commissioned by Mayor Muriel Bowser and began meeting in July. It identified figures like Thomas Jefferson, Francis Scott Key, Ben Franklin, and George Washington as problematic candidates for public-works dedications.

Of course, people fixate on symbols! That's why the symbols are attacked. You can't expect the pro-Trump side to refrain from engaging on what is a super-easy subject for them. Why should they?! Plus those of us who care about the traditional symbols are moved on a very deep level. I know how I've felt ever since Wisconsin protesters tore down the Forward! statue and the Hans Christian Heg statue in my town.

Speaking of superficial trivialities... I'm fascinated by Jordan's vocal slip: "thimbles" for "symbols." It underscores her point — symbols are small (compared to the big policy questions that government must decide). Now, I think some symbols are very big! This D.C. committee is recommending that the federal government "remove, relocate, or contextualize" the Washington Monument!

Jordan bemoans human nature. "We live by symbols" (to quote Felix Frankfurter).

But if symbols were thimbles... A thimble is a symbol — a symbol of smallness.

Just a thimbleful for me!

What does a bird symbolize?

Sunrise, captured at its predictable time — it was 5:19 — with the sudden appearance of a bird. Seeing it only now, as I process this morning's photographs, I wonder what does a bird symbolize?

The internet answers most simplistically: Freedom!

Which cues "Ballad in Plain D"...

Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me
“How good, how good does it feel to be free?”
And I answer them most mysteriously
“Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?

ADDED: I have made a study of the birds of the Bible, and I have produced a list of 8 quotations, which I've ranked in the order that seemed right to me:

8. Matthew 8:20 — "Jesus replied, 'Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.'"

7. Ezekiel 38:20 — "The fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the beasts of the field, every creature that moves along the ground, and all the people on the face of the earth will tremble at my presence. The mountains will be overturned, the cliffs will crumble and every wall will fall to the ground."

6. Psalm 50:11 — "I know every bird in the mountains, and the insects in the fields are mine."

Things that feel more substantively meaningful than they are...

INSANE Video from our @wusa9 SkyCam WOOOOOW #lightning #WashingtonMonument pic.twitter.com/iYmwDwDUMO

— Ryan Sprouse (@RSprouseNews) June 5, 2020

Things people are saying on Twitter, which I'm not bothering to do links for: "Even GOD is speaking out against Trump"/"If only the lighting hit Trump while he was photo oping in front of a Church with bible in his hand"/"Dear God, aim more north. White building, surrounded by fences. 38° 53' 52.6452'' N and 77° 2' 11.6160'' W."

It's not all anti-Trump. Even as lightning makes many/most people think it's God!, the thought that God is speaking out is closely followed — like thunder after lightning — with the interpretation He is expressing an opinion similar to my own.

Thus, there's also this: "It’s God’s way of saying ‘go home’ to these anarchists, and saying 'this is mine!'"

By the way, to give God directions — replete with longitude and latitude — is to say outright that you don't think He is omniscient. Might want to fine-tune your prayers. And as you note, He is already angry. He is wrathful. Don't tell Him what to do.

What were those symbols written on Tom Steyer's hand?

It got some attention from viewers of last night's debate, and got him some good press. Here's NBC:

The design is called the “Jerusalem Cross,” and as Steyer wrote on Facebook late last year, he does it “every day to remind myself that ultimately, the truth always wins.”

Also: "to remind myself every day always to tell the truth."

What are you drawing on your hand every day? Well, let's assume you have to draw something on your hand every day — the same thing — kind of like getting a tattoo, but with more day-to-day mindfulness — what would you draw?

Remember when Sarah Palin wrote on her hand?

Here's the Wikipedia article on the Jerusalem Cross. Excerpt:

“The rise of the bowl cut has nothing to do with the hairstyle itself, or the view that it’s somehow a cool or attractive hairstyle to be emulated.”

“In fact, in a lot of ways, it’s precisely the fact that it looks silly that it gained traction as a white supremacist symbol. Mark Pitcavage, the senior research fellow with ADL’s Center on Extremism, compares [Dylann] Roof’s bowl cut to Hitler’s mustache: an objectively ridiculous-looking, yet distinctive enough feature that it can be easily subject to memeification. Yet the rise of the symbol is inextricably tied to part of a larger effort to canonize Roof within the white supremacist movement. The ADL started seeing white supremacists incorporate the bowl cut into their iconography around 2017, a few years after the Charleston church shooting. Pitcavage says this timing is significant, in large part because in the immediate aftermath of the Charleston shooting, many white supremacists either disavowed Roof or expressed disapproval of his actions — not necessarily for moral reasons, but because they believed violence would attract undue scrutiny to the movement.”

From “How a White Supremacist’s Haircut Became a Symbol of Hate” (Rolling Stone).

"Amelia Brookins, object handler, arranges a poster of Bella Abzug to be photographed at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History."

Photo caption at "The Smithsonian is digitizing political and military posters — 18,000 of them/More than 200 posters a day are being converted to make them more accessible to the public" (WaPo).

I like that job title, "object handler."

From the article:

Neither of the young Smithsonian object handlers knew of the formidable New York feminist and three-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Brookins said she had heard of Abzug, who died 21 years ago, for the “first time in the poster.”...

The Bella Abzug poster, in orange, black and white, shows her in one of her trademark hats, along with the slogan “This Woman’s Place is in the House . . . the House of Representatives!” (The Smithsonian also has one of her hats.)

You'll have to imagine the orange lettering:

Pictures really do help us to remember. Pictures of posters, posters that helped us to have an idea of the candidate at the time. The hat helped too. It's another visual (and the Smithsonian is preserving one of her hats). This woman really did imprint herself on the public by wearing a hat. She was the one with the hat.

These days, Trump is the one with a hat, and he imprinted himself on us by making his head distinctive not with a hat but with a very odd hairstyle.

Anyway, these kids today. They don't know much about history. But maybe if you give them some pictures, some glimmer will arise. And what do you really know about history? What's there in your odd head? Isn't it — to be fair — just some posters? Stuff like...

Oh, my. Does he looks like Trump?

It's so powerful, the visual. In the visual archive of my own head, there is John McCain leaning over and muttering the names of dictators in the ear of Amy Klobuchar at the Trump inaugural. Trump/dictator. It's connected.

And look at the hands... Trump has tiny hands... what is he hiding?

What does the candle mean? Why is it burning low? Look at the other hand, look at the objects... the pen, the sword, the orb...

We are all object handlers in the mind's visual archive.

It's not enough for women to succeed. Men must fail.

That's the message I take from this Daily Beast graphic:



The image is of a shattering of the symbol of the male. The conventional shattering we hear about when the topic is feminism is the shattering of the glass ceiling. The glass ceiling is a barrier that has kept women from rising beyond a certain point. It's glass because you don't see it. Women are told that they can rise and that there is no limit, but in reality, there is a ceiling. The glass ceiling metaphor led to the idea of breaking through the glass ceiling, and when you break glass, it shatters. But the glass shouldn't have been there in the first place. Maybe "shattering" feels like a feminist activity, but it is destructive, and it shouldn't be done to things you don't want to destroy. So I hate this image of shattering the male. Women are not trapped inside the male and needing to destroy him to achieve our full dimension. The male is not the equivalent of the glass ceiling.

The article is "Democrats Can Vote to End the Myth of the White Male Savior/As accomplished women fear that they’re imposters, men see greatness as their birthright. Will primary voters agree?" by Emma Goldberg (in The Daily Beast). I don't know how much supports the offensive message in the graphic. After the first 3 paragraph, it's blocked by a pay wall.

The 2020 Democratic primary will serve as a referendum on a whole host of political questions—chief among them the myth of the white male savior.

One of the assumptions stubbornly lodged in our cultural psyche is the belief in male genius, the notion of men destined for a hero’s journey. Women can be hardworking, motivated, enthusiastic—but not brilliant by nature. For children, this assumption forms as early as age 6; according to NYU psychologist Andrei Cimpian, girls rate their male classmates as better suited for activities that demand exceptional talent. This insecurity persists throughout women’s careers. Research in the journal American Psychologist found that women are less likely to apply for jobs when the description requires candidates with “a brilliant mind.” Another recent study, also by Cimpian, found that people associate terms like “genius” and “brilliance” more often with white men, not people of color.

It’s unsurprising that we find it so hard to undo our tightly held belief in white male saviors; it’s a story that gets perpetually reinforced. Harry Potter was anointed, from birth, to slay Lord Voldemort; Hermione Granger may be savvier and more hardworking, but without a messianic birthright, she remains just Harry’s sidekick. From Odysseus to Skywalker, we’ve been raised on tales of men who are reluctant to take on epic journeys but find that they were just born for it....

Perhaps Goldberg goes on to say that women can be brilliant and heroic too. I don't know, and I'm not going to subscribe to The Daily Beast to find out. Judging from the title, the idea is that we need to stop thinking of men as heroes. Is it that we need women to be our heroes or just that we ought to stop looking for heroes and give the job to a savvy, hardworking Hermione type? That makes sense to me, but I've never looked to politicians for salvation. The "Myth of the White Male Savior" isn't anything I've ever believed in. And I'm not interested in Harry Potter or Star Wars or all the many super-hero movies that fill the theater these days. Maybe America does have a problem of fixation on heroes, and maybe that does affect our willingness to vote for a woman for President because — on some deep level — we feel the hero is male.

If so, the "myth" might be something like a glass ceiling, and I might see the temptation to illustrate the concept with a shattering symbol of the male. But the temptation should have been resisted. It expresses a hateful intention toward a class of human beings.

Some people are taking the Democratic women's wearing of white and connecting it with the white robes of the Ku Klux Klan.

For example, at Instapundit:



I don't like this, taking clothing that people put on in an upbeat positive mood and turning it into something ugly.

But that's the move made by Democrats against the Americans who thought they were expressing something optimistic with their MAGA hats. Democrats have worked hard at rebranding the clothing so it would mean racism. They wanted to deprive the hat wearers of the powerful visual form of expression they'd found. They want the message to be: If you wear that hat now — now that we've shown you want we say it means — you must want to be identified as a racist.

I don't like that KKK flip on the Congresswomen's homage to women's suffrage. But if turnabout is fairplay, it's not unfair.

I'd rather call us to a higher level, but you know that I think that in politics, all calls for civility are bullshit. I'd like to be outside of politics, merely observing, from that position I've called "cruel neutrality." So maybe I'm not a hypocrite if I say, don't tie the suffrage expression to the KKK. But I completely realize that if you go along with me about that, it's not going to stop the Trump-haters who are dead-set on stamping the MAGA hat with the meaning RACISM.

Iconoclasm.

"Trump’s Star on Hollywood Walk of Fame Destroyed With Pickaxe" (Daily Beast).

"Multiple people—including police—tell me a man walked up with a guitar case and pulled out the pick axe. Then, it’s believed, he called police himself to report it, but left the scene before they got here. Now, he’s nowhere to be found."

Guitar case, eh? Reminds me of gentler times, when Woody Guthrie had a sign on his guitar, "This Machine Kills Fascists."



No, it wasn't really gentler times! It was 1941, and Woody was doing "Talking Hitler's Head Off Blues."

"This Machine Kills Fascists" has its own Wikipedia page. There, we learn that in later years, Pete Seeger had "This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces it to Surrender" on his banjo — as he sang "Waist Deep in Big Muddy," protesting the Vietnam War.

And Donovan had "This machine kills" on his guitar — and explained that "fascism was already dead" and his "machine would kill greed and delusion." Delusion!? Yes, Donovan can help with delusions — Get together/Work it out/Simplicity/Is what it's about...

But today's news is of a pickaxe in a guitar case. The destruction is direct — smashing with a tool — not indirect like music that has to enter the human mind and motivate the action of others.

By the way, a submachine gun in a violin case is a TV Trope: "This has been done so much that nowadays when some people see a violin case, they assume it contains firearms." Jinx in "League of Legends" says, "What's in my violin case? Violence!"

Now, that guy with the pickaxe used his tool to destroy, but he didn't destroy a man. He didn't "kill fascists." He destroyed an inanimate thing. And that's iconoclasm:

Iconoclasm is the social belief in the importance of the destruction of icons and other images or monuments, most frequently for religious or political reasons....

"Socialism Is on a Winning Streak."

It's John Nichols, at The Nation.

From the 1910s through the 1940s, Socialist Party members served as state legislators, mayors, city councilors and school board members. The Pennsylvania party, with its deep roots in Reading, produced national Socialist leaders, including candidates for president and vice president....

But the dry spell is over. Socialists have been on an electoral winning streak in some parts of the country for a number of years—Socialist Alternative’s Kshama Sawant made her electoral breakthrough in 2013, winning a major race for the Seattle City Council—but the results from western Pennsylvania in the past two years have been particularly striking. And, now, national observers are starting to take note. “Democratic Socialists scores big wins in Pennsylvania,” declared CNN this week, while The New Yorker announced: “A Democratic-Socialist Landslide in Pennsylvania.”

... “We’re turning the state the right shade of red tonight,” declared Arielle Cohen, the co-chair of the Pittsburgh chapter of DSA....

Official logo of the Democratic Socialists of America via Wikipedia.

ADDED: About that official logo. I presume the white and black outlines for the shaking hands are intended to represent white and black people coming together in socialism. Why then is white the color for the outlining of the rose? It seems to convey the dominance of white. You might try to defend the design by saying the socialists want to say that there is white supremacy and it needs to be recognized in order to be fought, but portraying white supremacy as a rose would suggest that it's good. And, in any event, the red rose (according to the above-linked Wikipedia article) is a traditional symbol of socialism. The logo infuses the symbol of socialism with whiteness, the whiteness that is the white hand that shakes the black hand. It seems to say that white people welcome black people into what is a white enclave.