Origins of Wednesday xlviii: Look away?

    What is that moment,

    as affectionate irri-

    tion with you little

    twerp dissolves into

    stupefied disbelief,

    that he will govern?

    Where is that place,

    the vanishing point?

  A gathering farce in the 
  Senate is, to the practice 
  of medicine and the dis-
  tribution of care, what 
  opium wars and the slave
  trade were, to their own, 
  absurd excuses: simple 
  rape, with unctuous hymns 
  of dogma. What is calculated 
  exploitation of the body, 
  for a violent concentration 
  of wealth in the fewest pos-
  sible hands? It's whoring. 

  This final vengeance on the
  outcome of our Civil War is
  an incinerating rampage of 
  racism and sexism, resurgent.
  It engulfs our very identity,
  with fanatical thoroughness.

  Look away?  

Henry Moore
Tube Shelter
Oil on canvas
Tate Gallery
1941

John Thomson
1778 - 1840
The Blasted Oak
  the remains of
  Torwood Forest,
  near Stirling
Oil on canvas
1815

Bruce Weber
River Phoenix
undated