The World, The Naked Truth + The Well-Dressed Lie

Truth Coming Out of Her Well to Shame Mankind, 
Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1896, oil on canvas, 910 x 720mm

One day, a long time ago, legend has it that The Truth and The Lie meet up. 

And The Lie says to The Truth: “It’s a marvellous day today”! The Truth looks up to the skies and sighs in surprise, for the day really was beautiful. And so The Lie began earning the trust of The Truth, and they began spending a lot of time together.

And then one day, they came upon a well. Says The Lie to The Truth: “The water is very nice, let’s take a bath together!” The Truth however--still suspicious--tests the water, discovering it is indeed very nice. So they undress together and start bathing. Until suddenly The Lie leaps out of the water, steals the clothes of the Truth, and runs away with them! 

The furious Truth swarms out of the well in pursuit, running everywhere to find the Lie and retrieve her clothes -- but to no avail. And The World, seeing The Truth naked for the first time, turned its gaze away to hide its own embarrassment, and contempt.

So poor Truth returned to the well and disappeared forever, hiding her shame from The World. And ever since then, The Lie travels around the world dressed as The Truth. Which satisfies the needs of society, because, the World, in any case, harbours no desire at all to ever see the naked Truth.

[HT Dan Kealy]

Letter to a bone-head

Readers sometimes ask me why I don’t post so-called “conceptual art” here at NOT PC.  My simple answer is to say it’s not art. The longer answer involves explaining what art is (it's the technology of the soul, of course).  The middle step involves ridicule and a few pointed home truths.  This is the approach taken by Don Boudreaux in a letter to the Washington Post about an alleged artist they profiled who uses human bones in his “conceptual” anti-art. [Hat tip Tibor Machan]

Dear Editor:

Benjamin Kelley says that his art "represents the dehumanization of modern society" ("An artistic body of work's bone of contention," July 16). I'd like to ask him which aspects of pre-modern society he believes to have been most humane. Was it a life-expectancy of about 30 years? How about mass illiteracy? Maybe Mr. Kelley longs for the odors, lice, and scabs that regularly adorned human bodies that seldom bathed and that slept on dirt or straw?

Possibly Mr. Kelley regrets that the homicide rate in modern society is far lower - as much as ten-times lower - than in pre-modern societies? Perchance he laments modernity's liberation of women from the oppressive dominance of men? Maybe he finds fault with modern humans' greater skepticism of tales of witches and sentient volcanoes? Or perhaps Mr. Kelley is upset simply because modernity has eradicated slavery?

Being only 26 years old in modern society, Mr. Kelley has many decades left to reject his fashionable romantic nonsense about a past Golden Age. Were he born just a few generations earlier, however, not only would he have been unable to earn a living as an artist, his own stint in humanity would have been much shorter.

Sincerely, Donald J. Boudreaux Professor of Economics George Mason University Fairfax, VA 22030

Below is Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Working in Marble.  You can read about it here and here, and enjoy it here:

Caesar crossing the Rubicon

‘Caesar Crossing the Rubicon,’ by Jean Louis Gerome

A piece of poetic prose for Anzac Weekend; from a famous account of Julius Caesar’s seizing of Rome by his soldiery, at the point his coup was made irrevocable—the crossing of the river beyond which Rome’s armies were hitherto forbidden by a long-standing law.

     How swiftly Caesar had surmounted the icy Alps and in his mind conceived immense upheavals, coming war.
    “When he reached the water of the little Rubicon, clearly to the leader through the murky night appeared a mighty image of his country in distress; grief in her face, her white hair streaming from her tower- crowned head. With tresses torn and shoulders bare, she stood before him in sighing, said: ‘Where further do you march? Where do you take my standards warriors? If lawfully you come if as citizens, this far only is allowed.’ 
    “Then trembling struck the leader's limbs, his hair grew stiff and weakness checked his progress, holding his feet at the river's edge. At last he speaks. ‘Oh thunderer… surveying great Rome's walls from the Tarpeian Rock. Oh Phrygian, house gods of lulus, clan and mysteries of Quirinus who was carried off to heaven. Oh, Jupiter of Latium seated in lofty Alba and hearths of Vesta. Oh, Rome, equal to the highest deity, favour my plans! Not with impious weapons do I pursue you. Here am I, Caesar, conqueror of land and sea, your own soldier everywhere now too if I am permitted. The man who makes me your enemy, it is he will be the guilty one.’
     “Then he broke the barriers of war and through the swollen river swiftly took his standards. When Caesar crossed the flood and reached the opposite bank from Hesperia's forbidden fields, he took his stand and said: ‘Here I abandoned peace and desecrated law. Fortune, it is you I follow. Farewell to treaties, from now on war is our judge.’
     “Hail Caesar. We who are about to die salute you.”

            -Chronicle from Marcus Lucanus on Julius Caesar's crossing of the River Rubicon.

'Bonaparte before the Sphinx' - Jean-Leon Gerome

"In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte changed history.  In 1868, Jean-Leon Gerome showed us why."

What does historian Scott Powell mean by that comment above?  Find out here, in a thorough and entertaining historical analysis.

    Whatever may be said morally about Napoleon, there can be no question ... that he commands our attention. All of subsequent world history has been irrevocably conditioned by his presence in the time line, and it is in this regard that those of us who wish to change the world for the better should examine him.
    What was it about Napoleon that was exceptional, not mundane? What made him ... a world-changer, as opposed to a mere cipher of history? The root of the answer is provided in the deceptively simple painting: Bonaparte before the Sphinx...

Read on here for the answers to these and other questions.  (And just by the way, it's still not too late to sign up for Scott's Ancient-History-by-correspondence course.  Sign up now before the NZ dollar tanks completely.)