Lumps of Coal Aplenty for Defilers of Culture, Decency, Humanity, and Truth

Lumps of coal to them all

C oal pits? They’re in overdrive. Climate kooks? Their heads are twizzling, their eyes bulging, their teeth ground to the gums, their bowels distended. They look like the girl in The Exorcist. Where else are we to turn, though, to supply all the coal 2023’s nogoodniks are bound to get in their Christmas stockings. Quality-control freak that I am, I’m going to be embedded on Santa’s sleigh to ensure the naughty get their comeuppance. If we’re short of coal, I’ve got lumps of Blockbuster gift cards.

It’s a carbon glut this Christmas for art vandals in London who smashed the protective glass in front of the Rokeby Venus, Velázquez’s famous nude from the late 1640s, at the National Gallery. On November 6, a group called Just Stop Oil sent two goons with hammers to maul the picture. Since it was slashed in 1914 by a suffragette, it’s been a target for whoever’s irked by whatever.

The pair were arrested. “Just stop oil” means just stop growth, opportunity, and prosperity. It’s no crime to be crazy, wacky wrong, but it’s indeed a crime to vandalize art.

May they spend next Christmas at Monster Mansion, Britain’s most notorious prison, where the digs are less than luxurious. It’s in Wakefield in West Yorkshire, also home of the National Coal Mining Museum. They can be prison docents!

On April 27, two loons from the same group attacked The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen by Degas, smearing red and black paint on the case housing the delicate wax sculpture from the late 1870s. It’s on display at the National Gallery in Washington.

Joanna Smith, one of the two full-mooners who attacked the Degas, pled guilty last week to one count of vandalism. She’ll be sentenced in April and could get up to five years in jail and a $250,000 fine. Timothy Martin, Smith’s colleague in crime, wants a trial. Miners in West Virginia are already digging deep to fill their 2024 Christmas stockings, or whatever holiday receptacle Wiccans use.

The Rokeby Venus’s bare butt is undefiled, I’m relieved to say.

Speaking of butts, Aidan Maese-Czeropski’s got booted from a United States senator’s staff after he posed in flagrante and for the camera in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing room. The video had circulated in a private group chat of gay men in politics.

I never, as you know, write about politics. But I consider Maese-Czeropski something of a performance artist. A few days before the video emerged, he’d channeled his inner Queer for Palestine by taunting a Jewish congressman over his support for Israel. Maese-Czeropski claims he’s a target and a victim of homophobia. He’s targeted, he says, “because of who I love,” also channeling his inner Edward VIII.

Maese-Czeropski appeared in a Joe Biden campaign ad in 2020. He’s got a passion for public service, he says, or is it service in public? Santa’s delivering him a chute full of coal to share with ignorant, hubristic, narcissistic Pajama Boys just like him.

Printed Matter was the respected Manhattan not-for-profit dedicated to the advancement of artists’ books. That is, respected until it closed its doors on October 20 for an art strike in solidarity with Hamas — you know, the terrorist group that had just murdered more than a thousand men, women, and children, almost all civilians, during its October 7 attack. Hundreds of young people at a peace concert died, many raped and tortured.

People in the arts have many qualities. They’re creative, poetic, enigmatic, intuitive, and curious. What, as a cohort, they lack is common sense. Mostly left of center, they’re natural targets for the Marxist ideology defining people as either victims or oppressors. Since October 7, hundreds of artists, art historians, and critics have endorsed Hamas’s brutality, disguised as the “Free Palestine” movement. They despise Jews but despise Americans as oppressors as well. Their open letters demand an immediate cease-fire. They have to know this leaves Hamas in place to kill again.

David Velasco was the editor in chief of Artforum, a leading art-criticism magazine. He connived to run one of these love letters to Hamas, hijacking Artforum and making it an apologist for antisemitic terror unknown since the days of the Nazis. The owners fired him.

He’d be happy to get his hands on some coal. It can get chilly in whatever hip lefty monoculture in Brooklyn he calls home. Santa’s got other ideas. Nothing says “You stink” better than a stocking stuffed with Speed Stick.

In the U.K., they’re digging new pits from Armthorpe to Winches to find enough coal to fill the British Museum’s stocking, which, since it’s staffed by socialists, is a collective one. Early this year, the BM admitted that a staffer, likely a curator, swiped some 2,000 ancient mounted gems and sold them on eBay. And, by the by, the objects had never been catalogued so the museum doesn’t know precisely what went out the door.

An antiquities dealer told the BM’s director, Hartwig Fischer, and deputy director Jonathan Williams almost two years ago that he’d seen objects for sale he was certain belonged to the museum. They tried to hide the theft, terrified a scandal would undermine the BM’s contention that it, not Greek museums in Athens, was best equipped to preserve the Elgin Marbles, the sculptures that once adorned the Parthenon. The Greek government was blowing hot to get them back, supported not only by the usual Trot suspects but by urbane thinkers to whom symbols of high Western culture seem dirty.

A big, fat, juicy, smelly scandal’s what they got. Fischer retired early. Last week, Williams left. The curator said to have emptied the gem box was in the BM’s antiquities department supervising, of all things, the Elgin Marbles. Williams, before he became the deputy director, was also an antiquities curator there, specializing in ancient coins.

Santa tells me clumps of anthracite will likely pile as high as Poseidon’s belly button.

While the BM’s frantically trying to recover its stolen baubles, its board chair, George Osborne, is busily negotiating with the Greek government to send the Parthenon sculptures back to Athens. Why isn’t everyone working from the same script?

Osborne, once chancellor of the Exchequer, is Notting Hill through and through. He and his wife just bought a £10 million manse there. Virtue exhibitionism’s the lingua franca connecting that neighborhood to American ones like Georgetown, the Upper West Side, Santa Monica, and Menlo Park.

Keeping the marble gods right where they’ve been since 1815 or so is, to them, rude, crude, and socially unacceptable. Never mind the British nation owns the marbles, and there’s no evidence the Greeks own them, and everyone involved in the transaction’s been dead for 200 years. The chattering class needs to chatter about how noble it is.

Don’t worry! Santa won’t forget Claudine Gay, Harvard’s presidential plagiarist who sits, with her trustee enablers, atop a $50 billion pile as well as Harvard’s superb museum system and its billions in art. She’s bad news. She’s okay with calls for genocide, in context, of course, and always in moderation. “My truth,” she intones, while Jewish students are taunted and threatened.

This big phony’s a million-mile flyer on DEI Air. Her agenda is race, identity, and grievance. That’s her expertise. She’s a pasticheur of grudges, a lightweight as a scholar but no lightweight as an ideologue or as a bureaucrat. Her fingerprints were all over Harvard’s race-driven admissions protocol, which the U.S. Supreme Court tossed in June.

As Harvard’s dean, and working with her predecessor as president, she packed the university’s board with her cronies. Still, they’re uneasy. She’s an embarrassment.

Should Santa go camorra and stick a severed foot in her stocking? It would be an apt reference to all those missing footnotes. She’d better hope for less messy coal.

Then there’s the U.S. Army and the Reconciliation Monument. That’s the memorial to the Confederate dead buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Dedicated in 1914 and designed by sculptor Moses Ezekiel, the 35-foot-tall monument is also called “The New South” or, vaguely, the Confederate memorial. Acting under congressional order, the Army, which runs the cemetery, began removing it this past week. It’s the only time a memorial’s been dismantled since the cemetery opened in 1864.

The monument, a work of art, isn’t being destroyed. Rather, the Commonwealth of Virginia will reinstall it on the grounds of the Virginia Military Institute. As a work of art, it’s what I call American Renaissance Revival. It’s a bit of a clunker but a handsome thing. It’s topped by a bronze figure of a woman facing south. It’s a personification of what some saw as the Confederacy but others saw as a new South united politically and emotionally with the rest of the country.

Below are 32 figures, among them a mammy holding a baby as a father says goodbye, a blacksmith leaving his tools to enlist, a minister and his wife sending their son off to war, and a young woman kissing her husband or fiancé as he goes to fight. The soldiers fought, as the inscription tells us, “in simple obedience to duty as they understood it,” referring to the dead buried in a pattern of concentric circles surrounding the monument.

It’s a nuanced, ambivalent project with, as Ezekiel knew, a past, present, and future audience. It’s not delivering one message. Only the Claudine Gays of the world profess to be offended by it. “Being offended” is their calling so let’s put them aside. The last thing they want is reconciliation. That’ll put them out of business.

Aesthetically, nixing the monument will leave an entire section of what’s a beautiful, moving cemetery defiled. Engineers decided to leave the monument’s base and foundation. Removing them would disturb dozens among the hundreds of Confederate graves. So, what will remain sitting there is an ugly carbuncle.

I see the Reconciliation Monument as a teachable moment, which is why I think it ought not to have been banished. People today need to understand and to intuit on their own how we bungled and fumbled into a civil war and its immense costs. Hiding history isn’t helpful. “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture repainted,” George Orwell wrote in 1984. The Thought Police want history to stop. “Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

I don’t fault the Army crews. They do what they’re ordered. We’re governed by awful people. No amount of coal’s going to change their hearts and minds. Best to gird our loins in the new year and work to shove them from their powerful perches and media spotlights. Santa can’t do it alone.