Hey, Hey, LBJ....

[poliphilo]

I've been around a while and I've seen hateful politicians come and go.

They arrive, they block out the light, they depart.

The first American President I really hated was LBJ.

"Hey, hey, LBJ
How many kids have you killed today?"

Actually Johnson wasn't all bad. He pushed through civil rights legislation. Sometimes the biggest monsters do the most surprising things.

Like it was Nixon who went to China. And maybe (as the old Vulcan proverb says) he was the only one who could.

Then there was Margaret Thatcher. I hated her with a passion. And she just seemed to go on and on and on. But she's stepped down now- and I find it hard to remember what all the fuss was about.

Politicians are less important than they/we think they are. Who was in charge in the 1890s? Which American Presidents? Which British Prime Ministers? I don't know. I'd have to go look it up. But everybody's heard of Oscar Wilde.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Wilde flourished in a more repressive era than our own. He was a licenced jester, continually flirting with danger. And in the end he got swatted- though not for anything he had written.

The queerness is coded in his work. He said as much as he thought he could get away with. Pushing up against the boundaries of what is permitted is what artists do even in the most liberal states.

If censorship is tightened artists will find ways of subverting it- as they always have done.