SALVADORE DALI MEMORIAL SERVICE IN TUSCON

What WAS that?  I know everybody and their brother is chiming in on that event last night, the event that was supposed to be some kind of memorial service for the dead.  But as I reflect on what I saw and heard last evening, I want to give my own perspective on it.

Today the word "surreal" keeps coming into my mind.  Maybe because I am an artist, "surrealism" is the word that seems to me to describe the incongruous juxtoposition between anything real and the fantasy experience the Obama administration put on in Tucson.  Surreal is how I felt while watching the president speak as the crowd kept erupting in cheers and applause.  

Someone needs to call Miss Manners.  Someone needs to clue the Democrats in on the dignity and respect required in response to death.  This was not supposed to be a raucous Irish wake.   It was a memorial service.  And I ask you, have you ever seen people behave so disrespectfully in the face of loss of life? It was unreal, inappropriate, and anything but solemn.  

I guess there are some people who think Obama gives a good speech.  Tom Brokaw, being a good sheeple of the media, launched into kudos, even going so far as to compare Obama's speech with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.  If Brokaw ever had any credibility, it just went straight down the toilet.  Makes you wonder what would make someone like Brokaw sell out....but that's another story.  Once again, we see media personalities gushing over a speech that was just not that great.  What made it worse was the crowd.  The rock star, cult-like, response to Obama had nothing whatsoever to do with the tragic events that were supposed to be the focus of the event. 

Have the standards become so low that people don't even recognize a good speech anymore?  Or is it that people are so hungry for some smattering of any kind of leadership that they will ooh and aah over a crumb thrown at them?  And handing out t-shirts emblazoned with a brand at a memorial service was supposed to do what?  Make the teenagers swoon?

Again, the disconnect.  People are disconnected from reality.  Irrational.  The rational response to a nine year old little girl being murdered is deep sadness.  The loss is horrendous. The normal human reaction to this very tragic murder and wounding of so many at the hands of a lunatic is concern and empathy for the pain of it.  Instead we got a Democrat cheerleading practice.  Instead, the president turned a tragedy into a party.  A party with all eyes on him.  Which is where he wants everyone's attention.  On him.  Disturbing.  Distorted.  Bizarre. Not unlike the Wellstone funeral in tone, but more pointed toward the ego of one person, Obama.  It's sophomoric, adolescent, ego massaging surrealism. Has the entire country gone mad?  Are so many people just so blinded by a fictional version of an empty suit that they can't see what he is turning them into?  How humiliating.  How juvenile.  How inappropriate.   

As I look over the past two plus years since Obama's election, I have to admit a lot of life seems surreal, distorted, bizarre, and very disturbing.  So the choreography of Obama's appearance at the Tucson event is just par for the course at this point.  The maturity level of the majority of Americans must have come to a grinding halt at the teenage stage.  That is the only excuse I can come up with for such a response to a truly tragic event.

Frankly, Obama did not have to show up in Tucson.  If he had any sense of decorum regarding a tragedy of this proportion, he would have given a speech to the American people from the Oval Office. Instead we got Cirque de Soleil.  A Salvadore Dali painting.  A surreal event that had nothing to do with the reality of painful loss.

Back to my easel.....channeling reality.