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Yearly Archives: 2014

Acts of Destruction

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“Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.”
– Pablo Picasso

Long ago, artists were called on to, more or less, represent the world around them in some form that ennobled the subject at hand.  In the Baroque Era, paintings usually depicted either the ruling class or the saints in ways that made mythologies of power real.  Music was used to provide dignity to a setting or to magnify the glory of God himself to every heart that pounded along with the moment.  Not today.

An artist today is supposed to be someone who pushes the boundaries of our world by creating a new understanding of what it means to be human.  The mythology is something otherwise dormant within us.  That makes the statement by Picasso, a creator and master practitioner of this view of art, even more troublesome.

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What Do You Expect?

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Another week, another crippling cold. It is January, after all, and numbing cold is only to be expected. But expectations are the key to surviving Winter, especially one as brutal as this one. As long as you expect it will be deadly cold, the few days spent actually above freezing turn into a blessing. And there is always the greatest expectation of all – that this can’t last forever and some day it will be Spring.

Expectations are also the key to understanding predictions and the sinking feeling of disappointment when they don’t come true. Barataria has come under some fire for insisting that predictions are the key to a worthy blog’s identity, so it’s only natural that we should deal with three stories of expectations gone horribly wrong in today’s news.

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Exit the Eurocrisis – Slowly

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Now that the Eurozone Crisis is over, we can all breathe a little easier. Right? While it’s good to not be loping along from one crisis to the next, the aftermath of the flood that lasted from 2008-2012 in drips and drops is still being mopped up. The hits are just being absorbed by the banks and growth is going to be sub-par through 2014, meaning that the lingering unemployment problem is not going away.

There are two parts left to this clean-up – what comes next and what can we learn? They are both important and will dominate 2014 in Europe and the developed world.

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The Long Road of Dr. King

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“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.“
– The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

At this time every year we have the same kind of conversation around the dinner table. My kids are growing up in a different world, one even more thoroughly defined by the struggles and triumphs of Dr. King’s generation than mine was.

But as they grow older, they see the work left to do more plainly. It is disheartening and difficult to watch those who once thought that the old black and white news film of dogs and firehoses was a document of a black and white history – a story of races and realities laid bare for history to pass its judgement. Now that they are in school they’ve seen and heard what racism is. The struggle is still alive, and every year more than just black and white.

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A Big Fat Target

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Target corporation is the victim of the biggest credit card security breach to date, affecting up to 110M cards. That’s an amazing statistic by itself, but the problem is even worse – it remains unclear exactly what happened or if other companies are themselves targets of the same thieves.

But that is only to be expected in a system that is only as secure as the weakest link – and the potential gain by hacking it is nearly unlimited money. There is little doubt that even before we learn exactly what happened at Target it will happen again, on scales both large and small.

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