Is This Pornography?
A sculpture of Buddha with a banana and two eggs strategically placed was happily on display at the Royal Academy of Arts (in London) this summer, but when it was moved to the sculptors’ home city of Norfolk it raised hackles amongst the local police force’s hate crime unit. DC Dan Cocks ordered it to be removed from the gallery. The artist said he aimed to show that in a global village everyone can take offence at something.
Detective Constable Dan Cocks?!? He's either a right schmuck or over-sensitive, having suffered from too many ribald comments in the school playground. In which case, with a name like that it's little wonder he took offence.
And if you don't know what I mean, try bludgin' koala basher if you're Australian and baguette magique if you're French. Oh, and kontol in bahasa Indonesia.
Apart from its obvious vulgarity which some may consider blasphemous, my reason for showing the picture is that according to noted poet, Leon Agusta, in yesterday's Jakarta Post, parliament is trying to sneak through a revised version of last year's Pornography Bill, in a renamed guise - the Anti-Pornography Bill.
According to this new bill, "Pornography is any man-made work that includes sexual materials in the form of drawings, sketches, illustrations, photographs, text, sound, moving pictures, animation, cartoons, poetry, conversation, or any other form of communicative messages; it also may be shown through the media in front of the public; it can arouse lust and lead to the violation of normative values within society; and it can also cause the development of pornographic acts within society".
This is, of course, yet another scenario originally demonstrated by Emperor Nero who reputedly fiddled whilst Rome burned. There are a hell of a lot of more important issues which the House of (self-appointed) Representatives could and should be discussing, matters of education, the environment, employment, economy - none of which are particularly easy, but all are vital.
Fiddling with the concept of diversity (and their expenses?) is therefore outrageous in these times. The artist is right: in a global village everyone can take offence at something.
Well, I take offence at folk who try to impose their own convoluted and perverted modes of living on others. The politicians and their backers behind this bill are typical examples.
In the English vernacular, those who have prioritised this bill and "sent on the bill to the government executives for further study without the required approval of a plenary session " are just a bunch of wankers.
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