Oil Paintings and People

Oil Paintings and People

Blochbauer1Gustav Klimt’s 1907 portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer sold at auction in New York in June of 2006 for $135 Million dollars. This exceeded the previous sale of Pablo Picasso’s painting Boy with a Pipe which sold for $104 Million earlier in 2006 and Vincent Van Gogh’s painting Portrait of Dr. Gachet which sold for $83 Million in 1983. If oil paintings are worth multi millions of dollars because they are unique and irreplaceable, what are unique and irreplaceable human beings worth when they are killed or injured? The market place determines the value of material things such as paintings, airplanes, cars and houses, but special interest groups continue to complain about allowing citizens who serve on juries establishing a value for the far more significant human life and human suffering. We need to get our priorities straight.

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  1. Another tactic that the Bush administration has taken from the regime in Orwell’s “1984” is the notion of perpetual war. In the book, the government was always at war as a matter of policy to keep the populace under control.

    We have now declared war on a noun. The “War on Terrorism” can never end; there is no enemy to surrender. This perpetual war can always be the excuse for any limitation of civil rights that the administration chooses.

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