Bigger than the Both of Us

Sometimes when we sit waiting for the wind and the rain to leave it is hard not to believe that we are suffering and enduring while everyone else is having a good time.

We think that a little bit of discomfort equals the real hardships people in other parts of the world are living with on a daily basis. Our people, sent to those other parts of the world so that we can enjoy football games and television and food, lots and lots of food.

We forget the responsibility that we as artists have to speak for those who cannot speak, to shout for those whose voice has been muffled, to move the disinterested, discomfort the comfortable and just cause a great big stink.

Norman Rockwell one of our most revered painters and icons made his career painting life not as it existed, not even in Norman’s time, but as it existed in that Perfect World we all hope is just around the corner.

But even Rockwell who invented Beaver Cleaver’s world never forgot that he was an artist and needed to occasionally shout like blazes, just to get our attention.

Being Norman he did it in the most polite and gentile of ways but shout he did and with images only Norman could create.

We frequently use selective vision when recalling things that have faded into time, Grandma’s was the best, every holiday was filled with food and fun and family, there was never a drug problem or a war or a political mess and we all had good jobs and could pay the rent without praying or selling our bodies to science.

And of course there were times when that was exactly was the case, but more often than not things just weren’t like that.

It seems since the turn of the nineteenth century, (That’s eighteen hundred for those of you who cut class that week); we have had a war to fight every generation. The Napoleonic Wars, the last noble war where heroes came waving banners and marching to the sound of drums and there was no pesky press to shout about casualties or body counts.

That all changed with the American Civil war, that most uncivilized fight between brothers where everyone killed was an American casualty. And Matthew Brady with his magic box brought us the first battle pictures with all of the horror of corpses and broken bodies scattered about the battle zone.

That made it harder to ignore the cries of wives and mothers whose sons and husbands were left there in the dust.

The Spanish-American war had good press but that didn’t keep it from being a nightmare and a blood bath where men died from disease faster than from enemy action.

We weren’t alone, in Europe they were killing off a generation or two, in the Crimea or in the Colonial wars.

Then came the first of the World Wars where airplanes and poison gas made cripples from young men faster than you could recruit them. But it was “The war to end all wars.”

Guess no one told Germany or Japan. There we were listening to Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman and the next thing you know someone has gone and bombed Pearl Harbor and forced us into a war. The guys in Europe had all of the press, the guys in the Pacific just got the Japs.

And when it was over we heaved a big collective sigh of relief and went back to eating turkey and watching football games, until that little problem broke out in Korea.

Not much had changed since the Pearl Harbor days, the guys fought and died and the press stayed away cause there’s not much of a night life in the jungle, not like the gay life in war torn Europe.

We fought that one until both sides gave up in futility, but just cause they gave up, didn’t mean that all the guys who got shot up got to jump back up and come home. Funny thing, you can’t conjugate dead.

Still we didn’t learn much cause in just a few years we were back in Viet Nam. Now that was a happy time. The television covered it day and night and the more awful they made it look the better the ratings. Never mind that there were guys dying, they drank beer and smoked dope and lived in Quonset huts and had hooch honeys, shame, shame, why can’t you just go and fight and not make such a mess?

And then there was Desert Storm or was it Grenada or Desert Victory or some other silly name for going into harms way when you should have been home fixing the old car so that you could go to work and be part of the American dream.

Maybe the Networks forgot all of this in their never ending battle for ratings, but guess who didn’t?

Ole Norman.

That’s right; the creator of the vision of peace, harmony and a chicken in every pot took on the responsibility to remind us that all of these things which we ignore so we can have 116 cable channels have to be paid for by someone.

He painted as only he could and brought the word back to the rest of us.

Artists love to create beauty. They strive to make the most ordinary things so amazing hat it makes your heart stop for a second. They take any old thing and see it in a completely different way and make you gasp because it was there to be seen but you missed it.

Don’t let Norman be the only one shouting out loud this Thanksgiving. You do something, something only you can do and do it for all of the guys and women who gave up their remotes so that you could switch at halftime and catch the score on the other channel.