Plus One

Thirty-two bells tolled today at a Nevada college for the victims of yesterday's shooting in Virginia, for the families who lost a son, a daughter, a mother, a husband.

They forgot one.

Thirty-three people died on that Virginia campus. One of them was the young man who pulled the trigger. What he did was horrific, almost beyond most of our ability to contemplate. But he, too, was a victim.

A victim of what, exactly, we may never know. He was a loner, isolated, suffered perhaps from deep depression. Something drives a human being to commit such atrocities. Something broken, something lost.

But whatever drove him, whatever broke in his heart or his mind, he was a human being. Just like the other people who died at his hand. I don't expect a memorial to him, or an outpouring of sympathy. Still, to leave him out of the count of the dead just seems callous. He may have lost sight of the value of a life, but that doesn't mean we should.

Think of his family. Like those other 32 families, they lost a son and brother yesterday. But in a way, they may have lost more. The other victims are being honored, remembered, eulogized. Bells chime out in their memory. But the shooter's family isn't part of that national mourning. Their loved one has had his humanity stripped from him.

Dehumanizing him is natural, I suppose. If we treat a man who could do such a thing as a monster, we can more easily pretend we share nothing in common with him. That it could never be us, or someone we know, who falls so far into mindless, hopeless despair and anger.

If he's just human, like us, well ... who knows?

His name was Cho Seung-hui.

He did a terrible thing. And he was his own final victim.

Oh for ... well ... His sake!

I guess maybe I just don't get art.

And that's fine with me. Most of the time, I'm happy to ignore some of the more idiotic things self-declared connoisseurs try to pass off as art. But when some idiot artist and his posse force me into something that comes even remotely close to kind of a little bit agreeing with William Donahue, well then they've gone too far.

Donahue is the loudly outspoken president of the Catholic League. He's also a first-class self-righteous, hypocritical attention slut. I could bother to do some research and find examples to bolster this point, but for the sake of simplicity, just take my word for it. He is one hateful son of a bitch.

Which makes it excruciatingly painful for me to admit that he might just have a point about the chocolate Jesus.

Chocolate Jesus, you see, is the brainchild of Cosimo Cavallero. He apparently is a renowned food artist.

Yes.

"Renowned."

"Food artist."

Press reports call him "quirky."

Well, his latest quirk is the sculpting of a life-sized Christ on the cross. Naked. And reportedly well-endowed.

This piece of Easter-candy-gone-horribly-awry was supposed to be exhibited at a hotel in New York beginning this Monday. The display was scheduled to close on Sunday, known to some as Easter.

The hotel canceled the showing, however, when Christian groups, including Donahue, met the offensive piece with their own PR offensive. That, of course, isn't surprising. What is surprising -- stunning, even -- is that the hotel appears to have been genuinely surprised that hanging a naked confectionery Christ in its lobby on the highest of the Christian holidays might offend some people.

Clever phrases elude me. All I can say is that that is unbelievably, mind-numbingly dumb. Overzealous frontal lobotomy dumb.

Donahue, true to form, overreacted in a manner carefully calculated to blow the story way out of proportion while simultaneously maximizing his media exposure, declaring in typical bombast that the hotel would "rue the day it sought to declare war on Christian sensibilities."

Declare war?

C'mon Bill. Just once, could you tone down the rhetoric and do your faith more service than your clip file? Wouldn't it have been enough to tell the press that as a Christian, you are disturbed and offended by this casual, thoughtless, pointless and stupid dilution of the event that is at the core of your faith? And wouldn't a little forgiveness have been more in keeping with the spirit of the man who you believe sacrificed himself to wipe away the sins of humanity?

Still, in the end, this atheist blogger comes down, however painfully and reluctantly, on Donahue's side. Anatomically-correct-choco-Jesus was either a work crafted to offend or a work of staggering stupidity. Cavallero had a right to create it, but that doesn't mean anybody had to lend it merit by agreeing to exhibit it. At the very least, anybody who thought it was worth displaying (I suppose it might be; again, I don't get art) should have known it was offensive to a lot of people.

Still, artistically speaking, the sculpture is a big step up for the "quirky" Cavallero. From the photos, it looks to be at least a passable bit of sculpting. It stands in stark contrast to some of his past work, which include using melted mozzarella to repaint a Manhattan hotel room, spraying five tons of pepper jack cheese on a house in Wyoming, and burying a four-poster bed in 312 pounds of processed ham.

In the world occupied by the well-adjusted, that's not art. It's what moms everywhere would declare a "mess." Or, perhaps, a "waste of perfectly good food."

So maybe I don't get art. But I think it's more likely that what I don't get is why people insist on calling pretentious asses artists.