Douglas Mercer
October 27 2024
"From their origin in the 18th century, encyclopedic museums—those with collections representative of the world’s diverse artistic legacy—have been dedicated to the proposition that museums serve society as a force for understanding, tolerance, and the dissolution of ignorance and superstition about the world. Today, in our age of globalization, when 3% of the world’s population, or nearly 200 million people, live outside the country of their birth, encyclopedic museums play an especially important role in the building of civil society. They encourage curiosity about the world. And as so much of the world is represented in our great cities—in Chicago, 26 ethnic communities have over 25,000 members each, and over 100 languages are spoken here—encyclopedic museums can serve as place where we come to know better the diversity and dignity of our many neighbors. This is the promise of encyclopedic museums. And it is a promise all the more important in the age of globalization in which we live."
The thrust for total knowledge is a noble one and perhaps the so called Encyclopedic Museum started out as a great quest—but in our degraded age of love and tolerance it’s just another squalid prop to say every culture is equal and every people is equal and every race is equal; in the same way that Kenneth Clark’s Civilization became the plural Civilizations under the insipid auspices of the black man’s BBC. But the eggheads in charge protest too much and no matter how they wheedle, cajole and whine an ugly statue of a flat faced negro won’t compare to a Greek statue of the Goddess of Love any more than the exhilarating climax of Ludwig Van’s Ninth can be compared to the puerile warbling of pot smoking dead beat dad Bob Marley. I don’t care if three little birds showed up on his doorstep or not—one listen to even a few notes tells you this is the lazy man’s music.
When we were kids they were always shoving the it’s a small world propaganda down our throats and the mighty Coca Cola was trying to teach the world to live in perfect harmony. But a quick glance at the red in tooth and claw nature of history shows there’s fat chance of that, man is ever a wolf to man and it’s best not to be a sheep; and what they really want is a docile White man so they can run roughshod over everything that’s beautiful in the world and they can welcome us to their machine. I used to go on the It’s A Small World ride when I was a kid and I knew even then that it was a dopey, schmaltzy and off key Potemkin Village, with an insidious tune meant to lobotomize and hypnotize. So when it comes to knowledge I say leave these mealy mouthed museums aside with their poring over the wonder of pottery shards of the savages; and consult a real encyclopedia, if they have not been memory holed to suit the reigning regime’s requirements, or just get an old book by one of the great Greek or German masters, it’s the only way to get to the other side of the present idolatry of one world is enough for all of us nonsense. And now that I think about it I always preferred Tomorrow Land to Fantasy Land anyway and now even Frontier Land and Adventure Land leave me cold; tomorrow being the only frontier of fantasy that we need, and it is going to be quite the adventure. And now that I know that a good and solid National Socialist had an instrumental hand in creating Tomorrow Land I can see that my presentiment is confirmed, and the nostalgic glow for the future has sent me reeling down memory lane.
Encyclopedic
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Douglas Mercer
- Posts: 10963
- Joined: Tue Mar 28, 2023 7:29 pm
