So...I don't think dA is a great political forum and some of my recent posts have had political/religious leanings, but all of my things are art related and my writings fall under that category. Writing is as much an art as anything else, with the imagining, arranging, and rearranging of ideas, paragraphs, sentences, words and punctuation as much a craft as sculpting or painting or composing a good photo. Even though we now have tools that do the actual character creation, you have only to look at illuminated manuscripts where beautiful and creative images are made of initial letters and where wonderful borders and spot illustrations were integral to the handwriting itself; or the writing of China, Japan, and Korea, which incorporates visual representations of words and sounds into the writing, or, of course, Egyptian or Mayan hieroglyphs, or ancient pictographs to see how writing and art have remained intertwined throughout history.
In my day we were still taught cursive writing, considered proper for personal correspondence, and graded on our penmanship. My penmanship was never very good, hindered by my dyslexia, and I was often penalized on tests and exams by not being able to read or write fast enough in the time allotted, but I always held people with good penmanship in high regard as great craftspeople and artists. One of my favorite forms of writing is Arabic [link] which reminds me of sailing ships and scimitars, stars, meteors and auroras.
I try to promote open mindedness in many ways. I am a product of a unique era and a unique country, an era of flower children and flag burning, of draft resistors and desegregation, of Earth Day and Apollo 11. It was also an era of cold war and neo nazis, of race riots and FBI files, of Mob hits and secret arms deals, "nuke Iran" T-shirts, and "freedom fries", and unverified reports of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of dictators. Today there are cameras on our streets, listeners on our phones, endless security lines at our airports and search engines that work for the government as well as for Google, which are a supposed response to terrorist attacks in the US, but whose implementation is really a logical continuation of the mindset that it is necessary for governments to spy on their own citizens. This has been common for hundreds of years. It is not new and is only partly related to terrorism. That doesn't make it ok. In any case, it is not unique to America, we just do it more quietly and surreptitiously, but in other countries monitoring has more immediate results than a case of paranoia and trouble at the airport.
Recently deviantArt was banned in Saudi Arabia, The United Arab Emirates, and Qatar and possibly elsewhere (it was also banned in China from Dec. 14 to Dec. 21, 2008 [link] ). Since January 14, 2009 I have had no contact with my friend and watcher CandyPhotographix and have not been able to see new works or comments uploaded by this unique and exuberant artist. She had recently been excited about passing her exams in the English language, but is proud of her heritage and religion. She was active daily on dA. I'm sure many others have similar experiences with dA artists from these countries. A person whose work I recently discovered is stuartperry through absinthFenix 's repost of: [link] and it is only through proxy provider shifting that his work and words are still coming to dA.
It is instances like this ban which show the paranoia and inherent fear that our governments exhibit in this day and age when we as humans should be trying to come together in peace and mutual understanding, and shows that there is still a long, long, way to go.
Keeping the general public uninformed, out of touch, compliant, and force-fed propaganda while increasing surveillance and spy networks is a very old ploy by insecure leaders. It has no place in today's world. Pulling the shutters down on the world or cutting holes in them so that only certain views are illuminated (or prosecuted) has a dual effect. It prevents your people from seeing the outside world, and it also prevents the world from seeing the beauty that is your world and relegates you to mysterious entities to be feared and hated because of that fear, conquered and eradicated, which is much more often the result of ignorance than curiosity is. The last best hope of societies to flourish is the resourcefulness of their people to shine out in the darkness of ignorance from around the world with their visions and dreams; to shore up and defend their own heritages and beliefs by helping others to understand them, while at the same time embracing others as human beings and artists, not as strangers or foreigners or enemies. It is all too easy to throw out the baby with the bathwater in one's attempt at moral cleansing; to discard one's own best contributions to the world by stifling their voices.
We look to our governments for leadership. A dictatorship will breed dictators; a militant government will breed warriors whose purpose in life is to kill; a corrupt government will breed corruption among the people; a free populace whose freedoms are violated by surveillance and monitoring will sooner or later realize they are no longer free. We talk about "trickle down economics" as if that is more important than trickle down morality. In a more moral world, our economic crisis could have been prevented if banks would have been called to task for making irresponsible loans and luring the gullible or greedy or idealistic or financially challenged into borrowing more than they can pay back. Instead, everyone wanted a slice of the pie, including governments, and a greedy government breeds greed among the people.
There are questionable moralities at play on dA as well, but like America, there is tolerance of ideas and morals because to become overly judicial would impose on people's rights to express themselves. It should be noted that artistic expression is not the same as acting on an impulse in real life. It is, instead, often a way of exorcising impulses without acting on them, or realizing ideas without any relation to our real lives.
It is true that some of the images and ideas on deviantArt are questionable, and not all are suitable for children--or anybody. Even the name has moral connotations, but it is still the best forum for artists and thinkers from EVERY society to get their ideas seen and heard, and to practice and develop their talents INSTEAD of a lot of other less productive activities like terrorism and crime.
Through the window of dA we can see that not all Arabs are terrorists, not all Germans are Nazis, not all Japanese are kamikazes, not all blacks are gang members, not all Indians are service workers, not all Irish are leprechauns , not all English are stuffy, not all Africans live in the bush, that ALL of the countries formerly behind the Iron Curtain have beautiful, imaginative, insightful, modern, and caring individuals just like everywhere else, and the list goes on and on. deviantArt is a window on the world as well as on the world of art. Of course some of the views are distorted by the individual artists, but we can still see through each other's eyes--each and every one of us--and we can see each other...if our connections are not cut.


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