Holier Than Thou

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The problem with having opinions is that sooner or later you are going to meet up with someone who disagrees with you. That's okay if that person is the type who never helps little old ladies across the road, but what if that person is someone you like and respect?

It can be very discouraging.

Yesterday at the gym, I bumped into a former co-worker. She's definitely the type to help little old ladies across the street, thousands of them at a single street crossing would be my guess - that's how nice she is.

But as we chatted she mentioned how much she and her husband had enjoyed and been amazed by the Body Works Show in Niagara Falls. (That's the funeral home that went on the road with the plasticised corpses).

My open mind closed with a loud clang and I let loose with a mini lecture from my oscillating lectern.

How annoying for her.

But the thing about kind people is that they know how to smooth ruffled feathers and make a gracious exit. We parted amiably.

Later during my usual six hour hunt for the spy car in the parking lot, I had lots of time to think about it. About changing people's minds, not plasticised dead people, although that comes into it.

After my blog about the Body Works show, (S.O.S,. 4/12/10), I followed up with a letter to the St. Catharines Standard. In the letter I suggested that perhaps local politicians and dignitaries (and certainly the ones who brought us Body Works), would like to make arrangements to have themselves plasticized so that when they died they could be used as chess pieces on the giant chess board at the Pen Centre Shopping Mall.

The Standard didn't print my letter.

Jeesh.

I thought I made a good point, tasteless maybe, but worth visualizing.

But for all of my efforts have I ever managed to convince anyone to see things my way?

Nary a soul. 

So I've resolved to change my evil ways. Forget Christie Blatchford and Christina Blizzard. These days I'm all about St. Ursula and Mother Theresa.



Now feck off, will, ya. I'm busy.

S.O.S.

When "Body Works", the collection of posed plasticised human bodies, first hit the Ontario Science Centre a few years ago, it made me uncomfortable although it was carefully marketed as a science exhibit. To me it looked like an art show. At the time though it wouldn't have occurred to me to question the Science Centre.

But now the science/art line has been crossed and I think we need to think about it. A similar show of plasticized human bodies is coming to Niagara. This time it is being advertised as "artistic, entertaining...also educational" and a real money maker for the area.

A more truthful marketing ploy, I suppose, but still very disquieting because it is literally an art exhibit of soulless humans.

Suppose a local sculptor managed to find a number of dying people and offered to pay them for the use of their bodies after death. Suppose the people were in need of the money and so agreed. Suppose the sculptor draped their naked, dead bodies across frames that made them seem as if they were engaged in an activity of some kind so that we could see the miraculous way the skin works to cover our internal organs and muscles. It isn't likely that many of us would go and see this art show. Because we might have known one of the people? Because it smelled? Actually it doesn't matter because the police would close it down.

I believe the adage that art reflects society. We've become so desensitized to death, especially death that happens far away to people we don't know, that we too are in danger of losing our souls.

Pretty and sanitized as it may be, this art show smells.

Actually it reeks to high heaven.