Ravishment of Art

When the Brainless begin to fall in love with allegory or metaphor, regardless of what they want to call it, the world becomes immersed with cliches. A cliche by itself is of no harm. It only demonstrates to those of us who have a brain that even truism can one day be degraded to the extent that it becomes nonsense. One of the terms that the Brainless love to use is "rape" or in verb form "to rape". I am not sure of why, but they just love to use it in a very broad sense. They like to say, "you are raping the [result of the] poll." Or they say, "you are raping the will of the people." Even worse, perhaps, they say, "you are raping your own dignity." But what they do not know is that they are raping the word 'rape'. They would feel surprised that the term 'rape' can now be raped. The use of the term "rape" or the verb "to rape", like some chanting of life, provides the Brainless with some sense of meaningfulness in their unworthy life.

Just read an article from a local newspaper that says Mona Lisa, the painting Leonardo created, is being spiritually raped by a bunch of dudes who come from a country called China. How can civilisation like China rape another civilisation that flourished because of the Renaissance? Perhaps there is some misunderstanding of this civilisation or that civilisation. China boasts herself that she has a civilisation of 5,000 years or more if those who domiciled in where now China is and looked more like their kins the chimpanzee than us homo sapiens, are included. But the civilisation of the West is quite different from China's. I would tend to believe that civilisation of China is no longer existent. It perished after Tang Dynasty as civilisation had met its pinnacle then. Afterwards, civilisation headed downward and when Qing Dynasty became corrupted that even a newly developed Japan could beat it, civilisation was no longer civilisation, but the situation only represented a current being of the 5,000-year history. Call it a snap-shot? I would prefer the term snap-shot to Zeitgeist, for the spirit of time is nothing of what we have now is nothing but antiquity. After many years weakness and travesty, a new China re-emerged in the early 1980s. What we saw was, in fact, merely a billion people who were completely outmoded after years of backward alienation. Then another 2 decades have gone, what we now see is 100 million people who can afford to go out of China, buying some good stuffs like Louis Vuitton - for them it is a two-letter word LV, for Louis Vuitton proves as too difficult for them as philosophy is to the monkeys. But they have money -- they have been given plenty of monies by the Japanese, the US and Europe, for the people there are cheap. They have 300 million workers who are willing to make a shirt at 5 pence. The advantage of China is they have people and those people can work. 1/100 th of their population can collapse Louvre! Now they know civilisation, again, and they rush to see civilisation of the West. Lord Clark asks "what is civilisation?" and he answers in the meantime, facing the Notre Dame of Paris, "I don't know .... but I shall know it when seeing it, and I am seeing it now." But what they do is the complete contrary of civilisation - a property of Chinese people. Even in "a bit more developed place" such as Hong Kong, the situation does not much deviate from the old backward China. People there like "to be there". They have things to talk to their relatives or friends and boast, in such a shallow, obnoxious tone, that they have been there - seeing Mona Lisa, the real one, very much like a small kid tells his peers that he has been to a zoo and has watched an elephant as told derisively in this newspaper article. Wow, hail civilisation! In fact, for the civilised, I have to agree, this is a ravishment of art, which civilisation in fact forbids. Where is an old civilisation placed, when the re-emerged one is so in lack of the elements of a civilisation? Should it still be called a civilisation. Lord Clark opines that civilisation declines and falls as it becomes exhausted. I take the liberty to add, after imagining 100 million people look at Mona Lisa in such an obscene manner, that civilisation is suffocated to death.