ignorance ain't bliss

There is an advertisement all over the city on billboards and bus stops and, frankly, it pisses me off. Not because I'm a pessimist and not because I hate these ridiculous motivational posters, but mostly because it is pretty much, well, wrong.

While Norman Rockwell gained an inescapable notoriety as "the guy who painted the Saturday Evening Post," what most people tend not to know is that he was an actual artist, one with convictions and a point of view and a real understanding of the sometimes shitty and fucked up world we live in. So when I see something like this:



I am irksome because, look people, he didn't really see the best in all of us. At best, Rockwell saw the best in some or, hell, even just a few of us. His Saturday Evening Post covers were idyllic images, ones that many used as a sort of benchmark on which they could base their own lives and families. And while, yes, the 40s and 50s were a bit easier, a bit nicer, a bit more relaxed and innocent, most people didn't have it so nice. But that's not to say they didn't want to think they they did. And that's sort of the point of magazines and advertising, right? There's always some fudging going on, an uptick of the truth, a slight exaggeration that Rockwell was no doubt aware of and paid to depict.

I know it sounds like I am undercutting Rockwell and perhaps projecting my own despondency onto him as a person and an individual, but the advertisement just strikes me as propagandist based on a collective ignorance. Because when you see Rockwell paintings like this:



And this:




or even this (note the heartbreaking loss of innocence, the insecurity freshly realized on her face):



I wouldn't quite say that Rockwell saw the best in us, so much as the truth in us. And that truth is sometimes kind of ugly.

SP