Maggie's Farm

Norman Rockwell was no fool. Look at the painting. There is a bust of Lenin, with flowers strewn in front of it, a totem to the all-encompassing nature of that regime. All the children's faces, some half in shadow, look dutifully at the front of the room. Here is where Rockwell adds the small thing which informs the whole. Unlike all his classmates, one lone face is turned to look out the window, a window you can sense by the light shining in the room. It is the look of the daydream. The light shines on his face fully, the only one in the class. He is beatified. Rockwell is a subtle genius.

Rockwell's information about the Soviet Union was imperfect, same as the rest of us. They lied, and many people here in the west actively helped them in these lies because they saw the Communist system as a viable and benignant alternative to their own societies. But though Rockwell, like the vast majority of people in the west, obviously held no kneejerk terror or hatred of the young people he depicted with such elegance, he wasn't foolish enough not to put the face of hope, the face of his own society, in the middle of that lockstep scene. His moral clarity was intuitive. We have evidence now, we don't need his kind of moral genius to see behind the curtain. One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich doesn't have to be smuggled out of Russia anymore. It's right there on the shelf.

It's not 1967 any more. Leonid Brezhnev is not running a closed society. It's not possible not to know that the Soviet Union was one of the greatest crimes against humanity in the history of this planet. Put aside the grinding misery and unnecessary poverty of the most basic human posessions, as well as the rights of the human spirit; just consider the tens of millions -- perhaps hundreds of millions-- of people who died unnatural deaths at the hands of the monster whose bust graces that painting, and those that administered the state apparatus he made possible. He might be the most evil person that ever lived who got their hands on the levers of real power. His evil was of the most durable, institutional kind, and so it transcended the sort of evil that dies with the man that carries it.

The library has biographies of Hitler in it. That does not make them cheerleaders for the fellow. The history of the world is filled with very bad people, and must be examined dispassionately. Even an artist like Leni Riefenstahl, who had the talent of a Rockwell, but was bereft of the innate morality that made Rockwell instinctively feel the need to depict in that one shining face a caveat to the picture's general comity, is deserving of praise for her artistry, if not her common sense.

I have only one question. Is there any set of circumstances that you could conceive of that would allow you to walk past this painting in your office, day after day, with that monster's head on it, garlanded with flowers? I couldn't. But then, I don't work in Hollywood. There is a fad for things Soviet there.

I've seen Triumph of The Will. I didn't watch it for entertainment.