There is a controversy in Piedmont CA right now. It’s a controversy about a mural painted 24 years ago. It has always been a controversy because there is a penis and some breasts. But this isn’t a puritanical controversy, this isn’t about a penis and breasts. A well meaning white man painted the mural. The penis is attached to his depiction of an Ohlone man and the breasts are painted on his depictions of Ohlone women. The mural depicts a well meaning white man’s interpretation of the Spanish slaughter of the Ohlone people. The Ohlone man is perfect, tight, muscular, righteous. The penis is prodigious.
A local native man, asked about the penis was quoted as saying, “They would never put a white man’s dick on Piedmont Ave. Show me a white man’s dick on a wall anywhere in the bay…”
A well meaning white man responded by saying “I just don’t care if indigenous people don’t like it, it’s my favorite work of art.”
We are broken. I am broken. Maybe broken is the same as used? I don’t know if I want to be not broken? I don’t think I want to be great again. I don’t think I was ever great.
I fight with myself to see who will win. The me that wants to make things, that wants an art shed, my dog, and a donkey. Or the me that wants to rail against all the other me’s, who are capitulating to the us’s, who are flailing about puerile and naive, unbroken, wearing loose fitting diapers that badly need to be changed.
I’ve always thought that I was Don Quixote, angular, cognitively thin, tilting, valiantly, righteously, futilely, but definitely righteously and valiantly, at windmills. Windmills that are not just windmills. Windmills that are the marauding Capitalist machine, mutilating us, destroying us, grinding us into grist. We will bake bread. We will break bread with ourselves, feeding ourselves with our own remains. Did I mention that I was valiant, that I was righteous?
I am a well meaning white man. I want to aspire to aspire to be Sancho Panza but first I need to break a little more. Break enough to welcome my self. To welcome my body. All of its bits. All of my flesh. In a little bit more I can schlop myself onto a donkey. I can understand myself as not just broken but breakable. Sloshing and absorbent, but breakable.
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Quotes from: https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2025/09/04/18879591.php
Beautiful and necessary piece. Thank you for asking the hard questions.