Love Is Love and Other Absurd Truisms

("Untitled - The Eye of Jihad", 2019, original encaustic) Love is Love - and other absurd truisms “Love is love” is like “Follow your bliss” a way to deflect the moral agency and subsequent consequence of our desires with vague equivalency. It’s like all love and bliss is somehow equal, which is absurd. What if my bliss comes from destroying yours? Or I love abducting, raping, slicing and dicing then barbecuing the infant you love…? Where is the moral equivalence? This is why the Golden Rule sounds great up until you are up against a masochist. And the world today is apparently filled with masochists. But it’s all good… At least it feels good, to think we are all the same, all equal in what we love and cherish. The truth is we aren’t. We may all be made of the same dust, but that doesn’t make us equal. Meanwhile the world turns, a hit soap-opera in its nth season spinning relentlessly a veritable Wall of Death which in its shocking extreme delivers some kind of perverse pleasure. It may not be bliss, or even what we love, but it’s certainly captivating. (11/1/23)