Today: Governor's Mansion Fire Mentioned As Warning (Austin: city hall, established neighborhood)

[theaustinegalitarian]

At the City Council meeting in Austin today, a young child got up to address the City Council on a question of creating a new art division that is going to control all arts in Austin.

She gave a very adult, well-coached presentation that opened with remarks about the fire at the Governor's Mansion in Austin, which she said is something we all need to notice (no context for this) and then she went into a discussion of graffiti as art. It struck me as a thinly veiled warning of how far the adults who sent her are willing to go in pushing their agenda.

It was surreal. I posted about it in the blog I publish on City Hall.

I doubt we will see much more come of those remarks, but the next few months are going to show a fast-paced establishment of a new City art group that is going to squash all independent artists and is going to be dominated by leftists who will characterize all critics as right-wing Christians, even if the critics are atheists or pantheists who simply question the stifling of all artistic activity that is not controlled by the new commission.

The article in question is Article 59 and can be seen in the City Council agendas posted here:
Meeting Agenda

[LookingtoLeave]

Sorry if it's a stupid question, but is art what motivated the fire? Our local news here didn't say much besides it being politically motivated.

[theaustinegalitarian]

The issue is not art. "Art" is the excuse, but political violence is the motive. The girl's reamarks were supporting the establishment of a new City department that will control all activity connected to creative expression. The tiny group of activists that wants to establish and control said commission is a poltical extremist group.

No one actually knows anything about the fire except what little has been published: KXAN.com - News, Weather, Sports - Austin, TX | Trooper should have been on duty at Governor's Mansion this is a good summary.

The remarks the young girls made were astounding in view of the history of this political group that has used the NEA as a funding source for many of its most outlandish propaganda art in the 1990's.

In one case, a teacher was "accidentally" arrested on a graffiti spree in the city of Pittsfield, Massachusetts in about 1993 and she was found to be doing actual graffiti vandalism how-to's with federal funding. It is hard to find stories that old by googling, but you might pull something up somewhere. There were a few news stories about the police arguing with the city and county arts people about it.

I noticed the new graffitti of the hanging bat this week, as well as some new stenciled graffitti of a young boy ("Little Rascals", maybe?) and if it is the same group that has been involved in it in other cities, then it is using Federal arts money to fund vanadlism training for young people, which is part of political activist training for more violent actions later.

It also gives them control of any youngster who would not otherswise come into bad contact with the "law".

In Austin, fewer than 10% of the people vote. That essentially means the Austin City treasury is there for the taking for any extremist political group that can muscle in.

[mandib]

what is the motivation for the art group? being an artist myself, I'm hard pressed to understand how this fits...burning stuff is not artistic. unless of course you're burning s*** and a gallery then pays you for it. LOL.

[theaustinegalitarian]

The motivation is not for artists. It is for political activists who can stop any art/creative expression from criticizing them if they control all art/creative expression in the City.

It also is a gold mine for getting funding that can pay for their political activities as if their activities are "art".

Such as training young recruits to engage in vandalism and street violence, but calling it "art education".

There is no "art group" connected with this. There is a "political group" that will use art for getting money and for forcing propaganda into the public while being able to stop any art group that challenges it.

[atxcio]

Hey, it could be the art group for all we know. Stranger things have happened in this town... like when Treaty Oak was poisoned for some kind of spell or ritual.

[love roses]

So, can I still call and harass Austin City Council even if I am in Williamson County, because this could affect more than just Central Austin.

[theaustinegalitarian]

Calling and harassing is not a good idea, roses. It guarantees that they will not respect you.

But keeping a close watch on your own local area and emailing and commenting about what you see is a good idea. They read comments, and so do the voters in Austin who may be inspired by your comments. My blog gets close to 100% of its traffic within Austin and the "time spent" is averaging more than five minutes, so that means that visitors are reading the posts. Notice the numbers alongside these threads and you can see that there is a lot more "influence" from posting comments about an issue than from phoning a single person.

People outside Austin should also demanding a strong investigation at the State level, and not get sidetracked into the question of lax security at the mansion, which is the big distraction in mainstream media. After all, the mansion was vacant and open to construction workers. All the people and important items were away. It was a carefully chosen target, even if the act itself was "random", because the choice was in the adults' decision to have that child reference the arson.

But I don't think the arson itself was "random" because the other events, the sudden announcement of art group closings alongside the unveiling of Article 59, were happening at the same time. Also there has been that very recent upswing in new, "cute" graffitti in just the last few weeks. I'm an artist and I have always noticed graffitti.

The people running the financial scam through the NEA structure are professionals who have been doing this for years without getting caught. In Massachusetts they used a lot of violence against the artists who did challenge them. They used graffitti as a means of influencing children and then used the children to frighten the families into silence.

I think some natives of the Seattle area might have similar stories to tell. This group was formed out of extreme-left radicals who went into the Democratric party in the 1970's and drove the moderate left out of it. These people went so far left they went full circle and became more like the extreme radical rightwing in their violence and hostility towards average people.

Austin has an interesting "immigrant" population from both ends of the country. Many Austin artists and musicians came here in the 1980's and 1990's as young people just the same way as young artists fled Europe for New York in the years before Hitler's Nazi Party emerged as the face of fascism there. Those artists felt it ahead of the rest of society.

It would make an interesting sociological study: is there a natural human sensitivity to social violence that triggers awareness in creative thinkers about ten years ahead of the general population?

There certainly is a geo-social side to it. Artists have always brought their energy to peaks of creativity in poor neighborhoods because they could not afford established neighborhoods, and they sometimes need the lax standards of poorer neighborhoods to do their work, but then their success brings an aura of trendy "cool" to the poor neighborhoods and the gentrifiers begin to move in, and within a generation they are complaining that it is not the "cool" place they "discovered". And the artists either remain there on retirement or will have to move on to some other unknown pocket of laid-back poverty.

But this City-Hall-oriented art cartel, which operates from behind the scenes, is not interested in art or creativity. It is interested in absolute thought-control, absolute power, and with that of course will go whatever money they can channel away from more mundane budgets. Austin's city council is not the first one to face them.