Night Music: Lester Left Town

Reason #224 NOT to Use Facebook

I guess I had some hope that a new year would bring new sense to the censors at Facebook. But no; here we are just two days into the year and already they are censoring well-known works of art.

If anyone had been a tourist in Bologna, they will have seen the magnificent 500-year old statue of Neptune in the square named for the old god.  A local artist wanted to use a picture of the statue to decorate her FB page. But FB said no. This glorious statue they said, “violates Facebook’s guidelines on advertising. It presents an image with content that is explicitly sexual and which shows to an excessive degree the body, concentrating unnecessarily on body parts.”

Once again, FB’s managers show themselves as dull-witted as any Victorian. What is in their minds is what is “dirty”, not this piece of art that has stood unmolested in the public square for 500 years.  We can only assume that these idiots – and I am sorry but that’s what they are — keep their eyes closed as they wander around Italy and Greece. More likely, they don’t visit these sites because they don’t want to be upset: they stick to EPCOT and Six Flags.

 

Previous Reasons NOT To Use Facebook editions.

Poem: December 31, 2000

 

In a bus line

in the heart of the city,

in a hailstorm thrusting silver shards of icy glass

deep into the concrete earth,

a woman holds a little Japanese baby

the colour of Cadbury’s

Dairy Milk Chocolate.

 

Asleep in peace,

his little fingers wave in the air like

undulating undersea fronds.

Beneath the coloured threads and protective fibres

of his logoed rainsuit,

no fever shakes the young child’s bones,

no distrust disturbs the sleep of purity,

no threats or worries fly about

in his head so full of wonder and learning.

 

In this child’s dreams lies the promise

Of the new year.