The Giant Galactic Cock That Threatened the Russian Universe

The art piece of the day is the "Giant Galactic Space Dick" of Saint Petersburg, Russia to your left. This 213-feet-tall, 89-feet-wide phallus which was put on on the Liteyny Drawbridge in St. Petersburg in 2010 by the Russian art activist group Voina, the group out of which Pussy Riot arose. The giant cock, by the way, points in the direction of Russia's biggest dicks of all (all puns intended), the internal and external security agents of the FSB and the building they inhabit, the FSB Building in Peter's. The FSB, of course, is the Russian successor to the KGB. Not surprisingly both Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, and its Christian Orthodox patriarch, Kirill, both of whom are making an example of Pussy Riot presumably in order to nip criticism of the neo-Tsarist Russian state they have created or recreated in the bud, were once agents of that biggest of Soviet dicks, the KGB.

Speaking of Pussy Riot and freedom of expression what does it mean when a Bahrani human rights activist Nabeel Rajab gets three years for protesting against Bahrani authoritarianism on Twitter while Russia's Pussy Riot gets two for their non-violent protest against Putin in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the cathedral that was once destroyed by Stalin in 1931 to symbolise that the Soviet state would no longer be the theocracy the Tsarist state was only to be resurrected in the 1990s by Yeltsin and others enveloped as they were in a haze of nostalgia for a time in which church, state, and subjects apparently knew their divinely ordained place, something Putin and Kirill are now teaching those who don't know their place in the new old neo-Tsarist Russia they have created. Durkheim lives. But back to Rajab and Pussy Riot, does the differential sentences mean that Islamic theocracy is one year harsher in its treatment of dissidents expressing their freedom of speech than Christian theocracies? Does it mean that neither Bahrain or neo-Tsarist Russia have experienced the Enlightenment?

Speaking of the Enlightenment does that notion of that Tea Party evangelical Christian idiot running for the Senate from Missouri, Todd Akin, about how the bodies of women who are legitimately raped-this distinction between legitimate and illegitimate rape, by the way, is not novel to Akin and has been common in some circles within the Republican party since the 1980s-excretes some sort of magic chemical during rape that inhibits pregnancy, indicate that many Americans haven't yet experienced the Enlightenment or learned much from the Scientific Revolution?

And why are there so many dicks anyway? I have already mentioned dicks in Russia and Bahrain but there are, of course, dicks in every time and in everyplace. Currently we have dicks in Great Britain where governmental officials threaten the Ecuador embassy with invasion if they don't give up that celebrity activist Julian Assange and where a nation in the midst of cuts to government services is spending thousands of pounds a day to surround the Ecuadorian embassy with cops whose sole mission seems to be to arrest Assange who they apparently consider the essence of all evil in the known universe, should he come out. We got dicks in South Africa where police killed 44 striking workers who confronted them with primitive weapons in what seems to some eerily reminiscent of apartheid era South Africa. We got dicks in India who spread rumours of sectarian violence causing thousands to flee preemptively. We got dicks in the United States where neoliberal Randfan Christians want to punish the poor for their sins, religious and secular, and reward and celebrate the one percent for their apparent inherent godliness or naturalness in a return to the days of Ebenezer Scrooge, the days of that old time gospel of wealth, and the days when good old social Darwinism ruled the one percent roost. And we got dicks, boy do we have dicks, right here in river city who want to close historic pools and historic bath houses while giving money and services to private businesses who, our politicians promise, will finally bring salvation to our economic problems. Of course, these dicks have been making these promises almost every year since the 1950s.

Still don't get the picture? Look above or just look around you at the spectre of dicks which haunts the universe in which we all live. The patriarchal and paternalistic mentality that helps give rise to dickism exists almost everywhere and has been taken to new heights in the "civilised" modern West. There really is more to fear than fear itself.

Further Viewing and Reading
"Why Russian Art Group Voina ‘Dicked’ a St. Petersburg Bridge", 16 June 2010, Animal