Barack Obama And El Greco

A dubious poll appeared last week that claimed to show that President Obama was the "worst" president since World War II.  I made a crack on Facebook about George Bush II, who is, let's face it, the obvious winner of that contest, hands down, stop your calls, we have a winner!  It was a straightforward comment, meaning simply that Bush was a worse president than Mr. Obama.  Facebook lit up.

So many people these days are unreasonably negative about Mr. Obama, for one thing.  Not to mention that anyone who declines to say terrible things about Obama is immediately attacked for "supporting" him, which is given to mean that one approves of everything that he's done and believes that he is doing a fabulous job. This is either a reading comprehension problem or a pathology of the mind.

There is little hope of redressing this imbalance this year or next, but I'm hoping that history will treat President Obama like it has treated many others who were underappreciated in their own times.

For example, the great painter, Domenikos Theotokopoulos, aka, El Greco ("The Greek"), who spent hundreds of years on the shit list.  "Contemptible and ridiculous, as much for the disjointed drawing as for the insipid colors . . ."

The people who wrote these things were just not understanding what they were looking at.  They were looking at the paintings after they had been moved from churches to museums.  El Greco's paintings, the famous ones, were originally hung high on the walls of Spanish churches.  So you'd be looking up at them.  Any decent artist will adjust his perspective to accommodate that situation.  And the churches were bright spaces with vast white walls, which necessarily affected color choices.  Today we understand what El Greco was doing, and we appreciate it as great art.

I don't know if President Obama will ever be considered to have been a great president, but I do know this much:  he will be remembered more fondly than Bush.