Father’s Art: Works of Billy Charles Duvall [7]

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A River Journey to Paradise

By André Duvall

My Father’s Art columns up to this point have featured small groupings of paintings with some unifying theme. Today’s post describes the evolution of a single painting that Dad modified many times over the course of several years, and it was one of the paintings that were among my childhood experiences of home.

Ken Marks: Bad managers as types in Dante's circles

[Ken and I go way back, to 1970's IBM in San Jose, California. Reading his cast of bad managers actually makes me feel less bad about my own recent experience. And I bet he could identify a few more types from among the dozen managers to which he alludes....]

Courtesy University of Texas at Austin
(lots of incisive graphics)

It's impossible for me to pick a single Bad Manager story. At least a dozen managers in my work history are Dantesque figures whose characters vary in all the textures of venality, timidity, pomposity, oafishness, and treachery that you might imagine. To pick one would be as capricious as awarding a Razzie for worst movie of the year. But maybe you'll permit me to offer a sample.

On passively accepting evil...

On April 4, 1967 (one year to the day before his assassination), the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke in Riverside Church in Manhattan, and among the things he said in a speech titled "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence" was the following^*:

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

This seems to me to echo the sentiment of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321):

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality.

While I "believe in" Dante's hell only as a poetic construct (in the stomach-turning "Inferno" third of his Divine Comedy), I do get the message. We are called on to avoid "passively accepting evil" by informing ourselves of it and protesting against it in whatever great or small ways we can.
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* Brought to my attention by Bob Herbert's op-ed piece ("The Lost Voice of Protest") in today's New York Times.