One look at the puppet giant faces of Iraq grieving women as a trio was a stark reminder at the first anti-war demo in SF against the war in Iraq that drew thousands. The Venice masks of the Renaissance are extraordinary in their surrealistic and psychological powers which were illlustrated in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.
In my theory of everything. this particularly art form, the mask has the psychological power to disturb the psyche to mythological levels once thought only to be the privilage of `primative' peoples. That observation is simply not true.
We desparately need Wall Street characters and especially politicans and their bankers to be codified in the Venetian school of masks. The characters you see in that tradition were bankers, politicians, charlatans of extraordinary power, extraordinary evil of every sort. Here is the Doge of Venice:
http://tmmahone.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/port-doge.jpg
Under the silk brocade coat was a empty body of raw political rationalism that had no human content, that was to say Machiavelli's Prince. And the elders of the Duma? Essentially a 300 member Mafia of aristocrats the likes of which Don Corleone never imagined---until the very end of Godfather III when the Vatican elimenated the Corleones as the potential bankers of the Church. Dreams of the Medici died. It was all supposed to be fiction.
The entire Southern Europe from Spain to Italy to Greece and most of North Africa hasn't change in deep substance since the Roman Empire
