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Sunday, July 15, 2012

"An artist erased the halo over the late Joe Paterno on a mural in State College, Pennsylvania..."

"The artist Michael Pilato had put a halo over Paterno’s image after the coach’s death in January...."
Pilato added a large blue ribbon on Paterno’s lapel symbolizing support for child abuse victims, a cause the artist said Paterno had endorsed.
“When I took the halo off of Joe, it was kind of saying that he’s a human being, put the blue ribbon on him as well, and that was talking about sexual abuse awareness,” Pilato told ABC News Radio.
Then there's the image of former university president Graham Spanier, which people are "throwing stuff at." Pilato's thinking of things like painting a blindfold on him, but "I have no idea right now, you know, I haven’t slept in days because of this whole thing."

Iconography is difficult. Blindfold? But Lady Justice wears a blindfold.
The blindfold represents objectivity, in that justice is or should be meted out objectively, without fear or favour, regardless of identity, money, power, or weakness; blind justice and impartiality.
So get some more sleep, Mr. Pilato. Maybe paint his hands over his eyes, like the "see no evil" monkey. But no:

The three wise monkeys... sometimes called the three mystic apes, are a pictorial maxim. Together they embody the proverbial principle to "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil". ..

The source that popularized this pictorial maxim is a 17th century carving over a door of the famous Tōshō-gū shrine in Nikkō, Japan. The carvings at Toshogu Shrine were carved by Hidari Jingoro, and believed to have incorporated Confucius’s Code of Conduct, using the monkey as a way to depict man’s life cycle....

In Chinese, a similar phrase exists in the Analects of Confucius from 2nd to 4th century B.C.: "Look not at what is contrary to propriety; listen not to what is contrary to propriety; speak not what is contrary to propriety; make no movement which is contrary to propriety"....

Though the teaching had nothing to do with monkeys, the concept of the three monkeys originated from a simple play on words. The saying in Japanese is "mizaru, kikazaru, iwazaru" (見ざる, 聞かざる, 言わざる, literally "don't see, don't hear, don't speak". However, -zaru, an archaic negative verb conjugation, is pronounced the same as zaru, the vocalized form of saru (猿?), "monkey", so the saying can also be interpreted as the names of three monkeys.

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