Kahlo Controversy

It looks like there's some controversy surrounding the movie Salma Hayek has made about painter Frida Kahlo. Not so much about the movie itself, but about its subject. Depending on who's making the argument, Frida Kahlo was either an important, intimatist painter who redefined self-portraiture and inspired Hispanic feminist values throughout the Americas, or she was a Yankee-hating queer Commie pinko left-wing subversive! My oh my, who on earth would be afraid of a woman just because she was a bisexual Mexican leftist?

Why, conservative white men who are stupid and clueless, of course (i.e., most of them). What the honkies bitching about Frida Kahlo don't understand about her is the simplicity and subtlelty of her paintings; never mind her politics. But then subtlety is one of those things our friends on the right don't understand, as evidenced by their outcry over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial design in Washington twenty years ago. I don't see how anyone could look at the Kahlo self-portrait that appeared on the U.S. postage stamp honoring her that was issued last year and say she was not a legitimate artist.

The insufferable U.S. Senator Jesse Helms (you know the party and the state - I won't repeat them) wrote a letter of protest to the Postal Service last year suggesting other Hispanics whom he thought were far worthier of commemoration on a postage stamp. Hmmm, do you suppose he would have made such points to the USPS if a Kahlo stamp had not been issued?

Yeah, I bought the Kahlo stamp. I used it on bill payments to companies run by the pro-business types that Kahlo always hated. Cheeky, no?