"Respect/Empower/Include."

Murals on the boarded up windows of State Street, photographed today, in Madison, Wisconsin.

Madisonians in shorts trudge past a mural of Barack and Michelle Obama that is painted on the boarded-up window of Which Wich Superior Sandwiches:



On the boarded-up window of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, a drooling troglodyte cop observes what might be a pile of burning doughnuts that give off smoke that reads — like a thought balloon — "Defund the Police":



A longer view of the side of the museum featuring an ironic "Right turn only" sign:



There's the notion that "being a revolutionary" has an element of being fun, loving, and beautiful:



There's the grievance that you can't play your music really loud without people calling the cops:



More Madisonians trudging along, this time past dripping letters that few will read, but I'm seeing "Tell the President/To prepare the bunker/When he flee/Because until we see/Justice you will/Never see peace!"



"Yes, we can!" the old President says, as a waiter sets up an outdoor café table.

"Day 10 of protests ends with 'defund police' painted on road leading to [the Wisconsin] Capitol."

The Wisconsin State Journal reports.

Protesters painted "defund police" in giant letters on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard Monday night. The street leads from the state Capitol to Monona Terrace, passing between the Madison Municipal Building and City-County Building, at top.

We're told this was "without city permission," but I think that has to be read to mean without explicit city permission. Something that conspicuous — taking that much effort, in that location — is actively condoned. It had the tacit permission of the city.

Also at the link are other photos of the 10th day of protests. Based on the photographs, I would say that the protesters are overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly female.

If I were still the sort of person who roams around inside protests and talks to people, I would ask them how they would harmonize the #MeToo movement with defunding the police. A year ago, there was so much of a push to get men arrested for things that used to be ignored. Then, the slogan was "Time's up." We were never going back. Is time up on Time's Up?

I remember when it was a big feminist goal to force the police to take domestic violence so seriously that they were required to arrest someone when they answered a call. It became the statutory law here in Wisconsin. I'd like to ask the female protesters whether they ever supported that law and if they did whether they will now declare it to have been a mistake — a racist mistake.

ADDED: In "If they can, why can’t we?," David Blaska muses about painting over the "u" in "DEFUND THE POLICE." Changing the "U" to an "E" would flip the message: "Call it a little editing. Call it vandalizing the vandalism. Call it free speech. Call it civil disobedience. Call it a profile in courage or social suicide in the super-heated atmosphere of progressive Madison. Call a lawyer."

"We the People of the United States have hope for the future..."

Photographed yesterday on State Street in Madison.

"Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway came up with the idea for the murals and tasked city arts administrator Karin Wolf with the job."

"Wolf says she reached out to community cultural partners the city already has a relationship with in order to tap local artists. 'We definitely wanted to amplify the voices of people who have been directly impacted by racial injustice,' she says.... Not all the murals are part of the city program, says Wolf. Some store owners arranged for their own art and others artists went rogue. 'People didn’t know better,' says Wolf. 'A lot of people wanted to help and didn’t know how.'" — Isthmus reports on the murals of State Street.

There was a noticeable change from the condition of the plywood 4 days ago, the last time I'd checked. There's an effort to replace harsh graffiti with real murals and, as you can tell from the quote above, a prioritizing of black artists — with spaces marked as "reserved" and this message to white artists that "giving up some white privilege means saving this space for artists of color"...



A space that looked like this 4 days ago...



Is now painted over in yellow and marked "Reserved for a black female artist/Please respect this space":



I think some white artists were painting flowers rather than a "Black Lives Matter" image, and this looks as though someone who'd chalked out her design thought better of it, quit in the middle of things, and requested that a black artist "claim this space":



At the art museum, they were painting out the graffiti, presumably prepping for a nicer mural...




Some of more on-topic images were colorful and optimistic, like this...



And this...



Others had a harder edge, but were, I would say, respectful toward the city:



I wasn't sure which of the art was part of the city's program. This has more of a graffiti quality but it's also pretty positive...



This, I think, is the kind of thing the city is trying get painted over...

I went back to State Street this morning and saw how the murals have changed...

"Man Who Killed and Ate the Spirit Raccoon," "Spirit Horses on Horse Hill," "Flying Skull," "Big Beaver," "Girl Whose Lover Went to War"...

... "Rattlesnake Myth," "Wakanda Loses Lake," "Wakanda Annoyed by Rabbit," "Thunderbird Roost," and "Girl Who Married a Sky Man" — Native American myths named on this map of Lake Mendota, drawn in 1948 by a student of a University of Wisconsin professor, to go with his booklet "Lake Mendota Indian Legends."

I first saw the map at "Daily diversion: See how Madison's lakes changed changed since 19th century, in photos" (Wisconsin State Journal).

And here's the booklet!

Lake Mendota was called Wonk-sheck-ho-mik-la — "the lake where the Indian lies."



"Manitou" = a spirit.

Lake Mendota this morning at dawn...

Downtown Madison this morning... let's see how the lockdown is progressing.

There's certainly no rule against going outside, and that's what I did, taking my ebike down Willow Way and the lakeshore path to the Memorial Union. Click on the image to see the official "dos" and "dont's" of the "social distancing" to follow "if you spend time outdoors."



Here's how it looked on the Union Terrace:



Here's how that strip of lakeshore looks in good times:



That's from June 7, 2013 (when fewer students are in town than the end of April). Notice the picnic tables. They're not there today — now that they're regarded as vectors of disease and not places to stretch out and absorb sunlight.

Here's a pic from May 2, 2010:



Note the iconic tables and chairs that are gone today.

I walked through the terrace and up State Street and back. No trouble keeping my distance from anyone. I think I saw about 200 people along the way. At one point, I thought about writing this blog post and telling you that I did not see one person wearing a mask, but then I saw a young man in a mask. He was skateboarding. Was the mask ironic?