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Fifty-five year old Jerome du Bois didn't get his way. Now the downtown Phoenix arts and business community has had to pay - with unwarranted allegations and mean-spirited attacks against them.

As a result of politely being told “no” to some of his artistic endeavors (which happens all of the time to artists), du Bois and his wife, Catherine King,have embarked on a two-year running online temper tantrum known as The Tears of Things blog. Fashioning himself as an “art critic,” Mr. du Bois has generated a great deal of controversy among Phoenix area artists by harassing those who are actually helping to build a community. Reading through any number of his exhaustive posts, one is reminded of a more inarticulate, myopic and nasty version of Moses Herzog, the schizophrenic middle-aged character who obsessively writes letters (most of them unsent) in Saul Bellow's famed 1964 novel. Only in today's age of digital self-publishing can such amateur critiques receive exposure of this magnitude.

Upon visiting the website www.thetearsofthings.net for the first time in over a year, that same familiar and overwhelming feeling was ever present: pure and unequivocal boredom. I recently found out that I indirectly made the hit list in a post about the Writers' Bloc that is absent on facts and soaring with self-deprecating diatribes (http://www.thetearsofthings.net/archives/000384.html). This is the formula for a majority of his entries, which also consist of the “I Slam Islam” series and draconian views of undocumented peoples.

The nature of dissent is healthy. Social movements can't exist or improve without discussion, opinions and criticisms. The late Ken Saro-Wiwa, who used his pen to exploit the injustices done to the Ogoni people in Niger Delta region, said, “Literature must serve society by steeping itself in politics, by intervention, and writers must not merely write to amuse or to take a bemused, critical look at society. They must play an interventionist role.”

In the case of The Tears of Things, dissension comes in the form of brash heckling, calling people pathetic and suggesting that they are racist because they incorporate non-White identities into their art (http://www.thetearsofthings.net/archives/000405.html).

Not only is this ineffective, it's a suicide-bomb attacking style that is standard operating procedure for the blog. Mr. du Bois is essentially a stay-at-home assassin against the arts. It's obvious that he never actually goes inside the galleries and instead reviews the exteriors by photographing the buildings in unforgiving lighting conditions.

The consensus among the downtown Phoenix artist community is that The Tears of Things used to be an effective means to rile people up and spawn a diminutive level of discussion. Some of this banter can be found in the comments section that follow a number of entries, which du Bois either deletes if it doesn't meet his “standards” or exploits in an insulting way. Now that the blog's novelty has worn off, the few readers that are left are still seeing the same lily white noise over and over.

And in the end, we simply become bored to tears.

In one of Herzog's letters, he writes, "A man may say, 'From now on I'm going to speak the truth.' But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he's even done speaking." We can only fathom where along the path Mr. du Bois has misplaced any and all signs of the truth.

Steve Jansen is a freelance writer based in Phoenix.

:: visit the TheTearsOfThings.net
:: contact Steve :: fugitive4030@yahoo.com

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