James Wagner

Once one sixth of Monty Python, but still a sage today, Terry Jones had a piece in London’s Observer two sundays back. It’s very good, but really no laughing matter.

And let’s face it, Mr Bush’s carefully thought-out policy towards Iraq is the only way to bring about international peace and security. The one certain way to stop Muslim fundamentalist suicide bombers targeting the US or the UK is to bomb a few Muslim countries that have never threatened us.
That’s why I want to blow up Mr Johnson’s garage and kill his wife and children. Strike first! That’ll teach him a lesson. Then he’ll leave us in peace and stop peering at me in that totally unacceptable way.

[thanks to George Carter]

Now we are even being told by the police state how we can remember the dead. It’s bad enough that our putative secular authority can only speak in religious imagery, and only Christian imagery, when he can get away with it.

In heavily religious language, Mr. Bush sought to comfort the family members of the astronauts seated in the front row.
“Some explorers do not return, and the loss settles unfairly on a few,” he said, as the wife and sons of Cmdr. William C. McCool, the shuttle’s pilot, wept.
The sorrow, the president said, is lonely, but he added: “You are not alone. In time, you will find comfort and the grace to see you through. And in God’s own time, we can pray that the day of your reunion will come.”

Elsewhere in Texas, three days ago a pair of artists, Robert Ladislas Derr and Lynn Foglesong-Derr, who live in Nacogdoches, began a beautiful and totally secular performance intended to memorialize the seven astronauts lost in the Columbia disaster above their home.

Dressed in black to show mourning, Ms. Foglesong-Derr somberly outlined Mr. Derrs body with chalk within the site of one of the debris from the shuttle in the town center. Once the silhouette was drawn, the artists walked into the crowd and recited from Jean-Paul Sartres book Essays in Existentialism, speaking the words, When we say that man chooses his own self, we mean that every one of us does likewise; but we also mean by that that in making this choice he also chooses all men.
The artists chose this quote from the French philosophers book because it speaks to the effect of an individuals action upon the many. This tragedy involving seven astronauts emotionally touches humanity throughout the world.

Minutes into the performance, Texas state troopers stopped them and told them that flowers and flags were a more appropriate way to remember the deceased. The world is being made poorer by the ascendancy of small minds.
[Thanks to Douglas Kelly for the Nacogdoches story.]

Could the White House have done anything else to draw a more dramatic parallel between its policies and those of Nazi Germany? We have no doubts about at whose behest the image was removed.

NEW YORK.- The “Guernica” work by Pablo Picasso at the entrance of the Security Council of the United Nations has been covered with a curtain. The reason for covering this work is that this is the place where diplomats make statements to the press and have this work as the background. The Picasso work features the horrors of war. On January 27 a large blue curtain was placed to cover the work.
Fred Eckhard, press secretary of the U.N. said: “It is an appropriate background for the cameras.” He was questioned as to why the work had been covered.
A diplomat stated that it would not be an appropriate background if the ambassador of the United States at the U.N. John Negroponte, or Powell, talk about war surrounded with women, children and animals shouting with horror and showing the suffering of the bombings.
This work is a reproduction of the Guernica that was donated by Nelson A. Rockefeller to the U.N. in 1985.

The United Nations is the world body founded 60 years ago precisely to prevent such horrors as that visited upon Guernica in 1937. “Guernica” obviously belongs there, but in 2003 the U.S. is embarassed by Picasso’s iconic image of murderous war, because we are preparing to visit our own horrors on innocent civilians.
The NYTimes now has the story as well.

At the entrance of the United Nations Security Council chamber, a baby blue curtain has been placed over a ruglike copy of “Guernica,” Pablo Picasso’s powerful antiwar painting. Picasso’s depiction of the horrors of war, given by the estate of Nelson A. Rockefeller, who donated the money for the United Nations compound, hung at a site where it often provided a background to televised interviews with ambassadors and other officials. On Jan. 27, when Hans Blix, the chief United Nations chemical and biological weapons inspector, was to appear, microphones were repositioned to accommodate expanded press coverage, diplomats discussing peace were placed in front of Picasso’s image. Speaking of the blue curtain and member flags that now decorate the area, Fred Eckhard, press secretary of the United Nations, said, “It is an appropriate background for the cameras.”

Uh huh.

The hawks are afraid, as their continued fighting delay shows. They aren’t afraid enough however, and in that lies their undoing, even if it may mean they will unleash a holocaust first. Washington is making a very big mistake. We already have a major antiwar movement in place, even before there’s a war, and it’s not going to be limited to just placards and speeches, especially if or when the fighting starts. We can bring down the regime in Washington. The only question is how long it will take.

“The difference between this antiwar protest movement and the Vietnam antiwar movement is that we have a huge grass-roots campaign before the war has even begun,” she said. “Our volunteers on the subway are approached by strangers requesting leaflets.”

Leslie Cagan is talking about the February 15 demonstrations in New York and elsewhere around the world:

“This may be our last chance to stop the war,” she said. “If it starts, it will be much harder to end. If marches do not work, we will escalate. We will have to do things to disrupt the normal flow of life in this country. There will have to be more civil disobedience. If bombs are being dropped on other people in our name and with our tax dollars, we will do what we can to make sure these bombs do not get there.”

Alright, whom am I kidding. We’re all going to be locked up, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens the day the bombs begin.