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April 19,
2003
Art Bombs
American Libertines
for Peace
by
Dr. SUSAN BLOCK
Just returned Stateside after a spell in enemy
territory. Iraq? Non, France. The timing was chilling. As Bush
dropped Smart Bombs on Baghdad, we brought "Art Bombs"
to Cannes.
Smart Bombs, as everyone with a TV knows,
are those all-American explosives with the uncanny ability to
pulverize their targets between the crosshairs from umpteen miles
away, like an experienced porn star shooting his money shot right
where the director wants it (though a few stray drops always
do seem to dribble on things).
"Art Bombs: American Libertines
for Peace" is the name of an erotic art exhibit of photographs,
paintings, drawings and digital artworks by American artists
that counteract and comment on Smart Bombs and the eroticization
of explosive, massively endowed, corporate-sponsored violence.
"Art Bombs" explode with Eros as opposed to Thanatos
love not war; featuring dildos and vibrators instead of cruise
missiles and tomahawks, feminine juices and lube rather than
Middle Eastern oil, consensual BDSM games as distinguished from
colonial-style domination; people in bed with their lovers instead
of journalists "embedded" with the military; the Bonobo
Way as opposed to acting like a bunch of baboons, the truth of
sex instead of the lies of war, sensuous Bush-eating as opposed
to vicious, unilateral Bush-whacking.
This exhibit, now on display at El Teatro
Club and Restaurant on 38, Rue George Clemenceau in Cannes, France,
is our modest but earnest effort to offset the America of smart
bombs, dumb diplomacy, Pyrrhic victory, and ugly, apocalyptic
scenes of death and demolition that the Bushies have presented
to the world. Hey, it couldn't do worse than ex-Undersecretary
of State for Public Diplomacy Charlotte Beers' ignominious attempts
to improve America's image beyond its borders.
"Art Bombs" exploded in our
heads in the midst of all the media-boosted foreplay for "Shock
& Awe," built up by defense experts and pundits as the
Greatest War Show on Earth, Opening Night to Bush's Bukkake Bombing
Crusade, a super-duper international infomercial for American
Weaponry. If you took the right drugs, it was pretty orgasmic
to watch from a safe TV screen, especially as it was accompanied
by a soundtrack of gasps and moans from the fatuous newscasters,
embedded and otherwise.
All that explosive precision on top of
the considerable advance warning (1000 times more advance promotional
build-up than the Oscars or any mini-series) meant few Baghdad
civilians were reported killed that first frazzling Friday night.
It also meant that no one was shocked or awed, just really rattled
and enraged. What immediately followed was rather strange, at
least to most TV-watchers. Instead of the instant, smiley-faced,
flower-tossing welcome that we were told to expect, surrenders
turned into booby traps, and soon we were the ones being shocked
and awed--that the Hajis were fighting back. Of course, they
were no match for our ridiculously superior weaponry (let's run
that Bukkake Bombing infomercial again, Wolf). And so smart bombs
make way for dumb slaughtering, maiming, starving and displacement
of Iraqi civilians and soldiers, grisly deaths of Anglo-American
troops, and even a few rather suspicious killings of unembedded
journalists.
The night before the Pre-Come Bombs (you
know, that dribble that came before Shock & Awe, in our attempt
to "decapitate" Saddam & sons), my art curator,
Kim Mendoza, and I packed up the trunk with our bubblewrapped
"Art Bombs" which, though fingered thoroughly at LAX,
made it safely to the lovely little village of Cannes where they
are now exploding quietly upon the walls of El Teatro.
Which bombs are smartest? We'll leave
that to the French to decide. That's why, at a time when France-bashing
is a fashionable fetish in the more pugnacious parts of America,
we brought our "Art Bombs" to France. Though they never
claim to have invented the French fry (the Belgians did that),
the French are America's philosophical godparents, having given
us the Statue of Liberty, the French kiss, the French tickler,
and generally helped us make our way in the world ever since
the American Revolutionary War which we may not have won without
them. They are trying to help us even now as we ride our snorting
Warhorse from Umm Kasr to Baghdad to Tikrit to Syria and beyond...
Yes, in part, the French, like the Russians
and the Germans, have had economic reasons behind their pacifist
positions. And what's wrong with having a few economic reasons
to prevent a massive war crime? The emergency $75 billion that
Bush's chickenhawks are now coercing American taxpayers into
feeding the hungry Warhorse could feed Iraq's children for a
decade. It could also feed America's now burgeoning poorer class
(thanks to another domestically flaccid Bush economy) and give
the American veterans that fight our crazy wars some decent healthcare.
The rewards that accrue for "winning" this war will
only benefit certain US corporations in the oil and construction
industries, as well as the military which will continue to inhabit
the ever-expanding conquered territory indefinitely. Most Americans
will get nothing but the hollow, jingoistic satisfaction of "winning"
and the responsibility of financing George and Rummy's Great
Adventure.
The night of "Shock & Awe,"
Max and I stopped in Rim's, a little all-night market, and there
was Mohmed the clerk watching the bombs fall on fellow Arabs,
anguish lining his young face. We flashed our peace signs, trying
rather pathetically to "apologize." Then we went to
one of our favorite Cannes libertine clubs to try to forget about
the war, and stopped back in a couple hours later. Again, we
heard the sounds of bombs coming from the TV, but this time Mohmed
was smiling. Was he changing his mind and now seeing the American
invaders as liberators? Not quite. He'd changed the channel and
was now tuned to an old movie on Vietnam, his fury placated by
watching Americans on the receiving end of wartime brutality.
We laughed stupidly and shivered nervously as we paid for our
Evian.
"Art Bombs" is also a kind
of therapy, I admit. Yup, erotic art therapy for the vicariously
bombed sex therapist. Why not? When the bombs began to fall,
I couldn't watch TV or even read the news on the Internet without
crying. From the loutish war-stoking of CNN, etc. to the scenes
of suffering eloquently described by Robert Fisk and other un-embedded
journalists, all of it makes the tears just stream like Spring
rain. I cry for the Iraqis losing their lives, their limbs, their
loved ones, tender bodies pitted with fragments from this "new
kind of war." I cry for our troops, so young and strong
and sexy, being shot at and killed and forced to kill civilians,
blood that will never leave their hands or their mind. I cry
for the families of the soldiers, helplessly and "patriotically"
steeling themselves for news of their loved ones' death or injury,
or perhaps they will come home in one piece physically, but mentally
broken or hardened into gunmetal. I even cry for the TV news
hacks, the press whores embedded with their soldier-daddies,
so excited about the romance of reporting a war, trying so hard
to play their part in the game, their tongues tied with the intricacies
of invasion, their eyes stinging with sand and the sights of
slaughter they dare not describe (for security reasons), their
souls scorched by the carnage. I even cry for the blown-up buildings,
and for the archeology of this ancient land of Mesopotamia, Ur,
the birthplace of Sarah and Abraham , Biblical mother and father
of the three "great" monotheistic religions, Judaism,
Christianity and Islam (remember the outrage we felt when the
Taliban blew up the Bamian Buddhas months before 9/11? What we
have done to Iraq is the same crime against archeology). And
I cry for myself, now branded an Ugly American throughout the
world I have always loved to travel.
But all that crying just chaps my cheeks.
"Art Bombs" therapy is, at least, a bit more productive.
What else can an American libertine for peace do? Feeling helpless
and frustrated when the bombs began to fall, despite the protests
of the largest peace movement in history, I'd briefly considered
becoming a human shield, but rejected that as my concern for
the sanctity of life begins with my own. And though I gamely
tried praying for peace (whatever that means in the new era of
Permanent War), I just couldn't bring myself to "pray for
the President" with the Presidential Prayer Team, organizers
of the "Golf and Prayer Walk" here in the U.S. and
the In Touch ministry that asks everyone, even troops on the
battlefield, to "pray for President Bush."
But perhaps, as part of the evolving
American Peace Movement, our little "Art Bombs" exhibit
could help the French-- and the rest of the world--see that not
all Americans are behind this nightmare of might obliterating
life. Perhaps it would show that some Americans wish to "support
our troops" by not supporting an illegal, unconscionable,
expensive invasion, despite the Raving Castrati who try to silence
all criticism, pumping up their Patriot Act, effectively taking
away the very freedoms that we're supposedly fighting for, calling
protestors "treasonous anti-American Hitler-lovers"
and the like, just because we don't relish pulverizing the sandy
poop out of a barely armed and hardly dangerous, sanction-decimated,
sovereign nation.
Americans are bombers by nature. We make
a big stink. The night before the "Art Bombs" opening,
I went to hear Tom Jones sing "Sex Bomb" (part of Cannes'
MipTV festivities). He didn't sound bad for a greasy old man,
a lot better than the foppy French kids that sang around him.
I guess I needed to remind myself that there are certain types
of Anglo-American bombs that create and don't destroy, even if
they're just disco tunes. A luminous blonde German journalist
by the name of Irene Hell, who's interviewed everybody on all
sides of the world from Colin Powell to the Dalai Lama, took
me there. Like most modern, cosmopolitan Germans, Ms. Hell is
very sweet and sensitive, as if she is trying to make up for
the mess her forefathers made when so many of them let Crazy
Adolph run their show. Will this be our fate as Americans, I
wonder glumly, decades of apologizing to the world for the brazen,
belligerent, hazardous hubris of our Boy King Bush?
The night before, I'd watched the Great
Pretzel Swallower himself, assuring reporters that the Iraqis
were "surrendering gleefully." It was the Sunday after
Shock & Awe, and he was still a bit bleary-eyed from his
Top O' the War Party Weekend at Camp David, so he wasn't quite
up to speed on the fact that at least some of the Hajis were
fighting back. They weren't quite gleeful yet. Apparently, no
one had yet informed him that after losing the Cockfight of Diplomacy
in the U.N, he was losing Cockfight #2, the Battle for the "Hearts
and Minds" of the Iraqi people. Even those that now "surrender
gleefully," do it not out of pleasure, but abject fear and
the hope that the bombing will stop.
But then, Dubya's only experience of
getting "bombed" had always come, not on the end of
a cruise missile, but from a bottle of Jack Daniels. Actually,
that's not such a bad kind of bombed to get at this point. Pass
me the Fernet.
Humanitarian aid is, of course, essential,
but it's just too little, too late. One liter of British mineral
water per family when the Anglo-American demolition derby destroyed
a water purification plant serving 1.3 million people? Bush's
Bitch Tony Blair bleats on and on about the good ship Sir Galahad
filled with "ayed." He sounds like a guy who's just
raped and brutally beaten a woman, and then expects her to be
grateful when he gives her a can of warm 7-Up and a bag of freedom
fries.
Meanwhile, Iraq is now being invaded--or
crusaded--by the U.S. version of Sir Galahad: thousands of American
evangelical missionaries with raging hard-ons to convert the
Iraqis to Christianity, bearing water, food, medicine and the
gospel as their weapons in "spiritual warfare." Soon
the Iraqis will be exhorted to "pray for Bush."
Hearing about all this propagandistic
aid, my erotic imagination and entrepreneurial spirit gets the
better of me, and I think, as long as we're shipping aid, how
about a little sexual aid? If Bush has his Crusader Complex,
and Blair has his Sir Galahad fantasies, I can dry my eyes and
dream of the good ship Lady Godiva, filled with the latest sex
toys, precision-guided dildos, explosive vibrators, protective
condoms, smart lube, blow-up dolls and interracial erotica, plus
lots of vitamin-rich aphrodisiacs like oysters and figs, plus
Godiva chocolates, good for both hungry Iraqis and sex-starved
Anglo-American troops. I'd also throw in a few Art Bombs postcards
and the Arabic translation of my book The 10 Commandments
of Pleasure. Hey, if the Reverends Franklin Graham and Charles
Stanley can just crusade into Babylon with their Bibles, why
can't I?
Speaking of refreshments, our dinner
at the "Art Bombs" opening night, courtesy of the lovely
ladies of El Teatro, was delicieux. So was the entertainment:
a multiracial, multicultural, multilateral, transsexual stripper
by the name of France, who graciously told us that she loved
American dollars, even though they're now sagging below the hard,
hot euro. Permanent war looms, but libertines just gotta have
fun!
Having lost the Cockfight of Diplomacy
as well as the Cockfight for the Iraqi People's Hearts &
Minds, Bush has won the Cockfight of Military Might, so we are
told. Each day, more Iraqis are smiling. Not gleefully though.
These are the fearful grins and bows of ingratiation, sucking
up to the new oppressors--uh, liberators.
At the Art Bombs opening, we also played
a little game, one that Bush and his war-gaming junta seem to
have forgotten how to play. It's called "Find Osama."
See, one of the Art Bombs installations is my collection of political
dildos from "Cockfight at the Baghdad Corral." At the
outset of the opening, one dildo was missing, one that Dubya
was once determined to hunt down, "dead or alive,"
but that has apparently slipped his mind in all the bukkake bombing,
oil-rich excitement. But we didn't forget, and we were
further spooked by pro-American Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's
prediction that the war is going to create "a hundred bin
Ladens." It could also create a few John Allen Muhammads
(the sniper who terrorized Washington, DC), and Timothy McVeighs
(the perpetrator of the largest act of terrorism on American
soil prior to 9/11), both of whom were veterans of Gulf War I.
Almost as soon as we announced the "Find
Osama" contest, our international roster of distinguished
guests began searching eagerly, even though the prize was hardly
the $25 million on the real Osama's head, but just a Dr. Susan
Block Show cap. Within moments, without dropping a single bomb,
Matt the genial bartender from Quay's, our favorite Irish pub
in Cannes, found the Osama dildo embedded in a flower pot. Now
that's the kind of Anglo-American ingenuity we need to show the
world.
Faire l'amour, pas la guerre. Fermer le Bush!
Dr. Susan Block
is a sex educator, host of The Dr. Susan Block Show and
author of The 10 Commandments of Pleasure. Visit her
website at http://www.drsusanblock.com
If you'd like to contact Dr. Susan Block
with questions, comments or contributions, please email liberties@blockbooks.com
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