Suffer the Little Children

Suffer the Little Children to Wear Our Words

The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time. --- Terry Tempest Williams

I spent the first week of March in Davenport, Iowa in residence at St. Ambrose University. Davenport, one of the Quad cities ( along with Moline, Rock Island, and Bettendorf), boasts a first class art museum, the Figge, featuring great paintings by Max Beckmann, Jackson Pollock, Richard Diebenkorn, and Grant Wood. I went to the Figge twice, but not to see the big name artists.

Just inside the entrance was hanging a tapestry triptych by John Nava, a contemporary artist from Santa Barbara. (http://www.johnnava.com/JNS%202006/Neo-Icons/trip.html) Together the three tapestries are ten feet high and 20 feet wide. Each one portrays the same blond, blue eyed, pigtailed young girl in an identical pose. Her expression is haunting --- sober, challenging, mature, impassive, profound. Her stare, as deep and forceful as an indictment, is hard to hold. Long after you look away, you know that she hasn’t. Beside some minor color variations from one tapestry to another, the only difference is the words on the salmon colored tee-shirt she wears. The name of the work is W Haiku. The “W” refers to President George Bush. The “Haiku” is a Japanese style poem that John Nava has constructed from Bush’s words. The girl’s tee-shirt on the left says, “I say bring’em on.” The middle says, “One heckuva job, Brownie.” The right, “Mission Accomplished.” Together they follow the 5 syllable, 7 syllable, 5 syllable haiku format.

For those of you young enough to not remember the context of the words, let me explain:
By July 2003, after the first months of the US attack on Iraq had seemed easy, the Iraqi resistance picked up. Bush, with what seemed arrogant and insensitive bravado ( He wasn’t going to be in danger of Improvised Explosive Devices!), said, “Bring’em on!”
Following that statement the war became much more brutal and there were thousands of American casualties. In August 2005, a couple of days after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to New Orleans, and our government did next to nothing to rescue and feed thousands of trapped residents ( mostly poor African-Americans), Bush complimented Mike Brown, the director of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, for a job well done. Bush’s nickname for Mike was “Brownie.” And on May 1, 2003, less than six weeks after the attack on Iraq, Bush declared “Mission Accomplished.” Now, seven years later, the war and the occupation continue.

What moved me deeply about Mr. Nava’s tapestries was how he had employed this young girl to indict adults for allowing these events to have become our history. More importantly, her history. The ironic point that he is making is that history is not simply a tee-shirt that can be pulled off at the end of the day & thrown in a corner. It is not a tee-shirt that she can choose to wear to advertiser her favorite singer or funniest slogan. It’s a tee-shirt she cannot take off. And her life is forever changed for that reason.

She wears the burden of a history that had been propagandized, manipulated by lies not mistakes, and was the result of cynical policies and people who cared not a whit for its victims, including her. She is the victim of a history that was not inevitable. A vigilant press and responsible citizens could have written it differently. I suspect that Bush and Cheney, Rove and Rumsfeld, and all the rest of them, had cynical contempt for the American people they pretended to revere. Why shouldn’t they? Shouldn’t a people who allow themselves to be so easily led by fear and lies be held in contempt? And mustn’t they have held democracy in similar contempt? Why respect a system so easily manipulated? Wasn’t this the system whose legislative and judicial branches sanctified the stolen election of 2000?

The girl in the tee-shirts has in effect been branded. Not her body. Her destiny. Her tee-shirt has shaped her, not the other way around. Her life choices, the money available for her schools, the ability of her government to combat climate change and provide health care, explore alternative energies, and subsidize whole host of social programs, all changed because her government chose an unnecessary war for empire and resources, chose to go trillions of dollars into debt and become a country permanently at war. For lies. Her ability to be safe in the world is changed. Her self esteem as an American is changed. An essential hypocrisy will always be a bad taste in her mouth. She will forever question the wisdom and courage of adults who allowed this history to be made. A history manufactured from lies becomes fact.

Curiously, though, Bush’s statements have some profound truth in them. It’s easy to scoff at Bush for declaring “Mission Accomplished” when the war had barely begun. But he was right. If the mission was to dupe the people & start preemptive war, he succeeded. Once the soldiers were there, it didn’t matter how long it took or how many Iraqis and Americans died. The US was not going to abandon its 14 permanent bases in Mid-East oilfields & the biggest embassy in the world. The oil cronies, the Pentagon, the war profiteers had the last laugh. The little girl in the tee-shirt pays the price. The mission was accomplished. Democracy was successfully subverted. A new reality was in place. Shiites and Sunnis can go on killing each other forever. It makes no difference.

And Brownie did do a heckuva job. Thousands of poor blacks were removed --- dead & alive – from New Orleans as a result of incompetence, neglect, and corruption. Never to return. Gentrification by shock doctrine. The poor, dehydrated victims of the storm were successfully portrayed as criminals as they broke into stores to obtain bottled water ---enemies of property and the white middle class. Recovery would be a boondoggle for some of the same corporations making fortunes from Iraq. Government would be reduced to a hapless doll that could be drowned in the bathtub as some of the neo-cons had prophesized. Ironically the process would be helped by a flood. The government & the people drown together. But the spigot never stops gushing money for the Pentagon and the wars.

In the Mississippi River, on Arsenal Island, the largest government weapons facility in our hemisphere, right across from the Figge Art Museum where I was looking at this artwork, 25 million dollars is being spent to build another weapons factory at the same time that the local school departments are cutting teachers and staff. Should I say exploding teachers and staff? But, can't the teachers be re-trained to make bombs? The kids, too?

And when Bush said, “Bring’em on,” no matter how stupid, callous, or arrogant it may have sounded, that statement and the intensification of the war that followed, helped to shift the US to a permanently militaristic society --- and unending and unendable War on Terror. In a funny way the War on Terror is the Pentagon’s answer to the perpetual motion machine. Outrage precipitates outrage. Our drones and missiles for their IEDs and suicide bombers. Terror for terror. So, bring’em on again! Remember to ask the question, who profits?

What would redeem this girl? What could break the hold of those words on her, break the cycle of terror? What would prove to her that we adults are not drones ourselves, heartless robots whose primary appetite is for profit and comfort and whatever collateral damage is necessary? Because, finally, being complicit in an immoral system, and acting as though we have no ability to alter it, turns us all into robots. Drones. Invisible god-like appetites high in the air throwing missile lightning bolts to continue our consumption and dominance.

What would redeem her? Accountability. Prosecution of the war criminals. If we can’t do that, we have the same contempt for democracy and our Constitution as Bush, Cheney and Rove. The inability to prosecute the worst of our criminals, to really name their crimes, is our fatal flaw as a people. That inability enables the neglect of all our other moral obligations to our children.

The look on the girl’s face is deadly serious, but not angry, not judgmental. It simply asks, “Why do I have to wear this shirt?”

She doesn’t.