Before we get on to this week's
artist's statement, an announcement and a request: I will be giving a slideshow
and reading at Ravenna
Third Place Books at 6504 20th St. NE in Seattle at 7:30 P.M. on July
28th. If anyone out in the Seattle area has access to a digital projector
I may use for the evening, it will save me the considerable expense of renting
one. In token of my gratitude I will gladly give you a copy of my new book,
warmly inscribed to you, my new best friend.
They unveiled a new design for the Freedom Tower last week, this one redesigned
with concessions to security concerns. If anything, it is even less inspiring
than the original lopsided postmodern mediocrity proposed. And it really does
have a fortress-like Brutalist concrete base. (I find it embarassing even
to write the words "Freedom Tower." Who named this building--a ten-year-old?
George Bush and his cohort have so utterly debased the world "freedom,"
as to render it worse than meaningless; as with the American flag, they've
pissed on it to mark it as their turf, and turned it into the exclusive property
of jingoistic, warmongering shitheads. Whenever I hear them use the word "freedom"
now, I mentally substitute the word "oil," and suddenly the sentence
is translated into perfect sense: "Oil is on the march," "The
terrorists hate our oil," "Our heroic troops have paid the ultimate
price for oil," "Oil isn't free," etc.) As an aficianado of
extremely tall buildings (Empire State Building: always #1 in my
heart!), I have nothing but contempt for a pretender that's a stubby seventy
stories but tries to steal the mantle of Tallest Building on Earth with a
hollow, uninhabited superstructure and a spire. Like, fuck you, Freedom Tower!
It's a building that is, in effect, cringing. Like the Bush administration,
it is both arrogant and craven, with its head hunched down between its shoulders
but waving a flag at the top of a very long pole. (It occurred to me too late
that I ought to have drawn the Fear Tower as just the block of concrete with
a thousand-foot flagpole sticking out of the top.) If that's the best we can
do we deserve to lose out to Malaysia. For what I'm pretty sure is the first
time in my life I am agreement with Donald Trump, who argues that we ought
to rebuild the World Trade Centers, even taller than before.
The Fear Tower seems to me, I'm sorry to say, to be the perfect symbol for
what America has become in the last four years: the most cowardly nation on
Earth. I was truly impressed by the way Londonders have behaved in the wake
of the last round of terrorist attacks; they just got back on the buses and
subways and went back to work the next day. They did not shut down the city
for weeks or close their borders or round up a bunch of Arabs at random and
indefinitely "detain" them without charges. New Yorkers were just
as brave and defiant after 9/11; it was the rest of the country, the mean-drunk
soccer moms and blubbering NASCAR dads back in suburbia, who saw it all happen
on T.V. and crapped their pants with fear, imagining the barbarian hordes
storming their gated communities, and begged their big powerful daddy in Washington
to please take away our civil liberties and clamored for us to go to war against
somebody, anybody. So more Homeland Security funding per capita goes to the
trembling yokels of Wyoming, of which no terrorist has ever heard, than to
the residents of New York City. 9/11 was the single best thing that ever happened
to George W. Bush (after being born into the right family); he should be thanking
his Lord Jesus for it every night in his prayers and beseeching Him please
to send more terrorists to kill more New Yorkers. Fear is absolutely the only
thing he has going for him. Without it, even the American people might eventually
notice that he's sold their country out from under them. The people who voted
George Bush back into office voted for him because they were afraid; I voted
for Kerry because I'm not. I'm not afraid of anyone Geroge Bush wants me to
be afraid of.