On one level, this is merely a PR teapot tempest. All involved will benefit
from the controversy. I don't see any real risk for the library or PR firm
other than a flood of letters and e-mails. What is the chance of
litigation? Who would be litigated against, by whom, and on what grounds?
On a deeper and more significant level, I find the ads to reflect our brutal
culture, which is obsessed with death-dealing power.
We currently spend more than the rest of the world combined to kill,
imprison, and torture people. We have a history of massacre behind us
(beginning with Native Americans and continuing through direct interventions
or via proxies throughout the world.) J. Edgar Hoover presided over
COINTELPRO, if my memory is correct, along with other brutal and repressive
programs definitely in violation of law and Constitution.
How do we appropriate these images? How do we remember these people and
their ideas in context?
My guess is that most people will see this as a clever joke, and go on about
their business. Meanwhile, someone if molding primitive prosthetic limbs
for another child maimed this week from cluster-bomb bomblets dropped
illegally over 40 years ago in Cambodia. Someone in Baghdad is screaming
raw rage at a brutal empire that killed son, daughter, brother, sister for
the power over Iraq's oilfields.
And meanwhile, politicians and media in Minneapolis, Minnesota bow down
before the notion that we deserve life to go on unchanged for us until the
planted is exhausted and polluted beyond its ability to support human life.
Will we continue to accept never-ending brutal warfare to support life in
our comfort bubble, until we choke on our own industrial excrement?
Will we continue to design urban infrastructure that absolutely demands war
and planet-rape to supply it with enough energy to run?
These are the questions that the library campaign brings to mind. And one
more. Will anyone in Minneapolis really give a damn?
-- pedaling for peace and ecojustice from Lynnhurst -- Gary Hoover
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