Finally, I’m able to get a link to the CSM column of mine that ran last Thursday, that provoked so many expressions of anger and hostility in the Comments sections here.
I’m sending this post from Heathrow, on my way back to the US of A. All of political britain is abuzz with the prospect that this week will see many of the Blair government’s heavyweights testifying in public to the Hutton Commission about the two linked questions: Who threw scientist David Kelly to the wolves? and Was there indeed political manipulation of the intel on Iraq’s weapons programs? I think Blair’s chief media spinner Alistair Campbell is due to testify tomorrow.
Author: Helena
Short update from the UK
I’m writing this from my sister’s computer in England. Interested to see the numbers of ardently pro-Israel people posting comments on my last post, on the CSM column of mine that ran on Thursday (which they did under the next post here), and on the Israel/South Africa comparison piece.
When I have the time and the bandwidth, I’ll sit down and write some reactions to some of those. But it strikes me the level of some of the discourse/analysis there is really amazingly low. Accusations of me being a Jew-hater or the whole of France being a Jew-hating country really seem inane. As does the apparent description of Palestinians as Jordanian and Egyptian immigrants to “Judea and Samaria.”
Hey guys, let’s try to keep things reasonable and respectful?
France, wars, and churches
Today, I finished writing a CSM column, scheduled to appear Thursday, that draws a little on my experience of being here in a bustling and unified Europe.
The question I ask is how Israelis plan to build the kind of respectful relations with their neighbors, the Palestinians, that alone can assure their own longterm wellbeing. The examples I drew on were the way France and its Allies treated Germany after WW1 (punitive, harsh) versus what they did after WW2 (visionary, rehabilitative). I didn’t mention the war memorials here. Probably, I should have.
Tomorrow we drive up into Belgium. Definitely through WW1 trench country. I’ve found one part of our route that is called “La Route des Fortifications”. Maybe that would be the Maginot Line, folly of follies. Like Sharon’s Maginot Fence in the West Bank.
But generally, this trip seems to have had Romanesque (10th-12th century) churches as a major theme. Boy, France was a rich area back then, to support the building of so many, such huge churches, abbeys, etc.
Last Friday, we hiked two kilometres down to this little church at Thines:
The next day…
Gullible Westerners, then and now
I have written here before about Ahmad (“You can’t blame me for trying”) Chalabi and the way this convicted fraudster was so easily able to put one over on Bush administration hawks who desperately– oh, so desperately– wanted to believe that what he told them was true… (Try hitting “Chalabi” in JWN’s Search window for past posts to this effect. Also, look at yesterday’s post.)
But today, during our continuing Tour de France, Bill and I stumbled onto the story of what must be one of the all-time-great instances of gullible Westerners– people who oh, so strongly wanted to believe that what their Middle Eastern interlocutors were telling them was true.
You’ve heard of the (ill-fated) Shroud of Turin? Welcome, friends, to the story of the Shroud of Cadouin.
So, this morning I was driving, generally east along the Dordogne valley. And let’s just say a wrong turn was taken, okay? I was reluctant to turn round, and besides, 400 pesky French drivers were pressing on my tail. Bill, sitting beside me with the map, charted a new course to bring us to where we wanted to aim for. By chance, that new course took us through the small Dordogne town of Cadouin.
And there was a Romanesque (11th-12th century) abbey advertised as being there. Well, we’re both suckers for Romanesque religious buildings. (We visited three great ones yesterday.) So of course we had to stop and have a look. We found a large, beautiful church with some ovoid arches. And next to it, which we almost missed, the cloister from when there was body of Cistercian monks there. We’re suckers for Cistercian cloisters, too. Five Euros each? Sure. We paid up and went in.
Bill got our his handy Michelin Guide Verte for the region. “Oh, there’s a shroud here, reputed to be the shroud of Christ, that was picked up in Antioch by a local priest and brought here in 1115,” he said, scrabbling through the pages.
Antioch, 1115. That would be one of the early Crusades that took a local priest to that spot on the eastern Mediterranean in today’s Turkey.
In a room off the cloister there was a little museum giving the history of the Shroud of Cadouin. In the years that followed, it seems that everyone who was anyone in early-modern Europe made the pilgrimage here to see it. That includes Richard the Lion-heart, Saint Louis, France’s King Charles V, etc etc. Then, as the centuries rolled on, the French Revolution put a bit of a crimp in the pilgrimage business (basically, by outlawing it, I think). But as those restrictions eased in the mid-1800s, believers started flocking to Cadouin once again…
It was great for the local economy.
In that same room, they even had the Shroud!! It was so exciting!! It was displayed flat in a tab;e-like display case: maybe four feet by ten feet. Beautifully fine woven cloth. Mostly near-white. Nothing that to my eyes looked remotely like the image of a man’s face. (But hey, that was the so-called “Shroud” of Turin that purported to have that, I guess.) And at each end, a number of half-inch bands of very intricately woven designs in colored yarns: mainly floral and geometric, very even, repetitive, and skilfully done.
The Guide Verte told us, slightly abruptly, that in 1935 this “Shroud” was discovered to be not authentic. It didn’t tell us why.
We walked to the next section of the little museum. One of the informational panels told us that in 1935, someone figured out that the designs on the embroidered bands actually read, in Arabaic, “God is great. Muhammed is the messenger of God. Ali is the friend of the prophet… ”
Oops!
We walked back, of course, and pored over the decorative bands. At which point the Arabic script leapt out at us immediately.
So for more than 800 years, no-one who had visited the so-called “Shroud of Christ” in Cadouin had noticed that….
Or perhaps, some people had noticed, and understood the writing, and been too scared of upsetting the tourism/pilgrimage-industry applecart to draw any attention to it?
It is kind of amazing, to think of all those Western-Christian pilgrims, people who so desperately wanted to believe that this was the Shroud of Christ, coming here and expressing their veneration for an object that actually turned out to be an expression of Muslim religiosity.
The God is the same of course. That’s okay. But I’m not sure Charles V, Richard the Lion-heart, and all those simple folks who invested their life savings in making this pilgrimage would have been so happy about the part about the Prophet.
Oh well. O tempora, o mores, as I believe I have remarked on JWN once before. (Which means, “Oh, the times, oh the habits!” or, more roughly translated, There’s nowt so queer as folk.)
In our own times, there was also, throughout the 1990s and down to this year, a desperately eager desire on behalf of many well-positioned Westerners to believe the story being peddled to them by another latter-day Middle Eastern snake-oil salesman. The Westerners in question were Richard (he not of the lion-heart) Perle, Douglas (ye of little) Feith, Wolfie, etc etc. And the salesman was Chalabi.
What he sold them, that they really wanted to believe, was roughly speaking:
(1) that he had networks of supporters throughout Iraq who would rise in support of the US forces and make for an easy US takeover, a.k.a. the cake-walk;
(2) that these supporters could provide/were providing lots of excellent, well-authenticated intelligence about Saddam’s WMD programs and his regime’s links with Al-Qaeda (!); and
(3) that once he had ridden to power in Baghdad on the hood of a US tank, he and his supporters would be happy to install a government that would make peace with Israel.
Quite possibly, it was this last part that they really, really wanted to believe… So now, the poor battered Iraqis, the poor battered US grunts, and the much-abused US taxpayers all find ourselves stuck where we are, thanks to that desperate, and desperately informed desire on behalf of those individuals to believe in the myth that they had created.
A footnote here. In the French towns we’ve visited, I’ve been interested in checking the war memorials erected by each community, in which they list the names of local sons who died in each of the two “World Wars” of the 20th century. In Cadouin, a very small town, fifteen local men lost their lives in WW-1 and five in WW-2. The proportion is roughly the same in each of the places we’ve visited.
I remember, growing up in England, that the numbers there were more equal between the two World Wars.
But those losses, repeated throughout Europe, do a lot to explain Europe’s current war-aversion. People in the US should take note, and be sympathetic rather than mindlessly derogatory.
A view from Europe
I arrived at Charles De Gaulle airport Monday morning, had a few hours wait for the flight to Bordeaux. I spent some time keeping my eyes open for well-known Francophile Richard Perle who must fly through CDG a lot. But I guess he sticks to the First-Class Lounges…
The lead story in Le Monde was titled “Tourisme: l’ete des mauvaises nouvelles” (Tourism: the summer of bad news). The follow-on story talked about the “cross-atlantic slowdown which touched the Old Continent”, along with general global fearfulness and some local problems with forest fires etc. Folks in the French hospitality industry talk about the Americans staying away as the main factor.
But the most interesting thing I picked up at CDG was Monday’s Financial Times. It had a long article by Stephen Fidler and Gerald Baker titled “The best-laid plans? How turf battles and mistakes in Washington dragged down the reconstruction of Iraq.”
Well, the title more or less tells you what these guys’ thesis is. It seems they have talked to a lot of people in and around DC. It comes as zero surprise to me that they report,
- According to several participants [in internal administration discussions], the Pentagon ignored the extensive work done by the State Department and relied on a different group of advisors, including Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress exile group.
Anyway, if you can access that article, it’s a good read. I found it online today.
… Meanwhile, here we are baking in the hot French sun. We’re in a hotel near St. Emilion, which is a veritable Mecca (bad word, perhaps…) for wine-lovers. Nearly the entire landscape is planted with vines, which are meticulously pruned and trained into 60-inch-high rows that are cut square at the top. The ros are about four feet apart from each other and dead straight. As we look out from our window, it’s like looking down onto a sea of green.
Beneath the bright green foliage hang the bunches of now-blackening grapes. To my eye, the individual grapes look very small. I guess that’s from the drought they’ve been having hereabouts. Bill (who got here a couple of days before me and had a visit with a wine-grower on Sunday) says they’re hoping for some rain in September to plump up the grapes.
This morning I went out to run at around 9 a.m. and it was already really, really warm. But with a dry heat, unlike what we have back at home in Central Virginia. The French drivers give little consideration to runners, so where possible I ran along the broad strips left between the edge of the vineyards and the roadway. I ran around the Figeac fields and through many areas of Pomerol, including Cheval Blanc. Actually, I got a bit lost, but it was fun.
Tomorrow we leave this area and start driving across to the Ardeche area. I don’t know when I’ll get to blog again. I’m using a phoneline connection to AOL. It seems to work okay, but it was hard to get a connection this morning.
Quaker gathering
I am still here at the annual session of the Baltimore Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). I have been a fan of Quaker process for a long time, have worshiped with Quakers for some years now, and finally joined the RSF in early 2001.
What I love about Quaker process is the embodiment of the idea that every woman and man on the earth has a connection to the spirit and can, through quiet, spirit-led discernment, connect with a portion of it; the embodiment of the idea of human equality (i.e. no ministers!); and then, the fact that this strange body of people has found a way to continue in existence, bearing witness to the traditional Quaker testimonies of truth, peace, and simplicity, for just over 350 years now. And has done it–in my branch of Quakerism, anyway– without having any paid clergy or mammoth, cumbersome bureaucracy to maintain.
The way the RSF has done this is through a strong emphasis on congregational self-governance. For example, in Charlottesville, members of the Meeting community have a total of around eight to twelve opportunities to worship quietly together each month. But in addition we are encouraged, once a month, to take part in a Meeting for Worship with a Concern for Business at which the business of our Meeting (congregation) gets decided. So we are called a Monthly Meeting.
Then all the Monthly meetings in (roughly) the Chesapeake watershed area are part of what is called Baltimore Yearly Meeting. So once a year all the Quakers in Monthly Meetings in this area are encouraged to take part in the BYM session, which takes larger-scale decisions.
And so, through many periods of persecution, the Religious Society of Friends has survived, and has supported some pretty inspiring social witness by individual Quakers and groups of Quakers even at times when the costs for such witness were high.
This was the first time I was able to get to Yearly Meeting sessions, and it’s been a great experience…
Iraqi human rights– the road not taken
Tuesday night, I drove over the foggy Blue Ridge Mountains to Harrisonburg, VA, where the Baltimore Yearly Meeting of the Quakers is holding its 332d annual session. I came over specially to hear a speech by Mary Lord, the head of the American Friends Service Committee’s Peace-Building Unit.
Mary was great. At the end of her talk she laid some stress on the need, in time of war, to look at the “road not taken”, in the hope that it might be taken next time this or any other country is faced with a challenge similar to the one that drove us into war.
It was a good point. Of course, the “challenge” the US leadership faced in early March 2003 was– ahem– let’s say not quite what it was portrayed to be… But there were plenty of us, then as now, concerned about the human rights situation in Iraq under the Saddam regime.
These days, the US Prez is selling the main benefit of the war he (quite gratuitously) launched against Iraq as being that “at least it rid the world of Saddam Hussein’s mis-rule”. (Never mind that neither the touted WMDs nor the touted links with Al-Qaeda ever seem to have materialized.) And a general feeling of satisfaction with this aspect of the outcome has spread very much wider than the traditional pro-war circles in the US.
So here, in the spirit of looking at “the road not taken” in Iraq regarding Saddam’s human-rights abuses, is a link to a post I put up here on June 28 in which I argued that an UNMOVIC-style, unarmed-but-rigorous UN body dedicated to monitoring, verifying, and inspecting Iraq’s performance in the human-rights field could well have succeeded in improving the situation there quite radically. And without all the tragedies and genuine, large-scale infringements of human rights that any modern war involves.
I’m hoping that this suggestion can give pause to many people who still–four years after the war in Kosovo–think that launching a war might be a good way to deal with gross rights abusers.
A robust human-rights UNMOVIC could be applied, for example, in Burma… Or in a number of other places.
I hate that the term “intervention” these days is nearly always understood to mean “military intervention”. And then, there’s the Orwellian term “humanitarian intervention”, which is understood to mean a war launched for allegedly humanitarian purposes.
But war harms civilians. No getting away from that. And meanwhile, there are thousands of other forms of “interventions” countries can make in each other’s affairs– for worse or, preferably, for better–that do not involve violence at all.
We certainly need to remember that!
Also on Iraq, if you haven’t checked out the piece I posted on Tuesday about Juan Cole, and whether we should hope for a US “success” in Iraq, and the growing list of interesting comments there, I urge you to do so. Juan wrote his own very thoughtful reponse to the questions I raised in that post. I haven’t had time to write a further response to that yet.
Actually, I’ve been really busy again. Between hearing Mary Lord Tuesday evening and now– being back here in Harrisonburg at the BYM session– I rushed back home to Charlottesville and wrote a contribution to a book about peace and a column for Al-Hayat. I have this strong sense I should simplify my life. But (1) I don’t want to give up blogging and (2) I don’t have time to simplify it….
Israel and South Africa compared
I wanted to write a bit about one of the conversations I had on Star island last week, one in which we were comparing the issues of Israel and South Africa. The person I was talking with was Heather Gregg, a nearly-done doctoral student at MIT…
(The following is a slight revision of something I put in the latter half of the post I put up on JWN on July 27. But it was kind of buried down there. So I gave it its own post, here.)
The main thing people tend to say when the Israel/South Africa comparison comes up is, “Well, of course, it’s unlucky the Palestinians don’t have a Nelson Mandela.” My main reactions to that are threefold.
Firstly, it is quite true that neither Yasser Arafat nor Mahmoud Abbas is Nelson Mandela. But it’s also true that neither Ariel Sharon nor any other Israeli leader is a Frederick W. De Klerk… Something real and important happened inside the Afrikaaner community during the 1980s that enabled their leaders to accept the hugely radical notion of– hold onto your chairs– human equality, and equal political rights for all of God’s children.
Has this happened n the Jewish-Israeli community yet? I honestly don’t think so.
Secondly, just because the palestinians don’t have a Mandela, does that mean we shouldn’t pay any attention to their claims? Was George Washington Mandela?
And then thirdly, it wasn’t just the personalities of Mandela and Tutu or any other individuals that allowed the ANC to win in its struggle for fully equal political rights for all South Africans. Face it, Mandela was in jail for 28 years, and quite incommunicado there for most of that time.
What it was that brought the ANC’s remarkable victory in the 1990-94 period was the clarity and discipline of the organization itself. It was decades of tireless organizational and political work that brought them victory: work that succeeded in mobilizing people from all sectors of the South African population.
And that was where one important part of the clarity came in. The ANC was quite clear that the South Africa they sought was one that included everyone, even whitefolks, on a basis of real political equality. The ANC had credible whitefolks in its leadership. It walked the talk… And that stance was not uncontroversial in a black community in which “Black Consciousness” ideas were also strong…
So it’s important to notice the huge differnces between the culture of the ANC and that of the PLO or, even more importantly, Fateh. Clarity? Discipline? Where are they?
Obviously, organizations like these are the creations of individual men and women. But rather than focusing on any individual charismatic qualities that Mandela undoubtedly does have (and Y. Arafat notably lacks), I think it’s much more useful to focus on the abilities each of those men and their respective comrades-in-arms showed in the field of building disciplined and ideologically clear national-liberatin organizations… And that’s where the really important difference between them lies.
Having said that, there are still many, many parallels between the actons of successive Israeli governments and that of the apartheid governments in South Africa… Including of course their highly discriminatory practices on the ground, and the attempt that both of those leaderships have sustained over the years to keep their own people, and their supporters around the world, mobilized by reference to the threat of what the Afrikaaners used to call a “Total Onslaught” from the hostile indigenous populatons all around them…
Well, more on this later. Send in some comments!
US “success” in Iraq– for or against?
I have a lot of respect for Juan Cole’s wisdom on matters Iraqi and Shi-ite. That’s why I have a permanent link to his Informed Comment blog on the sidebar to the right.) Today, though, he has a small reflection on the blog that gave me a deep pause for thought. His argument there is, “I want the US to succeed in Iraq, just as I think all responsible Americans do.”
H’mm.
First, of course, it depends what you mean by “success”. Second, I don’t like the moral bullying involved in declaring that “all responsible Americans” hold this view. If I should question Cole’s argument, does that make me an “irresponsible” American? Or perhaps even– pass the smelling salts!– “un-American”?
So first, I guess I’ll paste in the nub of his argument, then I’ll pose a few of my questions. Cole introduces the argument by challenging Wolfie’s never-credible assertions that Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda were somehow linked. Then, Cole continues:
-
Look, I want the US to succeed in Iraq, just as I think all responsible Americans do. The war was not justifiable on grounds of an immediate threat to US security. But it still may have been a worthwhile enterprise if it really can break the logjam in the region created by authoritarianism, patrimonial cronyism, creaky national socialism in the economy, and political censorship and massive repression. [Not to mention just ending the US economic sanctions, which were hurting ordinary Iraqis and killing children.] If Iraqis can just do so much as replicate India’s success in holding regular elections and in maintaining a relatively independent judiciary and press, they would pioneer a new way of being Arab and modern… The US needed to redeem itself from earlier complicity in genocide against the Kurds and the Shiites (first against the Kurds in 1988 when the US was allied with Saddam, and then against both groups in spring of 1991 when the US stood aside and watched it happen even though they could have interdicted Saddam’s helicopter gunships).
A little humility, a little seeking of redemption, a little doing good for others. Those things could make a convincing rationale for the current project. But not a war on terrorism.
So Cole has essentially given as his definition of US success that
Iraqis should end up being able to “replicate India’s success” in a building a working (if imperfect) democracy. Not, of course, that any democracies are perfect–including, as Cole well knows, that right here in the US of A.
And along the way, there’s the “redemptionist” undertone to what he writes. Yes, I am totally delighted that the “sanctions of mass destruction” regime that US/UK pressure maintained on Iraq for 12 long years has been brought to an end. We don’t know yet, though, how many Iraqi kids will die over the next 2-3 years–have died already– from totally avoidable causes brought about by the social and economic chaos into which the war has plunged the country… We may not be out of the woods yet on avoidable-but-not-avoided child deaths in Iraq, so I think it is premature to assume that we are.
But whether we are or not we are, I have a deep distrust of the proposition that “redemptionism”, a desire that is joined at the hip to guilt, can ever provide a productive motivation in human affairs. (A lot of my work on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda deals with the tragic results of just such a motivation having been at work in the desire of rich, secure western governments to establish that misguided and laregly dysfunctional institution.)
So okay, here are some of my other questions for Cole:
- He seems to be arguing that a state of affairs in which Iraqis can replicate India’s success” would, for him, constitute a US “success” in Iraq. Does he have any reason to believe that that goal is the one that this US administration is actually pursuing there? In particular, does he have any reason to believe that the political empowerment of the Iraqis themselves is what the Bushites are aiming at?
- How does he assess the considerable weight of counter-evidence that there is out there, regarding this administration’s policies in Iraq, elsewhere in the Middle East (where “empowerment” of local pro-democracy forces seems nowhere to be on the effective agenda), or at home here in the US (ditto)?
- Equally or even more importanly: How about the precedent set for Iraqis, for that 96 percent of the world’s people who are not US citizens–and for the four percent of us who are US citizens— if the US administration is seen as “successful” in imposing its will on the actions of a large and distant sovereign nation purely through the force of arms and the waging of a war that was quite unjustified by any criteria of “just war” or international law?
This brings me to the heart of what I think it is that constitutes being a “responsible” American, which is a little different from what Cole seems to believe. For me, being “responsible” means having a sober and realistic view of the US citizenry’s essential inter-dependence with all the other nations of the world. So for me, the effects that the US administration’s actions have on world-order issues and on the Iraqi people themselves are actually far more important than any surface feel-good-ism about “the US must succeed”. (No, Juan, that’s not what I’m accusing you of engaging in. But I do feel you have a slightly US-centric optic in your argument–not to mention a disturbing dose of white-man’s-burden-ism.)
So actually, I feel no qualms at all– as a quite “responsible” American–in saying: No, I don’t want this deeply misguided and mendacious administration to succeed in its current attempts to cobble together a US-dominated “policy” for Iraq. Yes, I do want Iraqis to be empowered to build for themselves the very best form of participatory and accountable government that they can. But I don’t see the US military as being either the most effective (!) or the most appropriate (!!) midwife for this process.
It’s possible that the Iraqis don’t even actually need a midwife in order to realize their own self-empowerment. (Think George Washington. Did he need outside nannies to show him how to do it?) But if they do, then there is only one institution with the legitimacy and the capability required to get the job done.
And it ain’t the US Army.
That’s why I say it is quite “responsible” for US citizens to say: “Support our troops! Bring them home! Hand the Iraq question over to the United Nations!”
That way, perhaps US citizens and our deeply, deeply misguided national leaders might start to get back into a more appropriate and productive relationship with the other 96 percent of the world.
“The American Effect”, NYC
Still in New York City. Yesterday, I went to The American Effect exhibition at the Whitney with Greg and his and Leila’s friend Dave. To quote from the Whitney’s calendar, the exhibition “Explor[es] global perceptions of the United States in art made since 1990 [and] includes works from more than fifty artists in thirty countries.”
It is probably the best, most articulately expressed counterpoint to US jingoism that anyone could imagine. Here we have ageing superheroes; frank and shocking photographs of the detritus of US techno-consumerism (parts from old US computers, that is, as piled up in toxic dumps in China someplace); George Bush in a Mughal-style love-fest with Pakistani Prime Minister Pervez Musharraf (with Ronald McDonald dancing attendance); an incredibly funny re-enactment of a promotional “conversation” between Lee Iacocca and Frank Sinatra; and much, much more.
From seeing this exhibition, I think a person would have to draw some conclusions about the way the US is seen by the artists of the world… It is seen (mainly) as powerful, careless, and driven by consumerism.
The date of production of these items spans 9/11, which gives the exhibition considerable added “relevance” and, I think, added poignancy. It seems shocking now, after 9/11, to see the six-panel screen by a Japanese artist (forgotten the name), painstakingly painted in the style of many old “God’s-eye” city views in Japanese art—and painted some years before 9/11—that is a picture of recognizable chunks of Manhattan real estate aflame, after having been bombed by an iridescent twisted necklace of small fighter planes, shown circling above the flames and the smoke.
Still, if the events of 9/11 sparked an outpouring of sympathy from around the world, I’d have to say I didn’t see much sign of it represented in what I saw of this exhibition. The only apparently sympathetic view of the US that I saw, as produced either before or after 9/11, was New Manhattan City 3021, a futuristic assembly in the style of an architect’s model of how this artist saw a bigger, brighter, more Vegas-like Manhattan emerging a mere 1,020 years (!) after the devastation of 9/11.
I found that piece very touching. Mainly, because the artist, Bodys Isek Kingelez, is from the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country rent apart by its own conflicts that are so very much more deadly than anything the US citizenry has ever experienced. I think of Bodys working on this in 2002–where? under what conditions? Was the piece commissioned from him for this show? (Apparently not; it is on loan from a collection in Geneva, Switzerland.) … So he assembled the materials for it—it is a large piece, maybe 9 feet by 9 feet by 4 feet high. He acquired a map of the southern tip of Manhattan. (According to Dave, this was an old map, before the whole area of Battery Park City had been landfilled in.) And he set to work to make a piece that expressed, I think, his sympathy and his determination to be hopeful.
Determined to be hopeful, and a citizen of DRC. As a US citizen, I say thank you for your gift, Bodys. (Even though I really don’t like Vegas style, myself.)
But the rest of the exhibition sends a very different set of messages. I wish every US citizen—and especially, each one of the members of Congress and Senators—could see this show.