Re: <nettime> Wafaa Bilal's artwork under attack at RPI

[Brian Holmes <brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr>]

Thanks to Dara and all the tireless at RPI for keeping the neocon dogs 
more or less at bay in upstate New York!

Not to forget the essential: the dog and the man are pretty much 
neck-and-neck right now at Wafaa's other great project for his RPI 
residency, namely http://dogoriraqi.com. And since he was so set on 
doing the waterboarding (or rather, on having it done to him), it sure 
would be a shame if the dog finally won!

Just to encourage y'all, below is the letter I sent in to the contest 
organizers. Write to President Jackson in protest of the show closing 
(president@rpi.edu), cc it to freetroyletters@gmail.com, then go cast 
your vote for the waterboarding like a good American citizen (or for 
that matter, a jolly good citizen of the world) at 
http://dogoriraqi.com. 

****

Dear Sir or Madam -

Having scrutinized the World Wide Web as I do every evening, I am 
DELIGHTED to learn about Dog-Or-Iraqi. And with this letter, I want to 
encourage every New Yorker and every good American to vote as I will 
myself, for the Iraqi of course, and not for the dog - despite Mr. 
Bilal's protestations.

The facts, my fellow Americans, are simple. Even if we don't know 
exactly how he got here, who let him in or who fed him, we know that 
Mr. Bilal is now a citizen of this fair land, or at least he must have 
got his Green Card. And so, like every immigrant, he must desire deep 
down inside to do something good for his new country. Now I ask you, 
what better could Mr. Bilal do, than to prove with his punishment that 
there really are terrorists among us? And why should we believe him if 
he protests to the contrary?

After all, from the very outset of WWII, and all the way through the 
long Cold War that only ended to my regret in 1989, we learned the 
value of having a Common Enemy to give us Clear National Purpose. 
What's more, in the late 1940s and early 1950s with old Senator Joe on 
our side, we all saw how an Inner Enemy could strengthen our police 
forces and secret services, giving our rightly elected officials broad 
and sweeping powers to quiet down anyone who would try to critique 
their bravely decided and staunchly defended policies.

In the same way today, only terrorists give us the fortitude to Go It 
Alone in this dangerous world, and to continue ignoring the
so-called "international community" with its scare stories about global 
warming and world inequality and God knows what other trumped-up 
threats to our American Way of Life, not to mention the liberals with 
their ridiculous demands for socialized health care. Moreover, I ask 
you, without terrorists, how could we could we even hope for another 
Middle-Eastern war to pump up our economy with enormous contracts for 
our major industries, and to ease the strain on our leading 
corporations, like Exxon-Mobile, with its historic profits in excess of 
40 billion dollars last year? Without terrorists, how could we keep our 
economy going through another cold winter?

For these reasons and many more, I not only cast my vote in favor of the 
Iraqi and the National Interest, but since every dog gets his day here 
in America, if the waterboarding results in a successful confession as 
we all know it will, I would like to add a motion to have Mr. Bilal 
declared World Terrorist of the Year for the services he has loyally 
rendered to his adopted country, God Bless him and the cute little dog 
too.

Yours patriotically,

Brian Holmes


#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org