How much longer
do we tolerate mass murder?
In a world where
gravity has failed, does the search for belief run through art?
TELEVISION PIONEER CHARLES
Douglass, a technical director during the medium's untamed infancy, died April 8, 2003. Obits mentioned a family, a business – now in the hands of his son – and retirement in Laguna Beach. You could call his life a kind of unspectacular success story were it not for this: in 1953, Douglass shaped the future of popular culture by inventing the Laff Box, a device that added canned merriment to the soundtracks of TV comedy shows. If during the subsequent 50 years mass media has turned America into a nation of sheep, it was Douglass – not Saddam Hussein, the Sandinistas, or Nikita Khrushchev – who waved the magic wand.
I suspect eternal damnation is just so much negative advertising, and that upon passing, Douglass merely ceased to exist and has not been forced to watch Married ... with Children reruns, forever, to atone for his sins. Should the long shot come in – God, the afterlife, all of it – and it turns out the newly dead leave our universe, where Tony Danza had his own show, for a place with better programming, then I hope someone will pass along this message to Mr. Douglass: Thanks for nothing, pal.
Digging for the truth
On Dec. 4, newspapers around the globe reported that newly released U.S. government documents showed the truth of what activists had long claimed (and government officials had vehemently denied): the Ford administration had supported murderous efforts in Argentina to clamp down on resistance to the military junta. The transcript of a meeting between then-secretary of state Henry Kissinger and Argentine foreign minister Admiral César Augusto Guzzetti in New York City Oct. 7, 1976, is the first documentary evidence of approval of the junta's tactics, which led to the death or "disappearance" of 11,000 to 30,000 people, depending on whom you talk to, from 1976 to 1983.
Claudia Bernardi grew up with silences in Argentina during the 1970s, coming of age during the time of los desaparecidos, the disappeared. The experience scarred a nation, shaped a generation, and gave Bernardi, now an artist and a forensic anthropologist, her life's work. She has since the mid '80s worked with the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team at the sites of political massacres, finding stories in mud, bones, and odd bits of fabric. She articulates the experience in elegant prose, eerily beautiful frescoes, and unsettling installations.
My first exposure to Bernardi's art was on the Web, where I found an article by Angelina Snodgrass Godoy written for the winter 1999 newsletter of UC Berkeley's Center for Latin American Studies (ist-socrates.berkeley.edu:7001/Gallery/bernardi/angelina.htm). Included was a painting called Life Draws a Tree and Death Draws Another, part of a series of "frescoes on paper" catalyzed by the now infamous massacre at El Mozote, El Salvador. On Dec. 11, 1981, government soldiers descended on the village and proceeded to slaughter and then bury hundreds of residents. One woman survived to pass along word of the massacre. Bernardi arrived in October 1992 and during the next month helped exhume the remains of 143 people – 131 of them less than 12 years old.
Her art is essential to her internal conversation, allowing her to release the horrors that accumulate. "Something really major happens," she explained to Godoy, "when you go down a well to find over one hundred children murdered."
In her last days at the site, Bernardi wrote this:
I hear a voice in the middle of my body which sounds like a thousand voices: it is a scream, the current of a thick river made of rage. I feel a wave of energy, an urge to act.
Resist.
Resist madness.
Resist holding these bones as if they were the ones of my own child.
The membrane between hope and despair is so thin.
Speech defects
I met Bernardi in early April, a few months after she was named the 2003 artist in residence at Intersection for the Arts, the cultural community center that sits on the edge of the Mission District. The world's gaze was focused on the war in Iraq, and speaking just for myself, millions of people worldwide were readjusting their expectations of what the future had in store for them.
She was graceful, poised, and so accommodating that when I asked her about the El Mozote series – "You could say that the remains don't forget," she said quietly – I forgot to examine the effect the work and our conversation was having on me. A month later, when I sat down to write, my feelings were so knotted up that I couldn't put them on paper. It wasn't until mid June, in the middle of a conversation with a woman I barely knew, that the dam burst. She asked what I was working on, and – quite unexpectedly – I answered not with words but by sobbing for five minutes.
Meanwhile, the world was watching the war evolve from triumph to tragedy to overly familiar if deadly farce. I winced while considering the grim genius responsible for neutering the last vestige of living mainstream journalism – the war correspondent – thereafter known as the "embed."
Month after month, I thought of Bernardi's work, until it began to appear in my dreams – not as nightmares but as a kind of hope – as if I could find hope, a road to what comes next, in the way she was able to voice what she'd experienced. Eight months later, I'm still dreaming, and I still have no answers. Certainly, the ever growing gap between what is said and what is true contributes to a crisis of belief that has become a disabling national malaise. Small wonder that language cannot be trusted, forced as it has been for decades to prop up empire, prime time, the Statue of Liberty, press conferences, and my god, all those products.
In 1984 George Orwell wrote, "He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past." Orwell's facility with the nuances of treachery turned out to be merely autobiography rather than brilliance – exhibit A, in this case, the revelation by British intelligence of his willingness to inform on left-leaning acquaintances.
No doubt he'd have fingered the overenthusiastic artist who 31 years ago painted this equation on the wall of what was then the National Guard Armory on Mission Street: 1972 = 1984. His timing was off, but save the formula – you'll need it to decode events of the day. For more than two years, now-departed White House press secretary Ari Fleischer's solo show provided wonderful, bleak entertainment. Blessed with an almost supernatural ability to override, distort, and forget – to "stay on message," as he was fond of saying – he'd win the Big Brother Award for Orwellian Presence were such an award to exist.
"It's the same with every White House – you control the language, you control the debate," said William Lutz, an English professor at Rutgers University in an April 27 article by Linda Diebel in the Toronto Star. "This administration is very good at it, and they've gotten better."
"People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them," James Baldwin once wrote, an elegant articulation of what ails us – the fact that, as written, American history doesn't come with a way out. If, once upon a time, we were liberty-loving Jeffersonians, that time is past. Today we are Hollywood's children, not Jefferson's or Lincoln's, not Roosevelt's, and definitely not God's. We are the spawn of bad scripts and lousy acting, and you can call it a consensual hallucination if it suits you, but the truth is that the Terminator is currently California's governor.
"Ain't nothin' but a movie," Gil Scott-Heron declared in the 1981 song " 'B' Movie," about Ronald Reagan, Hollywood, historical amnesia, and officially sanctioned murder. "Someone always came to save America / Someone always saves America," he rapped over an irresistible groove that just grabs and holds like a federal agent on anyone named Mohammed.
John Wayne was America's hero when Scott-Heron was coming up; today Keanu Reeves is supposed to save the day (are you sleeping well at night?). As a precaution the nation has adopted hip-hop's mantra "Keep it real" – a metaphysical declaration of impotence that means believing is seeing. Blame it on the Benjamins, as they say in hip-hop, blame it on the movies, or – as I do – blame it on the Laff Box.
Water and time
Hope is in short supply, and I have moments when survival and sanity hinge on nothing more than crass denial. I turned to Bernardi the morning I found myself flipping past a story about a tribal massacre in Sierra Leone as I headed for the sports pages.
During our first conversation, she detailed memories of El Mozote that rival the horrors from warfare in that African nation – where the limbs of bystanders are routinely hacked off by rebels fighting to control the diamond trade. "We found small green flecks mixed in with some of the bones," she told me, "and not with others. And we didn't understand what we were seeing. But the green flecks were metal that had decayed – bullets – and to save bullets, which were expensive, they killed the children by other means ..."
I stopped her before she described skulls shattered by rifle butts and against trees, bayonet wounds, and secrets hidden at the bottoms of deep wells. "Art is the secret to hope," she told me, and I replied that she had no idea how much I wanted to believe her.
I am a product of modernist binaries, consumed by notions of right and wrong, ready at all times to fight fire with fire. When my political views came of age in the 1960s, I was influenced by Malcolm X and "the ballot or the bullet"; by Black Panther leader Bobby Seale urging me to "seize the time"; by Panther David Hilliard, who – referring then to numero uno, Richard Nixon – declared (and was subsequently arrested for doing so), "We will kill any motherfucker who stands in the way of our freedom."
If Bernardi's beliefs are best expressed in art, they hint at a world where a current of truth runs like a river beneath all things, where no voice is unheard, no life forgotten.
Her most recent installation, Agua y Tiempo/Water and Time – described as "an investigation into the physical, psychological, emotional, and biological properties of water and time" – currently up at Intersection, is as quiet and haunting as the noisy confrontation I often favor is oppressive and predictable. Walk up the stairs, and as the sound of music and voices plays in the background, you enter a dark room where the glow of what seem to be candles reflects on the surface of pools of water, and a video projection seems to dance through a veil beneath the surface of a mirror. The world outside – of course – has entered with you. You wait, on guard, for an image, a voice, an idea, for something – there's always something – to force its way in. Instead, gradually, as muscles begin to unwind, you become aware of your body and of the absence of engines, sirens, shouts, and lights, of appointments and plans; of newspapers and news – all leaking out into the cool dark, leaving you alone with yourself.
"Water and time disguise themselves as obtainable," Bernardi writes in the installation notes. "It is possible to consider them as vital parts of existence without which life cannot be created nor sustained. Yet, water and time, both elusive and persistent, present a conceptual challenge that can only be resolved in the intimacy of a personal and poetic consideration of the intangible aspects of memory."
I'm not sure exactly what she means, but she has allowed me to feel my feelings, to think my thoughts. I have questions with no answers, but at least those that surface are my own. That must mean something, I think, but to be truthful, I don't know exactly what it might be.
During what became a series of conversations, Bernardi pointed to the global enmity directed at the United States as a social fact that seemed to be part consequence, part deterrent. Yes, I conceded, but what if people around the world hate the United States, but Americans don't know about it, or worse, what if they know about it and don't care? She paused for a moment and replied, "Then I don't know."
There was no reason to expect anything else. But it doesn't mean I wasn't hoping.
No words
When I'm feeling melodramatic, I like to think I've been knocked into a state of aphasia – metaphorically, anyway – by the information age. The problem, I think, is not that I have too much information, but rather that it's all old news: Man kills man. Man justifies killing. Masses rally to man's side. Or: Man kills man. Injustice is declared. Masses rally to avenge victim.
Words – history proves this if nothing else – have been remarkably effective as a tool to promote humanity's march from horror to horror. As a deterrent, they've failed miserably. It's hard to describe how I felt when I read in Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others, these words, quoted from the New York Times: "One finds it in the midst of all this as hard to apply one's words as to endure one's thoughts. The war has used up words; they have weakened, they have deteriorated." It was nice to see I wasn't the only person in this quandary. Then again, it was disquieting to discover that Henry James had written them in 1915 in reference to the horrors of World War I.
Perhaps, I found myself thinking, the solution lies beyond language – in the image, in art. Not, of course, in photography, although as Sontag points out, its history is inexorably linked to war. Photography once was regarded – and in the heat of battle still is – as truth's trump card. But like language, if photography sometimes offers unequivocal evidence of the horrors we inflict on each other, it's been a better promotional tool than weapon against violence, even before Rodney King and Photoshop.
Art – at least the art I like – allows you to feel. Agua y Tiempo/Water and Time is just one example of this. Of course, when the floodgates burst and all you can access is despair, you have a problem.
Pilgrim's progress
And why not? For those who haven't been paying attention, history is not a record of peace and harmony occasionally undone by ghastly accident. One could begin with religious massacres in the Holy Land that date back to the Crusades. But why not stick to modernity and begin with Russia's vicious pogroms; move on to the mustard gas that snaked, soft and silent, across muddy no-man's-land into the trenches of World War I; consider Turkey's bloody genocide against Armenia, Japan's brutal occupation of Manchuria during the '30s and the as many as 200,000 Korean and other Asian women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese; add the firebombing of Tokyo and the nuclear attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki; what about six million Jews dead in Nazi death camps? Or, to simplify things, stick to the last decade or so and count up the dead in what was once Yugoslavia; Kurdish villagers gassed by Saddam Hussein; victims of massacres in Sierra Leone and god knows where else.
It's difficult, sometimes, to even discuss such horrors. Official efforts to strip language of its richness and its unpredictable possibilities have proceeded with a single-minded, breathtaking intensity. Half-truths, rumors, personal smears, and fabrications, repeated again and again, assume a familiar quality that for no good reason makes them seem plausible, and any justification – for war, the limiting of civil liberties, tax breaks for rich people, new weapons programs – seems logical.
And we're living in the age of irony – the "new tyranny," as described by David Foster Wallace in his essay "E Unibus Pluram": "The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to turn down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit 'I don't really mean what I'm saying.' So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say?... Most likely, I think, today's irony ends up saying: 'How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.' Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like an hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its subject is, when exercised, tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself."
At such times – and these days that's nearly all the time – I find an antidote in art, or at least in artists. Despite my questions, Bernardi's quiet strength is comforting and energizing. And playwright Tony Kushner, who in Angels in America found dignity, grace, and absolution amid the horrors of the AIDS crisis and the darkness of the McCarthy era, somehow is able to examine humanity at its worst and find hope to sustain him. He, in turn, often sustains me.
"But hope isn't a choice," Kushner told Vassar College's class of 2000 at its graduation ceremony. "It's a moral obligation, it's a human obligation, it's an obligation to the cells in your body, hope is a function of those cells, it's a bodily function the same as breathing and eating and sleeping; hope is not naive, hope grapples endlessly with despair, real vivid powerful thunderclap hope, like the soul, is at home in darkness, is divided; but lose your hope and you lose your soul, and you don't want to do that, trust me, even if you haven't got a soul, and who knows, you shouldn't be careless about it. Will the world end if you act? Who can say? Will you lose your soul, your democratic citizen soul, if you don't act, if you don't organize? I guarantee it."
Belief is just a matter of choice – I know this – but I need some help if I'm to keep breathing in the face of all the lies, unimaginable greed, surreal perversity, and violence that murders routinely and without guilt. I choose Tony Kushner; I choose Claudia Bernardi – and so I breathe, for the time being anyway.
Commissioning truth
In recent years more than 20 nations – Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Uruguay, and Chile among them – have created so-called truth commissions to explore the causes and consequences of the vicious repression of the 1970s and '80s. That it's possible to trace much of the violence back to U.S. ruling circles comes as little surprise to most people, as do fresh revelations such as that concerning Kissinger's role in Argentina.
In Uruguay, the notorious Punta Carretas prison in Montevideo is remembered as a place were political prisoners were held and tortured. I often wonder if those who survived shop there – because today the prison has been transformed into a shopping mall. I found a picture of the prison and the mall and taped them to the wall; some days I stare at them and think deep thoughts. What horrors are embedded in changing-room walls? Do lost souls hover above throngs of holiday shoppers? Do forgotten bones lie beneath the parking lot? Are bones ever forgotten when one explores unofficial history, history as told in art exhibits, plays, reports, rumors, testimonials, and mass graves?
Years ago I owned the album How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?, by the fiercely serious British band the Pop Group. Art – then as now – was my compass, and the Pop Group were passionate, as was I. And on the days that I find myself sitting in a chair, staring at photos of an Uruguayan retail mall, pondering torture, and realizing that the title of an album recorded 23 years ago still means something to me, I catch myself and smile – I'm never going to learn.
The joke's on me, but what the hell, laughs are hard to come by these days.
'Agua y Tiempo/Water and Time,' runs through Jan. 24.
Wed.-Sat., noon-5 p.m., Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia, S.F.
Free. (415) 626-2787.
