Bombs over the Embassy

What started for me and my fiancee (the mexican cyberfeminist Cindy Flores) as a warm sunny sunday, where we didn't have any plans beyond enjoying a viennese coffee at CafÈ Snob (a nice family place at the turistic Zona Rosa in Mexico City) soon became something completely different.

As most members of the U.S. Department of Art and Technology will acknowledge, war has become, through the years, a simple matter of "business as usual" for our government. So at first I thought war wouldn't get in the way of me enjoying a nice and warm Sunday. But it did.

Before arriving to the CafÈ, we stopped briefly at a newsstand to buy a couple of magazines, as a Sunday without something refreshing to read is not a Sunday. But we couldn't get that far into the magazines: no Cahiers Du Cinema or El PaÌs Semanal, because we couldn't look past the familiar gore tabloids which the Mexican working class loves so much. There was blood and body parts all over: Iraqi kids mutilated, people crying in despair, meanwhile i was thinking of heading to CafÈ Snob with my fiancee.

War was spitted at our face and so we decided coffee was completely out of the question. We changed direction into the embassy where we knew a demonstration against war was scheduled.

Please read on....

Fran Ilich, Under Secretary for Free Cultural Distribution and the Disintegration of Borders and Boundaries
US Department of Art and Technology.

http://delete.tv

As the appointment I was given by The Secretary, Mr. Randall M. Packer himself, is Under Secretary for Free Cultural Distribution and the Disintegration of Borders and Boundaries, I knew this was going to be a Sunday under official duty, something which doesn't happen often, but which under the circumstances our staff has to endure. Our mission is to spread art as a a weapon to break free from ignorance. Our mission has always been freedom, and fighting for freedom has never been an easy task. This is something every soldier knows in his heart.

Upon arriving at Paseo de la Reforma (one of the main avenues in the cosmopolitan city of Mexico) we saw the whole crowd. Multitudes. We didn't know what to think, as young demonstrators, the kind which has always been passionate, vital, engaged, where throwing stones to the Embassy of the U.S, which fortunately was protected by a shield of metal fences and mexican police officers in full combat suit, as is expected and customary in such ocasions according to diplomatic relations.

I must point also to the coincidence -and I don't know if i should remark the word coincidence- that the U.S. Embassy is right next to the statue of the Independence Angel. I wonder if this fact is an example of chaos-osmosis at work or the result of a rigourous planification of our remarkable urbanists working at the foreign service. I believe this fact is of extreme importance and shouldn't pass up as a simple colorful detail. Personally i don't believe this is a coincidence, and in the worst case scenario, I'm sure this is a perfect example of God's perpetual engagement in earthly issues.

The demonstration, as far as I could see, was divided in 2 groups or (sub-manifestations): those who belonged to the group of pacifism and strongly believe in the need of legitimal credibility, and those who couldn't care less and chose to simply use as their discourse the historical human weapon of preference: the stone. I find this very relevant as we could see depicted 2 societies at battle: the tribal, which oppose industrialization and globalization, visibly choosing the side of historical primitivism which usually belongs to the indigenous resistances prior to their colonization. And... And the other group which I believe needs no introduction.

Here I would like to pinpoint and go back to tabloids and how the Mexican industry has an evident fear of technology in all its incarnations. In every cover we see a casualty of humanity in the everlasting war against technology, it can be either a massive car accident or killings with automatic machine guns (as if their real cause would be to record the ongoing battle between humanity and technology) or as in this case, the depicting of deaths and massacres which our American news sources would never show, because our professionals are aware of the semantic power which we lose upon showing this images. Freedom and civilization have a price and showing this images could be contraproductive. But Mexican society works in another direction because their history belongs to the tradition of the defeated, and so this media usually spreads the fear of technology, as Mexican experience teaches them they aren't anything but servants of the industrial revolution.

And so going back to the stones over the embassy, Cindy and I decided to stand there, talk to the revolting people so they would see a smile at the government they were opposing with stones, showing them we believe in words and dialog, and so we where standing on their side to give them strength to assure that mexican troops wouldn't smash them.

This people strongly believed organizations like the UN had lost all credibilty and in the process decided not to play along or smile to the official American representation in Mexico. They took a symbolic action: stones.

And so the pacifists who where correct and nice people, fled in order to keep clean their family name in order not to be confused with the demonstrators who opposed the war with a symbolic parabolic shower of stones.

The pacifists fled because they thought there was no use staying. But I stayed. We stayed. Because there was a boundary to be dissolved, like the one which divides pacifism from pacification. But more so, a specific one: the border beetween the gesture of symbolic action (throwing stones) and the gesture of symbolic multitudinary quietness. The question posed was clearly if the people must stand outside in the streets with their hands crossed as troops kill each other and at the same taking the life of innocent people in an illegal war?

I believe our county has always been a nation of bold active engaged citizens. And so I stayed without ever throwing a stone, meanwhile the Mexican officers sprayed lacrimogen gas and fired a few shots off their guns. It didn't took long before symbolic violence morphed into drum beats and dances against police... The news helicopters of course wheren't there, they only appear when a bank is robbed, not when humanity is at stake.

And I was there as a peaceful observer, looking for new approaches to dialog. Completely aware that our Department has a big challenge in our hands, the chance of finding peace thru artistic means...

Bauds not bombs.

Nos vemos en el futuro.

Fran Ilich, Under Secretary for Free Cultural Distribution and the Disintegration of Borders and Boundaries
US Department of Art and Technology.

http://delete.tv

Posted by at April 7, 2003 10:44 PM | TrackBack
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