Nettime — Dara / Brian – Wafaa Bilal's artwork under attack at RPI
Topic(s): Academic Freedom? | Comments Off on Nettime — Dara / Brian – Wafaa Bilal's artwork under attack at RPIAlot more has happened since this email was written
including the city of Troy getting involved and
shutting down an independent space
http://www.mediasanctuary.org/ that re-opened the
show.
If anyone does send a letter to either the president
of RPI or to the Mayor regarding either incident, we
are asking for the letters to be CC’ed or forwarded to
freetroyletters@gmail.com
we are attempting to collect them on this blog
http://freetroyletters.wordpress.com
we also have some video doc’s up here and may be
putting more up soon:
http://www.youtube.com/user/TroyisFree
best, Dara
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