[Reader-list] Is It True, JetBlue? Artists In Time Of War

[NAEEM MOHAIEMEN]

Is It True, JetBlue?
by Naeem Mohaiemen

"The artist says, "It's not my business." Then whose
business is it? Does that mean you are going to leave
the business of the most important issues in the world
to the people who run the country? How stupid can we
be?" [Howard Zinn, Talk @ Massachusetts College of
Art, October 10, 2001]

Is It True Jet Blue? JFK? TSA? A rhetorical question
that leads to a tautology. Yes, of course people
racially profile the darker masses while whipping up a
pervasive fear in the name of "national security."
Paranoia is so essential to running the modern state,
other navigation tools seem permanently broken.

After learning that Raed Jarrar was told to remove his
Arabic WE WILL NOT BE SILENT t-shirt before he could
board a JetBlue flight, four members of The Critical
Voice (TCV) boarded a Jet Blue flight last Thursday.
The four members, all white women and US citizens,
were wearing the same Arabic t-shirts. They were
allowed to board the flight. This is more evidence
that the Raed Jarrar case is one of racial profiling
and censorship.

Many of us have been helping as supporters of TCV, an
affinity group of Artists Against the War (AAW).
Today, after consultation with other members, Laurie
of TCV went on Democracy Now and broke the story. I
first met Laurie when she and other TCV members were
ejected from NY Public Library's "Who's Afraid of
Iran" event (w/ Shirin Neshat, et al) -- they were
wearing the same t-shirts, but were ostensibly ejected
for carrying political posters.

The t-shirts have now spread globally, and become an
icon of popular, non violent resistance. Because of
the open-ended nature of the two phrases "We" (who?)
and "Will Not Be Silent" (about what?), people have
appropriated these t-shirts and used their bodies to
register opposition to many flanks of the "War On
Terror", including invasions, fear-mongering,
censorship, detention of immigrants, racial profiling
of Muslims, use of African-Americans, Latinos and
working-class Whites as cannon fodder, the abandonment
of poor Blacks in New Orleans, and the linkages and
overlaps between all these and other common struggles.
To give one example, two weeks ago, many of us as
members of Action Wednesday, collaborated with TCV to
distribute the t-shirts at Outernational concert in
Central Park, to protest the invasion of Lebanon.

Caroline Parker, Laurie Arbeiter, Susan Kingsland, Ann
Shirazi and other members of TCV and AAW put into
practice a new model of artists as public actors,
activists and intellectuals who refuse to confine
their cultural production inside gallery or museum
walls.

Contra Adorno, it becomes even more essential to write
"poetry" (using an expansive definition) after
Auschwitz. To use the many routes of contemporary
culture to dissent and to shape a new mental and
actual reality.

Sandy Kaltenborn of Kanak Attac in Berlin writes,
"Design Is Not Enough." Neither are t-shirts, but they
are a good start. To take the carrier of such witless
1970s slogans as "Have A Nice Day", "I'm With Stupid",
"Pobody's Nerfect", "Kiss Me, I'm Drunk" "My Parents
Went To London And All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt",
and invert it into an act of body-based defiance is a
good beginning.

At the risk of descending to repetition, I echo
Adorno's sentiment:

    "The only relation to art that can be sanctioned
in a reality that stands under the constant threat of
catastrophe is one that treats works of art with the
same deadly seriousness that characterizes the world
today."
    [“Valéry Proust Museum” in Prisms, Samuel and
Shierry Weber, trans. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983)]


Stay tuned.

*********************************************
Related Links

We Will Not Be Silent On JetBlue (Press Release)
http://tinyurl.com/jjo9k
http://www.parkerstudio.com/AAW/JetBlueNotSilentweb1.pdf

Snakes On, Arabs Of The Plane
http://alternet.org/story/41140/

Artists Against War
http://aawnyc.org/

The Critical Voice
http://thecriticalvoice.org/

*********************************************
Naee Mohaiemen
Visible Collective/Disappeared In America
http://www.disappearedinamerica.org

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