All You Need Is Love: Daniel Edwards' String of Babies

As President Obama tries to quell the madding mob, the sculptor Daniel Edwards last week unveiled the happy contrast of String of Babies,

a rubber sculpture of Octomom Nadya Suleman and her baby octopi. At a pre-publication $199.00, this is a bargain collectible, done in the soothing, au courant tone of Pepto pink. If there is any other work as joyously counterstated to the national dilemma--however unintentionally--one would be hard pressed to identify it.

You might argue that Nadya Suleman, the media focus on Nadya Suleman, the medical profession, and even Daniel Edwards are all part of the present troubles. Even our newly elected President has, over the past weekend, allowed things to get out of hand. But here we have Suleman's babies in a firm cephalopod grip; the same fate will not befall her even as she claims that a posse of nannies has been spying on her and reporting her every move to child welfare officials who would, presumably, be eager for her to release her protective embrace.

The artist's bio at Guy Hepner Galleries states that his body of work is "Neo-Pop" and that it is "prophetic and consistent in its ability to humanize social issues the media and public have trouble addressing." Translated, that means it is explanatory. One can therefore conclude that Mr. Edwards, not President Obama, has the answers. There is no humanizing AIG. One also notes that neither the media nor the public has had any trouble whatsoever addressing what appears to be the inhumanity of a medical profession that would implant multiple embryos into Suleman, who already had six children; that act alone felt like taking advantage of the mentally challenged.

Why, one wonders, does Edwards feel the media and public have trouble humanizing social issues? Why can we not put a face to the monster? Is it that man's inhumanity to man stuff so believed of Aeschylus, Aristophanes, and Apollodorus of Carystus? Edwards understands the monster, at least in invertebrate form.

If we admit humanity to Suleman, we might open a floodgate of such admissions. Imagine imbuing the AIG executives with tenderer human emotions. We might also have to take an awkward look at our own doubtful behavioral patterns.

Edwards states that he thinks "the world is in desperate need of a maternal figure who is exclusively devoted to being a mother. There is something almost religious and pure about her in that way." We need that something, even if we are presently unable to articulate just what it might be. And, slyly, Edwards implies that motherhood has gotten out of hand itself; if there are not enough difficulties in mother/child relationships to begin with, it is in some circles simply a means of accessorizing, a sorority pin, and a way of keeping up with the latest fashion. His Suleman is slightly victimized, not neurotic, and her regenerative powers are definitely misunderstood; she is an alchemist, her goals are humanitarian and patriotic; after the flag, whom do you love?

We have reached, evidently, an unfortunate point where motherly love is all but denigrated. In the face of all this bad motherhood, this most original and natural of bonds has been held up not only to public ridicule but also to the niggling question of the value of a human life lived valuably, which is to say given a fair chance at a decent economic and emotional means of survival.

You say you have trouble seeing the Octomom as religious and pure? Or maybe even as something other than a despicable fictional character created on a slow news day? Some said the same about Mary Magdalene, remember. One day, the Octomom might be seen as saintly, as a champion of the Constitutional right to do whatever anyone else thinks is wrong. and as bringing nothing into this world but love. AIG, on the other hand, is still plundering along as a meaningless and corrupt object.

String of Babies available at http://www.guyhepner.com/

Obama's Magic Kingdom

Barack Obama's victory was less a triumph of color than it was a triumph of the American donkey, that pack animal tired of laboring under the heavy load of political mismanagement, corruption, and greed.

Obama now holds the keys to a crumbled kingdom that often seems as if it can only be transformed by magic. We have regressed--through desperation--to the fantasies and fairy tales of childhood, where pumpkins become coaches, straw turns into gold, and Dick Cheney wakes up as a frog. Yet how many of our dreams are illusory? Much like a vacation to Disneyland, we have now bought a ticket to a destination that will bear a near-crippling weight of expectation and demand.

America has pinned so much hope upon Obama that he now seems fictionalized, as if invented to answer an overwhelming need for niceness and equanimity. Will we allow him error? Will we allow him human qualities beyond the acquisition of a dog? Will we will allow him failure?

What were we really voting for? I think we were voting for happiness, as if we were ten years old and were immeasurably satisfied with Saturday morning cartoons. Or fifty years old and disgusted with torture and civilian murder. We weren't voting for more scary monsters, and we certainly weren't voting for the strange and terrifying thing America has become: the country where you can't afford the cost of the ride. Obama's election is a family event, G-rated, presumed safe, and assumed to bring a smile to your face. Or so goes hope.

Code Names Revealed

By Suzanna Mars

Obama and Bush: The First Meeting

By David Ballard

And Your Little Dog, Too!

By David Ballard and Suzanna Mars

SLAM DUNK!

Music to Vote By: Election Looney Tunes

By David Ballard and Suzanna Mars

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

By David Ballard and Suzanna Mars

Spread the Wealth

Whip His Ass

Love Thy (Terrorist) Neighbor

Someone should tell John McCain that it is impossible to douse the flames of fear. Now that Senator McCain has attempted to control the uncontrollable--the emotions of the people--he seems unable to understand that his reversal is as good as fuel to the fire.

As of Friday, Democratic candidate Barack Obama is "a decent man, (a) family man" with whom Senator McCain just happens to have "disagreements." Barack Obama is also a "citizen," a word that McCain feebly used in the hopes of interlocking Senator Obama with the madding crowd, some of whom are uncivilized citizens of the non-ideal civilization otherwise known as America.

For some of these citizens, September 11, 2001 is the official birth date of the Arab-equals-Muslim confoundment. This confusion has always existed across our prairies and amid our amber waves, yet the events of that day eternally cemented the two in the minds of many.

Senator McCain's response was to a woman who called Senator Obama "an Arab." She likely meant "a Muslim," but befuddlement is in our Bill of Rights and we defend it proudly, especially on national TV and in other fora where we make asses of ourselves. What she meant wasn't necessarily relevant, because Senator McCain's clumsy response had all the thwack of someone getting hit in the face with a large ham: Arabs (or Muslims) are not decent, are not family men, and are not citizens (of America).

There are over two millions persons of Arab descent in America, and nearly seven million Muslims. Most of these are citizens, and surely somewhere among them are decent men and family men and guys who like to watch baseball in the dog days of summer.

So bumbling was Senator McCain's defense that it might well--in all its gaucherie-- have included our national pastime. "Yeah, and I've seen him toss a ball with the neighborhood kids. So there."

Our new national pastime is Muslim hating, a flare-up of religious hostility no less contagious and parlous than the anti-Semitism of America in the 1930s.

For his faute-de-mieux defense, Senator McCain was jeered. Jeered! They came to watch the further tarring of the terrorist and instead they got a nostrum of questionable value. Senator McCain's poorly phrased reply put the issue not in resolution or repair but in limbo, and in limbo it lies while the crowd calls out for more. We will have our Coliseum!

Whom can we blame for the McCain-Palin ticket's misapprehension of simple human psychology? As of Friday, this ticket has done nothing but confuse the crowd, who primarily took their cues from Sarah Palin. Once confused, without leadership, we are directionless, and without direction we are dangerous. Hardly an intellect, Ms. Palin still ultimately bears responsibility for her utterances, even if such a definition of literacy as to research Westbrook Pegler before quoting him would elude many of us. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is just a convenient sound bite: Pegler was a rabid anti-Semite who called Jewish immigrants "geese." And somewhat obscure to the average American, of whose company Ms. Palin so proudly keeps.

Senator McCain found himself caught in a political trap from which there was no clear way of escape and no immediate way to clear conscience either. Should he have
confronted us with a primer on linguistic, cultural, and religious identity and how they are not always intertwined? Has anyone asked him to define them? Could he have? And what about us, would we have listened? It's frightening stuff, this ignorance, but equally frightening is deafness. It may be too late to love thy terrorist neighbor.

Here is where Senator McCain's remoteness will truly work against him: Will anyone pay attention? It is also where Senator McCain should take on that leadership role--an unprecedented one to be sure--and go on national TV to bash some sense into our ugly little heads. Scholars not, we aren't known for digging at the root of things. We leave that to the Greeks, to Pilatus and Socrates, and not to our overstuffed numbskull population who appear to gorge mostly on the type of junk Ms. Palin was dishing up with her "terrorist pal" obiter dictum. That's the food of the Gods these days, or so it appears.

We are standing at the brink of war, once again, waving our flag as wildly as we ever have. This war now supersedes the war on behalf of the wage-earning classes that has been fought to so little effect recently. This is just the stuff that has burned so brightly for so many years and now threatens to engulf us, one liberty at a time.

Outside of some well-intentioned editorial, it isn't even clear if we are aware that this problem exists in the first place. It certainly isn't supper-table chat, at least not in my neck of woods. At this moment, several weeks before the election, we are as divided as ever. What did you do this weekend, and do you wonder if John McCain spent part of his in a crash course on successfully handling hostile face-offs? Three weeks away from voting, McCain stands poised to miss the single greatest opportunity to show his true leadership qualities, even if he learned them under a 48-hour time constraint.

(Thanks to David Ballard for the image concept and two cents' worth.)

STEAMED!

By Suzanna Mars and David Ballard