Reading (PA.) by Bomb Light

The artist Marcos Ramirez (aka ERRE), whose Tijuana studio is a mere fifty yards from the nearest border patrolman, spends a lot of time staring across la linea at the strange culture on the other side. He likes gringos well enough, but sometimes is scared by our sublime ignorance of our own history (not to mention those of our neighbors).

For example, how many of us ever bother to think about the contribution of strategic bombing to the American Way of Life? As Ramirez points out, the air forces of the United States have dropped billions of bombs in the twentieth century and have killed, by the most conservative reckoning, more than two million foreign civilians. Most, of course, were Asians, including over half a million Japanese incinerated by two atomic bombs and in the B-29 firestorms that burned their cities to the ground. Another million were Indochinese killed by B-52 carpet-bombing. There were also one hundred thousand or more Koreans in the Korean War, and probably that many Germans as well as surprising numbers of innocent Italians, Rumanians, and other accidental World War II-era Europeans.

We should add to this black ledger at least ten thousand non-combatant Iraqis in two Gulf Wars, a thousand Afghan villagers and maybe five hundred Serbs as well as a few Libyans and Sudanese. In the Western Hemisphere, Presidents Harding and Coolidge sent biplanes to bomb rebellious Nicaraguans, Dominicans, and Haitians during the golden age of Dollar Diplomacy. Later the CIA bombed Guatemala (1954) and Cuba (1962). We bombed Panama in 1989 and are still bombing rural areas of Colombia today.

There is, in fact, little of the earth's surface that we haven't at some time bombed, or, as the case may be, bombarded. Thus when Ramirez was recently invited to participate in "Mexico illuminated," a multi-venue exhibition (12 September to 23 November) sponsored by a consortium of arts institutions in Reading, Penn., he chose to illuminate yanqui history instead.

He won the approval of his sponsors and the Reading Redevelopment Authority to mount a public-art piece on a billboard next to the busy Bingaman Street Bridge. Imitating the green background and lettering of official highway signs, the proposed billboard simply lists eight cities bombarded or bombed by the United States, their distances from Reading, and the appropriate dates.

Ciudad de Mexico 3202 km 1847

Veracruz 3040km 1914

Hiroshima 11194 km 1945

Dresden 4837 km 1945

Hanoi 13206 km 1972

Ciudad de Panama 3497km 1989

Kabul 10979 km 2001

Baghdad 9897 km 2003

Ramirez's idea was to let commuters puzzle out for themselves the meaning of the dates and the association between cities as disparate as Ciudad de Mexico, Dresden and Baghdad. He saw the piece as a "mirror" to help us analyze our own impact on the world. He hoped that Reading residents would become active participants in the dialogue.

They have -- with a vengeance. Even though the billboard has yet to be mounted, the local paper calls it "an eruption of outrage." Letters columns and radio talk shows have been inundated with angry denunciations of Ramirez's supposedly "obscene America-bashing." The city of 82,000 doesn't seem to be talking about much else.

One columnist claimed that Ramirez was trying to show "that the rest of the world hates the United States." A city councilwoman couldn't understand what the billboard had to do with art: "Art is art. But bombing is not Art." Meanwhile, an unnamed "patriotic group" vowed to buy a counter-billboard that would simply boast (vis-à-vis the bombings): "We're Glad!" Others made darker threats.

Then the display company refused to rent the billboard space to the organizers of Mexico Illuminated, issuing a non sequitur press release that "it proudly supports the men and women serving in the military." For a moment it seemed as if Ramirez was about to join that illustrious pantheon of Mexican artists -- including Siquieros and Rivera -- who have had their work censored or destroyed by panic-stricken gringo patrons.