Burkha Barbies

By Ed Marshall

The Pittsburgh Organizing Group has been utilizing guerilla art to express the inhumane brutality of war to the City of Pittsburgh by painting dolls like bombing victims. They had requested, if you have, or your family has, BABY DOLLS of any shape or size, broken or working, which no one in your family is using any more, that you please donate them to the Thomas Merton Center for Project 1877 during regular work hours. They had asked you to bring your baby dolls to Project 1877 at 4805 Penn Avenue in Bloomfield/ Garfield. The first phase of this art project took place on April 7.

I couldn't help their project "Baby Dolls" because my daughter was not destructive as a child. She left no wounded dolls. So she would like to keep all her baby dolls for her children someday. However, I have another project in mind: "Bush's Bombed out Barbies."

We could create "The Paraplegic Barbie," "Blind Barbie" (with a white cane), or "Coma Barbie" (on perpetual life support). There is an infinite variety we could work on to parallel the Bush threats to real "Burkha Barbies," including "Raped Barbie," "Napalmed Barbie" (half burned away), "Gassed Barbie," (reaching for a gas mask), and "Nuclear Barbie" (totally incinerated).

Of course, we could put some Barbies into uniform and have a "Killer Barbie," (shooting competing companies' women and children), or a "War Crimes Ken" in gas mask using gas and flame throwers to create total devastation and derstroy the evidence. Unfortunately, there seems to be no end to the possibilities. This is a project that takes no imagination. Just copy what is going on or has been threatened to go on in Iraq.

My personal favorite would probably be the "Bombed-out Ken and Barbie Family" (with anatomically correct burnt body parts, severed and strewn around). Intermingled body parts, with Barbie's head in Ken's belly as well as all their intestines and contents strewn around, stinking up a bombed out, burning home could complete the realistic picture.

Of course, for "Burkha Barbie" (when you remove the cloth, her invisible face has been blown away) the "Miko" variation on Barbie, or other darker-skinned versions of similar dolls might be more realistic. But they would be less sympathetic to WASPs. It is harder to care about people who "differ." But we could use a little hair dye and tan paint. Besides, when someone is burnt to a crisp, you can't tell the difference anyhow. Complexion is only skin deep--if you have skin.

On the other hand, some examples of what Bush is making our military people create, like the "Tank Crushed Barbie" (flattened in the middle, with guts gushing out both ends) is easier to create full scale in Iraq. All our men have to do is emulate what the Israelis have been doing to Palestinians for over half a century: Drive a tank through a living room and take the abandoned homestead for "resettlement" (and, our variant, take their oil wells for Texas oil corporations).

I hope Mattel has some Kens and Barbies and their dark skinned friends and relatives who did not survive the assembly line, lying around, that they can contribute to this project. We could create a large display of urban guerrilla war games called "Barbie Battles Iraq." Or maybe "Barbie does Baghdad" could be true pornography, treating human life as so much "collateral damage," so much meat meant to be blown away, that we seem to think suitable for teenagers in the military.

We could make an animated videotape of the war games, showing the step by step destruction of human life from the moment "Stealth Ken" drops a bomb and "Missile Miko" lets one loose, to the final funeral when the Burkha Barbies and the Swarthy Kens, helter-skelter in intimate contact, with heads in crotches, are shoveled into mass graves. Some Kens and Barbies can be shipped home in body bags, with body parts intermingling, still unseparated and unidentifiable.

We might get Mattel a lot of advertising if we sent the video tape to be used by news media who are reluctant to show the real destruction on TV. After all, the American people don't have the stomachs for that with their TV dinners. Of course, the Burkha Barbies don't have the stomachs for that either, after those have been blown away by bombs or burned away by napalm.

A pretend "Ken and Barbie War" might fit fine with Faux News' pretend news that never shows the real cost of war. They pretend to show the cost of war when the House debates the billions it supposedly will cost. Too bad the House didn't debate the real cost of the war: the deaths and destruction it would cause.

Maybe if people took a good long look at all the variety of death we are freeing Iraqis for, they would not be so hard hearted to the calls of most of the people on Earth to stop our war crimes against humanity, the UN, and the United States' law and Constitution. Perhaps you'll wish us well on these projects designed to shake Americans back to reality about the real cost of war.

If people used their eyes to see the flaming flesh and their ears to hear the groans of misery we cause, they might take to heart what they saw of the true cost of war. They might even recognize Kenneth Emerick's courageous stand as a patriotic American, calling us to reject the fascists' call of "America, Right or Wrong,"

If children saw their Barbies in such a new light, showing the true cost of war, they might not be able to sleep at night, but they might just endorse the call, "America, right your own wrongs." Instead, their parents applaud the warmongers with cataracts on their own eyes gouging out the eyes of others to remove the gnats where those eyes had been. Can the blinding can lead the blinded on the path to democracy? Or is the only path we know the black gold road?

Many would rather badger Clinton for being a bugger on an intern than impeach Bush for violating numerous laws and committing crimes against humanity that may make "War Crime Kens" of all our kids in the military. They urge us to support cruelties that defy American and International Law and the UN Charter to which our Senate and President committed us as a law of our land long ago.

Opinions (as it was headlined and appeared in the Clarion News)

We should try, convict and execute Bush

By Ed Marshall, Clarion

For Bush's prima facie violation of the laws of the United States, our House of Representatives is obligated to begin an investigation of Bush's violation of our treaty law, and to impeach him with a recommendation of trial and removal by the Senate for his violation of their law endorsing the requirements of the charter of the UN.

Once removed, he can be tried and hopefully convicted and executed for his violation of our constitutional requirement that a commander in chief only exercise his war powers upon specific authorization of Congress and never against the laws of our country.

If our courts do not choose to invoke the highest penalty for treason that Bush's crimes deserve, death, our country must deliver him up to the international community to be tried for crimes against humanity.

We are the forefathers of the living constitution of our country for the future. The decisions we made are the precedents that future generations will cite to further define their liberties or their slavery. We must be the statesmen that our country needs now, true "patriots" in the sense of "fathers" of our country's future. A true patriot says of his offspring for the future not, my country right or wrong but "My Country right its wrongs!"

Right now, our country has committed many wrongs for us to right in Operation Iraqi Rape. We dare not sleep until we have set the precedents of righting those wrongs and removing and punishing, where it might be helpful to stop future violations of our land, those national and international crimes against humanity and our constitution by those who have been using our government to wage a religious crusade for Christians and Jews against Muslims. Neither the people nor the legislature of our country have legally authorized those crimes against humanity.