Macondo: Bonnie and Clyde Captured

Everything from the extraordinary form-conferring violence under a big empty sky, to the lack of security at the prison which permitted Bonnie to throw a pair of wirecutters over the fence, to the ARIZONA tatt bannered across Clyde's chest in the creepy photograph of his capture taken by the US Marshalls -- a war trophy photograph moving into the Abu Ghraib/Khmer Rouge trophy shot aesthetic of terror/cut ears on a string place -- to the fugitives allegedly thinking of themselves as movie stars, to their movement throughout this big empty space to Colorado and Wyoming -- to the name of the trailer park town, Jake's Corner, AZ, where Clyde's mother allegedly conspired to help the gang, to the chest-beating of the AZ troopies, it's all Macondo, baby.

I feel so at home.

I hasten to add that as a professional critic of war and genocide art who has read an execrable 500 page PhD. thesis on the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Kim Phuc/Nick Ut/napalm girl photograph, were I a newspaper editor? Not only would I not hesitate, I would, uh, kill, to print this photograph in my newspaper. The Macondo Manana [TILDE!!!!] has it on the inside, page 7, abutted with a pic of Clyde's victims. Interesting choice.



I think I'ma get me a Jake's Corner tramp stamp.


( Huge Headline in Today's Macondo Manana [TILDE!!!] )

The Veil: Notes

It is, of course, the women who don’t get to fly home to New York—or indeed leave any airport without their husbands’ consent—who truly deserve international attention. And yet these are the very women our Western politicians, media outlets, and academicians barely acknowledge because, as I was constantly advised by European and American diplomats in both Egypt and also the Sudan when I visited, “We have no right to pass judgment on the customs and mores of other countries.”

Here are just a few of those customs and mores: in Turkey, a nation often cited as “moderate,” wife beating is so common that 69 percent of all female health workers polled (and almost 85 percent of all male health workers) said that violence against women was in certain instances excusable. In April, a new epidemiological study in the European Journal of Public Health revealed that one out of every five homicides in Pakistan is the result of a so-called honor killing. And in Mauritania, the age-old practice of force-feeding young girls—a life-threatening process that is intended to make them round and therefore “marriageable”—has seen a renaissance. Girls as young as five are herded into “fattening farms.” Those who resist are tortured.
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/articles/2009-Summer/full-Bachrach.html