Fool for Love

Love makes me treat you the way that I do,
Gee baby, ain't I good to you?
There's nothing in this world too good

For a girl so good and true.
Gee baby, ain't I good to you?

From the song, Gee Baby, Ain't I Good To You? (Don Redman, Andy Razaf, 1929)

What role do visual fictions play in our consciousness? How do we respond to enacted images of happiness on billboards, sadness in television melodramas, or fear in horror movies? Do we rush to emotionally embrace each unfolding narrative, fooled every time as it were, empathizing with people who act out our daydreams and nightmares? Some suggest that we have a unique ability to temporarily suspend disbelief, to empathize with pictures as if the narratives they describe were real, and then to cleanly disengage as the credits roll and we turn the page. Can we maintain objective distance, and release only a fraction of our potential emotional response for fictions, reserving real empathy for real people and real events?1

The ability to discriminate between real and manufactured emotion is a talent individuals possess in varying measures. Yet our ability to negotiate the emotional power of fictional imagery may  be compromised by sheer volume. Everyday life is saturated by the proliferation of fantasy-based advertising imagery, coupled increasingly with an omnipresent popular culture of superheroes and supermodels that enact fantasies of prowess and attraction. Many times a day, we are seduced by images of wish fulfillment. Many times a day, we are invited to consider the disappointments of our own lives.

Vancouver artist Susan Bozic’s Dating Portfolio is a series of fifteen photographs that describe the iconic moments of the modern dating ritual as staged by the artist and a male store window mannequin she calls Carl. Through the series of images, the two unlikely lovebirds enact simple pleasures, from sharing a coffee in a café or enjoying a picnic, to more glamourous dates such as yachting and drinking champagne on a private jet. Taken as a whole, the dream-like images tell a story of the progressive staging of declarations of love, from casual meetings in public places to increasingly elaborate, formal dates. The narrative describes a modern dating ritual that is both humorous and psychologically complex, revealing dating as a socially constructed behaviour. The Dating Portfolio is a series of projections from the point of view of the female subject who is the active agent in the creation of every scene. Bozic’s store-window mannequin brings into relief the fantasy driving these images and defines an empty space of desire within the perfected image of relational happiness. The empty space, or the lack, represented by the male mannequin in Bozic’s images, functions as an ironic site of unrequited longing.

Bozic’s images combine the aesthetic values of commercial photography – contrived, tightly composed scenes, highly focused and controlled lighting, extensively refinished surfaces in post-production – with scenarios derived from romance literature and illustrated consumer advertising. The enacted photograph, the stock-in-trade of commercial photography, is a medium ideally suited for the visual realization of a contemporary idea of classical perfection. Conventionally used to sell hair and skin care products, make-up, spring wardrobes and automobiles, commercial photography is in the business of spinning dreams. Other-worldly glamour is lent to people and things through staged scenes of luxury and comfort that arephotographed in highly controlled lighting and polished through post-production photographic manipulation.2 Bodies can be toned and slimmed, images of food can be made to seem more appetizing than in real life, interior design and gardens can be rendered as small corners of heaven. In the enacted photograph and in the photographic still-life, every visible detail can be controlled and perfected, every gesture and nuance can be scripted. Life can be messy. Photographs can be perfect.

* * *

Eating popcorn and smiling a big, cover-girl smile, a young woman sits in a movie theatre curled under the arm of a store-window mannequin. The contrast of that smile and that stiff embrace is simultaneously humourous and disconcerting. Bozic calls the image He let me pick the movie – the “He” being, of course, her imaginary boyfriend Carl, the male mannequin with whom she sits in the cinema. The couple in the movie theatre is an icon of happiness and as such, He let me pick the movie doesn’t fail to charm. It is an image that generously communicates a flush of warm thoughts: the pleasure of human sociability, the warmth of companionship, the social approval of a public relationship and the thrill of romantic love. The movie theatre is a democratic space – indifferent to class or wealth. They eat popcorn – so we know it’s a light comedy or a popular  film, a passing diversion – neither high art nor serious documentary. Between them, there is no question of status or power or money. The charm of the image is in the absence of guile: the couple is there for no other reason than they simply enjoy each other’s company.

The charming images depicting simple shared pleasures in the Dating Portfolio eventually give way to an escalating fantasy of devotion and adoration. This is the fantasy of “Carl’s girlfriend.” Every activity is imagined from the point of view of her desire. The titles of the photographs name the things that Carl has done for her: He let me pick the movie; Carl takes me to the nicest places; He surprised me with a romantic getaway; He remembered our anniversary. Her imaginary boyfriend is so good in fact, that he is able to anticipate her needs in images such as All I said was my feet were a little sore, and He’s so thoughtful, it wasn’t even my birthday. Each consecutive image in The Dating Portfolio builds toward the inevitable emotional crescendo of the white wedding, a fantasy of mutual adoration codified in popular women’s literature, music and cinema.

Bozic’s staging of the Dating Portfolio recalls the highly aestheticized narratives of traditional romance fiction.  In its styling, the portfolio reprises the cover illustrations of the so-called “marriage” sub-genre of romance fiction, where marriage is the ultimate goal and the story-line traces a growing but somewhat dispassionate love. Marriage romances typically featured illustrations of attractive, well-groomed couples decorously, if stiffly, embracing.3 The lack of passion in this genre may account for the crucial role of the mannequin in Bozic’s restaging of the fantasy. However, she has updated the genre in many ways. The sketchy pastel renderings of the traditional romance covers are replaced here by saturated hues, satiny shimmer and the sharp-focus gleam of polished surfaces. In the image The picnic was his idea, the budding romance takes place under a clear blue sky and beneath falling cherry blossoms. In He remembered our anniversary, there is little left to chance in the wardrobe or setting. Carl’s girlfriend meets him at the door in pearls, embroidered satin skirt and matching satin shoes.

In Carl takes me to the nicest places the pair are out on the town in matching black. The marriage fantasy in the images is strongly equated with a fundamental materialist ethos. Make-up, hair and wardrobe are always fresh and perfect for the occasion. Deeper passion is equated with greater expense and better clothes. There is little that is spontaneous or left to chance in The Dating Portfolio.  In her aestheticizing of the dating ritual, Bozic describes for us a  culture in which the material qualities of life trump life itself.

If consumerism may be a characteristic particular to our time, commercial photography has lent itself well to the promotion of consumer values. In the Dating Portfolio, Bozic has referenced the photographic advertising conventions of magazine and billboard advertisements for jewellery, liquor, clothing and tourist destinations. Her actors enact their devotions to each other on a conventional stage, facing an unseen audience. Glamour is the focus of every shot, whether  it is mountains, pearls, champagne or apparel. Bozic moves beyond the conventions of commercial still photography in Bedroom, however, where the mannequin’s back to the camera recalls the conventional and economical staging of the daytime soap opera. Little is expended here in terms of adornment, the focus being on the anticipation of sex. Images such as Photo Booth and All I said was my feet were a bit sore point to a greater naturalism – seemingly referencing spontaneous photo booth sessions or casual snapshots. Yet even these apparently spontaneously captured moments have been codified, conventionalized, and marketed as signifiers of “unaffected” charm and affection.

The marketing of images of affection in cinema, television, and publicity plays on the inherent voyeurism of people and the Dating Portfolio images work within this convention. We have become accustomed to living vicariously through the emotional lives of celebrities and actors. The viewer of popular media functions as a fly on the wall, unseen by the actors who pretend to be in intimate situations and who behave as if there was no one watching, making the viewer's experience akin to that of a peeping-tom. Each episode produces a frisson of excitement similar to the feeling we get from looking through someone else’s private photos, or coming across someone's discarded photo-booth pictures, where we are afforded a fraction of a second of someone else's interior life.

The fantasy of Carl’s girlfriend’s that Bozic describes is clearly as hollow as Carl. While we are charmed by these images of simple affection and by the more elaborate displays of devotion, and drawn to the aura of glamour each image holds, there is a hole in the centre of  the picture. Carl’s girlfriend seems not to notice that her dream date is a dud. His perfect hair and rugged jaw line are only a cartoon fantasy of maleness. The viewer can’t help but laugh – perhaps at her naiveté, perhaps at our own. Is the joke on us? The empty space, or the lack, represented by the male mannequin in Bozic’s images is ironic, making reference to desire through the absence of its object.  The enacted scenes are expressions of Carl’s girlfriend’s need for approval and for displays of affection and of her desire for unconditional love. One criticism of romance fiction is that such fantasy becomes a substitute for agency in women. To quote Germaine Greer, “This is the hero that women have chosen for themselves. The traits invented for him have been invented by women cherishing the chains of their bondage.”4  

In Susan Bozic’s the Dating Portfolio, the emperor has no clothes. The imprisoning agent of her heroine’s desire is revealed as an empty shell. The artist mocks the fantasy of prince charming, and the contemporary culture of materialism associated with it, ironically asserting the emptiness of that dream. With the Dating Portfolio, Bozic directs our attention to the difficulties of establishing and maintaining meaningful relationships in a world of increasing atomization, digitization, and materialism, where face-to-face contact seems increasingly elusive. But the dream persists, even if the centre is hollow. Desire, that need for physical and emotional completion, persists even after we think we have deconstructed its political biases. We desire a connection to someone who listens to us, understands us, protects us and adores us. The possibility and promise of human connection suggest that with it, everything is beautiful and everything is possible. Instead, the desire for human completion remains chimerical – its emotional consolation a sterile and destructive dream of limitless consumption.

1. Cf. Naomi Rosenblum, who suggests that, “Camera images have been able to make invented ‘realities’ seem not at all fraudulent and have permitted viewers to suspend disbelief while remaining aware that the scene has been contrived.” Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography, 1984, p. 495.

2. Historically, photographic retouching was done using the airbrush. Contemporary photographic manipulation is now primarily digital, involving computer programs – the most popular being Photoshop.

3. Jennifer McKnight-Trontz, The Look of Love: The Art of the Romance Novel (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), 35.

4. Germain Greer, The Female Eunuch (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), p. 176.

Objects of Affection: Press Release

Curated by Gordon Hatt, featuring work by Susan Bozic, Meesoo Lee, Jillian McDonald, Maria Legault, Warren Quigley & Tanya Read

Objects of Affection was an exhibition about misplaced love. Desire, that intoxicating stirring of affection for someone or something, is a constant throughout our lives. The objects of our affection, however, are constantly changing. What do we desire? Why do we desire, and how do we express this desire? 

Desire is of course shaped and channeled by religion, tradition, education, class and culture. We are educated in wants and needs, taught what to hope and wish for and what to disdain. But lurking beneath our educated restraint are subconscious desires, desires motivated by needs other than those determined by culture and society. Our needs may be a striving for personal completion and fulfillment, something which may be little more than a projection of our own narcissism. Never quite satisfied, we are driven to confront a gnawing existential unhappiness, constantly desiring, in an endless search to somehow fill the feeling of an emptiness within. 

The six artists in Objects of Affection address this existential longing through their work. Popular culture, that great vehicle for the creation and imaging of desire in the service of the consumer society, is referenced by all of the artists in the exhibition. Romance novels and advertising, Hollywood movies and fan magazines, soap operas and comics are the direct or indirect subjects of these artists. The artifacts of popular culture reflect back to us both our ideal and our comically pathetic selves. We attempt to measure ourselves against these representations but they never seem to fit. Engaging popular culture by appropriating its means, in effect talking back to it, these six artists create spaces for the desiring subject in a culture of publicity and celebrity. They address the inadequacies of popular culture's representations of who we are and what we feel, and confront the feelings of emptiness that these images of popular culture do much to create. 

Vancouver artist Susan Bozic has created the Dating Portfolio, a series of staged photographs depicting a young woman's romantic fantasies. Her fantasy date in these photographs is a store window mannequin. Together they enact images that recall romance novels, billboard advertising, television commercials and Hollywood films portraying the blissful co-existence of happy couples. Her matinee idol mannequin is a pliant clothes hanger, providing an amenable but insensate partner in the illustration of the young woman's impossible desire.

Meesoo Lee, also of Vancouver, has produced a series of videos he calls Pop Songs. Working within the genre of music video, Lee samples television and video, selectively editing and adding soundtracks. His resulting modifications tease out the structural relationships of the media and its content, focussing our voyeuristic gaze on televisual images of figure skaters, rodeo riders, actors and the other shooting stars of our media environment. Lee's Pop Songs reveal video and film as a virtual peep show that feeds false intimacy to an atomized and insatiably desiring public.

New York-based artist Jillian McDonald 's video Me and Billy-Bob is a projection and examination of the obsessional fantasy that fuels our now pervasive celebrity culture. Me and Billy-Bob is a collage of clips from movies starring the actor Billy-Bob Thornton. McDonald digitally inserts herself into existing film clips as the recurring object of actor Billy-Bob Thornton's affection. They exchange looks of longing, pleasure, and pain, yet the desire remains unconsummated, looping infinitely. McDonald's intervention is part of a larger body of work that includes other videos, a website, a photo series, music, and a participatory tattoo project for fans.

Toronto-based performance artist Maria Legault's work is based around a life-sized puppet she calls Plus One. As the name implies, Plus One is Legault's imaginary partner, a foil and a projection of her desires and anxieties in being part of a couple. Their marriage and its disintegration are the subject of a performance where intimacy and communication are doomed from the start. 

Ridgeway, Ontario artist Warren Quigley creates an installation environment through the arrangement of aspects of a motel room. His Love Motel makes reference to bordellos from New Orleans from the turn of the previous century, to the Love Motels of Asia in the 60s and 70s, to the North American roadside motels spawned by car culture. While other artists attempt to describe the illusiveness of desire through surrogate love objects, Quigley describes desire as a vacant shell of anticipation and regret.

Toronto-based artist Tanya Read created Mr. Nobody in 1998, a black-and-white anthropomorphic animal resembling a cross between a panda bear and a cat. Mr. Nobody is not the ideal integrated self, but the self as fragmented, aimless, confused and desiring. Like his popular television counterpart Homer Simpson, Mr. Nobody is a bottomless well of omnidirectional need and comic pathos. 

Image: Susan Bozic, He let me pick the movie, C-print, 30 x 40 inches, 2005. 

Forward! Introduction to University of Waterloo Fine Arts 4th Year Studio Exhibition Catalogue

Nineteen students will graduate from fourth year studio at the University of Waterloo Department of Fine Arts this spring. Nineteen students will take the experiences and learning they have acquired in this past year and in the past four years and apply it to the next ten years of their lives. Give or take a few years. 

Give a few years extra if you have been present for every class, and used every spare time opportunity to work in the studio. Give a couple more years if you collected postcards or stole invitations from the bulletin boards containing art work that attracted you, irritated you, charmed you or otherwise turned your head, and then give a year or two more if you regularly stayed up late trawling the Internet or combing the library stacks looking for other images by those artists or reading interpretations of their work. Add a couple of months if in the past year you have had at least one drunken argument with a fellow student where the subject was the relevance of art in the contemporary world. Add a few months if you have fallen asleep with your head in an art book. Add a couple more months if it completely screwed up your dreams that night and tack on some more time if you woke up the next morning still thinking about it.

I don’t have to explain how you take years off. If you missed a bunch of classes for no good reason, rarely spent time in the studio, and gave little thought to the discipline of art during the rest of the day or week, then this experience will not linger. You won’t have to worry about fitting all of your art work into the van when you move. What the hell, what you have you probably won’t even bother moving – might as well just leave it for the custodians to deal with. With little invested, little will be returned and in a couple of years the whole experience will be a vague memory.

By the time you read this all of the above will be water under the bridge. You will have either done the work or you haven’t. The larger question facing you will be “To what end?” Upon graduating, will you be able to enter the world as a professional artist? Probably not yet. Those who are considering that route should be planning on a lot more work and study before that becomes a possibility. Will this programme significantly add to your employment prospects? No, not significantly, but neither will your fourth year psychology credit. Will you have become a sophisticated consumer of cultural products? Well, let’s put it this way. It’s a start.

When people question the importance of a fine art education today, I counter that it has never been more important. In a world where knowledge is increasingly mediated through images rather than text, where else do we study the construction and the interpretation of pictures? In our society, those who have the ability to control, shape and distribute images also have, not coincidentally, the greatest political and economic power. An educated population is no longer one that is just literate and numerate, an educated population today is also visually literate. An educated person today understands that we can be lead by our dreams and our fears and that those dreams and fears are often constructed by others through visual media. True freedom is the ability to perceive seduction, manipulation and coercion for what it is, and to act, speak and create and exchange images that are our own, consciously, freely, humanely.

Yes, it’s a start. Your education is truly the beginning of your freedom.

Gordon Hatt, 2006

Forward!

Nineteen students will graduate from fourth year studio at the University of Waterloo Department of Fine Arts this spring. Nineteen students will take the experiences and learning they have acquired in this past year and in the past four years and apply it to the next ten years of their lives. Give or take a few years.

Give a few years extra if you have been present for every class, and used every spare time opportunity to work in the studio. Give a couple more years if you collected postcards or stole invitations from the bulletin boards containing art work that attracted you, irritated you, charmed you or otherwise turned your head, and then give a year or two more if you regularly stayed up late trawling the Internet or combing the library stacks looking for other images by those artists or reading interpretations of their work. Add a couple of months if in the past year you have had at least one drunken argument with a fellow student where the subject was the relevance of art in the contemporary world. Add a few months if you have fallen asleep with your head in an art book. Add a couple more months if it completely screwed up your dreams that night, and tack on some more time if you woke up the next morning still thinking about it.

I don’t have to explain how you take years off. If you missed a bunch of classes for no good reason, rarely spent time in the studio, and gave little thought to the discipline of art during the rest of the day or week, then this experience will not linger. You won’t have to worry about fitting all of your art work into the van when you move. What the hell, what you have you probably won’t even bother moving – might as well just leave it for the custodians to deal with. With little invested, little will be returned and in a couple of years the whole experience will be a vague memory.

By the time you read this all of the above will be water under the bridge. You will have either done the work or you haven’t. The larger question facing you will be “To what end?” Upon graduating, will you be able to enter the world as a professional artist? Probably not yet. Those who are considering that route should be planning on a lot more work and study before that becomes a possibility. Will this programme significantly add to your employment prospects? No, not significantly, but neither will your fourth year psychology credit. Will you have become a sophisticated consumer of cultural products? Well, let’s put it this way. It’s a start.

When people question the importance of a fine art education today, I counter that it has never been more important. In a world where knowledge is increasingly mediated through images rather than text, where else do we study the construction and the interpretation of pictures? In our society, those who have the ability to control, shape and distribute images also have, not coincidentally, the greatest political and economic power. An educated population is no longer one that is just literate and numerate, an educated population today is also visually literate. An educated person today understands that we can be led by our dreams and our fears and that those dreams and fears are often constructed by others through visual media. True freedom is the ability to perceive seduction, manipulation and coercion for what it is, and to act, speak and create and exchange images that are our own, consciously, freely, humanely.

Yes, it’s a start. Your education is truly the beginning of your freedom.

Gordon Hatt, 2006

Anitra Hamilton: Bomb Ride

Anitra Hamilton’s Bomb Ride is a decommissioned and disarmed American-made MK-82 aerial bomb mounted on a children's coin-operated mechanical riding amusement like those found at the local supermarket or shopping mall. She has painted the bomb with stripes of red, blue, orange and white – colours that make the bomb look fun and festive but which also allude to the colours of military insignia.  Put a loonie ($1 coin) in the machine and you can ride it for three minutes.

A bomb is an explosive filler enclosed in a casing. Bombs are generally classified according to the ratio of explosive material to total weight. The principal classes are general-purpose (GP), fragmentation, penetration and cluster bombs. 1

The image of an adult riding a bomb recalls the comically patriotic Major T. J. "King" Kong (played by the actor Slim Pickens) in the satirical anti-war movie Dr. Strangelove. The image of a child riding a bomb produces more disturbing associations. Images of children burned and mutilated and orphaned by aerial bombing have become icons of the cruelty of modern war : a crying Chinese baby abandoned in the bombed out station during the Japanese rape of Nanjing in 1937; the image of the naked Kim Phuc, her clothes burned from her body, frantically running to escape the inferno of an American napalm attack during the Vietnam war. In 2003, the image of the orphaned, armless and severely burned twelve-year old Ali Ismail Abbas became the most recent symbol of aerial bombing’s cruel and indiscriminate victimization of children. 2

Approximately 50-percent of the General Purpose [GP] bomb's weight is explosive materials. These bombs usually weigh between 500 and 2,000 pounds and produce a combination of blast and fragmentation effects. The approximately one-half-inch-thick casing creates a fragmentation effect at the moment of detonation, and the 50-percent explosive filler causes considerable damage from blast effect. The most common GP bombs are the MK-80 series weapons. 3

Grocery store riding amusements seem to have been a rite of passage for many children growing up in post-war North America. The rides are aimed at pre-school children and their parents and feature cast fibreglass images of saddled horses, lions, tigers and giraffes, miniature cars, boats, airplanes, rockets and trains. Many parents obtain great pleasure in plopping a barely walking one year old child on a gently rocking airplane or mechanical horse. Often, the toddlers are terrified and have no interest in the ride – mostly they tentatively smile back at the their greatly amused parents. Following the initial Kodak moment, the kids gradually loose their fear of the rides and begin to look forward to the prospect of another three minute riding adventure. Parents, on the other hand, regret their initial enthusiasm in promoting these amusements to their children and grow weary of the prospect of spending another dollar on such an underwhelming adventure.

Blast is caused by tremendous dynamic overpressures generated by the detonation of a high explosive. Complete (high order) detonation of high-explosives can generate pressures up to 700 tons per square inch and temperatures in the range of 3,000 to 4,500º prior to bomb case fragmentation. It is essential that the bomb casing remain intact long enough after the detonation sequence begins to contain the hot gases and achieve a high order explosion. Approximately half of the total energy generated will be used in swelling the bomb casing to 1.5 times its normal size prior to fragmenting and then imparting velocity to those fragments. The remainder of this energy is expended in compression of the air surrounding the bomb and is responsible for the blast effect. This effect is most desirable for attacking walls, collapsing roofs, and destroying or damaging machinery. 4

The storybook image of the pre-schooler riding off into dream-land on an affable tiger is soon enough replaced by an active fantasy life of power and conquest. Pre-adolescent children act out these fantasies in the form of magic wands, ray-guns, swords and pistols as well as becoming fervently engaged with super-hero comic books, action movies and violent video games. 5 T he dream resides in almost every school-aged child of possessing god-like powers of life and death. Little boys especially like to pretend that they can fly like Superman, be impervious to assaults like Ironman, and possess super human strength like the Hulk. This childish dream of flying, shooting, killing and pretend-dying has been identified as a way in which children act out and deal with anxieties and fears. 6

The attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended is prohibited.” 7 Hague Convention, 1907.

According to the United States Airforce, Lt. Myron Crissy holds the honour of being the first man to drop a live bomb from an airplane. It happened during a civilian flying meet near San Francisco on January 15, 1911. 8 The first aerial bomb was dropped in combat on November 1, 1911 by the Italian pilot Lieutenant Guilio Cavotti. Cavotti made history by leaning out of his monoplane and dropping a two kilogram hand-grenade on the North African oasis Tagiura near Tripoli. 9

Cavotti’s bomb began modern history’s dark chapter of bombing in the cause of colonial subjugation. Where previously it had been agreed upon by international convention that the bombing of non-combatants constituted a war crime, now a combination of economics and the belief in European racial superiority permitted the indiscriminate bombing of Arab, African, Indian and Asian people. Aerial bombing was literally a license to kill and contemporary European legal opinion cleared the way for bombing in the colonies that in other circumstances have been consider war crimes. 10

Reading about these historic firsts, one can’t help but sense the elation, the sense of unlimited power that aerial bombing produced. These early bomber pilots were unassailable – gods with super powers, impervious to the primitive weaponry of the colonial trouble makers and savages they were sent to sub-due. They were like children on their mechanical hobby horses, zapping and vaporizing their enemies, and never having to die – big kids playing war. War at its root, is dangerous play – thrill seeking, joy riding, hunting, fighting, wrestling, banging, screaming, flying fun.

Wars, according to Martin van Creveld, are not engaged in order to achieve goals, rather, goals are chosen in order to create an excuse to wage war.

One very important way in which men can attain joy, freedom, happiness, even delirium and ecstasy, is by not staying home with wife and family, even to the point where, often enough, they are only too happy to give up their nearest and dearest in favour of – war. 11

When Anitra Hamilton’s Bomb Ride is described, invariably what ensues is a nervous giggle – a giggle that recognizes the ironic play of associations – the adorable toddler on a coin operated riding amusement contrasted with the cruel reality of bombing.  Bomb Ride punctures our idealized notions of art and human improvement to declare them a thin cover for our innate potential for violence. It is a picture of humanity, as seen by Hamilton – we are Slim Pickens riding the bomb in Dr. Strangelove. Bruno Bettelheim suggested that violent fairy tales have the purpose of guiding the child to “relinquish his infantile dependency wishes and to achieve more satisfying independence.” 12 Would it be so.

We recognize ourselves as we watch the kids jump up and straddle Hamiton’s Bomb Ride like some magic rocket. For three minutes, they are flying into a weightless space of power and unassailable omnipotence. Just like the kids we entertain violent fantasies and we allow ourselves to be entertained by fantasy violence. We are all kids at heart.

Gordon Hatt 2004

End Notes

1: Bombs for Beginners, <http://fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/dumb/bombs.htm >.

2: Ali Ismail Abbas has a web site dedicated to his story at <http://www.aliabbas.net>.

3: Bombs for Beginners.

4: Bombs for Beginners .

5: See Jones, Gerard, Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super-Heroes and Make-Believe Violence , Basic Books, New York: 2002.

6: Jones, Gerard, op. cit. , ch. III, “The Magic Wand,” pp. 45- 63.

7: Laws of War: Laws and Customs of War on Land (Hague IV); October 18, 1907, The Convention, Annex to the Convention: Regulations Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, Section II, Hostilities, Chapter I, Means of Injuring the Enemy, Sieges, and bombardments, Art.  25.  <http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/lawofwar/hague04.htm>.

8: United States Airforce Museum, http://www.wpafb.af.mil/museum/history/preww1/pw18.htm

9: Lindqvist, Sven,   A History of Bombing , translated by Linda Rugg, New York, The New Press 2001. Pocket edition with new preface 2003, chapter 4, “Death Comes Flying,”

10: Lindquist #123 p. 52.  Bombing of colonies was considered acceptable at this time because a) colonies were considered the properties of European powers and as such internal matters and, b) international law only recognized the rights of European or “civilized” nations.

11: Martin van Creveld, On Future War , London: 1991. From Lindquist, p. 185

12: Bettelheim, Bruno, Children Need Fairy Tales , 1976, p. 11.