A white truck is standing in front of the former Iraqi embassy in East Berlin, an unattractive example of modern socialist architecture behind an unimpressive white fence. The day lacks colour. The embassy is dirty grey, so is the street. The half a dozen or so on the trucks platform are wearing white overalls. It is a quiet, early morning, freezing, 17 January 1991.
We will soon add some colour. The truck is loaded with four huge barrels. Adrian connects the first to a pipe running to a drain at the back of the van. He carefully opens the tap to test the makeshift aperture. Dark red liquid begins to drip on to the grey asphalt. Some colour blood!
Prologue
You are weaving away the tapestry of your life, wondering from time to time if the right strings are coming together: a feeling which might fade as you advance in years . If, like me, more often than not you are an observer rather than an actor in the theatre of life, you sometimes ask yourself how, where and when is the time to act.
Weaving together scenes glimpsed on the world stage, media versions thereof and your own feeble efforts at improvisation, a pattern begins to emerge. For some of us, that picture of the world becomes as tightly drawn and evenly drafted, hard and shiny as Achilles shield: such a shield might serve its owner well, protecting the wearer from all mishaps undermining his outlook on life, and steeling his determination to act. I have always been jealous of the weavers of such strong, righteous concepts.
Others struggle with the allotted woop and warf. They mistrust the strings they send their shuttle through. Not knowing what they set out to weave, their tapestry emerges thin and uneven, scarcely tough enough to last, sometimes even too threadbare to cover their modesty.
Wanted, dead or dead
Episode 256: Making a splash
Mornings silence is killed by the roar of the engine. Wroom wrooom! Lothar starts to move the truck carefully down the road at snails pace, so that the two dozen or so ghost-like figures can keep up. Some of them, apparently, are in a bad state: limping badly, on crutches, or blood seeping through head bandages, pale. Getting cold, I pick up the drumsticks and begin to batter one of the barrels. Bum bum ka-wum! Bum bum ka-wum! Next to me Saddam is doing the same. Bum bum ka-wum!
The SFB camera team probably curse the early morning call, but it is the day before the start of the Gulf War and the public is still willing to contemplate more than computer game imagery of rockets finding their targets in some faraway desert (bum bum ka-wum!), accompanied by the sound bites of our man in the bulls eye CNN reporter, Peter Arnett in Baghdad.
As the protest under the banners of No Blood For Oil and The World Is Too Small For A Game Of Golf (Gulf and Golf is the same word in German) came to life, some newsroom editor must have been reminded of his protest-culture hippie youth, or more recently maybe of the eighties peace movement. Perhaps they thought, This is their Vietnam, sizing up the arts students behind George Bush and Saddam Hussein and Death Skull masks: anyway, it makes better TV than family inclusive demos with candles and banners.
The truck stops for a change of barrels. Soon enough the red liquid again oozes steadily on to the road, leaving an eight-mile-long trail of pigs blood through newly unified Berlin, from Niederschönhausen across Alexanderplatz and along the Kurfürstendamm towards the US headquarters in Zehlendorf. Bum bum ka-wum! Here, a much bigger contingent of demonstrators is expecting the arrival of the Blutspur truck and the hundred or so who joined us for some of the distance. The sun is out by now, early afternoon, and gives the remaining liquid emptied in front of the US armys gate a glistening sheen. The GIs are not impressed. Bags full of sand are already on stand-by.
The Gulf War was a fully-fledged media war. Those images available to news stations were not only controlled but carefully planned by the military. That is, until Saddam Hussein lit up Kuwaits oil fields a calculated public relations stunt which one marvels at with hindsight for it was the images of tower high flames, black skies raining ash and an image borrowed from some Exxon leakage but most effective in its new context that infamous bird with its oily wings struggling to die a gruesome death, that changed public opinion on Desert Storm.
The Blutspur action was also a success in its own small way. Other demonstrations might have had more participants, but it was this media-friendly protest organised by the Interflugsoffice for independent and interdisciplinary projects at the University of the Arts, Berlin that grasped the headlines of the 7 oclock Heute, 8 oclock Tagesschau and 10h30 Tagesthemen news on that January evening.
I, George Bush, was on television not just nationally, worldwide.
Some commentators mocked the sensibilities of protesters who started wading around in the lake of blood, while others doubted that it was genuine. Actually, it was: Adrian and Lothar were both prosecuted and fined for the environmentally-damaging dumping of animal blood.
Episode 384: The laughter of an American woman
I look back at that protest as my communist youth. Then, so shortly after the cold war, many of us qualified for that label. I have never mentioned my communist past until now and might have screwed up any career in the Foreign Office for good. But then again, Joschka Fischer would be my boss .
Someone once said that if you are twenty and not a communist you have no heart, but if you are thirty and still a communist, you have no brain. Bum bum ka-wum! A little more than ten years later no communist no more politically apathetic and a good citizen I am awoken by new towers of flames. This time it did not happen in a far away desert, but somewhere much closer to home. Not geographically, mind you. But movies and television shows have made New York home to all viewing publics everywhere .
Someone has learned a lesson from those burning oilfields. Immediately, the media industry jumps on the images delivered free-of-charge, and we feast on them for a fortnight. My personal highlight must be ITVs three minute vid setting planes, skyscrapers, fire and smoke to music. What a shame it isnt Wagners Ride of the Valkyries, so memorably deployed in the beach attack sequence in Coppolas Apocalypse Now; it would have made heavy rotation on MTV.
Possibly my least favourite show is the BBCs Panorama portrait of Osama bin Laden the Sunday after: his portrait, intercut every two minutes with footage from the collapsing twin towers. Someone at the Beeb had let Eisenstein's Potemkin go to his head .
The misinformation machinery rolls into action. Soon, the Internet, wonderful new global medium, is alive and kicking with rumours, gossip and images bad mouthing the enemy. And people believe it! I meet an Australian girl who is persuaded that the whole tragedy goes back to the 1980s or 1970s and Osama dating a girl during his studies in the US who couldnt help laughing at the size of his dick, leaving him forever incandescent with all things American. Please! If Freud only knew what he has done to us. She read it on the web. It must be true.
Possibly as true as that other infamous news story of the Gulf propaganda war. Do you remember that Kuwaiti girl, shaking from her recent trauma, giving evidence in October 1990 to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus concerning Iraqi soldiers pulling premature babies out of their incubators and smashing them on the floor? Well, did you know the girl was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the US? A New York PR agency had been given the task of winning hearts and minds for Operation Desert Storm.
Winning Hearts And Minds...
Winning Hearts And Minds or WHAM (once, I was George Michael, but thats another story: episode 255) is part of every war strategy, but one has to be careful how far one is prepared to take it. The British most certainly overdid it in the Great War, where anti-German rumour about raped nuns and other disgusting deeds only enemy soldiers can ever get themselves to do not only to do but actually to enjoy triggered an unwanted side effect much later. When the first rumour of mass-extermination camps in the East reached Britain more than two decades later, the public refused to believe them. Having learned in the 1920s that much of First World War propaganda was just that, they could not credit these latest reports of unimaginable German atrocities. As it turned out, the gossip of the Holocaust was much truer than even the most imaginative dared to contemplate .
So wartime WHAM is back and doing just fine, thank you. And the biggest coup for the propaganda machinery? The images delivered by the enemy himself. If only Osama bin Laden by all accounts an intelligent, educated man had considered drawing on media power for a different purpose. If only he really was the voice of an oppressed and exploited third world that some liberals would like to see in him. Surely he could have used his vast fortune to start an advertising campaign winning our hearts and minds. He could have been Ché. Any self-respecting American girl would have loved that narrative .
Episode 385: Club Tropicana
Talking of which, a couple of weeks afterwards I have fled the United Kingdom where I could no longer stand the paralysing climate of hyped threat and imminent opportunity for making history that prime minister, spin doctors and the media simultaneously pounce upon. Tired of not daring to voice a dissenting opinion in public dissent at that time already being articulated by stifled wonderment as to the value of a human life in different parts of the world, I am in San Diego.
What a surprise then to see that in my country of refuge, California, media reporting was much more level headed. Editors still seemed able to make a distinction between factual news reporting and opinion pieces. At least this was true for the Union Tribune. It was surprising to read interviews with young potential conscripts, the absolute majority of who said they would not want to go to Afghanistan to fight and die.
Good to read about it, too, as these were not the kind of guys I met in person. On the beachfront, youngsters were selling homemade T-shirts boasting the imprint Bomb Afghanistan. I wanted to talk to them about my days of protest past, but it would have made me feel old, so I left it and them.
At Footlockers, I got talking to an African American teenager who was with the Navy San Diego is home to one of Americas largest naval bases. He could not wait to be shipped out of there to kick some Afghani butt. Things you do for your Nikes! But it does need guys like that . We Europeans, I have been told, should be glad that the US exists the US that uses its military might not only in pursuit of its own goals, but also to protect the kind of paradise of reason that the European Union has become. Isnt it a fact of life that in the real world it needs a schizophrenic power adherence to the rule of law at home but might of the sword abroad to shield us all, the US and her allies, from the jungle out there?
Doris ("Dorie") Miller joined the Navy and was in service during the attack on Pearl Harbor. Restricted to the position of messman, he received no gunnery training. But during the attack, at great personal risk, he manned the weapon of a fallen gunman and succeeded in hitting Japanese planes. He was awarded the Navy Cross after persistent pressure from the black press.I was reminded of this division of labour, between American strength and European weakness that very night, at a fancy dress party, where I shared a Millers with Justin. A Navy chef barely out of his teens who had just returned from a tour of duty, he was ready to rocknroll again anytime soon. I pointed out to him a cute cowgirl from the heartlands who had caught my eye. But too late, as another party goer disguised as an Arab moved in on the object of desire. I would have left it there, maybe dreaming of a second chance later, but Justin, all-American man-of-action that he was, devised the following plan: he would go over with a Millers and some conversation for the guy which would leave the pass open for me.
And so it turned out! Bum bum ka-wum! What can I say? She did not laugh. (What unholy alliance might have resulted from such mockery, I dread to think .) But there are other lessons to be learned here. As Justin confided in me that night, neither he nor the other guy were really ready for action: blame the Millers! The world may be a safer place as a result. Still, I could not have done it without a little help from my American friend. Its good when someone knows his limits.
Episode 255: Once, I set out to Win Heart And Minds
The second time I was George Bush no, this time it wasnt me. It was a comrade, a fellow collaborator from the VideoZeitung, a monthly television programme on public access television made by students from all the universities of Berlin. This time I got to shoot George Bush!
Feeling that the Gulf War was indeed our Vietnam, we had once again set out to do something. We got some masks, a girl and a big ball, picked up a camera, and some lights, and blagged ourselves into the offices of a film production company. It was one of those rare times when there was a pervasive sense that something needed to be done, if they only knew what. Everyone was supportive. Have you been asking yourself if Chancellor Schröders anti-Iraq war statement was only a cynical election ploy? Let me set your heart at rest: it might well have been. But it was also a genuine expression of the prevailing sentiment of the German people this autumn that can trace at least one of its roots back to 1991.
The owner of the toyshop where I bought the big ball, actually a big globe, gave me a discount when I told him what it was needed for. We put the girl in uniform and the guy in a suit. We put a Saddam Hussein mask (I had to adapt Helmut Kohl with some Egyptian powder and a huge moustache) on the girl and George Bush on the guy. We blew up the globe, lit a huge desk and shot our home-video version of Hinkels dance with the world from that greatest WHAM film of all time, Charlie Chaplins 1940 movie The Great Dictator.
'I bought a big ball...'
Dilettante and pathetic best describe our shoot: the scene staged in front of a white wall (no good for video); the actors not seeing a thing under their masks, jumping around trying to bounce the world and sweating madly under the redheads. Special features include the visible wires with which we lowered the globe on to their backsides, and one of the worst executed freezestop tricks ever. Nevertheless, watching Saddam and George tumbling around with the insecure steps of two big toddlers chasing, hugging and playing with the world until it explodes, set to a clownishly sad trombone piece, moved a lot of people. (Watch 'Saddam&George Dance' here.)
There is no dialogue in the film. I think everybody understood what our concern was, without words. If you dont know it, however, do take the opportunity some time to read or listen to Charlie Chaplins closing speech. You may notice that like any good text the Bible comes to mind the barber offers us a stark choice of interpretation. Depending on what system you think he is referring to, you might come to the conclusion: lets go out there on a crusade for Iraqi oil, eh democracy! On the other hand, it offers an alternative utopia. I think that is what McCarthy suspected when he set his hounds on the tramps heels, and ran him out of town.
Episode 397: And round and round we go
On the TV, ABC has just aired an interview with one of Saddams mistresses, possibly soon to hit a small screen near you. I suppose this is designed to WHAM as many decent American women as possible. I can only hope they laugh when they hear the line, We had sex in the palace: then he slapped me, saying I'm never weak in my life, except when Im with you. Where have I heard that before?
Listen to daddy!
In the second television duel for the German election, Edmund Stoiber promised all and sundry voting for him to make sure that anyone can be evicted on the mere suspicion of being a terrorist Hey you, you look like Saddam, now get out of here only to have Gerhard Schröder assure him that this is indeed already possible, except that his administration likes to take some facts into account on top of the suspicion, that is. Makes you wonder: where will they take them? Afghanistan, Iraq? Surely not! Anyone for Guantanamo Bay?
If I were George Bush, third time lucky, I would be having a word with my son. Some say he is acting out an Oedipal complex by bringing in those Reaganite hawks whom I fought hard to disempower. Freud again shut it, Sigmund!
George W. listen up! I do not want you to go about finishing my job on Saddam. I do want you to stand up to those powers that pressure you for their own political or economic benefit. For the sake of the sons of the American nation, never mind the world, I want you to listen to your old Pa, albeit a wondrous European accent, curiously like that of Hinkel, may seem to have replaced the familiar Texan drawl .
Sure, the Dossiers attempt to impress upon you that Mr Hussein is indeed a man who loves the bomb in that Peter Sellers/Stanley Kubrick kind of way. Still, I cannot get rid of the feeling that something is being manufactured here. Maybe I am naïve. Maybe I have become European. Maybe, a decade on, I still do not have two intelligent thoughts to rub together. But many say, you too still have no brain. I think that is acceptable if you still have a heart! Have you?
In the first Gulf War we called the peaceniks, communists. Today, if you are not with us, u.s, U.S. as we are about to send our boys, your boys, in for a rematch in the nuclear desert, full of the shrapnel of uranium-depleted ammunition that their older brothers left behind you are one of Them, and called a terrorist!
Never mind, thats just a word, too. Go on son, add some colour! Dont listen to the propaganda! Win some hearts and minds! It is time to show some strength of a different kind. Know your limits! Have a Millers and make a splash while you still can. If you have the heart for it, that is. Bum bum ka-wum!
Let me put my alter ego to rest now. Good night, George. And: Good night, Saddam! Good night, Sigmund, Good night, Joschka. Good night, Justin. Good night, Adrian. Good night, Lothar. Good night, Ché. Good night, Charlie. If only it were a Waltons world, I would feel safe when the lights go out.
Good night, all.
Epilogue
These days, I suffer from insomnia. Sitting bent over the loom of my life, I am attempting to weave together a pattern that will not only make sense to me in hindsight but will also be clear and concise for you sturdy and protective enough to offer an alternative vision of the world, and at the same time showing the beauty inherent in the material of life.
Sleeplessness triggers paranoia. I fear that the strings will come apart, that a colour or tone will not match the pattern, that my shuttle travelling through the loom will overshoot the width of the tapestry and crash broken to the floor.
Still, I hope that some of you will see the value in trying to weave new patterns with old strings. The interpretation of the world is open to all of us, not only to those in power. In the theatre of life we can all write plays: we all can act!