Drawing (433) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP
"Potato Land, March 1995. On our way to Sullivan's Banks in Ohio we found the cemetery of a convent in New Bremen where protestant deaconesses with German surnames had been buried. Many of them had died on the same day, shortly before the German capitulation in May 1945. Very likely diagnosis: Collective Suicide, mass despair at the state of the world. If Facebook had existed in the 1980s, the rampant suicides of US teenagers who hanged themselves provocatively in garages would have seemed organized, and not seen as isolated fads of the latest fashion. Sacrifices, threatening gestures and martyrdom are intrinsic instruments to give a raison d'etre to the religions we are forced to deal with. A self-justification that revolves around itself and believes superstitiously in political impact. Here a bearded Christian martyr on a rope with a garage full of crosses in front of his eyes, and the North American continent is littered with gallows." (From: arsenal, may 12).
(1988)