The Face of Tomorrow's Army?

Though we love parades, we didn't attend last Saturday's Bastille Day number, which is much more regimented than most in Paris. A crowd of up to a half-million on the Champs Elysses, lots of barricades, heavy crowd control, screaming fighter jets overhead, and no access for interesting photos. Ares triumphant. In sharp contrast to, say, the Dionysian revelry of the Paris Gay Pride parade.




But we did wander, post-parade, over to the Esplanade des Invalides, the huge greensward in front of the gold-domed Les Invalides, which houses the military museum of France, and Napoleon's Tomb. This entire swath of the seventh arrondissement is devoted to France's past and present military glory, and the post-parade exhibits are like a trade show for the public; each branch of the service displays and recruits, from the French Foreign Legion, to the regular army, navy, and marines, to the gendarmerie.

As long-time peace activists who wear our hearts on our sleeves, we won't get into a long anti-war riff.  We just want to note that this was a marketing event, and War has lots of toys and tools on its side that make it look a lot more fun than Peace. There was nothing at Saturday's trade show that would make one think about the consequences of war. The world's literature is replete with heart-choking, compelling anti-war novels, films, articles, etc.--like our friend Chris Abani's horrifying novella of child soldiers, Song for Night. But somehow the message still isn't getting across.

We are Parisians, but we remain Americans.  Our country of origin is the largest arms supplier in the world, our adopted country is fourth.

The U.S.A. spends around twenty percent of its yearly budget on defense, up to half if you figure spending the way the War Resisters League does.

Given the vast sums of money at stake, it's no wonder that War spends a lot of energy looking attractive. Would that Peace had as effective a marketing machine.


 

Not A Fetish, A Crusade

Since October of 2007, Richard has been photographing orphaned or abandoned shoes on the streets of San Francisco, then Los Angeles, and now, Paris.

The collection began on a chilly night when he and our friend Willis Barnstone were walking along Valencia Street toward the 16th and Mission BART station, and Willis noted how many shoes were abandoned on the street in just a few short blocks.

Richard took it as a mission to chronicle the orphans with his little point-and-shoot, and has continued with the iPhone camera, and now, the Nikon.

In the course of posting them on Flickr, he's noted that a lot of people LIKE pictures of shoes, and there's even a special forum for lost baby shoes. O-kay.

But aside from being an urban art project that comments on abandonment and isolation (enough justification, as far as Paris Play is concerned), is there a deeper meaning?

Perhaps.

Today, over at the Trocadero, the grand public park that looks out across the Seine at the Eiffel Tower, the organization Handicap International invited the public, as it has done since 1995 in more than forty European cities (and now aross the globe), to bring a pair of shoes to donate, and as a protest. Every shoe in the pyramid represents a limb or life lost to cluster bombs and landmines.

During the day, various NGOs provided background information about cluster bombs and landmines, and advocated for their abolition. They are banned by international treaties (Ottowa 1997, Oslo 2008), but as Handicap International notes, "landmines and cluster munitions were used in Libya this spring. Furthermore, Thailand acknowledged having made use of cluster munitions during confrontations with Cambodia last February."

The United States has yet to sign either treaty, according to the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate International Campaign to Ban Land Mines.  

Richard's art project will continue, but it's now impossible for us to see an abandoned shoe without also thinking of the limbs and lives lost to land mines and cluster bombs.