As Irrational As Bert and Bin Laden: The Production of Categories, Commodities, and Commensurability in the Era of Globalization
Surrogate war, general violence, subversive activity, multiplication of small wars, widespread training of terrorists—each of these has intruded on our vision of war. . . . The borders . . . have been blurred. . . .
U.S. Army General John R. Galvin,
“Uncomfortable Wars: Towards a New Paradigm”
Liberal democracy versus fanatic Islamist fundamentalism: that’s not a dialectic or even a geographic rivalry—it’s two worlds conceptually (though not, alas, physically) sealed off from one another.
Hendrik Hertzberg, “The Bush Manifesto”
On Friday, 5 October 2001, several hundred people in Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, marched in the streets to denounce the beginning of U.S. military assaults on al-Qaeda training camps and Taliban government forces in Afghanistan. The protestors paraded with large posters that featured images of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden arranged in a collage with “Usama” written in large red letters at the bottom. On the following Monday another large group of people gathered in the city to join in public prayer for the health of bin Laden. They too carried the colorful posters, two thousand of which had been manufactured and distributed by the Dhaka-based company Azad Products. Reporters from the Dutch news service Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau, as well as journalists working with the Associated Press (AP) and Reuters news services, covered these two gatherings and photographed the protestors holding their signs. Rafiqur Rahman, a Bangladeshi man working for Reuters, took a picture that artfully framed the participants above one of the large posters of bin Laden.
This photograph was circulated widely by the news services, and many readers and viewers worldwide noticed the surprising and seemingly inexplicable presence of Bert, a Muppet character from the U.S. children’s television series Sesame Street, standing next to bin Laden on the posters. Officials at the Associated Press office in Dhaka quickly confirmed that their photographers had not altered or retouched the picture. In pursuit of an answer to this photographic riddle, they spoke with Mostafa Kamal, the production manager of Azad Products, who explained that his staff had obtained the images of bin Laden by surfing various open domain sites on the Internet and downloading several pictures of him, which they reproduced on the poster. Curious AP officials in Dhaka queried Kamal as to why he had included the picture of bin Laden with Bert, a character from a U.S. children’s television series, on a poster meant to celebrate the leader of a transnational network of fundamentalist Islamic militants. Kamal replied, “We did not give the pictures a second look or realize what they signified until you pointed it out to us.”1
As news of this odd juxtaposition circulated, Web users throughout the world searched the Internet for sites where Kamal might have obtained the image combining Bert and bin Laden. A humor Web site maintained by twenty-seven-yearold Dino Ignacio, a San Francisco animator, was among the potential sources. Ignacio’s site suggested sarcastically that Bert represented an omnipresent form of “evil” by showing manipulated images of the Muppet next to Adolph Hitler or as an onlooker in a picture of U.S. president John F. Kennedy’s assassination. According to reporters who interviewed Ignacio shortly after the appearance of the Azad posters, someone had e-mailed him an altered picture of bin Laden standing next to Bert just after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pen-tagon. Ignacio said he did not post the picture on his site out of respect for the victims of the attacks. Nevertheless, this and similar images circulated electronically and appeared on other Bert Web sites. Unknowingly anticipating Kamal’s explanation to the AP officials in Dhaka, Ignacio told reporters: “What I’m thinking is that [the poster-maker] has access to the Internet, got this picture to pop up off of AltaVista or Google and put together this collage.”2
These incidents play out the democratizing promise of the Internet and tenets of globalization boosterism in strange ways. The various users of the associated mediums participated in bringing together, across time and space, seemingly incompatible figures, including the separate images of Bert and bin Laden, the synthesized Bert–bin Laden image reproduced on a pro–bin Laden poster carried by his Bangladeshi supporters, and the image of the poster and its carriers recirculated as documentary evidence. Nevertheless, this densely layered story of signification achieved its meaningful qualities not from the possibility of any form of recognition but from the brute absurdity of such a conversation. Kamal stated emphatically that Bert would be deleted in future poster designs. Ignacio closed down his Web site, leaving an explanation for would-be visitors and an appeal to others who trafficked in the images: “i have taken down the ‘Bert is Evil!’ site from my server. i would like to thank Sesame Workshop for their patience and restraint all these years. i implore all fans and mirror site hosts of ‘Bert is Evil’ to stop the spread of this site too..."
End of Excerpt | Access Full Version
Notes
This essay emerged from a colloquium series organized by the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan, held during fall 2001 to address the “proliferation of ‘states of emergency’ across the world” in the months after the airplane hijackings and attacks. I thank Fernando Coronil, Ann Stoler, and members of the program’s core seminar for discussion of the essay in fall 2002. I am also grateful to Beth Povinelli, Kaylin Goldstein, and members of the Public Culture editorial committee for their helpful criticisms and suggestions.