2006-09-18 - 5:23 p.m.
This has really been bugging me since I saw it a few weeks ago. I went to Nya�s work at the Museum of Science and Industry and went to the exhibits during the day (I came to join her later at a party for the staff there that night). There�s a new exhibit there for a few months before it continues its tour to other museums around the country. It isn�t a presentation of the MSI itself, but is a visiting creation of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.
It�s so disturbing. I mean so disturbing. The exhibit (called �Target America�) tries to show a link between the drug trade and terrorism. Okay, fair enough. Except really it doesn�t show any actual link, just shows drugs and terrorism next to each other. Like: here are some DEA walkie-talkies and here�s a piece of rubble from the Twin Towers in the next case. There was no narrative connecting them, they were just shown adjacent.
The best section showed a picture of cocaine baron Pablo Escobar next to a picture of Osama bin Laden. Uh. Was it just a wall of bad men? There was a nearby text box that started to talk about money laundering. I read it carefully, thinking that maybe here they would finally show a solid connection between the drug trade and terrorism. But there wasn�t any, just an explanation of how drug profits are laundered by buying consumer goods that are then resold on the black market. Sometimes this is done in Turkey or Iran, see. Aha?
But far more than being bothered by the fact that�s it�s not a good exhibit, I�m really upset that it�s designed by the government. It�s presented as irrefutable fact (although actually it�s quite debatable) and brought to you by official Authority. The government designing a museum exhibit. That absolutely smacks of a 1984-style Ministry of Truth. Drugs cause terrorism: so say We the Government.
Museum presentation is supposed to be a free market. I mean if some museum wants to say that the Ku Klux Klan is a great bunch of right-thinkers or that the world was created by God in six days, I guess that�s their right, as long as they do it with private money. But the public sector entering the picture is quite another story. That�s like the Soviets with their official government newspaper (I forget � was it called Izvestia?).
Seeing the exhibit made me very sad. It made me tear up in fact. I could envision a future down this path. An elementary school class takes a trip to the Federal Government Museum of Official Science. �Gee, it says here that embryonic stem cells are dangerous and no research using them should be trusted!� think little Timmy. �I better warn my uncle not to try anything like that for his Parkinson�s!�
That�s not a future country I want to live in. But maybe the start is coming soon to a museum near you.
� 2006 Geoff Gladstone
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