There Is No Art In This

Contributed by Matthew Hartwell on 19/08/09

Everybody says she had green eyes, but I think I’d remember that. Sometimes we’d watch Alfie and Get Carter back to back and pretend they were parts one and three of a trilogy and try to guess what happened in between. There’s a good chance her eyes were silver.

Near the end, they were glassy, though that could just be the flash from the photographs. Good journos don’t do flash though, they actually know how to use a camera. They were hungry eyes, but not the way they were when we were together. Performance art? She couldn’t whistle, and nobody likes a hunger artist anyway.

Something like ten thousand children, which is more than the population of the town we grew up in together. A one with four zeroes after it. Ten times ten times ten times ten little people who didn’t get the chance.

She would wake up in the middle of the night and wrap my arm around her like a blanket, shivering through the heat. When we moved West, she told me it was practice. When the AC broke she told me to take the money I would have spent to fix it and find a better use for it. I had never encountered death, and statistics helped remove the situation from reality.

She knew this was a problem, the divide between numbers and images. She wanted to do something about it. She got involved in politics, and while she effected a number of major changes at both a city and state-wide level, I still think it was all a pretext to get where she needed to be.

The right to public assembly is limited, even on public property. You can’t sit on the White House porch without being arrested. Not for ten minutes, and certainly not for the amount of time a hunger strike would take. Not for one day. Not for ten thousand children.

She saw it as five 9/11s happening everyday, but preventable, and even more unconscionable for that fact. But nobody watched because it wasn’t tragi-porn on the television. Nobody was slamming planes of starving children into buildings full of the wretched, and so everybody filed it away, and got offended at the comparison and did nothing to fix it but shop green and dump their change in the Unicef box.

It all clicked into place the night she told me she’d been selected as an Electoral voter. I realized what she was going to do, and cursed the Constitution for making it possible.

It’s expressly forbidden to arrest a voter in the Electoral College until they’ve cast their ballot. This prevents corrupt parties from kidnapping unsympathetic voters on the pretext of illegal activity. We had our last supper together at a KFC two blocks from the White House and she walked there, the day of the election. She sat down, and was immediately confronted by two secret service agents. It didn’t take long for them to realize the bind they were in.

The president and press secretary applauded her efforts to raise awareness. They pledged three million dollars in aid to sub-saharan nations. The same year, a factory that produced toy arrows for children received four million dollars in aid. She knew this, and refused to stand. Within a few days, standing wasn’t an option. She drank water, and crowds gathered and I watched from the fence, unable to join her.

News crews came and eventually left. Watching her die wasn’t as ratings-grabbing as they’d hoped. She didn’t care, nor did she budge.

The day she finally passed, the president went on television to condemn the various warlords who stole food, and expounded on the need for education in developing nations while refusing to do anything beyond send money. The warlords took the money and bought guns instead of food. I mourned my wife and turned away visitors as I packed a bag. Ten thousand more children went to sleep hungry and never woke up.