Imagine you’re a 48-year-old artist, married to a 45-year-old colleague.

 

You’re both members of an internationally acclaimed arts ensemble whose work is controversial because its aim is to alert the public to the politics of commerce, information, communications and biotechnology.

 

You live in a house in a modest sized city, and though you’re not rich and famous, you’re comfortable. Life is good.

 

In your home, the two of you create much of your work, and like any artists’ home it is brimming with the materials of your chosen media.

 

Furthermore, being an artist, you’re particularly sensitive to things that people with other skill sets and temperaments may not be.

 

For instance, you may be viewed as weird by a lot of people, but that’s always been OK. You live in a free country, and weird people have a certain social value.

 

It’s common knowledge that weirdoes make vast contributions to the nation’s science and culture. Examples of creative geniuses abound.

 

However, though life is good, all is not well. Private interests are gaining dominion over public space at an alarming rate. New frontiers—cyber space, the human body, and the atom—are being colonized for profit.

 

In response, you and your spouse of late have been creating art that focuses on genetically modified seeds, reveling in your theory-filled performances that technologically fuse political truths within a theatrical context.

 

One of your colleagues in the ensemble describes your work as an effort to shed light on the methods of biotechnology to reduce the common anxieties associated with science.

 

Once these methods are visible, you re-direct your audience’s nervousness toward the political economic manipulation going on behind the products they’re consuming.

 

Discussions of your work revolve around what biotechnology really means and how it’s affecting the lives of unwitting customers.

 

You enjoy providing the psychic births of latent rebels and revolutionaries, who discover the beer they just drank contained human DNA. When they think about it, that in itself is no big deal, as it happens each time they kiss someone.

 

But they’re unnerved by it being slipped into their drink. They feel as though it’s been spit in. Your point is made on a visceral level.

 

As a result of your work, public debate regarding the morality and ethics of spitting in a consumer’s drink occurs, and the people decide whether it is right and safe or not.

 

Of course, this type of art is controversial, and that’s why it’s constructive. Gallery owners and patrons clamor for art that “bleeds.”

 

You publish schemes for discharging harmless mutant flies into eateries, exhibit safe techniques for annihilating genetically modified crops, and dig the hysterical reaction of certain dubious corporations like Monsanto.

 

Your work is so effective that these companies notify the government that they believe it has terrifying motives, like raising the bottom line to threaten their right as a corporate person to make a profit, or in other words, maintain life, liberty and the pursuit of their happiness. You have powerful enemies.

 

Then one day, your world caves in. You awake in the morning to discover that your wife of 20 years has died mysteriously in her sleep.

 

In a panic, you call 911. Police and paramedics arrive shortly, but find themselves very concerned about your artistic materials. You have scientific machines, petri dishes and test tubes in your studio.

 

They notify federal authorities, which descend on your property, confiscate your means of livelihood, and hole you up in a motel for two days of questioning. Your house is deemed off limits because the county says it’s a health risk.

 

You’re alone in your grief. You’ve done nothing wrong, but you’re not being treated that way. Tests done on the confiscated materials prove negative. The coroner, unable to determine an exact cause of death, determines your wife died of cardiac arrest—a catchall for when the expert is stumped.

 

Finally, you’re allowed to return to your emptied home. Although you haven’t had your materials returned, you think the nightmare is over. But then you get subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury. The federal government wants to charge you with running a bio-terror lab in your home, and is seeking a connection between your work and your wife’s death.

 

The final straw is that your colleagues in the arts ensemble are also subpoenaed, and may be indicted on similar charges.

 

WHO IS THIS MAN & WHY’S THE GUMMINT AFTER HIM?

 

His name is Steven Kurtz, and he lives in Buffalo. He is real, and this is happening. The grand jury convenes June 15 to consider indictment.

 

The United States v. Steven Kurtz, if it occurs, could become a landmark case regarding artists’ First Amendment rights.

 

If the government wins, it will be a severe blow. If Kurtz wins, a breath of democracy will still linger in our nation’s morbid body politic.

 

The Kurtzes belonged to an international group of six artists called the Critical Arts Ensemble.

 

But could the government really be acting on behalf of private interests?

Consider for a moment an article posted on Buzz last year, Are Environmentalists Terrorists?, which examines a nationwide effort by corporations to use the current political-economic fear of terrorism to their own benefit.
A proposed law now being considered by the New York State legislature is molded from a corporate funded model, and addresses the problem of increasingly vocal citizens campaigns aimed at halting environmental, animal rights and public health abuses by corporations.
Spearheading this effort is the American Legislative Exchange Council, which is pushing similar laws in numerous other statehouses across the country.

New York’s bill, is now, ironically enough, in the senate’s Consumer Protection Committee, which is considering it as an amendment to the state’s Agriculture and Markets Law that relates to unlawful tampering with animal activities.

According to the state’s web site (search S2996 and A4884), the bill is intended to protect “entities engaging in medical, biological or environmental research … [and] penalizes persons supporting certain unlawful acts.”

What is most problematic, however, is the bill’s stated “justification,” that it will “help differentiate” between politically and personally motivated acts (it would seem the federal government may be guilty of violating this law, if it were passed).

Why is a politically motivated act worse than a personally motivated one? Are the legislators who support this bill politically or personally motivated? And what’s the difference?

Also, the proposed law put forward by ALEC’s Republican legislators declares animal and ecological terrorism as forms of domestic terrorism, increases penalties for persons participating in politically motivated acts, creates specific penalties for persons encouraging, assisting or financing acts of [such] terrorism, and protects individuals or companies engaging in medical, biological or environmental research (the amendment, however, includes recreational and commercial activities like hunting, fishing, farming, etc., for protection—what about art?).

THE SMART ALECs

Founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, the grand pappy of the religious right, ALEC has a $6 million annual budget and claims 2,400  Republican state legislators as members (the actual list is hard to come by for some reason).

 

ALEC’s agenda, according to People for the American Way, pursues corporate America‘s interests by calling for the roll back of civil liberties, the privatization of public services, and challenging regulations on commerce and pollution.

 

Support comes from such places as the National Rifle Association, Heritage Foundation, Enron, American Nuclear Energy Council, Chevron, Shell, Texaco, Union Pacific Railroad, Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America, Phillip Morris, and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco.

 

ALEC represents something of a shadow government in many statehouses with nine “task force[s]” that mirror the executive branch.

 

In the 1990s, ALEC pushed for the deregulation of electric utilities by arguing states had a monopoly over the market, something strongly supported by Ken Lay, former Enron CEO, which led to the collapse of California‘s energy grid.

 

ALEC also fathered the first private school voucher legislation in the country that would divert money from public education to private schools, arguing that market competition would force public schools to improve or perish.

 

“Influence peddling to shape government laws to suit corporate special interests is not just a Washington phenomenon,” writes Defenders of Wildlife president Rodger Schlickeisen, in the introduction to Corporate America’s Trojan Horse in the States: The Untold Story Behind the American Legislative Exchange Council.

 

“It is just as aggressive if not as visible in the states. It’s time to shine the public spotlight on state influence peddling, beginning with [ALEC] … [which has] a carefully cultivated good government image, but the masters it serves are its corporate sponsors and funders, not the nation’s hard-working but vulnerable state legislators.”

 

Trojan Horse alleges ALEC serves “as a conduit for special-interest legislation from corporations to key state legislators on issues that range from rolling back environmental and consumer protections to privatizing government services [like] prisons and schools.”

 

It further accuses ALEC’s corporate underwriters of creating legislation that is drafted by lawmakers with assistance from the Council’s staff (in distant, luxurious settings), then approved as “model bills” by ALEC’s board of directors and introduced in various statehouses from sea to shining sea by due-paying Republican ALEC lawmakers.

 

About one-fifth of the roughly 1,000 model bills introduced in US statehouses during the last legislative session passed (Spring 2003), according to a report by Karen Charman called “Environmentalists = Terrorists: The New Math.”

ALEC calls its “model legislation” the Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act, and it criminalizes “virtually all forms of environmental or animal-rights advocacy,” according to Charman.

Never has such “draconian legislation” been seen in the US, claims human rights lawyer Michael Ratner, who serves as vice president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. 

“This is unique. Even under the definition of domestic terrorism in the Patriot Act, you have to at least do something that arguably threatens people’s lives,” he said. “The definitional sections of this legislation are so broad that they sweep within them basically every environmental and animal-rights organization in the country.”

Ratner says the bill is motivated by a desire to “eliminate all forms of dissent,” including civil disobedience.

The legislation was supposedly introduced in New York after three incidents of unknown individuals “trying” to inject milk cows with chemical agents.

According to a New York Farm Bureau legislative update, over the last several years there have been a rising number of incidents in which juveniles and adults have destroyed property and crops to raise awareness for a political cause.

 

“Instances such as milk tampering in Western New York, the burning of houses on Long Island to oppose new developments, and the destruction of a research corn crop also on Long Island, at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, are clearly examples of wanton destruction and domestic terrorism,” the NYFB update said.

“What was scary at the time [of the milk tampering],” said State Sen. George Maziarz, R-North Tonawanda, “is that it happened in different geographic areas around the state. It wasn’t kids and it was beyond vandalism because they were all related.”

Maziarz, who was one of the bill’s original sponsors in the Senate (but withdrew his name due to serious doubts re: its language), said New York State Police briefed him and other legislators on the incidents and the crimes have not been solved.

That type of incident, however, turned out to be just a small part of the bill, said Maziarz, explaining that he was in favor of increasing penalties for such crimes, but felt the language in the bill defining criminal act was too “vague.”

Although he said in September that the bill was “dead,” it was actually in the senate Rules Committee. Since then it has moved on to Consumer Protection.

Are dead bills supposed to move?

WAITING FOR A PATRIOTIC EXCUSE

 

The overall effect of this case on the arts is chilling, and only adds to the climate of fear that the corporate government is manipulating among its citizenry.

 

This case is already receiving national attention, and the hysteria that may be whipped up by it will only fuel the passage of the domestic terrorism laws under consideration in New York State and elsewhere.

 

If the feds fail in their prosecution, but succeed in swaying public opinion, a real need for the law described above will be perceived in statehouses across the country.

 

This bill, like the PATRIOT Act was, is waiting in the wings for its excuse. Each law passed on the state level will only serve to enhance the net being cast by our incorporated government, allowing authorities to get non-violent dissidents one way or another.

 

Protestors will be gathering in Niagara Square, downtown Buffalo, at 9 a.m. Tuesday to show their solidarity with Kurtz, the Critical Arts Ensemble and threatened artists everywhere.

 

See you there, or be square. Stay tuned.

 

Chuck Richardson is editor of www.niagarabuzz.com. An experienced poet, journalist, newspaper columnist, produced playwright and award-winning literary critic, he has just published his first book–Memos from Apartment 5–available now from PageFree Press. He can be reached at [email protected].

 

 

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