The Smiley Face of Death

By Crispin Sartwell

Not only was Luke Helder - the young man accused of planting pipe bombs in American mailboxes, injuring several people - disgruntled with the government, he was an art student. And not only was he an art student, he was drawing a smiley face in explosions across the American landscape.

As he told police, he'd done two circular eyes in the midwest and was working on the mouth in Texas when he ended up in a high-speed chase. He was described as jovial and friendly under questioning.

Your basic terrorists - the McVeighs and bin Ladens and suicide bombers making videos before their actions - tend to be rather grim. They're angry. They're vicious. They're uncontrollably violent. But Helder is a new breed: the terrorist as borscht-belt comic: the Buddy Hackett of death.

I'm not sure what to make of this; I only know that somehow it must be important. At least most terrorists think they're fighting for something or against something. Helder injured a number of mail carriers and others, it seems, out of a kind of whimsy.

Does that make what he did worse? Better? I hate to admit this, but when I heard the smiley face thing I snickered.

Helder's approach hardly seems possible. But then again I am beginning to wonder what *is* impossible among us human beings. Killing as an act of random aggression, an act of rage, an act of revolution, an act of insanity, I can sort of understand, I suppose. But killing as a work of bad art and killing as a joke are things that just seem beyond the ken.

The smiley face is an interesting choice. Ubiquitous in the seventies, it became synonymous eventually with the stupid consumer emptiness of American culture, along with the phrase "have a nice day." Then it was revived with irony in the nineties when the seventies became hip.

Was Helder criticizing the emptiness of our values? Was he into a kitschy appreciation and reappropriation of seventies symbology? Did he conceive his smiley face of death as a postmodern work of art?

I hope some day we know. Meanwhile we can only brace ourselves for the rampage in the shape of the Nike swoosh, the American flag, or, God help us, the peace symbol.

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Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy to art students.