"WHAT If It's All True?"

Eyes & Ears
"What If It's All True?"

Mark Lombardi tried to visualize the spirit of his
age.
by Danny Duncan Collum


The quote is from a Steve Earle song called
"Conspiracy Theory." It was also the headline of a New
York Times article about the work of the late artist
Mark Lombardi, which is featured in an exhibit,
"Global Networks," that's touring the country
throughout 2004.
For the last several years of his life (he committed
suicide in 2000), Lombardi made pencil drawings that,
literally, traced the connections between and among
the various players in major global criminal
conspiracies of the 1980s and '90s: Iran-Contra, U.S.
Savings and Loan, the BCCI Affair, George W. Bush's
Harken Energy scandal, and others. The Times headline
was referring to connections such as the ones Lombardi
drew linking both Presidents Bush with sundry drug
lords and terrorists. In the drawings, the players
float in labeled pods, connected by black dotted lines
showing the flow of money, solid lines showing the
path of influence, and occasional splashes of red to
indicate the death or detention of a conspirator.

This may sound like a computer program rigged up by
those conspiracy nuts on The X-Files, but Lombardi's
drawings are all handmade, with the information taken
from the artist's collection of 14,000 handwritten
index cards. And the drawings stand up as aesthetic
objects. They are the opposite of those Impressionist
paintings that, up close, seem to be a mass of colored
dots, and reveal their pattern when viewed from a
distance. In the long view, Lombardi's drawings are
abstract, but carefully plotted and symmetrical,
designs drawn lightly in delicate strokes. As you get
closer the details emerge - the names and dates and
connections. Somewhere in the middle distance, one can
apprehend the relationship of data to pattern.

"WHAT IF IT'S all true?" Indeed. It was a rhetorical
question from Steve Earle, and a silly one for the
newspaper of record. Every fact in every one of
Lombardi's drawings is drawn from published mainstream
sources. His first taste of the Bush-bin Laden
connection came from The Wall Street Journal. In case
you're out of the loop, one of Osama's brothers was a
major investor in Bush II's Harken Energy Corporation,
and the family corporation has been a heavy
participant in The Carlyle Group, the defense industry
conglomerate that has kept Bush I's wallet fat in his
post-presidency. You can still find these facts in the
corporate newspapers, but you find them as snippets
buried in the back pages, at the bottom of a story,
detached from any context or sense of significance.
And no one in the mainstream bothers to ferret out the
common threads in all this data, or - as the post-9/11
jargon has it - "connect the dots."

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=====
WHEN YOU'RE WALKING IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT
WHEN YOUR SOUL IS TURNING
WHEN YOUR HOPE SEEMS OUT OF SIGHT
KEEP THE CANDLE BURNING
ALL IT TAKES IS ONE STEADY HEART IN A WORLD THAT'S TURNING
SHINE A LIGHT AND PIERCE THE DARK
KEEP THE CANDLE BURNING
KEEP THE CANDLE BURNING

WE WILL OVERCOME

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