This piece of provocative art work makes many statements. To begin, the overall rectangular image is indicative of a U.S. one dollar bill & bares George Washington's likeness (a conventional image), so we already know that America is forefront in the intended message. We can also infer that America's pursuit of the dollar (capitalism) is also to blame for self-induced problems world-over.
Next we can read the otherwise unrelated words and pair them with the lead caption "The Apocalypse Will Not Be Televised" and conclude that it is America who will bring about destruction of the Earth.
Former Vice-President Dick Cheney's face is vilified via cartoonist imaging and sits opposing a character of the late Osama Bin Laden. A correlation is then made between the White House Administration (U.S. government) and the ideation of those we are at war with (terrorist) by captioning the words "our CIA guy" suggesting that Osama Bin Laden was working for our own central intelligence agency and that his actions were condoned by high ranking U.S. officials.
Dick Cheney's publicly known involvement in the Halliburton Corporation raised several eyebrows as they and private security contractors such as Blackwater USA received no-bid contracts in both Afghanistan & Iraq. The implication here is that the war on terrorism was propagated by controlling interests at the very top of our governmental structure and that we have created "homegrown" terrorists like Osama Bin Laden by educating him through the School of America's and other financial enablement in order to make the rich grow richer - even at the expense of troop's lives.
Similar to the perceived disregard for American service member lives, the image also contains the word "Katrina", placing blame on the federal government for a perceived, deliberate slow response time to hurricane victims based on race discrimination and out-of-control greed and competition over clean-up contracts.
Oil rigs can be seen in the background of this image which suggests that oil profiteering is what has driven the war, relief efforts and other aspects of our National interest. The bottom line - the American people don't matter as much as monetary gain. That we will create a crisis just to create a solution to the crisis, so long as the right people receive maximum payout for the now "necessary" service.
As all things in life, clearly defined issues of either black or white standing are scarce, leaving most tings a shade of gray. This artwork leans heavy toward the black. Regardless of personal opinion, this creation addresses several critical issues and a growing American sentiment on a relatively small, simple drawing. It is very deliberate and very bold.
All Americans are targeted here by the artwork, and the issue itself is certainly the business of all Americans. Each viewer may use syntactical indeterminacy when processing the image, and many onlookers may agree with only certain aspects of the image and to varying degrees at that. With so many statements being made all at once individual opinions will vary drastically, but in passing, a person will roughly have an idea of either yes, I agree with that statement, or no, I oppose the overall message of the artwork. In either case, the image lends itself to debate and discussion, which in the end, could be the exact intent the artist had in mind all along.
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