“Apparently, his heart simply gave out,” Wende said.

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This issue is likely to get a lot more attention, especially in the wake of the New York Times’s rationale that publishing the details of the SWIFT program was no big deal, because everybody knew about it anyway ($$). (See Power Line for a bunch of links that cast doubt on the “everybody knew” idea.)

From “everybody knows” it’s just a hop, skip, and jump to “everybody should know.” This has occurred to the author/artist of Travelling Guide, the ultimate in “transgressive art” (about which I had some thoughts here): a travel guide whose aim is to share tips on how to get into Europe illegally.

Travelling Guide is written in the style of a guide-book, but is not intended for affluent Western tourists. It is a piece of controversial art which aims to “subvert the language and purpose of the format”, speaking directly to Romanian travellers and illegal immigrant workers, helping them through border controls, ports and stations into Western Europe. It contains instructions on acquiring forged identity papers, fake UK national insurance numbers, includes a bar chart grading the risk factor at each crossing point, instructions on breaking into shipping containers and safety tips.

The author, Matei Bejenaru (funded by the Vienna-based Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary foundation), prefers to comparmentalize

[He] denies that his Travelling Guide encourages people to break the law. “This is a work of art and must be judged as a work of art. You can check for yourself if the information is true. Can you say that a film director is encouraging people to shoot each other because people are shot in his film? This is an alarm signal.”

Adam Lebor of The Times (London) begs to differ.

In fact such is the level of detail that a more accurate analogy would be a film that instructs on how to load, aim and fire in a gun in the middle of a war zone.

My favorite prophet

has this to say about that:

Everybody knows the scene is dead
But there’s gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows

—Leonard Cohen, “Everybody Knows“