In his ongoing quest to combine the inevitable elements of innocence and basic horror, artist Keith McGuckin is in trouble with the torch baring townsfolk of Oberlin, Ohio (population a whopping 8195) this week because he made a bunch of gingerbread men decorated to look like Nazis and displayed them in the front window of a store. The townsfolk, it appears, inexplicably don't like to eat the Third Reich so they have insisted the display be covered up. The article includes sterling quotes from the townspeople like this:
"He's gone way overboard this time...A few of his other displays were on the edge, but never that crazy."
On previous occaisions, McGuckin's genius ideas included creating cookies that depicted a suicidal snowman sitting under a hair drier and a little boy gearing up to smoke crystal meth.
These previous displays were left uncensored for some reason.
Are we to gather that while references to anti-semitism in history in cookie form is unacceptable, hard core drug abuse among children and depression and suicide among snowmen are themes that the public should be facing head on by staring at their central themes as manifest in cookie form?
It seems odd that the folk in Oberlin would be upset by something like this seeing as almost half the town are in fact students at a Liberal Arts college but maybe the other half are that extraorindarily attractive type of small town Republican (the kind who tried to outlaw dancing in Footloose) who like to be offended so they lucked out by moving to a small town that is full of art students with an axe to grind.
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