Franco waited to bomb Gernika on a Monday morning because he knew that day each week the town held an outdoor market. The ordinance dropped was given to Franco’s army by Hitler, who wanted to see what new tech would do to real human beings. And that is war. War is men sitting around in felt-walled rooms making deals about who to destroy and how. And it’s journalists and others sitting around worrying if telling the truth will move less paper. This ceramic version of Picasso’s “Guernica” sits in a park in Gernika, the little town that was bombed by Franco’s forces in 1937. The town is teaming with references to the work. Street art, galleries, museums are everywhere commemorating this work and what it says to power. And nowhere did I ever hear anyone say that this work is disrespectful to the victim’s families, or that seeing this might ruin someone’s breakfast, as I have often heard in newsroom environments, where moving product takes priority. Because fuck that. And fuck those who would collude with the state to censor or edit what war and mass-violence actually looks and feels like, especially journalists, whose job it is to do just the opposite. The state is supposed to lie and hide and make propaganda. The fourth estate is not. What is disrespectful to the victim’s families is the state sanctioned violence that took their loved one’s lives. What ruins breakfasts, at least ought to, as long as we insist on it, is what metal and fire does to human flesh, for reasons that are so abstractly political and moralistic they make absolutely no sense. If you are offended by what war looks like get offended by war, not those who refuse, often to their mental and physical detriment, to look away from it, from what we do to each other every day, almost on a whim, because we can, and because we tell ourselves we are in the right. And this work tells us fine, ok: let’s persist in destroying ourselves day in and day out, like petty children who will never know all they’ve been given. But we don’t get to look away. And no editor or president or angry reader gets to say otherwise. It says: Look. This is who you are. You. How do you feel about this? Is this all we can be?