Art is anything you can get away with.

So says one of the buttons in my collection. It's mostly true, I suppose, but sometimes art happens even if the artist can't really escape the truth.

It's been pointed out that Micah Ian Wright, the artist who has produced a couple volumes of 'remixed war propaganda,' including You Back The Attack, We'll Bomb Who We Want, which I have touted here, never was, in fact, an Army Ranger in Panama, or in the Army or any other branch of service at all. He made it up, and he got caught.

So how does that affect his work? Tom Tommorow observes that "There's an old saying: 'Trust the art, not the artist.' Unfortunately in a case like this, both are tarred."

I'm not too sure how I feel about Wright's war fantasy. I've heard a lot of war stories of dubious origin in my time, and known some real nice folks who've told them. The darn things tend to take on a life of their own, though, and it's a road best not taken. Mark Twain said something about the advantages of telling the truth - it's less taxing on the memory. He was right.

I'm pretty certain that there's not a single one of Wright's pieces of work, though, (dozens can be viewed at www.antiwarposters.com) that I find a bit diminished by the knowledge that part of his narrative is fictional. I'll stick with Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote a forward to You Back The Attack... and told the Washington Post, "He's a liar, but I still like his pictures."