This piece was entitled "Candide Redux: A Triptych on the Politics of Superstition." I made it for "Windows on Main Street" in Beacon, NY; the idea was to align the art with whatever establishment would eventually house it. I chose the Muddy Cup coffee shop, a great little hangout right at the beginning of Main Street that serves good chai and coffee. Voltaire, who drank between 50 and 70 cups of coffee per day, albeit demitasse, seemed a perfect fit. Candide also seemed an appropriate topic given the fact that early on in the conception of this piece, al-Zawahiri called for a Jihad on every country from Spain to Iraq, the Hezbollah began lobbing bombs into Israel (who launched them right back), and Bush continued his very effective war on the enlightened ideas of humanitarianism and democracy. The erasured poem on the bottom panel is taken from the scene in Candide where they happen upon a port town recently razed by a volcano. The egg in the first panel is real. The nails were really fun to hammer in. And the words of the second panel led to a wonderful discovery: "Boredom, poverty, and vice" is what Candide eventually comes to understand is humankind's greatest threats, and if you slice them up the middle, you can insert a few letters and you get "freEDOM, libERTY,justICE," and even the small letters can be sounded out to discover their own little meaning--"just lib free." Voltaire admired Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson (Jefferson even had a bust of Voltaire in his possession, I believe) and hoped one day France would have a liberating coup not unlike the Americans. Unfortunately, he did not live long enough to see that revolution.