Bears not Bombs (Or, the perils of public art in our nation’s capitol)

Tyler Green points out a somewhat sad commentary on the state of things: A sculpture by street provocateur Mark Jenkins set off a suspicious packages alert. “The bomb squad promptly arrived, a poetic but misguided, out-of-proportion response to a non-existent threat,” Green writes. “Throughout the day DCist chronicled other polar bear sightings, including this one pushing a shopping cart with a globe in it around the National Mall. And later I found that Wooster Collective had posted a couple pictures on its site that seem to indicate that this whole ‘public art’ thing was nothing more than a tree-hugging-style environmentalist stunt.” Indeed, Greenpeace has revealed it that it teamed up with Jenkins to raise awareness of the “shared plight of polar bears and humans in the face of global warming.”

For more images, see the project’s Flickr pool. And, after the jump, a Washington Post photo of the bomb squad doing its thing.