Here Comes Trouble by Michael Moore Page B

1980s—though Pepsi was less concerned with African starvation than with beating Coke.
    There was nothing that came close to the massive building sponsored by General Motors at the Fair. They called it Futurama, and with all of us being from the company’s hometown, we were quite proud to enter its doors. They put us in chairs—and suddenly those chairs began to move! They took us on a ride through the Future—flying cars, cities under the oceans, colonies on the moon, and happy people everywhere. It was a world at peace, where everyone had a nice job, and there was no poverty or pollution or anything that might upset us. That was cool. We went on the ride again, and this time I took notes. GM was making a very generous promise, and I wanted to be able to tell the boys back in the neighborhood about it.
    Many states and countries also had their own pavilions. New York State had three towers from which you could see the tri-state area. The tallest one had a huge lobby with a million-dollar map of New York laid out with exotic tiles (and a star on the location of every Texaco gas station in the state). At the top of the tower was a revolving restaurant. The new state of Alaska had an exhibit, as did Wisconsin (free samples of cheese!), and the British, French, Canadians, and dozens of other countries were well represented.
    But the longest lines were reserved for the Vatican City pavilion. For it was inside this edifice that the Pope had sent abroad, for the first time ever, a work of art from St. Peter’s Basilica. Yet this wasn’t just any piece of art. This was one of the most famous works of sculpture in the history of the world: the Pietà, by Michelangelo.
    The Pietà depicted the Blessed Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus, holding the body of her dead son after he was taken down from the cross. It measured approximately six feet high and six feet wide and was only the third sculpture by a young and somewhat unknown twenty-four-year-old Michelangelo of Florence, Italy.
    To view the Pietà you had to wait in a long line and, once inside, you were placed on a moving sidewalk where you could view the work at 1.2 miles per hour. No photography was allowed and silence and reverence were expected at all times.
    On my pass by the Pietà I was frozen in amazement. I had never seen anything like it. Suddenly, all the exhibits depicting the future were a distant memory, because this piece of marble from four hundred years ago had me transfixed. The moving walkway sped by far too fast for me, and as I passed by I cranked my neck back as far as it would go, until the conveyor belt deposited me out of the room.
    “I want to go back again!” I told my mom.
    “Really? Um, OK. Girls, let’s get back in line.”
    We got back in line, and within the hour, we were on the movable belt again.
    This time I locked my eyes in slow motion and soaked up every inch of the Pietà. Here was Mary holding her only son—her dead son—but she wasn’t sad! Her face was young and smooth and… content. What could be a worse moment in anyone’s life, to lose one’s child? And to have it happen in such a violent, barbaric way—and you, the mother, were forced to watch the whole sickening ordeal? And yet, there was no sign of any violence in the Pietà, just a mother gazing down at her son as he slept in her arms. And that was what Jesus looked like—serenely asleep in her arms. No blood from the crown of thorns, no hole in his side from the Roman’s spear. It was as if he would wake up at any moment—and she knew it. There was death, but there was life.
    I couldn’t take it much further than that—I mean, I was eleven!—but it was profound and it had my head spinning— and I wanted to see it again!
    “No, we have to move on,” my mother responded to my pleas. My sisters, too, had had it with me, as they wanted to get back over to the more fun parts of the Fair.
    “But I want to get a picture! We have to show Dad!”
    That won the