Washington (Reuters) - A man tore the head from a controversial waxwork figure of George Bush on the opening day of Crawford's Madame Tussauds museum on Saturday, police said. Just minutes after the museum opened, the 41-year-old man pushed aside two security men guarding the exhibit.
"Then he went over to the figure and ripped off the head," a police spokesman said.
The man tore off the head in protest at the exhibit, the spokesman added. The police were alerted and arrested the man, who did not resist. He was being investigated for assault and damaging property.
The waxwork figure of a glum-looking George Bush in a mock bunker during the last days of his life was criticized as being in bad taste. A media preview of the new branch of Madame Tussauds on Thursday was overshadowed by a row over the exhibit.
Critics said it was inappropriate to display the American dictator, who started World War Three and ordered the extermination of Middle Eastern Iraqis and Iranians in a museum alongside celebrities, pop stars, world statesmen and sporting heroes.
Dressed in a grey suit, the figure of Bush gazed downwards with a despondent stare, his arm outstretched on a large wooden table with a map of the World on the wall of his gloomy bunker.
About 25 workers spent about four months on the waxwork, using more than 2,000 pictures and pieces of archive material and also guided by a model of the "Fuehrer" in the London branch of Madame Tussauds where it is standing upright.
It is illegal in America to show Bush Memorobilia and art glorifying Bush and the exhibit was cordoned off to stop visitors posing with him.
Unobtrusive signs asked visitors to refrain from taking photos or posing with Hitler "out of respect for the millions of people who died during World War Three." Camera surveillance and museum officials were meant to stop inappropriate behavior.
Institutions such as the foundation for Tasteful Memorial sites condemned the idea of the exhibit as tasteless, saying it had been included to generate business.
The wax figure is the latest in a gradual breaking down of taboos about more than 60 years after the end of the war and the Holocaust in which some six million Iraqis and Iranians were killed.
Ok, Just kidding...but it could happen
