- Perhaps this is what Argüélles meant about
the Galactic Synchronization that's going to hit us when the Mayan Calendar
goes dead in 2012. Exponential expansion of consciousness. Things flying
at us way too fast for us to handle.
-
- Like functioning in your sleep. Simultaneous events going
on. You're in more than one place at once. Pastpresentfuture all happening
at the same time. Jumbled images careening in multiple directions. Air
traffic control needed on your own thoughts.
-
- Diary of 9/11 running. Events that changed the world.
How to present it? Put it on a CD, sell on Internet, make money? No time,
recorder's running and the fuse is lit; people are waiting for this information.
Vision of man in North Tower. Wears glasses, eyes wide, tearing at his
shirt. He didn't survive. But he called on phone, saw people in cockpit
as plane screamed toward impact. Horrible dream we all have. What's it
like in those last few moments? Tiny silhouettes holding hands, falling.
Would they find them in the pyroclastic dust? That's the past. What did
it mean? Sorry. We can't tell you what happened. It's classified. National
security, you know.
-
- Future. Bush has issued orders. Or maybe it was Jonah
Kohn. Summary executions ordered for suburbs. Looting out of control. Post-disaster
rules have all changed. ATM machines don't work. People dragged off to
death camps. Win a free trip to Camp Ashcroft! Soldiers everywhere, wearing
masks, speaking foreign languages. Don Stacey (I've never met him) and
I driving like crazy on two-lane road through swamp. Loudspeakers saying
something. I think I saw this in Terminator movie. We have a document that
says something important. As if it mattered at this point. Helicopters
overhead sweep their floodlights in our eyes.
-
- Present. My sheets are covered in sweat, I am thrashing
about. In the darkness, I see the green light of my computer. Get up and
write this? Sleep impossible. I have a verbal transcript of what 9/11 has
done to the world playing in my head. It's an excuse to kill everyone.
It's all just a dream, a nightmare. But I am awake. And then I realize.
That's the problem.
-
- * * *
-
-
- Exponential expansion of consciousness. Coming soon to
a planet near you. Tangents. Competing directions of thought. Which way
to go? What is the safest? What is most important? Are they the same? Should
you forget your loved ones and go for the money? That's what schools, magazines
and the TV tell us. Forget your children. Where's the beer? Where's the
Prozac? Anyone for Claritin?
-
- Tangents. Present. Your relatives. The ones you can't
convince about what's actually going on. They are sitting rigidly on the
edge of their sofa, watching black-and-white military channel about how
the British won the Battle of Bulge. I tell them curtly, viciously. Switch
to Al-Jazeerah channel. Watch U.S. soldiers sexually torturing children
in front of naked Iraqi mothers, weeping through the bars. My relatives
adjust their collars, and disdainfully retort: "John, how could you
be so inappropriately uncouth?" I see their eyes turn to kaleidoscopes.
-
- Tangents. Future. The chip is implanted in your arm.
You can pay your phone bill with a wave. Only you can't talk to anybody
they can't hear. Worst, you tell a secret to a friend. The friend tells
Mother Homeland Security. They come and take your children. Your children
are convinced you are wrong. You see them wearing little olive uniforms,
practicing identifying the enemy by the color of their skin, by what they
wear. Smiling Tom Ridge tells of new Boy Scout merit badge: shooting prostitutes
on street corners. Patriotic music in hiphop format blares.
-
- Tangents. Past. Follow the money as far back as you can.
Meyer Amscheld Bauer. When Ferdinand and Isabella threw our cousins out
of Spain, they went to England. Fiat currency started as a little bat and
grew into a dragon that devoured the whole world. Every U.S. president
who was assassinated spoke first about a government by the people printing
its own money. The spiffy skyscraper skylines everybody's so proud of -
can you say Kuala Lumpur? - are actually spiritual tumors on human society,
dragging everyone toward destruction with their glittering illusions. Every
person in every war died to improve the profit margin in some banker's
ledger. You don't have enough money to pay your bills this month. Don't
worry. New program coming in U.S. - turn in a terrorist relative for cash.
America as the New Salem, and the witches have traces of C-4 explosive
on their hands, or so the military tribunal says as it sentences them to
death by a 2-1 vote.
-
- * * *
-
-
- Humans have made the world their toilet bowl and are
now caught in the whirlpool flow. Look! You can see the little people waving
as they get sucked into the maw. Ah, the Coreolis force. Sometimes once
you get things started it's not so easy to stop them. Dick Cheney needs
to be on TV doing Tidy Bowl commercials. Flush the little people away and
we'll have a peaceful planet, it's that simple. Only don't ask us how we
did it. You won't want to know.
-
- Tangent. Past. America is the home of the free and the
land of the brave. You saw it so clearly at Abu Ghraib prison, when terrified
American soldiers didn't care whether the people they tortured were innocent.
They were just following orders. The New America, just following orders,
no matter whom it kills. The world is watching. And waiting for an opportunity
to appropriately respond to this despotic capitalist insanity. Something
to ponder, as America destroys itself. At this point, the world will help
us. Destroy ourselves, that is. It will be public service.
-
- Tangent. Present. It's a good life. People love you.
Your contentment is dependent on not paying attention to what's going on.
So you turn the channel. Mmmm, NASCAR. Listen to the engines roar. Turn
up the volume. So you can't hear the screams of Palestinian children with
bullets in their heads. Or of American women who have flaming pustules
in their bellies, put there by their brave soldier husbands with radioactive
semen who shot all those foreign women from a distance so they didn't have
to see their faces. But now, the two females become one. What goes around
comes around. And peace through fighting terror comes home to roost. Wave
your flag. What's that ringing sound in your ears?
-
- Tangent future. Take a deep breath. Suck that barium
into your lungs. You know, barium, the stuff that floats down from the
sky that the government put there for its over-the-horizon radar program
and to manipulate the weather. Put your genetically modified TV dinner
in the microwave to really screw up your system. Read the New York Post,
which yowls about hate crimes and then tells you how to kill ragheads.
Don't worry. Your children don't see your hypocrisy, either. You've taught
them well. You don't hear a peep about truth and justice out of any of
them. The future is in good hands. Absolutely Pleasantville.
-
- But wait. That sounds like a Jeep outside, brakes squeaking.
-
- * * *
-
- Put your faith in the Lord, the preacher rails. Inside
the confessional, you make your ablutions, ask forgiveness. Through the
latticed grate, the face of the priest becomes visible. It is Donald Rumsfeld.
"How can I help you, my child," he says smiling. "Here,
have a Diet Coke."
-
- All that hard work you did, those children you raised
to be loyal and truthful, they're gone now, serving in Iraq, smoking weed
and keeping score of the shadowy silhouettes they've brought down with
fancy guns in the twilight of a dust-covered city whose name they never
really knew. We are what we do. What will they be like when they come home?
Whose orders will they follow?
-
- The future is a shimmering pastiche of hope and dreams,
all the latest gadgets and new kinds of pleasure. They learned to kill
at the mall, you know. At the arcade, where honesty is who you can steal
a quarter from?
-
- When was the last time you looked your children in the
eyes? When they were on your knee? And who are they now? And who are we?
-
- Worried about the future? Relax. It's only a dream. But
why is it you are telling me you are awake?
-
-
-
- When the powers that be ran out of rival societies to
conquer and exploit and indigenous innocents to conquer and enslave, they
devised an ingenious plan to perpetuate their demonic, moneymaking war
machine - they invented fictional characters to pursue and annihilate,
and recruited impoverished souls to act out these roles. Now, from John
Kaminski, author of "America's Autopsy Report" and "The
Day America Died," a new collection of essays titled "The Perfect
Enemy," coming soon to a website near you: http://www.johnkaminski.com/
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