- "you got a fast car
- and I want a ticket to anywhere
- maybe we make a deal
- maybe together we can get somewhere"
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- -- Traci Chapman, Fast Car
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- Top speed, headed toward the cliff, you're in the backseat
hanging on for dear life, trying to catch at least a glimpse of the madman
behind the wheel.
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- Fox puts these shows on television, and for all the world
you can no longer tell the difference between the reality shows and the
fantasy news.
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- I saw both at once Wednesday night in a church on Central
Park West, as journalist Seymour Hersh and whistleblower Scott Ritter agonized
about a phony war gone wrong before an enthusiastic crowd of New York liberals,
but the level of discussion depicted al-Qaeda as an actual foreign enemy
(rather than a CIA freak show) and Israel as a helpful ally, and hence
never touched on the real issues. At least I got to hug Cindy Sheehan,
America's much maligned antiwar heroine.
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- The level of reality of most of antiwar activity in the
United States basically accepts the government's version of 9/11 and focuses
its objection on the unnecessary carnage taking place all over the world
thanks to U.S. policies, which of course is not a bad thing to complain
about. But missing the point about the nature of the war and who is creating
the violence -- it's not the neocons, it's the vast majority of the American
people who support them who are letting this happen -- guarantees yet another
useless and failed effort on the part of America's peaceniks, because they
simply do not see the lies that have been told by the White House and TV
talking heads have twisted the way everyone sees things.
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- It's not just the war we need to stop. It's the predatory
behavior of a rancid system that regards people as numbers on a ledger
sheet. Until why that happens is addressed, the other stuff will continue,
no matter how much people complain about it.
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- So, after you've seen the bloated bodies floating face
down in the bayou, "after the torchlight red on sweaty faces,"
after the bleeding babies in the prearranged pustule of Iraq ... reality
is in your face, and now, as the weather goes South, the earth trembles,
and your air is no longer fit to breathe, you ask yourself: who is that
shadow chasing the speeding car that so terrifies the driver he would willingly
drive straight over the precipice than simply have the courage to turn
around and face his own inner fright -- because not to do so is to ignore
one's destiny, and this destiny is the fate of all of us. How bad could
it be to let the universe just wash over you? Especially since it's something
you can't avoid anyway, no matter what your brand of magic trick.
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- We are the passengers in a car speeding way, way over
the speed limit. Our lives flash before our eyes, like the guy on the plane
to Hawaii who saw the passenger in front of him ripped out through a hole
in the fuselage.
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- With what I was able to understand in my lifetime, it
appears that humanity's own shadow has overtaken it. Yeats had it pegged.
"The center cannot hold."
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- And we are all about to be catapulted into a reality
we, pampered prodigals of a profligate lifestyle, have never before been
exposed to. Odds are that most of us will wither in the heat and die. At
least, those of us who aren't killed outright. If not by instantaneous
vaporization, then by wrenching diseases that will contort our faces for
all time in the rigor mortis horror of a Palestinian child gunned down
by a laughing Israeli soldier for sport.
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- It is the natural consequence of constructing a society
that avoids the real issues. I have some sympathy for Mao Tse Tung, whose
social policies conceded that man was an unruly criminal and had to be
constrained for the sake of peace.
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- With Mao it was not so much a lust for power as a necessary
expedient to quell the unending bloodshed, but as with all dictatorial
systems, it merely continued the cycle of violence. With the neocon cabal
in the U.S., powered by total control of the world financial markets by
a select few, the world government has far less compassion than Mao, as
the continuing slaughters following the vilest example of treasonous perfidy
ever recorded (that would of course be 9/11, a watershed event in human
history when a government's massacre of its own citizens was approved by
the masses because of the mind control the media had over them) continue
to drench the world in blood.
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- Such a shadow on the human mind had not been seen since
the Dark Ages (which really have yet to end), but even in this glittering
technological age, humanity had never been so "in the dark" about
what the real value of its collective life really was. For five thousand
years people piled up trinkets against the coming night and finally, after
years of searching for a safe pair of eyes, invented a friend who could
not be defeated, someone who at sometime, in some place, is the one friend
you can really count on, invention or not.
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- Who could have predicted, through all those eons, that
following this path of following the dictates of an all-powerful God would
lead to a situation for a species that first conquered the wilderness but
then became its own wilderness. Look at the planet. See where the wilderness
really is. It is where humans have been. The rest of the planet thrives
without us.
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- What is it we were supposed to be doing? Funny thoughts
cross your mind when you're pinned against the leather seat by the gravity
compression of an accelerating fast car about to crash through a barrier
from which there is no return.
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- First of which is .... what the hell am I doing in this
car?
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- But the matter at hand is ... how can we get the driver
to hit the brakes? Before we crash through the last fence.
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- I myself face this view this morning that when I return
home from a short sabbatical that my house could be in toothpicks as the
latest in a series of designer storms churns its way toward Florida's Gulf
Coast. It is appearing more likely that the new weapon of choice for the
totalitarian neocons is environment disaster -- first the tsunami, than
various major quakes, and now hurricanes. It's a much cleaner and easier
policy than trying to drum up support for wars with no reason except pure,
profane profit.
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- And all of our leaders are in on the scam. Especially
the current madman behind the wheel, who utters empty platitudes so meaningless,
uncaring, and illogical that one can only conclude this is a suicide mission
for profits. Exactly who profits, as we place our hands over our hearts
and pledge allegiance to our team, remains a fuzzy mystery, as men in expensive
suits gaze out from an opulent balcony on a European hillside and smugly
ponder their geopolitical gamesmanship.
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- Meanwhile, we're in the car, paralyzed by our fear, beseeching
the driver to get some common sense and stop the car, before it's too late
for all of us.
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- Perhaps a better way to describe the view that confronts
our bulging eyeballs is this one. Imagine you're in the cockpit of the
large passenger airliner and someone has a gun to your head. In those final
moments, you see the people in the windows of a skyscraper gesticulating
in uncomprehending panic as the plane closes fast on the face of the building.
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- This is today's snapshot of our species of individual
souls, trapped in the back seat of a fast car with a driver we don't really
know and are afraid to ask about, hurtling at breakneck speed toward you
know where ...
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- John Kaminski is writer who lives on the Gulf Coast of
Florida currently hiding from the latest designer storm in New York City.
Google him.
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