life, liberty and the pursuit:
...legislation now marching up to the Republican White House for signature, has shattered a number of bedrock legal protections for suspects, prisoners, and pretty much anyone else George W. Bush deems to be an enemy.William Rivers Pitt/truthout 29.08.06
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A lot of good minds are trying to get next to this latest signifier - there's shrugs and cynical laughter, shock and nervousness, bitter negativity, sorrow, the atomization of fragile communities as groups collapse around nuclei of helplessness.
Bleak - aching and empty out to the horizon, and the gloating behind us - well we'll get to the gloating later.
It isn't Bush, he doesn't even exist anymore except as a lunchbox full of soundbites. And as Rivers Pitt makes clear, the personal theme is the undeniable linear movement toward this moment, all those steps, all that sensible denial of what so frighteningly led right to here. And goes on from here, now.
It feels almost inevitable, like watching the skin of a bubble go from that swirling rainbow of bright glistening profusion to gold then silver metallic then colorless black white and gray, just before it pops.
The pigs can track anyone entering the country down to the minutest detail of locus.
Placing the emphasis for the utilization of that power on Bush is another, firmer, deeper form of denial.
This is preparation, it's like watching something prepare for its own birth.
What thing?
The tradition I was raised in would call it Satan, but that tradition has, at least for me, been degraded in too many ways to get and keep my blind trust.
The binary has too much of the shell game to it, diversion and misdirection, that building up of false confidence in the rube so he'll go with what his senses tell him has to be.
Terrorism's a false flag, we know that. What they're really afraid of is something else.
Jesus, maybe. Joan of Arc. Spartacus. D'Artagnan. Rosa Luxemberg. Thomas Paine.
Something like a Messiah. Or Subcommandante Marcos for the gringo world.
Those of us who don't have those kinds of bones can write our names, and arrows, on the walls of the maze.
The one consistent mistake the privileged left has been making all along has been the underestimation of its enemy, following the misdirection toward an empty shell. The near-drooling idiocies of fundamentalism, the illogic and overt hypocrisy of the barking mad right. These were, and are proving themselves to have been, masks.
But the alternative is to have no word to name it with, or to use the ones it gives us, to have no one to point with precision at except Bush and Rumsfeld and the rest of that collection of masks - the public faces it wears.
I have visions of a kind now and again, small things, clips, like youtube videos - a giant made out of babies sitting spread-eagle in an empty parking lot, Moloch at the PTA meeting with an antique dress on, lipstick on its monstrous telegenic smile - stuff like that.
On the other hand, I've always had this problem of seeing the humanity of what hates me, of what wants to hurt me, the mammalian commonality, the relation of living, of identification with anything that's alive, doing what it needs to do to live.
It weakens the defiance, makes for a pulled punch. That guy who's got you trained in his gunsight is just protecting his young, like any other creature would. The fascist leather-and-steel regulations that bind us in tighter and tighter now - just things to make it safer for the pigs to raise their families.
I tried a bunch of times to get to the gist of it, the kernel of the locked forces of the present - what it is that has to be recognized; it's still elusive but it comes down to something like
Make them remember you. Make it count.
