vox clamantis

11/7/04

Descending Logan Pass on the Coming-From-the-Sun Highway at the top of the world, the tour bus tries to straighten out a hairpin turn and sails through the guardrail into empty space. Those passengers interested in the geological history of the spot note that the valley they are entering by this direct if seldom traveled route was created by a huge glacier that plowed past that exact guardrail millions of years ago like a Brobdingnagian ice cream scoop. For the tourists and pilgrims and park employees who are only just noticing that the ride has become smoother, that a sudden wind is whistling at the windows, that their cameras and chili dogs are floating, the experience is too new to quickly assimilate. There is time, however. It's another quarter mile to the first bounce.

11/13/04

The diary from my excellent perspective continues, The author is on moral life support. The doctor says it is good for me to keep bitching. It keeps the mind active and the blood circulating.

It is a week and a half after the election. Bush has killed another thousand people already, just in high profile activities. I will try to spare my readers a litany of atrocities. I'm not the news. If there is a lull in the horror, a change in the rate of free fall, we will probably all notice it.

The last democratic American election any of us will witness in our lifetimes took place in 1996. For a transition period, as we enter the power millennium, placebo elections will likely be necessary. Unlike most of the non-European world, we are new at non-elections. I had the sense that they were not sure it would work, that some insufficiently anesthetized Jeffersonian would come up off the table and wake everybody else up, but it didn't happen. A few squeaks about the new inventory of touchscreen democracy boxes (that now are all that is required to keep USACorp employees convinced that they are free citizens and remain masters of their lives) to the effect that they appear to deliver unbelievable results, inconsistent with other sources of information. It's just way too complex. We're too fat and stupid. Everything is probably fine, you know?

11/16/04

Oh I'm sorry, we have to do the litany of atrocities. The atrocities themselves cry out for it. They need to echo in the open air, stand in the cold light of morning when their perpetrators wake from their dreams of innocence. The Red Cross now believes that 800 civilians were murdered in Fallujah. Two in three casualties inflicted by Ricky and Randy Sniper were noncombatant targets. The city of 300,000 people is today a bullet-riddled ruin of death and desolation. NBC news video shows the execution of wounded, unarmed Iraqis by our boys in uniform.

An embedded, helmeted reporter, wrapped in a snowsuit of antishrapnel gear, parrots the official spin the military wants to accompany footage of American troops herding the dazed, bloodied survivors out of trucks and sending them back to their smoking homes. "The soldiers are doing what they can for civilians today," she tells us. "but they are having trouble winning their trust."

Thousands of youngsters who have just completed a spree of state sanctioned mass murder will now have the choice of acceptance (becoming cowboy DPS cops or prison guards) or denial (flashbacks and nightmares) for the remainder of their wretched lives, back home here on the streets where the rest of us shop and drive our kids to school.

The facemasks of Bush's leering cabinet have been blown away by this week's "resignations." The CIA is being purged of liberals and whistleblowers. "I have political capital," says the Commander in Chief. "and I plan to spend it. It's my style."

11/23/04

Thousands of Ukrainians have hit their subzero streets tonight to protest their bogus and clearly rigged election results. The scenario was exactly like ours, a slightly wider point spread, identical anomalies in the exit polls, clear evidence of fraud. The difference is that Ukrainians are not having it. Unlike our corpulent, bovine populace, they appear to value their freedom and are unwilling to stand for the subversion of their democratic process. The opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, who favors moving the country toward the European Union, has taken his own oath of office following official announcements that Putin's guy, Viktor Yanukovych, was the winner. The cost of this insistence on principle may well be civil war. The cost of our acquiescence here in the Land of the Free, will be less arduous, a settling into the cozy warmth of corporate slavery. We drive to work past those strange Fox News billboards that dot the new Republican landscape telling us to "GO TO SLEEP." like some weird post-hypnotic suggestion planted in our brains by Bill O'Reilly. Charlie and Diane and OJ and a parade of bimbos with glitter-studded double breast implants wave from the fairyland of our morning televisions, back and forth like a shiny watch on a silver chain. Nitey nite.

Nothing that resides in our hearts, but only the weapons in our hands, gives us the edge in the battles we wage around the world. We face opponents who are vastly braver and more motivated than we are. In equal numbers and similarly armed, our production-line warriors would be torn to pieces by the militant rage, the ancient and desperate patriotism we face. We have become idiots (the French would have a single word for this, as in ça vous abêtirà.) Our substance has been reduced to clips from video snuff games and platitudes from pop religion. Like feral chickens, we just ain't equipped to get far in the real world. Nope, it's the weapons. The Humvees and infrared sniperscopes and laser guided missiles and Apache attack helicopters and layer upon layer of protective gear to keep us safe from a world that uniformly wants us gone. It's the hardware, the stuff that can be bought and sold on the black market, copied in Shanghai, smuggled across Uzbekistan, centrifuged in Iran, assembled in Nigeria, sifting through a world of ill will like the news, like recipes, like hate jokes, like water, like black flies. Sooner or later every girl scout will have nukes and RPGs, and the outcome of our squabbles will turn on will and spirit and staying the course across generations when, for the first time since Lincoln, in the Arcadian dream of our pampered society, we are suddenly visited by the death and mayhem we have inflicted upon others. We are counting on the mother of all bluffs to frighten away people who are beyond fear, but without the cheap sound effects the Great Oz possesses neither courage nor empathy nor a brain.

11/31/04

Heavily quoted on all the online news and essay sites in my neighborhood is Yeats' The Second Coming, a nearly perfect expression of the dark outlook into which liberals are today plunged. Those who believe that authoritarianism is countered by the democratic process have been forced into the perception that the populace is ensconced in madness. Those who consider themselves Christians, followers of the Prince of Peace, are renouncing Christianity itself as a corrupt institution hijacked by warmongers and charlatans. We few who are even aware that a large scale massacre of civilians has just occured in Fallujah, ordered by the President-elect purely as an example in terror to those who choose to question the invincibility of the American horde, have begun to glean that what we are witnessing is only a prelude. The dementia of Nero has spread to the streets. Something huge and awful is taking place, to which even our best pundits are reeling in confusion. We are in for a bad time.

This particular pundit is not up to the task of punditry tonight. I have spent the day reading, sampling the forlorn effusions of America's litterati. Addressing the heartbreak of Fallujah, Jonathan Schell's piece in The Nation goes beyond anything I could cook up for you in the way of outrage: A Heartless War

Or Joel Kovel's beautiful and premature analysis of our social malady: The Hour of the Beast

Read them all. The blogs are overflowing with it. It's a Biblical mourning, a time for weeping, for fear and rage and loathing. Don't try to rise above it. Don't be in a hurry to put it behind you. Don't close the book. There is clarity in desolation, wakefulness in the wake of loss, truthfulness in the humiliation of defeat. People are saying important things. Listen.

*****