stateside fear

“I’m afraid you will have take your boots off,” said a soldier wearing a 45-caliber sidearm with an M-16 slung over his shoulder when he saw Point’s scarred Swiss climbing boots at SeaTac airport in March 2002. They had steel rivets.

“Anything interesting happen while I was away?” said Point.

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“Do you mean the half before the shift or the half after the shift ?”

The G.I. answered with a dull blank stare.

A retired homeless bag lady approached security. “It’s good to know that 450 airports in early 2002 hired more than 45,000 workers. Maybe I can get a screener job here.”

“Why not?” said a T.S.A. official standing near an X-ray machine. “Each month, screeners take from passengers about a half-million things, including 160,000 knives, 2,000 box cutters, and seventy guns.”

“Look like things have really improved since I’ve been gone,” she said, pushing her grocery cart down the discount aisle. “Now I feel really safe.”

Point removed his boots and passed through detectors. Along the concourse he studied glossy high definition pixel posters of airplanes slamming into towers with the admonition:

Beware! This could happen to you.

Live in fear.

Report any and all suspicious activity.

Do not trust anyone.

Spy on your neighbors.

Report them to the Secret Police.

Do your civic duty.

Big Brother is watching.

He knew it’d come to this. He’d been far away, in Morocco and Spain imagining this Brave New World with precise clarity.

Returning to the United States of Advertising after centuries on the ground he sat down in a cabin on 8,000 year old Kalapuya Indian ceremonial soil. He had a maul, a hatchet, and a double bladed axe named Laughter. 

A Century is Nothing

after morocco

Well before sunrise in March 2002 on his last morning in Morocco, before seeing a sunburst orange ball on skylines flying toward Amsterdam, west to Seattle, and east over the Cascades; before leaving Sad’s family furniture factory home in Casablanca, a scribe, who’d been up all night anticipating another Exit, took a gigantic shit over a hole in the ground before sweeping a sweet smelling kid’s sanitized paper wipe over his skinny little ass.

He poured water from an old green bottle into the holy plumbing system, waking the dead on their life highway crowded with whiners, complainers and ghosts, before stumbling through darkness with Rex the German shepherd on his heels.

The toilet paper was crap in Spain. In Morocco it was nonexistent.

It felt good to blast yesterday out of his system. He knew all the bilingual time and surprises were worth it. Miniature adventures were a refreshing drink of water, a desperate invigorating breath during a climb for a clear perspective.

Slanting dawn light wrapped tentacles around an anonymous scribe gathering unfiltered and uncensored evidence of post 911 fear. Light cut the sky severing white villages, crude broken stone paths, scarred Moorish brown doors, ageless idle men, shifty eyed one-armed merchants and sad-eyed unemployed dissatisfied immigrants surviving with poverty and despair.

The scribe traversed light, space, and time intervals near sixteen blue, yellow, and green starred mosaic vaulted arches. He kissed everyone on cheeks, shaking hands, confirming an exile's flight.

All the adults were tired, wasted, beat. Moroccans walked, stopped, looked around with hesitancy, this delayed boarding card question.

Their visa stamp bled through indigo robes piercing shirts, blouses, and woven fabric designed by millions of minimum wage children in twisted alleys without a visa. They needed a bread visa, a scrap of meat visa, a tea visa and a chance visa. They craved sweet green tea to mix life’s colors with dust.

The plane taxied down the runway. Rainbows illuminated western clouds. The moon danced in cobalt blue sky. Above clouds, thunderheads formed a white billowing future infinite dream machine of air and water molecules.

Zooming over Canadian ice fields toward heightened U.S. military airport security and stateside psychosis after 9/11, global FEAR merchants had a never-ending consignment sale.

A Century is Nothing.

Children's story hour

He was in Morocco on 9/11. He didn't take possession of that event. Fate said hello, hah, hah, hah. 

After two months he shifted to Cadiz, Spain with Omar, a blind Touareg writer.

His forward observer position allowed him to witness young and old sexually repressed Catholic couples steal kisses at night under yellow street lamps. They hid in recessed Moorish doorways getting a quick feel. Passion with a purpose.

Meals with a Gypsy family timed down Gades days with a simple breakfast of toast, butter, jam or muesli, a lunch of thick soup, fresh salad, bread, water, and a main course at 2:30 p.m. He read Don Quixote...true history...the crux of fiction, harder to read than fantasy. The world of floating images.

It was shifts, frequencies, and transitions moving from pre-terror North America to North Africa and old Southern European worlds. Everyone was connected by history in the making: Phoenician, Romans, Berbers haunting conquests, establishing bases in Europe, Moors fighting Christians, morphing cellular structures.

In Andalucía citizens exchanged belief windows, values, attitudes, construction projects, and 3,000 years of icon free Arabian art. It was about agriculture, water, light, form, and substance. Equality was the word at a Muslim burial exhibit at the Mondragon Palace in Ronda.

Cadiz was founded by Phoenicians in 1100 BC. They called it Gadir and traded amber and tin. It was a Roman navel base.

Greeks and Phoenicians introduced the potter’s wheel, writing, olive tree, donkey and hen to Spain. They replaced iron with bronze. Metals became currencies. People developed agriculture as growing populations built walls, towers, and castles for security. Romans contributed aqueducts, temples, theaters, circuses, and baths. They gave the Iberian Peninsula Castilian language based on 2,000-year old Latin.

Their desire, wanderlust and greed established communities to satisfy their impulse for cuisine, sex, music, and trade expanded their nation-state.

The Museo de Cadiz was filled with Roman artifacts. Humans wandered through archeological epoch discoveries from settlements in Gades along the coast extending inland to Seville and Cordoba.

Travellers discovered estuaries, towns, villages, isolated tight white pueblos and rooms full of coins, maps, heads, pottery and faces. They discovered vases, dynasties, ruins, Roman legion armor, burial sites, aqueduct maps, temples, theaters, masks, busts, sculptures, marble, glass, and utensils.

Three million-year old human remains slept in stoned chambers. Sharp sewing bones rested in dust.

Scientists collected anger, desire, jealousy, pride, and ignorance. Minute grains of mica. Archaeologists and mobile blood donation units explored rain forests and hacked through Angkor Wat jungles discovering isolated oceanic islands above simmering volcanic eruptions.

ACIN

STC

Big Game, Little People

Centuries earlier or later depending on reference points along Time’s thin line on an event horizon as infinity and eternity played post 9/11 dirges, fugues, and blues with a full orchestra in the pits Ahmed resumed his story in the Sahara.

“Fate bites you when you least expect it,” he said waving his hands like wild kites. “Her appetite is insatiable.”

Leonardo was so far removed from 9/11 reality he took no possession of the event. He read Ahmed’s open palms and eyes. Leonardo’s facility for unspoken tongues was legendary. It was all body language and he was fluent in every language. Gestures were a work in progress. Gestures used people.

Ahmed described airplanes and two tall towers. “I’ve read Superman by Nietzsche in Arabic. He said 'God is dead' and God said, 'Nietzsche is dead.'"

Ahmed waved his arms like a Moroccan eagle condemned to freedom yet a prisoner of the sheltering sky. He raised a hand indicating height and smacked his flying hand into his stationary hand. The impact echoed across caramel dunes. He smiled through black teeth. His dark eyes held all the world’s secrets.

Leonardo had no idea where, who, how, why, or when Ahmed received his information. Perhaps from slave and gold trade caravans, perhaps through osmosis.

“Yes,” Ahmed said, “2,974 people from 80 countries died.”

“I see.” They were just two nomads in the desert. They did not talk about Being and Nothingness. They tweaked reality by breathing.

He handed Omar’s book to Ahmed. “Have a look-see.” Ahmed read Tifignagh words.

“He was not as surprised, stunned and scared as all the well meaning myopic tax paying, allegiance singing populace would have the world’s citizens believe in their us or them attitude. He knew they’d be catapulted into a new heavy deep reality, grounded fast, sifting soil, searching for answers, breathing through death masks, deconstructing and revising history while pleading for meaning to their existence. Postmodern dialectics.

“Now they had to figure out the big answer to the big question. Why? It’d keep them busy for life. Their children taught them to ask why? Being extremely impatient and under extreme pressure to be successful in their all-consuming reality, they became extremely frustrated with the “why” question from their children. Parents wanted to be the boss, the grown-ups in complete control. They figured they had all the answers.”

Whoops!

“In the BIG game people with a long history rolled their dice when it was their turn to play and everyone had to go back to the start. They had to read the rules. They had to read the small fine print. The details they casually accepted carte blanche, data they skipped because they didn’t think it was important, the stuff made in Hollywood, the fictional entertainment stuff with happy endings. They were well conditioned to violence, sex and reality television. Now they digested so-called reality television in real time." 

ACIN

Curveball

Media's running stories about falsified intelligence after 9/11 leading British and American politicians to believe Sad Man had WMD. We know he didn't.

The pretense of believing faulty intelligence led to the invasion of Iraq. Politicians and media pushed it down gullible throats ten years ago. Choke choke.

Cost? $1.7 trillion so far. Estimates of $6 trillion over 40 years. 

190,000 dead Iraqis, aid workers, security forces, journalists and insurgents. Millions displaced.

4,500 dead US soldiers.

Curveball, Wikipedia

An excerpt from A Century is Nothing, Subject to Change (2007, 2012).

Curveball came in for short relief. “I know where it is.”

“Where what is?” asked Bumsfeld.

“All the Iraqi mobile labs full of toxins and nerve agents.”

“For an alcoholic spy and fabricator you have a lot of nerve,” screamed the Tenant (CIA). He used to be Lew but now he was just a plain Jane Tenant from a housing project. He was on a speaking tour making big bucks when it happened after his slam dunk fell well short of the net.

“Look,” said Curveball. “I gave German intelligence the high hard stuff. But they don’t understand the American pastime. They said I was past my prime. They co-opted me with women and booze. A hell of a lethal combination, let me tell you. They grilled me over a hot flame. I became a double agent. I was beside myself.”

“Yeah, sure,” said Bumsfeld, “a classic case of split personality, bi-polar disorder and your mother wears combat boots. Anyway, then we distort flimsy evidence from a worthless intel source saying the dictator is an immediate and direct threat to our national security. He’ll attack us in forty-five minutes.”

“But,” said Resident President, waving his one-way tickets to Argentina, “that won’t give me time to finish reading the story about goats to the elementary kids.”

“No butts sir,” said his spokesperson. “You’ll just have to skip a few pages.”

“Isn’t this strategy too vague and deceptive?” asked a garbage collector.

“Vague and deceptive shit happens all the time,” said the man cracking his cool whip. “What planet are you from, amigo? We have the national media eating out of our filthy hands with all this flag waving patriotic bullshit. So, we con the world with these fictitious stories about the dictator being a threat to us with his weapons of mass distraction and start a war to remove him from power.”

“Brilliant,” said a very rich civilian military contractor from Texas. “What then?”

“It’s easy. We know the dictator’s been bluffing all along to maintain his power base. Just ask Curveball here when he sobers up. He’s never had weapons of mass destruction except for the munitions and sarin gas we gave him to support his eight-year war with Iran and commit genocide against the Kurds, but the world doesn’t know that unpleasant fact. His military will collapse like a house of cards. We send in, what, maybe 150,000 military forces, - mostly young, poorly trained national guard units from America’s middle and lower class mind you - take some losses sure, but that’s the price of doing business right, while we establish a quasi-official coalition government with us in total control of everything.”

“What about the local people?” asked a relief worker.

“Screw them I say. We’ve liberated them from a dictator for God’s sake. They should be eternally grateful to us and get down on their knees in desert sand thanking us.”

A public relations flack had an idea.

“For propaganda purposes we’ll let them form a provisional government so they’ll be distracted and think they have real input in how their country is going to be run. It’s like we’ve controlled Kuwait with our remote for years. They increase oil production when we tell them and they shut up when we hit the off button.”

“When do we get the contracts?” asked an oil man from Texas washing his bloody hands.

“All in good time. Rebuilding the oil industry will be tied into larger deals. We’ll start you off with easy contract stuff first: mail delivery, detention camps, prisons, roads, schools, building hospitals, and supplying food to the troops. That will keep your people busy for what, 5-20 years, easy.”

“Sounds great,” said the contractor. “This is going to make a lot of my friends very rich.”

“Hey,” said Hally Burden, “war is good business. Politics is business and business is politics.”