The Moroccan girl with wild brown hair tied back is not on the train leaving a white station.
Her bare feet grip small pebbles as root structures dance with her toes.
Her grounded shadow prowls toward late winter light.
She is not on the red and brown train zooming past green fields as her sheep in long woolen coats eat their way through pastures after a two-year drought.
She is not on the train hearing music, eating dates, reading a book, talking with friends or strangers, sleeping along her passage, or dreaming of a lover. She does not scan faces of tired, trapped people in orange seats waiting for restless time to deliver them to the Red City.
Her history remembers potentates inventing icon free art, alphabets, practicing equality, creating five pillars of Islam, navigation star map tools, breaking wild stallions, building adobe fortresses and writing language.
She is not on the train drinking fresh mint tea or consulting a pocket sized edition of the Qur’an. She does not kneel on her Berber carpet five times a day facing Mecca.
She does not wear earphones listening to music imported from another world, a world where people treasure their watches. Where illusions of controlling time is their passion to be prompt and responsible citizens.
She is not on the train and not in this language the girl with wild brown hair tied back with straw or flower stems surrounding her with fragrances.
Inside rolling hills cut by wet canyons she is surrounded by orange blossom aroma in yellow and green fields. Her black eyes absorb ephemeral cloud thoughts in sky mind. Her open heart feels her breath ripple her long shadow.
Her toes caress soil. She is lighter than air, lighter than an eagle soaring above the Atlas Mountains.
She smells the Berber fire heating tea for a festival. A shaman dances in a goatskin cape and skull below stars.
It is cold. Flaming shooting stars leap into her eyes. Her nomadic clan plays flutes and drums. She sways with the hypnotic rhythm of her ancestral memory.
She is not on the train. She is inside a goat skull moving through soil, dancing through fields.
Red and yellow fire invites stars to her dance.
Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir
At dawn a sardine man yelling, “hout, hout,” pushed his bike with reed baskets holding dead fish along a dusty path. Cheap eats. Fried bones. His plaintive voice echoed between cinder block apartments. His song enticed Bedouin women sweeping and mopping red historical dust to buy protein.
Blood is no argument.
A solitary light bulb behind double metal doors at #187 dangled from the ceiling. The place was an aesthetic disaster. Chunks of cinder blocks hung from rebar.
A framed Qur’an quote and a dead clock decorated a wall. A green and brown speckled gecko crawled through the pantry looking for a high carb insect diet.
I loved these sweet imperfect places. Travel and adventure offered majestic habitats.
I bought sardines wrapped in greasy paper and got on a long distance bus for Tiznit seeking old Touareg silver and the wild sea at Sidi Ifni.
We traversed towns where armies of unemployed men slept in dark corners, on sidewalks or below green shuttered windows sheltered from a brutal sun by truck carcasses.
The bus accelerated though sand washed canyons passing isolated stone homes. Women on donkeys hauled water in jugs. The terrain reminded me of Southwestern mesas in Amnesia with red sandstone, bluffs, valleys, and gorgeous gorges by George.
Camel herds wandered in scrub as goats foraged high in Argan trees eating leaves. Argania spinosa was unique to this region of Morocco. Argan berry stones make traditional oil. It’s a labor-intensive extraction process. It requires sixty-six pounds of berries and eight hours of manual labor to produce 2.2 pints. Women do all the work.
They collect the fruit during the summer, dry it in the sun and store it. The flesh of the fruit is removed, used as animal feed and the stones are cracked open revealing an almond-like nut. This is roasted and ground by hand. The residue is a high-quality animal feed. The decanted oil is used for cooking and as a medicine for stomach and heart illness, poor blood circulation and fertility problems. It’s consumed in the West as expensive cosmetics.
In the middle of nowhere a skinny naked black man under a tangled mop of hair dragging a shawl in blazing sun walked along the road at a steady pace.
His eyes were on fire. Baraka.
In the Tiznit old market square Berbers in blue flowing robes meandered through a dream.
A hustler on his motorcycle materialized out of thin air.
“Where are you going? Come have a look at my shop. Only five minutes from here. Great prices. You don’t have to buy.”
“Why should I?”
“Great morning prices.”
Five hundred years ago he would have been on a camel wearing a burnoose tending his flock in the Sahara. He’d be planning Spanish invasions, married to a beautiful girl with dark seductive eyes, produced many kids and conquered Iberia in his spare time. Now he was on an imported European 50cc bike wearing castoff designer jeans with slicked black hair and grinning with all his teeth, a distinctive character trait.
I dreamed with my eyes open.
I am a hunter-gatherer of words and images. Hunting with a singular flair, a cunning intelligence - metis - a hybrid form.
Trap and shoot. ‘Snapshot’ was a British hunting word from the late 1800’s.
I make them. I didn’t take them being the qualitative difference. The best pictures are the ones in your heart-mind.
I loved gathering raw material in Morocco and then Spain incorporating Omar's evidence and story-truth.
I practiced meditative patience, before the fact, the decisive moment, anticipating the vision manifesting itself. Before, during and after the emotional rush with detachment and reptilian behavior. Premonition is a beautiful thing.
Photography was a beautiful fascinating magical alchemy since Nam traversing the planet becoming intuition, trusting instincts. Be the moment.
It was the essence of being and nothingness. A singularity of being, stalking and allowing life’s movie to roll as scenic action led to climatic instants. I isolated elements clean and simple.
I tweaked reality.
I stopped time.
The emotion preceding the action was my intention.
It was the KISS philosophy of straight shooting.
A shooting star flashed across the sky shedding tears of light.
I settled into the rhythm of a place. Ephemeral realities evolved through time and space. Space folded.
I sat down, did my work, packed up essentials and hit the road. I found my comfort zone inside a visual zonal theory. Spectrums decrypted language, attitudes, perceptions and theoretical interpretations.
As a mystic and guardian of the visible world, light was my prayer wheel.
A decisive moment divided time in two. It was a pure thought with pure action. Wu-Wei. A way of life passed through a gate-less gate.
“Infinite diversity through infinite combinations,” said a laughing Zen monk walking on the curvature of the earth. It was a walking meditation or kin-kin in Japanese.
It was all the same - comforting addicts in a group, with Tran in Da Nang, offering Cambodian amputee rice and chicken or buying grapes from a malnourished boy offering sweet green life. Everyone needs love and compassion.
Millions graduated from the University of the Street with a degree in Hustling 101. It was all about survival. How the world works.
Meditating on the process of my death shaped my intention. Karma.
“The nature of my mind is the empty sky,” I said to the hustler.
Sky mind, cloud thoughts.
“Get on,” said the biker.
I shouldered curiosity and got on. We roared out of the market, down narrow twisting passages zooming along high gingerbread adobe walls slashed by blue sky, in and out of blinding sun, blasted into cool shadows and arrived at an empty shop. Full stop.
A young boy in the silver shop took over the sales pitch plying me with sweet tea and sugar words.
He tried sympathy and pity. He cajoled, he sighed wearing his saddest face. He tried to convince me to buy something. “Morning sale means good luck.”
“Every morning you wake up is good luck. A gift.”
The boy used well-established emotional appeals playing me for a sucker. His assumed every tourist was rich and relatively speaking this was true. He gave me a wooden bowl.
“This is the traditional way. Put your choices in the bowl. We can discuss the price later.”
I accepted the wooden bowl. I looked at inlaid boxes, daggers with fake stones, silver rings, bracelets, bangles, beads, earrings and silver necklaces in provocative gleaming displays.
In another incarnation I carried my begging bowl through dirt streets on Earth. It felt cool and smooth in my hands. Fingers caressed a worn oval surface. The begging bowl had a consciousness.
Recalibrating my existence I thumbed open a ragged existential dictionary. It was filled with stories, legends, myths, symbols, images, ideographs, pictographs, sliding scales, musical interludes, sonatas, and vibratos.
It contained journey notes, broken hearts, haiku, khata scarves, pure mirror paper, type-A negative blood donor manifests, rose thorns, rainbow threads, the game of life and empty wooden bowls.
The Tiznit boy wanted me to fill it up. He wanted me to be greedy. He wanted to hear the sound of silver strike wood. He had great expectations based on my desire. I wanted to hit the bricks. I found one interesting bracelet and it clattered, spinning silver.
I became a Touareg Berber. “I’ll give you 100.”
“Mister, please, the price is 350,” said the boy fresh out of tears being too tired to cry and the man in front of him being Berber and patient with Sahara nature existing inside silence did not buy self-pity and stayed with his final price.
I was a hustling poetic mercenary 24/7 and it wasn’t my fate or karma to rescue sellers trapped in their expectations.
“Take it or leave it,” I said in Tamasheq, a Touareg language. The boy was shocked hearing his cultural identity.
Culture eats strategy.
We were on common territory. Negotiation is hard work. Extra talk. It didn’t require extraordinary skills, only patience the great teacher, with determination and instinct. Always be closing. ABC.
I received one piece of silver and dissolved into a broiling sun, experiencing a metamorphosis as ego dissolved.
The bowl reflected emptiness.
Adventure, Risk, Transformation
Twice a week I traversed a rubble path from #187 past plastic bags, small broken trees and rubbish to a hammam. The Turkish styled public bath cost seven dirhams or seventy cents.
Women left. Men right. A shy veiled girl accepted coins. I crammed clothes in a plastic bag and handed it to the smiling toothless attendant. He gave me two buckets made from old tires, reminding me of the souk zone where boys cut the rubber, hammered and sold them.
I pushed open a heavy wooden door. Three low-vaulted white tiled rooms had variable degrees of heat and steam. Men reclined on heated tiled floors or collected cold/hot water from faucets in buckets, soaping and scrubbing themselves.
Entering a heat mist dream of forms, I walked through the first two rooms to a space along a wall. I filled one bucket with scalding hot water, another with temperate liquid. Closing tired eyes I stretched out absorbing heat on my back. It penetrated skin, muscles and bones in a respite from poverty’s chaos and hospitality.
Sweating men scrubbed in steam and water music. Working out kinks an old wiry man bent a man’s arms and legs into pretzels. The skinny bald man worked wrists, elbows, and shoulder joints to the point of snapping them off a skeleton. Rolling a patron over he pummeled a spinal chord, slapped a back and bent knee joints leaving the man spread-eagled on tiled floors. Customers welcomed his torturous attention.
I soaped and scrubbed off layers of dusty skin with a rough hand cloth. Oceans flowed from tiles to drains.
I retrieved clothing, dried off with a sarong, slipped into fabric and gave the attendant a tip. The old man smiled, rolled his eyes shook his head. I dropped more coins into arthritic brown fingers.
“Shukran. M’a ssalama.”
Clean skin felt cool night air. The dusty path was filled with scooters, boys playing on abandoned rusty cars, scavengers probing trash and mothers dragging black gowns on the ground. Yellow slippers slapping earth flashed golden dust particles.
Children sang, “I never promised you a rose garden.”
A one-eyed mendicant looking for alms stumbled past.
Cafe men watched perpetual terrorism reports at full volume on a television hanging from a ceiling.
“Ah, Ahab,” said a smiling young waiter in a purple vest balancing his silver tray of cups and water glasses. “Coffee?”
“Yes, no sugar please,” gesturing I’d sit at a table outdoors on cracked pavement away from media. Dejected shoeshine boys tapped wooden boxes as their dark unemployed eyes inspected shoes of chronically unemployed men drinking endless tea.
Another waiter cut mint tea leaves, crammed them into a silver plated kettle, dumped in a brick of sugar, closed the lid and poured a light brown steady stream of tea into a small embossed glass. He poured it back into the pot. He put the pot, glasses, spoons and sugar cubes on a tray to be delivered to patrons.
A subtle red sunset spread across adobe walls. Atlas snow patched mountain ranges on the southern horizon turned pink. Women in billowing blue cloth tread sand from clustered stone villages to take a local bus to the shimmering Red City or sit on broken cement talking with friends.
Dusk and twilight married, creating night children. More field hands, more economic resources and more offspring futures destined for trades making $1.00 a day. Women sat talking on fractured pavement surrounded by trash. People discarded their lives going through it.
A small single tree in a patch of dirt epitomized local life. People had stripped off branches and leaves leaving a sharp broken piece of wood sticking out of the ground.
People wandered aimlessly or sat on hard packed earth. Unemployed men on haunches stared at dirt.
A fruit seller with green grapes on a rolling cart waved at flies circling a light bulb. A young man in his wheelchair poured bottled water over a handful of grapes. Water disappeared into dust around his wheels of fate. Savoring one grape at a time he observed boys weave past on broken bikes.
A bearded man paced the street collecting discarded cardboard in his recycled life. Cardboard made excellent cheap sidewalk seats, foundations in rolling carts to keep stuff from falling out, sun hats, beds and shop doormats after infrequent deluges.
Shredded telephone wires dangled from the wall of a telephone office as men lined up to make calls on the single working phone while holding mobile phones and punching digits.
Disconnected grease covered boys with their tools spilling into the street manipulated mammoth truck tires along broken sidewalks. The area buzzed as people with survival instincts scrambled to make a living.
On a side street two men unloaded shoes from the trunk of a car. Location - location - location. One seller spread a bright blue tarp on the ground anchoring it with bricks. His partner arranged cheap running, dress and casual shoes. No Adidas Berber shoes for these guys. They fired up a propane lamp.
After a day of oppressive heat residents prowled looking for a bargain and telling stories.
Adventure, Risk, Transformation
Burma
“May we resume our deliberations now?” said a pedophile priest with a Big Unit mobile attached to his ear. He heard a long distance confession from Boston, “Why me? Not me.”
Not wanting to make an ass of himself in public, he knew he’d face felony charges when they found his big hand had been on the little hand. He knew he’d never make Cardinal as a stool pigeon without a prosthetic leg to stand on. He whispered to the congregation.
“We must make plans for the ordained conquest. The heathen are massing their cavalry on the mount of Venus as we speak on these vital matters of church and state.”
Idiots in rapture supported his religious ideology. Faith based her initiative in him.
Worm Hole, a mathematician, manipulated statistics on a child’s carnivore place mat. He created black holes to explore their gravitational pull. Space was more beautiful and mysterious than time.
“And now we’re here,” he said pointing to a small blue marble floating on a cosmic map. “It’s amazing how many people don’t appreciate their existence.”
“Yes,” said a knight errant, “there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all the earth’s beaches. Try putting that into your hourglass.”
Everybody laughed except Bumsfield and his greedy buddy Dicky Chainsaw from Why O Ming.
Knights spinning around the round table guessed the military-industrial campaign might end by spring. They didn’t know the year so they surmised seasons.
Veterans, children, orphans and women knew it’d be forever. Someone had to take the fall and remove leaves clogging the Rivers of Tears. Seasons were theirs for the taking. It was a crapshoot. They all knew it.
Dice man played his hand, “Snake eyes!”
The room became quieter than 1.7 million unmarked Cambodian graves where orphans played with unexploded ordnance.
“We hit a Blue Cross building yesterday,” said a psychotic coalition general. “Was it red or blue, I can’t remember. You know how confusing things get in war.”
“Oh no,” said the priest, “not another cross to bear.”
At the word bear the mathematician looked up in horror from his predator place mat. A huge Alaskan brown bear with blazing eyes charged out of a forest carrying a decapitated wildlife ranger.
“We have a situation,” radioed a Cobra helicopter pilot circling the grizzly scene.
His radio crackled, “You have permission to fire.”
He pressed his magic red button. A $50,000,000 dollar Hellfire Tomahawk Missile blasted the beast to kingdom come.
“We’re saved!” yelled orphans. Gutting the beast with Berber knives and Tibetan daggers they salvaged every part of the animal. A kid named Export packed the testicles in Ice-9 for a Hong Kong pharmacy.
Authorities arrived. They dragged the priest away for questioning after numerous Irish children accused him of sexual abuse. He requested to speak with someone at the Holy See.
“We’ll see what we can do,” said a member of the Vatican SWAT team preventing anguished angry parents from strangling him with his rosary.
“Crucify the hypocrite,” yelled the high masses. Priests in crisis management modus operandi looked at new cardinal points on their compass. They needed an alibi.
“Roast him over an open friar,” sobbed a sacred heart mother of all transfusions.
“Rest in peace … ” sang an angelic choir. “RIP it into shreds.”
“Let him write a check.”
“There’ll be a penalty for early withdrawals,” salivated a Vietnamese hooker lying on a thin mattress caressing a big hot strawberry flavored OK #1 condom.
“Any causalities?” queried a Foreign Legion mercenary just back from Yemen where he was shortlisted as MIA. He’d hitched a ride with a camel caravan across Oman heading to Kurdish/Syrian refugee enclaves near Turkey.
“Friendly fire wiped out a few of our forces which is to be expected,” reported an analyst. “Journalists, photographers, and an Italian intelligence agent bit the bullet so to speak. They’ve filed their final report. Wrong coordinates I’d suggest. They’ll be embedded forever. We have unconfirmed reports that Iraq, Syrian, Yemen and Afghan hospitals are overwhelmed with the dead or dying, amputees, grieving mothers and widows. 500,000 and rising.”
“So it goes,” said a historian turning their hourglass over as sands of time fell in love with the gravity of thinking.
“We suspect they are executing their own,” said a junior minion. “We’ve bombed beans, rice, cooking oil, water treatment facilities, power plants, and oil refineries. The price of crude is escalating as members of OPEC agree to disagree. They’ve had us over a barrel for decades. Any sheik maintaining four wives has to keep pumping. Staple expenses went through the roof at a fire sale. The cost of staples is driven by supply and demand.”
“Humanitarian aid is a noble casualty for the price of peace,” said a coalition officer waiting for extradition on mass murder charges. “Politically cheaper than body bags.”
“Those are back ordered,” said a supply clerk from Kansas City with an 8th grade education. “77,000 body bags were shipped to a southern Italian military installation before we invaded Iraq with the intention to occupy. Boxes of rancid democracy lie stranded south of Basra marshes. Pallets of freedom sit abandoned along the highway of death between Damascus and Kuwait.”
“Is the democracy smooth or crunchy?” said the chef.
“We can’t wait. We’re screwed,” said a selected two-faced Fascist puppet president from O-Zone. “We bought the ranch. I’m moving to Argentina A.S.A.P.”
“We’re not screwed,” whined a minimum wage slave. “When factories are finished producing expensive weapons of mass destruction, recycled petroleum products for happy meals and flags they will reconfigure their machines and production target quotas.”
“May I speak?” requested a poet.
“If you must,” said an officer buffing his medals with Brasso.
The poet tuned his Arabic oud instrument of mass distraction and sang a sad lament about a person dreaming they were free in a free country.
“Ingenious,” said a literary critic. “Uses language in imaginary and metaphorical ways. Gives it a goof feel.”
“We’ve allocated a percentage to Asian sweat shops,” said a textile importer. “To be specific: China, Thailand, Saipan, Malaysia, Burma, Vietnam and Cambodia, where one-third of sixty million people make less than $1.00 a day. Factory slaves are working overtime. They have absolutely no choice in the matter. A buck a day is a hell of a deal. Once the feds and W.T.O. leave us alone we’ll realize a handsome profit when all is sewn and done.”
“That’s nothing,” said an analyst, “it’s a two prong effort. We’ll construct air bases and military installations to control Middle East oil and air space and we’ll let American corporations buy all the Iraqi assets. We’re sitting on vast oil fields. Sweetmeat.”
“Perfect,” said Chainsaw, the greedy VP staring at a Spanish butcher dripping blood. “Where’s my cut?”
A security advisor spoke. “Last March we launched the largest psychological operations in our 225 year history. We have 1,000 PSYOP personnel working to sway Iraqis, Afghans, Iranians, and Syrians to join the rebuilding effort.”
“Are the PSYOP leaflets proving effective?” asked Colonel Sanderson with extra crispy clipped wings on his shoulders. He was molting. “We want them to see the democratic rationale of our occupation and walk on the bright side of life.”
“Propaganda is more based on untruth,” said a philosopher.
“Their illiteracy rate is high,” snarled a shoeless education major from Oxford. “Many of the fliers are being recycled as toilet paper and novels. Maybe we should have included lexicons?”
“Too expensive,” said a primary teacher named Laurie Lie. “We have standards to maintain with excellence. If we kill all the children no child will be left behind. This is our destiny for glory, truth, and democratic economics. The freedom and opportunity for children to go to school and develop independent critical thinking skills is our global educational platform. I suggest we set up a tax-free book foundation in Nebraska.”
“Excellent suggestion. Let’s call it Omaha Beachhead Incorporated with a buffet table.”
“It’ll be generations before we’re able to gauge the effectiveness of paper propaganda,” said a wood products CEO raising his options value. Adjusting his golden parachute, he grabbed the ripcord to bail out when share values plummeted.
A silent blind Touareg living on the edge of their deliberations knew they existed in a twilight zone beyond sight and sound bites.
“Who let him in here?” said Butler, pointing at Omar. “He should’ve been sent to Guantanamo Bay for interrogation and deprived of his civil rights with no access to legal counsel. He’s clearly a war criminal or a literary outlaw. Bag his head, shackle and torture him until he confesses or dies. To hell with the Geneva Convention I say.”
Knights ignored him. “Just bring us some food. Now,” yelled starving warriors rattling Moorish sabers. Blades flashed Chinese white, Permanent Orange, Pale Green, Cadmium Red, Viridian Hue, Lemon Yellow, and Prussian Blue.
“We’re experiencing limited success distributing electricity, food, water, medicine and a new artificial currency,” said a civilian. “We need to focus on fixing water treatment plants and restoring their infrastructure after 8,000 smart bombs laid waste.”
“Where does The Waste Land end?” said Eliot.
“The end is the beginning,” Omar said.
“If your rough draft changes by less than 10% you’re done,” said an unemployed literary agent arranging DNA syntactical building blocks on a marketing platform.
“We need to make sure we connect the dots between 9/11 and Iraq,” said Intelligence. “If we are successful, coerced politicians will get out of the way and give us a ton of money like a glorious $600 billion or more to rebuild what we’ve destroyed. It’s our way or hit the heavily mined highway of death. You’re either with us or with terrorists is our message to the world.”
“Yes,” barked Faustus, Director of General Incompetents, “these malicious vermin are obstacles standing between the Iraqi people and security. They are terrorists...no, they are rebels...no, they are freedom fighters ... no, they are guerillas ... no, they are ... insurgents.”
“Whatever. The road through Babylon, Tripoli, Tehran, and Damascus is endless. Our campaign will be well received. We will liberate the oppressed,” said an old white haired man named Regime Change wearing a pacemaker. He loved a girl from Why O Why Ming with a big spread near Bend Over.
Members of a House and their corrupt nefarious Congressional colleagues, doing nothing but squabble and bicker and delay and waste taxpayer money playing party politics for another term with automatic pay raises, looked at him with contempt, incredulity, amazement and pure terror.
“We ain’t in no fucking jungle on this,” sneered a nautical Delta Seal with ringmaster approval. “This war is on track Jack.”
“Collateral damage is a sorry fact of life,” said a man with a whip cutting through red tape.
“Bring them on I say,” yelled Bumsfield. “Our God is bigger than their God for God’s sake. Look, it’s easy, here’s what we do. We know the United Nations is useless. We’ll create false claims of nuclear and biological threats feeding 9/11 FEAR. Then we give the sheep a solution.”
Create a problem. Create a solution. Save the world.
Curveball came in for short relief. “I know where it is.”
“Where what is?” asked Bumsfield.
“All the non-existent Iraqi mobile labs full of toxins and nerve agents.”
“For an alcoholic spy and fabricator you have a lot of nerve,” screamed Tenant. He used to be Lew but now he was just plain Jane Tenant from a defunct housing project. He was on a speaking tour making big bucks after his slam-dunk fell well short of the net.
“Look,” said Curveball. “I gave German intelligence the high hard stuff. 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 Bumsfield, “a classic bipolar case and your mother wears a straight jacket on the 5th floor. We distort flimsy evidence from a worthless Intel source saying Sad Man is an immediate and direct threat to our national security. He’ll attack us in forty-five minutes.”
“But,” said President Bush League, waving his one-way ticket to Patagonia, “that won’t give me time to finish reading about goats to the elementary kids.”
“No butts sir,” said his spokesperson. “Skip pages. Get to the verb.”
“Isn’t this strategy too vague and deceptive?” asked a garbage collector in Marrakesh.
“Vague and deceptive stuff happens all the time,” said the man cracking his cool whip. “What planet are you from, amigo? We have the national propaganda media machines eating this flag waving patriotic bullshit. We con the world with these fictitious stories about Sad Man being a threat to us with his weapons of mass distraction and start a war to remove him from power. Problem and solution in one enchilada.”
“Brilliant,” said a civilian military contractor from Texas, “What then?”
“It’s easy. We know the dictator’s been bluffing all along to maintain his power base. Ask Curveball when he sobers up. Sad Man never had weapons of mass destruction except for the mustard gas and expensive munitions we sold him to support his eight-year war with Iran ... The world doesn’t know or care about that fact. His military will collapse like a house of cards. We send in 150,000 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 while we establish a quasi-official coalition government with us in total Control of everything. After a decade we send any military survivors to Afghanistan for 20+ years. Money & Power & Control, yes sir, the American way.”
“What about the local people?” said a humanitarian aid rep.
“Screw them. 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 sand thanking us.”
A public relations flack spoke. “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 and Saudi Arabia oil production for years. They increase crude when we tell them. They shut it down when we hit the off button.”
“When do we get the contracts?” said a Texas oilman washing his bloody hands.
“All in good time. Rebuilding the oil industry will be tied to larger deals. We’ll start you off with easy contract stuff like mail delivery, detention camps, prisons, roads, schools, building hospitals and supplying food to the troops. That will keep your people busy for what, 20-30 years, easy.”
“Sounds great,” said the contractor. “This is going to make a lot of my friends very happy.”
“Hey,” said Hally Burden, “war is good business. Politics is business and business is politics. I love it.”
Everyone had an agenda. Blazing a trail, beaters eliminated environmental impact statements. The grass was very high. Inhaling, they found Kyoto on a map and deleted it from their servers while Pablo and Salvadore created art for an upcoming show at the asylum. It was sold out. Standing room only. Their accountant was pleased beyond words. It was an excellent return on their intuitive investment.
A child said, “It’s not so much that there is something strange about time ... the thing that’s strange is what’s going on inside time. We will understand how simple the universe is when we recognize how strange it is.”
“This show is X-rated. Get your ass out of the room and get to bed,” yelled their divorced, manic-depressive father, “or else I will beat you with this stick and stone your mother to death for adultery ... If I have to tell you again I will send you to Drapchi prison outside Lhasa where, in 1997, five Tibetan nuns committed suicide after being beaten with clubs, belts, and rubber hoses filled with sand for refusing to sing Chinese Communist regime songs. Don’t for one minute believe they killed themselves with honorable intentions to end their suffering.”
A bearded fellow from the Saudi Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice spoke.
“We agree. Lashes, stoning, amputation of limbs, hanging and crucifixion for flaunting our rigid Islamic laws is true justice. Women lose their virginity if they drive a car. It’s a scientific fact.”
“What does that have to do with anything we can measure?” said a nuclear physicist.
“Everything and nothing,” said Rose, a psychic healer who was not, according to their official top secret Trilateral New World Order guest list, part of the elite inner circle.
“When we retire they give us a watch but we don’t have time to wind it,” said a blind watchmaker named Evolution.
The Lone Ranger, a civilian from a Special Ops Group, studied a satellite imagery map and pixel data. He was afraid to ask Pablo how to draw coordinates with a vanishing perspective. Knights considered him the Lone Stranger.
“Let us know if you find anything interesting,” said Macintosh, a Scottish bagpipe officer from the Guardian Angels, an invisible flying force. Squeezing hot air from a goatskin he played rational coherent necessity with cause and effect. His tartan was out of kilter. All dressed up and nowhere to go.
The sundial on the wall of honor at Langley’s house approached twelve.
Tick-tock.
Trick or treat.
Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir
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