Patriot Act

War on terror experts discussed tactics and strategies for a play with many acts. A dramatic play with word swords cut to the chase. Some acts were difficult to follow or comprehend. Reviews would be mixed when it ran off Broadway flagging down a Berber caravan inside an air-conditioned nightmare looking for a Caravansary on Route 66.

“What’s the name of the first act?” asked a playwright.

“Patriot,” said General Consensus.

“How does The Patriot Act sound?” said Sir Scribe, a former loan shark and energy consultant.

“I like it, I really like it,” said a general named Attorney. He was a neo-conservative right wing religious fanatic from the State of Misery. “It has teeth with wide ranging subversive constitutional powers perfectly timed for our agenda. Let’s push it down the legislator’s throats. We rule and Control by fear.”

“Does that mean the gag rule will be in effect?” cracked a comedian on welfare.

“Sure does. Anyone who expresses constitutional concern about this act will be blacklisted, ridiculed, ostracized, and labeled unpatriotic. They will never work again in this great beautiful free country. We will revoke their voting rights, cancel their citizenship and deport them to Cuba. I’ve had it up to here with this liberal democratic crap. Our culture is to kill. Take no prisoners. Abuse the hell out of detainees. Lock up all the immigrant children. Tell the tree huggers to take a hike through old growth forests,” smirked Attorney.

“There is no doubt about our honorable intentions. We are on a holy mission. Our destiny is to install democrazy in the Middle Eats,” said chef Boy R. Dumbed Down Dee, “whether they like it or not. They’ll eat what we give ’em or starve. This is an ala’ carte blanche military menu.”

“Perhaps we should we open diplomatic channels?” queried Plame as day, an agent with a blown cover.

Days, weeks, months, years and centuries after 9/11, English hawks warbled to Blare about taking the campaign into winter. They needed hawk food. As predators they knew the terrain, the sweet sound of droning wings whistling through clouds with laser-guided precision. Their talons were sharpened by inherent power, greed and historical imperative.

They were ready, willing and able to establish and sustain new empires by spilling native blood. They had the experience of controlling colonies using guns and fear to establish The Rule of Law. They’d raped, pillaged and plundered old world civilizations and would not be deterred in their desire for more money, power and influence.

They were experts at economic terrorism and exploiting natural resources using slave labor.

“Yes, open a channel,” said another covert agent disguised as a Spanish cleaning woman with Romani DNA.

Nonofficial cover was their nom de plume in proprietary front companies conducting espionage and money laundering. Fronts were social web networks, airlines, travel agencies, blood banks, world currency exchanges, military and civilian courts, oil and gas companies, construction firms, NGOs, global telecommunications, shipping firms, brothels, juke joints, casinos, tailors, beauty salons, crematoriums, mortuaries and cemeteries.

Everyone in the food chain was expendable.

The downside was being left out in the cold if their cover was exposed to compliant media sheep and the public. Accountability disappeared. A hard rain fell.

A buttoned down butler brought experts a mandate appetizer. They dug into their personal caves of hunger. They had Neolithic tools at their disposal. A laughing axe clogged the garbage disposal. Someone called maintenance.

“Maintenance,” demanded a shrill counter-intuitive defensive individual named Bumsfield with lipstick on his collar from a one-night stand. “Get up here on the triple and bring your torch. Stuff happens.”

“Sorry sir,” said Maintenance. “Stuff happens and my torch is down for maintenance if you get my drift.”

“Drift, draft, fore and aft,” said a divorced right-wing conservative senator up for erection. He washed his hands of the whole affair in dirty water. He threw the baby out with the bath water.

Baby swam into global suffering where 17,000 children died every day from starvation.

4,000 and then send some more American soldiers named Casualty in Iraq and Afghanistan slept their dream of dreams in black body bags.

Agents returned to deep cover operations funneling cash, arms, explosives, uranium-235, and communication gear and cyanide capsules to homeless, nameless volunteers. The number of American veterans committing suicide approached warp speed.

A Spanish black widow with an ear for dialogue mopped stairs and pavement along the narrow Rue Castanets in Cadiz. She dumped water into a gutter. It flowed to the Atlantic evaporated into clouds and rained flowers.

“This is no time to be surrounding ourselves with incompetents. Find someone who knows the lay of the land,” said a junior fellow named Full Bright on a scholarship. He unrolled a parchment for knights to seesaw.

“Now see here,” countered Deli, “what it’ll be gents?”

“Make mine ham on rye,” said El Salvadore reclining on a divan fondling his Dali. She was in no mood for his intentional violation of her writes.

“You know I don’t eat meat,” she said.

“Yes my dearest,” said Salvadore, “I’m well aware of your passion for fruit. You are my passion fruit my darling bed rabbit. Let’s see what’s in the queen’s pantry. Perhaps a nice juicy banana?”

“Yes,” sighed Dali dearest, “peel it down for me. I am your bed rabbit. Skin the bunny honey. Elementary my sweet.”

“Yes, darling, they who want to enjoy a fine fruit must sacrifice its peel. Let’s turn the lights down low and make whoopee.”

Salvadore unrolled a painting. “What do you make of this Pablo?”

“Hmm,” said Pablo, “it’s fairly abstract standing alone. It needs definition, stronger emphasis, a wider range of implicit specific graphic detail.”

“I agree,” said Salvadore, “perhaps broken orange melting time machines. Dashing surrealistic nature enveloping warriors disappearing into exile, fighting real and imaginary foes is needed.”

“Yes, a nice touch, that,” said Pablo. “Many are called few are chosen. We may consider this, my dear colleague, an experiential vision. An extension of a red or blue period.”

“Well put dear friend speaking of the blues. Less is more.”

“Agreed,” said Pablo, “let’s not put in anything extra or take anything extra out.”

“Such a novel concept,” said Don Quixote, an unemployed literary agent sitting on a nag wearing a battered bedpan for a helmet.

“Excellent,” said Salvadore. “My friend Cervantes said the exact words to his companion Pancho. One rode an ass into history. Shall we have a go then?”

“Yes,” said Pablo. “Be my guest. Let’s take a line for a walk with Klee.”

“It’s glee Pablo. Joy. Such a quicksilver tongue you have. Have you thought of a name for your new work my friend?” said Dali.

“Guernica comes to mind,” said Pablo.

“How appropriate,” Dali said combing his exquisite greasy mustache paying lip service. “It will be a classic. It will connect the wild subconscious and rationality. It’ll make you famous, old boy.”

Picasso’s Guernica commemorated the small Basque village of 10,000 in northern Spain. It was market day on Monday, April 27, 1937. In the afternoon waves of Heinkel 51s and Junker 52s from the Condor Legion piloted by Germans blasted Guernica. Survivors found 1,660 corpses and 890 wounded people in the rubble.

“Be that as it may,” said Pablo. “Art historians and critics will have their say hey kid. It will shock supporters of social realism and propaganda art in France and Spain.”

“How did you do it?” said Dali.

“From May 1st to June 4th in 1937 I made forty-five drawings on blue or black paper. I incorporated the bull, the horse, classic bullfighting figures and the lantern from my 1935 Minotauromachy. I used the weeping Dora Maar because she has always been a woman who weeps. Guernica is a bereavement letter saying everything we love is going to die. And that is why everything we love is embodied in something unforgettably beautiful, like the emotion of a final farewell.”

“I still think your vision aspires to greater heights,” said Dali. “Your work contains intuitive fantasies meeting the objective violence of history.”

“You are too kind my dear Dali. People are talking about your work. Your intentional dreams, so strangely manifested, in the way you allowed your subconscious free rein on the canvas. Most amazing, your Persistence of Memory.”

“You are too generous Pablo. I merely reflect the ongoing crisis in society, the surreal absurd nightmare, with shall we say, a twisted rather sordid but truthful elusive creative beast we must acknowledge to allow our perverse authenticity freedom wherever it leads us.”

“So true my friend, for we are only the conduit of the magic,” said Pablo. “We paint with our innermost senses born by authentic visions.”

“We are the mysteries speaking through the mysteries,” said Salvadore.

“We are redrafting the short story called our life,” said Omar.

 ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Yangon, Burma - 2015

Golden Garbage

Gold draped Cadiz women.

Inanimate visual remnants of Reason, Enlightenment, Illumination and Prosperity revealed gifts from the Magus.

Alchemists transformed base metals into heavy symbolic chains weighing wrists and necks of Spanish matrons and patrons.

The Fleischer - a butcher - wore no gold.

Paring fat his sharpened edge severed layers of gristle. A steel mesh glove protected his left hand. He slammed a sharp hatchet blade through tendons, muscles, bone and meat. Blood littered his table. 

Customers gathered to buy their favorite cut. Slabs of acorn fed pigs dangled in windows with funnel tags attached to cloven hoofs collecting fat. Wild boar and stag heads rested above color photos of famous Ronda bullfighters partying with Orson Wells and Ernest Hemingway. Red was the cape’s color. Bull’s blood rivers flowed down muscular necks.

Mandalay, Burma

People in deep state covert operations discussed ambiguities in conspiratorial coded languages.

Airliners slammed into towers of Babel on televised reruns between detergent, automobile and sherry commercials.

I murdered words in their sleep after they had their say. 

Word garbage was hauled down to green plastic curbside trash containers. Midnight men in blue garbage uniforms with yellow safety stripes rolled through Cadiz. Teams of men hosing down narrow cobblestone streets sang, “Don’t be fooled by cheap imitations. Everything must go. Going out of business sale.”

Water flooded grateful city grates. Spanish civilization collapsed without street cleaners and women with mops.

Humanity’s narrative explored adventures, quests, dreams, relationships, and historical facts mixed with courage, curiosity, joy and serenity.

Yellow streetlights illuminated a man walking his arthritic Labrador. The well-dressed bald gentleman with Romani DNA wearing polished black wing-tip shoes carried a newspaper and paperback entitled, A Century is Nothing by Omar.

He collected his dog’s shit from cobblestone using the financial section. He downloaded it into a metal trash basket nailed to a wall. Five minutes later a neurotic woman cleaning everything after midnight because she hated chaos and disordered dust in her ground floor flat wailed, “What in the hell is that smell?”

“History baby, history,” he said, walking toward the sea. “The more I see the less I know.”

One if by land, and two if by sea…

Easy Rider.

Oh say can you see? Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may I wish I might dream the impossible dream and throw the first pitch for a called strike on the inside corner.

“We’re headed to extra innings and the bullpens are empty,” cautioned a radio announcer on armed forces shortwave, “and now this,” cutting to a commercial from a mechanic offering an interest free no down payment deal on the finest internal combustion machine money could buy.

“Drive it away today.”

Every vehicle on the road is used.

This was followed by an ad for cheap fuel and a political proposal to open Alaskan wilderness for drilling. Unemployed dentists signed up. Their mantra was, “The more you drill the more you bill.”

Two unemployed poets holding hands walked down a cobblestone street discussing Spanish deficit economics, European financial bailouts, 40% unemployment numbers and financial insolvency. Andalucía was the poorest province in Spain.

Sexually repressed women pacing poverty’s alienation prowled streets seeking future lovers, husbands and fathers for contraceptive children. Lonely-heart club ads assaulted missing persons with conjecture, possibilities and probabilities. Hope floated in a breeze.

Cadiz scooter boys felt genital heat as their girlfriend’s arms held them tighter than tomorrow. After escaping narrow traditional parental attitudes they zoomed past pedestrians.

An old couple supporting their fragile bipedal existence took immediate steps into a long now. Small significant gestures of love and affection rained flowers.

I wrote under a desk lamp with jazz music providing rhythm, harmony and improvisation.

Dreaming of a new environment I studied a provincial map tacked on the wall.

Spanish church bells buried in the Plaza de Dreams, a fictitious conglomeration of unpleasant historical true facts in this tale tolled as mystics hearing hollow Zen bells toiled.

Mary sells seashells by the seashore before crossing to the other side of paradise after paying the troll a toll. 

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Mandalay, Burma

Hammam

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.

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation

Burma

Emergency Legislation

Omar and I collected grains for his hourglass.

In the United States of Amnesia emergency fear legislation was passed by congressional lame ducks with rancor. They wanted to get home for turkey with shallow stuffing.

Debate was minimized by official decree. Polls forecasted approval. It was a plutocracy.

The people with the most money had the biggest free speech, tax loopholes and influence.

In Amnesia it’s Special Interests.

In other countries it’s Corruption.

Democracy is the best government money can buy.

This invisible truth-story enhanced ratings on the media’s Big Show. They programmed simple moronic happy endings for distracted, misdirected, blind, stupid sheep.

Tax dollars were allocated for immigration detention prisons, pork projects and massive military expenditures. Full employment became the norm. Factories hired Norm to build washing machines with eternal spin cycles.

Rally parades marched across the land. They began playing near the Atlantic pounding war drums, eating, sleeping, procreating children, raising them, marrying them off, burying their parents and burning incense to feed dead ancestors.

Rising before dawn they soldiered west like conservative Christian zealots to reach the Specific Ocean. They dived into a shining sea to be baptized in the name of the father, son, holy ghost, suicidal veterans, orphans, internally displace humans and marginalized indigenous people. They gave thanks.

“Praise the Lord,” sang a woman stripping her clothes off in a cold ocean. A Nebraska man seeing a naked woman yelled, “This takes the cake.” He blew out celebration candles.

“Mission accomplished,” said Bush Wacker.

They did not have naked women or oceans in the corn husker state. They had combines, fields of amber waves, rusty factories and cow shit. Someone was all wet and he loved it.

“My, oh my,” said a woman escaping her wheelchair prison. Fighting gravity she crawled through falling sand inside an hourglass.

Children observed everything from a Council Bluff where Native American tribes of The First Nation gathered for a Ghost Dance ceremony.

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Attitude

I boarded a small plane from Richland to Seattle and sat next to a fat couple. We flew over the Cascades.

“Hi,” they said.

“Hi. Where are you going?” I said.

The man said, “Oh we’re going to Atlanta and then ... ” his heavy bejeweled wife interrupted, flashing lidded eyes above pancake makeup and perfect teeth ... “and this seating is just terrible. I mean, look at the space on this poor thing. There’s absolutely no room to move. When we get to Atlanta we’re flying first class to London.”

Her white pearl ring would’ve fed half of Bangladesh.

“We own a travel agency in Bend Over,” he continued. “We’re on our way to meet friends in London and then we’re going to sail down the Danube River, drink wine and have the time of our lives. Yes indeed. We’re going first class all the way.”

“Sounds like a relaxing vacation.”

“That’s only the beginning,” he said.

“Say more.”

“After Europe we’re going to an antiterrorist convention in Cuba and then,” his spouse interjected again … spitting her words into an overbooked air tight tin can where syllables floated with half-baked ideas meeting angry frustrated voices complaining about time, weather, seat selection, lack of dietary choices, cramped cattle conditions and the high price one paid to be human … she shut up and her husband sighed ... “then we’re going to China for a tour. We’re going to hit all the sights in ten days: Bee Jing, Shanghai, Xian, see Terracotta warriors trapped in dirt, walk the Great Wall, swim in the Gangster River and prowl open air markets filled with exotic animals like lions, tigers and bears oh my, dying of loneliness and neglect in cages, yes sir ree and you buy them and they’ll cook it right up in front of you. We’ll drink cobra blood. It’s a sexual aphrodisiac.” He rubbed his crotch.

His wife blew more smoke ...

“Isn’t freedom, democracy and free trade with open markets wonderful? Isn’t it a shame these planes are so small. You’d think the FAA would require carriers to operate planes with more legroom. They treat us like pigs. Some pigs are more equal than others, by George oh well ... And, if that wasn’t enough, those smelly immigrant security wage slaves made me remove my shoes and underwear before I passed through detectors. I hardly understood a word they muttered and stuttered. Can you imagine? I need another drink and I need it bad.”

“Yes, dear,” said hubby patting her pasty fingers, “this country is going to hell faster than you can say Osama who’s your mama.”

She inhaled a double gin and tonic. “You be careful whom you talk to now dear,” she whispered. “You never know when someone might be listening. There may be bugs planted on this plane. I need another drink.”

“You worry too much,” he said. “It’s been disinfected.” He got her a double G&T.

“It’s a wonderful life,” I said. A couple of fat happy complacent mediocre Yankee doodle dandies.

“What do you do?” said hubby.

“I work for Death Deferred Ink as a mercenary ghost. I freelance as a wordsmith gravedigger designing mysterious plot projects. Busy 24/7. I’m taking a break from my heavy, deep, real responsibilities. Headed to Marrakesh to meet a friend at a Storyteller’s Convention ... She’s a blind nomadic weaver in exile from exile. She lives in a cave with cannibals outside Rhonda in Andalucía. When someone passes on we strip the flesh off bones for writing parchment ... We grind the bones into sex medicine dust. We sell left over human organs and upright pianos in China. It’s an expanding market with tonal variations on a theme. No women and no kids ... Diversity and flexibility is key. Always be closing.”

This revelation took care of their first class attitude.

ART Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Children in Laos carry the world on their back.