PROTESTING THE MONKEY KING
WITH THE TRUE PATRIOTS
Ebon Fisher, March, 2003
We spread disproportionate terror and confusion in the public mind, arbitrarily linking the unrelated problems of terrorism and Iraq. The result, and perhaps the motive, is to justify a vast misallocation of shrinking public wealth to the military and to weaken the safeguards that protect American citizens from the heavy hand of government... When our friends are afraid of us rather than for us, it is time to worry. And now they are afraid.
--John Brady Kiesling, Political Counselor in U.S. Embassy Athens, in his letter of resignation to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Feb. 27th, 2003
I've been too busy struggling to feed a family to fully realize what has happened since King George took power. "Took power" is the kindest phrase I can muster for that down-right shadey election. I thought I had kept abreast of the unelected-one's pro-corporate, pro-billionaire agenda, but I hadn't realized how deeply the corporate "royalty" and their military attachments had slipped in and taken over our culture and infrastructure. We're living in a branch of history that wasn't supposed to happen. Even the most alarmed among us is sleep-walking through this strange aftermath of the presidential elections. We are all numb from years of peace and potato chips to realize the extent of the danger we are in.
My own alarm is now quickening to such an extent that I can barely focus on the mounting evidence of the Bush Administration's omni-directional hatred. US Diplomat, John Brady's resignation has just come to my attention and the stepping up of attacks in the no-fly zone is all over the airwaves. CNN's jargon has switched from "war preparations" to "war" with nary a bugle or a UN vote. The international press is up in arms over recent evidence that the US National Security Agency has begun spying on UN Security Council Delegates. With or without the UN, the war is likely to be pushed through, setting the US on a collision course with the entire law-abiding planet. Colonel Randy Gangols said on PBS tonight that the urban war zones US soldiers are preparing to attack are "the worst environment the military can operate in." Cold, blue-veined war pundits are talking about preparations for a 30% US casualty rate. That's thousands upon thousands of dead US citizens, real friends and family marching to devastation. It's all too horrible to conceptualize. Thankfully, the Turkish parliament's vote to refuse US troop deployment has given us a few days to breath. But I feel like a certified asthmatic.
My rude awakening to our country's perilous transfiguration was at the peace march in New York two weeks ago. My wife and I had driven several hours with our three-year-old from the Philadelphia area to attend the February 15th rally. It had sounded like a wonderful chance to express our dismay over a slew of US problems --from the lack of jobs, to the wholesale dismantling of workers' and womens' rights, to the unaffordable and dangerously antagonistic war build-up. Our reckless King needed to hear from the people. Or so we thought. The reception from New York’s newly militarized cops shook me down to my corpuscles.
THE END OF AN EMPIRE
Not that I didn’t have a hunch what was going on. I don’t like standing by as my country’s infrastructure evaporates into the thin air of boundless military spending. Our weapons capacity has bloated us into a freak war machine beyond all comprehension. A simple comparison to the rest of the world confirms this. According to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, our annual military expenditure is equivalent to the next five militarists combined: Russia, China, Japan, France and Germany.
US citizens may think they are inside the winning empire, but they are in denial of the staggering poverty and infrastructural weakness our military priorities have generated for half a century. According to the US Census, 33 million Americans live in poverty. That figure should be doubled given the actual costs of living, according to the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD). The poverty rate for children in the US has reached 67% and is worse than 19 other industrial countries, according to a study by the University of Michigan. 60% of the population suffers from poor nutrition. Our schools’ test scores hover near the bottom of the list of industrial nations. Even our advanced math and science students, who receive the best that our system can provide, barely approach the top 15. Lithuania and Greece consistently test better than we do. The middle class is steadily losing ground to the richest 10% which own 75% of the country’s wealth. Hamstrung with poor educations and writhing in poverty, nearly 2 million citizens have been transferred to US prisons and jails, topping the world’s totals. According to our own Justice Department we have a per capita rate of incarceration five to eight times that of most other industrialised nations. US cities are continuing to crumble and are quickly being joined by a new generation of dilapidated suburban strip malls. The American Society of Civil Engineers has actually rated our infrastructure with a D+, just a hair away from deplorable. They estimate that $1.3 Trillion is needed to fix the situation, a sum currently locked up in soldiers, bullets, jet fighters, and paying off the debt in past military investment.
So what does the phrase, "the richest country in the world" actually refer to? Our per capita Gross National Product, in point of fact, places us behind Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland and the Japanese. When do we start to feel a sense of horror in the face of our national phantasms of superiority? In the hands of a psychiatrist, this kind of denial would unlock a cabinet full of pills. Come to think of it, we’ve been self-medicating for decades --and arresting our children and the poor for trying.
But even the US super-rich, who may believe they’re above the carnage, are not spared the environmental waste our policies have bestowed upon this once heavenly land. Suburban sprawl is eating up the countryside at a rapid rate. Our conservation record is abysmal. We're poised to open the Arctic Refuge to oil companies, and our military establishments have left behind some of the most toxic dumps in the history of biological life. With pollution regulations in a post-Reagan tail spin, all of our industries have exacted a crippling toll on the country’s health. The population is aging and with it cancer rates are rising as the corporate over-use of fertilizers and pesticides settles into our flesh. All economic indicators have underscored these hard realities: we are in the worst recession since the Great Depression.
THE DEFENSE DEPARTMENT WON’T PROTECT YOU
So how secure, in point of fact, has the Department of Defense actually made us? Our state Governors are pretty clear about the farce. When most of the US Governors approached the president this month with a $30 billion dollar deficit, he told them to buzz off. Sending 200,000 troops to the Middle East is his compulsion for the time being. Is the illusion of security Bush has been scraping together with his hysterical team of "unilateralists" a laudable substitute for molecular reality? How can we trust a group of men who not only ignore their own population’s well-being and civil rights, but that of their allies who stand to lose the most if a war with Iraq spins out of control? These "unilateralists," using a euphemism for world domination, have also shown little concern for the majority of Israelis who are losing their enthusiasm for occupying the West Bank. For the price of a few stealth bombers we could build all the settlers homes, complete with swimming pools, in areas that don’t antagonize the Palestinians. But hammering out the social conditions for peace has never been a hawk’s fancy. (Besides, peace is SUCH a drag on the arms trade).
ETHICALLY CHALLENGED PSEUDO CHRISTIANS
As a media artist, I feel especially wretched watching the corporate media machine tag along with the generals, discussing technical details about troop deployment and hardware, oblivious to the cruelties to be inflicted on real people, 50% of whom are below the age of 15! This is the same media, of course, which ignores the suffering of most US citizens and chooses to spew out pointless information about sports stars, artificially propped up recording divas, and museum blockbusters on dead painters. However, with a quick click on the internet one can locate UN documents predicting real, hideous effects stemming from an attack on Iraq: 1.26 million children under 5 in Iraq "would be at risk of death from malnutrition" in the event of a war. While the UN has presented numerous methods of containing and disarming Saddam Hussein, the US military is preparing to DIRECTLY KILL up to a 100,000 Iraqis with no guarantee of getting the man at the center of their misery.
I cannot even imagine that amount of suffering. The hypocrisy of the US position is almost mind-numbing. With only a shred of connection to Al Qaeda, Iraq is a preposterous target. It will do nothing to prevent another attack like the one on the World Trade Center. In all likelihood any war in the Middle East will only fan the flames of hatred. It will bolster bitter, testosterone-fueled men for decades to come. Never mind the unaffordability and the strategic blunder of it all, scape-goating a poor, terrorized population is a deeply immoral act. It guts this country of its ethical base. (Unless you’re one of those ethically challenged pseudo Christians who consider a preemptive strike a proper interpretation of the life of Jesus). Many families who were victimized by the 9/11 attacks are not comfortable with the President's revenge mentality. The September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows marched at the head of last week's protest. As their web site proclaims, "We choose to spare additional innocent families the suffering that we have already experienced˜as well as to break the endless cycle of violence and retaliation engendered by war."
COKE AND BOOZE CRAMPS THE DUDE'S DIPLOMATIC SKILLS
Meanwhile a greater threat, North Korea, keeps a missile aimed at California and tests missiles over Japan. It is tempting to say that Bush is just plain chicken to take on the real monsters, but the truth is, he’s of average intelligence and more than a little crazy. His former staff have confirmed this. Remember, Dubya's perceptions have diminished considerably since the man singed his synapses during his coke-and-booze days as a cheerleader for Yale. Even if he had accidentally roped in a score of wise advisors, we know from his low grades that the monkey king can't learn without an incentive. (It depends on the scale of the bribe and which oil company can say "fetch, doggy" without snickering).
Countries with a fraction of the United States' power have staved off hideous regimes for hundreds of years simply through the threat of war, the nurturing of allies, and market incentives. These tried-and-true diplomatic arts are inconceivable to the former coke-head in the oval office. The world press is now proclaiming Bush is second only to Saddam Hussein in Planetary derision. Check the web, my friends. We can’t hide behind Fox News anymore. Helen Thomas, veteran sweetheart of the Washington press corps, who has covered 7 presidencies in her tour of duty as a journalist for UPI, has declared him to be "the worst president in all of American history." Pinch me.
THE TRUE PATRIOTS TAKE MANHATTAN
As my wife and I drove down the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway we found a report on the march on WBAI, one of the few stations with anything resembling news. Close to a million people were starting to gather in New York, joining millions in London, Milan, Rome, Barcelona, Melbourne and hundreds of thousands on every continent. It looked to be a world-wide demonstration of unprecedented proportions. Excited to finally arrive and give our son his first taste of citizenry, we parked in Queens and took the 7 train to 42nd street. Joining 15 million people around the planet in a day of free speech, it seemed like the Statue of Liberty would be dancing in the streets.
Instead of Democracy in action, however, we encountered block after block of police barricades. Cops were everywhere, sporting a range of less-than-civic outfits from dark blue polyester with bullet-proof vests to the latest in cyborg riot gear. Sub-machine guns were in evidence, a sight I hadn't witnessed since a trip to a third world country. Dozens of cops were mounted on horses, lurching back and forth, menacingly close to the public. According to United for Peace and Justice, some actually trampled activists sitting in at Times Square. (The public had, remember, hired them for OUR protection). The cops, however, were outnumbered by thousands of patriots pouring out of Grand Central Station and streaming up the avenues. There were so many people barred from marching, we formed our own parallel protest march. Except that no one was marching. Our legions were cordoned off, block after block, like so many cattle.
Horsemen were deployed like snow plows to make room for squad cars and fire trucks. I recall the humored expressions of the firemen as they looked down at both ours and the policemen's predicament. One fireman was so animated I thought he was going to pull out a camera and take snap shots for his kids. Did I mention fire trucks? There were, in fact, no fires that day. Was a replay of the civil rights marches expected? (You know, the kind where the people march peacefully and the authorities knock you over with powerful jets of water. Kinky stuff. Breaks a few skulls, but the videos make great stock footage for PBS documentaries).
In all my life I have never seen peaceful protest marchers treated like we were. Throughout the day the marching patriots were penned in on all sides, crushed up against buildings and yelled at to get on the sidewalk --even when it was obvious there were too many people to do so. It felt like a scene from Cameron's Titanic. The ship of state may be sinking, but we'll lock away all your workers to leave the deck clear for the officials and their wealthy patrons. Given our nature as true, peace-loving patriots, nobody had any interest in getting out of control in the first place. And yet our stature as proud citizens was reduced, in one afternoon of prodding, to that of animals. All day long I imagined what our ancestors must have endured in the hands of the British.
BOTTOM LINE: CRUSH PEOPLE INTO A LIQUID
It is widely known that mayor Giuliani had started this practice of treating his citizens as cattle. Bloomberg, it seems, has followed the same crowd control methods without missing a beat. It’s simply more efficient than treating us as humans. Never mind that this was once a democracy. Professional management techniques can transcend that. Officiousness is its own blurry justification. (And why stop at animals? Bottom line: crush people into a liquid, siphon off calories for fuel, save on the cost of health care). What makes these grotesque incursions on citizens' rights possible today is the degree of separation between controller and controllee. With the British the separation was as wide as the Atlantic Ocean. With the rogues in power today, the separation between us and them is wealth. Billions upon billions of very heavy dollars. These are the conditions of any second or third world country. Don’t kid yourselves. Disregard the richest 10% of the country and what do you have? Take a visit to Trenton, Detroit, the South Bronx or any of our barren, aging suburbs.
According to the Village Voice, Bloomberg says he was "never politically active" and "doesn’t remember ever participating in a demonstration." Given his monied removal from common experience, he could care less how it makes an American feel to have their rights contorted in a military vice grip. While his peers were out struggling in the anti-war and civil rights movements, or being killed in Vietnam, Bloomberg spent his youth making money at Salomon. What would he know about democracy? His ignorance is organic. Like Bush, he bought his seat in government. As beneficiaries of the royal corporate order, Bloomberg, Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld and their pals are incapable of seeing how their punitive policies in the name of national security echo the asphyxiating control mechanisms of the old Soviet camp or the autocratic chauvinism of Al Qaeda. Comfortable at the top of a net of corporate control systems, they can add another weight to the citizenry without blinking. Last week the control technique of choice was to corral the pesky citizens, block by squirming block, barricading them from marching.
DIVIDED FROM MY FAMILY
To add insult to injury, my family was divided in the crush. My wife, with our child riding on her shoulders, was able to make her way 30 blocks North to 70th street and work her way over to the official march. She was finally able to be under-counted along with a million others. I tried a more direct route by slipping under a barricade, only to be pushed back by five cops. One of them shouted, "what you need is a good boot in the ass." I noted he said "boot" not "kick." It's a striking choice of words. I found myself yelling back, "That is no way to treat a citizen. That is how fascists talk to citizens." The cop just laughed. What did he care? If we don’t have a democratic culture to back up our Constitutional protections, how long can our laws stand up to years of misinterpretation by cops, their managers, and warped judges? With most of our taxes going towards the military and squeezing education down to a cold pinky, how many people in the US can even spell democracy? I thought of Jefferson's dictum, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." Thankfully, one of the more vigilant organizations, United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), is calling for NYPD Chief Ray Kelly to step down.
Split from my family, blocked from the march, and verbally and physically harassed by men and horses, I decided to head West, joining thousands of exasperated patriots. I had learned from several emails that a gathering was scheduled for Times Square at 3 pm. I could see that word had gotten around. Finally able to walk freely, the crowds were in good spirits. Singing, chanting, and laughing was in abundance. Reading each other’s signs and joking about the absurdities of our government kept everyone in good humor despite the cold and the earlier treatment. It was clear the marchers share a common culture spanning a range of references from Solomon to the Simpsons, from Hendrix to Lauren Hill. My wife commented later on how mainstream so many of the protesters seemed. I saw one young woman skipping along 42nd street and swerve into some friends, hugging them in a merry tumble. These are the dangerous marchers the police had so actively curtailed? Are we in a different dimension than the cops and their managers? As I watched the twirling kids on the street, I wondered if this was their first experience with collective expression. I found myself worrying about their impressions of our emerging military state.
SWAPPING A HUMAN HEART FOR CIRCUITRY
As the crowd increased in size it naturally began to swell into the street. The only cars in sight were those of the police and they were over a block away. It seemed quite practical to fill out the available space like so many molecules in brownian motion. Streets, after all, were invented by pedestrians. In our dimension, at least, walking in a street when there’s no traffic is a primary right. As the sparkling lights of Broadway came into sight, I noticed a massive billboard for Intel, the computer chip manufacturer: "It's what's inside that counts," went the five-story ad. As I contemplated the implications of swapping a human heart for circuitry, a police van, as if on cue, zoomed around the corner and pulled up fast into a small opening in the crowd. Just 30 feet away from me cops flew out of the van in full riot gear. Without a speck of provocation they began aggressively shoving and shouting, forcing the marchers onto a sidewalk which couldn't contain us. There was a decisive fear in the cops' movements and their voices were hoarse. I didn't like the sound of these strained, technologically enhanced men. They probably didn’t like their orders, but their compulsion to fulfill them poured like cold water from a fire hose. I reminded myself I had a family which depended on my remaining free of incarceration. I couldn't join the velvet revolution today. Sensing that the cops’ first priority wasn’t our civic freedoms, I turned back towards Grand Central Station. I felt crushed by my inability to act, to freely assemble. I've been to dozens of marches, but the fear of protesting was being instilled in me for the first time in my life. As Václav Havel wrote of the old Soviet system, a national paranoia is setting in, subjecting us "to a prolonged and thorough process of violation, enfeeblement and anesthesia."
THE NARRATIVE OF A PATRIOT’S MARCH
I found the 7-Train and scurried down the steps, hoping to reconvene with my wife and child at our car in Queens. As the frustration of the day boiled in my brain, I found myself carrying the narrative of the march right into the subway car. Intoxicated by democratic struggle, I couldn’t repress an impromptu announcement:
"In case you haven't heard the news, millions upon millions of people all over planet Earth have turned out to protest against the US war build-up. Almost a million are marching right now above our heads on First and Second Avenue --peaceful patriots one and all."
A guy a few feet from me spoke up: "Dude, I don't see anyone here expressing an interest in what you have to say." Coming to my senses, I looked more carefully at the subway riders. He was right. Most of these people were looking the other way. I must have seemed like just another homeless man singing for change. In all likelihood, most of them were coming home from shitty jobs. As it was a Saturday, many were probably on overtime. Who was I to bring my middle class, international agenda to their table? What difference would it make to them if I started spouting off about the destabilizing US/Israeli occupations of the West Bank or the US training camps for Latin American terrorists in Ft. Benning, Georgia? Why bother mentioning the terrorizing effect of blockading and corralling peaceful US protesters? How can I explain to any hardworking citizen that Bush’s gang doesn’t want an end to terrorism, they want to be the biggest terrorist on the block --so they can play the Earth like the ultimate computer game.
Having already disturbed the subway riders, I figured I could sign off quickly with a weird plea:
"This message is sponsored by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. who died fighting for our civil rights. They implore you to join the next peace march if you can spare the time. Bless you all."
HOT COFFEE AND RIVERS OF BLOOD
Thankfully, the train pulled up immediately at my stop in Queens. I got off quickly and scrambled out of the station to look for my family. My wife had left no notes on the car so I went to a nearby café to wait for her and my son. I found an old German friend who joined me in reflection. As my throbbing temples cleared in the coffee's steam, we reflected on the hundreds of thousands of protesters surrounded by a penumbra of cops, horses and news reporters. What an utter odyssey. Had we all gone mad? Or had we simply been swept up in historical circumstances and found ourselves stumbling into uncustomary roles in an ancient theatre of consciousness raising? It is tempting to proclaim that peace marchers are the self-appointed prophets of the planet, cut loose from our televisions, hitting the streets again to warn of rivers of blood. I want to believe our new generation has the right stuff to pivot this planet towards a sustainable peace and prosperity. I cannot deny, however, that the royal corporate order now emerging, with Bush at the helm, is a huge impediment to achieving this goal. World peace and well-being requires the liberation of the small, complex business of daily resistance.
POWER, GRACE AND PEACEFUL PATRIOTS
If we really want peace, the peaceful must rise up and overwhelm the game of POWER with the game of GRACE. It’s ultimately a much sweeter game, with everyone in on the take. Grace is infectious. It's the ultimate meme. It has a remarkable way of turning the entire world into a form of wealth, shared by every being. It has cool effects, too, like curdling the vanity of college professors and millionaires. But there are many pitfalls. Grace can sour into religiosity faster than you can say "sexist hippy."
Gandhi called grace "satya-graha" or "truth force." Education and an open mind are critical to such a path. We have to be humble enough to listen more than we speak. Ultimately the truth is a shared construction emerging in a tango of communication and environmental activity. One cannot dictate truth no more than one can dictate the terms of peace --at any scale. Grace thrives on liberty and the decentralization of power. It yearns to dissolve the hierarchies artificially attributed to genders, races, and dollars. It places the economy back into the hands of individuals and small businesses (which have always constituted the majority). The true, peace-loving patriots are hungry for their heritage as voting, accountable and counted citizens. They love their country so much they want to take it back from rogues like Bush and his corporate aristocracy. Millions of Republicans are on the verge of joining forces with the Democrats and the Greens to oust the madman. No matter what happens in Iraq, the next elections will blow the lid off Bush’s gang of thieves and bring our extraordinary country back into the sunshine.
I genuinely have hope. Mainstream support for peace is in evidence everywhere. It's as if all the hippies, digruntled vietnam vets and black panthers grew up, got better organized, and finally realized they could come out of the closet and say "peace, love and justice" without tripping over a gen-Xer. The young, building up their cynicism for a long time now, have been bitterly awaiting their delinquent parents' return to civic life. Several generations are ready to call the Monkey King's bluff. Stacy Lu, writing for ABC News, wrote last year: "More people are waging peace today than ever before. The new movement is powered by more than 20,000 civilian organizations around the world, up from just 985 in 1956, and their work is beginning to bear fruit." Lu quotes Tamara Malinova, of the U.N.’s Department of Disarmament Affairs: 'There is a growing influence of civil society. No doubt about it."
There are times when I try to step outside the narrative of human affairs and see all our activities and thoughts as so much chemistry whirling around the biosphere, stirring into odd, evolutionary formations. From this standpoint a protest march is just another network of impulses, no different from a trainload of wage slaves heading home to a beer, or King George’s country club swarming with oil moguls. I could extract billions of tender filaments of thought out of these networks, each filament a world. The amazing thing is that today, despite the growing repressions in the US and the Middle East, a very distinctive medium of transmission, the human body in protest, has pressed firmly up against all the other filaments, overwhelming junk media and junk academia alike, pulsing with the conviction to change the world’s consciousness. It scares the people in power enough to unleash their dogs, but it's clear the times are a-changing again, beyond anyone's conception.
FEEL FREE TO REPRINT THE ABOVE ARTICLE, IN WHOLE OR IN PART. THE TERM "PATRIOT" IS A CURIOUS MEME FROM THE PAST WHICH CRAWLED OUT OF AN OLD NOVEL. IT THREATENED TO KICK MY KEYBOARD IF I DIDN'T GIVE IT A JOB: Ebon Fisher, <www.Nervepool.net>.
JUST DO IT. Throw a peace party this weekend. At the party, invite everyone to sign an email list and ask 3 people to throw a peace party the following weekend, inviting more people into the process. Peace parties will grow exponentially and so will the email lists --in chaotic abundance. Work the web and the phone. Spread news of peace actions. Link pleasure with peace and we will out-hype hatred, with or without a war. Chaos is on our side. :)
CONTACTS FOR PEACE:
Moveon http://www.moveon.org
American Friends Service Committee http://www.afsc.org/
United for Peace and Justice http://unitedforpeace.org/
Military Families Speak Out http://www.mfso.org/
Veterans for Peace http://www.veteransforpeace.org/
Black Voices for Peace http://www.bvfp.org/
Student Peace Action Network http://www.studentpeaceaction.org/summit.html
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom http://www.wilpf.org/
Jewish Voice for Peace http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/
Win Without War http://www.winwithoutwarus.org/