I am still working on the story I promised nearly a month ago. Meanwhile there is this, originally posted on Truthout in outraged response to the ongoing atrocities in Anaheim:
ANAHEIM
IS THE perfect microcosm for what has been done to the United States of
America, the land I loved and the constitution I as a young man swore
to defend.
Beyond its Disneyland Happy Face lurks the unapologetic brutality of a concentration camp.
Its guards are battalions of police militarized by the Department of Homeland Security into latter-day equivalents of the Gestapo and the Death's Head SS.
Their escalating atrocities in Anaheim will be repeated anywhere we dare rise up in protest.
As resistance intensifies, the guards will abandon their "less lethal" ammo and begin firing standard ammunition: double-ought buckshot plus whatever people-killer dum-dum bullets they are issued for their pistols, submachine guns and rifles.
Bet on it: cops who loose an attack dog to rend the flesh of women and children will have no compunction killing women and children.
Soon. Sooner than later.
And not just in Anaheim.
Anywhere in these former United States, their promise of freedom now rescinded.
Anywhere in the new United Estates, the Big Plantation of the neo-feudal neo-fascist One Percent.
(Such is "change we can believe in.")
Its guards are battalions of police militarized by the Department of Homeland Security into latter-day equivalents of the Gestapo and the Death's Head SS.
Their escalating atrocities in Anaheim will be repeated anywhere we dare rise up in protest.
As resistance intensifies, the guards will abandon their "less lethal" ammo and begin firing standard ammunition: double-ought buckshot plus whatever people-killer dum-dum bullets they are issued for their pistols, submachine guns and rifles.
Bet on it: cops who loose an attack dog to rend the flesh of women and children will have no compunction killing women and children.
Soon. Sooner than later.
And not just in Anaheim.
Anywhere in these former United States, their promise of freedom now rescinded.
Anywhere in the new United Estates, the Big Plantation of the neo-feudal neo-fascist One Percent.
(Such is "change we can believe in.")
***
When I think of these new United Estates, when I picture their ultimate truth, I see the gate of Auschwitz, not as the valiant soldiers of the Red Army saw it when they liberated its ravaged survivors on 27 January 1945, but in a back-to-the-future vision of capitalism's inevitable tomorrow, the morbid "Arbeit Macht Frei" replaced by a Smiley Face telling us -- the newly enslaved -- to "have a happy day."
Welcome to the new nation of USia.
Yes, USia.
The land from which undocumented immigrants are now in headlong flight.
This is not the America into which I was born.
The American Dream is dead. The American Experiment in Constitutional Democracy lies murdered in the graves of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, Fred Hampton, Allison Krause*, Karen Silkwood and the casualties of Vietnam and all the imperial wars since Vietnam.
To call this land of death and plutocratic despotism America is to pay it an honor it no longer deserves.
Verily, to call it "America" insults every other inhabitant of the American continent, every living being past, present and future.
Call it USia instead, you-SEE-ah, the domain of the United Estates and the prison in which We the 99 Percent are now enshackled.
Call ourselves USians -- you-SEE-ians -- those of us unfortunate enough to have been born here and now to be stranded here as we are relentlessly herded into capitalism's slave pens.
Call ourselves USians to distinguish ourselves from Americans elsewhere, the free people of Canada and the freedom-seeking peoples of the nations beyond our southern border.
Wake up, my dear comrades, my sisters and brothers in struggle.
Call ourselves USians to symbolize our awakening.
Anaheim today is all of USia tomorrow.
When I think of these new United Estates, when I picture their ultimate truth, I see the gate of Auschwitz, not as the valiant soldiers of the Red Army saw it when they liberated its ravaged survivors on 27 January 1945, but in a back-to-the-future vision of capitalism's inevitable tomorrow, the morbid "Arbeit Macht Frei" replaced by a Smiley Face telling us -- the newly enslaved -- to "have a happy day."
Welcome to the new nation of USia.
Yes, USia.
The land from which undocumented immigrants are now in headlong flight.
This is not the America into which I was born.
The American Dream is dead. The American Experiment in Constitutional Democracy lies murdered in the graves of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, Fred Hampton, Allison Krause*, Karen Silkwood and the casualties of Vietnam and all the imperial wars since Vietnam.
To call this land of death and plutocratic despotism America is to pay it an honor it no longer deserves.
Verily, to call it "America" insults every other inhabitant of the American continent, every living being past, present and future.
Call it USia instead, you-SEE-ah, the domain of the United Estates and the prison in which We the 99 Percent are now enshackled.
Call ourselves USians -- you-SEE-ians -- those of us unfortunate enough to have been born here and now to be stranded here as we are relentlessly herded into capitalism's slave pens.
Call ourselves USians to distinguish ourselves from Americans elsewhere, the free people of Canada and the freedom-seeking peoples of the nations beyond our southern border.
Wake up, my dear comrades, my sisters and brothers in struggle.
Call ourselves USians to symbolize our awakening.
Anaheim today is all of USia tomorrow.
_________
*Though
I damn well know better, I nevertheless misspelled the name of Allison
Krause in the uncorrected version of this essay, dropping the second l
from her first name. (Allison was one of four students murdered by
National Guardsmen at Kent State University on Monday 4 May 1970; I
named her rather than list all the victims for the same reason I named
Karen Silkwood rather than list all the U.S. victims of capitalist
death squads: perhaps because Liberty is always portrayed as a woman,
each of these martyrs has come to symbolize specific aspects of the
struggle against capitalist brutality.) As to my error -- a major fuckup
because there is a living singer named Alison Krause (with the
difference in first-name spellings vital to distinguish one from the
other) -- this is a classic example of dyslexic dysfunction, typing a
ruinous mistake despite correct knowledge, then failing (until someone
pointed it out to me) to recognize what I had done. When I was a
reporter, I depended on my editors -- and on the anti-dyslexic qualities
of nicotine -- to protect me and my employers from such disasters. But
now I have neither shield: no editors, and I haven't smoked since 23
September 1995. The momentary idiocy expressed by my misspelling of
Allison Krause is precisely the kind of utterly mortifying public
revelation of mental disability that makes it impossible for me to
take myself seriously as a writer, though now – with severely painful
arthritis in both shoulders having apparently forever terminated my
ability to photograph – it seems writing is the only medium I have left.
My thanks to Nancy Olsen for catching my blunder; my apology to all
including the living Alison Krause for the error itself. (Footnote added
29 July 2012)
_________
LB/28 July 2012
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