PAGE 5
RENTING THE
GARMENT
OF FREEDOM
BY D. ARMSTRONG
In the aftermath of the bombing in Oklahoma City, a
pervasive black gauze has settled over the people of our embat
tled United States. Beneath this charred blanket, once striped
and starred, a moment of revelation bursts - like an automatic
weapon discharging in a schoolyard - upon Americans of all
creeds and colors. From shore to shore, from inner-city drive-
bys to skinhead fascism, our country is not safe to picnic in.
From courtroom to ballfield, something in the good old USA
stinks. (Christ, casinos sacrilege the Indian reservations! What
is the fucking deal?)
Our drugged and weary eagle pushes its head up
through the soiled garment of freedom. It looks right, then left
for the source of the odor. Finally, the silly bird realizes it has
been eating its own tail feathers. (What’s that smell, O.J.?)
The extent of public distrust in the government was
demonstrated vtfien rumors begin to circulate that the bombing
in Oklahoma City was perpetrated by some covert arm of our
own intelligence service, as an action designed to undermine the
growing right wing of militant activists. True or false, this level of
paranoia grinds at our being. It doesn't really matter what entity
funded the enterprise or what individuals are finally made to pay
for the crime, because amid all the pointing of fingers, the real
problem is the flagging spirit in the people of our country. Our
identity is confused. We don't know who we are anymore. There
seems no clear line of reasoning that doesn't intrude upon the
freedom or livelihood of some special interest group. We have
become ensnared in our own egocentric web. Every action we
take to free ourselves only twists the grip of that web tighter.
Common sense is confounded. (Where do we go from here,
Billy Boy?)
Way out in the Pacific Northwest where we dare to
argue old growth forests, owl habitats and salmon runs against
our own economic backbone, no one need overstate the
complexity of protecting Mother Earth for the longterm while
taking care of your neighbor in the now. Unfortunately, even
were our system of government not polluted with bureaucracy
and legalese, even were the halls of Congress not littered with
graft and dirty old men, the solutions to the problems at hand
would be difficult.The far-seeing and stringent resource manage
ment necessary to live in, work with and heal this locale (and/or
the rest of the world) invariably goes against the grain of profit.
Not until pure air is sold in inhalers and clean water is adminis
tered in syringes will big money be interested in the plight of the
common person in Oregon. (When the cancer finally gets you,
follow the dollars to the doctor's office.)
Within the shackles of high finance, this country is not
as free as we think it is. In the years since World War 2 the
government intelligence community has grown like a cancer into
the constitutional fabric of the United States. As a world wide
instrument of manipulation, history shows the work of the CIA in
particular growng more and more Machiavellian and free wheel
ing. The episode of the Iran-Contra scandal exposes the
extreme nature to which this has evolved. Acting outside the
jurisdiction of Congress, under the guise of National Security,
private interests maintain a covert, so-called "Super Patriot"
vigilante group to supply strongarm support to American invest
ment properties all over the world Weapon and drugs sales are
used to finance illegal guerrilla wars and topple governments
that do not adhere to American corporate design. (Yes, some
thing is terribly wrong here.) When the Congressional investi
gation into the Iran-Contra affair ended, insult was added to
injury. None of the big boys went to jail!
There are some who say the military intelligence
community, backed by industrial plutocrats, took over the day
John F. Kennedy was shot. A nice neat little coup. We've been
silently run by the American mob ever since. Working in the
shadows of our rather suspect Senate and House of Represent
atives, private interests always make sure national policies suit
big money agenda. And meanwhile this self-serving element,
existing outside the law, has sold our country down the river.
The gold and silver reserves are gone. The social security trusts
have been looted. The treasury is mortgaged to the Federal
Reserve Bank - vhich is not a part of the U.S. government but
an international bank! And this has all happened primarily
because we've given them our votes with our souls.The average
American seems to think he or she can play the money game
with the big boys. Sad to say, just as in Las Vegas, the numbers
are heavily stacked in favor of the bank.
Even cursory reflection upon American politics since
1950 is enough to warrant anyone's distrust in the mechanism
that interprets our Constitution. J. Edgar Hoover's transvestite
FBI, the peculiar and ongoing covert actions of the CIA, the
assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the
illegal war in Laos, the conflict in Vietnam, Watergate, the Iran-
Contra connection, Manuel Noriega and the insult of the war on
drugs, these are only some of the most visible lies tvwsted into
the iceberg of deceit that glaciates in Washington, D C. In no
way can the inquiring mind imagine that any form of justice
prevails in this country that is not colored green. Factions to the
right and to the left may scream in frustration, even wage war in
the streets, but the sad truth is that the fat middle of America
just pretends that this is business as usual while it eagerly
swallows the opiate of material wonder (That's right. The real
drug of choice is our legal tender)
It can seem overwhelming just to ponder, much less
solve, the diversity of ills from ecological neglect to sexual
abuse to inner-city slavery that bridle our society. All of them.
Every ailment All of the frustration, all of the violence and all of
DAN HUBIG
the disillusionment that we face right now is directly related to
America's blind addiction to money. "Big Money" interests run
the show and the middle class simply goes to the mall in
support. The voting masses assuage their frustrations, and thus
relinquish their democratic clout, by trading moral values for
dollar distractions.
There are those who place a large portion of blame
upon irresponsibility in the media for many of our problems.
That the media is for the most part conscienceless, propagan
dized and profit oriented is clear. So what? In the age of inform
ation, the challenge to each individual is to process the glut of
information. (That is, glean the truth from the media's wide
variety of biased voices.) Also keep in mind, the media is really
no more than a tempting mirror. It merely reflects what we buy,
and we buy sex and violence just as eagerly as we buy fast cars,
guns and alcohol. Amid the surfeit of digitalized reality we can
not resist the draw of sanguinity
(Blood runs down my arm now as I type these words.
A deep and unhealing wound pulses in my forearm. I pull back
the gangrenous flesh and suck away the puss. Across the tom
muscles and frayed tendons of my interior arm, I see dancing
swastikas and dollar signs. The vision expands I am the
consciousness of this country. My etheric body is riddled with
vortices of green.Big city ghettos, larcenous insurance agencies,
fat daddy healer corporations, game show hosts, lots and lots of
lawyers, boil upon the remnant of America's native gown of clear
light. In my heart are two hundred millions of men and women
wrestling for gender identity, abusing each other vwth dildoes,
strangling each other with condom garrotes - just to determine
who gets to be on top! Me, Me, Me screams like incoming
rockets arching across the yuppied rainbow of consumerism...
ecstatic violent exultation is our virtual experiential religion. Only
the video impingement of violence can touch our buried carnal
origins. We are transistorized primitives elbow deep in electronic
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entrails, swooning to the pixeled sight of our brother's bowels
blown to kingdom cum. Our primal selves scream through this
last conduit of spirituality. Our beings are in rage! Human sacri
fice is the sacrament of our obscene material in communion ...
My head opens like an egg A deformed fetus falls out upon my
chest The new being has a penis, a vagina, one nippled and
hairy breast, two assholes and a credit card number stenciled
upon its palm. There is no scrotum. No testicles. Instead of
eyes, simply a video screen. And on that screen, playing in an
unending loop, is the collapsing cataract of concrete and glass
that faced the Federal building in Oklahoma City — as part of an
insurance ad! In dismay, I realize that the zombied actions of my
physical being willed this nonsense. I am to blame. I try to cry,
but no tears will come. My soul is dead. I am only so much
meat, packaged and sold like frankfurters in a pom shop. And I
am the spirit of America!)
If we can look with any objectivity at our society, we'll
see that moral responsibility invariably runs at cross-purposes to
making money. (Old news.) In a democratic capitalism, you vote
with dollars spent not a ballot. The products you buy, the
television shows you watch support particular manufacturing
syndicates and corporations that in turn pay lobbyists to deter
mine the outcome of national elections months before the day
we vote The spirit of freedom in this country runs green. It has
nothing to do with banners waved left or right, free speech,
rights to bare arms, justice, or plain and simple human decency.
Bucks up. We buy our freedom. We believe in money. This is
not to say money is bad Money is a societal necessity of
exchange It is merely empty in itself. Yet to wads of money go
most of our hopes and dreams and prayers. Our society is
glamorous, dazzling and distraction filled, but frighteningly and
increasingly meaningless.
The American is rare today who does not choose the
dollar first. And why not? All else that matters follows. From
family health care to sex appeal, money is the blood of our
society It is the pulse of power and justice in our nation. It
transcends all but ideologies of the far left and the far right. And
in frustration those extremes voice their indignation vwth an
explosive version of chemotherapy for a country vwth cancer of
its soul But what foolishness is this? Where are we headed?
Karmic meltdown!
Something is sadly amiss here. Don't look now, but our
country's soul is gone. How else could Christian terrorists be
bombing Federal buildings in Oklahoma? Symbolically, if we
dare, we have loaded the gun and placed it at our own temple.
So vhere do we worship now, Mr Bush? At the quik-pix
machine?
What wisdom might be offered to this desperately
material society coming apart from the inside? Oh, probably
Jesus Christ, or Buddha, or Mohammed or John Lennon surely
said what we all know already - but for some damn reason can't
manage to live The one to blame faces us in our electronic
mirror, the way we spend our money determines the cast of that
reflection Hug your child, open your hear, instead of your wallet,
and know we are more than material being.
Dan Armstrong lives in Astoria. He is a writer and poet.
"I must admit to being pnmarily a vwiter of fiction, and I'm not
certain if this emotional response to the bombing in Oklahoma
City is a political essay or jus, another piece of fiction," he wrote
in an accompanying letter ”1 don', pretend to be offering any
particularly new ideas, bu, I tried to incorporate a kind of primal
scream into an ordinary discourse upon disillusionment in
America."