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THE THIRD WORLD WAR
overhead scream of jets, the mysterious stealth bombers, black
helicopters, and who knows what else we are yet to be deceived
about. It's happening in Bosnia, Burma, Angola, Tibet, and
probably scores of other places. And this doesn't even touch the
darkest cancer of this infernal war. Random terrorism means the
sky can fall anywhere at anytime. LOOK OUT! HERE COMES
SOME NOW!
BY D. ARMSTRONG
The Third W orld W ar
Is happening now
Don't you hear the steady din of violence
At the edges of our town
The silent abuse of poverty
Screaming to get out
A state of w ar
Is upon us
W e see it in the streets
W e live it in our home
It courses in our veins
It swells within our mind
It pains us in our groin
It haunts us all the time
On one side of the information barrier are the semi-
fortunate. Those living in the propagandized paradise of mis­
information and distraction. Those that watch the Third World War
on television every night and cannot name what it is. Those who
actively engage in the warfare by buying products that have been
strangled out of nations strapped to austerity programs and labor
conditions we wouldn't press on a dog. Shoes that enable you to
fly on one side of the information barrier are the anchors and
bonds for yellow people impressed for life in a factory hot house
on the other side.
Information. A superhighway to some. The clash of
media bias to others. Mind control to others yet. But surely
nothing less than the dazzling glitz of the computer age in full
swing. ROM this, RAM that. The information net ensnares us with
an imaginary need to know -- to know a lot of nothing. The
labyrinth of chips and flashing pixels and sexy software turns
information into cerebral pollution and screens the screams of
the warzone horror going on all the time out there on the other
side. The Third World War is information as entertainment while
more than half the globe is illiterate. The business as usual is
dumbing up the masses like packs of drunken chimpanzees (no
offense to the apes). The police shows - live and dramatized. TV
sleuthing. Game shows. Huckstering commercials. Video games.
Junk, junk, and more junk to camouflage the quiet war of
espionage shadowing our personal information. The intelli­
gence community's banks of secret computer files. The tele­
phone surveillance systems. The invasion of privacy through
credit ratings, bank accounts, and health records. The ghostlike
impinging of pseudo-realities upon pseudo-realities upon what­
ever reality might be.
WHATEVER REALITY MIGHT ACTUALLY BE! That
is the question that dogs the semi-fortunate as the war erupts
between his ears. Where on one side of the barrier the war
is the empty plate or the son gunned down in the street or the
dirty syringe on the sidewalk, on the other side it is the press
of dangerous ideas, the invasion of alien awareness, the
consciousness that all is not right at home-sweet-home.The
paranoia for the children. The worries of guns and drugs in the
schoolyard. The sudden explosive frustration of postal clerks.
The telltale pendulum of time and the environment. The denial of
concern. The denial of this crazy war. The psychic pollution
pressing itself into the collective unconscious and resurrecting
itself in twisted dreams of world peace and clean air and cheap
sunglasses. WAKE UP!
The Third World War is a life and death struggle for those
that don't have, and a struggle of the mind, a war against
neurosis, for those that do. There is peace for no one today. A
war inside and out rages like a global hurricane upon our earth.
The heart of humankind is wrapped by its own thorns. There is no
sequestered island. There is no private sector. There is no
financial freedom. There is no hiding from our own insidiously
petty nature.
The battle lines are instinctively drawn across the center
of every stage -- our world, our nations, our cities, our families,
our minds, our souls. Battalions of irregulars everywhere stand
out against the shadows. Tiny bands of paranoid being loosely
joined by the necessity of survival strut the night to an impossi­
bly brash cadence... You are on a dark city street stopped at a
traffic light. Now look slowly over at the driver in the car next to
you. Slowly. Don't let it show. What do you think about the
teenager in that car? Is he carrying a gun? When he gives you the
finger, do you ignore it? Or do you dare to shake a fist at his
skinny ass? He might shoot you for less. Do you have a gun?
Is your hat on backwards? Do tattoos hide your skin color. What
race are you anyway? What side are you on? And for heaven's
sake, don't take your time deciding...Appreciate that the Third
World War rages upon us now like an invisible fire. Christ, our
Earth must blaze like the sun to all other by-standing conscious­
ness. Suit up in camey when you hit the streets today. That's the
name of the game. We're all double agents for the Nova Police
now.
That's right. This is a different kind of war. It's disguised,
and for the most part it's unrecognized and unlabeled. Still, the
entire globe has been subjected to a chameleoned war-zone.
Upon the fringe of monied culture everywhere, those with and
those without are enemies. The violence is in the streets. Abuse
in the home. Biocide. Racism. Sexism. Drugism. Terrorism.
Informationalism. These are all part of this new kind of war. It eats
at you from the inside out. It is waged in your very mind.
It lives in you consciousness whether you know it or not. It is
there. It is the paranoia and anger symptomatic of a society
dangerously stratified economically and psychically. It is the
image of poverty and death that the fortunate see in the news
and the unfortunate live day to day. It is the necessity for such
a concept as sexual preference. It is an inherent part of the
modern mind. What side are you on? What gender? What race?
Whose colors did you wear today?
Anywhere you are. No matter what you are doing. This
war is ongoing. It could suddenly explode through your door this
very moment or play on and on invisibly while you watch prime­
time situation comedies on your television set. That's what it's
become. A giant, cosmic situation comedy. The sirens. The
music.The look.The darting eyes.The hip.The unhip. The battle
simmers perpetually. Boils over periodically. And remains unde­
fined, uncatalogued, and unknown. Denied.Damn the
torpedoes, mates. Keep your wits about you. Dive, dive, dive.
The Third World War is a provision of awareness. It Is the
nature of our beast. Yes, it is a subtle and unsubtle living thing. It
bleeds in the streets and breeds in our minds. A cerebral herpes
erupting time and time again when internal stresses cause
overload, when anger and anxiety frustrate into bullets or bombs.
It is a poison and antidote all in one. It is the whole in the piece.
The holistic in parts. It is the individual's microbeing, mirroring the
state of the macrocosm world. (What's that smell, O.J.?) WAR.
WAR. WAR.
Information is the insulation and the shield for those that
have. It is the weapon and the poison against those that don't.
On one side of this invisible, partially perforated barrier is your
living room bathed in the fine luminescence of a cathode ray
tube. On the other side pulses the active, bleeding warzone.
Here the peoples of Third World nations experience overpopula­
tion, hunger and poverty unimaginable to those who bicker over
the remote. The Third World has been systematically shackled to
these conditions by the First World's program of indebtedness
finance management. Uh, what's that? Making money with
money. On a computer! Beautiful concept. Seems like the Nazz
threw the moeychangers out of the temple a long time ago.
Some act to follow. But don't worry, the balance plays out.
There's no getting out of the warzone. The struggle wages in the
streets of urban ghettos in every great city in the free world -- the
boiling hotspots of poverty - where the weapons and spoils for
and against are the same -- where the toxins (crack, heroin,
cocaine, amphetamines) leak back and forth across the graffiti-ed
demilitarized zone through the exchange of guns, needles and
lives. The children of those "that have" are held hostage by
those "that haven't" who are held hostage by those “that have"
for what they have. This is the way it is.
Do the ovens of Auschwitz compare at all with the
sacrileges perpetrated against the Native Americans for the last
five hundred years? Talk about holocaust. How many tribes and
nations of entire peoples were wiped out? Traded like a handful
of beads for this black invisible war. Whether committed by
Cortez, Hitler or Custer - in Watts, My Lai or Astoria -- these
crimes against humankind live eternally in the societal mind. We
become victim to our own victimizing. This is the way it is.
1154 C O M M E R C IA L
We are killing ourselves. The war on drugs is really a war
with drugs. An attack at the very interface of our culture. Invisible
bars encircle the embattled Third World blemishes within the
cities of the First World. Young blacks and latinos become
enslaved to ghetto life by the alluring drug culture that tempts like
a way out. Invisible prison cells spring up around whites bom to
opportunity. Suddenly they are prisoners of war. All free but
bound.
Homosexuals live a secret war. They are the triple
agents. Jekyll and Hyde and hide again. Then there are the
heterosexuals entrapped by personal phobias and clandestine
viruses. Gone neurotic about bodily secretions wrapped in latex
to be dropped in canisters like radioactive waste. Social conflict
smokes in the restaurants and lounges all around the world. Did
he touch that? Did you spit on me? Can I sit on that? Is he or isn't
she?
And what of the private horrors of strange codependen­
cies? The psycho/chemical warfare of personalities - abuser and
abusee? This is also part of the Third World War. The incestual,
the violent, the abusive twists of convoluted human dynamics.
Psychic stratification and dismemberment.
Stir in the steady poisoning of Mother our Earth, the
war of (hu)man against nature. The overloaded dumpsites. The
barges of refuse shipped from port to port. The hot potato train­
loads of atomic byproducts jockeyed back and forth around the
world with no place to go but from one place to another. The
chemicals in the food. The chemicals in the farmland. The
chemicals in the wild animals. The chemicals in the trees, in
the air, in the water. The carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide,
the sulfates, the nitrates, the nonstop exhaust of a society on
wheels. What happens when China finally goes to the maul? Can
our atmosphere handle 200 million more BMWs? Who's going to
tell the Chinese it's too late for them to have cars?
What about the molecular battle of organic versus
inorganic versus the mutated? Here we have the bacterial out­
breaks, the microorganisms straining to exist in the new toxic
environments. The epidemics of diseases that no one heard of
last year but have become household words today. AIDS, Ebola,
ecoli, and viruses yet-unnamed carried around the world in a
sneeze. This is part of the Third World War too!
And of course there are also the inevitable, visible wars.
The action we recognize as wars, the firing of guns by uniformed
peacekeepers against generic rebels, the strategic bombing, the
(For a moment I turn from this writing and look out the
window at the failing day. The sun sets in the distance. The sky is
deepening to azure with the press of night. Here and there are
the brilliant oranges and somber purples of trailing clouds. Life is
spectacular in its simplest act. And we seem bent on defiling it.
What are we doing? What have we done? No, man cannot write a
poem lovely as a tree. But he can build a jet to break the sound
barrier and split the atom and print the Bible and ten thousand
other titles on a microchip the size of a mustard seed. But he still
hasn't got the sense to not piss in his own bed. Even a dog
knows better than to shit in his own backyard!)
What curse has taken humankind? In our hands is the
power of the ages. Some ten thousand years of man's civiliza­
tion. We should have no trouble feeding, housing and caring for
everyone on this planet. We could return this cinder to Paradise.
Every conceivable grace of culture that we have acquired could
be shared. The horn of plenty could download on each and
every living being. We could live with complete compassion for
animals, plants, insects and bacterial life forms we can't see
without optical enhancement. Instead, resources are meted out
from the select few monied land barons of this earth. We live in
feudal times. Civilized man has always lived in this way. It is low. It
is wrong by any values but those of greed. This changes not over
the entire course of history from pyramids to rocket ships to
computer chips. The dominant theme in human civil-ization is
greed. Or at least, due to the nature of greed, greed always wins
out. Victory in the Third World War has been reduced or uplifted
to the individual's discovery of the thing within him. Living in the
grace of the clear spirit needs become our acquired attitude. We
are smart enough and aware enough to enact this as our willful
choice upon ourselves. Yes, we are capable of complete spiritual
transcendence...and still some feudal lord owns our planet and
dares to control our minds.
(I look again out my window. Black night presides. A
thousand stars flicker overhead. A thin crescent moon sits off to
the west. The suggestion of profundity comforts me. A tear wells
in each of my eyes for the struggle that humankind inflicts upon
itself. Why must we live in a state of constant war?)
Dan Armstrong lives in Astoria. He w rites," The 3rd World
War is intended as the third part in a trilogy, the first two parts that
(the NOTE has) already used Renting the Garment of Freedom,
June/July'95 & When the Fringe Becomes the Center,
Aug/Sept'95). I don't really know what to make of this piece. It
started out as a poem as I wrote it, but it wiggled its way into
prose. In no other way can I describe it. Fact ot fiction. I don't
know."
HOPE L. HARRIS
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