2232 lines
102 KiB
Plaintext
2232 lines
102 KiB
Plaintext
Living in such a state taTestaTesTaTe etats a hcus ni gniviL
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of mind in which time sTATEsTAtEsTaTeStA emit hcihw ni dnim of
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does not pass, space STateSTaTeSTaTeStAtE ecaps ,ssap ton seod
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does not exist, and sTATeSt oFOfOfo dna ,tsixe ton seod
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idea is not there. STatEst ofoFOFo .ereht ton si aedi
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Stuck in a place staTEsT OfOFofo ecalp a ni kcutS
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where movements TATeSTa foFofoF stnemevom erehw
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are impossible fOFoFOf elbissopmi era
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in all forms, UfOFofO ,smrof lla ni
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physical and nbEifof dna lacisyhp
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or mental - uNBeInO - latnem ro
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your mind is UNbeinG si dnim rouy
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focusing on a unBEING a no gnisucof
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lone thing, or NBeINgu ro ,gniht enol
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a lone nothing. bEinGUn .gnihton enol a
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You are numb and EiNguNB dna bmun era ouY
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unaware to events stneve ot erawanu
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taking place - not iSSUE ton - ecalp gnikat
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knowing how or what 6/30/99 tahw ro who gniwonk
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to think. You are in FiFTY-SiX ni era uoY .kniht ot
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a state of unbeing.... ....gniebnu fo etats a
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--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
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CONTENTS OF THiS iSSUE
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=----------------------=
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EDiTORiAL Kilgore Trout
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LETTERS TO THE EDiTOR
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STAFF LiSTiNGS
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[=- ARTiCLES -=]
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REFLECTiONS ON KOSOVO Crux Ansata
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RHAPSODY iN D MiNOR Clockwork
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SUNDAY, DESERT WASTELAND I Wish My Name Were Nathan
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DOCUMENT 04.25.99 Kilgore Trout
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GUiLTY BRAiN (EROTiCK-TOCK) I Wish My Name Were Nathan
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[=- POETRiE -=]
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THE THOUGHT OF iSLANDS Robert James Berry
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STONE CRADLES Robert James Berry
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[=- FiCTiON -=]
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EVERYBODY LOVES A FOOL Kilgore Trout
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OFF WiTH THE BLiSS Clockwork
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--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
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EDiTORiAL
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by Kilgore Trout
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I should have figured out by now that I always have lots of stuff to do
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on the day that the zine comes out. It would be nice to just get up after a
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good night's rest, mosey around the house for a bit, and then sit down and
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finish up the new issue for publication. But no. Today I've taken a summer
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final, gotten an oil change, gotten my car inspected, washed my laundry, and
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now I'm finishing up the zine on a laptop at a coffeehouse waiting for
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Clockwork to get off work because his car is in the shop and he needs a ride
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home.
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It's not really a problem, unless the half-charged laptop battery decides
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to die on me in the middle of editing. That just would not be kosher. I
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think if that happened, I would scream and yell and get kicked out. At least
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the Guy Who Plays Only Swing Music Or Johnny Cash isn't working tonight. He's
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a nice guy, even though he iced my vanilla chai last night while I wasn't
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looking, but he needs to vary his music rotation.
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But that's okay. The zine's almost done, and Doorway just sat down and
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said that he locked his keys in his car and would like some change to make a
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phone call so someone can get his keys back for him. So I'll help Doorway
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out, go pick up Clockwork, and finish up the zine.
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* * * * *
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I am home, and it is now much later than I expected it to be. Getting
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Doorway back to his car set me a bit off schedule, and some dunderhead decided
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it would be a good idea to send out the streetsweepers onto the upper decks of
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I-35 in downtown Austin at 9:45pm. Nothing like having only one lane of
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traffic when you've got somewhere to go. I'm supposed to be there at 10:00pm
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and arrive at 10:15pm. Clock is nowhere to be seen. He recently changed
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buildings, and I knew that, but I wasn't sure if he knew that, so I circled
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the large campus of the large corporation, going from building to building and
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hoping that he wasn't wandering around looking for me. By 11:00pm and two
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unanswered pay phone calls to his cell phone, I decided to go home and see if
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he got a ride. I get home around 11:15, and he calls me and says he was on a
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call since 9:45pm. I'm sure he got that call since I had to pick him up. At
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least I got to listen to that old Robyn Hitchcock tape I forgot I had. And
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Clock got home fine, cuz, dammit, this zine is all about family. </stump>
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So, as you can see, issue release days are always interesting and a tad
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bit hectic. Cha cha cha. And tomorrow, I don't have to do anything at all.
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That's kinda nice. I think I'll go scratch my dog's belly and watch her legs
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twitch and twirl like she's riding a bicycle upside down. Entertainment at
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its finest. I mean, after all, isn't the world supposed to end pretty soon?
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That's what the People In The Know keep saying. I'm not In The Know, so I
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wouldn't know. But if this is the last issue you ever get to read of SoB (and
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I'm not really counting on that), then you should remember that I told you so.
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If the world doesn't end, then just be grateful that you'll get some more
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zine. Or maybe you're pining for the end of the world.
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Join the damn club. In the meantime, be content and keep plotting.
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First person to blow up the world and/or extinguish the sun: drinks are
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on me. I swear.
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--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
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LETTERS TO THE EDiTOR
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From: Bob Clark
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To: kilgore@eden.com
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Subject: My Yahoo Page
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How do I add the "state of well being?
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Keep It Simple!
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[i'm not exactly sure what you're asking here. do you want to add a link to
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the zine from your home page? That's simple enough. Just put some goofy line
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like href=www.apoculpro.org in your html code. if you're talking about your
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own personal well being, well, it gets a bit more complicated. there's
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christian salvation, buddhist satori, or the ceremonial magician's knowledge
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and conversation of the holy guardian angel. of course, we here at the zine
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think that total fanaticism to the zine will solve most of your day to day
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problems. for one, it gives you a reason to live. you get a cause to fight
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for, and you can propagate the zine to all of your friends (and strangers,
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too). tell them the zine changed your life and showed you inner peace.
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absorb the text into your inner child, and allow it to blossom and grow into
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the multiheaded gargantuan that it wants to be. leave flyers advertising the
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zine in local punk clubs, pass out multicolored pamphlets to passersby with
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reasons why you think they should read the zine. and most of all, get local
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tv coverage. and then, when your day is over, and you're tired from a long
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work schedule, you can relax in your easy chair, meditate on life, and know
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that you have the answer. and when your dog starts talking to you, and your
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silverware begins to arrange itself in hieroglyphic patters in your drawer,
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then you'll know that you are blessed and that the zine gods have found favor
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with you. after all, when your utensils actually mean something, then
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everything else is pretty simple.]
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--SoB--
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Dear Editor:
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I was appalled -- appalled! -- to read the hateful attacks on Jar Jar
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Binks and on all symbols of the coming post-gendered world in a recent issue
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of State of unBeing (#55; May 1999). The challenge to traditional, bourgeois
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gender roles that this obviously transheterosexual -- even transmonosexual --
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entity presents could only seem "irritating" to the archaic, homophobic mind.
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Such thoughtless attacks lead to the mood of rage and hate that condone and
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promote homophobic assaults on and killings of homosexuals. It is such
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invective as yours that leads to vicious gay-bashing assaults in our
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supposedly advanced, tolerant society. I hope it will not be repeated. It is
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unfortunate such an affront to all victims of hate crimes exists, and it is
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hoped such enlightened publications as the Texas Triangle and the Village
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Voice, which have exposed the hateful reality of Jar Jar opposition for what
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it really is, will prevent an upsurge of gay-bashing episodes.
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In tolerance and solidarity,
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Crux Ansata
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P.S. -- I find myself in need of an emaciated, pale little urchin of a French
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girl to wear a short, thin, tattered dress, stagger in a hunger-induced haze,
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and sell cigars and cigarettes in faltering English, because I have a Zippo
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and hence minimal need for matches. (In the event I move to a place where
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absinthe is legal, this will, of course, be added to her wares.) If anyone in
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the SoB audience can arrange for one at a moderate price, or is willing to
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play the role, please put them in contact with me.
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C.A.
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[see, bob? ansat's an SoB fanatic, and look how he turned out!]
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--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
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STAFF LiSTiNGS
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EDiTOR
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Kilgore Trout
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CONTRiBUTORS
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Clockwork
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Crux Ansata
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I Wish My Name Were Nathan
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Robert James Berry
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GUESSED STARS
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Bob Clark
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SoB OFFiCiAL GROUPiES
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crackmonkey
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Oxyde de Carbone
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--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
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[=- ARTiCLES -=]
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--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-
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REFLECTiONS ON KOSOVO
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by Crux Ansata
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A hundred years ago, the United States made a mistake.
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It had already allowed itself to be fooled by the capitalist media. This
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was, of course, not the first time the media had been used in the furtherance
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of war, not even in the United States, where the founders of our Revolution
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had skillfully used the media to whip up public support for freedom. But, to
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the best of my knowledge, this was the first time an explicitly artificial
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situation was created by the media so as to further the goals of those who
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stood to gain financially from it, utterly fooling a people who had too much
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of a naive faith in the inherent virtue of journalism. It is a classic event
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of propaganda and United States history, to the point we all studied it in
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school, even though many or most Americans never took home the obvious lesson:
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The media is not infallible; men are not always honest. It also set the
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pattern for similar media manipulation to fool naive Americans into going to
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war, from the spin on the Luistania to the possibly staged and certainly spun
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massacres in the Balkans. We like to pretend the government has been
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deceiving us; the truth is we have allowed ourselves to be deceived, and by
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the media and corporate power mongers much more than a government that
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honestly could do no more than request the shots that were called.
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Nonetheless, this is not the mistake I refer to. Allowing a naive trust
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in journalists -- who, like everyone else, have vested interests; and who have
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a financial interest and power interest in preserving the capitalist state --
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was a mistake, and unfortunately not one that even the insights of
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contemporary philosophy, literary criticism, and contemporary history have
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purged. But I refer to a mistake that happened after the war. While it may
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have been the motivation of those who caused the war, the American people's
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acceptance of this event caused America nothing but pain for decades.
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In 1898, following a somewhat chaotic and almost farcical war with Spain,
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the United States found itself occupying foreign peoples. These were not
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peoples the United States ever intended to make Americans, but they also ended
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up not setting them free. American public opinion supported this government
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mistake: accepting the burden of empire. America shifted from a nation of
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liberation to a nation of imperialist oppression.
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This was not, of course, the first time an element within the United
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States had exerted force for territorial purposes, but this was a very vital
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change from what had gone before. Manifest Destiny and expansion to the west
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was never meant to be an occupation of other peoples. The west was always
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seen as being opened to an expanding nation of Americans. The bloody Civil
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War was not intended to be an imperialist occupation of one half of America by
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the other; it was meant to be a -- forced, granted -- preserved union of
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Americans, by Americans. These were people meant to be represented in
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Congress, extended Constitutional rights -- indeed to be, if only in the
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future, as much Americans as those in Boston or Philadelphia.
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Even the Monroe Doctrine, which admittedly asserted to Washington the
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ability to dictate actions in other parts of the hemisphere, was nothing like
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the results of the Spanish-American War. The Monroe Doctrine was not intended
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to dictate to other peoples what they could do, and was not meant to make the
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Western Hemisphere a Greater America. This was a strategic policy to keep
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European interests -- that is, the interests of imperialist aggression -- out
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of the Western Hemisphere. While the annexation of the Philippines in 1898
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was an act of oppression, subverting a national people to a will not their
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own, the Monroe Doctrine was a liberating policy, disallowing other nations to
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be oppressed, by force if necessary.
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But when the United States government annexed -- and the American people
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permitted and approved the annexation of -- the Philippines, the United States
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ceased to be a republic and became instead an empire.
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* * * * *
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Republics do not have colonies. Republics do not have protectorates. The
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republic called the United States was meant to be a nation of free people, by
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free people, and while we have bungled our own freedom, this should be more
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argument to leave others' alone. But at the end of the last century we forgot
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this, and at the end of this century, we are forgetting it again.
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The United States has no intention of making Kosovo the fifty-first
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state. This is not contested. However, some think this is reason to believe
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the action in the Balkans is not imperialist aggression. Nothing could be
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farther from the truth. To make Kosovo a state, with the full rights and
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privileges thereof, would be stupid. It would be expansionist. It would be
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aggression, and it would be wrong. It would not, however, be imperialist.
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Making Kosovo a protectorate, of the United States or its NATO proxy, is
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imperialist. Unlike Serbia's position of retaining its heartland, and even
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unlike the efforts of those fighting for a Greater Albania, the United States
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does not in this action seek to reunite a people. As America expanded
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westward, she brought together -- even brought into being -- one people, one
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nation of Americans. In the Philippines, in Cuba, in Kosovo, the United
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States had and has the intention of ruling another people. The original sin
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for which America defeated the British Empire, in the first anti-colonial
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peasant war of modern times, is now again being committed by a resurgent
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American Empire.
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* * * * *
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To understand what is happening, it is probably best to understand what
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has happened. For, in a real sense, Kosovo is not the beginning of the Second
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American Empire, but the continuation thereof. The United States has just
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finished fighting an imperial war. Unlike the imperialist aggression in the
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Balkans, fought by one empire against one nation, the Cold War -- America's
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only true imperial war -- was a battle between two empires.
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A brief note on why I discount so many apparent wars as not imperialist.
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The Spanish-American War was not a long term war. In a brief span -- less
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than four months -- the American Republic seized some lands from the Spanish
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Empire. It was not a long term conflict to consolidate imperial gains, but a
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brief battle in which the occupation of some other countries was nearly an
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afterthought. Empire resulted from, but did not cause, the Spanish-American
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war. The First and Second World Wars, which were imperialist for many of the
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nations of Europe -- France, Britain, Austria-Hungry, Germany, the Ottoman
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Empire, the Tsarist and Stalinist empires -- was not entered into by the
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Americans as an effort to reshuffle and consolidate her empire. This may have
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been the intent of some unAmerican elements within our boundaries, but the
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people of the United States rallied to block other empires and fortify our
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allies -- and then go home. Our imperialist war was different.
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Over the course of the Cold War, generations came and went. Few people
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alive today remember a time before the onset of the Cold War, and even those
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that do lived most of their lives under it. George Bush -- the last president
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to remember an America before the Cold War -- was a Cold Warrior through and
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through, even if he also fought in the last imperialist war where America
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intended to go home.
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I do not necessarily condemn the United States for fighting the
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imperialist Cold War. In the shattered ruins of the post-Second World War
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world, where the previous empires were collapsed or collapsing, only two
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empires survived, the Stalinist empire and the American empire. The Stalinist
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empire had already shown itself to be expansionist and imperialist, and would
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do so in increasingly explicit ways. Poland, 1920, for example.
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Czechoslovakia of 1948 and 1969. Hungry, 1956. This does not contradict the
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Soviet Union's Marxist heritage, though it may show a misunderstanding
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thereof. The Soviet Union did not consider itself Communist, of course.
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Lenin, and especially Stalin, saw that the world of the Tsars was an
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imperialist world, and the Soviet revolution was fought against an imperialist
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state. Unlike the postcolonialist actions in early America, the Soviets
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inherited not only an empire, but an empire's heartland, the circulatory and
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nervous systems. The Soviet Union thus was brought into the world an empire,
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and under the Marxism Stalin understood, the socialist stage of world history,
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where the Soviet Union would be battling the capitalist empires, the Soviets
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would have to create an empire to survive, and to export the revolution.
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"Socialism in one country," therefore, despite the name, was an inherently
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expansionist doctrine.
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It is perhaps the most unfortunate of ironies -- or perhaps the results
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of a revolution whose time had not yet come and evil forces whose faces
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history has yet to expose -- that the U.S.S.R. acted on these assumptions
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under Lenin and Stalin. Not only did the Soviet Union become the enemy
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through its attempts to defeat it, but the United States did, too. Only the
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United States was in a position to struggle against an expansionist Soviet
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imperium, and this was the Cold War. In a constant struggle for land, the two
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last empires battled for supremacy through economic manipulation and proxy
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warfare, until the Soviet Union became the first empire to collapse.
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But then, America made another mistake. A new world was being born. When
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the wall came down in 1989, the birth pangs of this new world were just
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beginning. The new world order Bush proclaimed was inevitable, but which
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world it would be was uncertain. We will never know -- though many of us
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suspect -- how much hegemonic power Bush would have fought to hold under the
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American Empire. We do know that Clinton -- the first American president who
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knew Cold War and only Cold War -- has increased troop deployment three
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hundred percent, acted to preserve U.S. hegemony with various degrees of
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success from Haiti to Somalia, from the Balkans to the Middle East, and acted
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for the same effect through proxy in all the Cold War killing fields, from
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Columbia to Turkey. No pacifist -- by which I mean a lover of peace, rather
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than merely one who fears military service -- can support Clinton, any more
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than any true socialist could.
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When the Wall came down, the United States should have said, "We won,"
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printed up a few million blue ribbons or little silver stars, and gone home.
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We should have dismantled the American Empire, from its secret police to its
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occupation forces.
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We didn't. For a number of reasons -- preserving economic dominance,
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preserving an international respect even now many Americans think we are owed,
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inertia, and the greed of those who saw the Second World as just more markets
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to exploit under Globocop America -- we didn't go home. And now we reap the
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whirlwind.
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* * * * *
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The United States and the Soviet Union, like any two empires, were in a
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state of constant aggression. Lenin explained this very clearly decades ago,
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even before there was a Soviet Union. Like two sumo wrestlers, the United
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States and the Soviet Union slammed against each other over and over again for
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half a century. While each tried to defeat the other, each also depended on
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the other. When the Soviet sumo was gone, the American sumo started slamming
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into the air, and falling on his face. In political terms, this was imperial
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overreach. If one leans something too far without any counterforce, it will
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topple over. Every empire eventually does so. Like the capitalism of which
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it is a form, imperialism survives by consuming. The imperialist world, and
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imperialist wars, were sustainable because they consumed other empires. Today,
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there is one empire, and not even any utterly undeveloped nations to prey
|
|
upon. There is no darkest Africa without any modern civilization, no soft
|
|
underbelly of the Pacific Ocean. There are any number of nations that, had
|
|
they existed a hundred years ago, could have taken their places as imperialist
|
|
nations. On a regional level, some are empires: China, Indonesia, Great
|
|
Britain. While our current botched foreign policy is rapidly pushing new
|
|
empires to form -- the E.U., Russia, China -- we still live in a world with
|
|
only one global empire.
|
|
|
|
Thus far, I have said nothing new. These are predictions and analyses
|
|
that have been known for a century at least. Under this model, barring an
|
|
utterly unforeseen global revolution, there are two possibilities: New
|
|
empires form now, and enter into a new Cold War of imperialism, or the one
|
|
empire utterly collapses, and we enter into a time of many smaller nations,
|
|
until empires reform. The unipolar nonsense about one American Empire -- or
|
|
one superpower -- being self-sustaining is utterly unbelievable, and I
|
|
personally don't believe even Clinton believes it. If he ever did, the
|
|
utterly botched way he has handled Russia in these past couple of years must
|
|
have disabused him of the notion, unless he is as insulated from undesired
|
|
information as Nixon had become.
|
|
|
|
There is a fourth possibility, though, and this the one I see most likely
|
|
to occur. Imperialism presumes the nation-state. In the minds of some, we
|
|
have already transcended the nation-state. I don't think we have, but I do
|
|
think we have a new entity in addition. This, too, may only exist in the
|
|
minds of some, but I tend to see the efforts to make it a reality well
|
|
underway.
|
|
|
|
An American Empire cannot survive, and those who now occupy the White
|
|
House, who grew up under the Cold War and cannot conceive of a state in any
|
|
but totalitarian, police state terms, seem to know that. They seem no longer
|
|
to view their foreign policy in terms of the nation-state. As Marx predicted
|
|
-- and as, in my opinion, Lenin failed to take sufficiently into account --
|
|
Clinton has come to have a global class-consciousness. Clinton sees the world
|
|
-- or acts as if he sees the world -- in global terms, and seems to think this
|
|
global ruling class has the right to oppress those who oppose it.
|
|
|
|
Or do they even see this in terms of oppression?
|
|
|
|
Chicago of 1968 was a police action. Whether a police riot or the mere
|
|
imposition of law and order through the barrel of a gun -- because Mayor Daly
|
|
understood Mao more than he might want to have admitted -- it was seen as a
|
|
police action. Waco of 1996 was a police action, even if conducted with
|
|
military material and possibly troops. Both were within our borders, and
|
|
means of policing the "peace" -- which is to say submission to authority --
|
|
that preserves the state. When one sees the world in its imperial terms, one
|
|
sees that, indeed, Vietnam was a police action, at least in the way the Cold
|
|
Warriors understood it. Vietnam was within the borders of the American
|
|
Empire, and putting down a proxy insurgency by the expansionist Stalinist
|
|
state was a means of preserving the law and order in Indochina. Korea was a
|
|
war -- a civil war, granted, but a war nonetheless. Vietnam was a colonialist
|
|
police action.
|
|
|
|
The disturbing thing today is how Kosovo is viewed.
|
|
|
|
There is no doubt that, for Serbia, the actions in Kosovo were police
|
|
actions. Ethnic cleansing, perhaps. (Genocide? No one who has followed the
|
|
events can reasonably believe so.) But ethnic cleansing in the context of a
|
|
police action. Why, then, do the members of the Clinton junta act as if we
|
|
are in a police action? Why are we imposing law and order in the Balkans, and
|
|
not acting to preserve a national interest? The thing I see, and that should
|
|
scare anyone who does, is that the Clinton junta, viewing themselves as
|
|
masters of the world, see the actions in Kosovo as means to preserve the law
|
|
and order within their empire, which is to say, they consider their new
|
|
"empire" to be the planet. For Clinton, and those who think like him, one
|
|
world necessarily implies one government, one state, one force oppressing all
|
|
other people. For Clinton, the absence of a counterforce, of another empire,
|
|
is ideal, and allows the one, ideal government to police the entire world.
|
|
|
|
* * * * *
|
|
|
|
The republic Jefferson struggled for is, at least for the time being,
|
|
gone. But perhaps the republic America has transformed into is not Weimar.
|
|
After all, like Hitler, like Mussolini, we have a leader who rose to power on
|
|
a declining, "Leftist" movement, working towards reformism to stave off
|
|
Marxism, mouthing working class slogans never manifested in his policies. Like
|
|
Hitler, like Mussolini, our leader embraces big capitalism whenever it is
|
|
politically -- or personally -- expedient to do so, and especially whenever it
|
|
preserves the state, which our leader, consciously or no, feels must be
|
|
defended above all else. Like Hitler, like Mussolini, for many he has
|
|
appeared as a near Messianic leader of authenticity -- through skillfully
|
|
manipulated press, propaganda, and political theater. Like those who went
|
|
before him, he has achieved the love of his people by claiming to identify
|
|
with their suffering. Like Hitler, like Mussolini, Clinton has risen on an
|
|
emotional, irrational wave of desperation, of a sixties generation who doesn't
|
|
want to admit they failed, and a rising generation trying to deny it never had
|
|
hope to begin with. And this irrational hope may be the reason why when
|
|
Clinton carries out his genocidal policies, either directly (Allied Force,
|
|
Serbia 1999), by proxy (Storm and Flash, Croatia, 1996; Turkey and
|
|
Turkish-occupied Kurdistan; Columbia) or through passivity (the Sudan), the
|
|
people cannot bring themselves to admit what is happening. Perhaps it is true
|
|
that Clinton sustains himself on a wave of senseless optimism, because for all
|
|
their cynicism, the American public won't admit not what America has
|
|
degenerated into, but what Americans have. And perhaps we, too, will have our
|
|
1945, when even the dupes and the collaborators will be faced in stupefaction
|
|
amidst the smoldering rubble of America with the physical proofs of the
|
|
anti-human and genocidal policies and the madness of a maniacal tyrant.
|
|
|
|
But perhaps Clinton, too, and perhaps the whole so-called Left cannot see
|
|
their racist oppression. Unlike Hitler and Mussolini, who were riding on the
|
|
wave of a recently consolidated nation which was rising on a jingoist euphoria
|
|
well suited to oppression of others, where the humiliation of Versailles could
|
|
be seen as an aberration, Clinton presides over a party and a state that have
|
|
spent so long on divide and conquer pandering to political and special
|
|
interest groups that perhaps he truly believes there is no -- even was no --
|
|
American nation. Perhaps Clinton really believes he rules a multi-national
|
|
empire, and to invade another nation is just an extension of his despotic will
|
|
to power.
|
|
|
|
Yet, we cannot blame only him, or even primarily him. The spirit of the
|
|
American nation -- distinct from the American state -- is flagging. As is
|
|
true in most any society, most citizens are apathetic and reformist, lovers of
|
|
slavery. In this current historical-critical moment, most tend to fascism and
|
|
anti-humanism. The many should, and the few must, keep alive a love for
|
|
freedom, in spite of the many and against the state. Complacency is
|
|
complicity. While America remains a nation in degeneration, it is all of our
|
|
fault.
|
|
|
|
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB---
|
|
|
|
|
|
"These, in the day when heaven was falling,
|
|
The hour when earth's foundation fled,
|
|
Followed their mercenary calling
|
|
And took their wages and are dead."
|
|
--A.E. Housman, "Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries
|
|
|
|
|
|
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
|
|
|
|
RHAPSODY iN D MiNOR
|
|
by Clockwork
|
|
|
|
This whimpering plate iron gate has been opened, unlocked and tossed
|
|
aside with clatter and ruffians, and it has all been sweeping through, the
|
|
rising Nile, fertile and flooding, mirrored sky and Orion. A monstrous
|
|
gnarled barrier has been broken, tipped over and scuttled into red clay earth,
|
|
shoved and bulled beneath the earth. Hemingway and his bulls, so tired of the
|
|
reference, scamper, drive through the gaping wound, purple glowing mantra
|
|
speech, all from one simple, deliberate act. Or perhaps not, for what
|
|
occasion has arisen from a single act? Are not all occasions and events the
|
|
result of a chaotic weaving orgy of influences and facts and conceptions and
|
|
perceptions? Temperature, humidity, wind speed, dissolved solids, butterfly
|
|
windfluence, solar sonic flares, pardon me, quarks, neutrinos, the federal
|
|
interest rate.
|
|
|
|
Nonetheless, the point is the rapture and rhapsody that has arisen,
|
|
pushed high by the bulls and big H., pushed up and forth, chest open and arms
|
|
out, open. Open is the theme, open eyes and ears, no stained filtered
|
|
nether-regions in the way, filtering, as they are filters, as filters do, and
|
|
how pure can we get? More likely the act was an effect and not a cause, swept
|
|
and burrowed with the other Spaniards.
|
|
|
|
Here I am now, walking like a sheltered boy, dazed and entranced by
|
|
reflections in the window, hearing a grating electromechanical buzzing
|
|
strobing constant from every corner, seeing the neon trance advertising -- 45
|
|
ft. tall men with horns, beer cans and tacos -- eighty-two worlds of
|
|
twenty-four hour screaming sex act prescription pictures, in wonder,
|
|
bewilderment, of how these others can live beneath this. I can feel again,
|
|
ideals or no ideals, false ideals, I can feel, weep to illiteracy news reports
|
|
and painted death in Europe, moved and driven by a six-year-old girl in a
|
|
sunflower dress spinning with grins amongst a room of adults who ignore her,
|
|
inspired, leaping, screaming passion from Shakespeare and three lines from
|
|
Joyce, two hours of Timothy in New York, unmistakable uncounterable passion
|
|
seething whipping up within my gut, jutting forth and frothing over, you make
|
|
me want to feel, and you make me feel. If you know who you are, if I know who
|
|
you are, a clue for me and you to know who might be me or you, I wish you to
|
|
see this passion and emotion as it rises -- oh, the critics, with their
|
|
handbooks of defunct sexual devices, have your way and burn with Freud -- and
|
|
know you are held, opening and offering, creating something unsaid.
|
|
|
|
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-
|
|
|
|
|
|
"Burning burning burning burning
|
|
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
|
|
O Lord Thou pluckest
|
|
|
|
burning"
|
|
--T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land"
|
|
|
|
|
|
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB---
|
|
|
|
SUNDAY, DESERT WASTELAND
|
|
by I Wish My Name Were Nathan
|
|
|
|
"So, when's the Sunday wasteland going to begin?"
|
|
|
|
A typical question. We, the roommates who rent this place, have an
|
|
understanding about the Quake II LAN parties that have become a habit for us
|
|
and our friends. What good is a high-speed network if not used at least once
|
|
a week?
|
|
|
|
For me, the amusement always wears thin around the eighth hour -- having
|
|
started around three in the afternoon -- and develops from there into one of
|
|
three tonal emotions: anger, disgust, or loneliness.
|
|
|
|
Anger is associated with a low score and jealousy at the ones who play
|
|
freely and laugh all the way through the night. Perhaps it is being cooped up
|
|
in my bedroom with the computer that leads to this sense of alienation. This
|
|
anger begets a short temper, evaporation of humor, and a high degree of mental
|
|
chattering, the underdog common-sense defense struggling for composure and a
|
|
voice in a river of leaching battery acid. Upon closer insight, it resembles
|
|
the seething fury I experience while driving to work, trying to maintain a
|
|
sensible speed while my life is being threatened from all sides by metal
|
|
caskets on wheels.
|
|
|
|
(Look in your rear view mirror some day -- the grilles, headlights, and
|
|
bumpers of cars, and trucks especially, are designed purposely to look like
|
|
people with expressions corresponding to the personality of the vehicle.
|
|
Sports cars resemble the squinting eyes and pressed lips of racecar drivers in
|
|
their helmets; trucks resemble bulldogs or bulls snorting their way to a
|
|
matador's blanket; Volvos and station wagons look like grandmothers with
|
|
square glasses inching their way up the sidewalk to ring the bell for a
|
|
donation; and all the rest are the apathetic and bored faces of the herd.)
|
|
|
|
This anger I speak of has no rational roots, none at all. It is the kind
|
|
of emotion which ceases to exist once a person sits in the passenger seat: it
|
|
is purely solitary. In fact, it is expressed in opposition to all other
|
|
individuals, perceived to have some advantage I can't comprehend or hope to
|
|
grasp. The specific pattern in Quake that triggers it is being fragged right
|
|
after spawning, six times in a row. Senseless unfairness. Whether or not it
|
|
is one person's specific goal to exploit my weakness and rack up an easy
|
|
score, I seek to avenge myself upon only one person, whom is the high scorer
|
|
in the game. Here charges in the utterly driven and pitiful rampage of the
|
|
bruised ego, running kamikaze into firefights to demonstrate the fearlessness
|
|
and brutality of a mind untinged by compassion. Death -- the enemy's or my
|
|
own -- is greeted with a twisted smile and sense of accomplishment. This
|
|
sense of accomplishment is akin to that one derives from seeing a plan
|
|
executed to fruition, or more plainly, from "seeing a job well done," but in
|
|
my frenzied state, it is merely the reflexive joy of having accomplished
|
|
anything at all. Do any of the people controlling these digital enemies see
|
|
my rage? Do they personally feel the humiliation I hoped to bestow upon them?
|
|
I doubt it. I am a pissed-off boy alone in his room punching buttons.
|
|
Frivolous.
|
|
|
|
Disgust visits me too. Perhaps I am playing well, perhaps I am in
|
|
next-to-last place -- doesn't matter. The only requirement is eight hours.
|
|
Playing a game like Quake, on today's still limited technology, doesn't afford
|
|
the opportunity to be disgusted by carnage. There might be the occasional
|
|
surprise of seeing someone gibbed right in front of you, or revulsion at a
|
|
grotesquely appropriate sound effect, but the imagery itself does not cause
|
|
the disgust I feel. This disgust is purely emotional -- though often
|
|
associated with physical exhaustion -- and grows solely from the affliction of
|
|
taking the game too seriously. My present analysis of the cause, of course,
|
|
is detached and rational, but after eight hours of continued play, the mental
|
|
context is utterly different.
|
|
|
|
During the onslaught of disgust, after I kill someone or am killed and
|
|
jump right back into the carnage, my passive mind remarks something apt like,
|
|
"Wow, life sure is expendable." Were I detached one hair's breadth from that
|
|
state, I would see that this is the only point of the game, but inside it, the
|
|
comment demoralizes me. How many places on earth are people playing this game
|
|
in real life? And how close to them am I?
|
|
|
|
Is the comparison worthwhile? Listen: in the game, we have two basic
|
|
classes of players -- individuals and teams. As an individual, I am as likely
|
|
to fall into a pit of anger as of disgust; my ego could not stand such
|
|
one-on-one brutality anywhere more real than the shopping market or the
|
|
highway. The goal is nonetheless simple: kill anything that moves. In
|
|
Quake, it is remarkably easy to abide to this goal due to the lack of
|
|
non-player characters. One does not have to make any decisions but must only
|
|
be armed and well-defended. In team play, the burden of politics becomes
|
|
clear. Who just came into my line of sight? Good guy? Bad guy? Is "friendly
|
|
fire" on? Do I care? Or do I just want to kill something? And, why do "our"
|
|
guys suck so bad? Are "they" just lucky? How can "we" regain our composure?
|
|
"Let's" teach "them" a lesson.... Is there any real camaraderie here, or is
|
|
it just my ego lashing out against a subset of the players?
|
|
|
|
Disgusting!, seeing how I react. Disgusting, seeing how we all act, yes,
|
|
freely fragging the guy who just spawned, laughing at the guy who died right
|
|
before he reached a decent weapon, treating it all as if it really were *just*
|
|
a game. But see how well we play the roles, how comfortably we fit into the
|
|
molds? Is this the highest expression of humanity? Is this the skill am I
|
|
forging for the future, to adapt to any game where I can wear a uniform and
|
|
carry a weapon and have no accountability?
|
|
|
|
Being a human, I am privy to the secrets of human nature: this lust, or
|
|
desire, or need, for unrestrained violence has a place in everyone's heart --
|
|
mustn't it? Maybe not expressed in the same way, and certainly channeled into
|
|
a limited number of acceptable outlets... but what the hell am I doing anyway?
|
|
Why do I only think about this after eight hours, after the blood has been
|
|
shed? The weight of the oversight is small in terms of the damage caused, but
|
|
in extension, in projection, to the burden of realization heaped on the
|
|
perpetrators of actual murders once they come to their senses? The jaw drops,
|
|
the heart sinks, a vast suffocating infinity of understanding and compassion
|
|
-- tainted! spoiled! It must be so! Is the threat of reprisal, the snare of
|
|
the law, really the only barrier a human has against killing? See us small
|
|
time hoods -- cables a'gathering, computers a'packing, what do we get out of
|
|
our transgression into that realm? "Whew, I'm tired. See you next Sunday."
|
|
|
|
Finally, I am lonely to see everyone leave, even when angry and disgusted
|
|
at it all -- especially then. Did I really just spend all that time lashing
|
|
out and the shadows of my friends? Couldn't we have done something more
|
|
constructive? I can see their faces: they are tired, angry, or disgusted too
|
|
-- or is that a projection? Didn't this happen last time? It did! But we did
|
|
it again. Every time, it ends the same....
|
|
|
|
And that's the basic reality-bending facet of the game itself -- you come
|
|
back to life, good as new, with the click of a button. Is there an endgame
|
|
here? A limbo? Any moment to think it all over? Legends say you can remain
|
|
dead as long as you want, but I am rarely conscious of my death long enough to
|
|
notice and stop firing, which serves to thrust me right back into the action.
|
|
This mindless, constant action opens wide the floodgates for the currents of
|
|
antipathy. Who of all the jungle guerillas, street criminals, or Texas state
|
|
governors experiences so much killing, both of others and of oneself, in one
|
|
lifetime, that I experience in eight hours? Is there any better way to clarify
|
|
the laws of nature -- endlessly turning cycles, spinning wheels, marching
|
|
ants, flowing rivers, circulating moisture, orbiting satellites, expanding
|
|
universe? It goes on and on and on, in the same patterns, over and over
|
|
again! What about it changes? The strategy? The order of events? The
|
|
quantized reactions? All details! All circumstance, lost in the grander
|
|
scheme of living and dying. This is the cycle of life -- not a happy
|
|
disneyfied African safari tour of multicolored dancing animals -- but a happy
|
|
little boy walking to school and being run over -- an old man meeting death
|
|
with fear and regret -- two lovers drowning the spark in stale routine -- a
|
|
girl scout being raped -- a college graduate entering the work force and
|
|
blindly feeding the cancer in his soul -- all decay, all downward spirals; but
|
|
all erased and forgotten in time, all reorganized and reinterpreted in a
|
|
context of freshness and youth, old paths trodden again, the failures of the
|
|
past illuminating the Way into the future. This is where we lose it -- the
|
|
path, the lessons, ourselves -- lost in the happiness of movement and of
|
|
pumping blood and of calculating mind, where the self expands into the
|
|
generals and specifics of the entire universe, repeating the cycle, honoring
|
|
the cycle, enriching the cycle with the glory of experience, the glory of the
|
|
hunt, the glory of the fall. This continues; this too shall pass; this is an
|
|
illusion; this is eternal.
|
|
|
|
Oh God, it's time for me to be committed -- I love this game!
|
|
|
|
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
|
|
|
|
|
|
"'O frati,' dissi, 'che per cento milia
|
|
Perigli siete giunti all occidente.'"
|
|
|
|
('O brothers,' I said, 'who through a hundred thousand
|
|
Perils have reached the West.')
|
|
--Dante, _The Divine Comedy, Canto XXVI, ll. 112-13
|
|
|
|
|
|
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
|
|
|
|
DOCUMENT 04.25.99
|
|
transcribed and edited by Kilgore Trout
|
|
|
|
[On June 1, 1999, I was sitting around at Mojo's Daily Grind, a local
|
|
coffeehouse, trying to write. Apparently inspiration was elsewhere, so I was
|
|
about to go inside and find a magazine to browse through when I saw a
|
|
magazine lying unattended on one of the outside tables. The covers were
|
|
ripped off, but the first page was covered in writing, so I picked it up and
|
|
figured I'd get a quick glimpse of a handwritten note to someone or a personal
|
|
reminder. What I found was a magazine full of paranoid ramblings and
|
|
cryptical dates and places.
|
|
|
|
The text below is the full transcription of what I found in the April 25,
|
|
1999 issue of _The New York Times Magazine._ The writing were scrawled in
|
|
the margins, across the text, and across pictures. Because the writing was
|
|
hard to decipher at times, and parts of sentences would be scattered across
|
|
pages, I have attempted to reproduce the sections as they appeared by
|
|
breaking the text up according to how it was found on the page. Naturally, a
|
|
faithful reproduction in ASCII text is not possible, but I have done my best.
|
|
The interpretation is left to you.
|
|
|
|
I'd like to thank I Wish My Name Were Nathan for going over about half of my
|
|
transcriptions and helping me figure out some particular nasty handwriting
|
|
sections.]
|
|
|
|
page 3
|
|
The cars they were out there -- bearing us then between Ivanhoe Circle. And
|
|
us 2 began and arrive and drive the 3 friends (teen girls) home to whichever
|
|
alleyway they lived and were born. Almost.
|
|
|
|
Received me at her mother's and father's and brother's home for the afternoon
|
|
with her friends. At home were telephoned by her mother.
|
|
|
|
A natural born grid of Oklahoma and this deed not last.
|
|
|
|
Here Margaret has approached us and over one of her own age group leeched by
|
|
this nigger man. She sweared it's her real address, since 1961 or 1960 on
|
|
Ivanhoe Circle or Lane house. In the later afternoon removed us by 11 or so.
|
|
|
|
Only other sister reselling and reselling and reselling us, the then youngest
|
|
Hopkins. Her friend's daughter appearing as one. There were 4 in 1960 and in
|
|
1962 with and of herself.
|
|
|
|
page 4
|
|
He appeared that afternoon to work with horses in a stable in Houston, Texas.
|
|
|
|
The month year 1999 around 1960 year -- it looks about like 1961. A colored
|
|
man drove mischief on about a covered car, I believe a compact, with her.
|
|
|
|
In 1960 and in the 1961st year. The one friend, youngest of these or the
|
|
older of these 3, had far far to go to Albightdnonded, Texas to sleep at home
|
|
and by 10 or 11 o'clock midnight by 11 or midnight hour. Margaret said then
|
|
she might her or her mother -- maybe herself -- to do it -- drive her home.
|
|
|
|
page 5
|
|
The second child-youth, she had to return to one orphanage -- or there on
|
|
Ivanhoe Circle -- was the second orphan at the home-house in 1960 or as in
|
|
1961.
|
|
|
|
The girl was an attending student, my friend of Zachary Lanier Junior High
|
|
School or whatever on Duval Road and at Westhauser Street on the corner,
|
|
remember.
|
|
|
|
The telephone of the family house Ivanhoe Circle was listed in the Houston,
|
|
Texas directory.
|
|
|
|
The year the district 13 or 33 or 30 or 39 or 31. I think it's Zone 7.
|
|
|
|
page 7
|
|
There in the 1960-61 year. The young girl drove her own car with two other of
|
|
older youths year 12 2 the house on Ivanhoe Cir. southside about the fourth or
|
|
fifth home on your right.
|
|
|
|
I believe they said they were 12 years old youth. Houses, too, in westside
|
|
district 21.
|
|
|
|
There another car arrived, and I believe Gerald Hopkins is there, the name of
|
|
the telephone listing of his family home in Ivanhoe Circle.
|
|
|
|
Then -- its driveway to the home's garage of 1 story was on the and in the
|
|
(4700's) or 4600's or 4500s.
|
|
|
|
The 4600's were used there properly, I believe. 50. 49. 48. 47. 46 or
|
|
4500s.
|
|
|
|
East on West Kettering Circle, then 1 street southward in 1 direction from
|
|
Westhauser Road it then traveled.
|
|
|
|
page 10
|
|
She said they are high and hiding narcotics use, but one told of the colored
|
|
chauffeurs appearing from the rear west -- oppose his own the side when one
|
|
drove the girl (person)
|
|
|
|
to which dwelling she lived. When he reached Houston said and over is
|
|
Sharpstown with around the Westbury School of an area angled south vs. west.
|
|
|
|
The other friend of mine -- friend's younger or little sister -- attended or
|
|
visited Westbury Junior High School in Longfellows Sharps Sharpstown, Houston,
|
|
Texas and Bellaire, Texas.
|
|
|
|
All niggers in Houston, Texas, my hometown, live east of us, behind and of us.
|
|
Nearer downtown's heart. And where that the colored schools are, also.
|
|
|
|
page 11
|
|
For the 1961 fall football there in Houston, Texas, in the 8th grade (7) or
|
|
1960 throughout 1961. Then my friends and I ran elected and nominated for
|
|
cheerleader there at Zachery Lanier Junior High School. His name, very Shelton
|
|
pretty, and rhymed with the 1 story brick home. The colored man was in the
|
|
street.
|
|
|
|
The older gal person in the family was the brother. The other girls -- little
|
|
ladies -- lived with her most of the time. I agreed after school. The more I
|
|
question up along the home's north and front curb, she had said in jest and
|
|
earnestly -- whence she was taken into the car on the front house's south
|
|
side.
|
|
|
|
I did have a decent front lawn, I remember. The home had a front north
|
|
sidewalk to the curb.
|
|
|
|
page 12
|
|
They have done this since some preceding year other than 1962. Strangers they
|
|
are to us. The colored peoples, they believe.
|
|
|
|
page 13
|
|
They too work at servant jobs, bartending, and some at private enclosed club
|
|
buildings. They come to work at differing places in town, such as a senior
|
|
high school cafeteria or a senior high school hall. There in the city and in
|
|
hotels they also work, too -- delivering our milk at home and to our front
|
|
doors, and delivering our newspapers and our telephone books -- each year or
|
|
so. They too work construction, and park our cars downtown
|
|
|
|
page 15
|
|
and out of the city, also.
|
|
|
|
Garney, Texas, Oklahoma.
|
|
|
|
The young lady's name was Garney, or she so announced that she lived there in
|
|
|
|
page 18
|
|
repeated published article.
|
|
|
|
page 19
|
|
Grand Prarie, Texas. Abilene, Texas area, area (a county). Albightdnonded,
|
|
Texas. Then the colored slave carried this magazine with him. I thought was
|
|
interesting. Those young people were enclosed in a home.
|
|
|
|
1960. 1962. 1961 year.
|
|
|
|
The three men ran through LaGrange at Smithsville, Texas afterwards, only an
|
|
hour or two in the one afternoon during the week after junior high school.
|
|
|
|
In the 1962nd year, during the day, they ran eastward on foot -- walked very
|
|
quickly much alikened to police officers on a man -- on a man hunt. man's
|
|
trail hunt. Was at an end one of those days by and of 3pm.
|
|
|
|
page 21
|
|
And we took Patty home. How it is 1980, and she is back this Margaret getting
|
|
into the car with one of her 4 friends that did drive cars, took the car over
|
|
from her mother.
|
|
|
|
(3) + (1) = 4. That's his name: she said. Or Willhite.
|
|
|
|
My mother never pays for anything. She leans on this other family member whom
|
|
she lives with, this other family -- their name and something Willheist, she
|
|
said.
|
|
|
|
Jim, Shelton, Patti, Kathie, and Mr. and Mrs. and Mr. and Mrs.
|
|
|
|
The oldest and the older male. The older female believed her mother.
|
|
|
|
[Not losing my mind, I begin.]
|
|
|
|
page 22
|
|
In first grade, too. NAME.
|
|
|
|
page 23
|
|
Snatched from my daddy's car. Then he stood from me.
|
|
|
|
The colored car driver there on Kettering Lane Circle. THIS IS PLAGERIZED
|
|
ALSO.
|
|
|
|
I began repressing in 1984 and went on into 1984 deeply. Withdrew in 1985.
|
|
She is, so as I, to speak, is no longer at Johnson, no longer at Lee, is no
|
|
longer at Dotter, and is no longer at Iverson.
|
|
|
|
page 25
|
|
Notice: it is not a practice of mine -- sitting on the bathroom or
|
|
downstairs' other toilet reading smaller contrasting compared points to grunt
|
|
better. [deficate.]
|
|
|
|
This was noticed since yesterday evening at the El Patio Mexican Foreign Food
|
|
Restaurant on Guadalupe Street. HOSPITAL SHIT.
|
|
|
|
page 26
|
|
To me, Jacob's the real Margaret. Goodbye! She -- is beautiful and unreal.
|
|
|
|
page 27
|
|
I found it -- the automatic pistol belonging to a Mrs. Ros Bankespoole, born
|
|
either in Birmingham, Alabama, south of Johnnesborough, Arkansas or
|
|
Hawkinsville, Arkansas, or Hawkins, Alambama, the USA -- in the 1976 1977th
|
|
year over on Wordsworth or Shakespeare or Dryden Street near the [wherever]
|
|
Boulevard Village.
|
|
|
|
2 streets on its south side. The streets are some of them some of the time,
|
|
one way. One way or the other way.
|
|
|
|
In Houston in Bellaire, I did drive a sports jeep -- brown it was and was with
|
|
an open top -- in Sharpstown, Texas in 1976 and 1977. In the Capitol and to
|
|
it in 1978 and 1979.
|
|
|
|
page 28
|
|
Some Chinese food, some work, some $75.00 home out of town, 40 miles.
|
|
|
|
page 29
|
|
Rapollo's (pizza). Downtown. Burger with poppyseed buns. Some T-bone steak
|
|
with fried potatoes. Closed. And roast beef -- cafeteria 5 slices, rare. And
|
|
mashed potatoes and butter and broccoli at the cafeteria and butter.
|
|
|
|
Mr. Martin owns and rents. Nor do I want to live in it. If he owns Lawton I
|
|
don't want to rent it.
|
|
|
|
page 31
|
|
It's nearer Texas. The crisis -- is American. This is 1999, they say why and
|
|
do they know TODAY is off the air?
|
|
|
|
In this Southwestern state, some have married illegally, some mothers haven't
|
|
married illegally. This is good.
|
|
|
|
The criminals are kidnappers, kidnapping and going to work for regular money.
|
|
My own daddy is one exclamatory remark! of Houstonians, I have heard.
|
|
|
|
Since 1960 and the 1960first year. Rah-rah.
|
|
|
|
page 32
|
|
In 1980, we have proof and saw helicopter flyers, men flying them over in Asia
|
|
and Iran, get dizzy and ill--
|
|
|
|
and incessantly demanded and announced they were dead because of then the
|
|
same.
|
|
|
|
In the Abilene, Texas area, across central north central Texas, since the 1960
|
|
year.
|
|
|
|
The [bastards] -- it is obviously the howl of the colored
|
|
person-man-perverted-one making money on a grander, complex scale.
|
|
|
|
1999. In the Houston, in the Austin Capitol and in the Dallas areas. This is
|
|
a public dirty drive, of pastime socializing party drinkers, who have decided
|
|
on their own to do what we see.
|
|
|
|
page 36
|
|
Then he went into Germany and flew a jet off a large ship afloat, and the
|
|
newspaper published the action as an everyday accident transpiring since some
|
|
year in the late 19sixties and 1970s.
|
|
|
|
Filling with narcotic -- charging money -- trying to (proof) prove of innocent
|
|
subjugation. Prosperity: making a real heart filled and dishonorable time of
|
|
America, in foreign nations, on foreign soil and of foreign countries. Fools.
|
|
Fools of grown men, fools of more intelligent men and their families, fools of
|
|
their grandchild, fools of their granddaughters.
|
|
|
|
page 37
|
|
Buying time in the United States, time of political professions, sitting out
|
|
and trying to run it to their fullest. And fathers they were, and Lincoln
|
|
Continental car drivers they were, and psychoanalysts they were, and Private
|
|
General Doctors of medicine they were, and husbands of psychiatrists, married
|
|
2 or 5 or at sometimes 9 times.
|
|
|
|
Posterity. And an American citizenship and here on American soil, of German,
|
|
Austrian, Swiss, French heritage. And Slavic he was thought or in the
|
|
newspaper in Austin read about as part of the antidereleased.
|
|
|
|
Sunk down in my hometown, Houston, Texas.
|
|
|
|
page 40
|
|
And he flew over some part of the Mediterranean Sea or some sea over there and
|
|
cursed the baby again with his pure, democratic citizen professional.
|
|
|
|
page 41
|
|
And then too he was in this newspaper article characterized or described as a
|
|
possible crazy adult or a convicted crazy adult, to be caught and assimilated
|
|
by
|
|
|
|
page 42/43
|
|
telephone. In 1971 spring he also visited and lived in Vicenza with a woman
|
|
and entered the back door of an Italian home in one of the Vicenza
|
|
neighborhoods -- because I saw him carrying three infants.
|
|
|
|
There in the article, there was no discussion of him being an American citizen
|
|
nor of it, truthfully.
|
|
|
|
But over in Europe, well, Italy, in 1971 and 1965, part of 1967 and 1969,
|
|
January. For facial expression, dearly there in Houston, Texas. Our year was
|
|
1966.
|
|
|
|
These 3 women approached an Austin shopping house in the Texas Capitol area
|
|
and demanded the infants -- 3. From Brackenridge, carried in a car directly
|
|
from Brackenridge or directly from where in 1970 the infants had been born.
|
|
|
|
The newborn was not taken at Brackenridge Hospital. We saw them. We do not
|
|
believe at all one of these at least.
|
|
|
|
A professional, charging money, and activating criminal kidnapping with a
|
|
funny little outlet end to his personality. The sigh of he himself at close
|
|
proximity -- 6 feet.
|
|
|
|
Then, too, I recognized the man: a NASA aeronautical space corporal in the
|
|
United States of America's southwest. He was then televised to be in the year
|
|
1984. Austin, Houston, and Dallas, Texas. He was the criminal partner in
|
|
this LSD injection drive flurrie via
|
|
|
|
page 44
|
|
a Houstonian. Born there in Houston, Harris County, Texas, in 1947, at Herman
|
|
Hospital, Jean A. Area.
|
|
|
|
They need addresses on buildings since 1970 -- on 501 E. 8th street.
|
|
|
|
U.S. female patient. Unmarried. Adult. White. Wt -- 185lbs. 5'7" ht.
|
|
Light colored skin. Blue blond.
|
|
|
|
page 45
|
|
We believe they stopped over there at, then, the Dover building -- the Ramis
|
|
Club or New Elks Club building -- and put on a floor up against a wall, in
|
|
August and in September of 1970, but he saying part of October. 1970.
|
|
|
|
page 46
|
|
Are then, and has repetitiously been with the policemen and police department
|
|
and law enforcement authorities, and examined for almost the purposelessly
|
|
clad. Idiots as narcotics users. To repress people with an overall lever
|
|
because illegal dope is pharmaceutically affiliated.
|
|
|
|
page 47
|
|
By in large finding the northerners her cousins (3), aunt, mother's sister,
|
|
and uncle not kidnappers in 1956 nor in the following year. Finally, in 1998
|
|
and in 1999.
|
|
|
|
Circumstantially, admit -- that it is hard to deny these 5 peoples -- there in
|
|
Kentucky no. However, one does the kidnapping.
|
|
|
|
page 48/49
|
|
Cold Hinoc Fleece cargo vessel. 1927-28 November.
|
|
|
|
False conjured passport books, false name. False physical descriptions.
|
|
False home addresses. False country nationalities. False autopsies. False
|
|
records. Numbers and falsely reliant faces -- data -- facts = lists --
|
|
addresses -- numbers. False photographs.
|
|
|
|
Jewelry -- and pearls. Theft. Stolen. Then -- if you took yours, talking
|
|
about at the photographs -- snapped Houston County Jail in and of 1959.
|
|
|
|
page 51
|
|
1998-1999 year. and we telephoned him and he threatened our lives -- then
|
|
what are you going to do about it -- he so as to speak entailed.
|
|
|
|
1968-69. By in large Time Magazine coverage. He told us by magazine he had
|
|
won a modern gunman.
|
|
|
|
page 52
|
|
Alikened -- my personal identification papers. Love Transporting and Storing
|
|
Company. Houston, Texas. International Interstate 10.
|
|
|
|
Stolen 1976. 77-1979 years off San Antonio street in Austin, Texas.
|
|
|
|
Miss (my first name) Martina (the first name) Church (my maiden name) Lee
|
|
(Last Name)
|
|
|
|
Lain down -- somewhere in the town, in the county. My identification papers
|
|
stolen one year to the next -- privately and publicly -- in Travis County in
|
|
Austin, Texas.
|
|
|
|
page 7a (insert)
|
|
I, cannot read (funny joke)
|
|
|
|
page 65
|
|
Bradley Bailey Square claims only 6 flours.
|
|
|
|
(KKK) office Johannesborough, Arkansas.
|
|
|
|
page 67
|
|
Pa -- Ma. Dr. Bass. Male -- Female. Female -- Male. Male -- Female. Male
|
|
-- Female. 1952-1954 -- Houston 1954. 1952-1953-1954-1955. 47. 1st grade
|
|
class 1956-57. Had mortuaries, funerals, Texas. 1958. Listed 1959. Beeler
|
|
Leece.
|
|
|
|
1966-1968. Lizeze, Italy. Geneva -- Weerne -- Berne, Switz. With Luxemborg
|
|
in mind, I thought. Brussels, Belgium. For car rent Hertz America. Austria.
|
|
Innsbrook. Salzburg.
|
|
|
|
Italy. From Venice, Vicenza, Vienna, and Vicenza. Distance and whereabouts
|
|
of these two cities. As distant as drives to Ireland, and with Pesci in the
|
|
rearview mirror -- leaving Florence and prior Rome & Riornie, Italy. And a
|
|
Venician found there set up in Turkey and Athens, Greece and in Southeast
|
|
Italy, a central town. And teaching in Italy, 1968s Italy in 2 places-towns.
|
|
|
|
page 69
|
|
Wanted from Greenland and sought in America since the outbreak of World War I
|
|
-- 1928 November. Found out on the Atlantic Ocean at 11:56pm at night with his
|
|
143 men, was sentenced with kidnapping and charged with it -- and his men and
|
|
sentenced (again) as 2 have the weather to Haitian Revolutionary National for
|
|
life in southwest Indies.
|
|
|
|
By those names, other preposterous named of criminal, criminal gatherers.
|
|
Dickson. Larry Laurence Edwards.
|
|
|
|
With a fuller and a broom I wandered and arguing for 4 harmonial affairs
|
|
illegally gesturing on appearing parties, some teens as many as 9 parties.
|
|
Some very small children with an age to question. Usually appearing single to
|
|
a 1st grade in Houston, Texas district 19. And a student not secured in a
|
|
class for their study room.
|
|
|
|
page 71
|
|
A self-supplied boyfriend and earlier vagabond, a prominent son of oiling
|
|
company in the 1980s, on a cargo vessel. Then caught -- and found supposedly
|
|
free of syphilis venereal germ.
|
|
|
|
Since 1966 has advertised outside of the Houston telephone directory (book).
|
|
1928th year, 18th to 23rd November at 11:56pm at night.
|
|
|
|
All and are they found then by 3 or 4 other men in the Houston area. He has
|
|
been ushered and bribed in uptown Austin in Texas on East Seventh Street on
|
|
its north side.
|
|
|
|
page 75
|
|
And leading as a televised Houston, Texas man and TV star -- Donn Mahoney.
|
|
And via askance photographic developments and illegally employed and aliased
|
|
as D. Mahoney. Since this Donn Mahoney's death in the 1960's in America, I
|
|
believe. Howdy Doody will have to go, and I will have to be taken away.
|
|
|
|
Drunk on liquor and alcoholic beverages and on, he says, America's stupidity,
|
|
especially those of and its teenagers.
|
|
|
|
In 1966 hence he is in illegal charge in touring "this visitor" by the poor,
|
|
deceiving the public by dining. Eating out is a crutch, isn't it? He has
|
|
infringed our public by stolen up Texas streets, usually clueless -- married
|
|
to a first-rate neighbor -- and drunk on dope in Houston, Texas.
|
|
|
|
page 77
|
|
To excuse spastiasms from the public view and to create study of its relief in
|
|
Texas capitol towns and university area.
|
|
|
|
Also proposed to the United States of America its Federal Plan. He was a
|
|
Herculean Randolph Hearst, and for all of his money invested in Texas created
|
|
wealth and buildings.
|
|
|
|
page 80
|
|
4 years here in this USA. 1926 year -- Oklahoma. 1927 year -- Texas. 1928
|
|
year -- unrecovered year. 1929 year. 1930 year. 1931 year. 1932 -- turned
|
|
up, then not ever again.
|
|
|
|
page 81
|
|
Hearing a (1980) Orwellian view -- and without assurance of to us. Studying a
|
|
thing and earlier -- even a missing person. They have found her now, I
|
|
believe, hanging out in the Austin Capitol, student of the University of
|
|
Texas, in temporary homes they use while in college, and too, in a house w/ 2
|
|
story level.
|
|
|
|
And too as STOP drunk called a trusting STOP at Lake Granger underneath Houston
|
|
Lake east and was west on the side from the streets of Houston downtown --
|
|
with a house in Harris county. Lying address the other funeral River Oaks
|
|
area.
|
|
|
|
And why would he not be feeding you?
|
|
|
|
Now why wouldn't this man be dangerous?
|
|
|
|
page 83
|
|
Then he was found supposing in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas in 1950 and in 1951.
|
|
A joker entering questions and leaving the prison a helper. Now he is found
|
|
asking questions.
|
|
|
|
Once again overcharging and too a private patient earlier whilst in Granbury
|
|
-- and lying farther to his legal uncle in Houston Texas and Lexington,
|
|
Kentucky and in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Ohio found him in the telephone
|
|
directory.
|
|
|
|
The Brutish Queen in of 1968-1969 caught him at the Austin area downtown
|
|
uptown police station trying to fortune and replicate disaster in favor of
|
|
becoming another character with another face and wickedly resought him.
|
|
|
|
1 son living out of Switzerland side out of Austria side. Out of Italy side.
|
|
Out of Greece side. Out of Germany side.
|
|
|
|
A daughter-girl out of Scandinavia.
|
|
|
|
page 86
|
|
The man has been announced the same man caught in 1990 through 1991 years and
|
|
1992 running -- a pilot over Germany and Austria with a suggestion of facial
|
|
acne -- and Sebringk is his name.
|
|
|
|
page 87
|
|
Then you hear, while you had such exclaimed words in the student area, a real
|
|
woman.
|
|
|
|
[and courageously] Found another lived right here uncorrectly.
|
|
|
|
I would not think you would want any food. He had touched melee.
|
|
|
|
page 90
|
|
By which how they always were before. That adult is too criminal and is a
|
|
dangerous joker. See -- they have found out a cover to use -- that they are
|
|
adults and were by and with adults -- adult care, adults brought around by
|
|
criminal and professional pay, of criminal pay.
|
|
|
|
A public waver of stripteasers in and out of the USA -- NOT NORMIES -- of
|
|
older and older women since 1957 in Houston's publicity world.
|
|
|
|
page 91
|
|
In a white undershirt, trousers, belt, socks, shoes. A Leo, Leonard,
|
|
Leonardo. Or it (ahead) of us, I swear.
|
|
|
|
Before being found in this Federal Building and that -- a private FBI
|
|
officeman in San Antonio and in Austin, Texas.
|
|
|
|
Say, as example, in something you have seen, in a magazine, hearing this job
|
|
is not -- a joke -- "Get up, boy" you guys!
|
|
|
|
Who has paid for this discouraged course of life -- 2907 Ferndale Street,
|
|
2905? Ferndale Street, 77006 in Harris County, Houston, Texas. He is trying
|
|
to list -- and sits on an ottoman in 1984 and swears he is listing others.
|
|
|
|
page 92
|
|
(Whom) (Who) is varied of on and sometimes about -- the American use of
|
|
assumed presumption -- is the way and manner in that he began his illegal
|
|
escape and that he is still living closely with them.
|
|
|
|
page 93
|
|
Relax and extend a hellish hand.
|
|
|
|
1926-1999. 1926 -- 73 years. 73 years.
|
|
|
|
2708-2710 Guadalupe Street.
|
|
|
|
I swear he cannot be of any use. I swear he is of no use no further use -- can
|
|
he be. Of which he can't be.
|
|
|
|
Should you see them -- every one of these out here -- in a penitentiary.
|
|
|
|
page 96
|
|
This bird full of syphilis and venereal disease -- gone inside deeper. Over
|
|
these years unfeasible that he should live.
|
|
|
|
He says -- of 1967 -- "Picked it up -- the teenager -- the young adult female
|
|
with are -- pocket full and filled with narcotics."
|
|
|
|
page 98/99
|
|
Out of Fort Worth's prison. The loose and toothless say he is an American --
|
|
and a prominent official of Texas since 1972. Greek. Greece.
|
|
|
|
Swore then he told us as the norm or this stuttered gal -- overnight -- north
|
|
or from the western -- "I might be -- but who knows -- he might be from the
|
|
United States of America.
|
|
|
|
The United States of America. 1893-4-5-6-7-8-99. They took him as prisoner
|
|
away. 1900-1-2-3-4-5-6-7- 8. 1908-09-1910-1911 -- the 1920 year. In talking
|
|
to her -- that my dad died and was buried in his home -- in Mississippi.
|
|
|
|
Earlier in 18something9 in Mississippi locked up and arrested in Austin, Texas
|
|
away from people like herself and his 142 men. The woman was his employee --
|
|
may have been. For a long time and housed there, they are been -- injured
|
|
children -- and infants, outgrowthed.
|
|
|
|
page 102
|
|
Riskship -- constitution, life, money, blood, and mindless mental fraud. Rent
|
|
or lease. In texas since 1980 and 1979. In Houston, Texas and 1969 and 1970.
|
|
In Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas since 1962. And since January of her and
|
|
December of 1962 -- hence falsify your television, (telephone), and some radio
|
|
and kidnappers.
|
|
|
|
Is it the big yellow page beach or not! For emphasis.
|
|
|
|
page 102b
|
|
These are just some facts about him -- reasons for staying away from him. I
|
|
saw you with that lawyer man down at the Burger King, Joe. Away from him too,
|
|
Joe. You might say thank you.
|
|
|
|
Skipped up 2710 Guadalupe Street, Austin. Lee -- 1998-99.
|
|
|
|
page 104
|
|
The homeless Austinite and Texan understand change.
|
|
|
|
1998-1999. From Lexington, Kentucky have never been mentioned and they are
|
|
not going to do me any good.
|
|
|
|
page 105
|
|
West University's village, a guitar teacher, also.
|
|
|
|
It was no help. He worked with the different "psychiatrists" there in Harris
|
|
County, Houston, Bellaire.
|
|
|
|
page 117
|
|
He met, see, other large criminals here in the United States after me.
|
|
Myself. My other dad with his 142 men.
|
|
|
|
Since 1965-66 Lykes Line Shipping, Delaware. In 1970 job. Is. It. Not.
|
|
Italy. Air. Etc.
|
|
|
|
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
|
|
|
|
|
|
"The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
|
|
Alive enough to have strength to die."
|
|
--Thomas Hardy, "Neutral Tones"
|
|
|
|
|
|
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
|
|
|
|
GUiLTY BRAiN (EROTiCK-TOCK)
|
|
by I Wish My Name Were Nathan
|
|
|
|
The guy at work who sits in the next cubicle worries too much. He says
|
|
he feels constantly guilty about being unfaithful to his wife. I ask him, are
|
|
you cheating on her? He says no, but that he finds other women attractive,
|
|
albeit unconsciously, like a mental reflex to the images he sees. So, I ask,
|
|
there's nothing more than a patterned firing of neurons? I guess not, he says.
|
|
There's no fantasizing going on? No, he says. Then I say, that's nothing.
|
|
That's normal. You're a male, you're programmed to react to women. Would you
|
|
rather be blind to beauty?
|
|
|
|
I think *I* should be sometimes. Whenever I see a woman, all the neurons
|
|
go off. I mean, it's really pathetic. I see her posing erotically, for
|
|
instance. Then right afterwards, I see her naked. The neurons shift that
|
|
quickly. And then, I see her masturbating on a bear rug. Then, we're making
|
|
love. I see us having wild, passionate sex. I see me on top, I see her on
|
|
top. I see us getting married. I see us buying a house and paying high
|
|
interest. I see her giving birth. I see our child grow out of diapers. I
|
|
see our family happily walking through a park. I see our child grow up and go
|
|
through adolescence.
|
|
|
|
Say it's a boy. I see him masturbating and fantasizing about women. I
|
|
see him dating. I see him getting laid. I see him getting married and
|
|
feeling guilty about being attracted to other women, albeit unconsciously. I
|
|
see him fantasizing about women he sees, to whom he makes love and gets
|
|
married to and then has children with. I see him having a daughter, and see
|
|
him fantasizing about her fantasies. I see myself as his daughter. I see
|
|
myself going through puberty and entering the menstrual cycle. I see all
|
|
sorts of biological clocks ticking in my body demanding that I have children.
|
|
I see men fantasizing about me, albeit unconsciously. I see myself having sex
|
|
with several men but feeling unsatisfied. I see myself getting married and
|
|
having children. I see myself giving birth and splitting into two. I see
|
|
both halves continue on, each having fantasies and sex and getting married and
|
|
having children and all of them growing up and procreating.
|
|
|
|
Pretty soon I recognize the pattern and can implicitly fill in my family
|
|
tree going backwards in time, where I see myselves coming back from their
|
|
graves and children coming back to their parents, serially morphing into them
|
|
and restoring their youth until they're adolescents growing younger and
|
|
younger and dissolving into their mothers and fathers; and sensing the decay
|
|
as less dead rise from their graves and fewer mothers and fathers are left
|
|
until that one moment when I am no longer human but pre-human and at that
|
|
point it's a bit difficult to describe, but past that it's just more rising of
|
|
the dead and feeling and merging and splitting on up the line until I'm not
|
|
even a mammal (and then I start to get confused wondering where these children
|
|
came from since they left so shortly after hatching) and on and on until,
|
|
well, it gets really mechanical and I just feel like the world's biggest jerk.
|
|
|
|
The guy in the next cube has it easy.
|
|
|
|
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
|
|
|
|
|
|
[=- POETASTRiE -=]
|
|
|
|
"In the East poets are sometimes thrown in prison -- a sort of compliment,
|
|
since it suggests the author has done something at least as real as
|
|
theft or rape or revolution. Here poets are allowed to publish anything
|
|
at all -- a sort of punishment in effect, prison without walls, without
|
|
echoes, without palpable existence -- shadow-realm of print, or of
|
|
abstract thought -- world without risk or _eros_."
|
|
--Hakim Bey, _T.A.Z._
|
|
|
|
|
|
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
|
|
|
|
THE THOUGHT OF iSLANDS
|
|
by Robert James Berry
|
|
|
|
The despairing song of waves
|
|
The echoing thought of islands
|
|
|
|
Brings me where dusty winds whirl like dervishes,
|
|
Where Allah commands 'Thou Shalt Nots'
|
|
From sun-stricken minarets.
|
|
|
|
The women in purdah I know,
|
|
Dry as Old Testament verses,
|
|
|
|
The idle, burned street vendors
|
|
Who keep faith with only their flied produce,
|
|
|
|
and the foundered ships off Quay Street,
|
|
Like desecrated carcasses in the stinking mud
|
|
Bitten by sand flies and tides.
|
|
|
|
When God has swept the furnace of this sky
|
|
and his sun haemorrhages over the sea,
|
|
Only then the betel palms shall sway slowly
|
|
|
|
And the final remains of a dead empire
|
|
Pedal its trishaw down Beach Street,
|
|
Waving generous good-byes.
|
|
|
|
Tonight an unlikely rainbow has settled over home.
|
|
|
|
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
|
|
|
|
|
|
"You don't know what you're going to get, simply because of the
|
|
limitations of the human mind, any more than the average person
|
|
can plan five moves ahead in chess."
|
|
--William S. Burroughs Interview, 1969
|
|
|
|
|
|
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
|
|
|
|
STONE CRADLES
|
|
by Robert James Berry
|
|
|
|
I am thinking of the cemeteried dead
|
|
Who fill the hillside.
|
|
|
|
Always I am aware of their broken homes
|
|
slumping but not quite effaced by the high hedges.
|
|
|
|
Even in blackness empty as widowhood,
|
|
There is a vulgarity in death,
|
|
The discomfort of their silence.
|
|
|
|
In more articulate starlight
|
|
Headstones show their best profiles,
|
|
but still all their grand sentimental words
|
|
resemble each other.
|
|
|
|
New bones erode over old blood.
|
|
That is the culture, the tongue
|
|
of death.
|
|
|
|
As first snowflakes
|
|
Settle on the long lashes
|
|
of the gravedigger's starlit eyes
|
|
|
|
and the mourners ebb off, divide like
|
|
tributaries, into the living
|
|
|
|
I am left standing, clutching the
|
|
lonely, sad hands of my dead.
|
|
|
|
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
|
|
|
|
|
|
[=- FiCTiON -=]
|
|
|
|
|
|
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
|
|
|
|
EVERYBODY LOVES A FOOL
|
|
by Kilgore Trout
|
|
|
|
I glimpsed the dark ebb of the event horizon briefly flicker in her right
|
|
eye. when she blinked, her eyelashes sheared the image of her still pupils,
|
|
and I heard her softly inhale, getting ready to speak.
|
|
|
|
"I know," I said. "I know."
|
|
|
|
She exhaled through her nose. A drop of sweat formed above her bare
|
|
upper lip. I watched a mosquito land on her neck and crawl inside her blouse.
|
|
|
|
"Yes," I said. "This is Byzantium."
|
|
|
|
Leaning back against the granite column, she absently brushed the rough
|
|
surface of the pillar with her callused fingertips. I pulled the map out of
|
|
my pocket, unfolded it, and let it flutter to the ground. It landed face
|
|
down.
|
|
|
|
"No," I quickly said, anticipating her question. "We can't leave.
|
|
This is what we came for."
|
|
|
|
It had taken me a decade to realize that I had passively watched the
|
|
world end ten years earlier. The fallen wall marked the end of the way things
|
|
were, and I sat in the grass, following the clouds with shoeless feet, while
|
|
it passed me by. I grew up after the world was over.
|
|
|
|
She was the one who brought me the map and said that we should leave,
|
|
that we should go back to the way things were before. She talked about a
|
|
golden age with golden birds atop golden trees, and she whispered the magic
|
|
word into my hollow ear that night which made me decide to go. I woke up that
|
|
morning with strands of her hair in my mouth.
|
|
|
|
"We have to burn it," I said, lighting a match and setting fire to the
|
|
paper. The thick, purple smoke began to fill the large room. She tried to
|
|
manage a smile but ended up walking outside. The etchings in the walls were
|
|
barely visible.
|
|
|
|
I left the broken temple and joined her on the craggy outcrop looking
|
|
over the sea. Our rowboat was moored below, halfheartedly rocked by dark
|
|
waves. I turned around and surveyed the island, its ruined buildings, the
|
|
dead wood, and the crumbled stone.
|
|
|
|
"We have to burn it," she said before I could stop her. I solemnly
|
|
nodded and looked up, seeing two clouds moving closer together. They were
|
|
slowly spinning in opposite directions on their horizontal axes, and when they
|
|
intersected, I thought I saw a cracked crown.
|
|
|
|
I heard her stepping on twigs as she went to gather wood.
|
|
|
|
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
|
|
|
|
|
|
"Hiegh ho, hiegh ho."
|
|
--dwarves numbering seven
|
|
|
|
|
|
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
|
|
|
|
OFF WiTH THE BLiSS
|
|
by Clockwork
|
|
|
|
Kerr answers the phone all day, at this plastic desk. No, not quite a
|
|
desk at all, really -- an artificial construct unit, modular, made in a
|
|
blazing slave shop in Singapore for multi-billion dollar companies in
|
|
economically viable countries. The floor is plastic and hollow -- Kerr can
|
|
hear his feet pop within the four foot plastic cavern with a plastic echo,
|
|
plastic tank, plastic sound, holding together a plastic building. Plastic
|
|
chairs, with artificial thin-layered thready plastic covering. The ceiling,
|
|
fifteen feet above him, is not plastic, but cement -- gray and splotched,
|
|
plastic-looking rendered flat cement. Cold and hollow like the plastic floor
|
|
beneath him, spewing forth air.
|
|
|
|
When his phone rings, it sounds like plastic -- incalculable strands of
|
|
plastic slapping against each other to give a plastic applause, pause,
|
|
applause.
|
|
|
|
"Thank you for calling, this is Kerr, can I have your name, please?"
|
|
|
|
Monochromatic.
|
|
|
|
"Hi. Yes. What do you need?" in a twangy male voice, fumbling, classic
|
|
twisting squeaks of a twirled benevolent phone cord.
|
|
|
|
"What is your name?"
|
|
|
|
"Oh. David."
|
|
|
|
"And your last name?"
|
|
|
|
"Gulkathasticki."
|
|
|
|
"Could you spell that for me?"
|
|
|
|
"G-L-O-W-A-C-K-I."
|
|
|
|
"And do you have the serial number of the system your calling on?"
|
|
There's always silence after that question.
|
|
|
|
David obviously was flipping through the drawers of photocopied and
|
|
paper-clipped paper world at his knees. "Uh, the what?"
|
|
|
|
Kerr is prepared. "The serial number. Should be on the back of the
|
|
system on a white sticker with a barcode -- seven digits."
|
|
|
|
More pausing, the drop and dissipation of papers, sliding grating metal,
|
|
grunts, groans, office phones, stampeding giraffes. "Oh, okay. LK0H21N."
|
|
|
|
"Are you with the New Jersey Department of Public Safety, David?"
|
|
|
|
"Yes, New Jersey Department of Law and Public Safety."
|
|
|
|
"OK. And what can I do for you?"
|
|
|
|
"Well, uhmm, I was trying to hook up this scanner, and it says it goes to
|
|
COM1, and I think I hooked it up right, to the back, there's a connector that
|
|
says COM1 on it, and I plugged it in there, but it won't find it."
|
|
|
|
"It won't find it?" Kerr has this habit of repeating the last phrase
|
|
said to him in the form of a question -- he wasn't sure if this was
|
|
condescending, annoying, or reassuring proof he was actually listening.
|
|
|
|
"Right."
|
|
|
|
"OK. And did you run the install program that came with it?"
|
|
|
|
"Uhm, yeah, I put in the CD that came with it," thicker paper being
|
|
rustled, "the one that says UMAX 7391b Scanner Installation CD, and it came up
|
|
and I clicked on install, and... well, I'll do it now."
|
|
|
|
"OK."
|
|
|
|
Kerr had flashes of visualization when he spoke to people, concoctions of
|
|
facial structure, hair color and style, complexion, posture, gut, what kind of
|
|
phone they were on, the room they were calling from, what they did in moments
|
|
of silence.
|
|
|
|
"David, are you wearing a hat?"
|
|
|
|
"Uh, no. Is that alright?"
|
|
|
|
"Oh, sure that's fine. Did you put in the CD?"
|
|
|
|
"Yes, I did, and now here it comes. It says UMAX 7391b Scanner
|
|
Installation, and it has a button that says Install, and I click on that,
|
|
right?"
|
|
|
|
"Right, go ahead."
|
|
|
|
One must really be quite careful in this kind of situation -- if someone
|
|
is asked permission to click on a button for eight hours a day, an array of
|
|
psychological tomfoolery could easily develop, power issues, God complexes,
|
|
the belief in gnomes.
|
|
|
|
"OK. So now it says it's going to put it in sea program files youmax, is
|
|
that alright?"
|
|
|
|
"That's fine, click on next."
|
|
|
|
"OK. And now there's this bar, it says it's copying -- oh, well, it went
|
|
too fast, and now it's something else. Says it is trying to detect the UMAX
|
|
7391b scanner, and it's sitting there."
|
|
|
|
"That's fine."
|
|
|
|
"OK. And now it says it couldn't find a UMAX 7391b scanner connected to
|
|
the system. And to check the cable and try again."
|
|
|
|
"Alright, David. Have you done that yet?"
|
|
|
|
"Done what?"
|
|
|
|
"Check the cable?"
|
|
|
|
"The cable?"
|
|
|
|
"Right, the cable that goes from the scanner to the back of the computer
|
|
-- the one you said you plugged into COM1."
|
|
|
|
"Oh. No. Well, I plugged it in there after I took it out of the box."
|
|
|
|
"OK. Go ahead and just unplug the cable on both ends -- unplug it from
|
|
both the computer and the scanner, and just go ahead and plug it right back in
|
|
there. And make sure that it is all firmly connected."
|
|
|
|
"So, unplug the cable and plug it back in?"
|
|
|
|
"Right."
|
|
|
|
"I'm going to put the phone down for a minute, is that alright?"
|
|
|
|
"That's fine."
|
|
|
|
More plastic clopping noise.
|
|
|
|
"Are you there?"
|
|
|
|
"Yes, David, I'm always here."
|
|
|
|
"OK. I unplugged the cable and plugged it back in."
|
|
|
|
"Great. Now, let's go ahead and run that same installation program again."
|
|
|
|
"So. Should I take out the CD and just put it back in?"
|
|
|
|
"That will work fine."
|
|
|
|
"OK. The light is coming on. And now it says UMAX 7391b Scanner
|
|
Installation, and should I click on the Install button again?"
|
|
|
|
"Right."
|
|
|
|
"And should it go to the same place?"
|
|
|
|
"Right, that's fine."
|
|
|
|
"OK. And now it's that bar again, and -- it's gone now, and is...oh, it
|
|
found it."
|
|
|
|
"It said it found the scanner?"
|
|
|
|
"Yes, it says it found a UMAX 7391b Scanner on COM1."
|
|
|
|
"Alright, great, David, than that should do it."
|
|
|
|
"So now I can use it?"
|
|
|
|
"Yes, once you go through the rest of the installation, you can use it."
|
|
|
|
"Oh, wow, that's great. And what was your name again?"
|
|
|
|
"Kerr."
|
|
|
|
"Well, thanks, Chris."
|
|
|
|
"You're welcome. Have a -- sure you can hang-up before I tell you to
|
|
have a good evening, that's fine. Just trying to spread joy to the world, but
|
|
that's alright."
|
|
|
|
Kerr didn't think Chaucer had anyone hang-up on him. Did anyone hang-up
|
|
on Galileo? The church didn't count, so no, nobody hung-up on Galileo.
|
|
Perhaps God hung-up on Galileo. Though, this is difficult to believe -- one
|
|
would think if God hung-up on Galileo, God would not allow Galileo to be such
|
|
an all important figure in the history of the globe. Kerr was a human, too.
|
|
Simple respect for another being is all that was necessary here, nothing more
|
|
was being asked. He finished summarizing the phone call he just took for the
|
|
benefit of the Great Customer Database and anyone who chose to read through
|
|
it, disregarding the fact he wasn't technically supposed to help the gentleman
|
|
at all, according to the Great Company Policy, and was misidentified
|
|
immediately after he told the man his name was Kerr. All just a simple case
|
|
of misunderstanding, really, nothing to become irate and disheveled over.
|
|
|
|
Sixteen emails an hour flew into his mailbox: 8:12am - Policy Change
|
|
Regarding Absences, 8:19am - UPDATE: Policy Change Regarding Absences, 8:29am
|
|
- Installing Windows 2000 on Windows 98, 8:29am - Installing Windows 2000 on
|
|
Windows 95, 8:31am - Uninstalling Windows 2000, 8:40am - New Monitor Serial
|
|
Number Tracking Policies, 8:49am - NOTICE: Disregard Previous Policy Change
|
|
Regarding Absences, 8:50am - $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$, 8:52am - Linux Support Policy,
|
|
8:54am - One-on-One Meeting with Manager, 8:54am - Team Meeting in Conference
|
|
Room Three, 8:55 - Team Meeting in Conference Room Twelve, 8:55 - Friday is
|
|
Shorts Day!, 8:58 - Team Meeting Cancelled. Not quite sixteen at the moment,
|
|
but one can always count on someone replying to everyone on a mailing list in
|
|
error, and then a flurry of reply-to-alls in response to the original
|
|
reply-to-all and the social ramifications of replying-to-all. All easily
|
|
mounting up to at least sixteen separate emails an hour.
|
|
|
|
Kerr sat at the end of a row, at a high-traffic corner -- the majority of
|
|
those who entered and exited this floor had to at some point in time traverse
|
|
past Kerr's cubicle. The elevators were fifteen feet behind him, and the
|
|
carpet gap was a mecca for travelers. In the past forty minutes, he has
|
|
continually glanced back as eighteen separate people walked by, coming from
|
|
the elevator, back into the building, back to their homeworld geometry. Of
|
|
these eighteen people, sixteen have been carrying food, food in square paper
|
|
bags, grease-ridden and plastered with logos, Styrofoam cups, colored straws
|
|
and carbonated darkened drinks. One after one they flew by, toting fast food
|
|
icons behind them. None were together -- they did not journey in a group to
|
|
the miniature concrete adventureland a few blocks away, taking no mercy upon
|
|
the costumed folk that served them their bags of faceless food, then returning
|
|
triumphant to the camp, sitting in circles to celebrate their plastic hunt.
|
|
All separate, individuals, different food, different bags. Processed,
|
|
unappreciated, this is what is deemed triumphant and beautiful here.
|
|
|
|
"Kerr." It was that echoing voice of managerial authority, piercing
|
|
through the thin anti-cotton fabric of the walls, reverberating in plastic.
|
|
"Come talk to me when you have a minute." It was strange, being a disembodied
|
|
command, originating from the larger cubicle twelve feet from his own. How can
|
|
he disregard such a call from the self-righteous aristocracy, stuffed in a
|
|
collar?
|
|
|
|
Kerr appeared in the one gap of his manager's cubiclized office, gripping
|
|
a pen in his hand. "Yes?"
|
|
|
|
"Kerr, come here, sit down." His manager looked as though he was the 2nd
|
|
string center from a nomadic high school football team, perpetually attending
|
|
a post-game social event, Josh's parents are out of town, and they left the
|
|
liquor cabinet unlocked -- Suzy is going to be there.
|
|
|
|
His manager stared at him with complete blankness as Kerr moved his body
|
|
into the chair in front of this man -- a single sheet of paper was slapped
|
|
down on the table. "Do you see those numbers there, Kerr?"
|
|
|
|
Kerr saw the numbers there. "Yes."
|
|
|
|
"Do you know what those numbers are, Kerr?"
|
|
|
|
Kerr knew what the numbers were. "Those are my stats."
|
|
|
|
"Right, Kerr. Your stats. And Kerr, your stats are horrible."
|
|
|
|
Kerr just stated at the rows and columns and lines and decimal places
|
|
brimming over on the page, nodding his head slowly. "OK."
|
|
|
|
"Kerr, do you see this one here? Logging rate? This is the only decent
|
|
thing you are doing. What that shows is the percentage of calls you put into
|
|
the Great Customer Database, which as we know is very important. And here, it
|
|
shows -- look here, yesterday you logged 148% of your calls."
|
|
|
|
Kerr looked at his manager. Blankly. "148%?"
|
|
|
|
"Yes, 148%, and that's great," his manager was beaming with some sort of
|
|
thoroughbred racing horse smile.
|
|
|
|
"How is it possible for me to log 148% of my phone calls?"
|
|
|
|
"Well, Kerr, it happened -- says it right here, and that just shows how
|
|
good you are doing there. But. Look at this one -- call time. Do you know
|
|
what that is?"
|
|
|
|
"Y--"
|
|
|
|
"That is how much time you spend on each call. And if you look at your
|
|
call times for yesterday, they are really poor. You took, uhm, 24 calls
|
|
yesterday, right. And, the shortest amount of time you spent on any of those
|
|
calls was 38 minutes. 38 minutes! The longest call you had yesterday was,
|
|
uhm, 72 minutes! Most of the calls were between 45-48 minutes. That is
|
|
horrible, Kerr! Simply outrageous. Do you realize that you were almost the
|
|
poorest in this department? On my team? The poorest in the department, Kerr!
|
|
That's inexcusable."
|
|
|
|
Kerr wrinkled his brow a bit, moving his eyes back and forth from the
|
|
sheet of paper in front of him to his manager's swollen face, attempting to
|
|
calculate what exactly was necessary to perform his job function. "Does it
|
|
seem odd to you that, well, alright -- I was here for eight hours yesterday,
|
|
right? Eight hours here at work. And. Those call times. I took 24 calls --
|
|
let's just say that all of them were ONLY 38 minutes--"
|
|
|
|
"But they weren't, Kerr, they--"
|
|
|
|
"That's fine. Let's just pretend. I took 24 calls, each one of them
|
|
lasting 38 minutes. And so, that would total 912 minutes. Right? 912
|
|
minutes. Which equals how many hours?"
|
|
|
|
"Well, uhm, I'm not sure."
|
|
|
|
"That is over 15 hours. Just on those phone calls. Not counting any
|
|
other projects I was working on, lunch, breaks, talking to you -- whatever.
|
|
Does that not seem just a bit impossible to you?"
|
|
|
|
"Now, Kerr, it's not impossible -- it says right here, right on this
|
|
paper in front of you."
|
|
|
|
"You don't think the numbers on this sheet of paper are inaccurate at
|
|
all?"
|
|
|
|
This man remained calm, strong, and convinced. "Kerr, numbers don't
|
|
lie."
|
|
|
|
How does someone argue against this kind of logic? Kerr was a baffled,
|
|
stammering, drooling mess. One-way gates and the meaning of cause and effect,
|
|
simple mathematics, flow charts, the measurement of time -- all were suddenly
|
|
deemed worthless and unusable. Kerr wondered if this man used a pre-Civil War
|
|
map of the United States when he went on vacations -- reaching the Midwest and
|
|
questioning why the Missouri Territory did not exist as it said so on his map,
|
|
proceeding to declare all nine present day states in that region to be
|
|
mislabeled. Or perhaps reaching the eastern coast of the United States,
|
|
peering over the edge of his Pangean map, and stating, "There can't be an
|
|
ocean here. There must be more land."
|
|
|
|
* * * * *
|
|
|
|
"Thank you for calling, this is Kerr, can I have your name please?"
|
|
|
|
"Look. I've called you six times today, and I have gotten nothing fixed.
|
|
And I have been working on this for 14 hours." An angry, middle-aged,
|
|
post-middle-aged women, gritting teeth and smoking.
|
|
|
|
Kerr closed his eyes and leaned back into a plastic chair and plastic
|
|
darkness. "Ma'am, that certainly is frustrating. Do you have the serial
|
|
number of the system you've been calling on, so I can pull it up and see what
|
|
has been going on?"
|
|
|
|
"Christ. You mean I have to give this to you again?"
|
|
|
|
"Yes, please, so I can see what has been done to the system."
|
|
|
|
Inhales, exhales, mumbling, "Christ...you people... what... tired...
|
|
this... what is this... VL3W11C. Alright?"
|
|
|
|
Kerr sprung back into an bolted upright position, flooded with
|
|
fluorescent lights, stating over typing, "Yes, ma'am, thank you very much."
|
|
|
|
The United States Marine Corp.
|
|
|
|
"Are you with the United States Marine Corp?" Kerr asked.
|
|
|
|
"Yes," was the response.
|
|
|
|
Usually, Kerr did not encounter much strife with members of the United
|
|
States military, which may or may not be an odd thing. Usually, those who
|
|
called were Privates, or Private First Class, or something of that sort --
|
|
they and them sat low on the handle of the country's ordained peacebringers,
|
|
and have been bred to take orders from others, cooperate with any and all, not
|
|
to act outside their bounds as a starter peaceboy.
|
|
|
|
Kerr continued with questions while he had the chance, "And what is your
|
|
name?"
|
|
|
|
Sighs and pride, "This is Sergeant Richards, United States Marine Corp,
|
|
Birmingham, Alabama."
|
|
|
|
Kerr jumped up. "Hoohaa!"
|
|
|
|
"Excuse me?"
|
|
|
|
Kerr sat back down. "Nothing. What is your first name?"
|
|
|
|
"Why do you need to know that?"
|
|
|
|
"It is purely for our records. I would also need a first name if to
|
|
issue any kind of service on the system. And I'd just like to know who I am
|
|
talking to."
|
|
|
|
"Well, I am not going to give you my first name," pant, pant, grunt. "I
|
|
don't think there is any reason why you need my first name."
|
|
|
|
There is a magical red button on the phone Kerr uses to speak to all
|
|
those who call, and on this magical red button is the word MUTE printed in
|
|
slanted dark text. This is certainly a beneficial feature to have on the
|
|
phone -- hit once when the technician must cough or sneeze, take a drink or
|
|
perform other strange involuntary functions, then hit once again to unMUTE.
|
|
This button is also somewhat of a sanity protection device.
|
|
|
|
Kerr hit MUTE and sighed heavily. unMUTE. "Alright. That is fine. So
|
|
you are having problems with Windows NT?"
|
|
|
|
"Goddamnit, I can't believe I have to go through this again--"
|
|
|
|
"I just wish to verify--"
|
|
|
|
"Look. I'm getting all these errors. All kinds of errors with blue
|
|
screens and memory codes and computer numbers all over the place. I've tried
|
|
to install Windows NT, Windows 95, and Windows 98 and they all do the same
|
|
thing: give errors and computer codes and memory numbers, bit-errors and
|
|
things like that."
|
|
|
|
"Do you know exactly what the error message was?"
|
|
|
|
"No. But I've seen this all before, and I know it's not the memory
|
|
because I've seen what memory does and it's not this. And I've had enough --
|
|
you guys better fix this now."
|
|
|
|
"Well, ma'am, this is what we are trying to do."
|
|
|
|
"You're not doing a good job."
|
|
|
|
"I'm trying t--"
|
|
|
|
"You haven't done anything."
|
|
|
|
"Ma'am, if--"
|
|
|
|
"You better fix this."
|
|
|
|
"Ma'am?"
|
|
|
|
"It is your responsibility."
|
|
|
|
"Ma'am?"
|
|
|
|
"What?"
|
|
|
|
"If you will let me speak, I am going to try to get this fixed for you."
|
|
|
|
"Alright, speak, go ahead."
|
|
|
|
Kerr sighed again. "Have--"
|
|
|
|
"I don't hear you."
|
|
|
|
"We--"
|
|
|
|
"I thought you had something to say?"
|
|
|
|
"Ma'am?"
|
|
|
|
"Go ahead. Speak. I'm waiting."
|
|
|
|
Kerr sat there and did not respond. Sergeant Richards went on about
|
|
speaking and listening and fixing and such, and it all smeared into a droning
|
|
noise. Kerr took off his headset, placed it on his desk, and walked around his
|
|
cubicle for a minute, doing a few quick hops into the air, few quick rollings
|
|
of the head, and then flailed his arms around wildly. He picked the headset
|
|
up again, placed it over his head, and the droning reformed into coherent
|
|
words.
|
|
|
|
"...I don't think that's too much to ask."
|
|
|
|
Kerr picked up with a plastic voice, "You're right. Have you tried
|
|
swapping out parts in the system?"
|
|
|
|
"No. We--"
|
|
|
|
"So you haven't tried removing any cards, disconnecting peripherals,
|
|
swapping out the memory?"
|
|
|
|
"No."
|
|
|
|
"Do you think that would be possible?"
|
|
|
|
"Look. What's your name?"
|
|
|
|
"Kerr."
|
|
|
|
"What's your last name?"
|
|
|
|
"I can give you my location number."
|
|
|
|
"Location number. And what is that?"
|
|
|
|
"PF-2FL-J02922."
|
|
|
|
"Pea-eph-2-eph-elle? Jay-oh-to-9-tutu?"
|
|
|
|
"Yes."
|
|
|
|
"And who is your manager, Care?"
|
|
|
|
"Eric Blankenship, number 37505."
|
|
|
|
Sergeant Richards was silent for a moment, and began again with a
|
|
superior tone. "Care, we are the United States Marine Corp. Do you know who
|
|
we are? Do you know how much money we spend on computers? I am in control of
|
|
purchasing for all of the Unites States military -- I tell them what to buy.
|
|
And I will -- I don't want to, but I will tell them to stop buying your
|
|
computers over this. Do you really want to be the one responsible for losing
|
|
the business of the United States Armed Forces?"
|
|
|
|
Kerr laughed openly. "No, of course not. What I am trying to do is
|
|
troubleshoot a bit here to find out what is causing the problem. If we do
|
|
no--"
|
|
|
|
Sergeant Richard's voice became an ominous, thundering Oz noise, "I am in
|
|
the United States Marine Corp, and I don't have to do any of these things. We
|
|
are much too important, my time is much too important to be wasting it working
|
|
on this. This computer is not the United States Marine Corp's responsibility
|
|
-- it is your responsibility! We have hundreds and thousands of computers and
|
|
they all work fine except for this one, and that is not acceptable! You have
|
|
to fix this now!"
|
|
|
|
Kerr hit MUTE and tried to use the Weirding Way on his phone. It didn't
|
|
work. unMUTE.
|
|
|
|
"Ma'am, I can send a technician out there with one or two parts, but I
|
|
would be completely guessing as to what parts to send, and could not guarantee
|
|
it would solve anything."
|
|
|
|
"I don't care, that is not our fault, that's up to you -- it's your
|
|
responsibility."
|
|
|
|
"Ma'am. Might I point out some fallacies in your arguments here? You
|
|
state this computer we are speaking of is our responsibility, and not your
|
|
own. Well, I am afraid that is incorrect."
|
|
|
|
"How is that?"
|
|
|
|
"It is like any other good -- once it is purchased it really becomes the
|
|
owner's responsibility. As you are the legal possessor of this good, it
|
|
surely has becomes your responsibility. Now, of course, if there are defects
|
|
in this good, the manufacturer of the good can and should be held responsible.
|
|
However, it must be determined whether the fault lies in the hands of the
|
|
manufacturer or elsewhere. Which is why processes such as these are used."
|
|
|
|
"Whatev--"
|
|
|
|
"Furthermore, if you own hundreds and thousands of computers that were
|
|
purchased from us, and only one is not functioning properly, I would state
|
|
that is a phenomenally low failure rate, and you should be overjoyed. To
|
|
expect absolute perfection out of hundreds and thousands of systems is
|
|
certainly being unrealistic, and yourself, being an employee of the United
|
|
States Armed Forces, should certainly understand this."
|
|
|
|
"Now ho--"
|
|
|
|
"Not to mention your cartoonical overreaction to one problem with one
|
|
system -- threatening to cancel the entire account the United States military
|
|
has with us over one problem. This, ma'am, I find to be immature and somewhat
|
|
out of line. Perhaps you should look into why you chose to state such things.
|
|
The attitude of 'I am in the military; therefore, I am superior,' is in fact
|
|
incorrect and horribly egotistical. Though, this is to be expected and
|
|
understood, coming from a member of the military -- this is what you are
|
|
trained to be. However, it does not change the fact that you are a human, I
|
|
am human, and this is a machine."
|
|
|
|
"Well, I--"
|
|
|
|
"And, finally, at this point in time I would like to inform you that I am
|
|
not going to provide you with any further support, nor am I going to provide
|
|
you with any service, because I am now calling into play my own moral code and
|
|
personal view on the United States Armed Forces. And, ma'am, I simply cannot
|
|
condone the vast majority of military actions taken in the past ten years or
|
|
so. In fact, it sickens me greatly to imagine the atrocities brought down
|
|
upon the citizens of the world, good or evil. I realize that you are not the
|
|
decision-making individual in these events that have come to pass, but one
|
|
must start somewhere."
|
|
|
|
There is a functional gray button on the phone Kerr uses to speak to all
|
|
those who call, and on this functional gray button is the word RELEASE printed
|
|
in slanted dark text. This is certainly a beneficial feature to have on the
|
|
phone -- hit once to disconnect the phone line when finished with a call, or
|
|
when tired of waiting on hold, or if one reaches a busy signal. RELEASE is
|
|
somewhat of the equivalent of hanging-up the phone.
|
|
|
|
Kerr removed his headset and hit RELEASE.
|
|
|
|
* * * * *
|
|
|
|
Kerr arrived 47 minutes early the next day, a fairly easy thing to do
|
|
since he doesn't usually start his shift until 2pm. On his keyboard sat a
|
|
yellow square, asking him to "See Me Immediately!" Who was he and what did he
|
|
see? Not everyone left mis-capitalized yellow notes on peoples' keyboards.
|
|
This was most certainly a managerial tactic, taught on the third day of the
|
|
Great Managerial Training Class, the same day they are taught to sacrifice
|
|
themselves for the Great Good of the company. The void left is stuffed full
|
|
of small yellow notes.
|
|
|
|
Kerr appeared in the one gap of his manager's cubiclized office, gripping
|
|
a pen in his hand. "Yes?"
|
|
|
|
"Kerr, come here, sit down." His manager was fixated on the piece of
|
|
paper sitting between them. Six minutes passed, eleven minutes passed.
|
|
"Kerr. Do you know what this says?"
|
|
|
|
Kerr glanced quickly at the sheet of paper. "No."
|
|
|
|
His manager now fixated on Kerr, grinding his jaw, red dragon pulsations
|
|
whipping through his back. "This paper... tells me what happened yesterday."
|
|
|
|
"What happened yesterday?" such an innocent schoolboy voice.
|
|
|
|
"You not only refused service to one of our largest customers, but you
|
|
hung-up on them. Did you do that? Did you refuse service AND hang-up on a
|
|
customer?"
|
|
|
|
"Well, I would not say that, exac--"
|
|
|
|
"Did you or did you not hang-up on the customer?"
|
|
|
|
"I would like a definition of hang-up."
|
|
|
|
"Well. It means to disconnect the phone line, I guess."
|
|
|
|
"Is there an alternate definition?"
|
|
|
|
His manager looked perplexed.
|
|
|
|
"Can the word 'hang-up' have more than one meaning?" Kerr offered.
|
|
|
|
His manager blinked a few times. "Why, yes. I guess so. Perhaps it can
|
|
be defined as having an emotional preoccupation. Or maybe even an unforeseen
|
|
obstacle."
|
|
|
|
Kerr sat a bit straighter. "An unforeseen obstacle? Such as a hitch, or
|
|
a snag?"
|
|
|
|
"Right. That is correct."
|
|
|
|
"And this paper here," Kerr pointed down at that paper there, "states I
|
|
hung-up on this customer?"
|
|
|
|
"Yes," his manager pointed down at that paper there, "that is what that
|
|
paper states."
|
|
|
|
Kerr lifted his hands. "This is accurate -- I did get hung-up on this
|
|
customer. The customer was an obstacle, a snag, a hitch, for various reasons,
|
|
and I was hung-up. But shortly afterwards I overcame this hang-up and
|
|
proceeded on. As for me having an emotional preoccupation with the customer,
|
|
well, I do not believe it is within the rights of this company to pry into
|
|
such realms."
|
|
|
|
"Kerr." His manager could only loosely look at Kerr, leaning back in his
|
|
chair, cocking his head from one side to the other. "I guess so. I can't
|
|
argue with that."
|
|
|
|
Kerr nodded a few times, grabbed the piece of paper between them, made
|
|
some long scrawling, covering scribbles with his pen, and placed it back down
|
|
on the table. His manager leaned forward and fixated once again on paper.
|
|
|
|
"My. Oh my!" His manager leaped up with paper in hand. "Yes, yes, go,
|
|
please do. Amor! Amor! Excuse me!" And out of the cubicle his manager ran,
|
|
waving this paper above his head, not waiting for the elevator doors to open,
|
|
heading straight for the stairs.
|
|
|
|
Kerr walked to the elevator, waited briefly for the doors to open, and
|
|
stepped in, on his way home.
|
|
|
|
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
|
|
|
|
State of unBeing is copyrighted (c) 1999 by Kilgore Trout and Apocalypse
|
|
Culture Publications. All rights are reserved to cover, format, editorials,
|
|
and all incidental material. All individual items are copyrighted (c) 1999
|
|
by the individual author, unless otherwise stated. This file may be
|
|
disseminated without restriction for nonprofit purposes so long as it is
|
|
preserved complete and unmodified. Quotes and ideas not already in the
|
|
public domain may be freely used so long as due recognition is provided.
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State of unBeing is available at the following places:
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World Wide Web http://www.apoculpro.org
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irc the #unbeing channel on UnderNet
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Submissions may also be sent to Kilgore Trout at <kilgore@eden.com>.
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The SoB distribution list may also be joined by sending email to Kilgore
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Trout.
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--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
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