Reality Bites: a new movie with ancient themes
Rated “R”
On Sunday night, between NFL football games (a popular opiate of the masses), I watched CBS’s 60 Minute tour of Gitmo, a chilling indictment of the U.S.A. Apparently, the Americans ignore their own rule of law and court orders that mandate the release or indictment of alleged terrorists, picked up accidentally in the Kafkaesque sweeps of Afghanistan. These Bush-era inmates, the so-called accused but un-convicted “enemy combatants,” as they are referred to in Orwellian terms, embody the face of the new savages—Americans, who conform to the corporate state. One need look no further than Bush “the Torturer” or Obama, “the Assassin” to understand the 1001 American Nights.
Hey, I read it in the Daily News.
The CBS story was remarkable for its portrayal of evil, an American Colonel, the Gitmo Warden, inmates protesting behind locked steel doors, young soldiers walking the corridors, faces protected by “splash masks” from the weapons of choice—inmates, who spit, throw blood, urine, feces, and sperm.
The story made me dizzy. In the Gitmo labyrinthian loss of civil and social principles, nobody, not defense attorneys, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, who asked for the release of a British Citizen, or the American Warden, could tell the CBS reporter why court orders have been ignored or why inmates are caught up in a metaphysical stew of bureaucratic evil.
The show revealed what we all suspected to be true but can’t quite believe until we see the evidence i.e. the Manning Wikileaks about American war crimes and diplomatic hypocrisy or the Snowden docs, confirming the worldwide surveillance state. The story, which couldn’t have been done without official sanction from the White House, was like a confession: stop me Father before I sin (or kill) again.
Now comes Chris Hedges (who spoke in Taos and collects Erin Currier’s work), commenting on Jeremy Hammond, “sentenced to 10 years in prison for hacking into the computers of a private security firm that works on behalf of the government, including the Department of Homeland Security, and corporations such as Dow Chemical. In 2011 Hammond, now 28, released to the website WikiLeaks and Rolling Stone and other publications some 3 million emails from the Texas-based company Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor.
As Hedges says, “The sentencing converges with the state’s per Jeremy Hammond prosecution of Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Barrett Brown, along with Glenn Greenwald, Jacob Appelbaum, Laura Poitras and Sarah Harrison, four investigative journalists who are now in self-imposed exile from the United States. And as the numbers of our political prisoners and exiled dissidents mount, there is the unmistakable stench of tyranny” (my bold).
If you follow the news, you know that the Clinton and Bush clans released the bankers from their fetters and allowed them to gamble with the savings of Americans and other citizens worldwide, including the vaunted ownership society’s home equity. First they encourage you to borrow and spend, and when you can’t pay the bill, they put you out on the street or in a state of indentured servitude, . It’s called bait and switch.
When the bettors at investment houses broke the bank, printers at the Federal Reserve produced greenbacks and credit slips, based on the full faith and credit of poor American taxpayers, who are encouraged to enrich the wealthy classes. Once moral and political principles are commodified and privatized, appetites are unleashed, and the desire for more money and more power grows exponentially until, as Marx noted, the capitalists cannibalize themselves.
Just as climate change indicates an inevitable catastrophe, so we wait for the crisis that will unleash the anger of the mob and the darker side of the American psyche (John Wayne in The Searchers): the progenitors of guns, god, and separatism. Statisticians say Americans hold 300 million firearms in private armories. Today you can buy computer software and 3-D printing devices that produce plastic weapons, which will escape the metal detectors at courthouses and airports. While the corporatists seek security profits at Gitmo or revenue from the Surveillance state, or insurance profits guaranteed by health care fanatics or blood money from the gun and god club, they have forgotten that outside the door the grim reaper waits.
Nobody is safe once the evil spirits emerge from Pandora’s box. When somebody asked the great Jewish scholar Hillel what the Holy Hebrew book meant, he said, “Love they neighbor as thyself.” All the rest is commentary.” Nature and the Sages of tradition teach us that to philosophize is to learn how to die and therefore live from moment to moment in the present.