And I Suppose ...
... nobody died when Johnny Carson was buried at sea, on the moon, either?
We were taught every day and in every way that ours was the freest, the happiest, and soon to be the greatest and most powerful country in the world.
— U.S. student of the 1820s, A History of the United States, Boorstin & Kelley
Open up your third eye and find out what really happened — Sept. 11, 2001, the Boston Bombing, the death of Paul Wellstone, Aurora, Columbine, the death of Terry Yeakey, the moon landings, Jim Garrison's appearance on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and more ...
And I Suppose
... nobody died when
Johnny Carson was buried
at sea on the moon, either?
by Mike Palecek
I understand how.
I do not understand why.
— Winston Smith, 1984Table of Contents
1 - Life During Wartime
2 - Cognitive Dissidents
3 - The Bums Will Always Lose
4 - Now The Smallest Line You Can, Please, With Just Your Third Eye
5 - Stroll Around The Grounds Until You Feel At Home
6 - Schmovid Schmabbitt Schmoyd & Schmoe
7 - Well, How Did I Get Here?
8 - Same As It Ever Was
9 - A Moon Too Far
10 - Form 302
11 - On The Group W Bench
12 - NPR Is Truth CNN Is Truth NBC Is Truth
13 - The Evil Empire
14 - If Americans Knew
15 - We Didn’t Start The Fire
16 - The Magic Pull-It
17 - Build Your Bomb Shelter, Remove Your Hats, Duck & Cover, Duct Tape Your Windows, Relax, Have Some Kool-Aid
18 - The Devil In The Details
19 - My Dinner With D.B. Cooper
20 - Born In The U.S.A.
21 - The Home Of The Brave
22 - Living The Dream
23 - Bernays’ Cave
24 - We’re All In This Together
25 - Zero Dark Thirty To Midnight
26 - There Will Be Bullshit
27 - Sympathy For The Devil
27 - Code Camo
After all, that is the only world there is now, what we invent. — Caroline Sanford, Hollywood, Gore Vidal
It’s the same day.
The gunshots echo as always around noon down Prairie Avenue.
Three. No, I thought I heard five. They came from there. Nope, back there.
When they killed and took away the hope and democracy of El Salvador we had better things to do. When they did the same in Guatemala it was not a good time for us, to become involved or read up on that. When they did the same in Chile, Brazil, we already had a full plate, and so there wasn’t much we could do. And so when they put full-page false stories, complete with sidebars, award-winning photos, feature stories, and in-depth back stories in the news stand at 45th & Broadway in New York City, at the Barnes & Noble on Webster Avenue in Chicago, at the Casey’s on Dixon Road in Kokomo, at the Kwik Trip on West Dodge Road in Omaha, at the 7-Eleven on Santa Monica Blvd. in Los Angeles ... and announced they were now here, had landed, boots on the ground, to put a brown wingtip up our ass, here, in the United States of America, there were no Salvadorans or Guatemalans or Chileans to speak for us.
All these events are still happening, ongoing, it never ends, in fact it’s culminating as we speak as we breathe as we check the mail on our way to take out the garbage. It’s happening right now. And it’s so hard to imagine. Life is happening right now, this moment, and I can’t believe it’s happening to me, and that it’s up to me, right now to figure out what to do because as the Allen Dulles and Wolf Blitzer balloons float down 6th Avenue, tethered by 66 army snipers from Muncie, the parade hosted by Lorne Greene, Betty White and Willard Scott, Allen Dulles sits there in a chair, nice chair, nice office, puffing on a cigar, Mona Lisa smirk in his eyes, looking right into your face and just knowing you won’t do a fucking thing. Karl Rove smooths into the office, big smile, big laugh, telling everyone that Philip Seymour Hoffman has just agreed to play him in the new Tom Hanks movie, “We’re An Empire Now.”
You see Paul Wellstone’s face on the television screen and the dates below the photo, 1944-2002. Crashed in the woods. And your mind goes to how terrible those last moments must have been. If it were you how would you have handled it? What could that possibly be like. What do we do now? I guess we’ll figure out something.
You see the indescribably sad image on the black and white TV screen of the riderless horse at John Kennedy’s funeral, and then the images burned into your brain of Robert Kennedy on his back in the pantry and the people lining the tracks as his body was passing by on the train.
You see that school children have been shot and killed. And you cannot imagine.
You see two people in a television studio telling you in somber tones about something big that has happened in New York City. And at some dragging yourself from the sea onto the muddy beach, primal ooze level you know that your life has changed forever, your routine, your joy, your smile will not ever be the same. It will all have to be faked.
You see the flames shooting from the buildings and you realize that people are right now burning alive in those buildings and you wonder what you could have done about it. And what that would be like. And what’s for dinner tonight at your house.
You see on the screen the remains of the building, ripped at the seams, down the middle, with its guts hanging out for the whole world to view, and you don’t have time to wonder, they have told you who did it and why and what will be happening next, tonight and tomorrow.
And then, you go about your day because what else is there to do?
And there isn’t, anything else to do.
It’s already been done, the deed as well as your seeing the deed. You cannot un-see it or un-feel it.
That’s part of the plan, but you do not know about that. How could you?
You have been given as a human being all these good things, these eyes, this heart, this mind, this earth, this soul — such that not even the thinnest, rose-gold, most advanced computers, or Google-Facebook-Amazon-DHS algorithm, Aspen Institute or NPR summer-all-employee-picnic-get-together-and brainstorm, RAND or DARPA intellectuals or CIA goat-staring shaman could replicate — and yet, those who have done these things have now inserted into your own interface a virus and it has an effect.