Thursday, May 29, 2008

Light Out Chronicles: Knoxville, TN

It is my favorite time of day--mid-evening, when the sun comes at everything sideways and the shadows stretch tall. We are cutting through the north of Austin, the less interesting half, but the last half of home I will see for months. You stack up enough months and you'll be talking years--could it be years before I see it again? The truth is, I have no idea, no way of knowing. Freedom costs you your capacity to prognosticate--if I go where I want, I won't be here again til I need to be. Life being what it is (temporary) I suppose there is an outside chance I'll never see these Live Oak choked, lazily rolling vistas ever again. But god what a curse that what be. it is like the last embrace of a lover, the last time lips touch before you're just occasional fuckbuddies or strangers. Welcome but painful, a symbol of an ongoing love that has nonetheless changed. That's what the first 30 minutes of a 22 hour ride on Greyhound are like.

Out of Dallas, usually the end of my line--this is where my family is and I once was. But the emotions came in Austin, now the magnitude of this sardine can experience is growing on me. The discomfort fails to really phase me, however, I end up having a good time. G----, a recently homeless guy from Virginia; K---- and A---- conjoined young lovers from Boulder (unimpressed by the merely majestic scale of the Smoky Mountains' foothills); K---- and J---- from London, UK coming stateside with cheap dollars and tickets to Dollywood; R---- the oil worker from Detroit going home from 10 long months in Ft. Stockton, TX: i made friends. Only 80 pages were taken out of Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

Riding Greyhound is a lesson in the flattening of the US landscape. When in Sulpher Springs or Benton you get to see corporate trucks identical save that in one they have Big 12 ballcaps, the other SEC. The bus stations in Little Rock, Memphis and Nashville are surrounded by the temples of corporate capitalism's last hurrahs--branded arenas and new high rise developments. High rise condos springing up in Little Rock show that the reach of the New Urbanist scourge knows no bounds. In between you have terraced farms in Arkansas and those majestic foothills. Tennessee offers as much natural beauty as anywhere I've yet seen, the foliage a chaos of species packing the landscape to create a lush texture like nowhere else. When the hills start rolling and valleys plunge away from the interstate, it is almost too much to bear. The South Texans among us were clamoring with camera phones and gushing over the view. Into this green and seductive terrain sprouts Knoxville.

There are a couple of quick ways to describe Knoxville--K-Town to friends. One is that it is a negative image of Austin: where Austin is a big city trying to be a small town, Knoxville is a small town trying to be a big city. Its downtown features a signature park--Market Square--full of public art garbage nobody minds getting rained, hailed or sat upon. It is walkable and you could see all the sights in a weekend. People still smile here, and it has got to be the least branded city I have seen. The only corporate eateries in Downtown or the adjacent Old City are an Arbies, a Marble Slab and a Subway. The only other corporate outlet of any sort I saw was a Regal cinema (its logo is downplayed on the facade of a classic movie house). No McDonald's, no Starbucks (check out Coffee and Chocolate or Old City Java), no Gap, Diesel, Express or other corporate shopping. I'm told that during the school year the place is lousy with frat guys and "sorostitutes." But I'm here the week after the other UT let out for summer so only the interns at law offices and banks are afoot. All this to say Knoxville--regardless of its ambitions--exists on a human scale.

The other way of seeing it is as very similar to Cambridge, MA 86 the self-important yankees sub laid back rednecks. It is old--founded in 1792--and it promises a great deal of stimulation. Still, it lacks a Boston over the river, offering the Smoky Mountains instead. It is a city where cars are gratuitous yet public transit paltry (though probably pretty good for its size). There are a few radicals afoot--the woman at the historical center told me that Knoxville turned out in the early 70s to protest Richard Nixon and Billy Graham. If you need any proof that there is a vein of cool running through K-Town note that it is probably the only place in a five state spread that would turn out against the war mongering Billy Graham. One of the alt weeklies has contact info for the local Critical Mass and the Green Party, as well as anti-Bush op ed screeds. It also, in a refreshing exception from its cohorts around the country, has no ads for prostituted women. There are actually two alt weeklies: the Knoxville Voice and Metro Pulse, neither offer women for rent in their back pages.

My last day in town I finally connected with the local underground. At the Southeast end of Market Square sits a Tennessee-style BBQ joint called Guss' with a "Peace In Iraq Now" sign out front. I went in, got the pork sandwich special and talked with the man behind the counter. He pointed me towards Yarnell Perkins, a local activist and writer with a group called Pledge to Impeach. The group is working to organize a general strike for East Tennessee, to be called off when President Bush resigns, the War in Iraq ends, etc. You could criticize them I suppose, and Yarnell is a left liberal type enamored of Cynthia McKinney and the Green Party. But still it was nice to connect with the lefties in town.

That same morning I sat in the aforementioned Coffee and Chocolate where I struck up a conversation with D----, who agreed with me 100% when it came to my radically bleak economic forecasts. His agreement was nice for a season, but when it came out that he was a mutual fund manager it turned terrifying. He is the sort I expect to say I'm crazy when I predict Great Depression style financial collapse. His agreement was unexpected and worrying. He made up for it though, as I was attempting to figure out where my next stop would be and he said some magic words.

"You been to Asheville yet?"

The answer was no, but per his advice it won't be soon. Keep heading east, north will come soon enough. Knoxville could only house me for a few days, Asheville here I come.

PS--Also check out Woodward Books, where I spent two hours before my bus out of town talking to one of the owners about politics. A great spot for rare and used books, not very big but comfy!

Thursday, May 22, 2008

The Backwards Read I: Gitmo War Crimes File and Second Generation Agrofuels

It is my practice to read newspapers from back to front--you get to the meaty buried stories first and leave the headlines for a light and fluffy dessert. Yesterday's New York Times was a perfect example of this policy's effectiveness. All the way back on page A17, next to a piece about pet cloning (how cyberpunk is that?) the Gray Lady reports that "FBI Agents Created a War Crimes File" of abuses at Guantanamo bay.

In 2002, as evidence of prisoner mistreatment at Guantánamo Bay began to mount, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents at the base created a “war crimes file” to document accusations against American military personnel, but were eventually ordered to close down the file, a Justice Department report revealed Tuesday.

The report, an exhaustive, 437-page review prepared by the Justice Department inspector general, provides the fullest account to date of internal dissent and confusion within the Bush administration over the use of harsh interrogation tactics by the military and the Central Intelligence Agency.


I suppose it is a feature of these dark times that we are left to rely on J. Edgar Hoover's handiwork for protection from state oppression. Especially telling is the fact that US military interrogators worked with Chinese investigators in Gitmo to torture Chinese Muslims. No word if the PRC guys were put off that Soviet-style sleep deprivation tactics were used in their Sino-American Clandestine Torture Summit rather than Maoist techniques. The media have been known to put China's human rights contempt in the front of their coverage, but US collaboration in and notetaking on the same is seventeenth page news.

The big eye-opener here is that the FBI agents in Guantanamo weren't hippie peaceniks hoping to bring an end to the War, they were criminal investigators accumulating evidence of serious crimes. In the end, the Times reports:

The report says that the F.B.I. agents took their concerns to higher-ups, but that their concerns often fell on deaf ears: officials at senior levels at the F.B.I., the Justice Department, the Defense Department and the National Security Council were all made aware of the F.B.I. agents’ complaints, but little appears to have been done as a result.


Radical environmentalists seem to be seen as a more serious threat than US officials torturing in the name of preserving, protecting and defending the Constitution.

Finally, the article demonstrates the cynical destruction of the English language for totalitarian purposes:

A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, noted that abuses at Guantánamo were the subject of a 2005 Defense Department investigation that found no evidence of torture, though it did fault some interrogation tactics and called the Qahtani interrogation degrading and abusive.


The military's distinction between "torture" and "degrading and abusive" interrogation tactics begs the question: what is torture if not degrading and abusive interrogation? It seems that the government is committed to making the word torture meaningless, and thus it would be impossible for the US to torture--as impossible as it would be for them to ballywonk or zurk or any other word without meaningful definition. Alternately, they might redefine it as "something the US doesn't do." By definition we don't torture so sleep deprivation (the central torture tactic in Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler's terrifying expose of Stalinism), waterboarding (a primary tool of the Spanish Inquistion) or sexual humiliation (a favorite of Saddam Hussein) are only torture when others do them. This is the classic rationale of doublethink and the DoD's innocent quote demonstrates the depth of commitment to repression in our national state.

Moving forward, page A6 has a fascinating critical look at "second generation" agrofuels. This article--like almost everybody else--calls them "biofuels," but activists in the global South have taken to calling them agrofuels. All fuels--coal, petroleum, natural gas--are made of biological materials, agrofuels can be distinguished by the fact they are produced from agricultural products rather than drilled or mined for. Second generation agrofuels are produced from reeds and grasses as opposed to staple crops such as corn, palm and sugar. The global famine caused in part by Western liberalism's posthaste embrace of agrofuels is leading Western energy firms to consider shifting to plants such as giant reed and jatropha--non-food crops. The only hitch in their giddy up is that:

Most of these newer crops are what scientists label invasive species — that is, weeds — that have an extraordinarily high potential to escape biofuel plantations, overrun adjacent farms and natural land, and create economic and ecological havoc in the process, they now say.


Hard to believe plants sold by their advocates as easy to grow in vast quantities anywhere might be weeds, no? It is still unclear how many desperate straw grasps from global capitalism we will endure before we recognize that the problem isn't that there isn't enough fuel or not clean enough fuel, but overconsumption. These grasps cost human lives: thousands certainly in the current famine (exceptional hunger in a world where thousands starve to death every day to begin with) and more if disastrous predictions about invasive species' threat to food supplies in poor countries were to come true. They cost lives, but they pay profits for capitalists convinced that the eternal economic growth is possible or desirable. Having ignored warnings about the first generation agrofuels' threat to food costs, they don't want to hear the expert predictions on second-generation products.

“With biofuels, there’s always a hurry,” said Geoffrey Howard, an invasive species expert with the International Union for Conservation of Nature. “Plantations are started by investors, often from the U.S. or Europe, so they are eager to generate biofuels within a couple of years and also, as you might guess, they don’t want a negative assessment.”


To this industry figures such as EuropaBio's Willy De Greef have this black comfort:

Willy De Greef, incoming secretary general of EuropaBio, an industry group... said that biofuel farmers would inevitably introduce new crops carefully because they would not want growth they could not control.


Inevitably? As in guaranteed to take place? I am curious what De Greef's source of such confidence might be. Unforseen, ignored or covered up threats to human life have arisen from every new energy innovation, and capitalism's pursuit of ever greater wealth explodes these threats with its consumption culture. The rapacious burning of wood, coal, petroleum and the first generation of agrofuels have all resulted in ecological crises that have killed multitudes of people. Now the "secretary general" of the newest energy concern lets us know this time will be different. We'll be waiting with baited breath.

This article ends with a scent of a solution, at least one of its dimensions.

That assessment, he added, must take a broad geographical perspective since invasive species don’t respect borders.


A global resistance is called for, anything less is simply insufficient. Blessedly, we live in the first moment of human history wherein such a coordination is possible. We in the US also live in this era's great global power and have an opportunity to decapitate the beast of world corporate capitalism. But as we tarry the US wanes, our torture-buddies in China begin their ascent replacing liberal capitalism with command capitalism, borders become increasingly anachronistic and people die. Good thing the revolution starts in September!

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Hagee, Donahue and the End of the Religious Right

John Hagee is a recent phenomenon for most Americans, but I can remember watching his sweaty, apoplectic, tremolo-throated sermons since childhood. I have long hoped that just once the madman would slip up and a flurry of profanities would sputter out, mid harangue. It seems that American media can only handle one grotesquely obese evangelical ayatollah at a time, and with the overdue shoving off of Jerry Falwell, 2008 has become the Rev. Dr. Hagee's coming out party. Those of us with a distressing attraction to televangelism have known the for-profit prophet for sometime. My first cousin was even a member of Hagee's San Antonio flock before moving his wife and three home schooled children to Fort Worth for a job with Kenneth Copeland Ministries. I suppose I begin with this to show some kind of credentials in discussing recent news about the Rev. Dr. Hagee's turnaround on the Roman Catholic Church.

From the Associated Press, last week:

John Hagee, an influential Texas televangelist who endorsed John McCain, apologized to Catholics Tuesday for his stinging criticism of the Roman Catholic Church and for having "emphasized the darkest chapters in the history of Catholic and Protestant relations with the Jews."

Hagee's support for McCain has drawn cries of outrage from some Catholic leaders who have called on McCain to reject Hagee's endorsement. The likely Republican nominee has said he does not agree with some of Hagee's past comments, but did not reject his support.

In a letter to William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights, Hagee wrote: "Out of a desire to advance a greater unity among Catholics and evangelicals in promoting the common good, I want to express my deep regret for any comments that Catholics have found hurtful."

Donohue, one of Hagee's sharpest critics, said he accepted the apology and planned to meet with Hagee Thursday in New York.
Wikipedia has the background on what Hagee said to get the papists in a pox.

Hagee's attack against Christian antisemitism in his book Jerusalem Countdown claimed that Adolf Hitler's antisemitism derived especially from his Catholic background, and that the Catholic Church under Pope Pius XII encouraged Nazism instead of denouncing it. (pp. 79-81) [36] He also states that the Roman Catholic Church "plunged the world into the Dark Ages," allowed for the Crusaders to rape and murder with impunity, and called for Jews to be treated as "Christ killers". (p. 73) Later in the book (pp. 81-2), however, he praises Pope John Paul II for repudiating past antisemitism in the Roman Catholic Church.

(…)

"Anti-Catholic Protestants have long labeled the Catholic Church "The Great Whore", and no amount of spin can change that reality. No one who knows anything about the term would suggest otherwise."[38] Furthermore, Hagee did identify (the Great Whore of) Babylon as Rome in his book From Daniel to Doomsday (1999), in a way that melded reference to the Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church: "The evidence would point to Rome...It was Rome where Nero wrapped Christians in oily rags and hung them on lampposts, setting them ablaze to light his gardens. It was Rome that orchestrated the Crusades where Jews were slaughtered...It was Rome that orchestrated the Inquisitions throughout the known world where "heretics" were burned at the stake or pulled in half on torture racks because they were not Roman Catholic." (pp. 10-11)

I find this latest episode a perfect illustration of the complete deficit in honesty that defines political Christianity. Hagee makes two types of claims: historical claims about the Catholic Church and theological claims about the Catholic Church's identity. I say "identity" in the sense that apocalypse simply means "revealing" and Hagee's pervasive spewing of apocalyptic nonsense seeks to make sense of the world by fitting something into all the holes in Revelation. The Whore of Babylon is a pretty important figure in Revelation—if you want to make millions by telling people the most fucked up book in the Bible is as good as a newspaper you better have someone slipped into that slot. Premillinnial Dispensationalists (the school of eschatology—study of end times and afterlife—that believes in the Rapture) have frequently cited the Church of Rome in this spot. They go to great lengths proving that the Catholic Church is not really Christian, to the point that my Texas-bred Baptist ass didn't know that Catholics were considered Christians until I learned it in school in the sixth grade. I always thought they were the bad guys in the Christian story.

So the question must be put to Hagee, who has been peddling his fortune telling schtick since long before I came in puking and mewling. Are Catholics Christian? Will they be in heaven with the saved? Are they among the elect? I don't mean predestination, he doesn't have enough dignity to be a Calvinist. I mean can people who 1) pray to Mary and the saints 2) burn candles to statues and revere graven images 3) accept authorities outside of Scripture, to the point that the Vatican has historically worked to keep Scripture out of lay hands 4) believe that taking the sacraments is a source of salvation as opposed to faith alone 5) practice infant baptism and finally 6) continue the practice of plenary indulgences with masses up for sale really be "Christian" by his definition of the term? Hagee wants us to believe that something he had taught and said and preached and written about and nodded in agreement to for DECADES like every member of his denominational and theological background wasn't what he really meant.

This is the very reason why fundamentalists were adamant about staying away from politics for decades: political considerations would cause them to have to water down or change their controversial beliefs. Hagee's theology changed last week, and it should be asked of him what caused it. Was it that God changed? Or was it that sticking with the things he had preached and had preached to him all his life jeopardized John McCain's chances of being president?

And as to the historical claims that Hagee now repudiates, has history changed? To say that the Roman Catholic Church has historically been anti-semitic, that they were directly responsible for pogroms and ethnic cleansing of Jews and that they were sympathetic to the Nazis (and close collaborators with fascists in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Chile and elsewhere) is hardly controversial. In fact, it is a truth that demands to be spoken. Donahue reminds me of one of those Muslim clerics after the Danish cartoon scandal—he is less perturbed by his own faith's violence than he is with people drawing attention to it. It is a cynical faith that bears a striking resemblance to the Mafia, where loyalty and honor are higher virtues than truth-telling. Having already sold out his faith, Hagee had no trouble ignoring historical facts and negating perhaps the only useful thing to ever come out of his jowly little mouth.


This is simply the latest sign of the death of the Religious Right. The movement has gone from a powerful clique of clerics who forced the GOP to change its policies to fit fundamentalist theology to a group forced to give up its fundamentalist theology in order to protect GOP politicians. Hagee's one-eighty on the Church of Rome is in the same vein as Robertson and Falwell's renunciation of their post-9/11 comments. Robertson and Falwell weren't just pulling stuff from their ass after 9/11—they were speaking in the fundamentalist tradition of taking the Old Testament seriously. The Old Testament makes it very clear that God uses group punishment through natural disasters and acts of war, and while most Christians have moved past that fundamentalists have been distinguished by their embrace of that sort of thinking. For Roberston and Falwell to abandon the vengeful god who is intimately involved in the events of history is for them to abandon the god of fundamentalist Christianity. When they do so, they—the last holdouts in this noisome religion—drive the nails into the coffin of the Old Testament god. There will be the Hebrew god of the Hebrew Bible, but the fundamentalist Christian god of the Old Testament is fading fast. It is a testament to some uptick in our humanity.

Fundamentalist Christians were once among the most vociferous proponents of secular governance and apolitical preaching because to do otherwise was to expose their weak-minded faith to the light of day. They would never have consciously decided that their beliefs were not strong enough to stand the test of modernity, but their religion only survived as long as they stayed out of the public realm. Hagee’s turnaround on fundamental dogma shows the best prophets were the ones who warned of the consequences of a political Christianity. Many millions hold the beliefs Hagee recently renounced. Let us hope their faith goes the way of Mithraism and Baal worship.

Monday, May 19, 2008

Occupied Pt. 2

This is the second chapter of the world's first NoBlogVel. Check 0ut the introduction here, and the first chapter here.


Wherever borders or barriers have been erected with the proud confidence possible only in the ruling class, there have been smugglers. Pedro was a part of a tradition that was as old as human civilization. When Solon was throwing up walls around new-fangled cities across Mesopotamia there were smugglers finding their way in—bringing in and taking out whatever it was Solon wasn't down for. Pedro had been taught by a Westy companero who ended up with his throat cut a couple of years before all this. It is a science older than written language—any barrier has a weak point. In terms of crossing borders there are structural/geographical weak points, administrative/bureaucratic weak points and personnel weak points. You have two options when exploiting weak points: one can push on it without them seeing you or you can let them see something they want to see, secreting the payload. You can dodge the man or you can fool him. You make a plan, have an escape and let go of your fear of death. You are ready to smuggle.


Getting from the burbs into the Greez involved a complex gambit. A ring of rubble and mighty piles of collapsed concrete formed an eighty-mile ring well off from the Greez, the first layer of resistance. Over it a labor crew had been compelled to unfurl several haphazard loops of stainless steel razor wire. Retired industrial equipment from the thousands of factories in the area was towed to the ring and given a casual distribution along the barrier.


“Ha!” Molly hadn't been to KC since before even the Bolie Wars, more than half a century before that day. She grabbed her waist and looked over the Trash Ring like a trader appraising a questionable mule. “That's old I-435. It was a freeway.” Pedro just stared. “Freeways were big roads that cars drove on. Back then everyone drove cars.”


He stared a bit longer before talking. “I know. I'm still just wondering how someone who talks as much as you is still alive.” The woman had regaled him all night with slow-paced tales of her days in Hollywood (he had no idea where it was until he asked her, found out nobody had been within 200 miles of the place in 20 years and wondered why she thought he cared). Her tales droned all along the bike ride through Olathe and then the always asshole-puckering experience of making it through enemy turf in OvParque. A good smuggler knew the secret path, and only rolling through all but forgotten alleys walled by overgrown grasses hiding the broken frames of cardboard-fire heated squats and avoiding the gutted strip developments that housed hundreds at a time—the concrete floors slick with the sleep breath of exhausted producers—he got them across the city with only a couple of bottles thrown his way by kids wearing the orange Kevmesh of OvParque New Popular Front. The maquiladoras were butted up against each other as they got closer, ten miles deep all the way around for more than 80 miles. The roar of sewing machines and scream of grinding metal was broken only by the rattling thump of something incredibly heavy being dropped into place. The factories came up so quick as to be disorienting. Clutches of squats with their rowdy unemployed tenants maxing out front gave way without any warning to an endless wall of dumpy corrugated steel warehouses full of human toil. Pedro had not been welcome here as a producer in months, ever since he fell off quota two days in a row. But he knew how to make sure he was always on the backside of each of the randomly faced facilities, his ride a maze memorized over years of smuggling.


“We are going to talk, abuelita,” He said, resting for a moment in the corner where a hulking dumpster backed into the rear of a loud maquiladora. “Before we get where the drones can listen again, I want to know how—exactly—you manage to say whatever the hell you want and not end up skyfucked. I once saw a guy start to tell an Admin to shove it in his ass and he was a hard to remove stain on my uni before he got to the profanity. What's your trick, lady?”


Molly took a long squirt off the bottle passed her by Pedro and squatted in front of him to relax a moment. “They don't know to look for me, and they couldn't if they did.”


Pedro was disbelieving and would have punished her obliquity with violence had he not remembered Xiu, laid up for four days with a broken instep locked into FirstAidTech. Had to get to the clinic for some more cordblood before the commandant would let him work any more missions, which he might not let him do anyways after getting his ass kicked by a 120 year old woman. “What does that mean? Sounds like some kind of snoozhead bullshit to me.”


The woman smiled. “Okay then. Believe that.” He was clearly unsatisfied, he needed to know if he was being reckless beyond conscience or protected from on high. It made the only difference in the world that mattered in the WPTs—life and death. “It is pretty blah actually. I was purged from the party, the Democratc Workers Party about three months before the Crack Up and the subsequent invasion.”


“So they didn't know you were a Bolie. Erased you from the pictures and shit.”


“You got it.”


“But there must have been a bunch of purged Bolivarans who ended up skyfucked anyways.”


“Indeed, there were. There was a whole well developed underground that lasted all of about six months after the invasion. Two, three at a time they were ripped up when they tripped up. But not me.”


“And you run your mouth. You said they couldn't get you if they knew. Why?”


Molly shrugged her shoulders. “I don't know.” Pedro's face was lousy with incredulity. “I have a theory,” she said. Pedro stared at her, waiting for her to elucidate. She said nothing for a long time and then “It's why we're going downtown.”


“You seem pretty confident in your personal security round here, girl. Especially for a chica dealing in theories and shit. Now, you're a tough one. Saw that when you put the bolt through ol Xiu.”


“That wasn't that impressive. That sizzle kid's to killing what a seat sniffer is to fucking. He don't do it cause he don't got what it takes.”


“What does it take?”


She spit on the ground and cracked her rubbery knuckles one at a time. “Perspective. That's a good word for it.”


“Perspective?”


“You gotta realize that it ain't that big a deal. Back in the day we had to worry about the pigs—police, an armed force of men that put people in prison for doing things society had deemed necessary of such things, you've heard of them?”


“Saw them in a zone once, a scene set in the old days. They were all fat and had mustaches and shit, right?”


She laughed. “More or less, I suppose. But we had to worry about prison, then the Bolies made us worry bout the wilderness, now you gotta worry about...”


“The skyfuck?”


“For simple murder? Hardly. All you gotta worry about is your conscience, retaliation and hell. Its a little equation. How bad will I feel about this guy not being around anymore, his friends missing him, his family suffering from his loss? How likely are his homies or his gang to come after me and grease me back? Do I believe in a transcendent justice, a post-mortem reckoning that sets right all wrongs of this mortal coil? You get two out of three and you can kill. If you don't give a shit about the guy, if you know you can handle the heat, if you know you're just gonna end up wormshit anyways, it's easy.”


“Where does Xiu fall off? You don't think he...”


“He probably does.”


Pedro bent his brows and shook his head as if trying to fling the very thought of the insinuation out of his head. “No way. We don't talk about such things, but I'd know. No way that guy's a sheep. He's lifelong Dub-PT, nobody here believes in hell outside the obvious.” He knocked on the wall of the screaming colonia behind him.


“The hub churches do good business.”


“He's zoning for cock and puss, baby. No sheepery in his glasses.”


“Were his parents clicks?” She read the confusion on his face and nearly wept—their history had been erased. “Clericals? Chrissies and Clares—Clicks. They were two parties that were sometimes... During the Federation.”


In a moment the fog of slang gave way to a bit of understanding, to Molly's relief. “Oh right, I heard about those. Yeah, best thing the Trees ever did was skyfuck every last one of them kids and pack a cruise missile into every one of their arcades. At least ninos don't gotta walk past hub churches.”


“But is our Sino-Mesoamerican friend drawn from their lots? Could be a closeter.”


“I'm telling you, I know the guy, he's fucking useless, but he's a killer. He ain't a sheep.”


“He ever held a gun down on you? He did me, you'll recall. He had a fear in his eye. I'm an old woman—shit, probably goddamn near the oldest in the whole WPT—no retaliation, no real loss if another toothless number like myself gets it. He's froze up on hell.”


It was Pedro's turn to spit now, and he followed it with a long pause. He didn't respond with words, just getting on his bicycle and pushing off. Molly got on hers and followed. The free trade pavilion went on for kilometers made even longer by the serpentine path demanded for security's sake. He was being watched right now by the surveillance drones, his movements analyzed by the metaprocessor regardless of which path he took, but the overseer drones at the various colonias were to be avoided. The noise of the factories had been identified early on by the Trio as a strategic cover for speaking without airborne eavesdroppers getting a piece of the action, and the industrial setting was fertile ground for revolutionary action already anyways. Might have led to a nasty strike—a sit down scene that made it impossible for the skyfucks to retaliate, lest they blow up the expensive machinery the Trees had brought over from Asia. But it would never happen—the overseer drones swooped in every day at exactly 0500, one to each factory, lowering themselves silently to a couple of feet above the ground where they hovered. Each projected a true and undeniable image of a professionally attired Chinese woman, attractive and smiling. Always smiling. She would read a list of names, and those not named were given four minutes—thats exactly 240 seconds—to hustle on out of the pavilion. If anyone tarried, the nearest overseer drone spun around and fired two custom carbon, laser-targeted darts directly into the pupils of the straggler's eyes. Better a dead producer to render than a potential troublemaker—they had no human empathy, they were based in outer space and they knew there was no hell for holograms.


There was but one path through the pavilion, and only Pedro and Xiu knew it nowadays. And now the abuelita. She was a lifelong revolutionary, a gangster with no boss, a hellraiser with white hair. No way she didn't remember every single turn and twist of the ride. He took a track through the colonias that ended up putting them on the other side of the free trade pavilion in an overgrown creek along which they walked their bikes. They walked a mile or more until they reached the place where a labor crew had strung a net of razor wire and signs in five languages warning that the creek beyond this point was heavily mined. Pedro's teacher had strung a pulley over one of the last trees, where one could tie one's bike and pull it up over the edge after scaling up and out of the creek. First Pedro and then Molly got out of the creek, finding themselves facing what Molly immediately informed him had once been I-435.


“Pretty sufficient test of the theory, eh?”


“I don't even know what this theory is. You seem to have some kind of Tree guardian angel, and that chica is more than happy to let you run your mouth about the good ol' days when we had instantaneous representation and the wilderness, long as you are wherever you've been.” He sucked on his nic inhaler, letting it set before he went to the bump. “But her eyes skip over your ass when the bolts fall in the greez.”


“His.” She had the ghost of a smile on her face.


“Come again?”


“You referred to my guardian angel as a 'chica,' my theory is that its a chico.”


Pedro snorted. “Some ol' Tree-hugger snitch cum Admin that you let stink up his fingers back in twenty fifty three?”


“Before that—had to be before forty nine.”


Pedro smiled mischievously. She was easily the coolest old woman he'd ever met, though he'd only met a few and none as old as this one. “Must have been some pretty primo shit to keep an hombre hanging on forty five, fifty years, no? I got no idea what that's like.”


There was a long time when nobody talked, and they just listened to the wind rattle the wall of junk and wire.


“Doubt I'll get to.”

Nobody For President!

I intend to cut this down to size and use it as my primary fundraising mechanism on the road. I will sell this little tract for spare change. Enjoy, and share your thoughts!

The next president of the United States will be walking into a growing catastrophe of American decline. Our economy is in serious trouble, our armies tied down in wars that Nobody knows how we can win. A number of ecological disasters are hanging over our heads—from overfishing to smog, desertification to strip mining, ocean dead zones to the dreaded global warming. And every day our freedom—the freedom to defend ourselves, take care of ourselves, speak for ourselves, think for ourselves and live our own lives—is trampled a bit more than the day before. We are told who we choose is of great importance. But what if Nobody can solve our problems? What if Nobody has the right ideas? What if Nobody really understands the real problems, and Nobody would do anything about them even if they did? John McCain, Barack Obama and a bunch of Nobodies (and Nobody thinks they can win) are what we have to work with. As an American citizen you have a right to choose (from the choices provided for you), so let's look and why you ought to Vote for Nobody!


Nobody Needs You!


This year, Nobody is talking about the issues. Nobody cares about policy—the boring stuff of asking how we pay for things and knowing what our money is being spent on. Nobody talks about anything but the polls, money or image issues. Nobody wants to know how we are going to bring good paying jobs back to this country as much as what Barack Obama's preacher or John McCain's temper are like. That's because almost Nobody gets to decide who the president is going to be. The media only cover campaigns that have a “viable” chance of winning. They base this on polls that ask their viewers and the public at large which candidates they support. Not surprisingly the candidates they don't talk about aren't as familiar to the people who listen to them for their news. But how do candidates get to the tops of the polls and thus get the headlines in the first place? By having lots of money to pay the media for advertisements with. Nobody thinks its wrong that a candidate has to have money to pay TV, radio and print outlets for ads before those outlets will talk about them enough to do well enough in the polls to be considered viable by those same outlets. Nobody calls it by its real name: a racket. If the media talked about policy and specifics, Nobody would be able to tell the viable candidates apart. That's because they are chasing after the same cash cow interest groups—trial lawyers, lobbyists, executives and big investors. Only these people have enough money to pay the media enough for “viability;” Nobody needs your vote as much as they need a rich man's dollar. That's why Nobody Needs You!


Nobody Can Save the Economy


If you can remember learning about the Great Depression in school, you will remember that FDR put into place several safeguards to make sure nothing like it could ever happen again. Things fell apart because big banks had been loaning money they didn't have to Wall Street speculators making money out of thin air. To stop this FDR put into place reserve requirements—banks had to have a certain amount in reserve to cover their loans (not 100%, just 10% to pay for defaults). He also signed the Glass-Stegall Act, which made it so that banks had to stay out of risky speculation where they had gambled their members' money. It is common sense—don't be lending more than you can afford and don't risk money people have trusted you with.


For thirty years now Nobody has been defending federal regulation of business, and “deregulation” has been the policy of both parties. President Clinton phased out the reserve standards and repealed Glass-Stegall—he could be sure of bipartisan “unity” for this one. The result is that banks have lost trillions now, and they have yet to announce the full extent of the damage. They spent trillions of dollars in reserves on risky speculation thanks to the Democrats and Republicans finding something they could agree on, and the result is they are now trying to cover their losses by raising interest rates on homeowners. Nobody is talking about re-regulating banking, and Nobody wants to get to the root of this problem: Wall Street's deathgrip on the government.


And Nobody thinks that the fact nothing is Made in the USA anymore is a serious problem, because Nobody wants to get rid of the free trade deals that are getting us into this mess. Wall Street is making money and Nobody thinks that they might not speak for everybody in America. When American workers are competing with peasants for jobs, wages fall, stay low and people suffer. Nobody has a plan for reversing the bipartisan “unity” record of redistributing wealth from the many to the few. Nobody wants to be accused of “redistributing wealth,” Nobody realizes that wealth is ALWAYS redistributed. Nobody wants to say that the pro-business, capitalist, Wall Street system redistributes wealth upwards. The cash cows and for-profit media don't want to hear that, so Nobody says it. Obama and McCain both support NAFTA, the WTO and every bilateral bill they ever had a vote on. Nobody has a chance of bringing wages, wealth and jobs back to the working people of this country as long as Wall Street finances the campaigns. That's why Nobody Will Save the Economy!


Nobody Will End the War!


When one street in the entire country gets to make the decisions that affect every American neighborhood, it requires a great deal of violence. There is enough to feed, clothe, house, educate and medicate every American, but millions skip meals, live in the streets, rely on hand-me-downs and have no access to medicine. That can only happen if billions and billions of dollars are put into a black hole—destroyed. The most efficient way to do this is with war. Every bullet, bomb, dead soldier who has been housed and fed and trained, every helicopter that crashes flushes thousands of dollars down the toilet. Nobody wants to spend money on ensuring everyone has enough to be free, so we have to burn the money in wars. As long as the pro-business redistribution of wealth continues, so will meaningless wars like Vietnam, the Cold War and Iraq.


And Nobody is talking about the fact that the number one industrial export from the United States is arms. Nobody wants to cut the annual three-quarters of a trillion dollar military budget, because nobody wants to hurt the arms businesses. Nobody seems to think that perhaps making war production the basis of our economy might require us to keep fighting new wars to keep the gears running. Obama and McCain have both said they will INCREASE defense spending, and Nobody says they will withdraw every US soldier from Iraq. Needless to say, Nobody knows how to win there because Nobody has any idea what winning would actually mean. Multi-billion dollar corporations aren't worried, because it makes money for a few and throws trillions more down the tubes. Nobody wants to give that money to everybody, because then the Wall Street types really wouldn't be that special any more. That's why Nobody Will End the War!


Nobody Will Set Us Free!


There are more than 2 million people in prison in the United States; we imprison a higher percentage of our population than almost any other country. Our prisons are dangerous places where rape, murder and gangs are found everywhere, and they do almost nothing to help the people who find themselves there. Nonetheless, almost all of the people in our prisons end up on the streets again at some point, usually to simply turn around and go back. This is especially disturbing when we realize that sixty percent of the people in prison are sent there for nonviolent offenses—most of these for drugs. Nobody wants to talk about whether or not we have too many people in prison, because prisons are big business. Corporate prisons are one of the fastest growing industries in the US, and billions are made off of prison labor. Nobody wants to be seen weak on crime, and the news spends all its energy making us afraid of our own neighbors. Nobody thinks about what a world without prisons might be like. They can't because prisons are built for the same reason wars are fought—to destroy wealth without helping people. Keeping someone in prison costs less than sending a person to college, but if we didn't send millions to prison we would have to spend billions in some other way. The result would be rich people not being quite so special. Nobody wants to see that, so Nobody will promise to send fewer people to jail.


Even besides our prisons, Bush has expanded the power of the executive to have you thrown in jail without trial, tortured, judged by military officers as opposed to a jury, disposessed of your property and to allow the government to spy on you. Nobody will give specifics about which expansions of state power they will end if president, because Nobody wants to give that sort of thing up. Neither Obama nor McCain have said that they would change ANY of Bush's powergrabs. Politicians don't give up power, they seek it out. As long as there are politicians serving as president, the threats to our security—secret arrests, secret prisons, torture, secret surveillance and denial of a trial by jury—will remain on the books. That's why Nobody Will Set Us Free!


Vote For Nobody!


So if Nobody is willing to talk about Big Media's shakedown of our democracy, if Nobody wants to get money completely out of our politics, if Nobody is willing to talk about Wall Street redistributing our wealth into their pockets, if Nobody will talk about getting rid of all our free trade scandals, if Nobody wants to end wars even if they could and if Nobody can stop them as long as they are making billions for a tiny few, if Nobody will start to look for solutions that don't involve the cruelties of prison and if Nobody wants to rollback the violations of our rights under Bush, what are we to do? The only choice for someone who cares about our country not being crass, broke, at war or under tyranny is to Vote for Nobody!


How do you vote for nobody? It is pretty easy really. You have three options for voting for Nobody. The first is the easiest—don't vote. People will tell you that you don't get to complain and that you are failing in some noble duty if you don't vote. But if voting had any real chance at changing things, they would have outlawed it long ago. Neither the Democrats or the Republicans have the vision nor the guts to make the changes that would mean the country we deserve. Neither McCain nor Obama will question capitalism, imperialism, republican democracy or executive power. So not voting makes a lot of sense. Still, politicians and talking heads will call you lazy if you don't vote and they will assume that you are stupid. A better choice is to pick out a Nobody on the ballot. Everybody knows Ralph Nader, and most people know of the Libertarian Party. But Nobody has any illusion that these people are going to win. But they might just stand for what you do, and if enough people vote for them, the major parties will notice that Nobody wants them around any more. Third Party candidates, however, tend to be weird and even if they won they would be so hogtied by the system that very little would likely get done. So a third and final option is to get your write-in ballot and write the word “Nobody” for President. If millions were to pick up write-in ballots and put in “Nobody” and millions more were to vote for a third party, we could keep all the candidates under 50%--Nobody really wins. Sure one of the two Wall Street sponsored candidates will still be in the Oval Office, but with millions choosing Nobody over them, maybe they would have to listen.


In the end, elections aren't meant to change things—they are meant to make us feel like we get to have a part in the show. It is like when a parent lets a little kid sit on their lap and act like they are driving: it keeps them entertained while the grown ups are in charge 100% of the time. The only way to change things is to make the politicians sweat with direct action in the streets. But we should be happy that we get the carnival of elections every other year, and we should make breaking the ballot an important part of breaking the wills of our rulers. So don't forget to register (if you haven't been to jail yet) and in November of 2008, support the only candidate that REALLY cares about your life: NOBODY!

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Occupied Part 1

For an introduction to the literary experiment going on here, check out this post .

This is the first chapter.


Pedro popped a nic-cartridge into his inhaler and took in a rush of stimulation, his consciousness rocking back and forth just a bit as his brain took the blow. It kept him sated, and he hadn't eaten in a few days. He'd had a soybrick in his hot little hands the day before yesterday, and was getting ready to pinch off a chunk to ball up and squeeze down his desperate throat when a hollow eyed little girl looked sad and played with the hem of her skirt. Things were mean, but nobody could be that mean. The girl's daddy had probably been skyfucked, her mama stooped over in a comm-farm somewhere in the Plain Zone. Hungry refugees make for bitter friends, but Pedro couldn't keep it—he gave her the brick, cussing in his mouth.


He wasn't quite sure how long one could go without food. Pedro was unlucky enough to live almost all 23 of his long years as a ward of the Western Production Territories so he had conducted something of a two decade experiment in answering that question. In the Plain Zone you could glean during the right months of the year, and that kept you awake at the very least. And soybricks, cornballs and Pigz were all made right there in the Labor Annex. Living here in the KC Burbs you sometimes went without rations if the train got skyfucked or ambushed by freedom fighters, but in the Plain Zone you were close to the source of things. He'd heard the grinding rip of a skyfuck in the distance the other night, so he guessed the OcTech was to blame for his aching belly. \


For all he knew you could go almost a week without food and you'll just wish you were dead. Water was different, though. He saw a couple of ninos get real thirsty and die wracked with dry heaves and itchy groans when he was a little one himself. The Plain Zone you were worried about water. Here in KC signs on the river declared in five languages that “water thieves would be instantly liquidated”, but they didn't mind people collecting rain and they got just enough here. Plus the river being so near kept fees low.


At least the game kept him in nic and yeyo. The West Olathe People's Army was as good a gang as any—better than the barefooted KlanKickers and White Front that had been whipping the shit out of backsliders with fencing wire back in the Peez. He'd been in the burbs for a while now—maybe a year or two, he wasn't quite sure the dates. Olathe was as shitty as they came, grass muscling up through degraded streets, forests of fetid toppling squats lit up by gunplay. The Trees didn't give a damn if they killed each other—saved them processing capacity—so they let all the gangs and militias survive the invasion. Its not like there was much any of them could do to effectively resist satellite-mounted rail guns turning them into an unholy mess. And the Trees knew that the nic, the yeyo, the speed, addies, pump and hotwire kept people producing, and these are the Production Territories, after all. Long as they got theirs, the gangs could have their's. They always talked nice about how it was a sign of respect for Western culture, and of course it was. But the Trees killed anything that wasn't in their plan, Western Culture or no.


“When the fuck they getting here, ese?” Xiu was pissed. They had been huddled down on the sweaty concrete for two days now, waiting for their cargo. The ceilings soared where they hadn't collapsed in some long-forgotten fire. The once polite padding on the pews was stiff and foul, stained with aged mold. The nic never lasted, so Pedro took a bump before he answered.


“If you keep asking stupid questions, I'm going to kick the shit out of you. They are rolling incog. It takes a while. Shut up and zone, baby.” Pedro was zoning himself—his eyeglasses casting new worlds across his field of vision, transforming the desecrated cathedral into the double-octofinal round of the Asian Trio Cup—the first of three legs between Kolkata FC and Dynamo Moscow, the neutral leg being played in Hong Kong's SemanTeque Stadium. Kolkata had a midfielder who had been born in the Western Production Territories and adopted from an orphanage by a middle class Bengali family. A strawberry blonde number, real nice chest and legs, named something uppity like Sriman Rajagopalan or something.


The game was 4-6, a slow one. Xiu groaned. “You won't mind if I...”


“Course not. May come help it along.”


“Why not.” He slid down his pants—Kevmesh guaranteed to last five years or it was your ass, elastic drawstring waist, choice of colors. Ejercito Westy rolled in green. “Oy, cunado, there's a hot zone over here.”


The match was a snooze job—everybody was gunshy of throwing elbows or taking out knees at this point in the thing. Pedro reached out and seemed to grab the top left edge of the whole world (as far as he could see, others would see a man moving with no sense) and ripping it away in a single smooth motion, a curtain of experience being rent to reveal a whole new place. He was now standing in a well-stocked, shimmering clean and pillow talk quiet shopping mall, a variety of avatars leaving various chills and zones. “Where you at?”


“Level 41, SlickZone.” Xiu hummed a bit in approval. “I don't want to ruin it. Right up your alley,
ese.”


Pedro's av galloped to the elevator, pushed “41” and he saw the floor of the mall fall fast beneath him. He actually crouched a bit and his heart skipped in spite of himself. In a matter of seconds he was there—if they got anything but the decade old castoffs of all the fat kicked-back Chinks it would have taken less time than clicking an old remote control between channels. “It's on sunside or nightside?” It made no sense to speak of cardinal directions in a virtual world, so the Western Production Territories Hub was a 512 story hotel with 64 ports in each—chills, zones and churches—lined up 32 to a side of a single corridor that was divided into sunside and nightside.


“What do you think?” That meant nightside. The av galloped down without needing food to fuel his exertions, reaching the seething entrance to SlickZone. He stepped in and as his eyes seemed to be adjusting he realized what was going on and his prick stirred. Two thick girls with sagging breasts, fecund bellies and rattling asses along with three muscle bound boys were in a knotted pile of fornication. A Subsaharan fellow, rather light-skinned like the ones he'd heard they once had in the Western Production Territories, with toned legs and a taut rubbery chest was using his mouth on a ripped Chinese man, one of the plumpers gobbling down alongside. These girls were as hot as they got—he was aroused to the point of hurt—with their sweaty flapping, these boys as mouthfuckable as any chum he'd ever had. Save maybe that one thresher he'd done trades with in the break room at the soybrick vats. But that'd been since he was a kid and these boys here were men. “Oh man...”


“I know.” Xiu's av was involved in a game of you-show-me-yours... with an impossibly heavy blonde, her fat curls a lie. In primary life you were far more likely to be able to count this girl's ribs, but the Hub was a place where things could be like they used to be. Pedro's av, and Pedro himself moved closer to Xiu and began to work him over. It always made zoning fun to have a meat friend there with you to play along with the home game. It could have gone on for hours—nothing made cumming harder than starving to death—but it was interrupted when the curtain ripped itself down and both men's instantly clothed avs stood in a security control room—gray with a variety of surveillance screens floating about them. The images were simulated—only a select caste of Research and Analysis Wing analysts and a couple of Russian metaprocessors saw any recon video, but it flattered them to let producers play spy—they served as a proximity warning for their cargo. “Off to work, old boy.”


They each shook their heads and the glasses went transparent. Each gripped his AR-15 and duckwalked to one of the windows where they could see the approach of Therese. “Who the fuck is that with her?” Xiu was jumpy—he'd been doing meth all morning and his pupils were the size of cigar burns down the middle of his sweaty eyes. “It's just supposed to be Therese.”


Shut up. Don't do nothing.” Therese was skirting the bowed-out wire fence, rusted and choked with invasive plants. The grass was chest high, but the late evening light came in sideways at Therese's head: short, neat hair with a razor sharp part, ghost white highlighted with flickering fiber optics, wrap around shades that made it so she could see in the dark, the WOPA spirit guide (a copperhead snake) tattooed across her neck and the left side of her face. Her clothes were not billowy and colorful like the fashion, just ejercito Westy green, not-quite-form fitting Kevmesh. Behind her followed a bent woman older than almost any left nowadays. If they didn't get buried under the rubble of a Trio cruise missile or liquidated by a skyfuck, they starved. Had to be a tough old chica to make it this far. She had to have been an old woman already when the missles flew, after the Federation collapsed and the Trio threw down the occupation. Surprised she didn't piss her old ass self to death those first 40 days and nights, when a quarter of the continent got blown up, cut down, suicidal and infanticidal with the madness of an unmanned barrage of military violence. But here she is, keeping up with Therese. Maybe it's Drag Your Emaciated Grandma to Work Day in Westy.


Pedro yelled out the window. “The next step falls in the grave, females.”


“Grave? Your hungry ass would turn us into barbacoa. Make some cardboard tortillas to wrap it up with,” Therese said.


“Even still,” he said, leveling the barrel at the still distant women, down a gentle but strategic slope from the window he braced on, “until I know who this abuelita is, moving is fatal.”


The old woman stood erect, swinging her broad shoulders into place. “I'm Molly Teachout.”


“Who the fuck is that, Pedro?” Xiu was getting nervous, a heavy film of perspiration coating his shaved, densely tatted head. “I swear to god, I'll fucking kill them man. Oh Jesus, I knew it shouldn't be taking this long.”


“Chill out,” he gritted through his teeth at his whimpering comrade. He annunciated the next words with formal intensity. “You are becoming a liability.”


Xiu popped his mouth shut in absurd, drug-perverted fear. Pedro yelled back out the window. “I got a terabit sizzle kid up here. He's armed heavier'n a bus driver in the Caliphate. Strangers spook him, Molly. What are we supposed to do?”


“This is your cargo,” Therese said.


“Keep your voice down, don't say anything else, and don't fucking move.” At this moment a drone with cham-mat framing was blending into the blue of the sky, hovering above the clouds and drawing power off the sun. It was listening to everything in a 50 mile radius, seeking suspicious phrases and passing them off to a metaprocessor in Moscow or St. Petersburg to make a determination about whether or not this chatty number should be a target. In a matter of milliseconds it has decided if the person speaking is a liability to production and harmony, alerting a clerk in Bangalore, Mumbai or Kolkata to take a peep with the same drone's visual surveillance. It does not matter if you hide underground or move at night or keep moving—Full Spectrum Occupation Tech saw all. If the OcTech decided that “This is your cargo” being spoken at a church mere miles outside the KC green zone was too dangerous to countenance, the skyfuck would fire a custom-carbon spear from 3,000 miles above them. The spear started out up there as a five foot long, four inch thick 50 pound rod and ended up driving through the meaty part of your innards as slightly larger than a bullet less than a fifth of a second later. Nothing but the acrid stench of plasma behind it, a scattered corpse oozing alongside it. If the skyfuck didn't like what Therese had to say, they would have been dead before Pedro finished his next sentence. “Xiu, go search them. I'll cover you here.”


Nothing. “Okay.” It was quiet enough for Pedro to hear Xiu's teeth grinding all the way out. He stopped the clacking to order the women around. “Alright, Tess, let's put the weaponry on the ground.” Tess laid out her AR and then removed two side arms-one from her belt, the other from her ankle. She also tossed a SleepLight onto the ground. “I assume you're unarmed, abuelita?”


Molly bore a look of disgusted insult upon her face. “I've killed more men than you've screwed, you strung out little fuckup.”


The drugs drove Xiu into grave breach of protocol, reaching back to slap the old lady. Before his hand finished drawing back he was grinding his face into the dirt, on the ground with a smashed instep. As he fell following Molly's stomp to the top of his foot, her elbow connected with the bridge of his nose, popping cartilidge and shooting blood.


Pedro laughed. “You are okay, Molly. Put your arms on the ground or I'll have to kill my new best friend.”


“Much as you talk about it, I'll bet you've never killed.” She was looking right up into the window with sunburned intensity. “I'd almost be willing to die just so you can finally bust your cherry, ese.” She put an ancient Glock on the ground, and then a Caliph-Uzi and a butterfly knife. “Almost.” She giggled an aged note of superiority.


“Keep your hands out and come on in, slowlike.” The women walked as if in an old marriage rite they had seen in some period piece they'd played at in a zone. They stepped through the tall windows that had shot sheets of light into the church when people did such nasty things in public where all the neighbors could see. They kept it locked in their bedrooms now, quietly zoning into one of the hub churches, having thoroughly proved up their age. They stood in the comfortable moisture of the empty space, the late hour casting uncertain shadows and cooling the humidity to a tolerable level. “Now how the fuck do you mean?”


Therese responded with finger signs—the OcTech could see through the roof, but its resolution wasn't that good. She recited the latest pop hit—a shrieky Russian bit with lots of three-quarter tones—while her hands spelled her message. “She needs to go to the green zone.”


Pedro recited the Western Production Territories Operating Edicts, required to be memorized by four years—“...and will cheerfully submit to the protection and generosity of our noble guests...” and on—while his fingers replied. “How?”


“You can move 1500 kilos of pump but not a 40 kilo woman?”


“Pump don't sneeze.”


“Neither will she.”


“OcTech will let tubes of gel slide, but it'll bite on an animal.”


“You just don't want to.”


“She is a liability.”


“You saw what she can do. She is less a liability than Xiu.”


Pedro's fingers twitched without meaning while he rolled it over. “Who is she, anyways?”


“Molly Teachout.” Pedro shrugged his shoulders and shook his head in response. “Your parents didn't teach you history.”


“My parents didn't teach me to walk.” His eyes expressed nothing, his mouth still babbling about “...punctuality, diligence, obedience and security.” He was too small to remember the chaos after the Bolivaran Federation of American People's came a clattering down, but he wasn't sure the skyfucks kept him any more secure than rioting anarchy would have. And nobody gave a shit about punctuality, diligence or obedience when there wasn't a government back then.


“She is the last Bolie.”


Pedro whistled. “They are all dead.”


“All but one.”


He fairly trembled. “She is skyfuck bait.”


“She hasn't been stewed yet.”


“Her luck runs out when she gets smuggled into the greez.”


Therese held her hands up and bowed her head without breaking eye contact, a gesture of warning that she was to be making a suspicious move. She reached into her green optic-studded Kevmesh jacket and pulled out a soybrick with 6 months scrip taped to the outside. Pedro's honor prevented him from indulging his first impulse: to tear into the brick with his teeth, barely gumming it before swallowing, forcing it all into his gut in a matter of seconds. “That's three times your usual fee.”


“Wish I could add it to my will.”


“What's a will?”


“Old saying.” He paused to calmly break off a piece. He'd have to save half for Xiu, who'd need a FirstAidTech fix pretty shortly. “Why do I need to get her to the greez in the first place?”


“A well-placed customer wants her.”


“For what?”


“What do Bolies do?”


“Kill labor organizers? Fuck everything up? Give long-winded speeches?”


“Revolution.”


Pedro laughed out loud. He cackled gratuitously at the shamelessness of it all. “Overthrow satellites, supercomputers and drones?”


“This is more than you need to know.”


“I don't like risking my guts for a pipe dream.”


“You are risking it because the commandante orders it.” Pedro was stuck now. “So any more questions?”


Pedro shook his head. Molly smiled and spoke up. “Suppose we move tonight, or wait til morning? Either way, let's eat.” Her calm was either hubris or prophecy—Pedro was perturbed to learn that he'd have a pitch-side seat to the verdict.

Thursday, May 8, 2008

The Most Audacious Blog Post EVER

I have elected to begin my blog with a half-assed cop at a literary revolution.

It seems to me that I was born with almost perfect precision in regards to timing. Perhaps our parents' peers can claim the demon of television and our grandparents can hang their hat on the eternally versatile medium of radio just as their elders praised telephony and telegraphy, but the advent of the Internet takes the basic premise of long range communication to something else entirely. Perhaps not since the kids raising hell in the alleys behind Johnny Gutenberg's press has there been a generation so blessed. Wires, phones, radios and TVs made it possible for strangers to be talked at by boxes or with one person at a time (the further away, the costlier). The net creates a new world that can allow people to create relationships with strangers on any continent and to get their fifteen minutes on the cheap. It is nothing less than a quantum leap forward—a permanent slip into an entirely new dimension—and I saw it from the ground up.

I like to sometimes still refer to the net as “the Information Superhighway.” Remember in '96 or '97 when it was still being called that? I was a—If I can be a skotch immodest—rather bright little kid, keeping up with the news and whatnot, and I had no fucking idea what they were talking about. It was a meaningless phrase—probably why nobody has used it since knowing your way around a gopher file has been called for. When an infomercially looking piece came on PBS one Saturday afternoon setting out to explain this information superhighway, I parked my 12 year old ass down to get a grip on this magic they said was being worked.

I won't repeat what they told me—really all I remember is when they described the difference between .com, .org, .mil, .edu and .mil—but I filed that away with all the other info I was reading out of World Book encyclopedias I'd convinced the teachers to let me take home. If you need any proof of the net's impact, look no further that when I read encyclopedias for fun I was the “weird nerdy kid” but now there's a word for the intoxication it brings—a Wikihole. I got bit with the bug when I got to middle school in 1996. At my suburban North Texas institution of barrel-bottom learning we had little besides too much money and as a result a surfeit of PCs. If you got to school as early as two hours before the first bell, you could go to the computer lab and get online at a top notch 28.8 kilobits per second. I remember the daily race to grab one of the one or two machines with Intel Celeron processors, failing that the few 486s, the smattering of 386s or one of the numerous and hated 286s. I got an email address (an FCA kid, I laughably chose JesusFreak49@hotmail.com) and was off and running by age 12, right alongside the Popular Internet from the very beginning.

I'm sure some spectacled white guy in ill-fitting pants will read this at some point and scoff at my presumption, having once gratified himself off of ARPANET porn. To this gentleman (I'll save half our species the ignominy by using gendered language) I'd tell that I am talking not about technology as much I am a cultural innovation—an echelon jump in terms of communication media. There have been people getting online for a few decades now, but the presence of technologically backward folks there is as recent as 13 or 14 years ago. I am of a great age to see a media that will surely outlive me by several centuries and swallow all its predecessors along the way in its embryonic stages. Perhaps it is true that nothing put out here ever dies, so some of the people then will still have this around to read (gives a whole new reason to leave comments, huh?).

It is this epochal jump that necessitates a literary revolution. Before the printing press, creating literary art in the form of printed novels made no sense. Literacy made left-handedness look positively normative and the process of producing each copy was so intense as to render the form unthinkable. An oral culture meant that bardic epics and long form poetry were selected for—they were easy to remember and pass on. Try memorizing 1000 words of Shakespeare (in the print age, but drawn from an older tradition) and 1000 words of Dickens and see which one is easier. Rhyme and meter are natural mnemonics that impacted the possible contents of their pieces, not to mention the meaningful organization. Printing presses sped up an already present process—the advent of prose fiction and the development of the novel. This medium has produced the fiction we read, with certain inherent and typically unseen limitations. A printed novel by its very nature as a physical object has need of a beginning and end. It also must be of a marketable length—60 pages would be far too short, 2300 far too long. Further, it is a static object. At times authors will release “authoritative versions” of their signature works, but these tend to merely restore cuts called for by publishers in the original go around. This static object is the tip of a creative iceberg—the final version of a tale that has been edited, revised, excised and manipulated dozens of times from inception to publication, most of its art hidden from view. The need for publishers with access to cash for production and distribution is another limitation on what is allowed for. Finally a novel is a product of a single person, or perhaps occasionally a duo—never a community of people. You could probably think of some others (throw out some ideas in the comments for our progeny to see).

The limitations I listed also happen to be the things a net-inspired literature would avoid. To this point net literature has consisted of web-based literary journals recreating on a cheaper and less respected scale the same forms print introduced us to centuries ago. But imagine an Internet literary form as distinct from the novel as novels were from epic poetry. Imagine combining the comfortable spontaneity of blogging with the fictional world-casting of fiction writing. Imagine if you could see a long work of fiction across its entire lifespan, and imagine if other Internet writers created subplots, counterplots and related stories in the same world on their own time. You could have a form that could be as long or as short as made sense for the tale, that could reach millions without corporate interference, that could change and grow over time, that could involve a community in tightening the narrative, directing the story and creating depth and breadth impossible in the printed novel. It could even be an endless story, a fictional saga that lasted decades, characters changing and growing as they would if they were real people. The possibilities are wide and can only be fully plumbed when more people get involved.

For no reason besides sheer sadistic joy in seeing serious people using ridiculous neologisms, I coin this literary innovation a NoBlogVel. Please come up with something better.

To the end of promoting this idea, I am hereby (historian progeny producing textbooks for 25th century schools...) commence the publication of the world's first NoBlogVel. This is a cyberpunky, dystopic, post-apocalytic number I just started pouring out this week and that keeps compelling new details. Frankly, it is set a while after some rather not good stuff I'd been writing recently. I'm not saying this is good, but I feel like I have world I want to explore alongside everyone else—see what other people find in this setting. I have no title for it—the filename is Occupied, so let's go with that for a while. Over time look for updates of Occupied and I encourage criticism, addenda and parallel inspired writings from peers online. Let's see where this can go (and if you start your own NoBlogVel, let me know, I'd love to participate).

Immodest? Certainly. Silly, in light of the fact that absolutely nobody reads this blog at the moment? With no doubt. But it is called for, and whether or not I do this some new fiction literary form will overtake us alongside this media. This is an attempt to play a role in this change. Enjoy Occupied and join the cause!

Thursday, May 1, 2008

First Post

To a world of friends, family and neighbors
where the currency is human connection
and desire liberated its highest value,

To those who recognize that this world might very well be impossible
but who resist nonetheless
recognizing that eternal resistance is perhaps utopia's only reality,

To those who reach out and help a stranger
and in so doing secure me as a friend for life,

and To those who have loved me before I Lit Out
and for whom I'm fighting and alongside whom I'll celebrate victory:
FREEDOM

THIS CHRONICLE IS DEDICATED