Chapter 2: The Violence of Entitlement
In olden times, empires rose and fell. Like one big, long-assed breath, with a lot of dead bodies and fancy dress balls in between.
They were run by one ruling fella—yer Julius Caesar, Constantine type. Empire building was a violent business, I think we can all agree on that. When yer Constantine decided to bring civilization and conquering to your land, that meant soldiers, rape, murder. It’s impossible to impose alien renditions of god, economics, culture, and political infrastructure without a tsunami of bloodshed.
And don’t forget about the looting n’ pillaging.
Empire building inspired an awful lot of violence.
In empire times, one ruling man forcefully thrust his specific vision about everything, from city planning (where the native folks who survived lived in slums designed by architects of the new empire) to new job descriptions (where everyone who looked like the civilization-bringer was the boss over everyone who didn’t). The Constantines had certain ideas about how life should be lived, and they made sure everyone in their self-projected path had a fabulously vivid understanding of those ideas.
Today, Bill Gates does not ride into battle against tattooed blue men. Howard Schultz does not rape the daughters of kings. The Walton family does not burn towns to the ground.
We live in kinder, gentler times.
Past civilizations were honest about what they were up to. “We’re the fucken’ Spaniards, man, and we’re gonna control all the trade routes and gold supplies on the planet, and you can kiss our randy indian-raping asses if you think otherwise.”
Now, it’s more like, “Oh, hi! We’re the Walton family! We’re here to offer jobs to your community! We’re here to make yer little world a better place! Oh, what’s that you say? Your grandfather committed suicide because we rendered his tire store obsolete? Well, obviously he wasn’t as committed to serving the community as we are. What’s that you say? We don’t offer health insurance? Well, go on down to the welfare office and get some medical coupons. The state government is as committed to us serving your community as we are! It’s all good, toots!”
Or, “Hi! We want to bring jobs and industry to your poor nation! We really love your country, and if you’ll just remove those pesky child labor laws and let us own your water supply, we think you will look pretty appetizing to our shareholders. What’s good for business is good for everyone in the world! Yippee!”
The idea is the same now as it was in olden times: nothing has value unless it benefits the men who rule. The earth, animals, people of color, and white women are still resources within the business venture. It has always been this way with this man. He always has to one-up his daddy. I do not know why this is so important to him.
In the twenty-first century, after lots of “advancements,” he controls the world from his corner window office and is home in time for dinner.
Need coal?
Blow the muthafucken’ tops of the mountains off!
Need water?
Brand it, take control of a region’s water supply, and have a very Nestlé day!
Need oil?
Vampiristically suck the earth’s blood out! Who cares if the oil is what keeps the earth’s plates from rubbing together and causing catastrophic earthquakes! Who cares if it destroys the land and life in Nigeria and the Gulf Coast region?
Need tomatoes?
Enslave undocumented workers, bioengineer the bitches, and celebrate when the US judicial system says you have a right to patent seeds! Be sure to strong-arm any small-time farmer who has land you want!
Need milk?
Impregnate them heifers and keep ’em in a constant hormonal nightmare for their entire lives! Take their babies and put them in miniscule cages from birth to death! Their meat is called veal, and folks just love it!
In live action, entitlement involves someone taking what they believe to be theirs. It’s difficult to conceptualize the “honor” folks may have for white men who show up with guns and deeds and proclamations about how life is gonna be until they take everything they want and decide it’s time to leave.
This sense of colonial-based entitlement is modeled in countless ways throughout daily life: loud cell phone conversations in public places, corporate takeovers, rampage killings, not stopping for pedestrians, shoving, stampeding, even trampling people to death in stores, bullying (including the ever winsome cyber bullying, which has inspired children to commit suicide), and countless microwars of many kinds.
Here is an example of how entitlement plays out in the US.
Bristow, Oklahoma, is a small town like many towns.
My cousin grew up there, after a six-year stint in Santa Maria. She liked Bristow well enough, with its jewelry store, clothing shops, cafés, a hardware store, drugstore, and all the other little local businesses that make a small town a self-sustaining economic ecosystem.
And then Wal-Mart invaded and colonized and homogenized the little town of Bristow. The government and Wal-Mart are great friends. Numerous federal laws, loopholes, and corrupt kickbacks pad Wal-Mart’s coffers, as they set about destroying pristine little local communities such as Bristow.
As the businesses closed, a ghost town took its place: shuttered windows, plywood storefronts. Everyone was forced to shop at Wal-Mart, where every product is made in China. All money flows out of the local community and out of the country. Every product is identical in every Wal-Mart in every town across the nation.
Then Super Wal-Mart dropped a bomb on little Bristow. The regular Wal-Mart would be closing, leaving a corrugated steel carcass and acres of drought-causing pavement behind. When the US dropped atomic bombs on Japan, “Little Boy” stripped Hiroshima, and three days later, “Fat Man” obliterated Nagasaki.
This is kinda like that.
Super Wal-Mart offers bioengineered Monsanto-sourced robo-food, evil-pharmaceutical corporation drugs, and cut-rate medical care via Wal-Mart doctors.
The only jobs available are through Wal-Mart, which has an agreement with the government about health care. Wal-Mart agrees to pay their employees little enough so that they are eligible for medical coupons. The US government and taxpayers, then, pay for Wal-Mart’s employee health program.
You know that stereotype of the welfare mother? She’s usually black, lazy, and entirely unambitious. Well, this little lady would be hard pressed to compete with Wal-Mart.
This doesn’t look like a brutal occupation, given the slow death of broken spirits, and it doesn’t smell like an occupation, so long as you avoid wandering around what used to be your town, and it doesn’t sound like an occupation, unless someone documented each scene in each family’s home when they realized Wal-Mart had destroyed their livelihood and edited it all into a time-lapse documentary.
Nonetheless, it is a brutal occupation.
The result is a conquered land and a colonized and—what is most damaging—deeply assimilated population. Many folks do, after all, love Wal-Mart and would defend the very thing that destroyed their community with their last dying breath.
This is presently one of the hallmarks of people in the US: we demand politicians who are going to fuck us over, and we fight for the right to be shafted by corporations.
We actively partake in our own abuse and demise as a civilization.
We think of this as “moving forward.”
It’s not exactly fun to think about all of these occupations based on entitlement, but it is quite nice to recognize it for what it is and then figure out one’s next move from there à la Art of War. I don’t shop at Wal-Mart, but that is because I have the luxury of living in a place where there are plenty of other options. If I had no recourse, I would probably fight to get Wal-Mart out of my community, as many, many people have throughout the years. People such as Al Norman of Sprawl-Busters, Charles Smith of Wal-Ocaust and Wal-Qaeda T-shirt fame, the glorious souls at WalMartWatch.com, and Teamsters and Raging Grannies pretty much everywhere.
People in Mexico, Canada, and the UK are none too pleased with Wal-Mart, either.
There’s no Constantine here. The US is, instead, an intricate series of microempires, and the visions we forcefully thrust on others are generally considered to be nonviolent, friendly sounding things like “free markets” and “globalization.”
All the same, we have a genetic past that we can’t (or don’t want to) shake, which promotes new and improved forms of invading and colonizing.
Here in the US we rose magnificently and are presently falling in the manner of olden-time empires.
Now he hates fags.
Depending on who you talk to, god also hates feminists and a vast, infinitely complex population of people known as “Middle Easterners.” Israelis are, by way of geographic reality, Middle Easterners, but they are not called Middle Easterners, so god doesn’t include them.
In the US, god’s hatred is closely linked with the imagination and collective consciousness of white Christians.
His hatred works in mysterious ways.
In many countries, including my own, god’s hatred settles on women—those who do not cloak themselves according to his will, those who are raped, those who have no husband. God has been known to hate children born into devastating poverty, whoever happens to be indigenous, and those caught in the middle of a war.
Again, depending on whom you talk to, god hates Tibetans, Americans, Haitians, and Palestinians. Hindus, Muslims, Christians, ’n’ Jews.
But almost everyone everywhere can agree on one thing: god hates fags.
This is because the folks who “founded” the country were Christian, and the god-who-hates-fags often speaks to them. The Bible informs most Christians, and the Bible (Genesis 1:26, to be exact) says it’s okey-dokey to commit untold atrocities against indians and black people:
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
If you have a hard time seeing the part about god sanctioning a centuries-long indian holocaust and five hundred years of slavery, well, our forebears didn’t. Only white Christians were considered to be “man in our image.”
Indians, Africans, noncompliant whites, and eventually, African-Americans were lumped in with “every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” I deduce this based on three factors: indians, slaves, and noncompliant whites and black folks weren’t fish, and they did not fly or moo.
Hence, the ease of mind in writing important sentences that say stuff like, “All men are created equal.”
The idea people were getting from this Bible god was that they should claim dominion over everything that moved. This idea chaperoned the indian holocaust, slavery, and pretty much every atrocity since, right up to droning Afghan people to death.
Without god’s hatred to back folks up, whites would have been like, “Whoa, we’re killin’ an awful lot of people and buffalo here, don’t cha think?” But since Manifest Destiny was ordained by god, well dang, white folks simply had no say in the matter. “Our hands are tied! It’s not our fault god loves us best.”
A lot more people would have said, “I dunno, Dad, maybe it’s kinda wrong for us to be raping these women every night and selling their children and humiliating their men in every conceivable manner.” But god said they weren’t really women, children, and men so committing atrocities against them was actually part of getting through the pearly gates.
You don’t wanna be tinkerin’ with the will-o-god.
And so, too, organized religion escorted these crimes against humanity to the cotillion of US history.
Without denial of the indian holocaust and slavery, the violence that presently exists in the Americas could not sustain itself.
And the history of violence rages on.
This forced exile, called the Ulster Plantation, happened in the early part of the 17th century, when the king of Scotland—wanting to make nice with Britain—uprooted a population of rabble-rousing marauders on the border the two countries shared, and thousands of people were shipped off to Northern Ireland. This, by the way, is where the word plantation comes from and also a wonderful example of how acts of great violence live on to procreate other acts of great violence. Hundreds of years later, many descendents from this replanted population, known as the Scots-Irish, relocated to the American colonies and created plantations in the South for slaves to labor on. So hundreds of years after suffering under the subjugation of an enforced plantation, Scots-Irish people themselves founded plantations and subjugated others. To this day, most Scots-Irish people in the South are from slave-owning families.
Whee!
No force on earth will ever truly convince me that Northern (Scots) Irish people belong in Ireland. Where, exactly, should the Northern Irish go after living in Ireland for hundreds of years?
Damned if I know.
I’m certainly parroting an idea that my mother taught me to believe when I was a kid, and no matter how many ways I look at the situation as an adult, I can’t see a place for the Northern Irish people in Ireland. They cause nothing but problems with their Protestant elitism. Value judgments abound in my thinking here, and I make no apologies for them. I feel the exact same way about Israel in Palestine and white folks in the US. It’s just not cool for people to show up on other people’s land and start bossing everyone around.
Ye olde animosities are hardly ever rational, just, or even plausible. It is, though, an exceedingly good idea to make note of their existence and the special power they hold in our hearts.
Northern Irish and Israeli kids are raised hearing their parents say things that keep the animosities alive no less than Irish and Palestinian kids. When problems go back hundreds—sometimes thousands—of years, there is no middle ground, no diplomatic solution.
Nonetheless, it’s imperative to look at old animosities for what they are and try to understand the other side’s perspective. The Northern Irish were forced to move to Ireland against their will in the early 1600s. At some point, the people of Ireland have got to accept this reality. The Israelis were devastated after World War II. They needed a safe place, and the US and Britain didn’t want them in their countries, so everyone suddenly remembered where the Israelis were during biblical times. It’s deeply unfortunate that the Northern Irish and the Israelis don’t seem to have the graciousness to live in peace with the people who were there before them, and it is deeply unfortunate that the Irish and Palestinians have resorted to violence, which hardly inspires ungracious people to act graciously, but fuck, man, it gets tiresome when someone has their boot in your face while setting fire to your five-hundred-year-old olive groves.
Tibet, China, India, Pakistan, Kashmir, Iraq, Iran, Russia, Chechnya, Georgia, Somalia, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Sudan, Bosnia, and Serbia all have histories rife with ancient animosities.
Think of all the children listening to their parents, absorbing one story into their hearts.
Those are our roots no less than the Declaration of Independence.
Present-day people in the US descend from this, but we are in no way equipped to deal with it because our violent history is manipulated and glossed over throughout our education. In an endless cycle of indoctrination, we have normalized things that are pathologically abnormal. We are schooled to understand the Indians were “removed” from their lands and that slavery was a few bad apples in Ye Olde South. Unfortunate things may have occurred on the journey of self-determination against the British throne, but the blood and sorrow of anyone who disagreed with the way things were going down is hardly worth consideration.
These lies we are told as children don’t really serve us when we take a gander at our various places in the world. This denial we learn to lug around in our hearts debilitates us and prevents us from shifting the present power dynamic. It is costly and retards our growth as human beings.
I don’t know why we hang onto it.
Today, it is difficult to get vast populations mobilized around the fate of the Brown Pelican, the coastal Redwood, or all life in the Gulf of Mexico because things of the earth are considered beneath us—part of a wilderness that god explicitly directed us to tame and dominate. Their destruction is sanctioned violence under a deluded mindset.
If you own the land, you own the people who labor on it. You own the birds that fly in your airspace and the fish that swim in your rivers. You are not a mere aspect of the world, oh no. Rather, you straddle it like it’s your grumpy old nag, and you kick it in the stomach when it’s not doing what you want.
Transocean is the shady US-based company that owns the Deep-water Horizon oil rig, which, at the time of this writing, is pumping about 210,000 gallons of oil into the gulf every day with no end in sight. The company was located in the rigorously regulated Cayman Islands before it took tax shelter in Switzerland. Newspapers love to call Transocean a Swiss company, but it’s a US-based company and the local Swiss hate their guts.
How will Transocean and British Polluters even begin to compensate for this holocaust? They’re much more concerned about the profits lost from the oil pouring into the ocean than anything else. I hope the people in the US, Mexico, and Cuba rise up against these shitstains together. But here, we’re so conditioned to the idiocy of corporatocracy, we’ll probably rest well with the appointment of a White House commission packed with oil industry lobbyists to investigate.
Mexico and Cuba might start some shit, but we here in the US probably won’t have their backs.
We will go along with it ’cause, within the bounds of our indoctrination, it seems useless to worry about one little accident, and furthermore, we don’t know how to do what Gandhi said and simply take to the streets.
And so, we, the people, seem to be accepting yet another atrocity.
Our unchecked indoctrinated entitlement is very concerning.
Not long after it became clear that our tax dollars for schools, education, welfare, libraries, transportation, and health care were to be squandered on military bombs, shyster contractors, and operations against the people of Afghanistan and Iraq, a woman named Parisha invited me to speak at a big march against the “war” in Washington, DC.
I wanted to do it, but it was hard to get excited. If we oppose these brutal occupations, let’s oppose them for what they are, rather than what reptilian spin-lizards decided to call them.
Despite these lexical misgivings, I was of course honored to be invited to Washington DC, and I said yes. So Parisha signed me on and sent me an e-mail saying I would be staying at the Sheraton or Hilton or some other huge, global economy vampire that sucks revenue out of communities worldwide.
I was stunned that an antiwar organization would opt to funnel resources to multinational corporations over locally owned small businesses.
I was all, “Parisha, what’s up with this? Are you all really opposing the bombing of Iraq while giving your money to a huge corporation over a small locally owned business?”
This is when Parisha came out as a bit of a maverick within the antiwar organization machine. She told me that she was the one who had really pushed to bring me there and that no one else really knew about my work or why she was so insistent on bringing me to the march.
So Parisha did some research. She found me a really cool, locally owned inn to stay at and channeled some Marriot- or Hilton-intended funds.
I got to the very cool little inn and was met by Shawna, the mistress of all trades on duty. She showed me to my room and directed me to a street where I’d find a buncha restaurants, and I had a nice evening stroll. I ended up at an Ethiopian restaurant and had a good dinner. On my way back, I passed a dark basement bar with a red light shining on a pool table. The place was named something sinister sounding, like the Dragon’s Crypt or Beelzebub’s Lair. Something like that. I was hesitant to go in because it’s never seemed a good idea to go alone into an unknown bar in an unknown city. I had never, up to that point in my life, done such a thing.
But the way that red light was shining on that pool table, filling the window and spilling out onto the sidewalk compelled me. It beckoned like a candy store, a happy hooker, a swimming hole on a hot summer day.
Also, it felt auspicious and somehow right.
Despite my heretofore nonnegotiable self-defense tenets, I went into the Cryptic Lair, got a beer, and put my name on the chalkboard. There were eight or ten men, of various races and ages, crowded around the table. Not one other woman anywhere near the pool table.
Again, another no-no.
And again, I was surprised that my body was very relaxed, even though my mind was racing. I sensed that I was safe, though it was incredibly difficult to rationalize.
The men seemed to more or less know each other, and it was a friendly scene. I stood awkwardly off to the side for a few moments, until one of the men said, “Hey, I’m up next, you can have my seat.”
I felt acknowledged and welcomed by this simple action.
I relaxed a bit more in my new seat with a great view of the table.
When it was my turn to play, I trounced my opponent. I beat three in a row before losing. The men started introducing themselves to me, and soon enough we got into a lively conversation. They were dockworkers, steel fabricators, mail deliverers, taxi drivers. They were very interested in Cunt, and we talked about the upcoming brutal occupation of Iraq, to which they were all opposed.
I spent a relaxing and thoroughly enjoyable three hours playing pool and totally hanging out with a group of men in a city I did not know.
When I wanted to go back to the inn, they said I shouldn’t walk alone and elected someone to walk me back. Again, every rational self-defense fiber of my being bristled, but in my heart, I knew they were sincere and simply wished me to come to no harm late at night.
So one of them walked me to my inn and said good night and went back to the Cryptic Lair.
There were a lot of 
arriving, and I wandered off into the crowd again. There was a “backstage” energy developing, and I was beginning to feel uncomfortable. In my experience, people start acting badly when there is a distinction made between those who are important and those who are the masses. World history is rife with examples of this reality, but moreover, I have been in the presence of enough to have noticed. When a hierarchy is in place, those who are designated important become impervious to the reality of others, and meanwhile, everyone else develops a yearning to be important too. This is why celebrities have stalkers and why there exists a perfectly legal industry where photographers stalk celebrities. People spend money, time, and energy engrossed in the lives of rather than being present in their own lives.
At the rally, entourages and stuff like that started to appear. The air tensed with the presence of celebrity, which somehow offers meaning and depth to everyone else’s self-perceived meaningless and shallow existence.
It is so bizarre how people change when celebrity shows up.
And there was a lot of celebrity here.
I circled the whole rally again and returned to what was, officially, a backstage area. The antiwar officials looked at the pass Parisha had given me and told me not to leave the backstage area again. If I did, they wouldn’t let me through. I was stunned. I’d been walking around the whole park for hours. It was how I was dealing with my nervousness about being on a stage in front of thousands of people. I needed to see the whole thing evolve in order to cope with the reality of standing in front of all those folks and really give them something from my heart. I was all, “Are you serious? I can’t leave this area for the rest of the rally?” They said they were doing crowd control, and it was so difficult to keep people out of the backstage area where all the and their entourages were that they decided to just stop letting anyone through at all.
Too many people. Security reasons, sorry.
I figured, whatever.
I’d brought a few signed copies of Cunt that I wanted to give to three of the women who were speaking who had impacted my life and inspired me. Since I was now sequestered with the , it seemed a good opportunity to keep my eye out for the three women.
I located two of them easily enough. I told them they’d changed my life, said thanks, and gave them Cunts. They were both really nice, and it was good to meet them.
The third woman was a famous writer who had been a part of my reading for over two decades. I loved her and was very excited to give her a copy of my book. Her writing had deeply inspired me throughout my life.
She was nowhere to be seen.
I stood by a wall, overlooking a large sunken garden. Soon enough, a cop walked up and stood next to me. We had said our hellos earlier in the morning and now struck up a conversation. We talked about the upcoming “war.” We were not in agreement, but we respected each other’s viewpoints. He and his wife were taking care of their three grandchildren while his son and daughter-in-law served in the military. His pain and worry were evident, and I suspected his support of the illegal occupation said more about his concern for his family than his opinion of the US government’s ridiculous shenanigans. He thought the “war on terror” was highly problematic, and so his stance, like so many things, was complex.
He also talked a lot about the park. About its history. It had been his beat for over twenty-five years. Malcolm X Park was his park. The neighborhood, he told me, was in the process of being colonized by a wealthier, whiter class who wanted to change the park’s name.
He was pretty outraged about that.
He got a call on his radio, and so we said our good-byes.
As he walked away, the strangest thing happened.
Three of those huge papier-mâché puppets that always appear at protests walked toward me from right, left, and center. They all just seemed to appear out of nowhere, right as the cop walked away. I was standing with my back to the wall still, facing the back of the stage and the huge crowd beyond, and these puppets are all walking toward me.
Then, the famous writer materialized.
She walked straight toward me and stopped four feet in front of me, right smack dab in the middle of all of the puppets. She turned to each one and bowed. The puppets all bowed to her. Then she walked to the wall and stood next to me.
It was like some dream or something. I could never in a million years anticipate a scene like that unfolding in front of me.
I turned to her and kinda nervously said, “Hello, famous writer. You have inspired me all of my life, and I brought a copy of my book for you.”
I pulled it out of my bag and offered it to her.
She looked down at it like it was a piece of rotting, maggot-infused pork and she was a Muslim and said, “What am I supposed to do with that?”
I spluttered, “Uhm, I just wanted to give you a copy of my book.”
“I don’t have anywhere to put it,” she spat at me, glaring. “Where do you expect me to put it?”
“I dunno,” I said. “Uhm, sorry. Uh.”
I put it back in my bag and walked away.
My heart was beating in my chest, and I wanted to cry.
The farther away I got from the famous writer, the more the tears surged in my chest. I couldn’t cry here. That would be stupid. This is when my Grammy appeared. “This isn’t the end of the world. Pull yourself together. Christ. You’re all right.”
I walked up to the stage manager, to see where I was in the lineup. She said, “I’ve been looking for you. You’re up after two more speakers. Stay by me.”
I sat by her station and waited.
And waited.
She was scurrying around, talking into her radio, crossing things off her clipboard.
When my turn came, the speaker after me—the last speaker—went up. I approached the stage manager, but before I could ask her anything, she said, “We cut you. Sorry.”
I was, for the third time in an hour, stunned.
I explained to her that I wasn’t going to deliver a speech; I just wanted to get the whole crowd to scream out in anger before they marched. I’d been pumping myself to work up the courage to do this for the past six hours. It wouldn’t take more than two minutes to get people screaming their diaphragms out. The whole city would hear it. I explained and explained, and she looked at me and said, “Look, everyone says the same thing. That’s why we’re off schedule. The march has to happen within a certain time slot.”
“Everyone says they’re not giving a speech?” I asked incredulously.
“No,” she patiently explained. “Everyone says they won’t take more than two minutes.”
“But I really won’t!”
“Anyway, it’s too late. The last person is speaking, and it would be disrespectful to her if we let someone go on afterward.”
I walked away.
Now the tears would not stay down. My Grammy was trying to soothe me, I could hear her, but after the famous writer shot me down like I was Dick Cheney’s quail, there was just no stopping the tears.
Here I was at this huge antiwar rally, surrounded by passive violence: egos, fame, entourages, and a distinct hierarchy over who is and is not important, and these are the folks who are opposed to the Bush administration’s homicidal machinations?
I decided to leave the rally and forego the march. I could not go on with this total charade. But my Grammy intervened. “You will be gracious,” she said. “You were invited to this event, and you will attend it graciously.”
I argued with her.
I’ve had enough.
This is horrible.
I must go.
We went back and forth for a while, my Grammy and me, as I wandered blindly out of the park. I struck a deal. I told her if I walked out and happened to meet up with the march, I would go.
She said, “You’re going no matter what.”
So it wasn’t much of a deal.
I thought that was a cool idea.
The march progressed, with the children at the front, the carrying the Brand Name Antiwar Banner behind them, and the huge, glorious crush of humanity taking up the rear.
I thought, “Well since we are all following the kids, I s’pose this isn’t adhering to a white, male-inspired hierarchy, so that’s nice. Maybe things will get better, and I’ll see that people are not completely deluded by their own self-interests.”
Unfortunately, this fledgling thought was snuffed out like a candle after mass and never had the opportunity to really shine in my mind.
The antiwar officials realized that the CNN cameras could not see their banner because the hundreds of children that they had corralled together to make a statement to the world stood in the way. A squadron of officials converged on the children, herding them off to the sides (where there was no room for them), so that the news cameras would have a clear view of the Brand Name Antiwar Banner. Having a recognizable brand, it was explained to me, would bring more people into the peace movement. With the presence of CNN, it became important that all the teevee viewers at home had a recognizable name to connect with peace.
This comes straight out of the Walton family’s Wal-Mart playbook.
For fourth time that morning, I was stunned.
How can you herd hundreds of kids out of the way of a banner during a huge march?
You can’t, that’s how.
But instead of realizing the pointlessness, not to mention ungraciousness, of this, the antiwar officials and the famous, started yelling at the kids to keep out of the way of the banner. The poor kids were in total confusion. They’d try to keep out of the way for a few minutes, but then someone would start leading them in antiwar chants, and they’d get all caught up in the spirit of their songs and naturally ebb out in front of the banner again. Then people would interrupt their chanting and scream at them to get out of the way.
And I do mean scream.
With exasperation, edged with anger.
I was positioned right by the children and saw this abusive, violent behavior happen over and over. Grown people yelling at these kids to honor the space for the Brand Name Antiwar Banner. Some of the kids were visibly distraught. When I stuck up for them, people shot me down, edged away from me, and ignored me for the rest of the march.
So much for the symbolism of death to innocents.
We were barred from walking in front of the White House. got arrested, and I walked the long way back to the inn.
When I got there Shawna was out front. I told her the whole story and gave her the copy of my book I’d signed for the famous writer.
Than night, I went back to the Cryptic Lair and played some pool with my buddies from the night before. Again, I felt welcomed and valued. And that’s when the grand irony hit me.
Surrounded by activists, feminists, and cultural leaders, I felt uncomfortable and tense.
Surrounded by hardworking men who probably laughed at and told sexist jokes from time to time, I felt perfectly at ease. The antiwar rhetoric of the march’s organizers, fixated on a goddamn brand name recognition banner, was simplistic and meaningless when compared to the conversation I had with the Malcolm X Park cop.
And so it came to pass that I found solace from those who are bent on saving the world from the architects of mass homicide, in the company of pool players in a dim, working-class bar and in the complex perspective of a beat cop.
It is, I have found, pretty much the way of my people.
We are indoctrinated to consider some people more important than others. We allow hierarchies into our lived realities and imaginations. We place fluctuating values on lives. We engage in passive violence even as we protest great violence. Perhaps, worst of all, we completely disrespect children in oh so many ways and fail to serve and protect them as we should because we are busy serving and protecting adult self-interests.
I understood that I had experienced passive violence the whole day of that rally and march. That experience taught me to recognize that when I start thinking I must be crazy, feel repeatedly stunned, and wonder, “Am I the only one seeing the total insanity of this?” then I am almost assuredly in an abusive and passively violent situation. This form of violence is very subtle, and we see it or partake in it pretty much every day of our lives.
It is the American way.
We undermine one another, gossip, manipulate, compare, criticize, and act out within the limited scope of our self-interests.
We do these things all the time, every day.
You agree to this and set about opposing your adversary with this arsenal they designed.
And no matter how good and nice and peaceful you are, no matter how cagey, imaginative, courageous, and scrappy,
you
will
not
prevail.
As Audre Lorde famously stated, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
When we are more interested in carousing with and putting on a performance that our fellow “progressive” activists will backslap us for, when we unquestionably design and partake in hierarchies, when we believe in “branding,” well, we’re using the master’s tools.
We become the master’s tools.
How prideful and egotistical we are to think we can change the world without changing ourselves and looking at our indoctrination and really understanding where we come from and who we, as a people, are. Humbling ourselves does not come naturally, given our sense of frontier entitlement, but it is only through looking deeply at ourselves that we can ever make a ding in the world’s present power dynamic.
Asking questions about permission places you in an inherently weak position.
In Nigeria, where BP has devastated entire regions, people die in protests. And the racism of our world has allowed this to happen in Nigeria without all the media hue and cry we see in the white, wealthy US of A.
You ask permission when you wish to respectfully trespass on someone else’s time, space, creation, or will. You ask permission if you can swim in the ocean. You ask permission for another cookie from your grandma. You ask permission when you need information that can somehow further your understanding of the deep complexities of life.
You don’t ask permission to take to the fucking streets. You take to the streets and you do not leave. People are invariably arrested, injured, even killed when they take to the streets. There is a very strong will that wishes to suck the earth dry and make a tonfuck of money doing so. This power is in command of all law enforcement and military on the planet. So, yes, of course when folks go up against it without tidy permits and tight schedules, this power is threatened and all it knows to do is attack.
This is what happens when people oppose forces such as corporations and/or their government: people die.
Here in the US, many folks lionized Neda Agha-Soltan, who was shot and killed by police during the protests against the fraudulent election in Iran in 2009. The Iranian government has been fighting tooth and nail to keep Ms. Agha-Soltan’s family from erecting a memorial because the government knows people will not forget her and will foment insurrection around her unjust death.
There is no Neda Agha-Soltan here in the US. We’re all home in bed or at the bar high-fucken’-fivin’ each other the moment a protest permit’s time has expired.
Don’t tell me we aren’t a courageous, imaginative, scrappy population. We are. The promise of freedom and independence shapes our personalities and our families, and it doesn’t matter if most of it is based on lies or untruths because the spirit lives in our hearts.
And that is a powerful thing.
People fucken’ know some things are seriously wrong. But we haven’t chosen our own arsenal of weapons, and so we’re organically disinclined to take our own actions. We root through the menu of words, thought models, and actions that are given to us by those who are presently perceived to have more power.
We don’t come up with our own vocabulary and thought models, and in the US, I don’t think it’s a terrible stretch to imagine that people can, indeed, do this.
We come up with great ideas all the time. Community Supported Agriculture is a great idea. It brings farmers and communities together, and most farms are willing to trade labor for food, so it isn’t just people who have the cash flow that can get the heirloom tomato and lemon cucumber hook-up. Sliding scale restaurants are a great idea. Legalizing and taxing weed is a great idea.
We come up with different thought models for business, art, science, politics, and education all the time, but when it comes to standing up together and fighting off these bastards who are destroying the planet, we, as a people, get all couch potato.
“We” being all of the people who voted Barack Obama into office and then abandoned him to fix everything for us, and then got mad at him when, without our support, he inevitably got sucked into the corporate power vortex.
We are also the 70 percent of Arizona voters who approved the federal government putting the kibosh on the immigration views of a few perceivably powerful individuals.
There are a lot of us, and we should be taking a much larger part in the present power dynamic.
That’s us.
We can do better.
Sí, se puede. That’s us.