Newtopia | Issue #20 - Feb/March 2005: "Law & Order"

"Deep Politics" is the irony the results when the perception of "radical evil" in the body politic coincides with a cascading series of crises that threaten the survival of life itself.

Borne of the shattered state and infrastructure of Iraq is a climate of complete insecurity, lawlessness and violence. Crime in Baghdad now is estimated to be at least four times worse than in the worst cities in America.

Over the last twenty-five years the "War on Drugs" and the Prison industry has been steadily built up into a Leviathan which has steamrolled across our culture with such force that it is hard to envision what might ever stop it.

Within the last few years the strategies police use to control activist events have changed dramatically, quashing dissent and prevening many protests before they even start.

Even before Hannah Arendt coined her ironic phrase, the "banality of evil," George Orwell called attention to the normalcy of war crimes in the 20th century, and he wrote extensively about the power of nationalism in destroying the essential decency of civilized, democratic peoples. Nationalism creates a culture of impunity that makes atrocities invisible, if not acceptable. No republic in time of war has ever held its own leaders accountable for war crimes committed in its name.

Although the events of 09/11/01 have had a significant and largely negative impact on civil liberties in the US, a far more insidious and dangerous threat is found in the efforts to rewrite American Law so that it is consistent with religious dogma.

What if young african-americans, the mentally ill, drug addicts, and the illiterate are actually worth more inside the correctional system than outside?

Sharing a history of destruction and atrocity by foreign invaders, Fallujah and Halabja are the epitome of distortion, destruction and needless war crimes.

The recent "War on Terror" sloganeering mostly involves the word freedom. President Bush has made the phrase "They attacked our freedoms" a sound bite. Fair enough, but what does that mean? Freedom shows up in the private and public sphere. We allow the state to curtail and coerce behavior in the public sphere, like the Speed Limit above, but in the private sphere, America has neglected to defend freedom. This is where the "unknown civilization that is growing in America" has, well, stopped growing. We have taken freedom and bagged it.

INCLUDES: "Iraq: A Silenced Majority", an article by Stephan Smith (Said) based upon interviews with his family.

On April 20, 1950, CIA Director Roscoe Hillenkoetter approved the United States’ government’s first research and development program expressly designed to develop techniques for the control of the human mind. It was known as Project MKULTRA, and eventually came to encompass 149 distinct behavioral science research programs and 33 related non-behavioral projects over the course of twenty-three years.

One needs only to pour over the intrigues that are shamelessly played out in Dafur to understand the impotence or timidity of greedy and self-serving international 'stakeholders' and an international legal system that will, as soon as there is some semblance of finality to the Dafur conflict, seek to excuse their actions.

The brick of which the society is built is law and order and the brick of law and order is made of rights and duties. Every member of any society has certain fundamental rights vested in them and every member of such society also has the duty to respect the rights of any other member of the society. As simple as this may be, the chaos of every society is mainly centered on the violation of this noble concept.

"In order to give meaningful suggestions for building a brighter future, we first need to speak candidly about what's happening in the world at present. It appears that there is a relatively small, powerful group of elites who desire to gain as much control over the world as possible. Their primary means for establishing control are through diminishing purpose, advocating secrecy, and promoting fear and victimization. As they gain control, our freedoms and liberties are increasingly taken away, often without our even realizing it."

"All people are not created equal and when it comes to my own American city of Lost Bay, Oregon; religion, presidential elections, fundamentalism, revisionism, economics or whatever else you care to throw into the cracked thought-plot pot, nothing is self evident. Today, everything is subject to change and reinterpretation. Our lives are speeding up regarding complications and a head on collision with radicalism is becoming inevitable making even TV's Will and Grace so unhappy they bought their favorite Jack a one way ticket to Canada."

"A government that restricts personal autonomy is inherently oppressive. What sense does it make for a group of people to form a government that then imposes upon them mandates as to what substances (which all equally spring in one way or another from this Earth) can be chosen to interact with on a personal basis? Governments, quite simply, should maintain rules of social/public engagement, not rules of engagement with your own body."

"The No Child Left Behind Act, enacted in 2001, and the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year of 2002 have made economic conscription much easier. They require every high school receiving federal education funds to hand over the names, addresses and phone numbers of every junior and senior to local military recruitment officers."

"As one who has traversed the American road of opportunities during eight score plus years, one who spent the best years of my life in the service of this Nation wearing the uniform of a combat trooper, believing that I was protecting the American dream, I realize much later in life after being repeatedly reminded by individuals and governmental law changes that living the theories, deceit and realities in life must at some point change one's childhood concept of man and his nation."

"I had felt the stinging loss of men like John, Bobby, and Martin. I saw what it cost to be committed to justice and the pursuit of truth in the political realm, and the price of such devotion horrified me. Instead of facing that fear, I sought change through story-telling. Think of Jesus spinning parables in order to give frightened, impoverished crowds a new vision, and you're digging my inspiration. I chose to take on the artist's struggle with rejection and poverty rather than flirt with assassin's bullets."

two white guys accidentally walk into an all black bar on a Saturday / night with the intentions of getting carryout, on the shelf is a bottle of / Heineken, a bottle of Malibu rum, and a bottle of Hennessy.

Tonight the smoke of wood fires scents the Northeast Wind. / The aromas of Autumn are spackled with pockets of Winter’s chill.

post crucified Christ covers his mouth when he coughs / but makes a mess of the place & the faces of his shocked / disciples, no one says anything because zombies don’t / like to be embarrassed

I watch the “Blue Moon” strain to clear the trees. / Heaving heavenward, pulling terrible weight, / While I, expecting some epiphany, instead find reverie.

The restroom attendant at the hotel was some kind of Arab, with mouth mask and long dark gown. Maybe in her forties or fifties; hard to tell with those foreign types what age fast.

They say the boy ogled women, the ones on benches. There they'd be simply resting quietly with their memories till he'd come along and leer, scaring their skirts off.

When he died in December 2003, most of his acquaintances knew Kevin Weremeychik as Chopper, Moby's roadie for five years. Chopper worked for other artists, too, of course, from Ric Ocasek to Tura Satana. They also knew that any spare moment he had, whether waiting around for something to do at Ocasek's studio, or sitting on an amp backstage at a Moby concert, was spent drawing. Chopper drew pensive gargoyles, and he created a cartoon series of dry humor and social observation called Jesus and Moses. But his magnum opus was The Essayist.

CinemaShrink Says "Bad Education leaves no one off the hook, pinpointing the long lasting and reverberating effects when young boys are sexually compromised by priests in parochial schools. However, it also confronts us with a reality of sexual attraction between boys that may be as difficult to accept as Kinsey’s discoveries. Kinsey’s discoveries made it clear that we human beings may talk a good game of monogamy but, in truth, we don’t walk our talk. Almodovar raises issues about what happens when natural sexual desire developing between boys falls prey to exploitation by an archetypal father figure."

A few millennia hence, when archeologists dig up our present world to discover who we were, they will have more than the historical record of these times to go on. History will tell them what we were doing. But our blockbuster movies will tell them something arguably more important — what we were dreaming about.