"I felt a great disturbance in the force... as if a million voices cried out in terror... and were suddenly silenced."
- Obi Wan Kenobi
It's February, the month of Pisces and the whole world hovers on the brink of war. The waves of some deep psychic fearfulness wash over me like an irresistible tide tugging toward despair. To let go to the tide is to let a lurking evil feed on all of the pent up rage in our collective being and see it transformed into a lethal weapon to be used by others against enemies we have never seen. To resist is to isolate oneself from the chattering spectacle playing continually on our physical and electronic sensors and come face to face with a demon that we've made from the remnants of our true selves.
Yes, America threatens war. This time it would be genocide without disguise. We will slaughter... we have already slaughtered millions... the innocent in order to slake the appetites of the guilty. We don't want the guilty really... they make handy enemies and good targets and a great excuse to trot out all of that state of the art weaponry and test/demonstrate it on a living population. A war will be a bigger commercial than the Olympics or the Super Bowl. The sponsors are lining up to sell beer and cars and passages into the armed forces.
A very familiar scenario for anyone who has lived through the last thirty years. A Democratic Administration finds itself in a dead-end war and brings itself down through it's own arrogance and incompetence. Have you seen "Wag The Dog?" Every American should see it. A glimpse behind the scenario of the machineries of the spectacle. Better than a dozen French philosophers... easier to follow anyway. Do you think this is accidental synchronicity, like when the "China Syndrome" was released the same week of the 3 Mile Island accident? Do you think this is a totally random event? I think there is another organizing center, known in chaos theory as a 'strange attractor,' somewhere off to the side, beyond the boundaries of what we've accepted as the 'real world,' pulling us toward itself, de stabilizing and undermining the status quo, eventually leading to change that is as inexorable as the dust of the ages.
The tricky thing to remember about the lessons to be carried from "Wag the Dog" is that in the 'real' world the situation is almost completely reversed; instead of a war being fabricated to hide a presidential scandal it's the other way around. The sellers and buyers of arms and ammunitions and crude oil, the merchants of war, would like you to pay more attention to Monica Lewinsky while they lead our children into the poisonous fields and while they commit bald-faced and unrepentant murder upon the poor.
There are moments in history when the fabric of the spectacle wears thin, and then it is torn, and at that point just about anything can happen. I feel that turn in the cycle has come. I have seen it and lived through it before. History turns a corner and the arrogance of power hits like shit against a fan. In Ohio they have one of their propaganda forums and through a sequence of uncontrolled and unforseen circumstances the dissenting voice is broadcast clearly around the world. On National Public Radio they allow one of them 'peaceniks' on the air amongst all the so-called experts from the Pentagon. In the 30 seconds before they cut her off she rants brilliantly, laying down a gauntlet for the warmongers to cross, warning that they are foolish not to consider the fact that it took several years for dissent toward the Vietnam War to become visible, and several months for any real dissent toward the last Iraqi war to be expressed in the public eye, but that demonstrations against this war have already proliferated in cities large and small on this continent and around the world. In the face of change we tremble, some with fear and some with exhilaration.
The power elites are likely to ignore the warning. They will go ahead with their sanctions and their mayhem, and trying to restrict our view of the horrors, and proceeding as if this were just another minor bump in the economic road of the empire. They will pretend they are still in control. But the spectacle has grown too complex for even the most arrogant to control. There is a new intelligence pulling the strings, born out of chaos, and those who pretend to be our leaders barely perceive it. It is a being made of chaos, an Apocalyptic horseman, a bearer of plague and pestilence and death and war and yet a bringer of light and hope, for only through great destruction shall the old world be washed away and the new world born.
Don't be afraid. The chaos must come. I will see you on the streets. This is a prophecy.