7,855 Words

© Donald Freed September 18, 2005: (310) 476-7250

Literary Representation: Patricia Rae; e-mail PATTYRAEF1@aol.com

Donald Freed is a prize-winning playwright and historian. His novel, Every Third House, will be published in 2005 by PENMARIN. He is a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the University of Southern California Professional Writing Program.

FREED PAGE 1 of 28

The exile from the United States sits on the hotel balcony in the tiny two thousand year old fishing village looking out at the Lecco leg of the Lago di Como. Across, is the foggy Prealpi range of low mountains; above, gulls wheel while on the shore ducks and their new born stay close to the rocky beach. Thus, this corner of the great lake from year to year unchanged, time out of mind. Or so it has always seemed.

Since the first century after Christ wanderers have stared trancelike at the silver and black of the lake wanting to believe that against the immemorial water and mountains time must have a stop. If only we could stop before it’s too late, that is what the exile repeats—today—before the United States of America becomes the last and universal suicide bomber.

The exile knows that something is ticking, that the lake—one of the world’s deepest—is staring back, that the lake is in fact a sign not of frozen time but, rather, of time and change, itself, from the last Ice Age until this moment; ticking and telling us how late the hour.

And, we, with our notoriously weak senses, we sapiens do make some allowance for change and history here on the old lake, but we make it under the heading of gossip and fable. Items: Jack Kennedy and friends vacationing at the Villa Serbelloni (before Dean Rusk acquired the vast estate for the Rockefeller Foundation); Robert S. McNamara launching his Indo-China confession, with no irony at all, from the Rockefeller, in preparation for his big book; Benito Mussolini’s treasure of fascist gold dumped into the lake as the Strongman made his dash toward death, (and immediate

FREED PAGE 2 of 28

liberation of said gold by partisans, which gold would finance the Italian Communist Party throughout the Cold War—only fair, according to hardliners, since the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency paid the bill for all the Italian anti-communist coalitions as well as the mafia strike breakers and their heroin trade—and the part about the CIA gold is actually a fact, and as Anthony Trollope is once supposed to have stated when he was at Como in 18—Enough!).

It is all true nonsense, a tourist trap of old and new scandals that, together with the weighty reports of the soil experts currently in residence at the Rockefeller Foundation, are designed to distract and amuse us so that we might prolong our collective fiction of Nature, the Lake, as in emblem of peace, permanence, beauty and our hypnotic denial of the gathering American storm.

What storm? The shitstorm of post-colonial war that the United States dares to call "Democracy" and has unleashed in the Middle East, and the boomerang of violence slung four hundred years ago from the former colonies of the West that we call "Terror".

So the Lake is a kind of timeless moral mirage. And if you fail to remember that, despite appearances, this mesmerizing water was once the cutting edge of an overwhelming iceberg, then you are, in Nietzsche’s warning, "hanging in dreams on the back of a tiger." Tremendous change at last does sweep over us—change that millennia later we call the Age of Ice or, if any sapiens remain, the Age of Atoms.

The exile, or the fugitive, wanderer, what you will, sits staring up at the point of the glacier- smashing promontory that in the Neolithic caused the massive ice formation to split around the rock that the Romans would call La Punta Spartivento. The point that

FREED PAGE 3 of 28

divides the wind. Here, twenty thousand years ago, the mountain of ice moved to cut out the valleys that would become the great Lake: that is a paradigm change.

The point of rock became Bellagio, and just there, in the first century of our era, Pliny the Younger built one of his Villas, Villa Tragedia, from where he sat staring out at the old Lake and the Little Alps. There, some nineteen hundred years later, the Rockefeller Foundation would tower over the town and Robert McNamara would sit in conference on Pliny’s very point of Iron Age vantage to try in vain to take the long view of Vietnam, beyond the plain and simple horror of utter disgrace and defeat.

A progression of Great Men have all stood here in Pliny’s place. Three of them, at least—Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger, Leonardo Da Vinci—had to have known that the shining surface that sparkled before them was in truth what Albert Einstein has designated as a New Stone Age clock. A clock being anything that measures the passage of time, if you study how to read it. And Einstein was right: scientific studies warn urgently that the remnants of old glaciers, from which Lake Como descended, are melting during the present global warming and that this meltdown of the ice in Austria and Switzerland could crack the glaciers; then the melting of the eternal ice would burst into "tsunami-like devastation" over the towns and population below the old glacier line including the towns on Lake Como. Global Warming? Merely a theory according to the American Commander-in-Chief.

Can Americans, today, trapped in our Imperial limit situation, read Einstein’s clock, do our leaders know what time it is? Did others, who came after the bright eyed

FREED PAGE 4 of 28

Roman, who viewed the perspective from the ruins of the Villa Tragedia, could they read the water clock? Stendhal, Nietzsche, and Robert McNamara? Each of these notable wanderers, including Pliny, was in retreat, brooding on, respectively: the fall of the Roman Republic; the last great man—Napoleon; the image of European Civilization "hanging in dreams on the back of a tiger"; Vietnam as the graveyard of America’s Imperial lust. And there were others who were not completely taken in, Franz Liszt, for one, who surveyed the scene and then, like Stendhal, shut himself away from the Lake’s eye and wrote music based on Dante’s Inferno.

These post-exilic parallax views—of the utopian idea of timeless memory against the tragic reality of personal and national destiny—again blur our vision as we squint and strain to focus and find the fatal flaw that has transformed the American Dream into the American Nightmare; to understand how we lost our luck, lost our way, turned the people of the world, billions of them, against us: How the U.S.A. metastasized into the Democracy from Hell.

II

Did the America Dream or its New World precursors ever have substance other than as a function of a New Jerusalem for the fugitives of the late Age of Reason and the early Industrial Revolution? The 17^th Century Edenic myth had already been both co-opted and exposed by Shakespear’s Caliban, that "thing of darkness" that American History would embellish as Big Chief Rain in the Face, and House Slave Caesar

FREED PAGE 5 of 28

Pompeii Rastus Brown—the Red man and the Black Man first slaughtered and enslaved to bring forth and feed the White Man’s New World Dream, then called back by popular demand for an encore, featured as the savage losers of the Wild West extravaganza, and the music hall Minstrel Jamboree Coon Show ("Minstrels Tonight No Longer White!").

This New World Red and Black of redskins and niggers was merely abstracted into the Manifest Destiny of the American continent that Robert Frost would celebrate so elegantly and so dangerously as "the gift outright" to the white immigrants rolling West. The Gift Outright that is now being retailed at gun point to the rest of the world, with only a small surtax, in a new package whose brand name is "The End of History." Caveat Emptor, it is a hard sell.

The Dream, the Gift, The End of History were already problematic by 1870 to Henry Adams, to Walt Whitman, after him, and to Mark Twain—who had also retreated to Como—after him. Adams divined that not only had the South lost the Civil War but so, too, had the North and that the emerging industrial Goliath’s first victim would be the hundred year old American Republic. Whitman, as was his way, would go further and predict that an imperial hyper-capitalist United States must represent "the most tremendous failure of time." And, then, Twain roundly cursed out the whole gang of missionaries and political windbags, demanding that they all come home at once from their spiritual and financial depredations and highway robbery in China, by which he meant what we now call the Third World.

By the turn of the century, 1900, the number of naysayers had multiplied to the point that the American People had begun to make out before them a crossroads and a

FREED PAGE 6 of 28

choice: The Gilded Age, or Chautauqua. Everyone knows, today, what the title of the victorious vision means—The Gilded Age of Imperial America—but only a few anymore

recognize the lost native image of "Chautauqua." Chautauqua—what might have been, the upstate New York Judeo-Christian-Humanist revival based on adult education, hygiene, science, health care, Abolition and then Women’s Rights, temperance, racial reconciliation, anti-imperialist foreign policy—Progress with a human face. Chautauqua swept the nation. North Americans, in their millions, were beginning to awaken from their industrial stupor. Then came World War I—"came," that is, when the powerhouse of the colonial super states exploded and all the hopes and dreams of a Chautauqua-America were lost and by the wind grieved.

And that is that: from the Somme and Verdun down to Auschwitz and Buchenwald, to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, down to our "American Century" of Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq—to the U.S. Victory in the Cold War and the End of History, down to

this hour of "Shock and Awe" Imperial American Triumphalism. Who could dare to doubt that Western Civilization had found its apotheosis? William Faulkner.

…this land which man has deswamped and denuded and derivered… No wonder the ruined woods I used to know don’t cry for retribution! ...The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge.

Thus a white man’s home truth point of view in 1950. Before him had sounded the prophetic voices of American women like Harriet Beecher Stowe on the sin of slavery; W.E.B. Dubois and the Black thinkers who saw the collision coming

FREED PAGE 7 of 28

between American colonial fantasies and the "color line" at home and around the world: a sampling error of men and women, exceptions to the rulers of the generations of the Gilded Age, the "Hogs Run Wild" of Thomas Nast’s brutal cartoons—and ringing in the heretics’ ears, all of them, were the closing words of the jeremiad of old Ossawatamie John Brown, the White Negro, at Harper’s Ferry: "This negro question—the end of that is not yet."

Henry Adams wrote for the disappointed descendents of the Old Glory of the American Revolution; Whitman for the grassroots of the democratic demi-urge; and, finally, Faulkner, half raving, himself, stood over the glamorous corpse preaching, beyond the South to the nation, that a living dog was better than a dead lion; that the Republic lay dying, poisoned by false power, doomed and damned unless and until we faced the terrifying truth of our hidden history. Anything short of this terrific truth being merely political sound and fury signifying nothing.

Can it be that the world’s oldest democracy is actually expiring from natural causes, with accompanying dementia? Sound and fury, Shock and Awe: Can entire nations go mad—Ancient Greece, Rome, Germany, Chile, Iraq, America?

III

On clear days the natives of Bellagio point toward the rock face of the Prealpi that surround the promontory and they say that "You can see the face of Mussolini" and higher up, "Napoleon." Or is it the other way around?

FREED PAGE 8 of 28

True, Il Duce was cornered at Como before being hung by the heels, but the fixed and pathological idea of the Man of Destiny is as old as the Sumerian hills (Mr. Bush the Younger once referred to himself as "Mini-me"). Napoleon is a stone statute now but he was the Man in the nineteenth century when Dr. Stendhal made his appearance at Como, wearing a blue coat, in his political exile. Stendhal had begun his campaign to sober up all the other young Julien Sorells of the time, on the make in their blue coats, from the fatal fiction of the leader as demi-god. This anatomy lesson of Stendhal’s would be completed by Leo Tolstoy.

The theory of the transference of the collective will of the masses to historical personages…seems irrefutable just because the act of transference of the people’s will cannot be verified, since it never occurred.

Was the phallic horse/man monster not yet dead, after War and Peace, was he still kicking, not yet like Alexander and Julius Caesar dead and turned to clay, Hamlet notwithstanding? Very well, then, unleash the ferocious god/critics of the nineteenth century to devour the rotting carcasses of all the undead Great Men.

They came hurtling toward us, the firstlings of the twentieth century, lead by Karl Marx. Marx, the psychopomp, who offered to lead America through the nightmare of democratic capitalism: "In the highest form of the state, the democratic republic, wealth exercises its power indirectly, but all the more surely. Thus in the direct corruption of officials, America provides the classic example…" He would be feared, he still is, but he would not be heeded. Neither would Nietzsche: "We live in a period of atoms and atomic chaos, and that terrible apparition the Nation-State." Well, well he was a lunatic, no? and

FREED PAGE 9 of 28

his corpse stolen to prop up whatshisname, Schicklegruber? Charlie Chaplin? One of them. And as for Sigmund Freud, even his mantic tribe of soul seekers scoffed at his neo-classic construction of Thanatos, the "Death Instinct": "Men have brought their powers of subduing the forces of nature to such a pitch that by using them they could now very easily exterminate one another to the last man. They know this—hence arises their current unrest, their dejection, their mood of apprehension."

No one who was anyone listened to these new gods of the twentieth century—believe it or not, Nietzsche actually predicted that in the new century not only would books be burned, but human beings, starting, he insisted, "with the Jews" (!). No, the powers-that-be were deaf, dumb, blind, and they had not the courage to see the shock and awe coming that the mighty Wurlitzer of State propaganda would call "The Thousand

Year Reich", "The Dictatorship of the Proletariat", and, finally "The American Century" with its correlations "The End of History" and the "Clash of Civilizations."

So, yes, in a way nations can go mad. Bush the Elder, after the Cold War, announced a "New World Order", and Bush the Younger, after 9/11, thought he saw an "Axis of Evil." In other words the Bushes saw a First World, America, and another World of Evil and Terror. In clinical terms these delusions of reference are diagnosed as paranoia. The Greek root of this syndrome signifies "another mind", para-noia. That is where we live now—the place Gore Vidal calls the "United States of Amnesia"—in a new world, where we have forgotten who and where we are.

FREED PAGE 10 of 28

IV

Turn and turn about in our search for the Reason behind the reasons for the madness and blindness of American democracy and its attendant destruction and we are driven like Oedipus to follow the red footprints down still deeper towards the genus loci, ancient Athens, of the American tragedy. Athens, 399, before Christ: the Democratic War Party and its unending war had reduced what Perikles had called "the school of the Greeks" to a broken enslaved city whose starving citizens ate rats in the streets and lived at Sparta’s mercy.

From the stone windows of Socrates’ death cell, as far as the eye could see, Plato, before forced to run for his life, peered out at a line of crucifixes stretching to the horizon of the harbor. What the great Greek poets called "The Long Foot of Time" had caught up with and overtaken the demagogues of the Attic vision and was closing on Rome, though only Sokrates and his companion Euripides could see that lengthening shadow.

This was 2,500 years ago. Three thousand years before that the Agricultural Revolution in the Mesopotamian grainlands had produced Gilgamesh, the first hero, and the first writing that would immortalize him and his archetype. Thus, the beginning of writing, History, the masculine protest of the first hero, and the World-Historical defeat of women and the preliterate Nature worship. These coeval combined elements were a huge paradigm change and they define us to this day: Gilgamesh, wearing many masks, made the trek from Ur to Athens to Rome to Washington D.C.—all in one cultural day like the giant hero that he was.

FREED PAGE 11 of 28

It is, as our leader George Bush never fails to remind us, "hard work" to be a hero: Murder Sokrates at sunrise, Jesus at high noon, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

at the cocktail hour. Hard work, indeed, this killing of subversive anti-heroes and gadflies:

…It’s only a matter of time now before I stumble, and the Long Foot of Time overtakes me. We all run that race, my Judges, and we all lose it in the end.

But no one could improve on Euripides’ parting words to "the city that hated him" and to the Democratic War Party that would silence the voice of his close friend Sokrates’ "examined life." The poet wrote, "You destroyers of cities…of the graves of the sacred dead…yourselves so soon to die."

"Here’s fine revolution," Hamlet murmured, "and we had the trick to see it"; but alas, poor Yorick, we did not or, rather, the mini-men on stilts have been blind to the

poets’ handwriting on the wall ("…power…an universal wolf… must last eat up himself."). From Ur to Homer to Shakespeare to this hour, the poets, from the anonymous Gilgamesh singers to Beckett and Pinter, have provided the word and the silence.

Listen, America. There is a ticking in that silence. Listen to the fading echo of the Lake: "Hubris," chant the Greeks, "Vanity," warn the Hebrews, "Don’t tread on me," the America rebels.

FREED PAGE 12 of 28

IV

Now, at the end of our seven thousand year day of Western Civilization (that began in old Chaldean Iraq), out of the silence of America hanging in imperial dreams

comes the horror and roar of the tiger, the final fury, booming and bouncing off the canyons of Manhattan smashing down our skyscraping towers. The suicide bombers from another planet called The Third World have exploded on us, we think, from out of the blue.

These young incendiary outriders are at least half-educated and from the lower middle-class and their ideological mentors have access to millions in money, but the human capital and power of their nihilism is based on the exponential colonial and post-colonial torment of billions of lost souls on that other planet; half of them, now, not yet twenty-one years of age!

Even a rocket scientist can add up the long odds against American democracy and its coalition. The numbers are against us, we have created our own nemesis. So, how shall we be saved? Should we retreat into metaphysics and the masochistic rapture of Jehovah’s judgment, or shall we nuke that other planet of everyone that is not us, kill

them all and let God or History "sort it out," as we used to say in Vietnam? Hail Doctor Strangelove and go out singing "I’ll see you again"?

These are shocking ideas. There ought to be a law against them! Relax, breathe, there is a law already against such words, and many more coming. But not against such thoughts, and you know that Sigmund Freud had it right, my fellow exiles at home, when

FREED PAGE 13 of 28

he whispered that "no one can control their thoughts." And what American has not stared at the slow motion catastrophe, speeding up now, of the wretched of the earth, our economic and colonial victims, as they die of disease, hunger, war—in short, die from the

collateral chaos of White Western Judeo-Christian Civilization—stared at the television screen, changed the channel, in vain, and begun to give up the ghost.

America and the West have watched the children’s faces, knowing that they, the children, are the prisoners and hostages of these so-called "Group of 8" nations that now, at last, have the wind up and plead with their Commander-in-Chief, the United States, to consider (for its own security) increasing its annual charity donation to this Third World from 0.16 percent up to at least 0.7%. The shame, the shame!

What American, in the name of decency, can witness this world-historical scandal and not fantasy that an anti-colonial boomerang is on its way to wipe that smirking grin off the face of the White House or Downing Street? Then change the channel again, cursing inwardly, trying, again in vain, to erase the images of the damned from our mind’s eye, raging that we have been driven to obscene visions of our own national suicide by these haircuts and empty suits on the Potomac.

Think of it, fellow Americans: in the six decades since Hiroshima the United States of America has overthrown each democratically elected government in the Third World: Iran, Guatemala, Guyana, Jamaica, Chile; and subverted democratic and nationalist movements in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, South Africa, Haiti, Indonesia—the list goes on—Nicaragua, El Salvador, Santo Domingo, Mozambique—and then to come talking about Freedom and Democracy in Iraq—where Sadam Hussein had been the

FREED PAGE 14 of 28

American agent used against Iran —and Iran as part of the "Axis of Evil." Iran that could have, would have provided the democratic model to the Middle East had not the U.S. and the U.K. overthrown Iran’s elected government because it dared to claim the oil under its

own soil for themselves. How is one to feel about these serial killers of democracy who preach every day to the rest of the world and without an instant of shame? Who has not inwardly vowed that the American gang having sown the wind must now reap the whirlwind?

The White House/Downing Street one word answer to these charges used to be "Communism," today it is "Terrorism." The fact is that there has been rebellion for as long as there has been colonialism. Rome provoked both Jesus and Spartacus, Great Britain the Minute Men of Concord, and the Kenyan insurgents of the 1950s. If you won you were called the "Founding Fathers," if you lost, "Mau-Mau."

If you lost you were penned up, tortured, slaughtered in British concentration camps and called Mau-Mau. In Vietnam, before you could win, you were called gooks and Cong and the U.S. "Operation Phoenix" conducted a national assassination campaign to destroy your country in order to save it.

Study the vastly unequal body count against all the barbarians and savages and rebels of color since the rebirth of Europe (Colonialism) down to today. The Mau Mau killed some 200 whites, the British as many as 50,000 Africans. In Southeast Asia—where the U.S. took over for the rightist Vichy French Officer Corps after World War II – the nationalist and communist insurgents and civilians were killed at a rate of up to 30 to 1—and they, the Vietnamese, still defeated the "Free World." In Iraq, since the Gulf War,

FREED PAGE 15 of 28

the "collateral damage" of sanctions, bombing, and wars is killing at a differential of more than 50 to 1. And the U.K. when they invented Iraq in the 1920s did not scruple to use torture, mass murder, aerial bombardment and poison gas in the process of their progress.

Compare the insurgency and innocent body count in Africa, Asia, the Middle East to the shocking but still very small number of terror victims in the colonial home countries. Then add the tens of millions of deaths every year in the populations of poverty and color. Face the facts, the exponential mortality numbers—whether they flow from tsunami or drought, starvation or civil war genocide, disease or plague—have one common denominator: colonial occupation and control depends on there being no independent infrastructure or independent political structure during or after exploitation and colonial and post-colonial dependency.

As we talk, the television news is playing the narrative of The Group of 8 posing for their yearly photo opportunity at a world-class resort. Then the news cuts from the lush lawn to the wasteland of Africa in its agony, and it unreels the ocular proof: the faces, the eyes, the flies, the flies on the eyes of the faces; the dying cattle, the skeletal children; the ten year old boys dragged into the killing squads, murderers all, now, whom

we will be seeing again one day; the rape tents where the victims huddle, and a few NGO and medical volunteers stare at us through the camera as they say, "…the

international U.N. aid funds were promised and pledged, but so far…": every flood, famine, fire, earthquake—anything and everything is a disaster to these people because when you have no surplus or savings or security or structure then anything that happens –

FREED PAGE 16 of 28

natural or political—is a tragedy. And these black ghosts are the original sapiens stock of our own African genesis. These are our foremothers and fathers who, over some three million or more years, managed the miracle of survival so that they could pass on to us their DNA and their gene pool. And how have we, Western Civilization, repaid them, our

kin? Turn on CNN, watch your own flesh and blood die like flies on that "Dark Continent" of fabulous wealth.

So—if it is America and the sociopathic West that must be confronted then who should step forward, and with what weapons?

(Possible end of Part One here)

VI

Measured by Pliny’s clock at Lake Como, American democracy is ripe, is rotten, toxic and sclerotic, the sick man of the twenty-first century at the end of its history and the beginning of China’s capitalist revolution. The "Chinese Century" is another story but the point at issue is : the day is at hand when the history of America and the West will not be written in Cambridge or Washington , at Oxford or Harvard; our annals will be printed out for us in Peking and Jakarta, Teheran and Bombay by scholars of color who are not American Jews or Christians and whose family trees, in modern times, are rooted in colonial bondage and humiliation. And the question that will animate the multi-volume internet studies of 2090 will be "Why did they hate us?" Meaning why did we hate them?

FREED PAGE 17 of 28

The analysts of tomorrow will not be capable of elucidating the old question of why empires like the American turn paranoid and create enemies in order to maintain their false power identity, but they, the Chinese scholars, will at least be asking the right question. The question we should have asked ourselves long since while there was still

time: why, over a span of some five hundred years, did white Western Civilization in the name of Christian Salvation and Economic Progress destroy and enslave vast populations of "heathen" and degrade the eco-system to its present crisis?

This issue of "perverted" democracy, to paraphrase the Messrs Blair and Bush, begs another almost unspeakable question: After the outright U.S. defeat in Southeast Asia, and the debacle and disaster in the Middle East, is it not as clear and cold as death that the United States intends to compensate for its failing moral and human power (body count) by first the threat—then, when exposed, the actual use of "tactical" nuclear weapons? Since Nagasaki the U.S. has continually threatened to play the atomic card. No longer—the message has reached the Pentagon—China, Iran, India, others soon, will be calling the American bluff, and then what?

Make no mistake, this is what McNamara was signaling at Lake Como. We did unleash the bomb, twice, that is why our threats since 1945 have been believable. President Kennedy faced a potential air force putsch before and during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962; the hopelessly misnamed "neoconservative" seizure of U.S. foreign policy is one of sword and shield in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, against the "Axis of Evil": the tactical nuclear sword, the missile defense Star War shield. That is our historical boundary situation in Fortress America—we have, in Robert Oppenheimer’s

FREED PAGE 18 of 28

words after Hiroshima, "become death." We have terror bombed for sixty years now; we’re escalating; we’re preparing, unless stopped, to press the nuclear button again: Face it—America, like Athens, is become a Terror Democracy.

There is a catch, however, to this neoconservative, neocolonial crack pot realpolitc. The former colonized countries are ready to take casualties in the millions—the suicide bombers are only the first wave of messengers—and the U.S. will never again fight a ground war in a Korea, Vietnam, an Iraq, or an Iran (and the cheap face saving stunts in Grenada and Panama are back numbers now). Then what? Could there be an eleventh hour rescue—a Yankee version of Perestroika or Glasnost, a U.S. Gorbachav who would not be assassinated?

VII

To simply continue to e-mail or scream out strangled questions and answers to the effect that there is an atomic apocalypse coming out of the death throes of the American Empire is obviously hopelessly inadequate, even if it were true. Ah, but is it true?

Each one of us must be the judge, take no Chinese or Persian historian’s word. To begin, do you believe the balance of international statistical studies? For instance, after a lifetime of red, white and blue noise on the public address systems about America as the Greatest and the Only and Richest and the Strongest—you know it all by heart—how do you deal with the metrics that carve out the dystopian doomsday of a U.S.A. defined by its prison population, the largest in the world and overwhelmingly of color; the worst poverty housing conditions (ghettos, barrios, hollows) of any advanced society; the

FREED PAGE 19 of 28

highest level of social violence of any nation, "failed" or otherwise; the most costly and least effective health care system in the First World; the most miserly coercive foreign aid policy of any of our allies; the most violent anti-labor policy of modern times, since

the civil war, and continuing; most savage Anglo-Saxon Protestant form of slavery ever in history. Period. But we are not near the end, merely picking out facts at random; (the Most, the Worst, The Least), a stream of negative epithets to eat away at the patriotic gore, the echolalia from the spinners in the swamp—(Wait! Can it be? Yes —CNN is interrupting its coverage of the Group of 8 decision making conference in Scotland—concerning the salvation of the darker races, as usual—to announce that—No! the senses reel—that the Leader of the Free World, Mr. Bush, has just had another accident while riding his bicycle and has crashed—you couldn’t make this up, it would be condemned on the stage as a fiction—he has crashed his bike into a Scotch police officer and inflicted minor injuries on both himself, that is the Commander-in-Chief, and the unlucky constable, but that—hold for it!—the president is unscathed and will be announcing later

in the day to the G-8 that the American People are the most generous people in the world.)

Where were we? Torture? That’s correct: since the Second World War the U.S. School of the Americas has taught and exported torture, filled up the world with a new regime of physical/medical/psychological/chemical/torment (the Syrians and the Egyptians aren’t in it). The naked mound of tortured living bodies at Abu Ghraib were only the first course, the "softening up" process assigned to the MPs of the West Virginia

FREED PAGE 20 of 28

National Guard. There are as yet no films of what transpired in the sanguine and secret rooms reserved for the senior officers of Military Intelligence, CIA, and the "Independent Contractors." This snapshot of torture is the elementary reason that the United States refuses to accept the Geneva Protocols or the existence of the World Court or an

independent United Nations, much less the Nuclear Proliferation treaties or inspections—all refused by the U.S. before September 11, 2001.

Today we are in the grip of a one-party anti-terrorism state, a hollow rich/poor psuedodemocracy of denial, of fabulous wealth and soul breaking dread and poverty (Faulkner had tried to pinpoint this stark split when he described his Mississippi microcosm as a hell where poor "white men rent farms and live like niggers and niggers crop on shares and live like animals…"). Yet still the G-8 demands to know why they hate us, these Third World zombies, these "dead enders," these (cheapest of all words) terrorists, these—(CNN is breaking in again. What next? Another Bush bicycle—No… A terror attack on London! Prime Minster Blair stands before the cameras at the luxury resort, Bush and the Group of 8 ranged around him. Blair is whey-faced, his voice failing; Bush bruised and frozen. These men are panic stricken; terror surges out of the television box. So all the bombers are not pinned down in Baghdad after all… "Worse than the IRA" the commentator is saying, and that such horror should be timed with this G-8 conference which, above all, has been "called to address the misery of the world’s Poorest of the Poor"—Turn that mighty Wurlitzer off, turn it off now! Before the censor under the skin tears up these pages).

FREED PAGE 21 of 28

In 2001, the man who falls off bicycles smirked that they envy and hate us for our Freedom, our Civilization, our Progress. Yes, he was half right, the G-8 has half the reason. But it is the other half, the major term of the dialectic, the truth beneath the half truth that condemns us to the most drastic accounting: Our Freedom, our Progress, our Civilization is based on the vast criminal colonial conspiracy that we, variously,

Spewing that word salad while Western Civilization and its comprador classes raped and robbed the ancient world and the new until not a diamond or an ounce of gold or oil or a buffalo was left uncounted in Madrid or London or, latterly, New York.

We North Americans know that the original sin of our empire was the Spanish, French, English genocide of the Native Population of the New World from Hispaniola to Tierra del Fuego, in the tens of millions, by murder, disease, induced suicide and madness: Gold and God. Then came Uncle Sam and, now it can be told, the theft outright of the way West. How it was that white posses first scalped the so-called Indian savages. Scalped them, and called them niggers. "These whites have come up shooting," the great Chief Black Elk wrote. Shooting and slaving and stealing until the price of retribution to

FREED PAGE 22 of 28

Red and Black is beyond even the American national debt. No money and no shame—and no answers to the real question, "Why did we hate them so?"

Talk about "innocence." Talk about "paradigm shift" and "everything changing after 9/11"—what white settlers did to red and black people in the name of Civilization, that was a paradigm shift, for them; that was a change, all right, if you call the Holocaust a "change." September 11, 2001 was not a paradigm shift: 9/11 was a bloody by-blow of American and Colonial crimes against humanity, a boomerang, the chickens coming home to roost, the reaping of the whirlwind.

The terror of 2001 is born out of our crime in delineating the losers of the colonial bloodbath as half-men, heathens, savages, wogs, gooks, apes, animals; calling them women, witches, devils and terrorists so that our homegrown heroes on horseback and bicycles could boast of themselves as not only Men but Great Men. These great cowards and psychopaths who have pushed the hands of the clock on the cover of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and all the other scientific man-made chronometers on earth, to 11:59 P.M.—and they have the audacity to ask, "Why do they hate us?!"

So we do know. Have always known. And, thus, understand what we must do. Know that turning ourselves into human bombs is the last vanity; that we cannot kill every banal bureaucratic bully in the world (from Adolph Eichmann to Dick Cheney) in effigy or in absentia merely by wishing it so, or waiting for a god to do it, that is for the Bible and the movies. No, if we are, as it appears, simply a small number of higher primates situated in a part of North America who have, too soon, styled ourselves as Human Beings and the Guardians of God, Freedom and Democracy everywhere, then

FREED PAGE 23 of 28

how can we, in Abraham Lincoln’s word, "disenthrall" ourselves before it is too late? How can we—Homo Amerikanus, late in the Age of Atoms—ordinary citizens interpose ourselves between the killing machine of the Washington War Party and the rest of the world? Is there an idea, more powerful than the hopeless and pathetic terror of high explosive suicide, that we can grasp and use now, today?

The old Russians used to say that "one day was enough" to save the soul—it had better be, at one minute to midnight.

VIII

To stop and save America before she goes ballistic must be our obsession now. And how shall we be saved?

Permanent Non-Violent rebellion.

Not simply a tactic or a strategy but an immediate unremitting onslaught with what Gandhi called "the weapons of the brave." You shake your head. What! After the

assassinations of the ‘60s; the outright smash and grab hijacking of the 2000 election in Florida and the suppression of the Ohio vote in 2004 in the African-American wards and on the college campuses—you cling to the day dream that "The System Works" and the world need only wait for 2008?

What will work is non-violence: the soul-power of Jesus and Sokrates, Thoreau and Tolstoy, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and the hundreds of millions in the United States and around the globe who hate and fear our wars and our

FREED PAGE 24 of 28

weapons of mass destruction. We do not have to reinvent the wheel if we remember that prolonged non-violent campaigns of unearned suffering have prevailed in the past and must prevail again once and for all because America has violated the technological time lag that until now had allowed nations to recover from their berserk breakdowns.

The necessity now is not to cross over into Jordan, not a Rapture or the Raising of the dead. We Americans have one therapy alone for our lethal addiction to power and all its attendant delusions. Non-violence must be our rehabilitation once again. We need to build on our own Abolition and Women’s movements, on Martin King’s magnificent Human Rights Mobilization (co-opted by his murder when he began the March on Washington to challenge the nation to face up to its destiny as a true democracy of Economic Rights) that now can and must be completed.

Have we forgotten that Mahatma Gandhi broke the might of the ruling power of his time in India with non-violence, and Nelson Mandela overcame a looming blood storm in South Africa? That Poland’s epic Solidarity Movement prevailed? And it was all done with the almost balletic elegance of the politics of non-violence.

The details, the order of battle of this non-violent struggle to the end against what President Eisenhower, who understood something about World War, called the Military-Industrial Complex that was "crucifying mankind on a cross of iron"—the details exist and are emerging in their twenty-first century format. We will all have to create the new non-violent rebellion together; the dialogue was already begun in the huge anti-war

FREED PAGE 25 of 28

demonstrations of 2003, the essays and books are following. There will be new editions of the genius of non-violence, and old truths recovered.

A hint: Albert Einstein argued irresistibly that if 2% of a democratic nation, like America, refused to pay that percentage of their taxes that financed war then the death machine would grind to a halt—because the Systems (at each and every level) would be

paralyzed. Literally paralyzed: courts and jails, legislatures and executives. The business of the nation would suddenly not be business and the business of war. American life would, again, include non-violent traditions from the 1930s, the 1950s, 1960s; from the 1770s, the 1860s, from Chautauqua 1880-1900: non-violence has as many faces and forms as violence, it includes individual tax protest and a new march on Washington; poverty rent strikes and health care demonstration actions; college and university war crimes trials and actions. The Judeo-Christian-American story has a vital suppressed anarcho/democratic root of love, rebellion, peace, justice and mutual aid, and this radical source of energy will start to flow from the county courthouse to the White House. The long stalled American Revolution will groan, then it will start moving again.

(Again! CNN in Terror mode is retailing what they are calling a "copycat" terror attack on London, as if the new bombers manque were a caricature; as if the suicide terror of Iraq was not, in itself, a deadly caricature of the techno-chemical fury and remote control carnage of the mad bombers Bush and Blair and their various grandiose operations –"Just Cause," "Enduring Freedom," "Desert Storm," "New Democracy"… The long coming boomerang that smashed into the Manhattan skyline has passed over London, moving east. Never mind—it, the terror boomerang, will come

FREED PAGE 26 of 28

around again, and again, unless we can manage to unplug ourselves from this idiot box of canned metaphysics, this mighty Wurlitzer that at the moment is broadcasting the image of the long headed Prime Ministers of England and Australia bloviating on the characteristics of "The Terrorist Mind," and their certain knowledge that, in any case,

nothing that happens has anything to do with the presence of a vast Western expeditionary host on the Arabian Peninsula.)

Hold on to the scraps of non-violent hope: William Faulkner was attacked from all sides when he pleaded for a moment of patience to allow the South to purge itself of the guilt and the rotten gallantry. Now behold how the only authentic expression of shame and responsibility in the nation is coming out of Mississippi and Alabama!: The Terror—the crimes against Medgar Evers; Vernon Dahmer; Emmett Till; Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman; the children dynamited in the Birmingham Church in 1963—this homeland terror is being confronted and judged today by home county small town Southern juries. You may say it is too little, but you may not, in good faith, say that it is too late.

The Deep South rebelling, again, against its damned nightmare legacy just as Faulkner promised. Official and popular non-violent racial and social justice in Yoknapatawpha County, in Dixie, in the Republican Old Confederacy of Alabama and Mississippi: the non-violent rebellion building now is going to astonish us. There will be many old and new tactics and scenarios, all of them non-violent. With most ending in arrests and trials and some jail time—until the numbers grow to critical mass...

FREED PAGE 27 of 28

VIII

The end of another day on the Lake. Not the end of History. Something deep in the United States of America and its Camp of Victory went dead after the boys and the heroes came home from the Second World War, even as in Athens after the triumph of Marathon. The final victor, then, was Sparta, and after Auschwitz and Hiroshima Gandhi mourned that "National Socialism has won," that democracy would need to be reborn. Just as old Pliny the Younger pondering in both his Villa Tragedia and Villa Commedia foresaw the end of the Roman Ideal and prayed for a sign.

Time for the exile to go home. New Orleans and Baghdad are now sister cities. Yet it still sparkles, this Lake, and the sky looks flawless. Nature’s clock seems to be in perfect working order. And it is: out of sight and sound behind the high Alps the last of the glacier lakes are breaking up—even as the polar ice caps. An authentic paradigm change in the real world, vast and terrific, is silently, for the moment, moving towards us. And we are slowly waking up because that soft ticking sound is the heartbeat of our species and it is infinitely louder than all the suicide bombs in all the worlds—First, Second, and Third.

The exile looks up, and there on the rocks, just north, is the message: the giant stone death mask of Mussolini, clear as day. Or is it Napoleon? And we had the trick to see it—Alexander and Julius Caesar dead and turned to clay; Napoleon and Mussolini to stone; Bush and Blair? They will be overcome by non-violence. Let them pass away, they are already dead men.

FREED PAGE 28 of 28

The clock that tells us of their demise is the Lake. The Stone Age sign, the huge deep still wet print of the Long Foot of Time that has, so soon, caught up with the United States of America—exiles and all.

Pescallo at Bellagio, 2005

-30-