The Nineties

I never really had anything that could be charitably called a political thought in my head until the early nineties, during the era of Operation Desert Storm. My wife and I hadn’t gotten our first computer at that time, much less did we have access to anything resembling the internet; we were very much limited to a couple of channels of network television, various magazines and newspapers, plus whatever we could pick up from the radio.

Even limited to those avenues of information it was pretty obvious that the United States of America had become a sick place. George Bush lost his reelection bid and handed the white house over to Bill Clinton. Various militia groups such as the Freemen of Montana were circling their wagons. Attorney General Janet Reno administered the burning of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, and the wife of Randy Weaver was shot to death at Ruby Ridge. In Los Angeles, the videotaped beating of Rodney King sparked riots. OJ was on trial, and media maggots like Geraldo Rivera populated daytime TV.

The Unabomber and Norman Schwarzkopf were on the news every night, while Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City had yet to become a gleam in his resentful eye. There was plenty of reactionary jingoism to go around. The red, white and blue became a ubiquitous design element, used to sell used cars, cheap Chinese goods and advertising space.

The men and women who managed to survive their tours in Iraq gradually trickled back home, bringing with them whatever damage they had internalized there, physical or mental, and the cycle prepared to repeat itself. Meanwhile, here on the home front, the privatization of the prison industry spread like a civil cancer, while home invasions perpetrated by SWAT teams funded on behalf of the War On Drugs became ever more common.

These are the events I remember. I sure that I don’t have a good grasp of the time-lines, since I was distracted by my own concerns, problems and hardships. During those days I witnessed my family slowly splintering, succumbing to economic and social pressures, their connections to one another undermined by the general zeitgeist. They sent me photos of newborns along with news of family members who had gone to prison. My wife and I clung to one another with a low-grade fever of ever-present desperation, and moved on as best we could.

A bomb went off in the basement of the World Trade Center. The Freemen and the Branch Davidians each had their dealings with the federal government. McVeigh carried out his plans. I continued to receive letters from my family, with news of various trials and tribulations, and wallet-sized photos of wrinkled newborns. The president got a blow job.

And then there was an election. and not long after that the twin towers in New York came down for good. The U.S. decided to initiate an assault on the beleaguered people of Iraq for that. The government of France wasn’t willing to play along. My wife, being a citizen of that nation, was treated to some rather shabby treatment because of it, and I began to take another look at my fellow Americans. I didn’t much like what I saw.

I still don’t. I see what I perceive to be a fundamental lack of awareness there. Or maybe it isn’t that; maybe it’s simply the results of being distracted by trifles and nonsense, conditioned to respond to the same in ways that serve the needs of an elite in some far off city, rather than those of our own people, right here and now.

Now we have the internet, and the ability to examine wide variety of views on current affairs. I read everything from Marxists to free market libertarians, evangelical christians to hardcore athiests. All of them are worth studying, not really for anything they have to say about any given issue, but rather for the patterns their thoughts assume.

Even the most enlightened among us are full of crap. Go read your Twain, your Mencken, your Ingersoll. Read stuff by people who wrote by candlelight. Make no mistake: things were just as messed up in their day, though the distractions were fewer. It’s an edifying way to spend an hour or two.

We suffer from a distinct lack in the ability to empathize. Our connections with one another have been systematically undermined on behalf of a heirarchical social structure that cares not a damn for any one of us, beyond what paper riches we can circulate in favor of maintaining an illusion of wealth and well being. In truth, our real wealth has been in our own hands all along; but due to the vulnerabilities imposed upon us by our very nature we have been subject to being convinced that those things were to be found elsewhere, In another city, far away.