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 Ice
Cube 
 "It's
a tried and true way of dealing with people or nations that the
ruling elite finds troublesome or inconvenient -- whoever gets in
our way. They're simply lumped into the enemy pile. "
 "You
need gas money and a car that works. Of course, my preference is to
do it in the middle of the night! Leave them little presents, you
know what I'm saying? Like the Easter bunny."
 "It
is often that we find a corp-orate-controlled president who widens the gap between rich and poor and is involved in nefarious military adventures abroad in the White House, but this goofball is off the scale."  "
I think art and politics are directly related to each
other, and people that deny the cross-influence are kidding
themselves." |
Are We There Yet? by Nathan Means While Amerikkkas’ Most Wanted was being overwhelmed by two incorrigible kids in Are We There Yet?, Minority Report was playing on the streets of Washington DC. Set in 2054’s Washington, DC, Minority Report follows police officers in a six-year-old experimental program that has eliminated homicide by arresting would-be murderers for pre-crime. In 2005’s Washington, DC, another six year-old program prevented people from blocking traffic, breaking windows, or inconveniencing conference attendees by arresting would-be protestors prior to political events and shutting down the entire city on event days. Of course, the 2005 version of Minority Report doesn’t have the same sleek Spielbergian sheen. Instead of the movie’s freakish but infallible psychics, today’s pre-crime arrests must rely on the predictive ability of the same police force whose major breaks in the year-old Chandra Levy case came from a guy walking his dog. Given their abysmal record, it’s small wonder the cops occasionally decide to bag it and just arrest everyone in a park at lunchtime. As fruit of this labor, says Mark Goldstone of the National Lawyers Guild, the past six years has seen the DC police force face more lawsuits for false arrests, police misconduct and brutality than they have successfully convicted criminals city-wide. Thus the great pageantry of a presidential inauguration went forward in a captive city, the 100 blocks downtown squeezed behind a $17 million security blanket funded by a disenfranchised and mostly African-American citizenry. Snipers lined rooftops, missile launchers were positioned next to the Capitol, marching bands and other paraders were warned not to look directly at the president or make any sudden moves, scores of protestors were arrested all around DC and several apples and bananas were taken off bystanders as the presidential motorcade approached. That this crowning event of democracy was simultaneously history’s most lavish and security-heavy is one annoyance -- are we at war or is it time to break out the champagne? But more irritating is our government’s recent refusal to go through the courtesy of jolting our adrenaline with an ominous spike-in-chatter before instituting draconian security prohibitions. Instead, this inauguration’s unprecedented security was merely explained by a “Special National Security Event” designation. Clearly after more than three years of Tom Ridge’s psy-ops deployed on our freaked-out civilian populations, the government thinks we are effectively “reprogrammed” -- sort of like the funds for Rumsfeld’s private spies. By no longer bothering to dispatch the terror boogeyman, the Bush regime is not trying to calm us down, but to normalize the state of emergency that presumably justifies repressive security forces, military intervention, ballooning deficits, and unexplained, endless war. Remember, however, it was in 1999 -- after protestors in Seattle shut down the WTO meetings -- that the right to protest publicly in DC was suspended. These prohibitions first occurred under a Democrat way back when you didn’t have to undress before boarding a plane. Though terror’s specter has only increased this tendency to lock down the First Amendment, the state first bared its teeth at the mere interruption of an economic conference.
Keeping this in mind elevates us slightly above the news cycle’s spastic gurgling and disorienting hyper-rhythms and allows us to trace how the Age of Terror clouds what was a well-defined conflict between student, environmental, labor, so-called Third World farmers and others against international capital. As so much of the world’s progressive energy is now expended battling the White Houses’ regressive black hole we tend to forget that, pre-9/11, we were already in the shadow of a massive security state determined to defend capital’s prerogatives. So. Are we there yet? Hollywood’s bleak techno-fears are rising up off the screen -- 1984‘s totalitarian intrusions, Minority Report’s pre-crime and soon the Terminator-esque gun-wielding robots the Pentagon says it will deploy in Iraq. Our Leader is beginning a second term by conflating both Jesus and Freedom as the “last hope of mankind” while theocrats, quasi-fascists and Capital’s automatons pack the wings anticipating the next four years’ spoils. Have we yet arrived at the gossamer of possibility that “Democracy’s” credibility -- scorn heaped on it both through Our Leader’s abuses and it’s rhetorical shielding of our bloody invasions of foreign lands -- will empty out and collapse? While recognizing our fortune (versus, say, the average citizen of pre- or post-invasion Iraq) can we shake off Democracy’s somnambulistic spell? Are we approaching a demystified time when the vague invocation of “Democracy” no longer disappears murderous ghettos or political systems rigged by partisanism and choked by cash? Can we now join Al-Zarqawi in calling Democracy a “big American lie” -- not in quest of Islamic theocracy but a more radical and equitable economy? We live in The Permanent States of Emergency. The sooner we know that the easier it will be to go forward. Are we there yet? 10
February 05  Nathan
Means performs with cacophonous aplomb for Washington D.C.'s post-rock
badasses, Trans Am, whose newest release, Liberation, is insulting a red-state
citizen somewhere near you. This is his first column for Morphizm. To
be abused by the Am, click
here now.
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