We live in strange, dangerous times.
Wherever we turn, war and rumors of war saturate the headlines. Blast walls, border fences, SWAT teams, green zones, dispatches from the abyss...
A cacophony of competing images assail us: terror, "disappearances," torture taxis, trips to the "dark side," ecological collapse. What do they mean, these hallucinatory apparitions cast by the corporate media's ubiquitous lens? A million dead Iraqis and the latest buzz on Brittany: what "metrics" do we use to measure this?
How explain the gross indifference, the criminal disregard, the pampered extravagances of a political culture steeped in theft on the grandest scale, the bastard child of Alien and the Real Housewives of Orange County? The racist opprobrium heaped on immigrants, the poor, the dispossessed, the victims of Hurricane Katrina, beaten down, despised, forgotten, as society morphs into the wrecking ball of Hurricane America: universal shipwreck as social policy?
More pertinently, how do we clear away the fog that blind us to realities lurking just below the surface, if not in plain sight, the thousand and one acts of willful blindness described by Israeli journalist Amira Hass as the gesture of "looking from the side," averting our glance from the horror show running without interruption that is "actually existing capitalism"?
There will be no easy answers here: no "unified field theories" purporting to "analyze" the crimes of our twenty-first century masters of the deep state. No fruitless exploration of the alleged "mysteries" of Tower 7's collapse. No idle speculation on whether or not 9/11 was "allowed to happen" or "made to happen." It happened. 3,000 human beings murdered, their lives snuffed out in the blink of an eye, faster than you can change the channel or navigate to the nearest hyperlink.
Yet what are we to make of this passage from Daniel Hopsicker:
On June 28 at Boston's Logan Airport, Mohamed Atta boarded a United Airlines flight and flew first class nonstop to San Francisco. He bypassed the bohemian North Beach district, and didn’t take the cruise to Alcatraz... Atta headed for Vegas.
Atta: a lap-dancing jihadi? A coke-fueled commando tossing dice at the Bellagio? A kitten-killer in the front ranks of Osama's "Martyrdom Battalion"?
What "happened in Vegas," didn't stay there, of that much we're certain.
Here, as elsewhere, ours is a system of malfeasance, complicity and corruption -- the ultimate "inside job." Capitalists gone wild.
Yet conspiracies do exist, they form a hermetic architecture of fear lacerating our corporatized landscape. A vista opening onto an endless succession of car parks, shopping malls, apartment blocks, gated communities, prisons: a controlled environment out of control.
Who are the well-coiffed grifters, the military-industrial-media securocrats who rig the game, designers of a multitude of "crusades" and "jihads" who have transformed our planet into a deranged novella cribbed from J.G. Ballard or Philip K. Dick, one you can't put down, one you're compelled to "read" straight through to the end? The "little Eichmanns" who always make the trains go off the tracks. You'll meet them here, shocking in their utter banality.
And the degradation of words, of life itself, where meaning is emptied until all that's left is a simulacrum, a brand: "Operation Gladio," "Operation CHAOS," "Operation Iraqi Freedom": the inevitable accoutrements of "Team" Disney and WalMart. Are they too, not signposts of a system infinitely corrupt and corruptible? How else explain the repetition of certain motifs, tried-and-true methods to throw us off guard, disorient us in the face of an unlivable reality we're forced to live, to navigate like so many bats whose radars have been switched off?
If, as Peter Dale Scott would have it, parapolitics "describes at best only an intervening layer of the irrationality under our political culture's rational surface," then what I propose to do here, with modest means, is take a plunge into the dark political recesses of the deep state.
Is it fascism yet, you ask... When hasn't it been?
Time to wake up...
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