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CounterPunch
December
28, 2002
Call Me Johnson:
Sticking Up
to the Joneses
by ADAM ENGEL
"To say someone is a Johnson means
he keeps his word and honors his obligations. He's a good man
to do business with and a good man to have on your team. He is
not a malicious, snooping, interfering self-righteous trouble-making
person...A Johnson minds his own business. But he will help when
help is needed. He doesn't stand by while someone is drowning
or trapped in a wrecked car."
William S. Burroughs, "The
Adding Machine"
William Burroughs, that nasty, ex-junky, queer
(and what are YOU gonna do about it?), gun enthusiast and satirist,
that - horror of horrors - FREE MAN, had a word for the decent,
peace loving folk of the world. He called them Johnsons, or The
Johnson Family, an expression he first encountered in a book,
"You Can't Win," by Joe Black.
While Burroughs described what it means
to be a Johnson quite well, he neglected to mention the other
family in this Manichean contest: The Joneses.
You know the Joneses. Those folks who
are always trying to keep up with each other and take each other
out and lead you to the Kool-Aid.
Johnsons shut up and leave you alone
unless you need a hand, unless anybody needs a hand and wants
a hand. They'll help you out and then be on their way, not lingering
to be congratulated, immortalized, PERSONified live on TV.
But a Jones'll stab you in the back until
you're good and dead. Look in the US PATRIOT/TIPS stool pigeon
registry and you'll find only the first-names are different;
the last name's always "Jones." You usually won't find
a Johnson on any list, certainly not a list belonging to a government.
Johnsons stay under the radar, but do the right thing.
Burroughs wrote, "The Johnson Family
formulates a Manichean position where good and evil are in conflict
and the outcome is at this point uncertain. It is not an eternal
conflict, since one or the other must win a final victory. Which
side are you on?"
I imagine if there was a religion for
Johnsons it would be some variation of Zen, in which the only
law, commandment or moral imperative would be to SIT DOWN and
SHUT UP.
Joneses on the other hand comprise the
extreme, fundamentalist, doctrinaire wing of almost all major
religions -- Judaism Christianity Islam Hinduism Buddhism Capitalism
Communism etc. - and don't be fooled by any old Yarmulke or Collar
or Turban or other disguise. They're looking for your money and
your soul. They need your soul to make quota; they need your
money to make their brother's wife (or son), and also to buy
guns so other Joneses can kill each other in the name of their
respective Jones morality, virtue and god.
Well I don't know about you, but my name
is Johnson. "My people" are of no specific race, creed
or ethnicity, though as a Johnson I always have and always will
stand up to bigotry of any kind, nor do they belong to a specific
Nation State. As a Johnson I try, to the best of my ability,
to treat all world citizens as people, not the property of whatever
government that claims to own them. No, there are as many Joneses
among the Jews, Christians, Muslims and Hindus etc. as there
are as there are among, Americans, Chinese, Eskimos or any other
religious group, ethnicity, nation state or category humans find
themselves placed or born into.
So, when I first heard the words "NEVER
AGAIN," I took them to mean never again. For anybody. It
meant all Johnsons had to make sure "it" never happened
again to anyone, ever. If there's one lesson we Johnson's learned
from the Nazis it's to stop any Fascist Joneses in their tracks
before the first Fascist Jones uniform comes back from the tailor.
That means fighting all racism, "ethnism," sexism,
homophobia, xenophobia, injustice and any Jones phobia or "ism"
at all times, always, as much as is in our power to do so. Might
not even have been a war or a Holocaust had some German Johnson
interjected himself between Hitler and his first bedraggled,
snarling audience and threw a fat ripe tomato in his face. Imagine
Adolph trying to look all mean and autocratic with tomato guts
dripping from his Charlie Chaplin mustache...
I don't know about you, but I have no
intention of being like the good German Jones's who said nothing
while their Jewish German neighbors were shipped off standing-room
only on cattle cars to be slaughtered like...cattle... around
1941, nor do I want to be a good American Jones who sat by all
patriotic that same year as their Japanese-American neighbors
were shipped off to a humiliating albeit not fatal "detention."
Never again means liberty and justice
for all, all the time always, the right to mind their own business
and be left the hell alone, as Bill Burroughs might say. But
those Joneses are cunning and you gotta watch 'em. Seems like
right now, while Dubya Jones has filled his cabinet with African-American
Joneses, Jewish American Jones, female Jones and every color
shape and size of Jones imaginable, there's a stink of "It's
happening, It Will Happen " rising from the Dubya Jones
Administration and all those sniveling shit-bird Joneses in Congress.
Seems like there's trouble in the making
for all of us, but Arab Americans in particular or anyone who
looks like one (a Jones can't tell the difference between an
Arab Christian, a Pakistani Moslem, an Indian Hindu, or an Iranian
Jew and pretty much doesn't give a damn).
This could just be a shiver I'm feeling
in these old, arthritic Johnson bones, but it seems to me that
even "Arab-looking" Americans who wrap themselves in
the flag - doesn't work; the Flag may carry to be Potent Magic
these days, but it still ain't bullet proof - seem a little less,
shall we say, "free" than they had been, a little less
"safe," a little less "American."
Seems like the Joneses are up to nasty,
nasty, nasty. Again.
Maybe, me being a Jewish American- born
Johnson, and made not a little suspicious of Jones nature by
the Holocaust and other Jonesian monstrosities, I'm being paranoid.
But as Burroughs said, "A paranoid is someone who knows
a little bit about what's going on."
Well, whatever I know or don't know,
I'll be damned if I'll sit back like a "good German"
or "good American" Jones if it ever comes to watching
my Arab-American or any other neighbors "held indefinitely"
for questioning due to suspicion of "Terrorism-By-Default"
or whatever the Joneses might come up with. Never again, as I
said, means never again, not here, not anywhere. Never again
means standing up like a Johnson, immediately, to let those Joneses
know that NOBODY'S life is cheap.
I believe we Johnsons outnumber the Joneses
by orders of magnitude on this planet, so if we each do our bit
maybe we can accomplish something, or at least stop the Joneses
from doing any more harm than they've already done. If you look
around - anywhere, from your own neighborhood that's unseasonably
warm AGAIN this year to the spooks on TV spooking your kids into
thinking god himself was a Jones and this is his will - you'll
see how much considerable harm the Joneses have done to this
world already.
The world is never gonna be safe for
anybody until Johnson's make it safe for everybody.
You can pretend the Johnsons are naive,
idealistic, that they don't understand the hard realities of
religion, patriotism, racial identity, class, money, snack food,
whatever. But again, look at the world around you with its toxic
water, rotten-egg-sperm asthma-air and grim, grim future. Blood
all over the place it makes me sick. Look at "your own people,"
whoever they are. Do they and they alone have your interests
in mind? Are your children their children, or merely their clay
and fodder? Are they really your people, after all? Or more Joneses,
leading you and the rest of the herd to yet another vat of poison
Kool-aid?
No. No way. Not this time.
My people are the Johnsons.
Adam Engel
can be reached at asengel@attglobal.net
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