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CounterPunch
November
21, 2002
From Wal-Mart
to Proudhon
by MARK HAND
A Wal-Mart advertisement caught my eye during
the Washington Redskins game against the Jacksonville Jaguars
two weekends ago. It was the Sunday before Veterans Day and the
company thought it best to honor former military personnel who
now work at its stores by buying ad time during NFL games. Faces
of the soldiers appeared on the television screen, with a label
of where the Pentagon had sent them. Vietnam. Persian Gulf. At
the end of the spot, a young man appeared on the screen, affixed
with the label, "War on Terrorism."
The Wal-Mart employee's designation as
a veteran of the "War on Terrorism" made me laugh and
cringe at the same time. Wal-Mart's advertising department had
concluded--without too much expensive market research, I hope--that
the typical viewer of a U.S. football game had bought into the
government and establishment media's propaganda: America's greatest
heroes are those who have stepped on either a battlefield or
a playing field, or ideally both.
The Sept. 11, 2001 attacks had spawned
an environment where the United States could produce heroes from
such an amorphous thing called a War on Terrorism and then parade
them in advertisements for Wal-Mart, the biggest retailer in
the world. The atypical aspect about the War on Terrorism, though,
is that its most important battlefield is not overseas. The frontline
is here at home where the federal government and its lieutenants
at the state and local levels are using their taxpayer confiscations
to whack us with new forms of restrictions on freedom.
In the War on Terrorism, the new hero
is the well-read librarian who betrays the noble tradition of
the profession by snitching to the government his suspicions
about a patron who has been checking out books by Mikhail Bakunin
and Emma Goldman. Or it's the vigilant Transportation Security
Administration screener who stops an airline passenger from getting
to his gate on time because he's carrying a copy of Edward Herman's
The Real Terror Network.
For Veteran's Day 2003, Wal-Mart may
choose to honor one of the Sam's Club elite membership customers
who also happens to work for John Poindexter's Information Awareness
Office at the Pentagon and who succeeded in uncovering the purchasing
habits of a citizen who earlier in the year had used his AmEx
card to order a thousand copies of the Quran through <Amazon.com>
and had them FedExed to a mosque in Brixton.
Today's War on Terrorism is really a
battle to desensitize us against the true meaning of freedom.
Because in a war, a nation-state demands that its subjects subjugate
certain superficial rights, such as many of those legalized in
the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution, for the greater
cause of fighting the "evil-doers."
If we could have the good fortune of
asking Noam Chomsky's astute observer friend on Mars for his
opinion on today's War on Terrorism, we would probably get a
better grasp on who deserves the greatest accolades. Chomsky's
Martian friend would probably argue that in the real war on terrorism
the true heroes are those who are able to find peaceful but effective
techniques to rein in the greatest producers of terror--the militaries
and police agencies of the United States and the other dominant
nation-states. Given that the Soviet Union fell more than a decade
ago, the Martian also may wonder why U.S. confederates in cities
such as London, Rome, Tokyo, Canberra and, yes, Moscow not only
tolerate the American Empire but also provide materiel support
for it.
Chomsky's Martian friend probably would
find even more heroic those who are seeking freedom against the
murderous despots in all of the Middle East, much of Asia, Africa
and Latin America. The Martian, I'm sure, already has noticed
the unusual trend of Earth's artificial nation-states placing
the sanctity of their governing systems above the freedom of
the people who live within their borders--borders that, in more
cases than not, were drawn in the blood of the governed.
The Martian may even pull out his pocketbook
of the writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon that he bought at a
Wal-Mart during one of his visits with Chomsky in the Hub of
the Universe and recite that not-famous-enough quotation that
proves more timely to him today than at any other time he has
been observing human life on Earth:
"To be governed is to be at every
move, at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered,
enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed,
authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished.
It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the
general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed,
exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed;
then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint,
to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused,
clubbed, choked, imprisoned, shot, machine-gunned, judged, condemned,
deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked,
ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is
its justice; that is its morality."
Mark Hand
is a diehard Redskins fan and editor of PressAction.com.
He can be reached at mark@pressaction.com.
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November 14,
2002
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