July 4th, I wandered down to Independence Hall. There were soldiers in dress and battle uniforms, a high school marching band, many beefy bikers and a handful of svelte beauty queens, including Miss America, Teresa Scanlan. In front of the National Museum of American Jewish History, more than thirty Falun Dafa drummers, all female, performed a measured dance. Nearby, Sri Chinmoy followers sat under a portrait of their God stand-in, with these words emblazoned on their float:
America, America, America!
Great you are, good you are,
Brave you are, kind you are.
O my America, America,
Your Heaven-Freedom
Is earth’s aspiration-choice.
With you, in you
Is God-Hour’s Victory-Voice
I saw a fake, many-gunned Navy ship and, in front of the Library Company of Philadelphia, a real armored personnel carrier. Over a gorgeous transom, a marble Ben Franklin stood, draped in a toga, but no one gave this eminently sensible man a gander. Native or foreign, everyone was more interested in climbing inside the ass kicking killer transporter for a souvenir photo.
Seen often these days in civilian contexts, on streets, in ballparks and malls, soldiers and military hardware are there to remind us that we are in many wars at once, or, rather, we’re in one open-ended, bankrupting yet somehow necessary mother-of-all-wars, because the enemy is always near. That terrorist could be standing next to you, or maybe he’s you, buddy! That’s why the government must shove its hands into your hair and down your panties, brief or Depend adult diaper. Got a problem with that? Tough shit.
Half a block away, I ran into another Ben Franklin. Standing next to a faux Betsy Ross, this impersonator was being interviewed by a television crew. In an increasingly fake America, where even wood pulp has become an ingredient in pancakes, muffins, salad dressings and fish filets, it’s appropriate that an imposter should dish up mcnuggets of jive wisdom to an audience of post literates.
What would the real Franklin make of our horrible mess? You can’t say he didn’t warn us. Poor Richard, “Buy what thou hast no need of, and ere long thou shalt sell thy necessaries.” Since over half of our tax revenues goes to service wars past and present, America is worse than broke. Unable to pay her bills or maintain basic infrastructures, she’s leasing her freeways and parking meters to foreigners.
She may even invite China to build a 50-square-mile “technology zone” in Idaho. As Lt. Gov. Brad Little explains, “Idaho’s the last state that should say we don’t want to do business with Asia. Asia’s where the money is.” According to the Idaho Statesman, this complex will be a “fully contained city with all services included,” and the Chinese are attracted by Idaho’s “low cost for doing business,” and “because of the lack of infrastructure here, which means it has more opportunity.” You read that right, an American state is now pitching itself as underdeveloped, cheap and ready for foreign capital and expertise. By selling us everything, including pre-infected, spy ready computers, China has so many of our depreciating dollars, it might as well buy itself a private Idaho. Of course, this will be spun as a great opportunity. As Indigent Dick already warned, “The second vice is lying, the first is running in debt.”
As I write this, Obama and the Republicans are still haggling over whether to tax our wealthiest just a tad more, or to starve and shortchange the rest of us even worse, but what’s not being discussed is America’s monstrous war budget, though this is the main cause of our national bankruptcy, actual and moral. Since endless war fattens our richest, America will continue to commit mass murders on a vast scale, even as she destroys herself in the process.
Americans are planning two mass protests in Washington DC against the military industrial complex. One, Seize DC, will start on September 11th, and the other, organized by October2011.org, will start on October 6th, the anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan. Unlike all recent American protests, which tend to be no more than sign waving parades lasting but a few hours, weather permitting, these two protests are meant to go on until the authorities yield to their demands. As October2011.org articulates, “We will NONVIOLENTLY resist the corporate machine by occupying Freedom Plaza until our resources are invested in human needs and environmental protection instead of war and exploitation.”
A precedent comes to mind. In 1932, destitute World War I veterans and their families descended on Washington to demand an early payment, roughly $1,000 per soldier, of a promised bonus. Estimated between 20,000 and 40,000 people, they lived in abandoned buildings, tents and shacks for nearly three months until routed by federal troops. Four marchers were killed and over 1,000 injured. Though these Americans had no radical aims, though they didn’t seek to change or even upset the system, their government responded to their pitiful plea with deadly violence. Four years later, however, the veterans’ demand was met after a similar protest.
A more radical protest was mounted the Poor People Campaign in 1968. According to Marion Wright Edelman, it was Robert Kennedy who had come up with the idea, “I had been working with Robert Kennedy on poverty in Mississippi, and he told me to tell Dr. King to bring the poor to Washington. To make them visible.” Though King organized it, he never saw it to fruition, for he was assassinated a month before Resurrection City was erected in early May on the Washington Mall. On June 5th, Robert Kennedy was also assassinated, then on June 24th, federal bulldozers wiped out this encampment of 5,000 people. Mission accomplished! Who says the United States is not decisive when it comes to dealing with “trouble makers”?
With an “economic bill of rights,” these protestors’ central demand was a $30-billion anti-poverty program. Like many Americans of today, they simply wanted less money for death, more for life, but of course, such a silly sentiment from a pack of nobodies could not be taken seriously by the Washington masters of wars.
Washington DC makes absolutely nothing yet eats up everything. With its career politicians, lawyers and lobbyists lurking in every corner, Washington DC has to be, by far, the biggest magnet for crooks, bullies, asskissers and shameless liars in the entire country. Wouldn’t it be perfect if Washington was granted not state but nationhood, so it could be independent from the rest of us? Imagine your life without Bush, Cheney, Rice, Obama, Pelosi and Clinton, etc, inside your wallet, head and pants, and on you back constantly! Elections would not be so pointless as they are now, for Americans could exile their very worst to that squarish lump of land inside the Beltway! Washington DC, where America purges.
Minus that fantasy, our future is indeed grim. Washington DC will likely ignore the upcoming protestors until they voluntarily disperse, but if enough Americans show up and stay to become an eyesore and a nuisance to business as usual, cops and soldiers will come to evict them, without any concessions made whatsoever, but what are these protestors’ demands, exactly? Would they be satisfied if Washington promised to withdraw all American troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, or are they demanding more, much more? (I’m evoking the promise, not the actual withdrawal, which would take months.) And what does it mean to say that protestors will occupy Freedom Plaza “until our resources are invested in human needs and environmental protection instead of war and exploitation”? Would the pledge of such a shift be enough to disperse them, or will these protestors stay until actual laws?which, and how many, exactly??are signed? Compared to the Poor People Campaign, the aims of these upcoming protests are not as clearly articulated, not yet anyway, but perhaps these will come into better focus, soon.
But asking the right questions is still much easier than getting any answers, even wrong ones. We will be reminded, yet again, that the moneyed interest won’t yield us an inch without a savage struggle. They have all the funds and guns. We have our disunity.
For a glimmer of hope, one can perhaps look to Thailand. After seeing their elected leader ousted and their political parties repeatedly banned, the red shirts staged protest after protest and suffered many casualties, nearly a hundred dead in 2010 alone. That year, at least 25,000 of them occupied Bangkok’s central shopping district for six weeks, until the Army came and blasted them away, but before fleeing, they exacted revenge by burning Asia’s biggest shopping center and the stock exchange. Persisting, these red shirts finally gained victory when their candidate, Yingluck Shinawatra, became elected as prime minister.
The red shirts became a force because they dared to disrupt the normalcy of a very corrupt and vicious system. Americans will undoubtedly have to do the same. The stakes and risks are already high.
Linh Dinh is the author of two books of stories, five of poems, and a just released novel, Love Like Hate. He’s tracking our deteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photo blog, State of the Union.