Every Head has a Headache

I remember when they started the bombing of Afghanistan I was in a restaurant and they turned on the tv and everyone got silent, motionless....listening to the report. For a moment I felt a sense that the people were wary of what was taking place. And they were. Of course then the weapon's and hero worship set in amid the unqualified demonization of OBL and the anti-war movement. Anti-war = Anti-American; therefore America = war. There were many voices that rose against it (not as many as those against Saddam, but people were still disoriented from 911...it started on 10-7, people were still watching the planes fly into WTC over and over again). The attack had to happen fast before people could process it. No significant debate over it for almost 9 years, not that there weren't ample voices warning of it being a misadventure at best.

The stage was set, the actors well rehearsed. Everyone else was like a member of an audience and if you raised your voice you'd be silenced or removed from the "theater".
Systematic abnegation of dissent is where I agree with Chomsky in that the war was handled like a PR event. It was referred to in the administration as a "roll out", as one would do with the introduction of a major new product to the consumerat.
Liberal brains are not wired differently than conservative ones. I used to live down by the river, between me and the river was a switching yard where they parked the diesel rail engines every night. The first month I couldn't sleep. Then I got used to it. In the spring they moved the yards and the engines and I couldn't sleep again. Point being, the brain is reactive to conditional continuum and adapts it's behavior accordingly.
So does the mind. Perhaps the most brainwashed people are the ones who think they aren't.




The tears for fears are in arears. At the desk today I sat next to a young girl probably nine years old in a hijab. It was my son's spanish class and I thought of the origins of the greeting Hola which has it's roots in Moorish commerce with the spaniards. Oh Allah! By way of greating we hold forth an empty hand with the word of our god on our lips. Why not have an inquiry into the art and culture of Islam? Why not have a kangaroo court for bomb making nazis from Washington state?
Why not convene a meeting of nations to teach our children to focus on keeping their own shit together and respecting everyone else's way of doing the same.
For as the old arabic saying goes "every head has a headache."
Solutions are always part of the problem. They leave their sluggy trace for new whims of empire. The Harry Mulisch evil in the universe is detectable at all times, in all histories.

The young girl in the hijab says "you tengo frio." The sun is breaking through the clouds racing in from the Sound, yet the wind beats bits of branches against the window.
It hit me that in an instant that she looked at me and smiled that I probably have never nor ever would probably see anything in the world more beautiful than she was in that instant.
Life is full of such fleeting moments that contain the jist of symphonies and epic poems and novels one can't put down; indeed, one stalls in mid chapter to prolong the ending.
If such a girl could look at King and say simply "do you know a lie when you speak it, or has your whole life become a servant of the lie? Is your love stronger than your fear? Or is your heart a withered thing that clutches only at bile and the yelow venom that drips from your tongue?"