The Dead Zone Scenario
What do we do when confronted by the certainty of evil?
by John Kaminski
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These days hang heavy, languid, dreamlike. I imagine how it must have
been sitting in a park on the coast of France staring
at the gray ocean sky in those dreary days right before World War II.
The Nazis had stolen your country and you wondered how long it would be
before your life, if you kept it, would be changed forever. That's about
like how it is now as we sleepwalk
through these hollow days of well-worn lies, listening intently for the
echo of each footstep, as we wait for the bombs to start
falling.
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It is a common theme used in several short stories I have read, although
the only one I can readily identify was by Ray
Bradbury: what would you do if you could go back in time, before the
conflagration started, knowing now all the heartache
and carnage Hitler had triggered? What would you do? The heroes in some
of these fanciful stories - maybe this was a
Twilight Zone episode; I'm envisioning the actor Christopher Plummer -
went back in time and tried to stop the Führer's
ruthless rampage before it started.
But the message in all these stories was mostly the same: history could
not be changed, and proceeded as the history books
surely tell us, despite the best-intentioned efforts of the inspired
hero.
More recently, Stephen King's The Dead Zone was developed along these
lines; in the movie version, it was the eerie Christopher Walken playing
clairvoyant Johnny Smith who could read the future and foretell that
evil Senate candidate Gregg Stillson, portrayed by Martin Sheen in a
masterfully dastardly way, would nuke the world if allowed to achieve
his destiny. Old
Johnny, mimicking all those other heroes, decided he had to follow his
intuition and save the world from a holocaust, so he
went after the demented politician with a thirty-ought-six. He didn't
have to kill him, though; the threat was enough to reveal
the villain's true character (he tried to hide behind a baby, and all
the newspapers snapped the photo). It cost Johnny his life,
but it saved the world from disaster.
Oh, if real life only was as simple as popular fiction.
Lately, this archetypal fable has been floating at the periphery of my
thoughts. Much in the same way George W. Bush
fantasizes about how simple life would be without Saddam Hussein, many
others, I'm sure, are having the same thoughts
about Bush himself. And not a few of them, I'm equally sure, would put
him in the same class of human being with Hitler,
since many of his recent achievements bear a striking resemblance to the
resumé the Führer so cravenly assembled.
A number of folks lately have suggested such that doing such a number on
Bush would be an appropriate remedy for many
of the ills of the world, especially in light of recent provisions of
the Patriot Act, which mandate instant termination for
anybody deemed to be consorting with known terrorists - something our
character-challenged commander-in-chief has
certainly done simply by hanging out with people like Rumsfeld, a known
terrorist if there ever was one. Hey, he sold Iraq
its weapons of mass destruction, didn't he?
This radical and illegal recommendation of offing the big boss has
lately become known as "pulling a vox," after the
suggestion of the popular New York columnist and Internet legend who
recommended invoking the Patsy Act provision on
Duhbyah. But all that earned the voxman was a midnight visit from forty
or so federal agents and the destruction of his
website - which lives on, by the way, in numerous and anonymous mirror
websites lovingly maintained by admirers who
seriously appreciated his suggestion, and his outspoken insistence that
the tragic atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001 were an inside
job, engineered by the petro-nazis in Washington, D.C.
These are the stark facts. Current American leaders are proven liars,
particularly in the recent cases with Colin Powell at the U.N. and the
subsequent terror alert based on the lie of a prisoner. In a court of
law, one lie disqualifies all previous and subsequent testimony of any
witness. It is not improper to infer that the lies told by the Bush
administration in these two instances render everything its lackeys have
said as fabrications to hide some other purpose, some other action. This
inference can logically be taken back to the events of 9/11, whose
coverup without investigation has lasted so long that there can be no
doubt that the official version of those events - blaming Osama bin
Laden and saying the American defense apparatus was taken by surprise -
are total lies. There can be no doubt about this.
If the leaders of America are proven to be liars, why are they allowed
to continue in authority? Because the entire government is collaborating
on a gargantuan lie that it is operating in the best interests of the
American, when it is crystal clear it is not.
And that is precisely what leads us to this Dead Zone scenario. We
know, from the perspective of history, what results Hitler was allowed
to perpetrate because no one had the foresight or courage to stop this
demented dictator before he pillaged most of Europe. If no one does
anything now about Bush and his designs on world conquest, will we reap
the same harvest? Will the entire world be consumed in torrents of
depleted uranium flames. It seems very likely that we will.
What will we do when we finally realize we have the reincarnation of
Hitler on our hands? Bush even venerates Hitler memorabilia that is kept
by his college fraternity. Will we stop the madman in Washington, or
will we let him have his way?
I myself do not believe in the death penalty for any reason, not even
for a proven lover of capital punishment and mass
murder such as George W. Bush. I guess that's how I'm different from
virtually all the leaders of the so-called free world,
who now generally approve of killing thousands of innocent Iraqi
children in order to divvy up that beleaguered nation's oil
reserves among themselves.
Despite their superficial protestations of "let the inspections work
before we bomb them," none of them really measures the
situation in terms of babies with birth defects or mothers who have to
watch their children die of easily curable diseases
because U.S. sanctions prevent doctors in Iraq from obtaining even the
most basic kinds of medicine. None of them
assesses the current crisis in terms of lives to be lost. In their crass
calculations of budgets and political influence, human life
is valueless to them. All that seems to matter to them is control of
commodities, and kowtowing to the wishes of Israel, which
manipulates the U.S. like a puppet to achieve its own aspirations to
empire.
I wouldn't want to be like them. I pity them. If this is our future - if
this is the way humans are supposed to behave - well,
I guess this is not my kind of planet. As my old friend Guido, just past
90 and still messing with the authorities, says: "Once
a person is dead, there's nothing you can do. All those possibilities of
a long life lived, those connections, those
achievements, those relatives, those inventions, they're gone, and the
world is a lesser place."
This all seems so obvious to most thinking, feeling people. So obvious
it's not even necessary to state it. Yet it's a thought that apparently
escapes the thinking of our erstwhile leaders. So who are they, and who
are we to let them ignore it?
And all this talk about "beginning" a war against Iraq is equally
repellent to me. Sometimes, when I'm walking down the
street, I want to run up to some businessman, grab him by the shirt, and
scream: "Do you realized we've killed a million Iraqi
children?!"
Do YOU realize the United States has killed a million Iraqi children in
the last decade?
So, that's why I don't take kindly to talk about STARTING another was
against Iraq, because the first war has never really
stopped.
But conceding how many Iraqis America has already killed is not
something the froth-mouthed George W. Bush would
readily admit to. He's just not that kind of person.
All he's interested in doing is creating a Dead Zone of his own, a
whole series of them actually. Of course, recruiting a
Johnny Smith to cut short his career wouldn't solve the problem, because
there are plenty of pathetic political poltergeists
willing to walk in Bush's shoes and pursue his identical objectives, in
which ordinary humans just don't count for much. Just look at who's next
in line: our own Dr. Strangelove, Dick Cheney, the one person in the
world who can make George W. Bush look like a humanitarian.
For that matter, just look at the situation now unfolding in Iowa
caucuses, look at the so-called opposition party. More Bush
clones, all willing to push that button and bomb Baghdad on the bogus
basis of the lies that have been in place for a decade
now. Gephardt, Kerry - all those pseudo-Democrats except Kucinich -
would all eagerly step into Bush's shoes and
continue this assault on humanity and common sense, ordering the
needless deaths of thousands more brown-skinned
innocents simply because the men who really push the buttons behind the
scenes say this is the thing to do.
America is the new dead zone, morally and spiritually dead, where for
some time now the price of gasoline has been a far
more important topic than the lives of innocent people. That's what
happened in the first Gulf War: America wholeheartedly
endorsed the slaughter of 150,000 people in a few weeks just to keep the
price of gasoline from rising too high.
Don't you realize the war in Iraq has never stopped? And don't you
realize that if something seriously radical isn't done about
the situation as it exists now, this new War on Terror is never going to
stop. When Bush spoke at West Point two summers
ago, he said that there were 60 countries that harbored al-Qaida
terrorists.
If we don't stop him here and now, that's 60 wars we have to look
forward to. Sixty new Dead Zones. The U.S. already has armed troops in
40 different countries. I guess that means we need a bigger defense
budget, right?
I never thought I'd have to say this, but the Dead Zone scenario is
real, not fiction. It's here and it's now. If the world ever regains any
degree of real freedom and equanimity, I cringe at what the historians
are going to say about us, and about how we let a man with the IQ of a
pea roam around the world killing thousands for reasons that were so
obviously lies.
Then the question remains: what do we do when confronted by the
certainty of evil? Especially when the vast majority of the people in
authority don't consider it to be evil, and have basically signed on to
the evil course of action.
We need at least to remember that the people in power who endorse this
plan of action, who endorse the coverup of 9/11 and the abandonment of
the anthrax investigation, who back the continuation of the attacks on
hapless countries around the world, need to be separated from that
authority as soon as possible. Immediately, if not sooner.
In our own distinctive ways, we all need to turn into Johnny Smiths,
heed the unmistakable handwriting on the walls of our hearts, and take
our own kind of action - humane and compassionate but effective action -
to stop this menace that threatens to destroy the world as we know it.
To motivate yourself, simply consider the alternative if no action is
taken. It's right there in the history books.
- – John Kaminski
John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the coast of Florida and is
running out of ways to say the madmen in Washington
need to be stopped before it's too late for all of us.
timewedo
There is also an archive of my essays here: Rense
My next-to-latest about Duhbya is here: Scoop
and my archive on scoop (New Zealand) is here: Scoop Archive
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