Tuesday, September 13, 2005
I watched the men in masks. Humans behind the feeling of safety. I cried. I saw them care for their horses, put masks over their faces and many army green blankets over their bodies--yet skin was still exposed. I watched them fire guns into an atomic explosion and I cried for my soul. For my lost innocence. I want to go back to a day when I didn't know that men wore masks, hoping to protect themselves from their own toxic inventions. I want to go back to a day when I didn't know that some men used other men as pawns in the war games, in the grand show. I want to go back to a day when I didn't have to watch women dance with guns slung between their undulation shoulder blades--when I didn't see that war was sexualized...that the very bodies of these women would leave imprints upon deserted sidewalks. Could I erase these images from my mind, I'd be able to sleep tonight. Could I forget that bodies lie dead in so many trenches, in so many once-homes. It's frightful. People die and I know that. I know it is the way of the world. I know that disaster strikes and some will always be unprepared and lose just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I'm in the wrong time. In this time of television broadcast of death and mayhem, of bodies floating through once scenic lands. Countries of experience, countries of love and warmth, countries of domestic strife. I want to strive against it all, against the pain. I want there to be some sacrifice that I can make but I know that there isn't. There isn't for the people drowning in New Orleans. There isn't for the people my country occupies and oppresses. There isn't for the children with whom I once worked. I can't give something of myself and make it better and that is the worst feeling in the world. What can I do? I feel pain. I feel fear. I can't sleep and the anxiety seeps into my dreams. Is it enough? Is it ever enough? Never. Not until the bombs go off and a few men in the world decide the fate for all of us.
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5 comments:
I am so, so sorry, my love. I am so accustomed to dancing through the forest of grinning skulls, the circus of toxic horrors; laughing back at the twisted grotesques of institutionalized sado-fascism and military-industrial-phallo-stupidity...
It's easy to forget that not everyone shares my dark amusement, and probably just as easy for someone outside to miss the bitter loathing and the anger that fuel it from beneath.
I'd like to think that we're fixing the world one idea at a time. I can't stop the malicious stupidity of the people who traffic in death, who want to push us around like pawns, but I can refuse to play their game, can mock them and show them for the stupid overinflated worms they are. I can dance and sing - heck, with Rakkab, I sing the "enemy's" songs - and so doing, I not only defy their ignorant ideology, but I hope to inspire others. Music and love are better than death any day.
I know that people use this argument frequently. It comes down to appropriating an idea and making it your own...owning it even in the face of terror..like a badge. Unfortunately, I think this process serves to reinscribe the idea as much and contradict it.
Mm, I think there's a line between merely reinscribing an idea, and rubbing the general public's face in the truth of it. I think what you're talking about is a little like negative reinforcement: if you simply tell a child "Don't do 'x'", the first thing he's gonna do is 'x' - even if he hadn't been thinking of doing it before.
But you can change the aura of an idea. Look at how public perception of smoking has changed in the past 50 years. You can do that with any idea, but you have to hold on to it to do it.
I want the entire idea of war to fade into oblivion--Ozzymandias.
Ayyyy-MEN, sistuh!!!
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