What
could be more American than Las Vegas?
As a professional cynic, I couldn’t have taken off from the homefront
and landed anywhere on Earth further away from the new Gulf War.
March
25,
2003
Let The Madness Begin
War:
As
a Distraction From the Stress of
(Eighty
weeks after September 11)
* Pro
War Voice Unwelcome;
Strip Protesters Nearly
Drowned Out By Megaphone- Wielding Homeless Man Performing for ‘Bumfights’
Filmmakers:
“A
tame antiwar
protest on the strip was interrupted Friday evening by a homeless man,”
(found at a homeless shelter and induced into performing for dubious
filmmakers,) “who used a megaphone and
sandwich board to plug decidedly un-peaceful sentiments.
‘Kill Saddam,’ the front of the board said. ‘Bomb Iraq,’ urged
the backside.
The three dozen or so antiwar protesters gathered in front of New
York-New York Hotel Casino seemed dazed when the homeless man strutted into
their sedate protest and started screaming, ‘Drop the bomb, Kill Saddam! Drop
the bomb, Kill Saddam!’
But the antiwar protesters soon responded with some venom of their own.
‘Get out of here,’ screamed one. ‘Shut up,’ shouted another. ‘You’re
an idiot,’ a third one yelled ...”
What
could be more American than Las Vegas?
As a professional cynic, I couldn’t have taken off from the homefront
and landed anywhere on Earth further away from the new Gulf War.
That’s why I flew to Vegas.
I
hit the strip at 2 o’clock on Friday afternoon and spent the day and evening
lolling around the Sahara Hotel Casino and watching first-round NCAA Tournament
basketball on the TV in my room, keeping up with my tournament bracket
predictions on the tube --- and every now and then checking in on the progress
of America’s newest war.
Janet hit town
around 9 o’clock and we went out onto the strip to find some adventure, and
sure enough we did. A limousine pulled up next to us as we walked south on Las
Vegas Boulevard and a passenger in it rolled down his window and shouted, “Hey,
do you want a ride down the strip.” So I pushed Janet into the thing and
the seven of us who’d ended up together at that same place at that same time,
took off past the Stardust toward the Frontier.
Two heavy-set
drunken good-ole-boy brothers from Indiana were our hosts and Janet sat
nervously between them on the back seat as they sized her up and she them. I sat
between a mixed-race couple (he black, she white) and a very white and
bewildered young lad from England who was visiting Las Vegas for the first time.
The TV sets in the limo were all tuned into the war (fiery video pictures of
bombs exploding in Baghdad over the CNN headline, “Showdown
Iraq”), but nobody in the limo heading south on the Las Vegas strip seemed
to care.
After 10
minutes of introductions and animated were-all-in-a-limo-together-on-the-Las-Vegas-strip-drinking-beer
talk, the couple asked the good-ole-boys if they minded
dropping them off a block over on Paradise Street at the Hard Rock Cafe. Shortly
after we arrived there and while waiting in a line of limos to pull up to the
entrance, one of the drunken Hoosiers picked a fight out the window with one of
the Hard Rock patrons waiting in line to get into
the place and he even left the limo cursing and foaming for a minute or so to
menace the guy, but no punches were thrown.
After the
tussle was over and we’d made our way up to the entrance, the drunken brothers
shook hands with the black man and the white woman and the couple bailed out of
the limousine. As we headed north up Paradise away from the Hard Rock, one of
our hosts slipped a CD into the limo CD player. It was a recording by racist
folk singer David Allen Coe (who liberally sings about black people being “niggers”
on his uncivilized little ditties), and it was apparently played by our drunken
host in honor of the mixed-race couple he’d just unloaded at the Hard Rock
Cafe, (now that the nigger’s gone ...)
You’ll find a
cross section of the world in Las Vegas. All kinds of people from A to Z. Like
families saving the fare to the real Eiffel Tower in the real Paris by staying
at the Paris, Las Vegas one instead. Like limo-renting bigots from the heartland
cruising the strip and trolling for an audience. Like radical terrorist
extremists spending some of their last few days alive before blowing a
World-Trade-Center-sized hole in a precious era of world peace.
The bombs kept
falling on Baghdad up on the limo TV sets as the US armed forces hunted for
weapons of mass destruction, but the sound was turned down and nobody seemed to
care.
I’d just
spent the last 19 months in obsessed solitude writing and editing a god-awful
grim personal history about the first year of World War III, and my TV and
streetphoto obsessions with it. “And now
here I was,” I thought to myself. “In
a limousine in Las Vegas, rolling down Paradise with a chatty driver, my
beautiful wife, two spooky drunken racists from Indiana, fiery exploding orange
images from the war on TV, and one (very white and very intimidated) Englishman
wondering if he, ‘might just get off
right here ...’”
What could be more American than Las Vegas?
*Climate
of Fear:
An Immoral Imperative:
The
Whole New World is Watching
“To
(postpone) it (the NCAA basketball tournament) would
be like not having spring.”
A US Marine interviewed on the ground from Iraq
On Saturday, after coffee and morning newspapers and after placing a few
NCAA basketball bets at the Sahara sport book, we watched one of the
second-round NCAA Tournament games on the TV in our room and one in the Sahara
casino. Then we rented a convertible and spent the late afternoon driving it
around the western suburbs of Las Vegas. And then in the evening, after watching
the KU Jayhawks clobber Arizona State 108-76 on the TV back at the Sahara (every
once in awhile checking up on my tournament bracket picks and the bets I’d
made and the war), we took the convertible out onto the strip to try to
recapture the magic of Friday night’s loony limousine ride.
I was feeling
good. I was a decent 28-12 so far on my NCAA basketball bracket picks and I’d
even won a little money gambling on the games. And now my Jayhawks were 2-0 in
the tournament and headed to the Sweet Sixteen for the third year in a row. I
was with my darling wife and best travel buddy, the beautiful Janet. We had a
convertible. It was 75 degrees outside.
What could be better than living life big in Las Vegas?
On Sunday morning we drove the convertible through exceptionally tight
Terror War security across Boulder Dam and into the Arizona desert. There was
still a lot more college basketball to be had, and so on that glorious day we
decided to listen to it on the radio in a convertible racing across the desert,
instead of watching it back on the strip on the war-spoiled TV. There was much
more new war news to be had of course, but alas, the convertible only had a
radio. So we listened to NCAA basketball games, raced across the desert, and
healed ourselves for awhile in the sun ...
But it was
while listening to NCAA basketball, driving in the wind and the heat, that I
found myself pondering and then succumbing to the past few seasons leading up to
this Gulf War II portion of World War III, the whole mess slashing through my
brain like a machete. I’d been a reluctant patriot for a few months, a proud
patriot for a few weeks, a disappointed patriot between the Axis
of Evil State of the Union Speech and the September 11 anniversary, and a
born-again-patriotic cynic ever since. And I was proud of the steps I’d taken
to ensure I’d stayed that way during this round of World War III. I’d flown
off to Vegas (instead of to Baghdad) to get as far away from this war as I
could, yet the undertow of what was happening in Iraq began pulling me under
even as I sped through the desert listening to basketball on the radio to forget
it.
“I take back
everything I wrote last November about maybe being able to stomach going fishing
with honest Donald Rumsfeld,” I thought to myself. “Now I wouldn’t even go
fishing with him if I were starving to death and ole’ Don had a fish finder on
his boat and invited me aboard.”
Let the lying
begin without me ...
As a reformed
victim of the obsessive TV wars and lying politicians, I was trying my best to
stay clear of the bloodlust, the hysteria, and of either hyper nationalism or
hyper anxiety. But now (even in the desert on the outskirts of plastic Las
Vegas) the mess was turning up everywhere (even at the top of the hour on the
NCAA Basketball radio station) and even there, out in the desert, in a fleeing
convertible --- it had become
impossible to completely get away from it.
It’s a whole
new world out here in America today.
A whole
new world that’s forced us all to accept a whole new American morality
with whole new American ideals. A new world that America hopes will presume that
America is a civilized powerhouse and will use its presumption of right over
wrong properly. A whole new damaged
and belligerent American morality that says it’s OK to hit first and to accept
the unavoidable thousands of innocent civilian deaths incurred along the way as
a necessary consequence of war. An
all-new “American normal” that the Bush administration promises skeptics
will end in world peace, a notion that the rest of the civilized world holds
it’s breath and crosses its fingers for.
A whole
new world where the American free press applauds the bombs and bullets and
waves the flag and often acts the fool (Fox). A media that gets fat in the wake
of every American tantrum, justified or not. A whole
new world where the American-hating outside civilized world now has fresh
anti-American ammunition against a seemingly dangerous, bloated, and
victory-empowered thing. Who wonder if America is behaving in a way consistent
with its values? Or if it’s redefining whole
new world values beyond the outside-civilized world’s will.
And me, I’m
just a regular media-watching global American street artist trying to lead a
good life in God’s country ---
avoiding commerce as best as I can and trying not to let the whole messed up TV
world drag me down with it.
The whole new
messed up America in the second year of the Terror War is a place steeped in
patriotic hysteria, either for or against the aggression. A portion of those
hysterical patriots wanting to guide America forward, accepting bloodlust as a
necessarily permanent new American responsibility, and a portion of those
hysterical patriots wanting to harness the bloodlust and channel it in a more
constructive and moral fashion. Like we did during the old American way. A time
at the end of the last century when we needed someone to shoot at us first
before we’d shoot at them last. Like the way America had been before ... ...
... before September 11, 2001.
But that was
then, and this is now, and now it is a
whole new world out there. And the whole new world’s being shaped by those on
the other side of the American patriotic continuum from me, those who are
driving this whole new messed up bus and who are still hell-bent for
justice.
World peace is
an illusion, I’m afraid we’ve learned once again.
You can be a
cynical antiwar pacifist and still be a good American too (and I’ll fight you
to the death about that point if you force me to). And any random good American
(even a cynical near-pacifist good American like me) can summon our newfound
September 11 bloodlust and kick anyone’s ass we need to kick because we’ve
got all the guns and (because, according to people a lot smarter and more
involved than me) we’ve got no other choice. No other choice, aside from a
messy divorce from our American allegiance, a divorce that (we’ve found out
over time) we’re incapable of even filing for (much less finalizing) ---
because of the human nature of allegiance to home.
America isn’t
so much a mystery or illusion anymore.
We’re no
phony last-superpower-left-in-the-world.
We’re as
corrupt and sometimes as reckless and as foolish as any other place on Earth,
but we stand for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and for good over
evil and self-determination over tyranny. And until this whole September 11 mess
happened, we did it with a principled and moral mindset mocked by the kind of
people who’d run civilian jetliners into civilian buildings just because they
were jealous of our money and our guns.
We have the
right to say what we want to say on the streets here --- yielding a protest sign
or a streetphoto camera alike. The right (when attacked) to push morality past
the “never hit anybody unless they hit
you first” principal and apparently the right to trade that all in for a whole
new world principal of absolute security for America --- no matter what the
cost.
Absolute
security for the US homefront against weapons of mass destruction at any cost,
that’s all America wants now. That is --- aside from when it comes to the
nuisance terrorists (the newbies) of Lawrence, Kansas. Because even in this
whole new world, I still can’t call the cops up and have them make a
preemptive arrest on a newbie house until they fire up the noise. It would be
silly for me to even try, and that’s what the cops would tell me. In fact the
cops would just laugh at me, the newbies would mock me, and I’d be drummed out
of the neighborhood bitch club for
even attempting such a preemptive strike. Even they (my allies) would figure
that somewhere along the line I’d suffered a tragic disconnect.
But now the
waving red white and blue tidal wave can (in this whole new world) violate that
rule of engagement on a much more critical level than a petty ongoing battle
between criminally rude newbies and a spoiled American who unreasonably demands
the quiet to sleep through the night as one of his inalienable rights. And
it’s all happening on the heels of an impressive post-Cold War era of peace
and wealth because of the 3025 people who were murdered in cold blood on
September 11 by selfish and uncivilized Islamic extremists. And because we’re
powerful enough to take a whack at trying to make sure it never happens again,
no matter who or how many in the world object. No matter what global mood of
compassion we piss away. No matter how many civilians around the world
needlessly suffer in the wake of our government’s needful process of securing
America against the uncivilized.
Me?
Well I’m not
on the bus for maintaining an arrogant mindset of bloodlust revenge as an
ongoing practice. So I’ll just (quietly) hang onto my polite and antiquated
posture of old-world principle for as long as I can, and see if it doesn’t
just make a comeback after 10 or 20 years of war.
We say we’re
good and that we’re still principled and moral and that we’ll prove it to
the world by cleaning up the bad guys, and then we’ll stop making war. We say
it’s an obligation, an immoral imperative now --- if you will ... ... ... so
trust us ... ... ...
But we sure as
hell better live up to our word --- because now
the whole new messed up world is watching us live on TV.
Anyway, my Kansas Jayhawk home team is now 2-0 in the tournament and has
reached the Sweet 16 for the third straight season. Now all it has to do is beat
Duke and Arizona this week and it’ll have survived and advanced to two Final
Four’s in a row, one of the greatest pleasures in my life. TV pundits aren’t
giving KU much of a chance. But I’m sure we’ll end up beating both those
teams.
I’m certain.
Because, you
see, we owe Duke a payback for knocking a highly touted Jayhawk team (staring
Paul Pierce) out of the 2000 tournament and for beating us in the 1991
championship game. And this season Arizona beat us in embarrassing fashion at
home (in Allen Field House!) on national TV when they recovered from being down
by 20 points halfway through the first half, to clobbering us soundly by nearly
20 before time ran out.
And nobody gets
away with beating my home team in our home barn.
NOBODY!
In the past 19
months spent surviving the first year of the war and spent writing and editing
my journals, I’ve learned more about the power of revenge than I’d ever
hoped to know. How bad it is. How eerily good it can feel. How easily it can be
shaped by rhetoric and manipulated into senseless violence. And since we owe
both Duke and Arizona a spanking (owe them both our revenge), and since I now
know better than most regular Americans the power of revenge, I’m certain that
by Saturday night KU will have beaten Duke and beaten Arizona and that the
Kansas Jayhawks will be Western Regional Champs.
As they say
around Las Vegas --- you can bet on it!
So God help
Duke and Arizona, and God help the noise newbies of Lawrence USA, and God damn
every last one of the September 11 terrorists for messing up my world.
God, bless the
Kansas Jayhawks --- and God bless America too ...
It looks like
things are getting out of hand ...
They say
it’ll be over by Christmas ...
Who’s next?