Pacific Views
You've been had. You've been took. You've been hoodwinked, bamboozled, led astray, run amok. - Malcolm X
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| Pacific ViewsYou've been had. You've been took. You've been hoodwinked, bamboozled, led astray, run amok. - Malcolm X |
... by Mike Palecek
"You can't arrest me, I'm on a book tour." — Michael Moore
Hello.
I am somebody from Nebraska who now lives in Iowa, who will soon be taking a country drive, a road trip, because our country seems on the verge of something bad.
Really, I'm not trying to get away.
Actually my mother told me once that when they heard the War of the Worlds broadcast on the radio they got in the car and just drove. Just to be going somewhere seemed to help because they were so scared. They thought it was the end of the world. This time the fire.
Well, I suppose I'm plenty scared, but I'm trying to run towards the blaze, trying to see what I can do to put it out.
I have written some books during the Bush era. I'm going on a book tour to promote my latest, "The American Dream."
Before I leave I'm also going to send a letter along with a tax form with a black Magic Marker X through it as a protest against George W. Bush.
My book, "The American Dream," is a punch in the nose to George W. Bush and Karl Rove. Somebody needs to punch those two in the nose.
They smirk while others die. They are getting away with murder. They are robbing us blind.
By sending off this crossed-out tax form and taking this drive around the country in my '90 brown Honda with the driver's side window and radio that don't work I'll feel that I'm at least doing something.
Because.
Can we say it? ... Out loud? ... In public? ... Won't people think we're crazy? ... Won't they roll their eyes? Wouldn't it be easier to just talk about American Idol? The people on Fox and the announcers on the radio don't say this. They'd say it if it were true. ... Right?
Because.
They— Bush & Co. — did 9/11 themselves.
They killed Paul Wellstone.
They sent the anthrax.
They lied about WMD.
They stole two presidential elections.
They would never have told us about Abu Ghraib.
They have secret torture prisons around the world that we were never meant to find out about.
They spy on us. And not because of "terrorism."
They steal the oil.
They want power. They want to be rich.
They could care less about us, about the soldiers, about the freedom of the Iraqi people. They snicker about all that in the back rooms. Sure they do.
And there's more.
Some [many?] of our news media "professionals" are actually professional propaganda ministers for this cabal. Who cannot wonder about Fox, Tom Brokaw, Rush Limbaugh, Dan Rather, Peter Jennings in this regard.
It sure seems that way.
What's that expression about talking and sounding like a duck?
I was in third grade when our principal, Sr. Ellen, walked into the room just after lunch recess and said the president had been shot.
A few years later I went to sleep wondering if Bobby would make it through the night. And of course, they had killed Martin Luther King two months before.
So, well, now I'm 51, and those my age would do anything to really understand what happened during those few minutes after lunch in Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22 1963.
My kids will grow up wondering what really happened on Sept. 11, 2001.
Perhaps none of us will ever know. They keep the truth locked away, marked to be opened after we are all dead. The rest the strike out with a black Magic Marker.
But the Bush family is in power.
And American oil companies recorded record profits last year.
The world turns.
They want power. They want to be rich. Human traits, desires.
Quack.
The American Dream.
You look outside your window, you see robins and squirrels and Snickers wrappers and Labrador poop.
Fair to partly cloudy.
It's all a fairy tale. You are a living character inside of a children's book, with dragons and monsters and evil kings and queens.
How did we come to this?
We have fake history — our junior high and high school history books should be all in italics, presented with a wink by the teacher handing out the textbooks on the first day of school: Remember the Maine, Pearl Harbor, Gulf of Tonkin, Iran-Contra, Waco, OKC, moon landings, Watergate, stolen elections — millionaires in Washington D.C. who spend long days agonizing over the lives and living conditions of dump truck drivers and nurses aides. Right? Sure they do.
But even so, to talk about conspiracy in the United States ... it's like being ... a person who has spent the day upstairs alone writing poetry ... and he steps out onto the corner to hand those poems out to passersby. You can imagine the looks he's going to get from people.
Because we accepted the Warren Commission we got the "9/11 What Controlled Demolition?" and our children will get the "XYZ Non-Investigation By Rich People Covering Up For Other Rich People Leaving The Poor Folks To Drown, Again."
After the Supreme Court stopped the counting of votes. ...
Stopped the counting of votes.
Stopped the counting of votes.
I sat by the upstairs window and looked out at the robins and the squirrels and the Labradors and thought, of course they killed the Kennedys, they can do whatever they want.
I thought about tossing a concrete block through the military recruiters offices over in Sioux City, just to put up some kind of resistance against all this. I even drove over there, about an hour away, to drive around the area and see how I might do it and get away.
I asked others to join me. Nobody wanted to.
Then I drank a quart of beer out on the patio and sort of measured in both hands the weight of a concrete block against a piece of paper, and decided to keep writing.
I don't know what good I can do. Maybe I'm just driving around just to be moving because I'm scared.
Kurt Vonnegut once said that an anti-war novel is as likely to stop war as an anti-glacier novel is to stop glaciers.
But you still gotta. You gotta walk out the back door and put yourself up against that ice and push. Set your feet and lean and get your hands cold. Push with all your might, until you've got no push left.
There are many of us who see the murder of the Iraqi people for gold as evil, and who want their children to grow up in a world not perverted by the mind of Karl Rove. Those are also human traits, desires.
You got something better to do?
Join me. I'll be writing a column along the way.
From Newton, Kansas to Omaha to Sioux Falls to Des Moines to ... well, here's the whole schedule. Here's where that brown '90 Honda will be pointed over the next three months.
Peace.
seeya
— Mike
Tour route:
"It has been many years since I picked up a book and didn't put it down till I finished it. Mike Palecek's "The American Dream" smacks you right between the eyes with every turn of the page. This book tells the God-awful truth that none of us wants to accept."
— Guy James
www.theguyjamesshow.com
"No more than a few degrees from what currently passes for reality, 'The American Dream' is a societal vision that hits too close to home(land) to be called a futuristic satire. Channeling both Orwell and Bill Hicks, Mike Palecek has created more than a powerful and engaging novel; he has let loose a global wake-up call."
— Mickey Z
www.mickeyz.net
"Dark, brutal, blunt and disturbingly funny, Mike Palecek's "The American Dream" is an inside joke for the outsider looking in. A satirical metaphor for the life we Americans now live, and the choice we Americans will soon have to make: At what cost is the American Dream worth and who should ultimately pay it?"
— Ty Rauber
Producer & Director
"Who Killed John O'Neill?"
"Mike Palecek writes with passion, wit, and always with a profound social conscience."
— Howard Zinn
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Posted by PV Guest at March 26, 2007 09:30 PM | Guest Writings | Technorati links |