I first posted "Epistle for the Dead" in 2006." That was twelve years ago. Little did most people know that the United States was being transformed into a war culture. I had hopes that the election of Barrack Obama would usher in some sanity, and we would stop our the ongoing quest to lay waste to the Middle East. Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize and that was the extent of his anti-war history. If anyone remembers, the anti-war movement was strong during the G.W. Bush presidency. Once Mr. Obama was elected, it vanished. Speaking out against anything Obama did was likely to get you branded as a racist. It was a brilliant move by the people who actually select the president. Brilliant. The neocons were not letting go. Why would they? They job was not finished. The BIG PLAN still had more to go.
In the year 2000 a paper was published by the neocon think tank, PNAC, "Rebuilding America's Defenses." It called for the projection of US military power, and establishment of US bases in the Middle East. It did recognize the US citizens and our allies would not embrace naked aggression. How would this take place, then? That was addressed.
"Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor." Yeah, they actually wrote that. One year later, we got that new Pearl Harbor. How fortunate for those who wanted one to "get the ball rolling."
General Wesley Clark has talked about the neocon plan on several occasions. He said the following during a speech at the University of Alabama in October of 2006, recounting a conversation with a general at the Pentagon:
I said, “Are we still going to invade Iraq?” “Yes, Sir,” he said, “but it’s worse than that.” I said, “How do you mean?” He held up this piece of paper. He said, “I just got this memo today or yesterday from the office of the Secretary of Defense upstairs. It’s a… five-year plan. We’re going to take down seven countries in five years. We’re going to start with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, then Libya, Somalia, Sudan, we’re going to come back and get Iran in five years.”
If anyone thinks they we will not "take out" Syria and Iran, I'm sorry, you're stupid. The plan was bigger than Bush, it was bigger than Obama, it's bigger than Trump too. "Play along or get a JFK lead brain tumor."
We, the public, never seem to learn. Politicians play us for fools over and over again. Young men and women are told they are going to war to defend freedom and the values of their nation. We are told that the war will be short and casualties will be light. We are told everything will be done to prevent civilian casualties. We have been told these new wars are different. We are fighting "terrorists." Anyone could be one. Muslims. Any Arab. Christians too. Someone different. Terrorists are ghosts that move from place to place. Wherever our leaders want to control, you can be sure there are terrorists hiding there. If there are not, we will create them. Blow up a wedding party with a drone, stage a chemical weapons attack and blame the other guy. Destroy a country, then invite the angry citizens of that country into yours. That way, governments don't have to bother going somewhere else to fight terrorists. They will be right there in our own backyards. Right in your house. You clicked on the wrong link, after all. That's always been the plan too.
In the year 2000 a paper was published by the neocon think tank, PNAC, "Rebuilding America's Defenses." It called for the projection of US military power, and establishment of US bases in the Middle East. It did recognize the US citizens and our allies would not embrace naked aggression. How would this take place, then? That was addressed.
"Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor." Yeah, they actually wrote that. One year later, we got that new Pearl Harbor. How fortunate for those who wanted one to "get the ball rolling."
General Wesley Clark has talked about the neocon plan on several occasions. He said the following during a speech at the University of Alabama in October of 2006, recounting a conversation with a general at the Pentagon:
I said, “Are we still going to invade Iraq?” “Yes, Sir,” he said, “but it’s worse than that.” I said, “How do you mean?” He held up this piece of paper. He said, “I just got this memo today or yesterday from the office of the Secretary of Defense upstairs. It’s a… five-year plan. We’re going to take down seven countries in five years. We’re going to start with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, then Libya, Somalia, Sudan, we’re going to come back and get Iran in five years.”
If anyone thinks they we will not "take out" Syria and Iran, I'm sorry, you're stupid. The plan was bigger than Bush, it was bigger than Obama, it's bigger than Trump too. "Play along or get a JFK lead brain tumor."
We, the public, never seem to learn. Politicians play us for fools over and over again. Young men and women are told they are going to war to defend freedom and the values of their nation. We are told that the war will be short and casualties will be light. We are told everything will be done to prevent civilian casualties. We have been told these new wars are different. We are fighting "terrorists." Anyone could be one. Muslims. Any Arab. Christians too. Someone different. Terrorists are ghosts that move from place to place. Wherever our leaders want to control, you can be sure there are terrorists hiding there. If there are not, we will create them. Blow up a wedding party with a drone, stage a chemical weapons attack and blame the other guy. Destroy a country, then invite the angry citizens of that country into yours. That way, governments don't have to bother going somewhere else to fight terrorists. They will be right there in our own backyards. Right in your house. You clicked on the wrong link, after all. That's always been the plan too.
Hitler fought terrorists. So did Stalin and Mao.
All their soldiers were told they were patriots, fighting to defend the Homeland, The Motherland, The Fatherland.
Think about that this Memorial Day.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Memorial Day, 2006
I walked among the graves at the Mentor, Ohio City Cemetery today. Mentor has war dead from the Civil War up through today. Wars are a part of the human experience, and the end of the human experience for far too many. Few would argue that the Civil War or World War II were necessary. Other wars, or "conflicts" as we like to call some, are questionable, at best. Walking among the graves of the war dead, The Face of God seemed absent today.
EPISTLE
William H. Gibson
The truth is our wisdom sets my teeth on edge. By everything I know, the death of the animal is fortuitous, meaningless, and total; insofar as man, a maker of meanings, is at the utmost stretch of his talent to bestow upon his dying a purpose, I wish him luck in it; but when each meaning he arrives at is used by him to multiply the deaths it consoles him for, I think I am living among lunatics. Is the decomposition of the flesh hideous? it is a door to the light beyond, said the priests of infinite love, let us kill all who think otherwise. Is our life brief as the grass? we are immortal in the glory of the empire, said the bearers of every flag, let us die to plant it in another place. Saints, patriots, bards, which of them in the name of a greater life has not counselled us to kill and die? From the day I was born I was taught, against the yearning in my bowels for the sun, that I should consent to my death for the illusions believed of my elders; and in all the battlecries of the world, honor, order, liberty, valor, justice, duty, faith, I heard a baaing of sheep, as ignorant as I of what the sounds in their throats meant.
Children, I write this epistle to a punctuation of incendiary bombs my neighbors vote to let fall, as seeds of freedom, upon the heads of children no older than you. I am by trade a maker of fictions, but no word of mine is so counterfeit as the myths by which men who kill and die will ask you to live; the world is a windbag of pieties, that in each age blows multitudes like you into its graves, and weeps over them as blessed. Its touchstone of greatness is bloodletting, Saul hath slain his thousands and David his ten thousands, and no king or president is venerable in our thoughts but like the Judas goat has marched a people under the slaughtering hammer. And beneath the baaing of trumpets and dreams, faint, the only sound I hear as fact is the death rattle of each man.
That sound is my premise. I am the elder now, I tell you my wisdom, not one of the dead is blessed; consciousness is all. I am of course less epochal of mind than the statesman, who in eulogy of the corpses that have served their purpose, his, is confident none has died in vain, well done, thou good and faithful servants: a dish I think fit for the devil is the tongue of every man who asks the power of life and death over others. I speak as that ignoble, small-minded, disaffected citizen, servant and master only of his trade, I mean the artist, joyous and haunted by time, who, making of his spittle a shape, a soul, a voice to survive, wants no interruptions by history or its heroes. Selfish and harmless, in love with my life, I tell you no more than what everyone knows, and is ashamed to live by. Consciousness is all, the sun is born in and ends in your skull; the struck match of self in your skull is all.
So much is simple. It may be pinched out in an hour, therefore, burn in this hour; it may persist a half-century, therefore, burn wisely in this hour; but burn. Yet to make of each day an end and a beginning is not simple, and what is self? I have other selves of me, flesh of my flesh, whatever I believe in is of me, and much of a man is outside his skin; men not fools will die for a fool's light as their own. Then burn, believe, die, but, children, I beg you, not for the lies of statesmen, and I think it better to hide and live.I learned these things at the deathbed of my father, between two wars; on the wall hung a poem with a pasted snapshot of his young brother's head, blown apart in the war that began in the year of my birth, and upon the night table sat a clock ticking, ticking the irrecoverable seconds away, and at his shrunken hand a portable radio bleated its news of a worldful of sheep who predictably would soon march under the hammer of another war; I did not intend to be in their ranks. It is a most beautiful earth we inhabit, but not in the eyeholes of the dead. So a savior knew who two thousand years ago said, A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another, and that night was betrayed. Are we less than lunatics who, aware we go into the grave at sundown, even in the failing light cannot love, but wrestle each other in? And when I remember what pains I took to hone this grievous and only jewel, my consciousness, I will not surrender it to any leader half in love with death, neither do I wear it in shame; nothing in his head is worth my life.
Daily I hear a whisper in me of the first and holiest commandment, Thou shalt not die.
Not in our time, but one day when there is silence in heaven about the space of half an hour, all the people will voice their right to live in a joyous shout, and the pillars come tumbling down. States, churches, armies, banks, schools, edifice upon edifice cemented in the blood of our bowing to the hammer, will lie in a rubble; the world will be born again as a comedy whose text is blessed are the living. In that day, great men who invite us to die for causes will charm the children as clowns in the parks, and cowardice will be in style, the ancientest virtue which preserves us, all manner of weakness be revered, and over every kindergarten door will be carved, I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord. Not in our time, when that primal commandment is only a whisper, served, yet deviously, and in dishonor.
Well, I too shall break it, in the end, and you. Till then, little children, keep yourselves from idols, greet ye one another with an holy kiss, and let us be neither goat nor sheep, but lovers of the sun, which is no fool's light.
All their soldiers were told they were patriots, fighting to defend the Homeland, The Motherland, The Fatherland.
Think about that this Memorial Day.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Memorial Day, 2006
I walked among the graves at the Mentor, Ohio City Cemetery today. Mentor has war dead from the Civil War up through today. Wars are a part of the human experience, and the end of the human experience for far too many. Few would argue that the Civil War or World War II were necessary. Other wars, or "conflicts" as we like to call some, are questionable, at best. Walking among the graves of the war dead, The Face of God seemed absent today.
EPISTLE
William H. Gibson
The truth is our wisdom sets my teeth on edge. By everything I know, the death of the animal is fortuitous, meaningless, and total; insofar as man, a maker of meanings, is at the utmost stretch of his talent to bestow upon his dying a purpose, I wish him luck in it; but when each meaning he arrives at is used by him to multiply the deaths it consoles him for, I think I am living among lunatics. Is the decomposition of the flesh hideous? it is a door to the light beyond, said the priests of infinite love, let us kill all who think otherwise. Is our life brief as the grass? we are immortal in the glory of the empire, said the bearers of every flag, let us die to plant it in another place. Saints, patriots, bards, which of them in the name of a greater life has not counselled us to kill and die? From the day I was born I was taught, against the yearning in my bowels for the sun, that I should consent to my death for the illusions believed of my elders; and in all the battlecries of the world, honor, order, liberty, valor, justice, duty, faith, I heard a baaing of sheep, as ignorant as I of what the sounds in their throats meant.
Children, I write this epistle to a punctuation of incendiary bombs my neighbors vote to let fall, as seeds of freedom, upon the heads of children no older than you. I am by trade a maker of fictions, but no word of mine is so counterfeit as the myths by which men who kill and die will ask you to live; the world is a windbag of pieties, that in each age blows multitudes like you into its graves, and weeps over them as blessed. Its touchstone of greatness is bloodletting, Saul hath slain his thousands and David his ten thousands, and no king or president is venerable in our thoughts but like the Judas goat has marched a people under the slaughtering hammer. And beneath the baaing of trumpets and dreams, faint, the only sound I hear as fact is the death rattle of each man.
That sound is my premise. I am the elder now, I tell you my wisdom, not one of the dead is blessed; consciousness is all. I am of course less epochal of mind than the statesman, who in eulogy of the corpses that have served their purpose, his, is confident none has died in vain, well done, thou good and faithful servants: a dish I think fit for the devil is the tongue of every man who asks the power of life and death over others. I speak as that ignoble, small-minded, disaffected citizen, servant and master only of his trade, I mean the artist, joyous and haunted by time, who, making of his spittle a shape, a soul, a voice to survive, wants no interruptions by history or its heroes. Selfish and harmless, in love with my life, I tell you no more than what everyone knows, and is ashamed to live by. Consciousness is all, the sun is born in and ends in your skull; the struck match of self in your skull is all.
So much is simple. It may be pinched out in an hour, therefore, burn in this hour; it may persist a half-century, therefore, burn wisely in this hour; but burn. Yet to make of each day an end and a beginning is not simple, and what is self? I have other selves of me, flesh of my flesh, whatever I believe in is of me, and much of a man is outside his skin; men not fools will die for a fool's light as their own. Then burn, believe, die, but, children, I beg you, not for the lies of statesmen, and I think it better to hide and live.I learned these things at the deathbed of my father, between two wars; on the wall hung a poem with a pasted snapshot of his young brother's head, blown apart in the war that began in the year of my birth, and upon the night table sat a clock ticking, ticking the irrecoverable seconds away, and at his shrunken hand a portable radio bleated its news of a worldful of sheep who predictably would soon march under the hammer of another war; I did not intend to be in their ranks. It is a most beautiful earth we inhabit, but not in the eyeholes of the dead. So a savior knew who two thousand years ago said, A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another, and that night was betrayed. Are we less than lunatics who, aware we go into the grave at sundown, even in the failing light cannot love, but wrestle each other in? And when I remember what pains I took to hone this grievous and only jewel, my consciousness, I will not surrender it to any leader half in love with death, neither do I wear it in shame; nothing in his head is worth my life.
Daily I hear a whisper in me of the first and holiest commandment, Thou shalt not die.
Not in our time, but one day when there is silence in heaven about the space of half an hour, all the people will voice their right to live in a joyous shout, and the pillars come tumbling down. States, churches, armies, banks, schools, edifice upon edifice cemented in the blood of our bowing to the hammer, will lie in a rubble; the world will be born again as a comedy whose text is blessed are the living. In that day, great men who invite us to die for causes will charm the children as clowns in the parks, and cowardice will be in style, the ancientest virtue which preserves us, all manner of weakness be revered, and over every kindergarten door will be carved, I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord. Not in our time, when that primal commandment is only a whisper, served, yet deviously, and in dishonor.
Well, I too shall break it, in the end, and you. Till then, little children, keep yourselves from idols, greet ye one another with an holy kiss, and let us be neither goat nor sheep, but lovers of the sun, which is no fool's light.
++++
To all of those faces of God, from all cultures and people, who have been mislead to a young slaughter -
Rest in peace.
Rest in peace.
