Fast Car - Shadows On A Lonesome Road

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Fast Car - Shadows On A Lonesome Road

By John Kaminski

skylax

10-22-5

 

 

" you got a fast car

and I want a ticket to anywhere

maybe we make a deal

maybe together we can get somewhere "

 

-- Traci Chapman, Fast Car

 

 

 

Top speed, headed toward the cliff, you're in the backseat hanging on

for dear life, trying to catch at least a glimpse of the madman behind

the wheel.

 

Fox puts these shows on television, and for all the world you can no

longer tell the difference between the reality shows and the fantasy news.

 

I saw both at once Wednesday night in a church on Central Park West,

as journalist Seymour Hersh and whistleblower Scott Ritter agonized

about a phony war gone wrong before an enthusiastic crowd of New York

liberals, but the level of discussion depicted al-Qaeda as an actual

foreign enemy (rather than a CIA freak show) and Israel as a helpful

ally, and hence never touched on the real issues. At least I got to

hug Cindy Sheehan, America's much maligned antiwar heroine.

 

The level of reality of most of antiwar activity in the United States

basically accepts the government's version of 9/11 and focuses its

objection on the unnecessary carnage taking place all over the world

thanks to U.S. policies, which of course is not a bad thing to

complain about. But missing the point about the nature of the war and

who is creating the violence -- it's not the neocons, it's the vast

majority of the American people who support them who are letting this

happen -- guarantees yet another useless and failed effort on the part

of America's peaceniks, because they simply do not see the lies that

have been told by the White House and TV talking heads have twisted

the way everyone sees things.

 

It's not just the war we need to stop. It's the predatory behavior of

a rancid system that regards people as numbers on a ledger sheet.

Until why that happens is addressed, the other stuff will continue, no

matter how much people complain about it.

 

So, after you've seen the bloated bodies floating face down in the

bayou, " after the torchlight red on sweaty faces, " after the bleeding

babies in the prearranged pustule of Iraq ... reality is in your face,

and now, as the weather goes South, the earth trembles, and your air

is no longer fit to breathe, you ask yourself: who is that shadow

chasing the speeding car that so terrifies the driver he would

willingly drive straight over the precipice than simply have the

courage to turn around and face his own inner fright -- because not to

do so is to ignore one's destiny, and this destiny is the fate of all

of us. How bad could it be to let the universe just wash over you?

Especially since it's something you can't avoid anyway, no matter what

your brand of magic trick.

 

We are the passengers in a car speeding way, way over the speed limit.

Our lives flash before our eyes, like the guy on the plane to Hawaii

who saw the passenger in front of him ripped out through a hole in the

fuselage.

 

With what I was able to understand in my lifetime, it appears that

humanity's own shadow has overtaken it. Yeats had it pegged. " The

center cannot hold. "

 

And we are all about to be catapulted into a reality we, pampered

prodigals of a profligate lifestyle, have never before been exposed

to. Odds are that most of us will wither in the heat and die. At

least, those of us who aren't killed outright. If not by instantaneous

vaporization, then by wrenching diseases that will contort our faces

for all time in the rigor mortis horror of a Palestinian child gunned

down by a laughing Israeli soldier for sport.

 

It is the natural consequence of constructing a society that avoids

the real issues. I have some sympathy for Mao Tse Tung, whose social

policies conceded that man was an unruly criminal and had to be

constrained for the sake of peace.

 

With Mao it was not so much a lust for power as a necessary expedient

to quell the unending bloodshed, but as with all dictatorial systems,

it merely continued the cycle of violence. With the neocon cabal in

the U.S., powered by total control of the world financial markets by a

select few, the world government has far less compassion than Mao, as

the continuing slaughters following the vilest example of treasonous

perfidy ever recorded (that would of course be 9/11, a watershed event

in human history when a government's massacre of its own citizens was

approved by the masses because of the mind control the media had over

them) continue to drench the world in blood.

 

Such a shadow on the human mind had not been seen since the Dark Ages

(which really have yet to end), but even in this glittering

technological age, humanity had never been so " in the dark " about what

the real value of its collective life really was. For five thousand

years people piled up trinkets against the coming night and finally,

after years of searching for a safe pair of eyes, invented a friend

who could not be defeated, someone who at sometime, in some place, is

the one friend you can really count on, invention or not.

 

Who could have predicted, through all those eons, that following this

path of following the dictates of an all-powerful God would lead to a

situation for a species that first conquered the wilderness but then

became its own wilderness. Look at the planet. See where the

wilderness really is. It is where humans have been. The rest of the

planet thrives without us.

 

What is it we were supposed to be doing? Funny thoughts cross your

mind when you're pinned against the leather seat by the gravity

compression of an accelerating fast car about to crash through a

barrier from which there is no return.

 

First of which is .... what the hell am I doing in this car?

 

But the matter at hand is ... how can we get the driver to hit the

brakes? Before we crash through the last fence.

 

I myself face this view this morning that when I return home from a

short sabbatical that my house could be in toothpicks as the latest in

a series of designer storms churns its way toward Florida's Gulf

Coast. It is appearing more likely that the new weapon of choice for

the totalitarian neocons is environment disaster -- first the tsunami,

than various major quakes, and now hurricanes. It's a much cleaner and

easier policy than trying to drum up support for wars with no reason

except pure, profane profit.

 

And all of our leaders are in on the scam. Especially the current

madman behind the wheel, who utters empty platitudes so meaningless,

uncaring, and illogical that one can only conclude this is a suicide

mission for profits. Exactly who profits, as we place our hands over

our hearts and pledge allegiance to our team, remains a fuzzy mystery,

as men in expensive suits gaze out from an opulent balcony on a

European hillside and smugly ponder their geopolitical gamesmanship.

 

Meanwhile, we're in the car, paralyzed by our fear, beseeching the

driver to get some common sense and stop the car, before it's too late

for all of us.

 

Perhaps a better way to describe the view that confronts our bulging

eyeballs is this one. Imagine you're in the cockpit of the large

passenger airliner and someone has a gun to your head. In those final

moments, you see the people in the windows of a skyscraper

gesticulating in uncomprehending panic as the plane closes fast on the

face of the building.

 

This is today's snapshot of our species of individual souls, trapped

in the back seat of a fast car with a driver we don't really know and

are afraid to ask about, hurtling at breakneck speed toward you know

where ...

 

 

 

 

John Kaminski is writer who lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida

currently hiding from the latest designer storm in New York City.

Google him.