Letter to the President

I woke up very early with a protest in my dream. I had achieved something, which I cannot remember, and at the last minute I could not perform it, or read it, or whatever. I then started writing this very long letter to the President, which eventually also became a letter to Hugo Chávez, the WTO, and sundry. Especially sundry. So in the end I had this motley crew of people I was bitching to, and a realization that I had to finish writing the letter, request, yell, bitching, song, novel and perform it, whether anyone cared to listen or read or watch. Not very articulate today, am I...

Somewhere along the way I thought about something Amy Goodman said in a recent interview or talk about the media... she said something to the effect that if the media every day for a week, at the top of the news, showed the real footage of war, the dead children and the women trying to walk on bloody stumps or watching their dying babies, or even our own servicemen and women gutted by shrapnel, the "American people" who are not cruel as a rule, would say, war is not the answer to conflict.

And then there was one of the Yes Men, who talked about how when he spoke as a (fake) representative of the WTO and said that the WTO would disband within months and then reorganize with a view to the original founding principles, creating trading practices and regulations that were fair to the poorer countries and poorer people, for a couple of hours after it was reported in the news, before everyone realized that this was a hoax and not a real WTO pronouncement, everyone that was interviewed were amazed and excited that this was going to happen... and when they engaged in the DOW Chemical hoax, where he pretended to be a high representative from DOW who was finally going to take full responsibility for the BHOPAL incident, and pay 12 billion dollars to the injured, and to clean up the place (Dow had bought out Union Carbide, who ran the plant where this horrible industrial accident took place), the Dow Jones index went nuts, investors lost confidence and Dow Chemical lost billions...

So it's this greed factor in our world or global society that is in the middle of our inability to 'fix' the world...

And the question, as always, is, are we on the side of the angels or the greedy bastards who run it all?

Of course, somewhere in my letter there has to be an explanation of why America is not a country, and why the United States as a world power is so clear about this that when they opened the school of assassins to train torturers that would do the dirty deed throughout Latin American countries, they called it the "School of the Americas."

In November I am going down to Fort Benning again... last year the interpreting for the victims of torture took its toll on me, and I had a dizzy spell getting out of the airplane, so that the airline produced a wheelchair and nice man who wheeled me about. It is hard for them to speak about what went on, and the interpreter, whoever does it, has to live through what is being talked about by the victims. There were so many stories... the literacy teacher who was tortured in her 8th month of pregnancy for teaching indigenous people to read and write... and lost her baby and went into a coma for 6 months, and only survived because her torturers believed she was dead and threw her into a common grave. Or the sister of the doctor who treated the very poor and who disappeared, only to be found, his body a mangled bloody mess, dead on a roadway...

All of it, all of the wars, covert actions, military interventions, police actions (too many to mention, but some of them are listed here: http://www.globalpolicy.org/empire/us-military-expansion-and-intervention/26024.html) had greed as their foundation. Greed for markets, for power and control, for hegemony. And of course, before the US, there were all the other empires, throughout the bloody history of mankind.

Ultimately, if we are to survive as a world, as a planet, we need to change our point of view, eliminate the greed factor... In Moore's latest film, and in his talks about it (Capitalism, A Love Story), he discusses the fact that throughout the world, countries have taken out the profit motive from the health question, as the right to medical treatment is one of the fundamental rights of man. But we are mired in a discussion that has profit at its bottom...

I want to know what it is that everyone out there is fed to keep them so compliant, so willing to cut their own throats on the altar of greed and capital... to act against their own interests.