TOO MAINSTREAM

The first billboard you see from hwy 12 is for a catholic children’s fund with an impoverished ragamuffin on it. The next billboard is for Hardee’s (the off-shoot of Carl’s Junior for off-brand regions;) 

“Come for breakfast, stay for dinner,” it reads. 

There is a ham, folded egg yolk, bacon triple-stack lurking seductively behind a moist-looking cheeseburger, also with bacon. The Hardee’s sign is near a motor-in motel called, ‘THE EDGE’. 

This is the edge of town.

The third billboard is for the National Guard. A man is repelling from a helicopter to swoop a little girl into his arms. There is an arrow pointing to the National Guard soldier that reads, “local business owner.” He sells pickled vegetables and leather bike seats in a terrarium shop downtown while not on the battlefield. 

The battlefield on the billboard features little white girls.

The fourth billboard is empty of advertisements. “If you see this, it’s working!” say a large pair of eyeballs. The next billboard is for donating to homeless vets. The largest newspaper in Montana’s capitol, The Independent Record, sponsors the billboard after that. It claims that a local democrat, “votes with Barack Obama 95% of the time,” and features a blown up photo of a dude shaking Obama’s hand and smiling.

In his life, Benjamin Franklin was a nudist. He celebrated the joys of “air bathing.”

I’m safely indoors, fed, and free to ponder. I’m also tracked around between multiple databases and I do nothing about it.

I open email with colleagues in the middle east, and smoke plants that would get me thrown in prison were the time or place any different. Later, I walk to my credit union and retrieve money out of the ATM, shuffling it neatly into an envelope before nervously strolling through the poverty of Seattle’s Third Avenue towards home.

A homeless man is being stop-n-checked by two sheriffs for smoking within 25-feet of the Rite Aid doorway at Third & Pike. He is black, and they are white; he is shoeless, and they ride bikes. I see the barcoded back of his ID as I pass, and two black teenagers are nearby having a chuckle about the scene. The beggar outside of the nearby Kress Supermarket tells me it’s his birthday, and I apologize– deliberately avoiding the words, “I have no money.”

I get home and pour the hundreds out of the envelop onto my living room table. After a few minutes looking at the funny green papers, I count and organize the bills.

Franklin– who counted England’s centralized banking practices as the primary cause of the American revolution – stares back at me from the federal reserve notes with the eyes of a 200-year-old cadaver.

A knowing smirk cracks his lumpy face– knowing of Franklin’s ironically repurposed iconoclasm as a ‘founding father’, mascoting for a note that burdens the American merchant class, rather than liberating it. An American who despite vehement, personal opposition to international banks, will forever be linked to the global-standard for fiat currency. A physical, hundred-dollar punchline, growing more obscure with every completed e-payment across the banking ether. Billions of imaginary Benjamin’s, with their imaginary value, bouncing digitally around the universe and lament the days when they were fondled and looked at lovingly.

It’s difficult to describe the Montana epiphany: it’s a realization somewhere near the remote intellectual crossroads of complex international banking and 19th century American land management policy.

It has nothing to do with popular conceptualizations of “How the west was won,” and everything to do with a zeitgeist of American exceptionalism and corruption that persists today.

It’s a bit like sitting in a Victorian parlor with Chinese, Montenegrin, West African, and Scottish roughnecks, while a monocle-clad robber baron plays Nicki Minaj for the group off of his iPad.

Montana is a vast historical brew of exploitation, corporatism, and outright racial genocide – it contains the largest superfund contamination site on planet earth– the Berkley Pit– along with a plethora of land based nuclear weapons systems, and a state population that totals less that Seattle’s eastside suburbia.

It is an unforgettable physical space that has been mysteriously redacted from the popular American consciousness– buried in the myth, and snow, and the obscurity of the “boom” years– rather than examined for what understanding it may offer us in our contemporary enslavement to American plutocracy.

"The refusal of King George to allow the colonies to operate an honest money system, which freed the ordinary man from the clutches of the money manipulators was probably the prime cause of the revolution."

Benjamin Franklin

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies… If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency… the banks and corporations that grow up around them will deprive the people of their property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”

     The photo at right, taken by a German at the culmination of a French assault, has captured the fleeting moments of six doomed young men. The photo was taken in 1916 at the Battle of Verdun; a theatre of the Western Front fated to bury ~362,000 young Frenchmen, grown old before their time.

In order to watch this video, it is likely you will be forced to watch the first ten seconds of a Matt Damon preview about natural gas drilling, or a RetailMeNot.com commercial celebrating the shopping period known as Octonovemcember. These three months represent the first, and most important, fiscal quarter for America; and consequently, for Wall Street. The success of this period will justify American financial projections for the next three quarters, concluding projections for the positively shitty month of September. Through complete circumstance, Jesus' birthday and drug-fueled after-party conclude Q1.

The US Government estimates that it is responsible for dropping 250 million bombs on Laos. Many of these weapons were cluster-based munitions: large bombs that carry hundreds of smaller, fragmentary bombs within their payload. These smaller bombs have not been accounted for in the formal catalogue, but the US government projects that roughly 30% of these American munitions remain buried in Laos as unexploded mines.

When a government blatantly neglects to reveal 250 million details about a situation for many years, it eliminates trust in the institution’s ability to provide the whole story. It undermines the accuracy of a retrospective admission, such as statistics documenting total bombs dropped in a foreign conflict. After all, if a few million bombs disappeared here and there, the only institution capable of tracking these numbers is the same one responsible for the initial lie. Additionally, when political dishonesty goes unpunished; or worse, when accessories to a lie are rewarded; citizens are left to speculate the motivations for such deceitful behavior, and what corrective action can be taken.

When it takes many years to uncover and diagnose an aggressive illness, it is often too late to stem the tide of the disease. Had evidence been available at the ailment’s inception; however, there would have been a greater opportunity to combat, and defeat an otherwise terminal condition.

Creating a conversation about the American military-industrial complex can follow this metaphor of unchecked disease. As a cultural and economic disorder, the diagnosis of this relationship between business and war is obscured by the secrecy of unknown battlefields, fear of impending homeland attack, and an inability for popular media to report facts. The disease poses an even greater threat when the institutions obliged to report the facts have financial interest in making issues more opaque. And unlike America in the pre-Cold-War era, the possibility for war against ideas, plants, and multinational groups is now possible; so long as the basic ambiguity of “who, where, and how” remains intact. Because the contemporary story is never declassified, often for purposes of “national security,” confusion arises around foreign conflicts, and with whom exactly America is waging war. Modern confusion is exacerbated by the public’s misunderstanding of past conflicts, which now declassified, are not fit for headline news or social commentary.

In the Whitehouse recordings taken between April 6, 1971, and February 23, 1973, Richard Nixon talks casually with presidents Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Gerald Ford. He also addresses Donald Rumsfeld, and other aids concerning race, foreign policy, and the war in Vietnam. Throughout the tapes, Nixon also addresses Jews, Africans, Asians and Latin Americans with flagrant, paranoid contempt.

It is worth noting that Nixon was responsible for escalating American air operations over Southeast Asia between 1968 and his removal from office in 1974. By the time the US withdrew its forces in 1975, more bombs had been dropped on Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam during America's undeclared war, than were used over the entirety of World War II by all participants. Additionally, 20,000,000 gallons of herbicide chemicals were used for deforestation in the region, and yielded enormous profits for the American corporations responsible for their production (Dow Chemical and Monsanto.) These chemical compounds, concentrated in the groundwater and soil of agricultural regions, continue to induce birth defects en masse. Unexploded American ordinance is a constant threat, as well, lingering in shallow graves across the rural countryside. 

With 40 years of retrospective vision, it is easier to hear the hate, desperation, and prejudice in the voices of the Nixon tapes; it is also easier to condemn the qualifications of the featured politicians. What proves more difficult is to map the political implications of racist, violent decisions made during this period of American history, and to weigh the consequential burdens on contemporary America. 

Prior to the War on Terror, America fought a multi-theater War on Communism, or as it has been popularly euphemized: “The Cold War.” Like the War on Terror, the Cold War was an ideological, unconstitutional war that utilized American economic and military power to overthrow and reform foreign governments. The United States backed coups across the globe during this period, including successful actions in Syria, Greece, Cuba, Iran, Haiti, Laos, South Korea, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Brazil, Bolivia, Zaire, Ghana, El Salvador, Chile, Liberia, Chad, Grenada, Fiji, and others. Because of the ideological position of the U.S., success for these coups was measured in the plasticity of new leadership toward progressive capitalist interests. This included, but was not limited to, the willingness of a new government to incur loans from centralized financial groups.

In 1954, The CIA ousted democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz from the Guatemalan presidency, in order to maintain economic control over this “Banana Republic.” At the time of Arbenz’s election, the United Fruit Company (based in Boston) had privatized control over Guatemala’s port, railroad, and telecommunications infrastructure, as well as owning 500,000 acres of the country’s finest arable land. When Arbenz moved to nationalize agricultural production, offering to buy out the UFC for twice what it paid for the land ($1 million,) he sealed his political fate.

John Foster Dulles, a former board member of the UFC, was the U.S. Secretary of State for President Dwight Eisenhower between 1953-1959. Dulles was integral to the overthrow of Mossadegh’s Iranian democracy in 1953; which, because of its inexpensive, pro-capitalist result, became a standard for CIA covert operations. Not incidentally, John’s younger brother, Allen Dulles, was the director of the CIA from 1953-1961, and was responsible for sponsoring the coup that replaced Arbenz.

In the decades that followed Arbenz’s removal, the U.S. provided military and financial aid to maintain the economic status quo in Guatemala. By the 1980s, the atrocities of the Cold War (including what had fondly become known to the U.S. Government as “collateral damage,”) were hardly headline material.

Rios Montt, whom Ronald Reagan referred to as “a man of great personal integrity,” rose to power during the Guatemalan civil war. Montt was educated at the CIA’s “School of the Americas” in 1951, and became a personal friend of American Christian Pat Robertson after converting to the California-based Church of the Word in 1978. The Reagan administration (without the approval of Congress,) sent $10.3 million in military aid to Montt’s government between 1982-83; an action that coincided with growing U.S. support of right-wing groups in El Salvador and Nicaragua. Guatemala’s defunct leaders had begun purchasing arms and training from the Israeli government in 1974, and combined with the CIA’s logistical support, Montt’s soldiers were well suited to crush political opposition during the 1980s.