I am deeply unwell. For the first time in my now very long life this unwellness stems not from poverty, from that sickened dying hunger of the too proud artist. No. We have a nice American home. Our son is a wonderful American boy. My job is that for which I had dreamed. My car doth gleam. I am financially secure even in this time of plague.
This unwellness is instead a kind of disgusting slurry of sloppy, angry political objections to the unwavering trend towards Fascism. I refuse to keep them inside of me exclusively any longer.
This is a long story.
I will forego the tales of my white trash boyhood and skip directly to my militarization.
In the beginning of the War which has defined the entirety of my adult life the United States was deeply obsessed with rounding up Arabic men all over the Middle-East and subjecting them to a long chain of slightly larger “black” detention facilities. Let me explain how this process goes, you’ll becoming more familiar with it in the days to come and this information could be useful, if only to ponder from a cell.
Let us create for the purposes of this timeline a hypothetical Muslim man of his exact time and place. The time is 2004. Lets call the place Pakistan just for fun as we never actually went to war with Pakistan yet we ended up with lots of political prisoners, known as “Detainees”, from Pakistan. They were detained in Pakistan. You do the math.
So we have a, lets say 22 year old Pakistani male living in Pakistan in 2002. Nothing else about him is relevant for this story to take place. This man is sleeping. It is night. He has worked a long day and he must work again tomorrow. There is a crash at the door. He awakens from his slumber to find four heavily armored, fully masked, heavily armed men with $50,000 worth of gear on him assaulting him, placing a black bag over his head and zip-tying his hands.
He is assaulted verbally and physically while he is taken to a helicopter. He can’t see anything. He is assaulted on the helicopter flight. The helicopter lands.
Dogs are barking. Spot lights illuminate the fibers in the bag. Strong men jostle you with hard gloves on. You’re forced to sit. Shackled to a floor. Everyone is yelling in a language you don’t understand. You think maybe it has been 12 hours but you have no idea really.
You aren’t allowed to sleep. The first time you hear your language spoken awkwardly with a deeply American accent you are accused of being a terrorist working for Bin Laden. This has just been a mistake.
You inform this soldier that this has been a mistake. He repeats that you are a terrorist. This goes on for about 2 weeks but you don’t know what time is. You just piss yourself and eat when they throw food on you. They beat you when you try to pray.
You are boarded onto another helicopter. When the mask is removed at your destination you are in a bigger camp. There are hundreds of Arabic men in chicken wire cages. Guards roam around with shotguns. They are doughy and fat, nothing like the soldiers you were seeing in the last camp.
For two months you repeat the same cycle you’ve been going through where a white man tells you you are a terrorist and you insist there was a mistake. They beat you when you pray. They force you to rape a child. They pile you like a dead body, naked, on top of other men and pose with smiles on their faces. In their eyes you know you are nothing but an animal.
This time when they come for you you are boarded onto a plane. You can only hear it because you have a bag over your head again. You are shackled to the ground, drugged and forced to piss and shit yourself during a very long flight.
You arrive in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Life here is hot and the beatings are less frequent. The guards look like children or old drunks. Every day you are hustled back and forth from an interview where your script is repeated for several years. You develop Stockholm Syndrome and start thinking maybe these guards aren’t such bad guys after all.
You do this for, say, 7 years. You had a trial once where they finally told you that you were originally detained because your fiancee’s uncle doesn’t approve of your lifestyle and sold you for $5000 American, a fortune. Nothing comes of it though.
A year and a half after that you are laying on your metal slab listening to a distant ocean and wondering why Allah has forsaken you when men come with shackles. They put you on a truck and take you a plane. The plane takes you to a tarmac somewhere. You can see all the stars.
An Arab soldier walks up to you and shoots you in the head.
This is America’s renditions policy and it is how it intends to treat anything it can wrangle into the term detainee.
As you can now clearly see, their interest lies in using this power against you. You are now the Arab man or woman. You are now subject to an entirely illegal, entirely Fascist means of political torture. It would behoove you to not underestimate the powerful legitimacy of fear at the sheer terrifying power that this nation unleashed in its Global War on Terror.
As you see protestors taken by tagless authoritarian goons in the night with no due process you are possibly witnessing the end of their lives either by death or illegal and indefinite detention. The apparatus of the State when it comes to this ought to be deemed as the most dangerous thing you’ve ever encountered in your life; it is.
I have watched the police state here try to attain this power since our worthless Anti-War protests of 2006-ObamaV2. But as I watch Twitter in disgust I can see now that the Global War on Terror has finally come home.
I thought saying I told you so would feel better than it does but instead I am filled with panic and dread.
I have no solution to submit. The corporate powers that be obviously want to turn this apparatus against us and we have proven time and time again that through spinelessness or laziness we are absolutely in their thrall. I encourage you only to realize that America never was the glorious place they said it was. If you are only awakening now to this desolation it has not only been in motion but been necessitated 20 years ago.
America is dead. It died the day they built Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay. You are living in the 4th Reich now. Destroy it at all costs.
The Paper Trail 