Guernica

By: James Higdon

"Yes. I have tricks in my pocket. I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion. To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them. Or they had failed their eyes. And so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery brail alphabet of a dissolving economy. In Spain there was revolution. Here there was only shouting and confusion. In Spain there was Guernica..."

- Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

As a young actor trying to memorize this passage, one who had paid too little attention to history classes up this point, I researched the reference. What was "Guernica", other than a painting by Picasso?

Guernica was the name of a sleepy little village in Spain where Hitler, wanting to demonstrate the prowess of his Luftwaffe, conducted a devastating bombing run that nearly wiped out all the men, women, and children of a town that posed no threat to anyone.

I was ashamed of myself that I had slipped through higher education without ever knowing this. I vowed to study and learn from history from that time forward. Nowadays I fully appreciate that Guernica is the international symbol of what military aggression is all about. For many years, Picasso's painting of the screaming women, children, and animals, has hung like a warning sign in the pressroom of the United Nations. It is the very symbol of what the United Nations was created to prevent. It is Picasso's ugly "truth" in the "pleasant disguise of illusion".

Now, so that John Negroponte, the war criminal and felon that G.W. Bush appointed to be United States Ambassador to the U.N., will not be offended, the painting will be covered up whenever news conferences are held at the U.N. which address the coming war with Iraq. And yet I do overstate the situation here. The likely fact is that Negroponte has never much concerned himself with the content of Guernica. The truth is that covering the painting helps to keep the sheep from thinking. A thinking American public might prevent a war that could quite possibly lead, even according to our own CIA, to the most devastating conflict Mother Earth has ever known.

Neither history nor current events, without party revision, are any longer part of government approved public information. As yet there is no punishment for those of us who seek information on our own. There is only punishment for those who attempt to distribute such information that may damage the Little Deserter, and the chickenhawks who surround him. Such punishment currently is geared toward destroying the career of journalists who have made their living in the mainstream of U.S. journalism, and branding as wild-eyed radical communists the ones who haven't.

We, among the disapproved, tend to mention nasty things that might worry folks who have some interest in the democracy left to them. For instance, here is a little tidbit that we like to talk about when supporting our claim that democracy is being subverted in America.

The key Republican Senator from Nebraska, Chuck Hagel, has a financial interest in the company which supplied, programmed, and serviced nearly all of the computerized balloting equipment used in Nebraska when he won his first term in 1996 and was reelected in November 2002. And Mr. Hagel failed to disclose any of that interest in his ethically required financial filings to the Senate Ethics Committee. Hagel won the 2002 election with more than 80% of the vote, including African-American communities which have never before voted Republican. Of course we have to take Mr. Hagel's word for that because Nebraska law states that there will be no independent audit of the vote count. That would interfere with the secrecy afforded the corporate patent.

Now, even though the preceding is absolutely true, only a wild-eyed radical communist would question the integrity of Mr. Hagel, such as the director of the Senate Ethics Committee. After Victor Baird questioned Hagel about failing to disclose his interest in The McCarthy Group Inc., Baird resigned his post. Mr. Baird has certainly learned by now that when a God Fearing Republican claims to be an honest man, you ought to just take his word for it.

So, Mr. Hagel is a "God Fearing Republican" just like George W. Bush. Neither man is capable of telling a lie, and every "mainstream" pundit knows this. Of course we are told that the "mainstream" journalists are "intellectual liberal elitists", who regularly insert liberal bias into the news. I suppose Hannity, O'Reily, Russert, and the rest are demons who have shed their godless ways. Paul Krugman didn't fully understand this until he was correctly informed by his recently enlightened editors at the New York Times that Bush never lies.

On the other hand, Bill Clinton and Saddam Hussein always lie. There are other standards and rules to live by, of course. Anyone who defends and supports the frat boy king is a patriot. Anyone who defends and supports the Constitution of the United States of America is a name calling, ACLU, "red diaper doper baby". These are the tough-but-fair and consistent standards that I find whenever I wake up in the new Amerika.

When Bill Clinton took a perfectly legal college deferment from the draft, that was proof that he may have well been a Soviet agent provocateur. On the other hand, if one questions where George W. Bush was during the last 18 months of his tour in the Texas Air National Guard that his daddy got him to avoid danger in Vietnam, it is part of the "politics of personal destruction" that Bill Clinton invented. When a picture of Chelsea Clinton holding hands with her boyfriend at a sporting event shows up, it proves that Chelsea is a morally bankrupt little slut who was raised by morally bankrupt parents. When multiple pictures are revealed, along with arrest reports, of Jenna Bush, half dressed and falling down drunk, and she subsequently has the taxpayer funded Secret Service bail her boyfriend out of jail, she is a "normal teenager", and any question of that is part of the campaign of "personal destruction", invented by Bill Clinton.

My parents were born in the heartland - one of the "red" states, actually. They have a saying in Missouri: "Show me!" I'm wondering if this saying, which hasn't seen the light of day lately, has been obscured by the new standards. For those of us who have been banished to the margins because of our inability to abide by the new standards, the saying is still alive and well.

Chuck Hagel stole the 2002 election in Nebraska by rigging the election system, preventing an audit, and attempting to cover up any involvement in the company that installed the balloting system. So there it is, Chuck Hagel. I believe that you are a liar and a criminal. If you won the election in Nebraska, show me!

George W. Bush intends to wage a war on Iraq that will get thousands of America's children killed, destabilize the Middle East (thereby destabilizing the world), and "glass" hundreds of thousands of Iraqis (in the name of liberating them), for oil. The idea is to strengthen the U.S. by controlling the world's oil supply (with the side benefit of untold riches for the Bushes and their oily friends). This strictly is a strategy of murder for profit. Tony Blair is going along because Great Britain is the second largest refiner of oil, and if he fails to support the Bush doctrine, Great Britain will be reduced to a third world economy. This, of course, is being furthered by Bush family friend, Dick Cheney, as Junior is an incompetent moron without so much as the ability to eat a pretzel during a football game.

Junior and Cheney, you are about to commit armed robbery and murder on a global scale. If Saddam has weapons of mass destruction that threaten this country any more than they did in 1991, show me! Of course, since I can count on one hand the times between you that you've told the truth, whatever you show me must be verified by an independent source.

It may be odd to hear this from a wild-eyed radical communist, but it appears to me that every day brings this nation closer to life under the Stalinist Soviet Union, and I don't view that as an improvement. We have a "free" press that reports no more nor less than what the government tells it to report. We have "free" elections that no one is allowed to verify. We have multiple parties, but only one is the party of sanity and morality, while all others are the incarnation of evil. We have people who merely disappear, never to be seen again by their families or friends. Our "leadership" doesn't just believe that religion is "the opiate of the masses", it attempts to prove it by using the approved interpretation of God to sedate the people with undying faith in George W. Bush.

I wonder if Americans are no longer capable of questioning their leadership. I wonder if Americans understand the difference between air strikes and a war. I wonder if Americans still understand that freedom is not a gift, but something that every American generation has had to earn anew. I wonder if American eyes can see the changes around them. I wonder if they are merely anticipating the adventure of it all.

"Adventure and change were immanent in this year. They were waiting around the corner for all these kids. Suspended in the mist over Berchesgarten. Caught in the folds of Chamberlain's umbrella. In Spain there was Guernica! Here there were dance halls, bars, liquor, hot swing music, and sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier... All the world was waiting for bombardments."

- Ibid.