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June 08, 2005

Activity Report No. I

Operation TIPS
c/o Homeland Security

Dear Norm,

I drive under your Report Suspicious Activities signs frequently, and read them each time. I had thought, before the world changed, in the years those signs were erected over the highways, that it was a little bit suspicious to build those signs at all: ‘Congestion Ahead’ is not worth it, as everybody who drives here already knows it’s already true, the signs were thus merely infuriating, to those spending gas on the parking lot beneath them. But now I understand, that their installation, and the cameras, sprouting on poles of their own like metallic mushrooms, or clinging to lamps and bridge edges like barnacles, was prescient. A prescient precedent, set for a bellicose President. How was I to have known the world would change like that September morning changed it? Now, as I sit in the traffic, the TIPS-line flashing over the lanes, I realize that I am suspicious.

                              This is not to say that I suspect I’m a sleeper, though I sure can sleep, or that any of my own behaviors as witnessed by myself since that day have raised any doubts in my mind about my own loyalty to the Republic, its Constitution and its Emperor. No, indeed. I am not suspicious of myself, in that way (and trust those who read my e-mail to know when I should be designated a ‘person of interest’ better than I), but, well, I am sort of sensitive to language, ‘hyperlexic’ some call it, others, ‘infuriating literalness,’ but the effect is the same: I parse and parse, wringing every meaning I can from the presented syntax, like bureaucrats pun, by compulsion. So the question arises, which the signs already beg:

                              What is suspicious activity? The way it seems to be intended, suspicious activity is anything which could be construed as an ‘Islamist’ surveying or moving equipment or renting vans or buying fertilizer or aluminum tubes, PVC pipes, sheetrock or spongy vanilla confections, and such an ‘Islamist’ could be anybody but probably darker of skin than Dan Rather, and bearded. Or are they? Aren’t they swarthy, evildoing enemies of freedom, or do they look like Patriot McVeigh? Of course, it does not mean adherents of the docile and politically impotent religion of Islam, or Sikhs, not these.

                              But ‘suspicious activities’ might be those undertaken at the direction of a suspicious mind: following those dark men with the boxes; looking askance at the speakers of the tones of Arabic, Pashto, Farsi; watching the minarets; lurking, or even voicing incendiary ideology, on the discussion boards. The fact that the mind harbors suspicion, that harboring is such an activity.

                              Norm, I gotta tell ya, I’m suspicious. Suspicious of just about everything susceptible to interpretation. Suspicious of the text, the context, the subtext and the author. My suspicious activities consist in this interpretation, and reinterpretation, of the metrical assonance of the sound-bytes, and the framing programs, the curious repeating leitmotif of the severed head in the news, like a fugue, ‘Islamist’ snuff films in counterpoint to abortive decapitation strikes, the head- shots, the pot shots, and the talking heads. By the bankruptcy of the third estate, abdication of the first, and the scripted, juggernaut ascendancy of the second, all to the fanfares of the debauched and complicit press, who keep We the People informed, more like Hamilton suggested than Jefferson’s proscription. I’ve been suspicious all along, Norm, but I’ve kept quiet, because I’ve been busy. Busy being scared by the suspicious proliferation of American flag stickers and stick-pins on imported cars and Italian lapels—“love it or leave it” emblazoned in red, white on blue Chinese tee shirts by religious prisoners across the Pacific. I am suspicious because salaam now indicates evil, pacific stands for surprise attack, columbine (rhymes with combine, carbine) now a dove of death diving under desks, and the cradle of civilization is also the pyre on which civilization is toast, a holocaust to a god that drinks up the souls of those who die angry and scared, adrenalin concentrated in their brains and veins, briefly, before it flows with the blood, a god that speaks to us through a burning Bush, the oily scion and high-priest of his own oily sign of vincit omnia. Oh, I’m suspicious all right, Norm, all day, every day, sometimes more, as the headlines roll off the wires, the wires pull, prod, hobble and shock.

                              Now that I have reported on myself, identified myself as constitutionally suspicious, will you hire me to write propaganda for the Reich? Keep me close like Sun Tzu’s enemy.

Thank you, sincerely, for your time and consideration. I will await your knock at 0400, or any other time you need your propaganda parsed.

               Yours,
               Pére A. Gnoyde
 
 
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Posted by Rock Heals at June 8, 2005 12:00 AM