Third Meditation on Pittsburgh G-20

We face a wall of riot police, standing there in the street. Of course, they create the absence of a safe passage through their wall. We can’t march that way. There is no soft door in their ranks. None of these folks want to talk, and as we try to engage their eyes somewhere deep in their Darth Vader helmets, we don’t know where their eyes are focusing. Meanwhile, as they slap their hands with their clubs, they accuse us of violence while we shout about Peace.

They are in the foreground but at the same time they are in the distance, as vast as a landscape. Their body armor has the repeating edges and shapes, the lines from body to body that dominate the visual – like the façade of an office building. We forget about the bodies underneath and see the structural overlay. These repeating lines give off the same inscrutability as a suburban Wal Mart. Oh yes, this is very familiar. We Americans know the forced absence of meaning in the enclosures of social control. We silently rope-a-dope with the mono-culture throughout our day.

In the USA, our “Sea of Identical Details,” is so dully omnipresent that some of us will go into a chain store like Starbucks and put our hands on the cash register and shout to God – just to have a feeling, any feeling at all. We put our hands on the the genitals of the corporation to incite a response, to make someone come running who is honestly confused, slipping out of their military self-possession. Oh what a relief that someone would shout, “What are you DOING?” The American built environment is so bullying that ordinary people must do extraordinary things, and some of us volunteer for war, or for turning into a human wall, or any number of habitual altered states. Some part of us, though, feel a silent terror that we are lending our lives to sentimental patriotism, the most deadly form of Consumerism.

We watch our taxes finance 2 inch wide clouds of yellow pixels on the television screen. Body parts fly around the screen like litter in the wind. Then we watch our children sneak off to point the cursors that fly those same predator drones over imagined villages. We stare at our bizarre native land and we try to figure it out. On the one hand we have these huge expressionless crowds of isolated people, and then we have these screaming sports crowds, and then we have bloodied bodies on the front page. We would like a few minutes to ask if this is the way things should be. But there is no time for waiting. We are distracted by this entertaining wall, a screen that has a secret deal with our optic nerves…

Maybe these young people staring at us from inside those helmets have got the right view of preposterous America. What other world have they entered by standing there and imitating a wall? Maybe the people inside this wall are actually unaffected and kind. When they step out of the metallic vests and straps, back in their locker-room somewhere, are they laughing and ribbing each other, just a part of a tribe, doing a job? So today they contained some peace marchers. Are we all supposed to be in those uniforms? Is that the final march to Consumerism?