OH, WELL...BACK TO THE STUPID REVOLUTION

When you come to the devastated village, and it's like a life-saving dream, one of those quasi-nightmares that ushers up from unconsciousness like a dark angel or some kind of saving grace, for the first time you realize that, yes, this is the Third World. All your life, you’ve heard of that horrific place of frustrating sorrows and mind-bending poverty. Of course, in your own life, you've seen both frustrating sorrow and mind-bending poverty, but this is the real thing. It's not a dream. Now you see it, the Third World, for the first time. Why, on this prison planet of good and bad, rich and poor, entitled and disenfranchised, does this place exist?

Here in the Third World, where it’s India or Pakistan or Kenya or Bali any other easily mis-pronounceable nations that don't make the news briefs ever and all the time, every day, a plague of insects has decimated family life, destroyed the livelihoods of men, annihilated the playgrounds of children. Fire ants, millions upon millions of them, scour the bare, moon-like ground. Your mission? Exterminate. Disallow insects from bonding, from creating any semblance of even the barest of inhuman relation, break it down, remove the debris, plant seeds, hand out the hoes, dig wells and lay new foundations. Scour the sacred homes that have persisted since the ancient of days, clean the lowly cupboards of the poor, release the pantries of the inhuman parasite, flush out the baths, even the turn the mattresses of the sadly broken bedsteads–turn them all over, spray down the insects until they kick their feet toward heaven, high as the mites in a marijuana patch, keep your eyes peeled for the bugs.

This place was once like a cantaloupe: Rich farmland, brimming with life and bees humming, flowers blooming, yellow in the wild fields, the muskrats crawling. Now it’s dead, victim of an all-too-human battlefield of concepts, strategies, tactics and, of course, the dupes, the angry, the hungry and the used. The abstract against the real.

First came the disease: Conjured in the deep basements of some Socialist or Fascist demon, men and women were precluded from the essential relation, the act of love itself, the moment when man and woman, it is said, experience God untrammelled by the petty illusions and dogma, and suddenly it was a fearful thing, to hold one another, to reap the fields of the orgasm. Men died by the thousands, women bore diseased children, and of course the farmland--especially here in the Third World--went fallow under the sun until the plague's true children, anger and frustration, became kings and queens, hateful tyrants, and the gangs of survivors took up arms against one another in the name, oddly, of freedom, revolution, safety from the proverbial slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, all of them sowed so silently and hurtfully by men with agendas.

You are a social worker with no social connections. You've come with insecticide. You've come to remove the dictatorship of disease, to bring the hope--at least--of freedom to the suffering, the blind and the hopelessly grieved. But what can you do? The once grassy world is now nothing but a world of stones. The fire ants are everywhere on the most lowly of fruit. See it? It lies there on the broken clods, split in half, fireants crawling and feeding on the division like a metaphor. Yes, men are divided against themselves and against one another while in the more fruitful nations, men and women are clamoring against the war to which you cannot relate, mere pawns, you sometimes think.

You move the man away from the colloidal suspension of the boundaries they've made. He's dying. Hungry. How many days will he live? Yet the children of your country are aghast, it seems, against their own poverty, against the policies of a government they only pretend to understand. In a different reality, you remove the man's mattress from its pinons and spray the insecticide. You're almost in a panic. Because there are so many bugs. You'd like to kill them one by one. But you can't. In the distance, while you cannot see them, gangs of hungry humans, stoked up on the political excuses when it was always a social thing, a disease, a parasite, a horrific and ugly conspiracy bred by men and women so selfish they cannot comprehend the humanity of the dupes upon which they depend. They sit in the boardrooms, they listen to the parades enacted in their names, they sleep silently and quietly, huge pictures of their faces scapegoat stopgaps for a real dream.

In America, they're talking in the underground of moving to the small towns, of taking the dissatisfaction and steering it into political action. But they don't seem to know anything about the evil that has been bred in the name of something far beyond what they think they know. They know nothing of the starving men brought into antagonism against the evils they've been told have been brought against them. They know nothing of the animosity sewn, nothing of the hurt, the anger, the hatred. Instead, they're told of a better world, a good place in which man and man live in harmony in an almost spiritual communion with the land. But it's a lie. You know that.

And you've felt it yourself: The fire ants, taking advantage of all you have been, your property, your livelihood, your reputation, your hopes, your need to be loved--preying upon your inefficiencies, even your poverty. You've been crushed in a dozen one-way tickets to nowhere, pushed down by ignorant societies of dupes and idiots, antagonized when you were poor and alienated. Yes, you've walked the streets, slept in the parking garages, you've smelled the stench of 300 homeless bodies cringing in their sleep. And yes, you've seen the fire ants, changing faces, places, spaces. They do not belong in your world, yet still they come.

Spray, you tell yourself. Kill each one. Remove the anger and the hatred and sew understanding. Someday, you hope, there will be freedom from those for whom feeding on decay is like the nectar of God. Until that day arrives, your job is hopeless. How is it that spokespeople for a world communion would proclaim such beauty when it's such ugliness they sew? Why so many ignorant accepting such hypocrisy? You feel so unholy sometimes. It's not easy freeing people from the socialized hatred--the one-on-one displacement, the severing of ties, the men crying in their rooms from loneliness--brought down from above so seemingly nebulous it's almost incredulous to accept. How could men and women cry, "Peace! Peace!" when it's discord they command? The insecticide. Kill each bug. The ghost of its bonding must not survive.

Well, call it the Peace Corps. Call it a United Nations assignment. Call it NGO. Call it faith-based. But in Iraq, where the intention of fire ants has reached a critical mass, the armies of your nation are facing fire, and no matter what you do, it's called unholy, against the will of God. Red-checkers: Where was the Marxist mudrassa?

You remember the time you needed love just as the face of a man on television, his son blown to bits in the falsely-used name of Allah. You felt broken, your children in your hands. You were alone, scarfing through garbage on the back streets in the richest nation on earth. All you believed you needed at the time was to be held, to be called to be human again, and yet, for some strange reason, all your hopes were abandoned by people who, it seemed, came from nowhere. So strange who the freedom-bringers were. So strange to not be utilized for the anger that could be focused, but fed, clothed, housed and taught to feel again beyond the survial mode and the callow glance. At that time, of course, being an innocent to the socialization of an idiot's dream, you didn't know none of this had been planned. But the petty men who you knew were planning against this freedom upon which you learned to base your life, did you see them sneer at you when you didn't seem to listen or take-to-heart the numerous rejections and dismisals? Yes, indeed it was one-on-one: one person at a time, broken, pieced back together until each one became, it seemed, a machine of hatred, a tool of contempt. How could you have caught yourself in time?

To put you to sit alone in your room. To place alcohol before you. Yes, that was the plan. If you didn't join, then you'd be put into destroying yourself. In such a world, how could you find your center?

Now you are here: The Third World. This is the harvest of the plans of petty men, men who have nothing to do with capitalism or the mercantile aspiration. How clearly you see their facade, their fakery, their ugliness all couched in idealism and hope and faith. What hateful hypocrites. You bend to salve the wounds of the men those people used.

O, never listen to the paranoid dreams of early Spring.