What else would you call the War on Terror? It’s killing time between war and peace by savaging millions of people, our system of civil rights, the Constitution and the economy. And it’s killing the future for the incoming generations who will land in the middle of war, fire, explosions, revolutions, counter-revolutions, non-restitution for losses caused by the U.S., NATO, on the human soul and consciousness.
Worse, killing time is wasting life, with the above-mentioned slaughter of the innocents in various “killing fields” over the so-called Muslim terrorist-attack of jetliners on the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001. A decade plus has flown by and we are still killing time, people and money, our economy shot pursuing this outburst of empire and its slaughter. We could be sitting on the moon or Mars or have spent the money renewing the environment with non-carbon emissions, using clean energy instead.
Instead, we choose to kill everything alive, using Depleted Uranium in our weapons in the illegal wars on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and hopefully now, not Iran. DU is radioactive and slips through the skin to the body’s DNA and attacks it, accounting for hundreds of thousands of deaths and mutilated births since it was first used in the Gulf War 1. It poisons land, water and animal-life as well. Top it off with the radiation blowing in from Fukishima as a result of a tsunami that generated the reactor problems—and you hold hell in a handful of sand.
Killing time includes creating regime change that doesn’t change much. Not in Egypt or Syria, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Jordan, in the Mid-East or anywhere. Or as we kill the U.S. economy, spending on building military bases worldwide, the new Empire we can’t afford. And with a degenerate Congress that lives on bribes, the Republicans barely able to cough up a decent candidate (certainly not Mitt Man) and the Democrats stuck with Mr. Change, who seems to have changed most things for the worst, including our civil liberties, economy, the financial industry, and the Fed, here we are again, approaching election year and time for more killing time. This time will it be Iran? It is anyone’s guess.
Since we are a part of time and its business, we’re killing ourselves (not so coincidentally), creating a deadly Zeitgeist, as Wiki defines it, “The general cultural, intellectual, ethical, spiritual, or political climate within a nation or even specific groups, along with the general ambiance, morals, sociocultural direction, and mood associated with an era. The term is a loanword from German Zeit—“time” (cognate with English “tide” and “time”) and Geist—“spirit” (cognate with English “ghost”).
Inhale that every day and you’re killing time as the warring factions of the world are killing themselves. It could make a person moody, in need of Zoloft, the anti-depressant of the era, as in Zeitgeist and Zoloft. You can’t have one without the other, like love and marriage. But this is serious, nothing to be clever about. This is our time on this beautiful planet, encaged in our nature, which is in the larger Zoo of nature, and we’re hitting it over the head, killing it, and time, and even the vast ocean of space, turning it into the ultimate garbage dump. Is no place sacred? No. Not even heaven? Heaven is when you’re having so much fun and enjoying living that you’re not aware of time and allowing it to flow around you like a delicious river, carrying you up then downstream in an unseen eternity.
Does this feel like that? Or does it feel Waiting for Godot, the world-famous play by Samuel Becket about killing time and the paralysis of ennui it brings?
Two men, Vladimir and Estragon, meet near a tree. They converse on various topics and reveal that they are waiting there for a man named Godot. While they wait, two other men enter. Pozzo [sounds like pazzo, crazy in Italian] is on his way to the market to sell his slave, Lucky. He pauses for a while to converse with Vladimir and Estragon. Lucky entertains them by dancing and thinking, and Pozzo and Lucky leave.
After Pozzo and Lucky leave, a boy enters and tells Vladimir that he is a messenger from Godot. He tells Vladimir that Godot will not be coming tonight, but that he will surely come tomorrow. Vladimir asks him some questions about Godot and the boy departs. After his departure, Vladimir and Estragon decide to leave, but they do not move as the curtain falls.
The next night, Vladimir and Estragon again meet near the tree to wait for Godot. Lucky and Pozzo enter again, but this time Pozzo is blind and Lucky is dumb. Pozzo does not remember meeting the two men the night before. They leave and Vladimir and Estragon continue to wait.
Shortly after, the boy enters and once again tells Vladimir that Godot will not be coming. He insists that he did not speak to Vladimir yesterday. After he leaves, Estragon and Vladimir decide to leave, but again they do not move as the curtain falls, ending the play.
Existentially speaking, this is also a play about killing time as one waits for deity or someone or thing to appear rather than to start feeding the blood and senses with our own consciousness and life. That is the moral imperative, if I read it correctly.
So, perhaps we kill time because we don’t know what to do with it besides killing? What do you think? Could it be that we humans, so imaginative we send men to the moon and telescopes beyond to see Mars and Venus can’t think of what to do next or first? But when we are killing time there is the probability of the unexpected Godot showing up and our “flight or fight” instinct might go into high gear and kill Godot—just as we find the means to kill around the clock and the world over and over. This seems to be our central dilemma in this era in the time/space continuum.
It reminds me of hell as pictured in Dante’s Inferno. Going down into it, we find Circle 1 is Limbo; Circle 2 is Lust; 3 is Gluttony; 4 is Greed; 5 is Anger; 6 is Heresy; 7 is Violence; 8 is Fraud, 9 is Treachery; and 10 is Goldman Sachs. Having gone down through them all, you rise from the center, drawn up from the bottom of hell by the power of love. Take the journey. Read it. It’s worth the effort in seeing how little has changed from the various ways of killing time and people at least from the 14th Century on, which takes us back to the War on Terror.
It also takes us back to the demonization of Muslims as perpetrators of 9/11 when nobody really knows who did it except the US government. And they’re not talking for obvious reasons. Could it be they did 9/11 and can’t obviously face up to it for fear of being indicted as war criminals? Could it be they needed a reason to start killing countries like Afghanistan and Iraq to get their oil and real estate to build pipelines to haul it from the Caucasus region to Pakistan, the Indian Ocean to China?
Also, murdering bin Laden was not proof that Muslims did 9/11. It was only proof he was murdered. Actually, the Taliban offered to turn bin Laden over to the US government—if they could first give the Taliban proof that he directed the 9/11 catastrophe. On three different occasions they asked Bush, and got no for an answer. How feint-hearted of the US. But not too feint-of-heart to murder bin Laden and untold other Muslims.
But then he was the bearded poster boy, an easy target, a billionaire’s son who disliked the US government for basing troops Saudi Arabia. This just makes him religious. It was us who attacked Afghanistan first and all the other countries after, like Iraq, claiming Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction he was going to use at any moment. He neither had nor used the WMD. Those were lies, too, that killed a lot of people, time, and money.
But once you start killing time, killing any life form, everything else is a piece of cake. For instance, Hussein ended hanged by the neck until dead, murdered, after having been set up by the U.S. as the Godfather of the Mideast and going to war with Iran as a surrogate for the U.S. for nine years, in which several million people were lost and more than a million uprooted from their countries.
So, is there no end to killing time? It seems not. Darwin told us evolution was based on the survival of the fittest, meaning the species that is stronger and could kill better was the one that survived. Perhaps we are just acting out that simple law through our time in history, until some other species, the Androids or the Transformers replace us, as in some D-for-Doomsday- Hollywood movie, leaving a planet of ruin, broken stone, with flashes of memory glinting off the few standing buildings that make a mockery of the notion of evolution itself.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer, life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.
It should have become apparent some time ago that the U.S. definition of terrorism refers to any attack on U.S. soil or U.S. citizens at home or abroad. This construct is at the core of our so-called exceptionalism. We can attack any place or person(s) when we deem it to be in our interests, but that is a right we reserve to ourselves. 9/11 was a shocking departure in that an enemy (who apparently not read the rule book) attacked us on our own soil. Our soil is sacred and not to be touched. Moreover, it is exclusively sacred in ways no other real estate on the planet enjoys. The penalty for violation of the rule is the unrelenting use of a form of violence that obeys no laws or covenants to which we have chosen not to subscribe.