Another Perspective

One Flew Over the Apocalypse Nest

Our AP man rambles about the end of the world, Peter Jennings, Seattle, Mumia Abu-Jamal and...well, we're pretty sure he covers everything.

They tell me that this is the end of the world. The umpteen inescapable voices that compose my interior dialogue provide incontrovertible evidence that the gig is now nearly up.

My friend Mark has been collecting thirty-gallon plastic food containers as fast as the paychecks roll in, and for the past several months he has been filling them with granola, oats, and purified water. When he looks you in the eye, it's evident that he has stared down hundreds of thousands of miles of American highway with that self-same determined gaze from the cabs of various semi-trailer towing vehicles, narrating, all the while, countless travelogue audio tapes with the assistance of Art Bell's apocalyptic warnings. He's not going to let the UN fool you about the true urgency of things any more than he's going to ignore those UFO's, no sir.

I receive religious propaganda in the mail. I can't help it. Try as I might to elude them, the evangelists of imminent doom have got my number. Apparently my soul's salvation is contingent upon my recognition that the Pope is the Antichrist. At least I'm not on Pat Robertson's mailing list.

He's got a video for sale, you know. For $19.95 you can prepare yourself, just in case Y2K creates the havoc we've been promised. It's reassuring that, with its formidable media resources, The 700 Club has a better handle on our existential uncertainty than we do. Anyway, get your copy and take your place among the end times intelligentsia. You're going to need to know what to do when the government comes crashing through your door, demanding that you pledge allegiance to their Demonic Alliance. Don't even think about stockpiling guns; we all saw how far that got David Koresh.

A path of less resistance is simply to acknowledge the plain fact that it will soon all be over. Another month of The Man taking it out of your ass and then, pow!- no more anything. Come now, you've seen the flyers, haven't you? Let me bring you up to speed: this is the time to do what you want without regard for the illusion of consequences.

Soon they will be irrelevant. The Man will be overthrown when his computers can no longer control you. Don't question it; feel it. So quit your job, smash property, and have unprotected sex, lots of it. If anyone gets in your way, take 'em out; the legal system as we know it hasn't a long enough life span ahead of it to impede you from taking the necessary steps to assert yourself over said individual(s). Run up as much credit as They'll give you, as They will lose track of you when the world has ended and Their computers are frozen in helpless fin de sicle panic.

The problem with these viewpoints, after their mutual exclusivity, is that they imply, singularly and as a whole, an oppositional conventional awareness. This conventional awareness is the one that watches the television news with dinner and regularity and finds reassurance in the fact that Peter Jennings and Sam Donaldson are not going to contradict one another. The one that lends a bemused ear to JFK theorists, alien abduction stories, political prisoner-speak, and other assorted dissention, singularly and as a whole, only to say, "that's crazy". And of course, it is crazy.

Crazy is what you are when everyone except you or your cult believes the same way about something, according to Baba Ram Dass. He should know; he used to be a psychologist. He also said that a cult is simply any group of people who hold a set of beliefs in common. Fans of The X-Files, listeners of Mojo Nixon, stock market millionaires, and people who point out the foibles of student government, then, each constitute their own cult. I'm probably off-base, though, to put any stock (as it were) in the ideas of a man who made a lot of money by writing a book called Be Here Now and then became an investment banker. Hell, I'm probably off-base to disparage his sincerity in print based upon a rumor that was probably originally a meaningless joke. Where is certainty in this crass, (allegedly) doomed world? May the mountains fall upon us.

There are a couple of ways in which the end of the world is more than mere speculation. Not too very much more than that, though. You see, I'm talking about situations in which the consequences are dire in the eyes of the cult-members who perceive them, and just rather silly in the static eyes of convention.

The static eyes of convention do not blink twice at what is taking place right now in Seattle. To them, free trade, which is of course a major foundation not only of our fine country but of the original European Enlightenment itself and thus our libertarian era, can only do good things for us all by submitting to the streamlining process that is a meeting of the World Trade Organization. Those anarcho-syndicalist-types parading around up there and causing a ruckus present nothing but an eyesore, the way they see it. As always, the ones who cannot be placated can be squashed.

It's funny, though, how even as they are being squashed they continue to rave about democracy and the right to self-determination. It seems that those were some ideals upon which our fine country and the original European Enlightenment and thus our libertarian era were founded, too. In any case, those who favor the streamlining of international free trade over these other ideals seem to be making the rules, ushering the world into the next millennium. So you might call me crazy for proposing that the future may hold the end of the world as we know it.

The static eyes of convention are unwavering when it comes to Mumia Abu-Jamal, of whom concerned authorities and accomplished journalists alike are not only willing but eager to proclaim indisputable guilt of a heinous crime. Their rhetoric is straightforward enough: under the impression that a police officer was mistreating Jamal's brother (reports in favor of the prosecution vary from assertions that the man was being savagely beaten to statements that he was being lawfully arrested), Mumia used his own gun to shoot and kill the offending officer, then received a fair trial in which he was convicted and given the appropriate sentence of death, and has since used his race, rasta hair, and cutesy name to gain the sympathy of gullible people everywhere who, when it comes down to it, have no respect for the life of a police officer anyway. It's like a brick wall, their argument. And if you go to his website or glance at the huge poster hanging in a window in Suite One of the EMU, you'll have to concede this much: the slogan is not "Retry Mumia!" It has always been "Free Mumia!"

The fact that we Mumia-sympathizers really do, for what we consider to be very good reasons, hold police officers in contempt seems to be damning for his crusade. Think about it. The rhetoric of his most ardent supporters is that he never received a fair trial, that he was probably framed because of his acute awareness of the truth of the adage "the pen is mightier than the sword," his cogent essays were and are anathema to the very foundation of policing and even, to some extent, our national character, and therefore physical cop-killing would be not only small potatoes but a contradiction of the moralistic tenor of his writing, so The Man set him up to take him out. So the authorities' flippancy toward the "sacred guilt beyond the shadow of a doubt" and "fair trial by due process of law" is our moral high ground. Yet we say "Free Mumia!" as if that rallying cry were beneficial to the cause, when in fact it is their reference-point in saying that we want to free a cop-killer.

If in reality Jamal's brother was being brutalized, and he did stop the attacker in an emotional if efficient rage, I don't fault him. Neither do I want to come to his hopeless defense. So I guess you could call me crazy for having a perspective which differentiates me from not only the dominant paradigm, but also the counter-dominant paradigm. And I guess you could call me crazy for being concerned about the end of the world (December 2nd) of someone I don't even know, or for observing that, as in the case of Socrates or Jesus, here we may have evidence that challenging authority with words is the most capital offense of all.

Anyway, I'm starting my own cult. My first doctrine? Humans are crazy. That's right: you. And I've got my bazookas aimed at every last looney-tuned one of you.

Bryan Roberts, a senior majoring in English, is a featured columnist for theOregon Commentator