Here it comes...

Here's Allen Ginsberg in a 1982 interview talking about his sudden realization of 1958: "And so in 1958, on Independence Day, I wrote an essay saying that America was going to have a nervous breakdown, and that part of the cause of it could be located in that year's 30 billion dollar military budget and the growth of the military police state; that one aspect of it was the persecution of the junkies and the drug people who were basically sensitives who may or may not have been fucked up but needed compassion and medical care rather than Swatsika-like police agencies chasing them down with guns, calling them fiends, which is a terrible violation of the human spirit to create a class of people in America called fiends,--I mean, it's diabolical...once you realize you've got a class of armed police calling another group fiends you've really got a situation so surrealistic and hallucinatory and violent that there could be no outcome but some massive nervous breakdown in America when people find out that they've not only been lied to but drawn into a dream of reality which is not only false but painful and bitter and murderous."

So you notice that the total military budget he's talking about is about half of what Bush is asking for the military for Iraq alone this year. Thirty billion could buy you a nuclear arsenal in those days. And now we have the ongoing War on Some Drugs, which is the war on the class of fiends, losers, non-white cultures and non-corporate capitalists. Maybe the junkies today are more than proportionately more dangerous in some ways, but likely mostly to themselves.

What's interesting here is: how long has it been since anybody has called this a violation of the human spirit? Who talks like that anymore? Here in this false and painful and bitter and murderous nightmare of reality. Maybe it's a stretch to see the street junkies as sensitives, but on the other hand, many addicts are, or were. We hear a little more about treatment now thanks dubiously to Rush Limbaugh, but basically the war goes on.

How did we avoid that nervous breakdown? Denial is apparently a very powerful thing, aided by shopping. Our prisons are chock full of black men, but of course no racism is involved. The poor were joined by the working poor and now by the lower middle class and the middle middle a family crisis or two behind in being driven to insolvency and therefore homelessness by medical bills. But to talk about the rich paying a fair share of taxes is to engage in class warfare.
We dare not ask why terrorists find supporters in their countries, any more than we ask why people in our cities and towns turn to drugs. Well, they sure can't turn to us.

Think about this: everybody knows that more people are murdered in America than anywhere else. (We don't count revolutions and genocides of course.) So we get tough on crime and we watch cop show after cop show after cop show, all those tough smart guys solving homicides and struggling with the perverse legal system to make the bad guys pay because somehow this helps the dead victims. But what we don't know, can't admit, sure can't face, is that there are fewer homicides in America than suicides.

(cue: song) Here it comes...here it comes...