Welcome to the home of the very worst of the meretricious poetasters!
number 93 for 1-6-05:
Suicide Bomber
It's no surprise that you can be arrested for writing things these days. Which is fucking scary. I reported a while back on the kid who got in a shitload of trouble for writing a story where zombies take over his school, because it was interpreted as terrorist threatening.
Now, a man's been arrested because he wrote the words "suicide bomber" in a journal, and as he did so, fiddled with his backpack.
Is that a crime for which you should be arrested?
Well, is it a crime when Tom Brokaw is sitting on his ass in a plane writing an article about terrorists and he writes "suicide bomber" on his laptop? No.
So it's not a crime here.
But here's the problem with that diagnosis. The new rules, the new laws, fuck, terrorism, makes it so we think it's okay that ordinary people turned snitches and low-pay cops get to make the determination of whether it's the man-clutching-bag type of suicide bomber, or whether it's a Tom Brokaw type.
I consider this very important, because I've written things that, if someone read over my shoulder, would get me arrested on busses. A good example is my poem "Fuck America".
You may not agree with the poem, you may not even like it. Shit, I myself don't even like the message, but it's a pretty good piece, I think. But note the lines in the middle:
I want to kill them
I want to smash the earth in two and laugh as
We all spin off into space
They know the person fixing their burger is late
They don't know children die in foreign countries
So they can drive that SUV
That SUV I walk on past on the street
Wanting to choke them
Now, THAT, if you look at it, is one hell of a lot more damning than the words "Suicide Bomber" on a piece of paper. I was, in fact, clutching a backpack as well. A pretty packed one.
Did I deserve to be arrested? No. My words, if you'd only ask me (think the cops would?) mean that I feel the urge to kill everyone in the US and smash the Earth in two sometimes, when I'm down, but instead of doing it (which would be asinine, beyond me, and wrong), I instead write a poem, and then that urge dies down, and I want to drink Pepsi, eat apple pie, and fuck supermodels for a little while longer until my ambition whittles back to that of someone who gives a fuck about the world (roughly two hours, cyclical).
So I feel for this guy, even though he did something that, if I were on the bus, I'd want looked into. But arresting? I don't know about that.
Now, after reading this, I'm afraid to perhaps write something like I did on another bus. And I shouldn't be. That's not freedom of speech. That's guided imitation by a police state.
Which is what they do in Iraq. And Korea. They see you writing the wrong thing on a bus, you get arrested.
It's a tough bullet to bite, but I think actions, not speech and writing, are what we should base crime on. If a dude stands up and says "I want to blow up this plane!" that's fucking terrorism, even if he hasn't got a bomb, and he should be shot. If a dude says, "I feel like the world would be a better place if this plane weren't in it!", that's different. It really is. And cops can't make that distinction. They're not trained to. They're trained to bludgeon and ask questions later.
But it doesn't matter WHAT the fuck someone writes. You shouldn't arrest them until you ask what it means, and have a reasonable expectation that you know this to be correct. In fact, even if it seems that it means something nefarious, and they say it does, I don't know that you should arrest them even then.
Where the fuck is the line? When does my musings about a terrorist act in the form of fiction become a terrorist act in real life, even if I haven't blown up anything?
The public, even I, find themselves unclear about this whole mess, and the reason is because we were bred and brought up to assume that our freedoms would never be assailed by anyone except overbearing, over-righteous asshole parents and pastors. The government would not meddle in our private thoughts and writings, which we were entitled to.
Now?
Well, welcome to Bush Amerika. That's about it. If you're Arab, you're a suspect. If you're Muslim, you're a suspect. If you're a fucking Nazi? Well, the Nazis haven't really blown anything up in a while, so that's okay. Or the KKK. Or the fucking religious nuts who are trying to silence books, for that matter.
Suicide Bomber.
Suicide Bomber.
Suicide Bomber.
Suicide Bomber.
Until next time, if there IS a next time...
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