[Mb-civic] Life in the Shadows of the Empire

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

http://www.counterpunch.org/martin03182006.html

Counter Punch   March 18 / 19, 2006

Mysterious Photographers of Nothing

Life in the Shadows of the Empire

By Eamon Martin


"It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship,
but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings."

Sandra Day O'Connor, March 9, 2006

I help publish a small, nonprofit, independent newspaper in western North
Carolina called the Asheville Global Report. We print under-reported news
that casts an often-critical eye on the doings of our government at home
and abroad, in the hope that our fellow citizens will find the inspiration
and motivation to hold our government accountable. In doing so, our
explicitly nonpartisan goal has always been to fulfill the traditional
role of the press in a democratic society.

Since we began our project seven years ago, members of our staff have
encountered a few unmistakable incidents of surveillance --by whom, we
cannot say for certain. Although one episode back in 2000, when the
retired local field director of the FBI came by the used bookstore where I
worked at the time, leaves me with some suspicions. It had been two months
since I'd been arrested in Seattle during the WTO demonstrations, and one
month since my step-brother had died from a heroin overdose in New Jersey.
I was ringing up some books for this older man --who I later discovered
was named John Quigley -- when he casually uncorked the shocking 
comment:
"Oh, Eamon...did I read somewhere that your brother was sick? You're a
writer, right?"

I'd never met this man before and was stunned, speechless. He'd
blind-sided me. After a quick and intensely strange interaction in which I
explained that my brother had in fact suddenly died recently, and the
sheer impossibility of his having read anything about my brother anywhere,
he disingenuously apologized and left. He would continue to shop at the
store regularly, almost always parting with a "be careful" farewell. Then
of course, there was the time almost three years ago when I'd confronted
two men videotaping my fellow editor and I outside of the cafe where she
had been working that Sunday afternoon. A few months later, one of these
gentlemen had the audacity to appear at one of our benefits, merely to
hang out by the club entrance, not speak with anyone and enjoy several
cups of water. For some reason, this man who had been our very first
patron that night, suddenly lost interest in the show and quickly
disappeared after I approached him to chat a little.

But last week was special. There are moments in time when historic change
emerges from its sublimated status in the mundane and crystallizes itself
into personal consciousness and awareness. These are what I call "WAKE 
UP"
moments. It is in these jolting moments when one discovers that what they
are experiencing is endemic of something larger and much greater than
themselves. Last week I experienced one of those "WAKE UP" calls. On a
whim, I'd decided to drive to a favorite cafe to get breakfast. After I'd
finished eating, I went outside to small-talk with a friend of mine. After
a few minutes, my friend pointed out to me that somebody up the street was
taking our picture.

Perhaps realizing he'd "been made," our mysterious photographer
immediately put his elephantine zoom-lens camera down and made haste to
walk away. I followed him.

He seemed surprised when he soon discovered I was silently standing right
behind him at an intersection. Abruptly he attempted to cross the street
in front of oncoming traffic. Giving him about a yard of distance, I
continued to follow him anyway. Halfway across the street, he turned his
head back and noticed me on his heels, and then instantly started walking
diagonally back in the direction we'd came. What followed next can only be
described as a scene that was equal parts Rod Serling, Alfred Hitchcock
and Monty Python.

After a few minutes of this sort of preposterous, zigzagging pursuit back
and forth across the street in bizarre paces alternately shifting between
a fast trot and a sluggish lurch, I decided to give the man some space and
sat down on a portico stoop next to a closed restaurant He stopped walking
too, and then, while standing right next to me, proceeded to place his
zoom lens camera up against the window of the pitch-black, lifeless
restaurant and take pictures of ... nothing. At this point, it's more than
obvious that I've been following him, but his behavior never shifts from
feigned oblivion and muted, but comic, confusion.

A few seconds pass and he starts to walk away. I duck behind a car and
watch him through the vehicle's large windows. A minute later he turns
around, looks in my direction and attempts to take my picture through the
glass. I squat and hide, which begins an absurd round of "peek-a-boo" with
me popping up and down, into and out of his view, frustrating his attempts
to catch me again on film. Suddenly it maybe dawned on him that we were
now fully engaged -- still, without having any open, verbal acknowledgment
of such--and he abruptly quits the game and keeps walking.

A moment later he turns around again and looks back, but I've disappeared.
Briskly, he marches back in the direction he came and I continue to
discreetly follow him. Not much later, as we near what will be his final
destination -- a parking garage blocks away from the restaurant where this
escapade began, and right near our office -- a healthy-looking man in
"homeless" garb suddenly crosses my path, saying intently to me, "are you
still following him?" Undistracted, I keep on the first stranger and
follow him to the garage. As he pays his fee to leave, I make no attempt
to hide the fact that I'm copying down his license plate number. He looks
at me, and without a word, takes off.

The creepiest part about all of this is that I'd driven to the restaurant.
He obviously had not and was perhaps informed about my location? Of
course, one must always hold out the possibility that this man was just a
garden-variety Asheville wing-nut. Not only does our city have our fair
share, but it has become a well-established facet of our local culture
such that it has earned us national notoriety. Like I said before, we
cannot say for sure who these strangers are, or what exactly they
represent. But their appearance in our lives would seem to dovetail with
current events, the likes of which, we've made it our duty to report. And
our website seems to be a big hit with employees of the US Department of
Defense. The following day, with little media fanfare, President Bush
signed the USA PATRIOT Act into permanence. The lack of media attention 
to
this historic event was all the more glaring in that Bush was in effect
signing the death certificate of the Fourth Amendment -- which protects US
citizens from unwarranted spying -- at the precise moment that his
administration was fending off controversy about abusing that very right.
Also attracting little media attention that day were the staggering
remarks made by recently retired Supreme Court justice Sandra Day 
O'Connor
who'd made the astonishing admission that she feared the US republic was
edging towards a dictatorship.

Indeed, days before on the Senate floor, resident constitutional expert
Sen. Robert Byrd issued a stark warning about the PATRIOT Act that 
demands
to be quoted at length: "This new proposal would erase too many of our
freedoms guaranteed to the American people. In essence, this legislation
says that the Bill of Rights is right no more... There is no doubt that
constitutional freedoms will never be abolished in one fell swoop, for the
American people cherish their freedoms, and would not tolerate such a loss
if they could perceive it. But the erosion of freedom rarely comes as an
all-out frontal assault but rather as a gradual, noxious creeping, cloaked
in secrecy, and glossed over by reassurances of greater security."

Now this week it was revealed that a local college freshman and former
Eagle Scout had his computer confiscated by the Secret Service. Why? He'd
made the grave mistake of quoting some lyrics by the band The Misfits on
his Myspace.com web page, in which he had replaced some of the words
describing the assassination of JFK to portray a Bush version of the
theme. Our local Gannett monopoly franchise newspaper, the Asheville
Citizen-Times would reflectively opine that "it pays to be cautious
online."

No doubt. It was also reported this past week that the FBI has listed
Indymedia -- an open source newswire born out of the WTO protests which
disseminates news very similar to our newspaper -- as one of the current,
top ten domestic terrorist threats in the US. Did you catch that? The FBI
now considers disseminating news an act of terrorism.

As I entered our office this morning, I passed two guys who recently moved
into our building. They're media producers of some sort, and they were
intensely discussing a new ad campaign they're working on for the
military. The one fellow looked very much like Verizon's trendoid
posterboy --horn-rimmed glasses, vintage bowling shirt, elaborate arm
tattoos -- and he reeked of the musk of "X-treme sports" and that "I think
capitalism is killer, dude," ethic that seems more and more common in our
gentrifying city.

"We'll have the soldiers marching down the street together in
formation...the main theme of these ads is unity," this guy was
instructing his friend. "It's all about unity. Maybe use the image of a
man who is lonely and sad (gestures with arms over his head) and then cut
to 'No man should have to be alone.' Then the Navy logo will come in, and
it'll build up, cut with images of power and masculinity... I really like
the idea of using imagery of thunder and lightening...we want to stress
unity and masculinity, power, the warrior spirit -- all that man was meant
to be, all that man was born to be." Famous Nazi propagandist Joseph
Goebbels often said similar things.

However seemingly unrelated, for me, all of these events knit together
into a social mosaic of "WAKE UP" moments. As each of us individually
struggle to make our way through this competitive world, it can be easy to
lose sight, let alone recognize the fabric deterioration of our ostensibly
"democratic" social compact. Who knows who walks among us, what their
intentions are and what greater purpose they may ultimately serve? You may
not care and perhaps you may only register bafflement about what any of
this paranoid portrait of contemporary life may indicate. But I for one,
Senator Byrd, Justice O'Connor, am hearing you loud and clear.

Eamon Martin is an editor of Asheville Global Report.


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"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

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