A manifesto for the secret brotherhood of tunnel rats

This has been widely noted elsewhere, but too resonant not to repeat here: the Guardian on Will Self's workspace:

"I'm going to end up like one of those old weirdos who lives in a network of tunnels burrowed through trash - yet I do not fear this."

Sister Snake

Here's something I did on my summer vacation—not that working three science fiction conventions in four weeks, in parts of the country experiencing a triple-digit heat wave, constitutes a vacation in the normal sense of the word. Anyway, in late July I drove from Houston up to Tulsa, Oklahoma for Conestoga. Soon after crossing the Oklahoma state line, I started being struck by place names eerily familiar from growing up in Columbus, Georgia. Not familiar as in Smithvilles, Fairviews and towns named Columbus; familiar as in Muscogee (the local county and school district when I was a kid), Okmulgee (river in Georgia), Eufaula (town in Alabama) and Tuskegee (ditto.) These place names were very familiar to me growing up, and very strange to see in Oklahoma.

They turn out to be Muscogee (Creek) Indian names, echoes of people who lived in the Deep South, including along the Chattahoochee River between present-day Georgia and Alabama, before the U.S. government forced them to move to Oklahoma in the 1800's.

The forced removal was called the Trail of Tears. It was a wretched historical episode. American ethnic cleansing. To make it, if possible, even worse, Indian spirituality is generally connected to land in a way that Western spirituality isn't. Exile from ancestral land meant being cut off at the religious, cultural and even medicinal roots. This was explained to me once by a Lutheran theologian who belongs to the Osage Nation. He said that after being forced from Missouri to Oklahoma, Osage medicine people practiced less of their traditional medicine, and part of the reason was unfamiliar plant life. They didn't know the healing properties of plants in Oklahoma.

I recall precious little awareness of Indian peoples in Columbus when I was young. Most Georgians and Alabamians had no idea what Indian language so many place names came from. There was a "Yuchi Reservation" over in Alabama. But it was a golf course. I do remember a personable Yuchi Indian lady leading a program about her people at the Columbus Museum. A little present-day research on the Yuchi Indians proves very interesting. Their language is an isolate. Like Basque, it has no known closely related languages. Some of the Yuchi people lived in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley before being removed to Oklahoma with the Creeks in 1836. This came after several different bands of Yuchis had migrated or fled from place to place within the South starting in the 1700's.

There were a lot of migrations and upheavals of Indian peoples in the centuries after 1492. Topping it all off with removal and genocide, the end game was a colossal land grab by Europeans in North America. Now we live on stolen land, as the Lutheran Osage theologian emphatically pointed out to me. He added that the morality of living on stolen land can get sticky even for Indian people. He was then living in Oakland. Originally that was Ohlone Indian land.

For a lot of mostly irreparable reasons, most Americans dwell on the land of ancestors other than our own. Sometimes the original people are gone. The Conestoga Valley in Pennsylvania was named for an Iroquoian tribe that no longer exists. Wagons of a type devised in the Conestoga Valley carried waves of settlers and commerce westward as the United States expanded across Indian lands, including land that treaties had reserved for Indian tribes. It was a trail of broken treaties.

Conestoga in an SFFnal sense, namely Oklahoma's largest literary science fiction and fantasy convention, is a good con with a flair for originality. This year the con's charity was Safari's Sanctuary. The Safari's Sanctuary people rescue wild and exotic animals from the pet trade and from overpopulated zoos. They do educational outreach too, bringing some of the animals: wolves and lemurs and oh my—Carmella, the Burmese Python. A Safari's Sanctuary volunteer draped her on interested shoulders at Conestoga. A big (well fed, mellow) snake is all languid muscle from tip to tail. When you're wearing one, you feel the muscles flex as the snake shifts position. Not a suitable pet, but an amazing creature.

Carmella may be a kindred soul of mine. Oklahoma isn't Burma; she shouldn't be here, just like my own genes, or most of them, put me in Northern Europe rather than North America. But we are here and we make the best of it. She, dining on rats and educating the public about big snakes. I, living and writing without ever taking home and nature, place or past for granted.

PHOTO COURTESY OF SFF WRITER JOHN MOORE

Your Ballardian Dream Home (serious offers only)

FOR SALE

Titan 1 Missile Base
$1,500,000

Terms $300,000 down
Balance @ 7% interest only
3 year balloon

Contact:
Bari Hotchkiss
(949) 842-9479
bahotchkiss@yahoo.com

SERIOUS INTERESTED PARTIES ONLY!!
NO TOURS!! Must submit offer with $10,000 earnest money deposit into escrow subject to inspection.

Courtesy to Brokers.



The Missile Base consists of 57 acres of real estate. The center secured portion of the property is protected by the original barbed-wire-topped chainlink fence. There is a paved road leading into the property with dual entry gates.

Above ground is the original 40 X 100 shop building, two concrete targeting structures, two manufactured homes, two 8 X 8 X 40 storage containers, and the silo tops of the three missile silos, two antenna silos, one entry portal and a few other misc structures.

Below ground is a huge complex consisting of 16 buildings and thousands of feet of connecting tunnels. The major underground structures are:

Three - 160' Tall Missile Silos

Three - 4 story Equipment Terminal Buildings

Three - Fuel Terminal Buildings

Two - 6 story Antenna Silos

One Air Intake/Filtration Building

One 100' diameter Control Dome Building

One 125' diameter Power Dome Building

One - 6 story Entry Portal Building

and a few other misc buildings and areas.


Apparently, this is for real.

And it's not the only decommissioned missile base for sale as a dream home for secluded comfort in a freshly apocalyptic age.

Let's get lost

Pictured: Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970).

If you had trouble escaping your cubicle this summer, it's not too late to escape via your cubicle, courtesy of the mysterious Center for Land Use Interpretation -- a virtual encyclopedia and user-friendly Baedeker to most of the ephemeral sites of the United States. Nuclear waste dumps, skunk works, industrial facilties, and eccentric cultural sites. I have a particularly soft spot for the land art.

Marcel Marceau 1923-2007

Everyone else in the known universe will be posting this clip. I don't care. It's greatness personified.

Let's put on a show!

Courtesy of Gwenda Bond, an insane clip of 1500 or so prisoners in the Philippines recreating the video for Michael Jackson's "Thriller." (The acronym CPDRC stenciled on the prison oranges stands for the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center.) The implicit specter of actual prison violence certainly gives the hordes of shuffling zombies a predatory credibility that no amount of Hollywood prosthetics can match.



The idea of inmates performing live musical productions raises interesting generic possibilities. Could be a real morale builder at Gitmo -- let all the boys at Camp X-Ray collaborate with their captors on some all-American show tunes. Maybe a Wahhabi Godspell? A GWOT-centric reworking of The Producers -- Springtime for Chalabi? "Prisoners of Love" set inside Abu Ghraib? Why does that just seem so right?

The Blog Squad

For some time, I have been of the view that cyberpunk hacker types, Southern California cathode ray fantasists, and Madison Avenue product placement pirates would be far more effective warfighters in a "Global War on Terror" than mechanized minions of the Pentagon. That it really is ultimately about culture and consciousness. That it's bona fide netwar. And that, you know, we'll know we've really won when there's a Hooters in Riyadh.



Today's NYT reports on the State Department finally getting into the act in a way that actually sounds potentially effective, after so many larger scale bombs and misses -- the unsuccessful recruitment of a Madison Avenue executive to improve America's global PR after 9/11, the US taxpayer-funded Presbyterian edition of Al Jazeera (dig those digitally enhanced wild horses!), the mysterious recruitment of comics professionals to create Arab-language superhero popaganda, and so on. Karen Hughes' (you thought she was back in Texas, didn't you) Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs office has started hiring bloggers:



At State Dept., Blog Team Joins Muslim Debate

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

WASHINGTON — Walid Jawad was tired of all the chatter on Middle Eastern blogs and Internet forums in praise of gory attacks carried out by the “noble resistance” in Iraq.

So Mr. Jawad, one of two Arabic-speaking members of what the State Department called its Digital Outreach Team, posted his own question: Why was it that many in the Arab world quickly condemned civilian Palestinian deaths but were mute about the endless killing of women and children by suicide bombers in Iraq?

Among those who responded was a man named Radad, evidently a Sunni Muslim, who wrote that many of the dead in Iraq were just Shiites and describing them in derogatory terms. But others who answered Mr. Jawad said that they, too, wondered why only Palestinian dead were “martyrs.”

The discussion tacked back and forth for four days, one of many such conversations prompted by scores of postings the State Department has made on about 70 Web sites since it put its two Arab-American Web monitors to work last November.

The postings, are an effort to take a more casual, varied approach to improving America’s image in the Muslim world.

Brent E. Blaschke, the project director, said the idea was to reach “swing voters,” whom he described as the silent majority of Muslims who might sympathize with Al Qaeda yet be open to information about United States government policy and American values.

Some analysts question whether the blog team will survive beyond the tenure of Karen P. Hughes, the confidante of President Bush who runs public diplomacy. The department expects to add seven more team members within the next month — four more in Arabic, two in Farsi and one in Urdu, the official language of Pakistan.

The team concentrates on about a dozen mainstream Web sites such as chat rooms set up by the BBC and Al Jazeera or charismatic Muslim figures like Amr Khaled, as well as Arab news sites like Elaph.com. They choose them based on high traffic and a focus on United States policy, and they always identify themselves as being from the State Department.

They avoid radical sites, although team members said that jihadis scoured everywhere.

The State Department team members themselves said they thought they would be immediately flamed, or insulted and blocked from posting. But so far only the webmaster at the Islamic Falluja Forums (www.al-faloja.info) has revoked their password and told them to get lost, they said.

Not that they don’t attract plenty of skeptical, sarcastic responses. One man identifying himself as an Arab in Germany commented that they were trying to put lipstick on a pig. During Congressional testimony last week by Gen. David H. Petraeus, for example, the two-man team went into chat rooms to ask people their opinion.

“God bless America, the giving mother,” went one sarcastic response, going on to say that everything the United States does goes into “the balance of your pockets, I mean the balance of your rewards.” Another noted that Iraqis were better off before the invasion, while a third jokingly asked the Digital Outreach Team for a green card.

Mr. Jawad’s responses tend toward the earnest: “We do not deny that the situation in Iraq is difficult, but we are achieving success in decreasing the level of violence there with the contribution of the Iraqis who care about their nation and who reject the terrorists and killers who target their victims based on sect,” he wrote at one point. He directed the green card writer to the Web sites describing how to apply.

Mr. Jawad and his colleague, Muath al-Sufi, are circumspect about biographical details that would allow readers to pigeonhole them by their roots, religion or education. Mr. Jawad, would only say that he is in his 30s, was born in Texas and raised around the Arab world. Mr. Sufi also said he was in his 30s.

The team said certain topics repeated regularly, including arguments over the accusations that American soldiers tortured Iraqis at Abu Ghraib and President Bush’s comment that the fight against terrorism is a “crusade.” Much time is also spent trying to douse the Internet brush fires that erupt whenever prominent Americans from talk-show hosts to politicians make anti-Muslim remarks of the “bomb Mecca” variety.

Each response is carefully shaped in English by the team and translated into often poetic Arabic.

>>>

Wow. Government-authored war poetry. Makes me want to learn Arabic just to find out if that reads like a Cold War pamphlet rewrite of the Silmarillion.

Note they already have the perfect title for the first Robert Ludlum Blog Squad thriller: "PASSWORD REVOKED."