These Are the Days of Miracles and Wonder
for release 02-28-06
Washington D.C.
When I was locked up in 1984, there was a major transition underway in the Texas prisons. Following the contempt of court charges that were upheld against the prison system for non-compliance in the Ruiz v Estelle prison abuse lawsuit, the Feds, lead by Judge William Wayne Justice, took control of the Texas prison system.
This was a lucky event for me. When I arrived at the Wynne Unit in Huntsville, the place was a jungle. The inmates were running the asylum. There were radios blaring from every cell and gang colors were everywhere. Inmates were running free in their cell blocks selling dope, porn, squares on football pools and even tacos made of ingredients stolen from the prison kitchen. Even though the Building Tender system had just been dismantled, it was still a cruel and violent environment. Might made right and I only weighed a hundred and twenty pounds, so my rights were limited. Things changed rather quickly when the Feds took over. The institution went from resembling a plantation run by a bunch of tobacco chewing good old boys, to being what could almost pass as a modern penal system run by professional penologists who often-times had more education than the inmates in their custody. It was still no picnic, but it was an improvement.
Gang violence was curtailed as was sexual predation when new prisoner classification systems were instituted. They segregated the violent gang members and other trouble makers from the rest of the population and we had better food and the brothers had to listen to their rap music through headphones. Sectarian violence was reduced to a minimum.
Which brings to mind the Civil War that we see proceeding in Iraq. It reminds me of what I saw in prison. Gang warfare. The Bloods and the Crips, the Mexican Mafia against the Black Panthers against the Aryan Brotherhood, the Sunnis against the Shi'ites against the Kurds, who can tell the difference? It's all gang warfare.
Iraq has a history of extreme factionalism. It took the iron hand of Saddam Hussein to make it a workable country. And the sad fact is that the country was working better under his control than it does now. Though his regime didn't glow in the area of political rights, and while his hand was often brutal, he moved the society in a more secular, Pan-Arab direction and wrested control of his country's oil resources from the large Western oil companies (this being his major sin) and used the money to modernize Iraq's infrastructure before we bombed it back into the Stone Age.
In the minds of the neo-con geniuses who cooked up this war, once Saddam was toppled, democracy would magically and spontaneously break out and spread like holy jihad through the Mid East. I don't know if they were deluded or dreaming or just didn't really give a damn what happened as long as they got their greedy little fingers on the oil. They were apparently too busy fabricating history to study it. Did they imagine that a four-thousand year old civilization with nary a trace of democracy in its tradition was going to suddenly, by some mystical parthenogenesis, give birth to peaceful self-government? Any first-year poli-sci student could have predicted the outcome of our invasion of Iraq--violence, chaos, sectarian strife and terrorism. The rose-petal theory was just wishful thinking.
But friends, we live in a 'post 9/11 world.' The politicians constantly remind us of this. All the laws of physics and reason have been suspended or turned on their heads. In this new world, which is as different as A.D. was from B.C., you can impose 'self-determination' at the point of a gun, you can improve security at our ports by outsourcing their management to foreign governments, you can protect the environment by drilling for new oil. It's the age of miracles and wonder.
In the Texas prison system the junkies ran the show. The junkies had all the administrative jobs. They knew how to work the system. If you are to survive on the streets for any length of time as a junky, you must learn people skills, I mean you have to be able to run a convincing hustle. You have to learn what makes people tick and you must be able to quickly assess what they want from you and what you can get from them. These same skills are useful behind bars and in politics. In our government the oil junkies are running the show.
The Poet's Eye is blurred from miracles, but still sees that our adventure in Iraq is purely colonial. We are trying to use the Building Tender system in Iraq just like they did in the Texas prisons. The British used the same method to subdue India. It's a classical colonial prison tactic. You hire the natives or the inmates to police themselves.
And I believe
These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires and baby
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby, don’t cry
Don’t cry
--Paul Simon
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bullshit, took me a while to figure out the enemy of my enimy is my enemy too. How else can I love my enemy.
