Operation TIPS
c/o Homeland Security
Dear Norm,
I drive under your Report Suspicious Activities signs
frequently, and read them each time. I had thought,
before the world changed, in the years those signs
were erected over the highways, that it was a little
bit suspicious to build those signs at all: ‘Congestion
Ahead’ not being worth it; as everybody who drives here
already knows it’s already true, the signs were thus
merely infuriating to those spending gas on the
parking lot beneath them. But now I understand that
their installation, and the cameras, sprouting on poles
of their own like metallic mushrooms, or clinging to
lamps and bridge edges like barnacles, was prescient.
A prescient precedent, set for a bellicose President.
How was I to have known the world would change
like that September morning changed it? Now, as I
sit in the traffic, the TIPS-line flashing over the lanes,
I realize that I am suspicious.
This is not to say that
I suspect I’m a sleeper, though I sure can sleep, or that
any of my own behaviors as witnessed by myself since
that day have raised any doubts in my mind about my
own loyalty to the Republic, its Constitution and its
Emperor. No, indeed. I am not suspicious of myself, in
that way (and trust those who read my e-mail to know
when I should be designated a ‘person of interest’ better
than I), but, well, I am sort of sensitive to language,
‘hyperlexic’ some call it, others, ‘infuriating literalness,’
but the effect is the same: I parse and parse, wringing
every meaning I can from the presented syntax, like
bureaucrats pun, by compulsion. So the question arises,
which the signs already beg:
What is suspicious activity?
The way it seems to be intended, suspicious activity is
anything which could be construed as an ‘Islamist,’
surveying, or moving equipment, or renting vans or buying
fertilizer or aluminum tubes, PVC pipes, sheetrock or
spongy vanilla confections, and such an ‘Islamist’ could
be anybody, but is probably darker of skin than Dan
Rather and bearded. Or are they? Aren’t they swarthy,
evildoing enemies of freedom, or do they look like
Patriot McVeigh? Of course, it does not mean adherents
of the docile and politically impotent religion of Islam, or
Sikhs, not these.
But ‘suspicious activities’ might be those
undertaken at the direction of a suspicious mind: following
those dark men with the boxes; looking askance at the
speakers of the tones of Arabic, Pashto, Farsi; watching
the minarets; lurking, even voicing incendiary ideology,
on the discussion boards. The fact that the mind harbors
suspicion, that very harboring, is such an activity.
Norm, I gotta tell ya, I’m suspicious.
Suspicious of just about everything susceptible to
interpretation. Suspicious of the text, the context,
the subtext and the author. My suspicious activities
consist in this interpretation, and reinterpretation, of
the metrical assonance of the sound-bytes, and the framing
programs, the curious repeating leitmotif of the severed head
in the news, like a fugue, ‘Islamist’ snuff films in
counterpoint to abortive decapitation strikes, the head-
shots, the pot shots, and the talking heads. By the
bankruptcy of the third estate, abdication of the first,
and the scripted, juggernaut ascendancy of the
second, all to the fanfares of the debauched and complicit
press, who keep We the People informed more like
Hamilton suggested than Jefferson’s proscription. I’ve been
suspicious all along, Norm, but I’ve kept quiet, because
I’ve been busy. Busy being scared by the suspicious
proliferation of American flag stickers and stick-pins on
impor car and Italian lapel, “love it or leave it” emblazoned
in red, white on blue Chinese tee shirts by religious prisoners
across the Pacific. I am suspicious because salaam now
indicates evil, pacific stands for surprise attack, columbine
(rhymes with combine, carbine) now a dove of death
diving under desks, and the cradle of civilization is also
the pyre on which civilization is toast, a holocaust
to a god that drinks up the souls of those who die angry
and scared, adrenalin concentrated in their brains and
veins, briefly, before it flows with the blood, a god
that speaks to us through a burning Bush, the oily scion
and high-priest of his own oily sign of vincit omnia.
Oh, I’m suspicious all right, Norm, all day, every
day, sometimes more, as the headlines roll off the
wires, the wires pull, prod, hobble and shock.
Now that I have
reported on myself, identified myself as constitutionally
suspicious, will you hire me to write propaganda
for the Reich? Keep me close like Sun Tzu’s enemy.
Thank you, sincerely, for your time and
consideration. I will await your knock at 0400, or
any other time you need your propaganda parsed.
Yours,
Pére A. Gnoyde