watch beneath the eyelids every passing dot


Adam Ross, Untitled

* Seymour Hersh slams Bush at McGill address. excerpt:

"'The bad news,' investigative reporter Seymour Hersh told a Montreal audience last Wednesday, 'is that there are 816 days left in the reign of King George II of America.'

"The good news? 'When we wake up tomorrow morning, there will be one less day.'

"Hersh, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine, has been a thorn in the side of the U.S. government for nearly 40 years. Since his 1969 exposé of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, which is widely believed to have helped turn American public opinion against the Vietnam War, he has broken news about the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia, covert C.I.A. attempts to overthrow Chilean president Salvador Allende, and, more recently, the first details about American soldiers abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq."
...
"Hersh came out hard against President Bush for his involvement in the Middle East.
'In Washington, you can’t expect any rationality. I don’t know if he’s in Iraq because God told him to, because his father didn’t do it, or because it’s the next step in his 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous program,' he said.

"Hersh hinted that the responsibility for the invasion of Iraq lies with eight or nine members of the administration who have a 'neo-conservative agenda' and dictate the U.S.’s post-September 11 foreign policy.

"'You have a collapsed Congress, you have a collapsed press. The military is going to do what the President wants,' Hersh said. 'How fragile is democracy in America, if a president can come in with an agenda controlled by a few cultists?'

"Throughout his talk Hersh remained pessimistic, predicting that the U.S. will initiate an attack against Iran, and that the situation in Iraq will deteriorate further.

"'There’s no reason to see a change in policy about Iraq. [Bush]thinks that, in twenty years, he’s going to be recognized for the leader he was – the analogy he uses is Churchill,' Hersh said. 'If you read the public statements of the leadership, they’re so confident and so calm. It’s pretty scary.'"

* New York Times on the Great Divider. excerpt:

"As President Bush throws himself into the final days of a particularly nasty campaign season, he’s settled into a familiar pattern of ugly behavior. Since he can’t defend the real world created by his policies and his decisions, Mr. Bush is inventing a fantasy world in which to campaign on phony issues against fake enemies.

"In Mr. Bush’s world, America is making real progress in Iraq. In the real world, as Michael Gordon reported in yesterday’s Times, the index that generals use to track developments shows an inexorable slide toward chaos. In Mr. Bush’s world, his administration is marching arm in arm with Iraqi officials committed to democracy and to staving off civil war. In the real world, the prime minister of Iraq orders the removal of American checkpoints in Baghdad and abets the sectarian militias that are slicing and dicing their country.

"In Mr. Bush’s world, there are only two kinds of Americans: those who are against terrorism, and those who somehow are all right with it. Some Americans want to win in Iraq and some don’t. There are Americans who support the troops and Americans who don’t support the troops. And at the root of it all is the hideously damaging fantasy that there is a gulf between Americans who love their country and those who question his leadership.
...
"This is hardly the first time that Mr. Bush has played the politics of fear, anger and division; if he’s ever missed a chance to wave the bloody flag of 9/11, we can’t think of when. But Mr. Bush’s latest outbursts go way beyond that. They leave us wondering whether this president will ever be willing or able to make room for bipartisanship, compromise and statesmanship in the two years he has left in office."

* Watch.

* 1974 Interview of Ginsberg regarding Burroughs theory of evil. excerpt:

"Interviewer: I'd like to return to Burroughs' theory of evil. What would you say is its source?

"Ginsberg: Well, originally it was analyzed by William Lee the factualist (perhaps representative of a trust of giant insects from another galaxy) in Naked Lunch. But since then in Nova Express and Ticket That Exploded, and more recently in Exterminator! and The Job and The Wild Boys, the agency of the hallucinating Word is a virus from Venus so it's not other galaxies anymore — it's an external, extraterrestrial threat from within our own solar system.

"Interviewer: Would you go along with the notion that madness is the norm in Burroughs' fiction?

"Ginsberg: I would say the norm is metamorphosis. In Burroughs' fission madness is the normal behavior of the political world, but it's also a medium that A.J. Benway and the factualists are able to handle and deal with and use as the material for their examination... and sometimes get caught in, as is possible for an explorer to get caught in a sticky wicket, or as Burroughs himself feels he's been caught in certain areas he could not handle with drugs like psilocybin and LSD, or yage originally.

"But madness is not his ultimate goal, just the obstacle. That is why Burroughs' geography is so similar to gnostic and Tibetan procedural maps. The wrathful deities are the guardians of the gate to sunyala, blue space... except Burroughs is ascribing all these wrathful deities to a plot by the Control Forces. So his books are really investigations of his consciousness to "trace along the word lines" to the source of control.

"Interviewer: Is this terrifying chaos in Burroughs' fiction purposeful?

"Ginsberg: I think so. He would maintain that he is making propositions and hypothesis which he examines by means of language and imagination. So chaos — transfiguration is a better word, really — is only the preliminary guardian of the sacred extraterrestrial area of consciousness. The end is not déregelement de tous les sens but clear vision, not chaos but total silence and calm like a great blue tide flooding the body. And déregelement de tous les sens is not even so much as a means as it is a by-product of the pursuit through to the other side of phenomenon, the disruption of the apparently normal order determined by the CIA and the Control Forces.

"In fact, he feels that they are responsible for the chaotic apparitions, the fear of the Ovens, the images of death. What he is saying over and over, also, is that death is the greatest con, that it has been created by the Controllers to scare everybody, and there is really nothing to fear."