4.17.08 – Love Of Country. Loss of Faith In It.

Do you carry on now with a childlike vigour? Can you feel the sunlit breezes caressing your back? Do the blades of the grasses flutter like the wings of a butterfly dancing along to some foreign song – all for you – all for you? So just lay back, soak it in and wonder where these clouds and leaves and rabbits and planes are all going. Maybe you don’t know nothing hey – but then again, you are here right now. Let’s watch the passing of America – and laugh – as we pass out here in America.

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Tying up loose ends is always difficult. And it seems to me like there were more knots than usual this time round. But so it goes. And so it goes. James, the cat-loving tough guy who took over my room and knows a bit about traveling was right though when he said, “Sometimes you have to burn bridges to move forward.” But as Patrick told me, looking into the coloured sky outside my window as we lay limp and dejected one night awhile back, preparing for a long night of work and crazy adventures ahead, when communication breaks down, sometimes you just have to move forward. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s just that, when you look down the path of the future, sometimes you don’t see anything. Not clearly anyways. That’s fear. But hell, it’s also exhilleration, too. So hit the high-brow fashion scene and stripper parties hard, jump out the roof so you don’t get arrested, clear up any lingering misconceptions that are still dragging you down, take hitchhiking cues from the indie-rock kids, have wine, coffee, cigarettes and more with your friends, late into the night, and stick around for one more at home bash with the brohiems and their vinyl. It all seems to play out over a Crystal Castles soundtrack. Check in on the rave scene, and then just shove off – Because at the side of the road, you know it, is how it all begins.

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If you had to hit the ground running at the age of 12, could you? Could you look inside at your talents and put them to use? Would you know how to chase that Canadian dream if it was what you wanted? An inner-city kid, could you make it in the wider world, leaving hippie-central behind to go after your hopes? Or maybe you could. Maybe you knew somehow, a deja-vu accident probably, maybe some crystal clear image just flooded your mind for an instant: well-cut brown suit, riding smooth in your shiny red Lincoln down a 400 series toll highway and happy to pay for the convenience, making complex deals over your cellphone that ensure the 80 per cent income advantage over your associates, a stake in the golf course you swing at, kids well-off with even bank president hook-ups. I mean, hell, you’re polite, confident, but not quite filthy rich. Congratulations you’ve made model Canadian. You now have the ability to pick up hitchhikers with style, to watch them feel the creamy leather seats as you point out the shimmering Burlington Bay and the majestic haze of STELCO, and smile just knowing they’re thinking “Shit! I’ve never been in a car this nice before.” Joe was my first ride.

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American flags hang limp tonight in suburban Columbus. The quiet asphalt is slicker than oil and every inch of development from here to eternity is all cobbled up and owned by somebody more than happy to tell you what home alarm company they use. A street like Sandy Lane is more about imagination than reality. And the fancy lampposts are just too bright with no one around. At first you might think that the smell hanging in the air is the fragrance of flowers after the rain, but upon reflection you realize that it’s probably fresh rubber, new plastic, or whatever phosphates are seeping into the drain. A helicopter passes overhead, shattering the silence, adding an eerie touch. In a place like this, it’s not about what you see, but about what’s missing from the picture. To look around is to understand why you might want to flock to the functioning lighthouse serving as a steeple for the church just a short drive away – hell, it’s the most interesting thing for miles on end.

If you want cuban cigars you have to smuggle them in; but the tennis balls they crave so badly down there just sit out unscuffed and unused, protected by a fence, entrenched deep in the courts. The beeping that wakes you – not dump trucks or movers – that’s the sound of the trees coming down in the clutches of machines, probably making just enough room to squeeze in another subdivision, complete with vinyl siding, early to bed housewives and colourful toys for the kids. But if you’re persistent, and you know what to look for, and even despite all the efforts put out to mask it – you can still hear whispers of something else out there. Because no amount of electric candles behind laced curtains, tinted SUV windows or animal leashes can fully put a smile on the face of a sub-prime mortgage crisis, hip-hop public housing, a looming recession, or far-off wars that just won’t quit. Because, no matter where you run to, no matter where you try to hid – you just can’t escape the unending roar of the interstate highways – somewhere out there – somewhere not too far away. Not far way at all actually.

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I don’t think I’ll ever forget bombing down I-90 in a little compact diesel with the CEO of one of the most effective leadership and voluntary organizations in the entire world, his wife sitting passenger side. I’m staring intently into the laptop monitor, watching a former marine give his story of unarmed military observation in Darfur, Sudan. Love of country, loss of faith in it. A man who has been through the wringer. Because, indeed, the devil came on horseback, and he’s learned how to shake the hands. But maybe more importantly, beyond the plucked out eyeballs and charred corpses and beyond local atrocities, maybe the true depravity is not the Janjaweed pirates or a scheming Sudanese government, but that even when this well-trained marine, the New York Times and the Bush administration steps up to the plate to reveal a “genocide”, and even when the ability to stop the killing already exists... no one has stopped the devil from coming on horseback. To rape. To pillage. To kill. Because, the news deluge eventually reverts to a trickle, the government fails to live up to its commitments under the UN, and Barak Obama and everyone else knows the country’s resources are already gushing into Iraq. And it’s no conspiracy theory that the U.S. wants access to what’s under the ground in Sudan, and must please their government, and face off with China to get at it. Hell, Bush knows he needs a peace deal in place and was briefed on the country’s atmosphere by the fundamentalist icon Rev. Billy Graham himself before he even stepped into office. Everyone has the ability to know what’s going on. And I look at a retired, young marine sitting emotionally in shambles as he relates his tale of powerlessness to the camera, sitting in his off-road vehicle as the arid African landscape dotted with scrubby vegetation and burnt-down villages lined with corpses streams by in the background. I drink it in, take a breath, and look up. The first thing I see is another COSTCO. I’m surrounded by baffling light patterns that rise and fall with the highway I’m on, as we weave up and down over once virgin landscapes – passing under six-lane highways every few miles. I see 24-hour Wal-Marts (mall worts we joke). I see rectilinear structures that are home to the proud happenstances of inane office politics. I see gas stations complete with jumbo coffees, arcades and multiple massage chairs. I’m looking at a completely different way of life that’s so difficult to maintain. And I think about the blue collar steelworker with a knack for photography who took me up to the border, and expressed his concern with the towers of greed his rebar helps to create and sustain. And so I open up a little book he passed along, quite at random – and I read something to ease my mind: “Wherefore I was grieved with that generation and said, They do alway err in their heart; and they have not known my ways. So I, sware in my wrath. They shall not enter in to my rest.” Alexisonfire covers Moneen and knows it. Obama at least says that he knows it. And hell you can survive it, or be a CEO and do something about it. But let’s not forget how this shit runs.

And this was just Day 1.