On the road again
By
Saul Landau Read Spanish Version
“Jesus
Lives” screamed the giant billboard on I-80, some 20 miles east of
Lovelock, Nevada. At the bottom of the sign appears the sponsor:
adsforGod.org, an “organization whose only purpose is to advertise
for The only True Living God whose only begotten Son is Jesus The
Christ.”
From
the car, driving through dramatic mountain scenery in Wyoming and
into Nevada, I saw mountains covered with snow, sagebrush and clouds.
No people, cars, trucks or houses appeared on the horizon. As soon as
I reached a populated place in the state where slot machines abound
at every seedy bar and high class casino, at airports and eateries, I
suppose I could try to find out exactly where Jesus lives. Since
there’s no Bethlehem in Nevada, perhaps he’d take up residence at
the Mustang Ranch outside of Winnemucca, the world’s most famous
brothel?
On
the edge of Carlin, Nevada (population 2,161), I see a trailer park
and signs for several fast food chains. To further dampen my
appetite, a sign tells me Carlin is home to a prison, euphemistically
called the Carlin Conservation Center. The next roadside sign warns:
“don’t pick up hitchhikers.” Suppose the guy with his thumb up
was Jesus?
Maybe
Jesus lives near the prison guards in the communities of modest small
homes? Or in the shacks and trailers of those who work in the mines,
gold and other minerals, no longer the silver for which the state was
named? One can see how the modern Judases still sell their souls for
the old 30 pieces of silver — add a few hundred million — as the
refineries and smelters pour contaminating smoke into the pristine
sky. The payoff for such sins has grown. The silver processing in
Biblical times was a lot less contaminating. John Prine offered an
appropriate soundtrack on the car CD:
“The
coal company came with the world’s largest shovel
And
they tortured the timber and stripped all the land
They
dug for their coal till the land was forsaken
Then
they wrote it all down as the progress of man.” (“Paradise”)
Through
the thousand miles of deserted Wyoming
and
Nevada landscape lay God’s perfection — except for billboards and
a virtually empty four lane highway. After fifteen minutes passed
without me seeing another vehicle, I finally crept up to the car
ahead of me. The bumper stickers said: “Jesus Will Forgive You”
and “McCain/Palin 2008.” Another Prine song played:
“Father
forgive us for what we must do
You
forgive us, and we’ll forgive you.
We’ll
forgive each other till we both turn blue
Then
we’ll whistle and go fishing in Heaven.”
(“Fish and Whistle”)
For
the un-forgiven, Nevada provides lots of prisons. On the outskirts of
Lovelock,
another fortress looms on the landscape. The guard towers loom over
the medieval structure chiseled into the base of a brooding mountain.
“Correctional Institution,” the euphemism used throughout the
country for caging men for their sins, has a poor record for
correcting either their past behavior or their future course. Most of
the inmates, like those in prisons and jails throughout the country,
engaged in sins like smoking or using prohibited drugs and petty
larceny. Some committed violent crimes, but compare their sins to
those performed by the bankers and security speculators, Bernie
Madoff and the members of the military and the mercenaries who have
slaughtered civilians throughout Iraq and Afghanistan! The wealthy
hire legal talent that finds loopholes and brokers to pay off judges.
The military — well, they’re only following orders.
A
billboard “welcomes” us to the town of Lovelock (population
1,889). On a nearby highway sign, the big criminals advertise their
polluting product; the petty ones rot away in penitentiaries. Those
visiting family or friends can stay at a nearby Holiday Inn or Best
Western Motel. Such facilities will house visitors of O.J. Simpson,
who was sent to lock-up in Lovelock Correctional Center (Medium
Security Prison) for nine to 33 years. Simpson, who starred at USC,
won the 1968 Heisman Trophy, but on October 3, 2008, a jury convicted
him of robbery, kidnapping and assault with a deadly weapon,
following a September 2007, confrontation with two memorabilia
dealers in a Las Vegas hotel room. Simpson said he was just trying to
get his football trophies back from people who had improperly
acquired them. (He could no longer afford the high paid legal talent
that got him acquitted in the murder trail.)
Simpson’s
cell mates will include a high number of sex offenders. Like the
other inmates, Simpson will receive three meals a day, access to
mail, limited phone privileges and up to one hour of exercise every
day. He can also work doing yard labor, and kitchen chores. (Melissa
Arseniuk and Cy Ryan, Las
Vegas Sun,
Dec. 19, 2008)
Back
in 1994, I thought that the LAPD had framed the right guy for the
murder of his wife and her
friend.
It took 13 years for the police fraternity to catch O.J. again — in
what looked like a minor infraction
at
best. But time wounds all heels.
Simpson
deserved punishment. But how does one equate his murderous acts with
Chevron’s behavior in Ecuador or Nigeria, where they not only
dirtied the environment, but collaborated, according to two law suits
(filed by Nigerian residents represented by EarthRights
International), with Nigeria’s repressive forces to kill people. On
January 4, 1999, a woman and her children were fishing in Opia, a
small Nigerian village, when soldiers opened fire, killing her. Two
lawsuits allege that Chevron paid the soldiers, and that they
traveled in Chevron-owned trucks and helicopters in more than one
such bloody “incident,” including an armed attack on protestors
at an oil drilling platform.
Nor
does time seem to punish massive government-private sector
corruption. “Contractors” in collusion with U.S. military
officials stole hundreds of billions of dollars supposedly
reconstructing Iraq. According to journalist Patrick Cockburn, $57.8
million was sent in “pallet upon pallet of hundred-dollar bills”
to the U.S. comptroller for south-central Iraq, Robert J. Stein Jr.,
who had himself photographed standing with the mound of money. He is
among the few U.S. officials in Iraq to be convicted of fraud and
money-laundering.
Since
2003, Congress has appropriated hundreds of millions each year for
reconstruction, but “there have been no cranes visible on the
Baghdad skyline except those at work building a new U.S. embassy and
others rusting beside a half-built giant mosque that Saddam was
constructing when he was overthrown. One of the few visible signs of
government work on Baghdad’s infrastructure is a tireless attention
to planting palm trees and flowers in the centre strip between main
roads. Those are then dug up and replanted a few months later. Iraqi
leaders are convinced that the theft or waste of huge sums of U.S.
and Iraqi government money could have happened only if senior U.S.
officials were themselves involved in the corruption.”
(Counterpunch.org, February 16, 2009)
Instead
of seeing the symbol of corruption, the Casino, each Nevada town no
matter the size sports signs of virtue: church spires emerge on the
Horizon. According to adsforGod.org “there exist 9,900 different
‘Religions’ on the face of this earth,” but only “‘one’…can
prove that it is the ‘Inherent Word’ of the ‘Only True Living
God.’”
But
the certainty of religious statements must stand next to screaming
commercialism symbolized by towering Golden Arches sporting an
American flag and blinking neon signs shouting “Casino.” I’m
sure I would find, if I looked on the website of adsforGod.org, an
explanation of how God intended man to create shopping centers that
would merge into harmony with His perfect creation.
My
road trip began in Chicago and offered me a chance to see how a
traveler can adopt a shield of aesthetic insensitivity — beyond the
crime of scenery pollution. On the radio, news reported, as it
usually does, acts of extreme violence in Iraq, Afghanistan and
Pakistan. A news report talked about the final count of the dead in
Gaza, casual summaries of what 20th
Century political theorist Hannah Arendt called “the phenomenon of
evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale,” the kind that can’t
be “traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology or
ideological conviction in the doer.” Arendt saw “extraordinary
shallowness” beneath these wicked deeds, the kind cultivated by a
mass consumer society, snuggled in religion. The four lane highway
and the car radio combine to offer drivers and passengers a way to
think only about their consuming needs. The messages in print on
billboards or blaring from radio commercials distract us. They direct
our thinking away from the sky, the mountains, the people, plants and
animals and toward “choices” of brands of soap and brands of
representatives who will make war.
Then,
we can blame them for what they have done to us and others. We
continue to accept the word “free” as the defining adjective of
American life as the economy sinks into the mire of stagflation. Much
easier to go with the dictum of adsforGod.org: “The Bible is Right”
— whatever that means.
Saul
Landau’s film, “The Jail,” is available on DVD
(roundworldproductions@gmail.com).
He is an Institute for Policy Studies Fellow. His latest book, A BUSH
AND BOTOX WORLD was published by Counterpunch A/K.
