commentary by John Bennett

Free Press contributor

illustration by John Ambrosavage

We live in an age of such intense misinformation that even the Orwellian approach of truth-is-lie and lie-is-truth is obsolete. Truth and lie have melted down into a gray mush, and the gyroscope of reason has been smashed with the jackboot of megabucks. The flag flying half-mast for all the boys lost fighting for freedom has a red-herring with a dollar sign in its mouth where the stars and stripes used to be. It just may be that the stars and stripes is one of the biggest red herrings.

"What I want to know is, are you now or have you ever been a communist?" What I want to know is, how is anyone supposed to live on $5.25 an hour when they rake off a fourth of that in taxes, and rent for a two-bedroom apartment even in a small town is at least $600 a month? When a box of cereal costs five bucks?

Ninety-nine out of a hundred human beings on the face of the earth walk around dazed in a state of numbed-out overwhelmedness. The only way out is to pull the plug, it would seem. But once the disc on your electric meter stops turning, they dispatch two men in suits backed up by an FBI Swat Team. If you're getting media coverage, you become a media event. All the corporate red herring get a piece of you. Books about your life appear overnight, and dolls shaped in your likeness hit the market. It seldom takes more than a few months to reap a profit and dump you on the garbage heap of obscurity. Memory wears short pants, and cause and effect have been replaced by "No Fear." Cohesion has been melted down by a Dupont super solvent.

The key to King Herring's exploitation is to make you believe symptoms are causes.

Economic disparity is the biggest red herring of all. Economic disparity is a symptom. The key to King Herring's exploitation is to make you believe symptoms are causes. Look at every cause as a symptom, and you've taken a step in the right direction. Don't pull the plug, just walk out of the house. While you're still in the house that Jack built, watching the soaps on TV, a big bad wolf is heading up your street; he will blow your house down, no matter what you think it's made of. It's not your house anyway, it's King Herring's. You're a puppet with strings attached to your every vital part. Cut the strings, don't pull the plug, and walk out the back door. You'll intuitively know how to handle what used to baffle you. Every moment will be a raised curtain on a fresh vista. Deep ecology be damned! Another red herring! Deep spirituality is what's called for. If you meet the Buddha on the path, slay him and kick his body off into the ditch.

If you've caught even a glimpse of what I'm saying, censorship has received a mighty blow. Let your thoughts turn into stardust to be blown by the wind. That's all Woody Guthrie ever wanted you to do. You know what you have to do. Walk away. Just simply walk away, and the jig is up.

John Bennett is a writer living in Ellensburg, WA. His novel Bodo, Infant of the Aftermath was reviewed in the May/June 1997 issue of the Free Press.

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Contents this page were published in the July/August, 1997 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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