WHITECROW BORDERLAND

Bush: The Artifact. (11/04/04)

My greatest fear, and most ardent hope, prior to 1:00 PM yesterday afternoon, was that John Kerry would be declared the winner of Ohio’s 20 electoral votes. I hoped that would happen so that I could permanently retire myself from having to pursue this “line” of discourse for the foreseeable future. The Myth of Eden, after all, the Western myth of creation, has been examined and dissected here as much—if not more—than it needs to be. Giving it a rest, even if I have not added much to it lately, is truly an attractive idea to me. At the same time, the prospect of losing George W. Bush to a retirement of his own, even if that would have been the best thing white America could hope for, was truly a terrifying possibility that I did not want to contemplate. My silence lately, in fact, was “forced” upon me by the very possibility that I might say something in these pages that would bend enough voters away from Bush to insure his eventual defeat on November 2, 2004.

This statement, of course, depends absolutely on the fact that I am articulating a native American point-of-view in these pages. So, the question arises: how can any person of color—especially a “red” one (looking at it objectively I would be more inclined to say “brown”)—claim to prefer George W. Bush over John Kerry as President of the USA for the next four years? Why would I be terrified of losing him to the democratic process that was adumbrated in 2000, and permitted his existence as President, in the first place? Would it not have been “poetic” justice to see him go down exactly the way he went up (via the Supreme Court) between 2000/2004? I could have terminated this discourse with talk of Karma. That would have been perfectly satisfying, perfectly symmetrical, even ultimately, perfectly harmonic.

The problem with that possibility; however, is that so much effort on the part of so many people to create the George W. Bush who won Tuesday’s election would have been wasted by the premature departure of his radical “Christian” agenda. We need that agenda to run its full course before it falls into its so richly deserved hell. WE? Native Americans need that agenda, Bush’s agenda. We created it out the bits and pieces of everything we have learned about the nature of Eurocentric ideology during the last 512 years of colonial suppression (genocide) under which we have struggled to survive. We created the perfect “standard bearer” (George W. Bush) to carry it out of our homeland onto the world stage where its delusional insanity would become apparent to anyone who looked at it.

The Western myth of creation depends on the notion that a single supreme being (God, Yahweh, Allah) created the world out of nothing and has always maintained a dominant, controlling influence over the way it can, and has, progressed from the time of its creation until the moment of its demise. Both the beginning and end are foreseen as absolute, inevitable consequences of God’s will. Human beings in this view are perceived as imperfect vassals (more or less “free”) who have only a negative effect on when that end will occur. The end in most views will be the result of punishment for bad behavior on the part of God’s disobedient children. There are, of course, nearly an infinite variety of variations on these essential themes.

Native American views of creation are as different from the western Christian point-of-view as anything can be. We recognize, not one supreme creator (God), but two less powerful forces of creation (mother earth and father sky), who are spirits (preeminently not gods), that are responsible for every living thing that exists. Every human being, endowed and empowered with spirit as well, is required to participate actively in the ongoing process of creation which has neither a beginning nor an end. The role of creator given to human beings is exactly the same as the one performed by mother earth and father sky; hence, there is an absolute sense of equality between the two kinds of creation. When I say we created George W. Bush to perform a necessary task, from the point-of-view of native American culture, I mean exactly what I say. We created him. He is an artifact of our devising. We made him.

It is important to realize that I am not speaking here metaphorically. I have said nothing figurative at all. Bush is an artifact, a made thing, a creation of native American spirit forces. He was invented to perform a role on the world stage. So far, he has done that job with impeccable brilliance. No one could have done it better than Bush.

Two questions: first, to whom do I refer when I say “we?” Second, what precisely is the task Bush has performed so admirably?

“We” refers to a council of elders, all of whom are native Americans, who are “elders,” not because of their material, biological age, some, in fact, are quite young, but because all of them lived in the past, some even thousands of years ago, and are now dead. The elders all live in the spirit world, in the past. I am the only member of the council, as far as I know, and I know nothing of the sort, who is currently alive. As far as I know, I am the only living member of the council. Having said that; however, I must totally embrace my ignorance—there could be hundreds or thousands of us spread all across the world; there could be ten others now living; there could be no other one alive now. I do not know. The only members of the council with whom I communicate directly are in the spirit world. I do not know their names. I do not know precisely when they lived. I do not know who they are, who they were. I do not know to whom they talk now. I suppose they communicate with living people the way my spirit guide talks to me but I do not know that for a fact. Perhaps I am the only one currently in communication with the council of elders who are involved in the Bush project. I do not know.

We work this way to protect the project. For instance, in the unlikely event that someone might read this and actually take it seriously, not very likely, and consequentially decide to report this nefarious activity to the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, etc., and I suddenly found myself under the screws of FBI counter-terrorist interrogation, I would have virtually nothing to tell them. I can only say what I have done myself and, by the time anyone reads this from beginning to end, he/she will already know everything there is that I can say on the subject. I plan to leave nothing out of this account of the creation of George W. Bush, except the names and locations of my co-conspirators, matters I will leave unsaid for the simple reason that I do not know who, or where, any of them are.

My role in the project was relatively simple. I was the eyes of the council in the present moment. They were “seeing” everything I saw as I looked around for a suitable “standard bearer” who could be put up to run for public office (President, of course, if possible) as soon as possible. I first noticed George W. Bush when he was running for governor of Texas against Anne Richards back in 1995. She was the best chief executive Texas has ever had, perhaps the best any state could hope for. Her most important accomplishment was a tax initiative that collected property taxes in the state and redistributed them evenly among all the independent school districts in Texas. The system prior to that was for each district to benefit solely from its own property tax base. Rich districts, serving the children of the wealthiest Texans, had the best, most extensively funded schools. Poor districts, of course, had the worst possible schools anywhere in the country because they were severely under-funded. Bush campaigned against Richards on the ground that her tax reform program would destroy all Texas schools. It had already been passed, was in place, but its actual effects were unknown at the time. Bush crisscrossed the state frightening every parent in the state by convincing them of the disaster they and their children faced. He beat Anne Richards on the strength of that single issue.

The first results of statewide testing surfaced a few months after the election. Every school in Texas showed improvement. Bush immediately claimed credit for the tax reform initiative Anne Richards hammered through the state legislature. He still claims credit for it. His “Leave No Child Behind” school reform bill was based in large part on the success Texas schools showed after Richards managed to redistribute property taxes on an equitable basis across the state.

Bush, of course, proved himself to be the perfect candidate to take native American perceptions of Eurocentric genocide onto the world stage. His first months in office were essentially dismal as far as our project was concerned. Nothing of any significance occurred to set him off as anything more than a one-term failure. Then NINE-ELEVEN happened. Our perfect candidate was launched. He declared holy-war (Christian crusade) against Islam. That was exactly what we expected him to do. This raises a question, of course: do I claim that I and the council of elders knew beforehand that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were going to attack and destroy the twin towers in New York? I imply that is the case. The answer is more complicated than a simple yes or no can express. What I can say directly was that I was just as appalled as anyone else was that morning when I saw the images of the towers falling. I actually only saw the second one collapse since the first was already down when I turned on the television. I saw the replays, the airplanes striking the towers—I knew it was a terrorist attack before anyone said so. What else could it have been? The point, though, in answer to the question—I was not surprised by the events of September 11, 2001. Not in the least.

Does my lack of surprise that such a thing could occur demonstrate that I, and the council of elders by extension, possessed foreknowledge of the event itself? I do not know. There is an alternative way to understand it. Native Americans began studying Europeans 512 years ago when Columbus first caught sight of Hispaniola. When foreigners show up on your horizon and immediately begin killing you indiscriminately, you have a natural tendency to begin watching that historical nightmare unfold. We did exactly that. We have been doing it tirelessly for 512 years. We know European history better than most Europeans do. The struggle between Christian crusaders and Islamic jihadists has been going on since 638 A. D. when the Muslims first captured Jerusalem. We knew that recent history had seen a sharp rise in serious tension between Western ideology and Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East. Eventually that tension evolves into holy war. That is what European history teaches. NINE-ELEVEN was inevitable and we had our choice for white America’s War-President in place when the hammer fell.

So, what has our artifact been doing? He does exactly what any Cowboy, Gun-Slinger does when confronted by the existence of the other in the guise of a tribal people who are ruled by warlords (war-chiefs). He launches an all-out, pre-emptive strike against the evil-doer. He bombs Afghanistan (probably justifiable); then he invades Iraq (purely ridiculous). The point here is that native Americans have been the victims of people like George W. Bush for 512 years. We know exactly what his kind will do when confronted by tribal people—indiscriminant slaughter of the other: genocide; annihilation of the evil-doers; total destruction of every man, woman, and child standing within range of the 2,000 pound smart-bomb. Something to consider, of course, is that nearly all members of the council of elders became spirits at the hands of this or that European butcher (if they died after 1492) and have numerous descendants in the same class (if they died before Columbus reached Hispaniola). This is precisely why the council of elders picked George W. Bush for the project. He is perfect in the role we choose for him to play. He has been playing it perfectly.

Whether appropriate or not this perception can be put in a deeper, wider context by referring to historical precedent. Fort Mystic, for instance, was attacked by the Puritans in Massachusetts during King Philip’s War. The Christian elders of the Bay Colony raised an army of volunteers, never any shortage of volunteers, surrounded the home of the Pequot people, set it on fire as they slept, and murdered all but a few of them outright. Survivors were sold into slavery in the West Indies. The “nation” was annihilated. The first Christian Bishop of Mexico, Diego de Landa, burned thousands of Maya books in his attempt to eradicate their cultural heritage and destroy every aspect of their civilization. He burned as many Maya people as he did books. His reason for doing so was to obliterate what he considered to be the primary impediment to the Church’s conversion effort. At Sand Creek, Colorado, in 1864, the Colorado Volunteers, led by a Methodist Minister (Col. Chivington) attacked a camp of Cheyenne and Arapaho who had surrendered to the US Army three weeks before. In a four hour “battle,” 800 natives were slaughtered. US forces lost one “soldier” to friendly fire because the Indians were unarmed men, women, and children who had virtually no way to defend themselves. My own great-great grandparents were at Sand Creek on the morning of the assault and escaped the carnage. This could be taken as a special case were it not for the fact that nearly every native American, full-blood and half-breed alike, can tell their own story about the near death of an ancestor at the hands of this or that Christian ideologue.

Why is George W. Bush in Iraq and how did he get there? According to recent reports, people said to be close to Bush have come to understand “that this instinct [Bush is] always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do” (Bruce Bartlett quoted by Ron Suskind, “Without a Doubt,” The NYTimes, October 17, 2004). A second, even compelling, reason that we chose Bush to play the role he has on the world stage is because he is a “born again” Christian who honestly believes that God talks to him about policy matters that confront white Americans in the wake of NINE-ELEVEN. Given the election results, where 59 million Americans supported Bush as Messiah, our choice was perfect. The horrible truth, the one I concealed by not speaking about these matters prior to the election, the one statement I could have made that might have helped John Kerry defeat Bush—the voice he hears is not God; rather, that voice belongs to one of the members of the council of elders who died as a result of Christian bigotry in the centuries after 1492. That Bush thinks it is God telling him to convert all Muslim evil-doers to the true faith (bring them “freedom”; bring them “justice”) is simply an expression of the massive delusion that has always existed in the European-American mind relative to the status of the indigenous tribal people who were systematically eradicated to make way for the faith-based certainty that true believers deserved, according to God’s will, all the land and resources available to them under the thin and expendable skin (red, of course) that occupied and “controlled” it prior to 1492.

I know that the voice Bush hears is not what he thinks it is for two reasons. Firstly, if God exists as anything other than an idea in the minds of most people, if there is something “out-there” that corresponds to what people refer to as “God,” he/she/it does not talk to anyone. The idea that God is a “talking reality” is purely delusional. Secondly, and decidedly more to the point, exactly this same delusion overtook me several years after I first encountered my spirit guide; that is, the voice I was hearing eventually became “God” to me as well. I did not know I was native American when I encountered my spirit guide. The voice was real enough. I could hear it. I saw things that clearly did not exist in the physical world. At the time, when I was fifteen—eighteen years old, I believed that I might very possibly be insane. To protect myself from having to face that terrible possibility, I accepted a perfectly permissible delusion, even if I was pretty sure it was false at the time: the voice belonged to God; I declared myself publicly as a “born again.” I found religion. I wept. I fasted. I prayed. In time I gave up the delusion that God was talking to me and began to search for a credible explanation for the hallucinations that were haunting me. I grew up. I became an adult.

I began paying attention to what the voice was actually saying to me. My spirit guide was instructing me in the philosophical paradigms of native American tradition. Bush, of course, will never get to that because the voice he hears is filling his head with utter, complete, absolute nonsense about the role of the Messiah in the 21^st Century of the Christian crusade against Islamic evil-doers. He is being purposefully misled by the voice of the elder who is talking to him. That was the essence of the plan from the beginning.

Our ultimate purpose in doing this has two sides. We want the world to see, up close and personal, so to speak, exactly how European-Americans behave when confronted by a presumed threat from tribal people. Bush is recapitulating, in all his infinite glory, how white America reacted to native tribal culture in the Western hemisphere from the beginning of its occupation of our land to the present moment of that colonial enterprise. What Bush is doing in Iraq, what white America is doing to the Iraqi people, is precisely the same as what white Americans have been doing to native Americans for as long as they have occupied our tribal lands. Europeans, the people of other areas of the world, have already seen enough to condemn that activity universally. Mission accomplished. On the other hand, Bush’s ill-conceived adventure will ultimately cost white America so much of its capital (spiritual, cultural, political, material) that this country will enter a profound decline of the kind that has always characterized the collapse of every other empire which has arisen to scar the flesh of human society from the beginning of time. That outcome is inevitable. While we probably do not hope for the complete annihilation of white America, some of us do, of course, but most are deeply saddened by the fact that such extreme measures must be taken to re-balance the world in a more equitable form, we will not relent in the face of the terrible suffering bound to befall the people who have most profited from the near destruction of native American culture. Innocent people will suffer, some will die, but we already have our list of atrocities: Fort Mystic, Sand Creek, Wounded Knee. On November 2, 2004, 59 million Americans voted in favor of balancing the list. So be it.