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| October 6, 2006 Alaskan in Exile by Neil Zawicki The Lounge-lit Underbelly of Dissent:
Cheap Suits, Simple Patriots and Jesus Camp Dante’s is a dim club with brick walls that bounce red lights and the glow of open flames onto a crowd of hipsters, drunks and conspiracy junkies. It’s right next to Chinatown in Portland. A man with a rumpled black suit coat and a white shirt appears on the stage in the glow of one white spotlight, and his voice rattles the room with the resonance of an Evangelical preacher. “There’s so much to talk about tonight, I almost can’t get through it without blowing my head off,” he shouts. “How many enemy combatants are in the audience tonight?” The crowd erupts in cheers, and then somebody near the pool tables shouts, “It’s all a movie!” “It’s not a movie, it’s real life!” shouts the man in the suit. “And now, with the longest short introduction, here’s Clyde Lewis!” The host takes the stage, wearing an equally bad suit with a wrecked Rockabilly haircut and a thick torso that makes him look like a brutish, alcoholic refrigerator salesman from Nebraska. When I met him before the show, I noticed a mustard stain on his shirt, which under normal circumstances was hidden under his suit coat. Now he was at the front of the room, sending his polished radio voice through the microphone and into the air. Clyde Lewis is a conspiracy theorist. He’s a friend of Amanda, my big-eyed, red-lipped tour guide to this strange venue. She was once a regular in these parts, and was certainly happy to bring me here, and watch the events unfold. Clyde claims to have predicted the September 11th attacks, and says the FBI came looking for him as a result. He had a radio show for a while called News at Ground Zero, but he was pulled off the air. Penn and Teller have featured him on their show, and he has a TV special scheduled to air on The History Channel. It’s about his theory that the Lunar Landings never happened. He was also the voice of the Toxic Avenger. These days, as he works toward getting back on the air, he runs a weekly live forum at Dante’s. It has the feel of an old-time religion tent revival, complete with audience members shouting impulsive affirmations to his message. “Go back to bed America, your government is in control,” he says with a deep, soothing voice full of studio-level bass. “We’re gonna show you some incredible stuff tonight,” he continues. And then the movie screen above his head lights up with the words, “A bird in the bush.” He asks an audience member to read the words aloud, and then points out the extra “the” in the message, something nobody noticed. “We see what we want to see,” he says. “We see what they tell us we saw, right? And when those planes crashed into the towers, we saw just that, didn’t we? We saw people attacking us and that was all, right? Never mind what happened before or even after and never mind how perfect it all looked and never mind that there were dynamite charges in those buildings!” He’s worked up now, pacing and shouting. “It’s scary out there, America! Danger is everywhere and we are not safe! But your government knows what to do. Your government is in control now, and you are all free now to do as you’re told. They tell you they are in control, that it’s dangerous out there, that the terrorists are everywhere and that they will protect you and that…you are free to do as you’re told.” He comes to rest again at the front of the room “Go back to bed, America, your government is in control.” The movie screen above his head goes to blue, and Clyde begins to talk about Frankenstein and Jewish lore. “The Jewish faith talks of Gollum, the soldier made of clay,” he began. “Gollum has no soul, and does not know what he does. Does anybody remember the story of Frankenstein?” Where had I landed? What was this that I was witnessing? I sat on my barstool in near disbelief. Frankenstein? Amanda smiled, and sipped her drink. The crowd applauded, and a drunk New Zealander in the front row began shouting, so one of Clyde’s cadre rushed to his side and shouted back, “There’s a live mic right there for you to use, sir! If you don’t use it, then you are nothing but a heckler and the comedy club is up the street!” The New Zealander calmed down, and Clyde continued. “There should be a picture of Frankenstein on the screen now? Do you all see it?” But there was no picture of Frankenstein, only a blue screen with a progress bar. Phillips stood with his microphone. The screen flickered and produced a still frame from the 1930s-era movie. There was Frankenstein, with his flat head, kneeling next to a little girl by a lake. I just sat and stared, nervous with delight at this strange exhibit. “The name Frankenstein means ‘man of stone,’ he continued. “ Mary Shelley wrote the story of a soul-less monster, built by a man, that knew not what it did. A bolt of lightning brought the monster to life. Can anyone tell me what our bolt of lightning was? What brought our monster, our Gollum to life?” I looked over at Amanda and muttered, “911,” with a shrug. The room went wild with other answers to the question: “Television!” “Bin Laden!” “Rumsfeld!” “Cars, religion, Bush, the Internet!” Clyde spoke: “The answer is 911, people. 911 was our bolt of lightning.” Right. Dazzling. You’re breaking ground here. Beyond being less-than-impressed with the bit of parlor trick academia I was witnessing, I was intrigued by the spectacle, and the fact that Clyde is on target and not alone in his notion that our post-911 world is one of fear and control and power plays and insecurity. Clyde’s position that the attacks were planned by the government to create our present state of affairs, and that the towers were dynamited to collapse is a bit extreme. At the very least, I would allow that the government may not have created the attacks, but did in fact allow them to take place. There is precedent for this in the Pearl Harbor attack; all indications point to President Roosevelt knowing the Japanese would attack, and further that he knew the attack would galvanize the nation for an inevitable war. But it is not likely that he planted explosives n the ships and trained the Japanese pilots. That’s not nearly as much fun as the former. “Go back to bed, America, your government is in control.” Next, an agitated woman began shouting and grabbed the microphone from Clyde. He yanked it back and chastised her for doing so, and then held the mike to her face so she could talk: “Who the hell do you think you are in your cheap suit?!” she shouted through a cigarette. I sat up a little straighter. Now it was getting sporty. “Excuse me?” Clyde replied, “This is camel hair, madam.” “Who the hell do you think you are!” she continued. “I have children over in the war, and if you’ve got kids in the war, then you have no choice!” “But you do have a choice,” said Clyde. “They want you to believe you have no choice, but you do.” “Love it or leave it,” she shouted, “and it’s easy for you to say up there with your Rolex, making $50,000 in your cheap suit!” Clyde wasn’t wearing a watch. Amanda laughed. She knows that Clyde has had trouble making rent since his show was canceled. Clyde laughed, too. “That’s a pretty specific accusation,” he said, “I can assure you I don’t make that much. Did you know that Congress just voted to revoke Habeas Corpus?” The woman sat mute with the microphone in her face. The room was silent. “You don’t even know that word, do you? The government just took away your Constitutional rights, did you know that?” The woman stammered: “Yeah, well, anyway, that’s just how it is if you have a kid over in the war.” Before things could get any worse, an older woman appeared at the open mic. “How old are your children?” she asked the angry woman. “Eighteen and nineteen.” “I want you to know that we care very deeply for the safety of your children and that we respect the sacrifice they are making and that we support them,” the woman said. “That’s why we want to bring them home.” The angry woman could only nod, and shift in her chair. And this, to me, is the difference. Opponents to this war, unlike Vietnam, are extremely careful to give support and respect to the soldiers. Like a circus announcer, Clyde shifted from the tense moment, and gestured to the movie screen. “I give you, Jesus Camp!” The screen exploded with a high-intensity video montage of a camp in North Dakota where children are put through an immersion course in overtly militant fundamentalist Christianity. The program, near a place called Devil’s Lake, is called “Kids on Fire.” In the documentary, a seven-year-old talks about when he “got saved” at the age of five. Five? Camp Leader Pastor Becky Fischer sees the camp as an answer to the Jihadists in the Middle East, saying she wants kids from the camp to be willing to die for Jesus. “This is scary shit, people,” shouted Clyde after the clip. And here he departed from his theoretical rhetoric and vague references to Mary Shelley. Here, all he had to do was point to the screen, and it was enough. Neil Zawicki, exiled Alaskan, is Editor at Large for Insurgent49, a former reporter for the Alaska Star, and winner of the Alaska Press Club's 'Best Columnist' award. He is now living out the rest of his days in an undisclosed location in Oregon. He can be contacted at - hondo23@gmail.com |
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Reserved. in-sur-gent (in sur'jent), n. 1. a member of a group which revolts against the policies of its leadership. |
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