Out below, in my front horizon, is a stretch of highway 68 known as Union Pass. It is the straight line across the horseshoe bend on I-40 at the western Arizona border. Over the Black Mountains, where trains couldn’t go and so Route 66 didn’t follow, from Kingman the route runs west 27 miles and in the last 12 falls 3000 feet to Bullhead City, the fabled Colorado and the casinos of Laughlin Nevada, or, a hundred miles farther up the road, the casinos of Las Vegas.
At night, the stars trail down out of the mountains to crawl across Golden Valley below. It’s quite a sight, endless. These days 68 flows through here day and night. It is the alternative route for points East to Vegas and the only one for trucks and heavy vehicles, a detour around the Hoover Dam, every since the terrorists won back in ’01.
I see my share of traffic up close as well.
I drive that pass to work and often watch the trucks along the way, noting the armored vehicles being hauled west. I spot them more often than I’d like. Flat bed trailers, not always military rigs towing them, weaponry lunging like roped animals with each highway jostle, cannons strapped to the deck tugging at their tether. Machine gun barrels ropes in place, windows taped over. Bradleys, Humvees, tanks, at least a tank a month that I see, driven through this route, west. Where do they go, you can’t help but wonder.
This week, 9/22/08 , I hope I didn’t get an answer. But it appears this election round’s October Surprise may be a little livelier than I’d been expecting. It looks like the Bush Admin Homeland Security is preparing for the next front in the War on Terror right here at home: terrorizing Americans so we’ll shut up about Bush. Army Times reported it, Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman echoed it, and now everyone’s message board from Ron Paul to Nine Inch Nails is buzzing with the fact that a unit from our forces in Iraq, the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team, is being deployed to . . . the US.
That’s right, the enemy is now us.
Somebody page Alex Jones and let him know his padded cell at the Denver Detention Center is ready. If there really are Bilderbergs, this looks like an EndGame. The article goes on to say that the unit is being prepared if “called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control. The soldiers are learning to use so-called non-lethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals and crowds.”
Flaunting the once sacrosanct Posse Comitatus Act prohibiting the use of US soldiers against US citizens, the move is the first time an actual active army force has been designated to military group known as the US Army North. That’s right from the Northern Command, every conspiracy theorist’s worst nightmare, the same folk who bring you the martial law drills every year. They would also be the same ones back about seven years ago who created those hijack plane drills that happened to take place on the exact same day real planes were crashed into the Twin Towers — the ominous mystery men in films like Dylan Avery’s Loose Change and Zeitgeist.
Perhaps the soldiers are in actuality preparing for something that will never take place and we leftwing discredited are panicking over nothing. The government is just being prepared, providing for a common defense. Hey, there will probably be a peaceful transfer of power come January and no one will object in the slightest to any of Bush’s actions between now and then and any election results between now and then. Maybe I’m just nuts. OK, nuts and wrong.
But maybe Bushco is scared. The house of greed Repub policies have put in place have opened the door for the greatest economic disaster/swindle in history, a national economic disaster to the tune of $700 billion, even topping Brother Neil Bush and company’s half a trillion S&L scandal in the 80s. First Bush gives social program money to war profiteers with a phony war he knows is unwinnable while neglecting the war in Afghanistan and the misery we still manage to create there and now, giving what’s left to Wall Street, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and AIG for screwing up by being too greedy.
And the millions of mortgages that have been held by those companies, will now be owned by your favorite uncle, Big Brother Bush. No need for elections when this kind of class warfare turns to shooting warfare. Call in the army and open the cages. This could make Hoover ’s Bonus Army debacle look like an Easter Egg roll.
Now I know where all those tanks and trucks and weapons of mass destruction are headed: home to roost.