{"id":71,"date":"2007-08-05T04:20:35","date_gmt":"2007-08-05T11:20:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amanamission.com\/transblues\/?p=10"},"modified":"2008-07-04T19:20:51","modified_gmt":"2008-07-05T02:20:51","slug":"prove-it-didnt-happen-round-2-page-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.amanamission.com\/transblues\/prove-it-didnt-happen-round-2-page-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Prove it didn\u2019t happen… (Round 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\"Dharma<\/p>\n

Round 2<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cAnd the Judge said, \u2018What\u2019s that mean, anyway, that you\u2019re an anarchist?\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

And Amon said, \u2018Why, an anarchist is anybody who doesn\u2019t need a cop to tell him what to do.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018But you broke the law, Amon! What about that?\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018Oh, Judge, your damn laws…the good people don\u2019t need \u2018em, and the bad people don\u2019t obey \u2018em, so what use are they, anyway?\u201d
\n<\/em>-Utah Phillips, \u201cAnarchy<\/em>,\u201d The Past Didn\u2019t Go Anywhere<\/em>, c. 1996 Righteous Babe Music\/bmi<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

I am ushered gruffly into the prison. The guard accompanying me signals to the one at the controls, on the other side of the wired glass window. I wince as the massive, highly secured door is released to the tune of a loud, grating buzz, and again as it clamps shut behind me on its gnarled hinges with an irrevocable, booming click. The unpleasantly resonant sound reminds me of factories.<\/p>\n

Assembly lines.<\/p>\n

Slaughterhouses.<\/p>\n

Processing plants.<\/p>\n

As we stride silently, monklike, into the facility\u2019s innards, I reflect on the long, strange trip which brought me to this pass, lessons in futility and humility. My heart harbors no hatred for the civil servants conducting me down the corridors of gaol; they are merely unwitting agents of their own dharma, like those who sent me here.<\/p>\n

In fact, I have surprised myself by swallowing my sentence with uncharacteristic equanimity, though I\u2019ve broken no sane law. It could<\/em> have been much, much worse. And, strictly speaking, I had<\/em> committed the offense for which I had been sentenced. Shamelessly. Seditiously.<\/p>\n

Photographs published by pot magazines portrayed my proudly, provocatively and publicly produced \u2018ponic Chronic. I told tall tales of toking tyrants to tell-all tabloids, to trivialize the thumping: they took THC, too.<\/p>\n

Prove<\/em> it didn\u2019t<\/em> happen.<\/p>\n

I had even written extensively and boastingly about my own illegal exploits, making my guerrilla garden a major player in my blockbuster book. That was how I got to be so famous that they just had<\/em> to nail me.<\/p>\n

My dope-laden epic was a raspberry in the Establishment\u2019s face, as were my flamboyant forays into the sacred places of Babylon, temples such as the Whites-only House and the World Fraud Center, for the sole purpose of sparking a fatty of the kindest dank, while horrified tourists covered their Osh-koshed toddlers\u2019 eyes, ears, and mouths.<\/p>\n

So the push was on within the flanks of the humorless to crucify this irreverent unrepentant, who had somehow achieved success in spite of my distinct dissidence. I said little that was new, but my voice rang louder than similar throats had in the previous, more crowded generation of counterculture loudmouths and Pranksters that made the news fun during the 1960\u2019s.<\/p>\n

The climax, for me, was the ferocious stink raised by parents when a local high school\u2019s literary group invited me to speak to them on form and structure. In an ironic twist of fate, I attended my first and (Goddess willing!) last meeting of a Parent Teacher\u2019s Association. The PTA, it appeared, took issue with my unconventional viewpoint and had voted to ban me from the premises.<\/p>\n

By the end of that fiasco, I\u2019d penned a vicious essay claiming that the acronym actually stood for Prudish Tight Asses. I held up their own literary cannons and forced them to confront the flaw of their arguments. I belonged to a great literary tradition of deviance, I smugly pointed out, listing my company in contrariety comfortably installed on the curriculum, assuming, in my arrogance, that even my enemies would surely concede my status among the unacknowledged legislators of the world.<\/p>\n

No one told me there\u2019d been a coup, and now TV studios pretty much ran things.<\/p>\n

My roster of fellow thought-criminals included such high school English fixtures as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, and Aldous Huxley. Their work, but not lifestyles, were obviously considered salutary by the government\u2019s Federal Branch of Indoctrination, also known as the public \u201ceducation\u201d system, whose agents cravenly used the superior prose and verse of outlaw virtuosos to train a new generation of technical-manual authors and speechwriters, while the Partnership for a Fun Free America aired commercials about the diminished mental faculties of marijuana users. Can you spell, \u201chypocrisy?\u201d Probably not, if you actually relied on school for your learning.<\/p>\n

~ )))0((( ~<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Round 2 \u201cAnd the Judge said, \u2018What\u2019s that mean, anyway, that you\u2019re an anarchist?\u2019 And Amon said, \u2018Why, an anarchist is anybody who doesn\u2019t need a cop to tell him what to do.\u2019 \u2018But you broke the law, Amon! What about that?\u2019 \u2018Oh, Judge, your damn laws…the good people don\u2019t need \u2018em, and the bad […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[60,59,63,64,62,66,23,33,67,65,152,61],"class_list":["post-71","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transmigrant-blues","category-transmigrant-blues-round-2","tag-blog","tag-book","tag-destiny","tag-future","tag-girl","tag-metaphysical","tag-mystery","tag-reincarnation","tag-riverflow","tag-transmigrant","tag-transmigrant-blues","tag-writer"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.amanamission.com\/transblues\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.amanamission.com\/transblues\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.amanamission.com\/transblues\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.amanamission.com\/transblues\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.amanamission.com\/transblues\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.amanamission.com\/transblues\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.amanamission.com\/transblues\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.amanamission.com\/transblues\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.amanamission.com\/transblues\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}