Driving on the Bones of God- Joe Bageant

[callady]

Driving on the Bones of God
You and I may get smoked, but the fat cats will dine on peacock tongues
by Joe Bageant

Beneath the sandwich and cigarette wrappers on the floor of my truck, beneath this road and down hundreds of feet within the earth gleams a city planned for the Apocalypse. A complete underground city with apartments and dormitories, cafeterias, a hospital, its own transit system, a battery powered subway. It has TV communication, streets and sidewalks, a water purification system, power plant and general office buildings. A small lake fed by fresh underground springs dreams in its artificial lighting. That’s what former government workers who have served inside Mount Weather have said. Others say it is no fancier than your average Army base to be found anywhere in the world, but with a lake. Ever since the Eisenhower administration, this has been the designated place where the important people in government will go in a nuclear emergency or national disaster. Mount Weather is the hub of a nerve center of about 100 other Federal Relocation Centers, which guarantee that the really big players in the game escape even the worst disasters they create with their asses intact. In every likelihood, this “undisclosed location” sheltered Dick Cheney during 911. Employees say it did. To be in charge of the nation from the bowels of this bizarre monument to Cold War thinking would give far saner people than Cheney Doctor Strangelovian delusions. So we can only speculate what a congenitally paranoid old reptile like Cheney must have experienced. He must have had quite a time keeping that reflexive gloved hand in his lap. Throw in the fact that most of the hired help down there in the hidden city are born-again fundamentalist Christian pod people, (mainly because that’s about all we have around here) and I don’t know about you, but I cannot think of a stranger damned place on this earth.

Mount Weather has always been controversial. Back in 1975, Senator John Tunney complained that Mount Weather held dossiers on more than 100,000 Americans and that huge “bubble domed” computer banks were compiling data on virtually all Americans. He felt Mount Weather was “out of control.” We will never know if it was. After two Senate hearings were successfully stonewalled by Mount Weather officials, the inquiry died. At that time Mount Weather’s “survivor list” had 6,500 names on it. Understandably, just who made it onto the list was a hot item of Capitol Hill gossip and a grisly status symbol of sorts. Chief Justice Earl Warren is said to have been hacked off because, although he made the survivor’s list, his wife did not.

Because I drive over the wooded brow of this technology stuffed mountain twice a day, I find often myself contemplating its meaning. For example, I remember that an indigenous medicine man once told me that the earth is a single living deity and that stone mountains such as this are its bones. But lately I find myself actually considering the warnings from the conspiracy freaks, and wondering if I haven’t slipped over into the ranks of the “black helicopter” crowd. The mountain that never sleeps has understandably stirred paranoia among already-paranoid elements. By that I mean the appropriately-fearful-but-for-less-than-sane-reasons crowd, such as Aryan Nations and white militias, Virginia’s strange Libertarian Party types, etc. It long ago became part of modern conspiracy mythology, in this case representing fear of big government and technology. I am no fan of conspiracy cults, but always find anything new about Mount Weather interesting. So when I came across this little doozie on an Internet brochure, I was hooked:

<snip>

But I’m trying not to think. Like I said, it is hot as hell, another code red in the middle of Dog Days, those days when snakes molt and strike blindly at anything that moves and Congress slithers away from sweltering Washington. And here I am in my old red beater truck with two bald tires weaving in and out of windowless vans full of illegal Mexican laborers…rolling down the sides of a hollowed out mountain, into a landscape dotted with the secret safe houses of the unnamed powerful. The closer you drive to DC, the more money you drive through and the more obvious becomes the reality gap between them and us, even in such miserably democratic matters as commuting. As I write, plans are being floated for a new commuting lane, a toll “Lexus lane” for those who can afford to pay to whiz past puds like me and those Mexicans in the vans. A red Humvee passes at 85…one of those big commuter helicopters streaks overhead toward DC. Yet somewhere beneath this road rests a cool spring-fed lake carved into the granite, rippling under artificial sunlight in a subterranean city that never chokes in the red haze. And this morning as I left home I saw that the honeysuckle on my backyard fence has died. Some days just make you want to cry.

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Aug04/Bageant0823.htm

[babylonsister]

1. Wow. Thank you. Wow. Powerful. Thanks.

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

2. Wow!

Especially about the data collection. “I know from my stint with the Office of Naval Intelligence that these dossiers consist of information collected about American men and women who are most likely to resist the destruction of our Constitution… The data bank is constantly updated so that, when the appointed hour arrives, all patriots can be rounded up with little, if any, effort.” He says the plan calls for this to be accomplished in the dead of night on a national holiday such as Thanksgiving (hence the all caps warning mentioned earlier in the Cutting Edge brochure), when everyone, no matter the religion, race, or creed, will be at home.

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This is text that as recently as five years ago, I probably would've laughed at and certainly would've dismissed as conspiracy nut BS---I'm not laughing today, it sends a chill down my spine.

[Demit]

3. I do love Joe Bageant's writing. Thanks!