It is a time of freedom and fear, of Gaia and of borders, of many paths and the widening of
a universal toll road, emptying country and swelling cities, of the public bought into
privacy and the privacy of the public sold into invisible data banks and knowing
algorithms. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the
planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection.
These are the times when maps fade and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread. Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times. Private Jessica Lynch, in her own words, when the Pentagon isn't speaking for her: "...they used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff. Yeah, it's wrong." "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about. Only I would have been able to know that, because the other four people on my vehicle aren't here to tell the story. So I would have been the only one able to say, yeah, I went down shooting. But I didn't." When Private Lynch was captured in the middle of the American invasion of Iraq, the Bush Administration claimed that Private Lynch was dramatically rescued from torturers during the course of a gun battle. They also claimed that Private Lynch had fiercely resisted capture. It turns out that the Bush Administration just made it all up, exaggerating the struggle of Private Lynch in order to score public relations points. Lying about a captured, injured, and often unconscious soldier to look good - way to "support the troops", Mr. Bush! Return to the Irregular Times Main Page
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