Wo ist Amerika?

While surfing the Web, I discovered the Freewayblogger, and I was fascinated by his/her project and his/her energy. He/she exemplifies one of the finest sides of this country. Here you can read our e-mail interview about the ’state of the union’. This interview, however, is complementary to our interview in the Podcast #7. Please also visit www.freewayblogger.com.

WiA: Can you first tell us something about yourself and the project, the Freewayblogger, you have started, your motivation, etc.? And what is your particular focus: Bring the troops home? Impeach the president?

FWB: I prefer to remain anonymous. Not because of the government - they must certainly know who I am - but because I receive death threats from angry conservatives from time to time and have a family to protect.

I have always felt my purpose/goal on this earth was to reduce human misery. Before I became the Freewayblogger I collected warm clothing, packed it into my truck and set out to find the coldest, poorest and most isolated people I could find. Between 1999 and 2003 I clothed almost everyone living in the Sierra Madre mountains of Northwest Mexico. I set up a small charity with funding from Paul Newman called “Take to the Hills”. You can read about at www.taketothehills.org. I would like to return to this work some day.

Over the years, but most particularly since September 11th, I’ve noticed that the political dialogue in my country is controlled almost exclusively by corporate media. Although we technically have the right to free speech, we do not use it very effectively. Freewayblogging changes that - thanks to the freeways, a single sign can be read by 250,000 people. It costs nothing and is open to practically everyone.

My first signs were constructed after the 2000 election, which was stolen by the GOP with the help of a partisan Supreme Court. The basis of the Bush vs. Gore decision was that counting the votes would inflict “irreparable harm” to the Bush Presidency. This is true: it would have proven that Bush was not elected President. I was taught that democracy was a place where you counted the votes! Worse than the decision itself was the total lack of outrage or action by the Democrats. The presidency had been stolen, but life went on as if nothing had happened. Putting signs on the freeways (”1776 - 2000 R.I.P.” for example), succeeded, if nothing else, in eliminating the appearance of normalcy.

My first signs were made with wood and other heavy materials. They took a long time to make and hang. The evolution of the project really occurred when I switched to cardboard, allowing me to paint and post 20 signs with the same effort it took to make one.

The focus of the project is to directly insert those ideas and texts that the corporate media cannot or will not disseminate: “The War is a Lie” for example. It’s true, and everyone knows it, but you won’t hear it on the television. Osama Bin Laden is another example. From July of 2002 until November of 2003, George Bush, the President of the United States, did not say the words “Osama Bin Laden” once. And, for their part, the corporate media not only seemed to forget about him as well, but didn’t seem to notice that the President had also forgotten about him. It was as if the entire country had forgotten who was responsible, or at least widely considered responsible, for the attacks on September 11th and shifted their focus to Saddam Hussein. Probably half the country still thinks Saddam Hussein was responsible for September 11th. As a resulty many of my signs read “Osama Who?” and “Osama Bin Forgotten”. I felt it was my duty as a citizen to remind people who’d attacked us.

The exact focus of the project is to get other people to express themselves through signposting, either on the freeways or any other venue where a great number of people will read it.

WiA: So you and others contributing to your site are ‘real-world bloggers’ in every sense of the word. You publish your messages not only on the internet, but on bridges over highways and other visible locations. What are the most unusual loactions used so far?

FWB: Apart from overpasses, I use pretty much everything over or alongside the freeways: bushes, fences, the backs of roadsigns. Anything you can see while driving is a place you can put a sign and it will be read. The more difficult it is to reach physically the longer it’ll stay up. I’ve had some signs stay up for months. Determining the most clever placements is what really makes it fun and interesting.

WiA: And what would be you dream location or dream ‘real-world-blog’? Maybe a Superbowl TV Ad? Or Mr Bush’s cravat?

FWB: If you’ll think back to the very beginning of the War against Iraq, all TV stations, FOX, CNN, ABC, etc. were reduced to the vantage point of a single camera focussed on downtown Baghdad. The world sat watching, waiting for the bombs to drop. Waiting for the “shock and awe”. Waiting for the show to begin. My dream blog would have been a single person walking in front of that camera holding a sign that said, simply, “Fuck You”. Maybe someone in Tehran will get the chance next time…

WiA: Let us become precise: What are the lies of the President? And why does he deserves impeachement?

FWB: That Iraq had anything to do with 9/11. That’s the biggest lie. That reducing taxes on the rich will help the poor. That he understands or even cares about the teachings of Jesus. That creating enemies throughout the world will make us safe. The President’s lies about Iraq have been pretty well documented - just about everything he said, really.

If you wanted to know what I believe the biggest lie foisted on the American People is, it is this: that consumer choice is equivalent to freedom. It is not. It is, in fact, the opposite. If you truly want to be free, the first thing you should do is get rid of your possessions.

WiA: Many people in Germany and most friends I have living here in the US view Mr Bush as one of the worst Presidents ever. Personally, I went through a phase, where I tried to take him serious and I believed that he is indeed in charge and controls his politics and what he is saying. I viewed him as a ‘man of the people’, much less belonging to elite like, for example, Mr Kerry. How do you, as an american citizen, want people abroad (like in Germany) to view your current President?

FWB: Hopefully people will view Bush as an abberation: a terrible mistake that will never happen again. Unfortunately though, I’m afraid that anyone wearing a cowboy hat and carrying a crucifix who promises to cut taxes will become President before someone who’s smart. I’m not sure quite how this happened, but I think TV has a lot to do with it.

WiA: Is there some consensus about the best action of the President like, for example, border control?

FWB: At this point I can see absolutely no point of consensus between the two halves of my country. The best action of this president, as he himself admitted, was catching a fish in his lake. The worst actions — well — pretty much everything else.

WiA: The US is much more religeious than, for exmaple, the nothern parts of Europe. Mr Bush uses many phrases, which I would allocate to the middle ages, and he seems to have a quite special relation to what many people refer to as ‘God’. To the extend it is possible for you as a citizen of this country, can you outline for us Mr Bush’s relation to God and the way it may differ from previous presidents’ relation to God?

FWB: Religion in this country is the same as it’s been since the Dawn of Mankind: people will believe anyone who tells them they’re not going to die. The rise of “Born Again” Christianity in this country seems also to be a spawn of the media - almost half the radio stations are Christian now. The problem with modern Christianity, as well as most fundamentalist beliefs, is the absolutism it evokes: We are Good/They are Evil. We’re going to spend eternity going on pony rides with Jesus and Grandma up in Heaven… The rest of you are going to burn in hell. Pretty weird shit when you think about it. Bush’s relationship with God began when he realized the power of the Christian vote when running for Governor of Texas. I don’t know to what extent that differs from previous Presidents except that, in light of his past actions and policies, it seems a lot more hypocritical.

WiA: To different degrees, many people in the islamic world view the actions of the Americans in the middle east as some sort of a ‘war of Christians against Isalm’. Certainly, this may have many causes. But which aspects of it could be directly attributes to actions of the Bush administration?

FWB: Religion has always been the most useful medium for Demagogues, with nationalism running a pretty close second. You’d think by now people would know not to trust anyone who preaches either their own goodness or the evilness of others, but for some reason it always seems to work. What’s remarkable about the Bushes however, and by this I mean both George W. and his father’s administrations, is the sheer number of Muslims killed by our military: hundreds of thousands of them during each. While they had their faults, Clinton and Reagan managed to project American power without bombing the crap out of nearly so many people.

WiA: Let us assume that at least parts of the motivation for this war was indeed to spread democracy and to better integrate the middle east into the world economy (and to make a lot of money). What do you think are the most important secular american values? Do you believe those should be spread? And what is your suggestion: How to spread them (other than war)?

FWB: I don’t think we have much interest in spreading “democracy” in the Middle East, the nations there would be run by theocrats and mullahs instead of the nice bribeable authoritarians and ruling families we have today. Democracy is a great idea, but so long as dictators give us a better price on oil, it’ll have to wait.

As for spreading American values, I don’t really think there’s any such thing. It’s ridiculous to think that any nationality has a monopoly on any sort of human value. Our politicians are fond of talking about “Honest, hard-working Americans” as though this were some uniquely American phenomenon, as if somehow, before America came around, the entire history of human endeavour had been achieved by lazy people who lied a lot.

This isn’t to say Americans aren’t hard working, they are. They’re also very much in debt. The American Dream as it stands now is owning a whole lot of things you don’t really need and haven’t paid for. This is largely thanks, again, to corporate media. To live in this country is to be bombarded with advertisements: between radio, TV print and billboards we receive hundreds, if not thousands, of messages per day. And each of those messages says essentially the same thing: “You are incomplete without this product. Once you have this product, your life will be as interesting and beautiful as the people in this ad.” I think that, more than anything is what’s crippling the true spirit and potential of this nation: the sort of built-in dissatisfaction with one’s self brought on by advertising. We don’t drive big cars because we like them any better than small ones, or that we need them any more. We drive big cars because our TVs told us it was how our success is measured by our peers. We drive big cars because we were told that people would like and respect us more if we have a big car. Kind of funny when you think about it.

WiA: Before the Iraq war (in 11/2002) I was in Boston, and I read newspapers and watched TV. At that time, every channel broadcasted about the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (WMDs) in Iraq. All this seemed to me as a bad joke, because there was no objective evidence for the threat. Did the American public really believed the media? Or is it like I hope: a prostitution of the media, but the public not really believed it?

FWB: Actually, I thought Saddam had WMDs. I think most people did. Hell, we sold them to him when we were backing him against Iran. Nobody who thought about it thought he was a threat though. Cheney was doing business with him and selling him oil equipment in 1999 after all: after he’d invaded Kuwait, after he’d gassed the Kurds, presumably while he maintained WMD stockpiles, so it’s hard to feel too morally struck by such things if the Vice-President didn’t seem to mind them. When Bush said Saddam was going to get a nuclear bomb, that’s one thing. When Cheney said it though, then I believed it. Cheney would’ve sold him one of the goddam things.

WiA: It is very hard to put oneself into the shoes of victims of terror attacts. This applies, for example, to attacs in Israel as well as to the 9/11 attacs. Can you outline for us a little bit the current emotional situation of ‘the Americans’?

FWB: I don’t know… I’d say the current emotional state of the American People is a bit more hysterical than before, during the Cold War. Kind of silly when you think about it. We seemed to keep our cool well enough with tens of thousands of nuclear warheads pointed at us, but then seemed to go all to pieces when 19 guys fly some planes into buildings. An unfortunate percentage of Americans believe, or claim to believe, that these are the End Times, and that God has planned for ours to be the Last Generation. Religious demagogues are quick to make use of this kind of fatalistic narcissism. If you read the Bible though, so much of what people did was not for themselves or even their children, but their children’s children. If I have a religion, it’s that: my children’s children, and their children after that. Because of this it’s hard for me to relate to the great many of my countrymen who are looking forward to the End of the World.

WiA: And how was your 9/11?

FWB: I was on a Navajo Reservation on September 11th, giving clothes and blankets to the people in the mountains. It was a good place to be on that day, there with the Navajo. I think just about everyone had to reevaluate their lives on that day a little bit, and ask themselves if what they were doing in any way contributed to what had happened. I think that’s perfectly natural. I knew though, that by collecting clothes from the rich and giving them to the poor, I was not part of the problem.

WiA: After 9/11 new wars begun. What does the whole “Support the troops”-thing mean? This seems to unite the nation?

FWB: “Support the troops” means: don’t send them off to get killed unless it’s absolutely necessary for the sake of the nation. Right now supporting the troops means removing from office everyone responsible for sending them to Iraq. I don’t think we should remove all U.S. troops from Iraq though… just the ones that aren’t Sunni, Shiite or Kurdish.

WiA: As you may know, my Podcast and the Blog are about the finest sides of America, which are currently hard to perceive abroad. What I like very much about ‘the Americans’ is the high level of proactivity. Your activities exemplify not only a high degree of proactivity, but also quite a lot of creativity. Can you tell us something about other projets comparable to yours in terms of creatity and impact?

FWB: “The Yes Men” are pretty good at getting their message out. (Google “The Yes Men” if you’re unfamiliar with their work.) In general I’d say anyone who’s trying to make a difference in people’s lives that isn’t asking for money… chances are they’re actually doing good work. Banksy and I are definitely on the same wavelength, but he’s British. (Again, Google him if you’re unfamiliar with his work - well worth it.)

WiA: Let us imagine the ideal case: Where is the world in 10 years, and what has been/is the role of the US?

FWB: One of the smartest people I’ve ever known once said “I don’t know what Utopia will be like exactly, but it will have bicycles.” The world, ideally, in ten years will be one that’s run primarily by clean technologies and powered by solar energy. The role of the U.S., unfortunately, will probably to have screwed up things politically and/or militarily to the point where the capacity to produce and refine oil becomes impossible. It’s a pity to think though that if the world’s oil were to disappear tomorrow, it’d probably take us about nine months to adapt.

WiA: In 2008 you have the next election for President: Who do you hope for? How will enter the races?

FWB: I have no idea about the next elections. None. Frankly, it scares me just to think about it.

WiA: Many thanks for this interview!