BOMB Magazine: Mike Davis by Lucy Raven
BOMB Magazine: Mike Davis by Lucy Raven:
"MD The border is both a growth industry in its own right and a sector of a vastly larger complex of automated oppression. Together with the D.C. Beltway, San Diego is the principal world center for the development of new technologies of surveillance, identification, data mining, cyber-warfare, and remote-controlled murder. The Jacobs School of Engineering at UCSD provides a publically financed research hub for scores of secretive private firms, mostly in the University City area, including Science Applications International Corporation, the largest purveyors of software to the CIA and the DIA, and General Atomics, which manufactures the notorious Predator. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement/Border Patrol’s technology development branch is headquartered in downtown San Diego to take advantage of this cornucopia of Orwellian R&D."
The Border Patrol, of course, has long used the San Diego sector to experiment with stealth technology, beginning with the motion detectors and heat sensors that were first developed by the Pentagon in its futile crusade to seal off the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Vietnam War. The fantasy now is a transcontinental “virtual border” of advanced sensors and video surveillance integrated in real time with a new communications system for the Border Patrol, patterned after Pentagon paradigms of “network-centric warfare” and “virtual battlespaces.” As proposed expenditures soar into the billions of dollars, the giant military-industrial carnivores have become hungry for shares in this border boom.
...Since most tourists and non-military residents—I suppose beguiled by pandas and wet t-shirts—don’t even register the monumentality of these mega-bases and naval installations, they are unlikely to read the surrealistic fine print. For example, about 50 miles east of San Diego along the border is an obscure naval facility called La Posta Naval Reserve Base. In fact, it is “virtual Afghanistan” where Navy SEALs and probably the elite Marine recon guys train before they go to Afghanistan, because it so strikingly resembles that landscape. Forty or fifty miles northeast of La Posta, still in San Diego County, is the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) facility at Warner Springs where SEALs try to survive in the mountains but are inevitably captured and brutally interrogated. You might have seen the SERE (Florida) sequence in G.I. Jane where Viggo Mortensen beats the shit out of Demi Moore. SERE training has been invoked in the defense of waterboarding and torture, since our commandos and pilots themselves undergo what the Spanish Inquisition used to call “The Question.”
Live here for a while (I grew up in the San Diego backcountry in the ’50s and early ’60s) and you will inevitably have eerie, unexpected encounters with the brave new world that a trillion dollars of recent military expenditures is summoning into being. On hot days I like to run at the harbor with a sea breeze in my face. Frequently, in the mornings, there are dolphins doing Sea World–like stunts in the water; after an encore, they hop aboard the flat back of a Navy fast-boat which roars back to the “marine-mammal weapons facility”—or whatever it is actually called—at Ballast Point. The dolphins, of course, are the advanced descendants of pioneering ancestors domesticated and weaponized in the ’70s. Together with some killer whales and a few sea lions, they are now a routine part of the naval arsenal and were used to penetrate Sadaam’s harbor defenses during both Iraq wars. They are also rumored (most recently by the London Independent) to be efficient underwater assassins with a gunlike device attached to their friendly faces.
The military also operates its own versions of Disneyland. San Clemente Island, just over the horizon, west of the Encinitas surf shops and pickup bars, is one of the Pentagon’s most valuable assets. It’s about 25 miles long and has been bombarded, strafed, and invaded almost daily since the early Second World War. Recently they opened a 21-million-dollar American embassy on San Clemente: smaller than Madonna’s house, but still useful for practice by Marines and SEALs.
More well known perhaps are the stage-set versions of Fallujah and Sadr City. These “urban warfare simulators” include “Yodaville” at the Yuma Marine Corps Air Station just across the Arizona border, and the MGM-quality complexes at 29 Palms and Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert, where Arab immigrants impersonate unruly natives and give young Marines and soldiers an extra jolt of Baudrillardian hyper-reality.
...MD “Peace, prosperity, internationalism.” In Duncan Hunter’s own congressional district. And here are the founders, over here. Ruth Norman. Doesn’t she look adorable?
LR She looks amazing. Is it a painting or a photograph?
MD I think they added a little William Blake to Tesla here.
Unarian 1 Do you want me to light up the star map?
LR Why not?
Unarian 2 Another good photo you could take is of the Voice of Venus, the first Unares book—that’s the one that started the revolution.
MD (to Unarian) Do you live here in El Cajon? I grew up here, 50 years ago.
Unarian 1 I do. I’d read the books for about two and a half years and I came down and met Ruth Norman.
LR Is this space the physical center of Unarius?
Unarian 2 It’s the physical manifestation of the celestial world of Unarius.
Unarian 1 There are seven spiritual planets, teaching centers where scientists, artists, philosophers, and everybody else goes through time periods as they start to progress into a higher awareness of themselves. Nikola Tesla is the head of the scientific plane of Eros. It’s where all of the scientists who have left their mark in the world come from.
Unarian 2 Like many of the famous people of the past. Maybe they don’t consciously remember, but in their sleep or their out-of-body experiences, they gain knowledge. Like Leonardo da Vinci, he got his inspiration when he was taking night classes in one of the…
...
This is the thing about living in southern California or New York City. Whatever happens in world history, whatever invasion or war, a new stratum of refugees ends up on our shores opening restaurants. Somalis have come to San Diego in large numbers, too. Whatever the tragedy of history, of other people’s defeat or dispossession, we always eat better….
...MD This is Bostonia, or what remains of it: when I was in elementary school it was still a separate hamlet from the rest of El Cajon, with irrigation ditches on the side of Second Street, an 1880s general store, a noxious chicken factory, and a legendary Country-Western honky-tonk. (Indeed, I still recall childhood wonderment at the incredible quantities of puke and blood in front of the Bostonia Ballroom on a Monday morning.) I have some wonderful memories of early friends and especially my first love, but I am also haunted by the dark side of my childhood. As weird as it may sound from an old socialist and long-professed atheist, I actually believe that I have seen the devil or his moral equivalent in El Cajon.
No, I am serious. Like Terrell County in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, El Cajon seems episodically visited by inexplicable violence. Over the years I have led a charmed, unharmed life in various domiciles in West Belfast, the East End of London, and the Bowery. Likewise, I lived for two extended periods in South Central L.A., presumably the only white guy for miles, with only civility and warmth from my neighbors. In my hometown, by contrast, I’ve been shot at, kicked to pieces in the street, and even had someone try to set me afire. Why? Because my residual redneck self tends to stare back at the other bastard. Yesterday and today, that’s sufficient cause for absolute mayhem in El Cajon.
...
MD Despite my yarning to you, I am more allergic to memoir (especially those that betray family honor or the confidences of old friends and lovers) than poison oak, but I have scouted the idea of a surreal scrapbook, something enigmatic, along the lines of literary flotsam from the Atlantis of the ’50s.
But now let’s look at something that will rate five stars in any Baedeker for born-again Christians: the fundamentalist temple built by the world’s best-selling author.
...But neither my wife nor I are good spies. We blurt out the goods at the first opportunity. We were once at the Alamo and one of the tour guides, a daughter of the Texas revolution, came up to us and said, “Welcome to the birthplace of Texas independence. Do you all have any personal connection?” And my wife says, “Oh, I do. My great-great-grandfather, General Juan Amador, helped execute the survivors.” I thought we’d have to get an ambulance for this poor lady.
LR What’s the story there?
MD I am married to Alessandra Moctezuma and she has a very colorful genealogy, like a magical-realist novel, starting with a daughter of the ill-fated Aztec emperor. One of her great uncles was Carlos López Moctezuma, the Jack Palance, all-purpose bad guy of classical Mexican cinema. Another was known as “El Tigre,” and helped suppress (in ways I am reluctant to discuss in detail) the Cristero Rebellion in Jalisco in the late 1920s.
Her dad, who for years broadcast the pioneering modern jazz program on Mexican radio, was fascinated by Edgar Allan Poe and the gothic genre; he directed several now-cult horror films and produced Jodorowsky’s El Topo.
"MD The border is both a growth industry in its own right and a sector of a vastly larger complex of automated oppression. Together with the D.C. Beltway, San Diego is the principal world center for the development of new technologies of surveillance, identification, data mining, cyber-warfare, and remote-controlled murder. The Jacobs School of Engineering at UCSD provides a publically financed research hub for scores of secretive private firms, mostly in the University City area, including Science Applications International Corporation, the largest purveyors of software to the CIA and the DIA, and General Atomics, which manufactures the notorious Predator. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement/Border Patrol’s technology development branch is headquartered in downtown San Diego to take advantage of this cornucopia of Orwellian R&D."
The Border Patrol, of course, has long used the San Diego sector to experiment with stealth technology, beginning with the motion detectors and heat sensors that were first developed by the Pentagon in its futile crusade to seal off the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Vietnam War. The fantasy now is a transcontinental “virtual border” of advanced sensors and video surveillance integrated in real time with a new communications system for the Border Patrol, patterned after Pentagon paradigms of “network-centric warfare” and “virtual battlespaces.” As proposed expenditures soar into the billions of dollars, the giant military-industrial carnivores have become hungry for shares in this border boom.
...Since most tourists and non-military residents—I suppose beguiled by pandas and wet t-shirts—don’t even register the monumentality of these mega-bases and naval installations, they are unlikely to read the surrealistic fine print. For example, about 50 miles east of San Diego along the border is an obscure naval facility called La Posta Naval Reserve Base. In fact, it is “virtual Afghanistan” where Navy SEALs and probably the elite Marine recon guys train before they go to Afghanistan, because it so strikingly resembles that landscape. Forty or fifty miles northeast of La Posta, still in San Diego County, is the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) facility at Warner Springs where SEALs try to survive in the mountains but are inevitably captured and brutally interrogated. You might have seen the SERE (Florida) sequence in G.I. Jane where Viggo Mortensen beats the shit out of Demi Moore. SERE training has been invoked in the defense of waterboarding and torture, since our commandos and pilots themselves undergo what the Spanish Inquisition used to call “The Question.”
Live here for a while (I grew up in the San Diego backcountry in the ’50s and early ’60s) and you will inevitably have eerie, unexpected encounters with the brave new world that a trillion dollars of recent military expenditures is summoning into being. On hot days I like to run at the harbor with a sea breeze in my face. Frequently, in the mornings, there are dolphins doing Sea World–like stunts in the water; after an encore, they hop aboard the flat back of a Navy fast-boat which roars back to the “marine-mammal weapons facility”—or whatever it is actually called—at Ballast Point. The dolphins, of course, are the advanced descendants of pioneering ancestors domesticated and weaponized in the ’70s. Together with some killer whales and a few sea lions, they are now a routine part of the naval arsenal and were used to penetrate Sadaam’s harbor defenses during both Iraq wars. They are also rumored (most recently by the London Independent) to be efficient underwater assassins with a gunlike device attached to their friendly faces.
The military also operates its own versions of Disneyland. San Clemente Island, just over the horizon, west of the Encinitas surf shops and pickup bars, is one of the Pentagon’s most valuable assets. It’s about 25 miles long and has been bombarded, strafed, and invaded almost daily since the early Second World War. Recently they opened a 21-million-dollar American embassy on San Clemente: smaller than Madonna’s house, but still useful for practice by Marines and SEALs.
More well known perhaps are the stage-set versions of Fallujah and Sadr City. These “urban warfare simulators” include “Yodaville” at the Yuma Marine Corps Air Station just across the Arizona border, and the MGM-quality complexes at 29 Palms and Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert, where Arab immigrants impersonate unruly natives and give young Marines and soldiers an extra jolt of Baudrillardian hyper-reality.
...MD “Peace, prosperity, internationalism.” In Duncan Hunter’s own congressional district. And here are the founders, over here. Ruth Norman. Doesn’t she look adorable?
LR She looks amazing. Is it a painting or a photograph?
MD I think they added a little William Blake to Tesla here.
Unarian 1 Do you want me to light up the star map?
LR Why not?
Unarian 2 Another good photo you could take is of the Voice of Venus, the first Unares book—that’s the one that started the revolution.
MD (to Unarian) Do you live here in El Cajon? I grew up here, 50 years ago.
Unarian 1 I do. I’d read the books for about two and a half years and I came down and met Ruth Norman.
LR Is this space the physical center of Unarius?
Unarian 2 It’s the physical manifestation of the celestial world of Unarius.
Unarian 1 There are seven spiritual planets, teaching centers where scientists, artists, philosophers, and everybody else goes through time periods as they start to progress into a higher awareness of themselves. Nikola Tesla is the head of the scientific plane of Eros. It’s where all of the scientists who have left their mark in the world come from.
Unarian 2 Like many of the famous people of the past. Maybe they don’t consciously remember, but in their sleep or their out-of-body experiences, they gain knowledge. Like Leonardo da Vinci, he got his inspiration when he was taking night classes in one of the…
...
This is the thing about living in southern California or New York City. Whatever happens in world history, whatever invasion or war, a new stratum of refugees ends up on our shores opening restaurants. Somalis have come to San Diego in large numbers, too. Whatever the tragedy of history, of other people’s defeat or dispossession, we always eat better….
...MD This is Bostonia, or what remains of it: when I was in elementary school it was still a separate hamlet from the rest of El Cajon, with irrigation ditches on the side of Second Street, an 1880s general store, a noxious chicken factory, and a legendary Country-Western honky-tonk. (Indeed, I still recall childhood wonderment at the incredible quantities of puke and blood in front of the Bostonia Ballroom on a Monday morning.) I have some wonderful memories of early friends and especially my first love, but I am also haunted by the dark side of my childhood. As weird as it may sound from an old socialist and long-professed atheist, I actually believe that I have seen the devil or his moral equivalent in El Cajon.
No, I am serious. Like Terrell County in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, El Cajon seems episodically visited by inexplicable violence. Over the years I have led a charmed, unharmed life in various domiciles in West Belfast, the East End of London, and the Bowery. Likewise, I lived for two extended periods in South Central L.A., presumably the only white guy for miles, with only civility and warmth from my neighbors. In my hometown, by contrast, I’ve been shot at, kicked to pieces in the street, and even had someone try to set me afire. Why? Because my residual redneck self tends to stare back at the other bastard. Yesterday and today, that’s sufficient cause for absolute mayhem in El Cajon.
...
MD Despite my yarning to you, I am more allergic to memoir (especially those that betray family honor or the confidences of old friends and lovers) than poison oak, but I have scouted the idea of a surreal scrapbook, something enigmatic, along the lines of literary flotsam from the Atlantis of the ’50s.
But now let’s look at something that will rate five stars in any Baedeker for born-again Christians: the fundamentalist temple built by the world’s best-selling author.
...But neither my wife nor I are good spies. We blurt out the goods at the first opportunity. We were once at the Alamo and one of the tour guides, a daughter of the Texas revolution, came up to us and said, “Welcome to the birthplace of Texas independence. Do you all have any personal connection?” And my wife says, “Oh, I do. My great-great-grandfather, General Juan Amador, helped execute the survivors.” I thought we’d have to get an ambulance for this poor lady.
LR What’s the story there?
MD I am married to Alessandra Moctezuma and she has a very colorful genealogy, like a magical-realist novel, starting with a daughter of the ill-fated Aztec emperor. One of her great uncles was Carlos López Moctezuma, the Jack Palance, all-purpose bad guy of classical Mexican cinema. Another was known as “El Tigre,” and helped suppress (in ways I am reluctant to discuss in detail) the Cristero Rebellion in Jalisco in the late 1920s.
Her dad, who for years broadcast the pioneering modern jazz program on Mexican radio, was fascinated by Edgar Allan Poe and the gothic genre; he directed several now-cult horror films and produced Jodorowsky’s El Topo.
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