FRONTIER FORTS AND CORPORATE ENCLAVES

Fort Le Bouf, PA
In my late awakening to the breadth and depth of deception to which governments must go, and certainly are going, to appear honorable in history books and media while perpetually perpetrating atrocities against human rights to maintain the “national security” ensured by the people’s ignorance of the elite leader’s “dirty little secret” actions and agenda, I am just getting around to reading Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. Whew! I am up to the “as long as grass grows or water runs” coverage of the US program of Indian removal and noticed how each imposition into new, recently granted Indian territory involved a fort for the protection against the treachery of the red man as the whites radiated to the far reaches of the territory. Great precision in military planning. Heartless and efficient.

While reading I kept getting echoing metaphoric patterns from past experiences and information; Eisenhower warning of the military-industrial complex, the distinction between we military personnel and the “townies” wherever I was stationed over four years, the stories told me by friends returning from oil company work in Teheran whose family lived in the American Zone behind chain link fence and who treated trips downtown like any other tourist, and how when I worked for IBM in its move to Austin, they had their own complete athletic program on the grounds of the plant and adjacent land all staked out where the executive-engineering staff built their new homes.

The invisible enclaves of corporate America came home to me with devastating military complexity and precision one night while returning to my lane with beers for my bowling team when I looked along the foul lines of thirty six lanes at Dart Bowl and saw one hundred and eighty men wearing identical bowling shirts, uniforms of the troops, not a towny in sight. This momentary realization has been more than confirmed by the fact that since I quit working there and sold my home in their ghetto and moved into town proper, I have yet to see any of the folks I worked eight years with downtown. It seems that malls evolved to help corporate America service corporate America with complex military precision while creating inflation, long drives and ruined small businesses of the towny tribes wherever they go. Shape up or ship out, it’s for your own good whether you like it or not.

Anyone discomfited by the encroachment of corporations qualifies to consider themselves much closer to indigenous people than they may realize. Anyone who considers the people who don’t work for their corporation to be “townies” qualifies to consider themselves much closer to Indian exterminators than they may realize. Beware of the complex industry of the military model. Heartless and efficient.

The Bechtel Corporation