Lest the Terrorist Win

A day or so after the attacks on the World Trade Center President Bush suggested that we “go shopping” lest “the Terrorists win.” I was taken by the strange logic and the phrase has echoed in the back of my mind ever since. I’m beginning to understand it.

The Barnharts recently spent sixty hours or so strapped in a confined space exactly the shape of a minivan. To keep my mind from spinning out of control and self destructing, I listened to several books on cassette tape, including “Sitting Bull and his world” by Albert Marrin. It is a full account of the last days of the “Plains Indians”, including the Sioux. I learned the demise of the American Buffalo was purposefully engineered by Washington to starve the Sioux out of Canada and confine them in concentration camps, called reserves. The US army supplied weapons to marksmen and thrill seekers to maximize buffalo casualties. Cavalrymen rode organized patrols to turn back or shoot any herds that might wander north and become food for 19th century terrorists. When Sitting Bull and the last of the starving Sioux moved off the Canadian Prairie to become wards of the state, they numbered less than 200, men, women and children.

One event caught my attention especially. In 1873, the economy of the US was jeopardized by collapse of over-leveraged investment banks. President Grant was advised that salvaging the investments would require an increase in gold production. Coincidentally, the undeveloped gold fields lay in the Black Hills of Dakota, the crown jewel of the Sioux reserve. Without the game rich Black Hills, the Sioux were left with Buffalo free Prairie and no hope of sustaining a hunter-gatherer society. As you can imagine, the Sioux ended up mostly dead and the Black Hills became a commodity. This time around there are no Indians to expend in the interest of “recovering” the economy, so it has been decided to steal from the future. Capital and its economic machinery must be protected.

A co-worker periodically attempts, in Spanish, to convert me to various conspiracy theories. I told him the conspiracies I am afraid of are not hidden, they are written in business plans, mission statements and quarterly reports, they are in the President’s speeches. Allow me to interpret that cryptic Presidential message of 2001: “Our enemies will try to convince you their war is with the economic system of the West. Do not believe this. They are just bad people who hate freedom. They fight for no reason. Go buy something or the industrialists will lose.”