to break through all this dreaming

To break through all this dreaming.

Or is the point not to? Is the point to all agree on the dream and who we are in it? Is that to make us different people in it? To surround us with wavy lights lit from below...

There are not any oppressed cute little high cheek-boned coffee coloured girls in fetching scarves now joyously going to school in whitewashed buildings. There never were. We are supporting elite religious boys' schools in a different country. There are not grateful women, veiled but cooking delicious unleavened bread and succulent meat over discrete open fires. The schools are in ruins. The people are eating from cans. Their militia are guarding the paths. The Americans are in convoys. The warlords are building some schools for their tribal areas. We did nothing. You can’t. It is a war and chaos. Besides, no one wants it.

Some money has gone to the staff of a sectarian organisation.

Some of the money went for a makeover in Los Angelus for our fundraiser which actually made her late for the fundraising event. She had put little flags on each table sold to celebrities and lady wives of corporate assholes to show fictitious cities where we have fictitious projects in a fictitious Afghanistan now democratic and free. Fictitiously. Her assistant, who represents the products served at the event, insulted the journalist who asked about that. As did the false Afghan. Princess. A Mercedes mama who got a commission. They were all the entelechy of concerned bourgeois.

It is worse than the fictitious crisis with the paid starving baby on a pallet, the mothers running and fighting for food handed out from a truck in the billowing dust. There is also the little child with machete cuts but no sign of the CIA supported guerrillas who guard the camps and herded the refugees there in the first place. All paid for though. The villains, coincidentally the villains of our foreign policy.

I once worked for an agency to whom I pointed out how imprudent it was to refurbish a magnificent historic building (using the brother-in-law of the executive director as a contractor) paid for with money raised on television from children who sold their music and toys in small stands on the street because they were trying to eliminate blindness in other children (filmed in rows, tiny little blind kids, one hand on the shoulder of the next) caused by a worm, a worm eliminated with one cheap pill to be delivered in trucks to remote areas). The executive director got a lovely office.

When I went to the area of the blindness I found a doctor in a lovely house doing nothing. There was another doctor with a great jazz collection who rented her house as the office and got a salary too. They took me to restaurants in the vehicles. Not trucks but SUV’s. For personal use. There were no pills delivered. It was a dreamy landscape of slow moving rivers, desert and colourful markets. There were mansions in palm parks. There were embassy parties. Some of their kids had sold their music and toys on the street before they came. They got new ones in diplomatic bags.