Moford: Behold! The Bliss Watch List

Behold! The Bliss Watch List
To hell with the FBI's million-strong Terrorist Watch List. Here is your killer alternative

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Somewhere deep in the bowels of the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center which is naturally connected by a series of secret, rotting, subterranean vacuum tunnels to the National Security Agency and the Homeland Security Department and Dick Cheney's nipple-torture fetish room, is a vicious little computer bank running an encephalitic version of Microsoft Vista that's right now churning through some sort of satanic algorithm designed to mine enormous piles of chaotic data from a million unreliable global sources, all in an effort to add tens of thousands more names to the U.S. government's specious and hugely flawed master terrorist watch list and oh my God look at that, 500 more were just added in the time it took you to read this fantastic little sentence. What a thing.

Ah yes, the U.S. terrorist watch list. Are you on it? Is your sister? Are you sure? Because there are, apparently, already upwards of 800,000 names in the database so far, fast approaching a million, so many names of so many people from so many different countries (and yes, rest assured, many are U.S. citizens) all stacked together in such a frightening, funny-if-it-wasn't-so-goddamn-draconian secret government file it makes you cringe and shudder and feel just a bit ashamed to be an American — or rather, make that more ashamed. You know, considering.

In fact, if my rough estimates are accurate, at the current ridiculous rate of growth, the terrorist watch list will hold roughly 87 billion names by, say, your next birthday. It will soon list every single person on the face of the planet, along with all dead people, the unborn three generations out, and (strangely) many plants. It is just that insidious. It is just that absurd and obscene and just that much of a hint of the nasty surveillance state we are quietly, viciously becoming.

Perhaps you missed this story. Perhaps you skipped right by the fact that the database added 700,000 new names (maybe your kids!) in the past three years, 100,000 in the past five months alone. It's OK. You were probably too sickened by the fact that Dubya has just demanded another $46 billion from Congress to add to the previous $140 billion, all so that he may even more brutally lose the Iraq war.

Or perhaps you were distracted by how the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the total cost of Bush's disastrous invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, now hovering around $600 billion, will hit a cool $2.4 trillion in a mere 10 years, a simply staggering amount of unimaginable waste, with not a single thing to show for it.

Except, oh sweet Jesus yes, for the terrorist watch list, that little red flag o' fascism, another warning light on the nation's jumbled dashboard, blinking frantically to let us know that something is indeed deeply wrong with our unstable, overheated engine.

But wait, maybe it's not all that dire after all. Maybe we are merely looking at this all wrong.

After all, Rule No. 1 in the Eternal Karmic Guidebook says that like attracts like, violence begets violence, dark creates only more dark. Hence, the minute you set up a nasty government system designed to screen for hate and fear and violence, well, the more hate and fear and violence the system will find, and the more that must be created for it to find, and the larger the system will get. And on it goes.

But here is the good news: This truism also works in reverse. Or rather, inverse.

Which is to say, I am here to suggest an alternative. I am here to offer up a new plan, a devious little scheme that will run directly counter to the vile U.S. database of death.

I am here to suggest that we can override this insidious system and create a database of our own, one so goddamn radiant and slippery and omnipotent it shall overshadow the TSC's list and hack into its operating system and stab at its violent little heart and, to put it gently, shut that f-er down.

We shall invent a new algorithm. We shall begin a new list using a complex formula made of simple truisms of delight and honest pain and unquenchable love. We shall call it the Bliss Watch List.

I am only ¼ joking. Our screening process will be rigorous and incontrovertible and true. The BWL will contain only the names of people widely suspected of being savvy, titillating, open-hearted, deeply lovable, sexed-up geniuses of divine intent and hot self-exploration and ravenous intellectual curiosity.

It will contain the names of anyone who is suspected of daring to understand that life is not, in fact, a clenched and harrowing slog, but an actual ongoing, incessant, stunning manifestation of the divine, even when it's dirty and violent and obnoxious and horribly dressed and seems to contain only a bleak never-ending rundown of doom and decay and Dick Cheney. It's just that kind of list.

Creating the BWL will not be easy. Hence, I am hereby putting out a call. We shall need: teams of luminous database programmers who also double as appreciators of fine single-malt scotch; armies of fierce-eyed, nubile, callipygian, long-eyelashed interns who love to recite Yeats naked in the bathtub; squadrons of screeners who can write pornographic words in Sanskrit with their tongues.

Also: the seeds of 10 million oak trees, 8 billion bottles of Astroglide (for gifting), two large hawk feathers, a toenail clipping of Jesus, one pair of Muhammed's argyle socks, the eyelash of the Buddha, and a single drop of heavenly moisture from the hymen of Salomé. It's just that kind of system.

Do you know anyone who finds tremendous pleasure in, say, ecstatic dance, in the consumption of cold grapes on a hot summer day, or in photographing dark matter, and perhaps understands how all of these play into the idea that quantum physics and ancient mysticism are fast becoming one and the same?

Is there someone in your life who engages the world and thrives on books and media, who works to understand the woes of the world and the yank of politics and the guilty pleasures of pop culture, right along with the sadness of war and cancer and divorce and yet still, somehow, manages to wear really cute underwear and shrugs at contradiction and orgasms with their mouth open?

Have you personally witnessed or participated in a calm, simple, complicated, messy, or otherwise spiritually palpable act of bliss? Have you spoken out, changed your mind, shattered a stagnant belief, relaxed a clenched perspective, opened to a new possibility, blown yourself out of the water with your own impressive ability to, well, blow yourself out of the water? Call or log into the BWL, and report it immediately.

This is what will happen: Our international team of radical conspirators and sly informers and luminous spies will immediately appreciate you like you cannot even imagine.

Then a random team member will tickle the ass of the person next to them with the hawk feather, yell your name to the heavens (which, of course, will yell it right back), and send a bottle of Astroglide to a needy Christian evangelical, Islamic fundamentalist, or the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir. It's just that kind of organization.

This much we know: Like attracts like. Bliss attracts bliss. Radiance births only more radiance. If the BWL attracts you, well, you know what to do.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2007/10/31/notes103107.DTL&nl=fix


Keep rocking, Mark!

SR

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