Boilerplate: Koreshians, Potential Rioters, and Bureaucratic Complicity in American Self-destruction
Boilerplate was first published as a stand-alone book designed and produced by Stephen Farrell from Slip Studios here in Chicago. It also appeared in Memo To All Employees.
Stephen produced three printings of Boilerplate in stand-alone form. The first was December 1994 and the second was January 1995. Both of these printings were very small quanitities, in the range of a couple dozen. The books are completely hand-made. The covers are cut from gun range targets. The inside spreads are hand cut from paper run through a commercial grade office printer. Many of Stephen’s students from the Illinois Institute of Art helped in production of the book.
The third printing of Boilerplate was May 1, 1995, the same day Memo To All Employees was published.
The book has a cover price of $6 and it has never been professionally distributed; only sold by hand.
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Complete text
EPIGRAPHS
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
First, we’re going to cut it off,
and then we’re going to kill it.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell speaking of the Iraqi Army in Kuwait, January 23, 1991
DEDICATION
for Deng Xiaoping.
Ni-Hao!
FOREWARD
Now that the Branch Davidian Compound has burned to the ground,
now that they are all dead and gone and the
dominant culture puts its stern face back on,
furnished with police forces and satellite cities and hard/soft book deals
they draw back from the whimsy and jokes.
The news grubs at the ashes and tsks its head from side to side.
Now those on the outside of this psychodrama
from central casting can look on in earnest,
and fortify ourselves with a lesson like gasoline siphoned from a gastank.
Eight ways we are a lot like them
1 CONTAINED
First we remove the foliage from around the camp.
Separate outside from inside and only agents and
turncoats travel twixt. Then the incessant blasting of Nancy
Sinatra and rabbit squeals and Tibetan monk chants and the
speakers are all turned inward.
First we build a tall project wedged between a river and a bypass highway.
First we lay cable into each home and inflict us with a nation’s balm.
Like single servings we stare at the glow and wonder where everyone else is.
Stuffed into compartments of agnates; race is the great one foisted but
class comes first of all. Again and again we’re dipped into hot wax like
wicks in a factory and the wax says, “enter into mankind as a prisoner only.”
2 ARMED
“They were itching for a fight” the papers say now like they were
monkeys near food time. From prison shiv to the pink pistol of a lady,
there’s a lot of good reasons to be
belligerent once you got a club in your hand.
The startling rat a tat metal of the Koreshians used to pick off
government employees were manufactured here in proud America and
sold in sanctioned swap meets.
Rain falls from the sky; guns are shipped in cartons.
Just like the rest of us— ghetto-dwellers,
doomsday prophets, Texans, duck-hunters, candidates,
wife-beaters, mailmen, off-duty cops, kids:
we all hug the weapons and keep them close.
3 DERANGED
Scrang the sirens go. We’re led from one crisis to the
next, whether it’s a hurricane or a foreign intervention or the dead at
Brown’s Chicken (you can kill 7
people before midnight and get away with it) in
Palatine, Illinois. Cop shows beat us in front of ourselves.
There is no time for reflection, only a stilted
genuflection at each virtual funeral.
Quiet contemplation is discouraged— even drycleaning chemicals make us sick.
Glazed with the patina and muck of a whole culture built on destroying yesterday.
Collective memory is hosed out and
patted into caloric units of the whitewashed milquetoast truth.
Look at Ollie North— he whacked us over the head and we let him run for Senator.
That’s deranged. Oh, the rabbit squeals in each ear,
the rabbit squeals indeed.
4 MARGINALIZED
As one blunt apparatus the economy works like a snowplow. In the innocent neighbor faces of all employees the economy– which like God is everywhere and sacred– works as a broad mechanism of the center and what is the center without the pale to step beyond? Marginalization is an act of the center and driven by snarling quest.
The Koreshians raid must have been someone’s Focus Group– there were 9 o’clock meetings. Team Leaders with coffee in styrofoam cups spoke in nifty “game plans” and “situations” and “chalk talk”. This is the stuff of budgets.
This is what people call turf and the Thanksgiving turkey is born in all this. Who here does not bite this boob sometime? And who will denounce someone for feeding their children and clothing themselves against wind and snow and nudging for a spot at the trough? This is our quandary: Collectively all we do is carry out the directives of clenched teeth whether as a quality control clerk at a metal fastener subcontractor for warplanes or as the administrative assistant to the honcho in charge of canning the workers or as a hitman of the workaday murder industry there are only so many ways to come up with a mortgage. This is not some whispered conspiracy; this is the broad daylight complicity in our own self-destruction.
What do we expect of those on the fringes, in the crusty dirty snow piled up at the edges of expressways? What about the ones after the last nipple in line?
We can expect Koreshians and Potential Rioters and hardly more.
5 ORGANIZED
Often the marginalized shake hands with their own black and blueness.
Otherness is stroked for a while, made to swell until
virtue is made from deficiency.
A mild or strong group is formed in the cornfield or concrete block
apartment or downtown office building or 90 miles south of Fort Worth.
The rest of us plunk down into subgroups of 15 or so too,
often stockpiling enough similarities in each other whether it’s the
enjoyment of pro football or the repressed damage of mean parents or
training in the same profession or the loss of a child due to drunk drivers
or the mistaken belief that some freakezoid is the same Jesus Christ who used to
walk Earth. This way we raze a nation of citizens and
come up with a millioned
honeycombed units fractured, floating.
Lobbyists are good at this. Urban streetgang leaders are good at this.
David Koresh was good at this. Presidential candidates had better be good at
this or won’t win. Once there is a cohesive group
and the thwack of bureaucratic pressure
is placed at a right angle to it
things can go south, and do.
6 NEGOTIATED
Once the Koreshians killed four agents the tone changed.
“Hey hey hey slow dooowwwn there folks”
(it always comes down to “folks” like a balded man with his palms out and
arms bent to a surging crowd, always “folks” at this moment).
One day the phone call comes.
The negotiator will say something soothing like
“your mom’s out here” or “your lawyer is on the way in with a TV contract” or
the drug dealer who says to the cop “OK, you want in on this?”
Once you got a sliver of power that’s when the phone rings.
Except the Koreshians were up for 50 days listening to rabbits and they were
not exactly sane to begin with this is not exactly
“Dog Day Afternoon” or even cute.
(The chafing, the chafing)
The DEA didn’t bother to act in good faith
because negotiation and attack are interchangeable.
By now the Koreshians or poor Noriega “a corrupt debauch thug”
are all dressed up for a pounding, dehumanized.
Look at Haiti’s Cedras— one day he was a jerk/
murderer the next his little kid is bouncing on Jimmy Carter’s
knee. The boilerplate is rigid but teeters sometimes:
the bureaucracy makes the rest of us only
the subject of satiate, disdain, disinformation,
cash payments, and alternative whacks on the braincase.
Which one depends more on whim and the biorythms of
middle managers than anything else.
After a while we were able to say finally like a broken parrot
“Get rid of them they’re costing us money they’re a
big bore and crazy anyway except for the kids—
go in and save the kids.”
There is one messy doctrine and like the Koreshians we are surrounded.
7 ATTACKED
So now they enter with the battering rams executing the aforesaid game plans.
Or maybe the attack is wholly unconscious and unintended
(The dead of Pan Am 103 included Syracuse students but also some
spies going home on holiday.)
The consequences of complicity come in many ways and we cannot divorce our-
selves from any of them.
Military aircraft falls from the sky that hurts too.
Heavy metals and strontium in the water table are not passive.
The fire it did burn at noon and either it was set from inside
or something else but even collateral damage is
part of the deal, all wrapped up.
Every shooting among the rest of us is a self-inflicted wound.
Eventually the rest of us draw the blustery attention of the bureaucracy and
it comes in the form of your mother’s face.
The police are in the service of property and fraudulent
affidavits clang the prison doors shut how many people can we
put there how many food services contracts can be awarded doesn’t this hurt?
We have more in common with the beaten than the beaters.
Maybe someday soon we’ll find a way to kill the kids too without blinking.
8 IMMOLATED
Now all the policies have been enacted,
and the water is washed over all of the
‘flames, and it comes down to “look what they did.”
The mantra says how they were nuts and we try to place a
respectable wall between us and them
“look what they did.” The looters and burners and petty
crooks walking out of furniture stores with cheap beanbag chairs in the
Rodney King riots they were deplored too.
They were compared to dogs pissing on themselves but each day is not brand-new.
Each day the coppery scent of blood spilled the day before is still in the air.
The containment and armament of entire populations are not erased at daybreak.
The derangement and marginalization and loud booms
of the past still ring and make headaches today.
The organizations and negotiations and suicide pacts of
sickos are not null and void with one sun cycle.
Attacks at dawn don’t disappear, the soil stains around
the perimeter of a fiery immolation don’t go away ever.
There is no such thing as an isolated event.
As a nation we are one thin ribbon of people and the living can learn from the dead.