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.
© 1995 Daniel X. O'Neil
Epigraphs Dedication Foreward 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 |
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