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Pawelewski's Stratagem
the bears are in trouble and the sidewalks are in trouble this thing. Pawelewski's stratagem. it was something the more theatrically inclined AnarchArtists would test. someone developed a tactic for overthrowing the government by overloading their paper-handling capacities. you know, like the students who brought a bank down by forming continuous queues to deposit a few cents in their accounts, and then lopping back to withdraw those few cents again. and demanding full documentation of each transaction. they did some surveys and determined that this government spent most of its attention on citizens' mental health. the first useful sortie we devised was to visit, in twos and threes, the nearest state psych collective and spend four days a week there, confessing to bizarre mental disturbances. if there were enough of us pretending to be crazy enough, we could slow the machine down quite a bit. it wasn't easy, as far as performance art goes. i did it a couple of times. the hard part was walking the line between having problems too trivial for the state to worry about and being actively dangerous, which might risk Review (which was a nice way of saying "lobotomised and implanted with remote control devices"). we'd hit on the idea of inventing an odd cult, some wierd-ass Maracite splinter. we gave the psych terminals contradictory details about this cult, its supposed tenets, who of us were members and who were trying to be. and so on. we hoped to cause a stir in the police, try to waste some money. yeah, we forgot. they don't use money, they use energy. we got the expected result. within a few weeks three 'sleeper' students had been 'awoken'; they revealed themselves as the heads of this so-called cult. we sneered; we knew that they'd had nothing to do with it. we had invented it. a few other students joined. we'd seen this before. it was the State, fighting back against this imagined threat by assuming control of it. predictably enough after this the State did something different (we'd been long past the point of arguing about the "we're damned if we do and damned if we don't" problem; the State was a better chess player than any of us). it reacted to our game with what most people would say was over-enthusiasm (and in this, even, i recognised the fine hand of the dominion's SubOrdinator. i had seen this pattern before. we attack. it attempts subversion. we retreat. it attacks harshly in order to condition us against attacking again.) there were arrests and some low-level Reviewing (nothing implanted, in other words - they just pried the lid back and stirred it a bit with a metal ruler. imperial and metric scales.) but eventually most of us were released. the ones who weren't, we decided were probably State plants who needed their batteries charged or something. but the State hasn't let us forget that we have to be good. every so often -and this has happened to all of us and happens still, which led to the theory that it was an anarchartist inter-cabal joke - we'd hear voices. very clearly, from no visible source. it happened to me once in a one-man boat in the middle of a mostly empty lake. tiny, high-pitched chuckling voices, repeating the words "false memory syndrome! false memory syndrome!" with an odd kind of abstracted urgency (as if cheering on a racehorse they knew was going to lose anyway), over and over again. they'd fade in, stay for a minute or two, then fade out again. my head is killing me; it seems everyone else gets to spend more time in here than i do. welcome to the pointless bloody depressing even-Terry-Gilliam-didn't-think-of-this-one future.
Fri, 9 Apr 1999 |
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