Hella Nation - Evan Wright [8]
The power of America’s corporate marketeers to co-opt cultural dissent was driven home to me after the publication of “Wingnut’s Last Day on Earth”—which was based on my travels with anarchists as they waged war on the Gap by defacing its stores. The article featured an iconic photograph—shot by Mark Seliger, who also photographed the Kurt Cobain anti-corporate rock cover of Rolling Stone—of Wingnut, an anarchist in a black hoodie jacket. The black hoodie had become an anarchist symbol—much in the news then—and a banner of anticorporate sentiment. Within months of the photo’s publication, the storefronts of Gaps across America prominently displayed the corporation’s new line of black hoodies.
If there was a single strain of thought uniting my diverse subjects it was suspicion of the Matrix-like powers of a hostile monolith—the mainstream media, or corporations, or the government—to control people’s minds by shaping reality. Yet among the groups and individuals profiled in Hella Nation, none would ever agree on what defines the nation, or the forces they believe control it. For Pat Dollard, the nation was a place held captive by the liberal media, for the anarchists it was the corporate capitalist oppressors, for the white supremacists it was “ZOG,” the Zionist Occupation Government. Internet huckster Seth Warshavsky, whom I profiled in “Portrait of a Con Artist,” had a relentlessly optimistic view of America as a vast happy-land of potential suckers. For many of the troops I encountered, America remained a beacon of democracy, for which they were proud to serve, sometimes despite grave questions about the wars they were fighting. One of the teenage anarchists I traveled with down the West Coast defined the nation this way each time we stopped at a highway rest station: “Wow, it’s so hella America.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Oh, God,” she explained. “Like hella real. Hella harsh.”
NOT MUCH WAR, BUT PLENTY OF HELL
To the soldiers of the Fifth Platoon Delta Company living at Kandahar Airfield, deep in the former Taliban stronghold of southeastern Afghanistan, dawn breaks each morning with a horrible stench. Their tent is located at the southernmost end of the airfield, not far from the “shit lagoon”—the canal where all the excrement from the camp’s five thousand- plus inhabitants is dumped every day. Temperatures in Kandahar soar to more than 125 degrees, and the first hot winds of the morning bear an overwhelming smell of raw sewage, spiced with the odor of disinfectant from the latrines outside the tent, not to mention occasional gusts of diesel fuel blowing off the line of helicopters on the nearby runway. Sitting on the edge of his cot, twenty-year-old Private Joshua Farrar, a former surfer from South Florida, shakes a Newport out of a dust-covered pack, surveys his fellow soldiers getting up to face another day in Afghanistan and concludes, “This all sucks.”
The Fifth Platoon Delta are air-assault infantry attached to the 3-187th Battalion, America’s main combat force in southeastern Afghanistan. Their job is to fly into battle on helicopters, rappel down and blow the crap out of tanks, fortifications and the enemy. But in Afghanistan the soldiers have been thrust into an ill-defined role. They mount round-the-clock combat recon patrols through