Levitate the Pentagon

By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times

".......Forty years after the levitation of the Pentagon, there's no "democracy" to speak of anywhere. This is a plutocratic world. There's no formidable push to change the world for the better anywhere - but there are already rumblings of repressed anger from all corners of the global South, capable of exploding like a thousand volcanoes.

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek evaluates how hard it is today to think of a credible alternative to the current system: "Thanks to all these Hollywood movies and the catastrophic scenarios depicted by ecologists, it is easier today to imagine a total catastrophe destroying all life on Earth than a radical change in social life. In sum, an asteroid touches the Earth, but capitalism survives."

In 1967, the Pentagon did not engage in liftoff. It did not turn pink. But the 1967 levitation ceremony at least gave the world the indelible poetic metaphor of a rose down the barrel of a M16 - and the flowers dropping from the helmets of trembling 21-year-old soldiers. The Pentagon was humbled, anyway. It was - at least metaphorically - levitated. And the US - losing any intellectual support from its elites - started losing the war on Southeast Asians for good. It was a triumph of the human imagination over heavy-metal greed.

Can US public opinion - or at least the iPod generation - muster the will, the commitment and the courage to do it all over again? "