Or where is Wilhelm Voigt now that we need him?

Wilhelm Voigt (the infamous Captain from Kopeneck) and Lieutenant Kiji are names that may not be familiar to you. These are two semi-fictional military characters devised to swindle and ridicule past military bureaucracies. Briefly, the "Captain from Kopeneck" was the true story of a fictional identity devised in 1906 by Wilhelm Voigt, a shoemaker who masqueraded as a Prussian officer and took over the city hall of Köpenick for the purposes of theft of papers and cash.

Lieutenant Kiji was immortalized in Prokofiev's famous symphonic suite. The piece is perhaps best known for its deft employment in the soundtrack for the Alec Guinness movie, The Horse's Mouth. All artistic associations aside, Lieutenant Kiji was another mythical character made up by incompetent, but creative, bureaucrats in old Czarist Russia who found that they had inadvertently created a nonexistent Lt. Kiji through a typographical error. When one of their superiors wanted to talk to the guy, they invented an elaborate life history and heroic death for him in order to deal with the situation.

In a society such as ours, it is easy to find parallels that echo the conditions that inspired these legendary frauds of the past. Ours is not so different from other hierarchical societies. In fact we are coming to strongly resemble those of the bureaucratically dominated military cultures of pre revolutionary Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire - the settings of these two infamous deceptions.

Success in our culture is coming to be dominated more by the appearance of accomplishment and the pursuit of its credentials than by authentic achievement. Children are raised in an educational system that educates "to the test," a majority of our adolescents confess to, more than anything in the world, just wanting "to be famous" and a sizable number of graduates of this unfortunate environment say that it is OK to fudge or downright lie on a resume to increase ones chances of getting a better position.

Of course such a society is ripe pickings for all manner of fraudsters - from local bunko artists to the current occupant of the Oval office. On occasion the voters have even been known to elect an actor - thinking that, because he looks the part, he must somehow possess the qualities of the roles he is plays. What I am surprised at, is that the proto-revolutionary left has not grasped this "appearance before reality" principle and used it to ridicule, sabotage and subvert the very institutions they despise so. We seem to have forgotten the sixties' lessons the SDS, the Weathermen and especially the Youth International Party (YIPPIE) taught us.

Ironically the evil ones have used precisely this kind of fraud and paraded it before the public to prop up their own shaky lies, positions and programs. Let's not even get into the qualifications of our president or the credentials of most administration and cabinet officials. Lets look at how the Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch stories were paraded like Kiji, representing attributes and fictionalizations of experiences that never were. Even those "terrorists" we are told to hate often have something of a made up, mythic and ephemeral quality about them. Sometimes even their physical existence itself is in doubt. These days, everything has been spun so nearly unto death that, in the words of the old Brit journalist, "I don't believe anything until it's been officially denied." Yes, the forces of our Hoaxes-R-Us-Imperialism know well how to spin this reality and delude the public towards its own ends.

We seem to forget that the knife cuts both ways. I am thinking of certain kinds of present culture jammers such as Billionaires for Bush, the WTO jokesters documented in the film Yes Men and perhaps even certain hackers who can bring an entire industry to its knees. Unfortunately the hacker is usually just some pimply faced kid with too much time on his hands and the insatiable desire to create an effect at distance - not one with any valid target or any real rage against the machine. The possibilities of the use of parody, satire, impersonation, creative sabotage and hoax seem to be a lost art that has slipped off the table and largely been forgotten by those of us who so completely feel the thirst for change. We too often forget just how fragile this whole machinery of our peculiar brand of fascism is and the many ways we can alert out fellow citizens as to what a laughingstock those who would presume to rule us are. We may have lost our democracy, but I hope we haven't lost our sense of humor.

Bob Boldt

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