In December 1994, I published an eight-part verse essay called, “Boilerplate: Koreshians, Potential Rioters, and Bureaucratic Complicity in American Self-Destruction”, subtitled, “Being a List of 8 Ways in Which the Dead at Waco are a Lot Like the Rest of Us”.
Here’s more info on the book we published, with a snip:
Boilerplate was first published as a stand-alone book designed and produced by Stephen Farrell from Slip Studios in Chicago. It also appeared in Memo To All Employees.
Stephen produced three printings of Boilerplate in stand-alone form. The first was December 1994 and the second was January 1995. Both of these printings were very small quanitities, in the range of a couple dozen. The books are completely hand-made. The covers are cut from gun range targets. The inside spreads are hand cut from paper run through a commercial grade office printer. Many of Stephen’s students from the Illinois Institute of Art helped in production of the book.
1994: Boilerplate
You can read the entire text of this essay as well. As the title and subtitle suggest, the essay was focused on the Waco disaster of 1993. That event ended 30 years ago today.
Here’s a recording of Boilerplate that I did in 1995 in Sherman Oaks, California as a cello duet with Dylan Morgan, who also composed all of the music for the piece:
I started writing Boilerplate the day after the federal agents breached the Branch Davidian compound and were turned back. That was the day after my 26th birthday. Here is a snip of what I wrote:
The thing is that you have to kill four federal agents and have like 1,000 weapons in your house with about 30 of your own children by 15 different women as hostages, then you can get a live feed with CNN.
You see your power eroding and you try to do something about it. The names of these places begin to form a resident chime, they show us an easy place to keep the dead– Royal Oak, Michigan, Palatine, Illinois.
Journal entry, March 1, 1993
This has come true, has become cliche, has been something that is completely unoriginal and understood by all who breathe here. Reality television is where it’s at and everybody gets their attention and everybody gets their contract in Andy Warhol gets his say.
Here’s parts of my entry from April 29, 1993:
Looking back, in the context of this anniversary, I see what I wrote as having three thrusts: sympathy, tolerance, and patriotism.
Sympathy because I want to feel in league with the Koreshians– this is explicit in the making of the book. They were, in fact, just like the rest of us. People who were subjected to the same tactics as the rest of us regular people. We are all regular. This fact– we’re like them– was used by Donald Trump to become president. As I wrote in 1994, “We can expect Koreshians and Potential Rioters and hardly more.”
Tolerance because I like living in a country that allows for weirdos. I would never want to live outside of Waco, Texas with a guitar rock preacher, but I like living in a place where being an asshole is allowed. We’re messy and goofy and criminal and violent and tbh we really have a lot of issues. Those who don’t acknowledge that end of stilted and on the outs. Like single servings we stare at the glow and wonder where everyone else is.
Patriotism because as a nation we were finally forced to make a choice. The final child of Waco was the January 6 United States Capitol attack. That day there was a head count– that’s what happens in any insurrection, anywhere. There comes a day of enumeration, the day where the masses say what side they’re on. We saw that there was no majority for insurrection. I see civic cohesion in our future.
Those who clout-predict civil war never seem to say who’ll win. It’s us.
We’ve swallowed Waco whole.
We are one thin ribbon of people and the living can learn from the dead.