FREEDOM HIGHWAY

driving through Empire

The choice of time period for these recordings (September 2002) was obviously significant (additional recordings were made on the west coast in March-April 2003 and again between December 2003 and May 2004). In addition to being the anniversary of 9/11, September 2002 marked the White House's announcement of its radical new military policy of "preventive war" and concurrently, the launch of the Bush administration's relentless, hammering PR campaign for the 2003 war in Iraq, the first test of the new military policy. The airwaves at that time were filled with a strange mixture of post-disaster soul-searching and belligerent, repetitive and relentless rallying-cries for war. September 2002 can perhaps be pinpointed as the moment when American empire came out of the closet - although of course it's been building since the nineteenth century and accelerating since 1945, it's only in the very short span of the last year or two that the phrase has been on everyone's lips.