Rosa Parks, Enforcing the Constitution, and Who Will Bell the Cat?

I trust the reader will remember the old fable about the mice who got tired of being caught, toyed with, and eaten by the cat. There will be, however, many who don’t recognize the mice and the cat in public life today. For them - conservative and liberal extremists too conservative and too liberal to recognize the reality they live in - I will point out that we are the mice, and the cat is federal government.

In the fable, the mice had a brainstorm. If someone would put a bell on the cat, they would hear him coming, and have time to flee. But who would “Bell the Cat?”

The people who founded the United States had the same problem. Unlike the mice, though, they were very courageous. They also had men like Patrick Henry. Remember? “Is life so dear, and tranquility so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

You will note, I hope, that no one stood that day to protest the mention of God during discussion having to do with government and its affairs in the United
States. There was no government yet, and no United States. More, they would say that the human rights they would soon proclaim came from God. Hard to do that, if you mean to keep God out of government. Hard to speak or deliberate over those rights, too.

But we speak of “belling the cat.” The cat today makes the mice’s cat look like a pussycat. That is to say that federal government’s daily routine outrages make a cat’s behavior toward mice seem benevolent by comparison. It not only captures (nearly 2,000,000 in prison, one in every thirty-five males on parole, probation, or awaiting trial), toys with (yearly, 150,000 new statutes, laws, ordinances, regulations and rules), and kills us (2003 the most recent death toll in Iraq, plus that of Afghanistan), it has made Charmin of the Constitution our Founding Fathers pledged “their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor" for. Who will bell THIS cat?

Actually, for today’s mice, the bell shouldn’t have to be a brainstorm. A woman named Rosa Parks got the idea (“No, sir, I will NOT give up my seat on this bus” – remember?) and a man named Martin Luther King, Jr. hung the bell on the cat, big time. It’s been done, and umbriaggo.

So, what’s the problem? I’ll tell you (it’s my essay, you know). “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves . . .” that we are mice. Courage, cojones, balls. THAT is the problem. Men nowadays RECITE Patrick Henry; they don’t DO Patrick Henry. Life IS “so dear, and tranquility so sweet.”

In the piece I wrote yesterday, I cited a mere few or the evil usurpations – to use a word the Founding Fathers seemed to prefer when discussing our subject – inflicted upon us by federal government: the prostituted Grand Jury, and the co-opted Petit Jury of Peers, the contemptuously ignored Ninth and Tenth Amendments, and many, many more.

The right to own property is a private federal joke (don’t forget, I’ve been listening, and heard them speak of “seizure fever – catch it”). Literally millions of Americans have been caught, toyed with, and eaten alive by the cat called Internal Revenue Service. Like I was. On the say-so of a dog who sniffs your car and wags his tail excitedly, the government can seize your car, house, and everything you own. Even when proven, innocent, you may or may not get your property back. Ask me, I’ve been there, too.

And it goes on. Oh, from time to time, the cat has been belled. I did it. I hung one on that sucker he’ll never forget. The Omnibus Taxpayers Bill of Rights authored by Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa (Chuck and I lived seventeen miles apart back home in Iowa) is one hell of a bell.

Except you can’t hear it, can you? You can’t hear it because the clapper got taken out within days of its fashioning, when the Congress, led by the Texas senator who was later the Secretary of the Treasury (if you’re so dumb you think that mere co-incidence, stop reading – you’re brain dead), handed enforcement of the law to IRS. All of that while the clapper - America's vaunted whistle-blowers, the media - hung there, dead silent.

If you need an example of the contempt you are held in by your federal “servants,” there could be no better than that. Think of it. A law intended to control the Mafia, given by the legislators to the Mafia to enforce. Tell me a bigger, louder example of nonsense - sneering, contemptuous nonsense - than that. But it’s the law – FEDERAL law.

And if you didn't know, it's because the bell I hung on the federal cat lost its clapper.

You are held in utter contempt by your government, you know. You are held in contempt because you deserve it. “Life IS so dear, and tranquility so sweet.” Besides, the guy the cat has and is toying with, killing, is somebody else, right now. It’s not you or your kid who is being used and spent in Iraq like small arms ammunition. It’s not your family or marriage that’s being destroyed by IRS, like mine was, and it's not your kid who’s being broken under their pressure and tries to kill himself.

“When the Nazis came for the Jews,” Dietrich Bonhofer said, “I wasn’t concerned; I’m not a Jew. When they came for the Protestants, I didn’t care; I’m Catholic. Now they’ve come for me, and there’s no one to complain to for help.”

People have the government they deserve, if Sixteenth Century French essayist Michel de Montaigne is right. If I’m right, it’s because their MEN have the government they deserve. Today’s male is the “metrosexual” kind, a pussy-whipped, effeminate, middle-finger-salute-from-a-passing-car, shadow of what men once were. I won’t have to argue that one with much vehemence – the fact of it is all around us, everywhere evident. I’ve spoken of a US Constitution being raped repeatedly by a marauding federal government. Like a church here in Texas a few years ago, where "men" stood around or cowered under pews while a lunatic with a 9mm pistol raged about shooting until he had killed nine people, the rape of the Constitution takes place while the nation and society’s men stand around or dive cravenly for cover, doing nothing.

Another example of an abuse the studs who founded our nation would not have tolerated is the disgraceful fact that in all but a few states, enactments by feminism, “life is so dear and tranquility so sweet” legislatures have castrated society by removing the right to resist unlawful arrest. The mice may not resist the cat. In the United States of America, whose Founding Father Thomas Jefferson said, “The tree of Liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants …,” that is incredible. Disgusting.

The Constitution of the United States, its supreme law, controls government. That it must, therefore, be enforced by the people is utterly self-evident, something a child could understand. Like the Omnibus Taxpayers Bill of Rights, that it will not be enforced by the government it controls is equally self-evident.

The damned cat will not put the damned bell on himself.

So, it’s time. You can live on your knees and on your dead asses or you can die on your feet. There’s never been any other choice. Montaigne again – remember? We stand up now, or we die, anyway. We die either by being fed piecemeal into the wars government will continually foment for the purpose of selling its arms, and in the nuclear holocaust that will inevitably result, or we will die under brutal terrorism like the IRS, but we will die.

Some of us, people like me, will die of humiliation.

Sure, it will be hard. Freedom isn’t free. The enemy will not surrender his power, his wealth and his prerogatives without a fierce fight. He’s got cojones, too – or he wouldn’t be the boss the way he is now. But a little woman in Montgomery Alabama, Rosa Parks, did it. She "fetched him one up aside the head" that shook him to his toes. Martin Luther King and hundreds of thousands of black Americans did it. The people who founded our country did it. We enforce our rights as human beings, gifts of God (screw you, if you are among those who would deny that), or we get what we deserve.

And we admit that Rosa Parks was better than we are. She probably was, anyway.

No doubt about it.

Reply to a Friend's Bush Apologist Letter

I write essays for UselessKnowledge.com, as do several of my friends. One wrote an exceptionally well done apology for the Bush Administration, its war in Iraq, and the attack on Islam it represent for many of that particular creed. I wrote the following response:

"Make no mistake, Ron Lewis is a thoughtful guy. I’M a thoughtful guy, and I’m often wrong, too. More, I can certainly see how Ron can think the way he does. A whole lot of very bright people feel that way. They’re wrong, too.

"You see (and at the risk that I’ve already said it too often), I’m a tactician. It’s what I did – and still do - for a number of U.S. Army generals. Tactics was one of my assignments when I coached the US National Judo Team. I’m a tactician and I know better. Not only do I know better, but most of the former and still active military men I know and talk with know better, too – and they say so. So this (with a couple corrections of my habitual typos and run-on sentences) is what I’ve just written Ron":

"'I certainly share your concern for our kids' future. In fact, I never watch a little kid these days (something I love to do - they're the most precious thing there is) without real sadness. God, are we handing them a mess! As a matter of fact, the foreword in one of the first books I wrote is an apology to young people. I said I knew that one day, as Benjamin Franklin wrote, they would feel like pissing on our graves. I said I wanted them to know that all my life, with every fiber of my being, I fought to prevent what I knew was going to happen to them. When they came to my grave, they might feel like passing by.

“'You are generally right. But I'm a judoman (fifty-five years, more than a thousand organized matches). I know that headlong, unplanned attacks get burned just about every time. I also know that grapplers beat punchers and kickers just about invariably. As a military tactician (actually what I did for several generals), I also know that covert operations multiply their actual, TO&E force many times, and that any offense must be at least three times as powerful as any defense. I know, too, that the classic blunder of military history is the attack over unfriendly or uncommitted territory, or water - i.e., the extended one (Eisenhower knew that, and nearly had a nervous breakdown during Normandy). Russia during WW-2 continually lost huge numbers of troops after breaking pell-mell through the German lines and having the resulting bulge cut off. The latest examples of that classic blunder have been Vietnam and Iraq. To attack successfully under these conditions requires numerical and logistical superiority of at least fifty to one. Even we can never have that.

“'It's the reason we have never, and will never, be invaded.

“'I may have mentioned it here, but my friends will tell you that I predicted exactly (and I mean in detail) what has happened in Iraq, and that two months before invasion. There is simply no way that our military could have been as stupid as it obviously appears to have been. All over the world, military men (and a number I know and correspond with regularly) agree on that and are in dropped-jaw wonder at what we've done. NOBODY IS THIS STUPID. So what's the reason?

“'Well, my friend, in 1938, there were no German generals who agreed with what Hitler seemed intent on doing. When he began to unfold his plan, opposition was everywhere (almost literally) in the German general staff. To attack everyone around you sets up the classic (use that word a lot, don't I?) military nightmare, that of being surrounded. To be at war with an enemy whose industry and supply you can't reach is an even worse nightmare. To be surrounded by enemies whose industry and supply you can't reach is the worst of all nightmares. Still, Germany not only went to war, it went to war knowing full well that the worst nightmare was inevitable. Why?

“'German could have saved itself only one way, and that way is what the people who attempted to kill Hitler with the famous Fuehrerbunker bomb intended. Knowing and confident of our fear and respect for their science and weaponry, to say nothing of the obvious superiority of German soldiers, they intended to put a man they knew the Allies respected, Field Marshall Erwin Rommel in the office of President, then negotiate a peace. Many historians agree that it could have succeeded.

“'Ron, if we continue on our present course, the US will not survive in the state we know, respect, and love. Your daughter will live through both the transition and what comes. The military-industrial cabal that took over - even after President Dwight Eisenhower warned us about and John President Kennedy died trying to stop it - the economy and government of the United States immediately after World War Two doesn't care. Theirs is a psychological and sociological sickness, the deadliest known to man, that of power and greed. That their kind will stop at nothing is the loudest, most certainly of history’s lessons. Need I say with George Santayana and Winston Churchill that 'those who will not learn from history are condemned to repeat it?'

“'If we don't have the courage, and honor, to withdraw from Iraq within the next two years, your daughter and her fellows will piss on your grave. Provided, that is, that they still live to do it. Think about it.

“'By the way, I decided while I wrote this that I'm going to publish it on UK, verbatim. I care about children, and your daughter, that much.'


"'Hal'"

The Liar on the Deck of the Honest Abe

Words seldom fail me. I’ve been a student of language and an admirer of communication skills since high school, and anyone who knows me will tell you that I am seldom nonplussed – not where words are concerned. But last night’s congressional hearings concerned with Department of the Army “efforts” to “up-armor” Humvee fighting vehicles left me gulping like a fish.

And scared enough to tell my friends we’d damned well better look to ourselves for any of the protection and security we might expect would be provided by the people our Constitution charges with that sort of thing. Military Intelligence is, indeed, an oxymoron. Folks, the watchmen ain’t watchin’.

As to the hearings, I can only summarize. Man alive, I was so stunned, so damned disgusted and mad, I can’t even remember it all – the mental film that’s memory burned up in places. General Richard Cody, Vice Chief of Staff, US. Army (assumed that position June 24, 2004) said basically – I paraphrase, mind you – that Panjandrums on the Potomac didn’t know, don’t know, couldn’t and can’t, have no idea, have better things to do, and are annoyed that anyone notices.

Soldiers are just equipment, goddammit, and generals – that includes commanders in chief – use equipment any way they see fit. Patriotic citizens mind their own goddamned business. Mothers should listen to “Taps,” take the f------ flag, go home, and shut up. Unless, of course, they are asked to participate in a photo op for His White House Majesty, or provide a media clip wherein she relates how proud and glad she is to have sacrificed her son for our freedom in the “war on terror.”

As for the congressman, their Herculean posturing and sickening demagoguery left no doubt as to their fecklessness lack of consequence in matters like these. Several simpered like grade-schoolers who’ve just recited their ABCs successfully at being able to similarly recite the numerical designations of the several (three, from what I could gather) kinds of “retro-fit” armor. We want the folks back home to know we care. Look how we’re keeping an eye on things.

“Retro-fit,” incidentally, obviously means what should have been there in the first place, but now goes there because some tactical genius Pentagon grade didn’t originally know it would come in handy. We planned to retro-fit, of course.

Does anybody remember that Colonel David Hackworth, now deceased (damn it, Hack – couldn’t you have stuck around a little longer?), not only called guys like this “perfumed princes,” but warned time and again that crap like this was coming?

How long has it been since we recognized that our Humvees needed armor? Let’s see: the war started in March, 2003, and our magnificent leader of men declared “mission accomplished” on May 1, 2003. That, you’ll recall, on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. That kind of “floors” me, too. Probably the biggest liar in our history, lying like the proverbial rug on the deck of a ship named for Honest Abe. How’s that for irony?!

But, as these “hearings” make it damned clear that isn’t all our Bush League administration has been lying about. “Mission Accomplished.” There’s only one way to make that the truth. That’s if the “mission” was to spend billions and to justify spending billions more.

Remember how our man Secretary of State Rummie assured us all that everything was going exactly according to plan? Well, now we discover that it was. Still is, from what I can gather. The only trouble is that we haven’t been in the huddle, and don’t know the real plan. We’re still thinking about winning, freeing all those wonderful Iraqi people whose freedom and welfare we’ve always been so concerned for all these years, and deposing that awful Saddam Hussein (you know – the guy we waited twenty-four years to suddenly hate).

That, you’ll surely remember, was supposed to somehow cramp Osama bin Laden’s style. Osama, you’ll also remember, was the one bee in the beehive of people who justifiably hate us that we singled out for the stinging that was the World Trade Center attack . . . er, which our carefully planned defenses against “terror” somehow let happen. Mind you, now - if you don’t follow that, it’s, of course, because you’re not the Napoleonic tacticians that our military genius leaders are.

You probably think the “mission accomplished” banner was meant for Halliburton and the rest of the military industrial corporations.

But let us recapitulate this truly wondrous military campaign. We began with “shock and awe” (by the way, isn't that the definition of terror?) that was “surgical” and “wonderfully humane” (our man Rummie – remember?), a barrage of two thousand pound bombs.

That’s to say nothing of double talk: as I reminded us all at that time, the result of a two thousand pound bomb is – and I quote – “utter destruction of everything within a radius of about 500 feet. ‘Overpressure,’ in the parlance of explosives experts, reaches several thousand pounds per square inch. The temperature goes to 8,500 degrees. Overpressure and heat simply obliterate everything, human and material, within that 500 foot circle. Next, metal fragments – the 1,055 lbs of the bomb that doesn’t actually explode - are spewed hundreds of yards. No one within 400 yards can expect to remain whole, and flying shrapnel kills and damages things up to 1,100 yards . . . “

I sort of gathered that planning for this clambake wasn’t – shall we say, conventional – when with much of Baghdad reduced to rubble, we proceeded to invade, only to somehow get a large part (who can say – you know how much truth we get out of these “leaders’) of the troops intended for the operation stranded and impounded in Turkey. The Turks wouldn’t help, either – something about their not being able to go through Kurdish territory in Iraq. Great, great planning, you see.

Now just about everybody who ever humped a military pack or carried a military rifle knew what the Arabs we trained during their tiff with the Soviets in Afghanistan would do, and what anyone faced with having to fight on the cheap a modern super-power military would do. Guess what? They’ve been doing it. So, knowing what the enemy would have to do and are now doing, and equipped with a military almost entirely equipped with vehicles designed for off-the-road travel, we cleverly planned to do most of our travel on the roads – and into the “improvised explosive devices” we knew we would encounter.

History, I predict, will dub this Rummie planning.

And, of course, the war in Iraq has gone downhill from there. The triumphant celebratory parades we planned – you know, where they strew rose petals in front of you – somehow didn’t materialize. What did materialize was those damned “I.E.D.s” When all the lights went out, the oil wells stopped, and the country’s infrastructure froze, we somehow accepted the idea that it was all expected. Planning, you know.

Remember how the war would be paid for with Iraqi oil? Planning.

If that weren’t enough, we were – somehow, again – able to accept the Bush League administration’s insistence that tribalist and factionalist rebellions – we argued for a couple of weeks over whether all the people shooting at us constituted rebellion, insurrection, or insurgence. Important to the planning, I suppose. Finally, we started attacking here, there, and everywhere – that’s were the enemy was. All according to plan, of course.

As the death toll after “mission accomplished” mounted, the public – unpatriotic ingrates that they are – began to ask stupid questions. At first, things like “how come, if we thought we’d be up against bio-chemical attack, the troops didn’t have gas masks and the like?” “How come – knowing what everybody whose every fired a damned pistol since World War One knows, that the Colt. .45 stops what it hits – our troops are being killed because they’re armed with that pip-squeak, candy-assed damned .38 caliber Beretta?” “How come Mexican television could show pictures of burning Abrams tanks, but we’re still being told there weren’t any Abrams lost?” “In the land of the free press, how come we aren’t shown the flagged-draped coffins?” And so on.

And so on, and so on . . . you tell me to what. Now this. The up-armored Humvees are in Kuwait. Some of them. There still aren’t enough, and the troops who were supposed to have been home two years ago are still in harm’s very definite war with second or third rate armor. Why is that? Well, the new ones have radios the troops weren’t trained to use. I know, if I say the word “planning” again, you’ll barf. But I’ve got to ask. Why in the hell would you put radios the troops don’t know how to use in vehicles you know they HAVE to use, and right away?

Yeah, I know, pl - Oops!

Notice how no one mentioned, by the way, the fact that the troops originally – that’s when the other guys started doing what every damned fool knew they would do – had to scrounge in dumps for anything they could put between them and one of those “I.E.D.” mines? Yeah. The “P” word.

So this carefully planned war goes on. The Perfumed Prince Panjandrums (“P” words, you know) now plan for us to occupy Iraq for twenty or thirty years. Don’t plan on it, folks. If you think young US citizens are stupid enough, after having watched last night’s logomachy called a hearing, to subject themselves to any more of your planning, you’re planning about the way you did for invasion.

One more thing, a question I will, in the manner of Scipio Africanus, ask with every piece I write from now on: when will the military industrial complex, and all those corporations like Halliburton, make their contribution to the “war on terror” effort? When will they forego, in other words, all their profit?

I’ll bet nobody planned for THAT.

In view of recent revelations in the media, if is fortunate that my book “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story” is finally published. Of course, another version prior to this one and entitled simply “Letters to Aaron,” was published by a subsidy publisher in 2000. In that instance, inasmuch as the United States Government was and had been doing everything in its power to stop publication, I simply wanted to get my story on the published record.

My reasons for having published the first "Letters" are being vindicated daily of late, as are the stories, claims, and charges I made in the books. The subtitle to “Letters … the Hal Luebbert Story,” after all, is “’America’ and its Freedom Myths.”

This morning, another of my “Letters” charges was substantiated, that of the myth having to do with due process, fair trial, and all that. The Fox News morning crew interviewed a man named Wilton Dredge, yet another victim of the United States and its government, a man convicted of sexual battery, aggravated battery, and burglary he could not have committed. Set free by DNA tests, he is one of literally hundreds so violated, the subject of a new documentary movie, “After Innocence.”

In my books, I relate having discovered the truth about United States jurisprudence and its vaunted system of justice. Years before, when I had caught a crooked local county attorney faking evidence in trial after trial (in one instance, demonstrating the proof incontrovertibly on a local television station), I also charged that the equally vaunted Federal Bureau of Investigation not only mishandled and faked (what would you expect, that someone who fouls up something like that would just say he’d done so?) evidence, it committed perjury as a matter of course (ditto the same reasoning – liars aren’t born, they’re made).

The rest, I said somewhere once, was history. Corner the federal government of this country, catch them in their customary criminal work, expect to hear from Internal Revenue Service.

I survived, as I also said somewhere recently, because I’m a tactician. And my tactical mind knew that the only way to survive the people who wield the law is to play judo – get leverage or get your opponent off balance. I did that by infiltrating, obtaining proof of my charges. It damned near cost me my life – you don’t think the rich and powerful just concede their riches and power, do you – but I didn’t go to jail. Too powerful. I still pay no taxes. I still do some pretty outrageous things, too (one friend who takes me to task frequently for my remarks concerning our profligate nation, and undoubtedly many like him, think that’s because this is such a free country, such a “nation of laws.” Sheesh! How brain-washed and indoctrinated can you be?!).

But here we are again. The king is nekkid as a jaybird. We’ve put hundreds of innocent men in jail. We’ve executed several, too; and there’s no way statistical probability will let us off the hook, there, either. And while we’re on the subject, or one like “equality under the law,” guess – and while you’re guessing, consider why that might be – what percentage of the men we wrongly convicted were BLACK men? We’re not a racist country, either. Of course not.

Was I talking about myths?

Anyway, here we are, like I said. The liar has been caught again. We’re a fraud before the whole world. In fact, we’re much like all those totalitarian governments we’ve railed against for years. The “Land of the Free” is really the land of the legally oppressed, the dispossessed, and the wrongfully imprisoned. The “Land of Opportunity” is really the land of the wretched poor (forty million of them) and those worked literally to death by taxation. The “Nation of Laws” is really the nation of the plea-bargain, the ex parte deal with the judge, and the politically correct (even if it means repudiating our famed Bill of Rights). And so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, ad . . . or never mind – about here, I always choke.

The question, the reason I bother – the reason I stay here – is why? WHY? BECAUSE when the scum risen to the top of our great national pond does what scum can be expected to do, we sit on our dead asses and do nothing! We make a damned movie like “After Innocence.” That satisfies our civic duty to do something. Tut, tut, we can cluck, then go about our business. Who really gives a damn about some nobody in Podunk, Kansas – or was it Iowa . . . Dakota? . . ., anyway? I can’t do anything about some guy that far away, besides. Hell, he’s probably black.

When one of our fellow citizens is abused, like the Weavers at Ruby Ridge, the Branch Davidians, and a hundred more, we look for and find a reason to have more important things to be concerned about. They were “white separatists,” they were “some weird religion,” a “tax protestor,” or “some kind of political activist.” Not like me, or us. Besides, I’m not into that political crap. It’s probably all bull---- What can I do, anyway? I only know what I see on TV, and read in the papers. Who’s doing JayLow or Paris, that’s what I want to know about.

Yeah. Unless there is a prurient interest, like the Holloway case of late, and the Peterson case before that, I’m not interested. There are literally thousands of young women like Natalee Holloway missing. They’re presumed rape and murder victims, too. Why aren’t THEY famous? Why are all the people here on UK not interested and fulminating about THEM? Why don’t you know about Joanna Roberts from Lubbock? She’s the same age as Natalee. But she didn’t make it to her graduation, much less a blast in Aruba. Why don’t you hear from Joanna’s parents, and from Joanna’s mom every (damned) day?

Why have we lost all semblance to what we once were? I’m telling you (I’m telling you, and if you’re the typically political-propagandized, media-conditioned, brain-of-a-grape “American,” you probably didn’t even know it). Read “Letters to Aaron.” Why didn’t anyone so passionately interested in the disappearance of a teenage girl from nowhere, Alabama, a case that in cold reality has no bearing on their lives whatever, have utterly no interest in Hal von Luebbert’s fight for something bearing on the life of every, single taxpayer and citizen in the country? His war with the federal government brought not only the Taxpayers Bill of Rights and legislation that has affected every taxpayer in the country, but it had much to do with discovery of the jurisprudential, prosecutorial, and law enforcement incompetence, malfeasance, and criminality that put all those “After Innocence” men in jail in the first place.

Save the raspberries, and save the kudos, too. I’m so far past that they’re like peas thrown at an elephant, or roses handed a horse.

My point, and reason for this writing, is that this nation is no longer interested in forming a perfect union, no longer demands justice, seeks domestic tranquility only out of cowardice and desire for comfort, can no longer provide for the common defense, thinks “the general welfare” is a handout, mostly because its citizens couldn’t care less about any liberty except their own.

If, my benighted and decadent country, you really want to “secure the blessings of liberty for yourselves and your posterity,” start thinking and worrying about “what you can do for your country;” not “what your country can do for you.”

You might even lose some weight.

The Last of the "Freedom" Myths

I trust, what with the recent logomachy having to do with both the new Supreme Court appointment and that which is to yet to come, we have just about knocked down, trampled, and stomped into paste any remaining vestige of respect the world might have held for one of our most treasured myths, that of a fair and impartial judiciary.

A “logomachy,” incidentally, is defined by Webster’s as “contention over verbal points, or one that is all words and no sense.” If anyone can find a more apt description of our purported congressional hearings, he is a wordsmith better than I.

But the fact that antagonists here fulminate and rail so heatedly and at such length gives it all away. Each, you see, knows full well that the justices’ biases will decide matters near and dear to their equally biased hearts, and each wants to assure that his bias is the one that will be imposed on the rest. “Fair and impartial,” indeed.

I once wrote in high school (young, foolish, and apt to blurt out the truth, you know) that a democracy or republic’s life was dependent upon its ability to do justice. “Democracy never lasts long,” I quoted John Adams. Adams apparently meant that the power to vote inherent in democracy meant the power to legally steal from one’s fellow citizens - “It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.”.

But to me democracies failed because people lie. To claim entitlement to the property earned by another required the willingness to tell the falsehood, to lie. And the willingness to lie, to live in a false reality, would inevitably lead to unwillingness and inability to do justice, the very spirit and lifeblood, the raisson d’etre, of democracy. Unable to do substantial justice, I argued, any such government would sooner or later incite – force rebellion. It was already clear to a high school kid in 1952 that the United States was a society absolutely dedicated to the lie, and when John Kennedy, a president, said a few years later that, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable,” I was certain I was right. For all his faults (and I would soon know a great deal about that, by the way), I thought John Kennedy was a great man.

In the end, I reasoned, only lies could make “peaceful revolution impossible. “ And, my friends, the United States of America is on the stage of history, the biggest, the most prolific father of lies there has ever been.

It won’t do to attempt denial. The truth is everywhere. Each day, the television set delivers a relentless blizzard of the particular lie called advertising, hour upon hour of carefully calculated falsehood. A portion of the society as large as sixty-five percent is grossly – that’s as obviously as a three hundred pound, five foot, five inch woman can be – overweight. Nevertheless, disgustingly obese nation tells - and convinces – itself, “It’s my glands.”

The shear volume of mendacity in the United States is astonishing. An "American" will lie about anything in which he has an interest. In the legal system, the lie is so dominant a tactic that even the liability insurance everyone must now have to protect themselves against the lie that constitutes more than seventy percent of all civil suits stipulates that coverage is denied the insured who refuses to lie about his part in any event that may result in lawsuit. The law having to do with political campaigns, in fact, protects lying politicians from lawsuit resulted from relying upon their lying and deliberately deceptive promises.

That percentage, incidentally, is the number based on my own research a number of years ago, research corroborated by the admissions of erstwhile claimants years after having been awarded huge settlements or jury awards. Each of the seventy percent admitted lying about injuries or damages in order to “get my money.” Many, more than half, of these people considered what they had done acceptable. The statement “everybody does it,” was repeated again and again. The rationalization having to do with the assertion that “insurance companies have all the money in the world” (that in the words of one woman) was implied – or stated openly – again and again.

Neither did any of the people come by their arguments out of inventive genius. Any careful examination, moreover, of a weeks’ political punditry, night-time talk show hosts, television “analysts,” newspaper columnists and editorial writers, will uncover a penchant for deliberate, knowing falsehood in such colossal proportions as to beggar even the wildest imagination. Of course, each wing of the political spectrum is gleeful to point out mendacity by the other, but a soberly unbiased examination of their charges invariably reveals that each extreme is willing to tell the truth – about the other’s lying. For the independent observer, the conclusions are obvious.

How is it, I often ask, that a columnist like George Will, or his counterpart on the opposition side (I confess that I never read liberal commentary – the mind simply boggles at the vapid nonsense there), can hold conservative or liberal views on every issue? How does one do that, while still maintaining any semblance of truthfulness?

And how, caught so often in so much lying, does anyone like that manage to maintain any semblance of integrity?

The present and prior White House administrations are yet another case in point. “I did not have sex with that woman.” Of course, owing to the society’s appetite for the prurient, that was the most famous – or infamous - of President William Jefferson Clinton’s falsehoods. Any even casual examination will reveal literally hundreds, from campaign nonsense to those covering foreign policy pratfalls and malfeasances like losing the “football” – the briefcase holding the key to nuclear destruction of some or many of our enemies. All were covered, or concealment attempted, with lies.

The present administration’s proclivity toward mendacity is so obvious and in such proportions as to beggar description or enumeration. From campaign promises, often nonsense on their face, to asseverations having to do with claimed justification (even that doubtful logically on the basis of irrelevant conclusion) for invasion of Iraq, to falsehoods having to do with near-treasonous relationships with foreign nations, the Bush Administration has gone beyond the pale where credibility is concerned. Suffice it to say that almost nothing attributable to the Bush Administration can be given sober credence.

It’s a nation of liars. Now we bellow to the wide world that still another of our vaunted “freedoms,” that of the impartial court, is a lie.

And, of course, the fact is again an obvious one, acted out daily. Each time a president names someone for a cabinet post, Supreme Court berth, or other position high in government, the opposing political party begins deliberations at least implying that the nominee is a liar and will lie. And, of course, the nominees – to say nothing or those questioning them – do. That under oath and before the entire nation. Each evening, the opposing party makes sure that the public knows of every deviation from truth, and investigation invariably finds that the charge is true. As I said, each extreme is willing to tell the truth about the other’s lying. Not that anyone is surprised. These people, after all, are all but entirely lawyers. This is a government, let us not forget, comprised almost entirely of lawyers or those sustained by lawyers.

The legal profession in the United States, in point of easily demonstrable fact, is infamous as a cult of liars. It was the legal profession, let us not forget, who wrote the liability insurance contract that requires its insured and principals to lie. To paraphrase Admiral Lord Nelson, “The policy of the courts is such that common men would be ashamed to do likewise. All is finesse and trick, to which honesty, integrity, and honor are sacrificed.” The bulk of courtroom practice and procedure, “substantive” law, in fact, is designed to prevent truth and evidence of truth from arriving before the jury. Try to imagine a lawyer willing to sacrifice money or power for truth.

So the nation of liars about everything hopes to remain free, “to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty …”

How do you form “a more perfect union” from liars? Do you really think a liar will do what is good for his country, rather than what is good for him? How do you trust with your money and property a government made up of the most power-mad and greedy people you can find? Do you really expect truth from a thief?

When your property and freedom are dependent upon the oath of both court and witnesses whom you know to be liars, how do you really expect “justice?” How do you do that, when you can’t trust a single, solitary soul to keep his word?

How do you trust a liar to stand guard when you sleep? Won’t he always sleep, do whatever he pleases, confident that he can lie his way out of whatever happens? Isn’t that what happened with Ruby Ridge, Waco, and the World Trade Center – just to name a few among myriads? How do you “provide for the common defense” by a government and military industrial complex comprised of liars? Won’t they feather their own nests, provide for their own defense – confident of being able to lie when their derelictions betray their true interests?

You really think people who lie about everything are dedicated to the “GENERAL welfare.” Then why do they lie?

Uh-uh. The high school kid was right. John Adams was, too, but he was wrong about why “democracy never lasts long.” It’s because the people can’t stand the truth.

Sadly, when the inevitable happens, there will be those already among us who remember that I said that. I want them to know that I cared. Whenever I looked into their innocent little faces, I agonized over what I knew was coming for them, what was being bequeathed to them by their self-satisfied, uncaring parents and malfeasant government. I want them to know that I did everything, tortured every fiber in my being, to prevent it. My time, my fellows, their parents and grandparents, would have none of it.

We went on, eating ourselves into grotesque caricatures of humankind, consuming, spending, destroying, and polluting everything given to us and to them by god, confident in lies and lying, the lies and lying we made a reality and way of life, that we would be able to fool the future - our children and their children.

The nation of liars bequeathed to its progeny a lie. Surprise.

Mr. Bennett, Black Poverty, and Black Crime

Recently, I got a lot of response to an essay written for another "blogsite" (man - is that a word?), so I guess the subject is on people's minds, and important. The subject originally was William Bennett's (ex - I guess - politican and host of something called "Morning in America") paraphrase of Jonatha Swift's "Modest Proposal." If we were to reduce the black population, the gentleman said, we would, of course, lower the crime rate. If you've paid any attention to the news at all during the time since the Civil Rights 60s, you know what happened. Yeah, a bullshit brouhaha. One gentleman apologist for all things Afro-American (since there are thirty-five nations in the hemisphere, doesn't that include everybody black in them all - and where does that leave the argument?), wrote a scathing excoriation (figurative, of course) of Bennett. I wrote a carefully measured and reasoned response, to point out that - while I am on his side, and generally in agreement with his interest in the furtherance of black persons' advancement - his arguments and reasoning were flawed.

As I say, I got a lot of comment, mostly from people who seem to believe - like the gentleman whose essay I criticized - that poverty explains levels of black violence and crime far above those of whites and other ethic groups. This was my reply to one such writer, and it is my general view:

"I think you're right (about poverty), but only to a degree. As has been my penchant since high school, I did living research in order to see what the truth was. This time, however, it wasn't a matter of choice. The poverty I investigated was imposed directly - as opposed to its usual social and economic methods - by the Internal Revenue Service when my family and I were completely ruined and dispossessed. In my book, "Letters to Aaron," I relate having lived with my son among the very poor in the parks, waterfronts, and alleys of the nation. We had nothing, and only the money we could earn with odd jobs. But we didn't steal. We didn't commit any kind of crime, matter of fact (except refuse to pay taxes with money the government had already taken).

"Point? In every kind of struggle or fight, people acquit themselves differently. Some men in combat - or other kinds of extreme stress (like combative sports, for instance) get tougher and tougher. Some break and run. Taken prisoner, it's all but invariably the same. Some turn to stone under the interrogator's tormenting, other's spill their guts. There is always a spectrum of behavior. We simply don't know enough to predict what it will be.

"I mentioned the Quantificational Judgment model and TNDM in my essay. A few years before he published, Colonel Dupuy (the author) wrote to me to ask, "Why do Germans fight so much better than everyone else (he knew I'm the product of twenty three generations of pure German-ness)? I said honestly that I knew that (about German soldiers), too, but I could only guess at the reasons.

"First, I was raised from childhood (age four, matter of fact) to be a soldier and a gentleman. I stood when spoken to by an adult. When a woman came into the room or my presence, I stood - and at attention. I took my hat off in a woman's presence, and when I went into a building. I opened the door for a woman. I went upstairs before her, and down behind her. I walked next to the curb when accompanying a lady. I clicked my heels when, if, a woman offered her hand, and when I left the room. I did not cry in the presence of others, and when told to stop, I stopped. Immediately.

"In short, I was raised with discipline. I learned and obeyed a code of honor. The power of my upbringing is still amazing to me even today. I still cannot sit at a table with my hat on or with a woman present. Just can't. There's more, but it's boring - to most everybody. I obey the law, too. I stop at stop signs, obey the speed limit, all of it. I think you'll find that even today, Germans are the most disciplined and law-abiding people on the globe.

"Why are they better soldiers? Well, I said, I thought it's the way they are (were?) reared. The culture.

"I also noted that Germans are probably among the most intelligent people per capita on earth. Germans invented physics, you know, and a number of other sciences. I know how that sounds, and that it does may be part of our problem. I mean by that the fact that you dare not discuss differences between or among cultures without being labelled and cursed as a "racist." A whole behavioral science, that of sociology, has been effectively outlawed. We MUST "celebrate diversity."

"Nevertheless, "facts are stubborn things," to quote John Adams. It's either true or it isn't that Germans are better soldiers, or, for instance, that Germans have crime rates - particularly violent crimes - far, far, less than blacks (here or in Germany). More, Germans (white, that is) do not abandon their wives and families. White German males do not father babies they abandon at will. "Loyalty," my German nobleman grandfather would say again and again, "above everything - except honor." Et Cetera, etc., etc.

"As with the QJM and TNDM, comparisons like that could do us a great deal of good. We can't do them, of course, because they're "racist." But they work for the military, and they could work elsewhere.

"Oh, when my son and I were being forced to live off the land, the fields, streams, and woodlands, I thought about stealing - food, especially. At one point, I had to begin selling my blood to get food for my son (he was recovering from three attempts at suicide). I didn't, but I do see an understand the motivation. I don't even begrudge someone living in poverty the theft of things other than food, the things he sees other people enjoy while he is deprived. Morality isn't that simple.

"More, you can't just "break up a ghetto" (as one writer suggested would stop black crime). When I was still in the bucks (in April, 1974, I made $1,764,239.17), my boys' mother and I sat on the board of a new housing development for the "disadvantaged." The buildings were all brand new, constructed for the purpose. So were the furnishings. I contributed amounts of money you'd find hard to believe. The tenants were all black people, families. I saw to it personally that every man in the "project" - yes, that hated word - had a job. One was the first insurance adjuster our company every hired, probably - I couldn't seem to find out - the first black adjuster and investigator in the nation.

"There proved to be no way to prevent what you know - and we've all seen literally hundreds of times - happened. Repairs could simply not be done fast enough. A few years ago, the whole affair was finally bull-dozed (too bad, I'd have probably kept it up, had IRS not ruined me - hey, that's still another social lesson, isn't it?).

"Charles, the adjuster I mentioned, embezzled funds repeatedly (despite my admonitions each time) until the comptroller for one of my franchises caught him and its president demanded that I fire him. When I did, the NAACP charged me with racial discrimination. Only the local black community (one black leader, a man named Virgil Cunningham, told federal investigators and the NAACP rep, "Man, of all the white guys you could have picked to call racist, this is the last one - Hal Luebbert hasn't got a motherfucking racist cell in his body.") having come to my support saved me a helluva lot of trouble.

"NO, my well-meaning friends, the answer isn't anything we dare state right now (though Bill Cosby is damned close). It's culture. Africa is like Africa because of Africans. Mexico is like Mexico because of Mexicans. We, citizens of the USA, haven't the legal and social algorithms necessary to deal with the problem and produce a solution because WE are who WE are. The United States is the way the United States is because of its citizenry (11,000,000 illegal aliens is another matter, though further representative of wht WE are).

"You write well, and you think well, too. But you need to do it more, and without restrictions."