2006: This One May Decide it All for the Land of the Fee

January 1, 2006:

Okay - to get the dreary and the de rigueur out of the way - Happy New Year! Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, Good (or whatever) Kwanzaa, Happy Holidays, Best of Buddha's Birthday, and whatever other "holiday" (means "holy day," you know) excuse you need for respite from the "lives of quiet desperation" (Henry Thoreau) you lead. Keep telling yourself how free you are. And that's why you're so happy. If you won the lottery.

Everybody had a blast last night - just turn on the TV, if you don't believe me. The smug and the fat cats all say you can do that, even if you're poor. Sure. The Parade magazine I picked up in the parking lot this morning says that 13,000,000 kids went to bed hungry last night; which means logically that almost one-third of the poor bought a TV instead of feeding their kids. Y-a-a-a-a-y for the Land of the Fee! I didn't misspell that, in case you're wondering.

I trust you note that I don't give a flying f--- for holidays, especially those wherein the celebrants spend millions, even billions on booze, bullshit, and waste for things like the party in Times Square. Not while 13,000,000 kids went without a meal the same day. At least hitting a rock flying past Jupiter with a $40,000,000 rocket had a purpose other than just raising hell and chasing sex. I don't celebrate because I can only buy a couple of those kids a meal, and the government makes damned sure it stays that way. Even if I were still in the bucks like I once was, and I gave a bundle to the poor like I wish I could, some capitalist would steal like a congressman, and like the tsunami relief fund, steal a huge chunk of whatever I gave. I'd be able to do nothing about that, either. In short, I'm too damned weak and worn out anymore to do much about anything like that, except write these sorry-assed "blogs." I don't celebrate.

A lot of great people died in 2005. Some of them really were great. Those, by my definition, took the part of their fellow human being. Actually, that's not my idea; I got it from the author - the Author of everything. "I was hungry, and you gave me food: thirsty, and you gave me water; naked, and you gave me something to wear." People naming the "great" invariably mention saviors, warriors, the powerful, the ridiculously rich, and the like. Never the comedians. Well, they're wrong. "I was grieving, despondent, and afraid; you made me laugh." Johnny Carson, Richard Pryor, and Nipsy Russell made us laugh. Them, I'll remember, and miss. They were great. Really great.

In 2005, there were 846 people who heard God say, "I was beset by my enemies; you stood between them and me, and you were killed." Want to talk about "great?" No comparison. Now we're talking hero. REAL hero. "Greater love hath no man, than that he lay down his life for his friend." One of these stands out, even in that company. Pat Tillman was killed in combat in 2004, but I'm still thinking about him. The man makes me feel like a pimple by comparison. I hope you know the story, because you need to know. Some of us sacrifice a little, some a lot, for those among us who need help from their fellows. For you to appreciate what this guy sacrificed, you have to learn all you can: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4815441/ and http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2004/magazine/04/23/tillman.flashback/index.html will get you started. When you think you understand, tell your kids about Pat Tillman. They need it. They need to understand what "great" is. If it helps, remind them about what John F. Kennedy once said. "Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country" - remember? Pat Tillman must have had that for a mantra, and he was its shining example. Makes me feel like a pimple.

Last, but certainly not least, of the people who in 2005 made a difference that will last forever was Rosa Parks, the little black woman who became one of history's biggest inspirations. Rosa Parks will forever stand in my mind as the classic example of what ONE can do. What she did remains for me the ideal example of how what is right plays judo, and an otherwise simple act at the right moment takes on power beyond all imagining. Parks' simple words one day had the power of a Churchillian speech in them, and where it was said Sir Winston "mobilized the English language and sent it into battle," all the woman said was, "No, I won't go to the back of the bus." The words went into battle, and destroyed another tyranny. I've always aspired to be like that. Rest in peace, Rosa. And thanks.

So, we've got another year. What'll we do with it? I literally hate to think. We will NOT feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, or clothes to the naked - unless, or course, there's a profit in it. Some will, of course, but the great mass of man will go on being the greedy, self-concerned and conceited son of a bitch that he is. The "Americans" will demand that their country do for them, instead of doing for their country. Meanwhile, their capitalist country - controlled by certain of their countrymen - will go on exploiting the planet and its people for all they are worth, in effect sawing off behind us the limb we all occupy. Hatred of the nation the world's people once aspired to be will reach unprecedented mass.

Whether we take back control of our country from the military industrial complex and the people who provoke war after war for immense profit will decide our fate, maybe once and for all, in 2006. That single issue will be the one that makes all the rest insignificant by comparison. All the mathematical models I can construct for projecting the effects of peak oil, economic growth and "outsourcing," federal taxation and inflation - all the stuff the pundits and media talk about all year long - reach calculus high and low extremes in 2006.

No trend or force for change is more fearsome - not even Arab religious fundamentalism - than the behavioral drive toward mediocrity that is the natural product of the U.S. version of capitalism. "The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess success; that—with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success—is our national disease." William James, an American psychologist and philosopher, said that in a letter, Sept. 11, 1906, to the historian and writer H.G. Wells. The disease, which is a cancerous one, is now far advanced. It threatens the heart, and the soul, of the nation. It now chooses our Presidents and leaders, owns our government, and holds our people helpless in its scabrous and scrofulous hands. Slave-like, we - excepting me - obey its every whim.

No group of fellows, no organization, from family to nation, can persist so without being able to trust one another. The group entity cannot co-operate, the very essence of organization and concentrated effort. Without the truth inherent in trust, order cannot be maintained and justice cannot be done. Where there is no truth, there can be no justice; and justice is the very soul of order. Without justice, rebellion is inevitable. Finally, no nation of liars can gain and maintain ascendance over its enemies.

As Johanna, the heroine in my novel said, "You can never trust a capitalist - everything is for sale."     

So, it's 2006. The year will see cataclysmic events, many foreseeable and all having been brought down upon us by our own feckless stupidity and folly. The war in Iraq will bring more and more violence to that country and our own, a parallel to the Vietnam war. The Iraq war's result will be similar, eventually, with the exception that the firestorm of Arab hatred it has ignited will last for centuries, a monument to the colossal acquisitiveness of the military industrial complex, who having once killed a president, now uses one for a Judas goat. The death toll of U.S. service men will rise until the nation no longer has the stomach for it; then, like Vietnam, we will do "the unthinkable" - leave. That probably will mean having made another "Mission Accomplished" declaration of victory. The nation of "free Iraq?" Having lost more of its citizenry by hundreds of times than their deposed dictator killed in the first place, the Iraqi nation will go back to theocracy. Iraqis who followed our Pied Piper will be pay the price, eradication. White House and Congressional propagandists will perform "damage control," and the Land of the Fee will go looking for its next nation to liberate.

The planet is warming, protestations of Congressmen and Senators shilling for the oil companies and fossil fuel exploiters notwithstanding. The scientists of one hundred and forty-one industrialized nations, those responsible for 55% of the world's greenhouse gasses and related pollution, have agreed upon that and signed the Kyoto Accords, pledging to reduce greenhouse gasses pollution 5.2% by 2012. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4267245.stm The U.S., biggest polluter by far - surprise - refuses to sign. We will increase our poisonous emissions by enough to compensate for whatever the rest of the nations manage to prevent. It's all a myth, we say. Of course, we don't believe that, but this is just another instance of how we handle truth. Politics and lobbying what it is in the Land of the Fee, the power of propaganda with the "stunned and stolid" masses what it is, we will be standing up to our chins in polar ice cap melt while listening to the cynical protestations to the contrary of oil company prostitutes like Oklahoma Senator James Imhoff and his congressionally corrupt kind. That will go on, of course, until the oil companies have either moved on to greener - meaning more exploitable - pastures or have by manipulation in the form of congressional lobbying and bribery of courts have acquired saleable control of whatever new source of energy has emerged. http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CAV111A.html

Meanwhile, the nation willing to pick a fight with anybody or everybody has even pissed Mother Nature off. That last HUrricane season was a doozy, but we don't seem to have gotten the message. If you won't listen to anyone who can hit you with a force four hurricane, you won't listen to anybody.

The global situation is and will be a redux of the history of our own nation and its relations with the oil and other industries. Spurred on by greed, industrial pollution of the planet will continue to accelerate, in other words. Nothing is more important than economic and fiscal considerations. Bewildered by state-of-the-art propaganda wielded by the corporately-owned government and its news media, together with behaviorist-coordinated indoctrination by with the state-run educational establishment, the public will continue to rejoice that they live in a free market economy, even as great masses of their fellows die of the effects of massive environmental poisoning. Concomitantly, the U.S. population's inevitable shift to the Southern Hemisphere will begin in earnest. As the planet and its oceans warm, of course, hurricanes and typhoons will worsen in force and frequency. More property damage will occur in 2006, and more will be left homeless and more will be injured and killed. Even if - when - faced with repetition of contemptuously callous disregard for the public's welfare like that demonstrated in New Orleans after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the general public, addicted to its apotheosized federal government, will remain societally and nationally cowed and cowering - effeminate, castrated, and feckless.

The Kyoto meetings provide a glimpse of what is to come, not only as has to do with the environment, but elsewhere. The peoples of the earth must either control the cancer growing on it, us, or die with us. Economic sanctions, cutting off our oil supply or raising prices to oppressively instructive and debilitating levels, are beginning. There will be more, and everywhere. When they can't drive ninety miles an hour in their gas-guzzler busses, HUMVEES, and SUVs, the peace-loving people of the U.S. will clamor for their armies to take what they need. The better to "liberate" more oppressed nations, of course. You tell me what that means . . .

In the U.S., the chief concern of every citizen has long since become that of surviving his government, and the descent into criminal federal totalitarianism will continue. The latest outrage of the Constitution, that of the President and NSA's savaging of the Fourth Amendment, is only publication, an announcement - one intended to continue the mental bewilderment and behavioral cowing of a public already incapable of meaningful self-awareness, self-realization, and independent cognition - of what has been a practice since the late 1950s. In evidence of the befuddled and distracted state of the public's mental faculties is the fact that while the nation's law libraries are crammed full of books filled with cases which prove beyond rational doubt the lawlessness of government at all levels, the fact remains below the level of the anesthetized public and society's consciousness. Each of the Supreme Court reporters, of course, is a chronicle of government abuses of the U.S. Constitution. In my book, "Letters to Aaron," I recite a number of these.

Of course, were the public aware of what has occurred, it might also become aware that the condition could not have come to be without the deliberate and calculating efforts of the public's information and educational establishments. Like the Grand Jury and the Petit Jury, another control of government provided by the Constitution now turned against the people by their government. Surprise.

The case of "Sherry," one of the stories related in "Letters," is a microcosm of the society. One of my first "Knight Errant" cases, the mother of three was being raped continually by male members of a regional IRS office. During nearly three weeks of concerted effort, nothing we could do could enlist assistance from the rest of government (not even evidence in the form of video tape). Police, sheriff, lawyers, and judges all showed us the door. Faced already with relentless pursuit and harassment, acutely aware of federal officers watching like hawks for any and every opportunity to justify my arrest and murder, my elections and choices of tactics were severely limited. At length, my hand was forced when "Sherry" was obliged to return to the home town that was the scene of her tribulation. Impregnated almost immediately by one of the federal studs when her birth control tablets melted under a sudden roof leak and her abuser refused to wait for a new purchase or use a condom, "Sherry" had an abortion.

Alerted one afternoon by "Sherry's" daughter and after flying myself from Phoenix in a leased Mooney, I finally caught one of the IRS rapists almost literally in the act. After a judo workout including extended practice with kansetsuwaza (armlocks) shimewaza (strangle holds) and with money provided by her attacker and myself, "Sherry" emigrated to another country, the only way she could be rescued.

The analogy doesn't end there, either. There are many women like "Sherry" in the U.S., something that any rational and willing intellect would expect. Unbridled power doesn't bridle itself, certainly not its most base appetites. That the nation chooses to ignore a thing as obvious as that tells everything one needs know for explanation of the state in which we have come to exist. It also tells one like me what to expect in the future.

The federal government of the United States has become what IRS already was. When the public did all but nothing to stop the public outrages of the IRS, the rest of the criminal conspiracy had its reconnaissance. It's own excesses, long kept in the shadows, now come more and more to be committed in plain view. There are many, many, examples. As President Carter, Ramsey Clark, and others have recently pointed out, a sea change in our policy toward other nations has occurred. It doesn't take a genius to know where we are going, or what will result. What a mess!