"Unbelievable!"

“Unbelievable!”
With that barbaric yawp, the people who vaingloriously proclaim themselves “American,” disdainfully ignoring the other thirty four nations in the hemisphere, dismiss any fact or set of facts they chose to avoid. Easier that way, otherwise those lovers of freedom and all that is good might reasonably be expected to DO something. “Americans” talk. Or vote (more talk). They don’t do. "They" - someone else - should do. As their country drifts toward the shoals of national collapse, "Americans" continue to talk.

And the “unbelievable excuse” is one I was obliged to listened to continually - that in lieu of the assistance anyone might expect from bystanders during time of emergency, for instance - during all of the two decades the United States made war on my family and me. Even now that almost daily media reports concerning U.S. Government malfeasance, fecklessness, cruelty, abuse of civil right, and more provide more and more incontrovertible vindication for what I first said in “Letters to Aaron” twenty years ago, the Home of the Brave continues to cower behind its trademark excuse. "Unbelievable!"

Of late, even the most “unbelievable” of my assertions, those having to do with unauthorized and illegal wire-tapping, data mining on private computers, and unwarranted surveillance in general, have been exposed publicly. In fact, the President has admitted doing it, arguing speciously that he has that authority. Still, his supporters have their mantra shield. "Unbelievable!"

Oh, yeah, I've heard it all before. Ad nauseam. Years ago, in fact, when my agent, a man who knew the veracity of my claims by virtue of having checked them all, pointed out that my story was “unbelievable” to most soft and satisfied “Americans,” I let him have it. The letter, reprised in the book, “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story,” is here. It pretty much says it al


“Dear Jim –
Thanks for the rapid and useful response. Volume is not synonymous with ‘rambling.’ I think it was H.L. Mencken who said, ‘Anything that can be put in a nutshell belongs in a nutshell.’
“No, old buddy, I can’t get my FBI, IRS, or military records. Did you forget? The U.S. District Court ruled in 1988 or 89 that my records are a matter of national security - that to give them to me would “irreparably damage the tax collection system of the United States.” You read the court papers and ruling. That’s the first time collecting tax was ever raised to the level of national security by a court. Kind of tells you something about the ‘Land of the Free, doesn’t it?’ I told Dieter a while back that this isn’t the land of the free anymore, it’s the land the fee. With its ruling, the court said I was right. Justice in America isn’t just blind; she’s a whore.
“That case is, of course, is all documented or documentable fact. Not some visit to a UFO. The court record is there – unless they’ve altered or destroyed it. But I have my copy of the ruling, and they can’t get their hands on that. They keep trying, of course, and they’ve stolen several in the scores of burglaries I have to put up with. I think I’ll go back to my tent and the woods. Just the fact that they keep burglarizing my place ought to say volumes. And how many burglars have you heard of who pass up the TV and things they could hock to steal papers and documents? Have you forgotten about the burglaries at the Windsor Center, or Kathryn’s offices? Come on, man – pull your head out.
“You can also remember that the Attorney General of the United States himself called me. The federal magistrate who heard all the preliminary hearings before the U.S. District Court was Hilbert Schauer. He’d remember. They’ll probably kill him, come to think of it.
“Jimmy, this whole case is ‘unbelievable’ only to people who are bound and determined to find it unbelievable. Cowardice makes them eager to ignore their eyes, ears, and their minds. They’ve got the Nazi Disease. Remember? Ich habe nichts davon gewusst – ‘I didn’t know anything about it’. No, nobody in German knew was Hitler was doing.
“I’ve heard ‘unbelievable’ until it makes me want to puke. The lawyer the other day wanted to know it I got the names of the witnesses! Now, that is unbelievable. I’m fighting for my goddamned life, and I should get the names of witnesses?!
“Do you know that I actually tried? While those bastards were still trying to total me, I kept asking everyone in earshot to get witnesses names. Guess how many did. That, right there, is the reason all of this shit can happen. Nobody wants to get involved. They just want to suck up everything they can. Get the hell home to the security and standard of living somebody else is paying the price for and providing.
“Man, I can’t take you people anymore. Your ‘unbelievable’ is unbelievable.
"’Do you have any proof?’ I’m in a fucking gunfight, and I’m supposed to get the names of witnesses? What about the sonofabitches who aren’t doing anything but watching? What about them? Several people – a roomful of them – knew about my RV last year. The police took another of their ‘reports.’ I caught the burglar red-handed, followed him home, looked him full in the face, got his license number and address. The stuff he took was marked for identification.
“No warrants. No charges filed. No arrests. Doesn’t that tell anybody anything? If it doesn’t, it’s because you have made up your mind to be stupid.
“A PI down here, Catherine D’Unger, hired me. The same week I started – handled one case – she got a threatening phone call from IRS. All the way from Ogden, Utah. ‘Criminal Investigation Division,’ they said. Sound familiar? Do I have to ask why it would’ve been necessary to identify themselves as the Criminal Investigation Division? Among the lying bullshit they told Catherine was that I had used a false social security number. What does that tell you, Jimmy? They admitted at least burglary with that. The only place I ever used the wrong social security number was on the papers I marked for evidence and left to be stolen, to prove they were stolen. I agreed with Grassley’s office that everywhere the numbers zero and three were contiguous, they would be reversed. That’s the ‘wrong’ social security number, and we found it in the records they produced at a disclosure hearing. It’s one reason the Justice Department fought so hard to prevent having to surrender my records.
“Jimmy, when I laid that trap, it was inconceivable to me that anyone could dismiss proof like that with a mere word. But they did, and they still do. ‘Unbelievable.’ Well, I’ve got another word for you - ludicrous!
“No, Jimmy, I can’t fucking “focus.” I’m a sane man living in Bedlam. If I only present the evidence, everybody says the same thing. It’s open and shut, conclusive. Then I name the culprit. Yup, you’ve got it – “unbelievable.” I’ve been at war with these bastards for nineteen goddamned years. I’ve lost everything all the rest of my countrymen live for. In the last ten months, I’ve been hit by cars four times. That’s cars! Have you ever been hit by a goddamned car? Three or four thousand pounds of steel, iron, and the rest, moving at over thirty miles an hour? Let me tell you, it’s a little unsettling.
“I have three smashed bikes to show how unsettling it is. I’m bleeding inside, shitting blood, walking on dislocated bones and ankles too swollen to get boot or shoes over, and I can sit only with pain that would leave the rest of you decadent bastards whimpering. My face, where the stitches were and the glass keeps working its way out, is numb. But because I couldn’t afford x-rays and tests, can’t do business with people who get eight hundred dollars an hour, I’m “unbelievable.” Time for my word again - ludicrous.
“I don’t know it there’s a hospital report. The bills, though, were here two weeks ago. Funny how corporate America, hospitals and doctors especially, are always too late with everything, and fuck everything up when they finally do whatever, but the billing they get right and on time. Tells you something about their priorities, maybe?
“I have to go out only to get food now, sneak through the neighborhoods late at night to an all-night, K-Mart grocery. I gather food in the wild, only after sneaking out at night, camping and foraging. I’ve subsisted for days at a time on “Hill Country Fare” Cheerios, $1.79 a box. Ditto pinto beans. The only time I can relax is in a crowd or the darkness of night.
"For Christ’s sake, man, why the hell can’t anyone get it through his fat head that someone is trying to kill me! How many goddamned times does it have to happen? And the police are helping them! How the hell many times do the police have to free or refuse to arrest somebody who’s been caught burglarizing my place or trying to kill me, to make you melonheads see what’s going on? Man, this isn’t some fucking macho minimalist TV movie they make for the wannabee wimp and martial arts freak. I don’t get to yell ‘Cut!’ when I don’t like the way things are going. It’s real! Go out on the goddamned highway and watch the cars going by. Imagine being hit by one. Not in your car – on your ass.
“But there you go again. ‘Unbelievable.’ Fuck you. Try telling one of these beer-swilling – hell, they don’t even drink beer; they drink Budweiser – TV-educated, works-out-in-a-climate-controlled-gymnasium, lives-in-a-climate-controlled-house-and-travels- in-a-climate-controlled-car, has-his-hair-cut-in-a-climate-controlled-beauty-parlor, red-neck studs or his brain-dead automaton, hothouse flower woman that a man walked away from a hit by a van going fifty, and survived being knocked sixty feet? He’s too stupid to convince. Hell, the math he’s capable of can’t do his damned checkbook!
“’But facts,’ John Adams said, ‘are stubborn things.’ There are witnesses who say I was in the crosswalk. Evidence, debris resulted from the impact, was found in the crosswalk. The police report records where I stopped flying and sliding. My blood and skin left an unmistakable trail. They took pictures. This guy was going more than fifty miles an hour. In a twenty-five mile an hour zone. He tried to hit me a second time. He and another guy got out of the van and attacked me. And nobody got arrested!
“Facts are stubborn things. There were witnesses. Five lanes of bumper to bumper traffic. There are always witnesses. The witnesses this time stood by, watched the fight, then got in their cars and drove away. There have been witnesses standing by and watching for years. Take back in nineteen ninety or so, when the Thornton, Colorado Police took my computer. They took it without legal authority of any kind. None. It was a straightforward theft, an armed robbery as a matter of fact and of law. Their justification was the word of a man who was literally raving, a mentally disabled veteran whose reason for calling them was a misplaced telephone, a telephone that had been found before they had begun any search. They used that for an excuse to search my RV and take my computer.
“They refused to check the ownership of the thing, even to look at incontrovertible proof of ownership that was also in the van. A simple phone call, to any of the veteran’s doctor, the finance company, or the computer store would have ascertained everything. Even when the veteran’s son appeared to explain about his dad and the circumstances of my being there, the cops would not relent. Why? The whole incident is easily documented. The computer store is EDW in Westminster, 303-426-7772. The veteran’s name is Richard R. Benton. His son is William R. Benton. They live in Thornton, Colorado.
“There are always witnesses, Jimmy. Facts are stubborn things. Let the Thornton Police Department explain the law under which they confiscated my property. Have the Nueces County Sheriffs Office explain their handling of the burglary of my RV. Have the Corpus Christi Police explain the way they handled this rundown of a pedestrian in a crosswalk. I’ve been collecting evidence – tape recording and video-taping witnesses, government burglars, saboteurs, embezzlers, rapists and the like for years. I’ve gathered mountains of evidence no one is willing to look at and the courts have ordered concealed. That’s for years. For nothing.
“’Proof,’ you all say. Bullshit! You watch a man get blasted sixty feet through the air, kicked, stomped, and karate punched, and nobody hangs around to tell police what he saw, much less intervenes. For nineteen years now, there’s been a war – car chases, car wrecks, shots fired, blood and broken bones all over the place; burglaries, wrecked buildings and bugged offices - going on right under your goddamned Nazi Excuse noses.
“In Colorado, the government surrounds an entire town, barricades all the roads in, puts helicopter cover over the town, and goes door to door arresting a hundred nineteen people. In Idaho, a woman’s family is surrounded and besieged. She has her head blown off by a federal government sniper. Her thirteen year old son is gunned down, too – shot in the back. In Texas, another federal army surrounds a group of church people, starves them and deprives them of water, taunts them with loudspeakers and broadcast threats, attacks them with machine guns and tanks, them finally incinerates them. That kind of thing happens continually all around the country. Proof? Proof? Proof?
“What the hell is proof? You don’t see because you don’t want to see.” You don’t care as long as it isn’t you or yours the wolves are eating. You know what? Old buddy, the United States of America and its hypocrite public make me sick. When they inevitable happens and they get what they’ve brought on themselves and deserve, I’ll be watching with pleasure.

"Sincerely – you’d better believe I’m “sincere;” I’m mad. Madder than hell.

In a relatively few years now, the United States will die - cease to be a nation - because its “freedom-loving” people do not care enough about “freedom” and all that to DO anything about it. A few years ago during a debate in one of the coffee shops that had become my favorite haunt, a typical petty intellectual “American” asseverated that his one duty to his country was to vote. That, he said, was all of his responsibility (he didn’t use the word – I doubt that it’s in his vocabulary – I did).

“Americans” want something DONE when it is they who are being attacked by their government. Otherwise, they sit in coffee shops and bars and bitch.

Oh, yeah – I know what you’re thinking. I have grown so used to the “tu quoque” (look it up – it’ll do you good) recitation as part of discourse and debate that I can recite it, too. What you’re thinking is self-serving bullshit. You need to assume that everyone is like you. The fact is – and it is a fact everyone who knows me will report – that I have been DOING something about my fellow citizen in trouble since I was still a kid. Still today, I keep a hard, fast rule – that I never go anywhere without making sure that it is better for my having been there. If I can't do anything else, I pick up trash. As I said, it’s my reputation – you’re stuck with it.

But what comes next in the discussion is also very familiar. Ducks quack. Canaries and other bird brains sing the song they always sing. This one is so classic it has a name. It’s called ad hominem, a logically fallacious attack – usually sneering and sarcastic – on the object’s character, veracity, or the like. Frequently these days – everyone seems to hold stand-up comedians up as mentally superior – the ad hominem attack is in the form of a one-liner jibe.

Recently, with acquisition of access to a computer, I have joined a number of blogsites, chat rooms, and internet forums. Purpose? Well, if you know me, you’ve guessed it. Another of my fact-finder surveys, this one interested in the level of discourse in the U.S. How well do people debate, and of how much value is public discourse to the Land of Free Speech? I’ve been at it a year now, and, frankly, nothing in the news is as ominous and depressing as what I’ve learned. When columnist James Kilpatrick, Steve Allen, and others first spoke of the “dumbing down of America,” I took it with a grain of salt. Jay Leno and his “Jaywalking” was funny – for a while.

There's one more thing, another of the "American's" tu quoque ad hominem attacks on an adversary he can't answer with facts or reason. This one, too, you'll note assumes that everyone is like the detractor. I have one reason, and one only, for telling my story and wanting it promulgated. You see, I need nothing from you or my country - or anyone else's. I made myself self-sufficient, put myself outside the reach of government long ago. I have no use for money, no use for notoriety beyond what I just said. Those who know me will tell you that I was happiest while living in the woods, and that I avoid people as much as possible. There's a little story there. In high school, I was already known as "anti-social." Confronted with it one day by a teacher, I picked up the morning paper from her desk - the usual chronicles of murder, rape, thievery, war, government corruption. "Do you mean to tell me that I should be like THAT?" I asked. That ended the discussion.

Let me be even more candid (I know you, and I know how everything I say will be taken by the people and culture I know): When I started doing "Knight Errant" all those years ago, I did it because I liked how it made me feel. That's it. No other reason. The people to whose aid I went, after all, were strangers; and they stayed strangers after I helped them. With few exceptions - one a pilot I carried several miles through snow up to my waist in order that he wouldn't freeze do death or lose his hands and feet to the cold - I never saw them again. The only thing I got was how it made me feel. Are you ready? IT MADE ME FEEL SUPERIOR. In fact, I knew I was superior, because I was proving it. I could feel that way because you, my culture, society, and country TAUGHT me that people who went to the aid of others were superior human beings. Or have you forgotten . . .?! You made the rules; I won the tournament - are you saying I don't deserve the prize? F--- you!

"Dumb America" isn't funny any more. And yelling “unbelievable” won’t “get” it, either. So long, “America,” you had a great run – while it lasted.