A Modest Proposal, 2006

In 1729, Jonathan Swift wrote an essay which has come to be referred to as “the Modest Proposal.” Writing in the first person, Swift, already author of “Gulliver’s Travels among other pieces which would one day become famous, proposed that citizens of the Ireland of the time, an Ireland impoverished by the royal version of today’s corporate capitalist colonialism, fatten their children for sale at the age of one year to rich absentee land-owners. The new meat market, he said, would combat overpopulation and unemployment, spare already indigent families child-rearing expense, and improve the table fare of the wealthy. A “win-win” situation.

Swift’s satire drew howls of outrage.

Surprise? Well, note that while Swift had offered logical assertions and objective data proving that implementation of his idea would do more to solve Ireland’s societal and economic programs than any other measure being or having been proposed, none of his critics replied to anything he said with any sort of logic, certainly not mathematics. Uh-uh. Swift was criticized – verbally excoriated, is more like it – for his “poor taste.”

In fact, so furious were those “rich absentee land-owners” that he came near to losing his income, that derived from patrons of his writing. Does that remind anybody of anything or anyone today? The Dixie Chicks, perhaps? Colorado Professor Ward Churchill?

I trust I need not go further into the long list of persons who have come to grief for having exercised their right to “free speech” in the “Land of the Free.” Interesting - isn’t it? – that no one of late has noted the obvious similarities between the United States’ world-wide economic hegemony and that of Swift’s “rich absentee land-owners.” In fact, it’s conspicuous by its absence – thunderously conspicuous.

Witness, for instance, Venezuela President Hugo Chavez' remarks the other day at the United Nations. Did I say “thunderous?” What Señor Chavez said – like what Professor Churchill said – was incontrovertibly true.

(Yes, yes – I know he called our president a “devil.” I know that was in “bad taste.” That has no more merit than it had at the time of Swift. I also know that everyone who throws that stone should remember that he lives in a glass house: think back over the last few years of political rhetoric and speeches from the White House.)

But in the Land of the Free, just like in the Ireland of Jonathan Swift's time, the remarks were in bad taste - "insensitive." The Land of the Free become the Land of Feminism requires that truth always be couched in euphemism. Things are "challenged," rather than what they are specifically. Stupid is "mentally challenged." Perverted is "morally challenged." Killing a fetus is "abortion." In Iraq, the Sunni and Shiite Moslems slaughtering one another "threatens to become" civil war (when DOES it become civil war?). The relentless killing of our "liberating soldiers" is an "insurrection." You just don't tell the king who has no clothes on that he is naked. It's just that the clothes he's wearing are made of invisible material. To see that euphemism fomented by the feminist and the effeminate - "metro-sexual" - male works for the public in the Land of the Free requires only that you turn on the television set.

The trouble is that in the United States of American, Land of the Free, Defender of Free Speech, the little boy who observed aloud that the king had no clothes on is butchered and eaten. Hugo better get the hell out of here. Before shooting his mouth off like that, he should have consulted with Ward Churchill. Or the Dixie Chicks. Or me, for that matter.

As I observed here a while ago, there is nothing homo sapiens fears more than thought and thinking. Thought, I noted, is subversive. It respects nothing but truth, even when the thinker wants to believe something different. Thought is merciless to privilege - the thinker’s or otherwise (persons admired, for instance, or those in authority given them by the thinker) – and thought is a revolutionary indifferent to everything “everybody knows.”

I say all of that, and I came to the realization that led to my averment, ruefully. Beginning with the first time I was expelled from parochial high school for having questioned what was called The Assumption – the dogma of faith proclaimed by Pope Pius XII, that the body of Mary, "Mother of God" (I questioned that, too, incidentally) had been taken physically up into "heaven." That, incidentally, was at the same time that I was learning in Physics class that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. So, I reasoned, that meant that “heaven” was here in the universe – or vice versa. Zap! I found myself out on the yard.

It went on all the way through high school. It continued in the Army, then business. There was never any logical, forensic, or even rhetorical rebuttal, just an attack on my reputation, position, finances, or person. What else is new?

What else is new, and it continues today. The strange thing with Presidente Chavez' remarks, however, is that he merely paraphrased what corporate “America” and its neo-conservatives have been saying since they first began shooting off their mouths a few years ago. If I, in my turn, paraphrase the “neo-cons” and their scion George Dubya I may be forgiven; to note, in other words, that the stated intent of their movement is to bring “American” capitalism and democracy – they never fail to relate the two as if they were chicken and egg – to the world. To hell with anyone who doesn’t want to be rescued, by god – they’re going to be our kind of free or nothing.

Fairly put?

So, here is my own “Modest Proposal.” Let’s cut out all the damned mythology. In fact, let’s put it to the acid test. I’ve written voluminously here – in fact, I wrote a book, “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story” – about all of our meretricious and mendacious myths. Check the law libraries, see if you can imagine a more complete compilation – literally and numerically thousands of object examples - of the relentless assault by government on basic rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

Take for instance, our free press. I choose that because I happen to think that nothing is so critical to what we purport to be as a nation. The media amounts to the nation’s thought process, its thinking. Control, hypnotism by government, means a reversal of the democratic process itself. Instead of the public controlling government, in other words, the government controls the public

How free is the press? Well consider this: since its inception, the Internal Revenue Service of the Federal Treasury has amounted to a Congressional Frankenstein Monster. I exaggerate, you say? Repair, if you will, to the federal repositories and law libraries again. There you will find a plethora of proof, volumes in such staggering numbers as to boggle the mind. In 1986, morever, a U.S. Senator, David Pryor of Arkansas, reported to the Congressional Oversight (cute double entendre, that – try to imagine anything overlooked more often by the congress than the abuses of the taxpayer by the IRS) Committee "five hundred horror stories a day.” Note, please, the quotation marks.

That's five hundred a day. That’s to one member of the U.S. Congress. There are five hundred, thirty-four members of the U.S. Congress. If that’s not a crime wave, you tell me what is. Still mealy-mouthing? Consider this: in 1986, when I cornered him at his residence, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa – then Chairman of the Congressional IRS Oversight Committee – told me that his office had un-earthed fifteen hundred instances of felony crime by members of Internal Revenue Service.

That’s FIFTEEN HUNDRED!

In 1978, the absolutely powerful – that’s, axiomatically, the absolutely corrupt – utterly destroyed my business, then my family. In 1986, when I had recovered, re-married, and started over, they did it all again. Just fun - working out. Practice. Cat and mouse. This time, though, they not only took effective steps to assure that I would never again be gainfully employed, they drove a teenage son to three attempts at suicide.

But I digress. The scars where my thought processes dwell sometimes divert the currents. They're like electrical shorts. I'm not, in other words, exactly wired right, anymore. This is about free press, remember? Tell me, if the press is indeed free to report to the public anything they will, and matters like those I relate here are among those most important to the thought processes of the nation, why didn’t you hear about it?

In a nation where scum-sucking “show” hosts like Nancy Grace feature night after night every instance of rape or the lurid like they can find, how is it that something as juicy as the continual use of absolute power by IRS agents to force their attentions on women across the country is again conspicuous by its absence?

Are you mealy-mouthing again? Come on! YOU give the “power to destroy” – Thomas Jefferson, remember? – to a William Jefferson Clinton, for instance, and you believe there have been NO instances of extortion to commit rape among the nation’s tax collectors? Have some hay for dinner – you must be a jackass.

In 1988, the U.S. District Court for Colorado ruled in my Freedom of Information Act suit that to give me my records “would irreparably damage the tax collection system of the United States.” Now, of course, there wasn’t any legal way to deny me my country’s record of me. It's the law. But that record was devastating, proof - among voluminous other things – of exactly what we’re talking about. A female IRS “Hearing Officer” who said her name was Jane Brown offered to obliterate my impossible ($113,000 on a $30,000/year gross income) “tax liability” in return for a weekend of sex. Lose everything you've worked all your life to have, or screw. What would you do (the fact is, when you think of it, that you do that every day in one form or another)?

It’s not only what any reasonable person – even a member of Congress and our co-opted courts – would expect, it happens. It happens as often as you would expect.

So where are those watchdogs of freedom, the media?! Right where you’d expect, in a corporate capitalist society. You wouldn’t expect people who own everything, including the nation’s money and economy, to also own the media the way it owns the government? Have some more hay.

So I make a modest proposal. You, the public, seem incapable of productive reasoning. If the history of the nation since World War Two tells us anything, it tells us hat. But in keeping and part of the symptomology for that is always that mealy-mouthing and euphemistic apologizing, with its willingness to suck up the incredible blather put out by the media and its pandering patron, the government.

So, just this once, let’s just stop the cynically phony "dialogue" (anybody notice the feministic euphemism?). Let’s either stop with the elections, to leave the powers that be where they are, or abolish one political party. Things what they are, let’s make that the democratic party.

Result? Why, we’ll see what happens. We’ll see the nation and its political process devoid of all the obfuscating balderdash, smoke and mirrors, hocus-pocus orchestration of reporting of events, and behaviorist-devised technique by the networks. “Damage control” will be reduced to the “are you going to believe me or your eyes” chutzpah of the housewife caught under the neighbor guy when hubby came home unexpectedly (as things stand, that happens every day with government – and “hubby,” the public, believes it).

When the little boy in the story of the King’s Magic Clothes blows the whistle, there will be no way to shush or drown him out.

Think about it. What do you think a megalomaniac like Dubya would do, left to all his messianic devices? Well, what did the IRS do (and what are they still doing – come on by, I’ll show you)? What has the Congress done (that seven or eight trillion they overdrew the checkbook, for instance)?

The only thing, of course, that will change is that there will be for the people responsible no one to blame. That means no way to confuse a public used to excusing itself by virtue of claiming to have been kept stupid and deceived. When things reach their inevitable conclusion – you can’t go on like this indefinitely, you know; the world you want to colonize and enslave will stop you – there will be no self-serving historical finger-pointing. The grandchildren will know exactly who put the screws to them.

There’s an alternative, relative to that “stupid and deceived.” Let’s do away with the fourth estate. No more deceitful, hornswoggling, and behavior-controlling “news.” No more pundits. No more bullshit.

We’ll just see what happens. That should tell us all we need to know.

It’s hard to dissemble starvation or choking on poison air; it’s hard to dissimulate prosperity when you can’t get a job, and can’t pay for even basic needs like food or medicine. When the car’s engine starves for want of fuel in the empty tank, it stops. That's hard to un-do with words. No matter what you say, the car just sits there. When the fat man at the table – that’s Corporate, Neo-Conservative “America,” in case the media campaign of mass hypnosis has been successful with you – has ALL the food, your mealy-mouthing apologies for capitalism and your government by leviathan corporation will be all there is to chew on. You can eat all the rhetoric you want, you'll get hungry nevertheless. And you'll know it, too - no matter what anyone tells you. Any empty belly speaks in terms nobody can euphemize, for any reason. The word "hungry" may be in bad taste, or "insensitive," but by then, you're past caring that those you tell of your trouble are offended.

So, how about it? Compared to the Big Rock Candy Mountain economics and the Pecos Bill, Texas Tall Tales War on Terror propositions you’ve already bought, this one is only a modest proposal.

Our Jihaddist President - God Help Us!

It’s a bewildering thing, this post-Orwell world. It has a person behaving like a fighter pilot in combat, constantly scanning the potentially lethal skies around, never able to relax. This difference, of course, is that the pilot here is hunted only by his enemy. The citizen of the United States is hunted not only by his country’s enemies – those all but invariably made by his country - but by the same government, his own, that made the enemies.

Today – this morning, bright and early, as a matter of fact – there is still more to worry over. Usually, I worry mostly, anymore, for the children I accost during my day. I worry about the absolutely horrible, Orwellian future – the George W. Bush future – being delivered upon them. The little people deserve better from their government - and certainly, their parents.

Today, though, I’m worrying about us all. That serves me right, I suppose; having thought myself out of the woods on account of my age was presumptuous.

This morning, King George VII was addressing the people of Iraq. From the rostrum at the United Nations. It was stupefying. In that impossibly assured, Southern Baptist preacher tone of his, he preached the sermon of “American (don’t I wish the printed page could impersonate and mimic?) Democracy.”

You sit listening, as I said, totally nonplussed – flabbergasted. It’s the old, “Crazy or Stupid” dilemma. Does this fervor-addled, Walter Mitty character actually believe the nonsense he is parroting? Does he really believe that with a few words he will motivate a society steeped for centuries in a religious creed, that of Islam, to repudiate everything its holy scripture and apotheosized prophet says?

A few months ago, in an effort to extract information from Moslem warriors captured in Iraq, U.S. soldiers stripped and sexually humiliated them. Why? Because to a Moslem, nothing is more humiliating – or sinful. Islam doesn’t recognize extenuating circumstances the way we do, you know. A man should die before doing, or being forced to do, things like that. Unclean is unclean – whatever the reason.

So now we have our Bungler in Chief, speaking directly to an Arab nation, urging them to do what for them is similar. If I could be vicariously embarrassed at the almost impossible stupidity of one I am watching perform (rap music, for instance), this would be it.

My God! On the way home after picking Rita up at her work – her car is in the shop – I answered her question having to do with how the day had gone by saying I have never been more afraid for my country. Is this son-of-a-bitch crazy? I wondered aloud. A megalomaniac?

LISTEN TO HIM! Think about how he got us into this Brobdingnagian sink-hole morass. The Iraqi people would pile out into the streets, to strew roses – is the rose a flower endeared, or even available, in Iraq? – before our conquering – oops! – liberating – troops. They would laud our efforts to have them repudiate the governmental concepts and systems established in every totally Islamic society on the planet. They would celebrate the liberation of women, and laud the elevation of untouchables to the same level as sheikhs.

They would accept hegemony from Washington, D.C. with open arms, hugs and kisses.

SURE!

There’s more, available to the high and mighty like the CIA, the U.S. Congress, and the military industrial complex that owns and controls them both, but that will do for us, the more pedestrian.

WHO THE F--- WOULD BELIEVE ANYTHING THAT G.D. ASININE?

Tom and Daisy Buchanan would. Anybody remember F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby? Tom and Daisy were people who “smashed up things and then retreated back into their money . . . let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Does that remind you of anyone we know? Transpose a few words, then see what you get. “Blundered into war with all of Islam, blew Baghdad and Iraq generally - to say nothing of Afghanistan - to smithereens, and then retreated back into his money – to let other people clean up the mess . . .?

Does that suggest, perhaps, how we were led into the swamp of military conflict prescribed, circumscribed, and proscribed by weirdly chaotic sectarian religious rules no person committed to rationality can understand? How we’ve come to be caught between two religiously megalomaniacal nut-case philosophies, Islam and Judeo-Christian Fundamentalism?

Wake up, People! This isn’t rocket science. It doesn’t require Sherlock-Holmesian logic. All you have to do is LISTEN to what this messianic megalomaniac says. He sees no problem with al Qa’ida, Osama bin Laden, Iraq, the Arabs, Islam, and the rest, because George understands everything Arab extremist jihaddists do. That’s because he’s just like them. He listens to god, just like they do. God tells him what to do, just like god tells them what to do.

For Bush the Southern Baptist Messiah, and for Osama bin Laden the Islamic Messiah, it's god, so no matter how impossible the idea may be, it’s possible. Hell, just kill ‘em all. Onward Christian soldiers? Inshallah!

George VII and his Bush League White House, Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Muqtada al Sadr and their vision-following like dispense with people who confront them with inconvenient facts or truths. They’re all on a mission for god. There’s no need for facts, certainly not CIA or FBI intelligence, unless it’s the intelligence I already know. From god, of course. On faith.

And, to repeat myself here earlier, faith by definition is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.

The president has no qualms whatever that he will tell that he relied on his ''gut'' or his ''instinct'' to guide the ship of state, USA. He’ll say he ''prayed over it.'' Maybe the scariest part of it is that for all more than half the electorate – the half with an intelligence quotient below 78 – no matter what happens - that will be enough. It will be “the will of god.”

Inshallah!

Don’t forget, this is the watch-dog that didn’t bark when the Silver Blaze airliners were stolen on 9-11. The guard who slept on duty and was, nevertheless, put back in charge of security. The nation’s women found it somehow possible to believe that the bodyguard who let them be raped would get it right the next time; and the heart of the evangelical segment of society that had ushered the new King George to power went on believing in their religiously-bewildered minds that their leader is a messenger from god. Still another Christ. Or is it Mohammed?

George might Malaprop, bungle, and lie, but he did it all decisively. He didn’t “waffle,” by god. To recognize your mistake and change, once the mark of an able and wise man, is in the estimation of the religious to "waffle." Religion, after all, does not make mistakes. Neither does one guided by god.

So, anybody who wasn’t for Mr. Bush, the messiah, was against him. The religious like that. Things are black or white. God speaks clearly, after all. All that reasoning, all that situational ethics stuff, is demonic.

It’s now very clear, and by his own tongue, that King George demands unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides and his kindred spirits in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision - often swiftly, based on a creed or moral position -- he expects complete faith in its rightness. And righteousness.

You haven’t notice the disdainful smirks and scowls that greet members of the media, his administration, or the Congress who asked for any explanation of White House positions or actions? The unbelievers are stupid. These things are mysteries of faith. The unbelievers don’t understand that this is a faith-based presidency. In a faith, as in a faith-based presidency, open debate, thinking and dialectic based on facts, is evidence of doubt, the arch enemy, the destroyer, of faith.

Doubt results in loss of confidence, tantamount to defeat, to death. How many times on the campaign trails, press conferences, and the rest did King George repeat the nostrum that goes, ''By remaining resolute and firm and strong, this world will be peaceful.''

Neither is reality or the truth any barrier for the religious fanatic. In the Koran, taqiyya permits, even demands that the true believer lie in order to deceive the infidel. Obviously, again, our jihaddist president is much like his Islamic foe. Not long ago, in one of his more mendacious pronouncements, our little prince born with the silver spoon in his mouth averred that he knew how everyone felt. They just haven't the faith he has, poor souls.

The fact is that Dubya could have no idea how the pedestrian public might feel. He is as far from them as the patrician prince that he is is from a hobo. Earlier here, I contrasted his life with my own -from the sod hut I lived in through high school I paid for myself compared to Kennebunkport and the several baronial mansions his family owned, to forming my own business on quarters and public library self-education compared to his family financed oil wildcatting, Yale and Harvard.

I was never a drunk, and Billy Graham didn’t come to offer me god’s counsel when I was in my dark nights of the soul. No family, much less super-rich, stood by ready to rescue me from myself – or anyone else.

It’s ridiculous, I said, for a George W. Bush to say he understands people like me. George W. Bush is an Elmer Gantry, a tawdry, meretricious liar.

Of course, that’s as evident as his scrambled syntax, foot-in the mouth averments, and weird reasoning. It's that, as I say, that's the scary part. It's not as though we're being "had." This guy is the most blatant, thunderously obvious liar we've ever seen. It's right in our faces. But that’s all right, this is the Christian version of taqiyya. The president is a liar, alright, but it’s for the faith. It makes him stronger with the faithful. They have to believe him when he says god speaks through him. It’s faith.

Well, GOD HELP US!

"First the Sentence, Then the Evidence!" Or, Damn! - Back in the Queen of Hearts Court!

Three weeks ago, I became determined to say here something good about the country, the government, and the administration. I’m not a “doom and gloom” person, mind you; and, despite my “Spock” nickname, I am about as far as you can get from the dispassionate Vulcan. I like to play, have fun, and “let it all hang out.” The only movies I watch any more are of the “Odd Couple” variety, anything that will evoke laughter, especially the uproarious kind. The funnier, the better. I like, too, to be the bearer of good news.

Like I say, it’s been three weeks. I’m trying. I have a circle of friends both local and on the Internet, and they’re all trying to help. We’ve even been watching FoxNews, in an effort to see the positive side of Iraq (a year ago, Mike Reagan delivered a paean of good news from Iraq. Things, he said, were wonderful. Think positive. Positive, positive, positive.

We’ve been hearing that, haven’t we? The other night, Mr. Bush – in his “not political” address to the nation – said the same. Things are great. A few days before that, Labor Day, CNN interviewed Elaine Chao, Secretary of Labor. That was eerie. Here’s this little Oriental woman telling us the economy is great, unemployment is down, and things are coming up roses everywhere. It was like being told during an enemy air strike or artillery barrage that everything is great.

My god, I thought – where hell IS this woman?

Okay, I’m determined. Here’s some things good about “America” (I have to keep reminding all the patriots like our “born with a silver foot in his mouth” - remember Texas Governor Ann Richards? – that was George, Senior, of course – but it fits junior even better, doesn’t it? - President that there are thirty-four nations in America the hemisphere). Good things:

Sex – it’s hard for any government to screw (pardon the pun) with that; ours is trying, of course – mustn’t let people just go off doing any old think on their own, you know.

(The other day, during the hunt for cop-killer “Bucky” Phillips, New York State Police Superintendent Wayne Bennett said with obviously un-intended candor, “There isn’t anybody out there has total freedom;” yeah, we knew that, pal.)
Beautiful women – there’s still a lot of them around, and I love ‘em all (well I try).

Then there’s starry ni . . . skip that – a starry night is damned hard to find anywhere in this part of “America.”

Let’s see – there’s got to be more. Beer! Beer is still good – at least the kind imported from Germany or the UK is. Man! –I had some micro-brewery Altbier last night at the locally annual NPR beer-tasting fest that was absolute-erifically awesome! Now that’s GOOD!

But Altbier, of course is German. But speaking of things German, there’s Beethoven, Bach, Strauss, Hayden, Handel, and Mozart – to name but a few. There’s Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, and dozens more. There’s Alessandra Coletti – of late – Maria Callas (guys didn’t have to listen – just look), Birgit Nilsson, Sutherland; Pavarotti, Domingo, and Carreras.

There’s still good jazz, to, and Dixieland. From Tommy Dorsey, to Albert Ayler; Miles Davis (‘Kind of Blue” – DAMN, that was good!), John Coltrane, Charlie Mingus, Bill Evans, Bix Biederbeck, Louie (Armstrong – who else?), Sarah (Vaughn; it you don’t recognize “Sarah” when it’s music we’re talking – hell!), Sonny Rollins. On and on. Good!

And “American” – United States American.

If you find an “oldies” station, there’s good country, too. Music – it’s all good. Good, good – good!

There’s life, just living. If you can pull it out of the stinking, choking, caterwauling, concrete jungle of the city and our society with its legalistic, litigious, hyper-jurisprudential morass that they have become; if you can take it back from the Pecksniff phony moralist, the pseudo-religious “wolf in sheep’s clothing," and all their guilt-inflicting, scripture-wielding, mind-everybody’s-business-but-your-own ilk, you can live! And it's GOOD!

Have you ever seen a starry night? No, I don’t’ mean a sky with twenty in it, I mean a sky so full of stars – bright, shining ones – that it takes your breath away. No, like I intimated earlier, you probably haven’t; that was a long time ago, for most people. Pollution, the gaseous by-product of all that capitalism your “informed (laughter is good, too – but I said that already) society” can’t live without – and is being killed by – has blocked out starry nights.

Anyone who has lived long enough to have watched the starry night disappear can’t be fooled about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or the global warming attendant to it. That's good, too.

But you’re too “informed” to believe in a thing like global warming - not with the ten thousand corporations who are causing it telling you there is no such thing . . . Uh-uh.

Still, there are places out in the wilderness where the beauty of nature is unspoiled yet. Breathtaking. Awesome in its true definition – not some idiotic rap star, football player, or the tabloid gossip hero like. For a little while yet.

Things good about "America . . . I’m trying, I’m trying. Let me see. Things good about “America.” Hummingbirds. I put out feed for the little guys, and they come swarming. They’re like little gemstones, flying. Fun to watch – they have bird brains, so they act a lot like the people on the nightly news

Judo, and training to fight. I love that, and that knowing that when I say “Leave me the hell alone,” I can still ninety-nine times out of a hundred kick the guy’s ass. Even the ones I can’t will pay a price. Love it.

That reminds me, though: I’m free to do that – take names and kick ass - and just about anything else I choose to do. And the reason is that I made a study of what it takes to be left alone. I AM left alone, too. Oh, the government bugs the phone, but I don’t talk on it. They read my e-mail, but I don’t say anything. They keep breaking into the house, but I can stop that by going back to the wild – they’re too soft and cowardly to come where I am then. Hell, just the mosquitoes drive them away.

And, hey - if they get their prurient jollies from listening to the babe and I getting laid, fine. It’s kind of titillating to know somebody’s listening and wishing he could stay in the saddle that long. Or, if – when – it’s she, that she could find somebody with that kind of stay-in-the-saddle strength. Eat your heart out, baby – and you other bastards.

THAT’s something good about “America.” I like survivalism, the uphill clime, walking or peddling into the wind. I like to fight, to outwit an opponent. It’s been my lifetime avocation. I always win, in the end, and I know that from having done it.

I like to play the federal plenipotentiary vs. private citizen version of the “Great Game.” The espionage duels of history – England and Tsarist Russia, WW-2 German and the Allies, and the Cold War - now have their private and personal version. Government versus citizen. Absolutely corrupted government – that by craven coward, concupiscent pervert, and the incorporated greedy – needs to know not only what you eat, drink, listen to, look at – prefer in any way (they can sell you something) – they want to know what you THINK. And, like any other addict, those so addicted will stop at nothing. It’s fun to play a game like that – you know exactly everything he’ll do. He’s driven, you know.

And you get him. Lots of fun. Like "checkmate" in Chess. "Gotcha!" Satisfying. For instance, the guys who break in here continually are in for a hell of a shock one of these days. When the babe and I have acquired immunity to the stuff, anyone who goes in the wrong places here will have only a couple of hours to wish they hadn’t. I hope when the sphincters let go, they’ve made it to the driveway.

Then there’s that Patriot Act electronic eavesdropping “thing.” George the Seventh is on the radio as I type this, telling the media that the legislators and courts MUST make legal whatever he wants to do. He, after all, is the Great Poo-Bah. The Maharajah of Magadore - or was it Tralfamadore? The Great Carnack ("Knows all, sees all, tells all"). Nobody – that he actually said this tells you how far gone we are – will “do what they have to do,” knowing they might be charged with war crimes.

How about THAT?! We want to do what has always been considered a war crime – “crime against humanity,” whenever no war is available for justification, so the U.S. Congress and the nation’s courts should make it legal. And the guy is a Bible-Thumper Christian! (Ha! While I wrote that, he started telling us how he likes to hear from people who say they’re praying for him – holy crap!).

Remembering Ann Richards again, there’s not much doubt that Dubbya goes dad one better in the “born with a silver foot in his mouth.” You elected this boob president? Holy – oh, never mind!

I like to laugh, like I said, and the double entendre there in that last parenthetical aside was intended. Excuse me while I bust a gut. It’s good.

Want more? Well, consider that in July, the feds were in local U.S. District Court, trying to legalize what they’ve been doing for more than a years anyway. To pen registers, “trap and trace devices,” and similar Gestapo tactics, they want to stretch or erase the ECPA (that’s “Electronic Communications Privacy Act”). JULY. Now I wonder who they have in mind - now that I’ve caught the federal prick outside my house with his induction surveillance and eavesdropping gear?

Clowns are lots of fun, always – these are a little short of Emmett Kelly, I’ll admit, but what the hell – and if there’s ever been a more Keystone Kops administration, I can’t remember it. If the Bush League doesn’t remind you of Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts Court, you’re not paying attention. First go ahead and do it, then go to court to have it legalized.

“No!” said the Queen (of Hearts – remember?), “first the sentence, and then the evidence!”

Pretty funny. And when the other guys run their tactics like that, it makes a guy look like Clausewitz. One of these days, they’ll do their routine plug-in to my computer – every morning for more than a year now, the watchdog program on my rig tells me there’s somebody else already using it – and the program I call “Liver Fluke” (it swims up your dick, then eats your liver) will do something very similar to the eavesdroppers’ computers. That’s ALL of them. It’s like poking a wire through the keyhole the pervert is looking through. Oooooh! – That smarts!

There! I not only found something good about the country, I found LOTS of things. Besides the obvious (sex, in case you missed it), I’ve had more fun at judo tournaments than anywhere else. That’s because I love to fight. It’s my element.
Yeah? Well, f--- you! You made me that way, my country; you and the bullies of my youth. I hated fighting – at first. For quite a while, matter of fact. But, just like the school or street bully, you wouldn’t have it any other way. I trained – oh, how I trained – and after a while, I first got used to what I hated, then loved it. I went looking for obnoxious bullies the way I went looking for willing women.

Did I ever tell you about “trolling” (remind yourself that I never tell any story I can’t back up with witnesses who know I did what I say)? Wearing a two-karat diamond pinky, dressed in a tailored suit, flashing a big roll of hundreds and with as sexy a woman as I could find (one was a girl named “Kitty”) on my arm, I’d make the wrong part of this or that big city – acting drunk as the proverbial skunk.. With that much “blood” in the water, the sharks could never resist. When they came to feast, I had my weekly randori – judo scrimmage. FUN!

And, of course – some things never change – when the people who break in here die of what they disturb, and the eavesdropping tools fry and melt, I‘ll hear just what I heard when I “turned the tables” – actually it was what’s called a “switch to an armbar” – on the bullies back home. Why did I DO that?

Now, that’s fun – something good about “America.”

I laugh a lot, too – now that I’m thinking about it. And laughing is good. I laugh my ass off at a nation of people who keep bleating how free they are; that while their government rounds them up every year to be sheared like sheep. They’re free. That’s where there is damned near nothing they can do that isn’t regulated. Yesterday, I heard about a soldier who’s in trouble because he prayed (!) while wearing his uniform.

Your government puts five times as many people in jail as any other civilized nation on Earth, and every time a corporation like an oil company wants to gouge your eyes out (figuratively, of course – for a while), you “pay at the pump” – through the teeth - but you’re free. You’re going to have another of your Hobson’s Choice elections (you can vote for anybody you like, as long as it’s the candidates the people already in control give you), and the little rich boy you picked from the last presidential Hobson’s Choice is using a war he duped you into in order to transfer hundreds of billions of your hard-earned money to corporate pals like Halliburton and the like.

You’re free. Now, that’s funny – something good about “America.” I laugh a lot.

Then, too, the government is replete with comedians – funny people. Like, for instance, King George the Seventh (you know him as George Dubbya) and all those intellectuals in Congress, the people who are saying we don’t know how to extract ourselves from the quagmire war in Iraq. The von Clausewitzes all say we HAVE to “stay the course,” just hang in there, and scratch where it itches, sort of. We’d look bad if we “cut and run.”

Brilliant - Like we don’t look bad now? That’s like NASA saying, “We really don’t know how to get into space, but we’ll just bumble along until it comes out. Just keep the money and the bodies coming, folks – we’ll get it right eventually! It’d look bad if we quit just because we keep crashing and burning.

Which reminds me of another thing I love about “America.” The glories of democracy, the “way of life” we want to sell everybody. Think about that. With about half the world’s people – including the “American” version - having an IQ under 70, the implications are obvious – and pretty damned frightening. Imagine that all the idiots actually did what we’re always exhorting them to do – vote. Now imagine being at the mercy not only of whomever that pack of idiots elects, but at the mercy of the idiots themselves.

Why, a pack of idiots like that might elect president somebody just like THEM!

9-11 - "Because You're Stupid!"

September 11, 2006:

Of course, today's the day. It's the anniversary of a U.S. Government pratfall not unlike that which occurred at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. On December 7, 1941, as on September 11, 2001, people of sense - even people whose positions were intended for the purpose of warning of impending attack by an enemy - saw their warnings go ignored. The watchdog barked, but no one would listen.

That's what we're supposed to believe. Actually, the watchdog the sleeping camp had put on guard duty either went to sleep, or permitted the enemy to sneak into camp and slit throats. There are, logically, only those two possibilities.

In the Old West, or any military but ours (ours is "kinder, gentler," more feminist), the watchdog would have been executed either way. The comrades, relatives, and families of the raiders' victims would have been given some measure of relief from their outraged psyches.

Not in the Land of the Fee. What the living victims get in the Land of the Fee is a torrent, an avalanche, of excuses. It's called "damage control." The wonder, of course, is that they dare something as contemptibly cynical. That defeated commanders no longer fall on their swords is singularly "American." As a matter of everywhere evident fact, they make "lemonade out of the lemon." We can't even get rid of them by throwing them out of office or bureaucratic position. They won't go. Their lethal and public malfeasance and dereliction of duty is not only mollified with the help of a conniving press and media, they get the Medal of Freedom from their Fuck-up Commander in Chief.

How do they get away with it?

Well, let's go back to my last here for some insight. I related that fully half of the electorate in the United States has an intellect - Intelligence Quotient - below average. That's 70, in other words. That's barely able to read and write, cogent only to the level permitting him to find his way to and from the job he may or may not have. His skill with mathematics is such that it will not enable him to reliably make change for a five dollar bill. To the sort exalted by corporate capitalism, our national religion, he is as malleable as clay or putty. He falls for any and every fad, fashion, or trend among his peers, from moronic hair style to idiotic dress (I'm reminded of the latest - wearing one's belt lower than his underwear). He - she, ninety six percent of the time (a friend of mine who works at a check-out counter in a super market has never in eight years seen a man buy one) - faithfully reads and believes tabloid magazines. These are the people who can't identify the outline of their state or nation on a map. Some years ago, when I used the expression "turn of the century," one of these intellectual giants and deciders of our nation's "leadership" asked, "When was that?"

These people are the human equivalent of sheep. Once disciplined and made socially useful by a caring society including parents, they are now nothing more than a crushing burden for everyone including themselves. Nowhere is this more evident than where our present topic is concerned. In the movie "The Mask of Zorro," a trio of bandidos, one the future Zorro, tricks a squad of soldiers and their leader, to get the upper hand. "I thought your hands were tied," the dupe wails. "That's because you're stupid!" Zorro smirks.

The Dog That Didn't Bark has gotten away with malfeasance or outright treachery because we're stupid. A few days ago, on "Imus in the Morning," the host or a guest asked why it was that where government is concerned the, "the wheels have come off the wagon." The wheels have come off the wagon because no one kept maintenance on the wagon. Too stupid. Too stupid, and greedy. Too stupid and desirous of creature comfort, including freedom from every kind of responsibility. Like duty to the nation.

Remember "Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country?" Not if you're the typical "American," you don't.

Uh-uh. Neither do you remember any kind of training in logic or problem solution thinking. That's because you weren't taught. It's not part of the curriculum in any of out miserable school system. Of course, not having been taught to think by school system or parent (remember when they were essentially one and the same?), you wouldn't realize that, or its connection to the mess we're in.

You wouldn't recognize or realize when a television show like that of Bill O'Reilly was able to run its full length without once making a logically valid argument. You wouldn't have any way to recognize that literally weeks of broadcast and telecast time go by without a single complete truth having been told. You wouldn't realize that you are relentlessly subjected to the most massively voluminous and intensive mind and opinion control campaign ever levelled against a public (sit down one night and compare the time devoted to advertising and programming). It's the modern form of brain-washing, and only a fool could mistake it for anything else.

We don't know what went wrong on September 11 (people who read "Wake Up Call," by Kristin Breitweiser, wife of a 9-11 victim, will have a good idea). We don't know why "Operation Iraqi Freedom" is such a fiasco . We don't know why the Taliban are resurgent in Afghanistan. We don't know why the government can't stop illegal immigration from Mexico. We don't know why New Orleans and the Gulf Coast still languish in the misery wrought by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Oh, there's more we don't know. But it's not just the "why" we don't know. We don't even know that IRS, for instance, is still a Congressional Frankenstein Monster, raging and pillaging about the countryside. We don't know about the Veteran's Administration and its death-trap hospitals. We don't know about federal theft and fraud so mind-boggling that it would make any difference if we did know - it's beyond our pitiful math. We don't know about impending disaster in the form of global pollution, the accelerating gap between rich and poor, or the staggering increases in the number of homeless persons.

Even when we do know, things like the thunderously obvious fact that corporate oil company capitalism is strangling the life out of the economy, forcing prices higher and higher and driving more and more of the public into that poverty I just mentioned, we haven't the smarts to do anything as simple as slow down (it uses less gas, meaning reduces demand). There's more, but suffice it to say the wagon's wheels have come off and we don't know why.

WE DON'T KNOW WHY BECAUSE WE'RE STUPID! We'll believe anything, and we're having our noses rubbed in the fact that we will every day, all day, and every night, all night.

How many times have you heard that no one expected what has happened in Iraq? No one knew how many troops, weapons, and materiel would be required? How about that no one now has a plan for Iraq? Or that the only thing to do now is "stay the course" - all the while not knowing what the "course" is?

That's absurd. It's absurd, and the only reason you believe it, the only reason your "leaders' have the colossal chutzpah to tell you anything so absurd is the fact that they know YOU'RE STUPID! Let me show you what THEY know, and prove how stupid they think you are. Go to the following website, and read about a military mathematician who long ago - as early as 1958 - derived from the record of history a method not only to know the outcome of battles and wars, but - axiomatically - what was required to win them. http://www.dupuyinstitute.org

I had a small hand (the original argument that it could and would one day be done) in development of what was originally dubbed the "Quantificational Judgment Model Analysis." Anyone with either a thorough knowledge of military history or the Tactical Numerical Deterministic Model knows what was and is required to achieve any given goal in Iraq - or anywhere else. The TNDM is accurate with very small - five percent or less, either way - margins of error. To believe anything as absurd as the "we didn't know, we don't know" mantra liturgy now being recited by the government, national "leaders," and the co-opted and sycophant media simple betrays ignorance of military history. Ignorance. Stupidity.

To retain on pay any tradesman who doesn't know what has gone wrong, and admits not knowing what needs to be done next, is stupid, too. When the pilot of your plane delivers you to the wrong airport and destination, anyone who continues to fly with him is stupid. To follow a guide who keeps leading you into a swamp or quagmire like Iraq is STUPID!

No amount of ceremony and commemoration, no amount of pious pronouncements and political posturing, will change one absolutely inescapable fact. To ignore the fact of what happened on 9-11 is something akin to the behavior of the nitwit driving an SUV at ninety miles an hour, blissfully oblivious of the equally inescapable fact that he is accelerator-pushing himself toward poverty and the enslavement by the oil companies and "Corporate America" that means.

September 11, 2006 and the World Trade Center happened because the people of the United States are STUPID!

The Mongoose Trick

The Mongoose Trick

'You Must Be Mad, or You Wouldn't Be Here!"

September 9, 2006:

In a little while now, the people – some of them, at least – will participate in re-enactment of what may be the most cherished of their myths, that of republican democracy. The pundits and pollsters who would give us to understand that they are all in a lather, salivating over the prospects of a “landslide” (apropos, that – it goes with the blizzard of bullshit associated with the landslide) would also have us believe that we are choosing our government.

The wonder of it is that anyone cogent enough to find his way home after work or school could be so out of touch with the world around him as to believe anything so patently and obviously untrue. Of course, one way to accomplish such a mental miscue is to change word definitions. Equivocate, in other words. Since the dawn of militantly mindless feminism, we’ve become a people very adept at that. Don’t like the truth, reality? Change what you call it.

Yup, it’s everywhere you look these days. To call, for instance, what’s going on in Iraq “insurrection” implies that our invasion and the ensuing war ended as soon as President Bush said, “Mission accomplished.” Or, that it ended as soon as a citizen of Iraq welcomed us. All the people shooting at us didn’t count.

And, there’s no civil war going on there. Just because two major factions – eighty, even ninety percent of Iraqi citizens - are killing one another with weapons of war and in numbers like one hundred a day, you can’t call it a civil war. The definition is everything, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld will give you the correct – politically correct, that is – definition.
So there you have it. There will be a ritual called “election” where people will cast ballots. Voila – Democracy! Never mind that the “election” will offer two candidates controlled entirely by nameless and faceless persons, members of a corporate oligarchy who decide everything meaningful totally without the public’s representation or influence on what is decided.

Never mind that the candidates were in the main selected decades before, almost in adolescence and by that same corporate oligarchy. Never mind that to suggest the candidacy of a man or woman from actual mainstream “America” would draw nothing but derision and contemptuous laughter from the nation’s military industrial complex plenipotentiaries and the media it owns and controls.

So we may have “control” – notice the terminology; it means superiority in number – of the U.S. Congress by the Democratic Party. Tweedledee will supplant Tweedledee. Uriah Heap will sit in for Mr. Bumble the Beadle in our Dickensian national workhouse. And, like I said, don’t expect a Mr. Micawber to be elected any day soon – not even for janitor (that’ll be a Mexican, and they can’t – yet – hold public office; yet).

The “American” – even that requires defining – system of myths has reached absolutely religious proportions, dogma unquestionable by the faithful. There seems no limit. From the free market economy, to equality under the law, to federal government (“characterizing an agreement between states to unite, foregoing some sovereignty but remaining independent in internal affairs” – see anything like that here in the Land of the Fee, do you?), the United States of America is a myth, a people living in only virtual reality.

Why? How? Well, watch television for a week; and, if you are conversant with the rules of logic, keep score. (And for reference, here’s a page that will help you with the basic rules of effective thinking: http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org

Having done that, you will find that more than ninety percent of the argument and reasoning supporting it is fallacious. That, incidentally, is an actual statistical count done over a period of three months, and using the three major networks, CNN, and FoxNews. In the instance of “Fox,” matters were even worse. During on week’s programming, I found the following classical errors of logic:

Ad hoc
Ad hominem
Affirming the consequent
Appeal to authority
Appeal to fear
Appeal to pity
Appeal to probability
Appeal to tradition
Appeal to the majority
Argument from ignorance
Begging the question
Biased sample
Correlation implies causation
Denying the antecedent
Equivocation
False dilemma
Hasty generalization
Loki's Wager
No true Scotsman
Post hoc ergo propter hoc
Slippery slope
Straw man
Undistributed middle


In a number of instances, the fallacy was a specific variation on one of these, but one just as nonsensical. As a matter of fact, to cover the whole spectrum of blather spewed nightly by television pundit and expert would require a very voluminous book. Or two. It’s incredible.

A couple of nights ago, just for one instance by way of example, the national audience heard for what must be the fiftieth time since the President’s declaration of “war on terror” the argument concerning torture of prisoners. During a few minute segment featuring the remarks of former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity and his guest just about covered the waterfront of classical fallacy.

Of course, Fox News personality Sean Hannity always begins either with one kind or another of ad hominem attack, one made directly or by implication. Anyone who disagrees with him is an idiot, a traitor, or both – or worse, or less, whatever it takes. He specializes in the loaded question. “When are you going to begin condemning terrorism?”

Anyone who questions anything being done in Iraq or the "war on terror" is "encouraging the enemy" and "damaging the morale of our fighting men" (and, of course, women - demagoguery requires it). Supporting torture, Fox News' Bill O'Reilly does not once consider what that means for any of our troops captured by their enemies.

If that weren't enough, and speaking figuratively, the headline of the discussion was the contention that the means – torture - would justify the end - the supposed prevention of a nuclear attack on New York City. “We must use torture because it will get the information we need to prevent a cataclysmic attack on the United States.”

Now, any argument that the means can justify the end is a circular one, called petitio principii in formal logic. In the vernacular, it “begs the question.” This one assumes that what a person being tortured says is the truth. The specious argument, matter of fact, can be stated various ways, each fallacious for a different reason classically. This one will do:“Torture will get the truth. How do we know it will be the truth? Because torture always gets the truth."

While it is a statistical fact that more than half the human race has below average intelligence (something television’s owners and pundits rely upon heavily), it is an equally statistical fact that duress seldom obtains useful, much less truthful (not necessarily the same) information. That “stands to reason” – i.e., common sense due individual personal experience. Obviously, in the first place, the person being tortured may be willing to die, rather than say anything. That may be due several reasons, moreover. Then, too, the vast majority of persons will say under torture whatever they deem necessary to make the torture stop. A person ignorant of the information being sought is in a real fix, such that he will fabricate something, anything. The information then becomes something akin to an untested and unproven medicine.

I’m reminded of a drug(?) called Laetrile a few years ago. It supposedly cured cancer, but doctors pointed out that while the drug might be even inert, and therefore harmless, reliance up it might mean cessation of other kids of treatment more often effective. Information obtained under torture is often of that character.

But people intent upon misinformation aren’t going to just shut up when confronted with logical proof of their false reasoning or downright mendacity. During the week in question, Gingrich, Hannity, O’Reilly and the “Fox” team missed hardly one of the classical fallacies. That’s not just by way of several variations on petitio principii – like that which involves trying to prove what you say by arguing what you seek to disprove (an O’Reilly favorite, by the way) – but Argument From Adverse Consequences (“If we don’t torture, what’s to stop an attack?”), The Straw Man (“I can’t understand why anyone who doesn’t condone torture wants to leave us defenseless like that” - a Hannity favorite), and the Argument From Ignorance (“It hasn't been proved that torture doesn’t work, so we should do it.”).

Nastiest among the fallacious arguments, at least from my opinion, has been the relentless repetition (Argument ad nauseam) that torture of one or more al Qa’ida leaders prevented a particular attacked planned by the terrorists. That’s the fallacy usually called Argument By Selective Observation, or “Cherry Picking.” It’s what keeps the casinos in Las Vegas – to say nothing of the state lotteries – in business and very rich. Otherwise, it’s against the law and referred to as “bunco.” Like the “experts” on Fox, the argument counts the hits and ignores the misses. By that crack-brained criteria, any rifle becomes accurate enough to be trustworthy.

It goes on and on, a veritable blizzard of balderdash. For fun – well, hell; you owe it to yourself, to say nothing of your country - download a list of the logical fallacies, make a copy, and have it with you as you watch television, its “analysts” and “experts.” This is a collection of snake-oil salesman to beggar their counterparts in the patent medicine business of years past.

On the “Boob Tube” (singularly apropos here, what?), for example of the latter, Argument From Authority is everywhere. The “expert opinion” comes not only from individuals of experience and expertise doubtful in the extreme (why is today’s general automatically an authority where military tactics – especially having to do with guerrilla warfare – are concerned?), or those who have been thoroughly and publicly discredited. Former Los Angeles Police Detective Mark Fuhrman, for instance.

This is serious, my friend. In fact, it's nothing short of a crisis. The information media serve a societal and national purpose much like that which the brain and intellect serve for the individual. The fact is that our “information services” are nothing of the kind. They do not have that for their purpose. What they do intend is all but identical with that of the tabloids - money. None of it is real, none of it is honest, and none of it would make sense to an electorate of people educated anywhere but in our state-run schools.

Don't forget that half the people listening to this claptrap have intellect below normal.

The result is something for the society equivalent to insanity in an individual. Nothing explains as well, and is more symptomatic of, the bizarre state of affairs we find ourselves in. With Hurricanes Katrina and Rita victims collectively struggling like a wounded beast, possibly in its death throes, the result of a cataclysmic storm, we race to the aid of earthquake or tsunami victims overseas. While New Orleans languishes, we spend billions on Baghdad. Under threat of a clandestine terrorist infiltration, even a biochemical or nuclear terror attack, we leave our borders and ports wide open, while encouraging – even by way of incentives – illegal immigration. Meanwhile, to protect us from "terror," we are to be - are being - herded into virtual imprisonment, our rights protected by the U.S. Constitution arrogated by our "protectors."

If that isn’t illogical, even to the point of insanity, what the hell is?

LOYALTY? Honor? In the Land of the Corporate Capitalist?!

“Above everything, loyalty – except honor.” Actually, it was in German, a Sprichwort – Motto, I guess, is the best translation – on a Bierkrug – what you call a “stein” (it isn’t, but you call it that – it’s the way we are, nowadays) my grandfather had. I remembered it in a rather peculiar way when I realized that my mother, and my brothers and sisters, has abandoned me. I was twelve or so.

The words of the Sprichwort have always moved me, in a peculiar way, like I said. There are a lot of phrases like that. “Americans” love them. Ever telecast of a professional, college, or other football, basketball, or baseball game will recite that de rigueur mantra at least a dozen times, and the highest compliment an “American” can pay his fellow is to say that he is a team player. That means he’s loyal. Nothing more important than that.

While being an excellent movie and historical document, the recent made-for-television movie, “Band of Brothers,” celebrated teamwork and team spirit. “Band of Brothers” exalted another set of words – the information age, we love ‘em - these from Shakespeare, originally.

“From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,

Last night, it was a movie (an old one – I’m not much for movies, especially the drivel the new ones always are), “Soldiers.” That, you may have trouble remembering – like I said, it’s an old movie – is the story of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) in the Ia Drang Valley, 1965. 1st Battalion, Seventh Cavalry Regiment Commander Hal Moore tells his troopers, "And I swear to you that I will leave no man behind, dead or alive."

The movie makes me recall another, one I saw in a Laundromat a few years ago, Pittsburg, I think. That one, as I recall, was called “Uncommon Valor.” I watched some – Gene Hackman, you know, is a hell of an actor. “Valor” is about the MIAs – Missing In Action – we left in Southeast Asia after the Vietnam War. There are loyalty lines in that one, too. Great stuff – we never leave anyone behind. I guess I also remarked how “Americans” love to hear lines like that, and see their ideals played out ritualistically. After all, you can always tell we mean it when somebody makes a movie about it. Of course.

Just great stuff. In fact, it’s the stuff that’s the glue holding the best and most cohesive military units together. From Leonidas and his Spartans at Thermopylae to the First of the First Cavalry in Vietnam’s Ia Drang Valley, loyalty – esprit de corps - is the military unit’s version of gravity.

I know about loyalty. I’m all for it, and I was taught that Sprichwort by my grandfather, my hero. I believe in loyalty. Like gravity forms celestial bodies – planets, stars, systems, galaxies, and the like, loyalty is the reason for family, culture, society, nations and national alliances. Like gravity forms celestial bodies – planets, stars, systems, galaxies, and the like, loyalty is the reason for family, culture, society, nations and national alliances. That happens, I believe, because human beings don’t like to feel alone, or to think they’ll be left to fend for themselves. I think it’s a primordial thing, atavistic.

It occurs to me, however, and because I WAS left to fend for myself, that I actually know very little about it on the one hand, that of practical experience. On the other hand, that a matter of more than the usual study, I know a great deal about loyalty. More, and in a manner perhaps only another orphan can understand, I value the concept and tradition of parents, and family, far more, perhaps than those who have always had it.

Interesting, isn’t it, that as I typed that, the television announced still another loyalty flick, “The World Trade Center.” That’s about rescuing people trapped on 9-11 when the hijacked airliners made their humiliatingly successful attack. It’ll be a big seller, great stuff. Band of Brothers. We never leave anyone . . . Oh, I said that, didn’t I? It’s the kind of “tell a lie often enough, it becomes the truth” drivel we seem veritably to live on in the Home of the Brave. We are absolutely awash in language, rhetoric, and logic tortured in order to distort the reality we live in. A product of feminist humanism, I believe it represents the biggest threat to the life of this nation and the human civilization the latter threatens. “The Band of Brothers” Loyalty Myth is but one example, but it will serve to make my point.

In the movie, “Uncommon Valor,” Gene Hackman’s character Colonel Frank Rhodes says, “You men seem to have a strong sense of loyalty, because you’re thought of as criminals – because of Vietnam. Do you know why? Because you lost. And in this country, that’s like going bankrupt – you’re out of business. They want to forget about you. You cost too much, and you didn’t turn a profit. That’s why they won’t go over there, to pick up our buddies and bring them back. Because there’s no GAIN in it. “

The soldiers failed, in other words, and the United States of America, where individual life is so supposedly so precious, the life of a failure in NOT so precious. I use lines from movies a lot, as do I quotes of great men and women, because the so often say things succinctly, and better than I can. A while back, I also quoted from the movie, “The Mask of Zorro. In the movie, Anthony Hopkins, in the role of Diego de la Vega - the old Zorro, is instructing the new Zorro, Antonio Banderas, concerning a party they will attend in disguise. Raphael Montero, the story’s villain, will not recognize his old enemy de la Vega, Hopkins says, because a member of the Spanish nobility “would never look directly at a servant.”

Interesting, huh? Especially if you realize the reason a member of the Spanish nobility would never look directly at a servant. I can tell you about that from actual experience, not language or narrative. The nobility in this country won’t look at the poor, either. When you live on the street, it’s because you lost, and in this country that’s like going bankrupt, you’re out of business.” It doesn’t matter why, either. They look right through you.

Remember what I said the other day about thought, and thinking? That people fear thought more than anything else in the world? Remember why? Thinking, I reflected, is something Homo Sapiens – “Thinking Man” – fears because he has learned that thinking is subversive, revolutionary - destructive and terrible. Thought is merciless to privilege, to established institutions, and to comfortable opinions. To society and its governments, thought is anarchic and lawless; it’s indifferent to authority, and indifferent toward the “wisdom” of Man.

That’s probably why, as individuals and as a people, we do it so very badly. We’re far, far out of practice. Today’s public discourse, political and otherwise – from the man in the street to the purported expert on television – is riddled with logical fallacy. In fact, unless the public soon demands that public debate anywhere be moderated by a trained logician, we will perish as a democratic nation. The ship of state, like any other, cannot be left to the control of an idiot or lunatic.

But we fear accurate thinking even more than we fear thinking in general. If the hidalgo – the nobility – were to look at the “bankrupt,” the “out of business” – the poor, that is – the looking might evoke thought.

A few months ago, I happened during a trip to read the “Letters to the Editor” section of the San Angelo, Texas newspaper. A lady wrote indignantly that the poor in the United States had, “house, cars, even televisions sets.” Poverty in the United States, she said, was different from poverty elsewhere. A couple of days ago, referring to the Hurricane Katrina disaster, another American hidalgo, this one a columnist, expressed the same opinion. It fascinates me.

It fascinates me especially when I juxtapose Hackman’s Colonel Rhodes speech with that of say, our president or any of the pandering plenipotentiaries who rule here in the Land of the Free. I think, matter of fact, that ought to be done for everyone. Colonel Rhodes speech is one somebody should repeat daily in every school, and every forum in the United States.

We do love sanctimonious litanies, after all, especially those FEEL good ones feminism-imbued political correctness demands. You know, the ones the nation’s “pacifists” mouth like parrots daily. Peace at any price sounds so righteous – until YOU are the one whose life is part of the price.
The colonel’s speech should have been recited the other day, for instance, when pressure from the nation that abandons anything and anything unprofitable forced Israel to abandon the men kidnapped by Hezbollah and other Arab terrorists.

It ought to be recited by the poor, each time they are publicly ignored, and each time they are ignored in the congress.

It ought to be recited by the poor citizen of this country, when the hidalgos of corporate “America” look thought them to find an illegal alien willing to work for a quarter of what the legal citizen needs just to pay the taxes his illegal counterpart won’t be required to pay.

It especially ought to be recited by the U.S. Citizen like me, who served in the nation’s military, and played the game of “American Dream,” only to be savaged by the military industrial complex corporations auxiliary IRS, ruined, dispossessed of everything, and thrown out into the street – to become invisible, looked through like a pane of glass.

“Do you know why? Because you lost. And in this country, that’s like going bankrupt – you’re out of business. They want to forget about you. You cost too much, and you didn’t turn a profit. That’s why they won’t go over there, to pick up our buddies and bring them back. Because there’s no GAIN in it. “
Let me tell you something, my country, about the “team player,” “patriot,” and “loyalty” thing. It IS like gravity. It holds things together. Without it, things come apart – and much faster than you think. A nation that abandons those who have served it – soldier or otherwise, or both – won’t last long after it begins doing that. The reason is simple, and every human being knows it like a primordial urge, an instinct.

EVERYONE fears being left. Alone. No one wants to think about, even consider, being left alone. That’s why the MIA were never brought home. That’s why something like seventy percent of Vietnam’s veteran are unemployed. That’s why the gap between the nation’s hidalgos and the poor grows yearly, and now, exponentially.
“Never look over your shoulder,” Satchel Paige once remarked, “something might be catching up to you.”

That’s why they look right through you.

In Conservative Never-Never Land, Why IS the right to be left alone so un-important?

Since acquiring access to a television a little while ago after a ten year hiatus resulted from confiscation of all my worldly goods and dispossession by the United States, I watch people like Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, and the like with near-apoplectic wonderment. Last night CNN's Glen Beck was stultifying, stupefying. Is this guy in the same country and world I am? "America," he said with innocent insolence, is in a class all by itself, so far superior to the rest of the world that we are judged by separate standards. He was proud of that. Excuse me?

It looks like a reality check is in order for these characters. I assume, of course that they are not just actors playing parts and reading lines handed them by federal masters. I suspect they are - NOBODY is this oblivious and unthinking.

The photo here is that of the wound inflicted by a federal sniper, shooting from ambush on October 6, 1986. He was, I've always believed, trying to prevent my testimony at hearings preceding and attendant the first Omnibus Taxpayers Bill of Rights. In 1987, you see, the U.S. District Court for Colorado ruled in my Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that to give me federal records having to do with me would "irreparably damage the tax collection system of the United States."

Gentlemen, Mr. Beck, this isn't the country you seem to think it is. I wrote what follows here the other day, responding to persons who seemed to feel the same way you do about civil rights, quaint old documents (or however cavalierly it was that the Attorney General dismissed those "unimportant" - that the comment of one reader on my site - concerns), like the U.S. Constitution, and all that.

My essay was entitled 'Why IS the right to be left alone so important?'

As I may have mentioned on my website recently, I came home the other day after a bike – bicycle – ride, to discover that the government is still up to its old tricks. The guy or guys who were in the house had been betrayed by the electric garage door at the front of our new place. The overhead door, you see, has an automatically-operated light. When the door goes up, the light comes on, and stays on for two minutes after the door has closed again. Automatic, like I said.

I had ridden the bike for an hour, part of the morning workout I have been doing for fifty-five years now. Wary of any kind of gadgetry like door openers, I had left the dead-bolt on the place’s other front door, the one beside the attached garage, un-bolted - locking only the keyed lock. I left through the garage, using the house door there and the remote device on the garage’s overhead door. Returning, I came in with my key through the residence’s front door, going immediately to the house door opening into the garage. It’s about four feet distant. When I opened the door, the automatic overhead door light was still on. I waited the twenty-two seconds before it went out, timing with the second hand on my wristwatch.

Damn! I’d thought I was free of the bastards. Stupid, that - in this kind of government, no one is EVER free. In fact, it was with something of mixed emotions that I discovered the federal (how do I know? – tell you in a minute) intrusion. It’s been four years now, since the last of the “harassment on the highway” incidents. That's the “cop stop” by a belligerent and provocative minion of small-time law enforcement looking to make his statement of patriotic righteousness. Whereas every day had once been fraught with the high tension of anticipated confrontation with the power of conspiratorial totalitarian government, the sudden absence of it seems to be nearly as unsettling as its presence.

I suppose I should explain that. I’ve told here how for more than twenty-three years the United States of America, Land of the Free, Nation of Laws, deliberately and with malice aforethought tormented one of its citizens, me. After several overt attempts to kill me outright – that’s murder, in case relating "subject" and perpetrator has you confused – the U.S. resorted to its more subtle methods where enemies of the state are concerned. Oh, the attempts ran the gamut, from poison (two or three times, matter of fact), to blatant, right-in-your-face, mugging by professional goons.

One, matter of fact, was a two hundred forty pound karate expert. Failing by the method that would have further inflated his already over-inflated estimation of his martial arts lethality, he came back to try again with a silenced H&K handgun. He was as feckless with one as with the other. Pretty federal, when you think about it. It's like Iraq, and the "War on Terror."

The most insidious, though, was the “cop stop” method. Run-of-the-mill cops are generally accidents – murderous ones – looking for a place to happen. Supremely under-trained for theie purpose, they know it, too. It must be one of the worst traps society can spring on an individual, something akin to President Harry Truman’s “I felt like a load of hay fell on me” realization that he was suddenly the nation’s chief executive officer. As an "officer," you get six or eight weeks instruction and training, then hit the most deadly jungle on the planet, the mean streets of the U.S.A.

Armed with weapons capable of inflicting instantaneous death, including a handgun you generally can't hit the side of a barn with, you have the authority to use them in only the most precisely defined circumstances – circumstance for which the definition will come AFTER you have exercised your lethal authority. To appreciate - understand even remotely – one would have to be put through a SWAT, FBI Hostage Rescue, or the like special operations team “fun house.” It’s supposed to train you to make the “shoot – don’t shoot” decision correctly. No mistakes, or you flunk the course. Death is final, you know, whether that of a “perp” or of a housewife or her baby. Like the confrontation in that will occur in the street, the "fun house" target leaps into view in second, and you have half a second - or less - to decide. Shoot the wrong target, you flunk. Like I said.

Shitty occupation, really. Twenty or so years of walking the razor’s edge. Fuck up just once, lose everything career is about; and the longer you go without trouble, the higher the stakes get. I know, because I lived that way once, too.

You see, that cop who stopped me because the radio and police records told him to do that had also been told that I was probably “armed and dangerous.” I was, were that not bad enough, the radio or records said, a state pistol champion and master pistolero, an instructor. More, it said, I was a sixth degree black belt in judo, twice a national champion in its sport phase, capable of killing a man instantly with empty hands. The cop who came walking up along the side of my care was in his mind a mongoose about to confront a cobra. Except that this mongoose knows he’s a housecat. A rabbit, even.

He’s got one chance, he thinks - that handgun on his hip. I could always determine how much the “officer” had been told by that phony, "dummied up," record, just by spotting that sidearm. The retainer strap told me everything I needed to know.

So did the manner. Now and then, usually a state trooper, the guy was as courteous and professional as an Iowa Highway Patrolman (they’re without equal in this respect). Strictly no sweat. But I wouldn’t know that for a minute or two, damned near eternity, under the circumstances. Even when I realized this one had no ulterior motive, no fears provided him by the vicious bastards using him, termination of the “incident” would leave me drenched with sweat.

For a while, anyway – the human psyche can get used to anything.

Still, it was always there. One hundred and nine times, at least – I didn’t start a record until realization of what was happening came to me - in ten years. Each time, it was the run-up to a gunfight, the anticipation of having to fight or die. Damned clever trick, I’ll tell you. Win-win, for the bad guys. Were I over-react, lose my temper or “cool: and kill the cop, I die and they win. If I don’t, and do keep my “cool,” I live in torment worse than any SERE training or brain-washing by an enemy. Maybe I break down emotionally, even lose my mind. Clever, damned clever.

A couple of times, a cop came within a split second of instant death. Had one Corpus Christi, Texas cop or deputy sheriff moved the shotgun he held at port arms ready even perceptively, my bullet would have destroyed the hypothalamus of his brain – instant death.

Another time, a squad of cops suddenly and with utterly oblivious confidence in their really bumbling power, assaulted me as I sat eating a cup of ice cream in a grocery store coffee shop. Were it not for the fact of nearly twenty years of unintentional and inadvertent training by our federal masters, the first of the men who put his hands on me with insulting force would have died instantly, his brain destroyed and neck broken by the hands that had an instant before held a cup and plastic spoon. The same would have happened to the three men with him, this time by means of the loaded, cocked, and locked .45 caliber pistol I wore (I get off four aimed shots in a little more than a second, gentlemen - something your federal masters know very well).

But this night I was barely ruffled, even when I later discovered the cops’ deliberate attempt to wound or kill me. As I said, the human psyche can get used to anything.

Still, I’m wondering as I type this. Where is the f------ “bug?” Camera, even. What did they do to the computer? What did they plant? Pot? Cocaine” Heroine?

Don’t worry, gentle reader. I’m an old hand at this, now. The listening devices I located around the house the day we announced our intentions to move in have let me track all of the two people – a man and a woman – around the residence. I’ve disposed of the contraband – down the stool and by way of the microwave – and there’s nothing left but the “bug” – which I warned Rita about and pointed out to her. We’ll use it (I’m drawing up a lawsuit in U.S. District Court as I write this) later.

The practice drill I’ve made de rigueur with each change of residence was truly remarkable recently. The SWAT team breaking suddenly into the place was taken down in 1.3 seconds – all five of them.

(Don’t come, guys – not that way. There’s no way you could be ready for what’s here, or me. Just call me on the phone, first. We’ll talk. You’ll live. I’ve NEVER been your enemy, not matter what Lord Acton's "absolutely corrupt" say, and that record – the one you live by – makes that clear even to the stupidest clod among you. THINK about it.)

But the effective silence is deafening, and unsettling. I’ve carried the load for two decades, and for it to leave suddenly is . . . strange. I don’t know what to make of it. I haven’t been “tailed” menacingly - or otherwise, for that matter - by a patrol car in four years. I seldom even see a cop. Recently, letting Rita off at work while her car is in the shop, we passed a squad car and a cop writing a woman a ticket. Rita sensed my sudden readiness. You’ve never noticed – no reason, probably never an occasion – but a man who lives with or by the gun develops mannerisms apropos. The power to inflict sudden death is an awesome one, and the responsibility that goes with it is even worse. You think about it many times, every day. It changes you.

And Rita lives with me. She sees me with the gun every day, sees me practice with it. Every day. She knows that I am NEVER without it. She knows I sleep with it beside me. She refers to it by the same, “pet” name I do – “Sweetheart.”

She saw. She saw that I moved forward slightly in the seat, assuring freedom of access to the pistol on my right hip (actually better with it left-handed, slightly more accurate, I wear on the right side because the other means less access - a little slower - when seated in a car). At sight of the cop, I stopped chatting - and blinking my eyes, too - abruptly.

I don't suppose you've ever happened to notice the eyes of a stalking cat? Can you imagine that the mongoose closes his eyes, even for an instant, when he faces the cobra? There’s more, but, never having been anywhere like that, you probably wouldn’t recognize or believe what I say.

The cop never even looked at us as we went by. Incredible! Now, I’m thinking about it. What’s going on? Why are they leaving me alone? A trap? To device by which to inveigle me into un-readiness? A false sense of cease-fire? What? In a way, it’s as bad as the “cold war” – the war with IRS, that is. Maybe THAT’s it, another offensive move in the battle of wits and wills.

It’ll be all right, I’ll handle it. THEY WON’T GET ME, NOT EVER! The old dictum of Friederich Nietzsche, I've discovered, is true: “Whatever fails to kill me makes me stronger.” My enemy, you see, has made me invulnerable to everything he is capable of. Maybe that’s the reason there’s no more.

Yeah, maybe that’s it.

P.S. You know, I can't for the life of me understand why you don't learn from the troubles of folks like me. Like I said here, in a country like this NO MAN EVER FREE! Freedom is for fighters alone. It is not the nature of government - not once in all of history has it ever been so - to leave those subjected by its power, plebiscitic or otherwise, alone. Therefore, by simple, syllogistic logic, it must be FORCED to leave us alone. Worse, to leave the power to force government to respect our rights in the hands of the same government is by the same logic absurd.

If your government, the same government I hear federal hacks like Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly (though lesser, I must admit), Glen Beck, and their like apotheosize and suck up to, is so damned respectful of individual rights, if you have nothing to fear from their relentlessly illegal invasion of your privacy, and more, then how the hell do you explain what that same government did to me?

If you wonder why nations like Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and more don't trust the United States, tell me why they should trust any government that treats its own like the United States treated me. Do you think ANY of that would have happened, had I been able to say credibly that I had planted a nuclear bomb in one of our major cities (or anywhere else, for that matter), or had the ability to launch a nuclear attack?

WAKE THE HELL UP! The reason we are headed inexorably for a war with an entire race and their religion is because YOU - goddammit - have gone derelict in your responsibility to assure that what happened to me couldn't happen. Government is like disease - a logical case can be made that it IS disease - in that it must be controlled from without or it becomes an epidemic monster nothing can control. When G.W. Bush in his messianic obliviousness incites World War Three, IT WILL BE YOUR FAULT, and your children, who will pay for it and die for it, will hate you - righteously.

Wake the hell up. DO SOMETHING!