"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!