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.