Life Under the Ministry of Love.

Never in my lifetime, seventy years, and, on the basis of my long and intensive - avocational, that is – study of history, has the United States government at all levels been held in lower esteem with the public than today. From the outrage of the Iraq War to the security debacle of the World Trade Center, to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, to even more societally palpable outrages like the latest shooting by supposed drug law enforcement officers of a ninety-two year old woman, and the astonishing fusillade of bullets that riddled a young man leaving his bachelor party, the depredations of those in power against those subservient grows more horrendous daily.

Throw into the evil cauldron a Congress of supposedly elected officials shepherded by thirty-five thousand lobbyists owned by corporations whose wealth – and, hence, power – beggars description. Consider the tip of the iceberg represented by corruption personified with individuals like Congressmen Duke Cunningham, Tom Foley, and more, include a federal Gestapo like the Internal Revenue Service, then consider the implications of open borders and corporate treachery in the form of invitation and incentive to the aliens they exploit, and then try further to imagine the mountain of ice that must be below the surface.

Want more? Mine further the waters of our national life with generations of youth largely without parental supervision or even care, grown into illiterate morons who identify the victor in the battle of Yorktown as Douglas MacArthur, and the conflict in question as the Civil War, have the mathematical understanding of an exceptional chimpanzee, and listen ardently to the mindless drivel called rap (“music?”). Eighty-four percent of people interviewed in a small Texas town identified logic as a computer program. None – that’s zero, zip, nada, bupkis – could say correctly what is meant by the expression “begging the question.”

There’s more, and more. Ninety percent of people asked during the past four years say they listen to FoxNews either because it is “fair and balanced,” or do not listen to FoxNews because it is “biased.” None – that’s zip . . . oh, never mind – was able to offer any logically valid proof for his contention. Ninety-two percent did, however, say they were entitled to their opinion regardless of their ignorance of either the subject or the disciplines by which proof is established.

I don’t know what to make of that, except to recognize that it is the stuff most of our problems as a society are made from and stay ready. “Stay ready” means eschew wherever possible contact with what is dangerous. It’s the fundament, basic tactic of all living things. But therein lies yet another of the pitfalls of life in the land of corporate capitalism. You can’t stay away from them. They won’t let you. There is nothing more fundamentally inimical to societies and their governments than the right to be alone and left that way.

You see, the human being is a corrupt and concupiscent creature. He knows it, too. Knowing that he is corrupt, easily led by evil – especially evil he can foist upon his fellow as good (religion, for instance) – he assumes that everyone is like him. Dangerous. Neither is he willing to simply avoid what is dangerous. Uh-uh. That would mean that he had to provide for his own subsistence – all by himself. No one to exploit, no one from whom to steal, no one from whom to learn. The corollary, therefore, is that he fears to be alone as much as he fears his evil fellow. What a dilemma!

So, what does he do? Why, he creates governments. Governments do everything for him that he once imagined god did. Governments protect him from what he is – his fellow, that is. Governments do that by demanding to know everything there is to know about – know the very thoughts of - each potentially dangerous person; and, since governments are made of people who suspect everyone of thinking what they, themselves, think, there must be no privacy. In the words of humanist sociologists, it’s “anti-social.”

Now, just like the evil mind of man having been limited in the evil it could wreak upon its fellow man having become unlimited, the once upon a time limited ability of government to invade the privacy of individual has now become unlimited. The dynamite bomb that was a tap on your phone has become the nuclear one that can surveille everything you do – everything you think, even. Remember George Orwell? The book “1984?”

“It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”

How about this (1984, again)?

“The Ministry of Truth -- Minitrue, in Newspeak -- was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

“WAR IS PEACE

“FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

“IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

“The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.

“The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometer of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.”

“1984.” The difference today – 2,006 – is that Big Brother rules with state-of-the-art Newspeak technology. The Ministry of Truth, 2,006, is far, far more subtle. Gone are brutally obvious tactics like unisex uniforms, big “eyes” in every room, “The Two Minute Hate,” and all that. Oh, no. None of that.

Unless you look carefully, through eyes kept out of reach of the Ministry of Truth, the Ministry of Peace, and the Ministry of Love. Eyes kept private, that is.
Eyes kept free of indoctrination and today’s version of the Two Minute Hate rally see the similarities and parallels, the microcosms. And there is much to see, too much to deal with in a few pages.

But we can site examples. Consider the case of Michael Richards (I called him “Keith” the other day – I really do protect my mind from Big Brother). What is the seething diatribe elicited by his intemperate remarks if not a Two Minute Hate? Is there no alternative to an effort to ruin or end the productive life of the man?
How about sober refutation of what is being so rabidly denounced?

How about Professor Ward Churchill? Remember that? FoxNews people like Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, rather than rebut the professor’s supposedly inaccurately cruel remarks with valid argument, these Ministers of Truth demanded that Churchill lose his source of income. More, O’Reilly called his adversary in viewpoint “a traitor.” That isn’t hate? It will sure pass for it in my deliberations.

Do you know about Melinda Duckett, the woman who committed suicide after having been ambushed by a supposed newswoman named Nancy Grace? It’s a newsman’s business to put to third degree questioning persons uncharged with any crime, and of whom there is little – except in the fevered and lusting-for-ratings mind of the newsman – suspicion? Really?

I suppose for a society that thinks the Battle of Yorktown was during the Civil War, and thinks General Douglas MacArthur was the victor there, it’s a term from too long ago, but does no one recognize what was called in the time of another such “newsman” “yellow journalism?”

Does anyone ever see anything but yellow journalism today, 2,006?

Wanna play some more Orwellian word games? How about all out – meaning everything they’ve got, and if they had better weapons they’d use them - war between the true political factions (that it happens all politics there are religious issues makes a difference?) being termed “insurgency?” What makes it not a civil war? Or is what is happening really peace?

Without the Ministry of Truth, how do we tell?

And what of the Ministry of Love, 2,006? Well, the first thing that comes to mind for a guy whose body bears the scars of bullet wounds inflicted by our Ministry of Love, 1986, is something like the 92-year old woman shot to death in her own home by undercover officers of love, serving a “no-knock” warrant. Ninety-two. The earth-shaking, democracy-threatening, ruinous to peace crime being prevented? Suspicion of possession with intent to deliver . . . no, not a nuclear weapon; not even high explosives, or guns.

Marijuana!

WE – that’s you and I – killed a ninety-two year old woman in order to prevent the sale of ounces of marijuana.

When, by the way is the next of our regular, FoxNews Two Minutes of Hate rallies against that particular enemy of the people and destroyer of mankind?

Then we have the young soon-to-be (never plan anything as long-term as marriage in the Land of the Free - where you don’t dare venture out any where the Ministry of Love has easy access) bridegroom who somehow merited being riddled – fifty-one shots is pretty much a riddling, not matter what the Ministry of Truth calls it – as he left his bachelor party.

What’s that, commissioner? Mayor? Oh, it was a “Contagious shooting?”
Contagious. Well. That explains it, then. The boys didn’t know – we’re saying ignorant, right? - what was happening, so they just took care of everything by killing what they didn’t know about. Right?

Right – Ignorance Is Strength. Got it. Straight from the Ministry of Love.

It seems time for a “FoxNews Question.” You don’t know what a FoxNews question is? Why, it’s a question like, “Are those who question the White House giving aid and comfort to the enemy?” “Is a vote for Democratic Party candidates a vote for terror?” No more of the old, archaic – circa 1984 – questions like, “When did you stop beating your wife.”

Oh, no – No more Ministry of Truth. That was 1984. This is 2,006.

Oh, My God - Not the N-Word Again!

Oh, my god! Some moron has done it again. The N-word. Right in public; hell, right in front of an audience. The son of a bitch (anybody remember when that one could get you a punch in the mouth?) said it two or three times! Oh, my god! Oh, my god! Oh, my god!

Now we’ll have days, weeks even, of national garment-tearing, grief, and mea culpa-ing. Ministers who preach the gospel of forgiveness will demand everything from national expiation and prostration to reparation (we make, i.e., every soul with so much as a single DNA bead that is negroid financially wealthy). Politicians, those paragons of public piety (and private prurience), will posture for all their worth, protesting (I’m curious to see how many pee’s, or how much pee, I can get in a sentence) their prodigious love of everything Afro.

And one of the most racist societies in history will nod national approval.

My turn. I think - no, I demand – that Keith Richards (or whatever the hell his name is – who cares about people like this and what they say, anyway?) be dragged from wherever he is found, taken to the nearest tree tall enough, and hanged. Then, I demand that his body be dragged through the streets until suitably mutilated, hung up again, and left for carrion. And, of course, as a lesson to whomever might again utter that hated product of voice-box glottal stops and fricatives, we should hand a sign on him saying, “He used the N-word.”

Further, I demand that all of the Richards family be eradicated, their places of residence razed to the ground, the ground plowed and sewed with salt so as never again to support life. The name “Richards” should be stricken from the public record.

There.

No, wait a minute – it could happen again. I demand finally that the penalty for public, or - now that everything anyone can do is subject to federal and governmental scrutiny and exposure – private utterance of that apparently all-powerful word the penalty be death. Not by humane lethal injection, hanging, guillotine, or firing squad, mind you, but – now that the Bush-ian War on Terror has breached that societal barrier – torture to death.

There!

Ooops! Not yet. I demand, also, that each time someone as nationally powerful as Keith Richards (who the hell, by the way, is Keith Richards – or do I have the name wrong?) says “nigger” there be declared seven days of national mourning. Flags at half mast – anybody for dragged in the dirt? – moments of silence at football games, and all that. All television and news broadcasters shall, under penalty of law, produce fifteen minutes every hour of soul-searching and as pious as possible programming concerning the odious history of slavery – black, that is.

No mention shall be made of other nations, cultures, or races enslaved during human history. Under penalty of law, again, of course. Any distraction from our goal is traitorous. Your for us or against us, and any consideration or concern for any other objective or subject is treason.

That should do it. Wait a minute – what about the people who gave what’s-his-name a forum? Close the place. Confiscate their property and funds. Whatever else anyone can think of in the way of penalty shall be legalized. Tar and feathers included. Have I missed anything?

What about the people who by their having remained in the place gave tacit approval to what Creep – Keith, was it – said? Well, I leave that to the sanctimonious, Reverend Al, Reverend Jesse, Reverend (depending on the “issue,” of course) Hillary, or whomever.

Now I’m satisfied. Until the next time. Oh, there’ll be a next time. If the politically pious should ever succeed in eradicating that word so wondrous both in its political effect and the manner in which it can be exploited, there will be someone who will resurrect it for – you guessed it’s obvious – reasons.

Obvious. My god, people – how gullible can you get? How vulnerable and helpless? A single word. Like I said, glottal stops and fricatives, the product of muscle and bone expending less than half a calorie. GROW UP! Living around you is like living sane in a hospital for the criminal insane. I can’t sleep anymore without a damned pistol under my hip. Using the gift of speech publicly these days – hell, even going our in public – is fraught with “issues” having to do with “issues.” One word somehow related to an issue can become an “issue” – you could even get in trouble.

Everybody check their dictionary – “issue.”

That – the N-word, remember? - while another nitwit faction like the lynch mob frothing at the mouth over the latest Freudian “N-word” slip, demands that my gun be taken and I be left to the mercy of people like them.
With an entire religion and related culture foaming at the mouth with their rabid lust to kill us, and our borders left wide open by our “serve and protect” “leaders,” we spend days and billions on a careless lapsus lenguae (slip of the tongue)? A single word?

With hundreds of our soldiers being killed in a war certainly and incontrovertibly the most stupidly irrational and ill-advised in human history – to say nothing or prepared for – we stop to agonize and fulminate over a spoken word? My god (yeah, I know, I repeat myself – I can’t help it).

I could go on, but you must by now be aware of literally scores of problems – no, god damn it, they are not issues – that threaten millions of lives, even our national existence. We either grow up, mature, or we perish. Years – no, decades – ago, my youngest came home one day in tears because he had been called an insult.
I now counsel my country (at my age, time was, an elder could do that) as I once counseled my son. He was seven - considerably more mature than you, but I’m not that good at infantile psychology. An insult, I said, does nothing to the person offered it. And I use the term, “offered,” advisedly. Sometimes, language itself can be instructive. Insult is offered – only.

It does not have to be accepted, meaning it does not have to have effect. Only, moreover, when it is accepted does it have effect. And one of the “effects” is to demonstrate the immaturity and – yes, the stupidity – of him who accepts it. Whether accepted or not, an insult of the spoken variety demeans the one who offers it. Like the opponent who committed a foul during one of the wrestling or judo contests I participated in during most of my adolescent and adult life, the person who offers verbal insult shouts to the wide world his own inadequacy. By the rules, he can’t cut it.

However he desires or hates, he is incapable of anything more.

I now desire that the reader know how long I deliberated concerning whether to write what follows. The society and nation are redolent with the stench not only of racism, but the posturing and scrofulous piety of those who would exploit it. I don’t wish to join their nauseating and odious ranks.

But I think what I say here might have more weight – or the reader might better take its measure, good or ill – were I to point out that I was an orphan who largely reared himself. That meant little or no influence or indoctrination from peers or elders. There was none of Hillary’s “village.” The result, once considered by me to justify some resentment and lament, proved to be salubrious in at least one manner. I grew up without prejudice and bias concerning race, religion, culture, or the like. Living in a sod hut by a river while attending high school, I came to dislike most about my fellow human beings their intuitive rationality and peculiar ideation.

That was, mostly, their nitwit religions, biases, prejudices, and bigotries.
To an adolescent male living in a world of sometimes – often, it seemed – brutal and cruel cause and effect, there was no room, none at all, for idea or opinion based on myth or emotion. No religion, bias, prejudice, or bigotry. I didn’t give a shit what anything or anybody looked like, or thought like, I was only interested in what he, she, or it did or could do. Everything else took up time and thought I couldn’t afford to waste on triviality. Things, everything significant or important, were right or wrong, and readily apparent. One who is surviving against the elements and the wilderness during, for instance, a winter in Iowa does not tolerate error.
Neither does he have time for the trappings of ease and comfort of more conventional society. One worried, fearful concerning whether he will eat or not, or whether he will freeze to death in his sleep, pays no attention to being offered verbal insult.

A few months before I became an orphan, I recovered from poliomyelitis. The weakened and emaciated condition the disease left me in made me the target of every bully I happened to accost. I got strong and learned to fight, obviously, but I also learned that I much preferred being assaulted with speech to being assaulted with punches, kicks, and thrown objects. Spoken insult was ignored or forgotten in seconds. Cuts and bruises had to be endured.

I also learned that to create trouble in the mind – prejudge – was debilitating, like exerting all the effort necessary for carrying a load that wasn’t there. “Borrowing trouble,” I used to call it. It slowed me down in a fight, stole my thought processes and reasoning powers – I knew that without them, I would soon know pain or deprivation – and besmirched my self-esteem. I knew weaklings and women “borrowed trouble” like that.

I also learned love in a manner different from my fellow. Without nonsense, I mean. I learned that love is a one-way - not two way - street. People and things react to what you do to or for them. Good, bad, favor, insult, they do not react otherwise. Period. When you love, you do for the thing or person you love; and you do it regardless of what the thing loved might do or not do to or for you.
Love simply desires, demands, and will do whatever contributes the greatest possible good for its object. Period (again).

But there’s more. The physical universe, reality is never one-sided, never two sided, or three sided. It isn’t even dimensional. You can’t do anything all by itself, with just one result. Not possible. (sorry). Love that pretends – just in the pretense – is contradictory, oxymoronic, self-defeating. It is, at least in some degree, hate.

Hate, and all its corollaries, is the human condition. Hate is so all-pervasive that it can even be unconscious, unintended. Result? The only way to keep the ledger out of the red is relentless practice of love (people who know me won’t believe I said this – until they think about it for a minute).

If I sound smug or self satisfied now, consider what the differences between us might be. Go back and read what I said about my formative years and compare them with your own. Mine led to my never having left any place I was without my having assured that it was better for my having been there. Sometimes, that could be something as small as picking up discarded trash and disposing of it properly. A few times, it was something as significant as requiring risk of maiming or life. But the place was better for my having been there.
Period.

Friends of mine – those I mentioned a minute ago – would tell you that I seldom – most would say they’ve never heard it – say “I love you.” To anybody. I’ve learned that the word love is a verb, not a noun - done, not said. I know that human beings have a sometimes ruling tendency to believe that said is done. “I love you” is exactly like “I hate you.” It doesn’t mean a thing until you do something. Oh, you may, indeed – that’s what indeed means, you know – actually do what you say.

How often, really, does your experience tell you that happens?

I love my country. I love her because she is the cultural embodiment of what I believe to be the most important words ever spoken and lived. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men were created equal, endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights . . .” I love her because I have seen her struggle valiantly and relentlessly – and agonizingly - to do – to live - those words.
And I am fucking tired of people who seem determined to live in a language-only reality, where a fast neutron word like “nigger” can be fired into the atomic core mass of society made unstable and volatile by its own selfish pretensions, and create a national nuclear explosion threatening to destroy what I love so much - my country.

I'm also pretty tired of a society that makes the utterance of some loon somehow become famous - or infamous - significant just because he's something called a "celebrity." My god (oops, said that maybe once too often)!

God damn it – grow up! Remember who the hell you are! You may think you are so high and mighty that nothing you do, no error you can make, will bring you down to destruction. You are wrong. You are, in fact, a tottering weakling, debilitated more every day by things like those I speak of here. Take it from a kid who once – still does, actually – faced survival’s implacable demands in an unmistakable arena that you are just like me. You can be had by your enemies – and they include you; it’s how reality works, remember? – and it will happen soon, now. You are not only a demented hypochondriac, sucking up every nitwit nostrum and narcotic you can find, you are suicidal, tearing at yourself like a wounded, pain-crazed animal.

“Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country.”

Love is a one-way street.

More of Schroedinger's Cat Reality in the Land of the Free

We were absent there for several days, due to a computer crash accompanied by a forty milli-rem spike on the dosimeter here in the office. All the rest of the dosimeters in the house, seven in number, register nothing. That's zip. Zero. Nada. Bupkis. Someone, who somehow obtained all the passwords to all the systems, programs, and files - odds against random accident being 2.0923 X 1013 (20,923,000,000,000) to one - captured all my files and folders. They also obliterated one of my computers memory. With purchase of a new computer Saturday, we made another effort to return to blogging. No luck - the new computer crashed this morning. This back-up will, no doubt, do the same soon. I have two more, shielded by systems designed and intended to show incontrovertibly and as a matter of forensic evidence what is being done and by whom.

Incidentally, the lawsuit filed September 26, 2006 and published here the same day, has not yet been acknowledgement from the Clerk of Court - except, of course, for the U.S. Postal Service certification of delivery signed by the recipient. The process will now follow that encountered by the author repeatedly and invariably whenever he has attempted anything having to do with government at any level during the past twenty-nine years. Drivers, P.I., concealed handgun, and other licenses that required from seven months to a year to obtain, for instance. Mail, UPS, and other deliveries that simply could not be made - those numbering literally in the hundreds. Electronic banking - social security, for instance - and ATM machine transfers that mysteriously became impossible under my name, yet simple and immediate under a new pseudonym. Et cetera.

The court will report that all manner of irregularities have caused delays. Litigious in character, of course, they will nevertheless parallel unmistakably all that has gone before.

The week saw me listening as per usual to the newspeaking media. I mentioned White House Spokesman Tony Snow's Schroedinger's Cat version of truth, wherein violence in Iraq was both up and down, depending upon which lie was being promulgated. With four more today, the death toll of U.S. Servicemen continues to climb daily. But the level of violence, according to the White House, remains down from somewhere only the White House knows. On election day, the nation's electorate proved itself willing to give aid and comfort to the the enemy - that according to criteria set by FoxNews - by failing to support the White House - and, therefore, the troops in Iraq. So everyone who voted to throw the Republicans out of office and return the U.S. Congress to Democratic Party control is a traitor. That's why the level of violence that is down in Iraq is also up.

Saturday, the stock market seers wondered aloud about what the Democratic Party victories would mean for the markets, inasmuch - and I paraphrase - as the reduction of arms spending could prove very damaging.

Did you catch that? Massive arms spending is good for the markets. Here comes Schroedinger's bewildered and bewildering cat again. See, since WW-II there has never been a reduction, much less a cessation, of staggering expenditures for arms and the military. Fifteen trillion, closing in now on sixteen trillion. If there has ever been one of those "growth" stocks, those military industrial complex shares have been it. Read magazines like Aviation Week, and you will see the future. The military industrial complex takes absolutely for granted that they will receive scores of billions scores of billions to design, build, test, and then each and every weapon of which the mind of man can conceive.

But the Nostradamuses of finance warn that decreased arms spending could hurt the markets. We'll get richer by spending more. Does this remind anyone of the same violence that is both up and down at the same time?

Britt Hume has just fired another of his propagandist, "is there a chance that the Democrats want us to lose in Iraq questions." "How many more will the terrorists kill" if we do whatever he and his mentors at the White House don't want us to do, in other words. Well, pal, the terrorists sure as hell won't kill as many as WE will - they're nowhere near as well equipped for the job as we are.

During the week that was I also had another object lesson in why I have since high school and boyhood avoided groups and the groupthink that invariably results. There was the matter of the three web server support people who, when I called to learn why the new computer would not access my website, neglected to tell me that a password had been changed - that without notice. Then, once that little matter had been accounted for and I was still unable to access my site, still a fourth "support" expert advised that Microsoft has stopped, as of several days ago, "supporting their FrontPage program." What the hell does that mean? Try something called "DreamWeaver," he suggested.

The folks at Circuit City were not different. Having left my computer there for repair, new memory, etc., and having been told the matter would require two or three days, I began calling on the fifth day. I left messages asking that my calls be returned. On Saturday, I drove the two hours to Corpus Christi to learn that repair of the computer would cost more than a new one. The reasoning was interesting. The repair, I was informed by one technician, would cost $350. The cost of the new computer, when all was said and done was well over $750. Hmmmmmm.

The latter, incidentally, is the one that just "crashed." What do you want to bet that repair will cost more than another new one?

I now have a telephone that has a camera in it. Owing to the really asinine design and composition of the thing, it is all but impossible to hold the phone without pushing a button that causes everything but what I intend to happen to occur. The thing cuts out regularly, leaving both parties speaking to wonder what the hell they are talking about. And that's just REALLY annoying stuff. Unless you consider the fact that every time I try to make a call, I get a message from someone trying to sell something like this god-damned phone. Does that remind anyone of trying to watch the news or a movie on TV?

Am I the only one who does not want to watch a movie chopped into a hundred pieces by commercial messages? Or the morning news? The same happens when I get a call. So I have a telephone that will take pictures, but not make a phone call. What's next a camera that makes phone calls? Or is that what I have?

We have a government that can't maintain order even among, much less govern, themselves, and sells us out to every business interest there conceivable, including foreign nations like Mexico. We have a $460,000,000,000 a year military, armed with every gee-whiz, Star Wars weapon known to the mind of man, but can't defeat a nation the size of Iraq, armed with I.E.D.s and small arms. And our troops are the best ever, led by military geniuses of the first rank. You don't find that suspect?

How about the fact that we are not only supposedly spending more scores of billions on security, but giving up just about all of the civil rights that once made us exceptional in all the world, that while leaving our borders so wide open that literally hundred of thousands, even millions, of illegal aliens are pouring into the country? When the next terrorist attack happens, as it inevitably will, the newspeaking minions of the White House, guys like Britt Hume, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and the rest will make Big Lie lemonade of the lemon. Everyone who didn't want to give up his Constitutional rights will have been the cause, even though loss of those same rights will have done nothing to prevent the new "terrorism." More, the financial experts will be sanguine, because the promise of new spending for defense, new super high tech - super high expensive, that is - weapons and technology with which to compromise the security, safety, and privacy of the citizenry will be great for the nation's economy. We become prosperous by making ourselves prostrate before the terrorists. Logically, that's how that comes out, isn't it?

But, of course, our freedom will be saved by putting us all in prison. We'll save all the Iraqis from tyranny by killing them.

Schroedinger's Cat - both alive and dead. Quantum reality is a lot like things politically correct, isn't it? It all depends on whose looking and reporting. We decide on the basis of what most people like what's true and what isn't. Women warriors (last night a movie - "Basic" - wherein a woman is a U.S. Army Ranger) and pigs that fly. At that rate, things may one day fall up. And if you don't believe it, you'll be a traitor.

If you have trouble understanding it all, just ask Sean Hannity. Or Anne Coulter.

Then tell yourself you're sane.

According to FoxNews, to Vote in the Coming Elections is Treasonous.

The wound inflicted on October 6, 1986 by the United States of America - completely illegally and shooting from ambush. Like Iraq, nevertheless, the media and the courts in the nation of laws found a way to do "damage control," and the criminal conspirator perpetrators not only escaped, but shared the spoils. Nothing ever changes, huh?









Propaganda, the blizzard of bloviating bullshit to which the U.S. public is being subjected of late on account of the approaching elections, has reached a level unequalled in my lifetime. In fact, never in my worst Orwellian nightmare did I ever dream of anything remotely as voluminous or dishonest. I can find nothing in any similar time period during Nazism in Germany or totalitarian socialism in the erstwhile Soviet Union that compares for shear volume and intensity.

Of course, anyone who inflicts himself with television viewing these days ought not be surprised. Relentless and endless commercial messages – behaviorist-designed propaganda designed to alter the viewer’s state of mind and opinion – pummel the psyche.

But one need not, in fact, fear that. With small pressure from a finger on the remote – in Haus Luebbert known as the commercial control - I simply “surf” away from all the commercials, to a degree that I haven’t seen one in literally years. Then, too, I only watch the news each morning. That’s not to learn the news, of course. Commercial interruptions and tabloid nonsense concerning cockamamie celebrity behavior, the latest rape or disappearance of some totally obscure female so dismember news channel programming that little concerning national affairs can be had. What can be learned in two hours from the flow strip at the bottom of the television screen can be learned in fifteen minutes on National Public Radio.

Parenthetically, I note that television parallels the rest of the nation in that respect, where literally everything has become subordinated to commercialism and the lust for money. There is nothing, it seems, that “America” will not interrupt, degrade, or forego for money. That includes personal, family, and societal honor. The U.S. not only broadcasts to the world its prostituted and debased character, it endeavors to expiate, even exalt it.

Having as a society and nation been rendered psychotic by the behaviorist-contrived propaganda and mind-control technique and technology I refer to here, the Jethroe Clampett, Man With a Hoe stupid public wonders huffily why the United States is not only no longer admired around the world, but, in fact, hated.

No, I watch the “news” programs in the morning in order to study them, to stay abreast of the latest newspeak, propaganda rhetoric and methods. In the evening, in the same interest, I watch FoxNews, CNN, CBS, and the others.

So it is that I come to aver as I just have. I also take every opportunity to measure the effect of the propaganda. At a restaurant with friends last night, I found the opportunity to ask our waitress a number of probing questions. About to graduate from Texas A&M University with a degree in television journalism, I learned that the twenty-two year old woman did not know who General Douglas MacArthur was. Neither had she every heard of the Battle of Yorktown. About to be given a degree by one of our largest universities, she was unable to complete even the simplest of logical problems.

I chose MacArthur and the Battle of Yorktown because an NPR report the other day reprised others of the sort. A large percentage of college students surveyed across the country, it revealed, identified General MacArthur as the victor at Yorktown. It went on from there, even worse and even more depressing.

In my own surveys, also nationwide and undoubtedly far more exhaustive than those I refer to here, I learned that “Americans” identify Pearl Harbor as a shampoo, know the capitol of their state rarely, and even more infrequently know the name of a single one of there elected representatives.

But you’ve heard all this before. The citizenry of the United States has never been, not even remotely, as stupid and incompetent mentally as it is today.

And, of course, it is to this level of mentality that people like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and FoxNews purvey their “balanced and fair” newspeak. The same is true of the far left (I always have to admit to never listening to anything there – it simply isn’t worth the effort). It is to the unschooled, functionally illiterate and innumerate, non compos mentis, and religiously mindless that this kind of television is directed.

How else would you explain recent and relentlessly repeated FoxNews asseverations holding – implying and occasionally actually stating specifically and plainly – that to vote for Democratic Party candidates is to give aid and comfort to terrorism. The opposition in Iraq, too. According to Fox, to hold an election at this time is treasonous. Think about that (watch and listen, too – I’m not making this up). To practice republican democracy is treason.

That kind of shooting oneself in the foot is common nowadays. Almost totally ignorant of classical logic, public figures today reel off nitwit nostrums one after the other. Oblivious as the result of their stopped mental machinery, media pundits perform public pratfalls like Sean Hannity’s Charlie Chaplin routine of a couple nights’ ago. First having done a segment not unlike Jay Leno’s “Jaywalking” to demonstrate the kind of Baby Huey stupidity of the “American” public, he then proceeded to demonstrate that he is a very popular and highly respected media pundit – “a great American.” On same evening and as they invariably do every evening, both Hannity and Fox announced that they are the “most watched and respected” purveyor of “news” on the air.

Ah, guys – are you listening to yourselves?

Or is your respect for your audience what it seems to me to be? Just about the same as that held for the public by your hero, George the Seventh?

In the last two weeks, obviously desirous of bewildering the rabble even more before elections, the viewing and listening public has been offered these gems of non sequitur, circular argument, fallacy of composition, and dozens more logic. I have space here for only a few:

The month of October saw large percentage improvements in just about everything in Iraq. That’s according to Fox. For instance, things could have been worse there where the death toll is concerned – it was, after all, only the fourth worst month in that regard. Iraq still has little infrastructure – little electricity, scarce water, scarce fuel of all kinds – that’s one of the world’s oil-richest nations (oops – places) – and it gets worse from there.

But things are looking up because we intend even better things than we did at first.

Iraqi defense forces are in great shape, and will soon be able to take care of themselves. Not their country, mind you - themselves. As soon as they can be persuaded to refrain from murderous rampages against civilians each time one of their friends is killed or wounded, and as soon as they can be persuaded to stand and fight once in a while, and as soon as twenty-five to thirty percent of them do not go AWOL whenever it suits them, and as soon as . . . oh, never mind. Everything is going according to plan. Just ask Mr. Bush.

Oops! Actually, that isn’t exactly fair. In the last week or so, our fuehrer has conceded that things haven’t gone entirely according to plan. He and the Bush League haven’t made any mistakes, mind you – it just hasn’t gone according to plan. And nobody could have foreseen the several things that have been the reason things haven’t gone entirely according to plan.

For instance, nobody could have expected that Arabic translators – there’s an argument at the Pentagon right now about whether that should be “translators” or interpreters. Terminology is important, you know: first, people in this government make big, big bucks for inventing new jargon, new esoteria, and new weasel-words. Then, too, the difference between “insurgency,” “insurrection,” “rebellion,” and “civil war” are important – to a propagandist, anyway. Why, torture the language – “waterboard” it – enough, you can make “blind moron who can’t find his way home from across the street” turn into “leader.”

Anyway, who would have thought you’d need somebody who spoke the language when you invaded and occupied a place? You don’t plan for that sort of thing, do you?

“Guy who didn’t serve and has never done anything for the United States but bloviate balderdash” can be morphed into “great American” as slick as a whistle. That’s a lot of “morphing,” because “great American” Hannity is far, far from alone where leading the charge from the far rear – or right – is concerned. Put “never served the country he is now so desirous of having somebody else protect” behind each name here:

George Will
Chris Matthews
Bill O'Reilly (hid in England, from what I gather)
Rush Limbaugh (how about that - 4-F with a 'pilonidal cyst' on his chicken ass!)
Michael Savage (aka Michael Alan Weiner)
Sean ("The Great American") Hannity

Ah, yes – great Americans all (do you smell something?”). Add their fearless leader, the rich kid from Yale who had fun learning to fly while the “less fortunate” – don’t you just love this rhetoric, word game stuff – were humping through the everything-lethal-you-can-think-of-including-enemy-soldiers jungle in Southeast Asia. NOW he is concerned about his country’s security (unless he has to close the gates against the invaders, thus weakening his political base – that’s different)!

In the FoxNews wing of the White House, democracy in a nation where we have to ask a guy called the Ayatollah Sistani for an okay before we hold elections, and the Ayatollah picks candidates is eminently consistent. No problem. And once you’ve done that, and the Ayatollah has given his blessing, you choose democratically. Sure. No problem.

On Fox, after all, weeks of urging the viewers to boycott France, Canada, the Dixie Chicks, and more – fire Professor Ward Churchill without argument or hearing – is “fair and balanced.” Sean Hannity, for his part where the Dixie Chicks are concerned, “didn’t set out to injure.” That’s what he said the other night. Of course, all those genius people who have made Fox the “number one news channel” heard something else, just like I did, but whatever Sean says is right.

He’s a great American, remember?.

On “fair and balanced,” you’ll repeatedly hear questions like, “Is it possible that John Kerry and the Democrats want the U.S. to lose the war? “Why don’t the Democrats have a plan for victory?” “When did you stop beating your wife,” has morphed, you see. Have you noticed that changing your mind when you’ve made a mistake – of course, George the Seventh never makes mistakes, so we can’t include him in this one – is “flip-flopping?’’

Or aren’t you old enough to remember when to admit you didn’t know or had made error was to show strength and character. Times change, too, it would seem.

No, things are wonderful in Iraq. It’s hell – outside the Fuehrerbunker (oops – the Green Zone), there is no security at all. People live in mortal terror of roving and ubiquitous death squads who kill an average of a hundred people a day – it’s more, but that’s what “fair and balanced” is willing to “report” – and the few people who have a job or business must travel with all the assurance of a blind man walking through a mine field.

Contrast that with the rigorous upbringing of our Mr. Bush. You just have to know he understands what everyone is going through. As Tony Snow said the other day, Mr. Bush understands that twenty nine hundred and eighty-five is “just a number.” That was probably a Freudian slip, the way the Commander in Chief of all those dead – funny the way the media seldom mention the twenty thousand wounded, isn’t it? - “understands.” And the six hundred fifty thousand Iraqis John Hopkins’ estimates? George not only understands, he knows better. Obviously, FoxNews, Ann Coulter, and the Bush League are far more qualified – and certainly, less biased - to make that kind of estimate than Johns Hopkins University.

Johns Hopkins, after all, is merely a recognized world leader in research and education in medicine, public health, the arts, sciences, and engineering. What would they know?

The latest propaganda ploy (well, it’s only five, and I haven’t heard the news yet) has to do with John Kerry’s “outrageous” remark concerning what might happen to young “Americans” who don’t make it into or fail to finish college.
Now, folks, who gets the most attention from “recruiters” (you call what’s going on recruiting)? Wasn’t it just the other day that the Army lowered its standards for enlistment again? How many people really think that an individual with an IQ of one hundred and fifty, perfect grades in high school, and is the son or daughter of millionaire parents chooses the Army for a career?”

Sure they do – just like Dick Cheney did. Just like Sean Hannity did. Just like Bill O’Reilly did. And go back and check the list here. Just like all the patriots who so love and admire our troops (not enough to join them, of course).

Ex – fucking – scuse me, but where was all the outrage when our Patrician President was clowning about not having found all those “Weapons of Mass Destruction.” Can anybody smell something?

Yeah, I know: if I don’t like the blizzard of bullshit being spewed by the media, I can follow General (Brigadier, actually) Mark Kimmit’s advice to Iraqis who see TV reports of innocent civilians being killed by our occupying troops, I can, "Change the channel."

“Fair and balanced.” I had thought to post here a comparison of the “fair and balanced” data and statistics as reported and interpreted by FoxNews with the truth as seen by media in places like Germany, England, France, Mexico, and others. Unfortunately, I have thirty-four single-spaced pages, every one evidence – proof of lying on somebody’s part. I wonder who that could be, and when I so wonder, I usually consider who has the motive.

In the United States, of course, the truth has also become treasonous.


Postscript, November 3:



This morning, as if to vindicate what I said here in this essay, CNN (as I recall) published for the first time the results of a study of U.S. Army recruiting. Several months - if not a year or more - ago, I used the word "Shanghai," and drew howls of fury from Bush Leaguers. You'll have seen, or will see today, the study results. You'll hear the general in command of the recruiters in question mealy-mouth and "damage control" for everything the science is worth. FoxNews will bring to bear every deceptive, confusing, and mendacious weapon in its arsenal of propaganda.

It will work, too. Consider how we came to be in this sorry state in the first place. Look back at the history of military service. See if you can find statistics concerning how many kids whose parents are rich, or kids who already have a well-paying job, are trying to get into the Army. How many young people whose college education is assured by any device other than military service choose to enlist in the Army? But how many people do you think will check what FoxNews says in the days to come about the "Shanghai" recruiting going on all over the nation? Remember what I said about thought, and thinking, the other day? When your mind's been made up - or altered by behaviorist propagandists - you don't think. You don't bother to check "fair and balanced" facts.

Buy a copy of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, and watch the recruiters depicted there (see how often you hear Fox and the like mention Moore and the movie during their "damage control" of the recruiting story). See if you can imagine the sons and daughters of the U.S. Congressmen and Senators Moore interviewed in the movie being "recruited" in the same manner.

I don't know what John Kerry said - I don't listen to much he has to say - and it's damned unlikely any of the media will publish it all. So, I don't know what he meant to say. But "get stuck in Iraq" is evidently - emphasis on the root of the word, which is "evidence" - exactly what the U.S. Army and G.W. Bush have in mind for kids who can't afford or succeed in college. People who can find any other way to pay for the college education that provides fifty million people living on the edge of the chasm of poverty without taking a chance with I.E.D.s, roadside bombs, suicide bombers, and snipers DO that.

You had better wise up, "America." Read some of that history you obviously flee from like the plague. ANYBODY who has done that knows what segment of society fights "America's" political - staggering profits for the military industrial complex, and no other reason in sight for fighting them - wars. If you think the only capitalist who makes himself rich as Croesus by exploiting the poor with minimum wages and illegal immigration is the nation's business community, you're either not paying attention, or you've put a bag over your head. The U.S. Army is just another "equal opportunity employer" who hires the poor to fight and die, while making billions and billions in profit.

I ask my question again: WHY IS IT THAT WITH OUR YOUNG PEOPLE AND THE POOR OTHERWISE ARE ASKED BY THE NATION TO RISK AND SACRIFICE THEIR LIFE AND LIMB FOR PEANUTS, WHILE CORPORATE "AMERICA" LIKE HALLIBURTON IS PERMITTED TO PROFIT IN THE SCORES OF BILLIONS?

Ask yourself - reference my "how did we get in this pickle" question - how it is that FoxNews and their "did not serve" ilk can turn the John Kerry, "stuck in Iraq" matter into a national brouhaha? Why is it that SOME truth is "politically incorrect?"

You'd better start thinking about things like this. The Cindy Sheehans of the world find - every once in a very rare while - men. Real ones. Any day now, mothers whose son or daughter has been used like Charmin will find men willing to do what needs to be done. "Better to die on your feet," Emiliano Zapata said, "than live on your knees." And their vengeance will be terrible. Read the story of the French Revolution, for instance. Or Cuba.

There's a poem, by a man named Edwin Markham. In it, there are words you need to consider. "This man" is the poor, people who have to risk their lives in order to have even a little of what a rich boy like our miscreant President was handed on a silver platter.


O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings--
With those who shaped him to the thing he is--
When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world,
After the silence of the centuries?


Do you really think the people of this nation are stupid - "stunned and stolid, a brother to the ox" is also a line from the poem here, you know - by accident? When have the rich - "masters, lords and rulers in all lands" - ever done it any differently?
THINK, god damn it, THINK!