The Nation That Decided to Hate Truth

The picture is by Frank Frazetta, and has been featured on my website several times - it's one of my all-time favorites. The date notation on the bottom is mine, the picture here being a copy of the print I've had up on the wall wherever I stay since a short time after May 6, 1985. That's the date I caught four members of the U.S. Government— IRS, specifically—as they burglarized my house.

Yes, I said "burglarized." No warrant. No justification whatever for breaking into my house in the night. They did it anyway; they did it just because they knew they could do it and get away with it. "Above the law," it's called.

The picture is called "Combat" and, for me, it's a reminder. It's a reminder that I don't need all the discussion, argument, and recrimination to know the truth about the Bush government's so-called "war on terror," supposed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (how you believe a lie as obvious as that one amazes me), and the rest. I know first-hand, for instance, that everything being used by the White House, our suck-up courts and attorney general to justify their relentless use of the U.S. Constitution for Charmin is a lie. Everything—that's literally—they are now pretending to have legalized, was done to me and my rights long before that supposed legalization.

Inasmuch as the current thief executive says he can do that - use "that old document" for ass-wipe, I mean—whenever he perceives a "danger to America," I guess the president then—Ronald Reagan—must have ordered it all. I guess I was just another Iran-Contra (do you wonder why that doesn't seem to have been legal; maybe they needed those magic words—"war on terror," I mean). Of course, it all makes reasonable people wonder why this president needs—as he seems to—to have legislation making legal actions that are already legal. Hmmmm. It make ME wonder why—how, too—warrant-less interception of my mail, tapping my phone, burglary of my house, and larceny of my property was legal way back there decades ago; that's inasmuch as they're supposedly being legalized only NOW.

Yup, it sure makes me wonder.

It might be well, matter of fact, were we all to ask Mr. Bush and his Bush League—I would LOVE to hear Sean Hannity and all the "did not serve" right wing apologists for what's going on currently explain it—about more (I didn't start keeping record for a while) than 109 "legal" stops during fifteen years by law enforcement agencies around the country. I'd really like to hear an explanation—being from Texas like Mr. Bush, I like Texas Liars Contests—for the numerous times my vehicles were sabotaged, the six times I was run down and struck by motor vehicles, and the falsified traffic reports that resulted in each instance. And the several mugging attempts—I'd like to hear the Nation of Laws explanation for those, too.

Tell me, Tony Snow, how do you get a warrant to kill a man—even one who's a U.S. citizen—with a car, beat him to death, or shoot him from ambush? Oh, yeah—to "defend our freedom." Sure. I forgot about that. I wonder why.

Well, then, maybe you can explain why the lawsuit I filed on September 26, 2006, receipt signed by the U.S. District Court for the Southern Division of Texas, has not yet been answered. While you're at it, tell us why any and all licenses of any kind - even license to drive - have required at least as long as seven months for me to obtain. It should be interesting. I love to watch the verbal gymnastics of an articulate (if you're black, just ignore that, please—I can't think of a better word) and skillful bull— rhetorician, I mean.

Of course, it's all about truth. It's about truth, and it's nonsense to expect truth from our government. This is, as I've pointed our again and again—including my book "Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story—the Land of the Free Nation of Laws Myth. "Tell a lie often enough . . ., " as Lenin said.

I've been wondering about the just about desperate way "Americans" avoid the truth.
Why, really, would that be? In their book, "The Legacy of Lincoln, authors Pamela Oldham and Meredith Bean McMath relate that during the time of our sixteenth president, men customarily did business "on their honor." During the Civil War, men taken prisoner were released when they had given their word that they would not return to combat. "Parole," it was called then. Abraham Lincoln - Honest Abe - was known far and wide as a man of his word. A man was as good as his word - his honor.

During my youth in the northeast of Iowa, men still lived like that. I once watched my grandfather borrow five hundred dollars - a lot of money, then - on his word and a handshake. Hmmmm. What happened? How, for instance, was it that all the people necessary to make hell of my life were willing to DO that? Every one of them knew it was wrong. The Constitution, as columnist James Kilpatrick once observed, isn't hard to understand. What's hard to understand about the Fourth Amendment? Using police powers to harass a man with no record of even petty crime, try to incite a fight? (You might even, in that regard, ask yourself about Lieutenant Watada, and his detractors—what's hard to understand about that?). No, there wasn't any honor in any of it, and government is able to do only what individuals are willing to do.

Like face, even tell, the truth.

And justice, you know, has everything to do with truth. It's why, in the Nation of Laws, we have so little of either. From the woman made up so heavily that she dare not smile or show expression otherwise lest her face crack and fall off, to the metrosexual male and the billions of dollars a year in cosmetics now intended for him, to the national face-lift and cosmetic cover-up provided government by the "news media," the United States wallows in its mendacious myths. Seemingly afraid of their own thoughts, our benighted youth listen to cacophonous "music" and rhythmic chanting known as "rap music," played at literally deafening volume. That's while their fellows—including their parents and elders—flee reality and truth into a noxious never-neverland of mind-numbing and mood-altering drugs.

Not that the flight from the truth of the U.S. is something new—far from it. Almost a century ago, journalist and social critic H.L. Mencken once observed, "The men American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try and tell them the truth." Mr. Mencken seems to have anticipated the Twenty-first Century, and "Americans" now having reached the point of visible desperation to hear lies, be deceived, and evade the truth.

I watch, as a matter of fact, FoxNews entirely out of interest in both the volume and manner of its dedicated prevarication. The "Dixie Chicks—Bill O'Reilly" matter I referred to last time, incidentally, resulted in a "Factor" headline that read "The Dixie Chicks Grammy—was 'the Fix' on?" That's the "No Spin Zone," the audience is given to understand. How's that for Mencken's "daring liars?"

So pervasive is the "American" fear of truth that is has long since begun to torture and distort even the language used here. I mentioned recently the bizarre exchange between two young black women and a television host, that having to do with the "A-Word," the ineffable term being "articulate" when used to address or describe an Afro-American (I've long since confessed to having given up trying to follow the equally bizarre course of the "issue" having to do with what to call persons of that particular race). We now have legal sanctions against certain words—"hate speech," and daily discourse is filled with first-letter only allusions like "N-Word," "J-Word," "S-Word," and the fatuous like.

I said that last as though it were archetypical. It isn't. At the peak of the effort equivalent to the kids' drowning-out their own thoughts is the similar use of the lurid news story to divert the nation's attention from reality. Latest—and in my view, certainly the most obnoxious—is the saga of yet another personification of the meretricious nation, Anna Nicole Smith (just shows you how little I get around, anymore—I am NOT the father of her baby). With two and three of our soldiers being killed daily, more wounded and maimed for life, and hundreds of Iraqis also being killed and maimed, and our despicable @#$%&# Congress dithers (a NON-BINDING resolution—can you BELIEVE that?!), the tawdry escapades of an ostentatiously lewd woman and her string of effete fop sires holds the public's mindless interest.

Of course, historians and sociologists of the future will attribute it all to the emasculation of the society's men. So often was it all heard that no reason remains to review what author Susan Faludi not long ago termed "the betrayal of the American male." "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, remember?" Mary Cheney, whom I also mentioned last time, is only the latest to live by that mantra, daring to assume that the baby she will soon birth and rear likewise needs nothing of maleness.

Leonard Pitts, a columnist I read whenever I have the opportunity (even privilege), says in today's paper, "...fathers matter, something we seem to have forgotten, so busy are we pretending that women and men are interchangeable. My problem with Cheney and Poe is the same problem I'd have with a heterosexual single mom who decided to make herself a baby without benefit of a man in her life. It seems part and parcel of the diminution of fatherhood."

As unerring as Pitts is, another wise man may have said it even better.

"A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes -- will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish."

Does that describe anything you recognize today? The author was John Stuart Mill, in his essay, "On Liberty" (1859). Feminism was—is—in itself not only a successful effort by a nation to "dwarf its men," it was a headlong flight from the truth, one facilitated, even made, by rhetoric, reality that is only virtual (cosmetic?), language, and lie.

Think, incidentally, of how many men you think really give a good goddamn about who sired Anna Nicole Smith's now infamous kid? It might tell you something about why we're where we are—how we got here, too.