"In Honored Glory" - Yeah, Sure!

Honey, (I’m not being gauche – that’s the lady’s name) Intellectuals aren’t necessarily intelligent. Intellectuals like the folks you mention – especially the folks you mention - may have a great deal of knowledge. That doesn’t mean they are intelligent. Intelligence is the ability to think effectively and productively, a personal power derived from the growth of consciousness. Knowledge alone results in intellectuality, and intellectuality is like the memory in a computer.

Without logic programming, the ability to use the knowledge – the memory in the computer - the computer is next to useless.

When the computer is an intellectual human being, even worse, it thinks it’s intelligent. “Knowledge,” columnist Sydney Harris (now deceased) once observed, “fills a large brain; it merely inflates a small one.”

My grandfather had another observation on the subject of intellectuality. Speaking of a local guy just graduated from college and obviously very impressed with all he had learned, Gramp said, “There’s no doubt that Larry knows a whole lot; the trouble is, he doesn’t have the brains to use it.” “Larry” never did, as it turned out.

Quasi-related to that last is the latest subject of phony (they’ll, as usual, rage on about it for perhaps two weeks, then move on to the next meretricious brouhaha) media indignation. I speak of the Veteran’s Administration “revelations.” It’s an example – the epitome, in fact – of the system that constitutes the United States Government. The wonder of it all is that the public doesn’t see that.

Right now, there is another Veterans Administration story going on in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast stuck more than a year ago by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. There is one going on in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and, no doubt, several other places. Since the end of World War Two and the military industrial complex coup d’etat that now rules in the U.S.A., the IRS has comprised a Veteran’s Administration FUBAR. The Veteran’s Administration “scandal” (certain words draw the scum-sucking public’s attention like metal attracts a magnet), in short, has been going on for decades. How on god’s green earth do you think we came to be in the condition as a society and nation we are?

People, all of this didn’t happen overnight. Let me use an example, one I know all about because I lived it. I’ve told you about Sergeant First Class W.R. Benton, and Corporal Hadley Washington. They were soldiers who not only were being dealt with in a manner that would bring complaint from owners against a veterinary establishment; their disability benefits were being stolen. Worse, the reason they were disabled is that their country had used them like Guinea pigs for MKULTRA-like experiments.

For years, on a more frequent than monthly basis, I wrote letters to everyone I could think of, letters including documentation and proof otherwise of what had occurred and was occurring. I have been writing of it of late, matter of fact. Four days ago, at the first news I heard of the latest VA matter, I wrote to the Lou Dobbs Tonight program.

And you know what happened. You know what happened in every, single instance. Nothing happened. In the matter of the two soldiers nothing happened, that is, until I connected the theft of their stolen payments to the larger – maybe you can tell me why that should be – implications having to do with the MKULTRA experiments. In other words, the United States of America, Nation of Laws, Home of the Free, “Give me your tired, your poor, your struggling masses yearning to breathe free" Land of Liberty, cared more about its façade than its disabled soldiers.

Let’s think – really think (remember what I just said about intelligence?) – about Iraq and Afghanistan. What’s really going on there? Tell me how it’s different than what goes on with the Veteran’s Administration – now or any other time. Tell me how it’s different than what’s going on in New Orleans. Tell me how – you haven’t a chance: you’ve been looking the other way for decades – it’s different from the literally hundreds of thousands of people brutalized by the IRS.

What’s going on? I’ll tell you. Soldiers, for all practical purposes, are poor people. “Armies,” the Duke of Wellington once said privately (very, I imagine), “are composed of the scum of the earth – the mere scum of the earth.” They are for use, not sympathy or – god forbid – empathy. They are for use by the affluent society, the rich. Like the poor everywhere, they have NO political power (watch – see what’s going on with disabled veterans in five years).

For all the fine – and so, so de rigueur among the rich and their media – pronouncements, the public of the United States cares about our men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan the way Wellington did. “People talk of their enlisting from their fine military feeling - all stuff - no such thing. Some of our men enlist from having got bastard children -- some for minor offences -- many more for drink.” Today, of course, the recruiting posters for our Wellingtons add “education and training.”

Of course, anyone who like John Kerry makes a statement like that of Wellington publicly will be excoriated. What was it Kerry said – something about “Study, or you’ll wind up in Iraq?” Remember what I said the other day about truth – the way it stings certain people?

The public cares? Who’s getting more television play today, Anna Nicole Smith or the soldiers being maimed and killed in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Just as an admittedly maudlin aside, try to imagine that you, like I once was, were being systematically ruined by the Internal Revenue Service. Not so much the business, finances, and money – not even the campaign being waged to assure that you would never be gainfully employed again – but the cruel arrogance of power being used to destroy your marriage and family, and to torment your children.

The term “taxpayer,” you know - and no matter what you are told continually - means the poor. Ninety percent of income taxation in the U.S., don’t forget, is levied against families with incomes below $35,000. Our veterans are being treated by the VA just like the taxpayer is treated by the IRS; and the reason that can be is that both are poor. Any political power they have will last until the next Anna Nicole Smith scum-feeding frenzy occurs.

Today’s “Quote of the Day” here is from none other than Fidel Castro. Before you read it, ask yourself why he is the one, great enemy of the United States Government. We are great friends with all the despots and despotic governments on the planet; at least until it becomes convenient to invade and overthrow them – we seem to keep a supply on hand for the purpose, don’t we?

So why do we so hate Fidel Castro? Read:

“On what moral grounds can the rulers of a nation in which millionaires and beggars exists; Indians are exterminated; Blacks are discriminated against; women are prostituted; and huge numbers of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and other Latin Americans are scorned, exploited, and humiliated, speak of human rights? How can the representatives of a capitalist and imperialist society based on the exploitation of man by man, combined with egoism, individualism, and a complete lack of human solidarity, do this? How can those that train and provide military supplies to the bloodiest, most reactionary, and most corrupt governments in the world, such as those of Somoza, Pinochet, Stroessner, the guerrillas in Uruguay, Mobutu, and the Shah of Iran, just to name a few, mouth this slogan? How can the leaders of a state whose intelligence agencies organized assassination attempts against the leaders of other countries and whose armies dropped explosives in Vietnam equivalent to hundreds of atom bombs, such as those that exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and who murdered millions of Vietnamese without even deigning to apologize to the country or pay indemnity for the lives lost – the leaders of a state that has traditionally intervened in Latin America, subjects the people of this part of the world to its exploiting yoke, and is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of children every year due to illness and starvation – how can they speak of human rights?”

Upon whose toes was the commandant stepping? Had Fidel included (perhaps he has – the truth about Cuba is singularly hard to come by these days, isn’t it?) the VA mess, New Orleans’ plight (I understand Fidel did offer assistance there, but Cuban doctors and experts who happen to be best in the world with crises like Katrina were for some reason turned down by our president), IRS’ victims, and the abuse of poor people everywhere in the U.S. generally, upon whose toes would he be stepping, then?

A general has been fired over the VA hospital flap. “The system works.” Sure it does. Can I ask, then, was that one guy the only person responsible? Hell, no wonder nothing works.

How about all those congressional “Oversight Committees?” You know, like the one that supposedly “oversees” the Internal Revenue Service. They overlook things, all right. How about the Secretary of the Army? And didn’t they fire the head of FEMA, too? The system works, huh? YOU’RE DAMNED RIGHT IT WORKS. IT’S WORKING EXACTLY THE WAY IT WAS DESIGNED TO WORK. You’re watching it work, right down to the media coverage. It’s the way it is because you let it be the way it is.

"In honored glory . . ." Why don't you go to Hell?!

Oh, I understand that Anna Nicole’s body has (finally) been shipped to the Bahamas for burial. Isn’t that great?