Ron Paul, "Roosting Chickens," and a Bob Seger Song - "Like a Rock."

Searching for music to put on my www.judoknighterrant.com website, I came across the song I’ve now put there. “Like a Rock.” Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. That guitar’s crying voice still tears me up, as do the way the lyrics describe what I was thinking that night in the Arizona desert way back then.

You can’t imagine the emotions “Like a Rock” evokes, so I won’t bother. Here’s the gist of it, from my book, “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story.”

“I haven’t gone five miles when the proverbial “all hell breaks loose” occurs. The Cadillac comes up behind me so fast it seems to explode in my face as I check the rear view mirror. Then, as it pulls out to pass, my old Army buddy Arseneau leans out his back seat window and rakes the Skylark with what I think was an Uzi. John liked the Uzi and the Skorpion, but the bullets we found in the seat later were nine millimeter, and the Czech submachine gun is thirty-two caliber.
“I duck behind the armored vest hanging on the seatback just in time. Later, we count four nine millimeters still buried there. The air fills with flying glass, blown by the sixty mile an hour wind stream. Although it’s hit more than a dozen times, the only window still intact is the windshield
“I hit the brakes hard, standing the Skylark on its nose as the Cadillac shoots past, also braking hard and tires smoking. Swerving off the road into a shallow ditch, I breach the fence, then churn out into a pasture. I’m bouncing around in the car like a bull-rider. My head hits the unyielding roof twice, hard. Somehow, I get the seat belt fastened. I never forget to fasten it again.
“Back on the road, they’re backing up, then pulling around to come through the fence after me. They’re going to be bouncing around in here, too, and won’t be able to shoot – not well, anyway. I see right away, though, that there’s not enough room in the pasture to let me evade for long. They’ll just stop, take careful aim, and shoot me to pieces. After a couple of more fast “bootlegger turns” – thanks, mom, for teaching me that – I go back through the fence. Now I recognize there’s something radically wrong with the front end of my car. It’s become hard, really hard, to steer. I know I don’t dare drive through any more fences, that’s sure!
“But I know now what my one chance is, and I’ve got an idea. I still have old “Sweetheart,” the girl with the big knockers. Bullets, that is.
“I haven’t gone three hundred yards when they catch me. I’m thinking these evil sonofabitches must have Captain Kirk’s Star Drive in that damned Cadillac. The Skylark is making a hell of a noise, losing water and coolant, probably, and listing to one side on broken shock absorbers. But her engine is still running smoothly enough. When the Cadillac is right behind, I swerve to straddle the centerline, trying to prevent their going by on either side.
“If I can stay directly in front of them, I can keep John from shooting at me, and the farther I get to their left, the farther the guy in the front seat will have to lean out in order to get a shot. If they go by, they’ll wreck their shocks, and since John obviously doesn’t have his seat belt on, his shooting will be bad, too. Maybe I should’ve stayed in the fields.
“Now the guy in the right front seat leans far out and fires once, the slug striking somewhere on the Skylark sheet metal behind me. I note that he doesn’t have his seat belt fastened, either. Then, probably on John’s command, the guy retreats into the car. I find out why right away. Suddenly, pitiless fate makes the road three lanes. The driver of the other car swings left as Arseneau leans out their right side and fires again.
“Again, I huddle behind the armor, making myself as small as I can. The sound of it is something still with me, a staccato roar like golf ball sized hail on a corrugated steel roof. Glass seems to be everywhere again. Blowing around inside the car like a shotblast. Suddenly, I am seething mad, like that night in the Thunder Ridge Mall parking lot. This is like being raped. I have a right to be left alone, goddamnit!
“Still seething, I swerve into the shelter of the driver’s quarter of the car behind, pause a second, swerve again and slam on the brakes. Once more, the other car slides by, tires smoking and screaming. In that, I actually hear Arseneau’s thoughts. He’s anticipating me, rolling across the rear seat under him to come up in the left rear window. I’ve got “Sweetheart” on the dash, muzzle pointed through a five inch long hole blasted there by a burst from the Uzi. Come on, you sonofabitch . . .!
“There! The white face appears in the window opening. Range is about twenty-five feet. Through the spider-webbed windshield glass, I see the hit, dead center on the target, that shiny white face. I see the red spray splatter the car’s interior and the guy in the right front seat, too. The Cadillac swerves violently, turns almost sideways in the roadway, then fishtails hard in recovery, its driver fighting for control.
“While it’s happening, I wait, continually glancing at the road ahead quickly. Now. The car straightens, accelerating, its front seat passenger turning to resume the fight. Balls, I’ll give him that. Probably mad as a hornet. When he’s facing me, “Sweetheart” comments on the matter once more, spitting a two hundred thirty grain hardball forty-five kiss across the ten feet of distance between us. It hits the shooter in the front seat right under the nose, blowing his brains all over the driver behind him.
“Legs apparently straightening reflexively, the corpse rears up, then goes backward to crash into the man at the steering wheel. The Cadillac begins to fishtail again, leaves the hard surface throwing up a cloud of dust and dirt. Suddenly, its rear end leaves the ground, underside turning toward me as the big car goes by end over end, doing a kind of cartwheeling half gainer. A big sheet of something flies off, rippling in the air like a flag. In a minute, I realize that it’s the windshield. The car makes one, two, three, four flips, each slower than the last. The noise is incredible, the sound of tearing and crumpling metal.
“Finally, the Cadillac stops. Pieces are still flying, landing on the blacktop. Now there’s just the sound of the Skylark – pitiful. A belt is screaming, a bent tire rim pounding and thumping. I’m leaving a trail of water. I hope. Oil or gasoline, I’m out of business. Do I dare stop? Looking, I see another vehicle behind, a van of some kind, and it drives by the Cadillac without stopping. God damn! There were two cars!
“It’s over now, but I have no idea where the hell I am. For what seems an eternity, I grope around, keeping an eye on and finally losing the van. The engine keeps overheating, and I stop several times to find and add water. I avoid contact with people because the car looks just like what’s happened, and they’ll call police. A couple of times when I stop, I look for the device that’s letting the bad guys track me. No luck, but it doesn’t take me long to figure out that the van was the one actually doing the tracking. Finally, I arrive at my mountain campsite. I know what’s coming, and I know what I have to do . . .”

When you’re remembering a thing like that, it’s never really possible to remember it always the same way. Yeah, I know what all the courts, lawyers and moralists want to believe – it isn’t so; it isn’t so, and anyone who does remember everything and in detail about a time like that simply brands himself a liar. Just the fact that we say what we do on the subject betrays what a nation of liars we are.

Anyway, I always remember that black Cadillac and the way it could accelerate. Awesome – and I do not use the word loosely. Other things about remembering a fight like that are probably different for other people, but although I do remember thinking with certainty that I was going to die, I was far, far from afraid. I was, in fact, enraged, in a killing fury.

You may understand if I tell you that I think I know how a woman being raped may feel. The shear outrage of being violated. Of being dealt with as though you are nothing, something to be used by someone simply because he is powerful enough to do that, then to be thrown away. The only thing we really have of value, you know, is our lives. We have worked so hard for it, defended it from so much, from so many people and things; it is what all those men – and women – in history have suffered, been maimed, and died to preserve for us. That someone stronger intends to take it from you as if it were his to take is unconscionable and unforgivable. No, I won’t ever forget the rage.

For years, in fact, I fought the rage. Walking that night down one of those dug-out roads in the desert north of Phoenix, I fought the killing urge to kill. Anyone. Anybody. YOU! All of you! Everything was gone. Business, wife, family, money – everything. Even my identity, and record of having soldiered, of having fought for this execrable society and nation, all gone. The federal government of the United States, you know, controls and owns everything. Money, property – even your name! You have turned all of it over to them, and you have done that because you are crawling cowards, believing that you assure by submissive subservience your miserable security.

That night, in the desert, you were my enemy.

I had just learned with certainty, you see, that your government – the one you have give that kind of power because you are too craven and cowardly to face life on your own – was resolutely calling anyone who thought to give me a job, to threaten them with audit and retribution should I receive a paycheck. And I wanted to hurt you the way you were hurting me.

The song made it worse. “Like a rock, “Seger sang.


“My hands were steady,
“My eyes were clear and bright,
“My walk had purpose,
“My steps were quick and light,
“And I held firmly to what I felt was right.
“Like a rock.”


As I said a while ago about another song like this one, I can count the number of times I’ve cried during my adult life on the fingers of one hand. When that guitar started its wail, I fell to my knees in the road, and I wept.

Like I said, it’s strange the things you remember, and how you remember them. Another thing singularly vivid, like that damned Cadillac, was a quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche, the great philosopher. Translated from the German, it says, “He who fights with monsters ought take care lest he become a monster.” Some time later, I would glue it to the ceiling over the bunk in my RV. This night, though, I went into Scottsdale, found a music store in a mall, and bought the Seger tape. I listened to it through the night as I drove to Denver. The fight in the night near Fort Collins would take place a couple of years later.

Yes, I did fight back and I won; not the way you think, but I won. The first major piece of legislation attacking IRS, Omnibus Taxpayers Bill of Rights, had a great deal to do with my own efforts.

But that’s not what this is about, either. Night before last, I heard Congressman Ron Paul – I can’t help wondering at the co-incidence that he is my representative in the U.S. Congress; Chuck Grassley, the author of that first, landmark legislation, having then been my representative in the Senate – said that the world has begun attacking us because we have made a practice of attacking the world. We should have expected 9-11, he said, inasmuch as we had been bombing Iraq – and therefore all Arabs – for years.

The truth, in other words (sorry, but the world is not obliged to see everything the way you see it). Before you attacked an entire religion, you would have done well to learn a modicum about it. But you don’t do things like that, DO you?!

No, hell no – everything you do is right. Everyone on the planet should have our system of government, our way of life, and our moral code. Listen to your miscreant president and his neo-conservative, New World Order (thanks for the reminder “Treebear” lady), military industrial complex cohort. Nothing may stand in our way, especially our greedy way, and when it does, we – you, I’m your enemy, remember? - destroy it.

Save the bullshit. Wave the flag you won’t so much as stop to pick up from the gutter in my face, and I’ll cram it down your sycophant throat. I was there at the beginning of it all, don’t forget. That’s what caused my ordeal that night in the desert all these years ago. I was supposed to go to a foreign nation and kill its leader, that just because he had begun to stand up to you, to reprove what you had been doing to the people of Cuba for more than a century. There would be many more murder operations like Mongoose (they named it for me, you know), all over Latin America and elsewhere - Iran, for one. Chile? And Panama?

Oh, but when Congressman Ron Paul had the courage both intellectual and moral to tell it like it is, you know what happened. People in the Land of Free Speech don’t tell the truth unless it favors the neo-conservative, military industrial complex corporation line, and the Newspeak prole (you remember the proles, don’t you – Orwell’s “1984?”) public’s opinion. What Paul said was that some of the chickens came to roost on 9-11. There was a Colorado professor who said that years before, remember. Remember what happened to him? Free speech, your ass!

I’ll tell you something else I know, something I know because I’ve been where you don’t want to believe we go. One of these days, you will do to someone what you did to me, and there won’t be a mollifying or accusing song to ring in a his mind as he struggles with the desperate need to destroy you. You will destroy everything that someone loves, and he will retaliate in kind.

There’s one more thing you need to know: It was I who nearly thirty years ago in June, 1978 first wrote to our minimalist-minded government to warn what would happen if someone high-jacked a Boeing 747 or Douglas DC-10 and flew it into a skyscraper. The strike of what amounts to a 300,000 pound flying bomb somewhere near the middle of a building like the World Trade Center (the building I used for example was the Empire State Building), would cause its collapse. No one listened then, either. You always have your own version of the truth, no matter how mindless and divorced from reality it may be – haven’t you?!

And that, ultimately, is what saved you from me (if you think the airliner idea was my worst, you only demonstrate how decadent-stupidly vulnerable you really are). I realized that night in the desert and the next day that you are your own worst enemy.

You are your destroyer.