The Body of a Woman Hanging Under a Bridge - the "Land of the Free?"

Note: Where I usually write a blog in twenty minutes, this one has taken three days. No subject has every strained my powers of description where my own emotions are concerned like this one; neither has one ever so appalled me. I’m reminded of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.”

Seventy-one years of age, having “been everywhere, done everything,” I sat there watching, in a state of mind and body like nothing I’ve ever known before. I thought of the Roman Circus Maximus, of places like Wounded Knee, the Rape of Nanking, of Buchenwald, Dachau, Belsen, and “work” camps associated with the Nazi Holocaust. In the course of this hideous chronicle of human cruelty, I thought of Mao Tse Tung, Stalin, Hitler - even Vlad the Impaler. I thought of all the horrific, grisly savagery about which I’ve ever read, heard, or seen, running through my mind, memory, and experience looking for an equal. I was still thinking about it when I went to bed, utterly disgusted – and spent with the exertion of fury trapped inside me with nowhere to go.

In all my roamings about the planet, and they include literally dozens of countries, in all my studies of history, nothing equals this. Nothing – I’ve never seen anything like this.

But WHY? Why be so appalled, so shocked, so stunned, so stupefied? Hell, I have never liked my kind very much, that opinion and emotion having been acquired while still in high school, where I enjoyed a reputation for being a “loner” who preferred his own company. While recovering from polio and ridiculously puny, you see, I was the helpless plaything of local bullies until Spartan, self-imposed training made me too formidable to “mess with.” Nevertheless, the boyhood experience told me all I cared to know about my fellow human being. One day, “called on the carpet” for something cynical I’d said, the principal of my high school, upbraided me for my cynicism. Defiant, I seized the morning paper lying on her desk, oriented it for her to read, and snapped, “You think I should want to be like THAT?”

I don’t know what the headline was, just that it was something of the usual rape, pillage and burn – enough, I said, to tell me that I wanted to be anti-social.

I’ve never liked my species very much. But then, always when confronted with what the poet Robert Burns called “man’s inhumanity to man,” that searing thought: what if I had been one of them? It’s always there, nettling and nagging, when I view something like this “CNN Special Report.” Since first realization of the Holocaust as a boy, I have countless times in my life when confronted with this kind of societal and cultural depravity wondered if, reared among these people, educated and indoctrinated by them, I might have been a member of one of those who herded their fellow human beings into a pit and machine-gunned them.

Now, this night, I agonized over it again. Could I have been a member of these crowds standing under the body of a lynched, burned-alive man?

No, I’ve always concluded – no, goddammit, no way. I have, after all, lived the life I have, one of continual rebellion against my society, my country, and the tendency of my kind to be a bullying, cruel, power-craving, lying son-of-a-bitch. It was always I who incurred the wrath of the crowd with not only the “lust for the truth” for which a teacher once upbraided me, but for my refusal to take part and even endeavor to thwart their schemes and devices. No, I would always satisfy myself, you wouldn’t have gone along. But still, the medusa monster that is doubt lurks in my random thoughts. I always fight it down, bury it.

But this CNN segment was an epiphany, an epiphany starting it all over again.

And as I said, I’ve had my epiphanies, realizations that shook me to my soul. When Beverly, my high school sweetheart and wife, died suddenly of the pregnancy doctors warned against, it was an epiphany, one born of the realization that a religion, the Catholic Church, had with its insane dogmas concerning sex and procreation made me her killer.

Could I do that to another, were I a fundamentalist “Christian,” Moslem, or Jew? An Ayatollah, a Mullah; a Bishop, and Cardinal, a Pope?

I had an epiphany in final realization that I had been betrayed by my country, that it had no more respect for the human and civil rights of the individual than any other of the power-mad, and that it would do murder, rape, and any other bestial crime required to retain its power and wealth. I had an epiphany, too, the first time a bullet went through me, and I realized a man was trying to end my life. Killing someone who’s trying to kill you isn’t the same, incidentally – you know he deserves killing; in fact, in energizing the survival instinct of every creature, he has been his own killer. Added to the shock of that one was the knowledge that it was my own government that was shooting.

Given political or economic power, could I become as contemptuous of my fellow citizen’s life as today’s gentry, the politician and bureaucrat?

I had an epiphany that afternoon when an eight-passenger van raced with tires screaming under acceleration to the crosswalk where I was, to hit me and hurl me on a suborbital flight that reached ten feet above the street and ended sixty- one feet from impact, all while leaving eighty-one feet of skid marks. Realization of the U.S. involvement came only later when “investigating” cops failed to write a summons and deliberately let escape occupants of the van who had leaped from their vehicle to attack me with kicks and blows as I lay stunned and writhing on the street. That’s “epiphany,” in case you’re still considering.

Could I become a sycophant so desirous of his government’s forbearance or favor that I would torment, maim, or murder a man I didn’t even know?

NO; no, no, no! I know, as do many who know me, that I am as a friend once told others, “the most non-judgmental man who ever lived.”

And Walt is a psychologist. He’s right. Back there in the time of real news, back when I still struggled to be sure in my understanding of who, what I am, the newspapers, radio, and history books were enough to provide me insight into the human condition, and why my classmates and others so enjoyed tormenting me while I was easy prey. It was also enough to make me determine that I would prefer to be as unlike the rest of my kind as possible, enough to set me one day on a course I chronicled in my book “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story.” In 1987, finally, I had a card printed, left it everywhere I traveled. It said, “Knight Errant – Anytime, Anywhere, Anybody.” On its reverse side, the monograph said, “If you’re in trouble and no else one will help, I will; no strings – just be a good person and don’t lie to me.”

Here, parenthetically, I must make a confession. My story isn’t quite what it may seem. Short of the sex act, you see, I’ve learned that there is nothing like the “high” provided by the successful rescue of another from great peril or difficulty. It’s incredibly fun; so much so that it became for me something of an obsession. And, even if - as a famous actor once observed in a famous movie of the same name, “It is a magnificent obsession” – there is a kind of selfishness in it. Once their victim, I love smash a bully. I love to deprive him of his prey, to teach him what may be the most object lesson of all lessons.

As I said, I left my Knight Errant card everywhere, I helped a lot of people, and the experiences taught me a great more where the human condition is concerned. I saw human depravity in many of its a hideous forms, from pedophilia and cruelty to children to kidnapping for white slavery.

But this! My god – these despicable devils set those men afire while they were still alive! No one, not even the Nazis of Hitler’s Germany, rival these bastards for shear, demonic cruelty. It simply “floored” me. How could I have been so blind, so comatose? All these years, I had despised the Nazis, their Gestapo, and their SS Einsatzgruppen, the swine-ish demons responsible for the Holocaust and the detachments of non-Germans who had hunted their own people for the Nazis. I despised the Germans especially because they were of my own people, my own kind. As a boy, I cringed under the indictment of all things German that was the photos of German soldiers holding pistols to the heads of kneeling Jews, Poles, and others.

Now this! Grinning devils standing under the charred and dangling remains of another human being, their victim a man innocent of any crime, yet lynched.

A woman and her son, raped – presumably even while he was forced to watch – then, mother and son, hanged from a goddamned bridge (oh, god; I wish I could have been there with a machinegun – an axe, even!)

I am a man with a long-standing reputation for the kind of anger to which the poet Dryden referred when he wrote, “Beware the fury of a patient man!” I have a fuse a mile long. But finally angered, I am a terrible enemy (there may be in that something of an explanation – and excuse, even – for the people of Germany before and during WW-11). I have been angry for three days, now – and I am still angry.

“To speak of atrocious crimes in mild language is treasonous to virtue,” Eighteenth Century Statesman Edmund Burke said. Well, sir, what words are suited for this? I am inadequate in that regard, grossly so.

I strive here to pack into my words as much emotion as possible. In so doing, however, I must also confess – again – that I don’t do this just for that lynched woman and her son, or for all those men, or for black Americans generally. Oh, no – their suffering, largely – let us not for one minute doubt that the evil responsible for what I rage against still lurks in the hearts of men - has passed. We can only expiate ourselves with that woman and her son and with all the others like them by assuring that they are never forgotten by the nation who - like I – stood seemingly unconscious, indolently and fecklessly, by while they were brutalized.

I do this for me, a kind of catharsis – an expiation, even (I do it for my country, too, who ought feel as I do – but, probably won’t).

In that, I search my memory to understand how I could have been unaware as I grew up of anything so monstrously evil as the kind of racism of which we speak here. I have said before, and I say again here, that I heard – can’t remember a single time, matter of fact – during the years I lived among the mostly German people of Northeast Iowa the word, “nigger.” As I’ve also related here elsewhere on the Web, my nephew married his black wife sometime during the seventies, and my cousin, Patti, married a black guy earlier than that. I never once ever heard any racist comment concerning either couple. Not one.

Maybe that’s because I’m who I am – or was: also in my reputation then was the fact that I knocked kicking people who pissed me off. Ill manners, unkindness or cruelty, “ganging up” – bullying - like that would have pissed me off, and somebody would have punctuated his own remark by spitting teeth. Racism for me is, at its roots and in its essence, bulling. I think I’ve made my feelings, and the reasons for them where bullies are concerned, fairly well known.

But I prefer to think it was because the people I grew up among were far, far better than racism. And therein, I have still another epiphany – how much I love the places and people who made me what I was; am, too, I hope.

Still, I can’t believe it wasn’t there. How could a little place in a nation “sweltering with racism,” as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. put it so well have escaped anything as virulent as the Satanic psychosis that lynched that woman and her son, set alight and hanged while still living that man? They - I - MUST have known!

But here we go again. I have NEVER – and this is a place I seriously doubt even my enemies will gainsay what I say – stood quietly by when anything even remotely like this was occurring. If there is any one thing that more than anything else describes me and my character, it is that one. I have paid what most of my kind would consider a terrible price for it, matter of fact. It is the reason for the story I tell in “Letters,” my book.

Now I remember an instance of that, from U.S. Army basic training, 1955. We had just gotten our issue of clothing and equipment. In the barracks, we were picking bunks and the guy who had been behind me in the line during equipment issue, Johnson, and I were flipping a coin to decide who got the top bunk. Johnson was a black guy.

“Hey,” one of two guys standing across the aisle between rows of bunks called. “C’mere!”

He motioned to me, beckoning me over. I still remember the two guys’ names, but I suppose I should keep them to myself here. When I, a little out of my league here still, and wanting to offend no one, approached, the two men from Clearwater, Mississippi demanded to know if I was intending to “bunk with that nigger.” Was I a “nigger lover?”

That I didn’t acquit myself all that well – at least assuming what I know now – was due my total ignorance concerning what they seemed so intent upon. When the two explained, I was flat dumb-founded. What the hell difference did our skin color make?!

There was more, but it will suffice to say that had not the barracks sergeant come along when he did, there would have been a fight (it’s something I would encounter again and again, back then: the rest of the nation didn’t seem to understand that wrestlers aren’t much impressed with anyone who settles for “team” sports like football). You didn’t tell a guy from Northeast Iowa back then what to do or not do.

A few weeks later, a southerner cadre sergeant who didn’t think much of my views having to do with race would endeavor to give me further instruction in the matter during a clandestine meeting ordered by him on the parade ground. When, however, his attempt at my “come-uppance” failed and he summarily got his ass kicked, he was man enough to relent. As I later wrote in my book, he may have ridden my ass about everything, but he didn't offer any more extracurricular "instruction." Strength always gets respect.

No, I’ve been telling myself, I’ve not only never inflicted any kind of cruelty, word or deed, upon anyone, I’ve never been racist. But how could I have known nothing of what I was seeing this night on CNN television?

“How?” in these matters, I’ve learned, always means “who?” I’d like to go back (and, if you know me, you know I’ll do just that) and read the newspapers in Iowa of the time. Did they feature pictures like whose I saw as I watched television in shock and horror? Were there newspaper stories like those CNN featured? I doubt it – but I have to be sure.

Why? Because I have to know what my responsibility was and how I acquitted myself in fulfilling it. I have to know – as I should think my country and countrymen would - whether I somehow put out of my mind the plight of my fellow citizen under degradation, torture, and murder. I want to know, too, if I am innocent, how the society and nation might have kept me ignorant until I was old enough to induct into the army, and why.

It’s interesting, parenthetically – something that just popped into my mind as I type here – that the news “story” that followed the show I speak of here was a FoxNews attempt to justify “water-boarding,” the torture of one human being – of course, the pundit always says, “an enemy” – by another for “intelligence” (for the animal who calls himself “thinking man,” there’s always a good reason for utterly anything, isn’t there?). Maybe I’ve answered my own question. But that’s not enough for me. The next question, the only one that really matters for me, is the same one that is all that matters at this juncture for my country.

What are we going to do about what will have caused that woman’s body to hang in my mind for the rest of my life?