The First Days of September Are an Anniversary for Me, Too

Last night as we lay waiting for sleep, wife Rita suddenly asked if I missed the danger and excitement of the life I led before meeting her after September 11, 2001. It was strange that she asked when she did, because the first few days of September represent the anniversary of the time I first realized that my country and its government of the few, by the few, and for the few meant to destroy me.

It was, for instance, the first week of September, 1984, that cops In Nebraska stopped my car, threw everything in it (most of my clothes and belongings remaining after IRS took everything else) out on the road and into a roadside ditch, and knocked hell out of me under the pretense of “frisking.”

If financial ruin and interdiction of my chances of gainful employment, break-up of my marriages, and ruination of a son’s mental health weren’t enough, what would become relentlessly continual harassment by law enforcement everywhere should have done the trick. It didn’t, though. I had been by then, one should realize, schooled and indoctrinated in belief that the United States of America, Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, Nation of Laws could not do anything like this.

More, when I tried to tell them what was happening, all my fellow citizens schooled in the same manner said just that: “They can’t do that!” The U.S. Government doesn’t do things like what was happening to me, so it couldn’t be so. Yeah, I learned a lot during “the IRS wars,” and one thing I learned is that failure of us all to come to the aid of any one of us is totalitarian plutocracy’s best weapon. I learned that the nation of laws, “of the people, by the people, and for the people” – was a cynical lie.

I say “cynical” because I was hearing with my own ears the monster I was fighting say with his own words that the myth I believed and the vaunted system of law and government in which I believed were intended primarily to make by deception its victim more vulnerable, even helpless.

Do I miss the excitement? No, I said, of course not. I was asleep, I think, before I heard her rejoinder or question. The “IRS war” and what I learned have long been a foregone conclusion, not something that can keep me awake any longer.

In the morning, though, I thought about it some more. Having turned on the television as we always do the better to learn what new disaster might be impending, I could find nothing except the latest of the relentless propaganda being used to perpetuate the massive fraud that our nation’s government has become. That any of the politicians and either of their parties have the temerity to face the nation is astonishing enough. It is also terrifying - evidence as it is of the smug certainty the politicians and media have of their control over the public’s mind and opinions.

While their opposition’s electioneering is stupefying enough in its hackneyed repetition of tired nostrums more than half a century old, the cynical performance of the Republican Party is jaw-dropping. By doing more – much more - of what has brought the nation to near ruin, they tell the sleep-walking nation, they will make everything better.

The biggest wonder of it all, something even more stupefying than the shear chutzpah of it all, is that any of them can keep a straight face.

Meanwhile, the supposed debate between the parties’ partisans and their candidates resembles nothing so much as the bickering of children, a study in logical absurdity beggaring description to anything but behavioral scholars. The studied and memorized, relentlessly repeated lies are prevarications, inventions, and fabrications to which the national electorate listens every election year, a “made for television” performance designed by now state-of-the-art propagandists

“Tell a lie often enough . . .”

The unprecedentedly long electioneering and campaigning, of course, has been designed to restore the public’s flagging interest in what obviously isn’t real and doesn’t work. And the state-of-the-art Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels created works. Everywhere, on the Internet and in public, one hears people parroting mindlessly the equally mindless slogans of their single interest or party. Few have any real understanding of the science, economics, or history behind the subject; more, they don’t care that they are ignorant. This is high school loyalty stuff – “I want my man or my team to win, regardless of anything else. I don’t care if I don’t know what’s going on.”

Even what would otherwise be thought of as the intelligentsia babble nonsense, once their behavioral and post-hypnotically suggested verbal button has been pushed. Say the name of a candidate, and listen to a man of woman with a masters or doctorate degree recite like an automaton.

The general public is worse. Recently, a participant cornered logically in an online debate pontificated that “Logic has no place in debate.” One can only wonder what he believes the purpose of debate is.

Obviously, it’s all useless for the purpose of democratic governance. Like an individual suffering from Alzheimer’s the nation designed to be ruled by its people can no longer do so, and are being put - have been put - in an institution, a virtual prison nursing home operated by the rich and powerful. What comes next for those who have evaded the brain-washing effect of media propaganda is the survival I’ve been talking about for weeks now here.

Do I miss the excitement of being hunted by my government? A provocative question. But, inasmuch as I will have to do it all again, soon – so will we all – it’s a useful question, too.

Rita, you see, is concerned because she once lived with a normal man, and among normal people. It’s obvious to her (and to many, it seems, from what I sometimes notice) that I’m not normal.

Normal men don’t do an inspection of the car before they get in; neither do normal men rig the car to tell them if someone has tampered with it. Normal men don’t practice defending themselves against sudden invasion of the house by SWAT teams, or arrange things there in such a manner as to impede the progress of those bursting in to race from room to room. Normal men don’t rig the place in such a way as to betray to them surreptitious entry. It’s not normal to live in a house that’s booby-trapped.

Normal men don’t kick a shoe under the bed in motel rooms and enter only after having pushed the door open from one side and peered through the crack next to the doorjamb. Neither do normal men check minutely bathroom, windows, and doors, then examine the room for surreptitious listening and video devices. Normal men don’t check the handgun they wear and clear clothing in order to facilitate a fast draw before opening the motel room’s door.

Normal men don’t watch their car’s rearview mirror like the proverbial hawk, and see every police car the minute it comes into view; neither do normal men scan the roofline of every building around wherever they walk and before they get out of the car upon arrival somewhere.

Normal men don’t position themselves inside restaurants and other places in such a way that anyone looking in from outside must enter in order to recognize them. Normal men don’t first assure of all the entrances and exits before sitting down.

Normal men don’t drive by every place they intend to visit, scanning nearby doorways, alleys or other places the like. Normal men don’t shy away from open spaces, and watch distant tree lines intently – making it all but impossible to converse with them - when walking

Normal men don’t note the position and occupancy of every car outside places into which they go before going in, nor do they survey and assess the potential ability of every man inside, recognizing each one who is concealing a handgun or other weapon.

Normal men don’t fear conversation on the telephone, refusing to make calls and likewise refusing to talk for more than a few minutes to only close friends (four), and often breaking off the conversation abruptly before even that much time. Neither are normal men made angry in Pavlovian fashion each time the phone rings.

Normal men don’t wear a loaded, cocked, and locked Model 1911 .45 pistol everywhere they go, and eschew places where wearing a weapon is prohibited. Normal men don’t work with a loaded, cocked, and locked pistol within reach, or sleep with the same pistol on the night table beside the bed. More, they don’t leap from the bed snatching up the weapon when some little sound breaks the silence.

Normal men don’t have hands that flash to intercept with crushing force the hands of others who happen to reach suddenly in their direction; neither do normal men practice daily to hit a target instantly with a handgun, and hold a handgun absolutely still when aiming. Normal seventy-two year old men don’t hit distant targets with rifle or handgun at ranges impossible for others.

Normal men don’t at seventy-two years of age continue to train like athletes one-third their age.

But I said, no, I didn’t miss the excitement. I liked the peace and quiet like one who has suddenly been relieved of pain enjoys the relief. Until recently, when a Texas State Trooper stopped us for no reason whatever, something bitterly reminiscent of as many as one hundred fifty such stops during the IRS-federal government war, I had come to enjoy driving again, a pleasure I had long since forgotten. I like living like a normal man; I liked it a whole lot.

I said that. I think I meant it. But a lot of things are broken – behaviorally, I mean. You don’t go hunted for twenty-three years without adapting. When you have been continually for twenty three years threatened by men wearing guns, you are taught to watch for men with guns. When those men have almost always worn the uniforms of law enforcement, you’re watchful, tense, around policeman and the places they frequent. When your dwelling places have been burglarized or broken into more than sixty-three times, you are taught to be very circumspect about your house and its security, and you sleep differently than other people. When your telephone has been bugged continually for twenty-three years, you are taught to hate talk on the phone, and answer it only by pre-arrangement with one or two people.

You don’t survive six hits by motor vehicles while a pedestrian or riding a bicycle, and you don’t have your car deliberately rammed by others without becoming leery of cars nearby. When you’ve been attacked repeatedly everywhere by would-be muggers, you have your head on a swivel like a fighter pilot over enemy territory, and you keep practicing to fight. Only the continuing practice and the confidence born of being able to do twenty pull-ups, a hundred push-ups, five hundred sit-ups makes, and bicycle or hike for days can calm you enough for you to be fit to live with. Being able to hit a quarter in a second at thirty feet with a big-bore pistol may be remarkable and a prideful thing, but the practice is also therapy. It makes you feel better.

I’m told it’s called “Post Traumatic Shock Syndrome.” Whatever. It’s there, and I deal with it. I’ve learned – years before the “IRS war” started – self-hypnosis, and Rita often urges me to use it. It always helps, considerably; in fact, I’ve become so proficient with hypno-therapy that I can stop pain with it.

But I still sleep with “Sweetheart,” my forty-five, and I am hyper-cautious and changed without it.

Oh, I have no doubt that I will one day conquer all the rest of the PTS, but there’s one thing that I know will never go away. I loved my country. I was often heard to say that the two most important things ever written were the Ten Commandments and the Declaration of Independence. They say the same thing, you know – that all men are “endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.”

They say that we are to care about one another’s inalienable rights, and that the violation of any one of us is the violation of us all. They say that people who believe that and enshrine it in law are a kingdom, a nation, of God; and that such a kingdom cannot be defeated. To live in a nation like that, to know it and to practice it is tantamount to paradise.

You don’t lose something like that and not feel it, and when realization came that against an enemy like IRS no one, not even wife or family, would help, I knew the truth about me – and about the nation I love.

Nobody cared.