"For the greatest enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, pervasive, and unrealistic." John Kennedy, war hero and President of the United States, said that in a speech, on June 11, 1962. Read it; read it a couple of times, then think about it.

Think about the culture, the society, and nation we live in today. Where can you find, in all of your experience (and I speak here to people old enough to have lived during a time when honesty, integrity, and honor were not scorned and scoffed at), a culture, society, and nation more dedicated to mythology and falsehood like this one? Today, I digress to a degree again from my discussion of guerrilla law related citizens arrest tactics, that due the discussion I encounter repeatedly on websites, especially those frequented by the distaff side of society.

In that regard, scientific integrity requires mention that Internet research of the kind I have been doing suggests that women are far more often liberal in political persuasion than men. More, women are seldom moderates, all but invariably tending to one political point of view or the other. Rosie O’Donnell and Ann Coulter aren’t alone in their extremism. Neither do women hide their preference for emotion as a basis for deliberation – especially where political “issues” are concerned.

To suggest that society ought consider that in making its governmental decisions, however, is something now become “politically incorrect.” Anyone, moreover, who chooses to notice the connection between what is politically incorrect and the tenets of the feminism is in danger of losing any audience he might have gathered. The truly awesome power of feminism is everywhere evident these days, and unless one stops there, he is in danger of lynching – probably by males now referred to as “metrosexual.”

At any rate, any viewing of television “info-tainment” news nowadays must steel himself for the barrage of “news” concerning “women’s issues.” I trust I do not have to recite the wearying list of things like the disappearance and/or rape of the week, lost child of the week, beached whale (or the equivalent) of the week, and any other tear-jerker incident or matter the purveyors of today’s “news” can find or contrive with which to distract the viewing audience from things weightier like the ravages of illegal immigration and the Iraq War.

In the “dumbed-down” nation, lacking in emotion and appeal to emotion means boring, and the electronic news media – to whom number of viewers is critical - must not be boring. News without “human interest” – one who studies these things comes soon to understand that that means female interest – is capitalistic anathema. So, we have feminized news. We have a feminized – effeminate – nation. Everybody’s happy. We must be - it’s what we wanted, after all. We voted for it – that’s how it became “politically correct,” the same reason the news has become what it is. Everything is just great. But is it?

Let’s see. Several weeks ago, I started talking about issues like that of illegal immigration, the carnage in Iraq, and the appalling state of our federal government. I suggested that in order to change it all, it would be necessary to change the latter - the government responsible for it all. That, I said, would require what I called “guerrilla law” – lateral thinking and effective activism by the public.

This, I noted also, wasn’t the first time I have done that. I related how in 1989, my public call for the public to take back control of their country by availing themselves of the four powers given them by the nation’s founders (quick, dear reader – what are they?) sent shock waves through the bureaucracy and congress. I also recollected how when I had called “charge” and turned to see who was following my lead, I found no one. Not a soul seized the opportunity offered by my intensive and thorough infiltrations of the cesspool that is federal government, that despite my having discovered and made public corruption still being slowly – tactically so – revealed to the “dumb-down” society. Oh, there was much talk – I was for a time the darling of the radio talk shows and the underground press – but one did anything.

Except the government. In the decade that followed, I was hounded relentlessly and across the country by the nation’s police, stopped more than five score times on the streets and highways. My residences and offices were burglarized as many as a hundred times. I was run down by motor vehicles repeatedly, attacked by street thugs even more often, shot at, and threatened continually by police “sting” operations. Provocation by law enforcement agencies reached outrageous proportions, including near gunfights.

Even that could not stir the public into action. In a scenario now so familiar, the public stood by idly, watching and ruminating calmly as the war went on. No matter the crime being committed as they watched, no one took any action. Except to “get the hell out of there.” Several times, crowds of people watched indolently as I fought multiple assailants far younger that I, survived being chased and run down by motor vehicles, and being wounded by a sniper. Even when I lay on a street surface after having been blasted from my bicycle in a protected crosswalk by a speeding (it left eighty-one feet of skid marks) vehicle having “blown” the stop light, being kicked and punched by driver and occupants of the van, dozens of rush hour passersby and spectators did absolutely nothing.

Nothing, in short, I could do could cause U.S. citizens to take part in any of their civic duties. So, when I made my latest suggestion of “guerrilla law” activity, I wasn’t expecting anything to actually happen. Except, de rigueur course, talk.

Does anyone see how certain of my “spec ops,” gunfighter, mentality kind have come to view the society and nation as effeminate?

A couple of days ago, I remarked again concerning my twenty-three years war with the government behaving exactly the way it is behaving now. I refer to the immigration “issue,” the war on terror, and more – and to the manner in which the government is behaving in their regard. There isn’t any difference, in terms of motivation and behavior – or tactics – you know. Modus operandi, it’s called – method of operation. One lady responded in a manner by now stultifyingly familiar. I’ve heard the reasoning and sentiment a thousand times.

“We all have, at some point in our lives, gone through some rough times in one way or another. Let it humble us and cause us to be more sensitive towards those in need. Most just need some help getting back to that point in life where they can help themselves once again.”

As I said, that was a very, very familiar reaction. During the sixteen years that I wrote and contacted personally literally scores of congressmen, senators, journalists, television networks, magazines, and others, I heard again and again just two responses. The first, the most characteristic of the United States of America and its peculiarly cowed public was, “Unbelievable – they can’t do that!” “Just that simple,” I remarked one day to reporter and publicist Jim Frazier - “’Unbelievable’ absolves the individual of any responsibility to so much as listen further, let alone show interest or do anything.”

The second of the mantra-like, all but invariable, responses offered by the public when informed of my struggle against criminal government was that “Everybody has some trouble in their lives” sagacity.

Get over it, in other words.

So, let’s do the rest of my experiment – help me with my study. I proceed now to propose a number of solutions to “issues” much in the current news. Enumerated, they are as follows:

I. To stop illegal immigration, begin enforcing existing immigration law. Raise, however, the penalty for hiring or continuing to employ an illegal – or “undocumented” – alien to ten percent of the company’s gross income. Fine anyone aware of an illegal alien’s employment ten thousand dollars. Write or re-write the law in a manner that leaves no way out. Make the penalty for being found in the country illegally a sentence of five years, working in the crop-producing fields for only sustenance and lodging. Those already working in an agricultural profession will simply forfeit all payment (and, of course, reside in prison). Following completion of sentence, the individual may be given citizenship (I don’t imagine many will remain – do you?). Penalty for crime against a U.S. citizen by an illegal alien should be punishable by triple that committed by a citizen, and in the case all crime resulting in the death of a citizen, or rape, the penalty should be death.

2. To end the miasma of corruption in Washington, D.C., criminalize all lobbying activity. Make persuasive personal contact – attempt to affect legislation, that is – with any of the people’s representatives in the U.S. Congress a crime, punishable by heavy penalties including imprisonment.

3. To restore semblance of rational democratic rule in the nation, require a logician in attendance at all publicized – news media and the like – discussion, in order that the audience be informed of the validity of the argument being promulgated. Impose fines for deliberate lying to the public by all persons in government, bureaucrat or elected. All persons participating in political campaigning should be sworn in before debate and public statements, and deliberate and provable falsehood should constitute perjury. All speeches by those sworn into public office should be considered as being under oath, and lying perjury.

4. To conserve gasoline and reduce prices, require installation of a speed-limiting governor on all vehicles using the public highways. Enforce the law with heavy penalties for non-compliance. Limit speeds to fifty-five miles per hour.

5. To stop predatory behavior toward children, provide legally for a truly prohibitive and interdictory penalty – in the instance of repeated offense, life imprisonment or death.

6. To assure no further insanity of the kind evidenced by Iraq, and the specious war on terror, require that whenever our troops are committed to combat, ALL of the nation – I mean corporations who normally “earn” billions – contribute proportionately. Corporation profits from munitions and the like will be sold to nation and taxpayers at cost. NO profit should accrue to anyone from the making of war.

7. In criminal prosecutions, prosecutors should be chosen by lottery from the pool of those admitted to the bar in the district where the crime occurred. (If jurors should be chosen in a manner designed to assure impartiality, so should the court and its officers.) In civil lawsuits, plaintiffs who lose should be required to pay in damages to the defendant damages equal to those sought.

8. In order to end the logically and experientially absurd state wherein one who kills one or a few of his fellows is a murderer, but one who kills tens of thousands, even millions, is a politician or “leader,” the commission of troops to battle without a declaration of war by the congress should be punishable by death where combat is joined and people killed. In the event of emergency envisioned by the War Powers Act, proof of falsification of reasons for committing troops should be codified as an impeachable offense and conviction of such punishable where life is lost by death.

There are, of course, more legislative actions needed to restore our nation to health. Deliberate pollution, for instance, should have penalties on the order of lost license or right to do business. Farmers and agriculture should be permitted to participate in the markets, and sell their produce in the same manner as does the rest of industry.

Yes, of course there will be huge increases in prices. That, however, merely proves the degree to which the nation been living off the farmer and rancher for decades, while paying industry otherwise multiples of what their product was actually worth. The public who earned dividends from stock bought at the farmer and ranchers’ resulting expense would learn its lessons in the economics it refuses to teach its children.

There is nothing wrong with the U.S. that can’t be corrected. This morning, a U.S. Senator speaking in the U.S. Senate delineated how twenty million dollars was stolen by FEMA bureaucrats and truck lines for supposed delivery of ice to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. First trucked in refrigerated trucks from somewhere in the Connecticut, then to Arkansas and then to Mississippi, the ice was finally trucked back to Connecticut, then disposed of by being dumped somewhere. It was a story hideously familiar to one my age, a story repeated literally thousands of times during my lifetime.

Anyone remember the millions – or was it billions – in cash shipped to Iraq, only to mysteriously disappear?

NONE of the “issues” or problems facing our nation is difficult in solution, all being complicated only by attitudes and reactions like those I’ve described here. Rhetorical platitudes of the kind so loved by humanist, feminist, and liberal do not aid the homeless. Drowning, or being beating to death by a gang of the vicious children we are now feeding – nothing more – to adulthood, it is not your platitudes or prayers I need. With your nation in a death spiral piloted by “leaders” who sole interested in self-aggrandizement, it is not fustian pontificating and bloviating in a coffee shop or bar, at cocktail parties or in Internet chatrooms that is needed.

During the nearly ten years that I was “Knight Errant” – traveling the U.S. to offer free assistance to anyone I could find who needed it – I offered real, physical help to a number of the people being spoken of so much here on the Internet, in the media, and elsewhere. I lived among the homeless and poor, those being criminally oppressed by our execrable bureaucracy (including women being forced to submit to extortion for rape), and those being blackmailed, stalked, and, and terrorized.

In nearly ten years, all over the nation that bills itself as the most compassionate in history, I met not one of the do-gooders I am now obliged to suffer by listening.

Want – really – to stop what’s happening to our country? Stop, then, pretending that it’s necessary to listen or argue with someone likes me. Stop pretending that citizen’s arrest is some obscure idea, or that any reasonable person has any doubt as to its legality. Stop pretending that it is difficult or requires some special ability or knowledge to file a small claims court action. Stop pretending that it is difficult to find or identify illegal aliens (they frequent places where they can send money back to Mexico, they speak only Spanish, and a dozen more things obvious even to a child). No homeless person has ever been factually and physically aided by platitude or prayer, and neither has any nation. Individual or nation, the rescuer must DO something.

When Thomas Jefferson said that "people get the government they deserve," it was more than just a clever turn of phrase. It was a timeless truth.

Let’s deal with a couple of things, get them out of the way:

First, Glen, you might want to reconsider. You might go to the United States Judo Association site and check, too. They and literally thousands of others will tell you that I am, in fact, a two-time United States National Judo Champion, a six time state judo champion (Iowa) and a sixth degree black belt. I was a coach for the U.S. National Judo Team from 1986 to 1992. I’m also a state pistol champion (Iowa), and you can look it up. This URL will help:

(http://www.state.ia.us/government/ilea/stark_award.html

Finally, I do sets of a dozen pull-ups and sixty pushups every day, together with three hundred sit-ups and an hour walk. I still run a mile in under six and a half minutes. Do what you threaten, and you will have your ass kicked as neither your intellect or experience could possibly imagine.

I take the time to say all that because I wonder at the intellect of someone who offers insult randomly and to anyone who opposes his point of view. I don’t really have to wonder about the courage and character of someone who, like metrosexual machismo’s ideal, gives the middle finger salute from a passing car. How candy-assed can you get?!

A few years ago, I happened to have the good fortune to watch a guy who had just done that pull into a shopping center parking lot and park. Sprinting on my bicycle, I got there as he and the woman with him were getting out of the car. If you don’t know what happened next, you probably think the typical American male still has balls bigger than a canary. Outweighing me by at least fifty pounds, less than half my age, he melted like a marshmallow on a skewer. The women with him pleaded with me not to hurt him.

Glen, guys like me recognize guys like you the same way ornithologists recognize the song of a robin or a cardinal. Just about any of us recognizes the bleat of a goat – or a sheep. “Men” who offer insult like yours measure themselves exactly for men like me. Thanks, though, for telling me what you are; that way, I have some idea what your opinion is worth.

Next, for “Terri,” there’s this, a number of questions:

I'm a “racist” because I demand that my government uphold immigration law and deport illegal aliens? I'm a “racist” because I demand that state, country, and city government uphold statute, ordinance, and city codes? Why should I be required to observe law that citizens of another country are not required to observe? That makes sense to you?

I’m a “racist” because I expect the city where I live to not allow single family dwellings to be occupied by literally dozens of people? I'm a “racist” because I believe local citizens, police, and law enforcement have the authority to arrest illegal aliens? I'm a “racist” because I expect that my state government will not give drivers licenses to illegal aliens? Explain that for me, please. Why should I, a native – I was born here; I am not an immigrant – citizen be required to do and obey law a person who is here illegally doesn’t have to obey? Yes, indeed – I’d love to hear your explanation.

I'm a “racist” because I believe my fellow Americans should employ their fellow Americans before they employ someone in this country against our immigration laws? What do you suppose the purpose of immigration law IS? I'm a “racist” because I object to paying immensely higher uninsured motorist premiums because illegal aliens drive (like maniacs) while uninsured and kill U.S. citizens literally by the thousands?

Why don’t you come down here to Texas and let me show you the “descansos” – little memorial shrines erected by Hispanics at the site of a fatal crash by relatives of the deceased. Let me show you how to get the record of how many of these people were insured, and how many people – “Anglos” – died with them.

I'm a “racist” because I object to the horde of criminals pouring (an average of a hundred twenty a day) over the border? I'm a “racist” because I don't want to be taxed to pay for a prison population comprised largely of illegal Mexicans, or for the government lawyers necessary to fight Mexico’s efforts to free people like the guy whose gang repeatedly raped, then beat and kicked to death two young “anglo” women here in Texas?

Sweetheart, I not only object to that last, I would with the greatest personal satisfaction strangle to death that Mexican son of a bitch and his cohort. And that has utterly nothing to do with “racism.”

I'm a “racist” because I demand that my government protect our borders and our sovereignty as a nation? Show me another nation who permits what’s happening on our border. Check Mexico, for instance.

I'm a “racist” because I object to having to pay higher sales and property taxes in order to build more schools for the illegitimate children of illegal aliens? I'm a “racist” because I object to paying higher costs and higher taxes in order that hospitals all across America can continue treating illegal aliens and stay in business? I'm a “racist” because I believe the government and its news media have a duty to publicize the names and race of criminal illegal aliens? I'm a “racist” because I want to deny citizenship to “anchor babies” born in this country? I'm a “racist” because I object to our welfare system paying billions – that’s literal, again – to people who aren’t citizens and haven’t paid a dime in taxation supporting that system? I'm a “racist” because I object to municipalities, bureaucracies, corporations, and others spending billions – again, literally - to write and translate into Spanish laws and rules? I'm a “racist” because – even though I speak Spanish – it annoys me to have to push this or that number on a telephone in order to listen to a message recorded in English – the language of my country?

Let me stop for breath – I’m getting mad (any, trust me, you don’t want to make Hal von Luebbert mad; “beware the anger of a patient man. . .”)

I'm a “racist” because I object to immigration policies that actually give preferential treatment to illegal aliens; that, while discriminating against not only people who immigrate legally, but U.S. citizens? Lady, you must exist in another space-time continuum. I suggest that I arrange for you a similar system wherein you stand in the stead of the U.S. Citizen vis a vis another abusing your humanity like the Mexican alien is abusing the humanity of the citizens of this country. That might make my point far better than anything I have said or might say. I am not one to stoop to invective and insult – in the manner you have – but I am damned sick and tired of people who – especially now that your kind have made the use of certain words punishable by fine or imprisonment – hurl about hither and yon terms like “racist.” I have taken wounds – wounds I still suffer with every time the weather changes – in order to preserve not only the civil rights of all people but the right to abuse freedom of speech the way you have here.

Make a contribution, ma’am – then shoot off your immature mouth.

Okay. I’ve got that off my chest. Some time ago, I wrote of the “wrath of the Saxon.” I’m Saxon. We are a very long-suffering people – willing to forbear almost anything. Except arrogance; except insolence. It only so happens that arrogance and insolence are singularly characteristic of a certain culture. Check the flags I’ve posted above here.

The following article is from the Word Wide Web (angry, really pissed off, I have foregone the quotations marks):

August 21, 2006

What is a Citizen’s Arrest?

By: Collin McKibben, Attorney at Law & Ariella Rosenberg

Everyone is familiar with the term citizen’s arrest: we have seen it on TV, read about it in books, and even heard about it in social circles. Surprisingly, however, almost nobody really understands what a citizen’s arrest is, or legally, what it represents.

A citizen's arrest is an arrest performed by a civilian who lacks official government authority to make an arrest (as opposed to an officer of the law). An arrest, as defined by Black's Law Dictionary, is "The apprehending or detaining of a person in order to be forthcoming to answer an alleged or suspected crime." Ex parte Sherwood, (29 Tex. App. 334, 15 S.W. 812).

Although generally the person making a citizen’s arrest must be a citizen, in certain states, a “citizen’s” arrest can be carried out by a civilian who is not a citizen (for example, an alien or illegal immigrant). A citizen’s arrest does not necessarily mean an arrest made by a single individual who happens to witness a crime. For example, a department store may also carry out a citizen’s arrest in the course of apprehending a shoplifter.
The right to making a citizen’s arrest goes back to our roots in English common law. Historically, before the modern infrastructure of police departments, citizen's arrests were an important part of community law enforcement. Today, citizen’s arrests are still legal in every state, although state laws pertaining to citizen’s arrests are not uniform. In general, all states permit citizen’s arrests if a criminal felony (defined by the government as “a serious crime, usually punishable by at least one year in prison”) is witnessed by the citizen carrying out the arrest, or if a citizen is asked to help apprehend a suspect by the police. Variations of state law arise in cases of misdemeanors, breaches of the peace, and felonies not witnessed by the arresting party.

For example, California Penal Code mandates:
A private person may arrest another: 1. For a public offense committed or attempted in his presence. 2. When the person arrested has committed a felony, although not in his presence. 3. When a felony has been in fact committed, and he has reasonable cause for believing the person arrested to have committed it. (C.P.C. § 837).

In contrast, New York State Consolidated Laws hold that:
Any person may arrest another person (a) for a felony when the latter has in fact committed such felony, and (b) for any offense when the latter has in fact committed such offense in his presence. (N.Y.C.L. §140.30).

Unlike the California statute, which only permits citizen’s arrests in cases of felony, New York law extends the possibility for making a citizen’s arrest to “any offense committed in [one’s] presence”. Additionally, in cases where the citizen has not necessarily witnessed the crime being committed, California law allows citizen’s arrests when a citizen has “reasonable cause for believing the person arrested to have committed [a felony],” whereas New York law applies only to situations in which person has “in fact committed” a felony. Distinctions such as these are important–unwarranted citizen’s arrests can result in repercussions (such as law suits) for well-meaning citizens who attempt to make arrests without understanding local laws. It is important to be familiar with the laws in your particular state should you want to carry out a citizen’s arrest, or should a citizen try to unlawfully detain you.

Once a person has committed an offense meriting a citizen’s arrest (under the applicable state law), the arresting party must follow certain guidelines to detain and deliver to authorities the suspect in question. Acceptable guidelines for carrying out a citizen’s arrest also vary by state. In general, the arresting party must notify the suspect as to why he or she is being arrested, and may enter the building or private residence where the suspect is residing, using a reasonable amount of force to apprehend the suspect. In California, for example, To make an arrest, a private person, if the offense is a felony…may break open the door or window of the house in which the person to be arrested is, or in which they have reasonable grounds for believing the person to be, after having demanded admittance and explained the purpose for which admittance is desired. (C.P.C., §844). In New York, A person may arrest another person for an offense…at any hour of any day or night. 2. Such person must inform the person whom he is arresting of the reason for such arrest unless he encounters physical resistance, flight or other factors rendering such procedure impractical. 3. In order to effect such an arrest, such person may use such physical force as is justifiable pursuant to subdivision four of section 35.30 of the penal law. (N.Y.C.L. §140.35).

Once the suspect has been taken into custody (by the citizen), it is the citizen’s responsibility to deliver the suspect to the proper authorities in a timely fashion. In California, A private person who has arrested another for the commission of a public offense must, without unnecessary delay, take the person arrested before a magistrate, or deliver him or her to a peace officer. (C.P.C. §847). In New York, a citizen must also act without unnecessary delay to deliver a suspect to an officer of the law. (N.Y.C.L. §140).

Making a citizen's arrest maliciously or with insufficient evidence of wrongdoing by the arrested individual can lead to civil or criminal penalties. Additionally, it is in violation of a suspect’s rights for a citizen making an arrest to use unnecessary force, to intentionally harm the suspect, to hold the suspect in unsafe conditions, or to delay in turning the suspect over to authorities. A citizen making an arrest is acting in the place of an officer of the law, and as such, is required to uphold the same rights and civil liberties as an officer of the law must uphold.

A citizen who violates a suspect’s rights, or who violates the applicable state law in detaining the suspect, (for example, arresting a suspect for a misdemeanor when the state statute requires a felony for a citizen’s arrest), risks being sued or even charged with a crime. Additionally, if it is found that the arresting party did not meet the pertinent state requirements for a citizen’s arrest, any contraband found on the suspect will have been found illegally, and charges may be dropped entirely.

If you feel that you have been unfairly arrested by a citizen, or if you have been charged with illegally detaining a suspect during an illegitimate citizen’s arrest, it is important to seek the counsel of an experienced attorney. A good attorney will demonstrate familiarity with state laws, and as such will help you to ensure the best possible outcome of your case.

You will note that the attorneys’ opinions are nearly identical to what I said here earlier. In other words, I kid you not. I wasn’t kidding – and I wasn’t wrong back in the eighties when I said the same things on late-night radio programs. I won’t back off, either. In closing this time, I quote (as I am wont to do; I seldom say things as well as the great men and women of history – that’s why they’re “great” and I’m not . . .) Abraham Lincoln, author – I remind us – of the Emancipation Proclamation:

“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it.”

Let’s not forget that. This is OUR country. Our forebears made it, and we mean to preserve it in the state they made it. Anyone who intends otherwise ought read another quote – “The Wrath of the Saxon.”

I pause in discussion of illegal immigration, citizens arrest, and guerrilla law because what follows confirms what I have long expected and feared. Damn, but sometimes I hate to be right!

At a time of joy, especially for a guy like me whose life has ordered his priorities as only looking the imminent threat of pain and death in the eye can, it’s infuriating to have discovered what I did during our week visiting our first great grandchild and her parents. I’ve said it before, and at the risk of yelling wolf too often I have tell the reader that the nation I love enough to do everything honor will permit for faces its Götterdämmerung as the republic it has been. It’s that simple.

It’s not only that simple, but as many of the people who know me would tell you, I have seen it coming and feared it for almost three decades. The conclusive stroke is a book, a book vindicating everything I have said here concerning the silent coup d’etat of the military industrial complex President Dwight Eisenhower warned of in his valedictory address to the nation and shortly after it occurred. The book is “Blackwater, the Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army,” by Jeremy Scahill, and it documents what may very well be the final maneuver preparatory to overt conversion of the United States’ federal republic into nothing less than a totalitarian, neo-conservative dictatorship.

The President of the United States – we must not forget that he is merely a figurehead actor for the cabal of military industrialists who control Washington, D.C. and the branches of government – now has a private army. Comprised of “Steve Canyon” proprietary companies like the Bird Air, Flying Tiger, Air America, and literally dozens more of the pre-Frank Church Hearings CIA, new companies like Blackwater (named for a swamp in North Carolina where it is based), Triple Canopy, DynaCorp, Aegis, and others have been organized and formed under the cover of virtual secrecy provided by the Operation Mockingbird media. Numbering near a quarter million, the new Praetorian Guard for the President operates outside the reach of both the courts and legal system and the scrutiny of the public.

Placed tactically by state-of-the-art political and economic maneuvering devised in think tanks that make the RAND corporations of old look Neanderthal, they are even further above the law and untouchable by the courts as Internal Revenue Service and the nation’s Brobdingnagian corporations. They have the power to operate as we might have suspected when informed of things like Abu Graib prison, secret CIA torture cells covertly located in sovereign nations, and presidential, congressional, and bureaucracy complicity in contemptuously blatantly violations of the U.S. Constitution by the White House and president.

Let me summarize where we are historically by asking a simple question. What do you believe the public – what would YOU do – should the president refuse to leave office, and enforce his refusal with the armed (replete with the most high-tech weapons known to man) might of as many as a quarter of a million of the most professionally skilled - and ruthless – special operations soldiers in the world? Or, imagine what the ultra-right wing of neo-conservatism might do, were Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi elected president and vice-president of the U.S. With hundreds of billions – trillions, even – of dollars at stake, knowing of their history after World War Two having to do with similar straits, tell yourself that they would meekly submit to the political process supposedly governing our country.

Let me digress long enough to point out first that I have been monitoring the rise of the military industrial complex corporations since literally boyhood when I was impressed into their service. More, I have for more than twenty-five years operated in the shadows of CIA Steve Canyon operations and armies, mostly involved in providing armed and unarmed close quarters combat skills training sought by individual mercenary special operations soldiers. Additionally, and as I have both publicized here and in the book “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story,” I have covertly infiltrated the federal bureaucracy at all levels. There are, I contend, few people as qualified to hold forth as I do here.

I have also devoted what others including wives and family consider an inordinate amount of time to sociology and societal trends related to Operation Mockingbird and other “orchestrations” – the favorite characterization of the man who probably first conceived such a thing – designed to weaken the nation’s resistance to eventual coup and totalitarian takeover. In fact, you see, I recognized the enemy early on. Recruited originally at fifteen years for the purpose of doing its “wet work,” I recognized who it was General of the Armies and President of the United States Eisenhower spoke of in his lamentably not-so-famous or long-remembered speech. Since it’s pivotal, let me recollect it for you:

“The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Note, in particular, the words “only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry.” The General wasn’t the only tactician in government aware of what would be required to take over the nation and thereby continue the acquisition of wealth and power facilitated by war. Operation Mockingbird, control of the public’s alertness and knowledge was among the first programs begun by the newly-instituted Central Intelligence Agency; using, that is, the unlimited funding provided the fledgling organization – or should I say “orchestration” – by an already co-opted U.S. Congress.

The United States, the same as any nation and people, has a government of the kind and character the people provide for and permit. The deteriorated state of our government, axiomatically, is due the deteriorated state of the public it rules and abuses. Assessment is easy, a matter of self-examination. If, for instance, you can read history, especially that of the last two presidential administrations and doubt that Dwight D. Eisenhower foresaw accurately what has happened to the government and to you, you’re simply too far gone to be of use to a republic and its governance.

If your fellow countrymen are in the same condition, ask yourself how there remains any hope for our nation, for continued liberty, and the dream of our Founding Fathers.

Ask yourself again what you will do if Eisenhower, and I, are right.

At what point will you react? When what amounts to martial law – total suspension of all constitutional freedoms (all of which have already been declared to be in jeopardy) – has been declared? When we have invaded Iran or another Arab nation? When the entire world of Islam has declared jihad against our country? When the corporate depredations and hubris of our colonializing, global-warming and planet polluting corporations has resulted in a massive retaliatory economic attack by the rest of the world’s nations has brought us to our financial knees?

Assume for a giddy moment that our political process were still generally intact, and that a new president and vice-president - Hillary and Nancy, for instance – were elected and proceeded to follow the agenda already associated with and expected of them – end of the war in Iraq, for instance, or a significant shift in policy costing the military industrial complex trillions of dollars. Do you really think the latter would quietly acquiesce, that their corporate greed would suddenly abate for the good of the country? Having already seen the public’s reaction concerning the present administration’s depredation of our civil rights? Why would neo-conservatism, its originators and adherents halt their drive toward their new – they’ve published their intentions, you know – fascism?

What do you think you would to, should the new fascists not so acquiesce to your naïve wishes? Rebellion may already be out of the question. Don’t forget the record of history (of course, you haven’t read it – a large part of the problem we face). Consider what the world’s colonialist capitalists have already done, and what they are doing. Do you really think that the same people who won’t let the health of the planet and its ecosystem stand in the way of gargantuan profit will be any more concerned for your health? Wow – you DO need to read my book! Why would people who follow the Ford Pinto Doctrine of business (remember? – rather than spend the money necessary to make safe the car that exploded easily, Ford was willing to pay costs of settling all the claims of those burned and burned to death), do business differently in this case?

More, the rebellion Founding Father Thomas Jefferson assured us would from “time to time” be necessary may be impossible. The military industrial complex corporations’ drive toward control of the U.S. and world dominion has been planned and in operation since the late forties and early fifties, let’s not forget. The plotters have been watching, probing and testing the U.S. public’s character, its resolve, and the effect of their methods for all that time. The new Praetorian Guard is only their most recent operation and success. While the public became more and more decadent, they waxed sanguine, driving relentlessly toward their profit goals. Patriotism, loyalty to nation and country, has been shown by history to mean nothing to a capitalist, after all. As Thomas Jefferson observed, “Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.”

Look around, as I am wont to say. If you don’t recognize the truth in Jefferson’s remark, you merely personify how fat-headed and vulnerable the nation has become.

The men being recruited by Blackwater and their like are the best special operations soldiers in the world. I know because I’ve trained them. They will not only cut through our volunteer conventional military like a hot razor through butter, they will slaughter any citizen militia, of any size, like blind sheep. Don’t forget what any such militia must be made of, and what “Americans” have come to be. Fat, slovenly, morally decayed creatures reared and maintained in an effeminate, climate controlled society like this one make damned poor revolutionaries.

Of course, it may not be necessary for anything as overt as a president refusing to leave office to happen. The military industrialists who already control the country’s government would have need of an open and public coup only if the president they have put in office should refuse to leave, and use his Praetorian Guard in an effort to seize despotic power by military force. The nation and its public would then watch as the loyalties of the Praetorians were made manifest. I’d bet on whomever could pay their price.

But let us assume that by some miracle the military industrial complex plotters don’t stage the final assault of their long prosecuted campaign against republican democracy. Assume, in other words, that the public continues in its present posture, the nation drifting and decaying as it is. Where is it going? How much more can you give? Where do you think everything that’s been going on will end? For an object lesson, pick any or all of the government’s handling of matters from illegal immigration to global warming and pollution, to the war on terror. The method is essentially that of reductio ad absurdum, there is no doubt whatever where any of it will end, and the future is thunderously obvious.

It is likewise obvious, and rationally irrefutable that the United States has become a cancer the rest of the planet can no longer endure. While the U.S. citizen addled by Mockingbird media propaganda may remain oblivious, the fact of our past and present behavior thunderously manifest to the planet’s nations and peoples. If you have somehow survived Mockingbird, put yourself in the shoes of the citizenry in any other nation on the globe. The U.S., less than five percent of the world’s people, uses thirty-five percent of the planet’s energy, and contributes forty-one percent of its pollution. If that weren’t enough, the people of the United States demand even more of the planet’s energy, will not curb their appetite for fossil fuel, slow their pollution of the atmosphere, or leave their neighbors anywhere on the globe alone politically or economically.

In its capitalist ravening, in fact, the U.S. makes no bones whatever about its intentions for the future, and its past – even where the original inhabitants of the continent are concerned – is far better known to persons in foreign nations than it is to its own people. It all adds up like arithmetic, you see – the column of figures determines inexorably the sum. Want to see the “column?” I refer you to the history of history’s last private army and Praetorian Guard.

They were called the Waffen SS, and their creator was a man named Hitler.

As I . . . threatened, let’s say – “promised” sounds like you were waiting with baited breath – we’ll continue with my “guerrilla law” tactics discussion. First, let me clear up a couple of things concerning the court system – stipulating first, and again, that I am not a licensed attorney. There’s nothing the government would like better than to have an opening as obvious as that one. This is, after all, not called “guerilla law,” and I the “guerrilla lawyer,” for nothing.

This is historical and actual fact, and I discuss it in that manner only. You could look up – Google – it all. Having done that, you’d have learned that the civil – as opposed to criminal – courts once called civil courts and courts of equity are now lumped into what are called “trial courts.” Equity courts were those wherein – nice, legal, word that – disputes of the kind I mention were settled. “Adjudicated” was the term, meaning literally “judged.” Both courts, together with marine Law courts – marine law is a special kind of contract law – are now “trial” courts. When you are a government or a lawyer, always do whatever you can to confuse as many people as you can. The enumeration, taxonomy, and stratification of the courts system can be found in scores of places on the Internet – here’s one:

http://www.maxwell.syr.edu/plegal/scales/court.html

Courts, all of them, nowadays have acquired – everything in a nation like this is because the people let it happen – sweeping powers, powers they really don’t like to have discussed in public. One pull, the whole house of cards would come tumbling down, or require buttressing from men with guns. That, you may have noticed, has become the tactic much preferred in the Land of the Free with literally hundred of people being shot to death every year by cops with search and arrest warrants issued by courts. A Cato Institute researcher has found more than three dozen cases wherein totally innocent people were killed by police and FBI Hostage Rescue Team para-military troopers in mistaken raids. In twenty more instances cases, nonviolent and unarmed offenders have been killed; and, finally, more than a dozen police officers have been killed by suspects or mistakenly targeted civilians who thought police storming their homes were criminal intruders (big surprise, that – what would anyone think?).

http://www.cato.org/new/pressrelease.php?id=42

In the majority of these matters, a simple phone call from the sheriff (the method used by all the law enforcement agencies with which I was associated as a police officer and private detective), police, FBI, or other authority would have brought the “subject” – the word preferred by police in the Land of the Free – to the appointed place without trouble. I mention it all in order to candidly say what we’re up against – George W. Bush isn’t the only nut case in authority these days.

When you sue someone, as the Nolo Press books I recommend will also tell you, what is called a “summons and complaint” is issued by the court. You write the complaint, the court stamps it and returns it to you with the summons for the defendant – the guy you’re suing. You have the sheriff or someone older than twenty-one not a relative or associate serve both the summons and the complaint on the defendant. You can’t serve it yourself, for what might be obvious reasons. In small claims cases, you simple go to the court house and small claims clerk, get the forms to fill out, then have them served or serve them yourself by certified mail. Always, the rules for service are published in what are called Rules of Civil Procedure, and these may be different from court to court or jurisdiction to jurisdiction (the area, subject matter, and amount of money over which the court has authority). There are, in that regard, several levels of court – generally municipal, country, state, and federal.

The federal courts are the Supreme Court, the Courts of Appeals, the District Courts, and the Bankruptcy Courts, and each state has a court system that exists independent from the federal ones. State court systems have trial courts at the bottom level and appellate courts at the top. It might be useful here to point out that more than ninety-five percent of the nation’s legal disputes are settled or “decided” in state or local courts.

Some states have two appeals – “appellate” court levels, others only a single appellate court. Variation in the way the courts are organized and named is just what you’d expect of a legal system designed for self-protection and confusion of the public they supposedly serve. “Family” courts, for instance, settle divorce and child-custody disputes, and “probate” courts handle the settlement of estates – property of persons deceased. Below the specialized “trial” – remember? - courts are more trial courts, called magistrate courts, justice of the peace courts, and what have you. Courts at this level handle a variety of minor cases, like traffic offenses, and usually do not use a jury.

Cases decided in state courts can be appealed to a federal court if a federal issue is involved and usually only after all avenues of appeal in the state courts have been tried.

Okay. For the practice of guerrilla law, the courts we’re most interested in are the small claims courts. The routine collection of small debts forms a large portion of the cases brought to small claims courts, together with things like evictions and landlord - tenant disputes. While it’s true that the business and jurisdiction of the small claims courts encompass small and private disputes where large amounts of money are not at stake, the potential power of the small claims court where guerrilla law having to do with illegal immigration, for instance, is immense.

As I said earlier, imagine getting summons and complaint from five hundred people demanding a small claims court limit – ten thousand dollars (the usual limit), let’s say. Five million dollars (five hundred times ten thousand) is not “small.”

When you sue in small claims court, you will probably waive any right to claim more than the court can award. In some jurisdictions, a party who loses in a small claims court can proceed to a totally new – “de novo” - trial in a court with higher monetary authority and “jurisdiction,” one with more formal procedures.

The Rules of (Civil) Procedure I mentioned a minute ago, together with the Rules of Evidence are sometimes – usually, in fact, - simplified. Among the reasons for that is making costs of procedures economically reasible. A guiding principle of the small claims courts is that rules and procedures should make it possible for individuals to conduct their own cases and represent themselves without recourse to a lawyer. Expensive court procedures such as interrogatories and depositions are usually not allowed in small claims court. In some small claims jurisdictions, though, corporations must appear represented by a lawyer. “Rules of Pleading – those papers and what you have to say in them - are likewise simplified in small claims court, and in many courts systems, no formal – written and filed with the clerk - answer is required of the defendant.

Failing to answer – or, as it is called, “appear” (while one can actually show up, it just means answer the complaint) – results in what is called “default” and “default judgment” – the court finds in favor of the plaintiff. “Judgment” is the court’s ruling that the defendant owes whatever was asked – sometimes called “prayed” – for. Practically all matters filed in small claims court are set by the court (the “Clerk of Court” does that) for trial. Trial by jury is seldom – just about never - conducted in small claims courts, something set by law establishing the court, and “remedies” - things like injunctions – an order by a court against something being done, including protective orders - are seldom available from small claims courts.

We don’t care about it here, but most states don’t allow “domestic relations” – family law and disputes - to be heard in small claims court.

To bring any lawsuit requires what is called a “cause of action.” That’s what is called a tort. A tort, by one definition, is “the breach of a civil duty owed to another that results in injury, and requires a response in damages.” Coming to the United States illegally, then obtaining under illegally and or under otherwise false pretenses a job, is a “tort.” Against you, the “plaintiff.” “Injury” means damage to your property or your person, and, basically, costing you money (disfigurement, pain, and that sort of thing may not cost money but they, too, are “injury” – requiring payment in “damages”). “Damages,’ means the expense of restoring whatever has been injured or damaged. Illegal immigration is a tort, it results in “injury” and it requires a response in “damages.”

Research by a number of concerns suggest that as much as fifty percent of wage-loss to low-skilled and laboring citizens of the U.S. is due to illegal immigration. Native U.S. workers lose not just wages but their jobs through illegal immigrant competition. One research group has estimated that nearly two million U.S. workers lose their jobs every year by immigration; and the cost for providing welfare and assistance to these people is more than fifteen million dollars a year. The National Research Council, part of the National Academy of Sciences, found that in one year, 1997 that the average illegal immigrant who hasn’t completed high school of the Mexican equivalent imposes a net fiscal burden on our economy of eighty-nine thousand dollars during his or her lifetime here. The average immigrant with a high school education creates a lifetime fiscal burden of thirty-one thousand dollars. Your taxes pay the bill.

And that’s a small part of what Illegal aliens in this country cost you. Medical services for aliens have cost the U.S. taxpayer millions of dollars. Dozens of hospitals in Texas, New Mexico Arizona, and California, have been – are being - forced to close or face bankruptcy because of federally-mandated programs requiring free emergency room services to illegal aliens. More, the U.S. taxpayer pays his share of the half-a-billion dollars per year required in order to incarcerate illegal alien criminals who another study says cross the border at the rate of a hundred twenty a day.

The illegal alien, as we’ve already stated, isn’t the only one “breaching a civil duty to you.” Corporate interests reap the benefits of cheap labor, while taxpayers – not the corporations - pay the infrastructural cost. Research says the net annual cost of illegal immigration from Mexico is between sixty seven and eighty seven billion a year. The National Academy of Sciences found that the net fiscal drain on U.S. taxpayers is between a hundred sixty-six and two hundred twenty six dollars a year per U.S. household. Even people who claim overall economic gain for the U.S. have had to admit that any gain is outweighed by the staggering fifteen to twenty billion dollar cost to U.S. taxpayers.

Illegal aliens in the U.S. send home to Mexico as much as fourteen billion dollars, a massive transfer of wealth taken for all practical purposes from the displace working poor among U.S. citizens.

In a recent year, the total K-12 school expenditures for illegal immigrants cost U.S. states seven billion, four hundred million dollars annually. That’s enough to buy books and supplies, even a computer, for every junior high school student in the country.

And it goes on. “Anchor babies” cost YOU. An illegal alien mother only has to say she is "undocumented" in order to receive immediate - and free - medical care. When the hospital can’t collect from momma, it collects from you – you don’t really think they eat the cost, do you? I’ve already mentioned here what happened when my wife’s fall at work resulted in my reading signs at the hospital emergency room blatantly (in Spanish, of course) telling illegal aliens that triage costs could not be denied them; but payment for the same was dutifully demanded of us – because we weren’t illegal aliens. When I said we were Hispanic – Rita and I both speak Spanish – and illegal, it drew a furious and indignant response from the Hispanic hospital official.

Not long ago, it was revealed that Mexican ambulance drivers were – still are - driving their hospital patients who can't pay for medical care in Mexico to facilities in the United States (right across the border, under the authorities noses!), knowing that the federal Emergency Medical Act mandates that U.S. hospitals with emergency-room services must treat anyone who requires care, including illegal aliens. Meanwhile, you and I are supposed to believe that hospitals absorb the more than two hundred million in un-reimbursed costs to treat the illegal aliens. Sure - that’s why health costs never rise, and the public in the U.S. is regaled daily about all the people who have no health care insurance, and the broken health care system in general. Sure. Even at that, one has to believe that some emergency rooms have shut down because they simply can’t afford to stay open, meaning that local, tax-paying citizens are either denied medical care or have to wait in long lines for service as the illegal aliens flood medical facilities.

These costs are also staggering; and they have to be paid somewhere, by somebody. Guess who. Some time ago, while making a trip to San Diego, a Phoenix newspaper reported that the Cochise County, Arizona Health Department spends as much as thirty percent of its annual nine million dollar budget on illegal aliens. Other hospitals – Bisbee and Tucson, for instance – report similar straits. In Colorado, the state’s Medicaid program paid thirty million dollars in one year, delivery costs for six thousand illegal immigrant mothers. In Georgia, one hospital system established a thirty-four million dollar reserve in order to cover its anticipated outlay for illegal aliens in the year two thousand and three. In two thousand and three, the federal General Accounting Office studied the impact of illegal immigrants on Arizona and other border states health care systems. Just three hospitals, those in Cochise County, AZ again, paid more than a million dollars in un-reimbursed health care costs. The Florida Hospital Association survey of twenty-eight hospitals revealed health care for illegal aliens totaled forty million dollars.

Oh, you have “damages,” all right. These figures were obtained from an online website:

*Illegal alien households are estimated to use $2,700 a year more in services than they pay in taxes, creating a total fiscal burden of nearly $10.4 billion on the federal budget in 2002.

* Among the largest federal costs: Medicaid ($2.5 billion); treatment for the uninsured ($2.2 billion); food assistance programs ($1.9 billion); the federal prison and court systems ($1.6 billion); and federal aid to schools ($1.4 billion).

* If illegal aliens were legalized and began to pay taxes and use services like legal immigrants with the same education levels, the estimated annual fiscal deficit at the federal level would increase from $2,700 per household to nearly $7,700, for a total federal deficit of $29 billion.

* Although they create a net drain on the federal government, the average illegal household pays more than $4,200 a year in federal taxes, for a total of nearly $16 billion. However, they impose annual costs of more than $26.3 billion, or about $6,950 per illegal household.

“ Immigration causes average wage decline among U.S. citizens of $1,700 (my estimates are higher, but let’s go with that one).

Two decades' growth in the supply of immigrant workers cost native-born U.S. men an average $1,700 in annual wages by the year 2000, a top economist has concluded.

The task of proving tort here is pretty simple and easy, the proof having been made repeatedly and for years, in the media. What will require a little more effort is damages. Those last two figures there should do the trick. Multiply seventeen hundred dollars a year by whatever number of years are appropriate, and your action is ready to file. All that is required is a means of introducing the numbers into evidence, either an economics professor or other expert who knows how to do the calculations all the people I have cited here have done. In small claims court, you may remember, that isn’t necessary. You just have to cite the figures here. I’m researching other methods of proof, too, and – provided I don’t have to practice law to do it – I will explain them here.

Meanwhile, winning in small claims court doesn’t automatically ensure payment of damages, incidentally. If the defendant is insured – as a company hiring illegal aliens, for instance, might very well be - collecting might be easy, but that’s not going to be the case with a illegal alien. He’s going to flee – for guess where? And, yup, he’ll be right back as soon as he thinks the heat’s off. Then, you have to chase him down, file a lien against whatever he owns – his car, for instance.

But, you are now a better deterrent to illegal immigration than anybody – even the police; even the feds. Once you have a lien on the alien’s car – voila! It’s yours for the repossession, same as if you’re the bank with a lien on a car. When Jose learns that his wheels are subject to being seized at any time, guess where he’s going to go, and stay.

Next in the guerrilla lawyer’s bag of tricks is a simple one, as simple as a letter. We’ll get to that next time – this is already to long.

Let’s, for instance say that you publish in the local paper an add or article that announces the formation of a citizen’s committee.

And, parenthetically, yes, you’re damned right that means you’re a “vigilante.” It isn’t – no matter what you may think and what anybody tells you – to be a vigilante. Crime by a vigilante is no different than crime by anyone else – somebody who isn’t vigilant and doesn’t give a damn about his country, for instance – but being watching out for crime and criminals isn’t a crime, it’s a civic duty. Neighborhood Watches, for instance, are by definition “vigilance committees” – the derivation of the word “vigilante” – and the aren’t against the law. Sometimes the bullshit being spewed by the media is past credibility (unless you stop to think who’s purposes if serves, that is) like the Harvard Law School Graduate the other day who said on CNN that people who watched while doing nothing a ninety-on year old man being beaten senseless by the thug stealing his car were doing the right thing. To intervene, he implied, would be vigilantism.

Anyway, let’s say you announce that you will begin watching businesses and other employers for illegal aliens. Reason for watching? Lawsuits of the kind I’ve been discussing. We’ll talk about that more next time, and continue, too discussion of “proving up” damages for a small claims court or other action.

As I said, its’ time to take back our country. “Let’s Roll!”

Oh, man, I had another of my political, current events, rants half done when I checked my posts on TW and came across that posted by StarShadow, the classical music. Listening – having called Rita in so she could share with me while we finished our coffee – I couldn’t shut it down until I’d heard (and saved) it all.

I always do things like that – taking the grandkids home to Lubbock recently, we stopped a dozen times in order to look at the wild-flowers – and I wrote just now to “Star” to tell him of a night where I happened to come upon a friend when car on an interstate ahead suddenly pulled over. Thinking something wrong, and having pulled over ahead of the car and walked back, I found my friend Gary leaned back against the seat, listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

Understanding perfectly, I stood beside the car and listened with him as the Berlin Symphonic Orchestra played the powerfully evocative music. When it was through, and my friend had explained that the road noise and its interference with his listening pleasure had precipitated his sudden decision to pull over, he waved, said, “See ya,” and pulled away. We laughed about the incident for years.

When “Star’s” music had finished, I sat reflecting about a nation that seems to have lost – among so many other things – its appreciation of beauty and life, the encyclopedia of all its forms. What the hell – capitalism, of course – has happened to us? I am reminded of Markham’s poem, The “Man with a Hoe.”

“What gulfs between him and the seraphim!
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of the Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?”

Don’t we see, realize, that we are being brutalized? Racing desperately to stay ahead of a tax system supplying a military industrial complex so vast that it consumes part of everything an enslaved public earns, we have no time for anything but the “fast food,” one-liner news, entertainment, and political debate, and garbage art of life under corporate capitalism. Bombarded by mindless ideology no one has time to really consider, we accept the mediocre or less in veritably everything.

Worse, in order to survive economically – or to follow the siren call of supposed, what the corporate masters would have us believe, is success, we have cut our own children adrift, left them to fall prey to all of it. “What to them Plato and the swing of the Pleiades (quick – what IS that?); what the long reaches of the peaks of song, the rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose . . .?” For heavens sake, my friends, LOOK at your children once! Listen to the appallingly cacophonous, discordant trash they think is music, listen to what they believe a hero is, ask them what the word “honor” means (try it, I dare you – or don’t you dare ask yourself?).

I could go on, but this isn’t about that. Some years ago, while a coach at the National Judo Institute in Colorado Springs, I was taking a break and talking with one of the players when the young man’s girl friend approached. Her sinuously beautiful stride first caught my attention, then her magnificent form. Red of hair, which was long enough to reach her shoulder blades, she wore high heals and tastefully feminine apparel. The eyes she gave me when she said “Hi!” were green or greenish, and she was very, very pretty.

When she had made plans with my young team mate for meeting later, she turned to leave, and I, male as I am, watched her go – male as I am. What a beautiful thing she was!

And I said that to my young friend. “Do see how beautiful she is?”

I think I startled him a little, as perhaps I do you, now. Well, hell yes, he said – of course. But do you, really, I pressed him? For an instant, I saw him resign himself to one of “coaches” lectures, then become intent. “No,” he said, “I see what you mean – maybe I don’t.” He put his head down, looking between his feet. “Why do YOU notice?

I had to laugh at the obvious questioning inherent in his question, but I was equal to it. “Because, my friend,” I said, “THAT – nothing else – is what will makes your life worth living. If you pass through the years without seeing all the beautiful things here – and woman is the most beautiful of all, she’s the beautiful that teaches us about all the things really beautiful – you might as well have lived in a dumpster. If you let chasing medals, or property, or money, or political power make you deaf, dumb, and numb to things that are beautiful, you’ll never really know that you lived. You won’t really care, either. Even if you become president or rule or own the world, you won’t really care when it’s over. You won’t care because you will have become a corporation personified – no personality, no character, no feeling, no pleasure except the pleasure felt by a computer or ledger in having added another number. If you could see now what you would become then, you’d shoot yourself.”

His look was one of amazement. “You really mean that, don’t you?”

“You’re damned right I do,” I responded. “The next time you’re with (I said her name, which I choose not to here) her, look at her. Listen when she speaks, when she laughs. When she smiles, drink it in. Watch her walk, how she moves when she sits. And by all means, if you do nothing else, see how very, very different she is than we are. Think about why. She makes life, you know. You and I are just her wingman, we fly formation on her, cover her butt in the dogfight of living.” I laughed at the look of awe on his face. “Hell, she SITS on the one, sure thing that every man on the planet will bust his ass, fight, even die for.”

Two guys, we laughed at one another. And the truth. The funny truth.

And there’s another thing, my friends – what’s happened to the beauty of laughter? Recently, a sociologist friend of mine nodded agreement when I said I’d noticed that people laughed half or less as much as they used to. “Around forty percent less, actually,” he said. That, he said, is what the studies were saying.

You, gentle reader, look around – see what you think. The bees, the butterflies, and now the birds, aren’t the only things we are sacrificing to the corporate world and the all-mighty dollar. We’re surrendering beauty, pleasure - the quality of life itself.

But I’m a fighter now become a teacher, and I not willing to just “go gentle into that good night.” So let me, with Dylon Thomas, “rage at the dying of the light” a little. Consider what the military industrial corporations would do, should they realize one day that you have begun teaching your kids what life is really about, why and how to live it. What if they knew that you had become aware of what’s been happening? Tell me that it would be different – in the least – from what they are doing about the atmosphere, the water, the very soil and substance of the earth becoming poisonous. Tell me what you think they would do, were we to begin insisting upon learning why the bees, the butterflies, and now the birds are disappearing.

Tell me you imagine it would be any different than what they are doing, now that we are aware, however so vaguely, that the polar icepacks, the glaciers, and snow fields are vanishing. Can you really imagine that they would treat any of these “issues,” any differently than they are global warming? Tell me, while you’re at it, that you don’t understand why people corporately obsessed – remember my “you will have become a corporation personified” lecture to the young judo player – with wealth wouldn’t stop for even a minute to consider even the possibility that they – man at his most avarice-addicted – are responsible? What would the harm in that be?

Yeah, you’ve got it – the harm would be to their “bottom line.”

A hundred thirty years ago, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that the god created by metaphysics and religion would die (in the “Die Froehliche Wissenschaft,” he said figuratively “is dead”). As anyone might imagine, the remark stirred a furor among the people to whom god was a corporate product. Were the god they created to be found out or die, you can guess what the creators and purveyors of religion thought would happen. When one recognizes that the god of the military industrial complex corporations and the oil companies is production of weapons and oil, one might understand the furor that resulted from “Die Froehliche Wissenshaft.” Or, inversely, one knowing of the furor resulted from the discovery of the connection between global warming and corporate production might understand the “god is dead” controversy.

History does repeat itself, you know; you have to be watching, however. It – Die Froehliche Wissenschaft - means “The Joyous Knowledge” (science).

But consider again the death of another god, the goddess beauty. Of course, beauty – like god – will never die. But our awareness, our “joyous knowledge” of it, seems like Nietzsche’s “god” doomed. Then, when we have killed beauty, and, made certain by looking around, we know what we have done – then what? What will life be like? Remember my poem?

“O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
Is this the handiwork you give to God,
This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?
How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Touch it again with immortality;
Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?

“O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings--
With those who shaped him to the thing he is--
When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world,
After the silence of the centuries?”

What do you think your children will do, when they realize that you killed god?