This is the third or fourth time I’ve done this. In fact, in 1986, I wrote a series of “chapbooks” (seventy-five pages), discussing in an historical context the powers given citizens of this country for the purpose of controlling their government. The result of one book, “Citizens’ Arrest, Citizen Power to Control Their Government,” was that I became a target for the lawlessness typical of today’s federal totalitarianism.

The U.S. Government, you know, has been “working up” to the Bush Administration since World War Two.

In short and in fact, in order to save my own life, I fought a running gunfight with the criminal government of the “nation of laws.” It is a fact, an undeniable and quickly demonstrable one, that citizens of the United States, the Nation of Laws, are actively and passively prevented from knowing the law under which they live. Think about it – how much of the law jurisprudentially justifying control of your life and property is taught to children in the first twelve grades of public education? If you are accused of crime and prosecuted, how much of the law you are suffer under do you know? If someone sues you, meaning he demands that you surrender some, or all, of your money or property, how much of the law supposedly governing your case do you know?

Do you even know that, in fact, that the law being used, actually does govern your case?

Tell me something more ridiculous than being obliged to play in a game, a game in which you risk your life and property, whose rules are determined and decided only by your opponent. Go ahead, take some time and think about it. What is more ridiculous? And why do you play? Now, that’s really ridiculous.

The fact is, you don’t have to play. That you think you have to is due propaganda on the part of the people who stand to gain from your ignorance. The same people spend billions to assure that you stay in the state of ignorance that results in your playing a game as ridiculous as that which determines what the U.S.A of today is and will be.

Let’s just start with the real – not the Marshall McLuhan, “Medium is the message,” Operation Mockingbird, truth – but the real, what actually has happened, truth - the kind that historians of the future will recognize and shake wondering heads at.

And, parenthetically, if you want to test what I’m saying here, try to learn the truth yourself. I dare you. Begin with Freedom of Information Act attempts, then try to obtain historical material concerning how our government began, how it was originally structured and why, and what happened to it all. State records, incidentally, are not governed by FOI – state government will fight like a cornered skunk to prevent you learning what they’re doing, especially with your money. Get ready for a whole lot of trouble, too, at any rate and wherever you try to look. One of the reasons for the twenty-three years war I fought with the United States Government was my effort to find out what the hell was going on. When I sued – none of the crap you think is true about simply asking for your records is true – for my records, the U.S. District Court for Colorado ruled that they were top secret – to surrender them “would irreparably damage the tax collection system of the United States.”

The nation founded by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Patrick Henry, and those who risked “their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor” is not the one you think it is. Today’s post coup d’etat by the military industrial complex corporations government largely – any time they choose – ignores the law. They believe – frequently say so – that they ARE the law; and, moreover, our current de facto dictator has also made that very clear publicly. More, the failure of the U.S. Congress to impeach a president who in grandiose and smirking public statements both repudiates his oath of office and defiantly confesses breaking the law, makes assertions of de facto dictatorship in the Land of the Free incontrovertible. Things are what they are, not what they are called.

So, what can be done? Well, first learn the rules of the warfare game you’re playing. In fact, learn first that you are in a war. It is a dogma – one proven correct by success - of Alcoholics Anonymous that the drunk must first recognize his alcoholism. He must also recognize that his enemy is alcohol. To begin “guerrilla law” warfare against federal totalitarianism, we also must realize what has happened to us, and what, who, our enemy is.

Our enemy is greed - “the moral flabbiness born of excessive worship of the bitch goddess SUCCESS. . . with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success . . .,” as Father of American Psychology William James put it - and the people who out of a natural evolutionary mental aberration are unable to feel secure while they do not possess and control everything. The goal of the capitalist is to own everything and his life view is that of endeavor to exploit the earth and its people until he possesses and controls everything.

The embodiment of greed in the U.S. is the corporation. The corporation is a judicial fiction, one created by the U.S. Supreme Court in the now infamous case of Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad. In that ruling, the court said that the fictional person, the corporation, had the same rights under the U.S. Constitution (the Fourteenth Amendment) as a living person. The corporation had come to be in 1819 when the court – Chief Justice John Marshall – upheld in the case of McCullock v. Maryland the right of the federal government to create corporations under its “implied powers.”

Lying legally fro the purpose of advancing greed was already well-advanced as a practice by 1819, you see.

The effect of the courts rulings was a Frankenstein Monster, endowed with all the rights of the individual, but unlike the individual, un-killable and invulnerable. The Frankenstein Monster had rights and powers that even the individual states of the union did not. Inevitably, the corporations moved toward the obvious – control of the government that had created them. In the late forties and early fifties, unwilling to surrender the Brobdingnagian profits they had reaped in World War Two, the military industrial corporations moved to seize power. With the Clinton and Bush Administrations, representative democracy in the Land of the Free Nation of Laws ended.

It was a process any rational and reasoning person would have anticipated, and a process I first perceived while a sophomore in high school. I wrote about it then, as a matter of fact.

Whatever. It has happened, and all there is to do now is succumb or fight. Make no mistake, you WILL fight. You’ll fight because the Frankenstein Monster that is corporate capitalism won’t let you do otherwise. That’s its nature. The question, therefore, is when you will fight – now, while you still have a chance of success, or later when you have no chance, but must fight to live. There is, as Sir Winston Churchill once observed, even a worse case.

You may fight because you would rather die than live the way the greed monster demands.

So. Let’s begin with Dr. Frankenstein, the monster’s creator. The courts. A court of law under our system of government has never been more than an arbitrator. It does not have governing power, either executive – law enforcement – or enactment – legislation. A court of law has power only when given it by two or more parties, and the power is that of regulating and settling equitably – they were once called “courts of equity” – disputes. The court might, and did almost immediately, set rules by which the argument before it would proceed, but the court’s rules for proceeding do not have weight outside the courtroom.

Continue, by the way, comparing what I say here with what you think, and ask yourself how you became so benighted. Ask yourself why, too.

“Guerrilla law,” however, is little interested in the courts except as tools against government and its outrageously biased machinations favoring the nation’s Frankenstein Monster, the stupendously greedy corporations. Faced with a topic so broad and voluminous, let’s simply consider by way of concise, but exemplary illustration the illegal alien outrage which pits the government and illegal aliens its corporate masters seek to exploit against the government’s own constituency. There’s really never been anything like this before in U.S. history, a situation wherein illegal aliens from Mexico are being openly favored by the Congress and federal government over native and legally naturalized U.S. citizens.

As the public seethes in anger over the contemptuous slap in the face – both by the aliens and the U.S. Congress – the latter, caught between its corporate masters and the voters (potential or otherwise) dithers cynically, hoping for the people to be distracted by a recently-generated and colossal blizzard of prurience-oriented “news” having to do with the likes of Britney Spears, Anna Nicole Smith, Paris Hilton or their meretricious like.

Meanwhile, the public, convinced by conniving media and its pundits that it can do nothing but wait to vote, that despite having already been shown by Democrat Party do-nothing-ism the power of corporate lobbyists to thwart their will, waits – and goes on paying the staggering costs of illegal immigration and all it causes. Nothing can be done?

Oh, yeah? Let us suppose that citizens were to begin filing lawsuits against the illegal aliens and those who hire them – in, for instance, small claims court. Each illegal alien is costing working and tax-paying Americans real money, “damages” that can be computed and are legally as real as any other. Look it up: from medical costs hospitals and health care providers recoup by adding to the costs of treating you, the long-suffering American citizen to gasoline prices being driven higher by illegal aliens from Mexico driving on our highways at ninety miles an hour (pushing on the accelerator is demand, you know – and demand drives the price higher), the illegal alien and the corporation hiring him are costing you big bucks.

And it’s “actionable” – meaning you have the right to sue. Think it’s not a powerful tactic? Well, put yourself in the shoes of the alien. One day, he gets fifty, or a hundred (or more – there’s no legal limit) “summons and complaint” papers served on him. What would you do . . .?

Or, suppose you are Screw the Citizen, Inc – the corporation hiring illegal aliens instead of you or yours. Let’s say the limit on small claims actions in your jurisdiction is $10,000, and five hundred people sue the traitor capitalist. That’s $5,000,000 (five million dollars) – think that’ll get his attention?

You bet – and notice that there is no reason you can’t get an attorney and sue in a higher court, or learn the law (try Nolo Press – Google it – and get all the forms, procedures, and what you need) and sue pro se. If you put up with this crap, you deserve what you get. Once a number of citizens have begun this kind of “guerrilla law,” the Congress and other principals to what’s been going on – the rape of the common man by the corporate Frankenstein Monster – will get the message.

But the important thing is to served notice that we are waking up, waking up to the fact that there are many more ways to deal with government than just throw a feckless vote into a toilet being flushed by the practice of lobbying. There’s more, much more to “guerrilla law,” and in the days to come, I’ll talk about it all. There isn’t any doubt at all that we can regain control of our country, something that anybody who has made that much study of history knows, or can learn. The only question remaining is how much Operation Mockingbird and its corporate designers have succeeded in doing to you and your civic behavior.

What will you do? Knowing history, I’m pretty sure – but it’ll be interesting to watch.

The grandchildren were here for two weeks, and wife Rita and I are recovering, recovering both from the labors that children and their rearing requires and from the loss of such labor. When you love someone, the labor it makes necessary is one of life’s great pleasures. Too bad so few people ever come to understand that.

Of course, parenthetically, we have a media and an ideology – capitalism – that strives mightily to assure mis-understanding where that general fact is concerned, s-o-o-o . . . Selfish ego-centricity and self-aggrandizement are the credo and hallmark of today’s capitalism, after all. Where children are concerned, nevertheless, the rewards of self-sacrificing love are not only galacticly self-evident otherwise, but easily apparent to anyone understanding the process of evolution.

A Mother Nature who saw fit to permit parents abandonment of her children would condemn her planetary kingdom to lifelessness.

In fact, even a scintilla of understanding where nature and natural processes are concerned make obviously apparent the fact that we are here in this life for the purpose of bearing and rearing children, and how well one has lived, his true worth as a person, is measured in how well he has raised his children. Nature and Nature’s god, moreover, care not a hill of beans about rising to the rank of king, emperor, or president, about having subjugated and enslaved millions, or about having acquired colossal wealth and the political power inherent in great wealth.

Nature and her god require and exalt successful parents, and men who have husbanded and cared for a woman and her baby. That simple. For two weeks, Rita and I shared real, natural, and fulfilling exercise – that of caring for, nurturing, and teaching children. When, on Father’s Day, I was awarded a paper crown upon whose design and production the three grandchildren had collaborated, I actually felt like a king. That these aren’t my natural grandkids – we share no genes – made the coronation all that more meaningful.

But nevertheless, for me, the time was bittersweet. A natural clown, a guy taught by life to view the parts and players on its stage with a wryly jaundiced eye, I always keep kids in my charge in laughing wonderment. I love the ridiculous (one might as well: like air, it is inescapably everywhere these days) and during a twelve hour drive like that necessary to pick up and return the kids, a lot of humorous entertainment is required. We had a great time. Still, every joy and pleasure was tempered by guilt on my part, the guilt of knowing what ten year old Aidan, nine year old Mallory, and six year old Zöe will inevitably face one day upon reaching adulthood.

They’ll face a poisoned continent, under a sickening atmosphere, governed by corporate military totalitarianism. Children of the middle class that must be impoverished in order to perpetuate neo-conservative capitalism, they will live Hobbesian lives, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” God damn you, “America!” Rather than live the disciplined lives required of the citizens of a free and democratic society – freedom is, has always been, a state demanding of its citizenry the discipline demanded in turn by self-reliance, restraint, and responsibility – you have lived merely in order to grow surfeited, grossly obese and ridiculously soft and decadent – surfeited, obese, and decadent on credit derived from the promise of your children’s indentured servitude. They have trusted you and you have abandoned them, sacrificed them to the vicious gods of corporate capitalism, to the pandering panjandrums of the military industrial complex, men like Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, and their like.

There has never been anything like it in our history, and the frequent stories on our emotion, hate-pandering, media of parents’ horrific abuse of their children are merely microcosms of a society and nation behaving in the same manner where its progeny are concerned. The children are abused – beaten and starved to death because their parents are concerned more with self than with the children they have conceived as the result of base self-indulgence rather than love. This is a sick society, but nothing shouts the fact of its sickness like the fact of its children being sold into slavery by parents interested only in self and selfish pursuits.

You are beneath contempt, “America” – and were there something beneath contempt, I would hold you there, too. Having said, “god damn you,” it occurs to me that that might be the reason for what you are.

The ride home when we had returned the children to their parents might have been a boring and lonely one, were it not for the concerned – worried almost sick, actually – conversation in which Rita and I engaged. How in the hell might just the two of us, let alone our ages, protect the little people? What might we tell their parents, and the nation of parents; and how might we convince the latter of truth so drowned and buried under relentless corporate Mockingbird-directed propaganda?

In Big Springs, Texas, stopped to re-fuel, I noticed a Neil Diamond CD and bought it. Playing it, I was soon lost in reverie. Music, songs, you see, have played a sometimes pivotal role in my life. Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band’s “Like a Rock” probably saved the United States of America a debacle that would have made the World Trade Center seem a pop-corn fart when compared to what I once considered doing (count your blessings, “America” – when your enemies get serious, start thinking instead of jumping up and down and screaming “Allah,” you’re in for veritable hell). Three thousand people from a population of three hundred million is equivalent to a broken toenail on an individual. Only the scum-sucking decadence and demented, “Princess and the Pea” surfeited-ness of a people who, one among the thirty-four nations of the hemisphere, call themselves “Americans,” could explain the uproar and outrage of a loss comparatively so small.

The “rock” that once was the United States of America is now effeminate, a physical and moral marshmallow. Directly responsible for the deaths of literally hundreds of thousands, the impoverishment, sickness and misery of millions more, among them millions of their fellows, busily and meretriciously engaged in the enslavement for profit of their own children, “Americans” found cause for outrage when a dog they had been kicking bit them.

Oh, yeah – I can hear it. The sanctimonious and pious indignation of the unco guid in the Home of the Brave. B-a-a-a-a-rf! Save the bullshit, folks - I was one of your victims. It has long been evident – thunderously so – that your idea of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” means that you should be entitled to exploit your fellow on the planet to whatever degree your life, liberty, and happiness requires. Even at home, in the Land of the Free, your “Nation of laws” means law purchased by the fabulously wealthy in order to further their exploitations and enslavement of their economically and politically less adept or otherwise fortunate fellow.

Why the hell would your corporations do otherwise with the citizens of the world’s other nations, and how in hell do you have the colossal stupidity to believe the other citizens of the planet don’t see and know that? Corporate capitalism isn’t a whisper (and the world’s citizens don’t listen to FoxNews, you know) – it’s a thunderous roar.

You’re a fraud, a fraud as obvious as the purpose of fifty-six thousand lobbyists at the seat of power – federal government – and a president who publicly flaunts the law he swore an oath to uphold; in fact, a compilation of the evidence where your fraudulent image and façade is concerned would fill volumes. You have become history’s one, greatest lie. More, the successes of your Military Industrial Complex creation, the Central Intelligence Agency and its Operation Mockingbird co-option of the press and media make you totally incompetent to assess in any meaningful way the truth of what I say, such that I have neither desire nor intent to convince you.

This, therefore, is only the warning to an opponent demanded by honor of a gentleman, not a newscast.

The music, the song, I mentioned? “I am, I said” – Neil Diamond. When your sycophant minions treated me, a native citizen of the Land of the Free – where, supposedly, men . . . “hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” – like a stray dog, I remember thinking that then I said “I am . . .” And, “no one heard – not even the chair.” I was alone. I was as alone as I was the day an eight-passenger van ran me down in a cross-walk, knocked me from my bicycle into a suborbital flight that covered sixty-one feet and left an eleven feet trail of my skin, flesh, and blood on the street pavement; and when the driver and passengers of the van leapt from it to attack me as I lay squirming, I was alone despite dozens, even scores of passersby.

I was alone as I was through twenty-three years of federal crime against me and mine, crime that included relentless harassment, literally scores of burglaries, at least a dozen overt attempts at murder, and more.

I was as alone as Kitty Genovese all these years ago. Do you remember – the girl stabbed to death while dozens of the Home of the Brave’s citizens watched without so much as making a phone call? The time was 1964, and military industrial corporation power and the CIA it had created for the purpose had begun in earnest and with already palpable effect the destruction of the public’s mental coherence and resulting cohesiveness. “Deceive, confuse, and bewilder,” is how the federal wonk put it a few years later during a seminar for would-be participants in the federal program (for the desperately skeptical, look up MKULTRA, MKCHAOS, Mockingbird, and the like).

I was as alone as the scores – more than two hundred, at last count – of men convicted wrongfully of rape under mindlessly emotion-driven, politicized and corrupt laws of procedure and evidence. A decadent society, cowardily submissive to those interested only in their specialized self-interest, was oh, so eager to look the other way, as its victims were stripped of our vaunted “constitutional rights.”

Like freedom, you know, constitutional rights are subject to the rule of the mob, too.

Well-read in the history of such things, I wasn’t surprised when the public stood by idly while the government went about its relentless effort to destroy me. Of course not. I knew all too well that you were concerned with things the magnitude of Anna Nicole Smith’s sex life, the disappearance of the latest arrogantly oblivious bimbo to be kidnapped, raped, and discarded like the vapidly empty human condom she is, or the rescue of a strayed horse or beached whale. The torturing of one of your fellow “Americans” – me - was no more significant to you than was that of Moslem prisoners at Abu Graib Prison. Your character is such that television promoters and advertisers deem it necessary to intersperse vapidly lurid, tabloid nonsense like the lurid excesses of one Paris Hilton with that of the results of the appalling presidential, commander-in-chief-of-our-military pratfall in Iraq and its resultant slaughter of our troops there.

You care as much about your fellow “American” as your President – a man as perfectly representative of the nation he leads as conceivable - cares about his constituency, the common man, or his oath of office. You are a spectacle of spiritual rottenness and decadence unparalleled in history since that of Ancient Rome.

You are so rotten, so low, that you care about nothing – not even your children and grandchildren - but satisfaction of your appetites.

So spare me the sanctimoniously phony bullshit. I know you. Spare me the sorry-ass flag waving and patriotism. Save me your “support our troops” – you care for them, our children, the same way you care for their children and their children.

Still, nevertheless, I – unlike you – feel an immense responsibility, that of parent for his children; that of forbearer for progeny. Revelation – it wasn’t; I not only knew of it literally years ago, but wrote of it – that George W. Bush has spent as much of the public’s money as all the presidents of U.S. History combined spurs me again to do whatever necessary to assuage the horror we are by our despicable cowardice bearing down upon our children and grandchildren.

So, like Leonidas at the pass of Thermopylae, like Horatius at the bridge over the Tiber, forlorn in the knowledge of what you have become and what to expect, I will try nonetheless. As I’ve already intimated – maybe I said it flatly; I don’t recall – I will suggest, even begin by way of example, ways to institute a guerrilla law counter-attack against the takeover of our country by totalitarian corporate plutocrats who bill themselves as “neo-conservative.”

First, though, I invite you to read my www.judoknighterrant.com page having to do with Operation Mockingbird. I also encourage you to research the Operation Mockingbird project and its history. It’s all there, more than enough to convince all but the stultified, stupefied, and brain-dead of far right and far left political persuasion (those, in other words, already lost to Mockingbird federal propaganda).

I wish I could think of a rallying cry (make no mistake, people with trillions as stake will not take this lying down – this means war). This, perhaps will do: in the words of Mexican reformer and revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, “It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”

And remember this: I don’t care about how you live; I care about how your children, and their children, live.

As I type, a Cuban expatriate demands by way of the “fair and balanced” media that no matter what might benefit his new country - the one to which he now speciously professes undying loyalty – that it do whatever is necessary to satisfy his hatred of Fidel Castro (and, incontrovertibly, everyone else in Cuba). He demands – ever wonder where the hell people like him think they get the right to do that? – that the United States continue its economic blockade of the country and people to whom he once presumably also professed undyingly loyal. Do you have any doubt that inasmuch as he has great political clout these days, and many lobbyists in Washington among the sleeze of politicians there, he will get anything of your property and life he demands?

Yeah, I know you are a native citizen, and that you have been paying taxes all your life – but born not so long ago of humanism, feminism, and liberalism, this is the sort of thing that controls our nation, now.

I’ve just finished reading Al Gore’s latest, “The Assault on Reason.” I’ve just finished reading George Tenets, “At the Center of the Storm,” and before that, I read Gerry Spence’s “Bloodthirsty Bitches and Pious Pimps of Power.” A Before those two, I read Bob Woodward’s “State of Denial.” It’s hype-able, money-making stuff, but for a guy who said it all years – that’s years – before, more, it’s little more than annoying.

Let me repeat that: I’ve been saying all this for literally years. As a matter of fact, I said decades ago something I will say here in a minute, and it had the same result. Nothing.

Parenthetically, what is usually the Paula Zahn Show features two (or three) “experts” or “analysts” who are of such stature and credibility that they both (or all – who the hell can tell) talk at the same time, babble like six-graders of marginal intellect, and set up a cacophony interesting only to a psychologist interested in deviant or retarded child behavior. This is the Big Leagues of public discourse in the Land of the Free Press, folks. From these people, the public opinion which supposedly decides the fate of us all, citizens of the United States, and the world, is formed.

We could also, of course, decide to vote and determine the proper course of the nation by divination on the movements of Britney Spears (did I spell that right?) belly button. Don’t laugh – a considerable portion of our political opinions are so determined. Danny Glover’s view of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is currently deciding much of U.S. public opinion regarding that matter (whatever it is).

Also tonight, we saw still (my god – this rivals the capitalistic, Christmas-time promotion orgy exploiting the death of Princess Diana) another “documentary” on the assassination of President John Kennedy. Still thunderously – hydrogen bomb blast thunderously – obvious by its absence is any of the otherwise de rigueur “re-creations” that might show how you can blow off the back of a man’s head with a gunshot from the same side.

You’ll see that the same day you see an object fall to the ceiling or sky.

But you’ll see the rest of the speciously tawdry “facts” and “analysis” (by those geniuses of the media known as “expert analysts”) again and again, at strategically determined intervals, on television. You’ll see it whenever the government and the military industrial establishment corporations who own it need to distract public attention from something like Iraq and the massive lie now being revealed concerning the national budget (that’s the fact that the corporations stole five hundred thousand, five hundred dollars from each U.S. household last year – five hundred thousand, five hundred more than they’ve admitted stealing).

Have you never wondered why it is that when the government or one of its “officials” steals, even billions, it is something less than a crime? In a nation where a woman who writes a bad check for a hundred dollars in order to feed her kids can – and often does – go to jail for ten years, while a plenipotentiary in SleezeWorld on the Potomac who steals millions not only goes to jail seldom, he often gets re-elected. That makes sense? Yeah, in the Land of the Free, it does.

Al Gore’s book is specifically about my favorite topic of the past four years, the spastic, self-defeating, and totally feckless state of the public discourse. It’s entitled “Assault on Reason,” and if you don’t recognize in that what I’ve been saying, you haven’t been paying attention. The former Vice-President and popular vote for President winner in 2001 cites in his new tome everything we have discussed here months – indeed, years – ago. It has wife Rita is repeating her assertion, “These guys have to be reading your “blogs, Hal. What are the odds against anyone duplicating at random and word for word as many as three consecutive sentences?”

Well, I tell her – at least it wouldn’t be the first time.

It all happens at the same time, and a discussion on Internet website TagWorld demonstrates the degree to which that same public mind has been addled and incapacitated. It also demonstrates the overwhelming success of a 1950s program called Operation Mockingbird.” Mockingbird’s stated mission, in case you are among the typically un-informed of the Land of Guaranteed Free Press, was nothing less than to co-opt and take over the information media of the United States. Using a dictum first promulgated by Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels, then wielded mightily by Russian Revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, the Central Intelligence Agency made its mission nothing less than control of the nation’s mind. More, and representing literally millions of his kind, one TagWorld man has demonstrate there the anaesthetized state characterizing victims of Operation Mockingbird-addled media. Living in a supposed republic, a guy name Scott demands of the public that it accept everything being told them by the media and its federal overseers. Anything less, he implies, is treasonous. “Why,” referring to the incredible-to-anyone-awake-and-rational blunder (to give the liar who lied to get us inextricably involved the benefit of “innocent until proven guilty”), he asks, “don’t you just cheer?”
You tell me how much more biased an attitude or opinion can be.

Despite its obvious psychological implications, Scott sees no contradiction in his asseverations. Were he to do the same regarding his family, his property, bank account, or the like, he could easily be committed by his family, found by a court of law incompetent. That his tormented mental processes (face it, this country has become a great treadmill, wherein people labor desperately and hopelessly to stay ahead of corporate slave-masters who demand more and more exploitable effort from them) might decide the fate of a nation is something else again, and while protected by the Constitution, is evidence of the a segment of the people becoming more and more dangerous.

The rats in this cage are beginning to show all the classic signs of stress.

This guy isn’t the only one playing with a deck short several cards, either. Gore’s latest book explores the near-paralyzed state of our national reasoning. There isn’t any rational or reasonable doubt about the truth of what he says. The question remaining has to do with what to do about it.

During a recent polemical exchange on TagWord, I said that I had several times before attempted to do what is the only logical way to avert the disaster now looming before the United States. “Guerrilla Law,” a term coined by a friend and one time publicist, James Frazier, avails the public of the Four Powers given the public for control of their government. It’s our last hope.

The series of four “chapbook” pamphlets were once an underground best-seller; and as I noted on TW, they once made me the target of federal snipers. The industrial military complex corporations who rule in the Land of the Free want you to believe that the only way you can legally do anything about your government, things like the children of the poor being cruelly shanghaied into military “service” designed to enrich the governing rich and their corporations, is to vote in its cynically rigged elections. To vote for one of two sons of the ruling plutocracy is promulgated – and by the propagandized accepted – as democracy.

Frankly, you amaze me. Nobody, psychologically, sociologically, anthropologically, is that stupid. Only scientific intervention in the form of propaganda can explain that kind of self-defeating, self-injurious, irrational and nonsensical behavior.

Yes, I’ve already attempted to teach the public “guerrilla law.” While nothing about it is debatable in fact, those determined that the United States should again become politically a European-style democracy or plutocracy will insist that to do what is eminently legal under actual and existing constitutional law is anarchy. Legally, we should, they asseverate, elect what amounts to a dictator every four years, then shut the hell up. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth.

The first of the Four Powers provided our system of government is that of access to the courts. You are, of course, expected – it is demanded of you; everything else is “vigilante” action – to believe that only by hiring an attorney (licensed to represent you by the government you might sue) and paying the staggeringly prohibitive costs of the same can you petition the courts to protect your rights against the government. You sue the king and make your case against the king in a court where the judge is . . . the king.

That, when the government is your oppressor, may even mean that all the funds you must have to hire a lawyer have been seized by the government oppressing you. When the governing law is that of the U.S. Tax Code, that’s fair. “Legal.”

Hopeless? No, that’s where the “guerrilla law” comes in. A case I prosecuted a number of years ago may illustrate. This was among the first of those Eminent Domain affairs; the filthy rich corporation – maybe one guy, but fat financially enough to be a corporation – decides that, like Al Capp’s General Bullmoose, whatever is good for him is good for the nation. He wants to force you to sell your property for ten cents on the dollar (capitalism, after all, is about making money and the capitalist makes money by exploiting – that’s impoverishing - other people).

In this case, the public circulated a petition – think about how convenient that is for people who own the law, lock, stock and well-lobbied barrel – intended to stop the corporate government take-over of their property. When number of signatures required by the law had been obtained and handed over to the recording government authority, the government authority blithely – “they looked suspect” - disallowed thirty percent of them, just enough to make the “initiative” by the public invalid under the law. On a radio talk show a few nights later, I answered one caller’s question by asking what she thought would happen, should the petitioners on the now deceased petition have signed instead a small claims court action. Since a small claims action in that jurisdiction was limited to ten thousand dollars, I asked, what did she suppose would have been the effect of the same number of signatures required on the petition had they been on small claims court forms? Fifty thousand (the number of signatures required on the now dead petition drive forms) times ten thousand is $500,000,000. – five hundred million dollars. Did she think that would get the government entrepreneurs’ attention?

The host on the talk show nearly fell off his chair.

In the weeks that followed, I also published my intention to avail myself of the citizen’s right and duty to arrest anyone caught in the act of crime. A government that is essentially a criminal conspiracy reacted as anyone rational might expect. The story is that told in my book, “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story.”

No, there is no doubt that the public’s right and duty to control their government has been prepared and lies waiting to be used. Several times, including that during the time of formation of the Colorado Militia and arrest of FBI agents seeking by way of entrapment to bring about its ruin, I was able to demonstrate the power of just one of these rights – that of citizens arrest.

But that isn’t all. Imagine what would happen, were every citizen who knew of an illegal alien having been hired by a corporate entity in his town or county, enlisted the aid of all persons affected personally and financially by the hire, and filed a small claims court action against the alien and his deceitful, slave-master employer. Multiply the ten thousand – or whatever the limit is in your jurisdiction – by the number of suits. Imagine the result of your action.

And, no, you can’t be sued for having filed your suit. The worst the court can do is dismiss as “frivolous” your action. Neither can you be sued or prosecuted for false arrest of anyone caught in violation of the law. You merely have to be able to swear or testify that you saw a crime being committed. That is any crime in some states, felony crime in others. The standard for determination of what is a serious – felony – crime is that of a reasonable person. Would, in other words, a reasonable person believe what happened was a serious crime.

The incident recently – I wrote about it here – wherein a ninety-one year old man was being beaten by a man stealing the old man’s car is a classic example of a crime whose perpetrator a citizen not only may arrest but has a duty to do so. I should be forgiven a parenthetical digression to point out that nothing, perhaps, more suggests the root causes for our national decline than a public willing to stand idly – and cravenly by – watching heinous crime being committed. How can such a people pretend to respect the rule of law and the order it purports to maintain? It can’t. That’s “let-somebody-else-do-it” nonsense, and when only the government enforces the law and maintains order, the tyranny is the inevitable result. In fact, it is a reasonable definition of tyranny.

Oh, I can hear it now – I’ve been hearing it for years. “What can I do?” Now, I am not licensed anywhere to practice law. The government would love for me to stick my testicles in a vice like that. But I can tell you what I have done, how I did, it, and what the result was, and I have practices pro se (for oneself) law for decades, appeared in court again and again, and kicked the government’s ass from pillar to post (that’s why they started shooting, something else any reasonable person would expect of thugs like those who rule in the Nation of Laws). I suggest you read, as I have, Flast v. Cohen, 392 U.S. 83 (1968). Just Google it, and read it. If you don’t see what I’m talking about, and get the idea, nothing can save you (which wouldn’t surprise me, either).

The biggest criminal element in the United States, let us not forget – and this is a matter of relentless fact, reported daily (even if in its immensely and deliberately diminished and under reported form) by the nation’s media. When have we not had one or the other embezzlement, bribery, corruption, or other similar scandal in Washington, D.C.? What do you suppose more than fifty-five thousand pandering camp-follower lobbyists do there? And are you really so naïve that you believe the crime being reported by the IRS-controlled media is all of it? Be serious!

Let’s not forget, either, that during the decades that I infiltrated federal offices everywhere I not only uncovered literally hundreds of crimes by our “public servants,” I forwarded incontrovertible proof of the crime to U.S. Senators, Congressmen, and all the major news media. Absolutely nothing happened, and it’s what any reasonable human being would expect. When you hire the most greedy and power-mad people you can find, you have to expect them to do what they wanted to do once in control of the nation’s money and in power. Anything else is utter nonsense.

For some reason, I’m reminded again of the priest’s flabby ass pumping up and down as he cannonaded the wife of my home town’s leading citizen in the sacristy of St Peter’s Catholic Church all these years ago. Maybe I’m just cynical. On the other hand, it might be what any of us should expect (at least, the good father was screwing an adult female, not a boy like all those were would one day learn of). You might say that I expect little of people given power without restraint, and as the French essayist Michel De Montaigne once observed, societies invariably have the government they deserve. A people that will not avail themselves of the power granted them by the right and duty of Citizens Arrest, to say nothing of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution, in order to maintain law and order have what they deserve.

Keep watching, folks - I’ll tell you what I wrote in my book, you won’t even have to buy a copy, and you might even save your county. How can you beat a deal like that?

“'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
“Was there a man dismay'd ?
“Not tho' the soldier knew
“Some one had blunder'd:
“Theirs not to make reply,
“Theirs not to reason why,
“Theirs but to do and die,
“Into the valley of Death
“Rode the six hundred.

“Cannon to right of them,
“Cannon to left of them,
“Cannon in front of them
“Volley'd and thunder'd;
“Storm'd at with shot and shell,
“Boldly they rode and well,
“Into the jaws of Death,
“Into the mouth of Hell
“Rode the six hundred.

“When can their glory fade?
“O the wild charge they made!
“All the world wonder'd.
“Honour the charge they made!
“Honour the Light Brigade,
“Noble six hundred!”

That, of course, is an excerpt from the famed poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson commemorating the famed Charge of the Light Brigade in the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War. Anyone who doesn’t see the parallel between the blundering, misguided, and disastrous charge and what is going on now in Iraq is either brain-dead or in an altered state produced by CIA and federal U.S. Government Operation Mockingbird propaganda, and of no use in either a discussion of the Iraq war or Memorial Day efforts to honor the men and women who have died for our country there and elsewhere.
The phrase, “Theirs but to do and die" has made Lord Cardigan’s charge a symbol of warfare at its most courageous, its most tragic, and its most stupid. It is also my answer to the “Did Not Serve,” FoxNews patriot who chooses to further the purposes of the corporate dictatorship he sucks up to by pretending that anyone who sees the war in Iraq as anything but another idiotic Charge of the Light Brigade ordered by a latter-day Lord Cardigan is somehow a traitor.
I was a soldier. I was a soldier and I know the truth about the relationship between the rich and politically powerful – in a capitalist society, let us not forget, they are the same – and the soldier. I know, too, what Memorial Day remembrances held by those same rich and powerful – who “did not serve” – are worth. I know what they are about, too.
The Bill O’Reillys, the Sean Hannitys, the Britt Humes, and the like are not honoring – not even encouraging – those who stand on a wall and remain awake while those whom they love sleep. History has recorded faithfully the names of men like the Leonidas at Thermopylae, Byrhtnoth at Waldron, and Horatius at the bridge in Rome. Protectors, those men stood between those they loved and their enemies. All left history a record like the legendary missive of the Spartan to his people. “Stranger, go and tell Sparta that we lie here in obedience to her command.”
“Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die,” in other words.

While still a kid in high school and obliged by the Catholic grandparents’ rearing me to attend church every Sunday, I marveled at the way parishioners’ hour-or- two long piety turned quickly to the very behavior their services condemned. Walking into the church sacristy one evening to find the priestly pastor of the church mounted on a lady parishioner, I recollected as I beat a hasty retreat both the “sins of the flesh” sermon the priest had delivered the Sunday before and the angelic expression on the woman’s face that same day as she returned to her pew from the communion railing.

Daily, now, I listen to the same tone and tenor, the same fervor as Sean Hannity excoriates “traitors” who “undermine the morale of our men and women in Iraq.” I’m listening to it as I type this, in the voice of President George W. Bush as he “honors our men and women in uniform” on this Memorial Day.

And, of course, I listen as “a grateful nation remembers,” 2007.

I listen and I remember landing in Keflavik, Iceland, en route to the “Z.I.” – the United States - and listening as Armed Forces Radio recapped the 1956 World Series I had missed during the time I spent in infiltrating “Communist” – then, all socialist countries automatically devolved immediately into communism – Hungary in order to possibly rescue revolt leaders like Pal Maleter. It was just before Christmas, and as anxious as I was to get home, something about the broadcast relates here. A few weeks before, in a firefight I was still dealing with in my mind, I had not only brought to fruition years of self-imposed physical training the like of which no military on this planet can boast, I had killed in lethal combat three men in literally less than seconds.

As I would relate decades later in an autobiographical work, all three of the men that night were killed and were dead before the body of the first stuck by the big slugs from my .45 caliber pistol had fallen to the ground. It was one hell of a feat, one the teenage Hungarian girl being raped by the soldiers probably never forgot. In my personal de-briefing of the incident in preparation for the military one I knew was coming, I was feeling pretty good about myself. Until, that is, the newspaper or magazine I was reading made me realize.

Realize? Yeah, I realized that the nation that every year protests and postures as it does on this Memorial Day, 2007, was interested mostly in men named Don Larson, Mickey Mantle, Enos Slaughter, and Don Newcombe – the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball teams. Men who stood in a pass, on a bridge, or on a wall and defended with their lives the people and nation the pass, bridge, or wall led to were comparatively expendable, insignificant. They were, after all, cheaply bought and menial servants who did chores none of the celebrated would stoop to do.

A few weeks ago, in Building Eighteen at Walter Reed Army Hospital, I heard the echoes of my mind that day a few days before Christmas at St. Peters Church, in my home town, the same echoes I heard that day a short time before Christmas in 1956. Duty, so like morality of the priest that day in my home town, so like the interests and priorities of the public in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolt, and so like the posturing of the cynical Operations Mockingbird media like FoxNews of today, is easily imposed by authority and the powerfully rich who own it – in a capitalist society, there is no other real possibility, as I’ve noted - on those who are poor and therefore politically weak.

You may have yourselves and your time fooled, “America,” but you haven’t fooled me and you haven’t fooled your soldiers.

The fact is that the economically dependent and the poor fight and die in wars enriching and empowering those already rich and in power, and Memorial Days are only more of the propaganda wielded by the powerful in order to keep full the ranks of those like the Spartans at the Thermopylae Pass, the Saxons at the Battle of Waldron, and Light Brigades at Balaclava. With only a few hours of newspaper, radio, and television time, a nation’s plutocrats purchase the mind, spirits, bodies, and limbs of the poor who are “commemorated.” On this Memorial Day, look up the word you will hear, and hypocritically use again and again – ad nauseam. “To commemorate” means only to keep in mind. Only, and once a year.

Obviously, on this Memorial Day, that is all – exactly all - it means.

Politics and politicians, and the god-awful mess they’ve made of my country, have me so angry, so pissed off and disgusted, that I have to write about something else. Besides, politics and politicians are what we have let them become – and I’m part of the “we.” We deserve what we’re getting – including high gas prices (pushing the accelerator down, you know, creates demand and raises the damned price). I haven’t been part of the problem, including that last, for at least three decades, but with me, things just aren’t other people’s fault, and I should have done something. I should have done more.

Now we’re in a helluva mess. Something. I should have done something.

And I have to do something now. Our kids are going to grow up in a maelstrom of Hobbes-ian social and societal horror – “continual fear of violent death; and life… solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” to quote Hobbes - and there doesn’t seem to be a damned thing I can do about it. But I have to – I have to!

I don’t pray, implying as it does that god can be lobbied and is therefore as evil and unjust as any of today’s pandering politicians. In fact, to pray as we do today, much the manner with which we petition government, is to me blasphemous. But I know, too, that good deeds and the love of fellow man they demonstrate are obedience to god’s prime directive for man. If there are honest prayers, and praise to god, then they must be chivalry and loving conduct. That’s what I’ll do. Even knowing that all, probably, that I will really accomplish is balm for my own conscience, that is what I will do.

The thing is, though, that I’ve been a knight errant since I was a boy. From the day that I first used my extraordinary ability to cope with the elements and nature (Indians back home dubbed me “Walks-in-Storms”) to rescue a very pregnant women from an Iowa snowbank, and was awarded her grateful hug and kiss on the cheek, I could do nothing else. That hug and kiss, the gratitude in her eyes when I had carried her to the snowplow I had summoned from a nearby farmhouse for her trip to the hospital, addicted me to what is certainly the most powerful drug there is.

So. Let us sit down and reason together for a moment. A while back, seized by another fit like this one, I authored an “Etiquette and Manners” page on my website. Born like this essay out of disgust, what I said that day was due my having observed a number of today’s pitiful excuses for the human male behaving in the manner of the miserable surrogate he is. My remarks then observed that much of our present woes can be attributable to the mess feminism and male weakness derived from loss of contact with real men feminism fomented and demanded have made of the “U.S. male.”

Like the postal version of the word, male has come to mean higher and higher cost for less and less purpose.

I couldn’t help note at the time of 9-11 and the invasion of Iraq, and additionally, that society’s damnable misbehavior in the presence of the Stars and Stripes seems for some reason to parallel the abysmal conduct of men toward our women. I’m pretty sure the two examples of masculine weakness are part of and have the same origins. There are those who will remember my having quoted J.S. Mill at the time, and I’ll do it again here. Writing in his essay entitled “On Liberty,” the great man said, “A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes -- will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.”

I noted, too, that anyone who didn’t recognize today the state Mill spoke of must be sleep-walking, semi-comatose.

But enough of repetition; well, not quite – I also remarked that men so soft, so comfortable and surfeited on the seeming supportive plenty of today’s largely illusory society as to forget their primal role in creation, that of husband to a woman and her child, could hardly be expected to respect the flag of the nation they are also charged with husbanding.

Oh, I can hear the protests from men. I answer with a story from my boyhood, that of the townswoman then who frequented the town’s taverns with her husband. Hearing something I said, or the way I said it, regarding the woman, my grandfather seized my arm in that vise-like grip of his. “You listen,” he said in that scarily quiet tone of his when annoyed, “a woman, any woman, is a lady as far as you are concerned. Always! That doesn’t have anything to do, mind you, with the truth of what the woman is, it has to do with what you are. Don’t you ever forget that.”

I haven’t. That was long ago, of course, but all of my experience since then has made it clear that one’s behavior toward anything must not be derived from the worth of the object, but from his behavior as derived from his evaluation of himself. A man behaves – and treats others – according to his own estimation of what – not who - he is. Men who know themselves to be capable of great things not only dare great things, but dare to become knights errant, samurai, servants of their fellows; men who know themselves to be weaklings think only of themselves. That, you see, is the most worrisome thing to them, the thing most dangerous, the thing most likely to let them down. That simple.

There have been notable exceptions, but I have seldom seen a blustering and bullying male, the kind who inflicts himself on those around him by flaunting his execrable conduct and manner, who didn’t turn in to a sniveling coward when confronted. That or run to a cop or lawyer – for today’s male, the equivalent of “mommy.”

And it is a fact of nature and behavior that one becomes what he does. Ruled by his mind, the individual can become almost anything (in fact, more’s the pity, that’s true of good and bad); more, my life has taught me enormous faith in the power of one determined individual. “One man with courage,” Thomas Jefferson observed, “is a majority.” It’s also true, as anthropologist Margaret Mead once observed, "… that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world, indeed it is the only thing that ever has."

After that experience with the pregnant lady in an Iowa snowbank (I probably tell that story too often, but it was one of the most wondrous things that has ever happened to me) I determined that henceforward I would never leave anywhere I had gone until I had made certain that it was a better place for my having been there. I would never leave another person without having made the effort to assure that they would never fail to remember with pleasure my having been there. I have forgotten that pledge to myself seldom – like I said, it’s an obsessing addiction. So obsessed did I become that I would develop a certain skill with people, especially women (I suppose it’s just far more fun with the opposite sex, for some reason); and, as I related in the book “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story, it would all one day make me very powerful.

Powerful? Yes, so powerful that I would successfully stand up to the most powerful government in the history of mankind. I had, you see, by then acquired so many friends that I was impervious to everything the government of a capitalist dictatorship customarily does. I could not, for instance, be impoverished, or forced to steal or rob. Everywhere I went, and I could go anywhere I chose despite everything government could do, I found people eager to repay with largesse “a hundred-fold, shaken together and trodden down” even the simplest and smallest of kindnesses I had once given them.

Goodness like small courtesies magnify in the mind of him to which they are done hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of times. Offer a man in trouble a hand, he will often offer you his life, later – when you are in trouble. Offer a lady your hand, or arm, she may well offer you her heart, and there are few things in this universe as constant as the loyalty of a woman who loves.

And if you don’t believe that, you merely give yourself away to one who has learned it the only way it can be learned.

So what I mean to do for my benighted country today is offer a lesson once taught me. I have already said here that we really do not need government; and we need nothing governments have ever done for the people they imagine that they rule. That, of course, is provided that we have one another as I once had literally hundreds (perhaps thousands) of friends. We “have” one another when we do as I have done – never go anywhere without being certain that the place and the people are better for our having been there.

But it all depends, as all human society always has, upon good men. “Good” is not hard to define, when it comes to men. Good is the quality of being above price except when paid in the coin of love, honor, and respect.

Does anybody remember, “love, honor, and obey?” Does anybody remember what it meant? No, I don’t suppose; an ideology known as feminism buried it under an avalanche of militant propagandist falsehood. More, the rise of militant feminism has paralleled without deviation the nation’s decline, something absolutely undeniable. We are in the death spiral where we find ourselves because of a lack of will characteristic of female dominated democracies.

We have followed the path observed by ancient Greece philosopher Plato. “Male republics give way to female democracies, and democracies give way to dictatorships.” You tell me what you see in our latter day history.

We must restore our nation’s maleness. We must begin teaching our male children to be men. We must teach our little girls what a man is. These are not mere platitudes! They are, in fact, societal atoms that everything social and national are made of. They are absolutely critical, and failure means doom. Like most things so monumental in decisive import, it is a simple matter, but far, far from easy. It is as simple as the once-famous Boy Scout Oath so many of the nation’s men learned as boys. A scout, the oath says, has standards, rules to which by which he measures himself and is measured, and these rules are as difficult as making the nation slow its highway driving speeds in order to drive down the cost of energy, or prevailing upon the obese sixty-seven percent of us to lose weight meaningfully.

It is as difficult as taking back control of our government by total repudiation of elections, or by the rise of a political party totally independent of corporate influence and that of lobbyist. It can’t, in fact, all be done in one great effort. WE don’t have anything like the men that would require.

But it can be done. In the famed writing of a samurai of ancient Japan, the Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi speaks of a tactic he calls “Breaking the Corners.” A little at a time, the impossible opponent is weakened. Sometimes called “the death of a thousand cuts,” it can bring down a colossus – or a government. It can change a society. In fact, as Margaret Mead observed, “it is the only thing that ever has.”

We need to start now, and we need to start with our children. There is nothing they need more than role models, heroes and idols who are worthy of being emulated. We need to begin teaching our youth right – double meaning intended. We need to teach them what has traditionally and academically been called a life view. It happens that I grew up among people who had the only life view that nature and nature’s god will any longer tolerate. I dare say that because I can demonstrate by means of history and logic that we are now in the grip of evolutionary forces, such that we learn to treat nature and nature’s god with respect much in the manner that we need to learn to treat and respect one another, or we bring down upon our own heads cataclysm.

What, specifically and devoid of the politicians’ oblique and evasive rhetoric, does that mean? I set myself a daunting task there, but among the farmers of Northeast Iowa, boys were reared in an ethic almost exactly that of Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts, the ideal that all other persons were seen and treated as equals. “It isn’t about the other person,” Opa said, “it’s about you!” That idea was rooted in another, that earning enough to be comfortable and provide for all the needs of family was the proper and moral goal of good men, and that anything more was excessive and depriving of others.

Compare that to the ethics of today’s capitalist. While you’re at it, try to find anything of the Boy Scout Promise in the behavior of Congress these days – the immigration issue, for instance, or the war in Iraq. Those people, those men – I demand nothing of women here, save the obvious – are what they are or are not because of what they were or were not as children. They were taught. Just as children must be taught racism, sexism, and what have you – they are not natural, you know – they must be taught greed, power-madness, and all rest of that Congress and the weakling in the White House now inflict upon us.

And a child will be taught, by someone or something. There is no escaping that, either. The questions that remain are who will teach him? And what? I suggest this: “On my honor (are you aware that school children can no longer define that word?), I will do my best to do my duty to god and my country and to obey the Scout law, to help other people at all times, to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.”

The Scout Oath is followed by the Scout Law. It’s worth reading. “A scout,” says the law, “is”:

TRUSTWORTHY
A Scout tells the truth. He keeps his promises. Honesty is part of his code of conduct. People can depend on him.
LOYAL
A Scout is true to his family, Scout leaders, friends, school, and nation.
HELPFUL
A Scout is concerned about other people. He does things willingly for others without pay or reward.
FRIENDLY
A Scout is a friend to all. He is a brother to other Scouts. He seeks to understand others. He respects those with ideas and customs other than his own.
COURTEOUS
A Scout is polite to everyone regardless of age or position. He knows good manners make it easier for people to get along together.
KIND
A Scout understands there is strength in being gentle. He treats others as he wants to be treated. He does not hurt or kill harmless things without reason.
OBEDIENT
A Scout follows the rules of his family, school, and troop. He obeys the laws of his community and country. If he thinks these rules and laws are unfair, he tries to have them changed in an orderly manner rather than disobey them.
CHEERFUL
A Scout looks for the bright side of things. He cheerfully does tasks that come his way. He tries to make others happy.
THRIFTY
A Scout works to pay his way and to help others. He saves for unforeseen needs. He protects and conserves natural resources. He carefully uses time and property.
BRAVE
A Scout can face danger even if he is afraid. He has the courage to stand for what he thinks is right even if others laugh at or threaten him.
CLEAN
A Scout keeps his body and mind fit and clean. He goes around with those who believe in living by these same ideals. He helps keep his home and community clean.
REVERENT
A Scout is reverent toward God. He is faithful in his religious duties. He respects the beliefs of others.

The motto of a scout and the man he becomes is Be Prepared, and his slogan you may recognize from something I said here at the outset. “Do a good turn daily.”

There came a time not too many years ago, just about the same time as Helen Reddy sang her song, “I am woman, hear me roar,” that to “be a good scout” was a “put-down” - an expression of derision. It was the time of the anti-hero male, the guy who pisses me off almost daily with his bullyingly boorish behavior, the same guy who snivels like a boyish brat when confronted with real strength. The ladies of the feminist movement wanted their “sensitive man, a man who can cry without shame” (remember it all? - I do) – in order, of course, that the male should reveal no greater control of his emotions than they – and they got him.

He is everywhere these days, and he behaves exactly as a spoiled child once did, resembles nothing so much as a two hundred pound baby. Tell me, why are we surprised that our nation resembles and behaves likewise?

Fine. We either return to the time when men were proud of being a “Boy Scout,” or we go on to the time Hobbes spoke of, the time when men would live in “continual fear of violent death; and life…” Life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”