I hope I’m in good form today, because this just might be the most important thing I’ve ever written. I’ve been thinking since I wrote my last “blog,” you see.

I also have to say this: I’m a man who has suffered and recovered from almost every kind of hell you can imagine. A former father-in-law, that of my deceased first wife, used to say, “You’ve hit the toughest damned row of stumps any farmer ever did.” I won’t bore you with it all, but take my word (and I wrote a book about it), I speak here from the vantage point of one who knows.

“He never laughs at scars who felt a wound.” No one is better at evading what caused the wounds, either.

That we have to do better is something many of us realize, and, it seems, realization is creeping down from the senior citizens among us, those who have also born the heat of the battle that is life, to those younger and not so battle-wise. That we as a society and nation have not learned all those lessons taught by the battle is due mostly, I think, to the supposed information age and the wedge it has driven between parent and children. When I have finished here, you may have come to realization that the so-called generation gap is not an accident of life’s vicissitudes.

The younger generations haven’t listened to the older; they had all that information available from strangers, information that didn’t have to be paid for with the respect once paid parent and elder. Then, too, there was the feminist revolution, which told young people that the ship of society didn’t need the keel that was masculinity and its honor codes.

Had younger Americans then listened to their elders – this one, of course, was one of those accursed men – they would have heard John Stuart Mill:

“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.”

But we didn’t listen, and we are where we are now.

Where are we? I doubt that I need to say – the so-called “information media” and the daily news scream it. And therein lies the first of many proofs of what I have been saying in my blogs, that the nation has lost its democratic soul and republican heart. Bad news, like hate, sells. More, bad news is deliberately demanded of the media by government.

Bad news, you see, sells the government’s protection racket. It tells everyone that they need government, the worse the news, the more desperate the need. Good news, on the other hand, is the people’s doing. Good news tells us all that we can do for one another far, far better than government can. Face to face, hand to hand, caring, we can solve one another’s problems – every one of them – without repair to the far-off, megalithic, and implacable government in Washington, D.C.

That is not the message government would have its media disseminate.

More, government has long had the advantage, the tactical one so old that it was once stated by a Roman Emperor. “Divide to conquer.” Anyone listening to any of the electronic media, or reading the newspaper, can – if he will - quickly see the tactic in operation. That’s what bad news – and spreading hate – is all about. The actors in the government’s Greek Chorus tell us that we are at war, the better to assure that we recognize someone other than government as our enemy.

How often have I, personally, observed that no criminal or crook has ever troubled me very much, but that government here in the Land of the Free was like a Fifth Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a federalized mafia ten, a hundred, a thousand times worse than any gang of thieves or murderers, a far more vexing enemy?

And there it is: we are plagued by the assemblage of organized crime on the Potomac because we patronize them, buying the vices they sell. Strong, independent, supporting one another neighbor to neighbor and reaching only as far outward from our neighborhoods as necessary, we don’t need these people!

Think about it! We are told - as we have long been told - that federal government is necessary because it can do things for us we can’t do for ourselves.

Yeah, like what?! Oh, I can hear the answering refrain even as I write these words. “Defend us from foreign enemies.” Think about that, too. Spending nearly six hundred billions of dollars a year, fifteen trillions since World War Two, what are we getting in the way of “provide for the common defense?” Why are we, militarily supposedly the most powerful nation in history, cringing like children before a raggedy band of motley maniacs like al Qaeda?

“‘Splain dat to me, Luci!”

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” The italics are mine, and the words are those describing the purpose of government. Must I peruse and discuss, point by point, how well the Mafia on the Potomac are doing in that regard? Okay, I will:

“Domestic Tranquility.” A few weeks ago, Rita, my schoolteacher wife, was obliged to attend a seminar intended to teach her self-defense – against anticipated attack by her pupils. She teaches middle school. Yesterday, teachers here held a conference intended to deal with widespread disciplinary problems in classrooms. Check the news – dare you say our little school here is unique? How often has the utter savagery of our young people been in the news? While you’re on the subject, consider what the criminal conspiracy on the Potomac has done for education. Compare it with national defense. Do that, and you’ll discover the same thing in both cases, namely, that we have for decades continued to send staggering – life-controlling, matter of fact – sums of money to Washington, that while what the “establish” people establish has been a rapidly deteriorating status quo.

The government’s answer? Send more money. We’ll hold more hearings, consult more experts.

You need an expert to teach you how to defend yourself against an enemy armed only with small arms and improvised explosives? No tanks, no ICBMs? No submarines, not a single airplane or ship with which to invade? Call me!

You need a panel of PhDs from Harvard or Yale - to teach you how to raise a kid? How to teach him? How to maintain discipline? Call me!

And then there’s “promote the general welfare.” Forty million people in the “more perfect union” live in poverty. That’s one in six children. Your government will send hundreds of billions of dollars to a place like Iraq – where most of the people despise you, everything you do, and everything you are – but it leaves one out of every six of its own children in poverty.

And ignorance – or have you forgotten all those revelations of late concerning the abject stupidity of our youth; that while government spends billions on the welfare of citizens from Mexico? That, while government rages with argument concerning twenty million people who are here to live off its constituents’ tax money, while it just about totally ignores the trouble of its own people. “Promote the general welfare,” indeed!

Let me leave for a summary reminder how after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita “promote the general welfare” is going in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast.

Consider on the other hand what the case would be, were we all to do what I’m suggesting here. What if each of us simply went to the aid of his neighbor, of anyone we found to be in need? What if, in order to do that most effectively, we were to demand that all those rights guaranteed by the same U.S. Constitution we’ve been speaking of here were unfettered by government with its obvious motives and intent to do the contrary?

Were I somehow to obtain a national rostrum from which to discuss this, I would point out that the “services" government would most certainly sell with its bugaboo promotion is that first touched upon here, “provide for the common defense.” But what have they actually provided? What they have provided most meaningfully and effectively is dependence upon government, not freedom - dependence together with the distraction and need to defend oneself against that same government. It’s hard to sell – especially at the federal price - to anyone what he can do for himself, and the plummeting rate of violent crime since state after state has returned to the people by way of concealed handgun licensing their right to self-defense makes very clear who it is who best provides “defense” when it is defense against hoodlums like so-called terrorists. When Nine-Eleven terrorist victim Flight Ninety Three and what happened made incontrovertibly clear the truth about who – government or individuals citizens - is best equipped to protect individuals against hoodlum and terrorist, it was no mere co-incidence that commentary by the Greek Chorus that is our federally-controlled media strove so mightily to conceal the impotence of our near trillion dollar a year “common defense.”

Nevertheless, using the incident and its horrendous failure lemon to make lemonade, the chorus managed still another time to “Operation Mockingbird” the public. Instead of coming to realization, in short, the public handed over more of its money for “common defense.”

From the myriad of examples I might use to elucidate the point, none is more illuminating than the fact that personally-armed individual citizens successfully preclude or prevent violence and crime more than a million times a year – and that occurs without a single mention in the nation’s press. While every incident like that of Virginia Tech is blazoned and bellowed as long and loudly as possible (that, of course, without mention of the fact that what happened was made possible by the further fact that no one abiding by the law may on the Virginia Tech campus possess a weapon with which to defend himself). “Bad news sells government, even when the bad news is the fact that government cost thirty-two people their lives (talk about lemonade out of lemons!); good news is the public’s success, and it sells freedom.”

“Divide and conquer.” Keep divided, stay in power. That, CIA Operation Mockingbird formulators decided, was the function of the media. And, since formation of the CIA in 1948, that has ever been the case. Today, the effect of the public discourse, its free press, has been completely neutralized. We have not spoken to one another as citizens in a free society in decades.

Now there is a chance for that to happen again. The “chance” is the Internet, where the free flow of ideas is as obvious as is the government’s effort to gain control there. The government, the CIA, and the military industrial complex corporation that own both know as well as I what that might mean. Already a new Internet political party has arisen, that of Unity08. Already, too, however, the “protect us” cry, cynically broadcast everywhere by the media, is being noised about. While flooding the world-wide web with pornography, the federal government and the military industrial complex corporations that own it regale the public with that “bad news” - stories of sexual predators having preyed upon our women and children, the government sells it protection racket. No one suggests nationally and at the same volume, you’ll note, that individual parents might simply parent their children. Neither does anyone dare point out that women stupid enough to have been duped by feminist nonsense concerning their Helen Reddy, “I am strong, I am wise” equality are not the responsibility of the very same men they have dwarfed “in order that they may be more docile instruments . . .”, and are now themselves responsible for whatever happens to them on that account.

Freedom isn’t free, and it always costs personal responsibility.

God damn it, citizen of the United States of America - remember who you are! You are the inheritor of the greatest experiment in liberty ever attempted by man. Your grandparents and their forbearers, have purchased for you with
their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor,” a nation that should by now be a veritable paradise. With decadence, concupiscence, and greed, you have squandered almost all of it. Cowardly, slothful, you have sold your birthright democracy, in return for the neo-royalty and oligarchy of neo-conservatism. Once a republic, we are again a virtual kingdom.

We can do this. WE, DO, NOT, NEED, FEDERAL GOVERNMENT! I ask, I urge, everyone who reads this to link it to as many other sites and persons as you can. Let me explain again that citizens willing to help their fellows have no need of defense against terrorism. Citizens willing to go to the aid of their fellow cannot be beaten (my god, I should think – were it not for federal propaganda – that Iraq would have taught you that by now!).

In closing, I paraphrase a very famous – well, until a couple of generations ago, anyway – speech, that of Patrick Henry before delegates from Virginia. While the speech in its entirety are singularly apropos here, I will only use a few lines:

We are not weak or dependent upon would-be kings in Washington, D.C., if we make a proper use of the means which god has given us. Three hundred million people armed as we are and in such a country as this, are invincible by any force that could be sent against us . . . This battle, like that of which Patrick Henry spoke during the birthing or our nation, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave.
Besides, as Henry said, we again have really no election. Even if we were base enough – and, now, we may very well be so base - to desire it, “it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery!”

Where Henry’s speech went on, I tremble at how what he warned of has come to pass. I quake with rage at the cynically contemptuous daring of having named the proviso for the chains Henry spoke of then the “PATRIOT Act!

“Our chains are forged!” Patrick Henry said. I say with him in this time that war is inevitable. War between those so contemptuous of individual rights as the Patriot Act and fifty more usurpations long since a part of federal government is always inevitable, the reason Thomas Jefferson could not conceived of any democracy that did not rebel from time to time.

With Patrick Henry, I, too, argue that “It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen (I note that today these are all the effeminate kind, and few others exist) may cry, ‘Peace! Peace!’ - but there is no peace . . .”

It is said that Henry’s voice had been rising from the beginning of his speech. Here, it rose to a full-throated roar. As far as my method permits, I do likewise:

“What is it that (effeminate, metrosexual [parenthesis here mine]) gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!”

We deciding that, folks – make no mistake. What do you think the war-mongering protection racketeers will demand next? Who will pay its price? You’re damned right - your children and their children. The fight has to come. The human condition is what it is, and it has never been otherwise. We fight now, with the power of free people and with all the weapons made available by the Bill of Rights Patrick Henry once demanded as a condition for there having been made the nation we live in, or your children and grandchildren will fight – probably with guns.

“Forbid it, Almighty God!” And you, too - "America."

For those so trained, it is possible to learn life’s hard lessons by letting one event teach you how to deal with another. Just as the physical universe is a relentlessly continual repetition of the small to construct the large, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, microcosm resemble macrocosms, and fractal numbers contain little copies of themselves buried deep within their more massive “parent,” and seemingly overwhelming troubles have their solutions buried and hidden within themselves.

Still, I suppose you have to be trained to see that. I stand, these days, you see, in jaw dropped astonishment at our state as a society and nation. Like the guy (me, for instance) standing before the bathroom medicine cabinet unable to find the bottle literally inches from his nose, our country blunders about, a blind man groping around in a totally darkened room, looking for a black hat – a black hat that isn’t there.

Of course, as I’ve also said here again and again, I find it all but impossible to believe anyone is as stupid as our federal government officials appear to be. In fact, my intensive study and experiences with the Internal Revenue Service, their eminence gris, the military industrial complex corporations, and with the federal government in general make it impossible for me to believe anything except that everything happening to our society and nation today was planned long ago. More, there is massive evidence supporting my conclusion.

But let us pretend for our purposes here that our deplorable state is indeed something due the vicissitudes that have long ruled human affairs. Life, it has been said, is nothing more than a game played by the individual against the rest of his kind, and against the chaotic and unpredictable events of life and history. Children growing to adulthood are given to understand on the one hand that something called luck determines everything or on the other hand that man is the captain of his fate, the decider.

Luck may be altered by god alone, doctrine says, and for that to happen, the individual must seek favor with the almighty. There have always people who know how to do that, of course. The logos and method of these people has come to be called “religion.”

The second idea has to do with a quasi-religion, an ideology called capitalism. Originally the cause and result of emperors, kings, and despot in general – it is, after all, the economic form of survival of the fittest - capitalism has always been especially popular among the rich and successful. It gives them a kind of speciously justifiable nobility and ascendancy over their fellows, because it states boldly – and vaingloriously - that the reason they are members of the new nobility is their skill and talent.

Certain of their right to whatever they can take, they do: and homo sapiens – “thinking man” – has come full circle, back to the divine right of kings, and our current form of presidential monarchy.

With the late twentieth century, however, the two religions came under the merciless assault of thought. As I said in my last “blog,” thought is no respecter of established institutions, and comfortable opinions. Neither does it cower before privilege or authority, however derived, and it is indifferent toward the pretenses of man’s society and its governments. In fact, thought is lawless and anarchic, the very stuff rebellion is made of. It is the arch-enemy of religion, which is in turn the grand supporter of both the divine right of kings and the divine right of the nobility by wealth.

During the 1970s and '80s, moreover, scientists began to recognize and study a new paradigm of reality called "chaos.” Whereas the old mathematics could do nothing to explain luck and the apparent favor of god for some, the new mathematics could. Of academic and scientific gravitas equal to that of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, chaos mathematics was born out of the mixing of existing sciences like weather prediction, fractal geometry, catastrophe theory, and computer cybernetics. The latter, described by someone as the "the art of ensuring the efficacy of action," brought realization that with computer development one could effectively examine the heretofore incomprehensible depths of fractals, together with such things as “strange attractors,” fluid turbulence, evolutionary biology, mind-brain studies, and the otherwise incomprehensible like.

Unlike Relativity, which deals with the macrocosm of space, and Quantum Physics, which has to do with the microcosm that is sub-atomic particles, chaos science deals with the somewhere-in-between where we human beings experience life – the game played by the individual against those “vicissitudes,” fate, and the rest. Order began to be sorted out of chaos, in other words.

Exactly on that account, useful mind experiments and pencil-and-paper stuff calculations could be done without the prohibitive expense of space-age technology, celestial observatories, space-born telescopes, atom smashers, or the like. With only pure mind experiments, logic, and math, conclusive and incontrovertible results could be and were obtained. In short, man swiftly began understanding matters long attributed to god and left to divine understanding.

But as some of us would expect, not everybody was as happy as my friends; in fact, few were. Guess who. Among the religious, any understanding of the creator and his favor upon men extraneous to the Bible was anathema, something to be despised and ridiculed. The new theoretical paradigms even cast doubt upon never before doubted dogma like the direction of time. Mathematically, final conditions were seen to be just as good as initial ones for explaining the evolution of systems like those of nature – including the vicissitudes of life.

Just as a creator who didn’t have to be at the beginning of time might not be the “everybody knows” god anymore, so might the fat cat in the White House have been favored by someone other the god of inexplicable vicissitudes. All of the wondrous pronouncements of religion in its worshipping form and that in its economic form now became matters of “if this were so,” rather than “since this is so.”

And as we might further expect, the world’s new nobility – those elevated over their fellows by dint of their wondrous ability, talent, and intellect – were less than thrilled, too. Not many of the wealthy explain with eagerness that they have inherited their money and power, that they acquired it due the fact of their having been supported by wealth and power, or won it in a lottery. Uh-uh – they “earned” it.

Neither, actually, was there even unanimity in the scientific community concerning the theory of chaos, where one group of adherents insisted upon placing emphasis on chaos itself, while the other did the same upon the order of things. While the argument raged, however, there were a few folks who recognized more mundane corollaries and parallels, with the result that among them classical religion and the economic theory justification for capitalism’s Horatio Alger myths took a beating.

It happened that when I first heard of and began studying chaos, I was engaged in a war with the federal government and its goons, the IRS. I was also coaching at the National Judo Institute, were the games of sport and game theory were often discussed daily. How to win a judo contest seemed obviously a question similar to that concerning how to win the game of life. The game of individual against individual, as Samurai Sword Saint Miyamoto Musashi famously pointed out, requires the same fundamental tactics as nation against nation.

And there was, I realized, a yet another corollary - that of individual against nation. The war against a nation I was in immediately took on new dimensions. The greatest of force multipliers in any game – fight, in this case - is intellect. How, though, to defeat or reach stalemate in a fight with many minds? With the brainpower - cyber-memory – of the opponent many tens of thousands of mine, how could victory or stalemate be possible?

With the history of my fight with government already published, and having spoken on my website www.judoknighterrant.com often of it, I won’t repeat here my study or mental deliberations. Suffice it to say that I succeeded. It is what I learned that is important here. Members of the United States National Judo Team, its head coach, and others will attest to the fact, for instance, of my having found my way repeatedly to places I had never before been to, and had no ostensible way to find. Others who have received judo or shooting instruction from me, or competed with me will likewise relate having been anticipated when such was ostensibly not possible.

There’s a reason for that, and key therein was realization that the human mind – one, several, or a nation – does not decide or act by conscious and knowing volition as it believes it does. In fact, the theory of a Nobel Prize winning economist Kenneth Arrow, demonstrates that what man believes is his ratiocination is impossible. While Arrow’s Theorem demonstrates incontrovertibly that there is no process (“algorithm”) by which a social opinion of one or a few of its members can become the choice of the society (democratic process, in other words, is a fraudulent myth), the same is true of the society of many sublevels of consciousness. There is no way for the product – thought – of any one level or a few to become the opinion - or decision - of the individual.

So how, then, I wondered, do we think or reason?

Curious, and spurred by the exigencies of coaching and my war with the vicious government, I resorted first to a practice begun long since, that of self-hypnosis. Deep in my own sub-consciousnesses, I did experiments with things like cataloguing, understanding, and anticipating the myriad of actions – grips, hand and foot movements, attacks and defenses - a judo opponent (or opponent of any kind, for that matter) – could make. What was true of a multiplicity of physical actions like judo attacks and defenses was also true of a multiplicity of mind planning, organizing, and carrying actions aimed at my destruction.

A couple of years before high-tech experiments had shown that the mind of a human beings reaches a decision to act before he is aware of his having decided, I had come to the same conclusion and begun experimenting with it. My own interests, of course, were different than people like Benjamin Libet and others, in that I was initially interested in knowing what the minimum stimulus necessary to trigger response to conscious awareness might be. Thinking so, I came swiftly to the conclusion that only the mind itself was fast enough, because function of all the circuitry involved in visual, tactile, and the other senses was prohibitively too slow. When I had recalled the experience of having realized one night while flying at a thousand miles an hour that everything I was seeing, hearing and feeling were three hundred feet behind the airplane, I knew something of the relativity I would have to understand and use in my deliberations

In a relatively (no pun intended) short time, I became aware of knowing things I wasn’t aware I knew. Quickly, I learned to think without being aware or conscious of thinking. One night, escorting a lady named Kathryn (who, I’m sure, will attest to what occurred), I found a residence destination twenty-odd miles from where we started, a destination whose location neither of us had any way of knowing (Kat had left directions in her purse at home). I would repeat the “feat” later with NJI Coach Phil Porter in attendance, and - still later - with a busload of NJI judoists.

Finally, I would begin sensing attacks by IRS goons days in advance of their occurrence, several times evading certain injury or death in the process. Having worn a sidearm, often illegally (gun laws about the nation are a convolute and incomprehensible chaos world with which only my newly attained awareness could cope) for many years, I evaded one entrapment attempt after another by law enforcement officers egged on by IRS and FBI-falsified police records. Only when I ignored my “sixth sense” did I come to grief, and that just once.

As Bill Cosby once said in one of his monologues, I told you all that so I could tell you this. There is a catastrophe coming for the United States. This is not something any ardent student of history and economics should be unaware of, and I am, myself, aware on that account.

I should probably add here before going on that among my friends I have been known for my skeptical nature, and for having all my life debunked stories of extrasensory perception, psychic powers like telekinesis and telepathy, and the like. I not only don’t believe in that sort of thing, I don’t believe prayer influences god (that’s impossible, for if he is truly just, he must be totally indifferent – there’s no other logical possibility). What I speak of here is learned, a skill derived from natural, if not normal, human capability.

But for years, also a fact persons who know me will tell you, my sixth sense – be reminded that it’s much more than that, and that I only use the term metaphorically here – has awakened me from deep sleep between two-thirty and three o’clock in the morning. A few nights ago, after years (since 9-11, the government seems to have found better things to do than harass me) of absence, I was awakened by that strange awareness. The feeling is like that I always had while waiting “on deck” at a shiai (tournament) before a judo fight.

Heart racing, then slowing swiftly to near resting level as always before fighting, I can hear as never before, and see instantly without time to adjust to the room’s near pitch-black darkness. I am ready to ready to fight, even an opponent intending to destroy me. This time, though, there was more. In the movie, Star Wars, Obiwan Kenobi tells Luke Skywalker and Han Solo of his sudden awareness of the destruction of the planet Alderaan. “It was as though a million voices suddenly cried out.”

That’s what I felt, and it’s still there every time I relax and listen for it. We’re in real trouble, cataclysmic in proportion. I’ll be fine. You, however, won’t. You won’t because you always know better. Too bad.

“The rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious. The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly... it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”— Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Propaganda Minister

Change is hard; perhaps, for most people, the most difficult of all life choices. When the change is that of a group, a nation, or a culture, it is close to impossible. But we must change.

We must change because in god’s firmament there are things inexorable. You get out of the way or you are crushed. In the same way that an asteroid-sized rock hurtling out of deep space can, and will, blast its way through the thin panoply of atmosphere that protects us, to smash into the planet, and destroy everything where it hits, there are societal, national, and world events hurtling down upon us now, forces unleashed upon us by our own humanity, that cannot be stopped, only evaded. Perhaps.

Neither does that pleonasm of mine make any difference. It doesn’t make any difference who caused it or who is at fault. What is important is that we must change. It doesn’t make any difference, either, what anyone’s opinion of the matter is. When the catastrophe is upon us, it won’t make any difference what anyone there believes, he’ll be crushed like everything else.

And therein, that last, lies part of the reason we’ve come to this sorry pass. Homo Sapiens, U.S. version, has lost many of the evolution-given strengths he once had. In fact, he’s lost the critical one.

Man’s critical strength, the one whereby he came to ascendancy among his fellow life forms, is intellect. The world is a place where the strongest survive, and intellect is the great force multiplier. Among the puniest of god’s creatures where muscle-derived, weapon-equipped defense or attack is concerned, man alone – or at least, primarily – was able to derive means by which to increase many times his ability to survive. Lacking physical parity with things preying upon him, he was smart enough to hide or evade.

In fact, man’s intellect was at times his worst problem. What he came to call science would overtake him, and he would, often sometimes, injure or kill himself. While even that was sometimes hidden from him by certain of the other of his characteristics – acquisitiveness, or concupiscence, for instance – probably nothing made him as aware of his perhaps species-destroying tendency in that regard like what he called the industrial age. He had by this time grown smart enough to recognize the causes of his discomfort, illnesses, and death.

Smart enough to run from fire in quantity like that of the prairie or forest volume, he also learned as industrial volumes of smoke turned to smog, he would typically run away temporarily, or, in the latter case, move away. Intellect, you know.

But just as his acquisitive, concupiscent, and questing nature often found man in his more primitive form intellectually ensnared in a trap of his own making, so did man in his industrially and technologically empowered intelligence paint himself into the proverbial corners. Smarter than his fellow creatures as he is, man isn’t all that smart.

Perhaps a better way to say that is to say that man doesn’t like to think. In fact, I once wrote, man fears thought more than anything else in the world. Thought, after all, is merciless to privilege, to established institutions, and to comfortable opinions. To man’s society and governments, thought is anarchic and lawless; it’s indifferent to authority, and indifferent toward the “wisdom” and religiosity of Man.

The result is that, just as he would have others work for him – slavery seems to come to him as naturally as capitalism, and his fondest desire is to become a tyrant - he would much rather have someone do his thinking for him, too. Unfortunately, especially where his religiosity is concerned, his fear of thinking has a corollary. Man also hates truth, and for all the same reasons he fears thinking.

And, if we define religious as a believing intuitively – i.e., immediately and without ratiocination – and without the possibility of being proven wrong, there are many religions (including, incidentally, atheism). Among his most tenaciously held belief is religion, the result being that he would much rather not think about it.

With every new event of sufficient proportions to become national news (I ignore the obvious exception, which is anything sufficiently lurid or religious to promise a huge viewing audience for the television networks), we see it all acted out and demonstrated. With almost any such event, there are already polarized opinions, and the “debate” on almost any issue resembles exactly that of an argument having to do with religion or any other polemical game where the opponents must not concede.

The bizarre result is that politics has begun to supplant science as a method for determining and defining reality, each and every issue decided not by science or reason, but by popularity – vote of the ignorantly intuitive, easily duped and led masses.

Some years ago a university study provided for kindergarten and first-grade level children in several of the industrialized nations to play the game of tic-tac-toe. Japanese, Chinese, German, Swedish, French, and other nations’ children played for a few minutes, then recognizing the futility of trying to defeat anyone paying attention, became bored, and looked for something else to do.

The U.S. children, however, went on playing resolutely, determined to win. Fights broke out, things were thrown, and furniture overturned. Furious, the children would have rioted, were it not for their ages and the presence of supervisors.

One can see similar behavior everywhere these days, none more frequently than political talk shows now ubiquitous on television. Every new event becomes a political issue, with demagogue politicians at the heart of it all. Nowhere, interestingly and suggestively, does one find a logician, mathematician, statistician, or physicist moderating the invariably nonsense-riddled “discussion” or “debate." Were one to interject proven truth into the programming, there can be little doubt, the entire production would again become news, something the now stultified and stupefied, sensation-craving public wouldn’t watch.

Take, for example, the, hideous events at Virginia Tech a few days ago. Because firearms were involved, two of the loudest sociological factions in our society had begun ginning up their propaganda machines almost before the echoes of the gunfire had faded into quiet. So intuitive and religious is the dialectic that almost anyone familiar with the debate having to do with, for instance, the Darwinism vs. Intelligent Design controversy could use the same script that will be used for the debate concerning gun control. Just substitute names and terms – everything else is pro forma, a specious zero sum game with two parts. Tic-Tac-Toe.

Yet another corollary to the fact of hated thought, and hated truth, is hatred for provable facts. The fact observable by anyone interested enough is that the U.S. public detests any question that has a logical, mathematical, or scientific answer. Atop that is the peculiarly “American” religious dogma holding that we are somehow right about everything. That’s intuitively, of course. Any scientific examination is “un-American,” and ‘traitorous.”

Fascinated with the implications of the Tic-Tac-Toe study, I’ve examined the state of polemical discourse in the nation for more than four years now. For two years before that, I taught in local schools at all levels and participated in scholastic competitions all the way to the state level. Rita, my wife and a teacher of forty years experience at all levels, agrees when I say that “Americans” are losing the ability to think – that is, to reason effectively to a logical conclusion. Problem-solving skills are now at a level lower than either of us has ever seen before, and we find few teachers of long experience who do not agree.

The few who do not agree, interestingly enough, disagree on strictly religious or political grounds. The truth is forbidden by their religious or political creed.

What I learned during my study, among other things, was that the people of the U.S. do not make mistakes. They are never wrong. They are, you see, entitled to their opinion. “Entitled to your opinion,” moreover means they cannot be wrong. And being blessed by constitutional decree with infallibility, of course, means they are right. Everyone else must therefore be wrong. When two people or groups who cannot be wrong are somehow opposed by societal vicissitude, the obvious occurs – the Tic-Tac-Toe, Little League brawl.

Time and again – all but invariably – persons faced with incontrovertible and categorical disproof of their contention became verbally abusive. One gentleman, arguing the atheist position in that debate insisted that my proof of the existence of a creator (whether god is a matter of definition), was “circular.” How was that? I asked. Unable to demonstrate his (entirely intuitive) contention, the man resorted to a string of nasty insults (not only that, he then eventually accused me of insulting him). When, in my studied (don’t forget, this was a carefully constructed research project) manner, I took argument after argument promulgated by one debating adversary after another apart with incontrovertible mathematical, logical or scientific proof, the result was not concession, but rage.

Tic-Tac-Toe rage, you might laughingly call it – except it’s not funny.

The loss of intellect, the intellect that I contend, like the ascendancy of man over the rest of nature made the Land of the Free ascendant over the nations of the world, is not funny. What I’ve discovered is nothing less than the fact that the primary reason for our distress today as a nation is loss of intellect, the “dumbing down” of the society and nation.
.
Fully one-third of the persons I interviewed during a safari across the length and breadth of the U.S. could not construct and parse a simple sentence, and forty percent could not understand or solve even simple logical propositions. Six percent of those questioned could do even the simplest algebra. If I heard once the expression “I was never good at math,” I heard it five hundred times.

Repeatedly – sixty percent of the time – adult people could not solve simple verbal conundrums, not even classical ones part of societal lore during my childhood and adolescent years. One person in one hundred could in his head and without calculator or paper and pen correctly add a column of ten two digit numbers. Repeatedly, among strings of one hundred people, not one could do simple multiplication or division in his head, and among the same people, only seven in one hundred could so much as identify calculus.

Why do we care? Findings like these from my personal research are important to understanding of the effect of public stupidity on critical public debate of issues like that having to do, for instance, with the struggle between illegal aliens and the U.S. citizen their influx defrauds. The matter is one reducible by rather simple mathematics and logic, yet intuitive and emotional argument will likely decide it to the nation’s detriment, possibly - probably - crippling. And the issue is but one of dozens of similar weight.

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, asserted Thomas Jefferson, “it expects what never was and never will be.” We care because like the essential strength of society, especially ours, is the essential strength of the individual, intellect – the ability to think effectively on our own behalf. Without it, we are reduced to dependent servitude – slavery. More, we will almost certainly not endure as a nation.

We can’t operate a democracy like a game of Tic-Tac-Toe.

That - in case you're forgotten - is the flag of the U.S., being flown upside down and under the flag of Mexico on the campus of a high school in Montebello, CA; and as far as I have been able to determine, not one "American" lifted a finger in its defense.

“Truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” --Max Planck, Physicist

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” --George Orwell

“Hell is truth seen too late. --Thomas Hobbes, Writer

Ladies, perhaps you ought cover your ears and avert your eyes – leave the room, even. What I’m about to say will be difficult for me, a gentleman with deep respect for the fair sex, otherwise.

There. Now, gentlemen, let’s get a few things straight:

Every time I say anything in response to one of those “Support Our Troops” articles, I draw a veritable barrage of foul-mouthed and scatological invective, bellowing and bloviating bullshit nonsense that brands precisely and incontrovertibly the individuals who so respond. “What you are,” observed Emerson, “thunders so loudly that I can’t hear what you say to the contrary.” I, gentlemen, am a man and quoting my grandfather, another man, know you wouldn't make a pimple on a man's ass. 'Kay?

More, a number of you asseverate with apparent dead-certain confidence that the subject entitles you to ignore the truth. You say so. As several have put it, “My country, right or wrong.”

Swell. As someone else - Samuel Johnson, I think – long ago observed, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

I might also observe that as a U.S. Senator once wrote, the first casualty when war comes is the truth.

“My country, right or wrong,” of course, is exactly how Germans defended themselves against the truth after World War Two. The “German Excuse” was heard again and again at Nuremburg, from the lowest of the low of war criminals. So let me set those of you who so proudly trumpet your paltry patriotism in German Excuse form that it has never been either a matter for pride nor an excuse, and it will never be.

As I said in an earlier essay here in discussing torture, anyone who tortures another human being is a monster, one I will not suffer to live in my world. Nothing but the fact that he is a torturer matters. Nothing. And, yes, to “Mel in Michigan,” if I were to come upon an “American Soldier” in the act of “torturing an Arab,” I would, indeed, shoot that soldier. I would do it with satisfaction, and I would shoot the miscreant son of a bitch in the brain stem, the shot that kills instantaneously - that the better to have no more to do with him. He is, for one thing and in the very first place, NOT an “American Soldier.” He is a criminal rogue, having set himself apart from and dishonored the nation he serves and all it stands for, the uniform he wears. and everyone else who wears it.

That last goes for anyone who orders or condones torture, up to and including the president of the United States. Remember that I said “were I to come upon” the individual in the act of torturing someone. Few crimes rank lower on the scale of things despicable in my book – or, for that matter, that of human kind. Next, and to deal with another of the arguments hurled from the petty and pusillanimous patriot wing of our political discourse, the end never justifies the means. Never – never, never, NEVER!

Where the President of the United States in his condonation, even ordering, of torture is concerned, I will content myself with doing everything in my power to see that he is first impeached, then brought to justice. That our president is a war criminal is a fact made evident from his own statements and behavior. That he claims by virtue of his office to be empowered to torture people – to say nothing of prosecute an illegal war – is not justification under any law including that which he publicly flaunts by virtue of political power rather than legal right. Were he anyone else, his best defense under these circumstances would be that of diminished capacity or insanity. Facts, gentleman – not opinion.

Having said all that, I’ll also say that I have earned the right to say what I say here about soldiers and about our attack upon and occupation of Iraq. I know, too, that I am justified on those same grounds when I wonder how the hell the likes of my recent detractors - to say nothing of the list of right-wing radio and television wannabes already posted here - all of whom betray by their ignorance of things military, tactical, and strategic that they have never so much as worn the uniform of their country, much less faced a lethal weapon on her behalf.

Where the hell do you wimp wannabes come off?!

Calm down a little, Hal. Okay! Next comes the question – if another marshmallow male metrosexual uses the word “issue,” I’ll barf – of “support.” How in the hideous hell do you dare say that support for the president who is sending them back for second and third tours in the hell-hole he and his Bush League Administration have made in Iraq, who has caused Air Force personnel to begin training for use in ground combat and two dozen more things as mentally meandering and mindless, is support for our troops?

With support from people like you, who the hell needs enemies?!

I’m still shaking my head inwardly at the stupefying chutzpah of your soul mate, Sean Hannity the other night when he berated Al Gore demanding to know why the latter wasn’t “practicing what he preaches” were global warming and pollution of the atmosphere are concerned. “Well, Mr. Hannity,” I asked the television screen, “when do you ship out for combat in Iraq?”

So, “Mel in Michigan” and the rest, when are you signing up? If you’re so all-fired determined to “support our troops,” why aren’t you in uniform?” Or does your “support” just run to loud-mouthing anyone who doesn’t support your hero, George the Seventh. You remind me for all the world of all those flag-waving, “united we stand,” patriots in the immediate aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center, the same people who can be counted on to thunder so indignantly whenever the flag-burning issue comes up. As I rode my bike around town in those days, I came upon flag after flag having been blown from cars to be left lying in the gutter. I saw it happen several times, matter of fact. Not once did any of these flag-waving, flag-loving patriots stop to rescue “Old Glory” from the gutter, and not once did I see anyone searching for a flag they had discovered losing.

That’s not all, either. Repeatedly after 9-11, from Corpus Christi, Texas to San Diego, California, I watched “Americans” walk right by without picking up flags they saw lying on the ground or in the gutter. Twice, I watched a flag flutter from a passing car to land on the street, that while passersby looked, watched, and then kept walking. Patriots, my red, white, and blue ass!

The truth is that you just talk, isn’t it?! You wouldn’t actually so much as bend over and pick up a flag lying in the gutter because it might soil your lily-white fingers, dirty your manicure, or cause disarray of your beauty-parlor hairdo. The only shots you fire are the ones you can take verbally and from the safety of anonymity and distance, and the only missiles you launch are those you launch in the form of e-mail.

Who the hell do you think you’re kidding?! You got your military training by DVD, TV, or the local movie theater, dincha . . .?

The plain fact is, you haven’t got the balls to really support anybody – let alone troops in combat. NO? Then do what will really does do our troops in Iraq some good. Demand, start writing letters – that, I notice is something you do with real patriotic fervor – to U.S. Congressmen, Senators, the President, and anyone else you can think of (the media, too – they’re in on this), that the nation and its president do everything necessary to win (and, unlike anyone else to date including yourselves, readers here will remember, I have stated exactly what that means) or withdraw.

That’s it. War, more perhaps than any other endeavor (and, perhaps, another reason you obviously don’t qualify to comment concerning it), is a moral question. No one has the right to declare, prosecute, or support a war he doesn’t intend to win. More, to be moral, war must at very least be prosecuted in a manner most likely to end it as soon as possible. This “war” – under our system of law, a war must be declared and supported by the public – is by international law, and by every moral code and system observed and professed by civilization since the middle ages, categorically, point by point, article by article, wrong!

As I’ve already, too, stated here, if you don’t have the cojones killing requires, don’t get in a war.

More and finally, and even for those like you who seem to know utterly nothing of ethics or moral honor, the attack upon Iraq was – and is - incredibly stupid, both as a tactical and strategic matter and as common sense. In the latter consideration, it is obviously so. What kind of fool, having received anonymous threats over the phone or by computer, and having had his car sabotaged by yet another unknown someone, would use that for a reason to begin shooting at a neighbor, his family, or his house because he’d learned that the neighbor was suspected of abusing his wife and kids?

Even if the caller identified himself as the member of a local - or distant, for that matter – group, and evidence was found suggesting that someone from that group had sabotaged the car, how would discovery that the neighbor sympathized or agreed with the suspect group justify an armed attack on the neighbor’s house? That’s insane, and - even granted that this is a nation’s behavior, and as Nietzsche once observed, “Insanity in individuals is something rare, but in groups, parties, nations and epochs it is the rule” – it is still nuts.

There is, in point of sober fact, no possible way to logically, morally, or historically justify the United States’ attack on Iraq. None! Try, in that regard, to imagine defending yourself in a court of law – try, in other words, to find an attorney who would advise an attempt to make an affirmative defense – once you had attacked your neighbor under the circumstances I’ve just described.

Neither is any of this a matter of opinion. Truth isn’t decided by politics and politically. Inasmuch as it cannot be denied – having been argued and promulgated almost daily since it began - that this war was undertaken intending at very least to do what history stubbornly reveals must be equivalent to altering significantly the religious faith of twenty-two million Moslems, Operation Iraqi Freedom was an idiot’s blunder, a Charge of the Light Brigade that may yet prove to be a Little Bighorn.

And no historian has ever been deemed to have condemned by his report of those incidents the soldiers who participated. While history definitely – most definitely - decries the stupidity of those who issued the order to charge, “Never ours the reason why, only ours to do or die,” in no way contemns the men who did so. In Laos, 1968, there was a word for you guys – “downtowner.” In ‘Nam, throughout the fighting, there was another, this one an acronym. “REMF.” Google it!

Somebody go get the ladies. If I have to be among a bunch of pussies, at least they ought to be pretty.

THE MONGOOSE TRICK OPINION PAGE

I hope that everyone who reads this will pause in his thoughts to think momentarily and - if you do that, pray - for the the people of Blacksburg, VA and Virginia Tech University. If for no other reason, and for just that long, it will make you a better person.



This, of course, will be about the latest tragedy brought about by our governmental, national, and societal unpreparedness, that of Virginia Tech and the man named Cho Seung-Hui. The fact of that matter would be bad enough, were it not for the fact of what it demonstrates and portends.

Thirty-three people died for reasons among which are the same reasons the infamous 9-11 disaster, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and more were permitted, even caused, to occur. I said “unprepared,” and that’s certainly part of it; but there is more, much more. I propose to speak as an expert here, and aware the U.S. is beset everywhere and as never before with the blathering nonsense of supposed experts, I need first to present credentials.

First, it was I who first – 1958 – advocated and argued for the establishment of what would become known as SWAT teams. As my friends have heard me relate, the idea was met with angry scorn – an associate professor at the University of Iowa once termed it “lunacy” – and it wasn’t until a demented man named Whitman got up on the tower at the University of Texas and started shooting people that anyone was willing to bring it up again.

By co-incidence and my having been a Police Science and Criminology student of a professor named Stuart Holcomb at Iowa, I had reprised my paper only a few months before. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until the sniper in the tower in Texas that anyone decided to listen.

Therein, you may have noticed, lies the first of many things which constitute our weakness, a weakness that may bring a swift end to our nation. Until a man with a Ph.D. had awarded his papal nihil obstat and imprimatur to the idea first dubbed – and that derisively – the Mongoose Tactic, it lay fallow. “Lunacy,” in other words.

Let me put this first of the several causes for our nationally spastic state another way: If Albert Einstein were to offer to teach physics in a U.S. High School today, he would not be permitted. Among the greatest physicists in history, he would not be “qualified” legally. The same is true of Thomas Edison and electricity, or Ted Williams on hitting a pitched baseball. While experts half-baked by scholastic degrees masquerade everywhere as the real thing, experts I have for years exposed in minutes, sometimes seconds, as charlatans with sheepskins, William Butler Hickok – better known as Wild Bill Hickok – wouldn’t be “qualified” to teach a Police Science course in Practical Pistol Shooting (formerly the name of a police training course comical in its irrelevance to what it purported to do).

How is it that on a university campus like that of Virginia Tech, with all those degreed great minds, things were obviously so poorly prepared? How is it that when Hurricane Katrina struck, the city of New Orleans, its intellectuals and “leaders” were caught totally unprepared? How about that monument to unpreparedness, the World Trade Center and its “Dog That Didn’t Bark?”

But I digress as I often do. Returning to the reasons anyone should listen to what I say on the subject, I note that I first became a student of defense against violence while still a boy and the victim of bullies. Don’t laugh – you will only demonstrate what I said a minute ago, that people ignorant of things have no way to know of their ignorance. In its essential character, the attack on Virginia Tech University was that of a bully upon his victim. Predators of all kinds, bullies, terrorists, and berserkers like Cho, all have something essential in common. They are – and whether their attack identifies them for the first time or the fiftieth (this is the U.S. you know – largely the only place where that sort of thing is possible) – attackers.

Nothing else matters. The attack must be stopped, and all considerations otherwise are pointless. More, they contribute to the unpreparedness that invariably becomes a force-multiplier for the assailant.

The first sentence of the paper I wrote for Lieutenant General Thomas Hickey and later for Professor Stuart Holcomb was, “The only way to deal with a man with a gun is with a man who is better with a gun.” “Better” means many things, beginning with the educational maturation necessary. Being a gunfighter is not a college course. A Ph.D. education wouldn’t get the prospective gunfighter over the first hurdle, which is the training necessary to produce the icy calm in the presence of lethal danger characteristic of men who fight well with firearms.

Seventy now, I won my first gunfight at twenty, and easily against three men, because they were not only poorly prepared – being only Soviet Spetsnaz soldiers – they were certain that they were gunfighters. All three were dead before the body of the first man killed had reached the ground. Why do I bother with the apparent boast? Because the reader will have already decided that speed and accuracy are the sine qua non of CQB – “Close Quarters Battle” - thus demonstrating yet another fault in the nation’s preparedness to do battle, that of flawed ideation and unreasonable expectations born of societal and cultural influences..

Tempted to say you and your “leaders” watch too many movies and too much TV, I won’t. But think about it as I continue here, anyway. In the movie “The Shootist,” John Wayne, in the role of J.S. Books, answers an admiring boy’s question with the remark, “It’s not who’s fastest, it’s not even who’s the best shot – it’s who’s willing.”

A few days ago, and before the horror at Virginia Tech, I entitled my essay, “If you don’t mean to kill, don’t fight with guns.” That was before Mr. Cho had done his hideous deed at Virginia Tech, and my essay was about the nation and the massacre its unpreparedness for war is causing in Iraq. Get the point?

No, probably not. Probably not, because you are an inhabitant and citizen of a nation become effeminate and unable to be decisive until the “issue” – look up and consider the original meaning of the word – has been discussed at length satisfying the distaff side of the populace. With much more, actually, to be discussed concerning the making of a gunfighter and those who will join the Fifth Profession (look that up, too – on the way to finding it, you’ll learn much of benefit to us all), I come to the heart of the matter in question here.

Let’s consider any incident like this one, that at Columbine High School or elsewhere – a sort of generic scenario. You’ll recognize this one as the news of
Virginia Tech unfolds (I’ve listened to so many of these, I know the effect of the de rigueur media orientation of the script for the edification of female viewers and their interests, coupled with the dictates of Operation Mockingbird and federally prescribed formatting).

In the archetypical scenario, the killer bully begins his rampage, the police are called, and begin arriving at the scene. That’s the one reported by the first caller or, even, subsequent callers. Like Civil Defense and other “best laid plans of mice and men,” the planning and training, supposed or otherwise, begins to unravel right there. As German General Helmuth Graf von Moltke once observed, “No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.” Worse, of course, the plan quickly begins to eviscerate the organization essential to confrontations with a killer – potential of otherwise – armed with a lethal weapon.

Female dominated societies, however, demand planning, planning for outcomes approved by the female character and mind.

Once arrived at the scene, the police do everything training and planning dictates, things like set up a cordon around the building, preparation for hostage negotiation, et cetera, in order to begin all the machinations society dominated now by feminist concepts and ideals demand. So trained, they do this whatever the situation.

I know what you’re thinking. Save it. While an insurance company investigator, I investigated literally dozens of these affairs, besides reviewing hundred of case histories and video recordings of police sieges and shoot-outs. An individual tends – and in a fashion that becomes in the psychologically unprepared and inadequately trained individual dominating – to do what he has trained to do. The most salient example of such in my experience is the Maryland Trooper who carefully saved the brass from his revolver during a gunfight with two or three (over the years, I’ve forgotten) shotgun-armed assailants, having stood each spent cartridge neatly on the bumper of the car he crouched behind as he removed it from his weapon; reloading and with three rounds back in the cylinder, he died from the point-blank shotgun blast of an attacker approaching him alongside the vehicle.

With death approaching and very near, he did resolutely what he had practiced to do – i.e., made a habit – for years.

In the Virginia Tech incident, officers arrived and set up their cordon as they listened to the shooting occurring in the building before them. As they assembled and “obtained intelligence” (i.e., learned what was happening). shooting inside Norris Hall continued.

Now, consider: Inside that building somebody with a gun was killing people. This has happened again and again over the years, even since organization in 1967 of the first SWAT teams. The police show up, and go through their organized and practiced operation. Inside the building while they are doing that, people are being killed. The officers can hear it, and unless in this instance they thought the shooter was target shooting with paper cups or the like, they knew what it meant.

There is a corollary to all this, one that, knowing the opprobrium it will incur, I wish I didn’t have to point out. If the men on Flight Ninety-Three on September 11, 2001 had reacted immediately it is highly unlikely that the plane would have crashed. Few, perhaps even no, innocent lives would have been lost.

I can hear the howls – “lunacy,” again. Well, having studied these matters all my life and perhaps in greater detail than anyone else, ever, I not only know that what I’ve just said is correct, I know what went on that day in that airliner. I know because it goes on everyday in the society and nation around me. Day after day, I hear it demanded by the feminist and humanist liberal, and broadcast by the media who sycophantly serves their deleterious and indecisive deliberation on every such issue. I know, therefore, that before the men who attacked the hijackers that day on Flight Ninety-Three would have launched their heroic counter-attack, they had – at least to the extent of their keeping out of the way and quiet - to obtain the cooperation of the rest of the passengers. If you know anything about the history of our society and nation over the past several decades, if you’ve listened to the news, you’re ahead of me. You know what all the women and some of the men on board that airliner would have done when confronted with the idea of attacking the hijackers, and you can imagine the dithering and deleterious discussion that would have been necessary.

You know what happened on board Flight Ninety-Three.

And knowing that, you know, too, the reason we find ourselves in the utterly asinine and feckless mess in which we find ourselves today in Iraq. If you’ve read elsewhere on the Mongoose Trick Opinion Page, you also know that “If you don’t mean to kill, don’t fight with guns.”

If you know all that, you also know the reason that today, with our Vice-President assuring us that when the war in Iraq has been concluded (not quite the way he put it – but there’s no way around the fact of it), and with “terrorism there following us home,” the border with Mexico remains open to illegal immigration. Our government, in short, has the decision-making ability of a brick.

There is yet another consideration to be made here, one that may elucidate even more. In incident after incident, police officers in this country have stood and shot unarmed, even innocent people (I wrote about the forty thousand such incidents, and that involving Dr. Sal Culosi a short time ago). The officers, trained to shoot until their would-be or imagined assailant is motionless or they are out of ammunition, do just that. Training, again. In other instances, often recorded by television before governmental crack-downs on such were put in place, police beat the hell out of “subjects” lying helpless on the ground, subjects often outnumbered by as many as six to one.

Training again; “beat him until he is no longer a threat,” in other words.

By contrast, during the seven years I worked as a uniformed police officer, and the seventeen years I worked as a professional bodyguard, I disarmed armed men several times (so many, as a matter of fact, that one police captain back home remarked one night that every time we happened to meet, I handed him a gun I had just taken from someone). I repeatedly overcame resisted arrest, several times against multiple persons, twice by professional football players and once by a bodybuilder biker, all of whom outweighed me by as much as ninety pounds. I never injured a single arrestee, and I never once used mace, pepper spray, or club, refusing, as a matter of fact, to carry any of the three.

None of these arrests would have been brought to the successful – and by “successful,” I mean that no one was injured - conclusion they were, had I proceeded the way law enforcement in the U.S. does or used the tactical doctrines our government and military uses in Iraq.

The difference? A skilled and properly matured expert in CQB is decisively unhesitating. To be decisive, the gunfighter must first know that he is capable of what he is about to do. He must be certain of what he is doing and the necessity for it. He must, in short know that he is morally right. And because of all this, the member of the Fifty Profession must make the decision himself. It cannot be made for him.

And, there you have it. The contract between bodyguard and his client is just that, a meeting of minds and agreement that includes the understanding that once what the contract envisions has occurred, the relationship of gunfighter and client changes completely, totally. Any deliberation resulting in hesitance will almost without exception cost lives, possibly that of the client.

Still, nevertheless, if I had a dollar for every time I was accused of precipitous and immature action by the public and its democratically and effeminately cautious governments, those who invariably want to discuss and reach consensus before acting, I could toast my successes over the decades with the best Scotch whisky known to man. In short, the first officer on scene at the Norris Building should have entered the building any way possible, by blasting though doors – even walls – with a vehicle. He should have done whatever was required to close with the individual now his enemy.

Police officers, you see, must be the public’s husband and bodyguard, and like any husband of wife and family, must be prepared to risk, even lose, their lives in order to protect their charges. The same is true of persons who seek and obtain higher public office. The “public servants” of government, police officers, bodyguards, and husbands, follow whether they know it or not, whether they like it or not, the Fifth Profession and the Samurai code of Bushido.

That’s the commitment; it has always been so, and anyone who isn’t willing to follow that code is honor bound to step aside, and find another profession. There’s the rub, isn’t it – “honor bound.”