Of course, we’ve all heard that Captain America is dead. R.I.P., "Cap."

Captain America has been dead for some time now, actually. You do remember what he once stood for, don’t you? The “Spirit of America?” “Truth, Justice, and the American Way?” An “America” who battled the Nazi and the “Jap,” and went like the Lone Ranger to the aid of other nations?

Captain America has been dead in the minds of the world for some time now. But now he’s dead in the comic books, too.

In the comic book story, it was a sniper; here in the real world it has been neo-conservatism and its miscreant progeny. Born in 1941, the comic book Captain America did not interfere and dictate to other nations. He did not invade, seize the head of a foreign government in order to kidnap and bring him here for trial and imprisonment under our laws, nor did “Cap” set up drum-head trials in the hapless nation in order to execute their head of state, either. Old-fashioned honorable and incorruptible, comic-book heroes like Captain America didn’t condone and support things like Schools of the Americas, establishment of secret prisons in foreign countries, or parking nuclear aircraft carrier battle groups off their shores each time they misbehaved where our “interests” are concerned.

Captain America didn’t torture prisoners, in order to obtain “critical intelligence.”

No, Captain America is dead all right – dead long ago. But even the comic book version is also a product of, encapsulated in, the workings of the real world, you know. He’ll be back. The “Cap” will be back when it’s profitable for Marvel Comics. After all, the miracle of resurrection requires only that the cartoonist draw the costumed, shield-carrying hero again.

And he’ll be back in the real world, too. Oh, drawing the hero resurrected will require some effort, things like “plausible denial,” “limited hangout,“ and other “damage control” devices. This is a post-CIA Operation Mockingbird world, don’t forget. “Deception,” a former CIA Director of Counter-Intelligence once observed, is a state of mind; it is also the mind of the state.”

Don’t forget, either, the real “issue.” In the real world, what killed the Captain America was his insanely addicted desire for corporate profit. Being rescued by a super-hero who then demands your wallet lacks something of the comic book story. Do you really think we’d be in Iraq (or anywhere else), were it to cost corporations like Halliburton rather than enrich them? Would we be brandishing the mailed fist of nuclear carrier battle groups and torturing people, were there no profit in it? Sure we would. So resurrection of Captain America, corporate-style, will take some real economic and diplomatic legerdemain.

But we’re up to it. For a capitalist, addiction to money is as powerful a motive as there is. It’s the only reason for life, in fact – his or his victim’s.

Yeah, we’ll try to draw the character again. We did very well with the old one. Very profitable. We’ll use those “plausible denial, “limited hangout,” “damage control” colored pencils, and voila! Captain America will be back. A new alter ego like the lamented Steve Rogers will don the red, white, and blue costume, take up the shield, and sally forth. And “Americans” – the modern, U.S. version, that is – will buy it just like always (well, hell - try to imagine anything the public in this country won’t buy; a short – very short - review of recent events should convince you of that).

Yes, selling the new Captain America to the rest of the world will, indeed, take some doing. The rest of the world has already seen one change of the alter ego inevitable where super heroes are concerned. They know the hero behind the Mighty Wurlitzer and its Mockingbird program costume and shield of “Cap” isn’t a Steve Rogers. This guy works for Halliburton. His object isn’t “truth, justice, and the American way,” it’s the bottom line.

This guy’s shield isn’t the Vibranium-Adimantium alloy of that wielded by Captain America, its corporate law firms. This “masked crusader” doesn’t bother to master boxing and judo, he lobbies congress and the state legislatures and practices tactics like the Pinto Rule (remember? – let the victims of your mistakes die, because the cost of the lawsuit settlements will be less than the cost of correcting the mistake?) This guy’s athletic muscle is tons and tons of money.

And the world isn’t into meeting this Captain America head on in conventional combat, either. As I once (1958) asserted during a conversation with General Tom Van Natta, no one would try to stand up to a U.S. with all its military muscle. Who can match our fifteen trillion dollar military? Neither are today’s “Red Skull” adversaries “into” trying to penetrate the shield that is our nuclear missile submarines, either. But we won’t give them a choice, I said all those years ago. We’re a capitalist country, and that’s not capitalism.

Nope, I said, their only choice would be the “death of a thousand” cuts, or guerrilla war (1958, and a second john lieutenant knew it then – what does that tell you about the public and what it will believe?). In the fatal issue of Marvel Comics, Captain America is killed by a sniper, someone shooting from the cover that is the modern version of impenetrable jungle, the city. Guerrilla war. The only way to deal with a super hero gone bad.

So, Captain America is dead. The comic books had to tell you?

Meanwhile, back in the real world, where reality resembles the comic books more than they do reality, an illegal alien woman from Mexico caught availing herself of college tuition grants and a dozen more programs intended for our people doesn’t think she has done anything wrong (!). She has millions of similarly illegal aliens supporting her, too, and threatening to use the power of the vote to legalize her theft. “’Splain dat one, Luci.”

You thought I jested about comic book reality? Recently, school boards have begun announcing their intentions to hire illegal Mexican aliens as teachers in order to educate bi-lingually the children of illegal aliens attending our schools. Surreal? How about this: our president is in Brazil negotiating with the government there in order to assure that Brazilians will be able to undercut our own farmers in the U.S. market for bio-fuels. Does anyone remember the definition of “treason?” How about “capitalism?”

It gets even more bizarre. Elsewhere in the news, a pizza store owner who has announced acceptance of Mexican pesos (presumably, he’s found a bank here or in Mexico to help him) personifies the truth of the illegal immigration debate. Pizza Patrón founder Antonio Swad says right in our Anglo faces that it’s about profit, “not a political statement.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

”You really don’t see the parallel “Pizza for Pesos” draws with the reason we’re in Iraq?

Take away the profit, what do you think would happen? Well, try to imagine the super hero Captain America selling pizzas. The corporate one will sell anything. While you’re thinking about what killed Captain America, here are a few more: The people who guard you while you sleep, prevent terrorists from boarding airliners (unless they happen to scream “racial profiling” or the like), and do “security” work not only get minimum wage, but many or them are aliens (“work Americans don’t want to do,”) you know.

Parenthetically, the better to make the point, a true story: during my travail under criminal assault at the hands of the “Nation of Laws,” I worked several times for security guard companies. Having within a short interval at one such cohort been obliged several times to defend myself against violence at the hands of would-be perpetrators of crime against the premises and property I was guarding, I asked why it was that I seemed to be the only member of the guard contingent who seemed to have so much trouble.

“Well,” the captain confided, “you’re the only one who actually protects the places you guard. You don’t expect the old farts, women, and fat people we hire to risk their necks for minimum wage, do you?”

To my flabbergasted reaction, he confided further that his company just paid the cost of whatever was damaged or stolen as a result of the guards’ cowardice or sleeping on duty (the Pinto Rule, again?), the better to keep the contract and client. If the security company kept overhead – including, I assume, wages – down they made a profit.

The people who protect you from your enemies are not Captain America, in other words. He didn’t used to work for pay, remember?

Did I say surreal? Comic-book? Last night, obviously expecting attentive consideration from her audience, a magnificently coiffured woman wearing pearls and garbed in a manner costing at least the monthly salary of a private soldier in Iraq held forth authoritatively about what U.S. policy and tactics in Iraq should be. Her opposition in the supposed debate was even more of everything theatrically meretricious, her greatest assets where reason to persist in watching is concerned being heroically-proportioned mammaries.

G.I. Jane doesn’t even bother to wear the costume any more.

Meanwhile, turning the pages of the comic book that our electronic and print media have become, we come to the massive, “plausible denial,” limited hangout,” effort that is the latest Veterans Administration revelation. The latest edition of Media Marvelous Comics has it that the Captain America super heroes of the U.S. Congress really care about the minimum wage soldiers they sacrifice on the altar of their god, capitalism.

Several scripts for the Operation Mockingbird drama are being considered (currently, the Goebbelsian strategy is to avail our superheroes of the super speeds provided them by technology in order to test alternatives). Which will prove most effective in mesmerizing the hapless, stunned and stolid, brother to the ox, herd represented by the voters? There is little doubt, state of the art what it is, that the “limited hangout” – in this case a scapegoat – will be most effective. The public has sucked this one up repeatedly – it should work again. Ostensibly (you don’t really think anybody get fired, do you?) someone is found to be at fault, shifted to another six figure salaried job – and the story falls out of the news. “The system works.”

Lord!

By the way – you don’t see the parallel between Building Eighteen at Walter Reed and that of the forty million poor in the U.S. and the portrait of the nation being promulgated by the media? REALLY?

You don’t see a parallel between the story of the guard company and that of the nation’s government bureaucracy? Really? You don’t recognize that a person devoid of any skills (or one having been totally deprived by the system of assets and recorded qualifications having to do with employability) will do nothing to jeopardize his job and put his salary at risk? Phenomenal!

Go back and consider, now that it has been discussed again and again, the World Trade Center debacle. See if you can still think that way. See if you can imagine Captain America having behaved as the various persons must have.

It goes on an on, as one might expect of an equation or system as big as a nation and culture. Consider along the way the peculiar form of entertainment known as “rap music.” Try, if you will, to imagine music or entertainment reduced to a more fundamental and/or primitive state. In this cultural embarrassment, particularly for the Afro-American communities, nothing remains of civilized music except rhythm. There is no melodious sound or tone, nothing of musical instrumentation or related artistry, nothing but emotionally scatological smart-mouth. This is the stuff of aboriginal proto-intellect and consciousness awakening. If it's Captain America, it's the great man with a bone in his nose.

At that, the resemblance to the bloviating bilge of today’s political punditry can’t be mistaken. That never occurs to you – really? Amazing!

Finally, speaking of “rapping” diatribe and oratorical hyper-nonsense, we have the totally surreal, comic-book spectacle – fully aware of her purpose, I use the term anyway – of the strange woman named Ann Coulter. The appeal to the intellect of Coulter’s tawdry blabber is about what her physique would be to prurient interests, were she to stoop so low – and, given her previous remarks, she may – as to disrobe on television. Trust me, Ann – stay in costume, even if it’s one of Captain America's Femizons. "Nightshade," for instance.

Ann Coulter personifies radical capitalist neo-conservatism, the George W. Bush Administration, and the very ugliest of what we have become - utterly nothing left of heroic America. In that, I think, she does us a favor. An idealist always looking for something good to say about even people of the most reprehensible behavior, I can’t help wondering if that isn’t what she has in mind. Like Sean Hannity and Michael Savage, her male counterparts in the FoxNews-genre electronic info-tainment media, this shrewish, vicious virago simply can’t be for real. She has to be yet another comic-book villainess. Poison Ivy, for instance; no, that was Batman, wasn't it?. Whatever.

The Spirit of America and Ann Coulter, after all, are Captain America and the Femizons. You can’t be more diametrical.

Yeah, year, YEAH!

There is simply, absolutely NO REASON for an "accident" with a gun in the hands of a SWAT team member. NO ONE who is not an expert should be the member of a SWAT team, and experts do not put their finger on the trigger of a firearm until they mean to kill something. Or somebody. They don't put it in the trigger housing or guard. PERIOD.

There's more, and since I'm going to put it on my shooting page here as instruction, I'll include it here, too. The behavior and methods I see everywhere these days where SWAT is concerned - and I speak of both the movies and the professional versions - are clownish. The civilians aren't alone, either. Watch the videos from Iraq and Afghanistan and count the number of times you see a soldier with his rifle shouldered and finger on the trigger, the weapon pointed directly and at point blank range at another soldier.

Taught to walk forward (or, for that matter, backward) with the weapon in front of their faces, I can only wonder how many are wounded or killed by a mere stumble, by being jostled, or by being startled. I wonder how many times the same posture gets somebody killed from a ditch or low place he can't see, too. It will suffice to say that seldom - if I say "never," some loon will write to ask about ricochets - is anything or anyone ever shot by a weapon that isn't pointed at him. I realize that instructors teaching policemen and soldiers these days are often faced with teaching young men and women who have never fired a shot in their lives, but every human endeavor has fundamentals.

And, yes, I know what I've just done. So tell me this: why do you think the training our troops are getting is any better than the care they get once they've gone to war and come home all shot to hell and maimed?

Experts who are moral do not walk around with a loaded weapon shouldered or raised, certainly not with a finger in the trigger guard. An individual in that state is pointed death everywhere he looks, and things like what happened to Dr. Salvatore Culosi are too damned often the result.

When I wrote, in 1958, the first paper on "The Mongoose Trick" - i.e., SWAT - I said that to accomplish its goal, to kill an armed hostage-taker before he could kill his hostage, required a top gun. At the time, I demonstrated what I meant. In 1966, when as a student of University of Iowa Professor Stuart Holcomb I reprised my paper, I went further, to state the criteria by which to judge fitness for SWAT. That was simply the fact of having fired 50,000 rounds of ammunition (roughly, five-hundred rounds a week for two years), plus the ability to shoot a thrown golf ball out of the air nine times out of ten, having drawn the weapon being used in less than two-fifths second. A lot of people won't be able to do the latter, even having done the former. With extremely few exceptions, to be a competent gunfighter means that one must have spent at least fifteen years around and routinely handling guns.

There are, by way of elucidation, far fewer people capable of The Mongoose Trick than there are capable of playing the major professional sports. And this isn't a god-damned game.

I note that Dr. Salvatore Culosi's death took place fourteen years after the Branch Davidian slaughter at Waco, Texas. Experts investigating that particular atrocity expressed astonishment at the fact that no one there or at Ruby Ridge, Idaho a short time before (where an FBI SWAT team killed an unarmed woman holding a baby) thought they had done anything wrong (!). In my mind, it's no mere co-incidence that many of the same people were involved.

I'm sorry, but I can't help equating all of these things. The utter nonsense of turning an emotionally immature, poorly-trained warrior wannabe loose with automatic weapons, high-powered handguns, and SWAT gear and that of turning a George W. Bush loose with the U.S. military are similar folly to me. In my mind, Ruby Ridge, Waco, and the national disaster of Iraq are causally related. They're related to the death of Dr. Culosi, too. More, in fact, the incidents are not unlike the way we have loosed upon the public the Internal Revenue Service, still another Congressional Frankenstein Monster with the power to destroy.

Of course, one shouldn't be surprised. We also turn loose with the power to make law and of oversight of our most powerful weapons people of the lowest possible character and ability, the greediest and most power-addicted among us. These things all relate, as I said. They're a sociological syndrome, a "complex." They relate, too, to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and matters, to the raging monster that is indifference everywhere in our society. While corporations pay CEOs and their like multi-million dollar incomes, there are forty million poor in the Land of the Fee, and black citizens get far less consideration and concern from their government than do illegal aliens.

As Diego de la Vega said in the movie, the nobility never look directly at a servant.

At the beginning of the novel Jonatha’s Truth, a young woman’s family is assaulted and annihilated by a federal SWAT team acting upon FBI records falsified by an IRS official bent upon retaliating against a taxpayer who has thwarted collection efforts. When Jonatha serendipitously escapes, she is pursued relentlessly and with implacable single-mindedness by FBI officials, who, even when they have discovered the truth, remain intent upon covering up what has happened and all it portends.

Fantastic? Just a novel? No, it happens again and again in the Land of the Free. Since 1995, as a matter of fact, “there have been at least 292 botched SWAT raids–where, for example, an innocent person or nonviolent offender was killed or there was a ‘wrong address’ raid.” That’s from a Cato Institute research paper, and there are many more like it on the internet.

http://www.cato.org/raidmap/index.php
http://www.law.uga.edu/academics/profiles/dwilkes_more/52swatstika.html
http://www.justiceforsal.com/2006/03/no-justice-for-sal-today.html

“Since 1995,” the paper goes on, “SWAT raids have resulted in the deaths of at least 40 innocent persons and 20 nonviolent offenders, and in the death or injury of 22 police officers.” In one real-life raid like the fictional one in “Jonatha’s Truth,” thirty-seven years old Dr Salvatore Culosi Jr. had come out of his townhouse to meet an undercover policeman when he was shot through the chest by a Special Weapons and Tactics force. A particularly innocuous type, the doctor was unarmed and doing nothing remotely suggesting threatening or violent intentions. The last of the URLs here has the story.

Police say shooting was an accident. They don’t say Dr. Culosi isn’t dead (that happens, incidentally – when the victim is the victim of government, he just vanishes and the case remains “open”).

In the autobiographical book “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story,” I relate having lived for seventeen years in fear of what happened to Doctor Culosi. For nearly ten of those years, I lived mostly in the wilderness, in order to be free of the threat posed by the possibility, even probability, of what happened in my novel and to the doctor

A licensed pilot, former parachutist, mountaineer and rock climber, scuba diver, and life-long competitor, I’m not normally a fearful man. Most people who know me would tell you that. But during what seemed eternity, I lived in continual, almost constant fear of what happened to Dr. Culosi. I was, among many other similar things, stopped more than one hundred nine (that’s the number in the diary I started keeping after several stops had already occurred) times on the nation’s streets and highways.

Each time involved a confrontation with an armed man provoked by falsified records, and literally dozens of times the man either pointed a pistol at me or had it in his hand.

Lately, I’ve “come down from the woods” to live in a proper house, but it is three A.M. and I can’t sleep. Licensed to carry a concealed weapon (it was a hell of a fight to get the license, but the truth prevails – sometimes), it’s a few inches from my hand right now, and it accompanies me everywhere I go. Unless it is near my hand, I can’t sleep.

Tonight, the fear was exceptional, brought on, I think, by recent events in the news; recent events, that is, which include the vicious ravings of people like whatever-the-hell-she-is Ann Coulter, television “host” Sean Hannity, and their megalomaniacal ilk.

I should probably point out here that the other extreme of political minimalism, the “liberal” (how the hell did these lunatics come by names like “conservative” and “liberal?”) seems somehow less dangerous – inasmuch as the threat posed by a nut case nitwit who won’t fight for anything is a secondary one, one only dangerous in that it inexorably results in a kind of impunity for the “conservative” nut case nitwit who wants to shoot first and ask questions later.

Most of the time – like many people, I suspect - I just feel trapped.

Added to the effect of it all is the threat posed by that weird – with Mr. George W. Bush, words seem to fail me of late – man in the White House. Having discovered many years ago (May, 1985) that the federal government spies ruthlessly on just about anyone, contriving any excuse necessary, I am aware that even when I sleep, I am being somehow “surveilled” – watched. I don’t suppose even George Orwell knows what that really means, what it does to its object.

Remember Orwell? “1984?” “It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate, they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”

Now, I understand that people reading this might discount it all as paranoia. Regaled continually - almost daily, these days - with the psycho-babble so dear to the hearts of the effeminate nation we’ve become, everyone is an amateur psychologist. The thing is, the government not only got caught doing illegal surveillance, wire-tapping, they admitted having done it. Now, more’s the pity, the president of the United States not only says publicly that he’s doing it, he asserts that he has the right to do it. “Terrorism,” you know. It’s real, all right.

In fact, it wasn’t until September 11, 2001 that the open, right in your face, what- the-hell-are-you-gonna-do-about-it surveillance ceased. Too busy, what with the new “threat” and the need to “Hollywood up” those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, I suppose.

But they’re there. I can feel them. Once you’ve been hunted, you see, you get a sixth sense for the eyes of an enemy. Oh, I’m paranoid, all right. I hate telephone calls, can’t use the phone without the most extreme nervous discomfort. My friends are annoyed when I end calls abruptly or just hang up, but I can’t help it. Still, my sixth sense has never failed, not once. Each time I wake up like this, each time I suddenly and for no ostensible reason get that feeling I always had when standing “on deck” before a judo match, the government “pulls something.” During seventeen years, it never failed. I was waiting for them when it happened, or when they came.

Now, though, it’s Mr. Bush and that eminence grís of his, Cheney (Jesus! – that’s an evil-looking man!) that give me my strange premonition. Think of it this way: In the real world, as it is in the book “Jonatha’s Truth,” there is nowhere to hide. Imagine that they come for you one night, smash down the doors and pour into your house with pointed weapons. You haven’t done anything, but startled from your sleep – terrified, maybe – you shoot one.

Or, maybe, you shoot all of them. I practice that on a routine basis, you know. The doors and windows here are rigged to hinder the typical assault (I wrote the original paper describing and designing the S.W.A.T team ten years before the first such team was organized), and I practice daily with the weapon I keep within reach every minute. And there’s more; but as Mr. Bush is wont to say, “we don’t want to give the enemy anything.”

Anyway, you kill them all. NOW what do you do? Do you think the government – people of the caliber of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney (how about Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity) will admit they were in the wrong house? Do you think a court will defend you? Your “rights,” all that? You do need to read “Letters” or “Jonatha.”

More, you need to re-read the history of the last couple of decades. Make a couple of trips to a law library. Consider the men now proved innocent by DNA testing but being held by stubborn authorities. “Actual innocence,” a court in Illinois said not long ago, “isn’t necessarily grounds to release someone from prison.” http://www.aslme.org/media/transcriptions/dna_wrk4/swedlow.pdf

A number of courts have agreed, recently. "In the last ten years,” one reporter said, “DNA testing has uncovered stone-cold proof that sixty-five completely innocent people have been sent to prison and death row. But even in cases where there is physical evidence, the criminal justice system frees prisoners only after a torturous legal process. Incredibly, according to many trial judges, "actual innocence" is not grounds for release from prison."

So, to return to our supposing, there you are. An enemy of the state. That kind of state. Yeah, I suppose you could say this is one time that ignorance is bliss – it’s better that you don’t know what is happening to your country, your countrymen, and neighbors. Maybe if I pretend the tiger marauding in the neighborhood isn’t there, he’ll eat me last.

But you do know, now. Those are dead cops on the floor, and there are more outside. You could be the Blessed Virgin and he was raping you, they don’t care. You killed a cop. It wouldn’t make any difference if you hadn’t, if one of them had accidentally killed one of them or the rest. Who do you think will get the blame – now, in a country like this?

Yeah, I know – I’m paranoid. Well, tell me this? Haven’t I also been describing Iraq? In “Jonatha’s Truth,” the reason for the SWAT raid was a record that said Jonatha’s father was a suspected drug trafficker. And, of course, he was dangerous. He liked to shoot. Played judo. There were probably weapons in the house. The reason the SWAT team surrounded Dr. Salvatore Culosi’s house and ordered him from it to face the guns that killed him was that he made sports bets (gambling is sometimes a crime). Obviously – they sent a SWAT team – he had weapons – “of mass destruction, maybe.”

What got us into Iraq? Why can’t we get out? Kisten to Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and the rest. I don’t want to give away the denouement of my novel, but Jonatha and Baron von Paulus, the man who came to her aid, faced the same problem. Ars celare artem, folks. You think that a government who will raid a man’s house, kill and then cover it up wouldn’t do the same to a nation and its people? You think they didn’t? If it were you or me, it would be called “modus operandi.” You think that a government that won’t let an innocent man out of jail, even when science has proved that he could not be guilty, will stop the war in Iraq? You think they won’t invade Iran?

Now do you see why I can’t sleep?

I chose that picture today, because what I heard last night on the news reveals as never before the influence still exerted by the man known most often in history as "the evil genius". Josef Goebbels was, you see, the man who almost single-handedly developed propaganda into an art form and science. "Damage Control," most of all, was his forte.

Of course, the White House, the U.S. Army and their propaganda apologists in the television media face the daunting problem of what to do with the hundreds of thousands of disabled veterans of the wars relentlessly being demanded by the military industrial complex coup that began ruling the nation shortly after WW-2. See Operation Mockingbird.

Last night, several speakers on the various "news" programs - most notably absent in that regard, of course, FoxNews - alluded to the effect that the latest revelations about long-time malfeasance and substandard care provided veterans would have on recruiting. Hearing that they might not only wind up in Iraq but in Building Eighteen at Walter Reed Army Hospital should they not heed Senator John Kerry's earlier and much-deplored warnings about their studies, the nation's young people might begin to reject the government's blandishments regarding enlistment.

And there you have it. There you have the measure - the real one - of the patrician nation and government's interest in the plebian poor. Oh, Don Diego de la Vega's "members of the nobility" ARE looking directly at the servants, but only because the latter may very well rebel. Remember "Hell, no - we won't go?"

The nation's Veterans Administration has for decades, of course, been in execrable shape, a hell of a mess. I have already related here my own experiences and investigations having to do with the VA, and no one who has paid any enduring attention whatever to either the history of U.S. government federal administrations or the relentless pronouncements - you only have to listen: it is their veritable anthem - of corporate capitalism during my lifetime could possibly expect otherwise. The Veterans Administration is for poor people; the patrician rich do not go to the VA for medical care.

And - throughout human history - the attitude of the rich toward the poor has never changed. It is as constant and observable as the earth's rotation.

There is, in other words, no doubt - absolutely none - that everything you have been hearing in the last several days from politicians and generals - and from the contemptibly meretricious media - is a contemptuous lie. All of these people knew what was going on in the Veterans Administration and its hospitals. To deny that is absurd. I know that not only for all the obvious reasons, but because I told them so again, and again, and again, and again - all on the record which includes hearings before Veterans Administration officials.

Neither is the relatively sudden disclosure by columnists Anne Hull and Dana Priest genuine or honest. Think about it. No one, soldier who went there or relatives, nurses, service personnel - none of the literally thousands of people who knew of conditions in Building Eighteen - ever said anything to anyone? For years? Walls and ceilings covered with black mold, decaying and falling down; cockroaches, mouse shit, and the rest - nobody noticed? Nobody complained?

The literally millions of people who have seen the same elsewhere, time and time again for literally decades, have never complained to a congressman or senator? Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine officers were never told? None ever went to his commander?

Well, from sometime in late 1987 until 1992, I frequented - absolutely haunted -the offices of Congressman Joel Hefley, Senator Hank Brown, Senator David Pryor, and others - to say nothing of Veteran's Administration officials and hospital personnel - doing everything in my power to aid a disabled Vietnam veteran, one SFC W.R. Benton. I wrote literally scores - more than a hundred, now that this latest incident has caused me to recall - of letters to both congressmen and senators and to the media everywhere.

Parenthetically, I can't help laughing at the reaction of certain of these pompous poltroons, thinking as they must be now about what I might say and show.

I even wrote, and sent a package of documentation two inches thick, to Soldier of Fortune Magazine. Nothing I could do got any response.

But enough of that. I've said it all before - again, and again, and again. Many people would tell you that. My point here is also the same as always - that there is nothing new in all this. The behavior and mens rea of the Veterans Administration is not materially different than that of any other agency of the United States Government. It is the same as that of the White House, the Congress, and the courts (you don't relate the fact of thousands of innocent men in jail to the soldiers at Walter Reed and contemptuous manner of the VA? Really?).

It is the same as that of Internal Revenue Service, my arch-enemy of decades. Think about that for a minute. For decades (again), we have heard again and again - that despite the complicity by silence of the media - of the contemptuously merciless outrages of the IRS. Perhaps no agency of any government was ever more infamous. Across the nation, it was just about impossible to mention the U.S. version of the Gestapo without eliciting some tale of outrageous behavior from one of its victims. Every so often, 1986, then 1992, and - most recently - 1998, the government did "damage control" in the form you're hearing now with regard to Walter Reed Hospital Building Eighteen.

The same fulminating demagoguery, the same pandering posturing and fustian pontificating, the same cynical confessions and specious hang-wringing, the same Goebbels-ian "spinning" by the media. You heard it after 9-11, and Hurricane Katrina. You heard it after invasion of Iraq disclosed the absence of WMDs there. You heard it after disclosure that homosexuals in the House of Representatives were preying on pages there.

You hear it every day from the craven cowards in Congress, complicit and suborning by feigned ignorance and inaction the War in Iraq and the reasons our people are dying there for literally nothing save corporate military industrial complex greed.

Again and again and again. The public that pretends there is something unusual about the "revelations" regarding Walter Reed Building Eighteen and the Veterans Administration is doing the same thing they might otherwise complain about. Good Germans, they behave the way the government and our Uriah Heept media does. Good Germans.

And, as long as you leave the same people in power, as long as you suck up to the likes of FoxNews and the rest, AS LONG AS YOU PARTICIPATE IN THIS PHONY-AS-A-THREE-DOLLAR-BILL "DEMOCRACY," you'll not only hear it all again and again, your children and their children will hear it inside the virtual prison that will hold them.

Meanwhile for me and people like me, it remains only to stand in awed wonder at what has been done to the consciousness of a nation. How, I wonder every day - it's the only reason, these days, that I watch anything on television, listen to the radio, or read the newspaper – how you can express any kind of wonder at what is merely the latest outrage perpetrated by the patricians who hold you in such utter contempt? How do you stomach the oh-so obviously scripted and canned performances of the various Thespian "personalities” of the "news" media?

I suppose I would have to ask Reichsminister Goebbels, wouldn't I? After all, he invented it.

The latest media feeding frenzy, of course, is the latest Veteran’s Administration exposé (believe it or not, a federal agency isn’t being run very well), and it goes on. The posturing and pontificating by politicians and media camp followers is tumultuous. Anna Nicole is in the ground and in the interim between the now customary pornography spectaculars, we have the customary political equivalent, which is the latest orgy in the sybarite saloon maintained on the Potomac River by public largesse. The Congress of the United States, I mean.

The usually preening generals (what did Colonel David Hackworth once call them – “perfumed princes?” - have suddenly gone sickeningly sycophant, falling all over themselves, feigning ignorance or fawning, anxious to mollify the public and protect by heroically declaring mea culpa everything their perfumed status requires .

What, for instance, if somebody would relate this mess to, say, the mess in Iraq? Afghanistan? How about the CIA who thought Saddam had missiles and chemical weapons factories under his bed? ET cetera, et cetera.

And they’re not the stars of the show, either. Consider the people who tell us every day that they control the military in the Land of the Free – the sleaze of patricians we call “senator” and “congressman.” If anyone has ever seen posturing and pontificating like this, it must have been during the last time Congress got caught with its pompous purity down. I guess another “Oversight Committee” has overlooked something. Like the way the Congressional Oversight Committee charged with overseeing IRS overlooked for years – and goes on in the same fashion even after that particular exposé - just about every felony crime you can think of off the top of your head.

Where, in other words, were all the watchdogs? You remember the Adventure of the Silver Blaze, don’t you? Sherlock Holmes?

Watson: "Is there any point to which you wish to draw my attention?"

Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night time."

Watson: "The dog did nothing in the night-time."

Holmes: "That is the curious incident."

Where was the Oversight Committee journalism likes to call the Fourth Estate while Walter Reed Building Eighteen was falling into disrepair? What of that staunch defender of our liberty? Nobody knew about decades of this sort of thing, and with the same going on everywhere in the system and nation? That’s funny – especially for a guy who tried to expose it decades ago, and wrote literally scores of letters to those same “oversight committees.” Including the Fourth Estate.

Oh, sure – you say it was the media, reporters named Anne Hull and Dana Priest, who “broke the story.” Sure. And as soon as the story appeared giants of journalism like those whose names appear at the bottom of the page here - guys who, while never having been soldiers, swarmed immediately to join those already swimming swimmingly - and, of course, likewise indignantly - in the new feeding frenzy. Sure.

Okay, then “splain dis to me, Lucy.” Remember “limited hangout?” When a fed admits something, you’d better look deeper. If he admits taking your wife to lunch, well . . . Ask yourself why it is that the media hasn’t mentioned so far what happened to all the money that should have made the repairs to Building Eighteen at Walter Reed? You don’t actually believe that the responsible parties didn’t include all kinds of building and equipment maintenance and repair in their yearly requisitions and appropriations, do you? And, year after year, when the VA made no such funding applications, nobody noticed?

Sure. That happens all the time in government. The federal budget goes down every year, due the fact that nobody wants anything.

Funny, l like I said. Funny, what with all the media “posturing and pontificating,” feeding frenzy, and brouhaha, this essay will be the first mention you’ve heard of what I just said. How come all the “watchdogs” haven’t barked about that? Doing some fast digital terpsichory on the old calculator here, extrapolating Walter Read into all the VA hospitals and establishments around the country, together with a little FEMA-New Orleans ratio-ing, I estimate that we’re talking about something around thirty billion dollars. You can damned betcha that it was appropriated, so where did it go?

Is this story another of those twenty-one billion-in-cash-that-went-to-Iraq-in-order-to-vanish capers? Yeah, ‘fraid so. You can kiss your money good-bye, taxpayer – it not only won’t be missed, there’ll likely be no mention of it. Too bad, sucker.

But how is it that the “dog didn’t bark?” Yeah, how IS that - “Splain dat to me, Lucy!”

Okay, “Lucy,” let me see it I can help. . . . Every one of those heroes of liberty on that list down there, for instance, is also “rich people,” patricians - every one a contemporary Horatio Alger and trumpeting apologist for capitalism. Free market economy, and all that. While I hasten to point out that I haven’t seen any of these hot-air heroes’ stock portfolios, I know perfectly well that each makes big bucks with his interests in the military industrial complex corporations. “Where the carcass is,” after all, “there are the eagles” (the Bible, you know, says “eagles” meaning vultures). That means, by extension and common sense, making not only a chunk of their nifty incomes off the nation’s Halliburtons, but fattening their TV ratings – the real reason for the media feeding frenzy I’ve been talking about.

Posture and Pontificate, incorporated may not actually be legally incorporated anywhere, but it is as sure as daily observance can make it a de facto one. Congressional cesspool diving, media scum-suck frenzies, and general pusillanimous prostitution of anything saleable to pandering lobbyists, after all, is synonymous with government here in the Land of the Fee. Not exactly remarkable. Not even noticeable – that being a factor in the “scandal” – matter of fact.

Last time here, I wrote concerning the matter, to point out that soldiers are poor people, and some time ago, September, 2005, to be more precise, I remarked how in the movie, “The Mask of Zorro,” Anthony Hopkins, in the role of Diego de la Vega the old Zorro, instructed the new Zorro, Antonio Banderas, that a member of the Spanish nobility “would never look directly at a servant.” In the United States, I said, the capitalist rich never look at the poor.

Soldiers are servants. The word samurai, matter of fact, means exactly that. The samurai were soldiers.

“Members of the nobility . . . never look directly at a servant.”

That servants recuperate in “sub-standard” – note the studied euphemism – conditions from wounds taken in order for the nation’s patricians to be patricians is somebody else’s responsibility. Capitalist patrician’s business is to make money, preferably using somebody else’s money, but somebody else’s brains, skill, or muscle will do. Check your definition of capitalism. Any responsibility besides that is to be “overseen” by somebody else. Overlooked, is okay, too.

Or, of course – this is the effeminate United States – it will all be talked away. Listen to SecDef Robert Gates. “They should not have to recuperate in sub-standard housing, nor should they be expected to tackle mountains of paperwork and bureaucratic processes in this difficult period for themselves and their families. They battled a foreign enemy. They should not have to battle an American bureaucracy."

My goodness - that's more like it! That's what we want to hear. "The system works," again. When has it ever been otherwise? New Orleans after Katrina? When there proved to be no WMDs in Iraq? 9-11? When the outcry against IRS reached dangerous levels (in that case it took the threat of having widespread rape exposed to even get discussion and the little that happened)?

How long ago did the media watchdog go to sleep? That’s another story, the story of Central Intelligence Operation Mockingbird. Maybe you should have a look.

You won’t, of course – too much trouble. Have to get to the soap operas, some phony macho minimalist video game or the like. Nothing you can do about it anyway. It’s always been this way.

Which proves you’re wrong, again. That was the sentiment in 1775, when these words were written by a man like Samuel Adams: "If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." Just like there was then at Samuel Adams time, there’s a fight coming, and it’s a revolutionary one.

The antagonists are the same, too – capitalist and patrician ruler against the plebian and worker. And you’ll fight, too. You won’t be given a choice. Greed, the love of money, is relentless, eternal. The only question that remains is whether you’ll fight now when the fight can be won relatively easily or when the patricians' oppression stifles you in one form or another, and you find it hard to breathe. And, since I’m paraphrasing Winston Churchill, I’ll finish with his warning that there is even a worse case. You may fight, Sir Winston said, because you would rather die than live as a slave.

But even the famed Englishman’s “worse case” is not the worst. As CNN owner Ted Turner said a few years ago, and Glen Beck echoed more recently, the patricians need to get rid of a whole lot of you. When you fight because you’d rather die than live with a patrician’s boot on your neck or watch him sell into prostitution your wife and daughter, it will be nevertheless what he wanted all along.

He won’t even have to do the job, or deal with it. The servants – soldiers - will do it. And, “Members of the nobility . . . never look directly at a servant.”

"Did not serve”

Sean ("The Great American") Hannity
George Will
Chris Matthews
Bill O'Reilly (hid in England, from what I gather)
Paul Gigot
Bill Bennett
Pat Buchanan
Rush Limbaugh (4-F with a 'pilonidal cyst' on his ass!)
Michael Savage (aka Michael Alan Weiner)
Pat Robertson
Michael Medved