Well, I seem to have hit a lot of sore spots with my remarks of late concerning certain "inconvenient" facts. I’m reminded of Thomas Huxley’s remark, “Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.”

The reaction (I’ve learned a couple of new epithets of the “witty” flavor) tells you – I’ve known since I was a kid – a lot, too. For instance, when I pointed out that it might be time to consider the contribution to human kind and civilization made by the white, Anglo-Saxon male, I was obviously saying nothing that should have offended anyone who loves the truth. I made no assertions whatever about what would be found, just what ordinary fairness requires. I guess fairness isn’t what some folks are about.

Huxley also said, “The deepest sin of the human mind is to believe things without evidence.” No one does himself or his point of view good when he conceals the truth or when he lies (same thing, in my estimation). Or do we assume that the contest of issues goes to the biggest lie? Should go to the biggest liar? Who benefits from that?

What does it say, really, when the truth becomes politically incorrect?

“Facts,” 2nd U.S. President John Adams said, “are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclination, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” There is also, however, no prick that stings more and draws more violent slapping and scratching in reaction than that of the truth.

For the sake of illustrating a point by analogy, let's stay with the question - is it an issue? why? - of the German-ness of the United States. There isn't, for instance, any historical or statistical doubt about the racial, cultural, and ethnic composition of the people who founded, built, and established the United States of America.

http://usa.usembassy.de/germanamericans.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German-American


It simply isn't rationally debatable (so why do it, then - what's the point?) According to the 2000 census, there are nearly forty-three million Germans in the United States, at least fifteen percent of the population. Many more have German ancestry, and at least one demographer estimates that seventy-one percent of all native U.S. citizens have names of Germanic origin. The maps at the top here show the areas where German-American citizens are concentrated (shades of red) and where they are the majority (blue).

When you hear the "silent majority" spoken of, the maps are something to think about.

It is also true, incidentally, that Irish-Americans constitute another 10.8 percent of the U.S. population. Neither can their contribution to the nation and culture that the United States became be questioned. It's a matter of historical record. Fact.

It's also a matter of historical record that the ethos of the United States was that of the people who built her. It was long known as the "protestant work ethic." The term was first coined by Max Weber, a German, in his essay, "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism." Whereas the people of countries like Spain, Italy and France historically had a more relaxed attitude toward work, the ethic holding that work defined people in turn defined the societies of Northern Europe and the countries where Protestantism was strong - the countries whose people soon comprised the vast majority of U.S. citizens.

It is interesting to note (and maybe a little inflammatory - the truth often stings, like I said) a comparison once made by Albert Camus (I think), that of the Germanic Law and religions as opposed to those of the Mediterranean peoples. In Greek and Mediterranean mythology, a king named Sisyphus was condemned to push a heavy rock up a hill only to have it roll down again each time. For eternity. Strangely, Camus noted, in the Germanic legends, a man similarly struggled all day only to fail - be wounded or killed on the battlefield. Collected from the field and taken to Valhalla by goddesses called Valkyries, he was healed - to return each time to his labors on the battlefield.

To the German, Sisyphus was in heaven. To the Mediterranean peoples, he was in hell. To the German, heaven was a physical place of ideal living and labor; to the Greek, the Roman, or the Arab, it was a spiritual place of ease and comfort.

When I was reared, what might be called "the John Wayne" version of the ethic was considered sine qua non. Nothing else was honorable, or acceptable. "Americans" regarded it as the keystone of national prosperity. So steeped in it was I that for me it was synonymous with the "Yankee Spirit" everyone attributed to themselves and their nation. It was celebrated by everyone, nowhere more than in the paintings of Norman Rockwell and in the movie screen persona of John Wayne. "I won't be wronged, I won't be insulted, and I won't be laid a hand on. I don't do those things to other people, and I expect the same of them" - Wayne's lines in the role of the "Shootist" - was part of it.

It was indisputably masculine - rooted in maleness and a kind of knighthood. A man - it was a title much more than gender, then - was loyal to his country, polite to women, kind to children and animals, and he kept his word. He worked hard, but held wealth in contempt as axiomatic proof of dishonesty and robber tendencies. "Corporate America" wasn't held in high regard, even then.

Recently, I've had some nasty things to say about corporate capitalism, and my remarks have drawn some of the heaviest cannonades of invective ever for this website. "Capitalists" - especially the would-be or wannabe variety - do not tolerate any offense of their religion. They will not permit any of what they see as equivocation, either. All capitalism is good. Capitalism that uses women like pigs and sheep, sells its wives and daughters - even its mothers and grandmothers - is good. Anything short of actually brutal rape, after all, the woman wants. The poor are that way because they choose to be, too. Vae victis (woe to the vanquished). Et cetera.

Sorry, but that is NOT the Protestant Work Ethic of the German. That's the Mediterranean ethic of Arab and the Moor, where kings, sheiks, and royalty still flourish, still enslave as many as they can, and measure their supposed greatness and worth in those terms. It's historian Quigley's Iran-Peru Axis, where patronage and strong-man government has long had the same result.

During my lifetime, lamentably, I've watched as the nation that is the U.S. - Land of the Free - changed its Germanic Sisyphus to the Greek, Mediterranean, Arab one. To work all day for a lifetime has become a definition for hell. One does not work, one has a "career." "Success" is to gain ascendancy over others by any means possible, in order to have them working for you. Slavery, once hated enough to fight and die in civil war over, now is a matter of justification. Peonage is moral. Slavery isn't.

A man in the same conditions as a slave once was - even if he eats less and lives in worse squalor - is no longer a slave, his master no longer a slaver, because he is paid something.

Today's Horatio Alger - remember him? Rags to Riches? - dreams of being a sheik, a king. To labor, to sweat, after all, is unbecoming, even "un-American." No young lady dreams of marrying (were she to do so equally a demeaning thing) a man who earns his living with his muscles or physical skills.

Even the definition of male has changed. The "metrosexuality" of Leonardo diCaprio has supplanted the masculinity of John Wayne. Today's nubile woman dreams of a "sensitive" man, one dominated by his need to give her a life of financially secure ease. Fancying his mind more than his body, she considers his clothes, his car, and his income before his physique. In society, to take a lady's hand nowadays with a calloused one all but invariably signals the end of the "relationship."

Some years ago, parenthetically, a survey I did revealed that seventy-six of one hundred people younger than twenty didn't know what a callus was. Not long ago, a commercial (inadvertently) pointed out that grade-schoolers did not aspire to work - which was "failure."

In short, in the Home of the Brave, where men once demanded only to be left alone to work, the masculine republic has given way to the feminine democracy. One the hallmark of the society, the male spirit of individual independence has given way to the female spirit of social and group dependence. A people who once considered government dependent upon them now depend upon government. Once willing, eager to work, we now look for someone to work for us.

Poet Carl Sandburg's "big, brawling," hard-working nation of the big shoulders is now the chintzy, limp-wristed nation of consumers.

Almost daily now, we are told that illegal aliens are a great benefit to the nation, because they will do work U.S. citizens won't. And who can rationally argue when the same apologists say that corporate capitalists - the U.S. version of the Mediterranean kings, sheiks, patrons, and strong-man rulers - need the workers their kind have always exploited?

Of course, I see these things because I have been watching for a very long time, lived before all the changes started. I know how it was, and see how it is. Time was, in just about every society, ever, that that kind of knowledge was something sought ardently, sometimes even desperately, by the young. No more. Today, the study of history has gone the way of hard work and the callus. Siegfried and Lohengrin are no longer the archetypical male, the hero of legend. The Democratic Capitalism of the Protestant Work Ethic has given way to that of the despotic Mediterranean Ethic.

The Germanic Sisyphus has become the Greek.

This is Frank Frazetta's "Against the Gods." If you know me, or have read my book, "Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story," you know why - with his "Combat" - is my favorite painting.

Sometimes, I think I may be psychic. I woke up last night at three. That’s fairly common for me, something I actually learned by self-hypnosis. I go to bed looking for the answer to a problem, do self-hypnosis before sleep and implant the post-hypnotic suggestion to solve the problem as I sleep. I’m not the first to use the method, but it works for me every time.

Last night was different. I didn’t have a question for answer, didn’t self-hypnose. Wondering why I had awakened, I realize with some disappointment at myself that this is an anniversary. It was twenty years ago that I had one of those things people call an “epiphany.” I knew I was going to lose it all, everything I had worked all my life to have. In the movie “Replacements,” in the role of Shane Falco, Keanu Reeves delivers lines explaining the disaster that ended his hopes of a professional football career. When I heard them, I choked.

“You're playing, and you think everything's going fine, but then one thing goes wrong ... and another ... and another ... and you try to fight back, but the harder you fight, the deeper you sink ... until you can't move ... you can't breathe ... because you're in over your head. Like quicksand."

My epiphany was something like being stunned. Totally bewildered, I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t imagine why. Everything was so WRONG. This was the United States of America, Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, Nation of Laws. This was the country dedicated to the rights of the individual. We had a Constitution and Bill of Rights guaranteeing personal rights. We had a Declaration of Independence proclaiming that “to secure these rights governments are instituted among men . . .” I had never done anything wrong!

I mean that last. I was so straight-arrow I sometimes wondered about myself on that count, too. I was so damned law-abiding that I stopped at stop signs out in the country when I could see for miles in all directions and no cars were coming. I not only paid my taxes, I insisted that my book-keepers take no deductions of any kind that would draw IRS ire. I’d never (still haven’t) deducted a business lunch or the like in my life.

Ah, yes – I did fight the IRS one year when they disallowed my deductions for travel expense. And I proved in court that I had, in fact, driven the miles claimed for business. The amount was $117.00, for Christ’s sake.

But the government doesn’t seem to forget things like that. Without warning of any kind, all my funds were seized. Sitting at my desk one day in 1977, I learned that the three twenty dollar bills and change I had in my pocket were all the money I had. With all the monthly bills to pay, I found I couldn’t borrow from any bank or lending agency. Under pressure from the Internal Revenue Service, and with two exceptions, longtime friends found reason to forget they knew me. When I had tried to find a job – even for companies doing the service I had invented – I was turned down (of course, it took a while for someone to admit that they had refused to hire me under threat of audit by the government’s “tax collectors”). Each time an employer filed W-2 forms, they received a threatening call from the IRS.

And so it went. Like Shane Falco’s quicksand. I lost it all. Not once, but twice. Everything I owned, and more. First one wife, then a second, abandoned ship when the federal government broadsides continued to land. A son attempted suicide. Through it all, I was hamstrung by my continuing faith that what was happening had to be an anomaly, a mistake. I had those “rights” I’d been preached to about all my life. Every, single one of them had been violated. I might as well have been a domesticated animal.

Everything I did was wrong, made the straits I was in narrower, my plight worse. Indoctrinated since birth, steeped in it, I kept repairing to the law, playing a game wherein my oppressors made all the rules. I just couldn’t believe what was happening. Even when I had been reduced to life in a tent in the wilderness, literally fighting for my life against starvation, the elements, government goons dispatched to maim or kill me, and police officers being incited to do the same, I kept thinking something I might do legally would succeed. Only finally, when both twenty-three lawyers and my own pro se efforts had failed, did I realize that the king is a son-of-a-bitch who does not obey his own laws.

When I had learned to fight effectively, by "getting something on" my opponents, and they had revealed the real face of government as never before, all I could do was defensive, fight with judo and a handgun against the relentlessly continual attempts at murder by the people sworn to protect me from criminals.

I actually don’t remember when it started – combat like this does things to your internal calendars – but I came to know with familiarity strange times like that last night. It’s a sudden return of the bewilderment, a feeling much like that which a woman who has just been raped must feel. I still can’t believe what has happened to me. I woke as I always do, looking around, still expecting that when I wake one morning it will be to find that everything I can remember has been a bad dream.

But it’s always the same. All my surroundings are for a moment – a very long one – strange. I always have to do a kind of inventory. First my senses, my mind – am I all right, still sane? Then my surroundings. Where am I? How did I come to be here? Oh, Jesus – it’s all gone. I don’t have anything left!

Where did it go? When I remember in a minute, my mind rebels – that can’t be. And the litany starts, the litany of all the rights I have as a citizen of the Land of the Free. I do it every time. Every one. By heart.

Usually by now, I sit down – sometimes, right where I happen to be. It’s like I’ve taken an electrical shock that has burned out my nervous system. I always feel breathless. Then, I’m angry. No, not angry; enraged. I need desperately to attack somebody, even something. Experience, and the blood-pressure cuff I’ve kept now for years, tell me that my blood pressure is soaring.

It passes finally. That self-hypnosis I mentioned a minute ago kicks in, to make me suddenly calm, collected. I take three or four deep, satisfying breaths and mentally watch my thoughts segue to those pre-conditioned.

And it’s over.

But I always wonder how long it will go on this way. Last night was very strange, and it makes me wonder. The hunted animal develops from his circumstances a heightened sense of his surroundings. Having fought for his life and escaped repeatedly, he pays far more attention to detail than he would otherwise. He listens more intently, learns to see what others can’t. He knows when he’s in trouble before it happens.

And, of course, it’s no longer me and my safety I can be wondering about. I’m down to where I only care about food and water. Property, pride, all those things I lost to my country, its falseness, and my own naiveté concerning them no longer mean anything to me. Knowing that to have everything back would just make me weak and vulnerable again, I wouldn’t walk across the street to have it all again. More, I’m seventy. I don’t care all that much about my life anymore either.

But the news – those "circumstances" I mentioned – is all bad. I don’t mean entirely by that that the news brought by the media is bad. I mean the news brought to me by those “heightened senses” I mentioned a minute ago, the sixth sense of a hunted animal. When you’ve been hunted the way I was, you learn by watching the body language of a man approaching. Once he’s close enough, you read his eyes, and his expression. People still marvel at the way I anticipate and block an attack, even one from very close. As stupid as it is – I can cripple or kill a man instantly with my empty hands, and they know it – my friends, even my wife, will suddenly try to tussle my hair or the like, only to have their offending hands intercepted and held. It’s kind of a game.

But they’re me friends, and I know their playing. Those same friends also know of the extreme manner with which I remain aware of my circumstances, mentally planning for the worst each and every time I enter those other than those most familiar. Away from home, I have begun perusing the place as soon as I exit the car, planning for the worst that might happen. They’ve seen it time and again, know that I watch people who aren’t my friends in a manner entirely different from anyone normal. I know trouble when I see it coming. It amazes me that you don’t and I know that unprotected by the societal prison where you are, you wouldn’t last an hour in the real world – the one where I've lived.

So I’ll warn you. You can – you will – lose everything the way I did. The law that protects you is the same law that “protected” me. It can be set aside as easily as it was set aside where it concerned me and my rights, as easily as Mr. Bush has set aside the law having to do with his powers as president. It’s all a fraud, the idea that the government is here to protect you and your rights; it is here to USE you as it sees fit. You are to people like George W. Bush and his patrician kind a domesticated animal, a sheep to be sheared whenever they see fit. Your property, even your life, is theirs to spend as they choose (ask a soldier, “serving” in Iraq – ask him in private, away from the government microphones), and when they come for you, you will feel like I did.

You’ll feel the quicksand.

The new air filtering appliances come with a set of incomprehensible instructions. Written probably by a tech writer who first language is not English, they have omitted description or designation such as a model number, such that the actual filter components or their replacements cannot be obtained without multiple trips to the Wal-Mart where the original appliances and their filter components were purchased. At the sector of the Wal-Mart where the appliances were purchased, no one can be found who knows anything about the merchandise they are selling there, certainly not these air filters – which, of course, were made in China.

With purchase of a back up power system for my computer, I run into an infuriating scenario almost identical to that of the air filters, in this case a word-salad of incomprehensible, convolute gibberish masquerading as instructions. When I called the number provided, I got a "messenger" set-up and "you type, I type" conversation with a guy who obviously wasn't good at that sort of thing, at all. Only with atomistic sentences like, "How many wires go from the hard drive to the back-up?" did I get enough information with which to proceed, inasmuch as mention of a particular cable providing communication between the device itself and the hard drive of the computer have been totally omitted from the instructions. It’s not there. You’re just supposed to KNOW that, I guess.

Changing residence recently and unable to procure cable hook-up similar to that which we had formerly with CMA, we find ourselves relegated to a dial-up arrangement provided by Verizon. The “hook-up’ swiftly becomes yet another nightmare of the kind I’m talking about. Beginning with the “If you want to speak English, press one” and the rest of maddeningly obvious admission that the multi-millionaires with whom we have somehow been forced to associate – even do business with – care far more about profits than about service, I spend hours (six, all total, and as a matter of fact) on the telephone, talking to one person after another who obviously knows almost nothing about her job or the product for which she might otherwise be expected to provided service.

Again and again and again we are first obliged to wait long minutes (in one instance sixteen – we kept time) while the individual to whom we are speaking located another who supposedly had the answer to our question - then didn’t. After literally hours (I wasn’t kidding back there at the outset), we were delivered to a technician able to provide the instructions required. That, mind you, is not evidence that the latter knows his job thoroughly; it just so happens that our problem happened – at long last – to be one with which he was familiar. In the six – perhaps it was eight – other instances, that wasn’t the case.

These days, to call anyone on the telephone looking for the solution to any kind of problem, now matter how simple, is like groping in a tool box in the dark for a tool you need.

A short time – less than a week - after arriving here in Port Lavaca, my school teacher wife, Rita, realized that the duct work in the building where she teaches is infested with black mold. When the violent allergic reaction to the stuff hit her, we were obliged this soon to call a doctor. Obviously, having just arrived here, we were obliged to repair quickly to the telephone book, call, and request instructions for direction to the office. People at the school – teachers, mind you – couldn’t help, incidentally.

Once the number had been called, you’ve guessed it. If you’re like me, you’ve encountered dozens of times the local who doesn’t seem to know – can’t tell you, anyway - where he lives or works. Now, the distance from our house to the doctor’s office proves subsequently to be less than a mile. It also turns out that Doctor Lee isn’t the only Doctor Lee in the area immediate to our final destination. The second spells his name “Le.” He, or she, isn’t an American (surprise!).

Accompanied by a woman literally gasping for breath, on a cellular phone with another woman – one who can’t for the life of her tell us where she is by means of address, names of streets, distances, references to landmarks (she doesn’t recognize the term “landmark”) - I struggle with question after question (especially after I have spotted the name “Le” on a door in the strip mall nearby) to find my way. A stop at a “Medical Center” office two hundred feet distant from the place for which we’re searching takes me to two offices in the same building where none of the four people present there recognizes the name of either doctor.

Just when I'm considering a tracheotomy, I spot the building. It is removed from the street it faces by sixty yards, situated partially behind another much closer and a large parking lot. No sign betrays the presence of either edifice.

That, incidentally, has proved to be another peculiarity of the place: signs are generally – consistency seems to be a violation of local etiquette – far removed from the address, location, or building they locate.

The building’s construction and aspect are that of a residence, rather than an office or commercial site. An excellent disguise, shall we say. Again, you probably know the rest. Before Rita can be attended to by a physician, she must – gasping for breath - fill our completely a voluminous set of forms. These are very thorough, akin to intelligence briefing given a military commander before battle, information designed in this case to assure mortgage on the “patient’s” location, person, salary, and life. When we are not required – both of us - to put on an ankle-bracelet GPS locator, I am much relieved.

Then, I wait. Next to me on the waiting room couch, a man speaking Spanish to the cellular phone ubiquitous these days discusses in lurid detail his most recent sexual escapade. When I say “detail,” I mean number of strokes. His three or four year old daughter sits on his lap, presumably listening. He is oblivious, either to her or to his audience, Anglos he assumes doesn’t understand Spanish.

After a while, Lothario gets up and leaves with the little girl, leaving me to wonder how and why he happened to be there in the first place.

(I just threw that in here, just to relieve the tension; but, then, this is about oblivious stupidity, isn’t it? It’s apropos, in that, at least.)

Recently, in an effort to obtain and have activated my own cellular phone at a local Radio Shack, I am obliged (use that word a lot, don’t I – it’s how I feel, anymore, about my country) to speak Japanese for several minutes with a woman in Tokyo. That after the guy behind the counter at the store, endeavoring to do the same, hands me the thing to say, “Can you understand what she’s saying?” The friend who has accompanied me stands staring in astonishment, as do several other persons nearby. Once we have found a mutually understood language, by the way, matters proceed smoothly.

To learn why my new Microsoft Publisher program won’t do “word wrap” around graphics on my website, I am obliged – that word, again – to speak to three (that’s three, during more than an hour of communicating) young men in Bombay, India! At length (THAT word again), I learn, “the program won’t do that.” Note, mind you, that nothing in the instructions that came with the program, nor anything in the manual I later bought TELL me that. I had to learn - the hard way – that “You wanted to get FrontPage – that’s Microsoft’s program to do that.”

And it goes on. In every single instance, these days, of realizing the necessity of interaction with my fellow Homo Sapiens wherein explanation comprised of simple declarative sentences will be required, further realization is that I will have to go through it all again. The girl (no comment, just no f------ comment), for instance, at the car dealership parts department who doesn’t know the difference between a conventional carburetor and fuel injection, or recognize the term “cold start valve.” Another – a guy this time - called about the same problem doesn’t know there are TWO oxygen sensors on a 2000 Toyota Corolla. Trying to find parts for Rita’s Jaguar, it takes ten full minutes to make the girl (yup, another one) at the Jaguar dealership understand what I mean when I speak about the sensors that light up the “boot open” light on the instrument panel display.

No tactical arrangement of statements of questions can communicate the idea to her. She asks, “Boot?” three times. When I say “the trunk,” it only confuses her more. Finally, in a moment of surpassing brilliance, I switch to Spanish. Bingo! That does it, but even at that, she doesn’t immediately recognize the word “baúl” (trunk). They say “trunca” in Tex-Mex Spanish. And they’ll have to order the parts.

Folks, this was funny years ago when columnists, guys like James Kilpatrick, Donald Kaul, Steven Allen, and the like, pointed it out. It’s not funny anymore. Yesterday, a plane taking off on the wrong runway crashed. ComAir Flight 5191 from Lexington, Kentucky killed forty-nine people.

To quote Strother Martin in the movie Cool Hand Luke, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”

The plane crashed and the people died because communication between the tower and the pilots didn’t succeed adequately. That, incidentally, has happened several times, the worst at Tenerife some years ago. That particular “failure to communicate” killed five hundred eighty three people (the highest number of fatalities of any single accident in aviation history) when the confused pilots of two Boeing 747 airliners, one taxing, one taking off, collided.

Communication, the ability to explain or give clear instructions, is the foundation and basis upon which human existence and civilization depend critically. It is a life or death thing, for individuals and nations. Any day now, “failure to communicate” will result in disaster that will make the plane crash on Tenerife or that of Flight 5191 seem like an “excuse me” bump in the supermarket.. Last night, for instance, CNN (I guess – I just don’t watch that much, anymore) host Glen Beck reflected - rather lugubriously, I thought – that President George W. Bush’s “problems” with his recently abysmal approval ratings concerning Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, and the rest had to do with the Commander in Chief’s limited communication skills.

That may be the understatement of the year – and history.

Beck’s point seemed to be, first, that the President didn’t lie – he just doesn’t explain himself very well (some would say he doesn’t much care whether he does or not); and, two, that he really couldn’t think of a way to break to us gently that our real enemy was Iran. So we attacked Iraq, instead (whew!). Mr. Beck’s incoherent apology made about as much sense as any of the attempts at communication of any of the people I mentioned earlier here, actually.

This morning, on National Public Radio, commentators’ efforts to explain gaps between obvious truth and what the President said concerning Iraq had me staring. Given the mangled and solecistic diction of the commentators, “Americans” trying to explain something as incomprehensibly illogical as Operation Iraqi Freedom was in the first place, the result resembled more than anything else the splattered verbiage on the instructions for that computer power supply back-up I mentioned, or the feckless rhetorical floundering of Verizon in trying to explain their dial up system installation, at the outset here.

As I type this, by amusing – even eerie - co-incidence, NPR is reporting a new sporting event, that of throwing a cell phone as far as possible. “I’ll bet you’ve had the same experience, that of being so frustrated with instructions you were receiving that you wanted to throw the phone as far as you could.” Someone, the reporter, says, threw a Nokia over three hundred feet.

Also interesting: mine, also a Nokia, went three hundred, twenty six feet (I used to be a pitcher, and, besides, NPR reports only one hundred people in the reported contest).

But this isn’t funny. It not only explains things as serious as those planes crashes, it may explain things like the World Trade Center (even if realization that the “dog didn’t bark” makes you think it was deliberate) and the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. At least in part, it explains the incredible events leading to invasion of Iraq, and the spastic operations and tactics that have characterized the “war” (hell, we can’t even agree or decide what to call it).

Just consider that we purport to establish “democracy” in an Islamic nation. Assuming that you can write an intelligible set of directions to the local court house, or explain how to boil an egg and change a tire, see if you can explain how that might be done.

Jesus! Now, maybe that explains why he attacked Iraq – if a regular guy, even one reasonably articulate, can get so frustrated that he throws a phone (thusly attacking the wrong source of his frustration), maybe a president, one about as articulate as Forrest Gump, got so frustrated that he attacked the wrong country? Maybe an English composition and diction test should be required of presidential candidates?

Remember the guy in the doctor’s office, the one regaling us all with his pornographic tale of sexual conquest? It occurs to me that there was another reason no one listening objected. No one could tell from his description what the hell he was talking about.

Maybe he was just explaining how to replace a light bulb.

“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.” John Stuart Mill, 1862.

The "Cease Fire" in Lebanon has begun. The ravening beast who has been roving the neighborhood killing indiscriminately, has been permitted to find its lair, and recover from the wounds it suffered at the hands of its victims.

If there has ever in history been or most despicable, more cowardly, act of appeasement, I'd hard pressed to say what it is. The United Nations and the world's pseudo-pacifists make Neville Chamberlain look like Audie Murphy.

What we have decided is to provide for an nuclear attack, or worse. This is beneath contempt.

Whatever the number or designation of United Nations “resolution” that results from the world’s cowardly clamor for cease fire in Lebanon, it will go down in history as the betrayal that precipitated the first nuclear terrorist attack. Or worse. This, for moral beings, is unconscionable.

Hezbollah and the rest have as much money as they need to buy biochemical weapons from somebody as greedy as they are vicious, you know. Avid avocational historian that I have been since boyhood (I’m seventy), I can find no more egregious example of political pandering or contempt for human suffering. Thousands, even millions, will pay with suffering and their lives for this, the nadir of U.N. pandering to what is the most despicable and base ideology on the planet.

What’s next – assuming that events overtaking us will give us time for anything worse – a U.N. program to spread the ebola virus? Hemorrhagic fever?

Will the U.N. and the world's morally bewildered pacifists demand next that the United States cease fire in Iraq and Afghanistan, and negotiate with al Qa'ida and Osama bin Laden? Speaking of "morally bewildered," will someone explain to me why, if Israel has "over-reacted" in Lebanon to the murder and kidnap of its soldiers, the United States and its "Coalition" hasn't "over-reacted" in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the "War on Terror?" Why isn't the U.N. demanding that EVERYBODY cease fire on terrorists?

If ever there were a reason for the abolishment of the United Nations, and disdain for specious pacifism and those who would disarm those who care enough about peace to fight for it, this is it. Let’s imagine that another organization or group conspired to loose upon mankind a source like Hezbollah, Hamas, or the like. What it they were to spawn and support another Nazi Germany, the Gestapo, and the rest? How many times have the modern Neville Chamberlains of the United Nations announced more “peace in our time?”

WHY IS IT SO DAMNED HARD TO RECOGNIZE THE LOGICAL FALLACY IN DISARMAMENT AND PACIFISM IN THE FACE OF MURDEROUS TERRORISM? If we recognize the stupidity of putting down one's weapon at the approach of a ravening animal, what the HELL is different about this?

My god, people – WAKE UP! THIS KIND OF PEACE-MAKING IS AN EVIL GODDAMNED LIE! I'll tell what this really is. This is just one more international “protection racket” plot, a work of the devil intended to justify the sale and use of more arms, and the maintenance and funding of more armies. It’s a corporate operations plan to assure continued slaughter of innocents – both combatant and non-combatant. "Mankind," in the words of General and President Dwight Eisenhower, "hanging on a cross of iron." Militarist - and pseudo-pacifist - iron.

Had I the space and time (or patience), I would publish a list of the terrorist atrocities committed by Islamic extremists since the partitioning of Israel. I can't do that here, because it's pages and pages, thousands and thousands of incidents of cold-blooded and indiscriminant murder of innocents.

You think war ugly? Let me show you something REALLY ugly:


This miscreant savage sonofabitch is a Palestinian, and he is being cheered by a crowd of his miscreant savage sonafabitch kind. That’s the blood of an Israeli man captured a little while before. This hero of Islam is showing the crowd that he has washed his hands in another man's blood. For Allah. This is a demented, depraved animal. A devil. You need to think about that, folks. He, and those like him, will celebrate the same way when the blood is yours - or that of your children.

On October 11, 2000, Yossi Avrahami, the Israeli father of three small children, and Vadim Norvich, married four days earlier, were on their way to their yearly army reserve service, when they were unfortunate enough to take a wrong turn and end up in Palestinian police custody. They were taken to the police headquarters in Ramallah.

In a little while, the townspeople had learned that there were two Israelis in custody, and a mob of bloodthirsty savages like the guy in the window formed swiftly outside the police station. The mob, egged on and led by Palestinian policemen, beat and stabbed to death the two Israelis. When the atrocity had been accomplished, the lifeless body of one of the Israelis was thrown from a window in the police station, to be beaten to am amorphous pulp by the ravening barbarian mob. As it that weren’t enough to satisfy the satanic urges of the crowd, the body was dragged behind a car to the center of town, to be set afire.

That’s what the U.N. is protecting, encouraging, and providing for. Do you really think a rabid animal like the guy in the picture here has any compunction about whom he kills? Armed with a nuclear, or a biological, weapon, what do you think a guy who washed his hands in the blood of another man would – will – do? How about the Arab mob that day?

In the all the vicissitudes of history, I predict that never will there have been one like this. It is a betrayal of the thousands – and, god forbid, millions – who will pay for it with their misery and their lives. There’s never really been one like it, ever. The shear cowardice of the capitulation to demonic evil being arranged in the United Nations - in the name of PEACE! - is sickening and criminal, mind-boggling in its depravity. It is, in fact, a thing malum in se – evil in itself and in its essence. All who support it would be liable to a just god.

If the nations of the world have come to a moral state so decayed and degraded that they think nothing worth war, they will soon learn to their consternation otherwise. People who have nothing for which they are willing to fight, nothing more important than the specious and treacherous safety of cringing and belly-crawling passivity, are miserable creatures who have no chance of being free from men like this savage with blood on his hands unless made and kept so by the exertions of those far better than himself.

If the Israeli Defense Force honors the UN and its craven capitulation to barbaric terrorism, and fails to eradicate Hezbollah and extremist Arab savagery, it will never live down – and maybe not survive – its dereliction of duty to its nation and people. If the Israeli Knesset and Prime Minister yield to base cowardice, not only might Israel very well pay with its life, the human race will pay dearly for its abject amorality.

The captain of the legendary ship Flying Dutchman rolled dice with the devil. He lost, and his ship sails stormy seas - forever. The nations of the world, and their people, had better hear and heed the legend - and get through their thick heads that to bargain with the devil is to lose.

Using the Tu Quoque fallacy of classical logic, a couple of readers argue that I'm as biased as they admit being (of course, they are "pacifists," and that makes everything they do and say all right -very moral, you know). But there is some merit in what they say - where I'm concerned, at least. That's due the fact that I identify in a way with the people of Israel. By that I mean that I, too, once found myself facing an implacable and surrounding enemy determined and trying hard to destroy me. Like the Israelis, my enemy was totally amoral, observing no rule of civilized behavior. Also cowardly, willing to hide behind a shield made of his enemy's higher principles and morality, my enemy attacked my family, my wives and children, with alacrity. Just like any other terrorist.

Like the dithering and vacillating crowd of the U.N. and the world's nations posturing before one another their sanctimonious pacifism, a crowd stood by gawking but unwilling to lift a finger as I , too, fought for my life against a pack of ravening hyenas. When my counterattack turned the tables on the men trying to kill me, the crowd around me also clamored for a cease fire. I'll never forget the bubble-head woman who exhorted bystanders to "get his arms - he's hurting that man!" As the attackers tried to kick me in the ribs and testicles, one guy had just tried to smashed my larynx with a karate blow. The bubble-head probably had no idea that a smashed larynx means death by strangulation. All the other fights she's seen were on television or movie theater screens.

That's just like the pacifists and public in general as they watch the struggle between Israel and Hezbollah: damned little idea of what's really going on. Every time I watch the news of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon of late, I have the weird feeling that I'm watching the sports news, or that I've stumbled into a pep rally for either the nitwit left or nitwit right. A visit to any of the Internet forums gives much the same impression. Everybody seems to get his concept of the rules and morality of war and survival against an enemy made implacable by ideology nationalist, ideological, or religious from one team sport or the other. "Rah, rah, sis, boom, bah!" "It's my turn." "The other guys are not playing fair." "They're better staffed or equipped." "They're running up the score." Yap, yap, yap. Worse, it's all dependent and decided on the basis of which team I "support." My guys can't be wrong. If I thought that, it would mean I'm not loyal. Can't be disloyal, no matter what. That would mean I'm not a "team player."

These people remind me for all the world of the moron who shot the Sikh gentlemen the day after 9-11 because the latter wore a turban. Literally too ignorant to know better, the chauvinist red-neck reasoned that since his victim's headdress somehow resembled Arab headdress, the man was an Arab. Arabs, he said, had attacked the U.S., and he was a patriot. "An American," he said. "To the bone."

There's the other side of the non compos mentis spectrum, to - the militant pacifist. Of all the cuckoo-bird crowd, I think they may be more dangerous. There's a quote from John Stuart Mill, one I cite elsewhere on this website. It's so apropos, and I could never have said it so well, that I'll quote the great scholar, economist, and philosopher again here. "War" Mill said, "is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

"Decayed and degraded state . . ." There you have it. In the literally scores of conversations and debates I've had over the years with people who call themselves "pacifist," what I have found most often is self-reserving cowardice. The unwillingness to take part in society except for the purpose of personal gain. Were all the people they look at down their holier-than-thou, Pecksniffian noses to practice what they preach, neither we - not they - would have any chance of being free. At the risk of being repetitious - I've said this here before, too - I learned very early the lesson that only the strong, and willing to fight, or those protected by someone like that, are ever free.

The lesson didn't come easy. I hated, literally, to fight. I hated even to be near angry people. I still do, matter of fact. That's despite having participated in combative sports for fifty-eight years, more than a thousand organized judo and wrestling contests. When you fight, you get hurt, you know - no way around it. But a grandfather told me when I was still recovering from poliomyelitis, "Son you have to learn to fight, and shoot. Men are free only when it costs too much to take away their freedom. When the price may be his life, he'll leave you alone." Gramps was right. I've never seen it to fail.

But the pacifist MUST believe otherwise. He knows, like I said, that to fight means you get hurt. It's the "getting hurt" part that troubles him most. Except for human respect, that is. He wants others to see something high-minded and proud in his gutless, limp-wristed effeminacy. Yes, effeminacy. We've had several generations of female ascendancy in the U.S., and the evidence of it is everywhere. Generation after generation of wimps raised in "single-parent (still another of those feminist euphemisms - this one means divorced mom, bastard kid, or both) homes" don't want to fight, either. Won't, either - when's the last time we won a war?

Shit! Now I've butchered a sacred cow. Stepped on some toes. Well, f--- it! I don't know if it's ever occurred to you, but in Vietnam - and more recently; see if the shoe fits - our military, armed with every gee-whiz, high-tech, Buck Rogers, whoop-de-do weapon known to man couldn't defeat in a ground war an army of guys dressed in black P.J.s and armed only with small arms. In the skies, guys flying thirty year old MIG-17s fought our guys in the latest F-4s armed with air-to-air missiles and Vulcan cannon to a draw. Even with the intervention of regulars, the NVA, who were armed with everything out of date, obsolescent, and second hand, we should have clobbered them. Why didn't we? BECAUSE WE DIDN'T DO WHAT IT TOOK. Which means we weren't good enough.

Ooops! Another sacred cow. Yeah, yeah, YEAH! I know. We couldn't do this, and we couldn't do that. We couldn't go here, and we couldn't go there. Who the hell fights a war like that?! ONLY US. Do I have to repeat myself? WE AREN'T GOOD - that means we haven't the will - ENOUGH. Because we've become effeminate as a society and nation

Think about it! These days in the Home of the Brave, everybody who's ever heard a shot fired is a "hero." Everybody, in fact, who was even so much as in the same country with a war. Like so many others, we'll soon need another word to describe a real hero. How the hell did it get to be like that?

Well, think about it. Go back to the Korean "War? Does anybody remember Panmumjon, Korea? The "Truce Village?" That was the place in Korea, where during the Korean "Conflict" we "negotiated" with the enemy. We negotiated while the enemy fortified and supplied the hill we would try to take the next day. When the enemy negotiated for it, we gave up the hill. The next day or so, once the enemy had reneged on the "negotiated" deal, we paid the price in blood to take the goddamned thing back. It went on over and over. When it started all over again in Vietnam, there were those of us who just couldn't believe what was happening. But every time we got into one of these f------ idiot's nightmare scenarios, the ladies - and the pacifists - loved it. "Peace Talks" sounds to humane. Just lovely. NO MATTER HOW MANY GOT KILLED AS A RESULT.

Actually, we haven't had a war since WW-2. Think about that. We've lost more than sixty thousand soldiers without having a war! We do one thing, but CALL it another. What side of society does that sound like? Yeah. Damned right. You may be too young to remember a male-dominated world, but there are those among us who do. If you can't remember, get a history book or the old newspapers and go back to the Sixties. Listen to militant feminism. "I am woman, hear me roar," a woman named Helen Reddy sang. Women wanted all the male roles in society; and, by damn, they would HAVE them. In the climate-controlled, super civilized society male muscle had finally built for them, they could do anything a man could do - even soldier. There had to be a few concessions, made of course. A forty pound pack, for instance, is damned sexist. So is a twenty-five mile hike with one on your back, carrying a nine pound rifle. Forty pushups are forty pushups, ten pull-ups likewise - male or female.

But politics IS male or female, and the girls could vote. The country effeminized, and remembering what Gramps said would happen as it started, I recall ruefully that he didn't miss a thing that's now a fact of life. And among the first things to change was the nation's way of war. We stopped having them. Oh, we kept fighting people just like a war, but under different rules. Overrun with female influences, all that feminist, never-say-what-it is language, we just didn't have the balls to SAY it. It came to be something like killing a baby, one of the first things on the feminist agenda. When you killed a baby, it was "women's right to choose." That made it a whole lot easier, and, brother, did they ever get to KILLING!

And just like "abortion," and "woman's right to choose," so it was with war. War became a "policing action," or a "conflict." And we no longer kill the enemy, either. We "engaged" him. In the Presidential Study commission by the first "Bush Presidency," two hundred and fifty-two pages did not once use the world "kill." We ENGAGE our nation's enemies. Doesn't tell you anything? No, I don't suppose. Too effeminate. Oops - that's "metrosexual."

A few years ago - did I tell you about this one? - a female security adviser (groan) at the Pentagon recommended that we develop "a kinder, gentler Army!" No, I am NOT kidding. Soldiers in boot camp could hold up their yellow (appropriate color, anyway) "stress card" whenever things got too tough for their tender psyches. Some soldiers got time out for their period. Guess who.

Parenthetically, a few years ago I ran into an old buddy about to retire from the Marine Corps. "Hal," he said, "you got out just in time. With things the way they are now - women in combat roles and all that - they'd have drawn and quartered you." He was damned well right about that.

Hell, I served with - and there still are - guys in this country, guys so tough, smart, and well-trained that they would kick ass even against numbers twenty times theirs. Anywhere, anytime, anybody. That's when they're free to do what they've been selected and trained to do. Declare war, then let them do what men at war have done since time immemorial, and they will destroy those who want to work their will on you.

But we don't do that any more. First thing you know, if we do that, some women and kids will get killed. Never you mind that the enemy hid among them in order to shoot at our soldiers with impunity. STOP THE KILLING! In fact, it's worse than that nowadays. Now, at the first sound of guns, we have people demanding "peace talks." We negotiate. I don't care what kind of miserable, murdering, baby-killing sonofabitch you choose, there will be those here in the Land of the Free who want to protect him by negotiation from the retribution he deserves. And those who protect him will be women and effeminate males. And those people will call themselves "liberals." It's Panmumjon and the Paris Peace Talks (during the war in Vietnam, dummy) all over again.

Let me tell you something, from the view of a guy seventy years old, who's been everywhere, done everything - and everybody: IF YOU NEGOTIATE WITH ANYONE WHO HAS SWORN TO KILL YOU, WHOSE VERY REASON FOR LIVING IS TO KILL YOU, WHOSE CULTURE AND RELIGION DEMAND THAT HE KILL YOU; IF YOU NEGOTIATE WITH ANYONE WHOSE HISTORY OF MURDER, PILLAGE, AND TERRORISM IS DECADES - EVEN CENTURIES - LONG, WHO EXPLODES BOMBS ON AIRLINERS AND SHOOTS IN THE HEAD AND THROWS OVERBOARD OLD MEN IN WHEELCHAIRS, WHO SHOOTS KATYUSHA ROCKETS INTO A VILLAGE ANYWHERE, WHO HIDES AMONG AND USES FOR SHIELDS WOMEN AND CHILDREN, HE WILL USE YOUR DAMNED FOOLISHNESS TO KILL MORE OF THOSE WOMEN AND CHILDREN; AND, EVENTUALLY, HE WILL KILL YOU.

And I'll tell you what he has also done: he has shown you to the world for the gutless wonder that you are. I quote again J.S. 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."

Does that remind you of anyone - a nation, for instance - these days?

Another of the words the girls have butchered - like "chauvinist" ("male chauvinist") - is HEROES! Everybody in a military uniform is a hero. That's not the only place. There are heroes all over the place nowadays. Take sports (YOU take 'em: I lost interest with the steroids thing; but don't worry, there'll be a word pretty soon, and everything will be all right). How can anyone expect of a society whose priorities are so mix-mastered and splattered that it worships as heroes - by paying them a salary equal to literally THOUSANDS of normal people - guys who play football, baseball, basketball and the like; that's while paying people who face death just about daily, fighting psychotic enemies like the al Qa'ida, the Taliban, the PLO, Hezbollah, and Hamas with lethal weapons less than a "superstar" athlete makes for one game? Elsewhere, some bimbo whose sole contribution to the nation is basically pelvic thrusts while shrieking cacophonously into a microphone is hero-worshipped by our sleep-walking adolescent set. She makes more with one recoding than all the policeman and fireman - many of them honest-to-god real heroes in the long since passé sense of the word - at the World Trade Center on 9-11 put together. Man, we pay the people charged with educating our kids less in a year than a professional athlete "hero" makes for one game.

"Superstar," I guess you know, is much more admirable than "hero." "Hero" means basically a poor kid suckered by Madison Avenue huckster recruiters and promises to provide him the college education or training he needs give him a chance in a society owned by the corporations who have put him in this kind of straits in the first place, corporations who will profit by the wars he'll have sprung on him. What will he get for his arm, or leg, or life? The "undying respect of a grateful nation." With that and three and a half bucks, he can get a gallon of the corporation's gasoline.

But the unkindest cut of them all will be that once he's fighting the war the corporations use to make the billions they pay the "superstar" heroes, his nation's effeminate "pacifists" and humanists - liberals - will demand that he play by every cockamamie rule they can dream up to assure his defeat and death. He'll have warfare designed - cheerleaders and commercials, the whole shebang - to resemble the silly damned kids' game played by the society's REAL heroes, the ones it calls "superstars." If - perish the ugly, inhumane thought - he gets the upper hand, they will demand that he negotiate. "Peace Talks." His "kinder, gentler" Army will stand guard with empty weapons (remember the Marine - MARINES, for chrisssakes! - at Beirut?), and he won't shoot until he's shot at. Then, everybody will get a medal (remember Jessica Lynch?). And we'll go on with "policing actions" (the Korean War - remember?), "conflicts," "limited war," and abortions (notice the lack of parenthesis) the like. Killing, war - but calling it something else. Much easier, that way.

And you really expect a society and nation this FUBAR to win a war? Win peace? Be serious!

Grampa made his predictions, I'll make mine. You'll elect Hillary Clinton President of the U.S., because when she runs, ninety percent of women will vote for her. There'll be more and more women in Congress (THEY go vote, by god), too. Al Qa'ida, Hezbollah, and the rest can't wait. With a majority of Congress and government female, metrosexual, and homosexual, you'll dither and deliberate - "Let's talk" (and talk, talk, and talk) with every new attack. Then you'll negotiate. A lot of people - the innocent, as always with this kind of thing - will die. That'll be all right, as long as you can come up with the right word to describe it. You'll keep striving for peace by changing the word for everything your don't like and throwing bodies to the great gods of appeasement for political gain.

Until the inevitable happens. The Islamic Terrorists will get their hideous act together. They'll learn something beside blowing themselves up on airliners, in coffee shops, and the rest. Instead of knocking down buildings, they'll hit you where you really live. They mean to kill you all, you know (in case you've chosen not to hear what they're screeching at the top of their maniacal lungs). When they finally acquire a real tactician, they'll make life so miserable - and deadly - that you'll HAVE to do something male (gasp!). Maybe groups of people will realize first that the political process - including women in power - can't deal with psychotic killers. They'll start forming their own defense committees and enclaves (as I predicted they would in 1974).

But you'll learn, my country, you'll learn. You're a woman, and you'll learn by being raped and dying, just like all those individual women, the ones you liberated and "empowered," only to be raped, murdered, and thrown away like used condoms, already victims of feminist, "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" indoctrination. Had you learned from them, you'd have discovered that when the rapist who outweighs you by a hundred pounds because he's a male rips off your clothes, throws you on the ground in an alley, and forces your legs apart, what happens will happen no matter what you call or characterize what he's doing. Just like his bomb-throwing, airliner blasting brethren, THIS "terrorist" won't care, either. Neither will there be a "cease fire." And all the attempts at negotiation here will result just like all the other attempts at negotiation with "terrorists" in history. You don't get to hold up your yellow "stress card." You just satisfy this guy's urges, then you die.

And you'll, no doubt, die thinking you wish there were one of those "male chauvinist pigs" you heard your hero sisters talk about still around. But then, you'll probably have never been aware of J.S. Mill, or of men bigger than the dwarfs he spoke of. Too bad.