As one who has almost literally been everywhere, seen everything and done everything, I am seldom surprised at anything a human being does. A few days ago, having heard that Rush Limbaugh, railing in his customary fashion against anything left of Attila the Hun, called someone a “phony soldier.”

Rush Limbaugh! Rush Limbaugh the bloviating bottom-feeder of the right-wing media, the pompous prince of perissologia, the Brahmin of bombiphiologia, and the White Houses Uriah Heep; the craven, crawling, pill-popping, self-indulging sop who dodged the draft during the Vietnam era by way of a pilonidal cyst (an ingrown hair) on his corpulent ass! Man, the soaring hypocrisy of a Rush Limbaugh calling someone - anyone - else a “phony” is astounding, stupefying – like watching a guppy morph into a whale. At the rate this guy is going, "a Rush Limbaugh" will one day serve as periphrastic reference to loud-mouthed, bloviating, hypocrisy. I can think of no one in history more archetypical.

Only one person encountered during my lifetime rivals this Colonel Blimp for outrageous remarks, that being Limbaugh’s Jack Spratt counterpart in reverse, Ann Coulter. The fat loudmouth and the emaciated loudmouth lead their mentally scrofulous cohort on FoxNews and the ridiculously Rabelaisian right, seemingly willing – striving, even - to say absolutely anything contemptible and disgusting. It’s as it they’re intent – hired, maybe – upon testing the limits of free speech.

It’s something, however, I hope they continue; and I deplore those on the left who seek to shut them up. This Senator Jack S. Phogbound of the Dogpatch White House media, together with FoxNews’ emaciated harridan harpy Coulter speak for me and anyone actually conservative or moderate – the extreme left is too similar in method and too similarly engaged to notice - with everything they say.

There is no way anything I could say would make either look more ridiculous than they themselves already do.

Having said that, however, I am reminded of recent comment concerning my essay on the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to weigh in on the matter of torture. Like the statistically documented majority of our citizenry, most people in the world of “blogging” seem to wonder – demand, even – “what can be done.”

The great majority of U.S. citizens disapprove of both their president and congress – I hope that is also the case with our national Bartelby the Scrivener Supreme Court – and are dumb-founded to realize that it means nothing where the behavior and actions of their nation are concerned.

Well, now! Fancy that. Take the tabloid gentry like Limbaugh, Coulter, Hannity, and their tawdry horse manure masquerading as thought from their scum-sucking public, the U.S. public at large would become a lemming-like mass migration to whatever equivalent of oblivion they might find – something like another Princess Dianna, Chandra Levy, Natalee Holloway, Anna Nicole Smith, smut-fest. The nation perennially stupefied by the CIA Operation Mockingbird Media writhes in its intellectual death throes, its metastasizing brain releasing the creature’s bowels like those of a dying whale. Unfortunately – to use the broadest euphemism possible – parts of the body politic remain healthy and sane, yet forced to participate in the mindless spasms and resulting insult to itself and whatever of its former dignity remains. Ripped from one Brobdingnagian extreme to another, paralysis to spasm, we ride the dying giant like a flea on a Mastodon, helpless to leave.

Shit (pun, perhaps, intended and apropos)! It’s like being the normal and sane child being reared in a home for the retarded. “One flew east and one flew west and one flew over the cuckoo’s nest.” We cannot free ourselves from the Looney Tunes left or the Nurse Ratched right.

The extremist - whether true-believer, neo-conservative, and knee-jerk liberal, after all - is like a guy who plans a car trip by laying a compass on a map, noting the direction and determining that he will drive exactly in that direction without deviation. No matter the curves and turns, corners and intersection with other streets, roads, or highways, no matter what may happen en route, he will drive straight ahead – “damn the torpedoes.” And damn anybody who happens to get in the way.

Ah, well. In response to my friend Steve (whom I mentioned here last time, too), I made the following observation:

Steve,

No, actually this predates Goebbels and Hitler by centuries. All the way back to Julius Caesar and "divide and conquer." The Mockingbird Media tactic is known to propagandists as "System Overload or System Collapse." This is based on the fact that any cybernetic or reasoning system faced with conflicting data simply waits until the scales (as it were) tips one way of the other. Keep the system fighting with itself, it stays frozen or overloads (remember the Star Trek segment wherein Captain Kirk asked "Vger," the thing destroying galaxies and headed toward Earth such a question?)

Today's right and left media use this ploy continually. It's insidiously beautiful, because it appears so democratic. More, immigration, both legal and illegal, have much to do with the astonishing state of our society and government. We have factionalized thereby the nation to a degree many of us never thought possible, with the national discourse having become much like most of the Sunday morning "panel" shows, wherein everyone tries to shout everyone else down, and the audience can have no idea what the hell is going on, much less what is being discussed.

A corollary is the tax system. Completely chaotic, no logic rhyme nor reason possible, it makes IRS a de facto dictator. The great wonder is that a nation having lived under anything as obviously unconstitutional and “un-American” as the tax code can wonder at an electorate powerless to do anything about Iraq, the border with Mexico, the health care mess, or a dozen more issues similar.

What the hell would anything rational expect? How the hell can anything even basically paying attention continue to parrot mindless myths portraying that as democracy? What - the meaning of the word has changed like so many others?

Anyway, here we are. With all the nation's factions screaming to demand what THEIR ism, asm, spism, or spasm wants, the military industrial complex and its puppet government does exactly what it damned pleases. Check Iraq, the Mexico border, education, and dozens more. It's divide and conquer, all right. Ann Coulter, Keith Olberman, Al Franken, Bill O'Reilly and the rest are team-mates working on the same project.

Trust me, amigo - I've been watching and studying this all since I was a kid. More, when I was still in high school, and had delivered a rather impassioned speech about the wonders of our system of government, my grandfather chuckled. "The Constitution is like a bit in a horse’s mouth. The horse doesn't want that bit there, and if he gets a chance, he spits it out. To let the government’s courts protect the Constitution is like letting a horse decide how tight the bridle should be."

Like so many things my grandfather told me, I never forgot that. If the poeple don't enforce the Constitution, no one will. They haven't and we've lost it. It's that simple.

Like I said, wonderfully paralyzing to the national discourse. Operation Mockingbird works.

Like many others of late, my friend, you begin to recognize what my own studies of the national discourse long ago revealed. Each website I have more recently joined - left and right - has this information and logic-less tic-tac-toe sort of thing as its sine qua non. Like I said, wonderfully paralyzing to the national discourse. Mockingbird "judo" works. The result is that NO reasoning occurs. The public couldn't agree on putting out the garbage.

For a dictator, perfect.

Hal

P.S. "Judo" is to say “use the enemy’s strength against him.” In a democracy, use democracy to make the free enslave themselves. Remember Gibbons' quote about the Athenians?

Unless some kind of new Age of Enlightenment occurs, the Human Race faces cataclysmic change. We’re not only in serious trouble, but – thanks to the Mockingbird Media – and an education system even deeper in the toilet than the rest of the nation’s societal systems - we have no idea that we are. I don’t suppose there is any way, really, to sound the alarm – to do that would require shouting louder than the likes of FoxNews – but what the hell:

As we enter twenty-first century, the world is in the midst of three great and simultaneous revolutions, each one of immense significance historically and scientifically. One is revolt of the world’s people against totalitarian rule, revolutions like those in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Poland, China, and the Soviet Union. Profound democratic change is also underway in South America and Southern Africa.

After decades of geopolitical freeze, like the polar icepack, the ice seems to be breaking up. The one sour note, of course, is the totalitarianism of government by corporation. Driven to obey its prime directive - consume the planet and exploit its people, that is - humanity’s General Bullmoose must be put in his place before any true democracy can exist. A world governed as the United States is, by a five hundred, thirty-two member congress controlled by fifty-six thousand corporate lobbyists, will be no more free than the people of the U.S. are.

Dealing with the new Roman Empire long since established by corporate colonialism may well prove prohibitive.

Another revolution which is underway, after all, is that of globalization of the world's economy. U.S. hegemony of the rest of the planet by economic means, that is. Over the past twenty to twenty-five years there has developed an international struggle making many standard economic theories obsolescent or already obsolete. Rising world awareness of the U.S. Pax Romana seeks to end the long-held concept of national economies ruled by the U.S. dollar. Unifying more and more against U.S. economic colonialism, isolated and stultified local and regional economies of the world are increasingly awakening to exert their influence.

Nothing might more serve to demonstrate this fact than the concomitant rise of U.S. neo-conservatism. The economic natives have become restless, and the corporate white hunters seek means to pacify them while keeping them subservient and satisfied with status quo. Anyone who doesn’t agree “hates us for our freedoms.”

My mention of the word “prohibitive” as respects U.S. economic totalitarianism ought be considered by the individual as a means of tactical intelligence. Consider, for instance that with workers in the United States now competing not only with workers in other parts of their own country, but with workers in Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, Mexico, and soon, probably even Eastern Europe, the heretofore large American corporations can scarcely, even, be called "American," anymore.

At the same time, neo-conservatism preaches its new form of Nazism and “lebensraum,” major corporate greed has resulted in U.S. corporate subsidiaries overseas, with factories, and even corporate management offices all over the world; that while smaller corporations unable to colonialize foreign nations seek to grow bigger by importing illegal aliens (the new slave labor) with which to supplant U.S. citizen workers from Mexico and elsewhere.

As the result, the international economy little resembles that of even twenty years ago.

Finally, there is the "information revolution," a technological sea change, which has played an important role in making the other two happen. Its implications where global consciousness of the human race are concerned can hardly be overestimated. This is a sea change affecting the seven seas, indeed, the entire water planet, with the explosive spread of computers and other information technologies, and more importantly, the impact of this technology is simply impossible to overstate.

International transmission of data now makes possible, and has provided for, even daily maintenance of business enterprises scattered all around the globe, with computers and computer-supported communication even transforming the nature of work, and creating a new international division of labor.

More, satellite technology has provided man with swift, sometimes even instantaneous, witness to events anywhere in the world. The further result is that all three of the revolutions I speak of here are feeding off one another, with internationalization of economic activity impossible without the rapid spread of the information technology.

Even further, many, or most, of the democratic revolutions all over the world would not have happened without the economic reform promoted by computer technology, and that these revolts and uprisings have spread so rapidly is due the availability of mass communications technologies like television, fax machines, satellites, and computers.

Frankly, I doubt that anyone can predict accurately the eventually total effect of the revolutionary process we are now in. Years ago, for instance – and on the other hand – I insisted to a number of my friends that the Internet would produce a candidate for President of the United States, and supplant the hideously transparent coup d’etat and military industrial complex corporation cabal now in power here. The rise of Texas Congressman Ron Paul speaks to the question of how accurate my prophesy was, as does the rise of Unity08. The coup plotters, fifty-six thousand Washington lobbyists, and other evidences of our death as a democratic nation will not go quietly, however, something that makes the future uncertain. Already, concerted efforts to stop the free exchange of ideas on the Internet are underway, most obviously in the form of the Bush Administration’s outrageous assault on personal privacy and other related aspects of the Bill of Rights. Using Operation Mockingbird devices like still another of its protection racket “wars” – a new War on Drugs called the “War on Pornography,” for instance – the government seeks to gain total control of computerized communication.

To the government – not only here, but with rulers everywhere - the Internet represents nothing less than the ability to think freely, to obtain information not filtered through and altered by the ruler’s media. It is the ability to relate directly with reality, rather than through an electronical cloud or fog erected by government. Mark well my words, there is no way they will tolerate that.

We are, in other words, at a watershed in human history. The poor, the heretofore ignorant and the therefore heretofore exploited, are about to discover why that is so. History is about, finally, to actually – without re-writing and re-structuring, without being taught by those to whom control of the reality that is history is most important – speak.

If you think that doesn’t represent a sea change, you haven’t been paying attention – meaning you were somehow separated from your forebears, from your parents and grandparents. You were taught, instructed, and shaped by those to whom your education was equivalent to today’s television “commercial.”

Chains and manacles, you know, aren’t the only way to keep – and make - a slave.

Today, October the Tenth, is always a bad day. Beverly, my wife and high school sweetheart died on this day forty-seven years ago. Since then, bad things have happened again and again on the Tenth of October. My government, for instance, tried to kill me on this date, twenty-one years ago.

And so it is that I should not have been surprised to hear as soon as I turned on the television set this morning, that the U.S. Government has been up to its old tricks. At the computer – the truth is always much easier to come by there – I was directed by several friends and family members to articles like this one:

“WASHINGTON - A German man who says he was abducted and tortured by the CIA as part of the anti-terrorism rendition program lost his final chance Tuesday to persuade U.S. courts to hear his claims.

“The Supreme Court rejected without comment an appeal from Khaled el-Masri, effectively endorsing Bush administration arguments that state secrets would be revealed if courts allowed the case to proceed.

“El-Masri, 44, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, says he was mistakenly identified as an associate of the Sept. 11 hijackers and was detained while attempting to enter Macedonia on New Year's Eve 2003.

“He claims that CIA agents stripped, beat, shackled, diapered, drugged and chained him to the floor of a plane for a flight to Afghanistan. He says he was held for four months in a CIA-run prison known as the "salt pit" in the Afghan capital of Kabul.

“After the CIA determined it had the wrong man, el-Masri says, he was dumped on a hilltop in Albania and told to walk down a path without looking back.

“The lawsuit against former CIA director George Tenet, unidentified CIA agents and others sought damages of at least $75,000.

"’We are very disappointed,’ Manfred Gnijdic, el-Masri's attorney in Germany, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from his office in Ulm.

"’It will shatter all trust in the American justice system,’ Gnijdic said, charging that the United States expects every other nation to act responsibly, but refuses to take responsibility for its own actions.

"’That is a disaster,’ Gnijdic said.

“El-Masri's claims, which prompted strong international criticism of the rendition program, were backed by European investigations and U.S. news reports. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that U.S. officials acknowledged that el-Masri's detention was a mistake.

“The U.S. government has neither confirmed nor denied el-Masri's account and, in urging the court not to hear the case, said that the facts central to el-Masri's claims "concern the highly classified methods and means of the program."

“El-Masri's case centers on the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program, in which terrorism suspects are captured and taken to foreign countries for interrogation. Human rights activists have objected to the program.

“President Bush has repeatedly defended the policies in the war on terror, saying as recently as last week that the U.S. does not engage in torture.

“El-Masri's lawsuit had been seen as a test of the administration's legal strategy to invoke the doctrine of state secrets and stop national security suits before any evidence is presented in private to a judge. Another lawsuit over the administration's warrantless wiretapping program, also dismissed by a federal court on state secrets grounds, still is pending before the justices.

“Conservative legal scholar Douglas Kmiec said the Bush White House uses the doctrine too broadly. "The notion that state secrets can't be preserved by a judge who has taken an oath to protect the Constitution, that a judge cannot examine the strength of the claim is too troubling to be accepted," said Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine University.

“The court has not examined the state secrets privilege in more than 50 years.

“A coalition of groups favoring greater openness in government says the Bush administration has used the state secrets privilege much more often than its predecessors.

“At the height of Cold War tensions between the United States and the former Soviet Union, U.S. presidents used the state secrets privilege six times from 1953 to 1976, according to OpenTheGovernment.org. Since 2001, it has been used 39 times, enabling the government to unilaterally withhold documents from the court system, the group said.

“The state secrets privilege arose from a 1953 Supreme Court ruling that allowed the executive branch to keep secret, even from the court, details about a military plane's fatal crash.

“Three widows sued to get the accident report after their husbands died aboard a B-29 bomber, but the Air Force refused to release it claiming that the plane was on a secret mission to test new equipment. The high court accepted the argument, but when the report was released decades later there was nothing in it about a secret mission or equipment.

“The case is El-Masri v. U.S., 06-1613.”

I chose to include that, verbatim, here because I fear I might lose my temper and throw caution to the winds. These, after all, are torturers. More, I have been in their sights before. I have listened covertly to their criminal machinations, heard them plot their outrages of the law and our U.S. Constitution. I know these people.

At least, I thought I did. Now this. Were I not already well-versed concerning how great is the corruption of the absolutely powerful, I couldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t believe it. The “Nation of Laws,” the “Home of the Brave.” Torturers!

Nothing – not the death of my sweetheart wife, not betrayal by my own country, not the bullets passing through my flesh on that occasion – has ever wounded me as deeply as this. God – I am so angry!

And ashamed. Ashamed for the millions of men who lie in graveyards and on battlegrounds all around the world, dead because they would pay that price for their country’s honor, honor now besmirched by the action a government comprised mostly away of cowards who would not so much as serve in their country’s uniform.

I am ashamed for generations of children, for our children today and for their children that their country, its honor sullied and flag disgraced, will never again be able to hold itself up to the world as an ideal. I am ashamed for dozens of things I must not enumerate here, fearful again of my own rage and the retaliation of the torturers against – as they were once willing to do – those whom I love. As I said, this is the lowest of the low of whom we speak. What they will not stoop to is hard to imagine.

I am ashamed knowing full well that the firestorm of public outrage that should sweep a nation “so conceived and so dedicated” to “the proposition that all men are created equal” as this one is will not happen. We’ve slipped that far, and current events as well as those of the near past demonstrate how corrupt and despicable, how dangerous to anyone who earns their disfavor, is the general U.S. public.

If I were the religious or otherwise superstitious man that I am not, I would say, “God damn you, George W. Bush and your despicable corporate criminal class, god damn you to hell” – and I would lament that no worse future for you exists. You have committed in our names the lowest of the low of human behavior; and by so doing enlisted us in the ranks of the lowest of the low of humankind, the torturer.

But that is hateful, and I do not hate – not the person, anyway. But I hate behavior, and there is no act more worthy of hate than torture. More, torture is the act of a hater, and I will not be brought down to the contemptibly execrable level of a torturer, under any circumstance.

I will wait, moreover, to see what my country and countrymen do about this. If those who suborn this crime against humanity – the U.S. Congress who stand idly feckless, and/or cynically by, and the Supreme Court, who by their actions in the matter have attempted to look the other way, that is – are not thrown from office and imprisoned (subornation and misprision of crime is to commit the same crime), I will stop flying the U.S. flag. More, I will withdraw as publicly as possible what support I still give the U.S. government (they, of course, have long since declared themselves my enemy).

The public and any citizen of the U.S. who does not protest in the loudest and most effective means possible torture also commits the crime against humanity that is torture. I will not be a torturer and I will not number myself among torturers.

And for the Sean Hannitys, the Bill O’Reillys, the Rush Limbaughs and their sickeningly sycophant, toadying, Uriah Heap kind, who hurl their FoxNews “Do you want to see the United States lose in Iraq,” this: yes, you’re damned right I hope we lose. I hope anyone who commits the crime of torture fails at whatever he attempts.

You can’t, as I just said, support crime without making yourself a criminal.

At this point in our history, it is clear that America is in the final stages of fascism; oh, it hasn't yet metastasized into the outright jackbooted fascism of Nazi Germany, but it is poised like a boulder at the top of a slope, ready to roll into the abyss. In fact, it will take a miracle to keep this from happening. Consider the facts:

The collapse of the US dollar is accelerating. Under the almost incomprehensible weight of spending loosed by the new Cold War supplanted by the War on Terror, Iraq, Afghanistan, and others of which we are not yet informed, the subsequent and inevitable effects of the sub-prime loan swindle; soaring energy prices due the threat and certainty of peak oil; with catastrophic weather events caused by global warming; and, of course, the one thing that Bush's entire foreign policy guarantees will occur - another catastrophic terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

Any one of these could by itself usher in outright fascism. Put together any two of these, and fascism in the Land of the Free is dead certain.

In point of incontrovertible, by definition, fact, the full orchestration of outright fascism has already been accomplished. We have the SturmAbteilung, the infamous “Brownshirts’ of Nazi Germany. Or have you forgotten about so-called “private” security firms like Blackwater? Once known as “proprietary companies” of the CIA, they stand ready to serve in complete revocation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights under the new Patriot Act. When martial law is declared, they will do in the U.S. what they are doing in Iraq.

Neither is that all. The Pentagon has now established a new military command it calls Northcom, its purpose to organize military operations in the United States and Canada. The Posse Comitatus Act has in preparation been gutted in order to legalize National Guard service as police anywhere in the country. If that doesn’t convince you, consider the undeniable and published fact detention centers have been built across the land with plans having been made for internment of millions of U.S. citizens.

“Alea jacta est.” The die has been cast. As with the matter of torture, and just as experience tell us that once the individual has stooped to criminal behavior like rape, murder, or torture, he cannot be rehabilitated, history tells us that there is a point of no return in the evolution of fascism. There will be no going back now. The future will see destruction and death, death by the millions both inside and outside the U.S. Yes, I am angry as never before, and ashamed – ashamed of what we have done to me, to Khalid El-Masri, and to our children and their children.

For the love of God, THIS IS THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA?

Déjà vu, all over again, Yogi.

“If we invade Iraq, it will be a very limited invasion, part of whatever is necessary to drive Saddam’s troops from Kuwait. The “war” will last a few days, something like the six day affair that resulted when the Arabs attacked Israel back in 1967. I’m sure you remember how that went: Egypt, after expelling a U.N. peace-keeping force, amassed something like a thousand tanks backed by a hundred thousand troops on the border, and when they had called for a joint attack by all the Arabs, attacked. Jordan and Syria joined in the assault and the Arabs got their asses kicked, big time. It all lasted, basically, about six days.

“At the war's end, Israel had gained control of eastern Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. The Arabs have been pissing and moaning about their losses, in that way of theirs so incomprehensible to the rest of the world, arguing somehow that they should be given back what they lost. Talk about Jews having “chutzpah!”

“For a tactician, two things are key here: first, that last. The Arab mind is very, very different. It never forgets. Its – that’s he, really, women have no role in Arab culture except to supply sex to the male and reproduce - world will sulk, and hate, forever. Allah wills it.

“That concerning the Arab female, parenthetically, is something to think about, too, but also generally beside my point here.

“The Arab’s culture is different (hence my comment concerning its women), like many cultures are, from ours in basically European society. Our new “celebrate diversity” demands not only that we pretend all human beings (the sexes, too) are alike, but that we bullshit ourselves concerning matters as critical to the world as those having to do with geo-political policy between nations.

“That last, too, is beside my point, however. My point is that no one who doesn’t want to turn what is basically – yeah, I know I use that word a lot, but this is basic stuff – a religious war between Judaism and Mohammedanism into one between the latter and Christianity would invade and occupy Iraq. No body is that stupid, not even the United States of America post feminism.

“The second point is the first here, that being that the Arab gets his ass kicked every time he goes up against even little Israel (my god, the country is what, two hundred, fifty miles long, something like ten miles wide at one point?). He is a miserable tactician, mostly because Allah can over-rule him any time Allah likes, and because anything the Arab does must be macho-spectacular. He will send kids carrying some kind of religious symbol into a mine field (the Iran-Iraq war, remember?). The kids clear the mines by exploding them with their bodies; they all go to heaven and the mines get cleared. What’s true for their kids is true for the rest of them – don’t forget that, it’s part of the discussion here.

“The U.S. firepower is impossible to describe to anyone outside the U.S. defense establishment. Even Soviet military planners and all the technology they possessed during the Cold War had real, strategic and tactical difficultly with that. The military industrial coup d’etat that took over here right after the Second World War has spent fifteen trillions of dollars on our war machine, building levels of redundancy dictated entirely by fiscal greed, not military or defense strategy. In a conventional war – something other than guerrilla, in other words – the U.S. could destroy the rest of the world’s military powers about seventy times (the world, too – but that’s again beside the point) over.

“The U.S. will destroy Saddam’s Army in about ten days. Since there’s no real need to do anything else, that’s all they’ll do. The “Mother of all Battles” will deliver a still-born baby, weighing about a pound. Anything else, moreover, would be f-ing nuts, the reason Israel didn’t go to Cairo or Damascus, or whatever the hell the capitol of Jordan is (Amman?). The Arab will take any ass-kicking he can explain away with that love of language and bullshit bluster talk he has, but he will not tolerate being held captive. Read your history book, for cripes sake.

“If we go all the way to Baghdad, or – god perish the horrendously ugly thought – try to occupy the country, it would be a disaster of proportions so damned big I get sick to my stomach, just thinking about it. Man, have you thought about what all the terrorism against the airlines, against the Jews, and other enemies of Allah is about? How long has that been going on? Fifty years? Since the partitioning of Israel, that’s for sure.

“In fact and essentially, Islam has been waging guerrilla war against Christendom – and, for that matter, all other religions – for six or seven centuries. Read the Koran (of course, being a westerner – especially a citizen of “I know it all because I watch TV” U.S – you probably haven’t even seen the book, much less read from it).

“The Arabs have been fighting a guerrilla war against Israel because they believe the Jews are occupying their land. If we try to conquer – occupy Iraq – they will do exactly the same thing. And it won’t be just the Iraqis who wage guerrilla war; it will be every Islamic Arab on the planet. Moslems who live in this country will start here what Moslems in Israel started. It will also be Afghanistan and the Soviets all over again – in spades. Remember what happened to the Soviet Union, now only Russia?

“But there’s another possibility. And, now that I think of it, your question has really made me sick. The military industrial complex – to use President Eisenhower’s expression as he left office – is about making war, the bigger the better. I was always afraid during the Cold War – especially Cuba that time (are you old enough to remember that?) – that these goddamned (I use the term advisedly) maniacs would start a nuclear war, just so they could profit by it. Of course, the one, great reason they didn’t do that was the fact that they would suffer enormously, too. All their profits; and you can damned well bet that’s how they saw it. Remember when they were trying to make a bomb – cobalt, as I remember – that wouldn’t destroy anything, just people?

“We – and, more importantly, they – might even lose. Besides, they had going on the sweetest game in the world – a secret war. With the public having no way to know what was going on, who was winning and who losing, the military industrialists (and, don’t forget, their CIA with unlimited power to spend without even keeping books) could build weapons unimpeded by anything so conventional as having to claim the need to replace materielle destroyed in conventional war. The only war being fought could be the war called the Arms Race – everything was “destroyed” by virtue of having the other guy build a better one than we had.

“Meaning, supposedly, that we had to build another weapon - the better one. Even that could be faked, the reason for Operation Mockingbird and CIA control of the news media. If the evening news said the Soviets had a new weapon and we had to build a better one – well, what the hell? At the same time, we could foment a little “Communist takeover” brouhaha here, then there, and the folks would all be convinced there was another world-wide war going on. We were “making the world safe for freedom,” remember?

“The fact that none of the countries that “fell” to Communism ever actually attacked us was somehow lost on everyone. We needed desperately to “free all those oppressed people;” that we seldom did was also lost on everyone. Strange.

“Hell, even little “Communist attempts at takeover” like the Philippines and such weren’t enough; when Vietnam came along . . . Shit – perfect! Billions to spend on munitions, pull out after a while . . . Ken, you really don’t relate Vietnam with what would happen in Iraq? Damn!

“And if we should invade Iraq like we did Vietnam . . .? Holy crap! Did I say perfect? With Korea, the Philippines, and all the other places, there was always the threat of the Soviet Union and Red China and their nuclear arsenals. But with the Arabs . . .? Oh, shit! You don’t suppose?

“God, this could go on forever! If we invade Iraq, Saddam’s troops could just fade away, then start guerrilla warfare. AK-47s, RPG’s, mines, and booby-traps everywhere. The rest of Islam would feed sacrificial martyrs like those little kids in the Iranian minefields into the fight forever. Even that raises another specter. Pakistan has the bomb, and sooner or later, so will somebody else Arab. Egypt, maybe. Iran.

“And those demented loons will use it. Never doubt that. Our friend minister is always loathe to depreciate religions other than his own Christianity. Well, sorry, amigo – I call ‘em like I see ‘em. Remember those “children into the minefield?” I just looked it up, and it’s worth digressing for: During the Iran-Iraq War, the Ayatollah Khomeini (remember that nut case?) declared something called the Basiji Mustaphan – “the mobilization of the oppressed” (you should be thinking about jihad – “holy war”). Khomeini sent Iranian children, some as young as twelve years old, to march in formation across minefields and clear a path with their bodies.

“The kids were given a plastic key to wear around their necks, in order that they could open the gates of paradise when they got there.

“Think that’s insane? Well try this: The kids not only went, sent by their parents, but they went in droves, by the tens of thousands. A German newspaper I read all the time, the Frankfurter Zeitung, reported that sometimes the enlistments for the mine-clearing “became a race – even without orders, everyone wanted to be first.” What the hell (pardon the expression) - this is about paradise.

“If we were to invade Iraq and go to Baghdad, and/or try to occupy the place, that’s what we’d be starting.

“Nobody’s that stupid? No, but lots of people are that greedy. What Islam is to the Arab – those kids in the minefields – money and power are to the corporate capitalist. Thanks for your damned question, Jeff – now I am really, really scared.”

I wrote that in November, 1991 - letter to a friend at the old National Judo Institute. I found it yesterday, looking for this in my old files (when we moved a year ago, things got more than a little disarrayed – even worse than I knew when I started digging). I wrote this in March, 2005, concerning the Terri Schiavo matter (she was the brain-dead girl whose husband wanted to take her off life support, and her family didn’t).

“Oooh—did I stick some people right in their old (and obviously debilitated) consciences! Let’s see if I can help all you righteous (I am not being cynical) moralists with your moral dilemma:

“Suppose you are up on a mountainside and you suddenly hear the heart-rending sound of a child screaming in agony. Looking down you see her. A thousand yards from you, separated from you by extremely difficult terrain, she is being attacked and eaten alive by a wild dog. You have a rifle, a high-powered one, and you are an excellent shot. You have only four rounds. You shoot the dog in the head—you’re that good—three times, only to learn that for some reason you can’t kill it. It goes on eating the little girl as if nothing has happened. The child also goes on - screaming in mortal agony. You have one round left, and it will take you at least an hour to get to her rescue. One round left.

“What do you do? The Bible all of you cited to me says god's grace - the good sense and free will he gave you all – ‘is sufficient unto all.’ You are, in short, never given a problem, ethical or otherwise, you can't deal with to his satisfaction. . .

“Still, if you’re the United States of America, I wouldn’t want to be that child.

“Notice, incidentally, that I didn’t propose that the child could by some form of telepathy beg you to end her suffering. I assume, obviously, that—being like her—you know what she wants. Maybe I assume too much . . .?”

Now, I wrote the piece about the child being eaten by the wild dog in order to make a point about a nation so confused in its morality that it could have a furious argument about what GOD wants. I’ve written here, too, about the furious argument that ensues every time subjects like sex come up – again, what does GOD want? I’ve also, and finally, commented time and again, that I wish we could stop listening to god. For all of our wondrous, high-tech communication – hell, we can communicate with other star systems – we seem to get that one garbled every time.

GOD told the Ayatollah Khomeini he should drive little kids into a minefield? If Iranian parents put a plastic key made in Taiwan around a kid’s neck, the child could get into paradise after the mines vaporized (the kids also wrapped themselves in blankets, then rolled into the mines; the blankets would assure that the parents had pieces to honor with burial) him?

GOD decrees that a guy who straps on an explosive vest, sits down in a crowded restaurant or gets on an airliner and blows himself up will go to heaven? High-jacking an airliner, then diving it into a skyscraper with thousands of people in it and knocking it down, is “holy war?”

Crazy, nutcase, fanatics – right?

Well, now. I admit that I see the world and creation as an endless string of analogies. I relate things and affairs, one to the other. It’s the reason I am a history buff. But as Ricky Ricardo used to say, “’Splain dat to me, Luci.” How do those Moslem fanatics whose confidante GOD tells them to use “keys to heaven” children as minesweepers differ from confidantes of God like President George W. Bush? Invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan isn’t walking into a minefield that is Islam?

Isn’t that, in light of history, the societal and national equivalent of wearing an explosive vest? How about firing your pistol into a backpack you’re standing over in order to see if it contains a bomb. How about a suitcase “nuke?”

Of course, I hasten to point out, the average “American” (think about the implications here of one society among two hundred, thirty-four in the Americas calling their country alone “America”) doesn’t know enough about the Arab world to so much as be able to spell or pronounce any of their names, let alone anything of their religion or how GOD speaks to them. What the average “American” – all those people who keep voting for “American” George Bushes about as bright as they are – knows about their prospective enemy and what GOD is telling him you could get in your eye and it wouldn’t make you blink. You’ll shoot without having any idea where the bullet is going or what it will do, just like your dumdum vice president once did with his hunting partner (oh, boy – is that an analogy for Iraq?). You don’t know what’s in that damned backpack, but GOD, it seems – nothing else explains any behavior as stupid – tells you shooting into it will be okay.

When the son-of-a-bitch blows up, we’ll all go to heaven.

P.S. Why did I mention the Terri Schiavo matter, and the child with the wild dog on the mountain?

Certain males, my grandfather used to say, “… wouldn’t make a pimple on a real man’s ass!” I've been thinking about that, and the men who today foist themselves upon the nation as "leaders." Arrrrrrrgh!

A few days ago, I heard again what seems to me will one day be the dirge played whenever the former United States of American is remembered.

“Real men cry . . .”

And, of course, it was a woman – or several – who said it. Well, today’s “male” does cry; he blubbers like a baby, matter of fact – and about things so damned adolescent and puerile those of us old enough to be his grandfather find hard to believe. Or stomach. Today’s “real” man does a lot of things men didn’t do before the feminist revolution that was in reality little more than an attack – a neurotic one - on maleness. And, of course, the testosterone and muscle that had built the world that made their new offensive possible, or even feasible.

Today’s man not only cries, he is as emotional as an spoiled brat – meaning, among other things, he beats the hell out of his wife (and kids) whenever he feels the need to let off steam (odd, isn’t it, how the same women who rail against “spousal abuse” are also the same women who insist that real men cry).

Today’s “real” man not only cries, emotes, beats his wife, and is cruel to the dog, he suck drugs, imagines that muscles made of steroids make him tough, cheats at every damned sport he plays, and gets his kicks watching scum-sucker crap like cock-fighting and dog-fighting. He swills beer while watching such manly sports as NASCAR and pro football and basketball, and stuffs his face until he weighs four hundred pounds, all the while parroting one-liners from the latest macho-minimalist movie he saw.

Confronted by the possibility of any of the violence he would appear to crave, he melts like chocolate in a skillet.

More, use a term larger than two syllables, he pouts and postures, acts as though his semi-literacy is some kind of social award or credential. He’s as stupid as an ox, but you should include him in any deliberation having to do with the literature, science, or military tactics he doesn’t know the first thing about. He knows his rights, but can’t distinguish the first amendment from the Communist Manifesto (which he doesn’t so much as recognize by title). His highest ideal seems to be Larry the Cable Guy. In the alternative, he’s a limp-wristed panty-waist, metrosexual “girly-man” who wouldn’t make a pimple on a man’s ass.

Those or he’s a bloviating bullshitter like Fox News “line-up” of phony pundits, almost any of our pandering Senator Jack S. Phogbound (anybody remember Al Capp?) politicians, or their like. Oops – almost forgot our “celebrities?” Have you ever really looked at one of these wimps?” Jesus! – they're actors all right; poseurs is more it. And what they’re pretending to be is a MAN!

And if you think my having left out the likes of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and dozens more who haven’t the substance of the shadows of men like the late Ed Bradley, Bill Cosby, and others their like, you’re wrong there, too. It’s just that people like Jackson and Sharpton so piss me off that I always break things before calming down.

Anyway, I hadn’t been so aware of the level to which masculinity had fallen in the general public until coming to South Texas. The astonishing rudeness of my male brethren . . . well, it astonished me. Men not only acted like boors – hats on while indoors; even at table while eating, forcing their way to the head of waiting lines, belching, farting, scratching and fifty things more obnoxious – they seemed to take a kind of perverse pride in it all. I’ve got a reputation back home, however, one for drawing a line in the sand.

A guy steps over that line when he puts his hands on me. Back when my youngest was eight or so, there was a John Wayne movie, the Shootist. Leaving the theater afterwards, Aaron said, “Hey, mom – that sounded like dad, huh?” He was referring to the line, “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 from them.” Several times (some of which are public record, by the way), a man availing himself of what appears to be some kind of social dispensation granted his Hispanic class and attempting to force his way into a waiting line reached out intending to shove me out of the way. That, when you think of it, is a pretty stupid thing to do when the “shove” is a two-time national champion in judo with more than a thousand organized fights on the record.

One example, excerpted in my book “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story, it’s worth reciting for what it says about the new “real” man of America.

“As a boy, I was taught behavior and manners I still exhibit and practice today. I will not permit a man to be rude to a woman, period . . . When a friend and I happened upon one macho character as he was pummeling a woman he held pressed helplessly against a car, I answered his, ‘Who the hell are you and what gives you the right to stick your nose in my affairs’ with something that may prove instructional here. ‘I'm the guy,’ I said, ‘who's gonna kick your ass and use it to sweep this parking lot if you hit that woman again. And, mister, my ‘right’ is the same right any decent man who sees you abuse a woman has.’

“My eyes holding his . . ., I fished a business card from my pocket and handed it to the woman. ‘Ma'am,’ I said, "if he hits or abuses you again - ever, you call me and it will be my distinct pleasure to make him very, very sorry.’ I didn't hear from them again, so I have no idea – but the bull-frog bastard deflated right before my eyes like a balloon. When we came out of the store we had been headed toward, the couple was still sitting in the car talking earnestly. As we walked behind their car to our truck, the woman put her arm out the car window and waved the card. My friend and I - the lady, too, it seems - had a little laugh at Tough Man's expense.

“I do have to confess to have mellowed somewhat (don't get the idea that I've stopped training to fight or shoot, though - that could lead to error with serious effect) in my old age. After the six (or seventh - I don't really make a big thing of this) similar incident, one in a local K-Mart, it occurred to me that my penchant for kicking bully's asses might label me with local police as a provocateur. In several instances, including that of the WalMart incident, the police were called. In that instance, a burly character who pushed an elderly man and his wife aside in order to force his way into line ahead of them at the checkout counter, my armlock happened to smash his face on the conveyor belt and spray blood from his broken nose around. When the old couple and the check-out lady had explained to arriving police officers what had occurred (did I forget to say that smart-ass had attempted to give me a hard shove?), I was not arrested.”

So much for the “war stories.” I hope they make a point (other than that I’m an irascible old character who also happens to love women).

I quote this all the time lately, but I’ll do it again – it’s the ineluctable truth:

“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.” -- John Stuart Mill, from On Liberty (1859)

A while ago, I posted on one of my pages here a list of questions. I said I would be adding to them as time went on. Here’s another, one asked in a recent book by Lee Iacocca, former CEO of Chrysler Corporation: Where have all the leaders gone?

There’s more: Where the hell is the public’s outrage at what the sorry pack of clueless bozos who are guiding our country to obvious catastrophic ruin? We have corporate gangsters stealing us blind, ruining the countryside, polluting and poisoning the atmosphere and environment, and making a mockery of our U.S. Constitution and law. This clusterf--- of clowns can’t so much as come to the effective aid of New Orleans after Katrina and Rita, but we let them run a war in Iraq! “Stay the course?!” With this FUBAR fraternity? You have GOT to be kidding!

In his book, Iacocca chides himself for being enraged. Well, by damn – at least I’m in good company there. The eighty-two year old stud also says something you’ve heard me say, too – if you know me or have read my “blogs.” He says that no one who isn’t outraged at what’s happening ought call himself a patriot. DAMNED RIGHT – I agree. The former CEO notes, as I have here, that the whole political “debate” has become a handy cop-out. Let me quote:

“And don’t tell me it’s all the fault of right-wing Republicans or liberal Democrats. That an intellectually lazy argument, and it’s part of the reason we’re in this stew. We’re not a nation of factions. We’re a people. We share common principles and ideals. We rise and fall together.”

When I say I couldn’t have said it better myself, I mean it – hell, it’s almost as if I DID say it!

I might add parenthetically that those who attempt apologist rationale regarding what I’ve just said are suspect of insanity in my view. There are so many proofs of federal corruption, incompetence, and contempt for the public that one could fill a volume, none more irrefutable than the fact that foreigners – even foreign governments – lobby in Washington, D.C. against the interests of the common citizen of the nation once the land of the free. No one not as corrupt as they are has any real hope of influencing the government that desecrates by its presence the city once graced by the likes of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Patrick Henry. Even illegal aliens – thieves, rapists, pedophiles, and murderers – have the ear of government, an ear not accessible to the people who must pay for it all.

I’ll tell you something else, something historians will one day say: We have no leaders today because the society that would otherwise have produced them no longer exists.

“It’s okay for men to cry . . .” The fact is that the women saying that haven’t the faintest idea of what they speak. How many men do they know? Even their knowledge and familiarity with history is invariably so little that they have no real idea of what made its great men. The historical and sociological truth is that women have always had a major role in determining what a society and nation’s men are, because a man will always in some degree be whatever his woman demands. She is the prize in the great and eternal mating game, after all – what everything he strives for IS for. If a man can be a weakling and still have her, why would he strive for more?

Have another look, dear reader, at that quote from J. S. Mill.

I have some more questions, for the women who think real men cry, and the “real” men who do:

1. What happens to the self-esteem of a nation whose male leaders cry, whose leaders male and female practice the equivalent cowardice of lying? How do you get leaders from a society of men who blubber and weep? What happens to the spirit of self-reliance and independence that once defined us as a nation?

2. How have we brought down – ladies – the proud middle class male to a majority that this as impotent and feckless as what is now called the “little man?” You expect a George Washington, a Thomas Jefferson, an Abraham Lincoln, a George Patton, a Chester Nimitz, a Dwight Eisenhower, a Douglas MacArthur from “little men?”

3. Why are we no longer capable of raising our children to be real men? What are we doing to our boys? Why is it that these “real” men can do nothing – often, as a matter of fact, don’t even care about their children being mentally degraded, reduced to idiot consumers for the mere sake of consumption, their talent, creativity, and spirits inundated in the utter garbage being foisted upon them as food and drink, music, entertainment, sports – even sex. Why is it that “real” men seem powerless to do anything, either, about a nation so self-serving and conceited that they have become willing to feed their children poison, and let all the rest happen.

Were you paying no attention when feminism, the legislatures, and the courts exalted the “single-parent” family, making the male redundant, un-necessary, and without parental rights? I wasn’t. And my on the record prediction – pooh-poohed, of course by just about all the distaff side of society - concerning what would happen as a result is now daily news.

4. How is it that “real” men seem able to have no voice when it comes to responsible dissent? How can a nation continue as a democracy when its society has no real fear of or respect for genuine and honorable male anger? What government, what foreign enemy fears a nation of wimps?

5. Why would a nation of one hundred fifty million naturally powerful males, trained and educated in weapons and manly pursuits as males once were, feel it necessary to build billions and billions – hundreds of billions – of dollars worth of high-tech, push-button, and plush guns, tanks, bombs, planes, ships, submarines, rockets, and on and on – weapons all designed in the final analysis to somehow make a wimp a warrior? How is it that in Vietnam and wars since our “real” men, armed with every gee-whiz, Buck Rogers weapon the mind and science of man can devise, could not defeat an enemy essentially armed with small arms and rocket-propelled grenades?

Yeah, I know. The truth hurts. Dealing with it used to be a thing men did – no tears.

6. Why is a nation with all these “real” men so afraid? Why so depressed? Why so (fecklessly) angry?

7. Why do all these “real” men tolerate the veritable avalanche of hideous crime by government and government by the corporations? What kind of men have stood and still stand idly and passively by while corporate crime in America has reached, and now reaches even more staggeringly epidemic proportions; all while almost no criminal outrage is not tolerated by those pandering to the criminal corporations and their lobbyists in the Potomac capitol? What kind of men suffer under and tolerate a federal tax structure like ours, one that provides corporations like Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and literally thousands more advantage - total ascendancy in the cases of the “Marts” – over struggling small businesses in the U.S.

And on and on, and on and on. “Real men.” Men who cry. You bet – instead of doing something, he can cry. That’ll fix it. Make him feel better. I have a lot more questions, but just one more, for today:

What kind of woman respects that kind of “man” . . . ?

Last night, still more symptoms of our national mental illness. Britt Hume of FoxNews, having first proclaimed in that imperious manner of his that a “growing number” of scientists is speaking either negatively or voicing uncertainty about the causes of global warming (logic: we don’t know for certain what it is, so we shouldn’t change anything we’re doing even it we have a very good suspect), proceeded to announce in pedagogue’s tone “findings” (with truth serum, it would be “gropings”) “proving” that ethanol and bio-fuels will contribute more to “air pollution” than petroleum-based fuels, and we should therefore stay with what we arte doing.

Read that again. I’m too tired of this rationally spastic crap to bother myself, anymore. I only mention it, as I said, it because it’s so symptomatic. Call it a warning, one I’ve been trying to sound for thirty-five years.

But the nation listens to the likes of Britt Hume or his FoxFriends, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and the rest friends. And “growing numbers . . .” All, no doubt, “Reliable sources.” Good grief!

Change the subject, Hal.

Okay, here’s another. It’s that I don’t like to be afraid. I’ve hated it since classmate bullies taking advantage of my polio-resulted puniness made each and every walk to and from school a nightmare of terror. At one point, I so feared what nearly daily beatings was doing to my features that I would no longer be recognizable. It wasn’t, however, until a teacher honored my nearly-closed eyes, broken nose (seven times before reaching the end of my freshman year in high school), and broken teeth with laughter and a comic line in a school play’s script, that humiliation became a factor.

When a big girl – she outweighed me by at least thirty pounds - who was a classmate threw me to the ground, then straddled my chest and proceeded to punch me in the face, the witches brew that is hate due humiliation overflowed its cup. In a men’s magazine, one of several subscribed to for me by grandparents with whom I stayed during the years I “lost the use of” my legs – as “the folks” euphemistically termed my paralysis - I found an add selling a book. “Bernard Cosneck’s American Combat Judo” cost nine, ninety-five, and I ordered it – having it sent to the school in order that pacifist grandparents wouldn’t learn of my ominous intent.

“Combat Judo” wasn’t much of a book. Even then, the world’s men’s magazines were a macho-minimalist place; bullshit, in other words. Everything in the book required strength I didn’t have, not even close. Hell, I couldn’t do ONE pushup. That, I’d learned a few days after joining Troop 43 of the Boy Scouts of America. Encouraged to try earning the Athletic Merit Badge several other scouts had decided to work on, I did likewise. The result was more humiliation.

Not to fear, said Scoutmaster Vince Miller, where there was a will, there was a way. I know you think that’s trite, the mantra of a nation devoted to the platitude and lie. Maybe, but I was desperate, and Mr. Miller was one hell of a man. Farmer and wrestler that almost all the men in the area were, he was muscular and powerful, able to handle an animal like a two hundred pound hog during castration or administration of antibiotic shots as though it were a cat. His recommendation was that I begin doing pushups against a wall, by leaning forward to fall against it with outstretched arms. When I had added a couple of repetitions, he instructed, I should move my feet back farther from the wall and continue.

I did as he said, and a red-letter day of my life – equal to my first airplane solo, my first parachute jump, marriage, the birth of my first child, and the like – was the first time I did twenty-five honestly classic pushups.

From there, I became a local legend. Everywhere in the area, people saw “that crazy Luebbert kid” running. Or snowshoeing – even in an Iowa blizzard. When that resulted in the Indian wife of a local trapper calling me “Walks-in-Storms,” the name stuck with her people. Even at work, jobs for local farmers, I did pushups and sit-ups by the hundreds, and pull-ups by the score. I ran everywhere I went, sometimes as far as Charles City, eighteen miles away and back. I ran weekly to Osage, nine miles, in order to go swimming and visit the library. Dropped off each night by a boss, the man would see me run to the hay rope hanging from the barn’s hay-mow track and begin climbing. Having gone up and down the sixteen foot rope three times, I would run to the walnut tree in the front yard, to begin chin-ups and parallel bar presses there. And so on.

And I studied ways to fight. After experimenting with boxing, I discarded “the sweet science” as stupid, not unlike mountain sheep butting heads. Besides, watching boxing matches made it very clear how generally ineffective punching was. Boxers threw literally hundreds of punches without significant effect. I wrestled, but the rules of folkstyle and freestyle wrestling prohibited the armlock I recognized early on as the most effective of fighting tactics. When I had researched carefully and exhaustively, I found the sport called judo. Formulated for the express purpose of being the state of the art for hand to hand combat, I knew it was for me the first time I saw it.

And I grew strong. I grew fearsomely strong. When one day the farmer brother of the man who was my employer playfully challenged me, I threw him and forced his surrender easily. A powerful man used to the hard labor of farming then and a former state champion in high school wrestling, he outweighed me by forty pounds. When a local bully, an all-state tackle on the Osage High football team wouldn’t take “no” for an answer from my cousin Beverly, I invited him outside the skating rink where our confrontation had begun; there, using a particular judo throw, I proceeded to literally pound the street’s parking area with his body. He was sitting on the curb vomiting when the police arrived.

I learned to shoot, too. Initiated at five into the fraternity of German hunters to which all my family belonged, I knew how to shoot and handle a weapon long before my travail with polio and the bullies of my youth. While still a sophomore in high school, however, I bought my first Browning Model 1911 pistol in .45 caliber and began practice. As I said in my book “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story,” you wouldn’t believe how I practiced. Few people have ever practiced as I practiced.

I practiced until I could do what would one day be dubbed by the U.S. Army “the Mongoose Trick.” The Mongoose Trick is to draw a loaded, cocked, and locked Model 1911, .45 caliber handgun from concealment under a shirt or jacket, and fire it accurately at a target – in less than two-fifths of a second, the time it takes a coin held at holster level to fall to the floor.

It is also the time it takes a human being to react, to know he is being killed.

I practiced until I could do the Mongoose Trick with either hand, and from any of several holster positions. In a roomful of U.S. Army Generals and Colonels I would one day demonstrate the trick for Lt. Gen. Thomas Hickey and then Brigadier General Thomas Van Natta. It was only a little while later that the tactic got its then derisive name. Told by anyone who had seen it, the listener would invariably scoff. Arrogant stupidity has been S.O.P. – Standard Operating Policy – in the United States and its military establishment for a very long time.

The Mongoose Tactic would develop and evolve into what is today called “SWAT” – the acronym for Special Weapons And Training. SWAT is based on the idea of overcoming a daunting enemy or situation with surprise, speed, and decisively overwhelming force – the Mongoose Trick. It was after having been asked that day at Fort Polk, Louisiana how I would deal with a situation like that of No Gun Ri (when North Korean soldiers fired upon our troops from among refugees streaming south and our troops returned fire), I did my demonstration. Asked how it applied, I explained and added that in the alternative, one might kill a hostage taker for long range with a high-powered rifle.

Pressed a few weeks later at Fort Benning by General Hickey, a contingent of U.S. Marine officers, and others, I promised that provided a suitable fifty caliber rifle, I would be able to kill at two thousand yards. The idea was roundly jeered. That was, let’s remember, 1958.

Don’t forget that military arrogance I mentioned, either.

In 1966, while a correspondence student in criminology for Dr. Stuart Holcomb at the University of Iowa, I reprised the paper first written for General Hickey. It drew the same kind of reaction it had at first. “Lunacy,” an assistant to Professor Holcomb wrote across the paper. A few months later, when a sniper shooting from the tower at the University of Texas had killed fourteen people and wounded thirty-one others, an official of the Los Angeles Police Department, one Daryl Gates, organized the first SWAT team. The idea, it was said, was that of another LAPD officer – in 1965. The idea, you’ll notice, was no longer considered “lunacy.”

Another of my ideas of the time I might mention here by way of demonstration and to make the record was that of a suitable battle shield for close quarters combat, a light-weight shield not unlike, worn and used in a manner similar to that of the “target” of medieval times, except for use with a handgun rather than sword. With today’s Kevlar and materials the like, the shield would be immensely practical, and it will soon now gain acceptance in house-to-house fighting like that in Iraq, or in other forms of Close Quarters Combat. That’s because even in theory a soldier armed with a powerful handgun and hand-held shield would be multiples more effective than one armed with things like execrable M-16 rifle and its variants and protected by rather impractical armored vests now in use.

The “target” shield, like a number of combat tactics of the Mongoose Trick genre, is something I have recommended repeatedly over the years. An idea, it’s been said, must always pass through four stages – ridicule, tolerance, acceptance, and theft. It’s the way things are in the world of capitalism. This is, after all, the Land of the Fee, and of corporate capitalism, where stolen ideas pay off as well as stolen property, and are much easier to “fence.”

But as I often say – and do – I digress. To continue, I found it interesting to note that first organizational descriptions of the SWAT idea, as well as first organizational manuals, contained verbatim whole sentences also found not only in my 1958, U.S. Army paper, but in my subsequent, “lunacy” paper. It, as I said, happens. Yeah, I know – but can you imagine a corporation with honor? Against its “bottom line?” Imagine the stock-holders of a corporations’ reaction to an honor against profits policy?

Do I have a point to make here? Yup, and it’s this. The reaction of the townspeople in my little home town back in Iowa when observing my self-training, together with the strength and skill resulting from it so obviously, was to find it all very unsettling. The easy prey victim, butt of any annoyance or meanness otherwise they might feel, the weakling societally dependent upon them for kindness and protection, was somehow far more lovable than the formidably powerful and skilled, independent stalwart. It wasn’t good to fight, everyone agreed, not good to “study war.” I should turn the other cheek, even “offer up” to god “in expiation of sin” the injury, pain, and humiliation inflicted by my fellow student and human being.

When Sister Mary Pacifica found the book “Combat Judo” in the mail, she asked what it was. I told her. I wasn’t going to accept any more torment, I said defiantly. The nun only laughed, her eyes running over my rail-thin and puny arms and shoulders. She handed me the book.

In a book written many years ago – so long ago that I can’t find it even with the Internet – historian Etienne de Groef wrote that the people of the United States, desirous of freedom from all hardship and fear, would one day legislate themselves into virtual prison. In “Untergang Durch Instinkt,” he accurately predicted decades ago what we have today, doing so on the basis of extrapolation from observation of the forces with which I was forced to deal as a boy. Having come to the same conclusions many years before that, even, I chose to rebel against the supposed authority of the community, and to refuse to submit to the odious premise that in order to provide the community peace, one – I – or a few should submit to being beaten, tortured, and humiliated.

Faith – in a rigidly Catholic, small town community the surrogate for government under neo-conservative capitalism and humanist-feminist socialism – demanded that I submit to the modern equivalent of a tracking device on my ankle. When the Catholic Church, and so-called Christian religious dogma like it in effect murdered my wife and made me an accomplice, I rejected once and for all the rule of those who profess to talk to god.

Anyone who professes to do that is in fact a devil – that according to the man they profess and proclaim to worship as god. “False prophets.” We are again – how many times have we done this? – at war, surely, a work of the devil, in the name of religion, and god. My god – how obvious can your “devil” be?

I’ve written a book, and this is a blatant promotion. I’ve written the book because it tells a story that is the parallel and corollary of this government by military industrial corporation’s abuse of the public and their nation. An individual – me -has lived through everything that is happening to the nation and its society today.

Oh, I can hear the individual reared and indoctrinated in capitalism think – I learned to do that long ago. Forget it! I have no need at all of money. I have no need of society, even civilization. Deprivation resulted when IRS seized everything, drove from me my wives, and drove my teenage son to several attempts at suicide, taught me to live the way a wolf or coyote lives. I don’t need you at all. The book is written for the same reason this is.

I want you to destroy this government. If you don’t learn what I already know, from what I have already experienced, you will suffer what I have already suffered. Government in the Land of the Free, become the Land of the Fee, will imprison - or destroy - you.

Your choice.

P.S. I made MY choice, you'll recall, long ago . . .