Radley Balko hopes:

“Here’s hoping the Davises get at least the $12.5 million the Gallardos got. Perhaps a bankruptcy will convince North Richland Hills’ inept public officials to (a) exercise some oversight over its jacked-up police department, (b) rethink the policy of sending the SWAT team after nonviolent offenders, and (c) put some accountability mechanisms in place when things go wrong in the future.”

Why would that work? The money won’t be coming out of the pockets of these people, it will of course be paid out of tax revenues. And a public bankruptcy won’t show up on their individual credit reports.

One of the things I’ve been wanting to do for a long time is bash the idiocies about the current war and previous ones coming from the regular columnists of Lew Rockwell’s web site. Gene Callahan has kindly provided a target of opportunity in a recent article.

In it, he makes the mistake of treating the military prosecution of Japan in WWII as if it were a matter of whether the Japanese people, as distinct from the Japanese military or government, were necessarily to blame for their government and military’s war against the USA. Of course they weren’t. But, because of the total economic mobilization of the Japanese economy, and the preparations for total military mobilization of the Japanese people in the event of US ground invasion of Japan, they still contributed to the Japanese military threat to the USA. While this wouldn’t include those Japanese who were not engaged in war production or in the militia, military technology of the time wasn’t accurate enough to enable the US to only attack those who were engaged in war production or in the militia. Those in war production or the militia were fair game, the rest were collateral damage whose deaths and wounding are properly the fault of the Japanese government/military, not the US.

Callahan’s comments would be applicable if, after Japan’s surrender, the US had put the Japanese people as a whole on trial and then inflicted some sort of collective punishment, such as the aerial bombardment of the whole country. But, in fact, US conduct after Japan’s surrender shows that US intent was quite different. Truman accepted the first surrender terms formally offered by Japan, even though they weren’t the unconditional surrender FDR had been pushing for, and MacArthur called for massive famine relief to prevent widespread starvation due to the destruction of the Japanese merchant marine and railroad networks during the war. Starvation was prevented, land was redistributed from the feudal aristocracy and given to the peasants as private property, women were given the right to vote, a liberal constitution was imposed on Japan, free elections were allowed to take place, and the foundations were laid for one of the freest and richest countries in Asia and the world. Those actions were hardly consistent with the idea of collective punishment.

Interested readers are recommended to read Richard Frank’s "Downfall" about the atomic bombing of Japan and the question of Japanese surrender to the USA. Also see Thomas Fleming’s "The New Dealer’s War" for additional criticism of FDR’s policy of unconditional surrender.

I see that Callahan has also joined the chorus protesting the detention of Jose Padilla. I really wish those who criticize the War on Terror on civil-libertarian grounds would make up their minds. First, they criticize the detention of Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorist at Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, arguing that they ought to be treated as POWs, even though POW status is a privilege to be earned by obeying such laws of war as wearing uniforms, insignia, having a recognized chain of command, bearing arms openly, etc. Then they criticize the detention of Jose Padilla for his terrorist activities, arguing that he ought to be either charged with a crime or released. If he actually were a lawful enemy combatant, the US would be under no obligation to do either, they could simply hold him as a POW until the end of the war, at which point he could be repatriated - or tried for war crimes.

Padilla certainly isn’t a lawful combatant, as he wasn’t in uniform, openly bearing arms, etc., when he was caught. But in detaining him for the duration of the war to question him and ensure he never actually succeeded in any terrorist conspiracy, the US is well within its legal and moral rights to treat him as a POW in this respect. The Bush administration has already said that if it does decide to charge him with a crime, he will then be turned over to the civil court system.

Rothbardian libertarians like Callahan don’t seem to understand the international laws of war. They make much of the distinction between combatants and non-combatants when criticizing the killing of non-combatants, but they don’t seem to recognize that it is the responsibility of combatants to distinguish themselves from non-combatants so their enemies may attack them without endangering non-combatants. That means no using non-combatants as human shields, no hiding in civilian hospitals, churches, mosques, refugee camps, etc. It means wearing uniforms to distinguish yourself from non-combatants and insignia to distinguish yourself from enemy combatants. It also means restricting your choice of targets to enemy combatants. Terrorists, by any reasonable definition, break all of these rules. That puts them in the category of unlawful combatants, just like spies and saboteurs. Ever see one of those great WWII movies about Allied commandos operating behind enemy lines, like "The Guns of Navarrone"? A standard bit of dialogue in them is about how they can be shot as spies once they’ve been captured by the Germans. Those lines are usually assigned to the German characters, but they reflected the same international laws of war that were observed by the Allies, too. Enemy spies are subject to summary execution under the laws of war. That’s one of the things that makes espionage so risky and exciting.

Realizing that the US would be within its legal rights to simply line up Padilla against a wall and shoot him as an enemy spy puts his treatment into perspective. He’s being treated very leniently, all things considered. So are the detainees at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Traffic was wide-open travelling south on I-95 out of New Hampshire, and the deep breathing, long-legged Sport Satellite settled nicely into into its favorite 100 mile per hour cruising groove. 7.2 liters of displacement coupled with 3.23 highway gears gave it all the low end torque it needed for handling the in-town chores, but where the pavement turned long and straight the top-end was limited only by a somewhat indifferent front suspension,… and nerve. Being young and not overly-bright meant not having the sense to listen to that spark of reason in my head because there was competition to be found out here, and I would have it.

I’d meant no harm when the pretty little IROC Z retreated in my rearview mirror, and frankly I wasn’t interested in wasting gas on an anemic ghost of a past champion. The showroom Chevy raced up beside me, young boys crowding its windows, challenging the old MoPar and its driver as they mouthed, "Let’s go!" Bored but curious, I let the Camaro pull ahead by half a car length, making sure to keep the nose of the Plymouth right in the corner of the driver’s eye. Easing up to 120, the Chevy had run out of air, or gears, or perhaps guts, and I casually gave them a wave as I eased past right before mashing my foot to the floor, leaving them once again (and finally).

Mustangs also fell by the wayside in the same manner, and I’d always resented the emasculated Corvette owners who gave some pretense to racing yet fell back whenever we approached triple digits. Their machine was ‘an investment’, or ‘a statement’, or anything but the instrument for which it was designed; to propel a human being at speeds beyond the sanely acceptable. "The car has more balls than you do," I thought to myself, eyeing the middle-aged, executive type behind the wheel of what *should* have been some real competition. ‘Cool it down and pack it up’ was the plan to which I’d resigned myself as I looped around to pick up 128 North to Cape Ann.

North of Beverly is where the complexion of Route 128 really changes. The malls and industrial parks are left far behind, as well as the clots of commuters and extra lanes. Dense and green, the trees grew right up to the edge of the highway as well as filling the wide median, blocking the view between the north and southbound lanes. Even at 85 the scene was peaceful, and in my reverie I never noticed the bright red Porche 911 bearing down on me. Alone on that two lane stretch of highway, the Porche smoothly negotiated around me and back into the fast lane, checking his rearview to see if I was willing to give chase.

A slight dip of the nose told him all he need to know, and in a heartbeat our speedometers registered the news; each of us had found the challenge we were looking for.

My stock instrument gauge was useless as the needle swung through 120, pinning itself at the (undesignated) speed of 130, leaving only the tachometer and some ungodly sound from under the hood to tell the tale. NASCAR racing was coming to life, and the high-pitched sound of an engine running past six thousand RPM filled me with visions of pistons punching through the hood. Still the Porche maintained the lead, and drafting was no longer just a buzzword from the broadcasting booth. The 911’s whale tail opened a pocket for me to slip into, and moving out to pass left me desperately trying to convince the front-end of the Mighty MoPar that my notion of direction was worthy of merit.

The road pulled up into a slight rise with a sweeping right hand turn at its crest, and at 7400 RPM my motor seemed eager for even more fuel. This was my spot, my only chance to break away from the German fury and prove the mettle of American iron. Standing between me and victory was a sedate little commuter car in the right hand travel lane, blithely rolling along at the posted 55 miles per hour. Fortunately for me (and unfortunately for him), the breakdown lane was just wide enough for the Plymouth’s bulging rear fenders plus a jelly donut, and with the most careful input to the steering wheel I could muster, I let the beast drift across the lane, sheering off distance as I took a radically inside line, aiming for an apex between gravel and the station wagon’s side molding.

I wondered what the unsuspecting commuter felt as the two speed demons passed him on either side at nearly the exact moment, but by the time I’d pulled back into the passing lane in front of the 911 he was nowhere to be seen in the vibrating mirror. A bit of panic seeped into my brain as I realized that we were fast approaching traffic ahead at what must have been 165 mph, but both the Porche pilot and I throttled back and let it go with a friendly wave. Adrenaline rushed through me, my legs rubbery and jangling as I scrubbed off speed to take my exit, leaving me spent but elated as I mused, "there’s no replacement for cubic displacement!"

The social contract theory of the State has it that the State is formed by the agreement of the People to establish a monopoly on legitimate violence to perform certain functions. Social contract theorists sometimes disagree about the nature and scope of the State’s functions, but most agree that they include, at a minimum, providing police, courts, & the military. Many social contract theorists argue that other things should be done by the State, but few besides anarchists question whether the State should do these things at all. For the sake of this discussion, then, let’s stick to these three. If the theory holds for them, then it may hold for others as well. If it doesn’t hold for these, then it may be difficult to see how it could justify additional State functions.

On this minimal conception of the functions of the State, then, social contract theory has it that the People are obligated to pay taxes to the State and abide by its rules in exchange for the protection they get from the police, courts, & military. In turn, the State is obligated to protect the People. In theory, there is mutual agreement between the People & the State to these terms and this substance, and there is mutual obligation. But does this theory hold in practice? In practice, is there really mutual agreement and mutual obligation about this relationship? I will argue that, in practice, neither mutual agreement nor mutual obligation can be found in the relationship between the People and the State. Further, I will argue that, in practice, there is no such social contract.

Some argue that the Constitution of a country is the social contract. But, as Lysander Spooner pointed out, written Constitutions have "no inherent authority or obligation." They have "no authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between man and man." At most, they can only be contracts between those who were alive and "already come to years of discretion, so as to be competent to make reasonable and obligatory contracts" when they are written. Further, they can only obligate those "consulted on the subject, or asked, or permitted either to express their consent or dissent in any formal manner." And, those who may authorize & be obligated to Constitutions have "no natural power or right to make it obligatory upon their children." ("No Treason: the Constitution of No Authority," the Lysander Spooner Reader, p. 71)

How else could the people agree to the State? "If they have done so, they can only have done so in only one of both of two ways, viz., by voting, and paying taxes." (ibid, p. 73)

Taxation might seem at first to indicate the consent of the governed since people seem to willingly pay the State to protect them. However, the Mafia has also claimed to "protect" people in exchange for payment. In fact, the "protection" money collected by the Mafia isn’t willingly paid at all, but extorted by the Mafia from its victims. In fact, it isn’t "protection" money at all, but extortion. Extortion is defined as "obtaining property from another by wrongful use of actual or threatened force, violence, or fear, or under color of official right." (Black’s Law Dictionary, p. 302). The Mafia’s "protection" is neither freely offered nor freely accepted. Those who don’t pay their "protection" money are threatened with harm to their lives, liberties, & properties.

The same thing goes for taxation. The State doesn’t wait for anyone to request its "services," and, like the Mafia, its offers are ones that you can’t refuse. Those who decline its offers are also threatened with harm to their life, liberty, or property. Where the Mafia may firebomb the home or business of those who don’t pay up, the State will rob, beat, imprison, and even kill those who refuse to pay their taxes because they reject the "services" the State has to offer.

Taxation may seem analogous to rent paid by a tenant to its landlord, but this analogy doesn’t hold water, either. While legitimate landlords get their property by being the first to make use of it and mark it off or by getting it in trade or as a gift from someone who did, etc., the State doesn’t get its territory that way. The State gets its territory the same way as the Mafia: by violence, or the threat thereof. Thus, neither the State nor the Mafia are the legitimate owners of anything they get by means of their extortion.

Furthermore, this assumes that the State claims title to all the real estate within its territory, which isn’t always the case. In fact, land title was held "allodium" ("Land held absolutely in one’s own right, and not of any lord or superior; land not subject to feudal duties or burdens. An estate held by absolute ownership, without recognizing any superior to whom any duty is due on account thereof." - ibid, p. 39), or "fee simple absolute" ("A fee simple is an estate limited absolutely to a man and his heirs and assigns forever without limitation or condition. An absolute or fee-simple estate is one in which the owner is entitled to the entire property, with unconditional power of disposition during his life, and descending to his heirs and legal representatives upon his death intestate." - ibid, p. 317) in England prior to the Norman Conquest. But, as Thomas Jefferson pointed out in his "Summary View of the Rights of British America":

"America was conquered, and her settlements made and firmly established, at the expense of individuals, and not of the British public. Their own blood was spilt in acquiring lands for their settlement, their own fortunes expended in making that settlement effectual. For themselves they fought, for themselves conquered, and for themselves alone they have right to hold. No shilling was ever issued from the public treasures of his Majesty, or his ancestors, for their assistance, till of very late times, after the colonies had become established on a firm and permanent footing. That then, indeed, having become valuable to Great Britain for her commercial purposes, his Parliament was pleased to lend them assistance against an enemy who would fain have drawn to herself the benefits of their commerce, to the great aggrandisement of herself, and danger of Great Britain. Such assistance, and in such circumstances, they had often before given to Portugal and other allied states, with whom they carry on a commercial intercourse. Yet these states never supposed that by calling in her aid, they thereby submitted themselves to her sovereignty. Had such terms been proposed, they would have rejected them with disdain, and trusted for better, to the moderation of their enemies, or to a vigorous exertion of their own force… "

America was not conquered by William the Norman, nor its lands surrendered to him or any of his successors. Possessions there are, undoubtedly, of the Allodial nature. Our ancestors, however, who migrated hither, were laborers, not lawyers. The fictitious principle, that all lands belong originally to the King, they were early persuaded to believe real, and accordingly took grants of their own lands from the Crown." - Thomas Jefferson, "Summary view of the rights of British America," LIFE & SELECTED WRITINGS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON, ed. Adrienne Koch & William Peden, Random House, (c) 1972, pp. 294-95, 308

However, this error didn’t waive the right.

There are other essential differences between the rent paid by tenant to landlord and the tax paid by people to the State: tenants voluntarily choose to enter into their landlord’s estate, and to pay the rent charged by the landlord for the tenant’s occupation of the estate. Furthermore, tenants can quit the premises and thus relieve themselves of liability to pay rent to the landlord. Neither condition obtains in the relationship between the People and the State. Even if we assume that the State holds legitimate original title to its territory, this could only obligate people to pay rent if they’d voluntarily occupied it in the first place. Furthermore, the People aren’t relieved of tax liability even if they leave the country if the country in question is that claimed by the Federal Government of the USA, which requires its citizens to pay taxes to it no matter whether they live within its geographical boundaries or not.

The very word "taxation" means "forced exaction," according to Charles Adams, tax attorney and leading historian of taxation (see his books "Fight, Flight, Fraud," and "For Good and Evil"). As he points out, the common-law principle of fair benefit received for consideration given has no place in tax law. Black’s Law Dictionary says: "Essential characteristics of a tax are that it is not a voluntary payment for donation, but an enforced contribution…" (p. 758)

There are a number of reasons why voting isn’t an expression of the consent of the governed as well. One is that voting is also done under duress, just as is paying taxes. Taxes are assessed whether one votes or not, so many vote out of self-defense in order to prevent their taxes from being used against them in some way or another. Another is that the majority often votes to violate the rights of the minority, which violates the principle that contracts to violate the rights of another are invalid. Still another reason is that since voting is done by secret ballot there can be no meeting of the minds as is necessary for any legally binding agreement. Yet another reason is that voting could at most only bind those who actually voted in any given election, but elections are commonly held to obligate those many people who don’t vote. Still further, those who vote for candidates who lose the election can’t be said to have consented to the rule of the winner. There may be other reasons, but I think these are enough to prove that voting can’t be an expression of the consent of the governed.

One could still argue that even though there’s no mutual agreement to pay taxes & obey the State’s rules in exchange for the State’s protection, the people are still obligated to do so because the State is obligated to protect them whether they agree to it or not. But, in fact, not only doesn’t the State have any obligation to protect those who haven’t agreed to it, it doesn’t have any legal obligation to protect people who’ve not only agreed to the State’s protection but desperately need it because they have no other way of getting protection. Neither the police, courts, military, or any other officials or employees of the State have to protect them:

"As numerous courts have held, they have no legal obligation to protect anyone in particular. You cannot sue them for failing to prevent you from being the victim of a crime." - Jeffrey Snyder

This is an instance of the legal doctrine of "sovereign immunity," which stems from the medieval notion that the king could do no wrong. Black’s Law Dictionary says that it "precludes litigant from asserting an otherwise meritorious cause of action against a sovereign or a party with sovereign attributes unless sovereign consents to suit." (p. 724) The State has been so kind as to waive sovereign immunity in some cases under the Federal Tort Claims Act of 1946, but "preserves governmental immunity with respect to the traditional categories of intentional torts, and with respect to acts or omissions which fall within the ‘discretionary function or duty’ of any federal agency." (p. 317) What is the scope of this "discretionary function or duty"? It can be found in Black’s Law under the heading of "sovereignty": "The power to do everything in a state WITHOUT ACCOUNTABILITY, - to make laws, to execute and to apply them, to impose and collect taxes and levy contributions, to make war or peace, to form treaties of alliance or of commerce with foreign nations, and the like" (emphasis added). The several states under the federal government also have their own statutes relieving them and the city and county government under them of liability for any and all failures to protect the people from threats to their lives, liberties, and properties as do the county & city levels of government.

One could still argue that even though the State has no legal obligation to live up to its end of the deal it still has a political obligation: if its officials breach the social contract, then they can get defeated in their next election and replaced with someone else. However, this objection was anticipated by Lysander Spooner as well:

"Suffrage is equally powerless and unreliable. It can be exercised only periodically; and the tyranny must at least be borne until the time for suffrage comes. Besides, when the suffrage is exercised, it gives no guaranty for the repeal of existing laws that are oppressive, and no security against the enactment of new ones that are equally so. The second body of legislators are liable and likely to be just as tyrannical as the first. If it be said that the second body may be chosen for their integrity, the answer is, that the first were chosen for that very reason, and yet proved tyrants. The second will be exposed to the same temptations as the first, and will be just as likely to prove tyrannical. Who ever heard that succeeding legislatures were, on the whole, more honest than those that preceded them? What is there in the nature of men or things to make them so? If it be said that the first body were chosen from motives of injustice, that fact proves that there is a portion of society who desire to establish injustice; and if they were powerful or artful enough to procure the election of their instruments to compose the first legislature, they will be likely to be powerful enough or artful enough to procure the election of the same or similar instruments to compose the second. The right of suffrage, therefore, and even a change of legislators, guarantees no change of legislation - certainly no change for the better. Even if a change for the better actually comes, it comes too late, because it comes only after more or less injustice has been irreparably done.

"But, at best, the right of suffrage can be exercised only periodically; and between the periods the legislators are wholly irresponsible. No despot was ever more entirely irresponsible than are republican legislators during the period for which they are chosen. They can neither be removed from their office, nor called to account while in office, nor punished after they leave their office, be their tyranny what it may. Moreover, the judicial and executive departments of the government are equally irresponsible TO THE PEOPLE, and are only responsible (by impeachment, and dependence for their salaries), to those irresponsible legislators. This dependence of the judiciary and executive upon the legislature is a guaranty that they will always sanction and execute its laws, whether just or unjust. Thus the legislators hold the whole power of the government in their hands, and are at the same time utterly irresponsible for the manner in which they use it." - Lysander Spooner, "Trial By Jury," THE LYSANDER SPOONER READER, pp. 126-27

How could the State be obliged to protect those who reject its offer if it isn’t even obliged to protect those who not only accept the offer but whose very lives depend upon it?

What about enforcement of the State’s obligation to protect the people by means of the right of revolution? First of all, in order for the people to be able to overthrow the State by armed revolution they have to be able to break the State’s monopoly of legitimate violence by not only being able to keep & bear arms but also by having the authority to judge the legitimacy of their actions. Thus, they have to rob the State of its defining characteristics. The government that would then be overthrown may be tyrannical, but it wouldn’t be a State except in the sense of being an organization which tries to monopolize legitimate violence by means of force & fraud, however unsuccessfully it might do so. In fact, even if a State didn’t claim sovereign immunity, even if it were based upon the consent of the governed, it still couldn’t be held to its end of the deal without first being robbed if its status as a State. There being no practical way to enforce obligations upon an existing State, no such obligations can exist in practice, which means that there can be no mutual obligation between the People & the State - which means that there can be no contract between People & State, since mutual obligation is a necessary condition for contract to exist.

Secondly, Spooner answered this one as well: "The right of revolution… is of no practical value, except for those who are stronger than the government. So long, therefore, as the oppressions of a government are kept within such limits as simply not to exasperate against it a power greater than its own, the right of revolution cannot be appealed to, and is therefore inapplicable to the case. This affords a wide field for tyranny…" - ibid, pp. 129

It turns out that the alleged "social contract" is doubly one-sided: the only party to agree to it is the State, and the only party that is obliged by it is the People. The State agrees to collect taxes & enforce its rules upon the People, and the people are obliged to pay those taxes & abide by those rules. There is no mutuality of agreement nor any mutuality of obligation between the State and the people, and, therefore, can be no contract. There is no more contract between the State and the People than there is between the Mafia and the victims of its extortion rackets or rapists and their victims. Thus, the People have no obligation to pay taxes or to obey the State, and the State has no legitimacy in attempting to enforce any such obligations.

Our children will be ashamed that common integrity will look like courage.” (Yevgeny Yevtushenko, quoted by attorney Mike Tigar on CNN’s “Burden Of Proof”)

Within two weeks of news of outright FBI complicity in two horrendous crimes — J. Edgar Hoover’s order to thwart investigation into the infamous bombing of Birmingham, Alabama’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, and the ruination of Joseph Salvati’s life by thirty years of imprisonment on a murder charge that the FBI *knew* was false, all along — comes now the revelation that over three thousand pages of evidentiary documentation from forty-six FBI field offices were witheld from defense attorneys for Timothy McVeigh.

Who could possibly argue for moderation of outrage in this matter?

By dint of nothing but sheer obstinate habit by now, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is regarded by the senseless as the premier criminal investigative body in the world. For thirty years, that reputation has been has been an impenetrable mystery to me. If a fish rots from the head down, this one was *born* rotten, and it will be only my boundless personal grace and charity that permits me to entertain in the least any sort of incompetence defense of this organ of the Amerikan state.

I am not a fool. I do not, and will not, ignore the blazing contradictions between the mythic popular hype and the “mistakes were made” blandishments routinely offered as rationale for what is summarily dismissable incompetence, in the best possible consideration.

Let us consider, as far as possible, what could be the currently prevailing state of mind among those who revealed this evidence in the Oklahoma City bombing case. If these people are not mortified to their very bones, then they are monsters. That’s all there is to that. Even if they are not monsters under these qualifications, they are not qualified to hold the jobs that they hold, which is to say: they can in no way be trusted with the *power* that they wield.

This is an institution with the power to arbitrarily de-rail the lives of Americans — nationwide — in stark defiance of every rational concept of justice. We know this because they *have*. This is not some airified theoretical construct open to abstract dispute. This is a plain matter of fact, in practice. Any dispute of the point must dispute obvious facts.

The instant matter of the documents missing from the McVeigh prosecution has little or nothing important to do with the fate of McVeigh himself. The whole point of outrage over this has to do with understanding that the truth is not important to an investigative body whose value purports to be devotion to justice. The purpose of such a body is to render facts before a judicial body charged with determining what they *mean*. The judicial body includes all officers of the court, whose responsibility it is to try these facts for their meanings against accusations of crime.

It is simply common sense to understand that investigative bodies cannot be permitted discretion – deliberate or inadvertant — among the facts they render for trial. If the state were to set out on a course of tyranny, what else could possibly be the first step along the road but to represent as truth anything except every pertinent fact of any given case?

And if they cannot do that, then what are we paying them for?

Once that question is addressed, the next one, darker yet, is begged by nearly ten recent years of positive accelerated mendacity at the FBI. Who will call the roll? Why should it be necessary?

Why was Deputy Director Larry Potts permitted his retirement with full pension after he destroyed evidence of flat-out predatory “rules of engagement” at Ruby Ridge?

There are innumerable such questions written in the darkness of the past decade alone. How many can stand the light of day before the average eye glazes-over in boredom or fatigue at the danger they represent?

With numbing regularity, officials of this agency have gone before congress pleading for and even demanding greater investigative powers in a land that was not born to general investigation. Even if we extend them the consideration that they might not be evil to the core, conceding that they are only bumbling fools unable to do their jobs, why in the world would anyone trust them with such power over us?

Does it *matter* whether anyone trusts them?

The necessary implication of that necessary question is that they will have their way with investigative facts, in any case. Is this really the way things are, now? If it is, then it cannot represent anything but an intraversible gulf between the ordinary citizen whose powers are restricted to those common to the limits of his singular existence, and the massed force of governments known throughout history.

Forget, for a moment, the entire litany of outrages perpetrated by this Federal Bureau of Investigation, and consider one essential:

Why can’t these people deal in the truth?

Walking up to the ticket counter nearly twenty minutes my past gate-time at the busiest airport in the world, I knew already that I was looking at stand-by on the next flight out, at best. I was over it. Everybody else was settled in their seats, rolling out, and cracking a book or doing that airplane-breakneck-nap thing. They’d all be in their rooms by the time I came trailing in behind them and calling Ollie’s cell number to get where I was going, or maybe he’d leave me a packet at the ticket counter. When I blew things up like this in the past, he was pretty good about that.

I wasn’t really worried — just irritated as hell – and yanked out of that “I travel the world - I don’t know how” mode that Jidman and I have seeped into in the past three years. We get flight times in e-mail or on the phone. Somebody else puts it all together, meets us at the airport with the essentials, and off we go.

About eighty feet away at the counter, there was this baggage cart stacked about six feet high with not-suitcase stuff. I’m looking at this as I’m walking up to it, and I see these armored corners on what looks like Anvil cases, and I realize that it’s rock gear. And there’s a large guitar case lying flat on top of the pile, and I’m thinking “Well, that’s the only way to do it,” and I see the color of that case and it’s Dee’s case. That’s D-Bass’ bass guitar on that baggage cart. At nearly twenty minutes after gate time.

And that’s Jid’s RF (”radio frequency”) rack, the heaviest item we fly with. And the SPX box. That’s our gear.

“What the hell?…” I’m thinking. Stopped dead.

And Regina jumps up over there at that flat narrow end of that long, long room that is the ticketing concourse at the world’s busiest airport, and she hollers at me, “It’s all you fault.”

“*What* is going on?”

“We were all waiting for *you* to get here and check in, and they scrubbed all our tickets!”

By now, The Amazing Sleeping Man is starting to shake with the giggles there on the baggage scale at the empty counter, and I’m getting some kind of picture of this thing.

“Nonsense. Look: I’ve been listening to nothing but bullshit all week long, and I won’t have it.”

Halfway through the turn of the on-ramp to Interstate 85 and nearly fifty miles away I realized I was only an hour and twenty mintues from gate time. It was moderately alarming, but I’d seen worse, and at the right time of day it would go. This wasn’t the right time of day, but the operating principle here is, “Never give up.” Take every second you can shave, all the way along, because I’ve seen it play down to seconds: stashing carry-on and looking back at seconds anywhere along the way where the wrong play would have made the difference between making the seat with the team or dragging catch-up behind them all day long.

The first fifteen minutes southbound were as good as they could be, making eighty-five on average with room to stay safe out there with all those nutters. They seemed to be behaving themselves, and I was able to blow along all the way down to midtown in that time, which was hopeful. The south half was going to be a drag, but every second up front was going in the bank… which promptly went broke at the I-75 split. The six-lane parking lot, from there down past the stadium. Jesus, god.

Tick-tock. Nice 454SS pickup putting by in the HOV lane, and then the guys with the hip-hop blasting rust powder off their heap with the kick-drum beats. Riding in the afternoon sunshine, home on a Friday afternoon. I’m glad everybody’s having such a good time out here, but I wish they would all just get out of my way. Why can’t they plan their lives around mine? I wonder how hard could that possibly be.

The damned thing finally began sliding along at about gate minus-thirty. Gassing it on for the next ten minutes or so in broken traffic, I was thinking I still had a shot. The last of that silly flame winked out when the west economy parking lot was closed — which fact they never indicate out-front where one can make a sound strategic navigation move when seconds count — and I went another round the mulberry bush to get to parking nearest the ticket counter. Hell, though; I was rounding-round, at least five minutes past gate-time, and just went for the damned Park & Ride lot.

Forget it. It’s just that I hate to run like that and not make it.

Geena and September were having a fine laugh over it while Ollie was burning down a cell phone. D-Bass was laid-out on the baggage scale doing the Amazing Sleeping Man thing; out, if he wanted to be, but hearing everything. The way it was explained to me, I was was thinking somebody really needed to get fired behind this. Somehow, for the first time I ever saw in an operation like this, we had everybody standing around without tickets to the gig. Something weird had happened in the food chain far above our heads, or even Ollie’s, apparently. It wasn’t worth tracking down at the moment, to us. Someone either in the travel office or artist management. Didn’t matter, right away, because somebody was trying to hook up stand-by’s on the next flight, in two and half hours.

Jid came strolling up, with carry-on’s. “What the hell?…” I’m thinking. “Where did he come from?” Last anybody knew, he was in Oklahoma City, and I figured he’d just turn up at Sacramento.

“What are *you* doing here?” Geena and September were laughing all over again because they’d heard him call Ollie from baggage claim and knew he was on his way up to our end. “Jesus… you daughter was telling me last night that she knew where you were but had no idea when you’d be home. I thought you’d just fly out to OKC. Why the hell did you come home?”

He was groaning that all-day drag, and he finally let on how his bags were on the next flight in from Dallas or someplace. “Well, that’s cool,” I said. “We’ve got over two hours until our stand-by to the coast, so we can go play if Dad says it’s okay.”

Ollie didn’t need us to hang right away for ticketing and claim-checks on the gear. He was able to nod-out that much with the cell-phone wedged on his cheek and scribbling on his PDA. Carnell wanted to hang with the gear and the girls were talking real-estate, so Jid-man, Mark and I made our escape to the bar.

That’s where Jid told me the story about how he didn’t burn twenty-five thousand miles and seventy-five dollars to change his ticket out of OKC. *That* flight got goofed by the guy who booked him on that gig, so he was making up his mind about blowing straight home with the fastest thing he could grab or coasting on the ticket he had. That thing was a bounce to Chicago or something, and he’d been delayed already. He said, “To hell with it. I’ll just coast in, catch the next stand-by back out to the coast and catch up with you guys there.”

By the second tap on The Pretty Bottle, he was laughing at my freeway breakneck and figuring he’d made the right call.

“Well, yeah,” I said, “but what time did you guys get going this morning?”

Mark laughed, “Six o’clock. We could be in Europe by now.” Jid pretty much just rolled his eyes.

We walked back down to the flat end of the ticketing concourse of the busiest airport in the world, and I couldn’t believe it.

“That man has *two* cell phones going.” Ollie rolled his eyes with a phone wedged against his cheek and the other one in the hand that wasn’t thumbing the PDA. The Amazing Sleeping Man drawled out that “whatthefucknext?” look on his always-ready-for-anything face. I’ve never seen anyone more adept with the uncomfortabilities of airports, the world over, and he was having high comedy already. Geena and September were daintily lounged, best they could be, and tearing off bits of harmony now & then between the hang.

Carnell had been buzzing the ticketing agents, and between him and Ollie, the last laugh finally dropped when he said he was going home.

D-Bass couldn’t fall down laughing, because he was already down on the baggage scale. Everybody did the huddle on Ollie and noted the new times: the best move was just to go home and come back for the 8:10am. Jid-man was getting *very* happy that he didn’t burn those miles, when Derek came strolling up. He and Keetcho had been up at the gate concourse, soaking up a barley-sandwich, no doubt, and were just getting the word. Even Ollie was laughing now.

So, Mark, Jid, and I mounted our bags and headed off to Jid’s car, and I looked at the afternoon air. It was soft and windless, and just perfect for one of those early spring flights in a small airplane, of the sort that I’d been wishing I’d been able to squeeze in before I left on this trip. It didn’t quite open up before today, but the evening was perfect…

… and by the time I drove my ass all the back up north, it would be just getting too dark to take off. And that’s how it went. Jid dropped me at the Park & Ride bus; I got a toss out to my car; started driving the nutter-course up through town, with the setting sun just mocking me out the left window all the way home.

Yes, folx; it’s a glamorous profession.

I love my work, I really do.

It’s just too bad how I sometimes hate my job.

The miserable business of “counseling troubled youth” will naturally continue to thrive under Conservative Communism, even if certain of the poor dears’ criers come and go now and then. Taking each case on its own demands an eye on details always properly set in the big picture, like naming the winner in a close race to hell or congratulating someone acquitted of a murder charge. There is a lot more afoot than meets most people’s eyes.

It is always far more categorically important in these matters to not “take each case on its own," because of the nature of “these matters." I certainly do not suppose everyone in the world intelligent enough to abide my own nearly Victorian world-view in the matter of dealing with children — to say nothing of them as criminals — but I can righteously demand that they one & all keep their bloody hands out of my pockets while they’re at their own way about it. And I always do. The categorical imperative here is, as always: private property. Do not rob me in order to pay for your goods.

Conservative Communism, however, is about the continuing business of setting various gangs and herds against each other at the lip of the village soup pot. War-fighting doctrine now calls for establishing Faith Bases out where the enemy of poverty controls the night. Naturally, strategic hamlet chieftains must be carefully chosen for the role they will play in deploying such critical resources.

Looking out the chinks at the darkness all day long and glancing over one’s embattled shoulder at comrades toiling the brats in any given hamlet qualifies them to gauge a “good job” at that sort of thing, if anything does. Thus the wailing reaches us over the walls at one of the little forts because a good comrade has been cast out.

The New York Times Magazine brings the sad tale of Alicia Pedreira, whose good works at the Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children of Louisville, Kentucky, have come to naught because she is a lesbian. The works are alleged to be “good” by the brats themselves, various peasants living about the hamlet, as well as Alicia, and that’s good enough for the chink-outlook. I’ll take it.

She really cared. The brats loved her. She had a “sterling reputation” behind the walls, and she is educated, with “a degree in expressive therapy." She was solicited to work at the Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children and she even told them that she was a lesbian during a job interview. Nonetheless, she took her place among the comrades and brats and things went swimmingly until somebody went and won a state fair photography contest with – guess what — a picture of Alicia with her arm around her girlfriend at some AIDS walk around the hamlet.

Well, that was that for the Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children, who decided that they could take the seventy-five percent of their budget that they get from the state government and discriminate against Alicia by firing her because they can’t use queers or dopers. Actually… to be fair here, the Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children didn’t really say that Alicia was a doper, but they said they couldn’t use dopers, anyway.

Anyway, Alicia’s fired, various of her comrades have thrown themselves over the hamlet walls in her name, and the brats are in tears.

So, now, a man can stand at Cincinnati, cock an ear downriver, and hear the lawyers thrashing toward Louisville.

Alicia and the American Civil Liberties Union have filed a federal lawsuit in United States District Court at Louisville, because the Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children have a religious problem with a queer on the staff. Conservative Communism is said to be alarmed at some implications of the case, coming as it does in time with the new war-fighting doctrine of Faith Bases. Homosexual legaleers are scouting the most important case since some people recently told others to get away from their private campfires. Adventurers scaling the range of the 1964 Civil Rights Act are marking territory from which to lay fire on “Charitable Choice” strongholds, and Conservative Communist benders make the viddie rounds pleading for a special discrimination (”only on the basis of religion” – Stephen Goldsmith) hoping nobody notices such craven weenietalk.

The central issue in this case is the probity of a right to be dumb with other people’s money. If the Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children were truly and centrally concerned with their brats’ welfare, then they would also have concerned themselves with the instant facts of Alicia’s daily drill around the hamlet, which is said to have been quite soldier-like. “She really cared,” etc., and she apparently wasn’t the sort to start laying tongue-holds on the poor kiddies, or even walk around glaring about how “gay” she is. Nobody knows what actually concerned them in this case, because they weren’t concerned with it before some amateur took a picture of her. None of the ink they’ve sprayed at the matter seems to clear the air of it, but it really doesn’t even matter now, except for the hollering, and maybe a million or two in punitive damages years down the road.

To people living in and around these matters, it is the most rational possible thing to go to war over how they’re going to spend each others’ money. Every sort of creep with a jag on over “sky muffins” will be on hand to scream about how their money shouldn’t pay for “imposing religious beliefs." (They’re absolutely right about that, but nevermind.) The Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children have said that they would rather “stop contracting with government” (as if receiving stolen funds can represent a contractual arrangement) than to change their ways, and I’ll try not to laugh while I’m waiting. The governor of Kentucky has expressed concern at such a dire turn of affairs, and while the case only involves money stolen by the state, legal fangers hold out great hope of federal constitutional high-life.

The Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children and all the Faith Bases deserve the battle, of course. It’s only natural when there’s a war on.

"Yesterday and today, my friends and I visited Tanh Hoa province. There we were able to see at first hand the constructive work of the social revolution of the Vietnamese people. We saw luxurious fields and lovely countryside. We saw brave men and women who know how to defend their country from brutal aggression, but also to work with pride and with dignity to build a society of material prosperity, social justice, and cultural progress. I would like to express the great joy that we feel in your accomplishments.

"We also saw the ruins of dwellings and hospitals, villages mutilated by savage bombardments, craters disfiguring the peaceful countryside. In the midst of the creative achievements of the Vietnamese people, we came face to face with the savagery of a technological monster controlled by a social class, the rulers of the American empire, that has no place in the 20th century, that has only the capacity to repress and murder and destroy.

"We also saw the (Ham Ranh) Bridge, standing proud and defiant, and carved on the bills above we read the words, ‘determined to win.’ The people of Vietnam will win, they must win, because your cause is the cause of humanity as it moves forward toward liberty and justice, toward the socialist society in which free, creative men control their own destiny.

"This is my first visit to Vietnam. Nevertheless, since the moment when we arrived at the airport at Hanoi, I’ve had a remarkable and very satisfying feeling of being entirely at home. It is as if we are renewing old friendships rather than meeting new friends. It is as if we are returning to places that have a deep and personal meaning.

"In part, this is because of the warmth and the kindness with which we have been received, wherever we have gone. In part, it is because for many years we have wished all our strength and will to stand beside you in your struggle. We are deeply grateful to you that you permit us to be part of your brave and historical struggle. We hope that there will continue to be strong bonds of comradeship between the people of Vietnam and the many Americans who wish you success and who detest with all of their being the hateful activities of the American government.

"Those bonds of friendship are woven of many strands. From our point of view there is first of all the deep sympathy that we felt for the suffering of the Vietnamese people, which persists and increases in the southern part of your country, where the American aggression continues in full force.

"There is, furthermore, a feeling of regret and shame that we must feel because we have not been able to stop the American war machine. More important still is our admiration for the people of Vietnam who have been able to defend themselves against the ferocious attack, and at the same time take great strides forward toward the socialist society.

"But, above all, I think, is the feeling of pride. Your heroism reveals the capabilities of the human spirit and human will. Decent people throughout the world see in your struggle a model for themselves. They are in your debt, everlastingly, because you were in the forefront of the struggle to create a world in which the chains of oppression have been broken and replaced by social bonds among free men working in true solidarity and cooperation.

"Your courage and your achievements teach us that we too must be determined to win–not only to win the battle against American aggression in Southeast Asia, but also the battle against exploitation and racism in our own country.

"I believe that in the United States there will be some day a social revolution that will be of great significance to us and to all of mankind, and if this hope is to be proven correct, it will be in large part because the people of Vietnam have shown us the way.

"While in Hanoi I have had the opportunity to read the recent and very important book by Le Duan on the problems and tasks of the Vietnamese revolution. In it, he says that the fundamental interests of the proletariat of the people of all the world consists in at the same time in safeguarding world peace and moving the revolution forward in all countries. This is our common goal. We only hope that we can build upon your historic achievements. Thank you."

-

Noam Chomsky, originally delivered on April 13, 1970 in Hanoi while he was visiting North Vietnam with a group of anti-war activists. Broadcast by Radio Hanoi on April 14, and published in the _Asia-Pacific Daily Report_ of the U.S. government’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, April 16, 1970, pages K2-K3.

---

I first came across a quote from this speech in the book "DESTRUCTIVE GENERATION: Second Thoughts About the Sixties", by Peter Collier & David Horowitz. I had read the book several years before, & was reminded of it during a debate I was having with some Chomsky fans (on the Usenet newsgroups alt.politics.libertarian, alt.fan.noam-chomsky, etc.) about Chomsky’s cover-up of the crimes of the Khmer Rouge. Re-reading "DESTRUCTIVE GENERATION" reminded me that he’d also made a speech cheering for the Viet Cong from Hanoi during the Vietnam War. This was additional evidence of Chomsky’s Commie sympathies, so I quoted the bit from his speech which had made it into "DESTRUCTIVE GENERATION" in my Usenet debate.

One of my opponents, a Chomsky defender & self-described "anarchist" of the anti-capitalist variety, Dan Clore, immediately denied that Chomsky had ever made any such speech, & called David Horowitz a "notorious liar". He also accused Horowitz of using a fabricated quote from the socialist historian Ronald Radosh about Chomsky’s alleged policy of keeping quiet about the negative aspects of North Vietnam that Chomsky had seen on his tour of the country. Unfortunately, Collier & Horowitz didn’t indicate what their source for Chomsky’s Hanoi speech was, so I kept looking. I found the primary source in the book "POLITICAL PILGRIMS: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society", by Paul Hollander. Then, with the irreplaceable help of Stephen Denney, an archivist with the UC Berkeley Indochina Center, I was able to obtain a transcript of the entire speech, which I have provided above.

Near the end of the month of August, my year has been filled with worthy books, but I’ve just finished what I think is the book of the year, so far.

“From Dawn To Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life — 1500 to the Present” by Jaques Barzun (2000, Perennial Books, 877 pages in the paperback).

Barzun has generally arranged the period at hand around "four great revolutions — the religious, monarchical, liberal, and social, roughly a hundred years apart, whose aims and passions still govern our minds and behavior." He has done this with imposing critical presence, yielding at his age of 94 years the results of seven-odd decades of study and reflection.

My first reading has produced 27 distinct headings in my customary personal index of the work, with 61 entries among them: about average for a book of this length. However, these represent my own abstractions from a book brimming on nearly every page with memorable aphorism pegged to the idea of the past as knowable fact and useful knowledge. This is a true history: the author’s critical outlook does not stamp events with an exclusionary framework in order to make its case. (Students of Toynbee, Spengler, et. al., should take note.)

I found the implicit conclusion of the book’s title held in *suspense* — den�uement — revealed with plain observation in the final chapters. The whole project carries the added charm of a straightforward conversational style quite rare in these times of self-conscious impenetrability parading as depth and wisdom. Barzun has things to say, not prove. It is not a paradox that what he says proves the contention of his chosen title. I endorse William Safire’s estimate of the book as "a stunning five-century study of civilization’s cultural retreat."

I also found a great deal of room for dispute with some of the course of study. For example, I cannot regard 1789 as more valuable than 1776: the French Revolution’s grip on world imagination has never made sense to my understanding of the American Revolution as the highest political expression of Enlightenment philosophy. Barzun verges on pre-occupation with European affairs though parts of this book, and his emphases on France nearly irritated me several times. People who know my view of that ridiculous country might wonder at my tolerance. However, there are, I suppose, highlights necessary to this work, and Barzun treats them with literary power equal to his erudition, so my interest easily survived the ordeal.

Apart from strict material considerations, there are matters of form here that intrigue and delight. Barzun mounts a practical defense of idiosyncracy. "Techne" is introduced on page 4 with an end-note shortly instructing that the word is "short and exact; ‘technology’ is neither." "Techne" it is, then, throughout the book, and a considrate reader need not be confused with the useage. What we have is a positive assertion of judgment refreshing amid contemporary deserts of moral agnosticism. One might disagree with various judgments, as I have, but I had to applaud the exercise of judgment, throughout (and of which the above is a trivial but interesting example).

The text is arranged with quotations on page margins reminiscent of magazine "pull-outs": "sentences lifted out of the article to lure the reader." Citations from authors throughout five hundred years, Barzun calls them "add-ins": they free his own original text from gratuitous bits to introduce quotes, and as he explains in his "Author’s Note": "This small innovation also permits juxtaposition for contrast and emphasis. By the end, the reader may find that he has been treated to an anthology of choice morsels." It’s true.

Numbers are variously interjected with marks, thus — (<295, 410>) – in order to direct the reader to pages where a topic has been previously introduced or carried forward. This is a sort of organic index present throughout the book.

The comprehension of this book is wonderful. Dozens of important figures lost to contemporary view are rescued, if briefly, from everlasting obscurity in the glare of those notables come down to the present day. Events appear within precisely specialized context (e.g.: the Napoleonic conquest of Egypt, World War I) for their impact on cultural forces: intellectuals and institutions. "Movements" in the arts (painting, literature, music, theater, sculpture) are connected to their sources and effects on "culture", a word not employed to describe, say, the mood of a local police department or membership of some country club. What we’re talking about is something finely relatable as "the well-furnished mind", on the world scale.

Most important: *consequences* are tallied.

I’ve found this book fairly unsettling. In consideration of the early 18th century, Barzun says that, "When decadence is not anxious, it is the best of times," and I can take the observation in stride. I note, however, that a sensible mind is not arbitrarily manufacturing anxiety in objectively troubled times, and maintain that troubles are the natural end of decadence fulfilled. By way of simple observation instead of positive assertion of a "philosophy of history", affairs at the end of the 20th century are illuminated as troubled, in fact. However, the rolling tide of conditions and events naturally threatens hope for the future in terms of a single human being’s life, and despair can draw uncomfortably near from this account.

In his final chapters, Barzun correctly illustrates, in superb depth, the contest between dissolution of the nation-state and advance toward world super-state as it stands today. The individualist ontology must be alarmed here, but the rift is open to exploit by courageous and adroit dedication to principle.

No matter the "cultural retreat", there is still, I think, a good fight to be won, and Barzun’s masterpiece can serve the effort with its recitation of the uniquely eminent course of a hailed and maligned era. I maintain that the best purpose of history is to demonstrate the reasons between what is and, by way of deduction, what should be, and this book cannot be over-rated as a wealth of them.

Shattering violence. Random mayhem. Explosive particulate disorder. Flames. Hurtling monsters. Cool-edged dread. Blind hope. Hopeless luck. Immutable laws, intractably enforced. Long, tearing seconds. Massed fleeting snapshots. Pounding, ripping, howling, flying, tumbling, sliding, thudding, smoking, shedding, screaming, jumbling, smashing, blazing, flapping, flailing, and death, all jammed into a tiny box of time and popped open like a bomb just waiting for everybody to take their places, but nobody else knows exactly where they’re supposed to be, or when.

There. Would you care to go to work at a job that included all that among its ultimately unavoidable attributes?

It was so hard to realize that Dale Earnhardt died at Daytona, Sunday, but there was just no way around it. It was one of life’s little trick moments: the bomb popped and everybody saw it, but nobody knew what the precise hack of the clock meant when it ticked its last on Dale. The autopsy was scheduled for 10:00am Monday at Daytona, and the verdict was massive head trauma, but it seems pretty clear that the whole deal was between the clock and him while everybody else watched Michael Waltrip cross the finish-line only ten seconds later, with Dale’s own son, Dale Earnhardt Jr. in hot pursuit at second place.

They ran across the finish-line at over a hundred eighty miles an hour while that constant #3 car slowly backed down the high bank of turn four to stop on the infield grass, paired in smoking heaps with Ken Schrader. Earnhardt had collected Schrader on his way up to the outside retaining wall, which is where the clock ticked its last for him.

Looking back at it, the Fox Sports coverage hit the events with startling poignancy. Earnhardt was very likely already dead while we looked through the in-car camera aboard Waltrip’s car after the finish. This was Waltrip�s very first-ever victory in four-hundred-sixty-three starts, and the man drove his victory lap with tears rolling down his face, but he had no idea of the momentous turn receding behind him. Talk about your basic multi-tasking: the crash was an amazing event when and where it occurred and it had to be attended, but it was only ten seconds before the finish of what really must count as one of the most hotly contested five hundred mile races at the Daytona International Speedway. So, the eye bounced back & forth in the camera’s frame: the tangle just behind the leaders, the race to the finish, the whack on the wall, the checkered flag, and then the way the two crashed cars came to a stop. It was nearly impossible to soak it all up as it was happening and sort out which story was more important.

“Wow… Dale’s in the wall, but look at this finish… man, that was a tough hit back there, but that’s Earnhardt, and we’ve seen him in hard crashes before… and these two guys up front are still running as hard as they can.”

The truth: at the moment, it was the finish that was more important, because nobody knew that Dale Earnhardt had died.


It might be argued that it would be necessary to believe that he would have approved that kind of action triage, probably with comparison to the argument that it would have been necessary for man to invent God even in defiance of a known fact that he didn’t exist. Maybe so. Maybe it’s an essential auto-da-fe to picture The Intimidator smiling at real race fans who know where the real action is in a scene like that. I’d throw long odds at the bet, though: he would have approved.

We’re talking about a guy who pointed out that crippling the performance of race cars on NASCAR’s two fastest speedways is for "sissies." He was right about that.

In 1988, Bobby Allison nearly parked his car in the main grandstand at Talladega after a hellish crash, and NASCAR decided they needed to do something to rein these people in a bit. It was the next year when I stood in Dale Earnhardt’s pit and watched somebody — I don’t recall who – doing slow loops through the grass infield of the front tri-oval while flashing past at nearly a hundred eighty miles an hour, and there is no question about it: that’s an awesome sight when it�s happening in real-life about two hundred feet from where you stand. It is not a common thing to observe a thirty-five hundred pound car moving that fast and completely out of control, subject only to black-letter physics, while wondering where the hell it’s going to end up. To stand there looking at it, and hearing the astounding moan of that engine blowing through open header pipes as the car traverses major acreage in no time at all, it rips open one’s mind to something really big and serious going on. Some might call it crazy, but if so, then these people are very seriously crazy. They’re so serious about it that they start to circle around behind crazy with a specially clear sort of light shining on their project.

By that year, 1989, NASCAR had mandated carburetor restrictor plates at its two fastest superspeedways, Talladega and Daytona. The idea was to restrict airflow into the carburetor, and thereby reduce horsepower. Fans have always debated the probity of restrictor plates, but here’s a fact: the stock car speed record has stood still at Bill Elliott’s 212.809 mph logged at Talladega, ever since.

Now, I’m going to say this clearly: dead guys or not, the point of racing has never been to go slower.


It’s never exactly been the point of racing to bend sheet metal on the track, either, but stock car racing has always been specially amenable to that sort of thing. It goes back to the sport’s outlaw roots in running moonshine up & down hill country back roads, and the sheer “come get me and do your worst” competitive spirit that drove the bootleggers out into the broad daylight of organized racing. People who risked their lives running liquor weren’t the type to get nervy over a dented fender at a hundred miles an hour, and their professional descendants grew up with a particular gag in their bag of tricks. Open-wheel race cars like Indy and Formula 1 cars play on-track contact between cars the way nitro plays glycerin: touchy, touchy, baby. Those guys don’t trade paint because of all that rolling rubber in the way, which tends to launch cars like rockets when it grabs rubber on the next-door car at speeds beyond those at which airliners are off the ground and tucking their landing gear.

It’s a very distinct tough that can consciously fend-off another car with physical contact at those speeds, and you could put me at the head of the line interested in watching what it takes to do that. You could even call me a ghoul if you wanted to, but you’d be wrong about it. That’s because it never really interested me to watch cars crash. What interests me about racing, in general, is the decimal-point efficacy of someone fighting in those margins against someone else, both bound by absolute and universal limits, and making it through the squeeze. It’s an affirmative calculation of triumph over catastrophe, and, in this arena, it happens so quickly and minutely that we’re talking about a really compelling elevation of human action.

Some might flinch at that characterization, but that’s okay. They probably play soccer. Feebly.

Dale Earnhardt was an element. They say that he could see a draft on another car: he could look at holes punched in the very air by other cars and take advantage of them. The great Junior Johnson stumbled onto the phenomena by accident decades ago, and thereby illuminated it for his brother racers, but it’s almost as if human evolution turned a tiny genetic corner that day, and Earnhardt was born with the mutation. He came into the world hooked-up from one end to the other: from the times of brute power and raw cunning to wind-tunnel engineering and digital performance analysis. And that’s why he nearly single-handedly bootstrapped Winston Cup racing from a regional market ghetto to a great big coast-to-coast deal.

His fans understood that he was in touch with the roots — the essence — of the thing on the track, and people who had never paid attention to it were roused by the thunder. The essence of the thing was to get to the front as fast as possible, and he made a damned fine living pointing this out to people on the track, to many of whom it appeared that the point had become just a tad obscure. In an interview televised on ESPN, he once said, “I hear drivers saying maybe we’re going too fast, maybe we’re doing this or that… Maybe we are. Maybe we’re not. But do you want to race or not? I want to race.” Hooked-up as he was in stock cars, that meant bending sheet-metal now & then. And if some of his competitors were sometimes offended with swatches of his black paint scarring their pretty cars, they could later reflect that it could be valued at many thousands of dollars per square-inch in their own pockets, because race fans were seriously interested in watching the essence of the thing on the track.


Two weeks ago, Dale teamed with his son Dale Jr. and Andy Pilgrim, and drove the #3 GM Goodwrench Corvette C5-R in the Rolex 24-hour race at Daytona. It was his first sports car race. That team drove to a fourth-place overall finish, second in their GTS class. They might well have won if Dale Jr. hadn’t misdiagnosed a broken half-shaft and the crew hadn’t wasted forty-five minutes replacing an entire transmission. Junior is young, though, with no racing experience with differential rear-ends, so the mistake was natural enough. What the performance illuminated, however, was his father’s natural grasp of the essence of things on a race course.


There was only one time I ever even briefly imagined that a race car had gotten the best of Dale Earnhardt. He was wailing down the front tri-oval at Talladega in July of 1996, and leading the race when he got bagged in a pack tangle. He kicked-off the resulting ride with an appalling smash nose-on into the concrete wall, and then hung on for dear life while his car promptly bashed itself to widely scattered wreckage in a full 3-D flying flail. The biggest pile came to rest near turn #1, and it was about half a lifetime before there were signs of life in it.

It hadn’t gotten him.

He walked away from it with a broken collar-bone and sternum, and a week later, he started in the Brickyard 400, a sensational spectacle of Winston Cup cars running at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Last night, I was thinking about that crash, and I think that might have been the beginning of Earnhardt’s invincibility aura. After he got away with that, something in reality slipped common-sense, and it was just about impossible to consider that he would ever be killed in a race car.

“How does something like this happen?” The question, and others in its general class, often including the word "why," begins to muddle sentiments shortly afterward. The answer, however, is fairly clear: it’s a dynamic crap-shoot. Race car design attempts to shave the dice for a favorable tumble, but the authentic fact is that all bets are off when heavy fast-moving objects with people in them depart rational control. A bit of air off the rear spoiler, a cut tire, an oil-spot on the track, and the whole day gets tossed to the winds, and sometimes a life goes with it.

These people go to work in margins so up-close to the line between life and death that the rest of us wouldn’t even be able to see it at all if we were suddenly placed in their seats. It would make no sense, to me, to stand around and say they’re out of their minds for doing that willingly, even joyfully. I definitely go the other way: what’s magnificent to me is the fact that they do it so well, on average, that they learn to live with the possible price in silent terms, muted in the hearty roar of life to the utmost limits as they see them.

Some of them will now be very seriously challenged to pay attention to that roar. I have every confidence that Dale Earnhardt Jr. will be in the starting grid at Rockingham next week. The thing I’ll be watching to see is how well he can carry the whole hook-up into the future. If he can do that, then he’ll be a man, gauged against the best of them.

Q: "What’s the difference between Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton?”

A: “Tip O’Neill, Sam Ervin, and Maximum John Sirica."

Political fronts over the past two weeks have been just hellish. Within the past few days, there’s all the various mens rea among the Clintooniac press coming to terms with fleeting shadows of a criminal government amid the din of household goods shipping. Going back a bit more there’s the scattershot criminal pardons, comprehending one that only very few are qualified to analyze with principles. (That one goes like this: just because Rich was an “economic criminal” doesn’t mean it wasn’t a rotten thing for Maximum Bill to spring him.)

I was working my ass off in Houston and had just arrived in my hotel room after a fifteen hour day when CNN Headline news — the only thing available at the hour — spit out the fact of the criminal plea bargain, and there I stood too weak to defend myself from it. A savage underhanded blow to the least facades of justice: nobody’s even concerned to pretend anymore. I hadn’t gotten the story in real time so I missed all the sweet palliatives in original song, but the outlines were broad enough. “It’s for the best.”

The Thing was loose. It hadn’t even wriggled out of a cage the way The Dark One had just before his last helicopter ride: Maximum Bill drove the country like his own personal pickup truck chasing hill, dale and border on a midnight dope run for eight years, and then walked out the front door with a receipt in his pocket.

What’s going to happen when things have come to that? Aside, that is, from George W. Bush.

There is a point to “justice”. Justice is a value for which human beings act in order to correct something inimical to human life. It was always a just thing to pursue the end of The Clinton Administration, throughout all of it from first day to last. That was a just fight on the premises that it is a good thing for human beings to live freely as they choose, that nobody ever did that better than Americans, and that this ghastly hillbilly thug and his monstrous wife were always a direct face-front fang at the throats of the first two of these premises.

Long before they boarded the wretched “ship of state”, they were nobodies to let anywhere near it. Sorry as things were for the matter of American liberty when their act rolled into town at D.C., these people were natural trouble on the hoof. Who here didn’t laugh out loud when they boosted Les Aspin to the McNamara chair of international relations?

A wise man — my father, in this case, and about the Colossus of Yorba Linda — always told me, “If you think this president is bad, wait’ll you see the next one.” The man was never wrong for thirty years. Simply burned up from all the dragging nonsense of the Bush government laying on the best years of my life when I was born a free American, I didn’t really get it, then, when Terror Bill came around. I’ve never voted, but I never voted less than in 1992, because I was far, far, too busy for it.

The way he played homosexuals in the military; wotta laff that was. A couple of his puppets didn’t make it to cabinet or other, and from where I sat, he couldn’t hear all the bloody shooting in the Balkans…(not that I would have had him do anything about it in my name, preferring the idea of American volunteer action, but I might have at least expected the man to show some sign of life over it…) Bits & pieces of the beginning of the end, is what I got.

My phone rang some time in the fall of ‘93, and my brother was bending my ear about something, along the course of which he mentioned odd facts in the case of a White House Counsel found shot dead in a park near where Ethan Allen might mount an assault on the capital these days. “So what else is new?” I thought, generally. Another dead guy.

This Thing didn’t really start catching my attention until That Woman tried to sign me up to one of her doktors. I wasn’t going to have that in any way, and that would mean stuff like going to ground under her thumb beyond not paying taxes for this rotten fraud, which I already wasn’t doing. If I had to take to the hills, there was just no way in life that this government was ever going to take care of me.

It was never necessary to stipulate to the Constitution of the United States in order to denounce these horrible people, but it often made decent sport to point out why no reasonable person should respect it or pay for its administration. The way November 1963 lays in history across nearly four decades has never seriously been dealt with as a question of why free people put up with awful, completely intolerable fraud… and a line of that sort really only begs questions of why, then, Nixon happened, or why any of this, down to the present day, was not only allowed to proceed, but was actually bought and paid for by hundreds of millions of otherwise apparently sane individuals.


“How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.”

(Henry David Thoreau - 1849)

There is nothing erroneous or otherwise wrong about that statement just because it’s over one hundred fifty years old, and here’s the point: there is nothing essentially different about the times just because of the way they’re dressed up. These are despicable times in American history, when slaves strut their "freedom," and “rights” are a cracked whip. They follow on times in which people who should have known what they were talking about when they spoke those words sold them to vultures in order to just make the screeching stop. I don’t want to hear about Ronald Reagan’s birthday: I’m sure he was a very nice man, but, personally, I didn’t need him to set the federal dogs on every person working for a living in my homeland, yes, for the first time in its history.

All I needed to hear next was that Bush character telling me that “from now on, any definition of a successful life will include the concept of service to others.” In my early thirties, I was: ready to punch his lights out for laying claim to my life. Nobody in real life could have gotten away with telling me something like that and seriously trying to enforce it.

A bunch of clowns put on a circus in 1994. (No: I’m not talking about D’Amato’s hearings.) Here we sit with the Department of Education. Thanks a lot, ladies and gentlemen. Y’all are dismissed.

There hasn’t been a real principle worth fighting for in people other than outright brats, toads and thugs, as long as I’ve been alive. It was only a matter of time before the worst came around again.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There is not, and never has been, one shred of evidence that Vince Foster shot himself at Ft. Marcy Park with that Colt .38 the way they say he did. More than ninety percent of the people who have ever remarked on the case in my view were completely incompetent to come to terms with that fact. There was never the dimmest prospect that they would grasp what it meant that the case was defrauded in every official report.

It was the sheer scope and breadth of that sort of thing that made it eminently necessary to storm the White House with SWAT teams and “dynamic entry” by January of 1998. The Lewinsky Shitbomb finally touched a raw nerve among the more spineless, and they mounted their pathetic assault on “the legacy” or something. That’s because it couldn’t have been justice, or they simply were not grown up to the task, or both.

If Richard Nixon went down on the rails of perfidy to the game, then, looking at The Ozark Long March, I’d like to know what the game is.

The place was just rife with crumbs and cockroaches. When they weren’t out getting face-time with that “TheAmericanPeople” riff in their kinder-gentler-machine-gun style, every crank got a turn on cue in order to grind out “more ecstatic modes of living” and other mindless rubbish. Charles “Ironsides On Crack” Ruff couldn’t be bothered to ring up Yezhov-Reno the day he found the WHCA videotapes that the skells were lying about and the clock ran out. “Whoops!” Mistakes were made. Move along, citizen: nothing to see here. Steps have been taken, measures are in place, and the Attorney General’s so mad that, why, she’s just shaking.

The thing to do, all along, was to toss Imelda Rodham’s place for the notes she took on L. Patrick Gray’s fireplace scene. Even when she worked for the House Judiciary Committee, she doubtless figured that guy too dim to keep copies to pop from a stage-left dressing room at the right moment.

And the Clintooniac press is distressed over a dresser, now. Pardon me when I say I live in despicable times.

What didn’t they lie about? Why didn’t they lie about it? What was it they weren’t constantly lying about?

These people, to include their various mannequins and apparat, were out there throwing bloody cruise missiles at guys in sandals. They were doing that because The Lying Bastard had drained himself in a White House sink and some people in authority wanted to know what the hell that was all about. These twisted scheming anglers went out and blew up somebody’s private productive property — in my name — in a cynical sleight-of-gland from his balls to sheeps’ guts soaking it up on TEEVEE, and left America holding the terrorist-threat bag.

These people never stopped waving bloody chickens’ heads at the fearful of the land like cheap revivalists, aimed at lining them up for serial and parallel processing. “A hundred thousand more cops!” is what we got after “Showtime” at Waco: just ask ‘em, and they’ll tell you all about it in the "legacy." If you ever get within ear-shot of one of the era’s pressitutes, ask if two million people in prison is part of the "legacy."

These people — these specimens — never stopped pressing their claims to my life, and that, amid an array of pro forma scandal in unprecedented panorama, was the first thing that always made them indictable. It doesn’t matter that their evil philosophy was never strictly adjudicated in trail of that word. The machine can go hang itself: there is no reason why individual people cannot reject with prejudice the things these people thought in action at the levers of government. That judgment does not require official imprimatur.

They were grown to it from a time when dingbats swerved into steely-eyed ideologues and the resulting crash strew tie-dyed starry-eyed neuroses throughout a hitherto fairly healthy culture. The Civil Rights Movement will always be an heroic gleam on the American record, and more than wistful, too, because it was a long time coming. That stinking war was the right thing to fight over, too.

After that, though, they couldn’t find enough of America to destroy, and a fight that big was going to comprehend the roots of the whole project. Which meant: sooner or later I’d be taken care of.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Maybe The Lying Bastard walked because, sooner or later, I’ll be taken care of.

The damned Republicans are cooing over “a patients’ bill of rights” that will shake the loose sand out of the HMO gravel and square that “sector” away. That’s what’s going to happen with that. It’s probably the next best thing without ditching Medicare and Medicaid because constrained markets always require more coercive correction, but it’s headed to hell, anyway. The United States is manufacturing its “health care crisis”, has been for more than three decades, and these people have no hope of heading it off. Dennis Hastert said so in a discussion with Imelda Rodham about medicine. ("Holy mackerel, these are philosophical issues…”)

To indict the infamous Arkie thug might lead to unhelpful questions about why he and his henches behaved the ways they did in their time. It was because killing America was always worth lying about, to them. Bonior and Imelda both copped to it within hours of the House impeachment vote when they sternly warned the troops not to let the VRWC attack their "ideas." There was no obvious reason for that, except for the connection to the fact that The Lying Bastard was what he was and presently driving the government. Here were means to ends, and that was worth all kinds of rampant deceit.

The deceit was necessary to con the marks. It mostly worked, but that’s just a measure of the damage done by the time they came along.

Now, everybody knows this. Everybody who is not right now lying, knows all this, and more, about it.

What is going to happen in the times after the first president to cop a criminal felony plea? How many people know in their bones that it was among the measliest of his tramplings? How many bones in the ground know it?

And he’s just walked out the door for cheeseburgers over Carnegie Hall. Perhaps he stole a leather chair into which he can sweat after a good jog.

Terror Bill got away because justice has slipped its currency in America now. What counts is action, over all, as long as it frames right in viddiebits to harried people hearing it from sharp angles. That’s the presumption where the action is seeping past its reaches in the last eight years. There are agendas and moving-on to get done now and nobody considers what might the times have been like after a criminal president – and presidency — were treated according to their real scale against a precedent like The Dark One himself.

Be they ever so Democrats, and even unto the present day in the case of the lately miserable Sarbanes, they were nonetheless giving good battle to a corrosion that had to be stopped, then. Tip O’Neill, on his accession as majority leader in 1972, was ready for action already in a way that Republicans couldn’t even plausibly fake for eight whole years of the Clinton regime. The trains have run on time, The Big Lug dabs that like a napkin at the shirt-front of his “legacy” in a diner photo-op, and that sort of thing is what allegedly important people find important.

These are despicable days.

It’s no good to handwave in the direction of “uniting” with something irreconcilable. I’m not interested in “uniting” with people who will not act for justice, as justice, and I’m pretty “divided” from that sort of corrosion, which is only going to get worse as it goes. People who keep discarding facts and ignoring the truth end up stupid and blind, and no one like that will ever be an authority to me.

I was shaking out the bends after a ninety-or-so minute session with the Les Paul when I saw the guy on the teevee, standing in the beer factory with his hard-hat. The session wrapped with about ten minutes of “Can’t Find You” as I recall Kim Simmonds’ delightful eleven-bar shuffle (that’s right kids: eleven) arrangement. That’s the one with the two-bar 4-chord seventh-minor turnaround, and anybody who knows what I’m talking about can also understand why I was having the bends. The Paul is a necessary load: must carry — even when it’s physiologically nutty to go around another chorus before something in The Robot breaks — and those eleven pounds of maple and metal roll into the curves like a fine bike. “Take me now lord if you have to, but this just feels too good to stop,” so the chorus goes around again.

Go ten minutes of “Can’t Find You,” and you’ll see what I mean after you unsling the guitar and start looking for your neck and shoulder muscles.

And all that’s about prices. What it takes to get it.

I’m getting it with only fifteen watts out of this amazing Fender Blues Junior. There it sits on top of the Marshall 50-watt combo with blown tubes. All the way up, I have to stand at the length of the guitar cable in order to control it. It’s that loud. It’ll shake the room if I let it, and I don’t miss the extra thirty-five watts of the Marshall, but I would happily pay for them to sound this good in a sixteen-pound box. At any rate, I flip it on and raise local hell with the wah-wah pedal, whenever I want to, which is the way it’s supposed to be.

And, then, I’m seeing this guy with the hard-hat in the beer factory, on the viddie. He’s standing there in the stark industrial space under the orangey high-pressure sodium light, talking about how they just can’t make beer because the power keeps going out and they’re going to do something about it.

Talk about “the bends." This guy looked very serious. Because I won’t live in California, I get to just go light up my guitar anytime I feel like it, and go to the refrigerator for a beer, too, knowing that it’ll be loud and cold around here, on my command . That’s because electricity markets where I live are manageable. If I had the problem that beer guy is having, I too would have to drop what I was doing and see to the power difficulty myself. Fortunately, I can still pay people to do it for me. The beer guy can’t get reliable power at any price right now.

According to the CNN report, the Miller’s Brewing folx at Irwindale are evidently going to set up their own generation, which is only natural and logical, and it also points up exactly how to solve this problem in California: let people produce what they need in order to conduct their lives.

Ordinarily until now, nobody in their right mind would consider local power generation for an operation like Miller’s at Irwindale. But they’re in times that make a move like that sensible if not absolutely imperative. In fact, I was discussing the endarkenment a couple of weeks ago with an electricity distribution planner, and it became obvious to me when he started describing the loads associated with Web server farms. He was talking about forty to sixty megawatts per facility. That’s enough power for a small city.

I said, “Well, to me, that looks like a market for for custom generation capacity. In any rational political environment, enterprises like these would at least consider proprietary generation.” I had the subject on a roll, and began to imagine the technical ends of things; all that would be necessary to installing custom power generation for enterprises. I wasn’t talking about diesel generators on flat-bed trucks dispersed around the factory parking lots and snaking with #0000 cable and Cam-Lok connectors, but real dedicated power.

Why not? They require it for operations, so why shouldn’t they install it? Better yet, why shouldn’t someone crank up a business to serve this market? Working through it, I couldn’t imagine a better scene for driving technical innovation — necessity being the mother of invention, after all — and who knows where it could lead?

Well… actually, the next thing I imagined was hordes of bureaucrats crawling all over a gag like that, like starving insects drawn by the scent of money and bearing statute claws, stingers, and bites. The pall looms over the scene: want to attract all the wrong attention? Go try to do something productive. That’ll do it every time, and there is no corner of the action off their reserve. I thought about, for instance, a design office busy at drawing plans of hardware… as well as the accounting department devoted to managing The Bite of every employee in the place for The Mama State, and then figured the odds of getting the operation off the ground at significantly less than a first glance at the market would suggest.

Who knows what won’t be produced where it’s most necessary and in demand? There’s no telling… which, in a more philosophical vein, leads me to an interesting exercise in logic: proving a negative. Never before in history has it been so easy. Simply introduce the state to markets, and there you have it: the positive negative.

Operations like Miller’s Brewing Irwindale seem determined to solve their problems, though, and I wish ‘em luck. My technical curiosity over the details went unrequited by Miller’s Community Affairs Office, the designated catcher for these kinds of questions, but the nice lady in that office did let me know that they’re swamped with interest in the matter. Nonetheless, I can’t imagine much more than the best stop-gap measures. It simply is not an everyday thing to drop power service for an existing manufacturing plant, and nobody was ready for the scene they’re living out there right now. That necessarily means a fairly improvisational effort compared to what could be achieved if everybody was permitted to freely compete in electricity markets. In conditions like that, it wouldn’t be long before the current situation was alleviated by production guerrillas looking to make money at setting up high-dollar customers with dedicated power plants tailored specially to their exclusive requirements.

…sort of like what happens around my house when I want to light up a guitar. I’m still paying a rather mundane sort of supplier compared to the needs of someone like Miller’s Brewing, but the principle is the thing here, as usual. “Power on demand, for money.”

It really is not as difficult a problem to solve as some would have us believe.