At Middle Age, Lost in the Dark Wood….

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita.

        It is very difficult to feel more “lost” than to be locked up in jail…the dementors of Azkaban are not just a fantasy of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Books…rather, J.K. Rowling seems to have had an uncannot sense of social and political reality.  I don’t know how to explain it, but survival and recovery from the experience is all about evaluating who is at fault—the incarcerated self or the incarcerator?  I have pretty much concluded that it is the system, the series of jailers and their apprentices who are at fault, but I don’t want anyone to think that I haven’t considered the contrary. 

        When you’re trying to sleep at night on an uncomfortable cot with almost no cushion, it is very easy to feel “hated, rejected, and despised of men”…to become or think of oneself as “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”  Whoever recognizes these quotes, though, will see where I’m going with this.  There is something very powerful about the experience of justice, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for my sake.” 

        Jesus Christ was not the first revolutionary, but he was perhaps the greatest revolutionary of all times.  Few of the right-wing reactionaries who constantly cite Christian values and inspiration as a reason for this, that, or the other oppressive tactic employed or proposed to be employed would like to be held, line-by-line, to Christs’ teachings against oppressors and hypocrites, the wealthy and selfish, whose removal from the Gospels would cut the number of Jesus’ teachings down by about 90%. 

         It’s really SO hard even to remember that Jesus was, fundamentally, a revolutionary when you hear all the hateful reactionaries claiming to be Christians these days.   If the 43^rd President of the United States is a Christian, in the spirit of the Gospels, then I am Mickey Mouse.   

          Anyone who on ANY LEVEL supports or approves of the Bush-Ashcroft-Gonzalez-current Justice Department, the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, the war on drugs and/or the war on immigration while claiming to be a Christian is a fraud—a hypocrite, a lover of the law of EXACTLY the stripe against whom Jesus Christ preached ceaselessly.  It is probably not too much to say that Christ was not only a revolutionary, he was a socialist revolutionary. 

          Of course, Jesus did not ask either the government of Rome or Judea to strip the rich of their riches—he merely asked people to make a choice—which master to serve, and thereby warned the rich that they were doomed to hell in his and would never enter into his or his Father’s Kingdom so long as they grasped and held onto their wealth.

         I confess that I write all this as the product of a rather “WASPSY” background, that I am myself a fairly “WASPSY” fellow from a privileged educational and financial background (mostly Texas and Louisiana with English and German ancestors, at least a couple with titles of nobility).  My maternal grandfather was a politically well-connected “captain of industry”, and my paternal grandfather owned farmland spread out to the four corners of the horizon, with borders beyond sight (and although I’ve benefited throughout my life from too much of this wealth, as a Prodigal Son I haven’t hung on to much of it to speak of). 

         But I also really do write as one who hates drugs and what they do to people, really never touching any of the stuff myself, and as an eight generation American, through some branches of the family tree anyhow, I have no recent personal experience of what it’s like to be an “immigrant” in this country—except that I spent the past two months surrounded by sweet, innocent Mexicans and Central Americans who were among the most viciously oppressed victims of the jail system—they have done nothing wrong except come seeking honest employment (at least the ones I met locked up at any of seven prisons across California, Okalahoma, and Texas).The prison system has very few readily identifiable values, but one of the values is that “waste is good.”  

         They keep the jails insanely cold, for instance—ALL of them that I “visited” except the last one in Falfurrias, South Texas, where, even in January, it actually DOES get hot.  I was told that it is a means of emotional and physical control to keep the prisoners’ passions “on ice.”  If so, it is cruel and unusual punishment. 

         The Bureau of Prisons also loves to inflict selective sleep deprivation.  Of course, routinely, the guards wake you up throughout the night counting and recounting to see whether anyone managed to escape (as if it were likely or even remotely possible, especially in the Federal Fortresses).  But when you need your brains to be at their best, in jail, the days you’re going to Court—well those are the days when they intensify the sleep deprivation—the guards wake you up at 2:00-4:00 a.m. for hearings that NEVER start before 9:00 a.m. and may (in Los Angeles or Houston) be held only across the street, but even when traveling an hour or so as from Falfurrias to Corpus Christi, there is no need for a six hour (or in my case, 12 hour) lag time between waking up and actually going to Court.   But you see, you don’t want your prisoners to be thinking or alert while they’re in court—that would lead to disorder, chaos, and…..God Forbid—a fair adversarial process maybe.  They would NEVER allow that.

          Everything in jail is “throw away”, including especially but not limited to the inmates, the people, and the lives of the incarcerated.  But Jail is a very unsanitary, anti-environment, in which “conservation” is the last thing that could possibly matter.  Every inmate is forbidden to keep, accummulate, conserve, or save ANYTHING, and there is no recycling allowed—everything must be routinely thrown away immediately.

         And during this election year, it is worth noting that anyone who thinks that the Republicans are better or worse than the Democrats with regard to the past twenty years needs to “bone up” on their history.  The Patriot Act (as it came to be called in 2001) was just a series of amendments to the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) of 1996, drafted and enacted by Newt Gingerich’s Company of Corporate Minions and signed by Bill Clinton, the wolf in sheep’s clothing who came in as an alternative, rather than a clone, of the civil-liberty hating Republicans of the Bush stripe.  

           Let me clarify here about my political background (which naturally goes along with what I said about my family background above)—although all my Grandparents grew up as Yellow-Dog Southern Democrats, by the time I came around they were changing party and I was a more-or-less born and bred a Barry Goldwater Republican.  I don’t think anyone in my family ever joined, but it seemed like all of their friends were members of the John Birch Society and similar groups.  My grandfather was a 33^rd Degree Freemason. 

           I even went to summer camp in Colorado and New Mexico when I was a kid with one of Barry Goldwater’s grandchildren [Ty Ross, who later led Barry to one of his finest moments in later life---standing up against other Republicans of the Moral Majority stripe for the rights of Gays to be treated as Human Beings].  When I was in High School in Los Angeles, I was just about the only fan Governor Reagan had at the Hollywood Professional School (they considered me a wacked out Southern conservative, even though Reagan WAS Governor of California). 

         Then in my undergraduate years at Tulane I was actually President of College Republicans and founded a Chapter of Young Americans for Freedom.  Once I got to graduate school at Harvard, I was again the almost only person I knew who openly admitted voting for Reagan in 1980 (although Reagan DID carry the State of Massachusetts that year). 

          So I didn’t start off life thinking of myself as a liberal exactly.  But life experience is a pretty harsh teacher—and almost immediately, when Reagan took office as President, I got the feeling I was NOT going to be as comfortable with him on the national level as I had been when he was Governor.  For one thing, he appointed an anti-environmental lunatic (James Gaius Watt) to the office of Secretary of the Interior and for another, just when I was becoming acutely aware of the dangers of Third-World debt by virtue of living in Mexico during the 1982 nationalization of the banking industry and subsequent inflation/ disastrous devaluation of the peso, Ronald Reagan’s government took the modest Carter-era deficit and turned it into the catastrophic Reagan-era deficit from which this country has never recovered.

          On the other hand, I liked President Reagan’s first appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court, Sandra Day O’Connor—she was a protégée of Senator Barry Goldwater.   When Jerry Falwell, Chairman of the Moral Majority, questioned Sandra Day’s qualifications to sit on the highest court because she was insufficiently committed to overturning Roe v. Wade,  Barry Goldwater responded, appropriately enough, “Jerry Falwell can kiss my ass” on the Senate floor.  I’ve really missed Barry Goldwater since he died in 1998.  He and Strom Thurmond were two of the finest Americans who ever lived, and neither one of them were anti-American subversives like the Bushes and Clintons have been.  In my own recent struggles, I find myself using Sandra Day O’Connor opinions or dissents together with Strom Thurmond’s 1996 Amendments to the Civil Rights Action, 42 U.S.C. Section 1983, as the strongest arguments against governmental oppression and the corruption of the legal system.  Another Reagan appointee, Anthony Kennedy, also of the 9th Circuit (from whence Sandra Day O’Connor hailed), has also been one of the great libertarians on the Court.  But Antonin Scalia, Reagan’s third appointee, has pretty much only been reliably “libertarian” with regards to the preservation of the power and prerogatives of juries, for he is decidedly authoritarian on all other subjects.

         The old Goldwater-Rockefeller rivalry within the Republican Party was often framed as “reactionary conservative vs. progressive liberal”, but few people realize that Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller as Governor of New York started two of the most repressive modern trends in criminal law, namely the War on Drugs, which Rockefeller envisioned and implemented at the state level even before Nixon picked it up in the Federal system.  Goldwater was consistently, always, against the expansion of governmental power, including the power of the government to put people in jail.  Goldwater’s stance on the War on Drugs and the limitations on governmental power is now a decided minority in the Republican Party, represented ONLY by Congressman Ron Paul of Texas on the national scene.

          Possibly even worse for its victims over the short-term than, but closely correlated with, the longer-term effects of the War on Drugs, Governor Rockefeller presided over the first major “mass production” industrial level expansion of the American prison system—New York’s prisons became so over-crowded and inhumane by 1971 that in September a riot broke out at one of the largest and most modern prisons in the state: Attica.The Attica Prison riot occurred at the Attica Correctional Facility in Attica, New York, United States in 1971.  The riot was based in part upon prisoners’ demands for better living conditions.  Attica inmates took forty-two officers and civilians hostage and aired a list of grievances, demanding their needs be met before their surrender.  In a facility designed to hold 1,200 inmates and actually housing 2,225, theirs was a substantial list.  They felt that they had been illegally denied certain rights and conditions to which they were entitled, illustrated by such practices as being allowed only one bucket of water for a “shower” per week and one roll of toilet paper per person per month.  

         On September 9, 1971, responding to rumors of the impending torture of a prisoner, about one thousand of the prison’s approximately 2,200 inmates rioted and seized control of the prison, taking thirty-three guards hostage.

         In historical perspective, Attica was a landmark even, but had mixed results.   By the time of my own 54 days incarceration in December 9 2007-February 2, 2008, prisoners everywhere could count on at least one roll of toilet paper per week (and usually as much as you needed—if you begged hard enough) and all the facilities I visited had running water—not always hot or very good showers, but showers of a sort nonetheless. 

           After Attica, on the other hand, jail security measures became much stricter throughout the United States, and Attica garnered support for the increasing repression of the people in that it (almost for the first time) brought Northern (“socially liberal”) supporters of Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller (his middle name “Aldrich” was given after one of his uncles who founded the Federal Reserve System in 1913) and Southern White ”social conservatives” closer together than anyone had ever dreamed possible in supporting increased incarceration and severe punishment for all non-white “criminals” in the Country—Attica’s population was 54% African-American in 1971.  Now approximately 54% of the male African-American population between the ages of 15-45 have been incarcerated or on probation for at least six months out of their lives.  According to the U.S. Justice Department’s own statistics for the year 2004-2005, around one in ten African American men in their twenties and thirties are CURRENTLY in prison.

         And plainly, none of this EVER have happened without the War on Drugs which Governor Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller began, and which Presidents Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan, William Jefferson Clinton, and all Bushes, elder, younger, and Florida governor, have pursued with a vengeance.  Clinton’s greatest contribution was to sign the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.It was this “AEDPA” which first effectively castrated the ancient Writ of Habeas Corpus, the oldest legal remedy against oppression in the Anglo-American system, constituting a key facet of the Magna Carta in 1215.

          In fact, all the early (pre-9/11) attempts at “false flag” and domestic terrorism in the United States took place during the Bill Clinton/Janet Reno years.  It is disheartening in the extreme, it is deeply disturbing.  It is criminal.  It is not too much to say that the United States Government would appear to be the largest criminal enterprise in the world at the present time—even exceeding China.

The similarities between prison/incarceration and slavery are well focused through the fact that 1971, the year of Attica, was also the first year of approaches by Nixon’s National Security Advisor (later Secretary of State) Henry Kissinger towards China—and at this time the elder Bush was ambassador to the U.N. and later to China, or perhaps vice-versa—but he was in on the Globalist conspiracy to bridge the gap between the U.S. and China from the beginning. 

 Let no one be deceived that China became more liberal or open through this process.  After 18 years of contact with the U.S., from 1971-1989, China showed the state of its civil rights revolution at Tienanmen Square.  During the next 19 years, the U.S. became dependent upon trade with and loans from China—the greatest slavocracy the world has ever known, and the palpably more Maoist than Jeffersonian Bureau of Prisons is ten thousand times more repressive than Tienanmen Square.

And so now I spend my free time, still lost in the dark wood, still wondering how it is that a Goldwater Republican came to be a hater of the Republican Party’s President, Vice-President, and all of their policies.  I was brought up in my family to admire members of the aristocracy (both European and American), and in fact to consider myself to be one of the aristocrats, but I now look with devious suspicion on the connection between the Rockefeller Family, the Federal Reserve, the War on Drugs, and the expansion of American Prisons. 

Alex Jones’ latest movie “Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement” reflects on all these issues, and given my own life knowledge and experience, I cannot help but belief that it is true: the United States and China have become one—China has given up its ideals of communism and adopted a Gospel of Greed, while the United States has given up its ideals of freedom and adopted a Constitution of Mass Produced Slavery—importing slaves from all over the world to become melted down, not to confer the blessings of freedom, but to guarantee the riches of the oligarchy. 

Like the astonishing behavioral, psychological, and even morphological convergence of pigs and human landowners in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, it has become impossible to tell the Chinese Communist Oppressors from the American Capitalist Liberators: they all walk on two legs and flourish from the poverty and labor of the oppressed.  In reflecting after 47 years on this Anglo-Chinese world-fusion, it is very difficult to find Serenity…..