We, the new slaves

We are the new slaves, enslaved by the Corporate King. The king disguises itself as our democratic government. But it lies to us and betrays us. The king owns our minds.

We are the new slaves, enslaved by the king’s propaganda and lies. We are told we are free. But money controls all, and the people have little. The money I speak of buys elections and lying politicians who are the minions of the Corporate King. The Supreme Court, itself owned by the Corporate King, has just delivered our country over to the power of money with the court’s latest decision in which it proclaims that the king may spend whatever the king wishes to further enslave the people, by feeding the people lies, feeding their prejudices, feeding their fear, feeding their hatreds and suspicions and claiming it is all for their benefit and their freedom.

We are the new slaves, enslaved by the king’s voice, the television that educates us and our children, that corrupts our values with violence, that dumbs us down so we can no longer think for ourselves. We turn to the tube to think for us. It tells us what gadgets, what things to buy and how to become further enslaved to pay for them. We once enslaved the aborigines in this country by trading them trinkets and mirrors in exchange for their land. It is an old trick that those in power play on the powerless. We are the powerless.

We are the new slaves. We are enslaved by banks and their demand for interest. The banks own our homes. We pay the banks rent in the form of interest, and we keep up their property at our expense. The banks are the soul of the Corporate King. But king is governed by no moral code. The king is governed only by its greed.

We are the new slaves. We pay tribute to the Corporate King from the sweat of our bodies to finance the king’s wars, wars not for our benefit, but for the king’s further enrichment and power. Our people die in such wars. Our people die without adequate health care. Millions of our children go to bed at night hungry and uneducated. The king does not care. It cares only for its wars and its profit.

The king sits back and laughs. To control the minds of hundreds of millions of people is divine. But such power is in the hands of fools who are the collective mind of the Corporate King. That mind is terminally diseased with greed. And the people are in jeopardy, for the king will continue to betray the people and lie to the people until it has sucked out the last of our lives. The Corporate King is insane.

What shall a desperate people do? We will do nothing until we learn the truth of our slavery. Will it then be too late except to scream in the streets?

But the king is deaf.

Why I hated Avatar

I saw Avatar the day before yesterday. I hated the movie. You must see it so you can hate it with me.

I was shocked and dismayed at the special effects we were shown. They were magical. If I had been from another planet I would have stood in awe of the humanoids who could produce such a spectacle. 

I would have concluded that if they could create such as was shown on the screen in Avatar, they would be a species that could transcend the animal instincts of hate, killing, war, greed, and the insatiable quest for power. And that they would be able, instead, to find creative ways to care for the poor, to make love the overriding human emotion, to cure sickness and, in the end, to create a heaven-like place on earth for their brothers and sisters.

Instead, what made me hate the movie was that its theme was not love, but war; its message was not forgiveness but killing and hate. Its heroes were killers in the end. The story was the genetic story of mankind.

We have only so many stories in our human suitcase of stories. We have romance, love, betrayal, hate, killing, greed, and the rest of the human potpourri of stories; but they are limited. We cannot have a story without the conflicting story. Love without hate does not exist in the human experience. Nor can caring exist without greed. Peace without hostility and fear.

The sadness of the movie is that it could explode in its technical magic, but it was shackled to a totally predictable, banal story of the same human characteristics that will eventually destroy us and the planet. It is the same story that  existed when man came swinging down from the trees more than a million years ago. We make no progress, none, in reshaping our souls. We are confined to our primitive selves.

We may wish to change. But we cannot. We can yearn for beauty and grace, but we cannot shed our primal core of war. That this was proven to me at the movie is why I hated it. I wanted it to lead us out of ourselves. Instead, it taught me once again that we are trapped in our animal origins from which there is no escape.

A Christmas Story from Argus Joseph Thompson, Insane

In his reverie Argus had the vision recorded below. (Jenny, his girl friend, has been at large for some time in the mountains of Wyoming and is known as the “Mountain Woman.” She is wanted for certain crimes against the corporate glob of which she is innocent.) Here is Argus’ recounting what took place. I again warn you that Argus claims to be insane. I cannot attest otherwise.

Then just after the Senate broke for the Christmas holiday, Jenny came bursting through the door of silver-haired Senator Sylvester Sinclair’s holiday office in Jackson, Wyoming. Seventy-three representatives of the coal industry were meeting with the great senator and laughing inordinately at one of his better jokes – something about why the rooster crossed the road.

Jenny stood there surveying the 72 men and one woman. She had one hand in the pocket of her coat, the other grasping a coil of nylon rope slung over her shoulder. What happened next was reported verbatim in the Washington Post because the senator happened to have his tape recorder in his bottom desk drawer going during his meeting with the coal people, “just in case he was misquoted later on.”

“This is a stick up,” Jenny announced pointing her finger at the senator through the pocket of her coat.

“Don’t shoot!” the lobbyist from Peabody Coal cried. “I can arrange a free trip for you to Hawaii on official government business. Well, then, how about an all-expense-paid trip to Tahiti?” Then he screeched, “I know who you are! You’re the Mountain Woman!”

“The Mountain Woman?” the senator cried. “Why bless your heart, my girl, you’re Jenny Baines Rogers!” The senator never forgot the name of a constituent. He rushed toward Jenny in long steps, his hand extended. “Why I knew your mama. She came to visit the great state of Wyoming back in…”

“Stand back!” Jenny warned swinging her pocketed finger toward the senator.

“No cause for alarm,” the senator said, pinning on his best big Wyoming smile. “Why, child, we were worried about you,” the senator said in his famous baritone. “I just got the Air Force to send out another two dozen ‘copters to look for you. Thank God, girl, you’ve come to me. I can intercede with the president for a pardon. I can get you an audience with Nancy Reagan. I know James Watt, personally—a sterling man with great influence in the timber industry. I can get you cheap housing in Philadelphia. I can get you and your boyfriend food stamps. I can …”

“This is a stick up,” Jenny repeated. “Hand over your Rolodex.”

“My Rolodex? Never!” the senator cried grabbing his Rolodex and clutching it to his chest. “You can have my autographed picture of Nixon, and the gold watch dear George W gave me, but I will never hand over my Rolodex!”

“Drop it!” Jenny said.

The great senator looked at Jenny – something about the glow in her eyes and the set of her mouth that, suddenly forced his compliance. With a shaking hand he handed the Rolodex to Jenny and then he asked, “What else can I do for you, little lady?” He straightened his suit and shot Jenny another of his big Wyoming smiles. “We all love Wyoming.”

“We love your state, too,” the guy from Peabody said. “We got a 127 permits to explore for minerals in the Teton National Forest alone. We’re neighbors, lady!” He extended his hand.

“We’re all for Wyoming, too,” the guy from Mountain Coal cried. “We own over a million acres of good ranch land we bought for the water rights so we can pipe out your coal in a slurry pipeline to our furnaces back east. Why, we pay more taxes in your state than any of the other big ten and…”

“Get your suck-tubes out of our state,” Jenny said.

“I can help,” silver-haired Senator Sylvester Sinclair cried. “I can get appropriations to clean up the mess left in the desert from the uranium mines, and I can get money to fill in the pits up in the Black Hills by raising the price of federal coal leases and…”

“You can’t do that!” cried the guy from Peabody. “Remember our arrangement!”

“I made no promises,” the senator said. “I never make promises. I have never voted in parallel with the economic support I may or may not have received from your corporation or any other corporation, and you know that. Admit it!” He glanced at his desk drawer to see that it was slightly cracked open.

“Absolutely, Senator.”

“Furthermore, I report every penny of my campaign contributions and all honorariums, and I have never written a book. I comply! I comply and comply. I also go to Senate Prayer Breakfasts every week.”

Then Jenny slipped a loop of rope around the leg of the senator’s great desk, popped open the window, and descended in a single, long, beautiful rappel to the ground and disappeared into the Christmas crowd that was shopping at Ralph Lauren’s local factory outlet store.

After that the press went crazy claiming that the Mountain Woman had terrorized the senator, and the FBI was, of course, embarrassed and called every available operative into the search for Jenny.

On Christmas morning a group of 40 nondescript, oily, swirly, surly citizens gathered around silver-haired Senator Sylvester Sinclair’s home in Casper. Someone had alerted FOX television, and as soon as the cameras were set up the people began to sing “Silent Night,” and the senator came out of his house in his pajamas and slippers with his big Wyoming smile. But the second verse of Silent Night deviated somewhat from the standard lyrics.

Silent Night. Holy Night,

All is dead.

All is blight.

Round yon virgin the air is all sour Raped and pillaged for money and power,

Sleep polluted today

Sleep in eternal decay.

As they began singing other verses the senator grew increasingly irritated, and he began to scold the people saying they had no right to desecrate the holy season with such unchristian carryings-on. Further, he knew every one of them—he called all the carolers by their first names—and he said he knew their daddies, and he told them to go home and thank God they lived in America where people were free to express themselves, even if they were ill-advised, such as they were, and he wished them all a Merry Christmas. Before they could finish the last verse he slammed the door. But they had come many a mile on Christmas, and they sang the last verse anyway.

Silent Night. Holy Night,

All’s calm,

But nothing is right

‘Round yon mountain the forests are bare;

All God’s creatures lie dead everywhere,

Made into money for more millionaires, So sleep in heavenly peace,

Sleep in heavenly peace.

And from that day until the senator returned to Washington, people picketed the senator’s house with signs that read, “Take the suck-tubes out of our Mother” and “Don’t sell our Mother to the corporate dead” and “Your mother is angry.” After he returned to Washington a small group of the same rag-taggers surrounded his town house with similar placards keeping a silent round-the-clock vigil. But nothing changed, at least not that a person could see at first. Not until the silver-haired senator’s Roledex in the hands of the Mountain Woman, began to reveal certain facts and bring about certain changes that were nearly imperceptible at first.

(This is all that Argus Joseph Thompson, Insane, told me at the time of this posting. Stay tuned.)

Argus Joseph Thompson, Insane, on Moral Burnout Syndrome (MBS)

Argus Joseph Thompson, insane, presents the following on MBS. Its veracity as well as its merit are, as always, subject to question.

On the tenth of November, S. B. Hemmingsford was arrested by the FBI. A 47-count indictment handed down by a New York Federal Grand Jury charged Hemmingsford and three Wall Street brokerage house executives with insider trading in the stock of General-O Dynamics and 14 of its subsidiaries. The New York Times reported that Hemmingsford and his three co-defendants had allegedly amassed illegal profits exceeding $3.5 billion. All four defendants were immediately released on their own bonds.

Although the government claimed Hemmingsford was a criminal, the government saw him as a special kind of criminal entitled to special privileges. If you’ve illegally hoarded large sums of money before being caught illegally hoarding more, the presumption exists that you are responsible and can be turned loose on your signature to await trial…while Leroy, who is penniless and homeless and who robbed the 7-11 for $23 to get a quick fix, has his bond set at a $100,000, which he; his twelve brothers and sisters; and all of their known spouses; offspring; current and discarded soul mates and their pushers; along with their friends on Twitter and Facebook collectively could not gather.

Crime is a sport reserved for the rich.

Persons of equal loot, moolah and scratch are equal—that’s what Jefferson should have written if he was going to be truthful about it, not that worn out aphorism that he dumped in the Constitution —All (not including women) men are created equal. But why should some wino whose total assets never exceeded half a bottle of cheap Tokay and a three-month growth of whiskers have the same rights as me?

I once knew a rich man who I thought wasn’t a criminal. He bought a second-hand mattress at Orville’s Store for the Homeless, and when he was looking for bedbug larvae he found where the mattress had been sewn up. When he cut it open he found $423. Since wealth is always comparative, compared to me, he is rich. I am not mentioning names because this man did not pay taxes on his windfall. Once more that proves the age-old truth that behind every great wealth is great crime.

Anyway, a few days after Hemmingsford was released he appeared with his lawyer, Rutherford P. Benyon, before the federal magistrate where he entered pleas of “Not guilty,” and “Not guilty by reason of insanity.”

The Times filed a follow-up story, the headline of which read:

HEMMINGSFORD ACCUSES TERRORISTS

An attorney for S. B. Hemmingsford, chairman of the board of General-O Dynamics, today claimed his client was the latest victim of the newly discovered personality disorder known as Moral Burnout Syndrome (MBS), a disease said to plague high-ranking corporate and public officials operating under extreme stress and recently described by the Nobel Prize winner, Solomon P. Goldberg.

Benyon said his client was a victim of MBS and has been in the acute throes of the disease since the recent attacks on his company’s logging operations by a radical environmental organization known as The Children. Benyon said Hemmingsford took The Children’s invasion of the company’s timber sale, where thousands of trees were spiked to prevent their harvest, as an assault levied against him personally. It was the classic “final stressor-straw,” a term invented by Goldberg to denote an identifiable last emotional trauma, which, when combined with prior stresses, at last pushes the victim into the disorder.

Benyon said, “The action of these terrorists was allegedly to save trees, but their true motivation was to shove my client over the edge into the full throes of Moral Burnout Syndrome.”

The Times’ cover story recorded the history of Goldberg’s discovery of MBS, a breakthrough lauded by social scientists as the long-sought connecting link between science and morality. In part the article read:

Already some experts are proclaiming Goldberg’s identification of the disease as a contribution to modern psychology comparable only to Freud’s The Ego and the Id. Goldberg discovered that wealthy or powerful self-made men approaching the summit of their careers often suddenly plummet into the gaping hole of moral decadence. At the time of the onset of the disease most of the victims have already achieved what Goldberg called “their three primary P’s—power, prestige and position, and their secondary P’s, their plethora of playthings—their Porsches, their private psychiatrists, their personal pushers and their sultan’s assortment of blond pubescents.”

In short, the victims have it all. Yet quite without warning, many inexplicably leap over the edge into a life of crime.

The Times writers observed that the victims’ crimes were pathetically unimaginative—common thefts, ordinary bribery, artless payoffs, embezzlements, even mundane murders for hire. They embezzled when they didn’t need the money and illegally manipulated the markets when they didn’t know what to do with the cash they already had.

The Goldberg article asked by its subtitle, “Is Moral Burnout a Crime?” A picture of the distinguished professor receiving the Nobel Prize from the Royal Caroline Medico-Chirurgical Institute in Sweden accompanied the lead story in which the Times writers, in their usual imperious style, traced the psychological progression of the disorder as described by Dr. Goldberg :

The archetypical MBS victim, the high- pressure executive, having existed under fire for years, is one day heard to begin screaming, “It’s war out there, man! War! Your competitors want to kill you. Your customers want to kill you. Your board of directors wants to kill you. Your employees want to kill you. And when you get home, the old lady wants to kill you. It’s war, and it’s hell!” The victim begins to complain of autonomic anal tightening and other vague symptoms that are often precursors of the disorder.

Goldberg likens the disease to a soldier in combat who, after suffering extreme stress from fear and physical exhaustion, gets a letter from home saying John Wayne, his hero, was the secret lover of Rock Hudson. It’s the “final stressor-straw” that pushes the soldier over the edge into post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

MBS is a disease in the full sense of the word, Goldberg claims. “We would never permit the criminal courts to punish our leaders for having suffered a heart attack. To the same extent we cannot allow our criminal justice system to deal with this subtle and complex syndrome.” When asked about his willingness to testify in Hemmingsford’s case, Dr. Goldberg said, “It will be my privilege to convince the jury that this man was not responsible for his crimes but was, instead, a helpless victim of the insidious side effects of MBS.”

Argus concluded his presentation on MBS by claiming that MBS was merely collateral damage in a system engaged in the eternal and holy wars of American capitalism.

I find his logic and his conclusions unsupported by fact or logic but fully in support of his claim that he is insane.

The wild pig story

Someone wrote me the following:

A chemistry professor in a large college had some exchange students in the class. One day, while the class was in the lab, the Professor noticed one student who kept rubbing his back, and stretching as if his back hurt.

The professor asked the young man what was the matter. The student told him he had a bullet lodged in his back. He had been shot while fighting communists who were trying to overthrow his country’s government and install a new communist government.

In the midst of his story he looked at the professor and asked a strange question. He asked, “Do you know how to catch wild pigs?”

The professor thought it was a joke and asked for the punch line. The young man said this was no joke.

“You catch wild pigs by finding a suitable place in the woods and putting corn on the ground. The pigs find it and begin to come everyday to eat the free corn. When they are used to coming every day, you put a fence down one side of the place where they are used to coming. When they get used to the fence, they begin to eat the corn again and you put up another side of the fence. They get used to that and start to eat again. You continue until you have all four sides of the fence up – with a gate. The pigs, who are used to the free corn, come through the gate now to eat and then you slam the gate down on them and catch the whole herd.

Suddenly the wild pigs have lost their freedom. They run around and around inside the fence, but they are caught. Soon they go back to eating the free corn. They are so used to it that they have forgotten how to forage in the woods for themselves, so they accept their captivity.”

The young man then told the professor that is exactly what he sees happening to America.

My response was as follows:

This is a favorite story of corporate America that has captured most Americans through television, teaching us year after year what we must buy in order to be cool Americans. We buy on credit. We mortgage our homes and cars. We shop, as the saying goes, until we drop. Then the corporate master teaches us how to get out of debt by going to a debt-consultant who takes more of our earnings to help us pay the corporate overlord.

Corporations do not build fences to catch people. They throw propaganda nets over the people called advertising. The bait in the nets are the TV shows the people watch, and as we watch we are gradually dumbed-down and captured by endless corporate ads that tell us how we must spend our earnings to be acceptable – the new car –the new TV set – the right clothes – on and endlessly on.

Now that we are in debt and need help, the corporations love to tell the pig story. The question they ask is: Why don’t you work to feed yourself and your family? Why aren’t you independent like you should be? Why do you want something free?

I have rarely seen a corporate executive who was hungry. As a corporate executive who tells the pig story he also comes begging to the government to save his company from bankruptcy, and, at the same time, like a true pig, awards himself and his fellow pigs millions in bonuses while over twenty-five percent of America’s children go to bed hungry.

Please tell the children and their parents the pig story.

Housing for the dead

I am drawn to cemeteries, not because of some ghoulish, even sentimental reason, but because I want to reinforce my already steadfast and final decision that I do not want to be buried in one of those places along with people I do not know, and who if I knew, I would not likely like to be around.

After all, these places take bankers and insurance company executives and even golfers. Sometimes civil defense attorneys who represent bankers and insurance company executives, along with judges who habitually hold for them, are also buried there.

It’s also crowded. The graves are so close that but for the intervention of death one would have been able to reach out and touch one’s rotting neighbors on either side. And if, according to promise, we all magically sprang back to life one day, we would end up talking about the stock market, who was cheated by Madoff, and what one’s latest handicap at the country club was.

What a place to abandon one’s bones to rot, ever so slowly, depending upon how much you were loved (as love is defined by the mortician)! That is to say, if you were truly loved, you would be buried in one of those super, double-lined copper affairs with the anti-rust, anti-bug interiors, and you would be put to rest (and to rot) on a Super Sealy, Sweet Dreams mattress with silk sheets, and oh, they do get cold in the winter.

The point is, that if you are really loved, as one is lead to believe by the undertaker, one will be placed in a coffin that will allow you to rot slower than one decomposes in a cheap, leaking coffin, thus extending the ugly process all the longer.

Instead, I have asserted that I want to be buried in a pine box just deep enough that I won’t be excreted as a coyote turd, but shallow enough that I will become a part of the root system of the willows along the creek and emerge as a pussy willow in the spring time.

Better yet, so as to beat the devil, the fiery furnace of the crematory seems the best. After all, no one will be able to tell whether those are my ashes or the banker’s (miserable joke because I never wanted to get mixed up with bankers) or maybe they are the ashen remains of the old lady’s Chihuahua from across the street that spent its life curled up on her lap.

In any event, I just got back from visiting New Orleans and while there our guide dropped us off at St. Roch Cemetery. I discovered, to my extreme discomfort, that I needed to go number one, so to speak. No pissatories were in sight. So I wandered out in between the old family mausoleums, or whatever those stone, above-the-ground-family-graves are called, and found a place out of sight between a family named Foinheizer and one named McBaker. I looked in all directions to satisfy myself no one was in sight of me, or me of them, and immediately took to the task. Suddenly I had a sense of shame and sadness. Whatever would the families feel if they knew some old Yankee white man was pissing where, there under, Uncle Henry’s feet were or used to be?

How sad that the deceased as well as their immediate descendents, now also long dead, and theirs as well – are so long dead that no one remembers them at all. In fact they have all been dead so long, and it is not so long as long goes – less than a hundred years, that no one came to visit them on Memorial Day.

I know, because as was true for most of the graves, no one left a bouquet of those white plastic lilies or cold, white plastic carnations in a cheap vase at the base of that cold stone structure to honor them.

As I finished my task there above Uncle Henry’s feet I began to understand my shame. I had been taught as a child to honor the dead. Yet I wondered then, as I do now, why one should honor say, Uncle Henry, after his death if he was not honorable before?

Then I met a huge African-American there, a smiling, friendly man with a baseball cap brandishing the New Orleans Saints football team. He was at least as large as a Saints tackle. He said he was the caretaker. He pointed out some interesting sights: One, a grave stone had fallen over and broken in two. It was, of course, subject to the same destructive forces of man and nature as the dead it remembered. He told me no one gave a damn about the broken headstone since the man’s predecessors had not paid for perpetual care and the poor stone would just have to lie there for eternity despite the fact that it cast a certain shadow of neglect on the rest of the stones.

Then our guide showed us where a hive of honeybees had occupied the upper reaches of one of the above-ground burial sites. This disturbed the management so they took a torch to the bees the flame of which left its smoke stains on the stone, and me to wonder why things alive and producing sweetness should be such a threat to the dead?

Next he showed us a burial chamber, where he said he once witnessed hordes of cockroaches crawling over the rock and into the tomb. The contents of the tomb had allegedly been dead and decomposed for nearly a century, yet something was attracting the insects who usually like things living or just past living, and all of this raised new questions.

“But what seems a more than casual observation is that the dead here remain in expensive structures, the cost of which far exceeds the value of the shacks that house many of our living poor.”

But what seems a more than casual observation is that the dead here remain in expensive structures, the cost of which far exceeds the value of the shacks that house many of our living poor. And many of the poor, including helpless, hungry children, live in cold, deserted doorways and on the grates in the big cities, some even in the sewers.

I ponder a simple question: Might we better honor our dead by turning dead money spent to honor the dead, honorable or not, into something life-giving by contributing the funds, say, to decent housing for the living?

At last my companion caretaker told me that if the heirs did not keep up their monthly payments that the occupant would be evicted. When I asked, to what place the said occupant would be relocated, he said he didn’t know. Presumably there is a pauper’s field nearby.

So what? Remember, the rapture. Some insist that all the coffins will be thrown open on judgment day and the good, rattling occupants will be drug up to heaven whether they want to go or not. Which leads me to object. Who really wants to spend eternity with a bunch of angels? If you met one you might take a fancy to, the wings would get in the way, and after about ten thousand years, wouldn’t one get tired of listening to some dreamy-eyed sweetheart playing the harp?

Argus Joseph Thompson, Insane, on Love

In the fall in Jackson Hole the frost swipes the leaves from the trees like a mad painter stripping wet paint from his canvas.  But this fall the frost had touched only lightly, and the aspens and the cottonwoods had turned translucent and yellow.   The first light stroked the cornices of the Gable Peaks, and the granite rims turned pink, and the snow at the top was also pink.  The leaves of the chokecherries turned the color of tree-ripened peaches, and the mountain ash was red with its clusters of seeds as shiny as red porcelain peas, and the wild geese flew across a Mediterranean sky proclaiming their profound joy, and the early light was aglow on Jenny’s face and on her hair.

“Soon the leaves will fall down,” I said. “It makes me sad.

“The leaves have no regret,” she said.  “It’s only change, and change is beautiful.”

Then it came blurting out: “Jenny, there must be something wrong with you.”

“Of course there’s nothing wrong with me,” she replied still gazing into the early morning light.  The light was light yellow.

“Then why would such a woman as you fall in love with the likes of me?  You’ll have to admit, there must be something wrong.”

She turned to study me.  ”Argus, are you feeling bad?”
I tried to explain to her that it was as if she were blind, and being blind had fallen in love with a person who people with eyes would have found unattractive to the extreme.

“You can’t see yourself, Argus.  You can’t see your soul and you can’t see your beauty.”

“You can’t see how crazy things are in here,” I said.  “It’s like the lions are loose inside the circus tent and the people are panicked and running every which way trying to get out.”

“You’re very brave to live in such a place, Argus.”

“No,” I said.  “I am the world’s greatest coward.  And I think I am insane and…”

“Argus,” Jenny said putting her arms around me and looking up into my eyes—she didn’t have to look up very far—”that is what I love about you.  You are who you are and…”

“Maybe I’m crazy, Jenny,” I said.  “Maybe that’s the truth.”

“No, Argus.  You’re not crazy. It’s crazy out there.  Not knowing what’s real is real.”

“My God!” I cried.  “That’s really crazy!”

“Besides, you’re an animal,” she said bearing her teeth and letting out a growl and laughing, and then she grabbed me in ways and in places, and we were like mating tigers, growling and wrestling and screaming, and after that when we lay together in each other’s arms she said, “I love you for many, many deep reasons,” and I felt clear about it for the moment, and I felt beautiful.

That is what falling in love is about, I thought.  It’s when the other shows you your own beauty in such a way that you can, for that magical instant, see it, and you can feel love for yourself.

 

Argus Joseph Thompson, Insane, on the Environment

Since in these days we have become more interested in the environment I thought it helpful to quote Argus Joseph Thomspon, Insane, on some of his scattered and irrelevant thoughts on the subject.  He begins describing the early light in the mountains of Wyoming.

Ah, the early light is the light!  Nets of light.  Yellow lattices of light.  Great tubs of light spilling on the aspens, and the tips of the sagebrush glow like embers in the blacksmith’s forge, and the jagged edges of the mountains turn molten.

In the early light the air is brittle and snaps at the ears.  Magpies squawk and the marmots shoot chirps so straight and shrill old boulders crack, and squirrels chip—chip, chip like squeaking wagon wheels, and the coyote yaps until the sun warms the tips of his shedding fir.  Then he curls up in the early light and, silent as blue bells, he smiles and slumbers.

In the early light the breath of horses make golden mist, and their long nose hairs are light yellow with frost, and you can see their jaws smashing golden grasses and yellow prairie daisies, and once at such an early time a great bull elk, its rack in velvet, walked among the horses and then disappeared into the web of shadows.

He has a girlfriend named Jenny.  They are searching for a nearly extinct creature named the “Two-toothed snail.” Argus continues in his description:

Through the cabin window the early light touched Jenny and left her ablaze in joy, and she glowed in a strange wisdom that usually only animals and children possess.  Some call it innocence, but it is wisdom all the same.  The forest creatures acquire it from walking with their bare feet touching the earth and from eating from the earth and from being nourished by the earth’s wisdom.   In the early light Jenny’s eyes were like the wild doe—soft and deep and focused on a place beyond my vision.  And I felt such joy, such pain, I thought, if only I were struck in eternal rejoicing like a rock.

“Rocks are happy!”  I cried.  “I can actually feel their happiness!”

Jenny touched my cheek with golden fingertips.  “Yes, rocks are very happy.”  And oh,

I wondered how

Such as she

Could ever love

The likes of me.

But their joy is interrupted by a knowledge that General-O Dynamics, a mammoth multinational corporation, is about to invade the forest and destroy it for lumber to sell to the Japanese.  Some of the trees are four hundred years old.

Then as quickly Jenny fell into deep shadows.  “When they come with their bulldozers and their chain saws and strip the forest bare and muddy the stream and turn the air blue with diesel exhaust, the last of the Two-tootheds will be gone forever.”

“Maybe we’re too late anyway,” I said.

“You must keep your faith on,” Jenny said. “I know they’re up there, Argus.”

I said, “When Judge Hammond hears about what General-O Dynamics is going to do to the forest he’ll stop ‘em cold with a TRO as we lawyers call it, a temporary restraining order.”

“Argus, the law doesn’t protect the earth.  The law protects those who destroy the earth.  The Constitution doesn’t protect animals and trees and buttercups.  A corporation can murder fifty million buttercups and not one can sue.”

But the Constitution protects everything.  Great legal minds like Judge Scalia claimed the Constitution even protected unborn human pollywogs in the first trimester, and if the Constitution protected pollywogs then it ought to protect the two-toothed snail as well.

“Judge Hammond is a Reagan appointee, and he understands the right to life,” I said.   “I’ll explain to him about the Great Wheel Up in the Sky and how the two-toothed is a spoke, and. . .”

And then Jenny grabbed me and kissed me for the longest time, and I thought that all that legal talk about TRO’s and constitutional law must have excited her.

When we came up for air I said, “TRO’s are rendered only if there is no adequate remedy at law, and… ” and sure enough she kissed me again.

How Argus Joseph Thompson, insane, became a lawyer

As you may remember, Argus Joseph Thomson is a poor lawyer specializing in Poor Law for the poor. Here he tells us how he was driven to become a lawyer.

His childhood friend, Doc Blomister, had been working as an undertaker’s assistant and was charged with having sexually violated the corpse of a well-known movie star who was said to have died from over-exuberant frolicking with a Wyoming cowboy. They had Doc cold, pictures and all.

The charges shocked the community considering the fact that Doc enjoyed all of the apparent accouterments of normalcy and good citizenry. He attended the Baptist Church every Sunday; he was an officer in the Junior Chamber of Commerce; he served as an Assistant Scout Master, and he was an avid member of the Cowboy Joe Club, those rabid boosters of the University of Wyoming football team. But you can never tell about the secret stuff that stews away inside of people, especially immigrants from Pumpkin Buttes.

Doc’s lawyer pled Doc “not guilty by reason of insanity.” At the trial a psychiatrist, Dr. Henrietta Homony, testified that Doc’s depravity was attributable to the abuse he’d suffered as a child at the hands of Miss Bromley – the trauma of which, Dr. Homony testified, left Doc terrified of the opposite sex and powerless to relate to living women. “This is irrefutable evidence of his insanity,” the shrink testified, “because as every mentally healthy male should realize, the female of the species is essentially harmless and easily dominated by the superior, stronger male in whom God had entrusted the fate of the species.”

Doc’s lawyer hauled Miss Bromley into court to testify. She was the teacher at Pumpkin Buttes country school where both Doc and Argus attended.

“When you caught Wilbur Blomister down at the creek with Bessy Lou Hogelstein playing doctor what did you do?” the lawyer asked Miss Bromley.

“I don’t have to answer you,” Miss Bromley said lifting her chin. “That’s privileged.”

“Answer his question,” Judge Hammond interjected.

“I did what any decent woman would have done.”

“What’s that?” Doc’s lawyer asked.

“I won’t answer.”

“You’ll be in contempt of court if you don’t,” the judge snarled.

“Come over here and I’ll show you,” she said to Doc’s lawyer as she reached into her apron pocket.

“Answer the question,” the judge said.

“I’ll answer, but this is a form of rape. You are extracting from me what I do not wish to give. I swatted his little. . .what do you call it, Your Honor?”

“Call it whatever you want,” the judge said.

“If I have to say such a word I wish to use only the correct, legal terminology.”

“Call it his do-whackey,” the judge said.

“I spanked his little do-whackey with my ruler,” Miss Bromley said.

“Thank you,” the lawyer said.

“I should hope so,” Miss Bromley said. “That was the least I could do under the circumstances, and I made him promise he’d never do such a thing again as long as he lived.”

Later the lawyer called Doc to the stand in his own defense. He had grown into a nice looking young man, and his lawyer had him dressed in his three-piece black undertaker’s suit. His hair was cut short and slicked down with the latest hair grease for men so that he looked like an IBM sales rep.

“Why did you do this terrible thing, Mr. Blomister?” the lawyer asked right out. Doc didn’t answer. He looked down at his hands and began to weep.

“Tell the jury, Mr. Blomister.”

Finally Doc began to mumble something through his sobs.

“Speak up, Mr. Blomister!”

Then Doc said something about being in love and something about loneliness and that’s all his lawyer could get from him.

Doc’s lawyer took less than a minute to sum up for the jury. “What this man did was the unspeakable crime of a madman,” he whispered. “But think how lonely it is to be a corpse in a drawer in the morgue. Think of that ladies and gentlemen!” Thereupon Doc’s lawyer submitted his case, and the jury was out only long enough to elect a foreman and take a single ballot before they returned their verdict, and Judge Hammond sentenced poor Doc that same day to forty years, which is probably longer than he would have gotten had he murdered the woman in the first place.

I visited Doc in the Teton County Jail before they transferred him to the state penitentiary at Rawlins. He was wearing his blue denim jailhouse clothes and he looked pale and helpless. I didn’t know what to say to him.

“You shouldn’t have come here, Argus,” Doc finally said. “Ya shouldn’t never have nothin’ to do with the likes a me.”

“You’re my friend, Doc. Everybody makes mistakes. We all have our stuff.”

Then, like a small boy, Doc asked, “Do you have stuff, too, Argus?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Is yer stuff like my stuff?” he asked hopefully.

“No, Doc,” I said. Doc looked disappointed.

“Was yer stuff as bad as mine?”

“Stuff is stuff,” I said.

“No, stuff ain’t stuff. There is stuff and there is stuff. An’ my stuff is the worst there is.”

“No, Doc,” I said, and I started to reach out and touch his arm, but I thought better of it. It seemed wrong to touch a person when he’s in jail.

“It’s awful in here,” Doc said. “I hope they kill me.” He was silent for a long time. Then he said, “All I think of is the Buttes,” and he choked up, but he held it back because real men are not supposed to cry, especially in jail.

“You’ll make friends,” I said.

“They won’t have nothin’ to do with somebody that done the stuff I done.”

“But, Doc, there are murderers in there, and rapists in there and people who beat up old ladies and there’s people in there who’ve done terrible things to little kids. You didn’t hurt anybody. Yer stuff isn’t so bad.”

Suddenly Doc asked, “What did you do, Argus?”

“Well, Doc,” I said, “a man can’t talk about his own stuff.” Then I knew I should have told Doc about Marilyn Monroe because all the hope drained from Doc’s face, and his eyes looked like they were painted on with flat brown Kem-Tone, but Doc would have never understood. Nobody understands anybody else’s stuff. “You’ll be all right, Doc,” I said. “You can learn to make license plates, and you’ll meet a lot of interesting people.” Suddenly I began to cry, and Doc, being very considerate, turned his back.

Then a guard as big as a beer-wagon horse came in and hollered at me, “Hey, you a friend of this stiff-fucker?”

“Don’t you call him that!” I said, and I took a big wild swing at the guard who slammed me up against the bars, picked me up off the floor and heaved me out of the cellblock like he was throwing slop to the chickens.

After that I retried Doc’s case over and over in my mind. I would have argued it differently. I would have riveted the jury with steady eyes and in a low, deliberate voice I’d have said:

“Ladies and gentlemen: Wilbur ‘Doc’ Blomister is a very nice person. He’d never commit rape, and he’d never commit robbery. He’d never hurt another living being; he’d never even kick a mean dog. This would be a better world if there were more people like Doc. Think of it! There’d be no little children with their heads smashed in and old folks beaten and robbed. Why, the FBI would be out of business, and the politicians wouldn’t have to compete with each other to see who could be the toughest on crime, because there wouldn’t be any crime. That’s the kind of world we’d have if everybody was like my client, Doc Blomister.”

“Now Doc testified about love. But we’ve all been in love with the dead. I, myself, have been in love with Marilyn Monroe for years, and I know plenty of people who are still in love with Elvis Presley. And so I ask that you find that Doc is only a poor lonely man who is afraid to love the living. We all need to love and to be loved, don’t we?” I looked at the jury, but they stared back at me with Kem-Tone eyes.

“It’s a frightening thing to love somebody. It can cause great injury to your heart, isn’t that true?” Doc is no criminal. Criminals injure the living. Doc is only a poor lonely man. I wish you could forgive him.” But the jury wouldn’t forgive him. I looked from juror to juror, but in my mind’s eye I saw them sitting still and stony like 12 cadavers. I thought, “Oh, Lord, the jury is dead, and they’ll find poor Doc guilty for having violated one of their own. Probably render the death penalty.”

_____________

After that Argus decided to go to law school.

Argus tell us: How the FBI solves its cases

Argus tells us:

How the FBI solves its cases

Now let’s try to be serious just once.  Here is what Argus told me about his exposure to FBI deal-making methods as taught at the U. Wyoming Law School.  Take heed!

_____________________

So the FBI wanted to make a deal with me.  Little wonder.  The FBI couldn’t make a case without a deal.   I remembered studying “Deals 301″ in law school.  Professor George Washington Carver Jones, the only black professor at the University of Wyoming, taught the class.

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation has merely fallen in line with the preponderant persuasion in America—that deals are what it’s all about—mergers, takeovers, magical paper transactions that reap immediate wealth and make the dull and unproductive instantly rich and famous. Fuck this making stuff,” Professor Jones cried as he paced in front of the class.  That’s why Professor Jones always got the highest student evaluation in the law school.  The students loved to hear him use solid words.  “Fuck this work, for Christ sakes!  Work is for (the n-word.)”  The kids loved to hear him say the “n-word.”  He was the only one who could say it.  “The money is in deals.  Deals, man!  And that’s how the FBI sees it too.

“Today, in modern America, the FBI pretends to investigate, but its agents tap phones and plant bugs under beds so they can listen to the snoring and love-making.  They’d rather hear a couple of (n-words) fuck than make an honest case,” Professor Jones said boosting his rating ten points.  “Occasionally an agent subpoenas a document, and if things get boring a couple of honkies with the collars of their topcoats turned up and wearing snap-brimmed fedoras and imitation Porsche sunglasses corner a witness and scare the living shit out of him.  But they don’t engage in detective work.  They are merely getting things set up to make a deal.

“Now when the guy is ‘ripe,’ as the Bureau likes to phrase it, when the pressure has been on the suspect for Lord-knows-how-long, and the poor bastard has laid awake for six months staring up at the ceiling wondering how to convince his wife and his kids and the old folks at home that he is really innocent, when he gets up in the morning and the first thing that hits him is a ghastly fear that makes his heart beat out of sync, then like the Chinese water torture, the fear dripping down, the terror of the unknown having captured his mind, the pain of it, minute by minute, hour by hour, day after relentless day, wearing away at him until he has endured one drip too many, well, then he disintegrates into an inglorious pile of blubbering fucking rubble at the feet of the FBI, and he’s ready for a deal!”  At the conclusion of the longest sentence uttered by a professor in our law school career, we erupted in loud hoops and applause.

Professor Jones bowed slightly and continued.  “The FBI has several classes of deals available.  The Class I deal is made with subjects who are guilty of nothing and against whom the Bureau has no case whatsoever.   But they have been harassed so long they think they’re guilty, or still believing themselves innocent, they’re helpless to defend themselves, and stupefied by fear, they’ll testify to anything or against anybody if the Bureau will only leave them alone.

“But the FBI makes Class II deals, too.  The Class II deal is for subjects who are actually guilty, but still running at large.  Usually the more guilty you are the better deal you can make.  The Class II dealee might be more guilty than the guy they’re after, but to nail the ‘target,’ the Class II dealee can walk or take ’short time’ in exchange for his testimony against the target who will likely get twenty years to life. The target could be innocent.  That is not the point.  The point is the deal.  The government isn’t in business to solve cases.  It isn’t in the business of bringing criminals to justice.  The government has but one function and one function only—to make good, solid, saleable deals!”

“Amen,” some smartass in the back hollered.  But Professor Jones paid him no heed.

“Then there are the Class III deals—for inmates.  Here the Bureau scrapes the bottom of the deal barrel.  Everybody wants out of prison, and if an inmate can conjure up a good enough story against the target, the Bureau will make the inmate a fucking deal.  I don’t use the word loosely but with legal precision, because…”  He paused with perfect timing, surveying the class.  We waited, our hearts pounding with excitement.  “Because the deal is to fuck your brother.  Deals!  Buying and selling!  That’s what life in America is all about today.  After the Class III prisoner testifies he’ll be placed on the Witness Protection Program.  A Class III deal is a peachy deal for convicts who have a good story and are good salesmen.  Most crooks are.  Most honest people are not.”

We tried to write down every word the professor uttered.  “The Class IV deal, the most common deal of all, is one in which the suspect is both the fuckee and the fuckor.  He may be guilty or not.  If he admits his guilt the government will be easier on him than if he makes the government prove its case by bringing in Class I, II or III deals against him.  When you’re the target it’s pretty frightening.  You’ve been rotting in jail awaiting trial for eight months without a single ray of sunshine once touching your sickly black hide, and they’ve got you charged with something that pulls ten to life, and you’ve got for a lawyer a honky public defender fresh out of law school with 150 other cases.  You’re just one more n-word.  You can get out in two if you plead guilty, and you get good time for the eight months you already spent in jail.  You make a Class IV deal.  I repeat:  It doesn’t make any difference whether you’re guilty or not.  The Bureau doesn’t care.  It’s another case closed.  What counts to the Bureau is that they made a deal! “

I stole a glance at the woman student sitting next to me.  Her mouth was open and her lips wet like Marilyn Monroe’s.  Her eyes were filled with love or lust.  In the excitement of the moment I couldn’t tell the difference.

Professor Jones continued, “If you want to be a success, specialize in making deals with the government.  Besides, it’s risky to try a case these days, because jurors know that the last innocent person in America was John Wayne.”