BUSH WATCH...Dom Stasi

"Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll."  John Lack, opening words, MTV, 1981 "Shut up and sing."  Laura Ingraham, Conservative talk show host, 2003 � -LAND OF CONFUSION- Where The Only Constant Is Change By Dom Stasi Responds1@aol.com � Ever want to change things?� Ever want to do something - or more realistically  ever want to be part of a movement or a group that does something which, once its been done, effects a cultural or physical change that in turn affects just about everybody else in some way - even those billions who have no idea that somethings changed?� Ever want to do that?� If your answer is yes, but youve never tried it, I say, try it.� By all means, try it.� Or at the very least, if such an opportunity presents itself, dont step aside.� Confront it.� See where it takes you, or where you take it.� Change is what life is all about.� Quality of life is what change is all about.� � The world could really use a change right now, especially one that starts here at home.� If it starts here at home, it could be a peaceful change.� Because, make no mistake about it, the rest of the world cannot, and will not, coexist with the cultural aberration that is America under George W. Bush.� Theres just too much imbalance.� Which imbalance, when coupled with our current diplomatic arrogance, will inevitably lead to crisis if left to fester.� History is explicit on this. � So, if the 150 million Americans who are unhappy about the direction our country is being taken, each made an effort to invoke a difference, however microscopic, the aggregate effect would be one of (Dare I borrow a word from the Republicans?) "Biblical" proportions.� � But only if that change is self-imposed might it be effected without the usual Biblical slaughter. � Simply stated, if we 150 million concerned Americans take the initiative and change our� current leaderships behavior in the world, we wont be subjected to whatever solution the 6.5 billion equally-concerned, non-Americans eventually come up with in seeking quiescence without us.� � You would be astounded at how easy it can be to help effect change.� Cmon, if psychotic jerks like Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush can go around changing the entire world whenever they feel like it, why cant decent, normal people change things a bit too? �There are more of us than of them.� In fact, if marginal people such as Bush and his puppet masters change the world in ways we decent normal people dont like or that were reasonably certain will bring enslavement or premature death to countless of our children and grandchildren (or anyone elses, for that matter), shouldn't we be concerned enough about those changes to at least attempt to set things right again?� Its our world too.� Isnt it?� � "Hell yes! says I. � Can we look about us, see whats happening to our world, remain passive, and continue to call ourselves decent normal people?� � "Hell no!" sez I � Yet so many of my strong, compassionate friends are quick to retreat behind such responses as: "Whats the use?" or "What effect can one person have today?" or that most grating of all, "Itll all work out.� It always does."�� � Its a troubling irony that we, the first creatures to be endowed with foresight and responsibility, should abdicate instead to hopelessness or sloth.� We seem willing to� watch our world destroyed before us by misguided individuals, our republic raped by flag-draped criminals.� Yet, somehow, we fail to acknowledge the influence an individual can assert, and in turn, we fail to act.� � But the good news is this.� Even if you don't want to change the world, when things finally get too far out of sorts, someone or something will force you to either action or capitulation in order to set things right again, to ease the strain.� The former is a price we pay for calling ourselves fully-evolved humans.� I find it a small price to pay for humanity, both our own and humanity in the larger sense as well.� The latter is enslavement and the surrender of our descendants to the will of others.� � Social scientists call the tendency toward balance "entropy."� I call it "insurmountable opportunity."� � Insurmountable Opportunities: Sometimes insurmountable opportunity takes the form of a switch you are asked to flip, a button to be pressed.� � Consider the dark yet vivid example of the first guy to trigger an atomic bomb.� All he had to do was flip a switch  or not.� He didnt need to invent the bomb, nor did he need to help build it.� Those things took years to accomplish and millions of dollars and armies of scientists.� But on July16, 1945 someone fired the thing.� That someone could have been Enrico Fermi himself, or his maiden aunt Rosa.� Didnt matter.� Had someone not pulled the trigger, pressed the button, lit the fuse, whatever it took, had nobody been willing to act, all that work and money might have come to nothing  a change in itself.� Somewhere, somehow, someone must flip the switch  or not  in order to change things.� Often the most seemingly insignificant and simplest act is that which changes everything.� What could be easier than flipping a switch?� Well, not flipping a switch.� Had no one flipped the atomic bomb switch, todays world would be a different place.� � As with the atomic bomb guy, the button is often a real one.� But sometimes its only a metaphor.� Doesnt matter.� What matters is that when it comes to world-changing, you can't hide once you've been confronted with the switch, because sometimes not throwing that switch will change the world too.� Thats why they call the thing a "switch."� Ours truly is a land of confusion. � At the dawn of the Atomic age, 1945, many of the very physicists who built the bomb said that the switch should never be thrown.� Instead, as its inventors, we (Americans) should� simply describe the effects of doing so to the rest of the world.� So horrific were the implications of the Atomic Bomb, that just describing it would have the desired effect while avoiding the carnage  or so they professed.� � We all know which course was pursued.� One may still venture into the American desert and see the glass beads that once were grains of sand where the Trinity bomb was fired.� Somebody pressed the button, threw the switch, typed the command, whatever.� Boom! � Who was right?� Anyone?� No one? � �Then, with the press of subsequent� buttons, atomic bombs were detonated over Japanese cities, killing hundreds-of-thousands of people.� Debate continues to this day as to whether that act  the pressing of those buttons  resulted in an aggregate loss or a salvation of lives.� Was it an act of cruelty, or one of compassion?� The very words - salvation, compassion - are unseemly in so horrific a context.� But war was already raging in foregone conclusion.� To not drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have mandated an invasion of the Japanese mainland with massive casualties suffered to both sides.� There can be no conjecture on that point.� In fact, many of the Purple Hearts awarded to American wounded in the Korean and Vietnam Wars were minted in an earlier decade.� They were minted in anticipation of the inevitable American casualties that would have accrued to an invasion of Japan: an invasion that never was, injuries that were not inflicted, but would surely be at some future time.� (So sure of this must someone have been, that all those extra Purple Hearts went into storage for future use.� Therein lies a tribute to hopelessness worthy of further contemplation.) � Add to the pro-bombing argument that countless more Japanese would have died in an invasion of their homeland by an invincible American force than actually did die in the heat and poison of nuclear fission. This is probably true as well.� The Japanese were not prone to surrender.� On their homeland, they might have fought to the very last.� Which, then, is the greater horror?� � Yet this period  this time of unspeakable horror - is part of the idealized past to which so many ignorant conservative pundits want to return our nation.� They may fondly call themselves patriots, but they are delusional nationalistic know-nothings at best, that or they are the most despicable of liars.� Some, perhaps, are both.� They are not patriots. � My own father was part of an American bomber crew in that war.� He and countless other American kids flew into the flak, dropped their cordite, and ran like hell back through the flak.� He knew full well what was happening behind and beneath him.� He never considered it a time of halcyon innocence as do the radio talk-jerks today.� Those others who did, pressed their buttons and retreated to the sanctuary of denial.� But, press their buttons they did.� Attempt to maintain their sanity, they did.� Long to return, they did not.� � In Hiroshima and Nagasaki as in the fire storms of Dresden, we promulgated an inconceivable futuristic horror, a preview if you will, of what awaits our entire world at some future date, either naturally in some future eon when our world is consumed in the nuclear fires of the very Sun that gives us life  that, or by our own hand far sooner. � But can there be a more perfect  albeit horrific  paradox than this, a paradox built upon a paradox?� � Once youre handed that button, theres no escaping the implications.� Act or do not act; either way you are a procuring cause of whatever follows from your decision.� Thats the insurmountable opportunity part.� Its a sobering thought. � But think about it we must, for any one of us can find himself in possession of such a button and without forewarning.� What then to do?� What then, indeed. � Lets consider the question in a more contemporary context.� Consider if you will, what might have followed if, upon learning that Osama bin Laden had flipped the switch that set in motion the events of September Eleventh, George W. Bush had acted differently.�� � Suddenly finding himself confronted with perhaps a thousand world-changing metaphoric switches, suppose Bush had not chosen the one marked INVADE IRAQ.� � Consider the possibilities.� Think of the humanity and compassion that had poured from virtually all the worlds rational people toward America following the September 11th attacks.� Think about what a real leader would have done with that power, that insurmountable, profoundly historical opportunity.� The possibilities are mind-boggling.� It was like those old sci-fi pictures from the fifties when all the world unites against a vile and incomprehensible thing that threatens our very humanness.� � Instead we are left to lament a squandered legacy.� Im speaking of the profaned memory of those innocent WTC deaths, deaths our stupid president and his ghoulish vice president sold out to their oily, avaricious owners: a bunch of ugly white guys safely ensconced in their overstuffed Houston and Washington easy chairs.� Think of the good that could have risen from the ashes of tragedy if only wed had a president for the ages and not the irrational blood-stained buffoon we continue to tolerate at our nations ever-more-apparent future peril.� � Unlike 1945, today the entire world knows what were capable of militarily.� There was no need to go out and attempt to prove it like some stupid schoolyard tough.� Invading Iraq proved nothing of value.� If Bush wanted to prove his manhood to his father, he should have done that when he wore the uniform of our country.� We were at war then.�� The only thing Bush was fighting were his demons.��� � Or, for the more pragmatic among you, think of the trillion public dollars stolen or squandered by the opportunists whove usurped our government in the name of false security; one trillion dollars we would today have available as a budgetary surplus instead of finding ourselves the most indebted industrial society on earth.� � Money, not cordite, is power.� Money, not plutonium, is power.� In this world, money is power.� And we allowed crooks and fools to spend ours as if it were their own.� We did so because as Americans we have been weaned on the concept of "good government."� � Ours is no longer a good government.� The only question is, how long will it take that 50% of our countrymen still in denial to come to grips with that reality? � Things change.� America has changed.� Its not to late to change it back.� If the fake conservatives want to return to traditional American values as they so persistently profess, why do their agents of change keep taking us in the opposite direction?� � That trillion bucks would have been money better spent on things like pursuit of the actual 9-11 mastermind(s), Social Security for the boomer generation, education, medical research, clean air and clean water, and all that other silly crap that does not trade on Wall Street but that our kids will someday have to beg their Chinese overseers to provide for them if we do not get off this path were on and retake our country.� Think about how the most reviled and justifiably despised man on earth would today be, not the president of the United States, but Osama bin Laden.� Think.� Think.� Think.� Its the only thing that makes us human. � � Fondly persuading ourselves that we look like god, while behaving like so many giant cockroaches does not make us human.� Kindness, compassion, society, intellect, and vengeance  yes, cold, calculated vengeance directed against our real enemies, not against hapless and helpless shadows - these things make us human.� Or, as major world-changer, Galileo, put it centuries ago: "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."�� � The Abyss: Now, if this leads you to believe that effecting change is a luxury reserved for presidents and terrorists and scientists and others of such luminescent ilk, think again.� Change happens in far less dramatic ways, and it is imposed by far less celebrated practitioners.� It happens in ways to which the dopes of the corporate press would never turn their shallow, short-span attention today.� Most change is subtle.� The "opportunity" to take part -� however small that part might seem - in something that effects such change could be imposed upon you at any second.� Will you press the button?� Will you throw the switch  or will you not?� � Ive had the button handed to me a few times in the course of my six decades on the world.� Sometimes the setting was spectacular and the implications clear.� Other times, I barely noticed, if at all. Every time, though, I was a tiny part of something far more grand than any of its parts or all of them together.� For change, like the hour hand of a clock, like continental drift, can proceed in increments too small to be seen until theyve accumulated or been resisted until they result in an earthquake.� � Everything grand is a derivation of little things.� The word Atom, loosely translated from the Greek, means "that smallest of things cannot be made smaller."� Yet, as science has shown us, split the atom further, and nothing could be bigger.� We know of nothing more powerful, more world-changing.� Perhaps the ancients were on to something. � To be even that smallest of things, when taking part in something larger than ourselves, we soar.� For me, being a part of something big meant just doing what I was paid to do, or just having some fun with no sense of implication.� Other times, I knew I was into something more serious than a heart attack.� But, again in retrospect, I know I was there when differences were made in the way we live, play, fight, and think about ourselves as a people, and all I did was take the switch when it was passed to me.�� � That realization - that Ive held the switch  defies cognition even as I write this.� But looking back upon some of the stuff to which Ive been small party, and that conclusion is inescapable.� In every instance, the truth of what was happening was revealed to me.� When one knows truth, hes harder to fool, harder to frighten, harder to manipulate.� I know this is not easy to swallow.� So I figure you expect some proof, some examples, some evidence you can use to verify my claim that just being human qualifies every one of us as a potential vehicle for change.� Okay, consider some of the following examples.� They are all from everyday life; they all pertain to me; I had nothing to do with any of them getting started.� But I was there when they were started.� I did not step aside.� And sooner or later I found myself holding a button and what I did or did not do with that button helped to effect change - change that� was not always for the better, but change to be sure  big social change.� � Heres my story.� Perhaps youll find it interesting.� Perhaps even inspiring.� (Think Forrest Gump.)� But either way, the message is simple: stand your ground, and in the end youll own your life; retreat, and youll be owned by others.� � Come back with me to the Sixties.� Well build from there.� � Eager to follow my fathers example, if not his advice, I quit college and joined the Air Force.� Before long, I found myself part of a US reconnaissance crew flying the Soviet frontier on the hottest days of the cold war.� I'm talking the absolutely hottest days:� October, 1962. � The now-famous Cuban missile crisis was dramatically playing itself out in the warm Caribbean with the world watching in breathless anticipation  anticipation of being vaporized at any second.� Meanwhile, in another part of the world, with nobody watching, a small bunch of the most unexceptional techno-geeks you could ever want to meet (or not), were mobilized from an equally innocuous place called Lawrence G. Hanscom Field .� Hanscom is an air base in suburban Boston where some of the worlds most advanced electronic warfare systems have been devised and tested.� Small, quiet, nestled in the shadow of the Minuteman statue where Americas first shot was fired in anger, the base was the understated headquarters of the Air Forces Electronic Systems Division.� Those of us stationed there, fondly called ourselves, The Minutemen.�� � With the missile crisis unfolding in the Caribbean, my detachment of nerdy Minutemen was put on alert and relocated (TDY) to Alaska.� We brought with us secret electronic warfare systems so advanced theyd not yet been fully tested.� Wed do that empirically.�� (Theres another story here which Ill inflict upon you at some future date) � From our Arctic nests, we self-proclaimed, modern-day Minutemen  like our suitably anonymous namesake high in the steeple of the Old North Church - spent our short days and long nights aloft, looking for the first telltale signs of the enemys approach.� Flying above the frozen Arctic and North Pacific Oceans, we flew our clandestine missions in hopes of catching the Russians before they pressed any of their world-changing buttons.� � Our systems were secret, our intentions anything but.�� � The Russians did the same in turn, flying downrange of our missile and radar outposts, badgering us in a never-ending game of nuclear cat and mouse.� Similar danse macabre were being played out above and below other of the worlds oceans that week, too.� But it was in the Arctic, along the Russian frontier where its implications were potentially the most catastrophic.� Here the� ramifications of failure or provocation were the most draconian.� For it was from here that the big Communist rockets would come to deal their death and havoc on our cities and towns and homes and factories and the flesh and bone of those we loved.� For if they were ever launched  if the buttons were pressed  wed be left with little recourse but retaliation.� Two or three of the worlds most "advanced" societies would spiral into the fires of our mutual manmade Suns. � Above the frozen Arctic, it was our job to see that no Russian rocket ever left its pad undetected and under hostile guidance.� And if one did, our counterparts in Air Defense and Systems Commands had to employ every means known to science and war to wrest control of the thing, or blow it back into hell before it went "exoatmospheric."� � The situation was as tense as a drumhead, but there was more anger than fear among the citizenry back home.� JFK had inspired Americans to outrage, not exploited us to fear.�� � (Now, I fully realize that the prospect of facing one billion Russian and Chinese armed with everything from clubs to nuclear ICBMs is not as frightening to a civilian population as are those three black-clad alQaeda guys on the jungle gym we keep seeing on Fox "news," but one must go with the enemies hes got.) � JFK was a Navy man, and this was a Navy show.� But while our navies faced-off down south, day after day, up beyond the Dew Line wed badger the Russian Air Force to distraction.� Wed rush the beach at Kamchatka, even pressing on to the sea of Okhotsk.� Next day wed fly up their northern coastline all the way to the Laptiva Straights.� Theyd be forced to redirect their interceptors, leaving Kamchatka exposed.� Then wed shake ourselves off and do it all again.� Poke em in the eye off Sakhalin this time.� � Day and night wed rush the Soviet Unions borders and coastlines at full cruise speed, flying our� unarmed, antenna-bristling jets sometimes in formation, other times solo.� Our big aircraft resembled Boeing 707s.� As such, to the Russian radars wed be impossible to distinguish from a formation of strategic bombers, B-52s or B-47s.� The Soviets had to react... had to.� So wed just keep coming until they did.� Making no effort to disguise our intentions, we fairly begged the "enemy" to come up and have a look.� They did just that.� � Paired against their interceptors, our big lumbering EC-135, and RC-135 jets were sitting ducks.� Though unarmed we were still fair game if we made a wrong move.� The enemy could have waxed us at will with but the press of a button.� If our wreckage fell into the sea the world would be none the wiser.� If it could be dragged onto Russian soil, the intercept would have been seen not as an act of war, but an execution of spies.� Still, to do so was to risk plunging the world into nuclear Armageddon.� Enough of that was already going on down south in the waters off Cuba, and, as wed learn, in the skies above it as well.� Nonetheless, theyd never fire first.� Of that we were certain.� � Then, we got word that one of our U-2s was brought down by a Russian SAM over Cuba.�� So much for certainty.� � Tactically, it changed nothing.� Ours was a calculated risk of the highest possible order, involving both the airmen of the line, and Americans back home already in the crosshairs.� But it was a risk that had to be taken.� For we had to know our enemys capabilities.� We had to know, had to know empirically, exactly what they could do, and we had to know before they did it.� Boldly  many would say recklessly  we pressed on beyond the limits of caution, for it was the only way to force the Soviets hand.� By doing so we gave the enemy no choice but to bring up his electronic defenses.� And when he did, then wed read the electronic signatures like a book.� What can be read, can then be jammed.� Other crews did other things.� Together we called them electronic countermeasures.� Many of us had trained and worked side by side in calmer days.� Others had come from far corners of the world.� But we grunts didnt know each others mission objectives, or even who was going aloft, or where, or why, or when.� We even launched from separate bases, changed from day to day.� � Day after day wed fly into the Russians faces, listen to their communications, press our buttons and jam their signals into hash.� We'd poke them in the electronic eyes, prove we were better than they, illustrate the folly of taking on the mighty US, challenge them to react and foolishly laugh at their blindness.� And day after day, they did the same, or tried.� Astoundingly, no shots were ever fired on the northern frontier  not to kill.� We knew that every time the Russians scrambled their fighters - every time they came up to buzz and posture and harass us and determine that we were not armed strategic bombers but recon scouts and electronic countermeasures planes taking their electronic pulse, looking for evidence of ICBM activity, blinding their systems  every time they did that, their pilots' fingers were tensed on buttons of their own.� They hated us and were bursting to blow us to hell.� But in the end they didnt.� Nobody did.� Nobody wanted to flip the switch that would fire the shot that would start the war that would end the world.� � Meanwhile, with their next wave of ships steaming toward Cuba and confrontation, the enemy brass back in the Kremlin were shocked at the vigor of Americas military response.� They needed a little more time, time to consider the clearly raised stakes.� So, with a tense world watching, and Americas naval might spread out and standing firmly in their path, the Russian ships halted their advance.� � As the world held its collective breath, humanity stood at the precipice, and for a moment we all quietly stared into the abyss.� � Finally, the Russians made their decision.� It was not a good day to die.�� � One by one, the Soviets turned their ships for home.� � My group received the order to stand down immediately.� This was no time to screw up. � For those of us on the northern frontier, it was over as quickly as it began, and (unlike the unfortunates aboard Korean Air Flight 007, a commercial airliner that ventured into this same airspace several years later and was blown to pieces by a Russian fighter) we all went home without a scratch, but with stories we could someday tell our grandchildren  but not a word until then � What we and our Russian counterparts did in the frigid Arctic and the warm Caribbean  or better stated, what we didn't do all those years ago - changed the world.� It could have ended the world.� But for the moment the world was merely changed, not destroyed.� Ive never been prouder to be an American. � I never believed what the press and the politicians tried to promote from the safety of their offices and their ignorance.� That being their false assumption that the Russians backed down.� Russian soldiers do not back down.� A solitary pilot, confronting an enemy squadron above a dark and frozen ocean is a man whos already accepted his fate: just like the American sailors standing fast in the Caribbean, every Russian airman on the northern frontier was prepared to die in defense of his country.� They did not back down.� Neither did we. �Their government had overplayed its hand, and faced with reality, just came to its senses, thats all.� There was nothing to gain and literally everything to lose.� � I liked to believe that that one encounter between superpowers changed us all for the better.� I thought it proved empirically that there could never be another war. �I liked to believe that we all of us suddenly realized no winner would emerge from such a conflagration.� There could be no victors any longer, only vanquished, thus there could be no more wars. � But in the years just ahead, Vietnam would destroy that belief.� Iraq would make a mockery of it.� � Good or bad, love it or hate it, JFK and American Camelot are long gone now.� Today our "leaders" are as children playing with loaded guns.� Deserters, criminals, draft-dodging idiots who - along with the millions of American sheep who still support them - have plunged us back in time, and we find ourselves once more looking into the darkness.� They and their ignorant ilk will destroy us all in the end as would a plague of old.�� If left to their devices theyll destroy us as they hope to destroy our democracy, and theyll kill our children, too, and our childrens world.� Im certain of that as Im certain of little else.� � We were not a warlike people in 1962.� We stood tall against an undeniable threat to our survival.� Real weapons of mass destruction were being deployed 90 miles from our shores.� Unlike the lies Colin Powell told the UN and his countrymen with his innocuous pictures of nothing in 2003, we had undeniable evidence of our enemys WMD back in 1962.� Undeniable.� So we ripped their weapons from their roots and threw them in our enemies faces.� And we did it the American way  gloriously, honestly, and in the interest of security  not oil, not money, security.� Homeland security.� � But security too is a switch.� Its pursuit brings change.� The concepts of victor and vanquished matter not at all in the face of fear.� What matters it seems, is only that old men send young men (and women) to war while lying about the reasons, and provoking the simple-minded to terror.� If such men are not restrained or punished by an educated populace, theyll always kill because it makes them richer, or taller, or more like the real men theyll never be.� If theyre left to make the laws, then their kind of killing will never be punished for the crime it surely is.� � We are a warlike people today.� Not because we need to be, but simply because we can be.� As I said earlier, its quiescence.� The pendulum swings first this way, then that, and if ignored for long enough, it stops.�� We cannot let it stop here. � The Feather Merchants: I loved the Air Force, I truly did.� It entrusted me to do things no young person could imagine himself doing.� But in the process, it had given me valuable skills, skills that I could trade for money out in the world of civilians, those colorfully clad people the military fondly refers to as "feather merchants."� � Upon returning to civilian life, my first job had me back in reconnaissance engineering flight test at a company called Grumman Aerospace.� Grumman was the builder of the Hawkeye and Intruder aircraft, two of the best military spook planes ever to fly Americas colors.� They were Navy aircraft, funny-looking, tough machines whose pilots (real aviators, not strutting old deserters wearing better mens poop suits) flew them off of ships.� � My Grumman job was a better-paying extension of the exciting work I'd loved doing in the Air Force.� But I must have gotten that urge to get back in the main game again.� It didn't take much to act on that urge.� For the main game was being played right down the corridor.� At the far end of the plant, other engineers and technicians were building the most amazing machine ever built by man.� In Grummans plant #2, the place where I went to work every morning, was being built the flawlessly astounding Lunar Lander of Project Apollo: LEM as it was called then. �The Lunar Excursion Module. � Holy mackerel, I would mumble as I stood at its base drinking my morning coffee.� "Holy mackerel!" I of course worked my way onto the project.� First I was a part-time guinea pig on loan from the flight-avionics department.� I would let the moon guys strap me into their centrifuge and spin me like a human tether ball until I� was certain the skin would rip from my face.� I was willing to expose myself to aviation physiology experiments of all kinds�in order that the smart guys could better devise support systems for the real pilots who would fly the LEM to the moon and back.� Eventually, when I refused to go away no matter how much abuse they heaped upon my healthy torso and empty head, they made me a liaison engineer.� I was on Project Apollo!� I could tell everyone about it this time, and of course thats exactly what I did.� Designing and building transistor testing equipment was hardly more than a microscopic part of Apollo, and not as much fun as engineering flight test, but it needed doing.� I was in the main game.� Its a thing Ill never forget.� For in the end, all the transistors worked perfectly.� � Apollo changed the world.�� In fact, it changed two worlds.� Once again, I was never prouder to be an American.� � But, all good things, it is said, must come to an end.� So it was with Apollo.� A peculiarity of the space program was that after every success, came unemployment.� So, going into my thirties, I switched gears.� � My space-program background had gained attention from an unlikely quarter.� � Some entertainment industry executives had their eyes on outer space too.� They figured� that I could be of use to a project they were pursuing.� They were planning to put a little known cable channel on the satellite.� They called it Home Box Office  HBO for short.� � Working together with engineers from Western Union, RCA, Scientific Atlanta, and other companies, we did it.� And in doing so HBO became the first cable television network to take so bold a step.� Guess what: It changed the world.� But we could not do it before persuading the formidable likes of the FCC, ATT, and a larger group of engineers and lawyers from my beloved Air Force in the process. ��All of whom were certain that our junky equipment would interfere with their elegant communications systems already in place.� In the end we prevailed.� HBO began building the first and largest private entertainment-based satellite network in the world.� And though the inspiration to go satellite came from other parts of the organization, it was we engineers who executed.� Along with a crazy lawyer or two we "flipped the switch" as it were.�� � The first movie to be telecast by HBO was aptly named, "Sometimes A Great Notion." It starred Paul Newman.� Nobody was watching yet, but that mattered not one bit.� For the changes in media and its effect on the public that grew from that effort and its subsequent deployment to the mass media are far too sweeping to describe here.� Simply stated, they effected a cultural change so subtle and yet so great it defies comprehension to this day.� � Consider this.� Prior to HBO going onto a national satellite, media coverage was largely limited to regional coverage of what were called demographic market areas, or DMAs  the areas covered by the signals emanating from a broadcast tower.� That signal generally extended from the tower out to a radius of about 150 miles.� If there was a very large city (NY, Chicago, LA) within its contours, a stations signal could reach about 10 million people. But within that 10 million there were many tastes and interests.� That further broke-down a stations reach.� Perhaps 20% of those people were interested in a specific genre, such as comedy or documentary or right-wing news with no facts, and only a few of them were watching or listening at any given time.� Further still, most stations reached not 10 million, but only about 50-thousand folks.� Divide that down, and youre left with nearly nobody watching your shows and, more importantly, your commercials.� It was grueling work to gain and hold substantial viewer interest.� Harder still to sell them stuff.� � But with the satellite signal, a station  any station - could cover the entire country.� A station using the satellite could get its message  any message  in front of potentially 280 million people!� A station in rural Appalachia, for example, could get its signal to a satellite and reach a market 30 times larger than the biggest station in New York, once receive stations were in place.� Thats exactly what happened, too.� Religious broadcasters were among the first to recognize this (see "Moral Victory" by this author) and build networks or piggyback aboard that being deployed for HBO.� Entertainment� and news media followed (the two were actually somewhat separate back then).� � Now, commercial media is often described by those in the business as a series of words and pictures designed to keep people tuned in between the commercials.� With that realization, came a sea change in the world of mass media, and later, the world at large.� � Casting Couch or Couching Cast: Most commercial media (advertiser-supported) is hardly political or idealistic, despite what you might see and hear to the contrary.� Thats just part of the hype.� It is a business.� The commercial medias legions of self-aggrandizing right wing commentators are not the passionate political idealists they portray, any more than William Shatner is really a starship commander from the future.� The medias political commentators are just showmen (or, with the possible exception of Ann Coulter, show women).� All that separates them from other show people is their lack of� artistic talent and looks.�� Most are just new kind of no-talent Hollywood whore.� � Thinly veiled, unlovable versions of the casting couch sluts we all know and love, these flacks must turn instead to whatever wiles they possess.� Therefore, even upon the most cursory critical evaluation it is clear that most political commentators are today merely commonplace hucksters who  like their better-looking starlet counterparts - will do anything to break into and stay in show biz.�� Devoid of artistic gifts or conventional bankability, they instead sell out their country in return for the celebrity status they covet.� Though revered by their dopey exploited fans, they will distort reality, glorify murder, and say virtually anything as long as it is couched in language adequate to separate the genuinely idealistic fools out in listener and viewer land from their money.� This, in return, grants the hucksters the fame and fortune for which they hunger.� This abuse of free speech was once recognized as treason.� Today its practitioners thrive.� These men and women of the people live in mansions far from their adoring fans out in the wheat.� Trust me, I see them in the supermarkets here (LA) and in Manhattan.� I see them in restaurants on the Santa Monica pier, and South Beach.� � I just returned from Texas and Oklahoma.� There I saw them only on the billboards.� � The medias owners, on the other hand, tolerate and exploit the flacks in return.� � Their bosses, the medias moguls are apolitical for the most part.� They are overwhelmingly hard-nosed tycoons, Globalists interested only in persuading large numbers of perfect strangers to buy products and thus satisfy their investors.� � The fact is, much of the media is little more than commercial persuasion in its highest form.� And, as anyone who engages in this sweet science can tell you, it is the dumber consumers  it is always the dumber consumers  who are the easiest targets to persuade.� Thats why most shows - and virtually all commercials - are not very interesting to discriminating consumers.� But within a fragmented and smallish demographic, there were not enough less-than discriminating (i.e.: dumb, credulous, nationalistic, so on) consumers to make a station owner rich.� That has always meant selling soap with magical beautifying ingredients to women, and cheap mass-produced beer that ostensibly attracts those now beautiful women to the 18 to 34 year low income white males who drink it while watching high income black males perform athletic feats on TV.� See?� Let the circle not be broken, tra-lala. � � But put your signal on the satellite, and you could be in front of scores of these morons, tens-of-millions of them in fact.� And, they will buy whatever you have to sell them.� After all, wasnt it the Republican president Dwight Eisenhower who observed that fully half of all Americans are of below average intelligence?� That means, at any given time, about 20 to 30 million people could be watching or listening to your now-national station.� Of that (according to Ike) 10 to 15-million of them are not exactly Mensa candidates.� Thats three times as many people as comprise the largest DMA in the world  and theyre all dumb!� Thats 10 to 15 million boneheads wholl� buy your baloney.� Given this reality, why would any businessman with a thing to sell, bother trying to persuade the other 10 to 15 million viewers or listeners who are not that dumb?� The smart people are pains in the ass who want proof of your clams before they buy things.� � So, the media moguls told their programming minions at the networks to, "Forget them." � Which is exactly what corporate media has done.� Theyve forgotten us.� Put on a Jerry Springer show, telecast it nationally (via satellite), or worse, put a microphone in front of Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, or Sean Hannity, make sure his "Liberal" guests are lightweights whom they can baffle with distortions of fact, edit the flubs in case the Lib gets a shot in, and put it on the satellite.� Do these things and you can be guaranteed a dumb audience.� Put up a right-wing religious show (or channel) and you can be guaranteed an audience that eschews such things as evidence or proof-of-concept.� Simply stated, preach to the converted.� Theyll put faith before knowledge, belief before evidence and man-oh-man will they buy whatever form of baloney youre selling.� � So pervasive and profitable has been this philosophy, that today, among commercially sponsored media talk shows, for every 310 hours of right-wing talk, there is but a miserable 5 hours of progressive chit-chat.� For the rest of us there was Bill Moyers (Gone.� Too liberal for todays PBS), Jon Stewart (Comedy Central), Amy Goodman (Pacifica, Link TV), Al Franken (Air America, Sundance Channel), and Bill Maher (HBO), to name the few.� � And that, dear reader, is an eye witness account of how HBO and the space program combined to inadvertently change your world.� Its also why, HBO  free of commercials and outside censorship  remains among the smartest and most cutting-edge television there is or ever was, while most of the rest of popular media has become so damned incredibly inane (and financially successful) today.� � Money for Nothing:� Suddenly it was the Eighties.� Technical success had led to professional success and not a few promotions.� I had risen to the post of Director of Engineering.� As such I was expected to behave like a serious network executive.� I could not do that.� I was not quite ready for that buttoned-down kind of life... plenty of dough, but no adrenaline rush.��So, purely out of selfishness I walked away from my cushy job at Home Box Office.� � Fledgling HBO had been bursting with creative people and was a great place to work.� A rousing success, corporate HBO also represented the kind of job that would virtually guarantee me and my family a life of comfortable security.� Though still quite young, I was a made guy.� Yet I walked away simply because the corporate management would not gamble on my latest high-tech pet project.� Things had changed.� HBO was no longer in the�change-the-world mode of operation that had spawned it.� It was a corporation with stockholders and responsibilities, and money to pay back to those who took a financial risk to create it.� That was fair and proper.� They thrived.� I walked.� I cherish the experience and the lifelong friends I made there; but in the end, I walked in search of excitement, another switch to be flipped. � I didnt have to walk far.� Because right across the street, on the other side of 6th Avenue on Rockefeller Center, was this enormous switch, calling out to me.� � "Push me," the button shouted from across the avenue.� "Push me, and youll help change the world."� There was no mistaking that message.� I stepped off the curb.� � Now, though I live and work in "Hollywood" today, the real center of power in entertainment media is concentrated along a few blocks in New York City.� About a thousand times closer to Wall Street and Madison Avenue than it is to the Hollywood sign, Rockefeller Center is where the television networks and movie studios have their corporate offices.�� � So, right across from HBOs headquarters in the steel and glass TimeLife Building stood the limestone art-deco tower that housed Warner Communications.� (Eventually the entire staff crossed the street when the two merged into Time-Warner a few years later. But that, too, is another story.) � Id been invited to lunch in the Warner Brothers executive dining room.� Lunch was with an impressive and handsome middle aged executive named Jack Schneider.� I knew of Schneider, as did everyone in the neighborhood.� Prior to joining Warner he had been the successful and progressive president of the "Tiffany Network": CBS.� He fit the role. � Over lunch, Jack got right to the point.� Warners was developing a new channel.� In fact it was to be a new kind of channel.� It was to be all music "videos" all the time.� They needed a chief engineer to design and build their satellite origination studio (the very thing HBO had been denying me) and to head up network operations.� It was to be the first of its kind.� I was all ears.� This would be quite a challenge.� But the concept  all music videos (a term net yet part of the lexicon) all the time seemed dubious.� HBO had been running music clips (thats what short-form videos were called at the time) between its movies. HBO called it Video Jukebox.� It was just a cheap time-filler, nobody really watched it for the content... or so we thought.� Schneider wanted to make a network of it. � "Well," Jack Schneider pressed, "What do you think?" � "All clips all the time," I said as I pondered a polite way to tell him what I thought of such a program concept.� I� finally settled on, "Thats the dumbest thing Ive ever heard." � I signed on.� They named the new channel MTV.� � I spent the next year working harder than Ive ever worked before or since.� Then, just� before midnight of August 1, 1981, I was asked to throw a switch.� I did. � With that simplest of actions, a signal left the brand new (not even finished) MTV operations center in New York, traveled at the speed of light 22,300 miles straight into space, smacked into our satellite, and returned to earth a fraction of a second later, clear as a bell and in stereo.� � I checked a few scopes and meters in the otherwise darkened room.� All was well.� � "Continuity!" I said into my headset, and pressed another button, this one handing control to the director  my boss - and his own panel of switches and buttons in a control room down the hall.� "You got it.� Break a leg." � Thirty seconds later, the world heard the words, "Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll!"� With that was born MTV.� � In the end it was that simple.� Everybody knows what happened next, has happened since, happens now, and will happen tomorrow.� For a time, MTV truly changed the world.��� � Amid the tears, fears, and cheers of that first night, I knew something major, something very major had been set in motion.� The energy that filled the control room was palpable, but was as nothing to what followed in the months and years ahead.� We had launched a message that the young people of the world would hear and would take to heart.� They now had a vehicle with which they spoke to each other in their own words, through their own art.� They were young enough, and na�ve enough to use their words and music fearlessly.� Through it they endeavored to teach us all that we are all of us, of all generations, everywhere cut from the same stuff.� Like it or not, were cut from the same stuff.�� The music of the Eighties is still celebrated by MTV every chance it gets.�� � Lousy Business or Lousy Art: America has always spread her values through but a single medium.� Its not its missiles.� Its not its armies.� And its not its money or its increasingly moneyed leaders.� Americas strength has always come from her art.� Movies, music, literature.� The Constitution. The Declaration of Independence.� Even these were works of art.� In what other document of state will one find the words "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?"�� Happiness!� � Thats not statecraft.� Thats poetry.� Thats art.� � That which inspires us to the best of us, is art.�� � The rapid spread of MTV to virtually all the developed world proved it empirically.� It might be difficult to consider new music as art today.� But its still out there, one need only find it. � Stand in the wings of a concert stage when a great  usually American - band is performing in any country of the world, as I have, and youll feel it.� Only then can one feel it.� The passion that pours from an audience of thousands has no borders.� It is a tangible physical thing, and its as palpable as stone.�� Its humanity, not creed. � Live Aid.� I felt it then.� I felt it in the heat of Wembly stadium, and the fog of Red Rocks when Bono and U2 screamed the Irish heat wave called Sunday Bloody Sunday at the ancient walls of stone.� We all of us felt it.� Music became smart, cutting edge again as it had been in the 60s.� Unknown bands with massive talent and intellect were the rule of the day.� Nothing was officially off limits except violence and disco.� Yet, in the years that followed, it was violence that we were accused of promoting.� Wed gained the attention of the exploiters.� � Then came the MTV Award shows.� It was an annual evening of outrageous antics and anti-establishment humor wholly unlike any awards show before.� But behind it all, was a sense of artistic recognition beyond anything the pathetic white bread whine of todays degenerated corporate pop and crybaby country music can come close to achieving.� But it, too, was vanity.� Pride goeth before a fall. � One of the earliest videos to gain recognition was the politically-charged Land Of Confusion, by Genesis.� It spoke with crystal clarity about the need to change the world.� Utilizing unflattering images of the band members themselves, the video memorably flashed grotesque puppets of a confused and doddering Ronald Reagan, a mean-faced Richard Nixon, a starry-eyed Jimmy Carter, and sternly elite Margaret Thatcher to get a clear message across.� As Reagans caricature and that of other presidents filled the screen these words repeatedly filled the air: � Too many men Too many people Making too many problems And there's not much love to go round Can't you see This is the land of confusion � This is the world we live in These are the hands were given Use them and lets start trying To make it a place worth fighting for � There was not one complaint from anyone anywhere lodged against MTV for playing the unflattering socio-political parable, for showing the sitting president in the most unflattering -albeit prophetic  light, or for the music industry granting the piece its highest award. (Land Of Confusion won the eminently "establishment" Grammy itself for Best Concept Video).� � I believe it was movie mogul Louis B. Mayer who said, "Art makes for lousy business, and business makes for lousy art."� Ive never believed that, but I dont make the decisions.� So, alas,� time took its toll on MTV and on the new medium of video music.� The cutting edge has been replaced by long-form "reality" shows catering to the self-absorbed.� Whats left is filled by innocuous genre dictated by middle-aged media executives who are little more than overpaid salesmen living vicariously through the glory of their so called artists, and the commercials.��� � Like all corporate media, substance has been subordinated to selling.� We learned in the channels very first year that anything  and I do mean anything  that could make it into the "A-rotation" would fly off the record store shelves.� Record company executives learned this too.� Control MTV and you control your risks.� There was no longer a need to risk money trying to develop a new band based on its talent.� Talent is rare and besides, its has never been a guarantee of success.� Talented people are hard to control.� Why waste time and money on that?� Sell to the dumb and take it to the bank.� � So, the record companies eventually stopped giving the public what it wanted, and instead started simply telling the public what it wanted  through MTV.� A huge segment of the young and impressionable target demographic bought the hype hook line and sinker.� The result is the fragmented and empty forms of music that dominate air time and sales today.� � Empty-Vee might be a more appropriate name for what has become of that magical, world-changing and wonderful idea that once seemed so important but is today little more than another corporate vehicle to sell lousy songs by manufactured acts.� � Todays discriminating young music lover needs to dig pretty deeply to find anything worth hearing.�� Many dont bother "looking" any longer and turn to alternative media.� � Every generation produces artistic genius.� Every generation has expressed that genius through its music.� This one is no exception.� But just like the discriminating listener who gets tired of searching for quality musical art in the mainstream, and finally gives up in frustration, so the aspiring musician gets tired of searching for an audience in a world dominated by heavily-promoted mediocrity.� When they give up  when its artists give up or are destined to soldier on in obscurity - then an entire generation is robbed of its musical voice.�� � Conclusion: I came of age in the 60s.� As was common for the youth of my time, I wore the uniform of my country and wore it proudly.� It became difficult by the decades end. � But even then  perhaps especially then - our musical voice was our political voice.� It became an immensely powerful one.� As American public policy changed and we looked away from Americas real enemies and threats, to those our leaders manufactured, and as that policy culminated in the bloody adventure of Vietnam, so did the music of Americas youth change.� Long before the journalists caught on, our musical artists were telling us to beware.� Our musical artists persuaded us that it would be our young bodies that would be spent and sacrificed on the crucible of needless future wars.� Bob Dylans brilliant� "Masters Of War," was among the first such indictments.� Scores of brilliantly crafted "protest songs" followed, and it led to a sea change in American policy.� Old men cannot prosecute their wars without young people dying in the balance.� Neither then can one profit from a war that young people refuse to fight.� � Among the young people who chose not to fight in Vietnam were John Ashcroft (7 deferments), Dick Cheney (5 deferments), and George Bush (AWOL May - December 1972).� Me. � Theirs were options born of privilege, mine one of caution, a caution born of information.� When my squadron was called for volunteers to serve as forward air controllers in Vietnam, unlike the Cuban and Arctic operations, this time I remained silent.� Where was the enemy?� What was the threat?� What was the objective  to stop the spread of Communism?� Vietnam was half a world away.� There seemed no clear objective this time, no enemy offensive I cared about.� Though friends volunteered, I remained silent.� In effect, I said no.� I had already worn thin my vinyl copy of The Freewheelin Bob Dylan.� I was thinking more now, had a serious girlfriend.� Id changed. � When Vietnam exploded in our faces, Barry McGuire gave us "Eve Of Destruction," Edwin Starr grunted "War," while the Youngbloods beautiful "Get Together," sang of peace.� As usual, twhile the newspapers were busy with body counts, Americas young musical artists were asking the right questions.� Its called vision.� That - and courage  still separate artist from pretender.��� � With MTV came Springsteens Born In The USA, my schoolmate Billy Joels Allentown, and so much more smart music that reflected its time and the ever-changing human condition.� � Today, as the channel approaches its silver anniversary, for every Green Day it acknowledges there are 10 manufactured boy bands hoping around in sychronized video stupidity; for every Natalie Maines, 10 adolescent strippers screech anothers multisylabic lyrics about nothing. � Last week the retreat was palpable.� At the latest of televisions innumerable award shows, the MTV Movie Awards, Empty-Vee showed how mainstream and far away from that cutting edge it has moved since its inception as MTV.� But this too, ironically, is a reflection of our time.� � The band Nine Inch Nails was scheduled to perform its provocative and smart exception to the ruled entitled, "The Hand That Feeds."� A protest song in the finest tradition, this masterpiece� cuts to the heart of the obedient who promelgate war, and speaks to Americans of every age. � In rehearsal it was revealed that the band would perform before a backdrop of President Bushs face.� (You know, the guy who calls himself the "War President.")� Not a caricature or a distortion as was Land Of Destructions, the backdrop was to be a straight, unaltered picture of Bush.� One president, the war guy, no puppets, no caricatures, no distortions.�� Bushs face.� � Empty-vees management pulled the backdrop  too controversial, saying it would be uncomfortable with a performance built around a partisan statement.� � What?!� MTV?! � Nine Inch Nails pulled their performance.� � The bands lead singer, Trent Resner said on the bands website, "Apparently the image of our president is as offensive to MTV as it is to me." � Did the corporate press or the oxymoron known as entertainment "news" cover it?� Its certainly interesting.� Its certainly news: MTV frightened of controversy, yet feigning outrageousness with every faux rebellious frame.� A musical artist standing firm on principle, is not newsworthy? � Apparently not.� After all, with the runaway bride and the omnipresent Michael Jackson demanding attention, the entertainment "news" media cant be everywhere.� � Summary: Few among us have captured the state of our culture more vividly than our artists.� And among artists, few have succeeded with more verve than our musical artists.� And further still, among musical artists few have captured the state of change in America with the clarity and candor of Woody and Arlo Guthrie.� Their music is universal, introspective, beautiful and uniquely American.� � Father Woodys This Land Is Your Land was a soaring American anthem springing from his Oklahoma heart, that I hope will live forever.� But it is his son, Arlos treatment of the Steve Goodman song, City Of New Orleans that, for this writer, captures the altered state of our nation today better than any words ever limned.� If ever there was a song about helplessly and singularly watching change unfold in America, while being carried toward a destination suddenly uncertain, Guthries City Of New Orleans is that song.� � Many artists have performed City Of New Orleans.� Its meaning, though straight forward from Goodmans soulful lyrics, is radically altered by performance. For me, Guthries is the interpretive masterpiece and possibly my favorite piece of music. � In my interpretation of Guthries interpretation, an omniscient presence  an observer  awakens aboard a moving train.� The train has a name, The City Of New Orleans.� Moving across America, the observer asks, "Good morning America, how are you?"� � As the American landscape, degraded in every way, unfolds before him, he looks about for that which once was grand.� What he sees is ruination. � Just an observer, he is unable to deter the changes that assault his senses.� He can neither stop nor look away, but must continue, carried toward a destination he realizes he can no longer anticipate.� � In the end, seeing nothing recognizable as American or good or progressive, lamenting great things gone and dreams turned to nightmare, the observer closes his eyes in acquiescence, and is helplessly carried along toward just what he no longer knows.� Finally, at� days end, neither encouraged nor enlightened by the change he sees all about him, he can only ask yet again, and this time with resignation "Good night America, how are you?" � Like the observer in the song, will we, the participants of this great social experiment we call home, gently say good night America, or will we rage, rage against the dying of the light?� The choice is ours to make.� For if we do nothing, the choice will surely be made for us by lesser men if their darkness is allowed to fall across our once and future great land.� � No doubt like yourself, I love this country.� I love her with all my heart and soul and mind and sinew.� � Im not talking about any particular affinity I might have for her people, or her purple mountains majesty, or any of that.� That stuff can be found elsewhere.� No, what I love is the idea of America, the abject audacity of it.� Equality, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, government of by and for its people, freedom of and freedom from religion, as well as from poverty, hunger, want, slavery, and on and on forever.� America.� The sheer fearlessness of the idea is astounding.� America has allowed me to live an amazing life just by playing hard and playing fair.� Ive lived a life my immigrant grandparents could never have imagined.� Ive never suffered at the hands of a biased or unfair institution.� When pushed, Ive pushed back harder, spoken my mind without fear of official reprisal.� I want only the same for my kids, and theirs, and every kid who wants to play fair, and swing for the fences.� Thats not so much to ask  hell, to demand! � So.� I for one will not stand idly by and watch it all brought to its knees in the gutless coup our current "leadership" and their treasonous puppeteers are attempting.� Will you?�� � Where is that light switch, anyway?� I know its around here somewhere. � END � � � Authors Note: � This essay speaks of effecting change, each in our own way.� The opinions expressed are soley my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the entities referenced below.� But these are entities I believe are endeavoring to promote positive American values and social progress, while doing so without bias.� � Voter Activism: the current United States government is neither of, by, nor for the people.� Its three branches are controlled by bought and paid for Republicans who are republican in name only.� This is tantamount to totalitarianism.� The mid-term legislative elections and only the mid-term elections can give us back our government and reinstate the checks and balances of moderation our nations founders created for our protection.�� We must retake the peoples branch.� Get involved from now. � Black Box Voting: Your vote counts only if someone counts your vote.� BBV protects our most powerful instrument of change: the vote.� This requires work.� If we are to have a voice in government, we must protect a franchise already under attack and perhaps already corrupted electronically.� The mid-term congressional election will be the most important election in American history.� This organization will help make certain it is honestly executed. � The Center For Inquiry: promotes science and reason, challenges bunk (Smart, important and even fun.� My personal fave).� � People For The American Way: promotes progressive values through action within the American system.� (No newcomer.� Smart, steady, with a solid record of achievement.) � MoveOn.org: uses the power of the internet to organize and inform American activism.� (A growing force, already influencing public policy.)� � Democracy Now: No bubble-headed bleach-blondes here.� Amy Goodman is the best reporter working in radio and TV today.� Stay informed with the real news, every day.� Support the stations that carry this program. � Kitchen Table Democracy: non-partisan, founded by my neighbor, and a growing grassroots way to understand the nation around you through personal involvement.� Check it out. � Websites, such as Bushwatch fulfill the promise of a free press, a precious right largely abdicated to cowardice by the mainstream media in America.� Our nation has been the victim of a gutless coup.� Yet the mainstream "press" took a pass on the story.� Perhaps its time to take a pass on the mainstream press.� � Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Harpers, etc.� Several magazines have picked up what most newspapers have abandoned: the art of objective conclusion.� Read and react.� � Consider supporting such efforts as these in your own way.� Get involved, contribute, promote, whatever.� They are each

by Dom Stasi

"Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. ... It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling." - Lt. Gen. James Mattis; USMC Feb 2, 2005

What makes some guys like to fight? Why is it a hell of hoot?

Seems to me that even if one cares nothing at all for the humanity of his adversary, and even if he is beating women or children or defenseless men, even then, fighting will probably get you injured to some degree in return. The simple fact is that striking bone hurts one's fists. Does that add to the fun? Is there so much pleasure to be derived from beating another person that its worth the reciprocal pain? As an adult Ive come to consider fighting a last resort, a life-saving or life-improving defensive necessity, sort of like surgery without the anesthetic. But fun? Hardly.

Further, if we skip the part about shooting people, then most real fighting - brawling in particular - implies touching another person, doing so violently, passionately, and having him touch you in return, with equal ardor or submission. This person-to-person touching is generally accompanied by grunting sounds and sweat. Inevitably, there is also pain and often blood. Consider the image. Is fighting the only thing that comes to mind? Of course not. So, is there a repressed sadomasochistic sexual component to the joy of fighting? If so, does that make fighting rape when one of the combatants is unwilling?

Or, as is more likely - and perhaps more disturbing - is there something in all of us that responds to fighting's lure, the lure of physical domination? Is there a primitive compulsion to dominate that is perhaps stronger than anything the developed rational mind can use to counter it? Is there a thing in us so primal, so animal that it ignores or is oblivious to the inevitable repercussions of physical violence, repurcussions that only thinking humans can anticipate?

Did evolution weave some uncontrollable thing into the genetic fabric of its survivors that thrives on mortal combat?

So it seems.

Fun or fabric, the last real touchy-feely fight I had was as a teenager.

A big, dumb bully had injured my sister with a tossed firecracker. It left a minor scar. It was no big deal until I made it one. I encountered the culprit at the annual end-of-summer-vacation beach party. After a couple of beers, I decided that he wasn't all that big. I introduced myself, and invited him behind a sand dune. Once there and alone, I realized he was big, really big. But I was fast. At first that speed seemed little more to me than an exit strategy. That's when he swung. I ducked. He grabbed my head and I realized that for the first time in my life, I was about to be physically abused. It was a sick feeling. It was precicely then that thinking stopped, and something else took over.

Purely on instinct I dealt him a clean blow to the ribs and another to the midsection. He released me and I tagged him on the chin as he stepped back. To my amazement he fell to his knees. Then, in a textbook display of underage drinking's affect on teenage hormones, I proceeded to beat him senseless.

Oh, I could have stopped when he asked me to stop, but was not about to let him stand up again. I should have stopped when he begged me to stop, for by then he couldn't stand up again. Instead I beat him senseless. Was it fun? I dread to think it might have been.

The point of this, however, is that the big man's arrogance left him wide open for a beating he should never have taken. He did not know how to fight defense! He was, after all, a bully. Defense was never an issue. He was all about the preemptive strike.

Upon returning to school I encountered the repercussions. My sister, my pretty and popular sister, could not get a date for a significant part of her junior year because all the boys thought her brother a violent maniac. She hated me for it. But it didn't end there.

The bully became my new and unwanted best friend, following me around like a 230-pound pup.

I lost my position as varsity left fielder for having splintered the 3rd metacarpal bone in my right hand on the bully's head.

Pretty girls who formerly avoided the bully suddenly felt - and several displayed - sympathy for his bandaged countenance while shooting me disapproving glances. He seemed richer for this. I, poorer. Was any of this in the plan? Plan? What plan?

If you were to say, big deal. This stuff happens every day at high schools all across America, you would be right. We grow up, and we grow out of it. Well, most of us grow out of it.

Consider then, yet another, uglier little slice of life, something that does not happen every day. But it happens. It happens because not all of us grow out of it.

Who among us has not heard the story of the woman who was constantly abused and brutally beaten by her husband? He was much larger, far more aggressive, and immensely more physically powerful than was she. As such, his small brain told him he was safe and could continue the abuse. Fun dominion. No possibility of reprisal.

What he failed to consider was that he had trapped her into a life no longer livable. She acted. Of course she did.

One evening as he slept-off yet another courage-inducing drunken binge, she duct-taped him into their bed, wrapping strip after strip of the sticky stuff around his arms and legs, and around the bed. She then prodded him awake and proceeded to beat him first with her fists, then with her high-heeled shoe, then with a baseball bat until he was dead. She drove off never to be heard from again. He rotted beneath the tape. When the police discovered the body, they estimated that the beating was administered over a period of twelve hours. More fun? Perhaps. Retribution? Absolutely.

The moral of these stories is simple. No one with a sound human mind remains helpless in the face of inevitable abuse unless of course he or she chooses to. In all of human history, few have chosen to. Sometimes retribution is swift, as with the bully, sometimes slower, as with the woman. But in every instance, victims can be driven beyond their concern for repercussions. That's when even the physically weakest among us are moved to act.

I inflict these ugly little slices of life upon you gentle reader that it might illustrate how unplanned fighting among humans rarely yields the expected results. We call them repercussions. We too often ignore them before the fact in our quest for easy dominion.

It also illustrates quite typical human behavior. Bullies, even those who limit their violence to the abuse of women, children, and defenseless people, are still not entirely safe from reciprocal harm. Human abuse victims often have, or will surely find formidable and compassionate allies: friends and family. If that's not enough, they WILL gain access to weapons when they need them desperately enough.

In the hands of the vindictive, these family, friends, and weapons will shift the balance of power. They will be brought to bear against the bully at some future date lest the abuse ends. Even a small ally can distract a big bully's attention if he's brandishing a club. Under such conditions, even the littlest guy can score a game punch. Hit the right place, and it's the only punch he'll need.

On a larger, but equally human scale, consider a defenseless little unarmed country. It is reeling from extended abuse by a big, dumb bully country that just wont leave it alone. Since countries are geographically fixed in place and cannot run away as people can, might not a country under assault befriend a big brother country of similar family name but of whom it formerly - if only recently - disdained? If the big brother was smaller than the bully, but meaner, might not the victimized country find reason to patch things up? Family is family, after all.

I'm speaking of course of Iraq and Iran and the greater Middle East as well.

In fact, if one looks back a few decades, back to a time before the Europeans came into the Middle East and drew borders and changed all the names, he would find that Iran was part of the very same nation state as Iraq. Their new names are made up. They are European Christian given names and nothing more. So, might not the N country find reason to sympathize with the "Q country? After all, they are family. The only thing about which they formerly disagreed was religion. But America fixed that with this month's "US sponsored elections." They're both under Shi'a "control" now.

Oh the media will tell you Iraq's Shiite leaders are secular, unlike Iran's Ayatollahs, and if we drink enough Bush Administration cool ade perhaps we'll collectively find a reason why that matters. But lest we forget, the Shah and Saddam were "secular" too. By Middle Eastern standards even George W. Bush is secular.

That begs the question: So what? They're all nuts. Shouldn't that be what we focus on?

The point is this. With the emotional obstacle of religion out of the way, wouldn't that family affinity grow warmer now that the "U.S. sponsored elections" have given power to the very same majority sect that so altered life in Iran: the big brother country?

(That's right folks. We lost 1550 young troopers in order to turn Iraq into Iran. We did that by handing over control of Iraq to The Shi'a, the sect of the Ayatollah Khomeini.)

Amid the corporate press euphoria of elections in Iraq, elections where only 400 voters were killed, and amid the multiple orgasms in Washington because only 90 more Iraqi Shi'a were killed at Ashura observances this week, Russia, yes Russia, weighed in on the "Nukes For Iran" issue. On Saturday, February 19th, Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would help build an $800 million nuclear power plant in Iran.1 The only condition anyone set is that Iran must give back the spent nuclear fuel when depleted.

This comes on the heels of some very troubling revelations. Two days earlier, Bush's new CIA Director Porter Goss testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, that Bush's war has turned Iraq into a training ground for terrorists. At the same hearing, Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency told the committee that "Our policies in the Middle East fuel Islamic resentment." As evidence of this, Jacoby pointed out that attacks by a growing insurgency have increased by a staggering 240% in just the last year. 2 And finally, thanks to us, Iraq is doing what it did not do, could not do, and would not do before we arrived: Iraq is now a breeding ground for al Qaida, and they're both finally gonna get next to some nuclear weapons-grade plutonium.

� But back to our story. If that new ally had nuclear weaponry, just think of the possibilities. Might not such a newfound friendship yield vindication against the abuser at some future date, repercussions notwithstanding, a date when the abuser is tired or sleeping or drunk with power? Or in a word: distracted. It takes post-MTV America about a millisecond to get distracted.

Further, this defensive behavior by our adversaries is normal behavior. It's more normal certainly than "liking to fight." It is also human, and it is just. Though the result of conflict is never predictable, the result of continued abuse is. There will be vindication coming out of the Middle East. It's been going on in Palestine for 58 years so far. Now we've created another disaster in the region not another democracy.

Now, with Russia playing a hand by providing Iran with nuclear power, we're in a high stakes game again, just like the Cold War.

This raises questions in my mind, questions the press seems to have overlooked, or been told not to ask. I'll ask them here. They are, after all, obvious enough.

My first question is this: Does anyone really care what Iran does with its DEPLETED plutonium after a few billion years?

My second question is simpler still: We all know that Russia needs the $800 million they're getting for building the nuke. That's a given. But why does Iran, a country with more oil underneath it than a McDonald's freedom fry, need a nuclear power plant at all? Hello is anyone out there?

Yet this is the country - Iran - toward which we've driven Iraq with our stupid administration's stupid war.

But I digress... how does all this relate to the subject of fighting and its aftermath?

Simple. In the realm of Earthly creatures, humans are slow and weak and not especially big. Yet we dominate. That's because we are not programmed for helplessness. When it comes to fighting against humans, the only speed and strength that count are the speed and strength of the combatant's mind. Only here does size matter.

Vindication is so simple and fundamental a form of human behavior so predictably primitive a response to abuse, that it might even be within the cognitive grasp of the few intellectually advanced Right-wing chickenhawks sucking at the teat of our current government. Yet their greed and power-lust prevents them seeing it. They will, though. We all will.

The human mind is a more formidable weapon than anything it can devise. Whatever the mind can devise, the mind can obviate.

Against the bodies of our adversaries, America's weapons and warriors are devastating. But against their minds, even our nukes are reduced to so much irrelevant smoke. Add to this that our leaders are of inferior mind to their adversaries and are disdained by fully half of their own demonstrably better-informed population. Now, multiply that adversarial mind by 1.7 billion.

There are 1.7 billion Muslim minds out there in the world. They are being made drunk with hatred, hatred of their bigoted and persistent abuser: America. Their religious teachings deride violence. But so do those of the American armchair-warrior chieftain and his comparatively little group of never-bloodied war counselors who abuse them. We've all seen how malleable are religious teachings in the face of fear, hypocrisy, and hatred. Another few billion non-Muslim human minds despise our leaders because they realize they cannot share the planet with them very much longer and survive, nor can they assure the survival of their children at the hands of the Americans.

Simply stated, "in the course of human events," our "leaders" are demonstrated failures, doomed to failure yet again. They're just too dumb, greedy, and scared to see it. They will though. All of us on geographically fixed in place America will see it.

With billions of Chinese now clamoring for oil at any price, and the Euro kicking the Dollar's ass everywhere else, no one will need America for very much longer. Oh, the French will smile and make nice to Condoleeza, and the idiots of the press will eat it up. But the EU members have already begun their economic neutralization of America. I see it every day. They do not consider an increasingly fundamentalist, ignorant, scientifically irrational society worth its place at the table of mankind. We're a consumer of their goods, little more. As America spirals ever deeper into religious primitivism, we deliberately segregate ourselves from the modern world. Our economy is no longer the largest, our debt structure is unmanageable, our bonds are worthless to foreign markets, and our philosophies equally worthless to foreign minds. We're boring, we're boorish, and we're broke. We're also troublemakers. Nobody needs us any longer. We're the big stupid guy who always starts the fight that gets himself and everyone with him, bounced from the party. Then, when the bully finally gets his ass kicked, he starts to suck up. Look at Bush and Condoleeza grinning their way across Europe even now.

And as for our war, did you know that behind the scenes we've been secretly negotiating with the Iraqi insurgents? 3 I'll bet that lets them know they can't win. Better still, do our troops know that?

Sucking up. What a surprise.

So, fighting between humans is not quite the same thing as hitting your dog on the nose with a newspaper. Fighting between humans always yields repercussions. Most humans are vindictive not submissive. Eventually vindication overcomes concern for reprisal.

So one should not start a fight with innocent humans without an appreciation of those repercussions, and neither fighting nor shooting people should be fun when one combatant is neither willing, culpable, nor equally armed. In fact, shooting people should not be fun. Period.

Yet, when all is said and done, some guys just like to fight. They ignore the implications, and they invent justification for their actions. Consider what else General Mattis said: "In Afghanistan you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." 4

But is it justification? The general seems to be ignoring both reality and recent history.

For example, though I can find no evidence of any American generals having been killed in the Iraq or Afghanistan fighting, 1540 of their troops have died there recently. 5 How much fun were they having? How much fun will they never get to have? How many more will die simply as retribution for the general's misguided attempt at bravado. For do his words not incentivize an already suicidal enemy fully as much as those of our president when the latter foolishly bragged, "Bring em on!" They do, and perhaps more so. A general does not compromise the welfare of his men by incentivizing the enemy, an enemy our government is ostensibly attempting to pacify, not defeat, at this stage of the fighting. He knows this and should keep it top of mind. His words are damaging and disappointing because they came from a warrior leader of men, not from the brain damaged, drug abusing, alcoholic deserter who said, "Bring em on." Mattis's words have meaning, for General Mattis is a good and worthy officer. He has boldly spoken out against prisoner abuse, and torture and done so for reasons only a soldier can appreciate. Study his record, and you'll know he's been there. For this general, this good man and true, there is no excuse for so blatant a lapse of judgment.

Further, they are empty, self-serving words.

Remember, one million fighters died in the Russo/Afghan wars before we arrived. 6 Yet those remaining Afghan fighters never gave up. It was the Russians who gave up. They went broke and quit the fight. So one should weigh his words carefully before deriding this enemy's "manhood." Warrior generals know better than to ridicule their adversaries, however tiny those adversaries might be. By deriding the enemy's courage, a commander trivializes the courage of those fighting that enemy - his own troops. This fight ain't over yet. Remember al Qaida? Stronger than ever, and we've outspent the Russians with no results. Osama bin Laden is still free. Are you?

As for Iraq, words alone cannot describe our crimes. Our actions have left over 66,000 innocent women and children dead in Iraq. 7 We've left countless more people maimed.

As relates to these atrocities, methinks that each and every one of the women and children we've killed in the Middle East and everyone to whom they mattered, would have preferred that they be slapped around for a while longer - at least until they, or other rational humans found a better solution to their plight, a solution short of killing them.

After all, isn't that why were still in this fight, to free people from oppression? Or was that last week's excuse? I've lost track. --posted 02.25.05

About The Author... Dom Stasi is Chief Technology Officer for an international media network. A pilot, Air Force veteran, and member of both the Planetary Society, and Center For Inquiry, he is also a widely published science and technology writer. A father of two, Mr. Stasi lives in Los Angeles with his wife of 38 years.

- Footnotes -

1."http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36611-2005Feb18?language=printer" http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36611-2005Feb18?language=printer

2. "http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8133.htm" http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8133.htm

3."http://www.time.com/time/" http://www.time.com/time/

4."http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/marine_s_comments" http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/marine_s_comments

5. "http://icasualties.org/oif/Details.aspx" http://icasualties.org/oif/Details.aspx

6. "http://www.rense.com/general61/hate.htm" http://www.rense.com/general61/hate.htm

7."http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7967-2004Oct28.html" http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7967-2004Oct28.html

by Dom Stasi

"A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. �In the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt. If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience until luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake." -Thomas Jefferson

Today the most widely disliked man on earth swore a sacred oath of office. Then, in a display of arrogant and insensitive vulgarity unmatched in our nation's history he ascended himself to the 55th Presidency of the no-longer-United States of America. All about him, the believers reveled.

The debauch capped a week that saw the Secretary of State-designate, Condoleeza Rice, declare her sensitivity to foreign affairs by publicly calling the tsunami disaster "a wonderful opportunity for America." The inauguration caps a week in which we heard the nation's proposed chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General designate Alberto Gonzalez, endorse the most flagrant violation of human rights imaginable - torture - as a lawful way to interrogate prisoners. It was a week in which the White House finally announced that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and hadn't been since the Nineties. Then, as if to top it all off, we were subjected to more baby-talk from the great man himself.

In a post-election return to using his own words, the self-styled leader of the "free world," George W. Bush, blurted out that we cannot find Osama bin Laden because he is hiding. Still, the believers reveled.

What's happening here is simple. A pickpocket creates a diversion so he can steal your money while you're looking elsewhere. Well, guess what? The last four years have been one diversion after another. And our collective pockets have been picked clean while most of us were looking elsewhere.

Through skillful, and to all indications criminal exploitation of the ignorance, religious bigotry, and fear-borne panic of fully half of our countrymen, no less than $750 billion has disappeared from our public treasury with no accountability forthcoming. Yet they revel.

No fewer than 1.8 million jobs have moved offshore (5.3 million when adjusted for population growth) in response to Bush's $79 million in yearly tax incentives for corporations who leave the United States.1 Yet they revel.

When Bush took office America was $265 billion to the good. It was the most prosperous day in our history. Three years later we were $500 billion in the hole.2 We are today $7 trillion in debt to foreign banks and about to allow the Bush pickpockets to rob Social Security of $2 trillion more. Two trillion! Seven trillion! We're talking real money here! It causes one to speculate: can the knuckle-walkers who still believe this guy, conceptualize how very many zeroes are to the left of the decimal in such numbers?! Yet they revel.

The $40 million inauguration extravaganza - the most expensive ever - symbolically urinates upon the graves of the over 1300 young Americans who've died for Bush's lies, mistakes, and corporate greed. That money would buy one helluva lot of body armor for our troops. But that $40 mil will instead buy martinis, hookers, influence, and contracts here in America. Yet the believers revel while our young soldiers continue to die (and worse) before they've even lived their lives. Tomorrow more shall die, these will die secure in the knowledge that their deaths are in vain. For there are no explanations or excuses left as to why they're being made to die. None will be forthcoming either. No one who can stop the killing, cares any more. They've been given "political capital," you see.

Bush and his buffoons will be the face of America for the next four years. Perhaps they are an accurate visage. The rest of the world thinks so.

To appreciate just how far we've fallen as a society, consider inaugurations past. In particular consider that of the man whose social programs will be destroyed by the current crop of Pennsylvania Avenue cretins over the next four years. Consider but two inaugurations of the most reelected president since Washington. Consider Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

To begin his presidency, FDR spoke the magnificent and more appropriate than ever words we all now know so well: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself... nameless, unreasoning, unjustified fear." At the time of his last inaugural our nation was at war. It was a fight for our nation's very survival against an enemy who actually had weapons and armies and the means to prevail. It was not an armed robbery disguised as a war. Nor was it a blood-soaked diversion wherein a bunch of draft-dodgers use the bodies of other men's children to do their dirty work abroad while they pick our pockets at home. It was a real war, and real war-president Roosevelt came out onto the White House balcony to recite the oath of office. Then, in deference to the carnage extant in the world, he declared that there would be no celebrations of the inauguration. There would be no sycophantic tribute to his imperial magnificence. This was America, a place where honest men respected each other as equals. As Americans we would behave as a nation at war behaves. We don't throw parties while our children die. FDR knew that. He took the oath, then retired back into the White House for a tuna salad, a cup of coffee, and the business of the commonwealth.

Yes, that was America. It was magnificent. It was nowhere apparent today.

Instead, today finds the most powerful and lethal nation in history in the hands of the irrational, the frightened, the greedy, the ignorant, the criminal, and the bigoted. By many counts our president is the most despised human being on the planet. Yet millions of Americans revel. Our countrymen revel to the tune of a $40 million inaugural bash though we are more deeply in debt than at any time in our nation's history.

It is into this menagerie that I have wandered. I find myself in Washington this night. But I'm not here to celebrate. I'm simply making my way to Paris on business. There is a transportation strike in that city, it's raining there, it's foreign and frankly, both Paris and Parisians can be annoying. Yet it is nowhere near as foreign or annoying to me as is this place on this night. With its concrete barricades and legions of buttoned-down parasites, our nation's capitol is a reflection of its occupants. Parisians there, Parasites here. The choice is an easy one. I cannot depart soon enough.

Meanwhile, as I walk toward the DuPont Circle Metro station, the shark-smiles are everywhere apparent in our capitol. The greed-mongers are celebrating their successful raid on our national treasure. Tonight and all week there will be parties to celebrate the four-year feeding frenzy about to begin. The parasitic privileged will drink their wine and they will laugh at the very fools who voted for them and their stooges. They will divvy up what's left of our money. They will do so while laughing at the abject stupidity of a populace half of whom are too dumb to realize they've been robbed, and too dumb to understand why the other half are so damned mad. And, as is fitting, those who have robbed us will do what any rational crooks would do when met with such accolades from the majority of their victims, they will rob us yet again. They revel.

As night falls on the streets, the shark smiles are replaced by the slack-jawed smiles of the believers who will foot this bill. They'll be among the few in this town who are paying for their own food tonight as they fill the fast food joints. The believers might have driven their RVs from far and wide to be here, but they will not be invited to the parties. If they were, they'd know they were being laughed at behind the walls that keep them out. Yet they came. They came resplendent in their cowboy hats and stars-and-stripes shirts to revel and stand in the snow and wave their little flags. But, hey, they're not here to go to parties. They are here because they are patriots. Just ask them.

A man named Scott Ritter once said, "I can train a monkey to wave an American flag. That does not make the monkey patriotic."

As a nation, as a people we will fall farther than this before it's over. We've not been this divided since the Eighteen-Sixties. Yet I for one will do my best to heed Thomas Jefferson's words one more time, as I have all of my life. But one more time only. For, however divided, ours remains a nation worth saving. So, as the great man said, "Patience... a little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass."

Jefferson's message is an important one, however difficult it might be to accept right now. For, as in times past, the revelers will wake up before this one is over. Eventually they will feel the stranger's cold hand in their pocket. Then there will be hell to pay. I just hope it doesn't take them too long this time. My patience is awfully thin right now, Mr. Jefferson, awfully thin.

At the airport, I buy a copy of Le Monde and head for my departure gate. --posted 01.24.05

Dom Stasi, an engineer, is Chief Technology Officer for an international media network. A pilot, Air Force veteran, and former member of the Project Apollo technical team, he is also a widely published science and technology writer. A father of two, Mr. Stasi lives in Los Angeles with his wife of 38 years.

Footnotes
http://thebushpresidency.org/Economy.htm
http://www.altpr.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=6&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

Religious Exploitation, and the New American Creed

By Dom Stasi

Our moral perils are not those of conscious malice or the explicit lust for power. They are the perils which can be understood only if we realize the ironic tendency of virtues to turn into vices when too complacently relied upon; and of power to become vexatious if the wisdom which directs it is trusted too confidently. Reinhold Neibuhr IN THE BEGINNING
I remember it as though it were yesterday. I was a young engineer fresh from a successful and heady seven years in the manned lunar expedition program called Project Apollo.

Along with thousands of other American engineers, scientists, pilots, and technicians, people accustomed to working in relative obscurity, we had found ourselves suddenly at the center of the universe. And though Albert Einstein had already proven that everything and anything can rightfully be considered the center of the universe, Im speaking less prosaically. For a young man in the morning of his career, or an old man at its dusk, and today I can speak with knowledge of both circumstances, Project Apollo was that something we would remember the rest of our days. Physics aside, Apollo simply was for a time the center of the universe of men. Anyone who had the great good fortune and talent to be a part of it, would be changed for the experience, and changed for the better. Such harmless vanity is simply human nature. We are all of us creatures who delight in success however small might be our part in its achievement. Self esteem is critical to our well being as humans. On Apollo it made us all work harder and with more passion than any work Ive known since. Contributing to Project Apollo, and earning the trust and respect of project engineers older and wiser than I, and ultimately that of the astronauts themselves, gave this and so many other young Americans a special kind of self-confidence. Few have had such an opportunity so early in their lives and careers. Fewer still might have accepted it, for failure would have haunted all our days, and with each new moonrise, our nights as well. Its been said that experience doesnt change a person, but make him more of what he already is. Perhaps that is so. Think of the challenges you have faced in your own life. Think of how your responses to them tempered or softened you, contributed to, or somehow affected your social, intellectual, and perhaps, spiritual growth and attitudes. Reflecting upon ones life can be a rewarding or a painful exercise. Yet it is a thing from which we cannot hide. As Socrates observed, An unconsidered life is not worth living. Extreme? Perhaps. But keep these concepts of self top of mind. Remain mindful of self-confidence, self-esteem, and, not incidentally, self-worth as you read on.

Of course, even the best of good things must come to an end. So it was with Apollo. But at its close, when few outside the program really cared about silly-appearing moonwalks anymore, I was one of a relatively small group of Earthlings who had learned the empirical science of orbital mechanics and knew about sending moving pictures home from space. In our seven years of transmitting and receiving them, all of America had seen those pictures. All of the world would see those pictures evolve over time from grainy, hardly discernable monochromatic images to full color, full motion, high resolution renditions worthy of National Geographic. Yet, in the mid-Seventies, and the end of manned missions to other worlds, those of us still with the civilian sector of the US Space Program were developing more pragmatic concerns about its future and our own. Wed all be looking for work soon. As for me and my own future, the ability to send moving pictures back from space seemed an esoteric skill at best, a skill wholly devoid of commercial value and now, with no new worlds on the trip sheet, it was becoming boring as well. I grew restless.

As things turned out, I was one of the lucky ones. I could stay on at the aerospace plant where wed built the Lunar Lander. But with the program essentially over, I would have to transfer back to jets, back to reconnaissance flight test where Id started out, but in 1975, I and just about every other American had had his fill of warplanes. Also, I came to realize that Id lost my young mans taste for dangerous work. I was a husband and father now, and that was a convenient excuse to rationalize my growing yellow streak. I needed a change. I needed another kind of job, and we were in another stupid recession that the equally stupid TV economists never saw coming, yet dished out advice about to the credulous masses. Some things never change. Some jobs dont need a skill or a record of success to prevail. Unlike the unforgiving field of flight test, TV seemed full of such performance-free jobs. But I was an engineer, not a TV economist. Id learned about video technology flying Air Force reconnaissance in the Arctic, transferred it to a civilian career. It was the technology that revealed the Russian missiles in Cuba, and kept tabs on the Russian bombers poised like coils to spring from Siberia if things in Cuba went awry. It was that same video technology in civilian dress that had allowed us to see the moon walks. But in its private-sector application, the application known as commercial broadcast television, video was used shamefully. Commercial television it seemed, was a medium created by our collective genius only to have it exploit our collective stupidityat least stupidity enough to buy the junk they were continuously peddling from its screens. A career in broadcast television engineering held little allure.

I was offered a job with the State Departments Voice Of America propaganda arm, went through all the loyalty and security checks only to turn it down - twice. I tried teaching college for a time, but found myself too young and selfish to be satisfied by teaching others what I still wanted to be doing myself. But where? Who in the world needed a guy whose skill was sending movies back from space?

The answer came in a completely unexpected phone call.

Home Box Office was something Id never heard of before that call came in out of the blue. Home Box Office. HBO? Whats that? I asked the eager-sounding head hunter on the other end of the phone.

Next thing I knew I was sitting in a mahogany clad room high in the Time-Life Building on Rockefeller Center in New York City. This was no airplane factory. Elegant perfect women glided by, sylphlike and intimidating. All the men were dressed in white shirt and tie. I was too, of course. Yet, hidden beneath my jacket, was the only short-sleeved white shirt in the room. How impractical of them, thought I. Its high summer. Why wear long sleeves only to roll them up? Dont these guys get it? Id found another world, it seemed, right here on Earth.

Otherworldly or not, TV and motion pictures was the world in which I would spend the next 30 years of my engineering career. But first I had to get through this interview, or meeting or whatever it was. Eventually, I was led to a private corner office where I was introduced to yet another of the a long-sleeved executives. His sleeves were not rolled, but terminated in silver cuff links: obviously a big shot. To my amazement the guy wanted to send movies real Hollywood movies - back from space. Looking beyond his obvious lack of industrial fashion sense, I told him he was nuts. Then I told him why he was nuts. He dismissed my unqualified psychoanalytic opinions, but listened intently to my technical ones. To my surprise, he offered me a job. To my further surprise, I took it. So much for lofty ideals and even loftier opinions. I was in the stupid television business, and in it to stay.

Six months later, our antenna hoisted 22,300 miles above the Earth by a converted Atlas Delta missile, HBO, was sending movies back from space. It was an idea that caught on quickly in the private sector. With a single satellite in space, TV signals in the case of HBO, movies could be received at every single inch of the United States mainland. There would be no 1500 foot towers (which as a pilot Id always hated), no million watt transmitters, and no 100 mile contour limits of the sort that barricade traditional terrestrial broadcast signals. Nothing of the sort would impede our little 5 watt transmitter in the sky. Borne upon a satellite channel whose power was equal to but that of a night-light bulb, one signal from space could blanket the entire continental US and most of populous Canada. It was pure brilliance on the part of those long-sleeved executives practical physics and military technology now put to private and peaceful use. No mind-numbing commercials, and no numb-minded censors either. I liked it here. This wasnt stupid. This was cool. This was way cool. Funny, isnt it, how were able to abandon even strongly held opinions when our self interest is better served by forming new ones?

Firmly ensconced in HBOs fledgling engineering department, and with our early successes a matter of technical record, I suddenly found myself being invited to speak at seminars on how to do this TV from space thing. Ironically, I was teaching again, albeit in a different venue. Over the next couple of years I would visit all 50 states. But it was a tutorial for TV execs in the deep South that would remain an event apart from all the others. Though I was a speaker, I was still new to the entertainment business, so I knew no one in attendance. But my talk had gone well, the college teaching experience was paying off, so there would be no problem finding eager dinner companions among so large an audience.

Descending the podium, I had noticed but a single empty chair in the entire room. Taking it, I found myself at a table of strangely egalitarian folk. They were gentle in manner. They welcomed me expansively. They introduced themselves. To my delight, they spoke less of arcane technology than they did of their fellow man and their responsibilities toward humanity that such technology could help them fulfill. I listened, interested, noting that they all had that sort of deliberate not quite real Dixie accent that Id learned to recognize in actors when playing Southern characters before the camera. But why here? Their names - remarkable in retrospect, but hardly noteworthy at the time - were Jimmy Swaggart, Paul Crouch, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Pat Robertson, Robert Tilton, and a guy named Billy Batts. I was present, I know now, at American Televangelisms Big Bang, or if you prefer, its Genesis. Big league Fundamentalist Christian TV Evangelism was born at that table that day.

These seemingly gentle folk were fairly voracious in their acceptance of this new way to spread The Word, nationwide. Worldwide! They were there to learn of a new way to propagate their version of the Gospel Of Jesus Christ. They conversed in Biblical quotes, nodding their heads in profound understanding, Amen, brother, so on. The experience seems a bit surreal now. It was not. They were there to buy satellite antennas and anything else they would need to fulfill their self-proclaimed mission as Christs revisionist vicars on Earth. They each seemed to have a little licensed religious TV station of their own somewhere in the US, and if they hooked that signal to the satellite, they would not only be able, but mandated to have that signal carried by another hot, new medium: cable television. That mandate would come from a little known federal communications law known as the Must Carry Rule. It was little known to you and me, perhaps, but well known to the budding televangelists. These seemingly innocent people, and the equally innocent seeming circumstances that brought us together would change the lives of everyone at that table in the decades to come. And that in turn would affect the world in a way none of us could have imagined. Because, and though I had no way of knowing it, America was about to take its first step on a 30 year journey to the Dark Ages. Today we know it only as the 21st Century. When looking back upon it, history will prove less kind.

From this butterfly effect, would grow e-pietys perfect storm. It was the mid-Seventies. Our culture had been reeling from the narcotic excesses of the Sixties and the sexual intemperance of the Seventies. The divorce rate was the highest its ever been in our nations history. The entire concept of nuclear family was under siege as never before in America. It seemed as if everything familiar was changing. And while most Americans were blessed with moderate appetites, self-disciplined behaviors, and a measure of common sense, and thus well suited to social change, many others were not. To so many of our repressed and simplistic countrymen and women every new experience in this brave new age, however intuitive, however mundane, seemed an epiphany. So, while most Americans also managed to remain relatively unaffected by the willingly-acquired excesses that characterized the period, many others could not. America had also just emerged from a decade-long war of unspeakable horror, and dubious purpose. Thanks to a still-relevant news media, a mandatory draft, and casualty rate topping 200,000 (58,000 KIA) Vietnam affected all aware Americans. To avoid the draft, countless young Americans married in haste and conceived unloved children in order to gain deferment. Millions more enrolled and remained in colleges though they would not ordinarily have done so but for the student deferment. (No fewer than 12 deferments were granted to chickenhawks Dick Cheney (5) and John Ashcroft (7) alone!) Since the college deferment required actually going to college and studying something, the experience exposed millions of commonplace minds to the volatile philosophies of extraordinary and quite often revolutionary - thinkers for the first time in their personal, and Americas societal history. One way or another, every American, regardless of family, background, intellect, or social circumstance shared in the wars trauma and were made to look upon, and confront its distasteful significance. Drenched in this cascade of social and moral upheaval, vast numbers of Americans were driven to the edge. Many more went over that edge and found comfort only in denial or in excess, or both. Be it drugs, sex, alcohol, violence, or all of the above, there was a measure of comfort and escape to be found in the sensual distractions of excess, and it was available and beckoning from wherever one turned.

Indulgence would yield a temporary comfort, and when the millions who over-indulged came crashing back to reality, many needed comforting of another kind. They needed reform, and some degree of certainty in what seemed an even-more-uncertain society than that which they had attempted to escape. They needed someone or something to which they could turn for advice, direction, strength, and inspiration. For those who survived the fall physically but not emotionally, there arose a need for some mortal contact, someone who would not consider them failed humans, someone or something to show them the way back. Or, more simply stated, millions and millions and millions of Americans needed a new addiction to wean them from and obviate the mental scars left by their old addictions of war and sex and drugs, and social transgression, and violence, and confusion, and behavior outside the limits of their operant conditioning. Instead of assessing and accepting their memories, so very many Americans needed forgiveness for their actions. Those among the multitudes lacking the resolve to accept and assess and repair their assaulted psyches, those lacking the strength to pick themselves back up (and their numbers were legion) needed something more. They needed an emotional crutch. What people need, people tend to find. If they dont find it by themselves, there are always those willing to provide it usually for a price. In this case, it appeared literally right before their eyes. Salvation, forgiveness, aggrandizement, self-esteem, courage, moral superiority, all of it was beaming to them right from heaven itself, and onto their television screens. Satellite delivered televangelism was born on that day back in 1975. I watched it hatch. Suddenly it was everywhere. There was never a time in modern history when it was needed more. From the flickering boxes in Americas living rooms came the siren call to her desperate multitudes. Hey you out there in TV land, whatever youve done, and to whomever youve done it, no worries. Put down that bottle, throw away that needle, stop punching your wife, whatever. All is forgiven or can be. In fact, you can instantly become superior to those infidels whove not found the light and The Way and have done so much to degrade you for so long. Just listen to me, then send cash, check, or money order to the address on your screen. Youll be the best there is, brothers and sisters, the best there is. Trust Jesus. Trust me. Send a check. Halleluiah!

Given that so very many of Christian fundamentalisms contemporary American adherents believe that they have failed in the eyes of those who follow more moderate religious or societal paths, and given the widespread genetic proclivity toward belonging, they also needed something more extreme than rational theology to light their way back from the abyss. They needed to be a part of something so extreme, so strident that it would also provide them the psychological wherewithal to dismiss their moderate fellows judgments of them. That would require a system of beliefs and strictures so rigorous, so abstemonious that it would also serve to obviate or at least trivialize the beliefs and behaviors of their moderate Judeo-Christian counterparts, and those of enlightened liberal practitioners of any religion and religious thought, thus discrediting those they saw as their mortal judges and despicable scholarly elites, their betters. Once again, they needed an escape from reality. They needed a mind fix.

There is but one major creed that has offered such impenitent forgiveness, even aggrandizement for simply having rejected ones past transgressions and accepting its tenets. There is but one creed that associates itself so closely with an Anglo-Protestant American heritage, despite that no such identity ever existed. (Nature abhors a vacuum. The vacuum left by most Americans ignorance of their own countrys relatively brief history, is a vacuum easily fill by myth. Any student of American history knows well that many of the Founders were religious, but none publicly fundamentalist Christian. References to God, not to Jesus, prevail in their writings. The crafters of our Republic were brilliant men. But few would dispute that the three greatest geniuses among them were Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton. Franklin and Jefferson were professed deists, Hamilton a homosexual. From where does the religious Rights claim to their legacy stem? It stems from imagination. Because it simply never was. Religion was a part of the beautiful fabric of early America, not its foundation. The plurality of the US Constitution superceded the singularity of the Mayflower Compact.) There is but one creed that stimulates intolerance while proclaiming an inclusiveness based on its very antithesis. And finally, but most critical, there is but one creed that bases its fundamentalism on an absolutely literal interpretation of a Bible it considers absolutely flawless. Yet the Bible passed down through the ages is largely a fabrication. It is laced with revisionist scripture and distortions of convenience that the most serious of religious scholars have found to be at best, only 18% historically factual. HYPERLINK "http://religion.rutgers.edu/jseminar" 1 At best.

Thus, proximate attribution to the approximate Word is the rough equivalent of a 21st century airline or ships captain using 14th century maps, and only 14th century maps, by which to navigate and presuming them to be inviolate.

Ill take the bus.

By exploiting this widespread proclivity to believe, the Bible has become a convenient vehicle through which unscrupulous interpreters can derive a creed, a creed which, if accepted with a zealots fervor, would forgive anything absolutely anything one might have inflicted upon himself or his fellow man, woman, child, beast, vegetable or mineral in the past, and do so sans active or substantive non-monetary penance. It is a creed that is conveniently blind to any dichotomy between intolerance and forgiveness, theocracy and democracy, benevolence and vengeance, faith and political corruption. That is the creed that encourages one to be born again, the Evangelical Creed of Biblical literalism. Or what is alternately called rightist, conservative, Evangelical, fundamentalist Christianity. So ill conceived and distorted is this ostensibly literal acceptance of oft revised, translated and interpreted scripture, that serious Biblical scholars now consider it fabrication in the interest of self-servitude and the exploitation of mind-cure. Noted Biblical scholar and psychologist Edmund D. Cohen postulates that, Cast free form its Biblical moorings, Christianity came to denote anything good or wholesome in American life.2 Inventing religions of convenience is characteristic of men, not the province of man.

Nonetheless, and as usual, legions of credulous, disillusioned, disconnected Americans fell victim to fundamentalisms lure. Weather the adherent fancies a turban, a topknot, or a Stetson, religious extremism serves a purpose no different from drugs when it becomes a crutch. Religious extremism has become the simplistic answer for far too many of our countrymens mortal problems. For its Christian adherents, the answers to all lifes problems are found between the Bibles covers. There is no need to actually indulge in the human attribute of reasoning. Intellect is fabricated through rote memorization of scripture. But were it all that simple. Unfortunately, as with most other forms of extremism which abdicate thought to dogmatic obedience, fundamentalism is also the source of so very, very many more problems than it ever has solved, or ever will solve.

Recall now, the earlier references to self-esteem, the vacuum it leaves when it is absent or destroyed through self-destructive living, excess, compulsive-obsessive behaviors, inflicted or accepted abuse.

Anyone who would have been addicted to sex, drugs, and anything but rock and roll, was a candidate for addiction to whatever else suited his or her self-depreciated fancy. Anyone who needed forgiveness for the harm hed done to himself or to others, could find it here. Christianity but especially this strange, highly-selective, but very heady new simplistic form of it - was an addiction about which they could even feel good. They could even feel better than anyone else. They could garner immense self-esteem, however ill-placed. That rush was, and is to this day, a first in so many disturbed lives. In fact, lets throw in faith-healing of the most desperately ill while were at it. Whats the harm?

The ensuing decades would see the easily led, easily addicted, easily persuaded, easily frightened, abused, downtrodden, secret-harboring, pain ridden - in short, vulnerable - masses drawn to the flickering images of these fire and brimstone preachers on their cable televisions and they would be converted by the millions, by the tens-of-millions. They would belong. All is forgiven. All is well, or will be shortly. All. Absolutely all. Oh, by the way, dont forget to send the check.

If these words seem harsh, I simply make no effort to disguise my disdain for those who would exploit the vulnerable, nor will I soft-peddle the obvious abuse by so many, of a system of government created to, among other things, tolerate and protect religious freedom. The abuse of that trust by so many televangelists, and the further misuse of the public electromagnetic spectrum to exploit the irrational, credulous, impressionable, desperate, and weak who believe them is an especially vile form of TV indecency. But dont look for any scrutiny by our current Federal Communications Commission. Bush stooge and FCC Commissioner, Michael Powell, will be too busy looking for bare breasts to keep the citizenrys pathetic popular mind from realizing that hes destroying public interest protections such as the station ownership cap. That cap remains the only barrier to the continued expansion by the pious parasites of televangelism. Powell is bent on destroying that cap in the special interest of his owners.

FALSE PROPHETS / REAL PROFITS:
Keep in mind that were speaking of Christianity, albeit an extreme form, but Christianity: a belief in the divinity of Jesus as Christ, as God the Son, and in His teachings and principles upon this mortal coil.

Keep in mind, too, that were speaking of the Old Testament as well, of the introductory scriptures themselves, the scriptures to which many Evangelicals adhere dogmatically, the fundament, Genesis 2:16-17, the garden, the forbidden fruit. The Bible virtually begins with Gods admonitions to man on the virtues of moderation, the perils of excess. It is the first admonition to Adam the first! Yet, somehow, todays Biblical literalism seems to yield to interpretation at such uncomfortable junctures as Genesis. The flesh is, after all, weak. So on, so forth, ad infinitum.

As you read further, please remain mindful that Jesus in his Earthly manifestation owned virtually nothing. Such modesty must have set a poor example to TV evangelists. They own a lot of things. Boy, do they own a lot of things. They want to own a lot more. Michael Powell will soon allow them to do just that.

Need an example of how lucrative is the televangelist business? Several examples? Easy.

Most of you know of a religious TV show called the 700 Club. It was founded by presidential candidate, gay basher, and TV evangelist extraordinaire Pat Robertson. It got its name from Robertsons admonition to his initial 700 rural viewers to send him a donation of $10.00 each. That was the estimated cost of operating his fledgling terrestrial TV show. Ten years after Pat Robertson made his modest $7000.00 request, and with his channel now being carried by satellite, he had 26 million regular viewers across the country. Operating revenues had grown to a staggering $145,517,000.00 annually in the US alone. HYPERLINK "http://www.davidicke.net/religiousfrauds/associations/cbn.html" 3 Today the 700 Club is carried in 66 countries. Robertson and his Christian Coalition purport enormous influence in American politics. This lofty pulpit allowed Robertson to predict that Armageddon would arrive in 1982. This prospect would of course leave faithful viewers with no practical need for such things as green bananas, nor incidentally, their retirement savings, but thats just speculation by this jaded writer. When, despite Ronald Reagans best efforts, the world failed to end, it didnt matter much to Robertsons flock, no one was complaining or seeking a refund, instead they were told to thank Jesus. They did. Later, Robertson actually had his television crews preparing to televise the Second Coming. That was in 1990. Why would Robertson believe that he and he alone knew this? Are the TV crews still on location? Where might that be?

Eventually, his lackluster performance as a prophet led Robertson to abandon prediction in favor of the safer and more politically potent practice of hindsight. For example, he has recently proclaimed credit for George W. Bushs re election. However dubious a distinction that might be, Bush believes him, so little else matters. As such we can expect Robertsons influence to increase in these four dismal years ahead as Bush continues distributing our US Treasurys contents to his friends, and promotes his Faith Based Initiative program. Initiative indeed.

Robertson is not alone. Fabulous wealth and power would be visited upon many of this new breed of high-tech missionaries, and now it seems they and their fiscally less impressive sycophants are everywhere one turns. There is no admission prerequisite to the salvation club, and no barrier to moral superiority. All one need do is buy it at the two-for-one sale thats always going on. (Call the number on your screen). State it aloud with some reference to Jesus, wave your hand in the air, and back the rapt gestures with cash, check, or money order, and youre on the Heavenly Express. But dont forget that check. God dont save no deadbeats. The tax-free American dollar is still worth plenty in heaven.

Another dinner companion that fateful night was Paul Crouch. Like Robertson and Jesus, Crouch, the televangelist, and story telling founder of Trinity Broadcast Network (TBN), started out with v