STALLED REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE

by Neville Raymond

We’ve all been there. Our blood pressure rising. Our pulse beating hard. Our tempers flaring. Wedged in by lines of cars, in front, in back, on either side. Our daily hopes, dreams, goals put on hold as we inch along by fits and starts to our destination.

Have you noticed how many of us cope with this? Better still, have you noticed how we are told to cope? What do the experts advise us to do, as our 100 mph cars sit stalled in 1 mph traffic, and our nervous systems, designed to drive in an easy-going state of calm alertness, run at full tilt on frustration, irritation, impatience, and rage?

Get comfy. Make use of that adjustable lumbar support in the driver’s seat.

Breathe slowly, deeply, inhaling and exhaling from the diaphragm.

Put on soothing piece of classic music. Be transported by the latest audio book.

 
 Well, I don’t know about you, but these new-age coping gems leave me cold in a traffic jam. “Whenever you start cursing the traffic,” says one pop psychologist, the author of Urban Mindfulness, “remember you are the traffic. You have to recognize the situation is everybody’s fault – and nobody’s fault.”

Truth is, I have to do no such thing. The traffic is not my fault – my fault is that I have to be some place in a city with a monumentally irrational and absurd system of public transportation. 

If we are going to talk fault, why don’t we start with those criminal conspirators who hijacked our national transportation policy from under us in the mid-1930s and 1940s and plotted behind our backs to buy out our then state-of-the-art system of mass transit in city after city (along with the priceless rights of way that went with it) and toss it on the junk heap? 

Am I not totally within my rights to curse a sick, ineffectual and toxically wasteful system of crony capitalism that is happy to waste billions of man-hours and billions of gallons of fuel, decade after decade after decade, as long as it adds billions of dollars to the corporate bottom-line?

After all, who doesn't know by now that mass transit did not die a natural death? It was ambushed and brutally murdered for financial gain. Big Oil and Big Auto put their heads together and conspired to rip up all the light rail systems that had already been installed in cities like Los Angeles. 

A federal jury convicted them of it in Chicago in 1949. And we are still paying the terrible price. Imagine how we would be zipping along if we had used that incredibly valuable real estate to build up a high-speed mass transit system over the years, instead of allowing General Motors and Standard Oil to reduce us to a nation of vehicular basketcases by fostering our overdependence on the internal combustion engine.

Did the city fathers who rolled over for them give a bug’s whisker about the consequences? 

According to the latest Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, the longer your commute, the greater your risk of recurrent neck or back pain.  Not to mention high cholesterol and obesity. 

Did the city fathers who sold off our common wealth think about what a giant pain in the public back or the neck it would be, if they kowtowed to the interests of corporate America, instead of looking out for millions of their citizens?

Swedish researchers at Umea University found that a daily commute of 45 minutes or more increases the likelihood of divorce by 40%, with the highest risk during the first few years of marriage.  As the greedy oil executives ripped the heart out of mass transit, forcing us to sit in gridlock for the next half century and beyond, did they think about the strain that they would be putting on families – on marital relationships – on all the time that parents never got to spend with their children, because their could not use a swift, dependable form of transport from home to work and back again?

Of course not. They were too busy gloating over their sky-high future profits. Because of the inevitable congestion that built up over the years from smashing the nucleus of what could have turned into a high-tech world-class system of mass transit, idling California drivers waste the most gas of any state – 38 million gallons in one year alone – and put $160 million in the coffers of the oil companies.

And what about the corporate lobbyists who forced Congress to pass trade legislation allowing agribusiness to swamp Mexico with cheap exports of grain.  Maybe you don’t want to spare a dime for a homeless man. But can you spare a thought for how the forces of 'globalization' drove hundreds of thousands of Mexican farmers off their land, forcing them to declare bankruptcy and head for parts in North America to survive – and how this flood of immigration brings our freeways to a grinding halt morning, noon and night?

What about how the U.S. national security state’s appetite for tyrannical regimes in Central and South America, and Asia widens the gap between the rich and the poor and savages the livability quotient of countries around the world? Where are all these poor people supposed to go when their countries are sold out from under them? 

Not to worry. Corporate America will gladly hire these immigrants at bargain-basement prices and pack our cities and factories with cheap labor. That way the corporatocracy can drive down our living standards to Third World levels, instead of working to lift up the rest of the world to First World standards.

And finally, what about the runaway capitalism of the U.S. automobile industry. At a time when our highways are clogged to death, what do you see when you switch on your TV? A commercial for another car. A car that has the magnificent backdrop of the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls all to itself, instead of sharing the roads with millions of tried, bored, frustrated and irritable drivers.

So here we are, choking on our own exhausts, unable to budge for all the automobiles that lay siege to our quality of life. And capitalism takes pride in ramming yet one more brand-new spanking model car down our throats with all the latest electronic gizmos! 

Is gridlock the surest sign of capitalism run amok or what? Given that there are too many cars on the road, at what point does it cross our minds that perhaps we should rein in the untrammeled mass marketing of automobiles? Or should the rest of us continue to be resigned to losing another minute, another hour, another week, another year out of our lives so that GM or Chrysler make another buck?

If these culprits don’t turn your stomach – and goad you in turning your car into a rolling command post for economic revolution - don’t bother doing any breathing exercises or listening to audio books. You are probably so brain dead or heart dead that you may as well just lie back and accept your car as your mobile coffin.

THE DAY THE MUSIC WAS KILLED by Neville Raymond

Love - music - peace - and over a million people

A dangerously heady combination.

One that leaves the Pathocrats rather jittery, I suspect.

Millions who can come together for music can just as easily come together for peace and harmony...

Have you ever wondered why America doesn’t have any honest-to-goodness Woodstocks any more? Why it has never been able to recapture the first fine careless peace-and-love rapture of the original? Are there no more young people wanting to be blissed-out by the party of their lives? Have they have all grown up and been sucked in by the daily grind?

Forty years ago there was Altamont: a few drug-crazed bikers run amok - and an entire era comes crashing down. Is that just too convenient for the Pathocrats or what!

The goods news - until now - is that Europe didn't get that memo.

There they still have Woodstocky events like the Love Parade - millions of souls, gathering for a music fest of love and togetherness.

Growing out of the euphoric days of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Love Parade was a celebration of peace…solidarity…and world harmony.

Now you just know that something like that was bound to set the nerves of the Pathocrats on edge.

So first they got the Love Parade chased out of Berlin....

Then they got it cancelled in the Ruhr Valley.

But obviously that wasn’t going to be the end of it.

The party-hearty spirit dies hard, and it’s going to take more than stonewalling bureaucrats for people to give up on an orgy of musical tribalism.

Obviously this sort of thing had to be stopped once and for all.

But how?

Well, the formula is a tried and true one.

First, choose the worst possible site. One that would never pass muster for a football game, let alone as a concert venue for hundreds of thousands of people. A cramped speedway at Altamont - little better than an auto junkyard - would do fine. Or an abandoned freight-train yard at Duisburg, for that matter.

Then cram it way beyond capacity. And for good measure, fence the whole thing off, instead of preserving the wide-open feel of previous venues...

And then have your goons in place to turn a shot at heaven on earth into a disaster zone.

In Altamont you hire the Hell’s Angel for security! You donate a 1000 hits of LSD laced with speed to this security force and watch them going to town busting the heads of concertgoers.....

Times change and in Duisburg you are more subtle. You strategically station the police at both ends of the tunnel - and make sure they have their marching orders to set off a stampede by exercising a chokehold at just the right moment - at the height of the concert.

All the reports seem to sing from the same playbook: “It was unclear what triggered the panic....” But then you read about people making a mad dash for the tunnel. Or how a mysterious surge in the crowd forces people to escape by climbing up a metal stairway in front of the tunnel - and then falling into the crowd where they are trampled or crushed.

All of this begs the question... why this panic surge all of a sudden?

You don’t even have to read between the lines to discover that the police triggered it. Yes, the Achilles heel of the whole venue was that tunnel - it was both an entrance into the concert and the exit. This is a big no-no as these things go. You never want hundreds of people, let alone over a million, going in and coming out the same way....

But the police used this to their advantage.

They could have stationed themselves far away from the tunnel altogether. As they made an elaborate point of fencing the area off, they could have turned people back long before they got to the bottleneck of the tunnel. In terms of crowd management and safety that was a no-brainer. There could be no possibility of a stampede in an open space.

But no, they decided to station themselves strategically at the tunnel. There it was that the cops made their disastrous stand by telling the revelers that the concert was closed. They blocked the stream of people who were already passing through the tunnel or were trying to get out. And they created a mad crush of people that surged back on itself in a narrow space, trampling those in or around the tunnel who were still trying to get in.

Even reports that those trying to escape the barricades fell turn out not to be true. According to eye-witnesses, they were forced back in - by the police. In other words, the police decided to turn the flow of the crowd back on itself at the worst possible time and place! A guaranteed crowd-crusher.

Of course, the police union screams that the cops are not to blame. The claim is that the cops actually opened a second exit before the accident. Much better that the cops should have refrained from sealing off the one exit that was fully crammed but operating fine until they decided to butt in.

You might think that this is a case of he-said, she-said. But when it comes right down to it, who are you going to believe? The cops who work for oligarchs who are made nervous by mass demonstrations of peace and harmony? Or eyewitnesses who are there simply to have a good time and who are adamant that the panic only broke out after the cops chose to block off the tunnel?

In any case, everything was fine until that riptide of ingressing and egressing crowds in the tunnel. Only the police would have the authority to set that off.

And then to add insult to injury, there are all the reports that the police just stood by on the bridge and did nothing while people were trampled underfoot below them.

20 people died gruesome deaths! And over five hundred more were injured.

It’s hard not to believe that those in charge - the city officials, the organizers and the police - did not collude to make this happen. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time.

For some observers, like the concert-manager for Shakira and Sting, the loss of life rose to the level of a crime. "This is not a tragic disaster, this is a crime", said Marek Lieberberg. Whether or not you want to believe that the powers that be were behind this crime, the clincher for me was how the event organizer jumped on it as a chance to shut down the Love Parade in perpetuity.

He didn’t vow to get to the bottom of it. He didn't promise to do everything in his power to ensure that such a disaster never repeats itself. Almost on cue, he lost no time in insisting that the era of the Love Parade was dead. Out of respect for the victims!

Have you ever heard anything more ridiculous?

People die because the organizers and police messed up - if you could call it messing up - and from now on there are no more free concerts of love and music and world harmony!

Can anyone stand up and scream Shill at the top of his lungs?

Don’t you just love the way that something like this can bring the whole communal party to a screeching halt? The oligarchs can make a big to-do about being welcomed with flowers and songs in Iraq, because they are bringing peace and freedom to the region. And after tens of thousands of dead and maimed U.S. servicemen, and hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi men, women and children, the whole noble enterprise is still going as strong as ever! You don’t have the organizers of the whole fiasco standing up and proclaiming that it is time to cut and run: Well, that rings the curtains down on our efforts to bring peace and democracy to the world!

But here you have a wonderful open-air festival, pulsing with music and harmony, solidarity and world peace - a festival going on since the fall of the Berlin Wall. And then - either because of organizational foul-ups, in the most charitable scenario, or a deliberately orchestrated case of stampeding a crowd trapped in a tunnel - less than a couple of dozen people wind up dead. And you have the organizer standing up and piously bleating, No more Love Parades!

Come on, could you be more shockingly hypocritical?

The bad guys can mobilize to take over the world - and even in the face of hundreds of thousands of death, it is still all about staying the course for them so that those who have already died will not have died in vain.

The good guys mobilize for a world-class festival of music and love...and because less than two dozen lives are lost under decidedly suspicious circumstances, the era of world harmony and peace must be declared over and dead - and all in the name of the victims and their families, no less!

If only the urge to bomb and kill were as easily quenched as the spirit to party-hearty and have a blast! The world would be a much safer place, if not an altogether more joyous one.

And you thought that only the Taliban were down on music and dancing!

MANNING UP FOR THE MAN by Neville Raymond

“The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.” Colin Wilson

The pressure to conform is the embalming fluid that mummifies societies. It gives humans the staying power to make sure that this cold, unfeeling world stays the same from one century to the next, no matter how desperately they may want it to change. You don't have to be a philosopher to know that. You could be a boarding school survivor. There we were, led around by the nose morning, noon and night, not a one of us dragging his heels or kicking up a fuss. Lining up for parades like clockwork. Filing in and out of classrooms and chapels. Learning whatever they wanted to teach us, when and where and how they wanted to teach it. Studying, playing, eating, sleeping, waking, showering at the strict times of their choosing.

A marvel of synchronized activity! All those callisthenic formations on Founder’s Day were a flash in the pan compared to the rigidly organized paces they put us through day after day, week after week, month after month, March through November. What mysterious mechanism could make us so docile? What pied piper had us following this hypnotic tune? Consider the odds! There we were, four or five hundred strong, miles from anywhere. They were fifteen or twenty masters, tops! David and Goliath were not so badly mismatched! Yet we remained their dutiful little robots, bobbing our heads each time we ran into them. Good morning sir! Good afternoon sir! What good little boys we must have been to let a handful of them run the show like a well-oiled machine!

Were we content by any chance with our lot? Would you be if you were dragged from home and whisked to a glorified orphanage-cum-bootcamp? The truth is we were homesick as hell. Why didn’t we put up a fight? Not necessarily with machine guns like the students in the 1964 film If, that savage satire of English public school life. A Gandhi-style revolution with sit-downs, non-violent protests, peaceful demonstrations, would have done just fine. Where was our spunk, our courage, our spirit of fair play when we really needed it? Was there nothing left in us of that rambunctious spontaneity and playful exuberance that comes so naturally to boys? Had the school regimen killed it all off?

One crisp fall morning we were massed in the quad, doing jumping jacks on the barked commands of a PE master. Feeling a tad frisky, I clowned around in the harmless way boys do when craving attention. It must have spoiled the orderly spectacle of that Hitler Youth Rally. The PE master got off his perch and headed straight for me. The crunching sound of his feet on gravel seemed to go on forever. Standing before me at last, he administered a ringing slap to my face.

Did I reel with hurt and shame? I’d have to be made of crushed rock not to. But what if I wasn’t the only one? What if every witness to that assault resonated with my pain? What if they were shocked enough to sit down en masse, refusing to go on till things changed? What if boys began boycotting classes, taking vows of silence until the masters gave in? An apology for starters - then a ban on corporal punishment. What if an outraged student body rose up and flexed its muscles for regime change? From now on we have a greater say in running our school. Optional uniforms, relaxed schedules. A choice of earlier or later meal seatings. We decide what, when and how we want to learn. We communicate with our parents when we feel like it. And so on… until a paramilitary-run orphan asylum turns into something more akin to a pleasure cruise ship.

What nipped this solidarity movement in the bud? What kept us imprisoned in our lonely shells, helpless to come together to change our corner of the world? We all know the secret of British rule. Divide and conquer. God knows, there was enough of that. The student body was divided into four Houses and pitted against each other every which way. That wasn’t the root of our failure to unite though. It was the stigma attached to feelings. Tears sprung to my eyes when I was struck. But that stiff upper lip never wavered. Just as I got a grip, everyone around me did too. I didn’t break - neither did anyone else break ranks. I held it together because there was nobody to hold me. So we all held it together and soldiered on. For the biggest taboo of all was to make a scene. If every last one of us was equally terrified of that, how could we sit down to make a mass spectacle of ourselves? If our worst fear was to be branded a sissy for raising a fuss, how could we raise a collective fuss? Solidarity as fellow feeling poses no threat if every fellow is in charge of cracking down on his feelings.

I used to cry myself to sleep the first week of the new school term. As a group we could never join hands to cry ourselves awake out of our stupor. You want an empire on which the sun never sets? Drill generations of boys to always let the sun go down on their anger and anguish and shame.

GENOCIDE AS FUN AND GAMES

How do sociopathic leaders get away with mass murder? Take Adolf Hitler for instance. He was guilty of mass murder, but he is not one of the ones who got away with it. Yes, he set up the machinery of mass destruction and got away with operating it. But in the judgment of history he has been exposed as a mass murderer. If didn't take his life in a Berlin bunker, he would have been haled before the court at Nuremberg and tried, found guilty and sentenced to death. So, in the eyes of posterity, at least, he cannot be said to have gotten away with it.

If you want to beat a rap like mass murder, you have to get up pretty early in the morning. If you want to sugarcoat the pill of genocide so that it goes down easily, you have to be a far more savvy and powerful politician than Hitler ever was. You have to convince people that you are noble and well-intentioned and that it is all in a good cause. You have to work overtime to brand the victims as the bad guys. And at the same time you have to go all out to glamorize the perpetrators as the good guys. You have to turn the whole thing into an epic struggle between good and evil - a thrilling adventure full of drama and suspense. And of course you have to churn out an endless stream of books and films that romanticize the ugly subject of genocide and make it seem as normal as childbirth by representing it as the birth pangs of a New World.

If you can do that, well, you can consider yourself home free. You have successfully covered up the greatest crime of the century. You can be said to have made genocide - the granddaddy of all crime - pay. And if all that is true, that means that right now there are people out there enjoying our respect and arousing our admiration who are, in the final analysis, no better than Hitler. That means that there are cultural icons on a par with the Nazis who enjoy our trust and bask in our acclaim and stand out as legendary role models for our kids.

It kinda makes it hard to tell your heroic friends from your villainous enemies. I mean, in the 20^th century there were all these God-fearing patriotic Americans who volunteered to fight in the Good War. It was an epic struggle between good and evil, and the great villain of the piece was Adolf Hitler. We are all familiar with Hitler’s M.O by now. He was a pathological liar whose word could not be trusted. He made treaties and promises but had no intention of living up to any of them. He set out to dominate the continent of Europe armed with a grandiose sense of destiny, yet stooped to all kinds of trickery and force to pull off his blatant land grabs. And worst of all, he targeted an innocent people for genocide, rounding them up and throwing them into concentration camps where they perished by the millions.

But where did Hitler come from? He wasn’t born evil, was he? I mean, we know that he had a rageholic of a father who beat the daylights out of him at least once a day. But besides that, what else could have transformed the innocent boy into a genocidal maniac? What influential books did he read? Whose crazy footsteps did he follow? What served as his sick role model?

To be sure, Hitler the man did terrible things in the 20^th century. But first and foremost he was a child of the 19^th century. Was there a power in the 19^th century that blazed a path of conquest for him to emulate? A jingoistic power that made repeated treaties and promises of peace but failed to honor any of them? A rapacious power that refused to stay within its borders and grabbed an entire continent as its prize? An arrogant power that armed itself with the myth of a grandiose destiny and used trickery and force to pull off its blatant land grabs? And last but not least, a bloodthirsty power that rounded up innocent peoples and slaughtered them in a systematic policy of genocide, until the only survivors left were sickly specimens in de facto concentration camps?

If you know the answer to that question, you know the truth. You know that Hitler had a sinister guiding star. And that guiding star was our own Uncle Sam. Long before the Fuhrer claimed it as his manifest destiny to conquer the Europe, our leaders invested themselves with a Manifest Destiny to conquer America. Long before he used trickery and force to push for his dream of continental expansion to the East, they did the same thing with regard to the West. Long before he came across as a pathological liar because he broke all his treaties and promises with White Europeans, they did the same thing with Red Indians. And worst of all, long before he targeted an indigenous population of Jews, Gypsies and Slavs for genocide, they did the same thing with an indigenous population of Sioux and Cherokee and Iroquois. And while the world was justly horrified by the ravaged specimens of humanity that survived the war of extermination in Hitler’s camps, there is nowhere near the same level of outrage over the demoralized survivors of the U.S. war of extermination who were herded into glorified camps known as Reservations

All this is historical fact. Any schoolboy can look it up. The United States gets all virtuous over its fight against Hitler - and such is the power of indoctrination that its citizens forget that their government is guilty of the same atrocities as the Nazis! Our side likes to paint Hitler as a madman for thinking in grandiose terms of overrunning a continent and using duplicity and force to get his way and launching a systematic campaign of genocide. And we conveniently forget that We the People and our homegrown leaders have the same shade of blood on their hands. As a matter of fact, if there were an honest-to-goodness accounting of the Native Americans butchered in the path of U.S. expansion - estimates run from less than ten million to fifty million - our leaders in Washington would be haled before some tribunal just like Nuremberg and held no less guilty of crimes against humanity than the captured Nazi leaders.

So you think you're one of the good guys? You think you can tell a villain when you see one? Don’t be too sure. In the decade right after America emerged victorious from World War II, a new medium called television took the country by storm. TV Westerns were all the rage in the 1950s. Little boys dressed up as the Lone Ranger and Roy Rogers, complete with plastic guns and Stetsons, and swallowed hook, line and sinker the dominant myth. Cowboys and cavalry kept order at the point of a six-shooter. Indians were savages lurking behind every bush and rocky boulder, waiting to wreak mayhem.

Well, think of one of those boys growing up immersed in this Western mystique. He devoured books that hyped the morality play of the Wild West. He loved playing Cowboys and Indians as a kid. He lived vicariously through stories of tough two-fisted white men meting out their brand of vengeance on Indian savages. Television may not have been invented in his day, but he was weaned on the literary equivalents of Gunsmoke and Have Gun, Will Travel. Who is he? John Wayne? Andrew Jackson? No, we know him as Adolf Hitler.

We like to think that Hitler was an evil seed, but when you look at his childhood, he was just a regular old German kid. He grew up obsessed with the novels of Karl May, Germany’s answer to Zane Grey. May had never been to America but he made the Western his special genre, cranking out stories about a swaggering white hero called Old Shatterhand who was murder on Indian savages. Hitler never tired of reading about this bloodthirsty hero as a kid, in candlelight and even in moonlight. In fact, he was still reading these stories in his final days in the bunker. And as his surprised generals could tell you, his fantasy world would sometimes get the better of him and he would catch himself referring to the Russians as Redskins.

So where does that leave us? We started out by wondering how anyone can get away with mass murder. Well, here's the key. In order to get away with mass murder you must have a culture that goes gaga over its perpetrators. You don’t find Hollywood's dream factories glorifying the Holocaust or presenting its architects as worthy role models for kids to emulate. But the film vaults are bulging with Hollywood classics that enshrine the Western hero as a worthy role model for children and spin his campaign of extermination against indigenous peoples as a noble cause to identify with and even embrace and emulate. You will never find American kids playing Nazis and Jews in their backyards. But you will find them playing Cowboys and Indians.

That is how you know you have arrived. Your version of genocide doesn’t carry the same level of stigma as the other guy’s. Our own City of the Angels shows how easily it can be done. On the Westside of Los Angeles is a famous museum dedicated to exposing the horror that was Nazi Germany by sensitizing people to the full magnitude of the Holocaust. And on the Valley side, at the foothills of Griffith Park, there is another famous museum dedicated to celebrating the mystique of the American West - and it does just that without ever really shocking us into recognizing the full magnitude of the holocaust perpetrated against its indigenous peoples.

NOT ALL ABUSE VICTIMS BECOME KILLERS - SOME JUST BECOME HANGING JUDGES

Being tough on crime has two faces. 

The first is that you are fired up by force and violence as deterrents to crime. The second is that the idea of redemption or rehabilitation leaves you cold.

The other day the front page of my newspaper ran with the headline: “A life based on hate is no life at all.” Pretty eloquent, I thought. Who said it? Gandhi? Martin Luther King? No, it was Buford Furrow - the white supremacist who murdered a Filipino letter carrier and wounded a total of five people - three children, an adolescent camp counselor and an adult staff member - at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills. It turns out that he had done some soul-searching and repudiated his violent past.

I thought that was commendable. And then I read the subheading of the article. “REGRET: Relatives of victims say gunman’s apparent change of heart is welcome, but it won’t undo his deeds.”

Won’t undo his deeds? Are you kidding? Is there anything in the world that can do that? Er, no. What’s done is done. All we can do is to look forward and hope to do better next time. But the bias of our system is such that it cannot allow that to happen with good grace. Marry the man to his deeds and make sure that he pays for all eternity with no hope of divorce! In Furrow’s case, eternity amounts to two consecutive life sentences and an additional 110 years running consecutively with the life sentences.

Can anyone say overkill? If turnaround is fair play, I guarantee that you will never see this headline: “Relatives welcome throwing the book at hate criminal, but it won’t undo his deeds.” That might be just a tad too subversive for words. We don’t want to be reminded that our system of justice is nothing more than a vindictive judgment on that which cannot be undone. 

Anyone feel like beating a dead horse?

Take the case of Steven Anthony Jones. Jurors called him a killing machine. Prosecutors said he was like a submerged crocodile lying in wait for his prey. 

Even one of his attorneys professed to being taken aback by his resume of crime. When he came before Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy in his orange jail scrubs, she sentenced him to death for killing one man in an execution-style robbery and bludgeoning a woman to death. 

But not before she recited the highlights of his long career of violence, torture and rape, stretching from Lancaster to Arizona and back to LA County. As one by one the relatives of his murdered victims walked up to the stand and confronted Jones with their expressions of anger and grief, Jones turned to the audience in the downtown LA courtroom and said he understood he had ruined lives and was sorry. 

He blamed an abusive childhood and an addiction to drugs for his violence. “From the bottom of my heart, I apologize. I never knew about love. I never knew about family. All I knew was violence.”

I don’t know about you, but I think that as self-evaluations go, that one is spot on.

You cannot fault a child for failing to speak French when he grew up learning to speak Farsi. If physical violence is the only language you know, how can you be expected to become fluent in non-violent forms of communication? The judge begged to differ. She set no great store by his newfound awareness of his past. She told Jones that she was skeptical of his claim that he was a changed man. “I hope that your apology was sincere. However, these apologies do not make up for the horrific crimes you committed.”

This begs the question. What would make up for these horrific crimes? Injecting a man with a cocktail of toxic chemicals? Gassing or electrocuting him to death, and then resuscitating him so that he can gassed or electrocuted all over again?  Rinse, repeat??

Aside from that, change is the real issue. Times change. Societies change. But people? Can people change? If the criminal justice system is to be believed, the answer is, who cares. No institution on earth is more threatened by the implications of genuine change than the criminal justice system. 

If criminals can experience regret and remorse, they are on their way to being changed from a violent mindset to a kinder, gentler one. 

But here’s the rub. Change works in both directions. If human beings can change from a hateful, violent mindset to a loving one, perhaps they can be changed from an innocent loving mindset to a hateful, savage one. 

Now that is something that the criminal justice system cannot stomach. The idea of someone going from bad to good - that blindsides it and leaves its representatives shaking their head and sniggering with doubt and suspicion. But what leaves them positively apoplectic is the prospect that someone can go from being innocent and sweet to a violent criminal. That human beings can be born warm, cuddly, needing to bond, needing to connect - and then, through being routinely neglected, rejected, abandoned - through being viciously beaten, tortured and trashed - they can grow cold and insensitive, they can lose their vulnerability and bottle up feelings of anger and grief and grow mad and lash out against society…that's a non-starter. The system is shut off to that possibility!

And so when defense lawyers argued that Jones was just an innocent boy in the beginning, but that he was savagely beaten by his father every day, whether he did anything to deserve it or not, and that may have played a major role in how he turned out, Judge Kennedy will have none of it. “There are many, many people who have childhoods that are less than perfect and they don’t become violent killers as Mr. Jones has become.”

Is this one wise compassionate judge or what? Here she is telling a victim of catastrophic abuse that it's his own damn fault that he didn't grow up to become a decent law-abiding citizen. That's like a doctor telling a patient dying of cancer that it's his own damn fault that he didn't beat the odds to go on to live a healthy, productive life! 

It makes sense, doesn't it, in a loopy kind of way. As long as there are all these survivors of abuse who turn our well, those who fail to do so can't blame the abuse for ravaging their psyches and destroying their lives. As long as there are all these cancer survivors who do just fine, those who fail to make it cannot blame the cancer for ravaging their bodies and destroying their lives.

And don't you just love how the judge mincingly refers to all those with "less than perfect" childhoods. As if a less than perfect childhood is the same thing as an over-the-top sadistic childhood. 

Here is a system that is treated every day of the week to a parade of people overwhelmed with rage. And it refuses to face up squarely to what it is that makes them so mad that they would as soon strike you dead as look at you. 

Love is what regenerates us as a species. Is it so hard to believe that the absence of love turns us into degenerates? Love brings us to life. Is it so hard to understand that the absence of love kills? Love lifts us up to where we belong. Is it so hard to admit that the absence of love drags us down to the level of wild beasts of prey?

Why is that judges and prosecutors choke on the power of love?

Child abuse is at the root of all society’s ills. 

Human rights abuses, social abuses, abuses of power and money - all have their origin in child abuse. 

And yet the criminal justice system blithely acts as if the breakdown of love does not lead to the breakdown of social order. Love is not all that it’s cracked up to be! You can take it or leave it! 

Could it be because if the system copped to the awesome power of love, it would put itself out of business? 

Imagine if it did everything to ensure that every child received his share of nurture and affection, understanding and compassion, appreciation and respect. Who would grow up to be homicidally mad anymore? Crime just might be wiped out in a generation!

No, no, we can’t have that. Judges and prosecutors would have no one to throw the book at. And then what would they do with all the punitive hostility that eats away at them from the inside? Take responsibility for it? Well, now, there’s a game-changing thought! A judge who sits in judgment on herself!

You can see why it is easier for the judge to point a finger, without noticing those three fingers pointing back at her robed self. 

And so, no, your Honor, not everyone who is abused turns into a killer. You got that right, at least. 

Not all victims of abuse become violent killers on the streets.

Some become alcoholics and drug addicts and smoke or drink themselves to death.

Others internalize their rage and fill hospital beds with psychosomatic diseases and auto-immune disorders.

Then there are those who become black-ops killing machines and hit men for those in need of plausible deniability - or they go to law school and put their skill set to work writing legal memos in defense of torture.

There are those who walk the corridors of power and money and dictate Machiavellian policies that unleash waves of bloody repression in faraway countries, along with mass poverty, starvation, malnutrition and disease.

There are those who use bully pulpits on TV and radio to vociferously cheerlead the kinds of unjust policies that result in massacres of the innocents, in the form of the hemorrhaging of livelihoods and wholesale loss of homes or the degradation of national health, education and welfare or the destruction of the American Dream.

And last but not least, there are all those - and they are in the majority - who lounge in easy chairs and living room couches, or perch high on judicial benches, and passively acquiesce or actively rally around institutional forms of violence like war, capital punishment, torture and police and prison brutality.

When you’re right, you’re right judge. 

Not all victims of abuse become violent killers. 

But who’s to say that those who do are any worse than all the others victims of sadistic abuse who kill themselves, or become state-sanctioned technicians of murder, or slaughter tens of millions of innocent victims in foreign countries for no other reason than because their CO orders them to, or for that matter, just sit back in the comfort of their living rooms or the sanctity of their judicial chambers and blithely allow the state to go on killing in their name.

A WORLD STILL HOOKED ON THE CROSS

by NEVILLE RAYMOND

We were late for a dinner party.

My wife and kids were in the back seat, and I was motoring over the 101 Freeway through the Cahuenga Pass.

And then I saw it, silhouetted on a hilltop.

A giant cross, radiating its silver light.

It was as if someone had cut a big round silvery moon into two ribbons, pasted them athwart each other, and stuck it in the night sky.

For an instant I thought, “How pretty.”

And then the significance of what I was seeing sank in, and I felt invaded.

Here it was a beautiful night. The sky was cloudless with a star glimmering here and there.

And there was this shape garishly plastered against the sky.

And it was the shape of a grisly apparatus of torture.

What the hell!

Who ever thought it was OK to shove this thing into my field of vision?

A grim instrument of capital punishment.

A barbaric artifact from a time when lawbreakers were publicly crucified and left to die a lingering, excruciating death.

Why was I being reminded of this spectacle - this - this grotesque obscenity?

Here I was, driving to a nice dinner on a tranquil night. The car was filled with the strains of the Pastoral Symphony. The wife and kids were quietly enjoying the ride.

Why did this stomach-turning thing have to raise its ugly head?

Was I the only one to grasp the significance of what I was seeing?

Was no one else outraged?

If this were a neon replica of a giant female breast, people would be up in arms.

If this was a neon model of a giant middle finger thrust into the sky, people would be pulling over in droves and sputtering into their cell phones.

But here was this ghastly testament to the savagery of a bygone era.

And people drove on as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

How come they didn’t realize that they were looking at an ancient version of a gas chamber or electric chair?

Didn’t they realize they might as well be staring at a syringe for a lethal injection, blown up larger than life and illuminated against the heavens?

And then I thought of all the other places where this obscene image was found.

Places of public worship.

Buildings where people go on Sundays to commune with the intelligent being that created life on earth.

At least the CIA has the decency to practice torture in remote places known as dark sites. No one is even supposed to know where they are.

Why are we still flaunting this grisly instrument of torture and death on our most hallowed structures?

Why is it that I cannot pass a place to do reverence to a higher power without finding it decorated with a shameful instrument that was designed to inflict excruciating pain and humiliation?

Isn’t it time we refined our sensibilities?

Isn’t it time that every time we see one of these things, we see an innocent man of Middle Eastern origin being strapped to a waterboard, or having his testicles hooked up to electrodes, or subjected to any of the degrading practices that meet the legal definition of torture?

If we could just recover the power of imagination, would we ever allow such a thing from the Dark Ages to deface our landscape?

And then I remembered the times we were living in.

It was just a few decades ago that the CIA fought Communism by recruiting barbaric warlords who were throwbacks to the Dark Ages.

The medieval wing of Islam was found to be a most useful ally in beating back a liberal, progressive agenda, the way that a mullah beats back a woman with the audacity to bare her face or drive a car.

Just look at how our homegrown Christian Taliban are mobilized to thwart enlightened reforms that would bring the U.S. into line with industrialized democracies in Europe and elsewhere.

I mean, come on. Who did I think I was fooling?

The problem wasn’t a silver cross in the sky.

It was humanity hanging from Old Ike's cross of iron.

It was the supreme rulers of the planet hung up on the bloodthirsty logic of human sacrifice.

It was a belief system that the sons of man had to be scapegoated and crucified en masse - whole economies bled to death, millions stripped of their livelihoods, turned out of their homes with no place to lay their heads, buried under mountains of collective debt, and left to die in godforsaken alleys and tent cities of hunger, illness and neglect.

And all for what? So that a tiny elect can be enthroned in its material idea of heaven?

No wonder ours is an age in which torture has made a comeback as the latest tool in the counterterrorist arsenal.

Really, when you come right down to it, it isn’t that much of a stretch to believe that torture keeps America safe.

It isn’t that far out of line to believe that torture saves American lives.

Not if you believe that an act or torture culminating in death can save the entire human race!

WAR, TRUTH AND FREEDOM - THE ETERNAL TRIANGLE

By Neville Raymond

War, Freedom, Truth. Three concepts that are royalty in the world of ideas. If one of them is the king of kings, it would probably be Freedom. Freedom reigns supreme in our hearts and minds. And so it is not surprising that both War and Truth are anxious to pay court to Freedom and attach themselves to its cause.

Take the idea that we owe our freedom to the brave efforts of men who fight wars. World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - these wars were all fought to keep Americans free, or so we are told. If freedom has a price, it is paid in the currency of human blood. And so every Memorial Day we are treated to a barrage of articles and speeches about how all these wonderful freedoms that we enjoy here in America are brought to us courtesy of the enlisted men in the armed forces.

Then there is that other celebrated idea - that speaking the truth is a liberating act. We can all attest to this in some personal way. There is something refreshingly liberating about throwing off all social constraints and inhibitions and telling it like it is. In politics, there is the ideal of speaking truth to power. It seems that our rights and freedoms are being continually encroached upon by the powers that be, and so, in order to tell the state where to get off, it is necessary to speak truth to power. And of course, the need to speak to truth to power increases in proportion that the freedom of the press is muzzled. All you have to do is a little digging to realize that the corporate media carefully picks and chooses what it tells the public - because if it were unsparing with the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, the option to renew the system as we know it would not be picked up by the American people. I believe it was Napoleon himself - as powerful a political and military leader as he was - who was most candid in his assessment that truth-telling in the media had to be kept to a bare minimum. “If I were to give the liberty of the press, my power could not last three days.”

And finally, there is the real-life observation that during time of war the suppression of free speech is at an all-time high. At best, those who speak out or engage in dissent are the first to have their patriotism questioned. At worst, they run the risk of being branded traitors. Even during peace time, we know that the Pentagon is a watchful censor, rigorously filtering out any sort of historical reality, embarrassing fact or human feeling - whether in TV news or Hollywood movies - that undercuts the righteous image and heroic aura that the military likes to project. Naturally all of this has been summed up in a statement that was made by a U.S. Senator back during World War I, which by now has become axiomatic: “The first casualty when war comes is the truth.”

For most of us, these axiomatic notions casually hang out in our heads, and they come and go without our being aware of how they lethally opposed they are to each other’s existence. We never realize that Freedom, War and Truth are locked into an eternal love triangle. Freedom cannot be legitimately partnered up with War, without shamelessly playing Truth false. And conversely, Freedom cannot be married to Truth without exposing its relationship to War as a sham. But as soon as you get them all in the same room, so to speak, the double-dealing and deceit can no longer be kept up. And as things begin to sort themselves out, you are left with an inescapable conclusion.
If war is the great defender of our freedom, then you would think that war would be the great champion of truth, for as Jesus said, you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. But that is hardly the reality. What you find instead, in a thousand different real-time contexts, is that truth is the first casualty of war - and nothing has proved more subversive to a culture of militarism than the practice of telling the truth.
So what you are left with is an institution like war, that is always claiming to defend our freedoms, and yet as a matter of practical policy is downright hostile to the truth, which, coincidentally, is the very thing that sets us free.