.jpg)
How I Repelled the Advances of
Roman Catholic Pedophilic Priests
When, in Italy, nonne and nonni are at their wits' ends caring for their grandchildren whose father and mother are at the factory or office, they threaten their little hyperactive ones with this cutting admonition: “If you don't stop misbehaving, we'll call the Germans!” When, in New York, my Irishamerican grandmother or her husband lost their patience with me and my sister and brothers, they discouraged us with these words of caution: “If you don't stop showing bad manners, we'll send you to a school where the Irish Christian Brothers teach!” I often wonder whether it would have been more brainy to smack us on our backsides with a curt jolt to our overactive nervous systems instead of filling our tender sentiments with empty threats (I never studied with overtly sadistic clerics) that had no bases in reality and only occupied our minds with junk ideas—enough of them already! Why not tickling? Wouldn't that have done the trick? My parents and grandparents could have tickled my short-lived aggressiveness out of my nerve endings, and because I would have been in fits of hysterical laughter, I would never had been able to file a cease and desist order against them in juvenile court.
The centuries-old despotic streak of the Roman Catholic church (RCc) is well documented. Whether it be the cruelties authenticated during the Inquisition, or the blessings bestowed on nations stringently promoting colonial and imperialistic evildoing, or the collusion with the atrocious Nazi regime (Bavaria, Hitler's stomping grounds, is a citadel of Roman Catholicism) during World War II, or the gratuitous patronage offered to fascist military dictators in Southamerica, or..., there is no doubt that the RCc serves not always as an eleemosynary spiritual leader bent on encouraging the Christian virtues it so vociferously exacts others to simulate. Nothing and no one is perfect, you might say.
Nevertheless, we have an earnest discrepancy here when we set about finagling a logic which might in some determined fashion legitimize the actions of one of Christianity's most powerful spiritual institutions, and a divergence even its wishy-washy but authoritarian RCc archpriests and women servants married to God cannot contravene. Out of the mouths of pious religionists affiliated with the RCc, which I know best, there oodles a barrage of love, peace and hugs for all of us which does not trip the light fantastic with many of the actions of the RCc carried through during the two long millennia that it has subsisted.
Two direful personal observations taken from my university and military days come right away to my mind and these offer further cogent evidence that bear witness to the megascopic sanctimoniousness of the RCc. The first is its loathsome frame of mind with regard to women. Females are not only deprecated by RCc clerics themselves, the warped dogmas of the church's canons serve to handle women as second-class, docile laborers assigned to cook, clean and, above all, teach little Catholic rascals their catechisms and the Ten Commandments they will so diligently, so relentlessly disobey and then constantly seek forgiveness for their infringements of them. When I attended St. Bonaventure University, I was stunned one day in World History class when an often drunk Franciscan friar, nicknamed “The Spike” for his harshness, instructed the three female students in our class of thirty-five (set in alphabetical order by “The Spike”) to “occupy the front row, cross your legs, and close the Gates of Hell.” All the “Bonnie men” in the room ripped out with huge roars of laughter. The three ladies sat petrified in silence. At St. Bonaventure sadistic pranks were frequently perpetrated not only on female co-eds, even nuns who attended the learning “institution” were victimized by often drunk, childish “Bonnie men” trying desperately to be something they were not. If only James Joyce had attended St. Bonaventure University! His A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man would have enjoyed a slew of additional anecdotes testifying to the stupidity of untested, horny Roman Catholic boys endeavoring to be adult males.
It is late August 1967. I am sitting in a Continental airline's Boeing 707 at Travis Air Force Base, California set for takeoff to Saigon—via Guam and Manila. There is only one “class.” The whole plane is divided into two sections: one and the other of rows of three from forward to aft. Still, officers are at the front of the jet. I'm to the left, seated five or six rows from the front, in the middle. On my left, at the window seat, is a US Army chaplain. Captain. (Captain is the entry rank for lawyers, doctors, dentists and religious types into the US Army—those who have something to say to you and something to ask you to pay for! RHIP. Rank Has Its Privileges!) He tells me he is a Trappist monk on leave from his monastery “so I can go to Vietnam to help the boys.” We talk some in flight, but for the most part, like most of the others in the plane who are not drunk, we remain mostly mum about our feelings and are immersed in thoughts of what might befall us. We are told we are descending and will land at Guam for a fuel stop. As we touch down, I see to my left ranks and ranks of B-52 bombers! The sight is shocking. I give up counting—there are so many! The Trappist monk, to my amazement, is fanning crosses, is blessing the B-52s!
Then there was the Fourth Division's caput chaplain, a full-bird (chicken [sic]) colonel, Irishman from Brooklyn, New York. This person of grotesque appearance was a blustering, overbearing character who made no bones about pushing his Roman Catholicism wherever he visited throughout the Fourth Division's base camp. Every so often, in his freshly-starched fatigues and boots spit-shined by Vietnamese workers who were permitted to work in the BC for $1.00 a day, a polished chopper reserved for high-ranking officers would carry him to the battlefield to give general absolution to the troops. One day when I was jumping up and down with nervousness about an impending combat assault into unknown enemy territory, the chaplain's copter clock-clocked above and spiraled down to meet us at our “saddle up” area. About to be inserted first into a suspect enemy location in waves of three-a-breast Huey choppers, all members of my forward observer party then those of the infantry company to which we were attached were terribly anxious thinking whether or not we would jump into open fields and find ourselves on a “hot” LZ (landing zone). The warriorlike man of the cloth walked over to the largest group, and without saying a word or even asking if there might be any Roman Catholics there, put a purple sash (stole) around his neck and began absolving all in sight their sins—he too fanning crosses over the men! After confession, the colonel returned to base camp to count communion wafers for the next day's mass and then went on a priggish binge pulling Playboy centerfolds off the walls of soldiers' barracks! (Guess the name of the patron/patroness saint of the Artillery!)
A more contemporary transgression—that has caused the declining RCc not only outpourings of protest and has dishonored it irreparably demanding of it astounding accumulations of its wealth—is the scandal of pedophilia that has concerned an abundant number of its brothers and sisters and priests. Throughout the world, high-ranking RCc authorities have scurried to squelch the thousands and thousands of victims' revelations of maltreatment perpetrated by Roman Catholic churchmen and churchwomen. The RCc officials have offered the unfortunate characters monetary compensation if they waiver their legal claims and refuse to accept media coverage which might detail the events of their sexual abuses many of which were suffered at so tender an age, it would take a lifetime for them to come to grips with themselves and finally muster the courage to admit that which they were subjected to by the promiscuous religious associates of the RCc.
Papal crackerjacks of legalese have not been successful in crunching down the outrages caused by decades-old pedophilic dereliction in Ireland and the DisUnited States, but they have had success in France, Italy, Portugal and Spain where the RCc holds powerful sway in the media and political institutions. The “Devil” would need to be interviewed to determine the exact number of RCc clerics involved in sexual abuse among themselves and others not belonging to their religious secret club.
The thought of pedophilia at once brings a sense of repulsion to most individuals. This astonishment very often also provokes the curious to investigate the subject, and today there are innumerable websites where access to unnatural sex acts—even among animals—is casual for those who still do not own pedophilic predilections.
The repugnance for pedophilia is rooted in the notion that an unknowing, ingenuous child (boy or girl) is overwhelmed, seduced by a consenting adult (man or woman) who performs sexual acts that normally are the reserve of willing adults (mature individuals)—only. It is understood that a child is neither prepared nor competent enough emotionally to respond to the sexual inclinations of an adult who is both sexually more sophisticated and indeed more clever about the exigencies of life. In a pedophilic relationship, the child is someone who is initiated abruptly into the sexual rite without having the astuteness to say yes or no. Not only is the child's body invaded, his or her mind is interpenetrated by an individual whose lasciviousness is superimposed on the injured one by means of verbal deceit and trickery which could not have been contended by the minor.
When a priest or brother or sister engages in pedophilic matings, the disapprobation is magnified further. We do not expect those—for example, politicians—who constantly preach to us concerning our manners of performing, to flout the rules established for all of us to obey. We feel betrayed when they do so. We believe we have been duped. (The voting records of Northamericans testifies to the “faith” they hold in their politicians!) Ecclesiastical double crossing has encouraged many Roman Catholics to abandon the RCc, and today the RCc is in a scramble to recoup the religious formidableness it once possessed. (It took the RCc four-hundred years to accept the teachings of Galileo Galilei [1564-1642]! When will it permit gay and non-gay marriages among its spiritual leaders?)
Yet, there is another aspect concerning religious pedophilia which should be mentioned. A youngster who is inveigled by a clergyman or clergywoman is approached by an individual who is a symbol of an institutionalized say-so, dominance. The brother or sister or priest is garbed in those robes which relate to a two-millennia tradition that basks in an almost universal acquiescence. It is often easier for an ecclesiastic, whether male or female, to lure because he or she is propped up with a visible assurance that is spontaneous—as when a police official flashes his badge before us and wants to see our documents or a pregnant woman requests a seat on a bus. A child can be more easily overpowered sexually by a pedophilic reverend than by an old man or woman, with children as their preferred sexual object, sitting on a park bench. Consequently, mothers and fathers of children, who frequent Roman Catholic religious and social activities, must be cautious. Kids are not to be left alone with brothers, nuns and/or priests. Beware of the confessional. Many, many sexual impieties have been committed in confessional boxes.
From when I was a boy of twelve years (1957) to that of being a young adult of twenty-one (1966), I lived the most dramatic and depressing time of my life. For it was during that period that I had to succumb to the pedagogy of the Roman Catholic church dictated to me by priests and an occasional nun. I recall suffering enormously trying to understand why I had to accept various nonsensical precepts—merely obligated to believe them as a matter of faith. This tore at my intellectual faculties strenuously primarily because I felt alone, with no one to sync with my notions. It was a joyous day for me when I was “let out” of St. Bonaventure University's internment camp of Roman Catholic religious dogma. (See St. Bonaventure University: A Gulag of Militaristic, Sexual & Philosophical Indoctrination on www.scribd.com/thewordwarrior.)
I have reported the five Irishamerican Roman Catholic priests, who I believe approached me seeking illicit sexual relations, to Barbara Blaine and David Clohessy of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (www.snapnetwork.org) not because I was victimized by them, I was not, but because my “testimony” might help others who reluctantly could have been their sexual prey. I support the efforts of SNAP, and I am perspicacious enough to know that the RCc does not hold the registered trademark on pedophilia—nevertheless, many of its members are foremost practitioners of sexual perversion in which children are the preferred sexual object.
Why did I not become pedophilic quarry for the priests who were my instructors for almost a decade? There are two main reasons. The first regards the respect for women which, inadvertently, was the norm in my upbringing. My mother, some aunts and older female cousins held positions of authority in public and private organizations in New York, and these “role models” encouraged me, at a very early age, to come to expect that women were, like men, held in high regard by society in general. It was a terrible awakening for me when, in later years, I would come to learn that women did not enjoy the high esteem that many of my family members experienced working as professionals and managers in the not-terribly-so feminist 1950s. However, from 1957 to 1966 I carried with me the idea that gentlewomen were on an even par with gentlemen socially, politically and economically. Therefore, their role and my part to be with them, was what I envisioned for myself as I grew older.
Secondly, my sexual disposition is decidedly focused on females. There are a number of reasons for this. One in particular is the fact that when I was a small boy, five girls, who shared an apartment with their widowed mother and lived directly above my family, took an interest in me and frequently served as my babysitter. I received their affection and goodwill and I recollect best that time when I reflect on a passage from my manuscript, Why I Live Beyond the DisUnited States of Northamerica:
...I was in the back seat of the car with three of the sisters.
The girls were all modestly dressed and wore pants or shifts
over their drying bathing suits. Their lightweight summer wear,
colorful blouses and tee-shirts, let me view their anatomy with
intense interest, and I remember peeking at the depression
between one of the girl's breasts—made visible by her wearing
of a loosely-fitted shirt top—and taking peeps to take in
more of this lass sitting closest to the window on the right
side in the rear of what was, I can only guess now, a Ford
automobile. Or, was it a Chevrolet?
I was fascinated by the mounds of flesh protruding from
the chests of these girl-women. I counted ten “lumps” under
the cotton clothing covering the bosoms of the five sisters.
I would never have dared to make an effort to touch these
enormous, marshmallowy-like protrusions which I did not
even know incorporated—on their tips—protuberances,
lactiferous ducts of the girls' mammary glands, which opened
and from which their milk would one day be drawn to nurture
baby girls and baby boys. I know not why I did not make
real this cogent want. The wish to do so, however, was
embedded obsessively in my boyish desire, and in the years
to come would torment me excruciatingly. My day would
come, but I had to wait for it. I sank back down into the
seat of the car, into a sort of puerile puzzlement. I was too
green indeed to murmur the smooth, silver-tongued word
“Why?”
Overwhelmed in the simplemindedness of my callow
singularity, there was nothing for me to do but absorb the
sensory voluptuousness that spun around me lodged there
in the back part of that Ford—or Chevy. Women's breasts
and pretty dresses and wavy hair were not the only
impressions that landed ingratiatingly on my organ of
thought left there to commingle ultimately with a lifelong
peppering of imprecise feelings which, in toto, would
constitute that what I am.
For instance, there were scents to get a whiff of. Suntan
lotions. Lipsticks. Deodorants. Nail polishes. Makeup.
The odor that swelled out from an opened handbag.
Chewing gum. Hair that had been shampooed at the showers
along the beach. Perfume? I can't remember. But I do recall,
later in life, I could be strolling down a street in Caracas
or Rome and if a woman passed me by, buzzing away
and leaving me in the downdraft of her perfume or makeup
foundation, a precise fragrance, I could be drawn back
twenty—even thirty—years to a place in time and space and
to a woman I desired and loved. I could see her face and
easily summon up the surroundings of a room, a restaurant
where we shared the joy of being together.
As we traveled home to Brooklyn, a myriad of aromas were
fanned about my face, from all directions. From time to time,
they coalesced to create one unique trail of a pleasant
air that swept through my nostrils and stimulated me
into a goofy self-satisfaction. Otherwise, one outstanding
redolence, perhaps a maquillage or a sticky aerosol used
to hold hair in place, would impress me and I would
download this smell into my personal cornucopia where
it rested with the many others—gleeful reminders to me
of the distinctions possessed, I assumed, by whichever
member of the gentle sex.
And Music!!! To this day, I possess almost perfect images
of the radio's speaker with a chromed grill protecting it
and the two black knobs flanking it: one for tuning and
the other for volume/on/off. Under one nub there was a
metal ring that could be manipulated to control the tone
and vary it from high to low. The antenna was on the left
side fender of the car and through it a hodgepodge of
popular music waved through the car to the merriment
of all of us. One girl snapped her fingers. Another kept
time to the Music by tapping her foot. A couple of sisters
sang. One clapped to the beat. When a song faded away,
the girl in the “shotgun” seat immediately turned the
tuning knob searching to come up with another hit record
for us to sing and hum within our ecstasy which was
enclosed in the closed quarters of an automobile and not in
the open space of, for example, a dance floor. I cannot
construct a list of the songs I heard that evening coming
home from the cool beach and then flowing happily into
the sweltering streets of Brooklyn. It surely was not the
rock n' roll era. In those days Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald,
Frankie Lane, Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee,
Louis Armstrong and a host of other post-World War II
musical phenomena held sway in the recording industry.
And today, when I hear the Music of these hall-of-famers,
I wonder if it was their songs we had enjoyed in that car
returning to 310 Devoe Street on a sultry summer's night.
Jerking home—with the shifting of gears—to Brooklyn in the
congested beach traffic and yearning earnestly that I could
remain forever in the bosom of my five-member
sisterhood—all of whom I thralled at my beck and
call!--it would have been preposterous to think that I
could ever have roused in my mind the idea that Woman
and Music would come to be such an integral component
of my essence and abide in my psyche for the rest of
my life. There was no way for me to guess my forthcoming
and I unquestionably could not even have rationalized,
at my tender age, that I, too, would one day flourish to be
as complete as were the five girls with me in the car. I was
a boy being bombarded by bevies of empirical impressions
which I was powerless to categorize or interpret.
The way home was closing the more on Williamsburg.
The mademoiselles were fretting about the swelter,
foreseeing doing something more tantalizing after, and
trying their best to make the time flash by faster. Naturally,
I was delighted with the delay. Nothing in this world had
been before more pleasing to me than being now with my
five young unmarried women. I had it in my heart to stay
in saecula saeculorum in this serendipitous state. I was bent
upon nailing this splendid time to the wall—to keep it there.
I selfishly sought to pickle myself in the juices of this
thrilling companionship trusting that it would be conserved
for my eternity.
Maybe about an hour before getting to our destination—my
sunburnt skin and beginning-to-growl stomach had levied on
me an-end-of-the-day drowsiness and I had perched my
head on the top of the front seat—that inamorata, closest
to the window (was her name Pat?), took me into her arms
and laid my boyishness on the cushioning of her bosom!
I limpened in the tenderness of her geniality. Her smells
enveloped me right off. I was wrapped in that field of
energy that emanated from her flesh and blood, and as
tickled pink as a piglet in a pigpen, I curled up cozily and
every once in a while switched the position of my head
in order to find an even softer place amongst her doughy
front or to sample the texture—to see if it was equal to
the other portions—of another part of her two breasts.
Never once did the desire to quaff upon her cross my
mind. I did not seek nutrients. Eating was the last thing
on my mind. I craved emotional contentment. And I
was filling myself up with barrows of it. There was
nothing that could have made me happier than this
sensation of proximity to a woman. I could not doze off...
There was no way a male religionist—wreaking of cigarette smoke, dressed in black, the sleeves of his cassock snowed upon with chalk dusk, his breath bringing on the smells of beer or whisky, his skin coarse—was going to come so near to me where he might attempt to entice me into joining in with him in the performance of salacious sex acts. Amen!!!
Authored by Anthony St. John
1 February MMX
Calenzano, Italia
* * *
Monday, February 1, 2010
Friday, January 1, 2010
What I Am
Most Proud Of...
I write well.
I write poetry.
I appreciate Beethoven.
I prize many varieties of music.
I enjoy reading the English version of
Marcel Proust's
A la recherche du temps perdu
translated by G K Scott Moncrieff.
David Hume is my preferred philosopher.
I am indebted to Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell.
I delight in the company of others.
I can make people laugh.
I use public transport exclusively.
I was interviewed by Larry King.
I have not been in the DisUnited States of Northamerica since 31 December 1975.
I am an atheist.
I was born in Brooklyn, New York.
I did not permit the Roman Catholic church to quash me physically
or intellectually.
I have kissed three Italian princesses:
La Principessa Marcella Borghese, La Principessa Giorgiana Corsini, and
La Principessa Fiona Corsini.
I did not murder when I was an artillery officer in Vietnam.
I fight with my words not my fists.
I am TheWordWarrior!
I admire beautiful women.
When I watch a sporting event, I mute the sound.
I renounced my DisUnited States' citizenship.
I am a mitigated Marxist.
My electric bill is the lowest in my apartment building.
I read at least four or five or six or seven books at a time.
I possess a built-in instinct for what is insincere.
I have refused to recognize the three medals I was awarded for service in Vietnam.
I relish cigars.
I survived an airplane crash.
I listen to classical music (www.wqxr.org and www.retetoscanaclassica.it)
every day.
I outlasted two armed robberies.
Every time I encounter an Italian priest or sister,
I ask them if Hell is big enough to accommodate 57,000,000 Italians.
I pulled through two 122mm Chinese rocket attacks on the Cambodian-Laotian borders.
I outlived assorted mortar barrages in Vietnam.
I understand the Venezuelan people.
I have two doctors: Dr Diet & Dr Repose.
I comprehend the Italians.
I am a fan of Roger Federer but hope he has no “stupid” or criminal skeletons in his closet!
I walk as much as I can.
I bicycle for pleasure.
I suggest that young children be disciplined by tickling them—not
slugging them.
I was discharged by the State of Florida's
Division of Family Services because I refused to swindle
Afroamericans living in the ghetto of Fort Lauderdale
where I served as a social worker.
I was a journalist for three newspapers.
I was a copy editor for Venezuela's English-speaking daily.
My sensitivity for people's suffering and the incredulity I possess in watching them do all they can to worsen their condition.
My respect for Nature.
I do not own a motor vehicle.
My will to preserve the natural resources I depend upon.
My hope in the future.
My utilization of the computer and Internet.
The varied work experiences I have had in my life.
The extensive listing of subjects that influence my reading.
I have no respect for Tony Blair, John Bolton, Thomas Friedman, Francis Fukuyama, Al Gore, Stanley Hoffmann, Samuel Huntington, Robert Kagan, John Kerry, Henry Kissinger, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, John McCain, Norman Podhoretz, George Will, Paul Wolfowitz,...and others of this ilk.
I admire Daniel Bell, Fausto Bertinotti, Hugo Chávez, Noam Chomsky, Hillary Clinton, Paul A Cohen, Rodney Dangerfield, Richard Dawkins, Simone de Beauvoir, Barbara Dorris, Vittoria Franco, Eric Hobsbawn, Martin Jacques, Peter Lavelle, Karl Marx, Alain Minc, Robert Reich, Don Rickles, Joan Rivers, Ségolène Royal, Edward W Said, Israel Shamir, Peter Singer, Sun Tzu, Gore Vidal, Oscar Wilde, Howard Zinn,...among others.
Updated: 29 December 2009
Anthony St. John: www.scribd.com/thewordwarrior
* * *
Most Proud Of...
I write well.
I write poetry.
I appreciate Beethoven.
I prize many varieties of music.
I enjoy reading the English version of
Marcel Proust's
A la recherche du temps perdu
translated by G K Scott Moncrieff.
David Hume is my preferred philosopher.
I am indebted to Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell.
I delight in the company of others.
I can make people laugh.
I use public transport exclusively.
I was interviewed by Larry King.
I have not been in the DisUnited States of Northamerica since 31 December 1975.
I am an atheist.
I was born in Brooklyn, New York.
I did not permit the Roman Catholic church to quash me physically
or intellectually.
I have kissed three Italian princesses:
La Principessa Marcella Borghese, La Principessa Giorgiana Corsini, and
La Principessa Fiona Corsini.
I did not murder when I was an artillery officer in Vietnam.
I fight with my words not my fists.
I am TheWordWarrior!
I admire beautiful women.
When I watch a sporting event, I mute the sound.
I renounced my DisUnited States' citizenship.
I am a mitigated Marxist.
My electric bill is the lowest in my apartment building.
I read at least four or five or six or seven books at a time.
I possess a built-in instinct for what is insincere.
I have refused to recognize the three medals I was awarded for service in Vietnam.
I relish cigars.
I survived an airplane crash.
I listen to classical music (www.wqxr.org and www.retetoscanaclassica.it)
every day.
I outlasted two armed robberies.
Every time I encounter an Italian priest or sister,
I ask them if Hell is big enough to accommodate 57,000,000 Italians.
I pulled through two 122mm Chinese rocket attacks on the Cambodian-Laotian borders.
I outlived assorted mortar barrages in Vietnam.
I understand the Venezuelan people.
I have two doctors: Dr Diet & Dr Repose.
I comprehend the Italians.
I am a fan of Roger Federer but hope he has no “stupid” or criminal skeletons in his closet!
I walk as much as I can.
I bicycle for pleasure.
I suggest that young children be disciplined by tickling them—not
slugging them.
I was discharged by the State of Florida's
Division of Family Services because I refused to swindle
Afroamericans living in the ghetto of Fort Lauderdale
where I served as a social worker.
I was a journalist for three newspapers.
I was a copy editor for Venezuela's English-speaking daily.
My sensitivity for people's suffering and the incredulity I possess in watching them do all they can to worsen their condition.
My respect for Nature.
I do not own a motor vehicle.
My will to preserve the natural resources I depend upon.
My hope in the future.
My utilization of the computer and Internet.
The varied work experiences I have had in my life.
The extensive listing of subjects that influence my reading.
I have no respect for Tony Blair, John Bolton, Thomas Friedman, Francis Fukuyama, Al Gore, Stanley Hoffmann, Samuel Huntington, Robert Kagan, John Kerry, Henry Kissinger, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, John McCain, Norman Podhoretz, George Will, Paul Wolfowitz,...and others of this ilk.
I admire Daniel Bell, Fausto Bertinotti, Hugo Chávez, Noam Chomsky, Hillary Clinton, Paul A Cohen, Rodney Dangerfield, Richard Dawkins, Simone de Beauvoir, Barbara Dorris, Vittoria Franco, Eric Hobsbawn, Martin Jacques, Peter Lavelle, Karl Marx, Alain Minc, Robert Reich, Don Rickles, Joan Rivers, Ségolène Royal, Edward W Said, Israel Shamir, Peter Singer, Sun Tzu, Gore Vidal, Oscar Wilde, Howard Zinn,...among others.
Updated: 29 December 2009
Anthony St. John: www.scribd.com/thewordwarrior
* * *
Lamento per L’Europa
Terra del Sole Calante
Calderone ribollente in famelica disperazione
Per ritrovare i sapori del Passato.
Tu cerchi di proiettarti in avanti
Sull’energia della Tua logica
E di speranze non ancora idealizzate.
Tu invochi la Tua storia
Per rinvigorire le Tue fantasie.
Ti avvinghi stretta al Tuo orgoglioso io
Screpolato e corroso dalle intemperie.
Ti sforzi di far crescere nuovi fiori
Dalla putredine delle Tue tormentate memorie.
I Tuoi giovani, annusati da squadre di cani al guinzaglio,
Violentano-odiano nei Tuoi stadi
Strisciati con allettamenti elettronici
A premere morbidi e colorati bottoni di plastica.
I Tuoi vecchi serpeggiano stancamente verso ministeri della sanità in rovina
Dove i medici si trastullano con i moduli
E riempiono schedine del totocalcio.
I Tuoi vicini dell’Est—
Arroganti, sordidi—
Si aggrappano a Te
Pretendendo rudemente ciò che bramano e credono dovuto.
Tu, Europa, siedi imbalsamata—
Impregnata dei succhi del Tuo spregevole tempo che fu.
I Tuoi politici dilettanti spiegano bandiere
E i loro poteri vergognano—
Vergognano!—
Questo Nostro mondo.
Anthony St. John
Terra del Sole Calante
Calderone ribollente in famelica disperazione
Per ritrovare i sapori del Passato.
Tu cerchi di proiettarti in avanti
Sull’energia della Tua logica
E di speranze non ancora idealizzate.
Tu invochi la Tua storia
Per rinvigorire le Tue fantasie.
Ti avvinghi stretta al Tuo orgoglioso io
Screpolato e corroso dalle intemperie.
Ti sforzi di far crescere nuovi fiori
Dalla putredine delle Tue tormentate memorie.
I Tuoi giovani, annusati da squadre di cani al guinzaglio,
Violentano-odiano nei Tuoi stadi
Strisciati con allettamenti elettronici
A premere morbidi e colorati bottoni di plastica.
I Tuoi vecchi serpeggiano stancamente verso ministeri della sanità in rovina
Dove i medici si trastullano con i moduli
E riempiono schedine del totocalcio.
I Tuoi vicini dell’Est—
Arroganti, sordidi—
Si aggrappano a Te
Pretendendo rudemente ciò che bramano e credono dovuto.
Tu, Europa, siedi imbalsamata—
Impregnata dei succhi del Tuo spregevole tempo che fu.
I Tuoi politici dilettanti spiegano bandiere
E i loro poteri vergognano—
Vergognano!—
Questo Nostro mondo.
Anthony St. John
A Lament for Europe
Land of the Setting Sun
Caldron simmering in hungering desperation
To regain the smacks of the Past.
You seek to lunge ahead
On the energy of Your logic
And hopes not yet lionized.
You call upon Your histories
To lend strength to Your phantasies.
You coil up hard on Your proud self
Wrinkled and weather-beaten.
You struggle to nurture new flowers
On the dry rot of Your haunted memories.
Your youth, sniffed upon by strapped canine squads,
Rape-hate in Your stadiums
Striped with electronic rejoinders
To press softly-pliant, gaily-tinged plastic buttons.
Your elderly curl their ways to bankrupt health ministries
Where physicians fool with forms
And fill in football pools.
Your neighbors to the East—
Brazen, sordid—
Yank towards You
Roughly extracting for exacting theirs craved for.
You, Europe, sit pickled—
Soused in the juices of Your scummy heretofore.
Your dabblers in politics set flags unfurled
And their powers shame—
Shame!—
This Our world.
Anthony St. John
Land of the Setting Sun
Caldron simmering in hungering desperation
To regain the smacks of the Past.
You seek to lunge ahead
On the energy of Your logic
And hopes not yet lionized.
You call upon Your histories
To lend strength to Your phantasies.
You coil up hard on Your proud self
Wrinkled and weather-beaten.
You struggle to nurture new flowers
On the dry rot of Your haunted memories.
Your youth, sniffed upon by strapped canine squads,
Rape-hate in Your stadiums
Striped with electronic rejoinders
To press softly-pliant, gaily-tinged plastic buttons.
Your elderly curl their ways to bankrupt health ministries
Where physicians fool with forms
And fill in football pools.
Your neighbors to the East—
Brazen, sordid—
Yank towards You
Roughly extracting for exacting theirs craved for.
You, Europe, sit pickled—
Soused in the juices of Your scummy heretofore.
Your dabblers in politics set flags unfurled
And their powers shame—
Shame!—
This Our world.
Anthony St. John
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Plastic Flowers for Italians
Butchered in Auto Accidents
Just as in any other Christian, particularly Roman Catholic, nation where religion molds overly the social, economic and political mores of its inhabitants, there is a premium especially, in Italy, on objects that reflect miserableness whether they be crucifixes, hermetically-sealed glass coffins containing dead-for-centuries holy people, statues dripping with blood, priests with holes in their hands, bleeding sacred hearts...ad infinitum. From my perspective, these symbols prompt the Italians I live with to accommodate a unique disposition that induces them to lament. And they do it so well! But what is worse, Italians expect you to join in with them in sharing happenings which, in other cultures, might not be thought of as being edifying. Italians want to be felt sorry for. The “catch-22” here is that if you do commiserate, you are doing yourself a good deed, and for that you should be thankful to the Italians for this blessed opportunity. An Italian will not thank you. You must thank him or her. By giving thanks, you submit. Nothing pleases the racist Italians more than your recognition of their quasi-fascist sense of superiority, their contrived haughtiness. Half of the Italians live in the 1930s; the other half live in the 1960s. These desperate souls are struggling in vain to be something they are not without acknowledging the dreadfully tragic consequences of their actions which are often violent and self-destructive.
It is customary to see plastic containers or milk cartons holding flowers attached to poles or fences near to where an automobile or motorcycle mishap killed an often inebriated or doped Italian causal agent. Years ago there used to be real flowers in these make-shift recipients, but today they are plastic and in some places, where collisions are frequent, ten to fifteen bouquets might be visualized in rows—propped up there sometimes for years, the artificial floral arrangements now blanched by the sun and covered with the soot and grime from passing buses, trucks, cars, scooters and even, on occasion, horse-drawn carriages.
One late morning in Sesto Fiorentino, I approached the bus stop where I was to wait to travel on to Firenze. About four or five metres beyond, I could see a young woman kneeling down and preparing to set up a composition of “live” flowers which laid on the pavement in rolled newspaper pages right next to her. I went over.
“May I ask what you are doing, please?”
She looked up startled and responded compactly, but very softly:
“I'm composing these flowers for my brother.”
“Your brother?” I quizzed.
“Yes. He was killed here four years ago in a motorcycle accident.
I come here every month with flowers for him.”
I told her I was very sorry and she nodded her appreciation very demurely.
She was a comely individual and exceptionally sensitive in the way she expressed herself.
I wanted to do something for her.
I changed the tone of my voice somewhat to express my seriousness.
“Do you really think your brother would want you to be here so sad
commemorating his brutal death again and again and again?
Don't you think he would want you to go on with your life--
to be happy, to be free from the gloominess this tragedy causes you?”
In an instant, she burst out sobbing.
Her face was red as a beet.
I put my hand on her shoulder to soothe her.
Suddenly, she stood up.
Erect.
As if she had been regenerated.
She closed in on me and abruptly hugged me almost violently.
“Thank you.”
She walked away.
The flowers remained on the sidewalk.
I refused to call after her.
When she turned out of sight at the corner,
I picked up the flowers.
I returned to the bus stop.
I waited for a beautiful woman to pass by,
and when one did, I presented the beauties to her.
She was taken aback.
“For me?”
“Of course!”
“But why?”
“You are beautiful!”
Her face was red as a beet, too.
* * *
Authored by Anthony St. John
15 December 2009
Calenzano, Italy
Butchered in Auto Accidents
Just as in any other Christian, particularly Roman Catholic, nation where religion molds overly the social, economic and political mores of its inhabitants, there is a premium especially, in Italy, on objects that reflect miserableness whether they be crucifixes, hermetically-sealed glass coffins containing dead-for-centuries holy people, statues dripping with blood, priests with holes in their hands, bleeding sacred hearts...ad infinitum. From my perspective, these symbols prompt the Italians I live with to accommodate a unique disposition that induces them to lament. And they do it so well! But what is worse, Italians expect you to join in with them in sharing happenings which, in other cultures, might not be thought of as being edifying. Italians want to be felt sorry for. The “catch-22” here is that if you do commiserate, you are doing yourself a good deed, and for that you should be thankful to the Italians for this blessed opportunity. An Italian will not thank you. You must thank him or her. By giving thanks, you submit. Nothing pleases the racist Italians more than your recognition of their quasi-fascist sense of superiority, their contrived haughtiness. Half of the Italians live in the 1930s; the other half live in the 1960s. These desperate souls are struggling in vain to be something they are not without acknowledging the dreadfully tragic consequences of their actions which are often violent and self-destructive.
It is customary to see plastic containers or milk cartons holding flowers attached to poles or fences near to where an automobile or motorcycle mishap killed an often inebriated or doped Italian causal agent. Years ago there used to be real flowers in these make-shift recipients, but today they are plastic and in some places, where collisions are frequent, ten to fifteen bouquets might be visualized in rows—propped up there sometimes for years, the artificial floral arrangements now blanched by the sun and covered with the soot and grime from passing buses, trucks, cars, scooters and even, on occasion, horse-drawn carriages.
One late morning in Sesto Fiorentino, I approached the bus stop where I was to wait to travel on to Firenze. About four or five metres beyond, I could see a young woman kneeling down and preparing to set up a composition of “live” flowers which laid on the pavement in rolled newspaper pages right next to her. I went over.
“May I ask what you are doing, please?”
She looked up startled and responded compactly, but very softly:
“I'm composing these flowers for my brother.”
“Your brother?” I quizzed.
“Yes. He was killed here four years ago in a motorcycle accident.
I come here every month with flowers for him.”
I told her I was very sorry and she nodded her appreciation very demurely.
She was a comely individual and exceptionally sensitive in the way she expressed herself.
I wanted to do something for her.
I changed the tone of my voice somewhat to express my seriousness.
“Do you really think your brother would want you to be here so sad
commemorating his brutal death again and again and again?
Don't you think he would want you to go on with your life--
to be happy, to be free from the gloominess this tragedy causes you?”
In an instant, she burst out sobbing.
Her face was red as a beet.
I put my hand on her shoulder to soothe her.
Suddenly, she stood up.
Erect.
As if she had been regenerated.
She closed in on me and abruptly hugged me almost violently.
“Thank you.”
She walked away.
The flowers remained on the sidewalk.
I refused to call after her.
When she turned out of sight at the corner,
I picked up the flowers.
I returned to the bus stop.
I waited for a beautiful woman to pass by,
and when one did, I presented the beauties to her.
She was taken aback.
“For me?”
“Of course!”
“But why?”
“You are beautiful!”
Her face was red as a beet, too.
* * *
Authored by Anthony St. John
15 December 2009
Calenzano, Italy
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Why I Pity
John McCain, John Kerry &
Al Gore
I was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan, watched games at Ebbets Field, and first baseman Gil Hodges (number 14) was my hero. A mythical being charges you with a sense of hope in some future which you know nothing about except that it is coming. You desire to imitate your hero because his past brought him to a hereafter you might also want to savor. Above all, a hero is doing something appreciated by all, and we look up to him or her with respect and admiration. It is natural to want to be like them.
Of course, there is the allure of the game before us in the stadium, on TV, or on the Internet. The contest gives a sense of security. The regulations are fixed and one cannot contest the umpire or referee. We can cheat on our income tax returns, we can talk a cop out of giving us a ticket, we can lie and call in sick when we are not—but on the field, on the court, the ref is high-and-mighty. At the game, we more or less feel that things will be managed in a logical, fair-and-square manner. Just the opposite of our material lives. And we want our heroes to be not only extraordinary in the ways they entertain us, we also wish that they play by the rules so that they appear impeccable in our phantasy worlds.
It is undignified that we make heroes of sport figures more than we do of writers, scientists, philosophers, physicians, poets or others who might be actually doing more to benefit our time to come than one making a winning jump shot at the buzzer. We are significantly more precarious in our outlooks on life than we are fixed contentedly in them. Sport suffices to fill some inexplicable gap germane to our dire straits.
Naturally, sports are more useful than street fights or warfare. Sports serve to distract us from the tedium of our lives, and when we sit down in a stadium or colosseum to enjoy a sporting event, we enter into the spirits of our heroes and become oblivious to the difficulties we are experiencing at home or in the office. The Greeks were the first to elaborate on this relevancy. Of course, it is not the responsibility of sport to encourage us to read a book or attend a symphony. We should likewise recognize that players are stressing both their bodies and intelligences to limits most of us fail to come near to doing so. This is one of the reasons we applaud them.
In this article, I wish to discuss that which is not heroic. And more, I wish to expand on the consequences of making something larger-than-life out of something crass and perverted: in other words, I want to zero in on an enormous distortion of The Truth that I witnessed during the Vietnam “War” and the consequences of its calamitous aftermath which still haunt the psyches of the citizenry belonging to the DisUnited States of Northamerica.
No military maneuver, whether it be a Brobdingnagian battle or a single incursion, will succeed without a network of an indefinite quantity of materiel backing up its soldiery. Soldiers need to eat, sleep, be medicated, be entertained, be paid... An army that is furnished to the hilt stands a better chance of winning the group action than one which is wanting in giving its troops that what they require. The DisUnited States of Northamerica is an illusionist at offering the world the idea that it is so well-equipped it might dot the globe with its state of the art weaponry and most modern ground forces. There is no doubt that the DUS has been successful in the past (World War I and World War II) in supplying its troops with an adequate amount of provisions to get the war job done, but Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan have corroborated the notion that the most sophisticated armaments and the most galactic dollar investment are not the sure bets they were before. And because the DUS's forces are scattered among almost eight-hundred bases throughout our terrestrial planet, their supply networks today are less efficient and, indeed, less agile when responding on the pickup. (The Art of War by Sun Tzu!)
My case in point, notwithstanding, is the Vietnam “War,” or better said the Vietnam Debacle. From its inception this military police action was haunted with doubt and confusion about its intended purpose and eventual outcome. The DUS was split sometimes violently as the intervention protracted itself for many years. Apart from the deaths (58,209) and wounded (304,704), the emotional scars caused by the conflict are still ostensible today even so two other foolish expeditionary penetrations divide the DUS and stress its financial stability dangerously. There is in the air the horrible idea that a war, whatever one, has to be won in order to “correct” the failure, the defeat, sustained in Vietnam still trivialized by hawkish elements with the repugnant word “Nam.”
But what put one of the many monkeys on the DUS armed forces' back during the Vietnam conflict was the new conception of an air force, army and navy force fed to new recruits and seasoned lifers alike and boosted vigorously by an ex-president of the Ford Motor Company, the Vietnam era's budget-minded paper pusher and corporate plumber Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara. RMcN fought hard to bring DUS forces into the managerial world making them parts of his enormous hydraulic-like system, yet he miscalculated so miserably not only what it meant to be a soldier, he actually envisioned the instauration of a new type of warrior thus opening the door to the creation of the modern electronic fighter—to the delight of anti-DUS guerilla elements located everywhere, naturally. If protesters objected to RMcN's orders, they were quickly flushed down his drain. His pipe dream eventually clogged the entire defence scheme and even today the DUS's military complex is staggering about perplexedly in an embarrassing confusion to the delight of not only ferocious radicals, even old World War II friends are busting their guts laughing at the absurd performance.
Our Southeast Asian forces were so top-heavy with business-like paperwork and administrative rigmarole, soldiers were constricted to do everything but what their mission intended them to accomplish: to soldier! As a junior officer, I was expected to learn something about everything. We were to participate in community affairs near our duty stations. We were encouraged to further our studies by mail at some university if we expected to gain rank. We were assigned to attend courses which had nothing to do with soldiering but did enhance our managerial potential. After Officer Basic Course I was assigned to teach in a missile training battalion, but when I was sent to Vietnam I was attached to a field artillery outfit—with the “guns” as a redleg would say. I had forgotten how to “lay the battery” by the time I was assigned to the Fourth Division in Pleiku by the Divarty full-bird CO, Colonel McAllister. RMcN wanted managerial clones to robotize the Art of Warfare. Being able to bomb the world to smithereens was the armed forces' logic for being superior to all other opponents.
I want to relate something now again that has shocked so many people before who have listened to me say it. It regards the logistical formation of forces in the Fourth Division (Pleiku, Vietnam) when I languished in it from August 1967 to the first part of 1968. At Pleiku was located the Snowflake Division's base camp—on the outskirts of the poverty-stricken Asian city. Citizens from Pleiku lined up each morning to be searched before being admitted to the Bravo Charlie to clean quarters, work in the kitchen, shine boots, run errands, clean tanks and jeeps, etc. The BC was a city in itself. About 20,000 inhabitants or so. The commanding officer of the base camp was a major general, two stars, named Peers. The BC was a beehive of activity as soldiers performed carbon-papered administrative chores, prepared hot meals for the troops on the battlefield, maintained helicopters and aerial observation planes, operated the PX, doctored the sick and wounded...in other words, a BC was the backbone of an organization which existed to execute the Vietnam mission. For every man in the field, there were seven or eight backing him up in BC. Individuals serving in BC were sarcastically called “base camp warriors” because the BC was rarely attacked by an enemy which was largely composed of guerilla forces. General Peers once had to order all arms locked up in BC because drunken Snowflake Division troops were shooting themselves and their comrades so often! A shot in the calf was called The Million Dollar Wound inasmuch as it would keep you out of the field. In Bravo Charlie, then, was the place to be if you had to serve in Vietnam.
The place where supply sergeants could steal left and right. Where stolen guns and rifles could be sent home to National Guard armories and then sold to paramilitary kooks in the DUS. Where Afroamericans, who often comprised 30-40% of infantry companies in the field, could be threatened with battlefield duty if they misbehaved. Where officers connived for their next duty station and higher rank. Where extra R&Rs were bargained for. Where soldiers received care for unheard of strains of syphillis. Where sergeants re-upped two or three times more to pilfer more. Where sergeants from the south of the DUS had cocktail parties for weeks celebrating the deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Where sundry packs for grunts in the field were stolen and sold on the black market. Where division brass were entertained by Vietnamese-French prostitutes flown in from Saigon dressed in Red Cross uniforms. (RHIP: Rank Has Its Privileges!) Where graft and corruption went amuck. BC was such a disgusting pisshole, I preferred to be on the battlefield.
On the field of battle you did not have to shave or take a shower for a week or so. You might find a cobra or a bamboo pit viper in your hootch one morning. You could get malaria in the Central Highlands. If you did not take your anti-malaria pills to get out of field duty, you might end up in a tank filled with huge chunks of ice. Your armpits were bleached white from the salt tablets you were taking. Maybe 40% of your artillery rounds were duds. Your M-16 worked like a piece of junk, and you would wish you had an AK-47 like the LRRPs (Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol scouts). You might go without supplies for a couple of days because helicopters could not land on the mountain top where you were dug in. You might be killed by an errant US Army artillery round or the door-gunner of a Huey helicopter or a 750-pound bomb dropped from a US Air Force jet. You could be drenched by monsoon rains beating down incessantly for eighteen hours a day, and then go to sleep with rain-soaked boots on. You might get a “Dear John” letter. Your feet could ache with jungle rot. Without sundry packs, you could clean your teeth with salt and use leaves instead of toilet paper. Where officers were called by their first names and where they would be murdered later on in the “war” by fraggings. Officers and enlisted ones were not of the same mindset. Humping with the grunts on the battlefield did not endear you to the base camp warriors; no, they just kept thanking their lucky stars they were not in your boots. In the field you could lose your body, but in Bravo Charlie you could lose your soul.
Believe me when I say I never saw a journalist or photographer when I humped with my FO (artillery forward observer) party (recon sergeant and telephone operator) and with the grunts in the jungles bordering Cambodia and Laos. (Artillery types, although they advanced with the grunts, were not entitled to receive the Combat Infantryman's Badge or something analogous to it.) Division SOP (Standard Operating Procedures) prohibited non-combatants from going to the field. If a combat photographer came to the battlefield, he (not “she”!) did it after the smoke had cleared and with permission. In BC you could find reps from print and TV organizations representing the world's media conglomerates. They were carefully controlled and buttered up ridiculously—naturally. The United States Army was fanatically media-conscious in Southeast Asia, had been in the past, and continues to be so today. Horrendous crimes committed by DUS troops against the inhabitants of their host country were swept under the public relations rug with the complaisance of the media.
Al Gore served as an Army photographer. His mother is remembered for whip-cracking the career of her senatorial husband, and when Al was up to the political gainsay himself she coached him so: “Al, SMILE, RELAX & ATTACK!” Those words served the calling of her husband and would suffice for the election campaign of her dearly beloved son when he sought the highest political position existing in the the DisUnited States of Northamerica. AG's mother had as a mission the swearing in of her son as a President of the DisUnited States—that task which she had not been able to accomplish for her husband. Al smiled and smiled and smiled. A good guy. And, oh, don't you forget it, a war veteran—not a Vietnam “War” veteran! AG did not need to brag about his military “service.” There were staff members to remind obeying journalists that AG wore his Army uniform proudly and served his country patriotically—something which the sons of editors of National Review did not! Politicians serving their country had PT-109 on their minds and still remember today how military service blessed JFK's chances of becoming a president. It was rare to see politicians' sons on the battlefield. They served in the logistical rear, base camp, where William F Buckley, Jr—even Gore Vidal—and others of this ilk could once be found. AG got away with not serving in the field but to his credit he did not brag about his Vietnam days inordinately. We cannot call him a hero!
Two-faced John Kerry did. Listen to what this insincere, hollow one said after his tour of duty in Vietnam when he served as leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War: “They...raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up [sic] bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion [sic] reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam.” All of this is true. I can verify that DUS troops in Vietnam on very, very many occasions acted with criminal intent. They disgraced themselves and their country and did not help the DUS to honor its name nor its intentions such as they were. (How long would you trust your child with Lieutenant William Calley?) The worst, nonetheless, was accomplished by B-52 airstrikes that carpet-bombed to their deaths hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Most citizens of the DUS do not want to face up to these facts. They prefer to wrap themselves in their red, white and blue flags and deny historical facts. So be it. I can only say that those who lost their beloved ones in DUS bombings (The Americans are a wonderful people—if they aren't bombing you!) have not forgotten and will never do so. Hypocrites such as John Kerry are out for themselves and not Justice.
Well, then. Double-tongued John Kerry, who once harangued DUS involvement in the Vietnam Debacle, in 2004, accepting the nomination for president at the Democratic National Convention, did not present himself as the leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, but did boast that he was a proud veteran of that war and announced to the crowds, hawkishly, that he was “reporting for duty!” He even had film clips of his Vietnam “War” experiences. How he ever staged that is something that perplexes me. Did he pay the Viet Cong to act out for him? Deceitful JK criticized the Vietnam Debacle and then used it to promote his political fortune. He wanted his cake and wanted to eat it, too! What's wrong with that? Nothing! Would it not be difficult to find an American who did not think his political representatives were two-faced liars! Why should JK be credited with speaking coherently and honestly to his constituents? Citizens of the DUS expect their politicians to lie. Why should we think JK would even consider speaking The Truth to them? JK lost. He is a loser. He looked to wiggle his way to success. Not very elegant. Not in the least uplifting. We cannot call him a hero!
John McCain graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1958. He was ranked 894 out of a class of 899—a perfect tally for anyone wanting to be President of the United States! This Navy brat had a lot to live up to: both his grandfather and father were four-star admirals in the US Navy. JMcC was a hotheaded boozer and party boy at the Academy, and later in flight school, was famous more for the planes he crashed than he was remembered for his flying dexterity. In Vietnam he distinguished himself by accomplishing bombing missions against an enemy that possessed no air force capable of retaliating against him or his confrères. There is no record of him shooting down an enemy aircraft! When he was shot down, he was cared for, cured and eventually returned to the DUS after being used as a bargaining chip with bets being placed on his grandfather and father's high naval rank. He was not slaughtered as he had massacred Vietnamese women and children from the air. JMcC claims he sustained injuries in a Vietnamese POW camp that have remained with him since, yet he was able to pass physicals that returned him to full flight status after his much-publicized incarceration. It would be difficult to prove the extent of JMcC's POW sufferings; he has stated that he was in solitary confinement for two years. Yet it would be equally arduous to believe him because, after all, he is a DUS politician and qualifies himself as being an underhanded pathological prevaricator. And he speaks through his teeth! Not very refined. We cannot call him a hero!
The Truth-O-Meter tells it all! But why are Northamericans so afraid to face the music sounding off against their maliciousness and conceit? Better worded, why would the Northamerican community and their associates vie so vehemently to cultivate reputations of being bullies and self-righteous fanatics? To scare others into submission? Because they possess such a boorish view of human nature and contend with it to dominate and contain it? For the fight per se? Due to the fact that they are overanxious, endangered? Seeing that they lack confidence in themselves, they demur? It is difficult to join a debate which delves into the inner core of the Northamerican psyche. There is trepidation to do so. It is much easier to skirt issues without going all out trying to resolve them. Have you ever heard of a give-and-take entitled “What It Means to Be a Northamerican?” Who would sponsor that? Goldman Sachs?
What is clearer to the observer who does not belong to the Northamerican community than it might be to the Northamericans themselves, is the fact that there exists a huge amount of hostility directed at the DisUnited States, and in recent years it has crystallized beyond anyone's expectations. This has been achieved, in grand part, by the exponential utilization of the electronic communications' revolution now in rapid forward motion. The DUS is regarded as the prima facie of modernity and “progress.” It is alluded to continually as being the most powerful, most influential nation on Earth. As such, granted, it will bear the gratuitous criticism of others for being exaggeratedly proud and self-confident as a res publica even when it might not desire to be so. But those who cannot enjoy the material resources of the DUS and are violent in their attacks against the excessive and unconscionable modus vivendi of many Northamericans, are not uniting under the banner of enviousness but are singling out Northamericans for their human wickedness and abandonment of those ideals—generosity, justice, global fraternity, respect, to name a few—which others who tend to have not see in others who indeed have too much of. For many observers of the Northamerican scene, it appears that Northamericans cheat and steal Mondays through Fridays, and on Saturdays and Sundays ask forgiveness for their sins before beginning all over again on Monday morning. Citizens of the DisUnited States are loathed in all parts of the world, and in their inebriated amour propre, they refuse to perceive this actuality. Rather, they trust, quite remarkably, that their path is the one all should travel and they hold fast to the notion that they should be simulated.
It is therefore quite logical for Al Gore, John Kerry and John McCain to position themselves within the realm of The Untruth instead of The Truth. They feel obliged, as political representatives of their people, to cater to their constituents' weird opinions of themselves, and if a question of morality does spring up, the most convenient alibi is that they must follow the herd's quest, “in this our glorified democracy which abides by the wishes of the people.” Those people, almost most of them, clamored to have the murderer, William Calley, released, pardoned from his guilty conviction for the assassination of innocent children, women and elderly folk during the My Lai massacre. “Rusty,” today, cannot sleep and is haunted by the memories of his killing spree. (Some weeks after the My Lai massacre, I was assigned to the 11th Infantry Brigade [Americal Division] and served as the Brigade Artillery liaison officer for Colonel Oran K Henderson, the commander of the AO in which the butchery befell the innocent Vietnamese villagers. Colonel Henderson, then on the BG [brigadier general] list, was later accused by some of ordering the carnage, but was vindicated in court-martial proceedings. In the mornings, I flew with him in his spic n' span “C&C ship” (Command & Control Huey helicopter) to survey our AO. He was hung over every time and what I remember most about him was his ordering our copter pilots to ascend as quickly as possible to a 3,000-foot altitude so that we could be out of small arms fire! Never once did he offer his C&C ship as a MEDIVAC for infantry troops blown to bits by booby traps [90% of which were US ordnance!] in the heavily mine-infested My Lai AO. Colin Powell, who also served in the same AO, never went to bat to seek Justice for the victims of the My Lai mass murder.)
Might is right? When you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow? The hatred of the Northamerican people has no terminus ad quem. Any faction which disagrees with them is subject to the most vociferous, antagonistic charges, and these intolerable ones, these fanatics stew in the sauces of their self-righteousness and misconception. What hope is there for them.
I feel discomforted for Al Gore, John Kerry and John McCain. They are intellectual cowards. They are pathetic. They possess not the gumption to go beyond. To lead their fellow countrymen to a new order that would bring respect and admiration to them...to cause the DisUnited States to be regarded as a competent, mature real thing throughout the world...to act as beacons of Justice and peace for all the globe to steer towards...to set the pace for the implementation of a world order equitable and worthy of being imitated by others...to be, simply, authentic leaders and not mendacious crowd followers.
Authored by Anthony St. John
1 December 2009
Calenzano, Italia
* * *
John McCain, John Kerry &
Al Gore
I was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan, watched games at Ebbets Field, and first baseman Gil Hodges (number 14) was my hero. A mythical being charges you with a sense of hope in some future which you know nothing about except that it is coming. You desire to imitate your hero because his past brought him to a hereafter you might also want to savor. Above all, a hero is doing something appreciated by all, and we look up to him or her with respect and admiration. It is natural to want to be like them.
Of course, there is the allure of the game before us in the stadium, on TV, or on the Internet. The contest gives a sense of security. The regulations are fixed and one cannot contest the umpire or referee. We can cheat on our income tax returns, we can talk a cop out of giving us a ticket, we can lie and call in sick when we are not—but on the field, on the court, the ref is high-and-mighty. At the game, we more or less feel that things will be managed in a logical, fair-and-square manner. Just the opposite of our material lives. And we want our heroes to be not only extraordinary in the ways they entertain us, we also wish that they play by the rules so that they appear impeccable in our phantasy worlds.
It is undignified that we make heroes of sport figures more than we do of writers, scientists, philosophers, physicians, poets or others who might be actually doing more to benefit our time to come than one making a winning jump shot at the buzzer. We are significantly more precarious in our outlooks on life than we are fixed contentedly in them. Sport suffices to fill some inexplicable gap germane to our dire straits.
Naturally, sports are more useful than street fights or warfare. Sports serve to distract us from the tedium of our lives, and when we sit down in a stadium or colosseum to enjoy a sporting event, we enter into the spirits of our heroes and become oblivious to the difficulties we are experiencing at home or in the office. The Greeks were the first to elaborate on this relevancy. Of course, it is not the responsibility of sport to encourage us to read a book or attend a symphony. We should likewise recognize that players are stressing both their bodies and intelligences to limits most of us fail to come near to doing so. This is one of the reasons we applaud them.
In this article, I wish to discuss that which is not heroic. And more, I wish to expand on the consequences of making something larger-than-life out of something crass and perverted: in other words, I want to zero in on an enormous distortion of The Truth that I witnessed during the Vietnam “War” and the consequences of its calamitous aftermath which still haunt the psyches of the citizenry belonging to the DisUnited States of Northamerica.
No military maneuver, whether it be a Brobdingnagian battle or a single incursion, will succeed without a network of an indefinite quantity of materiel backing up its soldiery. Soldiers need to eat, sleep, be medicated, be entertained, be paid... An army that is furnished to the hilt stands a better chance of winning the group action than one which is wanting in giving its troops that what they require. The DisUnited States of Northamerica is an illusionist at offering the world the idea that it is so well-equipped it might dot the globe with its state of the art weaponry and most modern ground forces. There is no doubt that the DUS has been successful in the past (World War I and World War II) in supplying its troops with an adequate amount of provisions to get the war job done, but Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan have corroborated the notion that the most sophisticated armaments and the most galactic dollar investment are not the sure bets they were before. And because the DUS's forces are scattered among almost eight-hundred bases throughout our terrestrial planet, their supply networks today are less efficient and, indeed, less agile when responding on the pickup. (The Art of War by Sun Tzu!)
My case in point, notwithstanding, is the Vietnam “War,” or better said the Vietnam Debacle. From its inception this military police action was haunted with doubt and confusion about its intended purpose and eventual outcome. The DUS was split sometimes violently as the intervention protracted itself for many years. Apart from the deaths (58,209) and wounded (304,704), the emotional scars caused by the conflict are still ostensible today even so two other foolish expeditionary penetrations divide the DUS and stress its financial stability dangerously. There is in the air the horrible idea that a war, whatever one, has to be won in order to “correct” the failure, the defeat, sustained in Vietnam still trivialized by hawkish elements with the repugnant word “Nam.”
But what put one of the many monkeys on the DUS armed forces' back during the Vietnam conflict was the new conception of an air force, army and navy force fed to new recruits and seasoned lifers alike and boosted vigorously by an ex-president of the Ford Motor Company, the Vietnam era's budget-minded paper pusher and corporate plumber Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara. RMcN fought hard to bring DUS forces into the managerial world making them parts of his enormous hydraulic-like system, yet he miscalculated so miserably not only what it meant to be a soldier, he actually envisioned the instauration of a new type of warrior thus opening the door to the creation of the modern electronic fighter—to the delight of anti-DUS guerilla elements located everywhere, naturally. If protesters objected to RMcN's orders, they were quickly flushed down his drain. His pipe dream eventually clogged the entire defence scheme and even today the DUS's military complex is staggering about perplexedly in an embarrassing confusion to the delight of not only ferocious radicals, even old World War II friends are busting their guts laughing at the absurd performance.
Our Southeast Asian forces were so top-heavy with business-like paperwork and administrative rigmarole, soldiers were constricted to do everything but what their mission intended them to accomplish: to soldier! As a junior officer, I was expected to learn something about everything. We were to participate in community affairs near our duty stations. We were encouraged to further our studies by mail at some university if we expected to gain rank. We were assigned to attend courses which had nothing to do with soldiering but did enhance our managerial potential. After Officer Basic Course I was assigned to teach in a missile training battalion, but when I was sent to Vietnam I was attached to a field artillery outfit—with the “guns” as a redleg would say. I had forgotten how to “lay the battery” by the time I was assigned to the Fourth Division in Pleiku by the Divarty full-bird CO, Colonel McAllister. RMcN wanted managerial clones to robotize the Art of Warfare. Being able to bomb the world to smithereens was the armed forces' logic for being superior to all other opponents.
I want to relate something now again that has shocked so many people before who have listened to me say it. It regards the logistical formation of forces in the Fourth Division (Pleiku, Vietnam) when I languished in it from August 1967 to the first part of 1968. At Pleiku was located the Snowflake Division's base camp—on the outskirts of the poverty-stricken Asian city. Citizens from Pleiku lined up each morning to be searched before being admitted to the Bravo Charlie to clean quarters, work in the kitchen, shine boots, run errands, clean tanks and jeeps, etc. The BC was a city in itself. About 20,000 inhabitants or so. The commanding officer of the base camp was a major general, two stars, named Peers. The BC was a beehive of activity as soldiers performed carbon-papered administrative chores, prepared hot meals for the troops on the battlefield, maintained helicopters and aerial observation planes, operated the PX, doctored the sick and wounded...in other words, a BC was the backbone of an organization which existed to execute the Vietnam mission. For every man in the field, there were seven or eight backing him up in BC. Individuals serving in BC were sarcastically called “base camp warriors” because the BC was rarely attacked by an enemy which was largely composed of guerilla forces. General Peers once had to order all arms locked up in BC because drunken Snowflake Division troops were shooting themselves and their comrades so often! A shot in the calf was called The Million Dollar Wound inasmuch as it would keep you out of the field. In Bravo Charlie, then, was the place to be if you had to serve in Vietnam.
The place where supply sergeants could steal left and right. Where stolen guns and rifles could be sent home to National Guard armories and then sold to paramilitary kooks in the DUS. Where Afroamericans, who often comprised 30-40% of infantry companies in the field, could be threatened with battlefield duty if they misbehaved. Where officers connived for their next duty station and higher rank. Where extra R&Rs were bargained for. Where soldiers received care for unheard of strains of syphillis. Where sergeants re-upped two or three times more to pilfer more. Where sergeants from the south of the DUS had cocktail parties for weeks celebrating the deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Where sundry packs for grunts in the field were stolen and sold on the black market. Where division brass were entertained by Vietnamese-French prostitutes flown in from Saigon dressed in Red Cross uniforms. (RHIP: Rank Has Its Privileges!) Where graft and corruption went amuck. BC was such a disgusting pisshole, I preferred to be on the battlefield.
On the field of battle you did not have to shave or take a shower for a week or so. You might find a cobra or a bamboo pit viper in your hootch one morning. You could get malaria in the Central Highlands. If you did not take your anti-malaria pills to get out of field duty, you might end up in a tank filled with huge chunks of ice. Your armpits were bleached white from the salt tablets you were taking. Maybe 40% of your artillery rounds were duds. Your M-16 worked like a piece of junk, and you would wish you had an AK-47 like the LRRPs (Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol scouts). You might go without supplies for a couple of days because helicopters could not land on the mountain top where you were dug in. You might be killed by an errant US Army artillery round or the door-gunner of a Huey helicopter or a 750-pound bomb dropped from a US Air Force jet. You could be drenched by monsoon rains beating down incessantly for eighteen hours a day, and then go to sleep with rain-soaked boots on. You might get a “Dear John” letter. Your feet could ache with jungle rot. Without sundry packs, you could clean your teeth with salt and use leaves instead of toilet paper. Where officers were called by their first names and where they would be murdered later on in the “war” by fraggings. Officers and enlisted ones were not of the same mindset. Humping with the grunts on the battlefield did not endear you to the base camp warriors; no, they just kept thanking their lucky stars they were not in your boots. In the field you could lose your body, but in Bravo Charlie you could lose your soul.
Believe me when I say I never saw a journalist or photographer when I humped with my FO (artillery forward observer) party (recon sergeant and telephone operator) and with the grunts in the jungles bordering Cambodia and Laos. (Artillery types, although they advanced with the grunts, were not entitled to receive the Combat Infantryman's Badge or something analogous to it.) Division SOP (Standard Operating Procedures) prohibited non-combatants from going to the field. If a combat photographer came to the battlefield, he (not “she”!) did it after the smoke had cleared and with permission. In BC you could find reps from print and TV organizations representing the world's media conglomerates. They were carefully controlled and buttered up ridiculously—naturally. The United States Army was fanatically media-conscious in Southeast Asia, had been in the past, and continues to be so today. Horrendous crimes committed by DUS troops against the inhabitants of their host country were swept under the public relations rug with the complaisance of the media.
Al Gore served as an Army photographer. His mother is remembered for whip-cracking the career of her senatorial husband, and when Al was up to the political gainsay himself she coached him so: “Al, SMILE, RELAX & ATTACK!” Those words served the calling of her husband and would suffice for the election campaign of her dearly beloved son when he sought the highest political position existing in the the DisUnited States of Northamerica. AG's mother had as a mission the swearing in of her son as a President of the DisUnited States—that task which she had not been able to accomplish for her husband. Al smiled and smiled and smiled. A good guy. And, oh, don't you forget it, a war veteran—not a Vietnam “War” veteran! AG did not need to brag about his military “service.” There were staff members to remind obeying journalists that AG wore his Army uniform proudly and served his country patriotically—something which the sons of editors of National Review did not! Politicians serving their country had PT-109 on their minds and still remember today how military service blessed JFK's chances of becoming a president. It was rare to see politicians' sons on the battlefield. They served in the logistical rear, base camp, where William F Buckley, Jr—even Gore Vidal—and others of this ilk could once be found. AG got away with not serving in the field but to his credit he did not brag about his Vietnam days inordinately. We cannot call him a hero!
Two-faced John Kerry did. Listen to what this insincere, hollow one said after his tour of duty in Vietnam when he served as leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War: “They...raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up [sic] bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion [sic] reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam.” All of this is true. I can verify that DUS troops in Vietnam on very, very many occasions acted with criminal intent. They disgraced themselves and their country and did not help the DUS to honor its name nor its intentions such as they were. (How long would you trust your child with Lieutenant William Calley?) The worst, nonetheless, was accomplished by B-52 airstrikes that carpet-bombed to their deaths hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Most citizens of the DUS do not want to face up to these facts. They prefer to wrap themselves in their red, white and blue flags and deny historical facts. So be it. I can only say that those who lost their beloved ones in DUS bombings (The Americans are a wonderful people—if they aren't bombing you!) have not forgotten and will never do so. Hypocrites such as John Kerry are out for themselves and not Justice.
Well, then. Double-tongued John Kerry, who once harangued DUS involvement in the Vietnam Debacle, in 2004, accepting the nomination for president at the Democratic National Convention, did not present himself as the leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, but did boast that he was a proud veteran of that war and announced to the crowds, hawkishly, that he was “reporting for duty!” He even had film clips of his Vietnam “War” experiences. How he ever staged that is something that perplexes me. Did he pay the Viet Cong to act out for him? Deceitful JK criticized the Vietnam Debacle and then used it to promote his political fortune. He wanted his cake and wanted to eat it, too! What's wrong with that? Nothing! Would it not be difficult to find an American who did not think his political representatives were two-faced liars! Why should JK be credited with speaking coherently and honestly to his constituents? Citizens of the DUS expect their politicians to lie. Why should we think JK would even consider speaking The Truth to them? JK lost. He is a loser. He looked to wiggle his way to success. Not very elegant. Not in the least uplifting. We cannot call him a hero!
John McCain graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1958. He was ranked 894 out of a class of 899—a perfect tally for anyone wanting to be President of the United States! This Navy brat had a lot to live up to: both his grandfather and father were four-star admirals in the US Navy. JMcC was a hotheaded boozer and party boy at the Academy, and later in flight school, was famous more for the planes he crashed than he was remembered for his flying dexterity. In Vietnam he distinguished himself by accomplishing bombing missions against an enemy that possessed no air force capable of retaliating against him or his confrères. There is no record of him shooting down an enemy aircraft! When he was shot down, he was cared for, cured and eventually returned to the DUS after being used as a bargaining chip with bets being placed on his grandfather and father's high naval rank. He was not slaughtered as he had massacred Vietnamese women and children from the air. JMcC claims he sustained injuries in a Vietnamese POW camp that have remained with him since, yet he was able to pass physicals that returned him to full flight status after his much-publicized incarceration. It would be difficult to prove the extent of JMcC's POW sufferings; he has stated that he was in solitary confinement for two years. Yet it would be equally arduous to believe him because, after all, he is a DUS politician and qualifies himself as being an underhanded pathological prevaricator. And he speaks through his teeth! Not very refined. We cannot call him a hero!
The Truth-O-Meter tells it all! But why are Northamericans so afraid to face the music sounding off against their maliciousness and conceit? Better worded, why would the Northamerican community and their associates vie so vehemently to cultivate reputations of being bullies and self-righteous fanatics? To scare others into submission? Because they possess such a boorish view of human nature and contend with it to dominate and contain it? For the fight per se? Due to the fact that they are overanxious, endangered? Seeing that they lack confidence in themselves, they demur? It is difficult to join a debate which delves into the inner core of the Northamerican psyche. There is trepidation to do so. It is much easier to skirt issues without going all out trying to resolve them. Have you ever heard of a give-and-take entitled “What It Means to Be a Northamerican?” Who would sponsor that? Goldman Sachs?
What is clearer to the observer who does not belong to the Northamerican community than it might be to the Northamericans themselves, is the fact that there exists a huge amount of hostility directed at the DisUnited States, and in recent years it has crystallized beyond anyone's expectations. This has been achieved, in grand part, by the exponential utilization of the electronic communications' revolution now in rapid forward motion. The DUS is regarded as the prima facie of modernity and “progress.” It is alluded to continually as being the most powerful, most influential nation on Earth. As such, granted, it will bear the gratuitous criticism of others for being exaggeratedly proud and self-confident as a res publica even when it might not desire to be so. But those who cannot enjoy the material resources of the DUS and are violent in their attacks against the excessive and unconscionable modus vivendi of many Northamericans, are not uniting under the banner of enviousness but are singling out Northamericans for their human wickedness and abandonment of those ideals—generosity, justice, global fraternity, respect, to name a few—which others who tend to have not see in others who indeed have too much of. For many observers of the Northamerican scene, it appears that Northamericans cheat and steal Mondays through Fridays, and on Saturdays and Sundays ask forgiveness for their sins before beginning all over again on Monday morning. Citizens of the DisUnited States are loathed in all parts of the world, and in their inebriated amour propre, they refuse to perceive this actuality. Rather, they trust, quite remarkably, that their path is the one all should travel and they hold fast to the notion that they should be simulated.
It is therefore quite logical for Al Gore, John Kerry and John McCain to position themselves within the realm of The Untruth instead of The Truth. They feel obliged, as political representatives of their people, to cater to their constituents' weird opinions of themselves, and if a question of morality does spring up, the most convenient alibi is that they must follow the herd's quest, “in this our glorified democracy which abides by the wishes of the people.” Those people, almost most of them, clamored to have the murderer, William Calley, released, pardoned from his guilty conviction for the assassination of innocent children, women and elderly folk during the My Lai massacre. “Rusty,” today, cannot sleep and is haunted by the memories of his killing spree. (Some weeks after the My Lai massacre, I was assigned to the 11th Infantry Brigade [Americal Division] and served as the Brigade Artillery liaison officer for Colonel Oran K Henderson, the commander of the AO in which the butchery befell the innocent Vietnamese villagers. Colonel Henderson, then on the BG [brigadier general] list, was later accused by some of ordering the carnage, but was vindicated in court-martial proceedings. In the mornings, I flew with him in his spic n' span “C&C ship” (Command & Control Huey helicopter) to survey our AO. He was hung over every time and what I remember most about him was his ordering our copter pilots to ascend as quickly as possible to a 3,000-foot altitude so that we could be out of small arms fire! Never once did he offer his C&C ship as a MEDIVAC for infantry troops blown to bits by booby traps [90% of which were US ordnance!] in the heavily mine-infested My Lai AO. Colin Powell, who also served in the same AO, never went to bat to seek Justice for the victims of the My Lai mass murder.)
Might is right? When you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow? The hatred of the Northamerican people has no terminus ad quem. Any faction which disagrees with them is subject to the most vociferous, antagonistic charges, and these intolerable ones, these fanatics stew in the sauces of their self-righteousness and misconception. What hope is there for them.
I feel discomforted for Al Gore, John Kerry and John McCain. They are intellectual cowards. They are pathetic. They possess not the gumption to go beyond. To lead their fellow countrymen to a new order that would bring respect and admiration to them...to cause the DisUnited States to be regarded as a competent, mature real thing throughout the world...to act as beacons of Justice and peace for all the globe to steer towards...to set the pace for the implementation of a world order equitable and worthy of being imitated by others...to be, simply, authentic leaders and not mendacious crowd followers.
Authored by Anthony St. John
1 December 2009
Calenzano, Italia
* * *
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Listen to the Death Rattles of Western Civilization!
The Perfect President
of the DisUnited States of Northamerica
The principal purveyors of cultural, economic, political and social policy extending heavy-handed rule over foreign nations, these Death Rattles of Western Civilization—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, The Netherlands, The DisUnited Kingdom, and their kingpin, The DisUnited States of Northamerica—now find themselves challenged as never before notwithstanding their often turbulent histories. Having lost any sensing of authority and/or authenticity, these Concocters of Consent, their consent!, these Rulers of the Truth, their truth!, these Proponents of Judeo-Christian “Democratic” Capitalism, their capitalism!, now have their backs against the wall. Vicious societal agitation against them, oligarchic socialists (olisocists), is rampant throughout the world. Uncertainty is a certainty. Foreboding is the order of the day. It is as if a grand conflict, a universal war (World War III/Universe War I) is looming in the inner selves of people—still again! Is an Armageddon between The Haves and The Have-Nots in the offing? A super clash, to outdo all others, set on its deleterious course centuries ago? Who is going to redeem Western Civilization? Who is going to pull The Old World out of its nosedive? Who is going to call the tune for The New Europe? Who is going to skipper us through our Sea of Hypocrisy? Superman? Batman? Spiderman?
Why not the striking John Sidney McCain III? (McCain in 2012!) No other Northamerican politician is so in sync with his country’s animating spirit. His curriculum vitae substantiates my assertion. Born 29 August 1936 of Scots-Irish and English ancestry, McCain III boozed his way through the DisUnited States Naval Academy (1958) as did McCain I (grandfather) and McCain II (father)—both four-star DisUnited States' Navy admirals. McCain III graduated almost at the bottom of his class (894/899) thus qualifying himself as a potential Commander-in-Chief of the DisUnited States’ armed forces and manager of the world’s largest bureaucracy, the Pentagon. During his active duty military career, McCain III crashed many DisUnited States' Navy jets yet not one of the enemy's when he served in Vietnam. Nevertheless, like his antecedents, the Navy brat bombed to smithereens an untold number of Asian people, including women and children. Quick-tempered McCain III was held prisoner in the Hanoi Hilton where the erratic hothead dictated the rules to his turnkeys who stood in awe of his family background and even offered him repatriation terms because he had made anti-DisUnited States propaganda confessions. Rank Has Its Priviledges. He is a church-goer, naturally, and switched from Episcopalian to Baptist in a vote-getting scheme set to woo the southern DUS’s constituency. With a pathology of power stirring him on, he divorced his first wife disfigured in an accident, married the heiress to a beer distributing company who bankrolled the political ambitions of this pol with a John McEnroe temperament (he smashes million-dollar Navy jets, not tennis rackets!), and hooked up with Mafia-faced Arizonian shady characters to realize his political illusions.
The DUS’s citizens are privileged to still have the chance to select this time a Presidential Professional Bomber, who talks through his teeth, to represent them all over the world. (The Northamericans are a wonderful people—if they aren’t bombing you!) With his finger on The Button, McCain III, the DUS’s first PPB, with a vendetta on his agenda, would surely bully for the DUS all the way across the globe. He does it his way! Northamericans should not lose this unique opportunity to select a half-pint, semi-psychopath who might turn out to be a bona fide Dr Strangelove.
Have a nice nightmare!
Authored by Anthony St. John in Exile and Sweating in the Sweltering Heat of Tuscany
1 July 2008
Updated 15 November 2009
The Perfect President
of the DisUnited States of Northamerica
The principal purveyors of cultural, economic, political and social policy extending heavy-handed rule over foreign nations, these Death Rattles of Western Civilization—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, The Netherlands, The DisUnited Kingdom, and their kingpin, The DisUnited States of Northamerica—now find themselves challenged as never before notwithstanding their often turbulent histories. Having lost any sensing of authority and/or authenticity, these Concocters of Consent, their consent!, these Rulers of the Truth, their truth!, these Proponents of Judeo-Christian “Democratic” Capitalism, their capitalism!, now have their backs against the wall. Vicious societal agitation against them, oligarchic socialists (olisocists), is rampant throughout the world. Uncertainty is a certainty. Foreboding is the order of the day. It is as if a grand conflict, a universal war (World War III/Universe War I) is looming in the inner selves of people—still again! Is an Armageddon between The Haves and The Have-Nots in the offing? A super clash, to outdo all others, set on its deleterious course centuries ago? Who is going to redeem Western Civilization? Who is going to pull The Old World out of its nosedive? Who is going to call the tune for The New Europe? Who is going to skipper us through our Sea of Hypocrisy? Superman? Batman? Spiderman?
Why not the striking John Sidney McCain III? (McCain in 2012!) No other Northamerican politician is so in sync with his country’s animating spirit. His curriculum vitae substantiates my assertion. Born 29 August 1936 of Scots-Irish and English ancestry, McCain III boozed his way through the DisUnited States Naval Academy (1958) as did McCain I (grandfather) and McCain II (father)—both four-star DisUnited States' Navy admirals. McCain III graduated almost at the bottom of his class (894/899) thus qualifying himself as a potential Commander-in-Chief of the DisUnited States’ armed forces and manager of the world’s largest bureaucracy, the Pentagon. During his active duty military career, McCain III crashed many DisUnited States' Navy jets yet not one of the enemy's when he served in Vietnam. Nevertheless, like his antecedents, the Navy brat bombed to smithereens an untold number of Asian people, including women and children. Quick-tempered McCain III was held prisoner in the Hanoi Hilton where the erratic hothead dictated the rules to his turnkeys who stood in awe of his family background and even offered him repatriation terms because he had made anti-DisUnited States propaganda confessions. Rank Has Its Priviledges. He is a church-goer, naturally, and switched from Episcopalian to Baptist in a vote-getting scheme set to woo the southern DUS’s constituency. With a pathology of power stirring him on, he divorced his first wife disfigured in an accident, married the heiress to a beer distributing company who bankrolled the political ambitions of this pol with a John McEnroe temperament (he smashes million-dollar Navy jets, not tennis rackets!), and hooked up with Mafia-faced Arizonian shady characters to realize his political illusions.
The DUS’s citizens are privileged to still have the chance to select this time a Presidential Professional Bomber, who talks through his teeth, to represent them all over the world. (The Northamericans are a wonderful people—if they aren’t bombing you!) With his finger on The Button, McCain III, the DUS’s first PPB, with a vendetta on his agenda, would surely bully for the DUS all the way across the globe. He does it his way! Northamericans should not lose this unique opportunity to select a half-pint, semi-psychopath who might turn out to be a bona fide Dr Strangelove.
Have a nice nightmare!
Authored by Anthony St. John in Exile and Sweating in the Sweltering Heat of Tuscany
1 July 2008
Updated 15 November 2009
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Excessive Cheese Intake Obstructing French People's Brain Activity
FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELTS!
Here Comes...
Le Nouveau Moyen Âge!
This gem of wit by the French agent provocateur and philosophical economist Alain Minc very much more than any other quip sums up for me the state of mind of, at least, the world's industrial nations' conglomeration: “Hier, nous avions le droit d'être fatalists par optimisme; nous devons désormais être audacieux par pessimisme.” Or, as the song-poem goes: “Desperation keeps us strong...It's a terrible beauty we've made.” Spandau Ballet. Not even a Jean-Paul Sartre philosophical tractatus could, if it would, salvage this Western “Civilization”--this spent European continent which André Glucksmann declares “doesn't have a brain in its head.”
Voilà! Well now... There certainly was not enough grey matter in France on 6 May 2007 to push Ségolène Royal over the threshold and into the Presidency of the Republic of France (Presidentess of Europe?). We knew so way before the national vote casting: The “Un million de femmes s'énervent” campaign for pledges counted not more than 20,000 signatures (mine included!) only days before the final showdown; then, the vain attempt to secure votes from the third place first ballot winner—that horse breeder's boots bogged down in conciliatory pony dung—proved to be an exercise in futility. We had before us a splendid woman, oozing with dignity, tact and outspoken courage. A femme who rallied against France's electronic neo-fascists; who made a great effort to lift the largest country wholly in Europe out of the post bellum doldrums of its fictitious well-being where it had been marinating for decades; who had no fear of a recalcitrant, desperate Roman Catholic Church waning more and more each day with every passing scientific discovery; who fought tooth and nail against an entrenched olisocism (a Lagardère-Pinault-Arnault troika); who attempted to bring France—this cheesy subgenus of a puny Europe that bounces like a counterfeit coin—before the international community dressed in the overalls of a legitimate nation looking honestly to make friends, not allies, with all peoples throughout the world; and, who pleaded with all French citizens to ask not what France could do for them, but what they could do for France. A truly golden opportunity blown away by the winds of intransigent shenanigans. Merci beaucoup.
It makes no sense that France thinks it has the gumption to cultivate la politique de l'autruche and play political hardball, not soft, on the ever-expanding international scene. Limp-wristed Gaullist status-quoticians want this land area, a little less than the size of Texas, to tighten its belt, turn in on itself, and draw others unto France instead of stimulating bonds with those beyond this realm 16% of which is over 65 years of age. The conservative approach. What for centuries has been the safe methodology. Can France afford to mellow still in the memories of its Past? Can France conjecture that it can chip in to be part of the leadership of the globe when its own turf is rife with dissent, dangerously polarized, hamstrung by the very economic rules and regulations it goes up against in speeches and prayers tended to less fortunate developing populaces, when it talks with a forked tongue basing its legitimacy on standards that only French citizens might comprehend...ad infinitum! Is a France, stuck in the xenophobic, racist rut of its Past, going to impress any others who refuse to kowtow to its haughtiness and are not electrified by France's image of itself smoothly camouflaged with soft skin creams, suntanned-by-lamp youth, and swankily dressed and cutely coiffed political artistes vying for a piece of the ever-dwindling Political Pie?
France sorely wants to give it the medieval stab! And to prove it is not ribbing us, on 16 May 2007 it crowned, as President of France, a tsar puérile, the first French president with a facial tic...El Hombre Macho. A fogeyish braggart who swears he is going to whip France into law and order and bring economic miracles to this Land of Phoney Excellence! France's Number One Cheese Salesman will shuffle a spineless, passionless, hedonistic France and take its GUCCI-PUCCI set for a whirlwind of nationalism and fiscal anal-hoarding. He yearns to achieve what other European politicos were impotent to effectuate: to manage the creation of a post-World War II body politic fit for all European people. (We wish him luck with this Europe which buries Kremlin atheists at solemn high funeral masses and rescinds war orders for princes for “the good of the troops!”) One can just see this King of France on a visit to Africa—to shore up desperately-needed natural resources for his megalomaniacal castles in the air—pleading with Africans to forget those colonial days which even today keep large parts of them in misery and starvation. As would the King of Spain, on a visit to Venezuela to deal for lower oil prices, begging Venezuelans to dismiss from their minds the 14,000,000 Southamerican and Centralamerican natives massacred by Spanish marauders...or the King of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, on a visit to Russia to bargain for cheap gas prices, imploring Russians to stop thinking about their 30,000,000 dead sacrificed during the fight against Fascism and concentrate more on pasta dishes...or the King of Hamburger, on a visit to Japan to secure permission to open fast-food outlets not far from the ground zeroes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, suggesting that the Japanese people not recall the devastating effects of the world's first use of belligerent atom bombs. The President of France can wave all the French flags he so wishes, he can sing La Marseillaise as loud as he desires for as long as he wants, but nothing will change the spirit of the African people who have had to submit to the criminal abuse administered by those French nationals who still today connive to deprive Africans of their basic human rights. The game has changed dramatically and not as the French would have it. And to react to this transformation, this stuck-in-the-mud France, with the personality of a squeezed lemon, has selected to play Bully on the Block! There are Republicans in Washington DC with more brains than that! Am I not right, Professor Glucksmann?
French conservatives have had too much a share of pessimism and negativism to offer. They have grouped together to form palsy-walsy social, cultural, economic and political ties which serve the inclusive general concept that a government should dole out political and civil honors according to wealth. The French conservative is not interested in offering a fair shake to his fellows, and he excludes them from power circles with the justification that life demands a political philosophy which exalts the nation and a select group of individuals above all others, and that severe economic and social regimentation, plus the forcible suppression of the opposition, are necessary measures to exercise stringent control over the masses who are considered inferior to the nobler and more privileged French conservative. I deny this philosophy and its aspects of myopic gloom. I look for programs which show liveliness and interest in good things. Which look with hope to the future. Which signal danger, but communicate love and understanding. “Human behavior leads to make-believe, disequilibrium, frustrations, lies, or, on the contrary, it becomes the source of rewarding experiences, in accordance with its manner of expression in actual living—whether in bad faith, laziness, generosity and freedom,” said Simone de Beauvoir. I wish that all people enjoy their lives in a spirit of unselfishness, lucidity and unsusceptibility and I beg the new President of France to come to his political and human senses and yield to the ideal that all men belong to the same community where equality and justice for all is the common goal.
Authored by Anthony St. John
19 May 2007
* * *
FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELTS!
Here Comes...
Le Nouveau Moyen Âge!
This gem of wit by the French agent provocateur and philosophical economist Alain Minc very much more than any other quip sums up for me the state of mind of, at least, the world's industrial nations' conglomeration: “Hier, nous avions le droit d'être fatalists par optimisme; nous devons désormais être audacieux par pessimisme.” Or, as the song-poem goes: “Desperation keeps us strong...It's a terrible beauty we've made.” Spandau Ballet. Not even a Jean-Paul Sartre philosophical tractatus could, if it would, salvage this Western “Civilization”--this spent European continent which André Glucksmann declares “doesn't have a brain in its head.”
Voilà! Well now... There certainly was not enough grey matter in France on 6 May 2007 to push Ségolène Royal over the threshold and into the Presidency of the Republic of France (Presidentess of Europe?). We knew so way before the national vote casting: The “Un million de femmes s'énervent” campaign for pledges counted not more than 20,000 signatures (mine included!) only days before the final showdown; then, the vain attempt to secure votes from the third place first ballot winner—that horse breeder's boots bogged down in conciliatory pony dung—proved to be an exercise in futility. We had before us a splendid woman, oozing with dignity, tact and outspoken courage. A femme who rallied against France's electronic neo-fascists; who made a great effort to lift the largest country wholly in Europe out of the post bellum doldrums of its fictitious well-being where it had been marinating for decades; who had no fear of a recalcitrant, desperate Roman Catholic Church waning more and more each day with every passing scientific discovery; who fought tooth and nail against an entrenched olisocism (a Lagardère-Pinault-Arnault troika); who attempted to bring France—this cheesy subgenus of a puny Europe that bounces like a counterfeit coin—before the international community dressed in the overalls of a legitimate nation looking honestly to make friends, not allies, with all peoples throughout the world; and, who pleaded with all French citizens to ask not what France could do for them, but what they could do for France. A truly golden opportunity blown away by the winds of intransigent shenanigans. Merci beaucoup.
It makes no sense that France thinks it has the gumption to cultivate la politique de l'autruche and play political hardball, not soft, on the ever-expanding international scene. Limp-wristed Gaullist status-quoticians want this land area, a little less than the size of Texas, to tighten its belt, turn in on itself, and draw others unto France instead of stimulating bonds with those beyond this realm 16% of which is over 65 years of age. The conservative approach. What for centuries has been the safe methodology. Can France afford to mellow still in the memories of its Past? Can France conjecture that it can chip in to be part of the leadership of the globe when its own turf is rife with dissent, dangerously polarized, hamstrung by the very economic rules and regulations it goes up against in speeches and prayers tended to less fortunate developing populaces, when it talks with a forked tongue basing its legitimacy on standards that only French citizens might comprehend...ad infinitum! Is a France, stuck in the xenophobic, racist rut of its Past, going to impress any others who refuse to kowtow to its haughtiness and are not electrified by France's image of itself smoothly camouflaged with soft skin creams, suntanned-by-lamp youth, and swankily dressed and cutely coiffed political artistes vying for a piece of the ever-dwindling Political Pie?
France sorely wants to give it the medieval stab! And to prove it is not ribbing us, on 16 May 2007 it crowned, as President of France, a tsar puérile, the first French president with a facial tic...El Hombre Macho. A fogeyish braggart who swears he is going to whip France into law and order and bring economic miracles to this Land of Phoney Excellence! France's Number One Cheese Salesman will shuffle a spineless, passionless, hedonistic France and take its GUCCI-PUCCI set for a whirlwind of nationalism and fiscal anal-hoarding. He yearns to achieve what other European politicos were impotent to effectuate: to manage the creation of a post-World War II body politic fit for all European people. (We wish him luck with this Europe which buries Kremlin atheists at solemn high funeral masses and rescinds war orders for princes for “the good of the troops!”) One can just see this King of France on a visit to Africa—to shore up desperately-needed natural resources for his megalomaniacal castles in the air—pleading with Africans to forget those colonial days which even today keep large parts of them in misery and starvation. As would the King of Spain, on a visit to Venezuela to deal for lower oil prices, begging Venezuelans to dismiss from their minds the 14,000,000 Southamerican and Centralamerican natives massacred by Spanish marauders...or the King of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, on a visit to Russia to bargain for cheap gas prices, imploring Russians to stop thinking about their 30,000,000 dead sacrificed during the fight against Fascism and concentrate more on pasta dishes...or the King of Hamburger, on a visit to Japan to secure permission to open fast-food outlets not far from the ground zeroes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, suggesting that the Japanese people not recall the devastating effects of the world's first use of belligerent atom bombs. The President of France can wave all the French flags he so wishes, he can sing La Marseillaise as loud as he desires for as long as he wants, but nothing will change the spirit of the African people who have had to submit to the criminal abuse administered by those French nationals who still today connive to deprive Africans of their basic human rights. The game has changed dramatically and not as the French would have it. And to react to this transformation, this stuck-in-the-mud France, with the personality of a squeezed lemon, has selected to play Bully on the Block! There are Republicans in Washington DC with more brains than that! Am I not right, Professor Glucksmann?
French conservatives have had too much a share of pessimism and negativism to offer. They have grouped together to form palsy-walsy social, cultural, economic and political ties which serve the inclusive general concept that a government should dole out political and civil honors according to wealth. The French conservative is not interested in offering a fair shake to his fellows, and he excludes them from power circles with the justification that life demands a political philosophy which exalts the nation and a select group of individuals above all others, and that severe economic and social regimentation, plus the forcible suppression of the opposition, are necessary measures to exercise stringent control over the masses who are considered inferior to the nobler and more privileged French conservative. I deny this philosophy and its aspects of myopic gloom. I look for programs which show liveliness and interest in good things. Which look with hope to the future. Which signal danger, but communicate love and understanding. “Human behavior leads to make-believe, disequilibrium, frustrations, lies, or, on the contrary, it becomes the source of rewarding experiences, in accordance with its manner of expression in actual living—whether in bad faith, laziness, generosity and freedom,” said Simone de Beauvoir. I wish that all people enjoy their lives in a spirit of unselfishness, lucidity and unsusceptibility and I beg the new President of France to come to his political and human senses and yield to the ideal that all men belong to the same community where equality and justice for all is the common goal.
Authored by Anthony St. John
19 May 2007
* * *
Thursday, October 1, 2009
A Tender-hearted Partial Roster of People
with Whom I Wish to Dine
Roberto Baggio
Daniel Bell
Tony Benn
Fausto Bertinotti
Beyoncé
Jeff Bezos
Clarissa Burt
Aldo Busi
Andrew Carnegie
Leonardo Cemak
Jackie Chan
Hugo Chávez
Noam Chomsky
Michel Classens
Hillary Clinton
Paul A Cohen
Richard Dawkins
Pierre Durand
Jenna Elfman
Elizabeth, Queen of England
Lynette Federer
Roger Federer
Vittoria Franco
Franco Gabrielli
André Glucksmann
Cindy Gomez
Hala Gorani
Germaine Greer
Kathy Griffith
Tony Hadley
Jenny Harrison
Paris Hilton
Whitney Houston
Eric Hobsbawn
Dr House
Martin Jacques
Hu Jintao
Nicole Kidman
Naomi Klein
Paul Krugman
La Principessa Fiona Corsini
Spike Lee
Jay Leno
Gong Li
Jet Li
Madonna
Claudi Martini
Johnny Mathis
Giovanna Melandri
Alain Minc
Michelle Pfeiffer
Vladimir Putin
Laura Rasero
Robert Redford
Robert Reich
Don Rickles
Giulia Righi
Joan Rivers
José Luis Rodriguez
Jim Rogers
Ségolène Royal
Jerry Seinfeld
Brooke Shields
Jurg Siegenthaler
Peter Singer
Chang Sisi
Wolfgang Sofsky
Christopher Smith
Joseph Stiglitz
Lester Thurow
Livia Turco
Gore Vidal
Alessio Vinci
Vittorio Volterra
Karen Wilkinson
Tiger Woods
Gong Xixiang
Jean Ziegler
Andrew Zimmern
Howard Zinn
Greta Zografaki
Updated 19 September 2009
with Whom I Wish to Dine
Roberto Baggio
Daniel Bell
Tony Benn
Fausto Bertinotti
Beyoncé
Jeff Bezos
Clarissa Burt
Aldo Busi
Andrew Carnegie
Leonardo Cemak
Jackie Chan
Hugo Chávez
Noam Chomsky
Michel Classens
Hillary Clinton
Paul A Cohen
Richard Dawkins
Pierre Durand
Jenna Elfman
Elizabeth, Queen of England
Lynette Federer
Roger Federer
Vittoria Franco
Franco Gabrielli
André Glucksmann
Cindy Gomez
Hala Gorani
Germaine Greer
Kathy Griffith
Tony Hadley
Jenny Harrison
Paris Hilton
Whitney Houston
Eric Hobsbawn
Dr House
Martin Jacques
Hu Jintao
Nicole Kidman
Naomi Klein
Paul Krugman
La Principessa Fiona Corsini
Spike Lee
Jay Leno
Gong Li
Jet Li
Madonna
Claudi Martini
Johnny Mathis
Giovanna Melandri
Alain Minc
Michelle Pfeiffer
Vladimir Putin
Laura Rasero
Robert Redford
Robert Reich
Don Rickles
Giulia Righi
Joan Rivers
José Luis Rodriguez
Jim Rogers
Ségolène Royal
Jerry Seinfeld
Brooke Shields
Jurg Siegenthaler
Peter Singer
Chang Sisi
Wolfgang Sofsky
Christopher Smith
Joseph Stiglitz
Lester Thurow
Livia Turco
Gore Vidal
Alessio Vinci
Vittorio Volterra
Karen Wilkinson
Tiger Woods
Gong Xixiang
Jean Ziegler
Andrew Zimmern
Howard Zinn
Greta Zografaki
Updated 19 September 2009
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Why the Central Stupidity Agency
Refuses to Reimburse Me
150,000,000 Renminbi
for My Highly-sophisticated
Foreign Affairs' Consultations (Gulp!)
If any one of you reading this letter-essay have ever been tempted to think that the Central Stupidity Agency (CSA) and its Agents of Stupidity (ASs) were indeed intelligent, you will never be enticed to do so once more provided you follow this article to its satisfying finale. You are about to enjoy with me a reassessment of many of my international experiences and the hindsights we may draw from them now and, regrettably, did not do so in the Past. This is not a “I told you so!” lament. It is my way of celebrating my own intelligence. I do not claim to be a genius on the subject of foreign affairs, nor do I affirm, boasting, that I possess an éclaircissement to all the disorderlinesses caused by the misplays and wrongdoings which I have witnessed perpetrated by the CSA and its ASs. In fact, I believe my abilities are directly proportionate to the inabilities of the CSA, and many other normally nimble characters would have reached the same assumptions I have had they only had had the opportunities to have had shared my observations. The beat goes on.
It all began in the autumn of 1975—at a public phone in the lobby of the Gainesville (Florida) Hilton hotel where I called the FBI office in Jacksonville to ask for advice. Lucia and I had decided to leave for Caracas near the end of the year. I knew almost nothing about Venezuela—its language, religion, customs and practices, history, collective memory, the value ascribed to its heritage, public spaces, and specific landscapes. I did know that the Venezuelans had spit upon Richard Nixon long before the Northamericans did and, of course, it was an oil-producing nation—just doomed to be so.
Planning shortly to live happily ever after in the arms of Lucia in The City of Eternal Spring, I asked for some guidance about Venezuela wanting to know if there was anything I should be wise to before heading out. Vaccinations? Visa? Passport? The agent with whom I spoke told me to call the Central Intelligence Agency (sic!) because that “outfit” was updated better on foreign affairs. He gave me a telephone number to call.
A man answered but never identified himself. Nor where he was nor what office he was in. When I enquired who he was he abruptly interrupted and asked me why I was calling. I told him. Then he queried me as to why I was seeking employment. I wasn't. I wanted to know about Venezuela. I related to him that my girlfriend had invited her friend, Pablo, from Caracas to meet me in Gainesville. Pablo was the right-hand man of the minister of the Ministerio del Ambiente y de los Recursos Naturales Renovables, the highest-budgeted ministry in the Venezuelan government at that time. The guy at the other end of the phone then was curious to know if I wished to be “contacted” when I arrived in Caracas. “Who knows...I just might need some help there alone and distant from the United States.” An “insurance agent” would visit with me when I was in Caracas. He did not say when or where.
Being lovestruck, it didn't dawn on me at the time that I was a perfect catch for a CIA recruiting officer fishing for apprentices. I had a university degree in Philosophy. I was an ex-Army officer (on the captain's promotion list) already with a SECRET security clearance. I had served as the S-2 (Intelligence Officer) for the corps of ROTC cadets at my university. I had reported for three newspapers. And I might add, I am a lateral thinker! I was recipient of the “The Wayward Missile Award” and had been called “Loose Cannon” while I served with the field artillery! Most of all, I am an “outside the box” theorist. (“A standard recommendation for reform—one made regularly by people discovering these problems for the first time—is to encourage “outside the box” analyses that challenge conventional wisdom and consider scenarios that appear low in probability but high in consequence. To some, this sort of intellectual shake-up might well have led the intelligence system, rather than Tom Clancy, to anticipate the kamikaze hijacking tactic of September 11.” Reference: Foreign Affairs, January-February 2002, page 49.) But there was a little problem: I'm not a joiner; and it was Vladimir Nabakov who had reminded me that spies get shot.
Even though the Central Stupidity Agency would have been ludicrous not to have desired to have one such as me on their roster, they were not going to ask me to work for them! (Thank goodness!) It was for me to go crawling to them. The CSA hunts for supporters. Believers. Sycophants. It covets minions. Individuals who are predetermined and apprehensive. You must be of an unenthusiastic nature but raring to go to authenticate yourself, to give yourself some legitimacy by devoting your being to a strident cause. This amalgamation requires that a candidate be a conforming non-conformist. A contradiction in terms. A double-bind situation. An aspirant must exhibit exceptional abilities to think tangentially yet be disposed to submit to a last word. Any contestant who reaches beyond the control sphere might be stomached for his or her incomparable flair—if he or she is beyond doubt an important element—but this temperament cannot be remunerated in the context of such a person's career profile. If you want to feel free you should not join the Central Stupidity Agency! You must think pessimistically about everything. You must have an enduring faith in “The Company.” They are Jesuit-like. They know something about everything but nothing about what is obvious. And you better not be an atheist!
No “insurance agent” ever met up with me in Caracas. But that was not necessarily simply because I was surrounded by CSA goofballs where I worked: first, at The Daily Journal newspaper, a bulletin board for government undercovers traipsing through Southamerica; then at the Ministerio de Infomación y Turismo. I must append here a very freaky story I had read in the DJ and which hinted to me that even if an “insurance agent” was to accost me, I could not communicate with him or her about my “dealings” with the CSA. The article stated that the CSA had been infiltrated by “moles”--it was not said who or where they were—and that the CSA was taking precautions to remedy the state of affairs! How could I be sure that an “insurance agent” was a “mole”--or not. I was on my own. I could not believe anyone. It was one of the most liberating, joyous days of my life!
When George Tenet announced his resignation from the Central Stupidity Agency in June 2004, effective 11 July 2004, he made the following statement: “We are not perfect...but we are very, very, very good....” Don't believe him! Look, rather, at the history of the world for the past sixty years and decide for yourself whether or not this planet is a better, safer, calmer place to live on. And please do not offer excuses for the catastrophes that these swivel chair warriors have concocted for millions of innocent people who have had to put up with their often megalomaniac shenanigans. I am going to prove to you how and why the CSA is chock full of dimwitted personages who are doing the DisUnited States of Northamerica more harm than benefit, and I will draw upon my experiences with them in New York, Vietnam, Venezuela and Italy to do so.
The CSA ASs I knew were tense, grim and lived their lives strenuously: playing hard ball at work, but “soft” hard ball when they lightened up. Always the confrontation, the competition, the obsession to control. With the perks they possessed, the ASs had also been given extravagant opportunities to take the Rests & Recuperations that allowed them to regain their composure and verve. But once these breaks were interrupted, they were back again stressing themselves at their sinews convinced they were not only performing a patriotic service, but were also persuaded that they were executing some metaphysical, religious good turn that would reap them rewards not only in this world, but in what they believed to be an afterlife. Dog is their copilot. These Simple Simons do not sustain that the separation of Church and State should be sanctioned.
In this reading, my dear reader, I want to put the spotlight on only three CSA ASs with whom I broke bread: William F Buckley, Jr, editor of National Review, Clem Cohen and John Sullivan. Three pals. Three enormous egos. Three marionettes. Three footboys. Three extremists.
I will speak the least about WFB, Jr because his life is best illustrated by me in another article of mine, William F Buckley, Jr: Profile of a Right-wing Fanatic posted on www.scribd.com/thewordwarrior. Enjoy reading it, and tell me what you think.
Clem Cohen was the most affable of the ASs that I was to meet—and the most pathetic, unfortunately. I would have liked very much to have been his friend, but CC had no time for friends, for life. He was a CSA workaholic and obsessed with the cold-blooded mission set out for him by his Langley superiors.
Clem Cohen was on the masthead of The Daily Journal listed as a “director,” but he was my boss at the Ministerio de Información y Turismo (MIT) to which I had been transferred by the “directors” of the DJ. I had never seen him even once during my six-month stint at the DJ. Clem was from Brooklyn, New York as I was. This did not endear him to me because I had not been to New York since 1968 and Florida had sort of undone some of my New Yorkishness.
CC was very much unsettled with himself. As other ASs were, he, too, was extremely intelligent and fluent in at least four languages and had a knowledge of two others. He was pressured but quick—so nippy as to be on the verge of ill health. One day when I was called to his office to discuss the rewrite of a speech I was editing, he jumped up on his swivel chair, mimicked a monkey, and kidded with me that he was going “bananas.” On different occasions, I tried to help him as best I could to calm him down, although I had no success. People in the office told me he was diabetic, but I possessed no verification of this information concerning his health. It would not have surprised me that he was. CC was always in a hurry. He downed his lunches dashing to return to our offices. He had three or four phones on his desk, and I frequently saw him holding a receiver in each hand while he spoke to two people at the same time. He was a compulsively hard worker to the exclusion of other interests and gave me the impression that his job had control of him rather than he having control of it. He was driven to accomplish yet I never saw the harvest of what he had planted.
CC was Venezuela's “media czar.” Each and every word written about the government of Venezuela passed his scrutiny before being sent out to the world. At MIT, he was always in contact with the DJ. MIT utilized ten telex machines that hummed twenty-four hours a day. Our newsrooms were the most forward-looking I had ever seen with the exception of those at The Miami Herald from where I once reported. All of the people I worked with spoke two or three languages with varying degrees of proficiency. CC had to read all their work before it was transmitted. Articles. Speeches. Press releases. Anything and everything originating from the Venezuelan government were checked and double-checked by the overworked Clem. It was handy for CC to have me in his service because I could spruce up the repeatedly dreadful English copy that he had to deal with. I had no muscle to change any of the contents of that which I edited. CC was paranoid about his mastery over media material. Often, I saw French, Italian, English, Spanish, German or Arabic texts spread across his desk which was constantly in a state of confusion and glutted high. Journalists from all over the world representing important newspaper or television companies passed through Clem's office unceasingly. The place pulsated with excitement and energy. I remember speaking one afternoon with Bernard Shaw of CBS who was one of the most kindhearted journalists I had ever met in my life.
CC was poles apart the other CSA personnel I knew and who were excessively rigid in their opinions and very often uptight, self-righteous and lacking senses of humour. Clem surely could be a hard worker and an extremely difficult boss to work for, yet he never asked his underlings to do things he would not do himself. He was a man you came to respect. He had a kindliness for others that reaped him support and collaboration when he was dealing with those he managed. He would tear out of his office running to a meeting with the ministro of MIT, Diego Arria, screaming final instructions to three or four of us on his way to the elevator. He worked too arduously. Too relentlessly for his physical well-being. It was CC who gave me the idea that the CSA was comprised of a “left wing” and not just the “right wing” (a Hegelian tit for tat?) which had impressed me so much at National Review and The Daily Journal. CC was more open-minded than the doctrinaire parrots of the conservative force, and if I remember correctly, he spoke well of John F Kennedy with me—but not very revealingly. It was not easy to take Clem's mind away from his work which, I had the notion, was creating more discombobulation than it was inventing creative thinking.
Each and every of the ASs I looked at carefully were goaded with a zeal which distinguished their moral fibre. They were high-minded men. Persons with faith not in themselves. Profoundly convinced they were performing a good turn on behalf of their country—right or wrong! They were religious. Practitioners. They entreated, in church or synagogue, to be able to do their best for the United States of America. They sought protection from the enemy during their prayer gatherings. They walked with four eyes checking all angles. Overly attentive. Curious. Intelligent. Thinkers both on their feet and on a bar stool. From their military experiences they grasped the importance of keeping their ties fit properly and their gig lines tidy. They could be conservative dressers toting Samsonite accessories; or, they could be fashion plates decked out in European tailored suits with Italian leather briefcases and luggage. Their watches. Their pens. Their belt buckles. Every bit of them attended to to execute the task delegated to be brought to a conclusion in favour of the United States of America. The zealots, hyped with putting on their best act, squirmed and oiled their ways through the labyrinth of details and enigmas indispensable to their superiors in Langley, Virginia.
John Sullivan was a tall, solidly-built Central Stupidity Agency AS who had as his AO (Area of Operations) the whole of Southamerica. I first met him at MIT after he had had a hushed-up conference with CC. He was not fixed to any duty station. He scrambled about Southamerican capitals using Business Week as his cover. After a brief tête-à-tête, he left me so: “Let's have lunch some day.” He was very sure of himself. Too much so for me to like him. He wore the troubles of the world on his shoulders. He was strained. He had a mission. He was holier-than-thou and a tad arrogant reminding me of William F Buckley, Jr. Was he that “insurance agent?” Was he a mole? Years later we met again at the Tamanaco Hotel, and the trim, decked out with muscles JS looked surprised when he saw me: “You still here?” I responded so: “Yeah, I'm still waiting for you to keep that lunch date!” He was embarrassed. He balked. He told me he had a dinner appointment with a Puertorican lady, but before I could let him off the hook, he caved in and invited me to dine that evening, too. John wanted to give me the impression that he was a man of his word. Like most ASs in the field and not behind a swivel chair, JS also valued the virtue of being precise. When you are meticulous you can count your accomplishments with satisfaction without regretting later that you had left something out; or, if you did, you could remind yourself that you at least had carried through on the most of them! JS was overly scrupulous. Irish Roman Catholic. As we dined, I would get an inkling into why he was so.
John led the conversation for most of the time we three sat together. The lady with us at the hotel's restaurant hardly ever uttered a word, nor did she appear peeved—didn't even, I think, hide any sentiment of being annoyed at my presence—and this caused me to think that she was an employee and not a romantic chum of JS. JS called to mind1 that he was divorced.
“First thing every morning I go to mass and communion....” JS told me it was especially easy to find Roman Catholic churches in the early mornings throughout Southamerica—easier than coming across them in the United States. His revelation made me think immediately of William F Buckley, Jr, and I informed him that I had worked for WFB, Jr's National Review in New York. JS said: “Bill Buckley is a sailing mate of mine!” I reacted surprised. Just imagine! JS gossiped about many things and his speech was rapid fire and obsessive. He was verbalizing at one point when he cited “The Company” as a reference to some fact he had mentioned. “The Company” was not “insurance agent” so I had to remind myself that I could not voice anything about my Gainesville Hilton hotel conversation, but I clandestinely wished JS would eventually, during the meal, come up with those two magical words. He never did. But was he a mole?
Another slip of JS's tongue was this: “The Middle East is going to blow any day now!” That statement would stay put in my cranium for decades, and all through the eighties and nineties hardly a week passed by when I would open up a newspaper or search on the Internet a Canadian, English, French, Northamerican, Spanish or Venezuelan newspaper expecting to discover that World War III had begun in the Middle East exactly where JS had predicted it would that day in the Tamanaco Hotel in Caracas. When the Twin Towers were attacked first in 1991 and ten years later in 2001, JS came to my mind instantaneously.
John Sullivan made another personal “leak”--by now he was under the influence of the one-after-the-other drinks he had imbibed—while we were discussing the food which had been served to us: “I eat on the go. I don't enjoy eating.” When I made a cute “Didn't your mother breast feed you?” aside, I thought JS's date from San Juan would bust a gut trying to hold in her laughter which she did not want to express—thus convincing me further that she was a subordinate and not a person passionate for JS who had given me the idea he could not cultivate a close relationship with anyone, including himself.
After dinner, the Puertorican woman left us and JS accompanied me to the front door of the hotel. It was close to eleven o'clock. He asked me how I was returning home. “Like always,” I said. “By bus.” John let me know, as if I didn't know, that it was not wise to travel on buses late at night in Caracas, hailed a cab for me, and put 15 bolívares in my hand. I thanked him for the evening spent together, and gave him one last chance to utter “insurance agent.” He stood stiffly, robustly. He was doing something he had to do. His frame was solid, athletic. I could see that he had been trained to defend himself with his hands. I shook his hand. He went off. I entered the cab, and as it drove off en route for La Florida where I lived, I had the sensation that my world had crumbled on down on me, and I felt again as lone as I did when I had bereaved the loss of Lucia to cancer. But worse. I had once again been betrayed by my country. As if Vietnam had not been enough! The no show of the “insurance agent” was a very bitter pill for me to swallow, and I have often checked off that infidelity logically reasoning that an administrative mix-up was the root cause. “We Take Care of Our Own” was lost on me. I had been left on my own still again. In Vietnam, my country did not give me the opportunity to be a hero for it; and, in Venezuela, my country did not give me the chance to say “f**k y*u” to it. Nevertheless, from that day on I have never been convinced that CC and/or JS were not one of the Soviet moles The Daily Journal had put its readers to the wise about. Why should I be?
* * *
Having divulged to you three mini psychological profiles of three ASs subservient to the Central Stupidity Agency, three drumbeaters who were permitted to use their political and religious visionary speculations to taint the interpretations of their analyses clouding those deductions with chitchat and muddiness, I wish now to concentrate on three of the gross miscalculations of the CSA that I, personally, have corroborated and, with alarm, reported on attempting to bring to light the misconceptions of these detrimental courses of action:
I
My first revelation was reached with perceptions of the nature of the events I had studied after they had happened—regrettably. When I met Paul Fritz for lunch in Zürich in 1985 (PF, literary agent for Peter Benchley, John Cheever, Stephen King, Mario Puzo, Gore Vidal, Tennesse Williams, Toni Morrison, Norman Mailer, James Michener, Issac Singer, Ian Fleming, et alia, in German-speaking Europe and who died prematurely of a stroke in Florida on vacation) he accosted me with these words: “I read the first 180 pages of your The Hippie Lieutenant manuscript and I know why no one will publish it in the United States!” In fact, some of the most prestigious houses in New York had nixed the work.
The Hippie Lieutenant, my trilogy about the Vietnam “War,” recounts one, of the many, of history's most tragic events, and the three books put into focus the horrible miscalculations of the United States' government that destroyed a large portion of a people's lives and homeland. Further, this Asiatic “police action” ruined the lives of countless millions upon millions of Northamerican soldiers and their families and friends; and, it caused the DisUnited States of Northamerica to lose hope not only in itself and its ideals, but also in the future of its citizenry. The end of this nefarious debacle left the DUS with only one recourse: to adorn itself in the vesture of arrogance and revenge and seek a vindication of its unlawful behavior by any means. Who, in the DUS, would want to read about that!
II
The affable Paul Fritz thought it wise to leave The Hippie Lieutenant in his desk drawer saving it for a more opportune, later date—when hopefully the DUS would have come to its senses.
My trilogy about Venezuela, Men Without Honor, Women Without Love, activated PF's taste buds the more, and with it he made a valiant effort to have it published in Germany on my behalf.
These three tomes hit on still another Northamerican diplomatic fiasco, and they clearly distinguish the Venezuelan “good guys” from the “bad guys” in cahoots with greedy Northamericans and their coterie of Washington governmental officials, sleazy journalists, two-faced university professors, petroleum Robber Barons, corrupt bankers and financial advisers, and all else who had collaborated ignominiously with the Venezuelan oligarchy known as The Twelve Disciples. My production predicts (predicted!), with passion and careful elucidation, that the Venezuelan people would revolt against the insupportable injustice that they were being subjected to. And they did.
A copy of the first segment of Men Without Honor, Women Without Love was consigned to my niece, Bernadette (a DUS naval officer visiting me from the Sigonella Naval Air Station in Italy where she was assigned as protocol officer) with my explicit instructions that the manuscript be hand-delivered to DUS intelligence personnel.
III
I have lived in Italy since 1 May 1983. Here, too, the patterns of stupidity, greed, and corruption run in tandem with those I bore witness to in Vietnam and Venezuela. Each place shares similar spectacular anti-democratic, oligarchic traits that would shock most Northamericans who cherish the tenets of their constitution. Each one is enclothed in a different style, yet each one overlaps the other with their substances of deceit and malfeasance.
Italy is falling apart at its seams. It is more than knee-high in putridness, and a day does not exist—at this writing—that some Italian political pundit will not warn Italians of one threat, or another, that is debilitating Italian democratic values.
Some of my articles about Italy can be found on www.scribd.com/thewordwarrior, and I am collecting, as I have been for many years, notes, clips, newspaper articles and the more so that I can eventually finalize my thoughts in a book that I have tentatively named Italy: A Despairing Frivolity Floundering in Its Chaos of Ignorance.
* * *
The Central Stupidity Agency has miscarried dismally in the execution of its mission. This is so for a number of reasons only three of which I will relate now. The organization is bent of “converting” other nation-states so that they conform to what the CSA regards as the moral utopia of all time: Judeo-Christian “Democratic” Capitalism. This theorization is to be fostered, at all costs, throughout the world whether through the force of economic persuasion or the clout of armed intervention. (The people of the DisUnited States of Northamerica are wonderful—if they are not bombing you!)
In opting to stamp down on the world for “its own good,” the CSA has programmed, falsely, the global extension of its economic, militaristic and political power thus compromising the security of the DUS itself. The DUS's military forces at home are unfortified, and those scattered throughout the globe are threadbare.
The worst, for me, consequence of the CSA's incompetence has been the fact that the DUS has lost so much respect in the eyes of other nation-states it is being taken less seriously the more, day after day. The CSA and its ASs tugged too hard and did not reckon that it would have been best to have treated others as they themselves hoped to be treated. The arrogance of the CSA has assigned the DUS to the dubious position of being in a state of never-ending harm's way.
My dear reader, do you really believe that I am serious about cashing in 150,000,000renminbi in compensation for my intelligent intelligence disclosures? You would be crazy if you did simply because the Central Stupidity Agency would never admit it had gone astray, and inasmuch as the government of the DisUnited States of Northamerica is on the verge of bankruptcy, it could never come up with the funds!
Toodleoo...
And, have a nice nightmare!
Authored by Anthony St. John
1 September 2009
Calenzano, Italy
* * *
Refuses to Reimburse Me
150,000,000 Renminbi
for My Highly-sophisticated
Foreign Affairs' Consultations (Gulp!)
If any one of you reading this letter-essay have ever been tempted to think that the Central Stupidity Agency (CSA) and its Agents of Stupidity (ASs) were indeed intelligent, you will never be enticed to do so once more provided you follow this article to its satisfying finale. You are about to enjoy with me a reassessment of many of my international experiences and the hindsights we may draw from them now and, regrettably, did not do so in the Past. This is not a “I told you so!” lament. It is my way of celebrating my own intelligence. I do not claim to be a genius on the subject of foreign affairs, nor do I affirm, boasting, that I possess an éclaircissement to all the disorderlinesses caused by the misplays and wrongdoings which I have witnessed perpetrated by the CSA and its ASs. In fact, I believe my abilities are directly proportionate to the inabilities of the CSA, and many other normally nimble characters would have reached the same assumptions I have had they only had had the opportunities to have had shared my observations. The beat goes on.
It all began in the autumn of 1975—at a public phone in the lobby of the Gainesville (Florida) Hilton hotel where I called the FBI office in Jacksonville to ask for advice. Lucia and I had decided to leave for Caracas near the end of the year. I knew almost nothing about Venezuela—its language, religion, customs and practices, history, collective memory, the value ascribed to its heritage, public spaces, and specific landscapes. I did know that the Venezuelans had spit upon Richard Nixon long before the Northamericans did and, of course, it was an oil-producing nation—just doomed to be so.
Planning shortly to live happily ever after in the arms of Lucia in The City of Eternal Spring, I asked for some guidance about Venezuela wanting to know if there was anything I should be wise to before heading out. Vaccinations? Visa? Passport? The agent with whom I spoke told me to call the Central Intelligence Agency (sic!) because that “outfit” was updated better on foreign affairs. He gave me a telephone number to call.
A man answered but never identified himself. Nor where he was nor what office he was in. When I enquired who he was he abruptly interrupted and asked me why I was calling. I told him. Then he queried me as to why I was seeking employment. I wasn't. I wanted to know about Venezuela. I related to him that my girlfriend had invited her friend, Pablo, from Caracas to meet me in Gainesville. Pablo was the right-hand man of the minister of the Ministerio del Ambiente y de los Recursos Naturales Renovables, the highest-budgeted ministry in the Venezuelan government at that time. The guy at the other end of the phone then was curious to know if I wished to be “contacted” when I arrived in Caracas. “Who knows...I just might need some help there alone and distant from the United States.” An “insurance agent” would visit with me when I was in Caracas. He did not say when or where.
Being lovestruck, it didn't dawn on me at the time that I was a perfect catch for a CIA recruiting officer fishing for apprentices. I had a university degree in Philosophy. I was an ex-Army officer (on the captain's promotion list) already with a SECRET security clearance. I had served as the S-2 (Intelligence Officer) for the corps of ROTC cadets at my university. I had reported for three newspapers. And I might add, I am a lateral thinker! I was recipient of the “The Wayward Missile Award” and had been called “Loose Cannon” while I served with the field artillery! Most of all, I am an “outside the box” theorist. (“A standard recommendation for reform—one made regularly by people discovering these problems for the first time—is to encourage “outside the box” analyses that challenge conventional wisdom and consider scenarios that appear low in probability but high in consequence. To some, this sort of intellectual shake-up might well have led the intelligence system, rather than Tom Clancy, to anticipate the kamikaze hijacking tactic of September 11.” Reference: Foreign Affairs, January-February 2002, page 49.) But there was a little problem: I'm not a joiner; and it was Vladimir Nabakov who had reminded me that spies get shot.
Even though the Central Stupidity Agency would have been ludicrous not to have desired to have one such as me on their roster, they were not going to ask me to work for them! (Thank goodness!) It was for me to go crawling to them. The CSA hunts for supporters. Believers. Sycophants. It covets minions. Individuals who are predetermined and apprehensive. You must be of an unenthusiastic nature but raring to go to authenticate yourself, to give yourself some legitimacy by devoting your being to a strident cause. This amalgamation requires that a candidate be a conforming non-conformist. A contradiction in terms. A double-bind situation. An aspirant must exhibit exceptional abilities to think tangentially yet be disposed to submit to a last word. Any contestant who reaches beyond the control sphere might be stomached for his or her incomparable flair—if he or she is beyond doubt an important element—but this temperament cannot be remunerated in the context of such a person's career profile. If you want to feel free you should not join the Central Stupidity Agency! You must think pessimistically about everything. You must have an enduring faith in “The Company.” They are Jesuit-like. They know something about everything but nothing about what is obvious. And you better not be an atheist!
No “insurance agent” ever met up with me in Caracas. But that was not necessarily simply because I was surrounded by CSA goofballs where I worked: first, at The Daily Journal newspaper, a bulletin board for government undercovers traipsing through Southamerica; then at the Ministerio de Infomación y Turismo. I must append here a very freaky story I had read in the DJ and which hinted to me that even if an “insurance agent” was to accost me, I could not communicate with him or her about my “dealings” with the CSA. The article stated that the CSA had been infiltrated by “moles”--it was not said who or where they were—and that the CSA was taking precautions to remedy the state of affairs! How could I be sure that an “insurance agent” was a “mole”--or not. I was on my own. I could not believe anyone. It was one of the most liberating, joyous days of my life!
When George Tenet announced his resignation from the Central Stupidity Agency in June 2004, effective 11 July 2004, he made the following statement: “We are not perfect...but we are very, very, very good....” Don't believe him! Look, rather, at the history of the world for the past sixty years and decide for yourself whether or not this planet is a better, safer, calmer place to live on. And please do not offer excuses for the catastrophes that these swivel chair warriors have concocted for millions of innocent people who have had to put up with their often megalomaniac shenanigans. I am going to prove to you how and why the CSA is chock full of dimwitted personages who are doing the DisUnited States of Northamerica more harm than benefit, and I will draw upon my experiences with them in New York, Vietnam, Venezuela and Italy to do so.
The CSA ASs I knew were tense, grim and lived their lives strenuously: playing hard ball at work, but “soft” hard ball when they lightened up. Always the confrontation, the competition, the obsession to control. With the perks they possessed, the ASs had also been given extravagant opportunities to take the Rests & Recuperations that allowed them to regain their composure and verve. But once these breaks were interrupted, they were back again stressing themselves at their sinews convinced they were not only performing a patriotic service, but were also persuaded that they were executing some metaphysical, religious good turn that would reap them rewards not only in this world, but in what they believed to be an afterlife. Dog is their copilot. These Simple Simons do not sustain that the separation of Church and State should be sanctioned.
In this reading, my dear reader, I want to put the spotlight on only three CSA ASs with whom I broke bread: William F Buckley, Jr, editor of National Review, Clem Cohen and John Sullivan. Three pals. Three enormous egos. Three marionettes. Three footboys. Three extremists.
I will speak the least about WFB, Jr because his life is best illustrated by me in another article of mine, William F Buckley, Jr: Profile of a Right-wing Fanatic posted on www.scribd.com/thewordwarrior. Enjoy reading it, and tell me what you think.
Clem Cohen was the most affable of the ASs that I was to meet—and the most pathetic, unfortunately. I would have liked very much to have been his friend, but CC had no time for friends, for life. He was a CSA workaholic and obsessed with the cold-blooded mission set out for him by his Langley superiors.
Clem Cohen was on the masthead of The Daily Journal listed as a “director,” but he was my boss at the Ministerio de Información y Turismo (MIT) to which I had been transferred by the “directors” of the DJ. I had never seen him even once during my six-month stint at the DJ. Clem was from Brooklyn, New York as I was. This did not endear him to me because I had not been to New York since 1968 and Florida had sort of undone some of my New Yorkishness.
CC was very much unsettled with himself. As other ASs were, he, too, was extremely intelligent and fluent in at least four languages and had a knowledge of two others. He was pressured but quick—so nippy as to be on the verge of ill health. One day when I was called to his office to discuss the rewrite of a speech I was editing, he jumped up on his swivel chair, mimicked a monkey, and kidded with me that he was going “bananas.” On different occasions, I tried to help him as best I could to calm him down, although I had no success. People in the office told me he was diabetic, but I possessed no verification of this information concerning his health. It would not have surprised me that he was. CC was always in a hurry. He downed his lunches dashing to return to our offices. He had three or four phones on his desk, and I frequently saw him holding a receiver in each hand while he spoke to two people at the same time. He was a compulsively hard worker to the exclusion of other interests and gave me the impression that his job had control of him rather than he having control of it. He was driven to accomplish yet I never saw the harvest of what he had planted.
CC was Venezuela's “media czar.” Each and every word written about the government of Venezuela passed his scrutiny before being sent out to the world. At MIT, he was always in contact with the DJ. MIT utilized ten telex machines that hummed twenty-four hours a day. Our newsrooms were the most forward-looking I had ever seen with the exception of those at The Miami Herald from where I once reported. All of the people I worked with spoke two or three languages with varying degrees of proficiency. CC had to read all their work before it was transmitted. Articles. Speeches. Press releases. Anything and everything originating from the Venezuelan government were checked and double-checked by the overworked Clem. It was handy for CC to have me in his service because I could spruce up the repeatedly dreadful English copy that he had to deal with. I had no muscle to change any of the contents of that which I edited. CC was paranoid about his mastery over media material. Often, I saw French, Italian, English, Spanish, German or Arabic texts spread across his desk which was constantly in a state of confusion and glutted high. Journalists from all over the world representing important newspaper or television companies passed through Clem's office unceasingly. The place pulsated with excitement and energy. I remember speaking one afternoon with Bernard Shaw of CBS who was one of the most kindhearted journalists I had ever met in my life.
CC was poles apart the other CSA personnel I knew and who were excessively rigid in their opinions and very often uptight, self-righteous and lacking senses of humour. Clem surely could be a hard worker and an extremely difficult boss to work for, yet he never asked his underlings to do things he would not do himself. He was a man you came to respect. He had a kindliness for others that reaped him support and collaboration when he was dealing with those he managed. He would tear out of his office running to a meeting with the ministro of MIT, Diego Arria, screaming final instructions to three or four of us on his way to the elevator. He worked too arduously. Too relentlessly for his physical well-being. It was CC who gave me the idea that the CSA was comprised of a “left wing” and not just the “right wing” (a Hegelian tit for tat?) which had impressed me so much at National Review and The Daily Journal. CC was more open-minded than the doctrinaire parrots of the conservative force, and if I remember correctly, he spoke well of John F Kennedy with me—but not very revealingly. It was not easy to take Clem's mind away from his work which, I had the notion, was creating more discombobulation than it was inventing creative thinking.
Each and every of the ASs I looked at carefully were goaded with a zeal which distinguished their moral fibre. They were high-minded men. Persons with faith not in themselves. Profoundly convinced they were performing a good turn on behalf of their country—right or wrong! They were religious. Practitioners. They entreated, in church or synagogue, to be able to do their best for the United States of America. They sought protection from the enemy during their prayer gatherings. They walked with four eyes checking all angles. Overly attentive. Curious. Intelligent. Thinkers both on their feet and on a bar stool. From their military experiences they grasped the importance of keeping their ties fit properly and their gig lines tidy. They could be conservative dressers toting Samsonite accessories; or, they could be fashion plates decked out in European tailored suits with Italian leather briefcases and luggage. Their watches. Their pens. Their belt buckles. Every bit of them attended to to execute the task delegated to be brought to a conclusion in favour of the United States of America. The zealots, hyped with putting on their best act, squirmed and oiled their ways through the labyrinth of details and enigmas indispensable to their superiors in Langley, Virginia.
John Sullivan was a tall, solidly-built Central Stupidity Agency AS who had as his AO (Area of Operations) the whole of Southamerica. I first met him at MIT after he had had a hushed-up conference with CC. He was not fixed to any duty station. He scrambled about Southamerican capitals using Business Week as his cover. After a brief tête-à-tête, he left me so: “Let's have lunch some day.” He was very sure of himself. Too much so for me to like him. He wore the troubles of the world on his shoulders. He was strained. He had a mission. He was holier-than-thou and a tad arrogant reminding me of William F Buckley, Jr. Was he that “insurance agent?” Was he a mole? Years later we met again at the Tamanaco Hotel, and the trim, decked out with muscles JS looked surprised when he saw me: “You still here?” I responded so: “Yeah, I'm still waiting for you to keep that lunch date!” He was embarrassed. He balked. He told me he had a dinner appointment with a Puertorican lady, but before I could let him off the hook, he caved in and invited me to dine that evening, too. John wanted to give me the impression that he was a man of his word. Like most ASs in the field and not behind a swivel chair, JS also valued the virtue of being precise. When you are meticulous you can count your accomplishments with satisfaction without regretting later that you had left something out; or, if you did, you could remind yourself that you at least had carried through on the most of them! JS was overly scrupulous. Irish Roman Catholic. As we dined, I would get an inkling into why he was so.
John led the conversation for most of the time we three sat together. The lady with us at the hotel's restaurant hardly ever uttered a word, nor did she appear peeved—didn't even, I think, hide any sentiment of being annoyed at my presence—and this caused me to think that she was an employee and not a romantic chum of JS. JS called to mind1 that he was divorced.
“First thing every morning I go to mass and communion....” JS told me it was especially easy to find Roman Catholic churches in the early mornings throughout Southamerica—easier than coming across them in the United States. His revelation made me think immediately of William F Buckley, Jr, and I informed him that I had worked for WFB, Jr's National Review in New York. JS said: “Bill Buckley is a sailing mate of mine!” I reacted surprised. Just imagine! JS gossiped about many things and his speech was rapid fire and obsessive. He was verbalizing at one point when he cited “The Company” as a reference to some fact he had mentioned. “The Company” was not “insurance agent” so I had to remind myself that I could not voice anything about my Gainesville Hilton hotel conversation, but I clandestinely wished JS would eventually, during the meal, come up with those two magical words. He never did. But was he a mole?
Another slip of JS's tongue was this: “The Middle East is going to blow any day now!” That statement would stay put in my cranium for decades, and all through the eighties and nineties hardly a week passed by when I would open up a newspaper or search on the Internet a Canadian, English, French, Northamerican, Spanish or Venezuelan newspaper expecting to discover that World War III had begun in the Middle East exactly where JS had predicted it would that day in the Tamanaco Hotel in Caracas. When the Twin Towers were attacked first in 1991 and ten years later in 2001, JS came to my mind instantaneously.
John Sullivan made another personal “leak”--by now he was under the influence of the one-after-the-other drinks he had imbibed—while we were discussing the food which had been served to us: “I eat on the go. I don't enjoy eating.” When I made a cute “Didn't your mother breast feed you?” aside, I thought JS's date from San Juan would bust a gut trying to hold in her laughter which she did not want to express—thus convincing me further that she was a subordinate and not a person passionate for JS who had given me the idea he could not cultivate a close relationship with anyone, including himself.
After dinner, the Puertorican woman left us and JS accompanied me to the front door of the hotel. It was close to eleven o'clock. He asked me how I was returning home. “Like always,” I said. “By bus.” John let me know, as if I didn't know, that it was not wise to travel on buses late at night in Caracas, hailed a cab for me, and put 15 bolívares in my hand. I thanked him for the evening spent together, and gave him one last chance to utter “insurance agent.” He stood stiffly, robustly. He was doing something he had to do. His frame was solid, athletic. I could see that he had been trained to defend himself with his hands. I shook his hand. He went off. I entered the cab, and as it drove off en route for La Florida where I lived, I had the sensation that my world had crumbled on down on me, and I felt again as lone as I did when I had bereaved the loss of Lucia to cancer. But worse. I had once again been betrayed by my country. As if Vietnam had not been enough! The no show of the “insurance agent” was a very bitter pill for me to swallow, and I have often checked off that infidelity logically reasoning that an administrative mix-up was the root cause. “We Take Care of Our Own” was lost on me. I had been left on my own still again. In Vietnam, my country did not give me the opportunity to be a hero for it; and, in Venezuela, my country did not give me the chance to say “f**k y*u” to it. Nevertheless, from that day on I have never been convinced that CC and/or JS were not one of the Soviet moles The Daily Journal had put its readers to the wise about. Why should I be?
* * *
Having divulged to you three mini psychological profiles of three ASs subservient to the Central Stupidity Agency, three drumbeaters who were permitted to use their political and religious visionary speculations to taint the interpretations of their analyses clouding those deductions with chitchat and muddiness, I wish now to concentrate on three of the gross miscalculations of the CSA that I, personally, have corroborated and, with alarm, reported on attempting to bring to light the misconceptions of these detrimental courses of action:
I
My first revelation was reached with perceptions of the nature of the events I had studied after they had happened—regrettably. When I met Paul Fritz for lunch in Zürich in 1985 (PF, literary agent for Peter Benchley, John Cheever, Stephen King, Mario Puzo, Gore Vidal, Tennesse Williams, Toni Morrison, Norman Mailer, James Michener, Issac Singer, Ian Fleming, et alia, in German-speaking Europe and who died prematurely of a stroke in Florida on vacation) he accosted me with these words: “I read the first 180 pages of your The Hippie Lieutenant manuscript and I know why no one will publish it in the United States!” In fact, some of the most prestigious houses in New York had nixed the work.
The Hippie Lieutenant, my trilogy about the Vietnam “War,” recounts one, of the many, of history's most tragic events, and the three books put into focus the horrible miscalculations of the United States' government that destroyed a large portion of a people's lives and homeland. Further, this Asiatic “police action” ruined the lives of countless millions upon millions of Northamerican soldiers and their families and friends; and, it caused the DisUnited States of Northamerica to lose hope not only in itself and its ideals, but also in the future of its citizenry. The end of this nefarious debacle left the DUS with only one recourse: to adorn itself in the vesture of arrogance and revenge and seek a vindication of its unlawful behavior by any means. Who, in the DUS, would want to read about that!
II
The affable Paul Fritz thought it wise to leave The Hippie Lieutenant in his desk drawer saving it for a more opportune, later date—when hopefully the DUS would have come to its senses.
My trilogy about Venezuela, Men Without Honor, Women Without Love, activated PF's taste buds the more, and with it he made a valiant effort to have it published in Germany on my behalf.
These three tomes hit on still another Northamerican diplomatic fiasco, and they clearly distinguish the Venezuelan “good guys” from the “bad guys” in cahoots with greedy Northamericans and their coterie of Washington governmental officials, sleazy journalists, two-faced university professors, petroleum Robber Barons, corrupt bankers and financial advisers, and all else who had collaborated ignominiously with the Venezuelan oligarchy known as The Twelve Disciples. My production predicts (predicted!), with passion and careful elucidation, that the Venezuelan people would revolt against the insupportable injustice that they were being subjected to. And they did.
A copy of the first segment of Men Without Honor, Women Without Love was consigned to my niece, Bernadette (a DUS naval officer visiting me from the Sigonella Naval Air Station in Italy where she was assigned as protocol officer) with my explicit instructions that the manuscript be hand-delivered to DUS intelligence personnel.
III
I have lived in Italy since 1 May 1983. Here, too, the patterns of stupidity, greed, and corruption run in tandem with those I bore witness to in Vietnam and Venezuela. Each place shares similar spectacular anti-democratic, oligarchic traits that would shock most Northamericans who cherish the tenets of their constitution. Each one is enclothed in a different style, yet each one overlaps the other with their substances of deceit and malfeasance.
Italy is falling apart at its seams. It is more than knee-high in putridness, and a day does not exist—at this writing—that some Italian political pundit will not warn Italians of one threat, or another, that is debilitating Italian democratic values.
Some of my articles about Italy can be found on www.scribd.com/thewordwarrior, and I am collecting, as I have been for many years, notes, clips, newspaper articles and the more so that I can eventually finalize my thoughts in a book that I have tentatively named Italy: A Despairing Frivolity Floundering in Its Chaos of Ignorance.
* * *
The Central Stupidity Agency has miscarried dismally in the execution of its mission. This is so for a number of reasons only three of which I will relate now. The organization is bent of “converting” other nation-states so that they conform to what the CSA regards as the moral utopia of all time: Judeo-Christian “Democratic” Capitalism. This theorization is to be fostered, at all costs, throughout the world whether through the force of economic persuasion or the clout of armed intervention. (The people of the DisUnited States of Northamerica are wonderful—if they are not bombing you!)
In opting to stamp down on the world for “its own good,” the CSA has programmed, falsely, the global extension of its economic, militaristic and political power thus compromising the security of the DUS itself. The DUS's military forces at home are unfortified, and those scattered throughout the globe are threadbare.
The worst, for me, consequence of the CSA's incompetence has been the fact that the DUS has lost so much respect in the eyes of other nation-states it is being taken less seriously the more, day after day. The CSA and its ASs tugged too hard and did not reckon that it would have been best to have treated others as they themselves hoped to be treated. The arrogance of the CSA has assigned the DUS to the dubious position of being in a state of never-ending harm's way.
My dear reader, do you really believe that I am serious about cashing in 150,000,000renminbi in compensation for my intelligent intelligence disclosures? You would be crazy if you did simply because the Central Stupidity Agency would never admit it had gone astray, and inasmuch as the government of the DisUnited States of Northamerica is on the verge of bankruptcy, it could never come up with the funds!
Toodleoo...
And, have a nice nightmare!
Authored by Anthony St. John
1 September 2009
Calenzano, Italy
* * *
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)