4 Hour Hard On

Three Shards by John Bennett
(c) 2006, All Rights Reserved


MENTAL PATIENT

Words failed him completely. They melted down en route from his brain to his tongue and glottis like wax figurines. The melted words flowed back into his brain like hot lava. The villagers abandoned their huts and ran into the ocean. They swam as far as the barrier reef and then dog paddled in circles. The lava cut a swath into his brain consuming all in its path. It hissed into the ocean and went rigid with shock. It configured into grotesque statues of basalt.

They doubled his sedation, but still he rocked and moaned, his knees pulled up tight into his chest. They tried to undo the lock of his fingers, but even the strongest orderly couldn't do it. They put him out with a special shot reserved for surgery, but his fingers remained locked. He had become the firestorm in his brain. He had turned into basalt.

Small golden butterflies, the essence of what he had been struggling to say, pressed between his parted lips and fluttered to the ceiling. The doctors and nurses frowned at the butterflies, and the black orderlies slipped out of the room. That night in their favorite honky-tonk they would drink straight shots of Jim Beam and listen to the Blues band with newfound intensity.



BRING IT ON

Last night I dreamed I squeezed blood out of a turnip. When I woke up at 6 a.m., the sheets were soaked in blood. I threw the covers back, half expecting to find a horse head with glazed eyes. I've seen the movies that count. I know how they operate.

I wrapped the sheets around me and went out on the front lawn. "Come and get me, you bastards!" I yelled. Then I went inside and put on water for coffee--attach to no one and nothing and there's no way they can get to you.

Nevertheless, in Chicago, Meatball Vince boards a flight to Seattle. They're determined to see what I'm made of.

I pour a cup of coffee and light my first cigarette of the day. "Bring it on," I say to my reflection in the early-morning window, and then remember that I haven't given the dog her insulin shot yet.



SQUIRREL MAIMERS

An old injury has come back to haunt me, a mere shadow of its old self.

When I lower my head (to read a letter from an old lover or check out the latest stain on the rug), it doesn't want to come up again. An act of will has to step in and lend a hand to a reflex action. My head comes up slowly in ripples of pain.

Thirty years ago I knew this ex-Marine who used to sit in a second-story window and with a pellet gun maim squirrels that scurried across the back lawn of his Palo Alto home. One night at a party I told him what I thought of his squirrel-maiming pastime, and he said, "What are you going to do about it?" I pushed him backwards over a chair.

He was a tournament wrestler, a boxer and a football lineman, and he came up off the floor low and threw his shoulder into my mid-section. He ran me across the room into the wall and knocked the wind out of me, and before I could get it back again he had me on the floor with my head in a scissor lock. I could hear things snapping and cracking, and I knew I was hurt bad--for weeks afterward I couldn't move my head the slightest bit without daggers of pain shooting through my neck.

Fifteen years ago that pain came back to visit in a mutated form, so that if I tried to stand up, I collapsed. I was told by a neurosurgeon that if I wasn't operated on immediately, I'd be paralyzed down my left side within six months. After careful consideration, I opted for spontaneous healing. But that's another story.

The world is full of squirrel maimers, and this business with my neck is one of many scars I carry from pushing them backwards over chairs.

Ever since I tore up the high-school soccer field on my Harley at the age of 17, I've been known as a trouble maker.

THE SPIES WHO SHAG US
The Times and USA Today have Missed the Bigger Story -- Again

(c) '06, by Greg Palast


I know you're shocked -- SHOCKED! -- that George Bush is listening in on all your phone calls. Without a warrant. That's nothing. And it's not news.

This is: the snooping into your phone bill is just the snout of the pig of a strange, lucrative link-up between the Administration's Homeland Security spy network and private companies operating beyond the reach of the laws meant to protect us from our government. You can call it the privatization of the FBI -- though it is better described as the creation of a private KGB.

********************

The leader in the field of what is called "data mining," is a company called, "ChoicePoint, Inc," which has sucked up over a billion dollars in national security contracts.

Worried about Dick Cheney listening in Sunday on your call to Mom? That ain't nothing. You should be more concerned that they are linking this info to your medical records, your bill purchases and your entire personal profile including, not incidentally, your voting registration. Five years ago, I discovered that ChoicePoint had already gathered 16 billion data files on Americans -- and I know they've expanded their ops at an explosive rate.

They are paid to keep an eye on you -- because the FBI can't. For the government to collect this stuff is against the law unless you're suspected of a crime. (The law in question is the Constitution.) But ChoicePoint can collect it for "commercial" purchases -- and under the Bush Administration's suspect reading of the Patriot Act -- our domestic spying apparatchiks can then BUY the info from ChoicePoint.

Who ARE these guys selling George Bush a piece of you?

ChoicePoint's board has more Republicans than a Palm Beach country club. It was funded, and its board stocked, by such Republican sugar daddies as billionaires Bernie Marcus and Ken Langone -- even after Langone was charged by the Securities Exchange Commission with abuse of inside information.

I first ran across these guys in 2000 in Florida when our Guardian/BBC team discovered the list of 94,000 "felons" that Katherine Harris had ordered removed from Florida's voter rolls before the election. Virtually every voter purged was innocent of any crime except, in most cases, Voting While Black. Who came up with this electoral hit list that gave Bush the White House? ChoicePoint, Inc.

And worse, they KNEW the racially-tainted list of felons was bogus. And when we caught them, they lied about it. While they've since apologized to the NAACP, ChoicePoint's ethnic cleansing of voter rolls has been amply rewarded by the man the company elected.

And now ChoicePoint and George Bush want your blood. Forget your phone bill. ChoicePoint, a sickened executive of the company told us in confidence, "hope[s] to build a database of DNA samples from every person in the United States ...linked to all the other information held by CP [ChoicePoint]" from medical to voting records.

And ChoicePoint lied about that too. The company publicly denied they gave DNA to the Feds -- but then told our investigator, pretending to seek work, that ChoicePoint was "the number one" provider of DNA info to the FBI.

"And that scares the hell out of me," said the executive (who has since left the company), because ChoicePoint gets it WRONG so often. We are not contracting out our Homeland Security to James Bond here. It's more like Austin Powers, Inc. Besides the 97% error rate in finding Florida "felons," Illinois State Police fired the company after discovering ChoicePoint had produced test "results" on rape case evidence ... that didn't exist. And ChoicePoint just got hit with the largest fine in Federal Trade Commission history for letting identity thieves purchase 145,000 credit card records.

But it won't stop, despite Republican senators shedding big crocodile tears about "surveillance" of innocent Americans. That's because FEAR is a lucrative business -- not just for ChoicePoint, but for firms such as Syntech, Sybase and Lockheed-Martin -- each of which has provided lucrative posts or profits to connected Republicans including former Total Information Awareness chief John Poindexter (Syntech), Marvin Bush (Sybase) and Lynn Cheney (Lockheed-Martin).

But how can they get Americans to give up our personal files, our phone logs, our DNA and our rights? Easy. Fear sells better than sex -- and they want you to be afraid. Back to today's New York Times, page 28: "Wider Use of DNA Lists is Urged in Fighting Crime." And who is providing the technology? It comes, says the Times, from the work done on using DNA fragments to identity victims of the September 11 attack. And who did that job (for $12 million, no bid)? ChoicePoint, Inc. Which is NOT mentioned by the Times.

"Genetic surveillance would thus shift from the individual [the alleged criminal] to the family," says the Times -- which will require, of course, a national DNA database of NON-criminals.

It doesn't end there. Turn to the same newspaper, page 23, with a story about a weird new law passed by the state of Georgia to fight illegal immigration. Every single employer and government agency will be required to match citizen or worker data against national databases to affirm citizenship. It won't stop illegal border crossing, but hey, someone's going to make big bucks on selling data. And guess what local boy owns the data mine? ChoicePoint, Inc., of Alpharetta, Georgia.

The knuckleheads at the Times don't put the three stories together because the real players aren't in the press releases their reporters re-write.

But that's the Fear Industry for you. You aren't safer from terrorists or criminals or "felon" voters. But the national wallet is several billion dollars lighter and the Bill of Rights is a couple amendments shorter.

And that's their program. They get the data mine -- and we get the shaft.


**********

Greg Palast is author of "Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?", "China Floats Bush Sinks", "The Scheme to Steal '08", "No Child's Behind Left and Other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War."

BOING! BOING! BOING!
(c) '06, by John Bennett


Don't be a grouch. Don't slouch. Park yourself on the couch. Sit on your hands and bounce. The springs go boing, boing, boing. Go onomatopoeic. Sing it out:

"Boing! Boing! Boing!"

The Zen master comes off the rug like a tidal wave and boxes your ears until your nose bleeds. "Ah, Grasshopper!" he says. "You are such a piece of work!"

He loves you. He admires you. He worships you. You contain a kernel that he is trying to crack like a koan, like an Easter egg, like the Da Vinci Code. Do not be diverted. Keep bouncing. Sing it out.

"Boing! Boing! Boing!"

I know it seems absurd, but you are in the presence of the only man in the world who doesn't think you're insane, and he is in the presence of the only man in the world who does not take him seriously. Together you are on the verge of a momentous breakthru.



A WEEKEND IN CANADA
(c) '06 by John Bennett

Four days, actually. Walking through rain forests and eating salmon. Going in, the Canadian at the checkpoint sat tilted back in his chair in his booth. "Purpose of your visit?" he said. "How long do you plan to stay? Enjoy Canada."

Coming back out, at the Washington border, a mounted camera took a picture of our car. The woman at the checkpoint wanted a passport or a birth certificate. Visibly unhappy that we had neither, she asked for our driver's licenses, which she made photo copies of. Then she spotted the potted bamboo shoot on the floorboard. She slapped an orange sticker on our windshield and directed us to an inspection island. Three uniformed men with pistols on their hips instructed us to cut the engine and step out of the car. They sent us into an inspection facility.

Inside the building in the middle of a large room there were long empty tables for examining luggage. There was a glass partition along one wall with barred windows in it like teller windows in a bank; behind each window stood a man wearing a black tie and a white shirt with the American flag on the upper left sleeve. There were no other travelers in the building. The men behind the windows stared at us. Off to the other side of the room was a low, chrome-topped counter with a man and a woman both in uniform behind it. We hesitated, holding our potted bamboo shoot.

A woman behind the counter spoke up. "Over here," she said.

We walked over and surrendered the bamboo. A guard came in from outside.

"They neglected to bring their paperwork with them," the guard said, and handed the woman the orange slip from off the windshield.

She read it, frowning.

"What was your purpose, in attempting to bring this plant into the United States?" the woman said.

"It's a gift," said Suz.

"You can't bring this into the United States," said the woman. "You can't bring any living vegetative matter into the United States without a permit."

She walked into another room with the bamboo shoot. A few minutes later she returned with the pot, empty of bamboo and soil. She handed the pot to Suz.

"Thanks," I said, "for your help."

The man and woman behind the counter exchanged glances.

"You can go now," said the man.

Outside one of the guards was walking around our car with a scan wand plugged into a box-like device strapped on his back. Another guard said, "Drive to the stop sign. Stop. Make a left. Stop at the next stop sign. Make another left. Continue driving."

They watched us get into the car. They watched us drive away. Two lefts later, we were home.

"...What is still called order, but is really physical and spiritual exhaustion, comes into existence of its own accord when what is rightly called mediocrity is in the ascendant..."

--Jean Genet