From jhdaugh@a-albionic.comSat Sep 23 07:40:17 1995
Date: Sat, 23 Sep 1995 07:35:52 -0400 (EDT)
From: James Daugherty 
To: New Paradigms Discussion 
Cc: Weekly Up-date 
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy, alt.politics.usa.constitution, alt.activism,
    alt.politics.radical-left, alt.politics.libertarian, alt.illuminati,
    talk.politics.libertarian, alt.politics.org.fbi, alt.politics.org.cia,
    alt.politics.org.nsa, alt.politics.org.covert, alt.politics.org.cfr
Subject: The Extremist Center

A-albionic Research Weekly Up-date of 9-23-95
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     _________________________________________________________________



                         AMERICA'S EXTREMIST CENTER


     _________________________________________________________________





   Washington has become a city of barricades, a place where agents on
   rooftops scan the sky for missiles, and where metal detectors are
   turned so high they can find a nail in your shoe. It is a city of
   clearances, closed doors, need to know, a city that believes even
   Alice Rivlin should take a drug test.

   Washington is a town that will host an August conference on "Special
   Tactics and Security" featuring "personal, tactical, and corrections
   body armor, hand-held shields, blankets, helmets, face shields, soft
   armor" and so forth.

   Washington is where the idea developed that the rap of Sister Souljah
   might undermine our most precious values and that messages on the
   Internet were going to eat our children alive.

   And Washington is the town that won't speak to you unless it knows
   "what it is in reference to," assumes you have a hidden agenda and
   demands to know "who you are with."

   It is a bit odd that a place of such premonitions, predilections and
   obsessive precautions should come to believe that much of the rest of
   the country suffers from paranoia. But such is the eccentricity of the
   disordered mind that it sometimes assigns to others its own defects.

   A psychiatrist has suggested that one useful way to judge such claims
   in individual cases is to count the bodies. Which is to say that
   healthy people don't leave a trail of victims as they go through life.
   On the other hand, the disordered, no matter how convincing their
   claim to normalcy, produce a wake that tells a different story.

   A similar principle can be applied to politics. And when it is, a
   simple, stunning fact stands out: With few exceptions, the major
   threats to American democracy have come from neither right nor left
   but from the center.

   From that internecine struggle of two factions of the American middle
   known as the Civil War to FBI assaults on activist organizations in
   the 60s and 70s, from the Palmer raids to Bill Clinton's
   anti-terrorism legislation, Americans have traditionally had more to
   fear from people they have elected than from those on the fringes of
   politics. In fact, the latter have often served largely as an excuse
   for the American center to tighten its grip on the political and
   economic system. This is not to say that the left and the right would
   not enjoy being just as violent and repressive given the chance, but
   the American center has rarely allowed that.

   Even the KKK, so often cited as an example of the sort of threat the
   contemporary right poses, was powerful primarily because it was at the
   center, holding political and judicial and law enforcement office as
   well as hiding beneath its robes. In some towns, lynching parties were
   even announced in the local paper. And in the 1920s, both the Colorado
   governor and mayor of Denver were members of the Klan, the latter well
   enough regarded to have had Stapleton airport named after him.

   If we were going to worry, therefore, let's at least worry about the
   right thing. Let's, for example, count the bodies. The Vietnam War is
   a good place to start: nearly 60,000 Americans killed to test the
   conspiracy theory that if one country fell in Southeast Asia they all
   would. Or the paranoia about the civil rights and peace movement in
   this country during the 1960s that led the FBI to place tens of
   thousands of citizens under surveillance, including Caesar Chavez and
   Martin Luther King Jr. Or the 1969 memo from the agency's San
   Francisco field office that suggested the FBI use the women's movement
   as a wedge against the left. Or the 1970 memo that proposed to
   "disrupt and confuse" Black Panther activities. Or 1977 -- when the
   CIA told some 80 academic institutions that they had been unwittingly
   involved in the mind control research.

   Meanwhile, what was happening on the fringes of American politics? One
   study of civil violence in the tumultuous years between 1963 and 1968
   found just 220 deaths -- an overall rate due to civil strife less than
   one half that in Europe during the same period. Most of the victims,
   by the way, were inner city residents.

   Are the days of state-sponsored violence gone forever? Not at all.
   Let's, for example, count the bodies in the War on Drugs -- a decade
   of violence dedicated to the proposition that human nature can be
   effectively outlawed. It is a fantasy as wild as anything contrived by
   the Michigan Militia, but empirically far more deadly. The Drug Policy
   Foundation estimates that drug war has cost five to six thousand
   deaths a year, enough over the past decade to equal American
   fatalities in Vietnam.

   Now let's count the bodies wasted in order to combat another
   conspiracy theory, namely, that smoking a weed considerably milder
   than tobacco is a major threat to our society. This summer America
   celebrated its 10 millionth arrest on marijuana charges. Bill Clinton
   is even afraid to let pot be used for medical purposes.

   What about arms stockpiles and the like? According to a Defense
   Department report last December, America's share of worldwide arms
   shipments has risen from slightly over 20% during the last years of
   the Cold War to more than 50% today. During the last decade of the
   20th century -- as the nation occupies itself with Oklahoma City,
   Randy Weaver and Waco -- the US will sell over $150 billion worth of
   arms to other lands. Some undoubtedly will become part of what the US
   government will refer to as the international terrorist threat.

   Hate groups? Name those that pose anywhere near the threat to American
   minorities as does the 104th Congress. And what about the "wanted"
   poster published by congressional Republicans that showed 28 targeted
   Democratic incumbents -- 80% of them black, latino, women or Jewish?
   Or the Good O'Boys Roundup, a festival for law enforcement personnel
   sponsored by agents of the BATF, which has included such things as
   signs saying NIGGER CHECKPOINT, T-shirts with a target superimposed
   over Martin Luther King's face, others showing DC police officers with
   a black man stretched across a car hood above the caption BOYZ ON THE
   HOOD, and cards labeled NIGGER HUNTING LICENSE?

   Random acts of terror? They are a growing part of the police
   repertoire as domestic law enforcement and military tactics blend. The
   raids shown on TV programs like Cops are not designed merely to
   intimidate the criminal, but to convince whole communities -- whole
   ethnic and age groups -- of police invulnerability. They also teach
   police officers bad habits by providing dubious role models.
   Meanwhile, the centrist media shows minimal interest in whether such
   practices as jump-out squads, random roadblocks, arbitrary traffic
   stops and curfews are constitutional.

   Garden variety paranoia? How about US Postal inspector Don Davis who
   was quoted in the San Francisco Examiner as saying of the Unabomber's
   questioning of technological society: "There are groups that adhere to
   a lot of these thoughts, expecially out of Berkeley." As Hank Chapot,
   a Green who ran for Berkeley city office, asked, "Is Mr. Davis talking
   about me?"

   Good data on home-grown terrorism, meanwhile, is hard to come by. We
   do know that only 171 people were indicted in the US for "terrorism
   and related activities" during the 1980s. We find (using the BATF's
   own figures) that there were just 328 bombing deaths between 1989 and
   1993. These bombings include everything from Mafia retribution,
   insurance cover-ups, apolitical acts of madness, to right-wing
   sabotage such as that directed against abortion clinics. In sum, fewer
   deaths in five years than the city of Washington loses to murder
   annually. Even the Oklahoma City incident barely undermines the
   comparison.

   Three hundred people is, of course, too many to die for any reason.
   But it is also far too weak an argument for the end of democracy.

Hysteria hustling



   The media could give some sense of scale to this business. But because
   it doesn't -- because, for example, it insists that we treat the
   Oklahoma City bombing as a pivotal event of our time -- we find
   ourselves bouncing from crisis wave to crisis wave, unable to gain an
   understanding of the underlying currents of history.

   The media is more than willing to pump up the hysteria. The results,
   as in the Oklahoma City case, can be atrocious. The media watchdog,
   FAIR, recently cited a long list of those who leaped to the conclusion
   that the bombing might be the work of Arabs. Among them were the New
   York Post, Christian Science Monitor, New York Times, Los Angeles
   Times and the Washington Post. Also ABC, CBS, and CNN. Also columnists
   Georgie Anne Geyer, A.M. Rosenthal, Mike Royko, Jim Hoagland, as well
   as such predictable sources of anti-Arab sentiment as Steve Emerson
   and Daniel Pipes. Royko, for example, wrote in the Chicago Tribune:

   I would have no objection if we picked out a country that is a likely
   suspect and bombed some oil fields, refineries, bridges, highways,
   industrial complexes . . If it happens to be the wrong country, well,
   too bad, but it's likely it did something to deserve it anyway.

   When the first suspects turned out to come from the Mid-West rather
   than from the Mid-East, the Chicago Sun-Times' Richard Roeper
   responded, "Does that mean we conduct overnight bombings of Arizona
   and Kansas and Michigan now?"

   After the anti-Arab paranoia was deflated by none other than the FBI,
   the demon vacuum for the center was quickly filled by the citizen
   militias. Even such normally sane voices as FAIR and the Nation began
   to crack with alarm. So agitated did the Nation become that several
   readers had to write and urge some perspective. Here are excerpts from
   two letters:



   Actually, but for the [militia's] confusion over the distinctions
   between socialism and fascism . . . many of their fears regarding the
   multinational corporations running the world are valid.



   Though we disagree on many issues, we as working people must still
   view the members and supporters of militias as working people who are
   victims of government repression merely reacting to this repression in
   their own way. To focus your fire on this right-wing fringe element
   and advocate government repression against them is to invite this same
   repression against ourselves somewhere down the road.



   The most remarkable piece of hysteria-hustling, though, came in a June
   New Yorker article, by Michael Kelly. The article was called THE ROAD
   TO PARANOIA. Its subtitle: There have always been radical fringes on
   both the left and the right which believe that the government
   conspires against the people. But lately the two have formed a strange
   alliance -- fusion paranoia -- that is reaching millions of
   disaffected Americans.

   To support this claim, Kelly provided, over 14 pages, the following
   number of major examples:

   One.

   Telling the tale of the confluence of a liberal and a Montanan
   right-winger, Kelly outdid Newt Gingrich in reliance on argument by
   anecdote, spinning for the New Yorker's chaise lounge potatoes a
   delicious conspiracy theory of mischief and paranoia among the hoi
   poloi.

   Along the way, Kelly managed to extrapolate some conclusions that some
   might regard as, well, extreme. He implied, for example, that there
   isn't all that much difference between the "wise use" movement and
   radical environmentalists who "see the same corrupt conspiracy as the
   Wise Users, but in mirror image." Implicit in such an argument, of
   course, is the assumption that the sort of ad hoc and erratic
   environmental policies pursued by the Clinton administration represent
   a rational center from which fringes diverge. Another way to look at
   the matter, however, is that the Clinton approach is so intellectually
   vapid, that anyone -- whether on the right or left -- who actually has
   a view about such issues (rather than merely being interested in their
   immediate political impact) will find it wanting.

   Kelly's grasp of such matters leaves much to be desired. For example,
   he seems to imply that the Wise Users are well represented by
   something called The Sahara Club USA, which believes in a conspiracy
   consisting of:

   New Age nuts, militant vegetarians, anti-gun pukes, animal rights
   goofballs, tree worshipers, new world order pushers, human haters,
   pro-socialists, doom-sayers, homosexual rights activists, radical
   eco-Nazis, slobbering political correctness advocates, militant
   feminists and land closure fascists.

   In fact, far from being representative of the corporatist "wise use"
   movement, the Sahara Club USA, as journalist Husayn Al-Kurdi recently
   reported, consists of "a bunch of bikers who are mad because they
   can't have unrestricted access to the desert to practice their
   crudities."

   Kelly, even as he speaks of paranoia, manages to lump together not
   only corporate suits and bikers, but Noam Chomsky and the John Birch
   Society, Ramsey Clark and Bo Gritz, and Timothy Leary and Lyndon
   LaRouche.

   Here are some others that Kelly believes suffer from conspiratorial
   fantasies: moderate conservatives, liberals, feminists and
   African-Americans. Who then, besides Kelly himself, is finally left on
   the side of reason?

   In the next paragraph, Kelly gives another list, this one a
   compilation of charges that have been made against the president,
   which he cites as an example of "the degree to which political
   paranoia has worked its way into the culture at large." These charges
   include the drug and gun smuggling activities at Mena, the murder of
   Vincent Foster; the murder or beatings of those threatening to expose
   his illegal activities as governor; the BCCI scandal; and the
   retention of an incompetent medical examiner to cover up a death
   caused by Clinton's mother.

   By deftly blending the highly probable (a cover-up of CIA-assisted
   drug running at Mena) with the bizarre and unlikely (the incompetent
   medical examiner story) Kelly attempts, in best centrist fashion, to
   discredit all suspicions of the president. Such a technique eliminates
   the need to argue substantive questions such as: if it is all a
   paranoiac fantasy, what are more than fifty FBI agents doing in Little
   Rock? In the 1950s, there was a name for such skillfully sloppy
   associations. It was called McCarthyism.

   In the end, Kelly's story is about the center and not about the left
   or right. It is one of the center's most notable defenses to date
   against the growing clamor of non-elite America for a share of power.
   It is about the paranoiac obsession of the American establishment to
   make sure (in its own phraseology) that the "center holds."

   Kelly understands the stakes in all this; he describes fusion
   paranoids as believing that the government "is controlled by people
   acting in concert against the common good and at the bidding of
   powerful interests working behind the scenes." This elite is comprised
   of "the money-political-legal class, and the producers of news and
   entertainment in the mass media." In short the sort of people that
   Kelly and other Washington journalists hang out with and have come to
   accept as the model of normalcy.

   As Kelly himself notes, the center's concern is not new. He quotes
   Richard Hofstadter's chestnut about the "paranoid style" of American
   politics, which Alexander Cockburn, in the Nation, describes as one

   in which the American lower orders -- including unions -- were
   dangerous, potential brownshirts restrained only by educated elites of
   mature judgment.

   In the fifties it was the elites of mature judgment who were prompting
   the CIA to destroy labor movements in the Third World and dislodge
   populist tribunes of the poor, by murder if necessary. In the nineties
   the elite increasingly detour democratic process by means of
   'bipartisan commissions,' international 'agreements' fast-tracked
   through Congress, and the crude disenfranchisement of the poor, with
   'law enforcement officials' turning growing numbers of them into
   felons denied the vote.

   Ironically, if Kelly had only waited a week he might have had a better
   perspective on the sources of American violence and the cultural
   distribution of sanity. In the same issue as his article was a review
   of the life of General Curtis LeMay, written by Richard Rhodes. LeMay
   ran the air war against both Japan and North Korea, became head of the
   sacrosanct Strategic Air Command and was one of the military heroes of
   his time.

   Here are just a few of his accomplishments:

   The destruction of nearly 17 square miles of Tokyo with the loss of at
   least 100,000 civilian lives. The US Strategic Bombing Survey
   estimated that "probably more persons lost their lives by fire at
   Tokyo in a 6-hour period than at any time in the history of man."

   The destruction of 62 other Japanese cities. Only Hiroshima and
   Nagasaki were spared -- reserved for a different sort of horror. In
   sum, more than a million Japanese civilians were killed. LeMay himself
   would admit years later, "I suppose if I had lost the war, I would
   have been tried as a war criminal. Fortunately, we were on the winning
   side."

   The bombing of North Korean cities, dams, villages and rice paddies.
   Civilian deaths: more than two million.

   In short, with the enthusiastic blessing of the American center, LeMay
   was directly responsible for the slaughter of about half as many
   civilians as died in the Holocaust. To this day, establishment
   Washington won't even face what happened at Nagasaki or Hiroshima, let
   alone the far larger massacres occurring under the command of LeMay.

   And LeMay had even grander schemes. His plan for defeating the Soviet
   Union included the obliteration of 70 Soviet cities in thirty days
   with thirty-three atomic bombs and the deaths of 2.7 million citizens.


   To be sure, those vocally uneasy back then with the presumptions and
   power of SAC were not called paranoids. They were just called Commies
   and dupes.

Wannabes



   Let's pause for another body count. From the time I first began
   looking into citizen militias, I have watched assiduously for
   certifiable acts of violence. Not talk, not war-games, not uniforms.
   But action. What I've found is a few threats, beatings and
   hair-brained schemes like stealing tanks from an army base. There's
   some bad stuff, to be sure, but in aggregate the sort of thing that
   wouldn't even make a daily's front page if instigated by one of the
   urban militias, that is to say a gang.

   Not even the Oklahoma bombing, from what has been revealed to date,
   can be pinned on the militias. So far, the worst the militias can be
   accused of in this case is guilt by attendance.

   Tim McVeigh -- who has been found guilty by the media, although not by
   the law -- seems to have met those of his ilk mainly at gun shows. And
   if there is any violent link among the suspects it is with a military
   organization called the US Army, which teaches men such unmarketable
   skills as how to kill large numbers of people quickly and then returns
   them to a civilian world in which they can't find a job. Despite the
   ads on television, the unemployment rate of veterans 20-24 years old
   is twice that of those who have not had the benefit of Army training.

   Besides, the militias seem largely manned by wannabes. Former Green
   Beret Gregory Walker, who is writing a book about terrorism and
   anti-terrorism, told Pacific News Service:

   Today, the militia movement rates about 1.5 on a scale of 1 to ten in
   which one is completely benign . . . It's made up primarily of
   law-abiding citizens who make no attempt to conceal their identities
   or [ideology] and who are so desperate for real military training they
   put want-ads in the newspaper . . . Eighty percent of militia members
   have no military experience, and just an infinitesimally small
   percentage have any kind of combat experience. The rest are the
   butchers, the bakers and the candlestick makers, the guys who ran the
   computers and fixed truck tires. . . . That's why the militia's are so
   desperate to hire trainers -- and why they end up hiring bunko artists
   in a lot of cases because very few real-deal military would get
   involved.

The narrow window of normalcy



   Let's pause now for some argument by anecdote. To understand the
   establishment's fear of the rest of the country, it helps to
   understand how narrow is its definition of normalcy. A minor, but
   telling example, came earlier this year when I was bounced from the
   lineup for a TV show about the DC fiscal crisis after the host, Derik
   McGinty, found that I still supported DC statehood. In some pique,
   McGinty said, "Don't you know, Sam, that puts you out of the loop?"

   I replied that I had been out of the loop for about 30 years, but that
   I did try to do right. I didn't mention that probably a majority of DC
   voters agreed with me, but that wouldn't have mattered much anyway.
   The loop is not for voters, but for those who decide things.

   It's not hard to bump up against the Washington consensus. During 1992
   primary season. I was walking down 15th Street when I ran into Don
   Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post. Graham asked whom I was
   supporting for president. I said I was backing Jerry Brown. Graham
   immediately grabbed my arm and started waving it in the air as he
   shouted something to the effect of "Look, everyone, I've found a real,
   live Jerry Brown supporter! Look!"

   Brown, at the time, was the second choice of the country's Democratic
   voters. That, in Washington, wasn't good enough. No one in Washington
   who mattered supported Jerry Brown.

   Such anecdotes may help to explain how the New York Times can write a
   front-page story -- headlined CONSPIRACY THEORIES' IMPACT REVERBERATES
   IN LEGISLATURES -- that treated an historic debate over the Tenth
   Amendment (guaranteeing the rights of the states and the people) as
   some sort of right wing plot.

   The historic and constitutional ignorance displayed by the "paper of
   record" produced a piece as bizarre as if it were to be suggested that
   the separation of church and state was a scheme dreamed up by
   President Assad.

   As with Kelly and his taxonomy of paranoids, the Times even went so
   far as to link those concerned about the Tenth Amendment with those
   who think the numbers painted on the back of Indiana highway signs are
   signals to invading UN troops.

   Similarly, CBS News ran a piece attacking the fully informed jury
   movement (of which your editor is a supporter) as evidence of a right
   wing assault on the judiciary. In fact, the idea that a jury has the
   right to judge both the law and the facts goes back to the trials of
   William Penn and Peter Zenger, was supported by a number of the
   country's founders and early judges, and has been most recently
   applied to the benefit of the likes of Marion Barry and Abbie Hoffman.


Black helicopters



   We now pause for the really good stuff: black helicopters. You see, we
   are told, not only does the paranoid right believe in the Tenth
   Amendment and jury rights: it believes in black helicopters.

   The greatest power of the mass media is the power to ignore. As angst
   mounts in the heartland, however, and as alternative mass media like
   the Internet gain significance, the elites are losing their ability to
   decide what exists and what is merely a fiction of our imagination.
   Implicit in the mass media ridicule is a rising anger over its loss of
   control of the agenda. In the old days, issues like proportional
   representation, the fully informed jury movement, or the shorter
   work-week would never see the light of day. Now, however, whole
   movements can arise without the assistance of the Post or the Times,
   something that is regarded in establishment circles as truly
   aggravating. I suspect, in fact, that much of the media's angst about
   sex on the Internet is really little more than a foil for a far deeper
   concern: massive competition.

   The black helicopters are a trivial but interesting case in point. It
   is standard fare for journalists to make fun of the idea of unmarked
   black helicopters. Yet there is evidence -- newspaper accounts,
   intelligence sources and so forth -- that such craft do exist. In all
   probability their ubiquity -- although not necessarily details of
   color and markings -- can be explained by this country's growing
   assumption that it can conduct surveillance on anyone it pleases,
   especially those who might be engaged in growing marijuana. Certainly
   a federal judge in California thought so; he found helicopter
   surveillance so intrusive and harassing that he enjoined its continued
   routine use.

   And just one day after I had been jousting on such matters at lunch
   with a British journalist, and while engaged in giving him a tour of
   the city, he suddenly cried, "Look, a black helicopter!" To be sure,
   flying low above us was a dark whirlybird. Given the direction of the
   sun, I couldn't swear the craft was not dark green but it certainly
   was unmarked. I might, perhaps incorrectly (but without an iota of
   paranoia), have described it as black.

   The whole business reminds me of James Thurber's fable about the
   unicorn in the garden. Upon informing his wife that he had seen a
   unicorn in the garden, his spouse calls the police to have her husband
   dispatched to the booby hatch. When the cops arrive, however, the
   husband denies ever having seen a unicorn in the garden and has his
   wife locked up instead. And lives happily thereafter. Thurber's moral
   could well apply to today's discussions of black helicopters and
   political paranoia. "Don't," he warned, "count your boobies until they
   are hatched."

   To be sure there are those who see more than black helicopters, who
   believe that these craft are the advance troops of a UN invasion. But
   what service is provided to reason by the media pretending that they
   don't exist at all? Why not determine their function, color and so
   forth and point out that the UN is unlikely to invade with a staff and
   budget only slightly larger than that of the DC government? What's
   really going on here? Paranoiac co-dependence? Or are we seeing a more
   generic version of what often happens when government or defense
   contractor whistle-blowers speak out -- namely that they are sent to
   see a psychiatrist?



The myth-killers



   One of the greatest myths of America's elite is that it functions by
   logic and reason and that it is devoid of myth. In truth, elites
   function like other people; they choose their gods and worship them.
   The gods, to be sure, are different. For example, many in Washington
   believe fervently in the sanctity of data, the Ivy League, the New
   York Times op pages and the Calvinist notion that their power is a
   outer, visible sign of an inner, invisible grace.

   And some, even while professing to be without myth, spend their lives
   creating myths for others. We call them political consultants and
   ghostwriters.

   There is no consistency to all this. The Pope's disastrous myths
   concerning birth control are treated with deference while domestic
   fundamentalism is ridiculed. Similarly, politicians and media created
   an instant mythology around the deaths of 15 children in Oklahoma
   City, but tend -- as did the Washington Post recently -- to lump the
   22 children who died in Waco as among "80 group members," apparently
   as deserving of their end as was David Koresch.

   What makes those in power different from other Americans is not the
   absence of myth but their denial of it. In refusing to allow room for
   the unknown, for faith, for those temporary fillers called theories
   that slip into the empty spaces of our knowledge, those in charge of
   America ultimately separate themselves from such natural human
   phenomena as myth.

   As less of what should be known in our society is allowed to be known,
   the distance widens between those who have the knowledge and those who
   do not. To have any sort of decent relations with those Americans not
   professionally trained to suppress belief and imagination, we would
   need en elite with more poets and fewer economists. The poet
   understands that a myth is not a lie but the soul's version of the
   truth. One of the reasons so many stories are mangled by the media
   these days is because journalists have become unable to deal with the
   non-literal.

   Consider the mythic underpinnings of the OJ Simpson saga. The average
   white lawyer or reporter sees it only as a murder case. But to many
   blacks, Simpson is carrying the mythic weight of decades of ethnic
   abuse under the justice system. In a column for Pacific News Service,
   a black journalist, Dennis Schatzman, outlined some of the black
   context for the Simpson trial:
     * Just last year, Olympic long jumper and track coach Al Joyner was
       handcuffed and harassed in a LAPD traffic incident. He has settled
       out of court for $250,000.
     * A few years earlier, former baseball Hall of Famer Joe Morgan was
       "handcuffed and arrested at the Los Angeles airport because police
       believed that Morgan 'fit the profile of a drug dealer.'" He also
       got a settlement of $250,000.
     * Before that, former LA Laker forward Jamal Wilkes was stopped by
       the police, handcuffed and thrown to the pavement.
     * A black man was recently given a 25-year to life sentence for
       stealing a slice of pizza from a young white boy.
     * In 1992, a mentally troubled black man was shot and killed by LA
       sheriff's deputies while causing a disturbance in front of his
       mother's house. Neighbors say they saw a deputy plant a weapon by
       the body.
     * Simpson case detective Mark Fuhrman was accused of planting a
       weapon at the side of a robbery suspect back in 1988. The LAPD
       recently settled for an undisclosed amount.
     * In North Carolina, Daryl Hunt still languishes in jail for the
       1984 rape and murder of a white newspaper reporter, even though
       DNA tests say it was not possible.



   These examples would be rejected as irrelevant by the average lawyer
   or journalist in New York or Washington. What do they have to do with
   Simpson?

   Only this. OJ Simpson's case serves as the mythic translation of
   stories never allowed to be told. The stories that should have been on
   CNN but weren't. Everything is true except the names, times and
   places. In Washington, they do something similar when stories can't be
   told; they write a novel.

   Something parallel takes place when a militia member imagines that the
   Bloods & Crips are being armed by the US government or when blacks
   believe the same thing about the militias. Or when the UN is thought
   to on the verge of invasion.

   Like urban blacks considering the justice system, the rural right has
   seen things the elite would prefer to ignore. It has observed
   correctly phenomena indicating loss of sovereignty for themselves,
   their states and their country. They have seen treaties replaced by
   fast-track agreements and national powers surrendered to remote and
   unaccountable trade tribunals. And they have seen a multi-decade
   assault by the federal government on the powers of states and
   localities.

   Like urban blacks, they have not been paranoid in this observation,
   merely perceptive. But because the story could not be told, could not
   become part of the national agenda, they have turned, as people in
   trouble often do, to a myth -- and, yes, sometimes a violent myth --
   that will carry the story.

   The tragedy is that the American center has not responded to these
   myths by confronting their causes but rather with ridicule and
   repression. And by creating its own myths. In fact, to the American
   center, the militias serve much the same purposes as the United
   Nations and the Council on Foreign Relations do for the right. Just as
   once the establishment tried to define the civil rights movement by
   the Symbionese Liberation Army and the cause of North Ireland by the
   IRA, so Americans' concern over the usurpation of sovereignty at every
   level is being defined primarily by its most exaggerated
   manifestations. There is no wisdom and much danger in this.

   As author Walker puts it, "We've haven't seen a great peacemaker step
   forward to quell the fears and uncertainties. Instead we've seen a
   strong effort demonize people and polarize thought. Where is the
   person who can rise up and say, 'My fellow Americans' and truly be
   including all Americans. He's not out there, and she's not out there,
   and that's who we need to hear from."

   In the meantime, when someone tells you about a some Americans who are
   paranoid or crazy, be sure to count the bodies. -- Sam Smith, July
   1995

Forwarded Courtesy of:

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