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The FBI Files


by j jackson




I have documents (they're not on my computer, they're on paper) that I am in the process of burning that contain highly and negatively critical information on The Federal Bureau of Intimidation. By evening all physical evidence of them will be gone. But not really. I've committed them to memory. I am the physical evidence. My existence is a threat to the agency. This information is easily intuited, if you have a thorough knowledge of the agency and its operations, especially in light of the fact that I "broadcast" my thoughts on these matters daily when I meditate (from 9 until 11 a.m. EST, if you'd care to "tune in.") Now, let's see the FBI try to intimidate me into divulging what I know and desist from thinking it. (I only mention this here so that, if I disappear, you'll know why.)
This is a residue of the thought process of my youth. I still think this way, when I regress--and regression is more common than we think. We do it every day in slight and subtle ways. When I was a teenager, I felt intimidated by authority and had to rebel against it, to assert myself. It's only natural. But I'm still doing it. I've become a lot tamer as I've grown older. Or have I, really. Maybe the world is getting wilder instead. I certainly didn't act then like these kids do today, although I may have felt the same way.
Why are teens so outlandishly rebellious these days? I say it's their parents' fault. Think about it. When we baby boomers were young, we had conservative, middle class parents to rebel against. The same is true of some of today's teens, I know. That dynamic still persists, much the same as it had when flappers thought that bathtub gin was the bee's knees or when Cain slew Abel. (Yep. He was rebelling against Adam's uptight morality.)
But what about the rest of today's teens--actually, the greater majority of them. Their parents were rock and rollers. Even many (most?) of today's conservatives were once rockers. Now, every teen must rebel. It's in the rulebook. It's coded into our DNA. So, when raging hormones dictate that it's time to set out in their own direction, today's teens do a quick survey and see what?
"Well, although my parents are middle-class now, they were rockers when they were young, and they did some wild things, if some of the stories I overhear when they get together with their friends are true. And anyway, they still listen to Steppenwolf, ZZ Top, and Country Joe and the Fish. So, rebelling through rock and roll just won't do it for me. And becoming a conservative like Michael J. Fox on 'Family Ties' isn't a good answer, either. So, I'm just going to have to be even more outlandish and bizarre than I otherwise would have been if daddy and mommy hadn't been so wild when they were young."
Yes, folks. If you want your kids to grow up relatively sane, you have to deconstruct your past, and fairly early on, before your kids are old enough to understand (before the age of three). You've got to be seen by them as having been a member of the Young Republicans and campaigned for Nixon and Reagan. You've got to sell the Rolling Stones collection and replace it with Sinatra albums. You've got to give the kids something tame to rebel against, so that they don't feel that they must outdo your past.
Do you think that maybe we lost something in the great social rebellion of the sixties that had previously been passed down unintentionally from generation to generation? Maybe the parents of every generation before us had a secret past that they knew enough to hide from their kids, but we, heads clouded with pot smoke, missed the message. If you don't want your kids to dye their hair pink, tear the seats out of their pants and run around without underwear, huff industrial-strength solvents in the back alleys of the inner city, or shoot up their teachers and fellow students in a final day of glory, you have to convince them completely that you support Pat Buchanan for president and want to reestablish the gold standard.
Otherwise, your kids are lost to the eternal progress of radicalization, which is okay by me, because I'm a recluse who shields himself from such activities and takes perverse delight in the ruination of our culture and the onset of the Tribulation, but maybe you want something better for your kids. Seriously. Wake up. Stop trying to prevent their rebellion. It's only natural. Give them their head. If you accept the fact that they will rebel, they just might rebel against that idea, study hard, and after graduation, join the FBI or the CIA. Now, wouldn't that be nice?
The FBI is the place to be these days. Every self-respecting college graduate knows this. That's going to change, and soon, but for now, joining the organization is the epitome of success and chic. Most teenagers don't buy this line of thought, of course, but kids grow up real fast these days. One day they're raving on MMDA, the next they're buying designer clothes and driving new cars. It's always going to be in to be in, and most kids are eventually going to want to join up and change the correct pronunciation of their surnames to something more acceptable.

"Mueller's name is pronounced Mooller [rendition approximately, i.e., with an umlaut], not Muller, like everyone on the news pronounces it."
"Maybe that's the way he pronounces it."
"It probably is. So what?"
"You should pronounce peoples' names the way they want them pronounced, not the way you think they should be."
"I don't care how he wants it pronounced. I can pronounce my last name Rabinowitz if I want, but that doesn't change the way it's really pronounced."
"How do you pronounce it?"
"O'Brien."

After the name change comes the personality alteration. Rebellion transitions into, of all things, a belief in God. God is truth and power, the ultimate vision of success. Kids become adults by having visions. (Most of them won't attend to them so specifically that they actually hallucinate; most of the visions are sub-cerebral, body-intuitive, and probably hormonal.) A strong belief in a Western, Christian God is a defining and conditioning process that can propel a kid all the way to the top, where real power is to be had for the taking, like Ashcroft and his buddies are doing every day.
Ashcroft and his ilk will use any excuse possible to expand their sphere of power and influence, as when, for example, they use the FBI babe who squealed on management to occasion the restructuring (i.e., grabbing more power) of the agency. We don't need more FBI surveillance to solve these problems. We need the FBI to do the job it's supposed to be doing. It's obvious from recent events that the FBI's new powers were never necessary to protect U.S. citizens. The FBI had all the power it needed to prevent the attack on the WTC. What it didn't have was the management will to allow the agents to do their jobs. The provisions of law prior to 9-11 were far more than enough to get the job done. This is a power grab and it has been one since Bush came into office. And it not only applies to the FBI, but to every other federal law enforcement agency as well. They won't be happy until the only thing keeping federal agents from abusing the citizens is their own good will, which as we well know, can be at times in very short supply.
[If Ashcroft thinks he's any different than Joe McCarthy, he's a very deluded man. The monitoring of Internet and library usage and bookstore purchases is one step away from the monitoring of thought.]
If you want this kind of power, and you are between the ages of twenty-three and thirty, you should be seriously considering government service. The time has never been better. Sure, if you're hired on, you're going to go through some changes with organization you sign on with. You're going to experience a loss popularity as the agencies lose their current social status. But don't let that throw you. That's a superficial thing. You're going to find, as you grow older, that what's real lies far beneath the surface. Power is the name of the game, and overt power is only the tip of the iceberg. So, put your best foot forward and go on a few interviews.

"What's your biggest weakness?"
"I don't think that's a fair question. I've been asked it a lot before in interviews, and I know to expect it. So I could have crafted an answer to it designed to make me look good while I pretended to reveal a bad side. But a few years I ago, I decided that that was not what I should be doing. My role here is to present my best side. That's what I'm doing here. If you see your role as ferreting out my bad side, well, okay. I accept that. That's fair. But I don't think I should be required to make that too easy for you."

Wrong! Wrong answer. Tell them what they want to hear. That where real power lies. When people hear what they want to hear, they think you're on their side, whether you are or not. And, always, you want everyone to think you're on their side. That way, they look elsewhere to project their suspicions.

"But you have to tell people what you really believe."
"No you don't. Why?"
"Because you compromise your integrity when you don't. When people don't know what you believe, they make things up about you."
"So tell them what you want them to think you believe."
"But then you redefine yourself. You start to believe what you tell everyone else."
"Only if you're a weak-willed or mushy-minded person."
"It's too hard to go around all the time trying to keep your falsehoods straight. It's better to be straightforward and honest about your beliefs."
"Okay. Fine. But you should keep that real truth to yourself. Tell yourself the truth, but don't tell everyone else."
"Why?"
"So that you can control what people believe about you."
"Why would I want to do that?"
"It's how you get and maintain power."
"But I don't want power."
"Then you're more stupid than I thought."
"Anyway, people are going to believe what they wanna believe, no matter what you tell them."
"People believe what they're told to believe. And unless you tell them otherwise, they're going to believe what other people tell them to believe. You have to correct people's opinions when someone is telling them something about you that isn't true or that shows you in a bad light."
"People's opinions are automatically corrected over time. You don't have to do anything about it. It gets straightened out all by itself."
Yes, but in the meantime, you suffer."
"How am I suffering?"
"I don't know. Probably in a lot of ways. If people think badly of you, you might not get opportunities you might otherwise get."
"I don't need opportunities. If I needed opportunities, I'd go out and make them myself."
"You'd make them a lot easier if people thought well of you."
"You assume that people don't think well of me because of one person's ill opinion. One person tells someone I'm not a good guy, and everyone believes him."
"They might think better of you if you spoke up for yourself."
"And they might think worse. Sometimes a person can be his own detractor. I prefer to let my behavior speak for me, and let the opinions fall where they may."
"But then, they might fall against you."
"People's bad opinions, in the long run, only hurt themselves. When people go around spreading ill will, they create a bad reputation for themselves. And the people who listen to them are just as bad. People who base their opinions on rumor and innuendo instead of first hand experience are just as bad as the people who spread the rumors in the first place."


Dear Mr. O'Brien,

We are sorry to inform you that your application for employment with the Federal Bureau of Intimidation has been denied. We find that certain conditions in one of the modules of your status evaluation are not up to our standards at this time. We hope you have success in your continuing employment search and look forward to meeting with you again should conditions in your status or our standards change.

Yours Truly,

Saul Rabinowitz
Deputy Director of Employment


"They didn't hire me 'cause I'm a white male."
"Bullshit."
"It's true. There's a reverse prejudice."
"In this administration?"
"Of course. Bush doesn't dare fuck up on this issue. He hired Colin Powell, even though he doesn't really agree with his politics or methods."
"Colin Powell. Now, he's a different kind of a leader."
"He's not a leader. A leader is someone people follow."
"People follow him."
"Who?"
"Black people."
"Like who? Condolesa Rice?"
"You know what I mean."
"You more than others should know that black people don't count in this administration. Anyway, Colin Powell isn't black. He's Caribbean Indian, African, and Scotch-Irish."
"Just another example of the race problem in America."
"There is no race problem in America. There's a definition problem. We want to see everything in black and white, when we're all just shades of gray."
"You just got done saying you were prejudiced against because you're white!"
"That's not a race problem, it's a political correctness problem."
"That's just a lot of [unrecognizable word]."
"I don't know what that means. Speak English."
"I am speaking English."
"No you're not. You're speaking Ebonics."
"You white people jus' don' know wha's hap'nin' "
"I'm not white."
"No? What are you?"
"I don't now. Martian or something."
[Laughs.] "Martian?"
"Well I sure as shit can't be from this planet."

I don't belong here, I don't fit in, I don't agree with most of what's happening on this planet, I don't believe that humans are capable of honesty and integrity, I don't see in most cases that justice is being served, even in these great United States, which is supposed to be the best and fairest nation that ever existed. If that is true, and I have no doubt that it is, then the human race is in bad shape. And the justice system is the best of our institutions. But when assessing the validity and honor of the justice system, we must always keep in mind that judges are people who used to be lawyers. People who base their livelihoods on affording to an individual equal justice under the law regardless of whether he is guilty or innocent can't be all that honorable, nor can the system he works in be all that valid. It may be the best we can manage as humans, but it's inherently flawed. This is the problem: as humans, we can do no better. But I can, in my own world. In my own world, there is no injustice. If there were, I would act to eliminate it, but I've acted to eliminate it all so very long ago.
And I don't belong here on this planet because of all the violence. I have a personal antipathy for violence of any kind, especially when I fear that it will become directed toward me. War, unrestrained cops, personal battery, verbal abuse, animal survival, I'm against it all. [But I'm not a vegetarian. I eat meat, and at times, I've even killed for meat, because although I am a pacifist, I am also a hypocrite (as is everyone, and you don't generally have to go very far down into the unconscious to find it either)].
Other countries criticize America for it's violence, and I have to admit that they have a point. But they don't see that in criticizing us, they repress awareness of their own violent status, just like when we criticize China and other human rights violators, we repress awareness of our own abuses. No one is innocent, and we all ought to act like we know it and deal with our own personal and national problems and stop projecting them away from us onto a world that we always want to see as guiltier than we are. Everyone is guilty. (The Catholics call it original sin, but I don't know how original it is.) Everyone cannot escape the evil of the world, not even by retreating. My world is hopelessly corrupted by the larger one outside. I only pretend that I am safe and pure in it, to preserve my sanity.

Evil cannot be conquered in the world,
it can only be resisted within oneself.
 
Taoist saying
I've never been more in touch with the world. I've never been more understanding of it than I am now, now that I am more out of it than I have ever been. The world is easier to understand when you can take a few steps back and see the bigger picture, and it's easier to be in touch with that which you understand, because you can avoid those caustic aspects of it that prevent you from remaining in touch when they touch you with less than positive and gentle contact. And when you are in touch with the world, you can bet that the content is not always so gentle. Socially significant events tend to be jarring. And it's been a week filled with socially significant events:

Israel invades Hebron and four resisting policemen are killed. Doesn't that say something? Why would policemen, of all people, men who are supposed to be fighting crime and protecting the innocent, resist? Because they feel they are being invaded, of course. At the most fundamental level, the Palestinians don't acknowledge the Israeli right to defend itself by rooting out the murders of innocent civilians. As long as that mindset persists, there will be no peace. If the Palestinians really want peace, they have to elect a leader who will truly convince them that killing innocent people is wrong. It's the only solution. But nationalism is the same the world over, and nationalists will continue to put their patriotism ahead of a concern for innocent citizens of other nations;

And, back in our own great nation, a liberally biased California federal court of appeals declared the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional, opining that the words "under God" violate the principle of the separation of church and state. People on both sides of the issue went nuts. Senators and Representatives defiantly recited the pledge on the Capitol building steps. The news was filled with intolerant innuendo. Everyone was shouting everyone else down. How can people be so stupid? Words are cheap.
Either there is a God, or there isn't. If there is, then we are a nation under It, whether we like it or not, and to try to separate ourselves out from It is ridiculously futile. If there isn't, then it doesn't matter what we recite. The problem, however, isn't whether there is or is not a God, but whether we can prevent religion from usurping our civil rights--because that's not the role of religion in our society. But some people want to think that it's the role of the government.
When they wrote the constitution, it wasn't religion that our founding fathers were afraid of. It was government. Separation of church and state isn't meant to guarantee us freedom from the restraints of religion, as people who want to restrict school prayer believe and fear. We may choose to believe whatever nonsense we want to when it comes to religion, and religions may try to influence us to do so. But when government tries to influence us by using religion to manipulate us, then that's a different thing all together, because we are not so capable of resisting when legal authority comes into play.
But I have a great idea for a compromise on this issue: replace the words ..."one nation, under God..." with "...one nation, under Ashcroft..." Conservatives are happy, because he is their god. And liberals are happy because there is a separation of church and state once again. (But Ashcroft's religion is not really true religion, is it?)
Pundits claim that an overwhelming majority of Americans want the words "under God" to remain in the Pledge of Allegiance. I guess, once again, I am in the minority. And in an extreme minority at that. Not only don't I want the words "under God' in the pledge, I don't even want the pledge itself. It sounds way too much like a loyalty oath for my taste;
On a different note (sort of), it's been a tough week for school kids too. School vouchers, random drug testing, as well as the Pledge of Allegiance. Okay, so not being allowed to say 'God' in the pledge of allegiance hardly matters to most kids. And random drug testing's a hassle, but they'll learn to live with it. But what's going to happen if their parents are suddenly able to afford to send them to a Catholic school? My God!

God is still relevant in today's society, despite the advancement of intelligence and a liberal agenda (hidden in social folds, out of favor of the powerful, but waiting. It's relevance is mostly due to the efforts of right-wingers who use The Idea as a means of maintaining control over a populace that, given it's head, would be far more liberal than it is, the insinuation of ideas into it by fundamentalists being the primary motivating factor that stirs the masses up into a feeding frenzy against rogue and radical elements. Control is the issue here, not religion. Ashcroft professes fundamental Christianity, but his real agenda is control. (Those who feel that they must control society fear their inner motives and are really projecting a need to control themselves, from being too liberal. These are repressed individuals who, if they would act according to their true inner natures, would be liberals.) Religion is very seldom the issue. Almost always, it is used as a means of gaining and maintaining power. The top cops who administer the law, trying to ride herd over their sycophants and the populace at large and the policemen who beat kids in the street act out of a sense of self-fear, that they might be too soft inside and end up forgiving people and trying to help and understand them.

SUBPOENA FOR MAN WHO TAPED BEATING
Los Angeles County prosecutors subpoena the man who taped the police beating of a teen as a grand jury prepares to probe the incident. [CNN]
In a 7-11 parking lot in 1972, I witnessed a local cop punch a handcuffed white kid in the face while he was being put into a patrol car. Yeah, the kid was cursing at the cop, verbally abusing him, but he was handcuffed and physically docile and completely under control. It was wrong then and it's wrong now. Although blacks may suffer more from this kind of abuse by authority, whites suffer from it too. It's not so much a problem of racism as it is a problem of machismo, a need for physical dominance over even verbal behavior, a need to control people, society, and (the inner) self, ironically by acting out physically. Hormones rage, and cops get out of control. But there's no place for these kinds of men in modern law enforcement.
No matter what the "offender" has done prior to his being restrained, any violence on his person once he is restrained is completely inappropriate and is a violation of the individual's civil and legal rights. It's time to weed these cops out of the ranks. Adopt a one strike and you're out policy. If you can't control your emotional state, if you aren't emotionally mature (which is really what machismo is all about), then go and get a job as a security guard (the kind who don't carry guns) or a burger fryer at McDonalds. Grow up or get out. If you need therapy, get it, before it's too late for someone you encounter in the "line of duty." [And, oh yeah, while we're on the subject, stop beating your wives and girlfriends, too.]
And now, we see the heavy-handed way that the authorities are handling the witness who taped the beating in L.A. When they had the choice of asking the guy for the tape or subpoenaing him, they chose the latter. More and more, the authorities exist in a political and social atmosphere that enables over-reaction. The message is very, very clear. Don't be taping our activities or you're going to get leaned on very heavily. [Never mind that they guy was a fugitive from upstate authorities. They didn't know that at the time.] The gauntlet is being thrown. Law enforcement Neanderthals are standing up to the social challenge and threatening to drive the civilization back into the stone age, or at least into the fifties when they could get away with things that today people can inhibit them from doing via video technology. They don't want pictures taken. But they want to take pictures. They want to make it as difficult as possible on people who dare to expose them. It's time for these fascists to step aside. They should have been wasting away in an old folk's home a long time before now.

This kind of behavior exists more easily in a permissive atmosphere. Throughout the last century, society has been tightening up on this kind of thing, but not enough. The authorities exist in a kind of bubble, a vacuum of aggressive permissiveness within a larger cultural context that sees permissiveness as a different kind of thing. It's been a bubble waiting to burst, and now it has. Al Qa'ida flying planes into the World Trade Center has broken the thin outer skin.
Sometimes other people say it all so much better than I can and even quote it all so much better. The following is a direct quote from the Hardball Newsletter [This is verbatim, from beginning to end, no breaks]:
The head of the NAACP, Julian Bond, slammed Bush over the weekend...We'll play some of the sound...
Bond on Bush: "We have a president who owes his election more to a dynasty than to democracy," [sic]
"We know he was in the oil business. We just didn't know it was snake oil."
Bond on Ashcroft: "We have an attorney general who is a cross between J. Edgar Hoover and Jerry Falwell. And too often, one political party is shameless and the other is spineless." http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/metropolitan/1486111
The right-wing conspiracy is operating out of the Department of Justice and the office of White House Counsel, Julian Bond said last night in a keynote address to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (The Washington Times)
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020708-89210920.htm
Bond is a harbinger of things to come. Liberal reaction is about to be unleashed. Look out. It's all about to swing the other way--finally. I've waited a long time for this.
All men are created equal--unless we're scared.
Phil Donahue
There must be a sizable contingent of American voters who, whether they are registered Republicans or Democrats, vote their "conscience" on Election Day, despite their token affiliation. What else could explain the swings between a Democratic and a Republican congress? Are there that many Independents? Maybe there are. Is voter turnout the whole answer? Maybe it is. I guess that these three reasons taken together could tip the balance one way or the other. But whatever the reason(s), it looks like the swing is about to take place, two years ahead of (my predicted) schedule. The public is more scared of Big Brother now than it is of al Qa'ida. The conservatives are more scared of external threats, but the liberals are more internal people. Conservatives tend to be repressors and liberals sensitizers; or, probably more correctly stated, repressors tend to be conservative and sensitizers tend to be liberal (or radical). This can account for the former group wanting to control everything while the latter group tends to let things be. And moderates and independents swing one way or the other, according to the political season. I guess, after all, that it's these middle-of-the-road and freewheeling contingents where our true democracy is vested. Without them, we would swing wildly to one or the other extreme.

And speaking of control...

One more time I hear (this time from Ann Coulter on Phil Donahue) that liberals control the media. It's a lame old transparent psychology. In general, I find that the media is fairly well balanced between conservative and liberal biases. (It shouldn't be biased at all, but people will be people, even if they are reporters.) The myth of liberal [or the knee-jerk liberal backlash that purports that, in fact, conservatives really control the media, because they control the purse strings] media bias is a convenient means of distracting the public away from what's really going on. Conservatives [and many purported liberals--they're not really all that liberal, are they?] just can't stand the fact that the media is relatively balanced, so they have to perpetuate this myth in order to enable the denial of their pathology as control freaks. It pisses conservatives off to no end that they themselves can't get a stranglehold on the media like they try to get a stranglehold on every facet of politics and society that they're exposed to. Given this lack of control, they have to believe that the media is in the hands of their "opponents." For example, conservatives believe that CNN has a severe liberal bias, whereas studies have shown that it presents a quite balanced point of view. Conservatives can't stand the fact that a news channel will not only broadcast conservative opinion, which they conveniently ignore, but liberal as well. FOX, on the other hand, leans far toward the right. This was an intention from its inception, to "balance" the "liberal" CNN. The accusation that CNN is liberally biased is a projection on FOX's part, an unconscious, or maybe conscious, ploy to divert attention away from the fact that it is FOX itself that is biased, to the right. And its proclamation (practically every half-hour) that it is "fair and balanced" is a ruse to fog the issue, that it is not.
FOX's right-wing agenda is only marginally modified by its recent additions of slightly left-of-center dignitaries like Geraldo and Greta. These two are liberal (if moderate) powerhouses, and it's to FOX's credit that they added these tokens, but other FOX liberals, like Alan Colmes are media jokes, patsies for the likes of Hannity, who is quite capable of shouting his "opponent" down at every turn. (Shouting is always a good replacement for the lack of a logical argument.) In short, what I'm saying is that conservatives are closed-minded Neanderthals and liberals are wussies who by their nature let their nemeses get away with their myopic antics. To be quite honest, generally, liberals are nicer people. But nice guys finish last. It's better to be quite radical instead.

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