Day 186: Serfdom’s Up!

I’m not sure what rights we have left, but we sure have more laws. We are to be drafted into the Regeneration of American Liberty. (Clumsy acronym, but we can complain later, in theory.) For now, flu survivors shall serve the state at minimal wages. Unionized workers, too: Labor contracts that “limit emergency deployment of human resources” are suspended.

Turns out Restore America’s Independent Spirit & Enterprise will supervise the new arrangement. No wonder Enterprise comes last.

WAS STEFAN THERE? WOMEN & CHILDREN FROM THE MIZOCH GHETTO, UKRAINE, OCTOBER 14,1942Will RAISE outlive the pandemic? Is it a new incarnation of the War on Terror—an Orwellian bureaucratic device that will compel us all to ‘volunteer’ for many years to come? I begin to comprehend why its creators left the operative word Health out of the verbal lineup. It would limit this bureaucracy’s grand mission to something useful.

This looks like a long-term effort, a bureaucratic spearhead. Suppose America’s Independent Spirit needs apples picked next year, immigrants being scarce…?

I see, too, that Congress and the president have agreed not to stand for reelection until they concur that it seems safe. For whom, you English teachers ask? For the folks who presided over what the New York Times calls “this unprecedented national catastrophe.”

The rest of us can march around, singing Born To Be Servile:

Get the water running

Serve the state for no pay

We may have found employment

That’ll never go away….

If the estimable Dr. R. Edgar Hope-Simpson was correct, those who had the flu will now be spreading it far and wide. I see this as a great reason for y’all to buy even more masks, gloves, and goggles: If you never get sick, you can’t get drafted!

Otherwise, I consider it prudent to lie low. I’ve helped plenty of people. I’ll continue to do so. On a voluntary basis, as a free man, in a free society—well, scratch that part. Or parts. Heck, they know where to find me. Follow that UPS truck!

Meanwhile, has the Internet Security Act improved your access? Do you like your new homepage? Those yummy corporate preferences? What, you can’t find your old favorites since they reformed the address protocol priorities? They were dull, dude!

My telephone never tried to tell me whom to call.

I’m talking to an indie-minded company that wants a lot of money to host my domain because of the denial-of-service attacks you have undoubtedly noticed. Psst, media giants—I got these suckers to hunt me down for free! Wanna sponsor my rants? Maybe speed up access to this thing? Call me. I’m home a lot, when I’m not swabbing the indomitable Ukrainian next door.

Stefan’s Confession

He’s been telling stories. Yesterday, in a voice frozen with more than half a century’s weight and dust and regret, Stefan growled that I should sit and listen. “On a sunny day they told me to pull out the teeth and I did,” he began. It took a moment to realize he was describing something I had wondered about, but couldn’t bring myself to ask.

Stefan was saying that he had worked for the Nazis as a youth in the occupied Ukraine. He had done whatever they asked of him and he had become proficient at yanking gold teeth from Jewish corpses. I was horrified, but Stefan was just beginning his account.

“She was alive,” he was saying. “A young woman, pretty, holding a dead baby. She woke up when I was getting a molar.” The woman watched, eyes wide, as Stefan throttled her so she couldn’t call out while he finished the extraction. The Germans were watching, lest he steal a precious tooth, or take too long.

Gold still flashed in her bleeding mouth. “I left it.” He shrugged under those matted covers. (I change them, but the blood returns at night.)

I had to ask: “What happened to her?”

“Buried with the rest.”

That’s when I realized that the Holocaust was a sociopolitical pandemic. People were seized by—acted like—the worst viruses ever. The Nazis were the Black Death with flags and ideology and grotesque human intent.

Unless they were the cytokine storm troopers of an immune system gone haywire. Imagine being caught between the disease and the response. I’m trying to forgive Stefan. At least he feels bad about it.

Day 187: RAISE the Dead, Lose Your Rights

I always thought New York would do okay in a pandemic, that this city is so organized, so heavily policed, so rich, so important, and so proud that nothing too nasty would occur.

I thought we’d have seen the pandemic recede by now. I’d be pounding out warnings about the next wave, next year. It wouldn’t be as bad as this one, merely god-awful. People would go back to ignoring me during the second hiatus. I wouldn’t take it personally. I’d be traveling with Anna.

BRING OUT YOUR DEAD, IN LIEU OF TOURISTS: A CENTRAL PARK CARRIAGE (Paul Songco)Instead I’m living in a city whose death toll is rumored to have reached a third of those who catch H5N1. There are still lots of untouched subjects. No one planned for this.

What broke the camel’s back? New York’s snappy, can-do façade melted down in a four-story Bronx tenement. A grieving dad is accused of torching his apartment because the city never picked up the corpses of his wife and two kids. Understaffed firefighters got a few folks out and cleared neighboring buildings.

The next day they discovered five additional corpses presumed killed in the blaze. Yesterday they found three more. That’s 11 bodies in a total of 36 apartments.

Now we’re told they all seem to have died before the fire. There was no smoke in their lungs. Most were decomposing.

New York City is full of corpses. The difference between the Middle Ages and our exalted moment is that they used to send wagons around to collect the dead. Even in the morbid mess that was Philadelphia in 1918, a Catholic priest revived the death-wagon to useful effect.

What shocks me is that the mainstream media is reporting the Bronx “tragedy.” Editorials shriek for accountability. Why the sudden concern? Where were they when the LES DIY was spiritedly debating what to do with departed East Villagers?

Our leaders promise that the RAISE conscription program will solve everything, and not a moment too soon. (Is that why this mess is being reported?) It will be managed by the ubiquitous contractors that bilked the government for so much—in exchange for so little—in Iraq, Afghanistan, and New Orleans. Contractors will even police the drafting of American citizens for RAISE. They will assemble fresh databases on us. No doubt they’ll sell them to big corporations when marketing is back in vogue.

I'm staggered at the thought that the government will force us to work for companies. Even in privately run prisons, labor is still considered 'voluntary.' (Inmates are exploited for profit in public prisons, too.)

The grand prize awaits prison contractors that branch into administering and enforcing RAISE's flu draft. If we cooperate, we work for them. If not, they get to lock us up at government expense. No American left unmonetized.

I propose a far simpler plan. If New York can find some oats, Central Park’s idled tourist carriages could fetch our loved ones. They could begin by trotting over for Stefan, who expired just when I had begun to think he’d make it. (Of course I informed the city.)

The LES DIY: Anarchy with Purpose

They’d better be careful if and when they come for him. Front doors in my neighborhood carry warnings that strangers found inside will be killed. One screams NO QUESTIONS under a vivid skull crossed with AK 47s. It’s nice to see that artists still breathe here.

The LES DIY proceeds as best it can, without fear or resources. The medical side has gotten stronger. Doctors and nurses who were decertified for "unprofessional activity"—helping ordinary people in an emergency—are still at it in an undisclosed location. People from the projects and some idled yuppies have infused fresh blood. Cultures have melded unbelievably well. This squad fights flu like a complex animal, a living unit. When someone falls ill or is forced to withdraw, a newcomer springs up to kick butt.

Members who fall ill know that the others will watch their kids, pets, or parents. Trust has become contagious. I’ve never witnessed anything like this.

There’s none of the usual East Village bickering or tardiness or excuses for nonperformance. They talk a load of crap sometimes, but if I were ever in a war, I’d want this motley gang—freaky men and women, and teens, too—at my side. And behind me.

There are similar groups in the suburbs, cities, small towns, reservations. They are democratic manifestations of what is best in all of us. Anarchy with purpose.

Screw RAISE. They’re a fig leaf for state expansion.

Self-help groups need more members, more resources. Look over your home supplies for things you may have overstocked. Give them to folks who will make you proud to have been a part of your community when this thing ever ends.

Day 188: Houston

How can we talk of anything but Houston? What is there to say?

At least 10,000 killed by chlorine gas after an explosion that makes no sense. The company says it was impossible and no terrorists have taken responsibility.

I get the feeling that understaffing has caught up with us. Those train wrecks failed to impress. Every high-tech endeavor is at risk as society cracks and crumbles.

AMERICAN CIPHER 22 (Thomas C. Jackson) I hope the soldiers that the president dispatched to Houston have good masks. Chlorine rather mimics bird flu in that it destroys the respiratory system and asphyxiates its victims. Both sides used it as combat gas in World War I.

I sure hope this wasn’t a terror attack because every population center has loads of chlorine to detoxify drinking water. There’s nearly 1,000 tons of chlorine gas in an old tank under an overpass just across the Hudson in New Jersey. Oops, I’ve just remembered that something called the National Cyber Response Coordination Group has staged simulated ‘Cyber Storms’ with one of the targeted ‘problems’ being bloggers who discuss vulnerabilities in the system. (But I saw that chlorine tank on TV….)

Houston is full of plants that could blow up and kill everyone. Always has been, long before 9/11. Long since, too.

Day 188 (#2): Making Things Worse, ASAP

Now it’s a full-blown terrorist event, if we are to trust al Qaeda—or some digital shadow that claims to speak for it. (I don’t remotely buy the report that antivaxers blew up Houston.)

HOUSTON: AS PEOPLE LEAVE, ENTER THE TANKSTroops have been dispatched nationally to secure some of the hundreds of chemical sites that could kill at least 100,000 Americans. We may be approaching that unthinkable number in Houston. One thing I want reminding me of 9/11 is a casualty estimate that drops sharply with each passing day. Houston’s is rising.

No one I know is convinced this is a terrorist act. Who cares what we think?

TV screeches scary stuff. There’s blather from people who hate us, nonsense from officials who were supposed to protect us, and doubletalk from chemical companies that blocked efforts to heighten our security after 9/11.

To agree that Houston was an act of terrorism would emphasize that the company failed to secure the site. To admit that Houston blew up by accident would prove the facility should never have been located there. Act of God, anyone? Maybe—so long as it’s someone else’s god.

Witnesses, of course, are all dead, surveillance cameras blown to bits. I can’t wait to see the Emergency Indestructible Surveillance Camera Control Bill that will undoubtedly be breathlessly introduced in Congress this morning.

How many pre-deceased corpses will they find during Houston’s house-to-house inspections? How many Katrina victims who wound up there are reeling from post-traumatic stress? I wish Houston’s survivors the very best air, security, medicine, and love our country can provide.

Day 189: Blowing Up the Constitution, too

This looks like a fuzzy kind of nationwide martial law.

Army units have been spotted by bloggers in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Wilmington, Los Angeles, and North Jersey, key areas vulnerable to chemical sabotage. Unless they were National Guard units, which are officially reported to be in motion everywhere. It’s a tapestry of state flags no one can recognize. No matter. There’s a media blackout on troop movements, specifically including blogs.

I’ll bet the soldiers are confused, too. At least they have masks.

UNSOLVED MYSTERY: THE 2001 ANTHRAX ATTACKSMine won’t stop chlorine, or hydrochloric gas, or the stuff that killed at least 20,000 Indians (so far) in Bhopal. My protective gear assumes that people are inherently dangerous, but not because they mean to poison us.

So has the president quietly called out the U.S. Army for what seems a shaky terror claim? Al Qaeda franchises have occasionally used chlorine trucks and tanks for extra oomph in the Middle East, so the connection is thinkable.

I’m not convinced by that ‘martyr’s video’ allegedly posted on behalf of a dead worker who allegedly blew up the chlorine plant. The image is really shaky. The man’s family insists that the speaker’s voice, face, and ideology are alien to them.

Loved ones always want to believe that. But the man in the family videos that were posted, then seized by the government and taken down as ‘evidence,’ looks different to me, too. Sure, both guys have black hair, but their lips, eyes, forehead, and hair quality are different.

Dead men have certain charms in a pinch: Lee Harvey Oswald will never rise to challenge anyone’s convictions about John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas.

Consider also the enduring mystery over the post-9/11 anthrax mailings. At first the White House pressured the FBI to blame al Qaeda. Then the U.S. government spent years hounding Steven Hatfill, a bioweapons researcher who eventually won a $5.8 million settlement clearing his name. Finally the FBI pinned the attacks on Army researcher Bruce Ivins, who had committed suicide while they were pressing him.

Few were convinced he did it. A panel of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that the FBI lacked proof of Ivins’ guilt. (Read the text and/or watch the video presentation of its impressive report.) And the Justice Department admitted in 2011 that it had no idea how Ivins could have dried and weaponized the anthrax because the Federal lab in which he worked lacked the necessary equipment.

Laurie Garrett, prized journalist and author of The Coming Plague, put out I Heard the Sirens Scream, an e-book detailing her experiences and thoughts regarding the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent anthrax mailings. (Both on sale here.) Garrett suspects that al Qaeda is as likely as anyone to have launched the virus and that Osama bin Laden probably enjoyed the U.S. government’s response.

I’m still not convinced a crime took place in Houston. Chlorine plants are extremely dangerous. They’re meant to be inspected regularly. Journalists in Houston were preparing a story about inspection lapses amid ‘accidents’ and ‘incidents’ that caused injuries and production delays at that installation. The government has just seized their work and barred them from discussing it, declaring it part of a “criminal investigation.” There’s no role for al Qaeda in an industrial accident facilitated by sloppy inspection practices, so let’s not go there.

It worked! Now that the journalists’ videos have vanished from YouTube, Houston is all about terror.