Day 190: Martial Lawlessness in New York

I’m recovering from that bloody demonstration against Martial Law. I don’t understand why no one simply tells us we are under the boot. This is surely what it would look and feel like.

Anna and I went to Times Square at noon to join thousands of New Yorkers in protesting the imposition of Army troops on the city. Not that we didn’t already have National Guards from who-knows-where, but suddenly a lot more people are being searched and taken away for questioning by guys operating under the U.S. flag in full battle gear. No rights, no lawyers, no papers.

Middle Easterners, of course, are hotly pursued. Stretches of Brooklyn are said to be deserted day and night as Muslims and swarthy residents in general hide from the authorities. I get emails from people who say their kids were snatched off the street.

COVER YOUR EARS: AN NYPD LRAD TRUCK (Peter Bergin)To cut a long story short, the NYPD would not authorize the protest. Some big shots came out with military backup and read a riot act that entitled soldiers to shoot us.

That put me on high alert. I’m not accustomed to demonstrating and this didn’t look much like photos from the Sixties. No flowers in M16 barrels.

The announcement that we were all criminals set off raucous protests from the 9/11 Conspiracy people, who tend to be young and excitable and who don’t realize that the people united can not only be defeated, they can be corralled and massacred.

I’ve never been drawn into the mystery over 9/11, an unlikely event by anyone’s standard. I am more prepared to believe that a bunch of fanatics did it than that the U.S. government could pull off such a neat and complex set of activities. I think people prefer to think that a president whom they might conceivably control (though they never did) was responsible. By personally sorting out the lines of a mega-plot, they feel that they are battling the forces behind 9/11. How do you fight the idea that some nondescript guys with box cutters can wreck your life? You grant them special powers.

We can all agree that the vaporization of the World Trade Center helped lay the ground for the state to deprive us of all liberties, whether or not the White House engineered the event. I’m confident that our administrators weren’t sorry to see it happen. I see no reason to fret over past details. (Still, I can’t resist The Children‘s gorgeous elegy, September.)

We milled around as I sized up the security. There was a lot of military gear behind the barricades. Big trucks with strange equipment loomed over the crowd. A pair of military trucks alongside the demonstrators featured bulky plates tilted gently toward us. Closest to the crowd were dense packs of New York cops in riot gear, backed by soldiers. Was the military’s ammunition live?

People chanted all kinds of crap, from flu-related stuff opposing vaccine adjuvants and suggesting that bird flu was an experiment gone wrong to calls for U.S. troops to be withdrawn from various combat missions. (An Asian guy next to me found that one funny: “Bring ‘em home so they can shoot us instead,” he yelled.) He had a point.

RUN, IF YOU CAN: U.S. ARMY 'PAIN RAY' DEVICEAfter yet another declaration that we were breaking the law, I noticed that the cops were all donning ear packs to muffle sound. Sure enough, a pair of NYPD trucks mounted with black screens had drawn up on our left. I took these for LRADs, long-range acoustic devices known as ‘sonic cannons’ that were developed for the Navy after the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in 2000. One was used against protesters in Pittsburgh in 2009—successfully, as seen on YouTube. Somali pirates block them with headphones.

It was time for an exit strategy but Anna wouldn’t hear of it. “They always do that,” she said. “I’ve seen those trucks before. But not those,” she added, pointing at the Army trucks with the big plates.

The cops began making forays into the crowd, snatching individuals to haul behind their lines. (How long had they been watching these people? Hours? Days? Months?) A platform supporting journalists documenting the protest was clumsily cleared. The police knocked a photographer down. Were they removing witnesses?

Anna was intent on staying. I hadn’t seen her in a week. Her tough little fingers, honed by unrelenting altruism, felt safe in mine. Fate had plunked me in an arena with thousands of defiant leftists I generally disagreed with. I started kissing the one I loved and respected.

The crowd erupted in whoops and jeers. The police were withdrawing. The people pressed hard against the barricades, chanting “shoot the rich,” which probably wasn’t about vaccinating them. Facing us were soldiers, who must have been wearing earphones inside their ear guards. I heard no command when they sliced neatly into the 9/11 Truthers.

No Quarter for American Citizens

I dragged Anna away in my arms as she cursed, appalled at my cowardice. She must have seemed like a victim of police brutality, prompting the crowd to part for us all the way to the rear. I felt like Moses going the wrong way, but it worked. We wound up squinting at the confrontation from a subway entrance. Vigorous chanting resounded among the sunlit skyscrapers as the people defied the state.

Then the rhythm broke into fragments, as if 5,000 folks had run short of breath. There came a giant stomping, churning noise. It was the sound of soldiers charging demonstrators who grunted under blows that echoed like the work of woodcutters.

It was the kind of thing we expect from St. Petersburg or Moscow or Beijing, presented disapprovingly on good ol’ American TV.

Then came horrible piercing sirens and a torrent of screams. The stampede was on.

I pulled Anna down the stairs past a bunch of cops who had missed their cue. We raced to the crosstown shuttle and caught it just as the doors were closing. I looked back to see the police swinging into motion. A middle-aged redhead took a club to her face as our train lurched eastward.

Anna was pretty shattered. To cover my dignity, I’ll call my condition helpless rage.

Videos appear briefly on YouTube under ever-more senseless keywords, lest they be taken down immediately. They show that the cops got to use those sonic cannons and that the Army deployed what turned out to be ‘pain ray’ trucks against the most stubborn protesters. They arrested hundreds, at least. People were fatally crushed.

We were lucky. None of what I saw made sense. Why did the police withdraw? Why did the Army attack? Who was in charge? How many were killed? Who are we supposed to ask? Are inquiries even legal? Or is the law simply irrelevant now?

Day 191: The Real Sacrifice—Our Future

The surreal is made real. The massacre in Times Square isn’t New York’s lead story. The fatal stomping of nine protestors during an encircled charge by the NYPD and U.S. military units is playing second fiddle to the ghastly crime at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

You undoubtedly know about the bearded man who announced that God wanted him to save the world from man’s misdeeds and then killed his son on the high altar. You’ve seen him shout “I fear God” on the Web while he waves that bloody blade, courtesy of the phone cams that must have lit the Cathedral as if it were July 4^th.

The gory images went global in minutes, thanks to an inviting Google.

THE SPIRES ABOVE, THE BLOOD BELOW: ST. PATRICK'S CATHEDRALThey sound more striking than they look. The lighting was poor, the framing wide, and the man’s white clothing confused the sensors, so the unfortunate lad’s moment of death is more conceptual than real. The scene looked better on the TV news after some high-tech light therapy.

But hey, the sacrifice was not in vain. There’s much less fuss about those dead demonstrators. They were, after all, gathering illegally. I must have dreamed Freedom of Assembly. Was it old-fashioned of me to think that if the will to control is human, the will to resist is divine?

There are no vivid images of the state riot on TV, nothing to hold a candle to the ‘St. Patrick’s Sacrifice.’ Just wide shots of demonstrators chanting, some masked punks in black throwing things, and the unavoidable stampede when cops and soldiers followed orders.

Now that Google is barring ‘disruptive’ videos from its sites, the good footage is on the Web, overseas, still viewable if your ISP allows access. I’m not certain about the image that claims to show the late lab technician standing politely as a line of robo-clubs engulfed him. Practically speaking, it could be someone else being brutally assaulted.

Or it could be evidence of outright murder. It certainly shows what happened to people who didn’t run in panic over the mashed bodies of their fellow demonstrators.

The aftermath was a generously photographed press conference. Our mayor looked stalwart, solemnly flanked by the Commissioner of Police and the Generalissimo of Whatever, those imposing columns of state firepower. The citizens they killed weren’t victims, went the unmasked lecture. They brought death upon themselves by not respecting the law and our need for order. That’s what they get for chanting in public.

Incensed by Sanctimony

The official eye-wiping came moments later, when the masked media breathlessly solicited responses to The Sacrifice. An innocent boy lost, a deranged dad in custody, so sad.

Tomorrow will be a citywide Day Of Mourning. Not for flu victims, or police victims, or justice, or common sense, but for the kid.

Like everyone, I’m sorry for the boy. His father betrayed him.

Not that the lad got much help from churchgoers, who flooded the altar for close-ups and then oozed outside to post them online while the murderer waved his bloody bayonet and raved that Abraham caught a break when God called off his attempted sacrifice of Isaac. This guy thought God was just kidding.

The miracle is that no one killed the man. Will a jury find him insane, infuriating, or both?

Meanwhile talk shows pretend to debate God’s role in the pandemic while sneakily wondering why the boy lay still as his father wielded the blade. Was he hypnotized? Drugged?

I suspect the father and son had practiced performing Genesis 22. The kid thought it was just an exhibition. Dad expected The Word to call off his shtick at the climax.

Maybe Americans think the president will stop just short of dismembering our Constitution. When a voice from above says we’ve suffered enough, the authorities will relax.

Me, I see my people prostrate, licking the blood off their screens, fearing one another more than any God—and bowing to Caesar.

Day 192: Smashing the LES DIY

I’ll grit my teeth and keep posting one letter after the other.

The cops raided Anna’s apartment while I was posting last night. They busted a lot of LES DIY members, took their documents, computers, tablets, smartphones, and humble cell phones. They took the volunteers in for questioning, too—but not for long. They released Anna before I could figure out where she had gone.

COPS STILL LOVE TO BREAK STUFF WHEN THEY VISITHer door was removed, her daughter’s things scattered, her kitchen smashed like an old still after a revenuers’ raid. No more food for the needy, RAISE be praised.

Anna is here with me now. I drafted Mark to fetch her and her things with his new car. The idiot tried to flirt with her.

Unlike me, Anna fights hard not to judge others. I’m afraid she’ll implode if the government keeps pushing her. She’s furious that they arrested the group’s doctors and nurses and told the media that her free medics were quacks exploiting the poor and ignorant. The doctor who saved my life is in jail now, at risk of losing his. Contributions to the group’s efforts by a few people they treated are being pitched as illicit fees. This is what they do to Howard Roark in The Fountainhead.

Anna and I drank whiskey and held each other: Still breathing, still real. How can anyone make me so glad I’m alive in the midst of such a nightmare?

In my panic, I called Bart at his newspaper. No answer. He did warn me. Good for him!

Now to sleep off the shock—together at least.

Day 192 (#2): America’s Autoimmune Disorder

I can’t sleep. I think I know what’s going on. The body politic is overreacting. And to the wrong danger. It is targeting people—not the virus—with deadly force. As if America has been seized by a cytokine storm.

Since 9/11 our government has hunted enemies at home and abroad, tracking potentially disagreeable thoughts, words, and deeds. Vast resources have been devoted to data-mining our lives and transactions, the way an immune system tries to detect the presence of alien cells.

BAGHDAD: ARMED CONTRACTORS FOR THE U.S. STATE DEPT.Public safety bureaucrats have vied to fulfill the security mission. The CDC refocused on preventing terrorism more than disease. The DHS took border inspection duties away from the Agriculture Department, slackening food-safety enforcement—unless a poisoning seems political. The DHS also engulfed FEMA, reshaped it to contend with dirty bombs instead of hurricanes, fires, earthquakes. People replaced nature as the primary adversary.

Our reward was Katrina.

I’m sad to note that the private sector wholeheartedly embraced the War On Terror. Big telecommunications companies invited the state to spy  on their customers. Our greatest aircraft manufacturer conducted secret flights to convey kidnapped captives to be tortured. The Pentagon privatized warfare, shoveling tax dollars at paramilitary companies to pay contractors generously to die off the books. America’s glowing Web-search pioneers consented to stifle thoughts and words.

Now the popular social networks have just shut down antivax pages, groups, and circles. They banned certain antivaxers, including Fitch, without explanation.

State corporatism is no improvement on Big Brother. It’s worse. Look where it got Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo. Look what it’s doing to the individual, left and right.

More recently, it failed us against H5N1. As with Katrina, America proved helpless against a natural threat that Washington itself had warned was “inevitable.” In the wake of the cynicism stirred by the swine flu pandemic, corporations saw little profit in preparing for bird flu. When it came, they fired millions of workers. The government was so obsessed with finding and countering the dangers posed by human beings that it did little more than recite: Stay home & wash your hands.

Left without reliable water, power, food, medicine, and security, citizens took survival into their own hands. In keeping with our society’s finest traditions, many acted sweetly and effectively. The LES DIY, for instance, served as a kind of immune response to bird flu. The group put forth social antibodies to the helplessness, fear, and sickness that H5N1 was spreading.

A Better Enemy than Flu

Now Washington began to recognize a peril for which it had prepared: People. That would be us. We can be seen, defined, controlled.

The government desperately moved to assert itself. Washington nationalized the state militias, handed total power over our most useful communications medium—the internet—to giant corporations, and started conscripting flu victims. Hup two three four became the state’s latest mantra.

H5N1 wouldn’t listen.

Then came the shape of a familiar adversary—terrorism. Like an old microbial foe, the horror in Houston triggered the organized fury of American bureaucracy. Here at last appeared the enemy the state was geared to fight.

There was no time or need to determine if God, man, or incompetence had brought us Houston. Agents activated everywhere to fight terrorism by any means necessary.

Now America is aflame, flush with political toxins. We know they can’t kill H5N1. Will they kill us?

‘Nina’ just called, using a concealed number. She wouldn’t say where she was but sounded pleased to have heard from her friend that I’m concerned about her. Her voice was cool, suspicious—maybe a little weak. I said I’d be happy to have tea with her if she’s around. That made her laugh. I didn’t know what to say when she asked if I’m living with someone. I told the truth—to Anna as well. That ended both conversations. I hope Nina calls again.

Day 193: Grounded at Zero

The NYPD is staffed with gifted readers. Having obtained the LES DIY’s list of members who had recovered from bird flu, they managed to tip RAISE to conscript them all in less than 48 hours. These guys should probably be running RAISE (whose food distribution system broke down in Boston for reasons that are classified).

HEY, THEY SAID IT WAS SAFE!Or is RAISE already running them?

Anna intends to comply. She’s to report in the morning for a test that will show whether or not she has antibodies to H5N1. It’s fair to worry that the lab screens won’t be reliable. Our society is in shambles. What’s one more flu victim as long as the garbage gets picked up? What was a volunteer worth when they wanted to get Ground Zero cleared fast?

The good news is that we’re getting used to the telephoned death threats from people who mask their numbers. Anna recognizes a persistent Philadelphia accent.