Day 207: What WAS My Crime?

I’m sorry about the delay. I was just dreaming the same thing anyway, so here goes.

I have no idea how long I sprawled amid strange growls and light flashes. Mosquitoes droned around my head as dogs barked, even howled. I was surrounded by ravenous bugs and canines. A talented and degenerate sound designer who should have been turning out great recordings had taken loads of tax dollars to drive me insane. Could it work?

BEFORE THOMAS EDISON, THEY'D STRETCH YOUR BONESBy luck, I managed to shape the cacophony into a bizarre, looping rendition of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ The Sweets (from Show Your Bones—you can still buy music on this site!), transforming governmental growls and threats into Karen O’s honeyed yowls as she demands in a cycle of violence and repetition to know what my crime is.

Good question! I should find out what they were formally charging me with. Admiring Hope-Simpson? Preferring Gene Clark to Gram Parsons? Loving Anna?

Awakened, strapped back, and hooked up without a hood, I tried to question people I couldn’t see and was zapped for my pains. I was confronted with piles of papers about my life, which they had extensively data-mined. With the state privy to all our spoken and written thoughts in phone calls and emails, we might as well share our ideas and feelings with others we actually like, respect, care about: Post away, people!

They established that I’d telephoned members of the LES DIY, and Bart, and flu fatalities I loved, and my folks, and Mark, and UPS. My google query lists cracked them up—imagine the topics I’ve plugged into. I laughed, too, as they recited the searches that led me to toxoplasmosis, as well as blind googles I never wrote about, like plague sex. The climax came with the search that led to Hungarian researchers positing that ducks with small penises spread bird flu when they rape female ducks.

They asked me to quack and I did. I can’t explain this, but it was comforting to feel like a pretty good duck. The machine liked it, too.

The glorious terrorism inquiry devolved into questions about whether or not I was licensed to sell masks and if I had lied to get my Health Security Certificate. Finally they accused me of tax evasion. Yeah, Al Capone here, banging away with sore fingers on a borrowed keyboard.

They tried to assume that, as a libertarian, I had refused to pay taxes. But you know me: I filed. And paid. No zap. You would think they'd have the records, right?

Just as I was thinking I’d get out of the session without too much damage, up stepped the woman who had been so cruel the previous session. Tall heels paced behind me. She started demanding I admit to vending bogus Tamiflu with Mark’s strange friends. The machine backed me when I pointed out that I told my readers not to buy Tamiflu, even warned them against counterfeit antivirals, so she arranged to zap me directly. It was bad.

Eventually I fell apart again—cried, vomited, whatever. I was soaked in waste. You can’t imagine what it’s like to exist only as an object of abuse. I was drowning in high-tech bureaucratic brutality. No one decent knew where I was or had the power to find out. If I were to keel over and die, the government’s well-paid corporate flunkies had plenty of ways to dispose of me. No need to sully a community garden.

I have no idea how long that went on—or what I said. If I did confess to anything, we may someday see footage of it on TV, or in a courtroom. Prosecutors would need deft CGI to cover all-too-obvious signs of abuse, but taxpayers have deep pockets, don’t we?

I don’t recall what they did to me after that. They may have drugged me. Or simply lost my attention. I came to in a patrol car, hoodless. The door was open. I smelled of soap. I was dressed in new jeans and a Coldplay t-shirt that I thankfully had never seen.

Some lawyer met me and encouraged me to sip water from a bathroom faucet. I blearily pleaded not guilty while I tried to note my experiences on a legal pad with shifting lines. A friend of Anna’s turned up with my credit cards to cover one tenth of my $100,000 bail, which I’ll never get back. I don’t know what the lawyer cost me. I can’t read her signature on my release order. I hope she calls to explain herself. Who was she working for?

I still have to pick up the mess here. Sneeky would have enjoyed it. When I used to chase him, he loved taking shelter on pieces of cardboard and plastic, thinking they’d protect him.

Day 208: Homeland Insecurity

Anna and I take turns reassuring one another, cycling between anxious hope and confirmed paranoia. I still haven’t asked her what she thinks of what I said about her. She acts as if nothing matters but the present and future.

Perhaps to make me feel better about the words we find painted on our apartment door (“TRAITOR” and “PROFITEER” being two I can post), a homecoming present appeared today to brighten the wall in my suddenly spacious kitchen. Where boxes of personal protective gear once loomed, an extravagantly framed tapestry proclaims in red, white, and blue: AMERICA — LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT!

GOTHIC AS HELL: WHERE THE KUBARK MANUAL'S TORMENTS BEGANAnna won’t say how or where she got my homecoming gift—only that she’s happy her notorious “unemployed architect-blogger” is back.

Danged if my presence isn’t her doing. Anna worked tirelessly to spring me, as you all knew before I did. I thank her and I thank those of you who stuck your necks out. Home Sweet Homeland!

Blogula’s still not quite here, to be honest. I’ve been crawling through mind tunnels trying to recall and record everything that happened to me in that place. I feel empty and sick. Now that I’ve shared a lot of them, the memories are no longer any use to me. They’re like rocks weighing me down in quicksand. I wish I could cut them loose, forget it all. Anna keeps saying that writing about it might help.

I hope no one gets angry with me for saying this, but I wonder if this is how women feel after they’ve been raped. I’m numb, walking heel-to-toe in the fog, trying to fulfill tasks, hoping no one can tell I have flaming holes in my brain and body and soul and heart. I’ve been rendered helpless and hopeless by unthinking hateful brutes. What makes me safe from them now?

It wasn’t sexual, but I feel thoroughly violated, like someone penetrated my cerebral cortex with a toilet plunger. I feel like shit. I’m not sleeping.

I’m still here, writing. I miss my iMac, but I’m really grateful to the person who donated their plain old Mac. Even though I feel as if someone else is doing the typing, it’s a start. I’m awed when a sentence turns out to make sense. The words link to form nice-sounding logic that might even be true. Gee.

The Shock Doctrine

I can read, although it triggers headaches. I’ve been locked into a book Anna gave me: Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. It begins with torture and it pisses me off immensely, but it explains what happened to me.

Many of you will have heard about the CIA’s experiments with LSD in the 1950s and ‘60s. In fact, the agency’s Project MK-ULTRA deployed a wide variety of drugs and non-pharmaceutical pressures in mind-control experiments that traumatized, even killed, an unknown number of Americans. One likely effect was the violent eco-oriented career of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, who participated in MK-ULTRA experiments for three years while a student at Harvard.

Some of the nastiest known work was conducted for seven years in the Allan Memorial Institute, a Montreal mental hospital, by Donald Ewen Cameron, a former president of the World Psychiatric Association and the American and Canadian psychiatric associations. As Klein details very well in Shock Doctrine (buy it on this site), Cameron used an intense array of legal drugs, environmental controls, electroshock treatment (ECT), brainwashing tapes, and LSD on patients who weren’t necessarily so troubled when they entered his office, but who fared very badly later on in life.

Why would a psychiatrist who had served at the Nuremberg Medical Tribunal that sentenced German doctors to death for having conducted Nazi experiments on prisoners do these things? Apart from hating communism, Cameron wanted to prove the ‘psychic driving theory’ he had pioneered, whereby you could blow someone’s mind to bits with drugs and shocks and then play audiotapes to condition a new him or her. None of his patients knew what they were getting into.

Cameron, Klein writes, focused on “regression, the idea that by depriving people of their sense of who they are and where they are in time and space, adults can be converted into dependent children whose minds are a blank slate of suggestibility.”

I quacked for those freelance Fed torturers. I liked making them laugh under their hoods. It felt really good for a moment.

What if Anna hadn’t gotten me out of that place?

I’ll cut to the chase. The CIA’s MK-ULTRA experiments surfaced in a tide of government scandals in the 1970s. The CIA claimed involuntary drugging and torture were the doings of ‘rogue agents’ who had achieved nothing of value. Ho hum. I mean, why would any government ever want to turn dissenting adults into frail, trembling children?

Then something called the KUBARK Manual surfaced in the 1990s. (KUBARK is the CIA’s cryptonym for its own headquarters.) A series of CIA documents that began in 1963, the KUBARK Manual (read the entire text here) is the spy agency’s evolving blueprint for torturing people. It’s full of stuff Dr. Cameron did. It describes what the U.S. government trained Latin American military units to do to civilians in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. And what our government did to people it seized in the post 9/11 Middle Eastern conflicts: brutally administer drugs at Guantanamo and abuse prisoners at Abu Ghraib. (Some people probably shouldn’t look at these photos from Abu Ghraib—nudity being the least problem).

A word about forced nakedness: It’s a way of breaking down a prisoner’s character, cracking his or her psychological integrity. Nakedness has been a significant feature of torture since the CIA revived it. If they know everything, we are nothing.

Sometimes I just want to sit in the bathroom, alone. I come out when Anna needs to use it. I write better in there.

I have to stop. I feel sick that I didn’t complain when this was happening to far-off Iraqis. Now would be a very good time for us all to speak up. It’s never too late.

Is it?

Day 209: Capitalizing on Crisis

Anna is being very nice to me, even though she wishes I’d slow down on the blogging. How can she say that? It’s how we met. I wonder if she’s tired of trying to take care of me. Am I too needy?

GREED & DUPLICITY (Frank Zirbel) She says I should take a day off to celebrate that we’ve both conquered H5N1. What’s a bunch of well-funded thugs compared to history’s fiercest flu?

I still don’t know why they tortured me, or why they broke up the LES DIY. Naomi Klein says that for decades the U.S. government and the private sector have used great shocks to break popular resistance to radical economic and political measures. Shock Doctrine is a compelling catalogue of disasters that turned out to be very profitable, from foreign military coups to Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 tsunami, and the Pentagon’s ‘Shock & Awe’ assault on Baghdad.

We should all be able to agree that there’s nothing wrong with trying to make money by offering solutions to things that have gone wrong. I did that with my masks. Klein shows how some capitalists cheat by fostering chaos and catastrophe so they can boost profits.

The same companies turn up each time everything goes wrong. They’re like inept yakuza in a Japanese gangster comedy with a happy ending: They make lots of money making things worse.

I’m scared. Has a flu pandemic coughed up so much fear and failure that these clowns can get away with junking American democracy? Voters don’t seem to care. (Disclosure: I’ve never voted.)

The worse things get under this government, the more power Americans surrender to it.

Klein makes a big deal about contractors performing vital government functions. She sees the state as an indispensable utility that is being hollowed out by corporate worms that are accountable only to those who own shares in them. The courts aren’t saying much about any of this.

Unlike Klein, I’ve always been suspicious of the state. I should be heartened that the guy who zapped me with a (very expensive) penis prod works in the private sector and not for the government. But who cuts his checks? I bet I’ve got a penny of personal tax payments buried somewhere in his yard.

I cheered privatization for many years. Now its agents deride me as an immoral profiteer for selling a few masks while they scoop up big bucks replacing government services and busting unions. Some relentless, faceless process has begun to devour the rest of my life. I’ll never understand why my existence even matters to them. Do they hate me because I believed the things they were saying?

The good news: Anna has found a criminal lawyer who says I’ll be okay. He predicted today that the furor would subside by the time the case reaches prosecution. “People will want to forget all about the pandemic and the sh*t that happened. No jury’s gonna want to hear your case, let alone punish you for nothing. Or for something the state has to admit never harmed anyone.”

The word jury sounds so old-fashioned.

WHO GOT THE STORE WHEN THIS JAPANESE AMERICAN WAS HAULED OFF TO AN INTERNMENT CAMP? (Dorothea Lange)

But he was confident that the country’s, um, systemic problems will settle down. ”You’re like the Japanese Americans who got robbed and locked up during World War II,"  he told me. “Our country apologized after 50 years of embarrassing debate. You they’ll prefer to forget faster.”

Of course I’ve retained the man. Picture a cynical postwar Jimmy Stewart (with a heart of gold) doing the right thing for the little guy. He bows to the judge, tips his hat to Lady Justice, helps her get the blindfold back on. Then he skewers the assistant district attorney in Mr. Smith Saves Count Blogula….

He cracked up when I said I needed to file a crime report about the masks, gloves, and goggles the cops stole. Once I explained that my insured loss is momentous—it can ruin me—he heartily agreed. He even offered to accompany me to the precinct.

If I could find Sneeky, I’d feel okay. A vision when I was sleeping spurred me to look in at Liz Christy Gardens, but I didn’t see any cats. Not even the regulars. I can’t believe none of my neighbors tried to help Sneeky. They have no eyes when I see them in the hallway or on the sidewalk. They sure do write stuff about me.

Day 210: Police & Thieves

No one talks to old Blogula in the ‘hood. My block feels like part of the shadowy, sensitive world of The Curfew, Jesse Ball’s quick, fanciful novel about a kind of political plague that has stripped society of music, mobility, freedom. (Delighted to be selling it here!)

Every morning someone posts a death threat on my building’s front door. Even some of my supporters have caught buyer’s remorse since the Feds leaked some of the things I admitted to under torture. Fitch won’t talk to me since the Feds, armed with my quotes, broke in and took away all his devices and what remained of our inventory. He’s been charged with conspiracy to do things that would make you laugh.

LETHAL BUREAUCRACY IS FUNNY IN HELLER'S NOVELSome American readers write to say they’d happily improve on my captors’ methods. Europeans and Canadians are more sympathetic to me, though many favor the globalizing crackdown on dissent—as long as it doesn’t happen to people they like. I guess that defines a liberal these days.

An older New Yorker emailed to tell me about how in the 1950s and ‘60s and ‘70s, you would encounter people with tattoos on their arms—Nazi concentration camp survivors. They’d seen the worst things imaginable, had survived as their loved ones were ground up, gassed, cooked. “Some Holocaust survivors were the loveliest folks you could meet. They were oddly gentle and happy,” she wrote. “I’ve never understood how, but you should find out. Maybe living well is the best revenge.”

A couple of my countrymen (and women) call my report from Fed World illegal because I discussed interrogation techniques that are innately classified. They couldn’t be illegal because our government cannot torture anyone. I get what they’re saying: My lawyer isn’t allowed to discuss the state’s inquisition techniques in court. I’m glad I read Catch-22 when it still seemed funny.

Others say I’m deluded. No such machine has ever existed; a lie detector must have malfunctioned. (For days?) Not to worry, anyway: Such results are still inadmissible in court (unless you’re accused of terrorism; coerced evidence is admissible at Gitmo). Will the courts play a meaningful role in my case? So far they haven't.

I filed a burglary report. In the precinct house lobby, I saw one of those newfangled Internet surveillance posters. The government asks citizens to spot and forward “disruptive” emails and website URLs to a central Internet site for vetting by certified experts on influenza and journalism: Panic is like a virus – FIGHT FEAR – Call or Click 1-800…. (Look up the number yourself if you want it so badly.)

Upstairs, one of the detectives who shredded my life was doing paperwork. He inclined his ears to hear me recite the events to one of his colleagues. I dropped my voice to a virtual undertone.

When I spotted him angling to read my lips, I surprised both of us by winking at him. The things you learn in prison.

I kept the details as bland as possible. I made no accusations. Sure, my home contained officers of the law when I last saw my inventory. The place was stuffed to the ceiling with masks and gloves and goggles, exactly like the ones those detectives are wearing. The boxes looked just like that one in the corner. Just the facts that ought to help them identify any perps they might encounter....

The detective focused on the fact that my neighbors knew my apartment was full of gear. I haven’t seen any of them wearing my masks. They all look like ghosts.

How could I remain so calm? I avoided thinking of Sneeky.

Day 211: See Me, Hear Me, Fear Me

My tour of local lockups showed me that America has a new social division. There are two kinds of people—those who have endured the flu and the ones who haven’t caught it yet.

It was easy to spot flu virgins in prison. They were scared witless. They preferred not to breathe, avoided contact, barely looked around. Some were quietly preparing to die, praying in corners, trembling.

USA! WE’RE NUMBER ONE: PRISON POPULATION PER 100,000 PEOPLE I empathized with their vulnerability because I fear the resistant strain of TB. But I was already a flu survivor. Unless someone pounded them out of me, I wasn’t going to spit bloody bits of lung on the floor.

A burgeoning population no longer feels so endangered, at least from bird flu. You can sense this in the street. I saw a man collapse on the sidewalk today and people barely reacted, as if he were an old-time sloppy drunk. Sure I called 911—which answered from somewhere far away, but quickly. They should make phone contractors sing East Side, West Side till they know the difference.

The president appealed to the nation again. In cautious words I’d once have welcomed—but I now suspect may be exaggerated to justify ever-expansive powers—the voice of the state gave no sign that the flu has effectively wound down. Top gun says no effort will be spared to protect us (from me?), and that vaccine cometh to those who wait. Our vigorous young attorney general made a meatier statement, vowing war on criminals, illegal immigrants, anyone who spreads filth and lies to undermine our resolve.

I see more stories about terrorism than influenza. As long as we continue to dread one another and follow orders, it’s all the same. See me, hear me, fear me.

I have no opinion on the current conspiracy theory that the vaccine release has been delayed to maintain the crisis at a boil. Nothing about that process makes sense to me.

Did I mention that my Irish pal has been detained and is presumably being deported? I’m told they ransacked his (and Lisa’s) apartment for digital photographic storage media. His stash of protective gear has, of course, vanished. He had a Green Card. I’m sorry to have infected him with my special sociopolitical disease. I meant well.

There went the reserve of masks and gloves and goggles I had given him and Lisa.

This Cell Is Your Cell

Don’t bother sending me quotes, links, and pastes from the Feds’ study showing that 81% of the people they acknowledge having incarcerated in Houston will face criminal charges. I face plenty of charges myself. None have to do with public safety.

I suggest you all look in the mirror and ask which possessions and papers could get you busted. Long before the bug struck, this country boasted 5% of the world’s population and more than 23% of its prisoners. More than one in every 100 adult Americans was in jail. Those figures must be really arresting now.

How many nations responded to the pandemic by locking up so many potential victims?

Not that they don’t want to send this accused felon on vital missions to RAISE whatever they want. I’m being conscripted!

When did they take and test my blood sample to confirm I’d had the flu, you ask? Good question. They had certain opportunities. My work call starts next week.

Anna is feeling poorly. It’s been raining a lot and she is exposed every day to myriad children’s ailments. Without a mask. They give the conscripts color-coded caps and t-shirts, with armbands for the trusties—I mean supervisors.

My turn to take care of her. Teatime, my sweet!