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Mary4 on the Wild Wild Left wrote a comment on my piece The Joe Stack Story and the Media-The Dog That Did Not Bark. In it, she said:

 The ones calling [Joe Stack] crazy are the ones that are sponges for MSM, haven’t a problem in the world, and wouldn’t insult their intelligence by reading the rantings of a deranged man.

Precisely.

Except of course…that he was “deranged.”

He had been driven crazy by the ongoing contradictions of this system as it now stands.

Here is an interesting headline from today’s mainstream news. (And it doesn’t get any more “mainstream” than CNN.):

CNN Poll: Majority think government is broken

Americans overwhelmingly think that the government in this country is broken, according to a new national poll. But the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey, released Sunday morning, also indicates that the public overwhelmingly holds out hope that what’s broken can be fixed.

Eighty-six percent of people questioned in the poll say that our system of government is broken, with 14 percent saying no.

Of even more interest to me are the following lines.

Of that 86 percent, 81 percent say that the government can be fixed, with 5 percent saying it’s beyond repair.

Read on for more.

Much more. (Including the reason for including the above image.)
Now Joe Stack was a rational man. He made his living as an “engineer”. A software engineer, but still…he built things. He used rational, logical processes to create useful equipment. Engineers perform one process after another correctly, as they have been taught to do. They follow certain rules; they improvise and innovate within those rules; they discard whatever does not work and use what does…you know. The rational process. Step by step, inch by inch they make a certain kind of progress on a given task. I know this approach well…my father was an engineer. And a basically good-hearted man as well. Intelligent, diligent, hard-working, courageous…he was a fighter pilot in W.W. II, volunteered to join the Royal Canadian Air Force in the late ’30s to go fight Hitler before the U/S. entered the war and flew Spitfires in the Battle Of Britain. Only about 15% of his squadron survived the war. I watched helplessly as the contradictions implicit in this system tore him apart from the late ’50s on, just as they tore Joe Stack apart a generation or so later. Although my father never got in his own small plane and dive-bombed the IRS, I watched as he became increasingly angry, combative and embittered through his late 30s and well into the rest of his life. He followed the rules…as did Joe Stack, good engineers that they were…and watched as the cheaters and hustlers collected the rewards for his work. Eventually that situation drove him into repeated clashes with other workers and with passersby in life as well. My father finally did his own version of the Joe Stack thing. He retired early…after the war he had become an aeronautical engineer and a damned good one at that…and went to live in the Maine woods, essentially defeated by life in general and madder than hell at the situation.

I learned a great deal from my father. I loved and respected him deeply, but I could never reach his anger and help him. Why? Because like Joe Stack, he had been imprinted too deeply throughout his early life with the myths upon which this country was founded.

All men are created equal.
Do the right thing and you will be rewarded.
Our leaders know best.
Etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.

Later on an equivalent kind of man…like Joe Stack, I am betting…was less well imprinted by the cultural restrictions of my father’s time and found his way clear to at least try to resolve some of the contradictions that are perfectly clear to anyone living in this system whose eyes are not propped wide shut.

Joe Stack wrote:

We are all taught as children that without laws there would be no society, only anarchy.  Sadly, starting at early ages we in this country have been brainwashed to believe that, in return for our dedication and service, our government stands for justice for all.  We are further brainwashed to believe that there is freedom in this place, and that we should be ready to lay our lives down for the noble principles represented by its founding fathers.  Remember? One of these was “no taxation without representation”.  I have spent the total years of my adulthood unlearning that crap from only a few years of my childhood.  These days anyone who really stands up for that principle is promptly labeled a “crackpot”, traitor and worse.

While very few working people would say they haven’t had their fair share of taxes (as can I), in my lifetime I can say with a great degree of certainty that there has never been a politician cast a vote on any matter with the likes of me or my interests in mind.  Nor, for that matter, are they the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say.
Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours?  Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies.  Yet, the political “representatives” (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the “terrible health care problem”.  It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.

And justice? You’ve got to be kidding!

How can any rational individual explain that white elephant conundrum in the middle of our tax system and, indeed, our entire legal system?  Here we have a system that is, by far, too complicated for the brightest of the master scholars to understand.  Yet, it mercilessly “holds accountable” its victims, claiming that they’re responsible for fully complying with laws not even the experts understand.  The law “requires” a signature on the bottom of a tax filing; yet no one can say truthfully that they understand what they are signing; if that’s not “duress” than what is.  If this is not the measure of a totalitarian regime, nothing is.

He tried to rationally fight through this system, and the fight eventually exhausted his spirit to the point where he simply said:

I have just had enough…. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.

And then he committed suicide and murder. Both acts of a certain kind of insanity, in my book.

Back to the CNN poll.

Americans overwhelmingly think that the government in this country is broken.

86% of them believe that. (Probably a higher percentage because polls of this sort do not usually provide much information about the segment of the population to whom this statement is a no-brainer. The working, permanent underclass.)

When you get into an 80th percentile majority you are dealing with a fairly low intelligence level overall. You are right in the middle of the bell curve…able to do a job of some sort; able to read and write but not the quickest of the quick, most of them That’s the way it works and in a perfect universe I must believe that it is the way it is supposed to work. The way it works best.

The mythos is breaking down among those most likely to swallow it whole without much questioning.

But…

Of that 86 percent, 81 percent say that the government can be fixed,

In the face of massive, long-standing evidence to the contrary…from the murder of JFK to the present threat of failure from yet another “reform” movement at the very least…81% of these same people still buy into the myth about which Joe Stack wrote.

…starting at early ages we in this country have been brainwashed to believe that, in return for our dedication and service, our government stands for justice for all.  We are further brainwashed to believe that there is freedom in this place, and that we should be ready to lay our lives down for the noble principles represented by its founding fathers.

And the PermaGov says:

The mythos has not broken down that far, by golly!!! And a good thing too, JB!!! We kin still run our game and make a profit on the next quarter.

Whew!!!

I wuz gettin’ worried there for a minute!!!

How’s the property in Costa Rica comin’, JB? Have we got a place to run if necessary?

Yes?

Good!!!

Sic Ann Coulter on `em again. That’s the ticket!!!

And so it goes.

Around yet one more time.

And now…as promised..a song for my father. For poor, beaten and confused Joe Stack as well. RIP, both of you. Horace Silver’s song; (“Song For My Father”), Leon Thomas’s words and performance. The words say one thing, the pain implicit in Leon’s following improvisation says something else entirely.

Listen.

I got yer “contradictions”.

Right here!!!

Later…

AG