On these early spring days I’ve been working in our garage while listening to Mae Brussel radio shows from the early 1970’s. She was on the air for one hour weekly for years in northern California in a time when radio stations had “public affairs” departments. That’s an oxymoron, I realize.

Brussel was an unusual woman, inquisitive and thorough. She harvested information from newspapers, magazines and news reports, maintaining cross-referenced files on people and subjects in the manner of J. Edgar Hoover, but for a better purpose. She read every book that time allowed her. In so doing, a different world unfolded before her. She was not mystical, just observant.

Today we would label such behavior an aberration, and she would be called a “conspiracy theorist.” That is part of our thought control regime, designed to keep normally curious people from straying out of bounds. These are oppressive times – we have so much information at our fingertips, and are so afraid to access it. Worse than that, people are mostly boring, smug and credulous at once, self-infused with the idea that they are somehow clever and wise for all of the things they do not know and refuse to investigate. Eeesh!

Incuriosity and indifference, even if studied, are indistinguishable from stupidity. But I digress.

I am not nostalgic. I do not believe in the ‘good old days. I listen to Brussel with an ear attuned to similarities between those times and now. There are many. Then as now, public officials were usually in some manner compromised if not overtly corrupt, and TV was a drug.

But there was a difference. Brussel’s audience was people attuned and aware of incongruities between news and reality. She was constantly fielding letters and calls from sharp listeners. It was a minority of people of course, but enough that her radio show had a large following.

Mae was speaking to college students too. She was warning them that the government was tired of the activism of the sixties, the protests, teach-ins – a climate of vigilance that made the ordinary criminal activity of public officials more difficult. They wanted to dumb it all down again. She saw on the horizon a problem with drugs, and told college kids that they would be easy to come by and to avoid them. She urged her listeners to keep their minds clean and sharp.

That was prescient, I would say. Drug use has always been with us. We all know the image of the stoner and the attitude that accompanies habitual marijuana use – a mildly delirious indifference.

Pot is legal where I live, and the movement is spreading. This is not a sea change – as my son reminded me, pot has always been legal for white folks. Legalization will allow it to penetrate deeper into society. It was a huge tool in the law enforcement arsenal for harassing and imprisoning minorities, and police will have to reload their quivers with other tools. They’ll figure that out.

Legalization of marijuana is a step forward for civil liberties, for minorities anyway. But habitual use ought to be discouraged as well. A government that can stigmatize intelligence and curiosity ought to be able to attach a touch of shame to pot use. But they won’t.

Pot and stupidity go hand-in-hand. But a dumbed down public is a good doggy. Here’s a bone. Or a bong.

It is a good time to pause here and reflect on what has transpired these past days on this blog. I have introduced hard evidence and reviewed a few methods of critical thinking. I have been greeted with derision. I quite expected this.
Continue reading “Why even care about truth?” →

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” (Voltaire)

I am enjoying the news media as they wrestle with Hillary Clinton’s handling of official U.S. business on a private email server. It’s not complicated. She is hiding things we should know about. There is no other plausible reason.

She will be forgiven and the matter will pass, as the U.S. media does not investigate powerful people. We’ll get coverage, but no insight. [Along those lines, Daily Beast does its doody here]

In a recent post I pointed to (painfully obvious) planted evidence, a “hijacker’s” passport found several blocks from the World Trade Center after 9/11. No bodies survived, none of the millions of parts used to make a jet aircraft were found in the rubble. But the passport turned up.

I asked readers, including two commenters directly, to consider the implications.

The predictable response was no response. Such a glaring anomaly pushes subconscious fear closer to the surface. I fully understand the silence of the readers.

Such oppressive silence is a manifestation of hidden power, and is common in every age. Andersen published The Emperor’s New Clothes in 1837, but the story can be traced back centuries before that. Galileo was not arrested for spreading lies, but exposing hidden truth. Julian Assange lives the Ecuadorian Embassy in London now, Bradley Manning is in prison, Edward Snowden in Russia … for saying things that happen to be true.

Even recently with the Charlie Hebdo affair in France there has to be discomfort among thoughtful people that the supposed murderers were hooded men – they could be anyone. Shades of 9/11, the supposed perpetrators left behind an easily discovered driver’s license.

I know the sense of betrayal that one feels when a cherished illusion is destroyed. But we all have to grow up some time, and now would be an excellent time to start.

Robert Siegel is a news reader for NPR, and widely considered one of the better ones in the country. He is the host of a show called “All Things Considered” which airs each evening.

Siegel once commented that he would not be interested in “… airing the views of such media and political critics as Noam Chomsky” on All Things Considered. (Yes, I too marvel at the inappropriateness of the program’s name.)

Siegel routinely allows all manner of right-wing and right-center commentary on its programming, but insists that Chomsky is not welcome. He has said that Chomsky

“…evidently enjoys a small, avid, and largely academic audience who seem to be persuaded that the tangible world of politics is all the result of delusion, false consciousness and media manipulation.”

The word “evidently” is a tell, indicating the Siegel is not familiar with Chomsky’s writing or his world-wide reputation. If Siegel had real chops, he would be eager to discuss Chomsky’s ideas among critics and supporters and with Noam himself. Listeners could draw their own conclusions rather than having Siegel act as gatekeeper.

Not so. Chomsky is simply dismissed. He has been interviewed widely all over the world on media outlets large and small. He routinely fills concert halls and other venues when he lectures both in the US and abroad. But only rarely, perhaps three times in fifty years, has he been allowed on the American mainstream media.

Ours is a heavily censored media that allows discussion of issues only within a very narrow framework, that of our two corporate financed parties. It is true that there is passion involved as they debate horse races and candidate speeches or wedge politics. They do give the appearance of diversity of views. This is important, as it reinforces the illusion of self-government.

The natural effect of the censorship is an out-of-sight-out-of-mind environment where media distracts more than informs, and points our attention at minutiae while ignoring the vital issues of our time, the ongoing investigation of major events part of it. Siegel (or Brian Williams or Jon Stewart) would be quickly out of a job if he dared discuss the glaring contradictions in the official 9/11 story, but is on safe ground talking about legalized pot or a mosque or abortion.

If you really want to be challenged to consider ideas of thinkers of high caliber, go back in time and watch the following, from an era when there was a freer marketplace for ideas, though even then heavily censored. (Buckley, after all, was given free access to public television for his whole right-wing agenda, while no such access has ever been allowed dissidents of Chomsky’s ilk.) The two clips in total are about nineteen minutes.

“The CIA’s campaign to popularize the term ‘conspiracy theory’ and make conspiracy belief a target of ridicule and hostility must be credited, unfortunately, with being one of the most successful propaganda initiatives of all time.” (Lance deHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America)

Conspiracy theorists are really nothing more than skeptics. But as the case put forward by the Warren Commission began to collapse in the late 1960’s, CIA saw a need to immunize the general population from doubt, and so instructed its media moles to start branding skeptics as that. (In the late 70s we learned that CIA had placed 400 or more moles in the news media and academia, giving us our nightly news and scholarly books on current events, basically rewriting our history as we go.)

Skeptics, now belittled as conspiracy theorists, are the vigilant citizenry that a republic might need if there still existed a chance to keep it.

It appears now that the education system, nothing to brag about from the 1900’s forward, has gotten very proficient at turning out graduates at all levels who are not capable of exercising skepticism, or critical thinking skills. Consider this:

In 2003 the Department of Education did a study of adult literacy, and the findings were unsettling. Here is how it defined “proficient,” its highest level of skill:

Only 13 percent of Americans qualified as proficient. More interesting, only 31 percent of college graduates did. [More disturbing yet, see page 15 of the study: The grouping of those involved in graduate studies is only 36% proficient!]

Knowing the basic skill sets of most Americans, government, the media, advertisers and public relations people, writers and elected officials are able to lie with ease. And they do. As the bumper sticker says, everything we know is wrong. Here’s an extreme example (a 17 second clip):

(I do like that the news reader in this clip said “if you can believe that.”)

Stop and think: We were told that a jet aircraft slammed into a building at 500+ miles per hour* and that in the resulting inferno the planes and everyone aboard were incinerated.

Knowing that, what are the chances that one piece of paper encased in plastic not only survived, but ended up several blocks away? It has to escape the blaze, be transported in some manner, and be found in the huge mess that was Ground Zero. It has to be that one person’s passport, and not that of another passenger or airline employee, or even one of the several thousand people who died that day.

I do not have to calculate odds here. It is simply impossible. That passport came from some other source.

Given that the passport could not possibly have survived the inferno and then move blocks away, what are the implications?
________________
*Passenger airliners can only travel at those speeds in rarified air at 30-40,000 feet. At ground level, flying at that speed would cause a jet aircraft to disintegrate in midair due to resistance. The process of landing an airliner takes a half an hour or more because the pilot is slowly reducing his speed to allow him to enter heavier air as he approaches the airport.

One of my favorite teachers growing up was a nun with a mustache, Sister Janice (ju-neese’), who I had in fifth and sixth grade. I probably did not learn anything worthwhile. By that time I knew how to read and cipher, so school was just repetition and testing. I do remember her, standing by the window overlooking First Second Avenue South in Billings as she talked about the death of Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary General of the United Nations on September 18th of 1961, the day before. Sr. Janice, of course, thought that it was the International Communist Conspiracy that killed him, and we kids were brought up in that paranoid circus, so we thought that too. She spoke with gloom abut the world we were going to inherit.

It would be years before I came to learn that Hammarskjold had been gunned down by our old buddies in the CIA, who had not too long before that also murdered Patrice Lumumba. In the coming months CIA would also dispatch Ecuadorian President Jose Velasco and General Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic.

The theme behind the murders was the dominant propaganda meme of the time, that they were communists. The real reason for their deaths was that in the wake of World War II, with Britain and France greatly weakened, former resource colonies were breaking free of chains and charting independence courses for themselves. The CIA, Capitalism’s Invisible Army, was appointed the new keeper of order and was in brush fire mode.

The murders served both to get rid of pesky democratic forces, but also to warn all others in the colonial world that a new sheriff was on the beat. Any who got in the way of American corporations’ access to local resources would encounter assassins, marines, fighter jets and thugs parading as American elected officials.

One such thug was Lyndon Baines Johnson, a crude and coarse man who once, when asked why we were in Vietnam, took out his dick and shook it at reporters saying “This is why.” Johnson was a murderer, but only a local thug. Many have inferred that his crimes in Texas suggest he had a role in the assassination of President Kennedy, but he was, in my view, merely controllable due to his corruption, much like Harry Truman. Those who wheeled him into the Vice Presidency, and ultimately presidency, knew he could be easily managed due to his past. His rightful place was in prison, or passing into the netherworld in a Texas gas chamber. He was that corrupt.

That’s just how it works – to the naive it appears that men and women arise from the grassroots and run for office and get elected and do the people’s business. There are indeed many people like that, but they don’t often get elected. They are not corruptible. One key to getting elected is a skeleton in the closet, a lever by which a person can be controlled.

• Side note: Often enough, if a good lever does not exist, it can be supplied. For instance, the amazingly beautiful woman who did business with Elliot Spritzer and brought him down as governor of New York was part of a honey trap, a common ploy used to compromise troublesome officials. Please ask yourself, gentlemen, what you would do if this woman stumbled into your lap.

Many people know about Bobby Baker. He was a scandalous Washington, DC figure in the early 1960’s who ran a club where powerful people could engage in trysts and enjoy some protection. The Kennedy boys were clients, and JFK’s famous dalliance with an East German spy, Ellen Rometsch originated there. But Baker had many irons in the fire, and was tied to Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson, and so JFK had decided that in the 1964 election, Johnson would be dropped in favor of North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford.

That’s all filthy, but not unusual. Anywhere there is power, there is corruption, hookers, drugs, bag men and assassins. Johnson’s favorite assassin was guy named Mac Wallace. One witness has placed Wallace in a certain book depository on 11/22/63, but that’s more a rewriting of history, as CIA is anxious to do anything to deflect blame from itself in that murder. So there’s a school of thought that traces the JFK murder to LBJ, but it falls apart on close examination. Johnson was not powerful enough to orchestrate an event of that magnitude.

But Mac Wallace was a busy man.

Another friend of LBJ’s was Billy Sol Estes, who was doing a sale/leaseback scam for fertilizer storage tanks in West Texas. It sounds mundane, but there were 33,000 of them and it was a multi-million dollar enterprise. Following the money led back to a man in the Agriculture Department, Henry Marshall, who was tied to LBJ.

LBJ ordered Marshall’s death – “get rid of him.” A man resembling Mac Wallace asked direction to Marshall’s home one day, and thereafter Marshall was bound with a plastic bag over his head and a hose running from an exhaust pipe, and was plugged with five bullet wounds. It was very clumsy. His body was moved to a nearby farm, and when the five bullets holes were tied to a shotgun found nearby, it was ruled a suicide. I guess it makes perfect sense in Texas.

In the succeeding months thereafter, George Kritilek (carbon monoxide), Harold Eugene Orr (ditto), Howard Pratt (need you ask?) and Coleman Wade (small plane crash – gotcha!) all turned up dead, and all ties between Billy Sol Estates and LBJ were severed. Billy Sol testified to all of this in 1984, after LBJ was dead, naming LBJ as a participant.

That’s your country, folks, just a small slice of real history. A thief and murderer sat in the White House for four years, in real life a man who should have been sitting in prison. Had he waved his dick at anyone there, it would have been severed.

The population of the United States is a smart bunch, generally, well-educated and well-versed in politics. Not much gets by them. I have been in and around politics most of my adult life, and so have familiarity with the attitudes and ideas, and the tactics by which people are grouped, for all our good, into movement politics.

By far the most effective, educated and cagey group is the Democrats. I was born and raised to be a Republican, but as I like to say, I got over to the other side as soon as I could. Once enmeshed with the culture, I found a rich garden, a full life complete with outlets for activism, self-education, and leadership. Democrats had all the bases covered. If I wanted to work to preserve the environment, they offered candidates and pamphlets and legislation designed for that purpose. If I wanted to work for human rights, where else to go? The Democratic program for Central America, the Middle East, South America and Southeast Asia was a feed bag of programs designed to advance development, democracy, and basic human dignity. The national platform included platforms on anti-racism, choice, the environment, control of the corporate sector, and most importantly, peace.

That’s why our society is so well equipped for world leadership. It’s not our leaders – sometimes we introduce clinkers like George W. Bush, but the society as a whole is so vibrant, so well schooled in ground-level organization, and so well-educated that he was but a passing ship in the night, an aberration. Soon enough he was upended and put out to pasture, and a real leader took is place, a highly intelligent man, a scholar, a community organizer, a charismatic figure, and one who was of a minority race. That sort of man could only come to a leadership position by the vehicle known as the “Democratic Party.”

So it is with some regret that I see Barack Obama’s term come to an end. Yet, and this speaks so highly of the party, there is no shortage of leaders. The party has a strong bench. Waiting in the wings is another person of intelligence, compassion, vision and skill, and a woman. I am four paragraphs into this, far enough down that everyone has stopped reading. I’ll return to the theme for the last paragraph, where most eyes generally skip when bored.

James Carville spoke at the Mansfield-Metcalf dinner in Helena last weekend. I should not have put the words “Mansfield-Metcalf” in this paragraph, as skimming eyes might pick up and read what is really being written here. But I think I am safe that most are moving on to the last paragraph. Swede brought me a quote, verified, from Carville, a man who I like for some reason. He said “The voter is basically dumb and lazy. The reason I became a Democratic operative instead of a Republican was there were more Democrats that didn’t have a clue than there were Republicans.” I am feeling a surge of pride in reading that, as I said as much on my own accord in the post below this, that Republican leadership does not have to lie to its base the way that Democrats do, as they are all “Benghazi crazy,” or on the same page ideologically, right-wing extremists who feed on and support one another.

Democrats are a wonderful party. I had to say that at paragraph opening for deflection purposes. Here is what is real. Democrats are a largely ineffective group, tending to be soft and idealistic to a degree, but who care more about winning elections and earning validation points than actually knowing anything about politics and policies. They are so easily buffaloed. Even now, as they are set to say goodbye to Neocon Obama, they are welcoming Neocon Hillary into leadership. She’ll win their nod because she stands a good chance of winning, and because her being a woman feeds their need for that sense of moral superiority they so crave. They’ll ignore her warmongering tendencies and vote her into office, if possible. This country is such a zoo, a well-to-do banana republic with a political iq somewhere in the teens. What was that blockbuster Tracy Jordan movie? Oh yeah. It was called Hard to Watch.

With Obama leaving office, we now might stumble, but I trust the Democrats, with such a deep bench, will put up another person of such intelligence and vision. I hope it’s Hillary, but I trust my party. If not her, someone of equal talent will rise through the ranks. Remember, Obama was known to no one, and by a natural process of grassroots percolation, found himself in Chicago at Grant Park in November of 2008. I saw the tears, the smiles, the hopes of a nation. Maybe that moment will never happen again, but I trust that in 2016, November, an New York, a similar moment comes about when a woman, with her former-president husband and daughter and grandchild at her side, speaks to the throngs of worshiping admirers.

This is our essence, our sense of purpose, our homeland, our hope for the future. We are all Americans, but as a Democratic American, I stand just a little higher in pride and fulfillment than the honorable members of the other permitted party.

We are traveling today. We leave New Zealand at 6:30 PM Monday and arrive in Denver at 9:00 PM, Monday. It will take about 21 hours in total. We’ve gotten good at it over time, making sure devices are loaded with podcasts and having on hand books and sleeping pills. We play a lot of Scrabble when awake, and are both on an equal competitive level with one another so that winning is never easy. Such are the things that make a happy marriage.

The above video reminds me how much Noam Chomsky has aged since I first encountered him. He’d be 63 64 or 65 here in 1993, combative, assertive and confrontational. I remember listening to him in 1988, a speech at American University broadcast on CSPAN where he talked like this. As a right-wing Christian conservative reflecting my upbringing and education, everything he said flew in my face. It was outrageous. Nobody talked like that. Nobody.

And it would not have even registered with me, just as it will not register with those who watch but two or three minutes here and turn away. But I was gripped at that time with a burning question – who the fuck killed JFK? – that was causing me to look at things I’d never looked at before, opening a few doors, allowing curiosity to overcome the thought control system.

Chomsky, of course, pooh-poohs any curiosity about Dallas or 9/11, but I hold out that such events, if one lets go of the indoctrination system and looks at them in a questioning manner, are portals that will lead to sea changes in outlook. They disrobe the world before our youthful eyes, and begin the path towards intellectual maturity.

“Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day…. A series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through a change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate and systematic plan for reducing us to slavery. (Thomas Jefferson)

“The US mainstream hypnotic media, along with everything else in the US, has been weaponized.” (Comment by jfl, Feb 4, 2015 7:45:22 PM, Moon of Alabama)

Tribal cultures even today simply cannot comprehend the concept of the individual or of the separate and independent citizen. Oral cultures act and react simultaneously, whereas the capacity to act without reacting, without involvement, is a special gift of “detached” literate man.” (Marshall McLuhan, The playboy Interview, March, 1969)

“But what if your own eyes and your innate (though suppressed) ability to think critically and independently tell you that what all the institutions of the State insist is true is actually a lie? What do you do then? Do you trust in your own cognitive abilities, or do you blindly follow authority and pretend as though everything can be explained away? If your worldview will not allow you to believe what you can see with your own eyes, then the problem, it would appear, is with your worldview. So do you change that worldview, or do you live in denial?” (Dave McGowan, Wagging the Mooddoggie)

I live in a bizarro kind of world, shared by a few others who know exactly what I am talking about. My world is built on not just evidence, but rather easily uncovered and understood evidence.

Those things I know to be true are not things I happen to “believe,” as if such knowledge is subjective. Rather, I objectively see a plethora of evidence demonstrating that the major events of our times, be it Dallas, Watergate, 9/11, Boston or the supposed killing of Osama bin Laden, as explained to the public, are a gigantic, bold and easily untangled web of lies.

These lies have been untangled, uncovered, exposed, and in such a way that it is not merely the opinions of a few freaks and geeks. Rather it is a preponderance of unassailable facts discovered and uncovered by scholars and researchers of high integrity, and done with great care. There is no doubt in my mind that these men and women are closer to truth than any other Americans.

The events in question are not nuanced for the public, handled so as to keep certain important and sensitive information secret. They are simply big lies.

• The murder of President Kennedy was a giant domestic covert operation followed by an even larger coverup.
• Watergate has roots going all the way back to JFK and Dallas and involving the same people. Like Dallas it was a large conspiracy to undo the results of an election, to keep wars going.
• 9/11 was mostly a television show, complete with CGI, but the basic evidence is even stranger than supposed planes flying unhindered through steel buildings.
• The Boston Marsthon “bombing” is so easily seen to be a hoax that readers who believe in the lost limbs and miracle recoveries ought to be embarrassed to be so gullible.
• And supposedly killing a guy, tossing his body in the ocean, not showing photographs … please. People. You insult your own intelligence, much less mine. You should be embarrassed.

What’s up with you? What the hell is wrong with you?

I was impressed by the words “hypnotic media” in one of the quotes above. Hypnosis appears to be a large part of our problem, although groupthink and social pressure have a lot to do with it too. Critical thinking skills are like great books. Everyone talks about them, but few actually experience them. Teachers all claim to teach critical thinking skills. Few actually do, or even know how for themselves.

I was traveling across a couple of states with a young relative a few years back, and having read a book about roads and highways, was struck by the author’s statement that the vast majority of youth today believe that the lines on our roads are two to three feet apart. So I asked my companion what he thought the distance was. “Two feet” was his answer. When I told him the truth – 22 feet of between Interstate highway lines, I was in for an even larger surprise. He did not believe me. He still doesn’t.

It is right there in front of him, easily discovered. Yet he clings … to what? A myth? An impression? They have to put the lines far apart to create the sensation that we are moving slower than we really are when we travel on highways. Otherwise we would not be able to drive for hours on end without becoming mesmerized, disoriented, even nauseous. He is clinging to an optical illusion.

But why does the illusion rule? I have never thought such nonsense as he does. I have never for a second had any notion that highway lines are two feet apart. I trust my whole generation is like me. Most of us have walked on or beside highways and see the evidence. What is up?

In a similar manner most people suffer from easily shattered illusions regarding the events I name above, and many others. Our leaders regard those illusions as “necessary,” as in the words of Reinhold Neibuhr. Chomsky called it “thought control in democratic societies,” referencing Niebuhr in a series of lectures in Canada. These illusions are the glue holding us together. But we need to come apart, as this glue, this togetherness, is not wholesome. It is hard on the rest of the world, including those countries we are currently attacking and others we plan to.

If you’ve read this and are feeling safe that I am in a twilight zone while you are comfortably ensconced in hard reality, think again. I am the sane one here. Not you. It is your feet that need to touch terra firma, where mine have been firmly planted now for decades. I and others are evidence and reality-based thinkers, while you are steeped in lies, illusions, and CGI.

We are socked in for a day here and decided not to spend twelve hours hiking in the rain. I stand by that decision. Consequently, we are hanging out, reading and walking up and down a country road. How awful.

I was thinking of a bumper sticker we once sported on our vehicles that used to inspire rage. It was merely three words, “Keep it Wild.” We often came down from hikes to find epitaphs written in the road dirt on our vehicles suggesting impossible sexual acts. I once got a ticket for trespassing that I suspect had to do with the three words. Little known fact, the Department of Fish and Game rides fenceline for large landowners, identifies with them, feels for them. Those are the real employers.

“Keep it Wild” was the motto of Montana Wilderness association, now a collaborative group. I am told that the organization was well down that path even when I was active, but my own perceptions were newly formed and years away from clarity. But I have suggested a new motto for them, a bumper stcker sure not to offend anyone:

KEEP IT MILD

Bob Decker, then the executive director of MWA, suggested to me something hard to grasp at the time, now easily seen to be “framing.” He tried to explain to me that in order to sit and discuss issues with then-Senator Max Baucus, you had to get in the room. And the room was heavily guarded. The only way in was to check testicles at the door.

Current MWA elite are proud of their collaboration with Senator Jon Tester, not aware that they are merely working with the replacement Senator from the Timber Lobby. They were excited to be part of the Forest Jobs and Recreation Act, to be asked to sit in the room! The resulting bill, once thought to be the Conrad Burns agenda, is now dressed up as something new. MWA members are proud of their friendship with Tester and proud they are in the room. As I mentioned to MWA executive Gabriel Furshong in a friendly little tweet, it sort of makes me want to puke.

But it’s more than just being in the room. The whole organization has had to go through a mind shift, from combative to collaborative, and not be ashamed about it. To accomplish this they have demonized the fighters, the strong men and women who gave us the lands that are preserved to date. They are “rock throwers,” we are told. They just don’t play well with powerful people.

Well, you decide. For me, rock throwing beats moral cowardice every time, hands down.

But how, you ask, can anything ever be accomplished without compromise and effort at common ground?

That is the wrong question. Those things have a place, but compromise comes after, and not instead of battling. The politicians are bought and put in place to work for the monied interests. Jon Tester has no interest in compromise or collaboration. He receives guests on bended knee. If you are allowed in his office, you have already lost. You can only be held in undignified posture, your saving grace the imagined respect you think you’ve earned by acts of capitulation.

The political system crushes moral mousiness. There is only one way to deal with the Testers of this world, and that is to inflict pain as punishment for misdeeds. That is the only language that bought politicians understand. How often have we all heard Democrats (and that is all MWA is now, Democrats in action) say “Well, I don’t support so and so on this or that, but I will still vote for him.” Thank you sir, I’ll have another.

Effective punishment of politicians requires ground-level organization, and that is why MWA was founded. Money found a way, and replaced all of the fighters with collaborators, so that now Keep it Wild is Keep it Mild.

It would help, however, if in addition to yielding the agenda, MWA would also give itself a new name. No longer Montana Wilderness Association, they should be called Montana Wimps Amalgamated. Associated with the Timber Lobby, they’ve become a key driving force in the art of losing while feigning dignity.