-Caveat Lector- -----Original Message----- From: ...geminiwalker Sent: Mon 6/18/2001 5:54 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Subject: [CIA-DRUGS] Body Counts by Paul Krassner This is an unedited version of my op-ed piece due to be published by the L.A. Times, most likely on Monday: Body Counts Timothy McVeigh is gone, but the malady lingers on: people somehow robotized out of their innate compassion. During the Vietnam war, there developed a horrible ritual that was broadcast across the nation on the TV news--every Thursday, for some reason. It was the body count. So many "American dead"; so many "Vietnamese dead"; so many "Enemy dead." Just abstract numbers, functioning to hide the utter futility of it all. U.S. military intervention killed three million Vietnamese, as well as some 60,000 Americans. One Thursday, my four-year-old daughter, Holly, was sitting on my lap as I watched Walter Cronkite deliver the CBS News. When it came to the body count that evening, she asked, "Is that happening in our universe?" I experienced a flashback to that moment when it was disclosed how McVeigh had referred to the murdered children in the bombed Oklahoma City's Murrah Federal Building as "collateral damage," a concept he had learned as a soldier fighting in the Gulf War to make the world safe for oil magnates. On the one hand, it was an utterance of legalized evil. On the other hand, it was an expression of the darkest possible humor, inadvertently satirizing American chauvinism. In a strange way, it reminded me of Lenny Bruce in 1962. He was intrigued by the implications of a statement by Adolf Eichmann that he would have been "not only a scoundrel, but a despicable pig" if he hadn't carried out Hitler's orders. Performing at the Gate of Horn in Chicago, he requested that all the lights be shut off except for one dim blue spotlight. Then, in a most audacious act for a comedian, he credited Thomas Merton's poem about the Holocaust and, extrapolating on it, began addressing the audience with a German accent: "My name is Adolf Eichmann. And the Jews came every day to what they thought would be fun in the showers. People say I should have been hung. Nein. Do you recognize the whore in the middle of you--that you would have done the same if you were there yourselves? My defense: I was a soldier. I saw the end of a conscientious day's effort. I watched through the portholes. I saw every Jew burned and turned into soap. Do you people think yourselves better because you burned your enemies at long distance without ever seeing what you had done to them? Hiroshima auf Wiedersehen. [German accent ends.] If we would have lost the war, they would have strung [President Harry] Triman up by the balls...." Bruce was arrested for obscenity that night. One of the items in the police report complained, "Then talking about the war he stated, 'If we would have lost the war, they would have strung Truman up by the balls.'" The cops also broke open Lenny's candy bars, looking for drugs. And so it came to pass that McVeigh--perhaps the only positive remnant of his legacy--inadvertently forced us to come to grips with the realization that the grief of families on the other side of the globe matched the grief of families in Oklahoma City. McVeigh's attorneys have clung to his defense with a sense of identification that could be identified as Reverse Stockholm Syndrome. It is an ethical disease of the profession that certainly affected O. J. Simpson's dream team. More recently, a lawyer for the man who killed Madalyn Murray O'Hair, her son and granddaughter, insisted that they had all committed suicide. And, presumably, buried themselves. But the inhumanity epitomized by McVeigh transcends military action. Citizens do it all the time. For example, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America is sponsored, ironically enough, by pharmaceutical, alcohol and tobacco industries. From 1970 to 1998, the revenue of major pharmaceutical companies more than quadrupled to $81 billion. In 1999, 100,000 people died from prescription drugs. Alcohol killed 150,000. And 450,000 died from smoking cigarettes. All collateral damage. As long as the government can arbitrarily decide which drugs are legal and which drugs are illegal, then everyone who is behind bars for a nonviolent drug offense is a political prisoner of the war on drugs. That is, the war on some people who use some drugs. In the book, Trust Us, We're Experts, John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton report that in the early 1990s, tobacco companies paid $156,000 to thirteen academic scientists to write letters to influential medical journals, arguing the tobacco industry's case. A biostatistican was paid $10,000 for an eight-paragraph letter published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Was he any better than Timothy McVeigh? At least McVeigh acted out of principle, albeit the ultimate perversion of principle. Meanwhile, every day continues to be Thursday. ------- Paul Krassner is the author of Sex, Drugs and the Twinkie Murders: 40 Years of Countercultural Journalilsm. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. 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