STOPPED
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The car moved across the county line looking for gas. A large billboard proudly proclaimed we were entering the county that had beaten the drug criminals. A picture of the sheriff accompanied the declaration of victory. I suppose some would take this as a welcome sign like the Rotary and Lion and Optimist Club badges hanging on city entrances but with my present company I took it as a warning. A patrol car hooked onto our bumper. His red light signaled us to pull to the right.
"Good day." If it wasn't for the uniform, the black-jack, and his hand on the gun in his holster, you'd almost think he was a store clerk by the way we were greeted. Except perhaps for the cop eyes. Cop eyes have seen the worst of human behavior, repeatedly. They are not surprised by another worm in their midst looking to squirm past them. They are more than not surprised, they assume that's exactly who you are. "Do you have business in the county?"
"No, we're only passing through. Although perhaps you could recommend a good place to stop and have a few bites." I thought that was a nice touch to add.
He disregarded my inquiry. By this time he had perused the back seat and tried to get a fix on Eddie. I kept my hands visible on the wheel and my eyes focused on the officer. I was hoping Eddie was doing the same. I wanted the cop to see me for what I was, a harmless middle-aged man. I didn't want him to see Eddie for what he was, a fugitive on the run from a drug sentence with a rap sheet possibly several pages long. "You don't mind if I have a look in your vehicle?"
He was formal and officious and he knew his business and he was out to learn mine.
The cop ran my license. Nothing incriminating should have come up, but you hear stories, and until he gave me it back, I had the jitters. "May I have your passenger's identification." This was going to be tricky, I thought.
"Sure," said Eddie.
Shit, I said to myself. I didn't want to see him arrested but I wasn't going to do anything stupid like making a run for it either. I figured I'd have to call up his aunt to try to explain but in the end I was prepared to leave Eddie behind.
The cop walked back from his call to the dispatcher.
"Drive carefully," he said as he handed us back our licenses, went back to his patrol car, and waited till we pulled away.
"I thought a reason was needed before he could pull you over."
"You tell him. There's another one. That's what happens when they win a war. They're like an occupying army, a victorious occupying army."
"I've heard of this place. The North County has been nuked."
"Like microwaved?"
"Like nuclear bombed. They found marijuana plants in the back country and defoliated the whole damn area. Nothing grows, nothing may ever grow. No animals, fish, nothing."
"Seems a bit of an overkill."
"Not to them it doesn't."
I couldn't get out of there fast enough. Not until we were safely away and back onto the freeway did I ask Eddie how he got by the ID check.
"I've got ID. My cousin lent me his."
Good ole cousin. "I still need gas."
We sailed off the freeway past the filling stations at the top of the ramps because they are always more expensive than the ones a couple of blocks away from the highway. I made a quick left down the main street of a small burgh and after a couple clicks of the odometer ground to a screeching halt. The way was blocked by what looked like a gathering of about every person in town. A boxy white and red ambulance had its yellow running lights and red flasher working. I got ready to make a U-turn but was quickly fenced in by a large truck behind me and two smaller ones on the sides. I'm sure they would have let me out if I had insisted but since we were stopped anyway, I thought it was a good time to get the kinks out and maybe mingle with the locals. Eddie said he'd stay put.
I caught the gaze of an elderly man in a wide-brimmed hat and asked, "Do you know how long we're going to be tied up?"
He had a clean face and an eye that was a steady bead. "Nope. No telling. Sometimes these things have a way of lasting all day."
"What happened?"
"You see that large limb stretched across the road. It broke. And there was a fellow sitting on it."
"I hope he's alright."
"He's well enough so that he's threatening to sue the city for his indignities since the city failed to remove the tree."
"What was he doing in the tree?"
"He was protesting the city's plans to remove it. Thought it was a historical landmark of some kind."
"The city should be pleased. They can get their wish and remove the old thing."
"I don't think everyone connected with city hall is going to be that pleased about the whole affair. You see that building behind the tree? That's city hall."
"Yeh, I see it."
"You see that white mound of flattened metal under the tree limb. That's the mayor's car."
"Poor mayor. Parked in the wrong place and got his car totaled."
"Not that poor. Nor that innocent. He's been ramming his truck into that decrepit old tree for years hoping he'd kill it so the city would have to chop it down and he'd have an unobstructed view of the street from his office."
"It seems everyone got there wish, doesn't it? The perfect political solution."
"Funny how those things work out but I'd say it was more like a military solution where the mission was accomplished but the results unanticipated."
A path had been cleared and I went back to our car to point down the path and report about it to Eddie.
"Serves the tree sitting wacko right. I hope he busted something."
"What, you don't like trees?"
"I like trees, I don't like people who sit in them. If it was up to them, we'd all be in caves eating raw meat, too afraid to start a fire because we'd be polluting and killing trees. I think all of that environmental junk is just that, junk."
"You don't believe there's a hole in the ozone?"
"Who cares? Are you worried the moon might fall through it?"
"Tell me what makes you so sure it won't?"
"Don't you think people in power would plug the hole up or at least stop it from getting larger if it was a real danger?"
"Which people in power? The ones who are chasing you out of the country while franchising breweries and packaging tobacco, the ones who want to turn you into a snitch, the ones who impose mandatory sentences to make sure you get locked up, the ones who confiscate property without verdicts, the ones who have decided they can lock you up for life if you shoplift a slice of pizza because you have two priors?"
He was silent for several minutes while I alternately gloated and recriminated myself for being too forceful. Finally, he said, "They can't be wrong about everything."
Let's see: The CIA's placement of the Shah in Iran was a raging success until the Iranians got tired of the havoc wreaked by his secret police and opted for a theocracy headed by an anti-Western religious fanatic who severed relations with the rest of the world; Guatemala, another CIA success story, complete with death and torture squads that murdered any citizen daring to ask for democracy; Chile, one of Kissinger's proud moments, the Chilean military with the CIA's connivance replaced the duly elected government and not to be outdone by the barbarity of the Guatemalan despots formed their own teams of goons and henchman; Vietnam, supposedly its fall to Communism would bring all manner of calamity, obviously, that justification for the deaths of countless Vietnamese was a prevarication meant to keep the citizens of the U.S. looking away from their unfulfilled promises of government services; long after apartheid was discredited as a form of government in South Africa, Washington encouraged "business as usual" which helped sustain that regime for more painful years; the dictator in Panama, Manuel Noriega, a CIA operative for years, was deposed alleging that his removal would stem the drug trade in the U.S., a laughable conclusion except for the Panamanian dead; the CIA provided weapons to Muslim fundamentalists in Afghanistan fighting the Soviet Union's troops and then had those weapons turned on Americans after the fundamentalists prevailed; fearing that Iran might invade its neighbors in an effort to control the region, Saddam Hussein was provided with the means to defeat Iran and then quickly decides to invade the nearest country. OK, so foreign policy might not be their best game. Let's see: they have stood in the doors of schools to prevent black kids from entering; spent trillions of dollars on military systems instead of public institutions, inner cities, health care, or a myriad of other needed social programs; complained that labor was cutting into their pockets so they took their manufacturing plants into the third world crippling the labor market in the U.S., then aimed their complaints at environmental regulations; forced a drug war that most of us don't care about fighting; locked up countless citizens who posed no physical threat to the rest of us; peeked in bedroom windows in the name of morality so that they could make demons out of those in the dark; claimed for themselves the right to decide which couples are eligible for marriage; made damn sure that any reform that removed money from politics would never see the light of day; pretended that trickle down economics is a new economic gospel so that they could suck up more of the nation's wealth and trickle down piss on the poor; bilked the country out of billions of dollars in savings and loan scams; gave corporate brothers slaps on the wrist for their corruption; saddled up a horse of misinformation they knew wouldn't go the distance in the stock market race, paid the handicappers to raise the odds in Misinformation's favor, put their money against the favorite and then watched from the payoff window the little guy's horse stumble around the turn. These people are taking lessons from Vlad the Impaler. Stake out your citizenry in an excruciating pattern so no one will dare cross your borders. They can't be wrong all of the time, can they?
"Yeh, they can."
And it's always the same bunch. They're like tornadoes with GPS. They've got everything roadmapped so that they can roll from one trailerpark to the next devouring everything that's not tied down. They've got rollers on their office chairs so they can wheel from corporate board room to government cabinet meeting and back to the board room. They sit on defense firms gearing up for lucrative government contracts and then slide over to their cabinet posts where they throw business to their defense firms and then slide back into the board rooms to reap the rewards from the stock fallout. They've taken corporate shenanigans out of the minor leagues. These guys make Willie Sutton and Charles Ponzi look like choir boys. They privatize social agencies devoted to rebuilding third world countries, then they declare war on a pushover of a country so they can obliterate the country's infrastructure and deliver the services to rebuild it again using taxpayers money. They hold posts in the Department of Making War Industry, they're advisors to the Secretary of State in Charge of Corporate Sleazeballs, they're on the National Security Council of Crony Capitalists, they're the Secretary of Siphoning Off Tax Dollars, the Undersecretary of Screwing the Public.
It's always the same question or insinuation, isn't it? That's what Eddie was really asking, "What makes you think you know better than the President? If only you knew everything they knew, then you'd agree with them." What they knew was, and is, classified information. Classified for good reason because it disputes everything they tell us. If the Pentagon Papers upheld the policy, do you think they'd have given a damn about its publication? Not likely. We know from their memoirs that none of them believed the shit they were shoveling at us. Not Johnson, not Nixon, not Kennedy, not McNamara, not Russel. Even among the military there was Krulak and others who knew it was a crapload. But that's history, not policy, isn't it. Eisenhower waits till after he's out of office to warn about the military-industrial complex so he can leave it to history rather than change policy.
"I don't get it. You believe in Nostradamus but not the Nobel Laureates in science. How come?"
He didn't have to say anything, I understood. Nostradamus was like a capstone. No one wanted to take something apart brick by brick to examine how it was put together. They just wanted to snatch the capstone and let it tumble. It was easier to believe that one stone held everything together rather than to understand the forces generated by each resting on the other. And it was reassuring to know that the actions and pressure of the capstone were the only actions that mattered, that the rest of the stones were only doing their duty. Only the capstone had responsibility for the arch.
The truck behind me made a move to loosen the stranglehold of congestion and I followed his route to a gas station.