Positronic Souls and Our Bellicose Parades

Debbie Dread demanded total concentration. China Burg set snares and traps without revealing herself. When confronted with close-quarter fighting and scraps of memories, Mary Monday dug into the hillside to provide a platform for further mining. Trixie A. Baum had the power to absorb your thoughts. Bettina Floerchinger modeled astrophysical processes in the circumstellar dust shells of a huge elephant. Su Tissue rubbed against your shoes as she looked down the target line. Nina Canal was a plain old cat who calculated the methionine chain elongation pathway of an outdoor summer solstice concert. Lorry Doll committed a speculative notational act that affected the market price paid to producers. Kitty Byrne was in the process of building two medical facilities out of willow bark, chlorophylls, and the immense spherical clouds that surrounded where we lived and where our weather occurred. Vicky Aspinall seriously affected the quality of your life.

Hooray For Our Chains (24)

List XIX: Abraham Bolden

1. Abraham Bolden, the first African American Secret Service Agent in U.S. history, served briefly with the Kennedy administration. He was arrested on bogus counterfeiting charges in 1964, the day before he tried to speak to Warren Commission counsel J. Lee Rankin about the Secret Service's poor record of protecting President Kennedy prior to and during November 22, 1963.

2. He also planned to explain to the Warren Commission the plots to assassinate President Kennedy in Chicago (November 2, 1963) and Tampa (November 18, 1963), both of which resembled the successful assassination in Dallas on November 22. In Chicago, for instance, the assassination was to be carried out by a four-man Cuban exile hit squad, using high-powered rifles as the limousine was forced to slow down to make a hairpin left turn on the Jackson exit of the Northwest Expressway (now the Kennedy Expressway).

3. "The president's life was in grave danger because of the inefficiency of security around him, too many weaknesses. When that bullet struck the head of the president, it struck me, too, because I saw it coming," Bolden said to Chuck Goudie of WLS-TV, Chicago. In his book The Echo From Dealey Plaza, Bolden writes: "I suspected that the responsible parties [the killers in Dallas] set up the agents on the president's protection detail by exploiting their reputed weaknesses for women and booze" (73).

4. Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann report in Legacy of Secrecy that as recently as 2008, "sixty black Secret Service agents were supporting discrimination suits, and the Associated Press reported a black 'employee found a noose in one of the Secret Service's training centers,' resulting in the suspension of a white agent" (508).

5. "One morning, I was sitting at my desk when the phone rang," Bolden writes in The Echo from Dealey Plaza. "I picked it up and leaned back in my chair to have a conversation. Looking up I saw, tied to the ceiling light above me, a rope . . . a hangman's noose" (58). When confronted with the noose, Bolden's supervisor, Maurce Martineau, said, "Aw, someone's just joking around. I'll call maintenance and have it removed [. . . ] Don't be so thin-skinned" (58-59).

6. Before the jurors in Bolden's trial deliberated, the judge in the case, J. Sam Perry, told the jurors that Bolden was guilty.

7. Bolden was convicted of counterfeiting "based only on the testimony of two criminals: one of whom Bolden had previously arrested [Frank Jones], and one who later admitted committing perjury against Bolden [Joseph Spagnoli]" (Waldron and Hartmann, Ultimate Sacrifice 280).

8. Despite Bolden's exemplary reputation and stellar record of service, he spent six years in prison. He was placed in solitary confinement when he would try to draw attention to his case.

9. At one point during his imprisonment, Bolden was transferred to the prison psychiatric ward, where, if labeled mentally ill, he could be held indefinitely -- long after his six-year sentence expired.

10. The prison psychiatrist, Dr. Kinsel, told Bolden he suffered from a persecution complex: "'And you're very defensive,' Kinsel continued. 'You are going to have to learn to control your compulsions. They are the cause of what I see as antigovernment and sociopathic behavior'" (The Echo from Dealey Plaza 264).

11. Bolden was paroled in 1969. To this day, he continues to try to clear his name.

Episode Thirty-Three: "If Obama Would've Produced That Doggone Birth Certificate, Lou Dobbs Wouldn't Have Been Kidnapped by an Army of Invaders"

RHODA: I heard chants celebrating La Raza, and saw signs that said Lou Dobbs still belongs to Mexico.

MARY: It was an army of invaders, Rhoda.

RHODA: Lou Dobbs calls it the reconquista.

MARY: Lou Dobbs cured 7,000 lepers.

RHODA: Lou Dobbs is worried about his robust bodily form. Lou Dobbs wandered the city on the burning end of a cigarette.

MARY: Lou Dobbs consists of coalesced microspherulites and dark bands with isolated microspherulites.

RHODA: A thick, brown stripe runs down each side of Lou Dobbs's body from his neck to the base of his tail.

MARY: "Is Barack Obama the devil?" Bill O'Reilly asked Lou Dobbs.

RHODA: "If Obama would've produced that doggone birth certificate, he would've shut all this nonsense down," Lou Dobbs said.

MARY: Then maybe Lou Dobbs wouldn't have been kidnapped by an army of invaders.

RHODA: Any excitement that Lou Dobbs still finds in the pursuit of pleasure is fast disintegrating into a panting succession of mechanical gestures.

MARY: The reconquista invaders who kidnapped Lou Dobbs left behind a cosmic force -- the sense of the simultaneous -- which Lou Dobbs's passing presence on CNN never could provide.

RHODA: What remains of such joy, Mary?

MARY: Only vertigo, giddy transience, the effort to provide "illegal aliens" with free medical care, as Lou Dobbs said on October 1, 2003, and to sneak their children into public schools, which he reported the next day.

RHODA: And to look the other way when they commit sex crimes, as Lou Dobbs talked about on October 30, 2003. And to give them special breaks on college tuition, like Lou Dobbs said eight days earlier.

MARY: And to encourage them to clog up the federal prison system, like he reported on November 4, 2003.

RHODA: Sixteen days later, Lou Dobbs said that immigrants were "flooding across our borders carrying dangerous diseases."

MARY: What's the use of threading pearls to make a garland of memories, Rhoda, if the weight of Lou Dobbs snaps the thread?

RHODA: What do I want? Not a succession of moments, but one huge instant. Cable news is the opportunity to go and see what has been banalized.

MARY: Some leaders in media, politics, and business urged Lou Dobbs to go beyond his role at CNN and to engage in constructive problem-solving. Some leaders in media, politics, and business want Lou Dobbs to contribute positively to a better understanding of the great issues of our day.

RHODA: Lou Dobbs's witty and sophisticated friends, subtle drugs, seven-course meals, heady liqueurs, and sultry perfumes occupied the main part of the time that we lived outside of modern production until the reconquista.

The Vatican vs. Gertrude Stein (Part XXIV)

THE VATICAN: The sexual activity, in which husband and wife are intimately and chastely united with one another, through which human life is transmitted, is, as the recent Council recalled, "noble and worthy.'' Marriage and conjugal love are by their nature ordained toward the procreation and education of children. The right and lawful ordering of birth demands, first of all, that spouses fully recognize and value the true blessings of family life and that they acquire complete mastery over themselves and their emotions. For if with the aid of reason and of free will they are to control their natural drives, there can be no doubt at all of the need for self-denial. Only then will the expression of love, essential to married life, conform to right order.

GERTRUDE STEIN: There is no pope.

Hooray For Our Chains (23)

Pat Boone, El Ángel Exterminador (Part 2 of 2)

"Sarah Palin doesn't mean to steal," Brian Kilmeade said. "But her compulsive thieving produces relief and gratification. Now that she's written that book, she's afraid she'll go to jail. Why don't they try to help her instead?"

Sean Hannity and Joe Wurzelbacher rented a room above a mechanic shop. The employee glared, saying Joe Wurzelbacher looked familiar.

Joe Wurzelbacher doubted they'd met before. Sean Hannity guessed he looked like his sister, whom he loathed.

The employee warned them not to snore or touch his bikes.

Once in their room, Sean Hannity refused to sleep in the dirty sheets. As Joe Wurzelbacher soaked in the tub, Sean Hannity yelled to him that he hadn't seen any reports of Sarah Palin's most recent arrest for stealing.

Pat Boone ambled to the cracked bathroom door to watch him in the tub.

"Experts come in and send a very powerful fumigant, lethal to the varmints and unwelcome creatures, into every nook and cranny of the house," Pat Boone said. "Our White House is being eaten away from within."

Pat Boone, El Ángel Exterminador (Part 1 of 2)

Pat Boone told FBI agents that he went to church to pray. They didn't believe him. Debbie Schulssel entered, claiming that Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan worked as an advisor to President Obama's transition team.

Brian Kilmeade stated that John Allan Muhammad had been spotted far from Nidal Hasan, at the Red Onion Supermax Prison in Virginia. The FBI agents left, and Brian Kilmeade berated Sarah Palin for being a kleptomaniac.

Pat Boone said that the White House should be fumigated with poison gas.

"Like a very real infestation of termites and rodents," he said, "members of the Obama administration have settled into powerful positions and are already chewing away at the constitutional structure of our government."

Pat Boone wanted to pump poison gas into the White House, but Brian Kilmeade talked him out of it.

"Instead," Brian Kilmeade said, "it's time for the military to conduct special debriefings of U.S. soldiers who are Muslim."

Pat Boone said, "We treat the invaders, the alien rodents, to massive voter gas -- the most lethal antidote to would-be tyrants and usurpers. We must clean house. Starting with our own White House."

Brian Kilmeade told Pat Boone that Sarah Palin, not Lee Boyd Malvo, was the kleptomaniac who stole the clock from the hospital. She didn't need a clock. She didn't even like it.

"As long as necessity is socially dreamed, dreaming will remain a social necessity."

There's a sad day ahead in terms of your personal life, dear Shimmy. Under the influence of the Hermit, you're inclined to withdraw into the spot on the floor near the radiator. Rush Limbaugh lends a solemn atmosphere to your emotional situation. Every single product represents the hope for a dazzling shortcut to the promised land of total consumption.

Perhaps you need to take stock of the situation: it's funny, isn't it, that Glenn Beck never talks anymore about all those dogs (Pit Bulls) he tortured and killed? Ponder the question, but don't make any irreversible decisions today.

Nothing much is happening right now in your Tora Bora Box. The Hermit card is inviting reflection rather than action, and this may lead you to give up your ponderous sunken spot on the bean bag chair in your search for the truth. We can recognize a mystical abandon to the Tora Bora Box in those free gifts you bury in your litter, such as key chains which are not bought but are included by advertisers who claim they never have to use the bathroom.

Rub the Wastebasket Enemy Combatant with your face, Shimmy, and it will tell you that the fall of every figure with totalitarian power reveals the illusory community which had approved him unanimously, and which had been nothing more than an aggolmeration of solitudes without illusions.

As far as your romantic life is concerned, thanks to the Star and Strength you feel almost like you could sit on the window sill until sundown waiting for the cat in the window across the street to lick his curving haunches.

You have a bright smile on your face, and you radiate confidence. But this does not mean that ideology, having become absolute through the possession of absolute power, changes from partial knowledge into totalitarian falsehood. You should open your door wide for everyone! Be careful not to confuse confidence and naivety. The fusion of knowledge and action must be realized in the historical struggle itself, Shimmy, and in such a way that each of these terms guarantees the truth of the other.