THE BACK STORY on the "Greatest Teacher of Nonviolence" dialogue: Reading Mr. Wong's moving tribute to the late Rev. James Lawson as it was reprinted by Popular Resistance on 7 July 2024, I was moved to write, on the reprint’s comment thread, the following tribute to another nationally known dead pacifist, Tacoma's Fr. William J. Bischel SJ. Thus evolved the subsequent dialogue and my confession of ideological nonconformity, relevant parts of which are republished here, albeit edited for improved accessibility and expanded as promised, its unprecedented frankness no doubt prompted by the fact that – despite having received all available Moderna inoculations against Covid – I am terminally ill with Covid-inflicted complications, warned last September by my cardiologist I won't live beyond September 2028. I was no doubt equally motivated by the (unrelated) fact I -- the "man crippled by political corruption" -- had just been released from hospitalization for the only truly paralyzing agony I’ve ever suffered in all my 84 years, the legacy of my afternoon encounter on 23 September 1978 with a middle-aged, alcohol-fueled vehicular crime-wave named Charles John Hoover, one of Washington state's many defiantly habitual drunken drivers obscenely empowered by that era's state and local politicians, prosecutors and judges, with more of the incident's infuriating details reiterated in this post's penultimate paragraphs.
***
MY INITIAL COMMENT (herein edited for clarity): While we are properly honoring the very few clergy who courageously defy Christianity's historically proven patriarchal hatefulness, let us be sure to thank them for their brave rebuttals of the ecogenocidal misogyny the Christians' infinitely sadistic deity mandates via the biblical Genesis, and which Jesus perpetuates by boastfully murdering a fig tree (Mark 11:12-25) and declaring eternal war against and between all humans (Matthew 10: 34-36). And let us never forget the Tacoma Jesuit who was viciously persecuted and often jailed1 by our clandestinely theocratic, hence definitively ecogenocidal federal government. (For the identity of the neo-Reichsführers who increasingly enforce the government's orthodoxy, see The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, and subsequent works by Jeff Sharlet).2 About Fr. Bischel, I met him in 1978; admired him immediately; consulted him often in my coverage of Tacoma for United Press International c. 1978-1982; then happily reconnected with him in Occupy Tacoma and the city-council-betrayed fight for a minimum-wage increase led by Tacoma 15 Now.3 Nor do I feel serving avowedly nonviolent organizations in any way compromises my oft-acknowledged admiration for Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Budyonny and Lyudmila Pavlichenko. Indeed I regard nonviolence as the preferable, non-escalating first response to most atrocities.
If there is such a thing as Heaven, the man we activists fondly knew as Father Bix is already sainted therein, papal reticence not withstanding; and if there is truly reincarnation, Goddess grant he be reborn in realms of better times and genuine freedom.
(By the way, I have an amusing story about Father Bix and me working together in Occupy, which I will tell as accompaniment to this comment in my next post on Dispatches from Dystopia [via TypePad] and on Outside Agitator's Notebook [same text via Blogger].)
***
Comment by Red Hornet: I can't help but admire you and all the freedom efforts you have been part of. But I'm skeptical of memorials and testimonials set before an audience with little interest in history and minuscule interest in activist history. I think this site (Popular Resistance) and most others have abandoned their educational mission in order to lure clicks.
***
My Reply to Red Hornet (also edited herein for clarity)...I wonder if you're familiar with the writing of H. L. Mencken, a decidedly politically incorrect Baltimore Sun journalist made famous by his caustic coverage of the theocratic spasm he labeled "the Scopes Monkey Trial." Mencken defined puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." He denounced Arkansas as "the apex of moronia" in another kindred squabble and was already damned as an elitist for an earlier editorial comment that has since been proven genuinely prophetic: "On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." Hence "the Moronic Majority," my deliberate play on Nixon's "Moral Majority," as is much less obviously my repeated use of "Moron Nation" to describe the Disunited States.
Though I remain Marxian at heart -- indeed it is my unshakeable conviction the apocalyptic consequences of the slaying of the Soviet Union will prove to be not only the doom of all humanity but the reduction of our Mother Earth back to the bug planet she was 400 million years ago -- my faith in the U.S. working class was bludgeoned to death by the lynch-mob of construction-workers who viciously attacked post-Kent-State-Massacre peace demonstrators at New York's city hall on 8 May 1970.
Since then -- witnessing the gleefully sadistic participation of the USian working class in the methodical reversal of literally every progressive advancement the U.S. ever achieved -- I am appalled beyond words by the extent to which the self-obsessed moral imbecility pimped by Ayn Rand has become this nation's core ethos. Though no recognized critic dares say it, what Rand actually did was fictionalize the Nazis' übermenschen ethos. The ruling class then made her tomes of Mein Kampf values required reading for the nation's teens, who were already so theocratically oppressed, our masters correctly assumed they'd desperately seize any (apparent) ideology of rebellion. The (intended) result legitimized both the run-amok egotism that destroyed Occupy from within and the self-righteously ecogenocidal Christonazi misogyny, homophobia and racism that motivated the government violence against Occupy and will soon finish fulfilling Mencken's dire prophecy by electing Trump to turn this nation into the de facto Fourth Reich.
No doubt my militantly Loyalist ancestors -- deported to their ancestral realms in the British Empire by the U.S. founders' decrees in 1789 -- had reached analogous conclusions about the so-called "patriots," a "rabble-in-arms" that no doubt included the direct descendants of those who in the 1640s despised a uniquely successful Connecticut farmer named Mary Blisse (see correction below) so much, they twice persecuted her as a witch -- accusations that, Goddess be thanked, she managed to beat in court. In other words, I believe your dismal diagnosis is absolutely correct -- that writing anything sensible online is (mostly) casting pearls before swine. Though when it reaches persons as mindful as yourself, the effort is most surely redeemed, for which my deepest thanks.
***
CORRECTION: the Bliss ancestor accused of witchcraft was Mary Bliss (spelled "Blisse" in the 19th Century genealogy), for whom many more details are available on Google; Mary was one of Margaret's daughters. The mistake is entirely my fault; I was confused by the genealogy's archaic sentence-structure and discovered my error only by research tonight, 10 July 2024, hence my apology to all.
***
And Here's the Promised Funny Story: During Occupy Tacoma's first after-dark outdoor mass meeting -- a so-called General Assembly on a cold, sporadically drizzly early-November night (sorry my original notes with the exact date were destroyed by the 2019 computer failure) -- the several hundred participants began an obviously supportive discussion about the need for nonviolence and more specifically for training in its strategy, tactics and methodology. Because I was already recognized as a contributing but avowedly Marxian elder, several of the folks in my immediate vicinity thus seemed a bit surprised when I noted we had a best-in-the-nation advocate of non-violence --which is always my strategic and tactical preference -- in the person of a local Jesuit, William Bischel of St. Leo Parish, whom I further identified as a fellow alumnus of the infamous Knox County, Tennessee jail. But their surprise turned to chuckles when a voice from behind me laughingly said, " I gotta thank Loren; he's my advance man." I turned, and there, maybe three persons deep in the crowd behind me, stood Father Bix himself, whom I had not seen in person since 1982. As I said to him at the time, "I shoulda known you'd already be here."
*****
Added text: The details of Mary Blisse's many successes and her vengefully envious persecution by a typically hateful Christian neighbor and by her ever-more-hostile husband (an abusive male-supremacist whose name surely seems to be a cosmic pun), are available as linked. I assume her agricultural success was due to heeding the allegedly "Satanic" advice of local First Nations folk. I likewise assume her own survival of 11 pregnancies, two of then with twins, and the more indicative survival at least into early childhood of all her children -- each phenomenon among the era's most astounding statistical improbabilities -- strongly suggest she had somehow preserved much of the ancient, pre-patriarchal wisdom Christianity sought to destroy by its wars of extermination against witches, who were our originally matriarchal species' teachers, arbitrators, midwifes, healers and priestesses. Karen Vorbeck Williams wove the factual information about Mary Blisse into a 2016 novel, My Enemy's Tears: the Witch of Northampton. (Yes I will order it and read it ASAP, then if I am still alive, post a commentary on it here.) Apropos the "loving" Christians' continuation of such ecogenocidal intent into the present, note also their reader-board slogans during the late 1960s and early '70 --"Organic Is Satanic"; "Environmental Is Of The Devil"; and the more ubiquitous "God Hates Hippies." Obviously, the Christonazis' ever-escalating wars to expand prison slavery and revoke all female rights are merely resumptions of Christianity's historically proven intentions.
Moreover -- as I can personally attest -- there is also the fact many of Mary Blisse's present-day descendants (self and late father included), are unquestionably fey, which implicitly adds that eerie quality to the list of Mary Blisse's characteristics her patriarchal assailants would have regarded as "Satanic." (Despite my family's definitively English name, we are genetically mostly Celt.)
***
Added text: The irrefutable proofs of Christianity's incurable malignancy -- its murderous European, Middle Eastern, Asian, Sub-Saharan, African and American "crusades" against alleged "heretics" or non-Christian and First Nations peoples; the Burning Times; and of course the Original Nazis' Holocaust – are all expressions of the Abrahamic god's mandate to continue and expand his ecogenocidal agenda. And the standard Christian claim the New Testament reverses that doctrinal obligation is proven to be an especially egregious Big Lie by the moral imbecility Jesus models in the scriptures, that is -- to say again -- by his maliciously boastful destruction of a fig tree (Mark 11:12-25) and by his declaration of eternal war against and between all humans (Matthew 10: 34-36).
Thus it cannot be said too often the gospels are mandates for ecogenocide. Church history reveals any contradictory claims of “divine love” or advocacy for mercy are all murderous deceptions. The duration of this serial-killer mentality dooms us to repeatedly suffer ambush by frenzies of fundamentalist fanaticism and/or prosperity-gospel zealotry, in response to which, many of us are at long last awakening to what the Soviet Union always recognized (and what makes Marxism so "Better-Dead-Than-Red odious to Christianity): the fact such malignancy cannot be reversed save by total ejection of the Bible and all its doctrinal extensions).
What then, absent Soviet influence, might we do? However unlikely it remains, global embrace of the ever-more-credible Gaia Hypothesis
could surely save us; in essence, this is the scientific rediscovery of
the lost and forbidden wisdom that, beginning some 6,000 years ago, has
been (and is again) violently suppressed by the patriarchal onslaught.
One of Gaia's most important but unfortunately less recognized
implications is that every atom of every extant
substance -- whether past, present or future -- contains an undetected
quotient of inertial momentum thrusting it toward consciousness; that we
who are literally the evolved substance of the stars could not exist
were this not so. Gaia is thus probably our only means of escaping
extinction and halting patriarchy's deliberate reduction of our Mother
Earth to a bug planet. Combined with international socialism, it would
give us a truly sustainable, comfortably livable world. I doubt any
lesser solidarity can save us from the apocalypse of thermonuclear war
and/or self-induced terminal climate-change our patriarchal Masters –
whomever or whatever they might be – are working overtime to make inevitable.
__________________
1Popular Resistance does not allow inclusion of links to outside source material, so I've added them wherever they seemed essential for clarity.
2Related books that document Christianity's ecogenocidal history include American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America, by Chris Hedges (Free Press: 2007); An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (Beacon Press: 2014); and Hitler's American Model: the United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, by James Q. Whitman (Princeton University Press: 2017). Only the need for brevity kept me from citing these works in my original comment.
3The Tacoma City Council, a reliable puppet of the plutocracy and thus active on several fronts to forcibly gentrify the city, defeated the Tacoma 15 Now minimum-wage campaign by employing an especially nasty variant of the "change-we-can-believe-in" treachery for which the post-JFK "Democratic" (sic) Party is deservedly infamous. The council put on the ballot its own competitive initiative for a significantly smaller wage increase, then designed the ballot to impose maximum confusion and utilized a tsunami of brazen deceit and whispered bigotry to mobilize the city's Moronic Majority to resoundingly defeat the proposed $15 minimum, which would have been effective immediately. Instead, winning measure (gradually) raises wages to a $12.50 minimum and -- contrary to 15 Now's absurd claims of ideological victory -- has thus kept the issue off the ballot ever since. The loss of the $15 minimum wage was truly cataclysmic, with 23,536 votes against it and only a mere 9,437 votes for, a devastating 71.38-percent to 28.62 percent debacle. Apropos the nature of local electorate, my analyses here and here of its bigoted opposition to adequate public transport also explain the overwhelming vote against the $15 minimum wage.
*********
Three Comments from The New York Times' (meticulously censored) threads, their surprising approval for publication spawning my hope at least one of its editorial executives shares my hypothesis:
"Democrats Are Drifting Toward the Worst Possible of All Worlds"
Thank you for your forthright reporting, Mr. Klein. That said, it seems to me only two possibilities can (rationally) explain the president's behavior. One, as I have long suspected, is that a cabal of "Third Way" Democrats have chosen the Biden candidacy as the most plausibly deniable strategy for throwing the election to Trump (and thereby preserving most of their own behind-the-scenes neoliberal power). Two is far more ominous: that the president's destructive defiance is itself symptomatic of how deep he already is into 25th Amendment territory. (3 Recommends)
"‘God Help Us’: 12 Writers Rate Biden’s Performance at the First Presidential Debate"
President Biden's worse-than-abysmal performance in last night’s debate is merely additional proof of what I've been hypothesizing for the past several months: that the Biden candidacy is merely the Democrats' most plausibly deniable way of throwing the election to Trump -- whom the Democratic Party's corporate donors vastly prefer over Sen. Bernie Sanders or any other New-Deal progressive who might win the party's presidential nomination should Biden withdraw. (13 recommends).
"‘Is It Too Late?’ Four Writers on What Democrats Should Do About Biden"
As I said on an earlier NYT post-debate comment-thread, I strongly suspect (as I've been hypothesizing for several months), the Biden candidacy is the Democrats' most plausibly deniable way of throwing the election to Trump -- whom the party's corporate donors vastly prefer over Vice-President Harris or anyone else who might win the Democratic presidential nomination were Biden to withdraw.
*********
My World Socialist Web Site comment-thread dialogue on "Supreme Court declares America a presidential dictatorship" is far too long to republish here in its entirety. It begins with our national obituary:
(14 July 2024: Sorry I forgot to include the link for this. My bad; was still zombified on hospital pain meds.)
In embittering and infinitely depressing truth, this is the end, forever, of any lingering elements of the charade USian democratic process became on 22 November 1963.
I'm not the least surprised,, as what we are witnessing here is how the '"Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party is masterfully employing Hitler's pack-the-judiciary strategy to complete the nazification of USia. As I have repeatedly predicted, Trump will never be punished for any of his crimes, past or future.
What no commentator has yet dared point out is that this Supreme Court decision literally makes presidential elections moot, as the dictatorial powers the president has been given combined with the financial aristocracy's control of the nominating process means the (so-called) electorate has no more control over the process than the Roman plebeians had over who was emperor.
Indeed, with the U.S. constitution now entirely in the Dumpster of history, I would assume Congress -- with the court's cooperation -- will soon abolish presidential elections and reserve the choice of presidents for itself.
Most readers of this website are probably too young to comprehend the long history of what just happened, so here's a quick summary. The nazification of the U.S. began with the Bankers Plot of 1933-34, which in all probability was the product of active collaboration between the financial aristocracy and Hitler. Congress gave it tacit approval in 1934 by refusing to prosecute the plotters, who with their descendants – no doubt with the assistance of the high-ranking Original Nazi war criminals they adopted as comrades-at-arms after Stalingrad proved the Third Reich could not win the war-- obviously continued plotting, albeit at a far-less-obvious boiled-frog pace. Subsequent milestones were the aristocracy’s capture of white Christianity beginning c. 1938; the adoption of war criminals beginning c. 1944; the purge of Communists, socialists and intellectuals beginning c. 1947; the destruction of organized labor by Taft-Hartley in 1948; the murder of President Kennedy on 22 November 1963 and the decade of political murders that followed; the initial imposition of so-called “neoliberal” (actually neonazi) economics begun in 1976 by Carter; the so-called Reagan Revolution of 1980; etc. ad nauseam.
Seems to me the only remaining question is whether Biden or someone younger will complete the “Democratic” (sic) Party’s post-JFK function as the nazifiers’ Fifth Column and finish what is obviously a plausible deniable scheme to ensure Trump’s emergence as the first USian Führer.
Not that it matters. This nation is done, conquered, subjugated, enslaved. And this time there is no Red Army to save us...or to save the world the Christonazi USian Reich is sure to destroy.
***
The most relevant part of this dialogue's concluding "Joint Reply"-- all four parts of it responses to antagonistic rejoinders prompted by the above post -- is the following:
To Leon: My motivation for activism begin when I was seven and my father was sacked in late 1947 as retaliation for his 1930s Communism, this by the War Assets Administration, formerly the War Production Board; his last WAA job was equivalent to what today would be a deputy regional directorship. Due the purge and its the associated blacklisting, we were permanently reduced from what might be termed "a new Lincoln family" to "a used Plymouth family." The date of his ouster marks the true, pre-McCarthy beginning of the (total) U.S. purge of Communists, socialists and all intellectuals save those of the pro-nazi right – never mind “pro-nazi intellectual” is an obvious oxymoron. My activism began at age 17 with advocacy of the Soviet approach to education in post-Sputnik debates organized by the Knox County, Tenn. school district c. 1957-‘58; these combined with my father's political history and my lesbian birthmother’s certified insanity after two attempts to murder my father and me c. 1944-‘45 to guarantee my loss of security clearance at the beginning of the last of my three years of active U.S. Regular Army duty. During my pre-military-period c. 1956 to late ‘59, I worked as a stringer for three dailies and two weeklies and as a motel night-clerk. My post-military activism c. late ‘62 through the early ‘90s1 included the Civil Rights Movement plus the Anti-Vietnam-War; Alternative Press; Back-to-the-Land; Environmentalist; and Labor movements, the last category through memberships in the American Newspaper Guild, the National Writers Union and the National Press Photographers Association. I was also part of two NYC photographic collectives, Impact Visuals and Marc Crawford's TransMundo. More recently I was part of Tacoma Clinic Defense; was amongst the earliest activists in Occupy Tacoma; and served as a cadre member and a petition-signature gatherer for Tacoma 15 Now, from which I had to drop out due to ever-increasing crippling imposed by a spinal injury radically inflamed by osteoarthritis.2 Now hopelessly disabled by terminal post-Covid complications despite being current on all Moderna shots and boosters, I can no longer walk anywhere -- not even from one room to the next in my apartment -- without a walker, and my cardiologist told me last September these post-Covid complications will kill me within two years. Point being, your assumptions about me have no basis in fact.
My pessimism stems from realization during Occupy that Ayn Rand’s fictionalization of Mein Kampf’s self-obsessed moral imbecility – in which the younger generations of USian bourgeois whites are schooled literally from birth (never mind her writing is as wretched as Hitler’s) – is even more effective at nazification than the Better-Dead-Than-Red fear-mongering that co-opted feminism and environmentalism and otherwise seduced so many members of the Silent Generation and their Baby Boom successors.
When Occupy collapsed -- destroyed as much by zero-tolerance bourgeois self-obsession from within as by police-state violence from without -- I could no longer deny the validity of the leaked KGB analysis that damns most white USians as irremediably conditioned from birth to always betray genuine revolution. The analysts concluded the only USian populations possessed of the requisite pre-revolutionary consciousness are the most economically oppressed Blacks, Hispanics and First Nations peoples – which is why these groups are under constant surveillance and exterminated whenever they show signs of graduating to revolution – atrocities to which I as a near-lifelong journalist and activist can surely attest.3 Hence I’d urge you to remember history proves building revolution requires full acknowledgment of and evolution of countermeasures against all anti-revolutionary factors. That vital response now includes evolving an antidote to the infinite hopelessness (rationally) inflicted on us by USia’s methodical reversal of literally every progressive gain its peoples ever made.
___________________
1These dates inadvertently misstate the years of my labor activism. My first Newspaper Guild membership was in 1956 and early 1957 at The Grand Rapids (Michigan) Herald. My post-military union activism actually began with Taxi Weekly's tacit support of the successful Taxicab Drivers Organizing Committee (TDOC) campaign in New York City c. 1965-1967. I resumed actual Guild membership at The Jersey Journal, where I worked as an investigative reporter c. 1969-1970; I joined the National Press Photographers Association as the founding photographer of The Seattle Sun in the '70s, renewed it intermittently (depending on employment) after that, and added membership in the National Writers Union as a freelancer probably in 2005. Over the years I have also served several unions as a volunteer picket, and I have never crossed a picket-line, nor will I ever do so. All this was permanently ended by encroaching physical disability late in the new century's second decade. My error -- its misstated chronology unintentional -- was the result of my too-hasty effort to summarize a complex history terminated by medical circumstances that, because they were permanently life-changing, are profoundly unpleasant to remember. Nevertheless my sincere apology.
2This too is an accidental misstatement. What necessitated my dropping-out was a kidney infection; what made my absence permanent was the worsening back problem. Again my apology.
3A 2013 blog post that describes the earliest (1963) example of my overt victimization by Christonazi censorship and my retaliatory recovery by defiant reporting is entitled Censorship: Lessons from Nader and a Knoxville Atrocity is linked above in the Popular Resistance material and again here for readers' convenience.
*********.
About that ruinous encounter with the defiantly habitual drunken driver...
THREE DAYS OF ever-more-devastating lower-back spasms sent me to Tacoma General Hospital on Wednesday (3 July 2024), desperately seeking relief from most intense pain I've ever suffered. It had become so debilitating, I literally could not speak a word; merely trying to talk triggered cramps of hitherto unimaginable agony. Thus I could only scream; I muted my uncontrollable shrieks as much as possible by biting down hard on a rolled towel, this.to minimize their emotional impact on passers-by. But by about 3 a.m. Wednesday, the spasms had become nearly constant, striking me with unprecedented fury any time I moved at all. This meant I was 100-percernt dependent on the topmost-level verbal skills of Valerie Friedline to document my circumstances, to whom I am thus forever grateful. Valerie is an always helpful neighbor who is also my volunteer copy editor on the monthly senior-housing-community newsletter of which I am the volunteer founding editor, writer, photographer and creative director.
To elaborate on what I said in "The Back Story" -- pun intended -- my literally unspeakable pain and its trip to the hospital was the most recent consequence of my 1978 Autumnal Equinox victimization by Charles John Hoover, a petty criminal who ran amok as a judicially protected, defiantly habitual drunken driver. The injuries he wantonly inflicted on me defined not only my 38th year but became one of the three events -- the others the destruction of all my most significant work by arson on 1 September 1983 and the fatal post-illness complications of Covid resulting from a three-week, seemingly moderate bout with the obviously weaponized virus a year ago -- that now define my life as nothing more than a race against a literal deadline -- now another pun -- to organize my photography and writing into accessible form and perhaps -- should circumstances grant me the time --to at last fulfill the Tacoma public library's longstanding invitation to record my oral history as a local photographer, writer and Marxian activist.
(Though it is a bit of an aside, I find it very interesting that, as I have previously reported elsewhere, Runemal, the I Ching and the Tarot -- the same three oracles that correctly defined the fire as the end of my dependably productive and influential life -- unanimously predicted Covid would kill me. Nevertheless, until the ever-more-obviously lab-leaked bug nailed me last summer in a seemingly inexplicable localized outbreak that sickened 12 of my 40 apartment-complex neighbors without any of the dire consequences that are killing me, I'd begun to assume I'd somehow misunderstood the oracles' responses to the pandemic-motivated questions I asked in 2020. And as I said above, my fatal complications have arisen despite full [Moderna] vaccination. Thus -- though I am by no means an anti-vaxer -- I cannot but wonder if the vaccine is intentionally less effective than the documentably ecogenocidal USian government assured us it would be. Nor -- considering the multiple expressions of government hostility already known to have vindictively diminished my life -- is it beyond the realm of possibility I was somehow deliberately given fatally ineffective shots.)
That said, what the drunken Charles John Hoover inflicted on me in '78 was a classic Godzilla-versus-Bambi debacle; with his speeding 442 Oldsmobile, he utterly destroyed my five-month-new 1977 Honda Civic, and he did so without any obvious damage to himself, to the (abused) wife who was his only passenger, or even to his own vehicle. The investigating officer told me had I been accompanied by a passenger, that person would have undoubtedly been killed, as the impact of Hoover's 3,713-pound curb-weight projectile drove me in my seat a fatally crushing distance atop the Civic's right-side seat, far enough across the console I could exit the smouldering wreckage only because I always carried a Swiss Army Knife -- already the most useful tool I owned -- in a belt pouch. This enabled me to reach the knife and again prove its usefulness by cutting myself free of my safety harness and thus escaping the ruined hulk in time to squelch the fire hazard of leaking-gasoline by yanking the grounding-cable off the battery. Having de-electrified the rubble, I then snatched a motor-driven Nikon with a fully loaded magazine from a camera bag in the back seat, walked a 360 around the scene to photographically document the collision's immediate aftermath, carefully replaced the camera in the bag and passed out.
Though I have no recollection of doing so, I had somehow retained enough consciousness to ask the paramedics to fetch the photographic gear and retrieve my loaded .45 ACP M1911 Colt government model from the glove box. When I regained full consciousness maybe an hour later on a gurney in the Tacoma General Hospital emergency room, my first words asked the whereabouts of these items, and I was delighted to learn everything -- including the canvas G.I. pouch containing the Colt's two spare loaded magazines --had been given to the triage nurse, who would return it all to me when I was released a few hours later. The ER doctor said I had obviously been "running on pure adrenaline" in my immediate post-impact activities, that I had passed out because I had probably "forgotten to breathe," and that while X-rays proved I had no broken bones or internal bleeding, I would need a follow-up exam for probable spinal injuries, because I had "massive soft-tissue bruising" and would probably soon be immobilized enough to need an at-home care-giver for a few days, as indeed I did. Though I was able to get home in a cab, the next day I could barely move; I missed a full week of work, during which I was mercifully cared for by Kathryn Habbestad, a friend and colleague from Seattle who was kind enough to take time away from her own job and stay with me as a helpmate until I was again ambulatory.
When I realized Hoover had no intention of contacting me for the legally required post-accident exchange of information, I hired a lawyer, from whom I would soon learn my 4:30 p.m. victimization resulted in Hoover's 19th -- yes, that's nineteenth -- consecutive drunken-driving arrest, and that by some miracle -- or, more likely, some quirk of local corruption -- he still had (minimal) liability insurance. I also learned multiple witnesses said Hoover pulled out a bulging roll of hundred-dollar bills with which he tried to bribe them into claiming I had pulled out onto Pearl Street in front of him. (I was actually trapped motionless in the Highland Hills Shopping Center exit onto Pearl, unable to move forward because of heavy Saturday afternoon traffic and prohibited from moving backward by the vehicles behind me, thus forced to watch motionless in horror as north-bound Hoover skidded across the rain-slick street's four lanes, jumped the curb onto the concrete sidewalk, caromed in reversed direction off a concrete power-pole and careened southward toward me on the sidewalk perhaps 100 yards at what the police estimated was about 50 miles-per-hour to slam into the driver's side of my little Honda and destroy it with an impact energy of approximately 310,054 (three-hundred-and-ten-thousand, fifty-four) foot pounds, this by the Newtonian formula of one-half the projectile's weight times its velocity squared, E=1/2M(V2). For comparison, the identically calculated muzzle energy of the .50 caliber Browning M2 "Ma Deuce" machine gun round averages a mere 12,600 (twelve thousand, six hundred) foot pounds.
One of the same group of a half-dozen witnesses said Hoover lost control of his gas-guzzler because he was beating his wife and trying to drive at the same time. Several witnesses said Hoover, who was scarcely more than five feet, four inches in height, called the notably taller investigating officer a "cunt," then attacked her with a flurry of punches, which she quickly neutralized with a nightstick uppercut to Hoover's testicles. That dropped him. He went to jail in handcuffs, cursing all cops and vowing vengeance against me and the female officer who'd subdued him. He was charged with drunken driving, assaulting an officer, resisting arrest, attempted bribery and other crimes I have since forgotten. Hoover's violent tantrum had brought several more cops to the scene, and another one of the officers told my lawyer Hoover had managed to delay the breathalyzer test long enough to bring his score down from what was "probably at least a .32" to what I remember was a .28 or thereabouts. When I learned a Tacoma District Court judge had reduced his 19th drunken-driving charge to "physical control" and dismissed all the other charges, convicting him only of being in (alleged) control of a speeding projectile nearly twice the weight of a standard high-explosive 16-inch naval artillery round.
Since Hoover never once tried to contact me, I sued him, and of course I won; his sort of hatred of the world and all within it is unforgivable. But he was obviously a premeditated drunken driver, for he had maliciously structured his finances so all anyone could get was the maximum payout of his liability insurance, which as I recall was $15,000, a third of which went to the lawyer. Not that it matters; no amount of money would ever be adequate compensation for the pain and physical limitation with which Hoover cursed me -- the latter including eventual 100=percent loss of my formerly unlimited ability to backpack deep into the wilderness for trout fishing and/or archaeological research. And I cannot but wonder how many more people this infinitely malicious moral imbecile injured with his judicially protected drunken driving before his death in 2006.
********
In closing this anthology of horrors, I respectfully offer the following five songs as a suggested liturgy for compensatory contemplation and meditation: "The Burning Times"; "The Ballad of Thomas Rhymer"; "Song to Brighid"; "Phantasmagoria in Two" and "Mother Earth Song." Blessed be!
(Yeah, I know there's a lot to read here, especially with the links-as-footnotes. But it will be a long while before I'm able to post again. So you'll have plenty of time to read it all -- and it is my hope you find it both thought-provoking and educational. Meanwhile, thank you for your readership.)
LB/12 July 2024.
-30-
