So right that everything is wrong.

My first inkling that things had changed came at the Detroit airport. The young man sat down besides me in the crowded waiting lounge.
He wore an Arsenal scarf. Good lad.
I asked him where he got it and he said he was just back from covering the riots in London for a Communist newspaper.
Too cool. I had the opportunity to talk to a real live Red and an Arsenal fan to boot. We had a great time talking about the Presidential campaigns and the decline and fall of Western civilization. It was about the time we were discussing the balkanization of U.S. politics that I looked around the crowded lobby and was alarmed at the distressed expressions on the faces of those folks sitting around us. I smiled at the woman sitting next to me and she recoiled like my hair was on fire. I turned back to my young commie friend and he smiled at my confusion and said " you get used to it...that and don't talk so loud in a crowd."
 I reckon folks get spooked when you get off the 1st amendment's well worn acceptable paths and wander around the plains of free thinking.
I suddenly felt like Natalie Maines surrounded by pissed off country fans. Poor gal says an unpopular opinion (which over time turned out to be pretty damn well embraced) and her career is over.
I thought artists were supposed to challenge how and what we think.
Not so much anymore ever since Fox and Conservatives have made an industry out of beating the shit out of liberals and anyone who questions the right.
'Twas not always so.
I was screwing around on YouTube and found the song "The Universal Soldier" by Buffy St. Marie. Wow! Now there is a song that questions the root of war to a very uncomfortable level. Personal responsibility. Each and every soldier.
 An artist would be crucified way beyond a boycott if they made this song today. But then I messed around some more and found a version of this song performed by Glenn Campbell on Shindig. Radical pacifism on primetime TV.
A little more surfing and I found Johnny Cash and Buffy St. Marie performing "Custer don't ride so good anymore" on the Johnny Cash Show. Celebrating the massacre of anAmerican general and his cavalry regiment on a family variety show. WOW! This would take out an entire network these days.
I've noticed there is a lot of looking around the room before we speak. Sizing each other up to see if it safe to say what we really mean.
Can I talk like a Klansman circa 1958 Mississippi? Can I question gun control? Can I talk about secession? Can I question religion?
What I am seeing is a sharp rise in very noisy and indignant bigotry and a vast majority of good folks afraid to say what they think in fear of being labeled unpatriotic or even worse a Democrat.

Unpleasant phone calls.

So I'm sure we have all gotten this call:

"Hello Kristopher Robin Ludwig, this is Agent Daniels from the FBI field office in Jacksonville."
  "HaHa,pretty funny Farris."
"Sir,I assure you this is the FBI. Call me back at this number." Click.
Oh shit oh shit oh shit.....
(Brrrring) "This is Agent Daniels."
"Okay okay,I can explain everything!"
"I haven't asked you anything."
"I'm taking a wild guess and bet you want to know about a phone message I left on an answering machine about material and payment and some violent subcontractors." "Yes in light of all that has happened we are following any leads."

My phone had been cloned twice that year. It got so bad I would turn it off when I got anywhere near NYC. I received an $800 phone bill in June for hundreds of calls to Bolivia and Columbia. I would get calls in the middle of the night from people yammering away in Spanish. Shit cloned again.
In August I got a call from some guy speaking Dutch. He left a voice message which I took to mean oh boy another round of fighting with Verizon. So I called the number back with the intention of giving him a good ol' profanity laded outburst. His answering machine had a robot voice speaking Dutch so I decided to give this hacker something to worry about. He cloned the wrong phone....

"Where the fuck were you? We have the material. Where the fuck is our money? You can't just not show up for a drop. These associates are not agreeable when you piss them off. Now they want an extra $10,000 or they keep the material and liquidate everyone on this side. What the fuck were you thinking? These people have no regard for anything but their cause. Tomorrow you had better show up or we're all dead." I never heard back from him.
In September...well we all know what happened on 9/11.
In early October I got the call from Agent Daniels.
"I'm so sorry for wasting your time and resources but I swear I was just trying to scare a phone hacker."
"We know. What was that voice you used, Boris Badenov?"
"Yes! I love Bullwinkle."
"Yeah, me too. I guess we are going to write this one off to really bad timing eh, Kris?"
  "So we're cool right? You don't think I'm a terrorist?"
  "We know who you are. By our records you are not dangerous."
Ay caramba, nice to know I have a dossier.

Murder. Anatomy of a murder part III

Oh the price we have paid for our actions. What we did, we did because we thought we were right and would save the family from torture. Perhaps the damage was already done and all we succeeded in doing was trading one pain for another. Our victory saved no one. We all paid dearly. Right or wrong? We did what we had to do. We roared up the street to the end of the cul du sac ready to rush the house. We had decided on a blitz into the house. No words. No negotiations. We were stunned to see his car gone. Shit he was home an hour ago. My mind pondered if this was a sign from God. I had been waiting for some sign to warn us of the folly of our ways. Ern and I were both deep in thought when our sign came up to our window. Berta’s neighbor came up to my window and looked at us sitting there with weapons in our laps. She was a county sheriff who was in uniform about to go to work when we came to our screeching halt. She told us Tony had left about 20 minutes ago. She looked at us for a little long time and shook her head and told us next time don’t make so much noise. She also told us she wouldn’t be back for 14 hours and the other house on the cul du sac was empty. "just be quiet and get rid of the body. I didn’t see anything today." She drove off leaving us with mouths agape. We knew he wasn’t coming back anytime soon so we decided to go in the house and see what we could find. And thus our lives changed. The abuse? We found blood on the kitchen floor, in the sink. No food in the refrigerator for the youngest daughter to eat. In the bedroom we found a movie camera and a tape that I still can’t get out of my head. Please let this monster come home now, PLEASE. I would have relished torturing the son of a bitch at this point. We tossed the place expecting to find drugs. We didn’t but what we found was good enough. We found a hidden drawer full of stolen passports, social security cards, birth certificates and credit cards. We found immigration applications with false names to go with the pictures of strangers. "Hey look My girlfriend D. is from Ethiopia and wants to come to America. Boy won’t she be surprised." We found my stolen shotgun in the ceiling along with more stolen documents. Bingo. Between the sex tapes and identification fraud evidence we realized we didn’t have to murder this stupid ass after all. He was going to jail. We boxed up two crates of documents and the foul tapes to turn over to the police who in turn gave them to the F.B.I. who shared them with Immigration. We were ready to leave and felt confident Tony was done but we felt frustrated by not personally reaping vengeance. It was then Ern stepped up. Bless you Ern where ever you may be in the Diaspora we created that day. Ern wanted to scare Tony as bad as he terrorized us. Ern had a plan. In his theatrical studies he had learned how to make fantastically real looking blood and set about to make a gallon of the ghastly stuff which he then used as paint in a Mansonesque display of wall painting of Ibo evil signs which he had learned in his African/ metaphysics studies. You really can’t underestimate the benefits of a good education. Tony called late that night incoherent with fear. He fled the house as soon as he saw the bloody symbols on the walls and never realized we had seized his stolen goods. He was arrested soon afterwards and sent to a federal prison for four years before being deported back to Nigeria. Berta never forgave us. She holds me in contempt to this day. It took years for her to reconcile with her daughters and the whole affair seemed to poison us all. D. broke up with me. Prin divorced Ern. Everyone paid for my decision to destroy the man. I have no regrets other than having to make such a harsh choice. Sometimes our options bring us no peace but are necessary none the less.

Anatomy of a murder part II

After the initial mile of our murderous cross town trip we look at each other. Ern is chain smoking and silent as he has been all day. The look in his eyes is one of resignation to the madness we are in. We begin to talk going over the reason we are choosing murder. We want to be sure there is no other choice. Tony won’t leave. Of this fact we are sure. He is finally positioned where he wants to be. He is a tall strong man from Nigeria who came into our lives through a back door on the coat tails of dubious friends of Berta. She was enjoying the freedom of divorce with reckless abandon and meeting a wide and disturbing caliber of men. She was married for such a long time to Rob, over 20 years. They were the first interracial couple legally married in the state and had spent the first half of the years united together to fight off the prejudices of this backwards region. In the waning years life settled down and the fire went out. They were just another couple and like so many couples he cheated on her. She kicked Rob out in the blink of an eye. How could she get so mad at this nerdy little civil rights lawyer who had been with her for years and given her three daughters yet she wouldn’t leave Tony even after four beatings and the abuse he was giving to her youngest daughter. She said from her hospital bed it was her fault. She had aggravated Tony with questions about his business dealings. She blew off the threats he made to her daughters not believing he would say such horrible things. Whatever hold he had on her was working. She was in the hospital. He was alone in her house. And that was as good a place as any to gun him down. What unlikely assassins we are I thought. Two laid back peaceful men. Ern a theater graduate from Howard who was fascinated with metaphysics and me who has never been in a fight in my life. Yet here we rode resolved to murder. We had talked with Tony after the second beating. He denied any wrong doing defending himself with cries that we did not understand his culture. Ern had no patience with the man. Years of dealing with shady Africans in D.C. had immunized him to Tony’s appeals of cultural misunderstanding. An asshole is an asshole no matter where he’s from. After 30 minutes of driving and debating the wisdom of our actions we reached Berta’s neighborhood. We turned into the sub division that looked so normal but we felt so far from normal it was comical. I expected to freeze or panic or just chicken out as we got closer to her street but a hyper sense of awareness kicked in and in a manic clarity we both did a speed round of the charges against Tony and asked the question of justification. He had driven an entire family mad and threatened rape and death to all. Right. Unleash the dogs of war. We turned at her corner and could see the house at the end of the cul du sac. I readied my pistol and Ern took out a vicious crescent shaped Arabic knife. We were ready.

Anatomy of a murder part 1.

They aren’t going to stop crying. The kitchen is cluttered with the dishes of a day frozen. Each of the sister’s breath is on hold, choked in their tight throats horse from so much wailing and shouting. Eyes are swollen from too many tears and an unbearable truth. It’s Prin’s cries that upset me the most. The three sisters have been weeping all day. My girlfriend D’s cries have settled to a low moan. Val sniffles with her head down nodding no no no. But it is Prin’s cry that won’t subside nor her fierce wild stare she is throwing at her husband. "What are we going to do?" She is pleading to the room, the walls, the space that seems to have been fragmented between us all leaving a jagged reality separating us, banished to our own islands of panic and shame. What do we do? For the last few hours since we heard the news their mother was severely injured but still alive and going to make it this question has been asked , pleaded, screamed. Prin is furious but can’t decide at who, so she is tearing at herself. "How can she go back to that son of a bitch? He almost killed her!" I can see in her eyes she hates her mother for being with Tony let alone letting him beat her to a pulp and then taking him back? Too much. Tony had lost it. He was a mean man who succeeded in separating Berta from her daughters except for the youngest who lived with them. Once he had the two alone he began to terrorize the child and brutalize the mother. He had no fear of any of us. This day started with a call from the hospital informing Prin that her mother was in stable condition but in tremendous pain. Apparently she had been mugged. Prin knew it was Tony and in a rage called her sisters. We gathered in the small apartment Prin and her husband Ern shared with Val. D was flush with anger and called Tony demanding to know what happened. It was then that the panic struck. Young, good people are ill equipped to deal with evil. To watch innocence leave the face of my love was one of the most unbearable visions of my life. She dropped the phone and fell back into a chair. Val picked up the phone and screamed " what the fuck do you have to say for your self?". She too blinked unbelieving and hung up. "He says he’s going to rape me and kill me". D. nods and says "me too. He says he’s going to kill us all." Ern calls the police who are annoyed and belligerent saying unless you have the threats on tape don’t call back and without the mother pressing charges there is no crime. It’s been hours and even Prin is beginning to crack saying over and over " what can we do." I can’t stand it. I walk outside into the late afternoon and the clarity of being outdoors offers a cool solution. I’m going to kill him. Not a tense dramatic epiphany rather a calm necessary choice. I don’t feel dreamy or nervous and can’t think of any reason for going back into the house with nothing to offer my family for consoling. Ern sees me get into my truck and runs out "Hey man where you going?" I smile wanly at him and he says "Well then I’m going too". I ask him "can you think of any other way?" "Nope". "Ern, I don’t care if I get caught. 7 years is worth killing this fuck. You have a lot to lose." "Well then, I guess we aren’t getting caught." I check my pistol and start up the truck for the cross town drive.

The most dangerous word in the English language

It has filled the ovens, and then the trenches that buried the truth. It has sharpened the machetes, and glazed the eyes from the horror. It helped tie the young man to the fence and provoked fist to kill. It marginalizes any debate. It demeans any attribute. It denies all accomplishments. Dismisses Humanity. The most dangerous word in the English language and its derivatives? THEY. THEM. THOSE. Be careful how you wield these words because WE have to live together.

Superman Vs the Supercenter.

I don't know who asks these survey questions in the first place but I was disturbed by a bit of poo that got on me as I walked by a T.V. that was on at work. Americans were asked what one icon epitomizes America. Survey says.... Walmart. And we pick on the French. They have great food. Exquisite wine. The best Footballers on the planet and they take the month of August off for vacation. The Louvre, Paris, Marseille and a language in which you can say "hey honey, I think the milk is bad" and it sounds like a sweet invitation into the boudoir. And we have Walmart!!! The evil empire that is Walmart has single handedly destroyed more small towns by suffocating the small stores that once thrived in the squares and main streets. How very ironic that we choose this generic cut throat corporation as our nation's icon. I'd take God damned Disney over Walmart. No I take that back.... I'm still pissed at them ruining Florida and turning "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" into a happy musical. BASTARDS!!! Come on. Just off the top of my sleep deprived head some icons: The Statue of Liberty (Another French connection) The Grand Canyon. New Orleans. Minor league Baseball. Jazz. Somewhere Studs Terkel is turning over in his grave along with Woody Guthrie. This week Stetson Kennedy turns 93. He was a civil and human rights activist back when those kind of activities could get your head blown off. He infiltrated the Klan and gathered evidence of crimes only to be turned away by state prosecutors and the F.B.I. So he turned to the writers of the radio program "Superman" and gave them code words and plots used by the Klan in order to expose their secret world. To me if I had to choose an iconic figure that symbolizes the strength and heart of America I might just choose this warm and brave old man from North Florida who has lived his life in defense of all our rights. Happy birthday superman.