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Feb. 22 | Where Do You Go?

MY FATHER is a professor at one of the poshest community colleges in the US. True, a community college is not the Ivy League, but if two-year colleges had an Ivy League this would be among them. There's even ivy growing on some of the buildings.

He teaches communications: courses involving basic media, some television stuff, and one called Listening. He has grown frustrated with how little his students know when they show up -- like how to read, for instance. He has a new awareness test. The first day of class, he asks how many people know who Condoleeza Rice is. In a class of about 27-30 students, four or five raise their hands. That is well under 20 percent, people who obviously watch television but who are what you might call 'entertained to death'.

As I mentioned yesterday, a number of us who work on this Web project have been considering the ongoing emergence of facts surrounding detention centers in the United States -- that is to say, camps, and some would say concentration camps -- yes, in the United States, a 'free country' that is 'spreading democracy'. Yes, the problem has a plausible deniability factor; they could be something else; maybe they're for rounding up Muslims, not exactly a comforting thought. Sure, anyone can say that it's alarmist to discuss this. It would not be the first time I'd heard that one. Naturally, as usual, paying attention is paranoid and ignorance is its own kind of demented bliss.

It is true this has been an issue since the '80s and thanks to something called the Christic Institute, I've known of it personally since around 1991. Yes, FEMA (the sponsoring agency of this project, or the alt-government) is inept and the 'real' federal government is going broke on a war it cannot win in Iraq and Afghanistan and they may even go into Iran next. Yes, the administration is plagued with scandals (which is another way of saying high crimes committed are catching up with them), and yes, it is true, George Bush is not a genius and he cannot really inspire anyone; he is just at the heart of a huge patronage mill.

Play an MP3 of the J.F.K. inaugural address, or M.L.K.'s "I Have A Dream," and you'll see what I mean about leaders who can inspire people. I am fully aware that our supposed leaders have next to no public support, but I'm also aware that they are in power without ever having had real majority support.

Finally, I am aware that people turn into blithering fools when they are scared, and will allow anything in the name of taking the fear away.

I really started to get worried back when I saw parents -- over and over again -- leave their kids in dormitories contaminated with dioxin and PCBs, knowing full well what they were doing because I had told them personally. But most disgusting to me was the student newspaper covering it up year after year. Always the same routine: the new editors come to me for the real deal and to get the documents; I show up or Fed Ex articles and test results neatly organized; they read them carefully, freak out and say nothing. Good little Nazis, just like the mainstream media we have today.

Yet as a writer who can still feel in my body some of the responses I got to my early articles pointing out problems with the Iraq war -- the people who told me to bugger off; to do what I'm supposed to do, which is cast charts; to stop being an amateur political commentator and give us our astrological happy pills; I am still a little concerned about what I say here. It is also true, the times are changing, and I do get letters fairly regularly from people who ask me what they should be doing.

I am also aware that devastating information is coming so fast that it is quite literally overwhelming to most, and this is a brilliant media tactic. And hey, all in all, our country is pretty dumbed-down. The people who know, often think knowing is enough. People who are spiritual think God or Goddess will save us. Many don't know what to think and most don't care at all.

Sometimes people ask what is the limit; how far is too far. Well, I reached my limit a couple of decades ago and heck, I'm just 41. Then Bush War I pushed me way over the edge, and I never forgot it. In case you're interested, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark has a documentary called Nowhere To Hide, about what it was like to be in the middle of that war; he was there.

Anyway, I woke up to this email this morning. To borrow a line from my old New York Times ad: "Where do you go when judges break the law? You go public." The reader is in the Northeastern United States. Yes, it takes a four-year-old to see the issues: highly intelligent, and not indoctrinated. No previous ideas about what is and is not possible. Here is the email:

"In this case, I think what's going on over here is nothing more and nothing less than what you're describing. We have what I'm told by a friend (who has a prominent position working for the state) is one of these detention 'spaces' right up the street. It's next to a train track/station, as I noted one of your news articles specifies, and I'm told it's a bunker, as well. The other day we drove by and my little boy (who just turned 4) said, 'Hey look, mama, it's an army village'. I told him he was right. But it's a funny looking one. It looked to me like an abandoned place, at first blush. From above ground it's very run down and looks like some old left over brick garages. But T., with a 4-year-old's eyes (and a lot of Aquarius and Mercury in the ascendant) told me there were trucks and army things there if I looked. I did and there were. Lots of them, in fact, and they were the kind of transport trucks 'they' use for carting people around. I know this from library books about army trucks that my son borrowed last year."