The Match #97

Our philosophy and practice: Criticism of, and resistance to, all statist laws and authoritarianism. We believe that governments and religions rest on threats or outright violence, and do more harm than good.

Number 97 - Winter, 2001-2002 - Suggested Price on Newsstands: $2.75

Computers as Agents of Chaos • Who the Police Beat • Your Photograph: A Liability • News • Letters

---

THE MATCH! Post Office Box 3 012, Tucson, Arizona 85 702 — Subscription: Free

First published in 1969, this publication exists solely to criticize authoritarian society and religion in order to argue for the many humane advantages of freedom and rationality. We are not affiliated with any groups or organizations. Any publication of this same general orientation may reprint anything herein. DONATIONS: We welcome them and need them. But please: No checks. Just cash or stamps only. No kidding, no checks! Submissions of letters are extremely welcome, and all letters will be considered as being for publication unless you indicate otherwise. We have no telephone, no e-mail, so either write or don’t communicate at all. Typesetting and printing by Editor and Publisher, Fred Woodworth, 2001. No computers are ever used in this publication. This is issue number 97.

---

Contents

Obituaries

Freedom Eclipsed

Your Photograph: a Liability

Who the Police Beat

Copstoppers’ Notebook

Reining-In the Police

Crap-Detection Department

Around & About

Anarchism Through the Press

Books & Periodicals Vanishing

Computer and Technology Dept

Computers at Work

History Corner: The Cow-Killers

Review: The Koran

Publications Received

Contributors

Letters Column (World’s Largest!)

Ethical Anarchism

From the Editor

Religion scores another hit. In the sad history of the human race, god delusions have been responsible for more death and suffering than anything else except, possibly, disease. Now crazy fanatics have again lit the fire that has destroyed and mangled thousands of lives, and before it subsides (temporarily) once more some other unthinkable number of persons will be blasted out of existence, or poisoned, or shot, infected with ghastly, fatal diseases, and removed from this world—the only world there is.

Ideas drive the behavior of mankind, and flawed or insane ideas lead without fail to actions ranging from unfortunate to monstrous. This is precisely why we have to utter a groan of horror every day now.

First a terrorist holocaust, driven by the insane ideas of the world’s most authoritarian religion, wipes out six thousand people in a moment. Then, instead of realizing that if any “god” (that is, any all-knowing, allpowerful being) existed, he or it would have been uniquely positioned to stop this tragedy, the country of the persons who were eradicated plunges into an exact mirrorimage of the moronic delusion that animated the terrorists themselves : it sings hymns to the god, it prays to the god. It thanks the god! It promises to root out the evil maniacs, and those are defined as anybody who even knew about the terrorist plots, yet it excuses and worships the one entity which, by all operating definitions, certainly had to know if anybody ever knew.

Rather than draw the simple, plain conclusion that there is no such thing as any “god”, people rush to behave just like the madmen who’ve been hypnotized into mental illness by their own so-called holy book. Government and Church fuse together once more, thus uniting again into a potentially repressive force several times worse than either of them separately, willfully overlooking the horrific Islamic model of such unification that set the current world bonfire to blazing. At religious “services” the entire federal horde, seemingly, sat in overdressed and nervous subjection to preaching god-men straight out of the 1400s, just like Mohammed-rabid Allah-ululators who are actually still living in their own 1400s— a so significant fact that no one seems to notice.

THE ESSENTIAL BANKRUPTCY of religious advocates is" revealed in the responses to a recent question posed to various church ministers here. The basic query was Why would God let this happen? Of course, you can see what is wrong with that question; it still has built into it the supposition that there is a “god”, and it crawls around the real question, which is better stated as Does the fact that this happened indicate to you that there is no god, or are you able to still believe god exists, but that he just didn’t feel like doing a couple of extremely minor things to ward it off?

All the religionists who were asked skirted the question in what looked like desperation, and would have been remarked on by reporters had it been some political figure writhing to get out of an inquiry by trying to hedge that “it depends on what the definition of is is”. One said: “God gives us free will.” (That wasn’t the question, was it?) Another responded: “We have to remember that God’s original purpose did not include violence of any kind. The problem is sin.” Not the question.

Another: “God does care about what happens to us; however, his allowing humans to suffer trials and tribulations over the many years has a purpose: to determine whether humans can rule themselves independent from God, or whether rule by God is necessary.” (Considering that people have lived on this planet for tens of thousands of years, how long is this idiot “God” going to take to make this determination, particularly when he isn’t a god at all if he does not know the future?)

Another: “I actually don’t believe that God allows these kinds of things... I think that God weeps with us in the midst of a horrible tragedy like this.” (Still didn’t answer the question! But raises another: if he didn’t allow it, was he powerless to prevent it?)

Another: “The larger question, of course, is why God permits any human evil to exist.” (Thanks a lot; by shifting off to this “larger question”, you didn’t respond to either one, large or “small”.)

Another: “God’s work in the world is redemptive, to rebuild the disasters and the chaos that we create.” (Pretty good; you weasel out of answering the question, but still manage to rig the game so “god” gets credit for everything good, but never anything bad.)

Another: “If he has allowed it to happen, it presents us a graphic demonstration of our need to better unify the world.” (The question! How about answering the question?)

Yet another religious “leader” meandered around an answer that was basically “I don’t know”: “I really don’t believe this is of God. I truly believe this is about hate. To me, God is not of hate, God is of love. Why would God have this happen? That is a good question.”

The truth is, religion doesn’t have any cogent answers to anything, and particularly to basic questions such as “Why does religion exist at all? Why should we pray to a being who never answers? Why thank him for some events, but others arbitrarily proclaim he must have had nothing to do with?

WHATEVER the results of Sept. 11, it’s time to realize that religion is the enemy of mankind. The start -may be here of World War III, or the conflagration may die back if those who deserve to be executed actually receive, for once, the “justice” which governments so constantly promise but only seem to deliver accidentally and sporadically. But let’s be clear that Islam is not some noble ideal that has been perverted by a few foul mullahs and weird rich or suicidal fanatics. They haven’t warped or misconstrued the religion; they have it right — death by fire to the infidels and unbelievers is precisely what their “holy book” dictates. For a look at this brutal “Koran”, see our review of it elsewhere in this issue. Lately there’s a lot of pious talk about how “Islam is really a religion of peace.” Well, it isn’t. The fact is that Islam is worse than any other of the widespread mental illnesses. Religions are all fundamentally life-denying, freedom-hating, garbled, contradictory relics of days when schizophrenia wasn’t recognized as an illness Today, the only people who really work at incorporating all of any holy book’s mad tenets into their own lives are those who are isolated and undereducated. For them, repeated re-reading and chanting and dwelling on such texts contributes to a form of brainwashing or hypnotic dazing. Many kinds of religious madmen have plunged off this deep end and turned into vicious murderers : Catholic Inquisitors, for instance, witch-trial hysterics; and this is definitely the case with the Islamic “fundamentalists” (which is to say, those who really profess to believe in the religion at all, as opposed to ignoring three-fourths of it but still keeping the label).

Christianity is brutal too, but it has had more years to mellow, to get over the flaring-up of its own deadliest infections, to some degree. It passed through its Dark Ages, through its rabidly inquisitorial and murderous periods, its persecutions of women, its stonings, its drawing- and-quartering torture-executions. The Drug War is a lasting remnant of this moralistic authoritarianism; but to a large degree western civilization has brushed aside the ranting lunatics of biblical religionism and tacitly agreed to go forward with science and medicine and art and literature. Society was still nominally Christian but it had antibodies against the worst pustules and gangrenous microbes, so could more or less live with its affliction.

But with the attacks by an even crazier religion, the dormant illness becomes re-energized. For this reason, September 11 is becoming an even worse tragedy.

Freedom cannot exist in an Islamic culture. It exists only sparsely in a nominally Christian one, and with the praying and religious/patriotic rituals going on in every public place now, an atheist and a non-saluter of the flag is clearly unwelcome and maybe in danger, so even the sparse freedom is slipping away.

The essentially religious war now under way is going to set the values of this once very feebly secular society back many years. Islam is not going to win; it has shamed itself and to normal people in the rest of the world it appears as a decidedly unclean phenomenon. (Mohammed declared all of us “infidels” and “unbelievers” to be unclean, so the least we can do is reciprocate. I bet atheists bathe more often than he did.) But even if Islam has largely ruined its own secularists’ hopes of transforming it by selective overlooking into a “civilized” religion, it will launch a lot of poison and death into the world before it gives up to go skulk around and resume stoning women and gay people. In its frenzied launchings of suicide bombs, anthrax infections, poisonous mail packages, etc., it will have a massive impact on such previously tottering relics as nationalism, patriotism, enforced symbolic conformism, and so on. The kid who won’t say the pledge of allegiance in school will again face a harsh extralegal penalty, and the employee who overtly refuses to put on a flag pin may well be fired (for “other” reasons, of course).

Atheists and ethical Anarchists can only draw back from this incredible 21st century religious war.

LIKE A SNOWFALL that temporarily covers all that is around you, and obscures actual features so that for the time being even a field of litter and junked car parts looks beautiful, the recent events make cops look heroic and officials look knowledgeable and competent. This is an illusion. We haven’t forgotten what the ground really looks like, and articles in this issue show it as it is and will soon appear again.

OBITUARIES

THOMAS T. MORGAN, longtime friend of The Match (since 1974), died Dec. 8th, 2000, at the San Francisco Hospice, after a long struggle with hepatitis.

Tom’s father was a Los Angeles policeman who beat Tom and his mother. As an adult Tom developed a problem with alcohol, but had managed to stop drinking for about the last ten years In the 1970s he became involved with a taxicab company sold by the original owner to' the employees Called “Taxi Unlimited", it has been described by a friend of Tom’s as "a true collective, not a co-op, a great place to hang out and smoke pot; lots of artists." Cabs were hand-painted in various designs. Decisions were made by consensus; an agenda was placed on the bulletin board and items were added by anyone who wanted to discuss something. Then a meeting would be set, and whoever attended it decided the items unless unanimous agreement could not be reached.

Tom was one of the sustaining figures of Taxi Unlimited, even though he could reportedly at times be difficult to work with on account of his use of alcohol and drugs. In an incident that is described by a former member of the collective,

“...P---- became a signator on the bank account and then ripped off an insurance payment. Several friends tried to get him to take the money back when he finally surfaced a couple of weeks later, but he didn’t. Then Tom received some money from his mother’s estate and reimbursed the company for ten times the amount P---- had taken.

“But by then it was too late; all except a handful of the old-timers had quit in disgust. A few months later Taxi Unlimited sputtered out.

“Next door was a comedy improv group called the Blake St. Hawkeyes, which Whoopi Goldberg was a member of just before she jumped off in The Color Purple. No one at TAXI got famous or successful but it was a great place to work if you didn't mind being poor. Lots of Anarchists and Wobblies and interesting characters.”

After developing liver disease, Tom Morgan went on a health regimen for a while and worked at getting better. At one time he was reportedly on a liver transplant list, but then the doctors told him he would not be eligible for the program if he used marijuana.

He took himself off the list.

MINE OKUBO, whose late 1940s book, Citizen 13660, was discussed in our “History Corner” last issue, died on February 10, 2001, only two months after we had wondered what had ever become of her.

The Los Angeles Times, March 4, recounted the same incidents from her life that we did (using the same book she’d written, but picked up where we left off, to note her subsequent history.

After leaving the Topaz internment camp, Mine got a job with Fortune Magazine, illustrating an issue about Japan. After Columbia University Press published Citizen 1366 0, in 1946, the book received favorable reviews but then seems to have faded from sight until it was reprinted in 1984 by the University of Washington Press. In 1992 Mine’s drawings were displayed in a series of exhibits in Los Angeles, San Jose, Salt Lake City, Honolulu, New York and Tokyo. She lived alone in an apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village, where she continued to produce her artwork.

In 1990 she received a reparations payment of $20,000 as a result of her 1940s internment, and reportedly used the money to pay debts.

She stated in an interview a few years ago that: * I hope that things can be learned from this tragic episode, for I believe it could happen again.”

Mine was 88 at the time of her death, and had lived in New York for the past 50 years.

JACQUES A. MUSY, 83, of Valrico Florida, died on April 15. He was a long-time Atheist activist, convention-goer, and stamp collector. He supported a variety of freethought and anti-religious publications over the years, but did so critically, refusing to back Madalyn Murray O’Hair after she insisted on behaving in unethical and authoritarian ways. Musy frequently distributed our publications at conventions of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and was a source for news and documents used in The Match, particularly on topics pertaining to religious abuse.

TAD DAVIES, of Manhattan Beach California, died last September, of cancer. He was a faithful supporter of The Match from 1992 on.

**THOMAS ROLFSEN, of San Francisco. He was editor of the GALA Review in the late eighties and early nineties, a publication for gay and lesbian Atheists He was extremely encouraging and supportive of The Match, particularly during the period following Mrs O’Hair’s attempt to have Fred Woodworth jailed on bogus federal charges.

But Here’s a Cheering Item

In Seattle, a man impersonating a police officer stole a cop car and was driving around. Other cops saw him and gave chase. The impersonator eluded them, but during the pursuit a second set of real cops-raced up and, thinking the first ones were the impostor, opened fire. Cop car A fired back and a total of at least 33 rounds were exchanged— all, sadly, missing their targets.

Then cop car B rammed car A, repeatedly, inflicting substantial damage on both vehicles.

Meanwhile, back at the station, the impostor turned up, still in the stolen gestapo-car, and was promptly arrested. But even this is good news, because the culprit was a cop wannabe, and he’d been allowed access to cop cars. So everyone involved with this matter was in uniform and now they’re all pointing fingers at each other!

Freedom Eclipsed

Face recognition technology, tested on some 100,000 unsuspecting football game attendees early in 2001, is far more dangerous than any of the commentators on this horrifying police as sault have recognized. Buried far down in some of the articles about the Super Bowl Surveillance were admissions that while no “arrests” were made, a number of people were “detained” and questioned. Call it what you will, this amounts to arrest, since it is the stopping of a person’s free movement, and the subjecting of him or her to an indeterminate period of police custody.

In this particular case, such police apprehensions were based NOT on “probable cause”, NOT on “specific and articulable” suspicions by police, but by purely automatic functions of an unconscious electronic apparatus.

The technology’ works by analyzing a person’s face and converting key aspects into numerical measurements. A series of these numbers is then compared to a wide database of the measurements of persons wanted by police. Whenever there is an apparent likelihood of correspondence to some statistically significant degree, a signal is given for police to detain the person.

Cheerfully enthusiastic technology pushers professed instant confidence that the system can’t make mistakes because, as Frances Zelazny of Visionics (one of the companies making and installing it) says" “You’d have to do some pretty major surgery to evade the system.”

Our own comment is that this is what she’d have you believe, but it’s not true, and in tact the reason for saying it at all (aside from the desire to profit off sales of the systems), is to derail people’s confidence that they can beat the machines. We believe that you CAN beat them, and a little thought will reveal quite a few methods for doing so.

If numbers are what the computer compares, change the numbers, now — today — BEFORE any difficulty arises. Begin immediately a resolve to alter your face somewhat, whenever you have to be in a public place (a bank, for instance) where a surveillance camera that may be tied in to such a system can also be cross' referenced to your identity.

(In a bank, you typically stand in line. A camera focuses on you when you are at the head of the line and also, in some cases, when you are at the teller’s window. Either way it is easy to see how a later examination of videotape could be combined with the record of daily transactions in order to get a picture record of specific persons, by name.)

Simplest way to beat the cameras, of course, is to stay completely away from them' don’t go into banks or other such places at all. Use cash; MINIMIZE, if not altogether avoid, the probability of your image being captured.

If you do have to be in a bank line, stand a little to one side. The cameras have a narrow side-to-side range and you can often easily get out of it. If there is a monitor showing what the camera sees, as is often the case where banks may be required to give some notice of surveillance but do not wish to post actual notices, that’s even better because you can by means of surreptitious glances see whether or not you’re in direct view, and move casually aside a trifle. Needless to add, do not act overtly evasive, or that may defeat your purpose, which is maintaining your privacy, human dignity, and security.

Notice that just by staying AWAY from a camera you’ve already EVADED it, WITHOUT “doing major surgery," thus proving quickly what hype the Visionics pusher’s statement was. What the camera can’t see, it can’t work with. Facial skin albedo, or index of reflectance, will mean that people with lighter skin colors may be at greater risk of computer face analysis than persons with darker skin. Ironically, black peo pie may finally get some advantage; obviously it will be harder under low light conditions for the apparatus to get a reading. Deliberate skin darkening may be a step some will want to begin making.

Placement of cotton swabs inside the cheeks will puff out the face, altering numbers on facial ratios. For driver’s license photos, be sure to do this and also lightly pull your ears into a slightly different position in order to change another key ratio. Scotch tape works well for this purpose. Your driver’s license picture will still look like you — to a human being. But this may stymie the computer trying to recognize your face. Remember: It’s not that were assuming you’re a criminal. What we are assuming is that asset forfeiture, the drug war, crackdowns on dissidents, legitimate and illegitimate concern with terrorism, etc., make ramifications of false fingerpointing by computer systems very alarming. An ounce of prevention is worth a TON of cure.

DNA testing, increasingly demanded by law enforcement, and sure to be used eventually by insurance companies, educators and cops to take pre-emptive action against certain persons, is another privacy invasion that can only be avoided. Do not give out any sample of your genetic code for any reason ! Despite the cut-and-dried nature of comparisons, supposedly, there is in fact no evidence that DNA samples remain unchanged over time—just to name one problematic aspect. Virtually every other substance undergoes serious alteration over long spans of years; refrigerated food spoils; in eons even atoms themselves may deteriorate. The comparison of old crime-scene DNA by faceless, uncaring or even corrupt crime lab personnel, may put innocent people at risk if they’ve allowed samples of their genetic material to be catalogued by law enforcement or other agencies.

Even before the September terrorism in New York, officials were pressing for DNA to be taken from any person convicted of even a misdemeanor.

More "evidence” you can’t see or verify is taken via a new police device that looks like a flashlight. A cop thrusts the thing in through the open window of your car and it supposedly analyzes the air in your car for alcohol. On the other hand it may give a positive reading just because your car’s upholstery is outgassing adhesive or plasticizing solvents. There’ll be little pressure from cops to discover if this is the case, though, because in more and more localities cop departments are seizing cars when drivers are taken into custody on “legitimate" charges.

Utah’s new “porn czar", hired to crack down on sexually explicit materials, is a fundamentalist Mormon and self-acknowledged virgin. That’s right; Paula Houston, Mormon and virgin, is the new arbiter of what’s “obscene” in Utah. “My personal life is irrelevant,” she says. We guess having an acknowledged, practicing witch doctor running the Centers for Disease Control would be the same sort of irrelevancy.

Drunk NON-driver loses $40,000 car: The Court of Appeals of Minnesota recently upheld the forfeiture of a man’s new car, solely for his being inside the stationary car, in his own driveway, listening to its new stereo system while in a condition of technical inebriation. In order to uphold this incredible penalty the court had to affirm that it didn’t violate constitutional prohibitions against double punishment or excessive fines.

Police took the car under forfeiture laws.

It now belongs to them, though Mr. Bruce R. Barnes, from whom it was taken, still has to pay the rest of what he “owes” on it.

Watch TV or go to jail, was the order of officials in Ohio when two teenagers walked out of their classroom in protest against the compulsory viewing of commercials on Channel One. The channel is shown in schools all over the United States, but Carlotta and D.J. Maurer refused to watch it. They were sent to a juvenile detention “facility” (i.e., prison).

Something to remember when you hear claims about how “confidential” the census or other records are: Documents lately released from the House Unamerican Activities Committee investigations in 1947 show that these witch hunters got access to, and reviewed, people’s tax returns. Transcripts of the Committee’s remarks show investigators discussing one writer’s tax documents as if in a routine way. Still trying to claim it didn’t happen is one old-time investigator who said: “It could not have been done. It was a violation of the law."

Maybe so, but if transcripts of their own delvings don’t get released for 54 years, they pretty much get away with it, don’t they?

You think right now, in 2001, there isn’t huge pressure on the Census Department to release information, quietly, to investigators only, on people of Arabic ethnicity?

It’s mandatory to have a computer at many colleges and universities now. Essentially this amounts to a huge tax on students, for the benefit of the corporations that manufacture computers and software, and e mail and internet access accounts.

Meanwhile, for another look at what these unreliable apparatuses are doing to life and civilization, observe the new requirement that all applicants to attend medical schools submit their application forms over the Internet. People started doing this on June 21, and as usually is the case where computers are involved, the system immediately went haywire. Application sites repeatedly crashed; credit card screw-ups made it impossible for students to pay application fees, and students were regularly kicked off after waiting for long periods to reach the website. One applicant said he had logged 80 hours trying to fill out the application.

Quoted in the New York Times this student related how it works: “...I will be in the midst of a process and it will stop taking information. I’ll press Next and it will tell me ‘Connection Timed Out,’ or give me a ‘Refused’ message. Then I just sit there hitting Return. I feel kind of like a rat pressing the bar to get a little piece of food...”

Doctors of tomorrow!

Minicomputers on police gunbelts will let officers figure out instantly whether you should be gunned down on the spot, or at the least, subjected to a dangerous and stressful, disruptive arrest. Of course, the same systems that can’t even process a simple application effectively are now going to be entrusted with people’s reputations and lives. Naturally the tiny keyboards officers are supposed to use, punching in your name and relevant numbers surreptitiously, will be absolutely error-free, cops claim.

The California Supreme Court has ruled that “jurors are required to ... render a verdict in accordance with the court’s instructions on the law. A juror who is unable or unwilling to do so ...may be discharged.” The jury, therefore — which was previously a social rubber-stamp for prosecutions — is now a LEGAL rubber-stamp for the desires of a judge.If he says “Convict,” the jury is now under legal orders (meaning you go to jail if you don’t) to convict. The illusion may persist that jury trials have some meaning, but in reality they are now formally what they have been informally and slightly haphazardly for a long time: cunning instruments of state management, disguised as finders of truth.

Cameras on every street-corner for purposes of catching speeders and red light runners, are being installed by the thousands across the United States as various cities rush to accommodate police requests. The American Civil Liberties Union has called these cameras “particularly disturbing,” “Orwellian,” and “dangerous.” The National Center for Policy Analysis issued a statement calling them a “Trojan horse.”

You can now be subjected to full arrest for the tiniest infraction, the U.S. Supreme Court has decided. The case involved a woman who was handcuffed, taken to jail, booked, fingerprinted, and charged with the “crime” of failing to protect herself by wearing an automobile seat belt. Her children, left alone at the arrest site in the car, were taken in by a neighbor — though this might just as easily have been a passing childmolester. On being released from jail, the woman discovered that her car was missing—towed away by police.

And now she’s being billed for about eighty thousand dollars in legal fees.

The weird wimp of the Supreme Court, Justice Souter, quibbled that he couldn’t vote against this practice because it wasn’t “widespread”. A curious form of reasoning — apparently meaning that as long as only a few persons are to have their alleged constitutional rights violated, there's not a violation that matters Trouble is, now that the Court says it’s okay, cops everyplace can do it, and point to the Supreme Court’s ruling making it “legal”.

After the last election, with all the charges and countercharges of fraud and rigging, the managed consensus was that “antiquated”, “obsolete” methods of recording votes were to blame. Of course nowadays, whenever you hear words like these pop up, you know that somebody’s pushing Kom-pu-tors. Sure enough, punched holes which anybody could examine and verify are now an artifact of ancient history; the equipment has been discarded or sold off.

And replacing it are computer systems which NO ONE can examine and verify. A computer scientist at SRI International in Menlo Park, California—Peter Neumann — calls electronics “inherently corruptible", and favors counting all ballots by HAND in preference to using computer systems, he says they are “a disaster waiting to happen.”

As an example of how much more unreliable electronic systems are than more physical, examinable ones, consider this report by a local newspaper which was looking into pricing errors at supermarkets. In its article of Dec. 23, 2000, the Tucson Citizen stated that store scanners are wrong SIXTY PERCENT of the time.

Havoc-wreaking glitches will increase, warned the Chicago Tribune last year. Noting that some ruin businesses or individuals, the paper mentioned computer mistakes such as these: employees of a bank — 38,000 of them — found they had 16% less money than they thought they had when a $70,000,000 accounting error came to light. At another bank 800 people’s accounts were miscredited.Sixty thousand people recently reported telephone bill errors. A health insurance company, after spending two hundred million dollars on a computer, suffered a huge hit involving $60 million in payments,

Think of all the people who can t afford to see doctors, and imagine how many of them COULD do so if the whole process wasn’t made so needlessly expensive by this kind of crazy reliance on systems that don’t work.

Just like the totalitarian societies we heard about as youngsters, the one we live in is now flooding schools and children’s organisations with such propaganda as police trading-cards. Several thousand police departments nationwide now distribute the cards, the Associated Press reports. Use of the cards originated with the DARE program (drug abuse resistance education), which has also utilized such methods as encouraging children to report to school officials the contents of their parents’ medicine cabinets, or marijuana smoking by parents.

Suppose you are falsely charged with a crime, subjected to trial, and by some miracle acquitted. Aside from the stress and expense, both of which may have heavy effects on your life and health for years or even decades to come, there are further expenses in some states if you want to expunge the arrest from your record. To set the process in motion, you first have to:

• PETITION a judge’s approval. Think of this! These officials ought to be on their knees before you, tearfully begging for YOUR forgiveness; but no.—once again you have to apply, sub serviently, to THEM.

• PAY a fee of about $185!! Your taxes paid the prosecution, and now that same agency wants another big payment after falsely prosecuting you!

• THEN PAY $8.80 for every single agency that has to be contacted about destroying records. And “all the burden falls on the individual to find out who has their record."

When you consider that arrests and prosecutions are largely set in motion by police, who are for all practical purposes immune to subsequent lawsuits for false arrests, it becomes clear to even the most backward intelligence that true legal penalties can be assessed by the mere order of police. And that, of course, is exactly one of tire defining characteristics of a police state.

Canadian gun-owners, now required to apply for firearms licenses from their own federal government, have been turned by the hundreds of thousands into instant outlaws Millions of owners of firearms have indignantly resisted the demand, making themselves subject to seizure of their property, and liable to a five-year prison sentence. Those who do acquiesce and apply for the licenses must supply information, not only on the guns themselves, but on their own “personal circumstances”, including their health, whether they are involved in a divorce, and much more.

Not only that, if you DO get such a license, from that time on enforcement agents have the right to inspect your home to ensure that every gun is locked away and stored unloaded.

Obviously Canada is a police state too.

The Maine chapter* of the March of Dimes has lately helped to set up an official Birth Defects Surveillance System, principally by promoting legislation allowing data to be collected on private persons’ medical problems.

Crime pays for police dept.: Kyle (Texas) cops got to keep $31,383 they seized in a traffic stop even though no one was charged with any crime and no drugs or any other contraband were found

Red Squads return in Chicago: Police surveillance of private persons is re-established by federal appeals court ruling. This allows the cops to investigate anyone, WITHOUT "a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity.” They can also transmit this surveillance data to all other police agencies everywhere, the purpose being to “monitor suspected terrorists”. How they can suspect someone and not suspect them at the same time is some type of bizarro religious-influenced claim; but more significant were statements that the city of Chicago wants to investigate ‘'extremist beliefs”. As one lawyer noted; “THEY are going to be defining who’s extremist. They can spy on anybody they want.”

Police crime labs taint, destroy, misinterpret, and make up "evidence” to fit whatever cop agencies desire, an increasing body of evidence shows. Fingerprints declared to match when no reasonable person sees the slightest similarity between the defendant’s prints and the lone smudgy print found at a crime scene (the lab “digitally enhances” it)... DNA evidence conveniently lost when it can’t be contorted into a fit with the prearranged frame-up...Technicians testifying to the identity of hairs, later proved to be dissimilar, but only after someone has spent 15 years in prison, and interested persons have gotten the evidence re-examined over the kicking and screaming objections of prosecutors.

This Kafkaesque nightmare is CALLED justice, but only by persons who confidently feel immune to its horrific effects. -

Invasive laws in dozens of cities now prohibit your appearance in public, on a street or sidewalk, without a specific, articulable, socially approved reason for being there. People are now regularly going to jail for such crimes as sitting on a curb or wall, or sleeping in a park. Now a law in Virginia prohibits sleeping in any room of your house except the bedroom. The law is supposedly designed to prevent multiple residents from ‘‘overcrowding" small homes. At last report the state senate there had approved the law, but it may not have ultimately passed both houses.

Pro-computer propaganda has appeared on the propaganda-drenched “Sesame Street” children’s television program. Citing links between the TV show and America On Line corporation, Gail Collins in the New York Times noted puppettype animated characters squealing: “Computers are great!” She writes:

...Two other puppets...wanted to talk about their computers. “I love the screen and the keyboard,” one of them yelped, fondling the machine. ...A dancing computer tapped in, crying, “You’ve got mail!”

AOL is a top sponsor of the show, but “Our pure goal here is educational,” a SS spokes-woman hastened to reassure. “I wasn’t even aware AOL is underwriting(the show)” she said.

Computer fanatics’ bullying costs consumers billions of dollars in hidden expenses as systems that worked fine are thrown into landfills and are replaced by overpriced, short-lived computer systems that perpetually screw up. Internet hype frightens still other companies into taking steps to ‘‘keep up” which amount to unjustified, frivolous expenditures that get passed along to the buying public as higher prices— without any corresponding gain in product quality or service efficiency. In business circles this has been branded as ‘‘disruptive technology”, though the originator of that term, Clayton M. Christensen, a professor at Harvard, has been persuaded or bullied into backing away from it. He now says that the phrase “may have been misleading”. If he doesn’t have Galileo’s courage, too bad; but we’ll say here those classic words, Eppur si muove — “Still, it does move.”

Subpoenas of bookstore records have been used in recent months to develop law enforcement and prosecution actions against various persons. Cops see nothing whatsoever alarming about this, of course, because THEIR views are invariably the defining core of the social norm that is being enforced. But readers interested in (for instance) methods of manufacturing illegal drugs will be at risk because their own interests may seem to border on actually doing illegal things. Recently a Denver bookstore resisted a police/prosecution effort to find out whether a drug “cookbook” had been purchased by a man currently targeted for legal charges. Previously, a video store in another state gave police records on persons who had rented disapproved movies. Libraries, in the past, have gladly provided police with lists of patrons who had checked out books on the occult (during “Satanism” scares), and some will remember well how President Nixon called for librarians to take note of patrons’ preference for books that could possibly have some bearing on bomb-making. Considering that previous hysterias regarding por nography, etc., were far less pervasive than the current war climate, it would definitely behoove all book purchasers who are outside of the mainstream of American thought and opinion to stay clear of creating paper trails for what they read. Specifically: don’t check out books, and when you buy from bookstores, use cash.

Satellites track ex-convicts: The Minneapolis Tribune reported two years ago that government agencies were “experimenting” with Global Positioning System devices to .monitor people who are on probation or “serving sentences outside prison.” The account spoke of a particular prisoner of this apparatus who is on a 3 7’/a year sentence of restricted probation that limits his whereabouts to several square blocks of the city of Minneapolis. A non-removable ankle bracelet, capable of sending a radio signal a few feet, transmits to a relaying device about the size of a lunch box. The relaying transmitter which weighs 3^ pounds must be carried everywhere by the convict for the next four decades, as it re-broadcasts the anklet’s signal to a commercial company called Pro Tech which coordinates this signal with the GPS satellite and notifies police instantly if the prescribed area is strayed from.

No further publicity has been seen since the 1998 article, but you can bet that the "experiment ’ is still going on. An official of the Florida Department of Corrections was quoted as gloating: "Big Brother IS watching you."

Christian prisons: Preferential treatment for being a good little "religious" prisoner is the latest way the law and government discriminate against those who have no belief in the existence of "god"—and of course it’s all legal, as usual. "You see guys change right before you," says Prison Fellowship’s Tommie Dorsett. He burbles that he has "watched guys go from hardened thugs to guys you’d just like to have over for dinner. You see prayers getting answered."

Yes, most people would probably "accept Jeee-zus as their personal Savior" if it meant knocking six to eight off their sentence of ten to twenty. Most people with an eye toward selfpreservation, and a good grasp of situational ethics, would join the Communist Party, or parrot slogans about the Glorious and Illustrious Leader Kim il Something, or gladly volunteer for duty cleaning the Pope's shoes with their tongues, just as fast. The only people who’d decline such an offer would be ones with a strong sense of personal integrity and pride in their utter rejection of and disdain for the foul, stinking, inconsistent, unbelievable, ludicrous and horrifying Christian religion.

It is ever a matter for grim amusement and wonder to observe the insistent, unstoppable coercion and insinuation of the Christians into every nook they can sniff out, no matter what brazen assaults they have to make on simple humanity, common sense, and their own professed reverence for the “law”.

REMEMBER the Rodney King beating? Sure you do. Remember what it was that boosted THIS case of police brutality into an internationally known event? Of course : it was the fact of this beating’s being taped, by George Halliday, and its being replayed in front of millions of disbelieving dullards who otherwise would have been all too ready to discount or wave away the episode as they had always done before. This time, with the affair on tape, they couldn’t keep staring ahead vacantly and murmuring: “Oh, the police are nice young men. They wouldn’t do anything like that.”

Well, the government is now taking steps to make sure that people never produce such damning evidence again. The Massachusetts Supreme Court has just issued a ruling — which the United States Supreme Court will almost certainly either refuse to overturn or to re-examine at all - judging that such taping of police is unlawful wiretapping.

The case involved a man named Michael Hyde, who was stopped by police one night in 1998. Believing he was being harassed for no reason, Hyde quietly turned on his hidden tape recorder and got an audio version of the whole encounter. Believing that the recording showed his encounter with the police had indeed been pure harassment unrelated to any “legitimate” police function, Hyde later insisted police supervisors listen to the tape and take action against the officers involved. Needless to say, the department quickly absolved itself of any wrongdoing. But THEN it turned around and charged Mr. Hyde with “wiretapping”.

How the police must be laughing at the way they and their courts have dealt with a person who dared to stand up to THEIR authority!

Now, just to show what kind of a slippery slope this dictatorial making of new law is, consider the meaning, first, of so-called wiretapping laws. They were supposedly set up to ensure the privacy of parties engaged in private communication. Arrests, by allegedly public law enforcement officers, carried on in a public place, are therefore now to be conducted under rules set up to ensure consenting secrecy. Since the taping done by Mr. Hyde was, by definition, his own act of volition and therefore of his own consent, the secrecy demanded by this new ruling is purely that of a SECRET POLICE.

Second, consider where wiretapping laws came from. They arose out of laws against what was called Eavesdropping — literally, in origination, some clandestine listener lowering him self over the edge of the roof and getting close to someone’s window where he could overhear their conversation. To be an eavesdropper, you had to be a third party, not one of the participants. But, by the precedent of this late ruling, logically, you could be an eavesdropper just by being a witness — to an event or conversation in which you were, yourself, directly involved!

That, obviously, is absurd — but no more so than saying that recording your own encounter with police is Wiretapping. The next step could very well be charging witnesses to police abuse with Eavesdropping.

The intent, clearly, is to stop the public review of police behavior. We urge everyone reading this to carry recorders and to tape every single encounter with police that they may ever have. If this constitutes advocacy of the violation of the law, so be it. There has to be some point where people stand up and say, No More!

SO FAR HAVE THINGS GONE, even mainstream commentators are starting to worry that this has become a Police State. Writing about the above case in the National Law Journal, one prestigious lawyer called the verdict outrageous, and an example of the growing imbalance between the rights of “citizens” and the government. (Here at The Match, we don’t think the government. actually has any legitimate rights at all; it is a wholly spurious, illegitimate, criminal organization backed by force and the illusion or deceptively created sham of public consent.)

An ex-official of the government, Paul Craig Roberts, has recently begun saying (very belatedly) that “Americans are no longer secure in law—the justice system no longer seeks truth and prosecutors are untroubled by wrongful convictions.” He says the government is destroying constitutional guarantees of individual rights and creating a situation where every person is at any moment guilty of violating SOME law (something we’ve been saying here since about 1970). When even mainstream characters like this start noticing, it’s bad indeed.

Your Photograph: A Liability

**AS REPORTED by the St. Petersburg Times, August 8, 2001, a construction worker named Rob Milliron got the police-state treatment when his picture, taken without his knowledge by a police surveillance system, wound up in U.S. News & World Report.

Police were testing the new "Face It" computer software designed to match up faces of people in public places with databases of pictures of wanted felons, "sexual offenders" and others. Although Milliron’s face didn’t match up with anyone in the gestapo database, after the national magazine printed the photo as an example of what the cop cameras could do, a woman in Oklahoma scurried breathlessly to police with the Positive Identification of this man as her “ex-husband wanted for felony child neglect.”

Galvanized into instant action by this baseless claim, cops surrounded Milliron at his job, hurling accusing questions at him. Apparently managing to produce sufficient identification to PROVE HIMSELF UN-GUILTY, Milliron was allowed to go home, but then worried that police would break down his door and arrest him in the middle of the night.

Just to show how the media work, and how little regard they have for the effects their sensationalistic "journalism" has on innocent people and on human privacy and freedom, behold the caption U.S. News & World Report put on this innocent person’s photograph: "YOU CAN’T HIDE THOSE LYING EYES IN TAMPA."

As dramatic proof of how undependable photographs can be, and how utterly outrageous it is for people to have to risk arrest over such misidentifications, The Match asks you to take a look at the man in the photograph below. A familiar face, isn’t it? All right, make your identification, then turn this page upside-down to read who it actually is.

Lies and Tyranny that Have Ruined Millions of Lives

‘'.. .Today, the small towns of the nation are being invaded by the drug.. . It is being sold to school children in more than one state. Marijuana cigarettes, or 'reefers’, are peddled at fifteen cents to several dollars each... Before Pennsylvania passed laws against it, the chief of Philadelphia County detectives declared that whenever any particularly horrible crime was committed— and especially one pointing to perversion — his officers searched first in marijuana dens and questioned marijuana smokers for suspects . . .”

(No doubt thousands of innocent persons were charged falsely with those crimes, as a result of this police bias combined with prosecutors" and juries’ slavish readiness to believe anything a cop ever testified to.)

“. . .The smoker’s sense of space and time becomes distorted. The room in which he is located may appear minute, and everything in it is an infinitesimal spot upon which he gazes curiously like some giant in a doll house. Time becomes interminable. A second seems like a minute, a minute like an hour, and an hour assumes the aspect of a whole day. The time consumed in walking from one chair to another may seem like days on end.

“Noises sometimes are magnified. A match dropping to the floor will sound like a gigantic thunderclap reverberating on and on until it fades away and is succeeded by deathlike silence...”

All that just from smoking one joint!

If you think this propaganda, originally printed in Popular Science magazine in May, 1936 is ludicrously unbelievable, why not look ahead to the future and imagine how absurd today’s propaganda from statist “authorities” will sound?

Why not disbelieve in it now, instead of waiting 65 years?

POLICE BEAT

@@@[[]]

Q. What’s more dangerous than the rattlesnake you see ahead in your path?

A. The one you DON’T see, but which is there anyway.

All kinds of interested parties are using the most sophisticated and up-to-date, as well as the most ancient, blunt, and tried-and-true, ways to distract your mind from fixing on the real nature of police. The Bible (book of Romans) baldly states that they’re agents of “god”. (It even goes on to assert that they have the right to judge you and mete out punishment— a good gauge of how humane the Bible really isn’t.)

Television is almost unerringly cheerleading for police; programs show them pitted against a a world that is all bad. The newspapers are on their side, ALWAYS — even when such organs have to depict them as behaving abominably, since corruption or brutality are represented as anomalies. Schools drum into the heads of the young that cops are their friends; and businesses slap F.O.P. logos or “Support Local Police” stickers on their windows to attest to their own orthodoxy.

Liberals love them. Conservatives worship them. Communists install them on every street-corner and Socialists do it on every other one.Fascists give them snappier uniforms, and Oriental Stalin- isms crowd their anthill societies with more of them than anybody can count.

Authorities and experts tell you you can’t live without them. Philosophers claim you have some weird kind of unsigned “contract” with them. “Responsible” members of society urge you at every turn to fink on your neighbors to them.

In all times and countries they stalk about issuing commands and enforcing behavior ranging from whether you have to have a beard or wear a veil, to what uses you can put the organs and orifices of your own body, or what molecules, even, you may have flowing within your own internal circulatory vessels.

They backed up the Inquisition; they smashed property and jailed Jews. In Chile they made people disappear, and in Cambodia they strove to destroy an ancient civilization. In South Africa they were muscle upholding vicious repression, and in Alabama they swung heavy axe handles at fragile human flesh. From Siberia to Mexico their hideous face is masked with the bland urbanity of “civilized law”, and in that most self-congratulatory country of all, the United States of America, they swagger, bludgeon and execute just as they would had they been born in Czechoslovakia or Afghanistan.

These are criminals. The real criminals. Far more so than any small-scale individual abusers of rights, because POLICE operate on a scale of numbers and funding that no private criminal or even robber band ever has. Genghis Khan’s barbarian army was tiny compared to the American POLICE. Banana republics’ legendary cop torture is matched and surpassed in the “democratic” USA where statism has careened out of control and foul laws cannot be overturned.

For those who are willing to draw back their attention from the swirling jangle of gaudy propolice social inculcation and hypnotism, here is one short look, compiled by one small magazine, that can only suggest, not cover, a monstrous reality operating among us all.

When Annette Amoroso was stopped by Los Angeles police who supposedly thought the car she was driving was stolen, they ordered her out onto the ground, where she was made to kneel in an awkward position with her hands up. Behind her, a cop discharged a “non-lethal” shotgun, hitting her in the shoulder. As she fell and turned, he fired again, this time hitting her in the right eye, destroying it. Cops said Amoroso seemed to be reaching for a weapon, of course.

Police "non-lethal” rounds are variously described in the compliant press as ’‘beanbag bullets”, "rubber bullets”, "wooden bullets”, etc. The public scoffs at the idea of real injuries inflicted by a "beanbag”, but these hard, canvas or rubber-covered tightly wrapped wads of dense lead chunks hit with about the same force as a hard-swung carpenters hammer. In Tucson, Jeff Knepper, also shot in the eye by police, has filed a $3 million claim for the loss of eyesight and the pain and expense of treatment..

Acting on a so-called "tip”, police smashed the front door of Ann Halliburton, in Far Rockaway, New Jersey, rushed into her bedroom, thrust guns into her face, and handcuffed her. She had no drugs. By now you’re wondering: How come The Match puts this common, garden-variety, drug raid police roust into this column? THOUSANDS of these occur! Well, the reason is that this one is news: not finding any actual drugs there, the police left after only mistreating Ms. Halliburton severely; but they did not, in this case, plant some drugs there to justify their indefensible conduct. We wonder if Ms. Halliburton realizes what a narrow squeak she had.

Alameda California cop Sean Lynch ran across a 30-year-old homeless man, Jimmy Robert, sleeping next to his few possessions in an abandoned railroad yard. Pumping five shots into the man, killing him, the cop set himself up for his colleagues to call him,,, a hero. The victim, needless to say, "lunged” at the officer, and a hunting knife was found conveniently nearby. Interestingly enough this was the third person this officer had shot. He must have a bad effect on people.

Jerrold Hall, walking away from a police officer after being told to lie down on the ground so cops could verify that Hall really owned the radio he was carrying, said: "What are you going to do, shoot me?” The answer to that question was emphatically YES; Hall was blasted in the back of the head with a shotgun, no doubt while lunging backward at the officer.

At least 20 "suspects” being transported in Philadelphia police vans have been injured in recent years when cop drivers, for amusement, subjected them to the so-called Nickel Ride. A "part of street training”, according to a retired cop, the deliberately quick accelerations, abrupt sharp turns and sudden stops are fun for police, but a serious matter for handcuffed passengers with nothing to hang onto and no way to keep from being flung around the steel box where they're confined. Broken bones, a broken neck, and complete paralysis have been some of the sad results of this rotten "play”. The police commissioner professed to be "unaware” that officers would injure transported prisoners on purpose.

A cop who worked the after-midnight shift in Chattanooga had fun with people he was desiring to terrorize; in lieu of getting a citation or being arrested, he made them take off their clothing in public places. He did get fired from the force for this, though apparently reaped no other penalties. Just a bad apple you say? An anomalous psycho hired by mistake? Hmmm. He was in fact the Chattanooga Police Department’s Officer of the Year, two years ago.

Suppose you are Joe Smith. That’s your name. It’s a common name, perhaps, but yours. Being a 55-year-old black man, you don’t fret over the fact that a 20-years-younger white man bears the same name. You figure anyone can tell the difference. That’s what James E. Parker thought too. However, another fellow, James M. Parker, was wanted by the police in Attleboro, Massachusetts (they don’t call it "Massa” for nothing), so they nailed the black man. Even though they "soon realized their mistake”, by then they’d already charged James E. with "Assault on a Police Officer”, and he spent time in jail and was under probation before the charges were at last dismissed, six months later. The police chief shrugged and says he's sorry, but racial profiling had nothing to do with it. Sure. Anybody could mix up those two guys. We wonder how sorry he is. Suppose he’s sorry enough?

Arrested and convicted, Ansche Hedgepeth has to undergo counseling. She also has a sentence of "community service” (slavery) to perform. Her fingerprints are now on file with those of many millions of other Americans — how many millions is difficult to know, but at present 3% of Americans are known to be either in prisons or on probation. She was handcuffed and the laces pulled out of her shoes so she couldn’t run away (or maybe commit suicide). Her crime? Eating some french fries in a Washington DC subway station. Ansche is 12 years old.

As an example of how police and high powered government agents can mistreat or destroy people and suffer no consequences at all, here’s a case that came to light recently: After spending THIRTY years in prison for a murder he did not commit, Joseph Salvati was released. It turned out that he had been railroaded by the FBI, which never turned over to the defense some reports showing Salvati was framed by a vicious hit-man who had become a government witness. FBI agent H. Paul Rico, now 76 years old, who was largely and apparently knowingly responsible for sending Salvati into that hell, coldly shrugged off questions this May about what he did to this man. “What do you want— tears?” When asked if he cared that he could have given the court his report showing Salvati was innocent, Rico sneered: “It would probably be a nice movie or something, but I don’t know."

MeanwhiIe, 15-year-old Michael Barker of Columbus Ohio faces six years in prison for spitting in a police officer’s Coke at a fast-food joint.

There are beatings and beatings. The “beating” that David Shawn Pope received is an unusual variety: having just been freed after almost 15 years in prison for a rape he did not commit (as perhaps proven by modern analysis of evidence), Mr. Pope has received a bill from the State. He supposedly owes, because of a “law" requiring prisoners to pay for college courses taken in prison, $2300. What does the STATE owe HIM for fifteen years spent behind bars? NOTHING.

Another wonderful example of the fine concern the State exhibits for people’s rights, is the government-sponsored beating of Richard Danziger. During 13 years spent in prison that resulted from a police beaten-out confession and implication of himself by another man who didn’t commit the original crime either, Danziger got severely kicked in the head by another prisoner. After evidence slowly emerged against the most strenuous exertions of prosecutors and police, showing that Danziger was innocent, police-state grudgingly admitted that he should be released. But, because of the prison beating, he’s now brain-damaged and has a hard time getting along on his own. He gets no compensation for this outrageous theft of his life and his physical abilities because “federal prosecutors" and “the Police Department’s internal affairs unit” found no “wrongdoing" in his case. I guess the conduct of these officials was “right-doing”.

Criminal charges won’t be filed against Modesto California cop David Hawn.Hawn killed 11-year- old Alberto Sepulveda as Alberto lay face-down on the floor during another botched drug raid in September,2000. Shooting the kid with a shotgun was “excusable homicide”.

Dozens of victims of the Los Angeles Police Department have come to light in recent probes that reveal cops as, in the words of the Los Angeles Times late last year: “reigning over secret domains, ...governed by codes of behavior of their devising, liberated from normal life... in a shadow world,” where “they can come to feel like royalty, true princes of the city and masters of all they survey.” An apt description of cop psychology, but missing one contributory dimension: They couldn’t do it without the quiet acquiescence of the press all the rest of the time. Sure, once some scandal of this magnitude comes to light, complete with large-scale payoffs and police drug-dealing, the press gets on it for another short season. Later, though, they will revert to being cheerleaders for the “thin blue line”that supposedly is the sole barrier holding back “chaos".

Arrested while sitting in her car beside the road, crying after having had a quarrel with her boyfriend, Angelina Torres probably didn’t think “What a nice young man!” when the officer drove her around for a while, then stopped the car, ordered her to strip down to her underwear, and walk some blocks through the streets to her home.

After this last story hit the news, other young women in the same New York area began coming forward with similar stories. Jennifer Charles, arrested in 1998 for driving with a suspended, license, was subjected to extended one-on-one holding cell visits by a burly plainclothes cop who terrorized her with overt sexual comments and strong suggestions that his intention was rape.

Giving nazis like THIS limitless power is what we have to do to stave off “anarchy”?

Another woman, Juliana Rubio, 19, was also forced to strip by police. Josephine Castello, cleaning snow off her car in a parking lot, had a cop stop to “‘help” her.(Such a nice young man.) "Then, after we were done,” she recalls, he gave her a strange look and said: “You know, I could have killed you.” Horrified, Ms. Castello hurled herself into her car and got out of there. Far from hallucinating that cops are “nice young men” now, she says firmly: “I don’t trust cops now, just because they’re cops.”

In other words, Ms. Castello has now glimpsed that snake in her path. Can her warning make you see it too? If so, we’re all better off.

Quoted in the New York Post concerning this situation, an anonymous New York Police Department “commander” blustered this way when asked what women should do when stopped by male police in lonely places: “Can you call 911? ...I’m not going to allow you to do that. I I can order you out of your car. We can order you out of your clothes.”

Getting more into his snarling rant, the unnamed “commander” turned up his rhetoric: “If I arrest you for a traffic violation”, he raved. “I’m going to run my hand over every part of your body — your boobs and between your legs. I’m looking for guns and other weapons. It doesn’t matter what sex you are. “With a male you always grab the genitals through the pants.” This psychopathic sex-criminal gives new significance to Mae West’s once amusing inquiry, “Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?” Cops seem so preoccupied with their "weapons” that some dimension of sexual repression or substitution is bound to be involved, but the question one yearns to see put to the Commander is how MANY people he has run across through this procedure who turned out to have box-cutters in their panties (HE said it, not me!) or .357s taped to the underside of their penis? Such anatomical prodigies

should surely have some better way to spend their time than riding around on lonely, police- haunted streets in the dead of night.

You may perhaps remember the Ismael Mena case mentioned here in The Match two issues ago. in Denver, police raided the home of Ismael Mena without knocking or producing their sham search warrant. They ended up killing Mr. Mena, and were at the "wrong” address. (There is no right one.for them, EVER.) The cop who signed the request for the search warrant, relying on the shopworn anonymous tip, got the maximum penalty of the law, 150 hours of community service. He'll also be on probation for a year, but could eventually return to the police force.

The judge who rubber-stamped the search warrant without investigating it in the least, ought to be buried in the deepest pit of Hell, but in reality will have huge retirement benefits and get elected President of the Rotary Club.

While Annette Amoroso, the woman whose eye was shot out, "only” then got arrested for “interfering with an investigation,” victims in Oakland California had heavier charges fall on them when cops wanted to excuse the sadistic beatings and other damage they’d just inflicted in their routine, swaggering nastiness. Cops working night shifts in Oakland formed a specially brutal gang that called itself “The Riders”. Its members routinely worked people over for the sheer pleasure of it, then always falsified reports to claim that arrested people were attacking them, fighting, etc. Police carried bags of crack cocaine to plant at arrest scenes so that the people they ruined would be smirked at in court as stupid, middle-class jurors exchanged winks with the uniformed monsters. As some of this was revealed in court this past June, one young witness testified that after a man named Delphine Allen was tortured mercilessly, cops ended their shift and went out to breakfast, joking about what they’d done. Drawing, on a place mat, a crude picture of Allen’s bleeding head, one cop chortled to another: “Jude, you’re going to have to peel his cornea off your elbow.” Here is some of what they did to Allen: First, they handcuffed him. All tyrants and bullies want to prevent the oppressed from defending themselves so the first thing they do is to take away their firearms or tie their hands.

Next they forced Allen to the ground and drove knees into his back. He was beaten, taken to the police car, beaten some more, and sprayed with chemical mace. They then drove away with him and took him to an isolated area under a freeway overpass, where they beat him for a solid quarter of an hour.

During the early portions of this arrest, police directed a rookie cop to “find” a bag of crack on the ground near where they crushed their knees into the hapless man’s back. Later, in the concluding phase of this outrage, they presented Allen, now sobbing, with a certain paper to sign. He signed it. Such nice young men.

The biggest fear of actor Anthony Dwain Lee, reportedly, was getting killed by police — because Lee, a tall black man, had seen all too clearly how these protectors of society really behaved. He was shot to death by Los Angeles cops while attending a Halloween party.

Jack Dreyer, of Kokomo Indiana, was detained for being drunk. He was arrested and after a time admitted to a local emergency room where he was treated for severe intoxication. Police then took the arrested man away. Hours later, Mr. Dreyer was found unconscious in a roadway, and he later died of the following injuries, as found at autopsy: subdural hematoma and basilar skull fracture; multiple blunt force injuries to the head. It’s clear what happened to him, but the system which can convict anyone else in moments on the slightest evidence and incredible evidence of jailhouse snitches and so forth,

HUD’S HOUSES FOR COPS PROGRAM FLOUNDERS IN FRAUD

Readers will recall the glowing picture painted by the academic we cited last issue in our CrapDetection department, of the wonderful new list century police. So excellent, so vital to society are these officers, he chanted, that homes were being made available to cops, through the department of Housing and Urban Development, for tiny prices and as little as $100 down.

We stated then that such a program probably had more to do with inserting cops into neighborhoods to keep track of people than to “help” them; and we expressed doubt that the “new” police would be any more decent than the regular OLD police.

Subsequently, as reported by the Associated Press on March 4, dozens of cops, possibly hundreds across the country, have used the HUD program to get hold of cheap houses... and have turned around and sold the places for high prices or profiteered by renting them out at hefty rates.

These are the excellent new-style police that we’re to regard as fundamentally different from the usual old vicious and corrupt ones?

Copstopper's Notebook

@@@[[]]

WHAT IF they show up at your house? First: Don’t let them in. You don’t have to give your consent to any search of your house, car, or person, unless they have a warrant. Politely refuse and tell them to contact your lawyer. If you do consent to a search it can affect your rights later on in court.

Needless to say, in our modern times of noknock raids, you don’t have a chance to ask to see any warrant, as the gestapo will burst in screaming and shouting orders, firing chemicals at your face, and discharging 'flash-bang” disorientation grenades. But in case there is a possibility that anyone can hear you over the din, at least SAY the words *1 do not consent to this search,” on the off-chance that you may be recorded and they forget to erase the tape, so that this will subsequently put their raid in the light of a disallowed 'illegal” search.

Secondly; If they do have a search warrant, ask to see it. Make sure everything is correct (assuming that they give you time to examine it). If they conduct a search, watch them closely, unless, of course, you are lying on the floor hogtied and unable to breathe, or have a SWAT member’s boot on your neck. Try to make sure they do not exceed the boundaries set by the warrant, although with fifty masked officers ransacking your tiny apartment in a frenzied uproar, that will obviously be impossible— particularly when none of the mask-wearing cops has a name-tag so you can’t tell who is doing what, even if you’re allowed to look. Do not interfere with or obstruct the search; you can be arrested for doing so; but know that you will in reality be arrested for obstructing, or for 'resisting arrest” or “aggravated assault” no matter what you do. Basically, once it comes to this pass, you are a dead man and you may as well realize it.

Thirdly, however, SAY NOTHING. You do not have to answer questions. It is not a crime to refuse to answer questions, even if they have a warrant, although it may make you appear suspicious. What you say to the police is always important, and it will be used against you and others, even if it is something that you think could not possibly be used against you because it is your denial of any crime. They are not interested in hearing your denials and will not believe them in any case, so remain silent unless the torture they inflict on you (known as “pain compliance holds’ on your nose, or jabbing into your eyes) is more than you can withstand. There is no shamefulness in breaking down under torture.

Fourthly: Try not to be intimidated. Be polite but firm. DO NOT THREATEN them. Consider that if there is anything you desire to do in retaliation some time in the future, warning them about it is a service to them and a liability to you. Do not try to outwit or question them; they have the upper hand and are not going to give you one bit of useful information or, indeed, any statement whatsoever that is not a lie. Meanwhile, they will be extracting information from YOU, and even a bit of something seemingly harmless can help them to hurt you or others.

Fifth: Keep a record, if possible, of everything they say or do. Write it down as soon as possible afterwards. If you are a political activist and believe that there is some chance you will be raided, have a microcassette tape recorder handy that you can activate and shove into a hiding place. Carry such a recorder in your car and place it—activated—under the dashboard or in some other hiding place as soon as it looks as if you’re going to be confronted by police.

will, we wager, never deliver a verdict against any police officers in this case.

Detroit police were becoming so brutal that even the Justice Department felt bound to conduct some nominal investigation based on claims that “the police department has engaged in a pattern or practice of violating individuals' constitutional rights by using excessive force and providing inadequate conditions of confinement to pretrial detainees.” Oh, good: now they'll just use REGULAR (not "excessive”) force, and persons ruined and terrorized by crazy, needless arrests will now be confined in "adequate” conditions! The mayor stated there’d be immediate reforms such as this shocking body-blow to the police system: Investigations of police shootings would be transferred from the Homicide Section, to Internal Affairs.

"The Justice Department doesn’t even count (instances of) the use of force by police departments,” notes Victor Kappeler, a former cop and now criminal justice professor at Eastern Kentucky University. "If we don't have data on shootings and beatings by police officers,there’s no way they’re going to have numbers on this.” The "this” he refers to is sexual assault, verbal abuse, strip searches, and other mistreatment that has a sexual dimension. This researcher comments that police officers are imposing "punishment — their own sense of a kind of order, clearly designed to humiliate and denigrate women ” He adds: ‘‘If you actually knew the numbers of incidents... and police deviance, the public would have a very different view of police officers."

Recent reports of cop sexual abuse have included those already noted in this column,plus cases in which officers sexually harassed 16-year-old girls, fondled women stopped for traffic violations, forced them into sexually compromising positions, and assaulted handcuffed female arrestees.

In the Wallkill, New York case involving mass sexual attacks on women drivers and others, a local newspaper's expose resulted in "mass ticketings” by police in an effort to retaliate against the paper and the people who’d complained. This is highly significant because it shows that police are at the point where they are ALMOST above even mass, informed public opinion.

People who’ve seen this lying and utterly unaccountable (in most cases) horrific abuse of power are shocked and changed by the experience. Take Anthony Robinson, for instance. In 1986 he was falsely accused of a serious crime.

He saw how confidently police and prosecutors behaved in court, and what forces they arrayed against him. Ten years later, when new testing of evidence proved he was innocent, he was released from prison. But NOW, knowing how possible it is that he could be stopped for a broken taillight and subjected to police accusations again, he carries a copy of the "pardon ” everywhere he goes. He’s 40 years old now, but has nothing (and of course, no compensation from the State). He is now married, but insists on maintaining a separate apartment from his wife because he’s afraid the viciously insane "authorities” will come after him again, and harm her in the act of a typical savage arrest. He becomes panic-stricken whenever he sees a police car, and he now tries to account for every second of his time in case police "try to pin another phony charge” on him. Whenever he leaves or arrives at a place, he tries to make sure he has a witness. He now knows the truth about the Protectors of Society— he was convicted even though his fingerprints didn’t match those at the crime scene, and there was no other hard evidence linking him to the crime. Once the police system swung behind the effort to call him guilty, the Constitution he had sworn as a soldier to defend, now had no defense for HIM He told himself, "I’m dead.” Now he’s back among the living. But changed by the truth.

An Austin Texas cop has been returned to the force despite four infractions of the so-called law, including drunk driving and lying on official documents. In Las Cruces New Mexico another fatally shoots two homeless men. At Sing Sing prison a prison guard (cop) crushes five young cats to death in a trash compactor. In Oregon a pregnant woman was stomped by police and jailers and left without medical attention. In Dalton Georgia a 13-year-old kid was put in restraints and arrested for refusing to clean up ketchup on a cafeteria chair. In Texas a middle-aged couple were held at gunpoint as over a dozen yelling, nasty police raided their home, tearing down curtains and ransacking possessions after receiving a "tip” that plants in the yard resembled marijuana. (They weren't.)

In Chicago hundreds of uniformed police stalked into a courtroom during a trial of a man accused of killing a cop, One juror became almost hysterical with fear. In Afghanistan police patrol endlessly, lashing with whips people who fail to howl at Allah ten times a day. In Australia police are thought to be becoming an irresponsible paramilitary force because of a mere 50 or so police killings in more than TEN years. Mexican police have provoked another Human Rights Watch report condemning their routine use of torture. South African cops continue to promote beatings and murder. Malaysian police

But why go on? A letter in a Portland Oregon newspaper (a mainstream paper, significantly) commented : “I was once the recipient of police misconduct. It ruined my education and my family relations. This bully still walks his beat and I assume will collect a pension. Some police do lie, commit crimes and destroy lives. I fear them just as much as the Jews feared the Nazis.”

REINING IN THE POLICE?

IN THE OPINION of this writer, no society will ever be really free if it has police. Nevertheless, it is certainly true that conditions would be improved for most people if the police could be reined in, and we who perforce live in this society would be a little freer and safer from being beaten and robbed if the following policies were enacted. Please note, however, that the following are in the nature of “thought experiments”, NOT suggestions in any way intended as expressions of Anarchism.

1. The profiting, by police (either individually or collectively), from money or other assets seized by them in the course of arrests, ought to be banned under Conflict of Interest laws. Such laws already prohibit regulators and others from profiting off property or transactions that come under their official sphere of control, as it is believed that they would otherwise be too often motivated to conduct public policy according to its potential for their own personal gain.

2. Term limits, now in place here and there for some politicians, ought to be imposed on police. No person should be permitted to be a police officer or administrator for more than five consecutive years; and following such a period of employment, an interval of not less than fifteen years must elapse before such a person is again permitted to work in this capacity. No pensions shall be provided, and, in the case of repeat employment after the fifteen-year interval, officers will receive the basic, entry-level wage scale, not any wage artificially enhanced.

   It may be argued that this will deprofessionalize police; but if so it will also tend to rotate their jobs among younger persons and prevent the growth of jaded, corrupt cliques with little stake in normal society due to their formation of a separate police society as is the case now.

3. Special steps must be taken to extirpate the sinister police-culture that exists today and that tends to thicken with time. As ex-convicts and some military personnel are already, police should be prohibited from fraternizing with other police, by which term are included traffic agents, prison guards, detectives, all agents and employees of federal, state, or local investigative or enforcement agencies, security guards, or anyone that a person of normal intelligence understands to be an officer with powers causing arrest or detainment of private individuals.

   In the case of persons whose spouses or family members are also police, no exception is to be made physicians’ malpractice insurance, is to be paid for by individual police men and women, not by any public entity or “government”, and in the case of insurance settlements in excess of $1000 for police abuse of private individuals, police are to forfeit triple the amount paid by the insurer.

   Claims against police for abuse, including insurers’ payments, and forfeits by police to damaged parties, are to be resolved within ten working days, unless extensive litigation is required, in which case police’ insurers must place twenty five (25) times the amount of the demanded damages in escrow pending resolution of the suit.

4. No officer who is involved in any way with an incident of force that causes the death of any person, OR substantial bodily injury to anyone, shall thereafter work as a police officer, or draw any salary or benefits of any kind from the date the incident took place, onward.

5. No person employed in any police capacity is to be permitted to comment publicly about any matter of public policy touching on police matters. Specifically, no advocacy of laws or prison facilities that could constitute an effort at broadening the sphere of influence of police officers or organizations.

   This restraint is in recognition of the fact that policing is a grave danger to society, a truth which many societies have failed to see and have fallen, as a result, into police-state tyrannies.

1. All police officers must be instantly identifiable as such, by their real names, printed or sewn on their uniforms, both front and back, facing outward, in clearly visible letters not less than one inch high and a normal, readable lateral width. Everyone working as a police officer shall be listed in a public directory, under this same real name, and shall there be shown along with their real, current street address of residency, to be updated by special published addendum whenever residency is' changed for any period longer than two weeks cumulatively in a year’s period.

OF COURSE if these provisions ever got anywhere near widespread public consideration, a terrible roar would burst forth from police. They would scream that these amount to abridgements of their freedom. But that would be the first time they ever complained about any such loss by anyone; and in that fact one glimpses the pressure that draws civilization perpetually down into greater imprisonment under police control.

AFTER DECADES OF FALSE CONVICTIONS

Within a year, one expert predicts, a court will bar fingerprint “evidence” as unscientific junk. Because defense attorneys never had as much clout as government prosecutors demanding to introduce testimony about prints at trials, for about 90 years courts have accepted an extremely flawed procedure for identifying persons. Any smudged or blurry or partial print may be argued to look like a clear one from your finger, and no firm basis exists for judgment in such cases — which are the majority.

“I would predict that within the next year, some judge will write an opinion excluding fingerprinting,” said Prof David Faigman of the UC Hastings College of Law. “It’s inevitable. The research (on fingerprinting) is just toothin.”

What remedy will be made for this century of harm done to countless innocent persons?

LAW ENFORCEMENT STATE

According to the L.A. Times/Washington Post News Service, Sept. 3, there are fewer “service” personnel in government and more cops and prison guards than ever before. Quoted is James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern U., who said: “We may be serving them with subpoenas as opposed to serving them with housing and food. So we’re doing more regulating than serving...”

How about backing off and moving toward doing none of either?

OBOY, HERE IT COMES

As authoritarian rhetoric, flag-waving, compulsory “pledging” of “allegiance” (to the FLAG), calls for mandatory National ID cards and all the rest of the insane overreaction occurs that sends the U.S. spiraling even farther into the same orbit as its hated Taliban enemy, we hear talk of “The Homeland” and “Indefinite Detention”.

To hear the authentic voice of the pathetically typical American, let’s listen to these words of a recent letter-writer to the NY Times:

“President Bush is right to channel homeland efforts to prevent terrorism by appointing...the new post of director of the Office of Homeland Security ...

“As I remember my father, a civilian air raid warden during World War II, going out for an hour each night to make sure everyone had the shades down, so I can imagine senior citizens all over the country, armed only with cellphones, helping the local authorities by immediately reporting unusual activity ...”

And what’s unusual? It’ll be anything that the regimentarians don’t like or want to punish you for. A last assault by that “great” generation.

POLICE-STATE JOURNALISM

That monumental edifice of sycophancy toward the police, Tucson’s ‘‘Arizona Daily Star” newspaper, reached a new purity of collaboration with police agencies this last July 15. On the front page was a “news” story supplied by police, a photograph supplied by police, and even open and overt censorship of the photo— by police.

The ‘‘news” article, one of these scare stories that pumps public fear and results in high newspaper sales that day (but which you never hear about again because there was nothing to it), bore the headlines: ‘‘Arizona Border Alert” and ‘‘Brutal Cartel Moving In”.

‘‘A drug smuggling cartel with a reputation for brutality is making a move on the Arizona-Mexico border,” the item screamed. “DEA is expecting action by infamous Tijuana drug ring.”

Paragraph after paragraph quoted police... and no one else. No reporter went after facts and got them: the ‘‘reporter” merely listened and nodded and wrote on his copy-pad as cops dictated.

The large photograph topping the article (it is four by eight inches) shows one handcuffed and frightened-looking man surrounded by burly men in various police vests The photo credit reads: ‘‘Photos courtesy of Drug Enforcement Administration.”

Faces of the police in the picture ‘‘are blurred to hide their identity.”

I guess that makes them a SECRET POLICE, doesn’t it? And what does THAT make this newspaper?

Crap-Detection Department

"It's an amazing automatic crap-detector," she said drily. "No home should be without one."

-Dream World

CONSIDERING some of the items that have received notice in this column over the past

years, it may seem hard to believe that we have now whiffed out probably the most incredible one yet, but surely it’s true. See what you think after reading this notice from the September 14, 2001 edition of the Arizona Daily Star (sec. B, page 3):

“LIBRARIES TO MARK BANNED BOOKS WEEK. The Downtown Tucson Public Library will join library branches across town in marking Banned Books Week, Sept. 22 through Sept. 29. The library hopes to call attention to hundreds of worthwhile books that would-be censors have tried to ban. ‘Libraries and bookstores across the country want to really help remind people of some of our freedoms that we need to safeguard,’ library spokeswoman Elizabeth Burden said.

“‘We want to say what a great loss it would be if these books were banned... It’s important to make them available.’ "

And what books are in this horrible danger of being subjected to censorship? What ones are direly threatened with being unavailable, relegated to dark corners and kept off the library shelves if not for heroic, enlightened efforts like this one?

“...Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (and) J. K. Rowling’s popular Harry Potter books..."

HARRY POTTER! The recipient of uncounted millions of dollars of publicity, much of it donated by newspapers and other willing accomplices of the billion-dollar promotion machine dedicated to thrusting a copy of this chunk of printing into the hands of every man, woman and child — possibly every infant — in the Englishspeaking world!

HARRY POTTER — the lurid covers in carefully painted likenesses of a young Bill Gates, no doubt to cross-reference propaganda for his own giant corporation at the same time!

Harry Potter — millions sold! Libraries buying as many as 80 copies APIECE to meet the artificially pumped demand created by incredible “best-seller" lists published before a single copy is sold! Inflated by newspapers with as many as five separate articles in one single edition, examining, hyping, promoting, and bludgeoning parents and schools to lay down their cash lest young Johnny and Sally feel deprived as EVERYONE ELSE reads HARRY !

Censorship? You want to hear about CENSORSHIP?! In the city where I’ve been writing and publishing for 32 years, NOT ONE SINGLE WORD of mine resides in any branch of the public library system.

“Each library branch will mark the week differently .Some branches will wrap targeted books in plain brown wrappers, and those who check them out will receive bookmarks and other commemorative items. The Downtown branch will cater to area workers with ‘brown bag banned book lunch specials’ displayed on carts decorated like food vendors’ wagons..."

As for Maya Angelou : How somebody who was feted by the Clinton administration, published slavishly by major outfits no matter what feeble swill she produced, and anthologized in one-half of the high school textbooks of this country, can be regarded in any way as having even the most distant resemblance to a censorship victim, is a topic on which I will offer no further remarks.

AS readers will remember, we’ve been discussing in recent issues the topic of fingerprints and their reliability (or the lack of it). The criticism we‘ve been making of this form of identification has focused, NOT on any attempt to claim that people have identical prints, but on the simple fact that fingerprint “evidence" consisting of blurry or partial prints has to be INTERPRETED by POLICE. We believe that such judgments are subjective, and therefore far from accurate in many cases.

And as we mentioned last issue, this mistrust of fingerprinting is catching on: articles in a number of publications around the world are questioning the reliability of fingerprint evidence and looking at its possible role in sending innocent people to jaiL A book out from Harvard University Press attacks fingerprinting, and in more than one courtroom attorneys are trying to get it banned as ’“junk science’¹.

In such a climate it is highly instructive to observe who it is who DEFENDS print evidence.

For some years now we have watched the Sunday supplement magazine, “Parade”, which is included with the gigantic weekend editions of many daily newspapers. Parade is in many ways reminiscent of some Soviet-style party organ in which truth about events is only gleaned by careful separation of the propaganda, and then trying to understand the reasons FOR that propaganda.

Like all real totalitarian organs. Parade has no true letters column; the closest thing to one is the “Ask Marilyn” feature by the woman with the highest IQ allegedly ever measured, Marilyn vos Savant. Here letters appearing under her cadaverous-looking photo pose “questions¹ ranging from the idle to the disingenuous. In the April 22 issue this year, she suddenly gets a letter asking about fingerprints. It s from “Richard S Emerson, city not provided”. (Unusual, the newspaper that Parade Magazine comes wrapped in, in Arizona anyway, forbids the publication of letters from readers unless accompanied by full identification including address and phone number—clearly excluding the homeless and others who lack telephone service.)

At any rate, in response to Mr. “Emerson’s” convenient letter, Ms. vos Savant gets a chance to reaffirm the “everybody knows” wisdom of fingerprints, and needless to say, does NOT get within twenty miles of the real issue: comparison of equivocal prints, particularly when the original finger tips they were printed from are rather similar (which is frequently the case).The large-type subhead for her column says: “Fingerprints ARE unique, but that’s not why they’re a great ID.”

What IS the reason why they’re such a 'great ID”? Well, it’s that they don’t change— as if that justifies comparing smudgy or partial prints. Surely this is an example of an FBI-planted item if there ever was one.

ONE of the reasons for printing the comments above, about Parade Magazine, is to set the stage for looking at another column that appeared in that magazine’s issue for July 1, 2001. It’s titled “Why I Love America.”

“In 1956, at the height of the Cold War, Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev threatened America with the famous words, ‘We will bury you.’ Today,his son,Sergei Khrushchev, reveals why he chose to become a U.S. citizen.”

Now, clearly of course the whole article that follows is just Readers’ Digest-style tendentious junk. It would not be worth regarding here except for one very interesting example of the old Big Lie technique. This Khrushchev says:

“I could write what I wanted (in America) and publish every word...

“The great thing about this country is that people aren’t trying to suppress their neighbors.”

Of course he can write, and get every word published — because he’s saying what the U.S. government (and Parade Magazine) want to hear (and want YOU to hear). But suppose he were to say, instead of the above: “It’s a shame about America. People are always trying to suppress their neighbors.” What then? And which.of the two statements is actually true?

Well, in this country laws are passed against anything that religious pressure groups, liberal buttinskies, and conservative fascists don’t like. From the Drug War all the way down to neighborhood associations that want to give you orders to paint your house (and tell you what color too), the most salient fact about America is, in truth, that Americans are overwhelmingly EAGER to “suppress their neighbors”.

Look at the number of snitch hotlines currently in operation: Newspapers regularly print telephone numbers to call if you want to get at your “neighbors”—there are numbers for reporting too - frequent yard sales, unlicensed dogs, straying cats, private drug usage, loud mufflers, allegedly unsafe driving, rude gestures made in traffic, water wastage (a few drops on the sidewalk get you a $250 fine in some localities), alleged gang membership, operating an unlicensed business, failing to pay tax, looking like a crook seen on TV, allegedly owing childsupport, having too many weeds in your yard, or storing an inoperative car in your driveway, or WORKING on such a car there; not having a young passenger in a car buckled into a child restraint seat; possible use of unauthorized software; too many or suspicious visitors at your home; people living beyond their apparent level of income; yards with containers in them possibly contributing to mosquito-breeding...

In The Match’s home city there’s a busybody who walks around looking for containers as tiny as a small saucer that might collect water; he immediately phones in the tip. And, as is usual in most of these instances, that’s ALL it takes; people have the bureaucracy descend on them and they become embroiled, on the unsubstantiated word of one anonymous informant, in a nightmarish effort to prove themselves unguilty.

More include: hotlines to report "aggressive drivers[2]’, people with flowers growing in their gardens that could possibly (with the utmost efforts of expert chemists) be transformed into opium; gun-snitch hotlines (in Connecticut a neighbor can report that you have a gun and may be mentally ill, and on that claim alone the police will raid your home and remove any legal weapons you may own.)

And of course any disgruntled enemy of yours is GOING to be believed as a matter of course if he or she phones in an allegation that you have been abusing your child or children. This never seems to stop actual child abusers, but it has a way of bringing to bear a lot of muscle against precisely the most innocent parents

(This writer once saw his next-door neighbor in a state of real terror because one of her kids had got some kind of scratch and bruise on the way to school, and SHE was called in and going to have to account for it satisfactorily the next morning,)

Professor Khrushchev (that’s right; America is so good it called him all the way from Russia to be a "Senior Fellow" at Brown University) is seen in a photo in Parade Magazine holding a tiny American flag and pretending to read a book called "Welcome to USA Citizenship". But this stooge for lying propaganda knows nothing of the totalitarianism outside his ivory tower.

FROM Onward, Anarchist News, Opinion, Theory and Strategy of Today (third issue) comes proof that crap gets abundantly excreted in these circles also. The following is from a short item entitled "Men Hijack Gender Conference":

"Near the beginning of the conference, women and men took turns telling each other what each needed the other sex to know and what their feelings were about the other sex. Most of the men’s comments centered on the help they needed from the women, putting us once again in the position of the ‘nurturer’, expected to help the men deal with their subjugation of women ...

“After this exercise... the men began a process of gender-healing, discussing the ways society forced upon them ‘masculine’ archetypes. When the men and women regrouped, the teary- eyed faces of the men were thrust upon us. The facilitators of the conference warned us that the men had gone ‘very deep’ and were extremely vulnerable. In the activities that followed, the men repeatedly compared their ‘oppression’ to ours ...”

Which, of course, is intolerable because only women and "people of color" are ever oppressed at all. If the female writer of the piece had to register for the draft she might feel a little different, but it doesn’t really matter, since anybody who attends a "Gender Conference” is an idiot. Such events are pure crap.

PLASTER is sacred and would be given a “decent burial", the Arizona Daily Star reported in issues on and around Feb. 16. After some vandal defaced or wrecked about 35 plaster statues of "saints" inside a mortuary chapel near Tucson, the local paper hit the roof, bellowing for days as if these inanimate objects were human beings — or even MORE important than people, since victims of disfiguring beating attacks don’t get anywhere near this level of publicity and outrage from the local press.

“The statues in the chapel were special, Estrada said. They were prayed to for special petitions or intercession. People truly believe in the power of the saints ..."

(Notice how rapidly these things went from being STATUES of “saints”, to being called "saints", period. And what kind of "power" did they have if they couldn’t even prevent their own destruction?)

“...and establish close relationships with them. The saints are integral to their Roman Catholic faith,”

(What? Even more integral than their Bible itself, which commands them not to worship graven images? For an insight into media unfairness, consider that if this same paper were were reporting on some Anarchist organization, by this time the reporter would be interjecting sly jabs to the effect that there’d be a "contradiction” here because "Anarchists don’t believe in organizing”. While THAT isn’t a tenet of Anarchism at all, for Christians the injunction against worshipping statues IS. Think the paper ever mentioned THAT real contradiction? Guess again.)

“The saints are real to those who believe in them. They take on personalities... Because of the profound attachment to the statues, the elders have decided to give the statues a private burial...”

AROUND & ABOUT

I WANT TO TELL YOU about something that appeared on the front page of Section B of The New York Times, September 11. But before I do, some other remarks will be in order.

I myself am not a terrorist. I am a dissident and a critic — one who believes that the government of this country (along with the governments of all countries) is an illegitimate, criminal enterprise. I have actively resisted the draft, the census, police roadblocks, cop helicopters and cameras, forcible fingerprinting, and many other governmental activities which I believe are destructive to freedom and even life itself.

But I’m not a terrorist.

I object also to religion—not just organized religion, but to belief in “god”, which for very good reasons seems like an irrational and ruinous malady of thought. (Of course I hold that if people want to set aside some portion of their minds for religious lunacy and observance, it is and should be their right to do so, just like it is their right to lop off digits on their own hands or feet, or mutilate or destroy anything else on their own bodies if they want.) As long as they leave me, and my mind and body, alone, I say they can certainly think as they wish, though I still object to such ludicrous nonsense as the assertion that a “god” exists. So I’m definitely an atheist as well as an anarchist.

I’m not a terrorist, though.

Now, for the views I hold, society has mobilized an official response that has added up, over the course of my adult lifetime, to what could be compared to a medieval excommunication. I’ve been pushed to the fringes of life, been forced to vacate homes I rented as landlord bullies retaliated for something I said in some public place; been denied jobs; been victimized in legal proceedings through pure malicious prosecution. Professionally speaking, as a writer my expressions have been systematically denied

access to forums where readers could consider my views. So-called antidiscrimination laws always specify very narrowly what persons cannot be singled out for ill-treatment, and those laws invariably exclude me from their alleged protection. (But don’t get me wrong; I don’t look to any laws for any help or protection, ever.)

I judge that I have paid a very considerable price for the peaceful, live-and-let-live, rational views I hold and quietly express ; for instance I will frequently read about someone who has an income of $90,000 a year, and I reflect that that is probably more than I have managed to take in, in my whole life (I’m now 55 years old). Some times I’ve been in serious want; came close to living in a storage locker once, and another time was told most soberly that nothing except my political views had just cost me a very large sum of money. I have some bad things wrong now with a couple of internal organs of my body, but there is absolutely nothing I can do to get them fixed, since I have never had any medical insurance and moreover cannot qualify for any kind of gratis treatment since I have been outside “the system” for too long and have no documentation (and, of course, with my views, I would never accept any assistance from the State even if it would offer it, which it won’t). This last price frankly worries me a lot, but I try to investigate my own remedies; in other words I’m thrown on my own resources of knowledge and logic, because for me medical technology may as well not exist at all. Apart from knowledge available in books, I may as well be crash-landed on an alien planet, or living in the year 1300.

All just because of my views, which are and have always been peaceful and tolerating, though ever ready to interject my own objections.

I’ve even done some behind-the-scenes things that in my opinion might (particularly in one case) have saved lives.

So now, though, let me direct your attention to the front page of the B section of Sept. Il’s New York Times. The future will find it difficult to believe, and popular reality will absolutely deny, that on that fateful date there was publicity devoted there to an outright terrorist.

Yes, the most prestigious newspaper in this entire nation gave over a huge space, 7% by 11 inches, to publicity about a book lately issued which was written by a former terrorist bomber— and an unrepentant one at that.

I read the piece with utter amazement and almost disbelief. By the time the Sept. 11 edition made it to my humble door the evening of that day, the whole world knew that that morning a monster act of terrorism had occurred. In fact, if you add in the Pentagon hit (which is more an act of outright war than terrorism), the Times

piece begins to loom as one of the most towering ironies in the whole history of journalism, because the ex-bomber being touted in the article had, himself, once been involved with bombing that very building.

It was a blurb for the new book by former “Weatherman” Bill Ayers. Not only WAS he a proponent of violence, a bomber, a terrorist, but to all appearances he’s still gloating about it. In a front-page picture with his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, the both of them look smug and unapologetic. “I don’t regret setting bombs,” says Ayers, at the beginning of the 80 square-inch panel of invaluable book-publicity on the front page. On page 3, where the article continues in a huge, sweeping spread of 120 square inches more, he states: “Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon (in 1972).” He also participated in bombing the Capitol building in 1971, and the NYC Police headquarters in 1970.

Now, make no mistake about this: I’m not going to shed any tears over those bombings; all I want to do here is point out how much this fellow has evidently been forgiven or excused by the mainstream America that supposedly hates such acts.

And forgive him they have: Ayers now lives in a “big, turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago."

He “is a distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois."

He “has written a book," published by Beacon Press, and presumably available at Barnes & Noble, B. Dalton Books, Borders, and loads of others where you will NOT find this present journal containing MY writings, and where you will never find MY book, which no mainstream publisher would have touched.

Ayers’ group claimed responsibility for 12 bombings. When asked today if he would do it all again, the distinguished professor smirks, “I don’t want to discount the possibility.”

Ayers’ wife Bernardine Dohrn, who was once on the FBI’s Most Wanted list — for very real acts of violence — is now the director of the Legal Clinic’s Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University. I contrast her situation today with mine, and her past actions with mine: “In 1969, after the Manson family murders in Beverly Hills, Ms. Dohm told an S.D.S. audience: ‘Dig it! Manson killed those pigs, then ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach."

Today she calls this a mere joke, and says, “We were mocking violence in America... I never supported a racist mass murderer."

Maybe not, but neither did I, while you at the very least sure looked to a lot of people like you were. Somehow I, with my atheist and anarchist views, apparently ended up over the long run looking worse than you did, if prosperity is any inverse gauge of social stigma. How on earth can this be?

It’s a conundrum. But I know that if I walked into the “Legal Clinic’s Children and Family Justice Center” and asked for a job, I’d be lucky to get one just as a janitor If I showed up at some university’s “Department of Education” and announced that I too desired to be a distinguished professor, I might just be able to beat an exit before campus “security” got there. I won’t even think about submitting this cry of outrage to “Beacon Press”—whatever that is, no doubt some batch of smarmy, antiliterary profiteers.

But yes; I do in fact “get it”; I realize that it’s an unjust system. But why is it an unjust system? To answer that question I’m afraid we have to borrow a page from psychology, and apply it to society as if society was a conscious being.

Suppose that there are overt, conscious, surface motives of whole civilizations—and hidden, “subconscious” ones too. Suppose that people widely interacting all overtly hate and fear murderous terrorism; but another current, far below the surface, darkly grasps these horrors for their entertainment and spectacular qualities. As subconscious wishes may surface in dreams, the dream of mass society is its movies and television and persons borne aloft as celebrities. Bits of this collective subconscious float up and tug at policies, or at concepts of what constitutes “news”. The sum of all these millions of impulses takes concrete form as profit-motives and publicity imperatives.

Thus, while each of them might think, of some criminal like Ayers, “What scum!”, the demand of the whole mass for gaudy spectacle induces them to say, “Let’s publish his book! Let’s give him front-page publicity!” —instead of saying, if their overt desires were in harmony with their subconscious ones: “Ignore this jerk,”

That’s why he’s there, and I’m here. —K.

ANARCHISM--AS SEEN THROUGH THE PRESS

Images ranging from positive through negative to outright smears give the public a wildly varying impression . . .

POSITIVE.: “Anarchy—Maybe It’s Not What You Think", Reno News & Review, Aug. 30, 2001. This article goes out of its way to counteract the Seattle/Zer-zany misimpression of Anarchists as rioting, window-smashing thugs. That kind of thing, the article flatly states, is at best “an immature grasp of anarchist principles.” And ‘‘at worst, it’s a political ruse used to discredit an otherwise thoughtful philosophical movement.”

The article quotes actual Anarchists, including John Johnson, publisher of Imagine : A Journal of Anarchism, who said: “It seemed so transparent that these alleged anarchists (rioters in ski masks) weren’t anarchists at all.” He attributed such behavior to either “naive kids who didn’t know any better,” or “government plants.”

As for the latter, he continued: “If you read far enough down in the stories — and not all of these accounts made it into the newspaper — you’ll read quotes from observers who said they saw anarchists escorted in near peaceful protesters to start something. That was universal in every report. It’s a typical tactic of government to discredit a group by having its own provocateurs start something and then blame it on violent, ignorant protesters.”

Another, unnamed, Anarchist quoted in the story said he also noticed police infiltrators pretending to be Anarchists: “...beefy, footballplayer types with their brand-new Nike boots...”

The article then goes on at some length with positive, reasonable comments on Anarchist history, and presents rebuttals to the Zerzan “back to the Stone Age” lunacy currently passing for anarchism in some circles.

All in all, a most welcome, balanced, accurate article in a mainstream paper. Our appreciation to Deidre Pike, the reporter who wrote it.

MIXED : “You may be an Anarchist, and not even know it," Utne Reader, May-June 2001. This article was reprinted from the so-called Alternative Press Review, a disguised version (by the same people) of the Journal of Armed

Desire. (Note that this same outfit now has taken over Factsheet Five magazine, meaning that there’ll now be a third indistinguishable clone publishing the slurs on Anarchism generated by police informant B. Black and his buddy, the so-called “Jason McQuinn”.)

The Utne Reader’s reprint from APR claims that John Zerzan, an incredible loon who likes the Unabomber and thinks humanity needs to go back to a hunter-gatherer style of existence, “...can now credibly claim the decidedly dubious honor of being America’s most famous anarchist." Here’s the sort of drivel Zerzan has been spouting for years :

“I’m talking about time not existing. Time, as an abstract continuing ‘thread’ that unravels in an endless progression that links all events together while remaining independent of them. That doesn’t exist. Sequence exists. Rhythm exists. But not time. Part of this has to do with the notion of mass production and division of labor. Tick, tick, tick, as you said. Identical seconds. Identical people. Identical chores repeated endlessly. Well, no two occurrences are identical, and if you are living in a stream of inner and outer experience that constantly brings clusters of new events, each moment is quantitatively and qualitatively different from the moment before. The notion of time simply disappears.

“You might try this: If events are always novel, then not only would routine be impossible, but the notion of time would be meaningless . .."

This absurd crackpot, of course, has zero relevance to actual Anarchism. The reason we labeled Utne’s section as “mixed” in terms of being positive or negative toward Anarchism, is that following Zerzan’s befuddled remarks there is a good, short (much shorter than the cretiniz- ing Zerzan piece, regrettably) summary of Anarchist history which ends on a fine, positive note with these decent words by Chris Dodge: “People who don’t even call themselves anarchists keep the tradition alive by daring to believe that people, not coercive institutions, are best able to build a better world."

Sadly, the time is fast coming when MOST people who keep the tradition alive probably will quit calling themselves Anarchists, as long as the word is gutted and splattered about by the irresponsible or ignorant.

MIXED : “Road Bloc— Seattle’s Black Bloc Fights Its Way Into Canada" in The Stranger, (Seattle paper) May 3, 2001. Some good, accurate statements about anarchism, but mostly overshadowed by the usual verbiage about slovenly, mask-wearing nitwits.

“Anarchism is the belief that the state, with its courts, police, and jails, is by design corrupt and coercive... Anarchists seek to eliminate power... Not only is our current political system

corrupt, but so is every political system that’s ever existed,”

Well, that’s fine, but then: ‘‘The more radical wing of the anarchist movement is a group called the Neo-Primitivists, whose best-known advocate is Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, John Zerzan, the leading intellectual of contemporary anarchism, lives outside Eugene, and corresponds with Kaczynski, For over 20 years, Zerzan has argued that political oppression and our current environmental wreckage can be directly traced to the prehistoric development of agriculture. Zerzan believes we need to abolish the clock, art, and ultimately language itself...”

We need not worry about low-IQ ideas like Zerzan’s ever having any substantial adoption among normal human beings. But what his absurd mumblings may well do (and we’re sure this is precisely why the police agencies and big business news media give him such incessant publicity) is inoculate those normal people against listening to a single word that reasonable Anarchists might say.

QUESTIONABLE : ‘‘The Battle of Genoa,” in The Nation, July 23, 2001. Accounts of the violent police actions against protesters in Italy ‘‘Many protesters were very upset about the antics of the few hundred anarchists in a global assembly of about 100,000 people. (One asked-) ‘Why did the police go after peaceful demonstrators but take their time with the anarchists?’ The antics of the Black Bloc were the subject of many passionate debates. . . ‘There are reports that instead of arresting anarchists, the police were escorting some of them to critical areas.’ Han Soeti of Indymedia-Belgium, who was quoted with this remark, added: ‘I heard the same thing in Prague and Barcelona.’ ”

@@@[[]]

NEGATIVE: ‘‘Organized Anarchy in Genoa; Protests: Young men work together to destroy city; peaceful multitudes cannot stop them.” New York Times, July 22- Another horror and public-relations disaster as masked maniacs discredit Anarchism.

“They have window smashers who target banks and shops, and looters who move in amid broken glass... Bands of anarchists slipped in and out of larger groups of marchers and... turn(ed) peaceful protests into riots, and forcing ...a growing movement for global justice to question the strategy of besieging summits with large crowds.

“At least 2,000 violent protesters descended ...from all over Europe — mainly men...hooded

or masked, dressed in black. Many belong to secretive groups with names such as Libertarian Marxists and Class War.

“Mainstream protesters were furious... They tried to pull off the anarchists’ black masks, which reminded some Italians of the Red Brigade terrorists of a generation ago. ‘The police let the anarchists do as they wanted, as a pretext to attack us,’ said one protester.”

NEGATIVE: ‘‘Unabomber’s Gift Makes His Life a Study in Anarchy.” San Francisco Chronicle. Papers and journals chronicling Ted Kaczynski’s desire to kill are: “...being accorded all the academic solemnity...” the University of Michigan’s Labadie Collection can muster.

“The foremost archive of Anarchist papers in the United States... The Labadie’s curator has dubbed this trove the ‘Ted Kaczynski Papers.’

“Kaczynski ...has had the moral support of several members of the world’s anarchist community...”

Labadie curator Julie Herrada bragged that the Unabomber is the “most contemporary” person in the collection. Apparently Kaczynski’s acts as a murderer made him more “contemporary” than The Match!, which had been contributing all its publications to Labadie for many years. (We quit doing so, following the Labadie Collection’s enthusiastic publicity last year about its receipt of the papers of a police informant, whom it compared to Emma Goldman and Ammon Hennacy. We urge all self-respecting Anarchists to cease contributing their publications to a library that links you to insane murderers and police snitches.)

NEGATIVE: ‘‘Stylish Oregon Town Hotbed of Anarchism.” (Baltimore Sun.) “I don’t think property damage is violent — I think property is violent, the fact that you can keep something because you own it,” the article quotes one little shit as asserting.

(And thus, should the police decide to smash The Matchi’s press, they wouldn’t be committing a violent act at all; in fact, WE’D have been the ones engaged in violence, i.e., ownership.)

“In Eugene, Zerzan and others...call for a return to a hunter-gatherer society.” (Too bad about the animals that’d be hunted, eh? They have no rights, apparently.)

The article goes on to say that the prime method of communication used by these brave advocates of return to the soil, is the computer and Internet.

Quoted as if credible anarchistic publications are ephemeral gutter-zines, the Black Clad Messenger and Green Anarchy, which hand the press ugly or absurd looks at “typical” Anarchists. Naturally, no voices of sanity seem to be present— a fact which ought to move the few in that milieu who are not outright police provocateurs, to some sober reflections. If they’re so really

anarchistic, as the press gladly asserts, why is the press so eager to publicize them as genuine? Why doesn’t the press’s glee tell them something?

NEGATIVE: “Behind the Black Masks." (Oregon Quarterly.) Photo of shirtless youths in ski masks and train-robber-style bandanas accompany text describing a lot of people you wouldn’t want to know or invite into your home.

POSITIVE:

[[t-m-the-match-97-11.png]["I did this cartoon mainly to get the Anarchist definition in print - and I got sick of hearing that stupid 'Anarchy' joke." - Shannon Wheeler]

A Few Sober Comments by Non-Anarchists

“What bothers me about property destruction is partly just the destruction—I’d rather be on the side of creating. I can understand being so angry that I’d pick up a brick and throw it through a window. But I can’t understand coming to a demonstration with a brick in my shoulder bag just in case I get so angry . . .

“(Property smashing) alienates the public, which is, I think, our real target. It also divides

itself, if it breaks an agreement on what the limits of the action are going to be. ...In the end, when I watch masked demonstrators smashing windows, thinking that that is nonviolent action, it seems to me that there is a thin line between deep conviction and murderous fanaticism...”

That quote was from David McReynolds. From a report concerning recent Genoa events (we don’t know who wrote this article), here’s another:

“Rioters...are all being characterized as anarchist. An ‘anarchist rioter’ is described as waving a hammer and sickle flag. On the BBC footage is shown of ‘anarchists’ waving Maoist flags...(Some rioters indeed are members of the police force. Both in Prague and Genoa there have been reports of undercover police taking part in property destruction and assault. The Irish Times reported on July 23rd that a large group of people dressed in black had been seen at one police station. And video evidence collected by protesters and independent media suggests that men dressed in black were also seen in police vans, being taken to protests...”

Actions like these are eroding support for anarchism, even among Anarchists themselves. There is no way to fight such dirty tricks except to stay away from street demonstrations; the demonstration as a tactic is now fatally flawed.

Since actual Anarchists never want governmental institutions to take any action at all except disband, the only real purpose of engaging in a demonstration is to get publicity.The publicity we are getting is atrocious.

Making room for Harry Potter: BOOKS AND PERIODICALS VANISH DOWN MEMORY -HOLE*

By Iris Lane

FOR SOME thirteen years I have been attending library discard sales in my city : those several- times-a-year events in which the public library sells off, mostly at very low prices, tens of thousands of unwanted books.

In the beginning I was overjoyed at being able to build a personal library at rock-bottom prices, but I soon became deeply disturbed by the scope of and the purpose behind what the library system refers to as the “weeding” of its collections.

My particular interest is classical music, and the sheer numbers of really valuable reference books that were being tossed out appalled me. Again, I was glad to get such volumes for my own collection, but the fact that no one else would now be able to consult them, and that most of the books were being sold for a tiny fraction of what they originally cost, angered me, both as a music lover and as a person who had been taxed so that the library could purchase these books in the first place.

Occasional out-of-town newspaper articles made me aware that in other cities librarians were shipping their unwanted books to landfills, only to be met, to their great surprise, by angry book lovers who were denouncing them as heirs io the Nazi book-burners. I had already begun to consider myself to be a rescuer of books, and these articles made me aware that there were others like me all across the country. All of us were outraged by the deliberate destruction of our cultural heritage by those who had been hired to protect it, and all of us were buying from the discard sales as many irreplaceable books as we could squeeze into our homes.

Modern librarians don’t like books. They like computers, boxes of microfilm, and neatly arranged shelves of brightly-colored copies of today’s hottest bestsellers. What matters to them is not the depth and breadth of human knowledge in their collections, but how little space is used and how frequently their materials are “accessed”.

One would think that the dealers in used books would have taken a prominent part in this battle over library weeding, complaining that government agencies were engaging in illegal competition with private business. Based on my observations at the discard sales, however, I believe that the dealers were bought off by being given advance access to the stock. Considering

what the dealers charge their customers for such things as regional and art books, being allowed to buy what they wanted before the public got a crack at the books was a valuable concession that cost the libraries nothing.

AND SO IT WENT for quite some time, with the media paying only slight attention to the incredible destruction being wrought in this country’s libraries, from those in small towns all the way way up to the Library of Congress. But then Nicholson Baker came along, and stirred up a hornet’s nest with the book he called “Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper”. Baker’s book is a passionate denunciation of the library profession, not just in America but in Europe as well. It reveals how libraries have purged their collections not only of irreplaceable books, but of priceless newspapers and periodicals.

Having manufactured a “crisis” in which periodicals from the last two centuries were supposedly “crumbling to dust”, they spent enormous sums of money making bad microfilm copies of the papers and then throwing away the originals. Why? Because of a fascination with “new technology” and a yen for the government grants that accompany its use. And now that it is too late, the librarians have been forced by the publication of “Double Fold” to admit that not only was the microfilming of these now-destroyed newspapers incredibly shoddy, but that the film itself is far more fragile than the newsprint was. In fact, the microfilm is being eaten up by fungus, which thrives on the gelatine it contains.

By spending all of his savings and going deeply into debt, Baker was able to save complete runs of several of the most important daily newspapers, including the New York World and the Herald Tribune. Much of his collection

exists nowhere else except on microfilm, and the contrast between the glorious color of the original papers and the dreary, grainy black and white of the library microfilm is shocking and depressing.

Because of the ferocious outcry generated by DOUBLE FOLD (the title refers to a library test for brittleness in paper), the librarians⁵ destruction of old periodicals has mostly ceased. Now that the horse is long gone, the barn door is securely locked.

But the library sales are still going on. The pickings are nowhere near as lush as they once were, but that’s only because the good stuff is also long gone. Some went to the landfills, some went to dealers who cut them up for the engravings that illustrated them, and the rest are scattered among thousands of book lovers. We are glad to have them, although it can be hard to find a place to sit down in our homes that are overflowing with books. And we share with Nicholson Baker an intense worry: What will happen to these books when we are gone?

*(Double Fold: Libraries and Paper, by Nicholson Baker, Random House, 384 pags, $23.)

[[]]

Libraries as Potter’s Field

“I spent a bit of time wading, through the library's ’catalog' to find out how many. Harry Potter boohs they actually have. It tooh me almost an hour to count them all. The Alameda County Library system has one huge main branch, and 10 other branches, many times smaller,'in neighborhoods. One is just a Bookmobile.

“All told, these 11 library outlets own 837 Barry Potter books, and that does not include Barry Potter books on cassette, CD, or CD-ROM' That works, out to 76 books per branch on average.

“You've seen these books — they are HUGE tomes that take up almost three inches of shelf space in hardback (and cost a whopping $30 apiece), and even the paperbacks take up a full inch and cost $15. One can only imagine how many copies of the sure-to-be-a-putrid-blockbuster movie will make their way into the library in video form. My conservative guess: 50, at least."

(Correspondent Violet Jones, commenting on the fact that Dream World, published by The Match, is not available at ALL in the public library system, while the Potter books are now a featured display of “Banned Books Week". See also the Crap-Detection Dept., this issue.)

COMPUTER & Technology REPORT

@@@469.jpeg]]

COMPUTERS’ ELECTRICAL NEEDS TO DEMAND FEDERAL ENERGY GRID?

The unprecedented draw on electric power, largely caused by millions of computers in day and night operation, will require the federal government to create and maintain a nationwide power transmission system, says Roger Anderson, director of the Energy Research Center at Columbia University. Even a small computer, connected to the Internet, draws as much electricity as a large refrigerator, he notes.

See what you really promote when you use a computer to write those articles about decentralization and a “simpler” lifestyle?

WHY THE CAR OF TOMORROW WON’T WORK

Trumpeting the glorious advantages of autos we’ll supposedly see soon, Rich Taylor, in a special advertising supplement in the New York Times this past summer, listed the following ominous trends in engineering: digital steering, on-board navigation systems, “safety” contrivances that call the police automatically if they decide you need “help”; computerized controls; and “computerized digital highways”.

(Sorry, we won’t be able to make it this weekend. The freeway has crashed.)

COMPUTER COMPANY PUSHES FOR INTERNAL PASSPORT

The San Jose Mercury News reported on September 23 that a computer company with ties to the CIA and other branches of the federal government has volunteered to donate its efforts if a law mandating a national internal passport is enacted.

The passport, in the form of a plasticized document containing electronic and physical information, including engraved or embossed fingerprints, photograph, and computer chips holding a volume of other data about a person, would have to be presented on demand to any police officer. The passport would be required for all airline, railroad, and bus travel; and in many other common situations.

Urging this oppression, and offering its multimillion-dollar resources toward implementing it, is a company called Oracle, specifically its chief executive officer, Larry Ellison, The Central Intelligence Agency has reportedly done a large amount of business with Oracle in past years, and Oracle is the world’s biggest maker of software for databases; Ellison himself is one of the wealthiest men on Earth.

Adroitly seizing on the point that computers and the Internet have eroded considerable areas of privacy already, Ellison in a television interview jeered privacy, saying that nothing is left of it now except an illusion. “Right now, you can go onto the Internet and get a credit report about your neighbor and find out where your neighbor works, how much they earn and if they had a late mortgage payment and tons of other information.”

True—in some cases. But far from all. Huge numbers of people do not, in fact, show up in such databases at all; or if they do it is only in a shadowy way Ellison’s “proposal” in essence converts this invasion into the normal, and staying clear of it into the ABnormal—or an illegal — state of affairs.

In short his argument is that because HE and so many others like him have had such success at aggressing against private persons, nobody retains any further rights. A curious turning upside-down, since the argument ought to mean that as these companies have gotten so far already they should not be given even another inch let alone all the rest that we have.

However, it is a serious mistake to allow this assault to cast itself in terms of mere privacy. What’s happening with a national internal passport is far more than an attack on PRIVACY; it is an attack on our personal, bodily integrity — the right to exist upon the surface of this planet without being seized by authorities for violating laws requiring documentation in order to exist.

In regular operation, the role of such passports would quickly escalate. By a domino effect similar to the one Ellison approvingly cites, each new requirement for the document in daily life would set up and justify the next. Soon no freedom of movement of any kind would exist, as “citizens” would have to present the card in order to buy gasoline or even food.

In IRregular operation, more typical with computer technology, passports might succumb to magnetic or electrostatic fields and lose or add or distort information, leading to severe inconvenience and arrest or even death for persons misidentified or falsely accused of something by the card they carry but cannot read.

Begin now to form the resolve not to cooperate with this assault. Square your shoulders and decide that no matter what “seven out of ten Americans” want, they aren’t going to force YOU into line with this totalitarianism. Also begin now to see this computer phenomenon as an ENEMY, and get clear of it as far as you can. It has a plain and obvious agenda: converting all life to an adjunct of itself—a straitjacket in which human life as we know it cannot exist.

NEW WEAPONS DEVELOPED

Information we’ve received suggests that the government has at last managed to create the weapon so long envisioned by science fiction, and for so many years tinkered at by lone inventors in basement laboratories (including, we must quietly admit, our own). Two versions of this type of device have now sprung upon the world, and both operate by directing energy at a distance onto the human body.

Variety One uses microwaves, tightly focused, and a high-powered microwave generator, to put high-energy electromagnetic vibrations of the same general type that you may use to cook food, onto people’s skin. Range is unknown, but the effect is of extreme heat at the surface of the body. Supposedly there is no actual penetration of the body at the frequencies used, but the truth will only be known after extensive use on actual persons. (Sixty years ago, during the first testing of radar/microwaves, technicians actually stood in front of and adjusted dish antennas while pulses were being sent out. At least one engineer was said to have died after experiencing internal warmth—his insides were burned by the radiated energy.)

Variety Two apparently works by way of the discovery of the Holy Grail of electrical technology, an ionized beam (something your editor tried at various times for about 35 years to create). An ionized beam conducts electricity; you aim it at something, then run a voltage into the beam with return through the ground. Or, in this new weapon’s case, a pair of beams puts the voltage directly onto a human being. Reportedly, the beam is ionized by two focused lines of ultraviolet light. That ought to be easy enough to replicate at home . . .

COMPUTERS AT WORK, Part II

By June A.

IT’S BEEN over six years since The Match published my article entitled COMPUTERS AT WORK. Since the summer of ’95 I have continued to use computers at work, and things haven’t changed much. When the machines work they can be very helpful, but they erode people s skills and there’s always something going wrong with them

About a month ago my current office, a construction company, suffered a computer disaster. Someone pulled out of the wall a plug-which- must-not-be-pulled, and the system crashed.

Frantic calls to tech support ensued, and I congratulated myself heartily for having been nowhere near the building when the crash occurred. The owner of the company is a decent guy, but he has something of a temper The plug-puller would have been in a lot of trouble, except that he is the owner’s son. As a mere employee I could have been fired, but it’s hard to get fired from the position of “son”.

Repair attempts went on for about a week, and these were complicated by the criminal origins of our computer system. Although my employers were as innocent as the newborn babe, the person who had originally installed the system a few years back had been steeped in sin. Now serving a stretch on software piracy charges, he had used the same piece of software to inaugurate the computer systems of several different clients. The upshot of this was that although we had gotten straight with the software people, we had no way of reinstal ling our system because the criminal had given the discs to someone else

About a week and $2,000 later, the system was mostly working again, although some files were still corrupted and the last two weeks of data we had entered was gone. While others in the office wrestled with their own problems, and tech support continued its mysterious operations, I reentered my two weeks of data, got caught up on my current work, and recreated a few corrupted documents.

All seemed pretty well until the tech support guy came into my office and began to specifically work on my computer. What exactly he was trying to fix I don’t know, but he said something about system-wide problems that he had traced back to my hard drive. He had trouble getting his discs to work in my drive, which, as I told him, didn’t surprise me at all, since if one attempted to play music CDs in it they skipped horribly.

Eventually the fellow took my hard drive back to his office and ordered some parts for it. For days I wandered from office to office, using other people’s still-not-entirely-fixed computers. Two of these I could enter data into, but couldn’t print from. The reason I couldn’t print from them was that for some reason everything came out in about two-point type — readable only if you held the paper about three inches away from your eyes.

Two days later than he had promised to, the tech support guy returned with my hard drive (and two more invoices for upgrades and parts, totaling about $1,000). For some not entirely clear reason, he attached my hard drive to another employee’s computer and gave me the other guy’s hard drive. He said it had something to do with speed, but I’m not sure which of us was supposed to get the faster unit.

He spent most of the afternoon doing mysterious things at my desk, and at one point when I looked at the screen I saw files with wings on them flying from one place to another.

About 45 minutes before it was time to go home, he announced that my computer was pretty much okay now, although he would have to come back the next day to do some other things to it. I sat down and looked at my monitor, which revealed a desktop with a rather different arrangement from the one I had previously had. Well, it’s an old story, so I can’t say I never thought it would happen to me: while the basic programs I had worked with were all there, all of my personal spreadsheets seemed to have vanished.

Hurrying after the computer guy, who was now in the vice president’s office reporting on the progress he had made this day, I got right to the point.

“Where are all my files?” I demanded.

IT would be tedious to relate the next half hour: his increasingly nervous searching of the various drives and programs ; the explanations that our own computer guy (the plug-puller) had sworn that none of my stuff had been saved on the C drive; the avowals that nothing on the C drive had been erased; the queries as to whether I might have saved files on the G drive, the E drive, or the network; and my growing ir« ritation that he had taken away my hard drive with a dozen or so current and important spreadsheets on it, and replaced it with one that was bloated with stupid and outdated files including a three-year-old basketball pool and a gooey poem entitled “The Magic Hanky”.

After a while the tech support guy, his eyes averted, snatched up his backpack. Assuring me that when he returned the next day he would confer with the plug-puller, he left hurriedly.

Alone at last, I sat at my desk, looking morosely at my computer screen and trying to calculate how long it would take me to recreate all my departed spreadsheets As I shut everything off and got ready to go home, I could hear one of the other employees expressing shock that the tech support guy had left without even telling him he was going “...still have all these corrupt files...” he was saying, “...promised he’d copy everything onto the J drive, but there’s no J drive here ..”

* * *

Over the next few days, the computer guy and an associate of his were in and out of the office. During the time that they allowed us to use the computers, I recreated a few of my lost documents and did my regular work, which included paying some bills. And while I was doing the latter, I noticed something strange.

I was selecting vendor invoices to pay, and noticed that the computer had altered one of them. The vendor in question had two invoices due, a full month apart. One of the bills was for about $13,000, and the other was for about $25,000. As I looked at the screen I could see that while the amounts displayed were correct, the computer had changed the invoice number and date of one of them so that it was exactly the same as the other one.

This didn't persist, of course, I switched to a different report, and on that screen everything was all right, Then I went back to the first report where I found that things had magically corrected themselves. When I reported these happenings to our in-house computer man, who had set the mess in motion in the first place, he suggested the standard remedy: re-indexing the files. While he performed that operation, I opened the day’s mail and found two more bills from tech support, totaling about $550. 1 noted that one of the bills was for upgrade and file transfer work done on my hard drive.

I DON’T blame the pulling of the plug for all of our problems All computers do crazy things even when they’re working The word processor, for instance, makes all sorts of grammatical errors in its attempts to “help” the user write letters. It can handle basic sentence structure fairly well, but complicated tenses like the subjunctive are beyond it.

Infuriatingly — and often—I’ll be typing ; then the machine will display a horrid, winking little figure with a body like a paper-clip, and large eyes and a smirk. Unctuously it will inquire— of ME! —a HUMAN BEING! —who was speaking and writing the English language long before the I 9-year-old kid who programmed this insane ikon into existence was even conceived or dreamed of!—whether I need “help”.

“Hi!” it will chirp and leer. “It looks like you are writing a letter! Want some help?”

Do I look like I need help from a fucking PAPER CLIP?! Practically digging a furrow in the desk with the mouse, I lunge frantically to click this presumptuous bit of virtual wire into oblivion — or, with luck, even beyond. Despite the mind-dazzling alleged high velocity at which all microelectronic functions take place, however, the vile thing gives another long wink and smirks knowingly again before, all in good time and leisurely, it finally gets off my screen. Considering that when I turn off the lamp in my living room it goes out INSTANTLY, and does not hang around and thumb its nose at me for a while, I have to suppose either that the computer electrons don’t work as fast as the ones in the wall-socket, OR that this annoyance was purposely programmed to move at its deliberate pace — just to remind us users who’s boss.

A friend of mine hopes that with the computer so avidly promoting illiteracy, the writings and publications of those who are really on the ball will stand out like beacons I don't believe that, myself My pessimistic theory is that as the general population, aided by the computer, gets stupider and stupider, it will, as a mechanism of self-defense, firmly reject everything that is markedly better,

In other words, a new Dark Age is falling, and irony of ironies, its agent is the computer.

Back at my office, I continue to use the computer It’s working fairly well now, although I find more corrupted files all the time Perhaps in a week or two things will be back to where they were a month ago

Except for the $3,550, that is k^^^v

---

MORE COMPUTER CONVENIENCE: The following notice was recently mailed out with the latest issue of the “Zine Yearbook’:

“Maybe you’ve noticed; there are no apostrophes or quotation marks in any of the text that we’ve reformatted. How did this happen? We have no idea...”

NO IDEA?? Sure you do, unless you’re total defectives. It was your wonderful Komputor!

“We can only attribute it to some freak technical difficulty that occurred in the final stages of the preparation process. . .”

In other words, you sent your magazine to the printer on a DISK instead of as a hard, paper, verifiable copy. And the commercial printing company, unconcerned with whether a zine-type publication came out looking stupid or ignorant, threw the disk (prepared on an error-prone Kom- pu-tor'¹ into its own screwy, mistake - blitzed Kom-puke-or, and no human being ever reviewed the offset printing plates thus imaged.

“The only way to correct this problem would be to reprint the entire press run. However, due to the low cover price and tight budget of this book, this is virtually impossible.”

What? You mean you can’t press a button on a keyboard and make the fuckup go away? .Then why force something to go through a Kom-pew- ter stage when it’s going to have to exist as a REAL object in the REAL world?

“Please bear with us, and thank you for your patience. Become the media, (no signature).”

You can’t “become” anything when you have that little control over your product.

---

History Corner

with Don Holbrook

ONE OF THE MORE HORRIFYING events of the last months, which has been pushed undeservedly into the shadows, is the mass slaughter and cremation or burial of hundreds of thousands of cattle and sheep in several countries, due to an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease and the ghastly “Mad Cow” epidemic.

This tragic, wanton waste of life, and this monumental infliction of suffering on untold numbers of helpless sentient creatures, is only the latest episode in a story that repeats itself every few years (but with ever more deadly variations).

A strange book I ran across a few years ago relates the story of the militaristic effort in the late 1940s to stamp out hoof-and-mouth (or foot- and mouth) in Mexico. The Cow Killers: With the Aftosa Commission in Mexico, was published in 1956 by a university press (U.T., Austin). An ostensible reason for the book was to serve as showcase for the odd drawings of Bill Leftwich, a Commission member sent to Mexico as a livestock inspector. He: “Spent some three years rounding up and corralling cattle, chasing pigs, roping and tying down wild mountain steers, inspecting every cloven-footed animal in his district for symptoms of the virus."

Since Leftwich was an amateur artist, he had provided a look at what was done. His recollections verbally were re-worked by a hired professional writer, Fred Gipson, who turned in a job which served the academics’ purpose in a soulless way, though well enough for us to see what actually did occur.

The Aftosa (hoof-and-mouth) Commission ran roughshod over the Mexican people. Chapter after chapter shows them bullying or terrorizing these peasants (always, of course, “for their own good”). In some cases livestock owners were beaten; in others, threatened. In still others, terrorized. Most of these episodes are related as if amusing.

In one, the Inspectors intend to demonstrate that there is no harm in vaccination, so they tie a farmer’s prize bull to a post by his horns. At the instant they stick the needle into him, he gives a frantic lurch and— breaks his neck. The commissioners try to weasel out of paying for the valuable animal, but the townspeople force them to pay up: “The People were angry, and they spoke with no uncertainty. So La Comision paid for the white bull, and it was not until later, when he returned with armed soldiers, that (the doctor) could persuade the people of Zinapecuaro to allow their cattle to be vaccinated."

In another case, townspeople rose up against some of these invaders, and killed eight of them. (No word in this tome of what punitive action must then have been taken against the people of, probably, the whole district.)

For a good example of the attemptedly laconic and “amusing” style of this academic treatment of a series of outrages, the following paragraphs will serve:

Sergeant Alvarez said, “...will you do me the favor of assisting me in catching these cattle... ?"

The sergeant held out a rope to the Indian, but the man drew back. “Why," he demanded indignantly, “should I assist you in catching cattle that are not mine? Catch them yourself. I refuse.”

Sergeant Alvarez...was weary of their excuses. In sudden anger, he struck out, backhanding the Indian with such staggering force that the man’s hat...settled back at a comical angle across his ringing head.

When the startled Indian regained his balance, he straightened his hat on his head. He stood and considered the angry soldier. Then he smiled faintly and bowed. “Senor,” he asked politely, “would you do me the kindness to lend me your rope? As anyone can see, these cattle must be caught.”

In this same faux-simplistic sardonically smiling style we read of how troops of the aftosa commission rounded up townspeople, put nooses around their necks, and hanged them with their toes barely able to touch the ground. Just as some of them were about to die, the commissioners released these victims and called for more to be seized to take their place:

At last some citizen would cry out in desperation, “What passes, my general? What do you wish of us?”

Then the lieutenant would smile and speak in soft words . . .

And of course the people would RUSH to round up their animals then.

Mexicans began referring to these fearsome public health authorities as los matavacas—the cow-killers. The owners “might cry out in protest, plead for mercy in tones of anguish, but there was no mercy.”

After murdering their animals, many of whom were actually pets with almost the status of family members, the Commission would pay the owners some token amount; the tiny sum would vanish to pay expenses, or be drunk up in the cantina, and now there would be only utter ruin left in the wake of this noble bureaucracy. The government insisted that draft animals, oxen of cloven hooves, be replaced by mules whose hooves were not cloven (hence a type of animal not susceptible to aftosa). But in order to buy mules—even in cases where the peasant had not somehow been separated from his Commission payment — different harnesses, etc., were also necessarily to be purchased, thus driving the destitute peasants into- even worse debt and cycles of misery. . .

Of course the human victims of this wretched bullying could not afterwards depart back to the United States and sell their drawings and memories of the business to a publisher for a tidy sum. They had to make the best of what they were left with. Some of them had injuries from beatings or gunshot wounds. Some had memories of dead family members or friends. Some had seen favorite dogs gunned down; some had been reduced to feuding with neighbors; and some had been killed in feuds.

MEXICO OF THE ’40s is now quite distant, of course, from the situations and sophistication of today. But in some of the press coverage of recent mass slaughters, not only do similar images of tragedy recur, such as the photograph of a little English girl holding a tiny doomed lamb, but similar mistakes of the human race keep surfacing. A civilized economy resting in any part on animals’ deaths for food or anything else is simply an atrocity.

And far from being so much more advanced than those Mexican peasants, this present civilization is engaging in astounding, appalling actions that are resulting in millions of large mammals being bred only to be killed and burned because the diseases they now have are so much worse than ever before. Cattle and sheep — herbivorous creatures naturally—are being deliberately forced to consume ground-up remains of their own kind; the breeding and spreading of new and more awful diseases is the result.

This widening cycle of error needs to be broken. Each time the tragedy becomes more horrible... How many more times will there be?

Anarchist reviews

THE KORAN

Reviewed by Fred Woodworth

ALL BUT UNKNOWN in the West is the fact that, like several modern Christian evangelists, Mohammed (c. 570-632), the founder of the religion known as Islam, once found himself embroiled in a sexual scandal. One of his nine wives, Hafsah, caught him in the act with a slave-girl. Hafsah had evidently known something about this liaison earlier, and had extracted from the Prophet his promise to end the relationship—which, of course, he didn’t carry out. When Hafsah, furious at the thought that she might be a mere tenth instead of a ninth of his attentions, suspiciously checked up and had her worst fears confirmed, the situation blew up into a quarrel involving another wife, A’ishah.

Coming to Mohammed’s rescue, Allah dictated (through Mohammed, of course) another chapter of the Koran — generally number 66, entitled “Prohibition”. Here God attacks the wives, and blusters to them that: “If you two turn to God in repentance (for your hearts have sinned), you shall be pardoned; but if you conspire against him, know that God is his protector."

God also remarks—rather petulantly,! thought, that Hafsah and A’ishah had better watch out be- they can be replaced: “It may well be that, if he divorce you, his Lord will give him in your place better wives than yourselves, submissive to God and full of faith, devout, penitent, obedient, and given to fasting."

Already, back in chapter 33 God had issued a bunch of special dispensations for The Prophet, specifically making it lawful for him (just him) to have intercourse with a number of women who would ordinarily be off-limits :

“Prophet, We have made lawful to you the wives to whom you have granted dowries and the slave-girls whom God has given you as booty; the daughters of your paternal and maternal uncles and of your paternal and maternal aunts... and any believing woman who gives herself to the Prophet... This privilege is yours alone, being granted to no other believer."

In another (extremely short) chapter — number 111, as ever “In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful”, the Prophet gets word that his uncle, with whom he’s had a dispute (the uncle, Abu-Lahab, apparently thought the Prophet was making it all up), is now under a curse. The entire text of chapter 111 reads:

“May the hands of Abu-Lahab perish. May he himself perish! Nothing shall his wealth and gains avail him. He shall be burnt in a flaming fire, and his wife, laden with faggots, shall have a rope around her neck!"

HE FIRST TIME I read the Koran was when

I was in high-school, now quite some years

ago. Recently it seemed appropriate to do so again, so I spent a few evenings once more with the Recitation (literal meaning of “Koran”), the governing volume of the millions of persons who live within the sphere of Islam, a religion whose name means “submission”.

Unlike the Bible, you can get through the entire Koran in a reasonable amount of time, as it is only about the length of a moderate - sized novel 435 pages in the translation I recently read (N. J. Dawood’s 1956 work, revised in 1974). A few persons, incidentally, have claimed to have similarly read the Bible straight through, but one needs to be very skeptical of such boasts, since a little reflection (and actual experiment) will show how unlikely that is. Texts of this sort attract followers and rabid fanatics for this very reason, that they are so impenetrable in their dense mass. Not having read it and therefore feeling guilty about the failure to do so must constitute a powerful impulse to leap to the defense of things these followers do not actually know. At least with the Koran, comprehending the whole thing is a relatively trivial exercise.

Like the Book of Mormon, the Koran purports to be the further chronicles of what God wants you to do. It recognizes the existence of the Bible or Scriptures and Torah, and states as its reason for being, that the Christians and Jews had too far split into sects and had fallen away from proper observance of “God’s” laws. Also like the Book of Mormon, this one is supposedly the transcript of a tablet preserved in heaven.

Allah didn’t dictate the whole thing at once, though; more chapters came through as situations (such as Hafsah’s investigative surveillance) made them necessary. There are 114 of these, generally arranged by length, with the shortest last. The longer chapters at the beginning of this arbitrary (and non-chronologic al) arrangement drag rather badly; Mohammed saves his deadliest rantings for the somewhat shorter ones.

However, all chapters have in common the same type of basic presentation, which is comprised of three ingredients: stories, commands, and threats. Especially threats. All float and bubble to the surface again and again in a broth of astounding amounts of repetition.

For example, in one chapter, no. 55, which is something less than three pages long, the interrogation, “Which of your Lord’s blessings would you deny?” is repeated 31 times, many of these being complete non sequiturs, such as “Flames of fire shall be lashed at you, and molten brass. Which of your Lord’s blessings would you deny?” Well, for a start, I’d want to deny that one. Other repetitions include the story of Noah with certain embellishments, about six or eight times, Pharoah and Moses, maybe ten, Abraham, Joseph, et alia, many more; Jonah, etc. and on and on here and there through the book.

Commands go forward at a blinding rate, thick and fast, too; and more about those in a moment, but first this word from the First Islamic Bank of Sadistic Threats: Mohammed can hardly write two consecutive paragraphs without at least one fairly horrifying promise that infidels, unbelievers, apostates, “People of the Book” (Christ- worshippers), fornicators and others are going to burn in hell, drink boiling water, eat putrid filth for all eternity, have melted metal poured all over them, roast their skins in blazing flame and then be provided immediately with more skin by his eminence, The Compassionate, The Merciful, so that they can be burned some more, and so forth. I had wanted to count the number of threats, but bogged down in what seemed like a _never-ending mire, so was forced to resort to a statistical method. By this I compute the total to be around 1200 to 1500, including such ones as these:

“Garments of fire have been prepared for the unbelievers. Scalding water shall be poured upon their heads, melting their skins and that which is in their bellies. They shall be lashed with rods of iron. Whenever, in their torment, they try to escape, back they shall be dragged, and will be told, ‘Taste the torment!’ "

“Those who deny our revelations we will burn in fire. No sooner will their skins be consumed than we shall give them other skins, so that they may truly taste the scourge."

Atheists are to be crucified or else have their hands and feet cut off. _

Incidentally, chapter 74 contains an interesting point: “Would that you knew what the Fire is like! It leaves nothing, it spares no one; it burns the skins of men. It is guarded by nineteen keepers.”

OMMANDS a person would have to obey in order to avoid these demented tanning ses

@@@476.jpeg]]sions range from lawful eating to lawful sexual practices to treating orphans properly. Slavery

is permitted, in fact definitely cited approvingly, and a master is allowed to compel his slavegirl to have intercourse with him; but he is not allowed to prostitute her for money to others.

More commands order the faithful not to be friends with Christians or anybody else who is not Islamic, and especially not with unbelievers. The arguments of unbelievers should not be listened to. Their cities should be destroyed.

Women are not addressed in the Koran; the reader is explicitly and implicitly male. Women are indeed spoken of, but not to, and they are stated to be inferior and subservient. Girl infants are not lawful to kill, but otherwise it is definitely to be mourned when one is born instead of a son.

Conception is stated (several times) to take place when ejaculated semen turns into a clot of blood that Allah makes into a human being inside the mere vessel, the female. Other scientific thought has the sky as an actual dome, perfect as there are no cracks. The far western setting place of the sun is a pool of mud.

Mohammed thinks there are two seas on the planet, and lightning is a sign from God.

Sometimes he purrs and chuckles: “How many cities have we laid in ruin! In the night our scourge fell upon them, or at midday when they were drowsing,”

Sometimes he is apocalyptic: “On that day there shall be faces veiled with darkness, covered with dust. These shall be the faces of the wicked and the unbelieving.”

But always he is monstrous and insane. His recitation is one of gross, turgid evil, and the impact of his “Koran” upon Arab culture and the world has been profoundly, unrelievedly bad.

It is not accurate to speak of “fundamentalist Islam”; there is either the Islam that is founded on this book, the Koran, or there is something else some other religion—which has nothing to do with this book at all. In any case, THIS recitation, by Mohammed, of “God’s” alleged speeches and edicts, leaves absolutely no room for any latitude, any “interpretation”, any individual opinions at all. It eradicates, indeed, any trace of free will and only proffers to male fanatics several hundred paragraphs cajoling them to follow orders so that after death they will live endlessly in “gardens watered by running streams” where dark-eyed, explicitly “high bosomed” “virgins” will have sexual relations with them throughout infinity on green silken cushions and lush carpets. The repetition constitutes a pretty good technique of hypnosis; the threats drive home the consequences of disobedience, and the commands are those of an ignorant, insane priesthood operating as the heirs to a lunatic’s pretensions to speak for a nonexistent “god”.

We have witnessed the result.

Publications Received

The American Rationalist: May/June 2001. An Alternative to Superstition and Nonsense. Articles exposing Christianity; also a good review by William Harwood of “The Quest for the Historical Muhammad”, in which it is stated that: “The reality seems to be that Muhammad flourished in northern Arabia, ...and when it became necessary to establish a ‘sanctuary’ to fit the Muhammad myth, Mecca was chosen because it was the site of theKaaba,a vulva-image meteorite worshipped as a manifestation of the sex goddess to whom it was previously dedicated. Mecca and Medina were added to the Koran as Muhammad’s retroactive stamping grounds.

“The association of Muhammad with Mecca and Medina more than a century after his death is not hard to understand, when it is realized that Jesus had been dead for only seventy years when his birthplace was transferred from Galilee to Bethlehem, which he never visited in his life, and his home town was identified as Nazareth, a place that did not even exist until the fourth century.”

Also in this issue, Part 1 of Richard Bozarth’s essay, “When the Music’s Over”, realistically remembering the hideous disgrace on atheism, Madalyn Murray O’Hair. He says: “The first important thing to understand about Madalyn is that her character flaws are the most important facts of her life. This isn’t true of most of the champions we admire... Madalyn’s character flaws...blighted everything she did in one way or another, and also determined quite often what she did and how she did it.

“Her biggest success, her first lawsuit, turned out to have for its real story how she unethically used it and the publicity she got from it to create the urban legend that she was the one responsible for the ...U.S. Supreme Court declaring that organized prayer in public schools is unconstitutional...”

Bozarth continues with a realistic and knowledgeable assessment of a person he knew and later studied, and his article ought to be read by every atheist, particularly the ones who remain in Madalyn’s organization today, now slipping into perhaps an even more fulsome, hideous worship of this nasty, vicious woman than they allowed to emerge when she was alive. Bozarth notes the tragedy of what Madalyn could have been, had she been a decent person; also he examines her lust for money, and his conclusion is sadly correct that: “She thought that she and her kids were superior people, and she enjoyed various ...ways of displaying her contempt for all the rest of the inferior people on this planet, which included the Atheists she wanted to support her. When Atheists realized this, they stopped supporting her and started disliking her about as much as religionists did.” Bozarth’s two-part essay deserves to be read in full. Subscription: $13 yearly. P. O. Box 741, Amherst, New York 14226.

Anarchy In Kansas: issue 1; Box 3682, Kansas City, KS 66103. Editor, Joe Peacott. Kansas Anarchist history; Why I am an Anarchist; anarchist publishing. 4 pages, 8.5 x 11. Postage.

Animal People: (various issues, published monthly). Tabloid newspaper, approx. 24 pages. Box 960, Clinton, WA 98236. $24 a year. How Sonar Kills Whales; The Shame of Dog- and Cat-Eating in Korea; much, much more. (See review last issue in The Match.)

Any Time Now: Anarchist-Decentralist newsletter, no. 13, Summer 2001. Examining the system of social authority; Letters (Stirner); Anarchist history: Honore Jaxon. On 'Free Trade, Subsidy and Protectionism,” Larry Gambone writes; “It will boggle the mind of today’s antifree trader ‘marxist’ to discover that Marx and Engels, as well as all the major socialist and social democratic leaders, were free traders, (long, interesting section of historical citations follows).’ This issue 6 pages, 8.5 x 11. Affinity Place, Argenta B.C., Canada VOG 1B0. Donation.

@@@479.jpeg][A cartoon of a person with curly hair AI-generated content may be incorrect.]]

The Cunningham Amendment: vol. 3 no. 4 and vol. 4, no. 1. 1005 Huddersfield Rd., Lower Wyke, Bradford BD12 8LP, West Yorkshire, England. (Have you ever noticed how long English addresses are??)

The Cunningham Amendment is without any

doubt the most beautiful and intriguing anarchist-type publication I have ever seen. I love it; each issue is a collector’s item, and I can say this with absolute accuracy because I am a collector of beautiful typography myself, and this goes into my own collection. ■

Practically every bit of these extensive is- । sues is letterpressed; that is, it’s printed the classic way from relief-cast and engraved metal surfaces. There are multiple colors, beautiful engravings, and all on lovely paper. The orientation is toward cryptic or humorous, truly wonderful expressions of what the writers puckishly call the “anarcrisp” philosophy— a word I’m tempted to adopt myself, considering what “anarchism” has come to lately.

While most Anarchist (so-called)publications these days are extreme examples of internal contradiction, The Cunningham Amendment, in portraying something far different from the lackwit ugliness we live submerged in, is lovely and delightful. It does not rail against “capitalism” while feeding its columns through a computer. It doesn’t advocate a do-it-yourself ethic while turning over major operations of production to other people who summon up apparatus no private person can work with; instead, the publication really does Do It Itself, and it looks twice as good as anything else around.

I’m SO tired of reading “anarchist” publications that “want to go back to a hunter-gatherer existence”— and these sentiments roll off a giant web-press from computer-set copy. I’m sick of “insurgents” with University Student Union (i.e. taxpayer-funded) offices and addresses. I loathe the worthless rags whimpering about “solar power” and not one watt of it do they harness themselves. Still others desire to bludgeon their readers into “recycling” a few aluminum cans, weighing at most a few pounds, but they won’t go out and seek for old equipment, so that thousands of pounds of energy- moulded steel totters sadly to the landfills and more energy and resources are wasted to make still more billion-dollar corporations even wealthier as these manufacture ever brieferlasting electronic systems that work only half the time, and when they do, one-quarter as well.

The indicia of The Cunningham Amendment states: “Restricted Circulation”, so I don’t ; know whether they’ll let just any rabble on their mailing list; but certainly the readership of The Match is one or two degrees beyond that, and so I’ll hope that a few of you will mail off perhaps a ten or a twenty and see what radical publishing can be when it evokes the finest esthetic sensibilities, with a smile.

Eat The State: (various issues, published about every two or three weeks); tabloid, 8 pages. Box 85541, Seattle, WA 98145. $16 for 20 issues. Leonard Peltier, Farmworkers, Iraq;

Publications Received (Contd.)

The Drug War; Harry Fucking Potter; Corporations; One Dead in Italy; American Newspeak, and more. Intermittently anarchist.

Ethical Record: The Proceedings of the South Place Ethical Society, vol. 106, no. 4, May, ’01. Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square WC1 4RL, London, England. Guest Editorial: Anarchism in London, May Day 2001: “There has always been a connection between anarchism and atheism, reflecting the connection between government and religion. As Bakunin put it in the anarchist classic, God and the State, ‘the best justification for a tyrant on Earth is a tyrant in Heaven...’

“Supporters of bosses often use the term ‘anarchist’ incorrectly, to mean anyone who goes to a political demonstration hoping for a fight, much as the term ‘hooligan’ is used to mean anyone looking for a fight at a football match...” Ethical Record is published 10 times a year; annual subscription is £18.

Imagine: issue 3, $3.50. 68 pages, 8.5 x 11, folded. John Johnson, Box 8145, Reno, Nevada 89507. Examines the Dharma & Greg police propaganda episode; editor writes of why he isn’t a Mormon (after being raised one); studies on how authority makes good people do bad things; what causes violent behavior; also, a former anarchist tells why he thinks it won’t work. Here’s a clipping from “Imagine”:

“Last issue there was a report about a ...man who purposely didn’t avoid a police roadblock, because he had nothing to hide. But whether you have anything to hide isn’t relevant in a police state. Forced tests came back negative, and (he) was r e le a s ed ... after ‘going through the system.’ But now, for the rest of his life, when he is pulled over for an alleged traffic violation and his license is run, it will show that he has been arrested for drugs. This will open him up for further harassment. And when he applies for a job and is asked the question, ‘Have you ever been arrested?’ he will be required to say ‘Yes.’ I spoke to the young man’s sister to find out what caused the police to think he was intoxicated, thus branding him for life. She said he’d just come back from a long trip and his eyes were bloodshot. Have your eyes ever been bloodshot? Then you could be next.”

Comment from here at The Match: If we can’t stop this Drug War, and it looks like nobody can, since it’s too profitable for the police forfeiture and prison industries, maybe we can all start going out of our way to give preferential treatment to people with arrest records. If you own a business, why not quietly start favoring the obviously decent sorts of people who with obvious pain are forced to answer ‘Yes’?

Inspector 18: issue 6, Spring ’01, $2.00. 28 pages, folded 8.5 x 11. Michael Jackman, Box 3663, New York, NY 10163. Starts with a tale of bank hassles; moves on to a long episode of having the writer’s apartment window repeatedly shot with a BB gun from another apartment across the way, and the utter futility and mistake of calling the police.

My Moon or More: number 5. P. O. Box 773, Appleton, WI 54912. 43 pages, zine/pamphlet of folded 8.5 x 11 sheets. This issue consists of the account of a fellow named Cullen who tries to get a job and make a living. The ghastly trap of acquiescence for money at the employment he finally secures, in a greenhouse, leads to a monstrous and sad scene in which he finds himself killing a rabbit for his employer. “I felt so terrible, yet remained silent. Why? This isn’t me. When I find myself in a situation where I ...have to take an ethical stand, I wilt and become silent.

“The wound on the rabbit’s leg was pretty severe, leaving it with a limpy hop followed by a trail of blood. ‘It’s right by you,’ (his employer) said. I crept toward it... It didn’t move. Had it had all of its faculties it would have darted off at this point. I crept forward... I got a better look at his leg and felt like crying... I couldn’t bear to watch the little guy suffer any more so I raised the rake, closed my eyes... ...It lay pinned on the ground kicking up gravel in a rapid procession. Slowly, though, like a wind-up toy on its last rotation, the legs stopped kicking. The lungs, full of fear and pain, stopped expanding and contracting... ‘Job well done,’ (his employer) said...” Single issue, $1.

News From Nowhere: no. 42, Sept. Oct. Nov., ’01. 20 pages, 8.5 x 11 folded. Seton a typewriter, believe it or not; the authors don’t use any computer equipment. And, just to show how frantically computers ARE pushed by their dedicated dope-pushers, this issue contains a response to an article in issue 41 giving reasons not to buy a computer. Now, remember: this is a tiny little xeroxed publication. It has a readership of probably 200 or even much less. But, after attacking the sacred Komputer, they get a letter from Adam Rogers, “a writer on science and technology for ‘Newsweek’ who was one of the first journalists to cover consumer technology for a national audience.”

He: “argues...that computers have improved, immeasurably, have dropped spectacularly in price...” etc. The pusher evidently goes on in the typical way trying to bowl over the nonaddicts with all kinds of gabble about faster modems, laptop, conduits for data, replacing print shops and libraries, and on and on.

“Narrow-minded Luddism,” he calls this

little zine’s anti-computer stance.

Freedom is Slavery. War is Peace. And people who want to preserve and use a hundred human-scale forms of technology are Luddites, while someone who essentially wants to DO AWAY with everything except machines that have no moving parts, is “PRO-” technology. In truth it is the computer-slobberers who are the Luddites.

News From Nowhere is published by Morton Newman and Fay Blake, 2550 Dana Street #3C, Berkeley, Calif. 94704. Donation, please.

North Coast Xpress: P. O. Box 1226,Occidental, California 95465. Vol. 9 No. 1, articles exposing Conservatives AND Liberals as representing only themselves and their corporate backers’ greed for power. The flawed “electoral” system; Dr. Laura’s rabid TV show; How corporate-sponsored tests try to standardize children; Public television: who owns it? “Civil Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000: Expanded government forfeiture laws to include approximately 200 felonies, making more property subject to government forfeiture, even after the statute of limitations has passed for criminal prosecution. Property owners and heirs need not be personally involved in the felony that makes their property subject to government forfeiture... Even a 20-year-old crime may make the property forfeitable. An alleged misrepresentation by the deceased on an FDIC Insured Loan Application can make an inherited home or its sales proceeds forfeitable by the government. ...As before, only a ‘preponderance of evidence’ is required, not ‘clear and convincing evidence.’ * Also in this issue: RICO protests, School of the Americas, and more.

Vol. 9 No. 3: Health Care; “Land of the Free* (news items); free speech battles; media rites in McVeigh execution; the Bob Kerrey case and the nightmare of Vietnam; lawsuit against Ohio State Penitentiary; Crime control as an industry; Bari/Cherney lawsuit exposing the FBI. Each issue 46 newsprint pages plus white paper cover, 8 x 10.75 inches. Single copy, $5.00.

The Nuclear Resister: No. 122. Box 43383, Tucson Arizona 85733. School of the Americas protest; Gary Mechanic case, Leonard Peltier; the resistance on Vieques; opposition to N-waste storage plan; international notes on peace movements; future actions. 8 pages, tabloid size (11.25 x 17), subscription: $15.

Orthophobe: (this is the last issue). 52 pages, folded 8.5 x 11, from Box 764, College Park, Maryland 20740. $2.00. Hiking the Appalachian Trail, creative non-fiction; Inauguration Day— attending the most recent “democracy” spectacle (“Freedom is Following Orders”) and be

ing herded into tiny chain-link enclosures. The writer, Joe Smith, comments: “Despite my an- archo-sympathies, I consider myself part of that last group, the people watchers... (The anarchists’) protest, albeit much more active and spirited than that of their flyer-passing ilk, seemed merely for the sake of protest. That is, it seemed devoid of a particular aim or goal... I wondered what point they were trying to make. ...Granted, I think I know why they were there —to broadcast their disgust with the entire political system—but because they didn’t take the time to make their intentions clear, I can only speculate. One thing I did not have to guess about, though, was that the vast majority of the folks watching their anarcho-antics had no idea why the people in the black ski masks and bandannas were causing so much trouble.

“Given the black bloc’s lack of a coherent message, one could (and did) make the argument that the anarchos were there simply to engage the cops, and then, after the cops attacked, to say, “Look! Police oppression!”

Joe notes that this is bad strategy, as indeed it is, and “a skewed and backwards way to attract people or support a cause.” .

Peace Magazine: July-September, ’01. Another 8.5 x 11 publication, 31 pages. Rather dry, homogenized, standard computer layout, but this issue is much improved and contains some very interesting articles. “Do YoungMenCause Wars?” is too short but presents some analysis worth considering—particularly following the Sept. 11 New York tragedy. Also informative is “The Rise and Fall of the Plastic Bullet,” another short piece on the use and history of the “non lethal” ammunition which is blinding so many people lately, and which is invariably claimed to be aimed “only at the lower body” but never really is. The article also notes that police have stuffed plastic bullets with weightenhancing objects such as flashlight batteries which have resulted in deaths. Subscription to Peace Magazine is $17.50 Canadian; Box 248, Station P, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 2S7.

Port of Call: Oct.-Nov., ’01. 7 pages, 8.5 x 11; Box 98, Beaverton, OR 97075. Fighting the Wrong War; Becoming the Enemy (issued just after 9-11 events and analyzing the tactics and practicalities of war).

The Slush Pile: number one, Spring ’01. 95 pages, folded 8.5 x 11 plus cover. 4504 Pine St. #4B, Philadelphia PA 19143. $20 for four issues or $5 per issue. This is the new organ of the Underground Literary Alliance. “There are times in life when you have to ignore the voice of authority and simply do what you feel is right. (This first issue)is an expression of that thought. Experience, opinion, and authenticity are the

Publications Received (Contd.)

soul of good writing, but that simple truth has been forgotten by many. Too often the writers promoted by the establishment are smug, alienating millionaires, writers who know little and care less about life outside their narrow... class. This is often a world of pain, injustice, inequity, and woe, and a writer cannot confront it from the university classroom... It is time for underground writers to ignore the well- paved roads of the current literary culture, ...and blaze a new trail...”

And there is some excellent writing in here, good, angry stuff by Karl Wenclas, Michael Jackman, Doug Bassett and others. These writers are confrontational, sick and tired of the gutting of writing, the censorship, the awarding of prizes and stipends to in-group inhabitants with predictable points of view. We suggest that the ULA add to its roster of foul tendencies the amplification of the “editor” role, that today amounts to a “written with” credit: in recent months we’ve seen publishing company editors crawl out of the woodwork and start saying that books like “Catch 22” were really written “WITH” them— and no self-respecting writer can abide a claim like that. Only the underground press — that is, the alternative press that may soon rapidly BECOME a true underground as persecution picks up — is the right place for independent spirits. Our best wishes to the ULA as it gets started.

SPUNK: issues 6 and 7. 72 pages, 7.75 x 9, and 6.5 x 9. Violet Jones, P. O. Box 5533b, Hayward California 94545. This is a very impressive pair of experimental issues, particularly no. 6. The strange page-sizes noted above are reflections of the unusual — no, UNIQUE — printing method devised for this production. The publisher uses photo-silkscreen, a kind of image carrier usually reserved for printing onto cloth, ceramic, or other manufacturing materials but not paper. And in so doing, Violet Jones has taken this process to an image-clarity not generally found in silkscreen (and in my experience, never at all). Using some unsophisticated wooden frames, simple squeegees, and a lot of hand work, Jones gets results fully as clear and dense as any offset or letterpress printing.

The paper these issues are printed on is a very dark, crude-surfaced material of gray or brown, and the effect is a little like hard paper towels. Issue 7 gives full notes on how it was done, which basically boils down to the use of about one two-hundredth of the amount of machine technology we’re committed to here at The Match’s own printing plant.

That being said, though, I wince at the amount of work it entails, particularly the hand folding of each of the sheets. One way to speed up the whole operation would be by use of one or an

other old variety of hand-cranked screen duplicator, but there are practical problems galore associated with doing this.

Nevertheless, here is another publication that doesn’t just talk about putting into practice the independent crafts that many Anarchists babble about as they sit hunched over their computer keyboards and look forward to going down and stealing photocopying from some giant corporation outlet. I applaud Jones’s dedication to staying free of ethical compromises and collaboration with the computer disease.

Issues contain commentary about the Time Capsule project, long letters columns, even longer sections of alternative press reviews, ideologies and independent thought, reflections on ecological matters, and much original artwork (strongly influenced by the wall art and hieroglyphic written language of ancient Egypt, to the point that a couple of messages, even, are embedded in the hieroglyphs).

While these issues are, as mentioned, still in the experimental stage, I found them enormously heartening. Liberation will not come from linking oneself to networks maintained and monitored in unknown places by faceless executives and government snoops; nor will it come through theft of services— even from businesses that themselves regularly steal from employees and consumers. One is not ennobled or uplifted by participating in the kinds of outrages one supposedly objects to-

@@@480.jpeg[[]]

I would like to see a true independent, individualistic alternative press arise in the world, and if it does, this and some other publications mentioned here are what will accomplish that.

---

There’s Something About a Train, no. 6. Monster issue, 128 large-size pages 8.25 x 11. Crude, vigorous layout in typewriter, handwriting, and reprinted type. Subject: riding freight trains. Accounts by real people; also zine reviews; music reviews; even a section of “hoboerotica”. Unusual and absorbing. $7 and worth it (Ihelped print the cover which took an enormous amount of ink). P. O. Box 2497, Santa Cruz, CA 95063.

---

MADALYN’S GROUP STILL CAN’T SPELL "ATHEIST”

Members of that foul slur on atheism, the remnant of the late, unlamented Madalyn O’Hair’s “American Atheists" cult organization, have been trying to figure out how to spell the word that supposedly describes their philosophy, for some years now. They think it’s “athiest"; you are athe, I’m athier, and they’re athiest.

In Yorktown, New York last Christmas, yet another blunder occurred, as they joined a religious display on public property, presenting a large cartoon of the sun with the slogan, "American Athiests Wish You a Very Merry Winter Solstice.” When they were here in Arizona they kept getting it wrong, and the number of times they’ve given the press the opportunity to laugh is only surpassed by the frequency with which their defunct Glorious and Illustrious Leader handed reporters wonderful ammunition to shoot down and jeer the alleged non-religious philosophy Truth is, they ARE religious, having the same goose-stepping style of exalting a leader that the classically religious do, only perhaps worse.

Even if they’d spelled it right, the simple fact is that their sign was dishonest and everyone it was directed toward could doubtless see that. NOBODY actually gives a damn about any so- called "solstice”; it’s just an attempt to crash somebody else’s party — deliberate, transparent propaganda. Saying that should not be taken to mean that we have some sympathy for the religionists either; notice how THEY don't hesitate to take over public events, and have completely religionized virtually every recent public gathering and many newscasts. A pox on both your houses, religionists and "Athiests”.

---

“All that barricade rhetoric advocating the instant realization of utopia here on Earth is nine parts delusionary and one part worthwhile. We should treat with a pinch of dream-dust every claim that a particular ‘ism’ will prove the panacea for the human condition. Anarchism, like anything, else, has no solution for every social problem. Freedom does not solve all problems. It may even make some of them worse."

-Doreen Frampton, in ‘The Cunningham Amendment’journal

WHERE WE GET OUR MONEY**

Since last issue, and as of August 27, 2001, donations to The Match have been received from the following people and bookstores. Note: all stores are on a voluntary-payment system; we do not bill anyone. Cover price is a suggestion only. Subscriptions are free, though donations are accepted. Thanks to all of you for helping to make The Match possible: Anne Seaman, Bob Conrad, Jonathan C.,Eljay’s Used Books, Thaddeus Bordofsky, David Dionne, Jasiu Milanow-ski, Rick Howe, Joey Lynch, Mark Wruble, Al Medwin, D.R., Kim Kearby, Robert Kephart, Carl Watner, Brian Mallett, K. Comer, Dave Villanyi, Salve Santos, Tom Nespeco, Shane Blackledge, Stephen Brodersen, Jr., Joyce Hardin, D. R., Mary Dixon, Geov Parrish, Robert Carr, R. F., Jack & Shirley Davis, Bill Hansen, Jacques Musy, Time Tested Books, J. H. for Lucy Parsons Center, Bound Together Books, Robert J. Casanas, Douglas Bolton, Susan Boren, Fourth Ave. Smoke Shop, Henry del Bianco, Randall Cornish, Ned Brooks, Steve Bovee, David Dionne, Martine Richardson, Joan Thomas, J. & A. Deal, Bill Dunn, Al Medwin, Jerry Kubias,' R. Lambert, Mike Reilly, Richard E. Geis, Tom Hendricks, Chris Renda, Neal Wilgus, Andy Molloy, Corby Simpson, Noel Scott, Jerry Gouge, Willard Saunders, Tom Kaiser, Jacques Musy, Mayday Books, Eljay’s Used Books, Frank Roemhild, Michael Sherick, Anonymous (Seattle), F. Whitehead, Ed Stamm, R. F., Lynn Olson, Paul Johnson, Robert O’Donnell, Aren Ginsberg, Colin Everett, Roger Fowler, I. J. Yablon, Sigurdur Hardarson, Gerald Cooper, Ernest T. Murphy, Tom Trusky, Dan Chilinski, Ernest J. Brooks, Lisa Schaeffer, James Woodrow, David Rosinger, Steve Cullen, J.R.W., Violet Jones, Salve Santos, C. Wilson, J. Cohen-Joppa,David Fleiss, Tower Magazines, Ian Latta, Clark Timmins, Leonard Kerpelman, Michael Trusty, Michael Priborsky, Louise/Eljay’s, Lynn Jacobs, Judy Merman, Shell 63, John Johnson, Jerry Curtin, Amber Salisbury-Bryan, Joe Shaver, Frank Mathews, Lisa Schaeffer, R. Hogben, Dan Kiss, F. T. Sloan, P. Miranda, Earl Lee, C.W., Violet Jones, Mike Wilkinson, Louise/Eljay’s, Susan Newell, Cheryl Hussey, Tina W., Robert Thorp, DMM Distro, Tower Magazines, Chuck Sohaskey, D.A. Sachs, Vincent Romano, Robert Gwinner, Ken Goodman, Mario Cesari, Chris Stadler, Dr. Gregory Trulen, Dave Villanyi, Lucas Szabo, Mike Hargis, Peter Inglis, Charles Whittington, Vernon Richards (p' Chip’s Booksearch), Clark Dissmeyer, M. Ehrenberg, Marshall Gordon, Thaddeus Bordofsky, Y. A. Duck, Trudie Weer- kamp, Xan Karn, Greg Rice, John Kemp, Jeffrey Deboo, David K., Peter Sabatini, Frank Murphy, David Waters, D.R., Corby Simpson, Medina Library, Kathy Blumm, Josh (Gandalfs), Craig Kelso, Liz, Archaic Designs, Ken Miller, Sean Matula, Tonee Mello, Clint Marsh, James Grim- meison, Bound Together Books, Pat Murtagh, Wayne Babich, Gaea, J.L.T., Jud Eagle, L.J., Cody’s Books, Nick Wolf, D.R., Roger Caron, Mark Hetts, Liz Hamlin, Steve Depka, Nick Voelkner, D.H. Wilson, Judy Sciandra, R.C., Bob Calese, Otis Kinkade, Mort Newman and Fay Blake, Peter (for Cunningham Amendment publication), Camille Ninaud, Reinhold Lang, Daniel Holmes, John Johnson, Chris Slack, Bob Conrad, John Fletcher, Jack Morris, Stephen Brodersen Jr., Left Bank, D.R., Rhea Rainwater, Larry Mathis, Ronald Sanderfer, Joe Witt, Greg W., Lish Wilson, Eli Rough, Kimmo Sundstrom, Laughing Horse Books, D.R., John Johnson, Louise/Eljay’s, Phyllis Avery, Nick Wolf, David Andre, Robert Calese, Milaka Strand, Doug Harrison, Rob Morris, Tom & Jeannette Jaquish, Frank Roemhild, Hannah Vollmer, Mario Cesari, D.R., Lucas S., Terraphile, Subterranean Books, David Kent, Gene Roberts, Marc Myers, R. Husek, Ryan K., Martine Richardson, A.J.H., Ryan K., Samuel Paniagua, Earl Lee. Multiple listings indicate multiple contributions.

Letters

@@@[[]]

Brought to You in art by LAW

Hi, Fred: As I write this, we’re in the middle of total war-hysteria. I posted a message on Alt.Zines telling people not to lose their heads. I said this showed the failure of government agencies to ^‘protect”—even though we’ve given them trillions. I alluded to the U.S. government’s interference in other countries’ affairs, to its own global empire, manned by U.S. troops, as a cause of all this. (The U.S. accounts for nearly half the total “defense” spending on the planet, SIX TIMES the next closest country, Russia.) I pointed out the sight of senators wrapping themselves in the flag and singing “God Bless America” on capitol steps as away to distract citizens from their own incompetence. I also referred to President Bush — who talks on TV to his countrymen as if we were all five-year-olds, as a stooge. (“Today people destroyed our buildings. These are bad people. These are evil people. They were big buildings. This is tragic. But we will win.” etc.)

From all the voluble talkers on that forum, I received ONE response, from a zinester who said: “Yes, Bush is a stooge, but he’s the only stooge we’ve got.” He went on to say he’s ready to go and fight. All the rest, to date, seem to have been buffaloed into silence by 24-hour- a-day war propaganda.

Sure, it was shocking; it was tragic. We have to make sure it never happens again. But like a magician distracting the audience with sleight of hand, so it won’t see what’s really happening, the media will never unravel the causes of this, including the ties that have existed between U.S. oil companies and the U.S.government,and those mideastern governments and groups.True Americans recall what George Washington said as a warning, to “avoid entangling alliances.” The U.S. has been backing this side or that side, financing — and arming — most of the parties, whether Israeli, Saudi, Egyptian, or Taliban (once U.S. allies!), and now it’s blown up in the U.S.’s face.

A good starting point as history of this interference in, and exploitation of, the mideast, is Carroll Quigley’s “Tragedy and Hope”, which is an insider’s view of the machinations of the

Anglo-American establishment. It’s one of the more eye-opening books I’ve ever read.

Will dissenters to war be put in cages, as happened to Ezra Pound at the end of WWII ?

P.S. By the way, I notice Noam Chomsky has come out for “The rule of Law” through the U.N. Security Council and World Court. That kind of thing is how we got into this mess! Bush says the fight against terrorism will last many years. Of COURSE I Long enough to impose “Homeland Defense” on this country, and the “rule of law” upon every square yard of this planet.

— Karl Wenclas, P.O. Box 42077, Philadelphia, PA 19101.

Thanks for those sane and encouraging comments, Karl.

Readers: Karl is one of the founders of the Underground Literary Alliance (reachable at the address just given).. See also our comments on publications received, elsewhere in this issue. —Editor.

They’ll Be In Touch

Dear Fred: I want to thank I. R. Ybarra for the “Around & About* column in the Spring 2000 issue concerning the census. I had completed the standard short form earlier, and thought little of it, but then...in April (of 2001!) I filed a late tax return. Shortly thereafter I got a notice in the mail from the CENSUS BUREAU, telling me that someone would pay me a call to perform a more in-depth interview, and that they’d be in touch on an ANNUAL basis to do more interviews. They wanted to obtain a “more detailed" snapshot of what people were doing, etc.

After having read the column in The Match, I decided to do what I could to avoid this agent, so immediately I took various steps. There were repeated knockings on my door and I ignored them.. In all, I was visited at least a half-dozen times over a period of several months, until I moved out. I’ve had no calls or visits at my new place.

Perhaps they don’t really care who they talk

to as long as it’s someone at that specific address. But I find it tough to believe that my paying late taxes and being targeted by the Census are coincidental. I expect to get a new notice, or start receiving visits from more agents any day ...

I’d prefer it if you omitted my name and address.

— Refusenik, U. S. A.

I bet there are quite a few people of Arabic extraction around this country right now who wish they had just thrown away the forms of this recent damned census. Now they have to be thinking worriedly that there is a government agency that can correlate their ethnicity and their street address, and take any kind of preventive action it decides is “legal”, against them at any time.

Since nobody ever knows what’s going to happen in the future, including what hysterias and “special circumstances” there may be that will easily invalidate all current glib promises of confidentiality and privacy, it behooves anyone who understands how governments operate, to look out for his own interests by trashing census forms and COMPLETELY AVOIDING censustakers.

We Anarchists In Danger? Oh, Surely Not!

Dear Fred: Welcome to World War III. The politicians and religious nuts are starting to piss me off. I suspect you could be in some danger in the wave of patriotic fervor that’s sure to develop in the coming weeks and months. The righteous blather and flag-waving is going to be ’way more sickening than it normally is. I heard a report this morning that Wal-Mart’s sales of American flags have increased a hundredfold. Happy days are here again.

—Al Medwin, Englishtown, NJ.

He’s Being All He Can Be (The misspellings are his.)

Woodworth: God bless the USA! Love it or leave it! Your article in the November, 2000 issue of Playboy entitled “Why I’m an Anarchist” should be entitled “Why I'm an Ignoramus.” If you don’t love this country, move somewhere else, you ignorant moron. You are nothing more than what most would call an “oblivious utopian.” You don’t seem to understand that laws, sometimes numerous and absurd as they are to you, are here for order and protection.

Your comment that states, “It asserts the right to conscript people to kill others,” is absolutely correct. I am an Army Second Lieutenant and yes, our military does exactly that. Do you know why we conscript people to kill others? You obviously don’t, you ignorant unpatriotic asshole. We (the United States) conscript people to kill others so we don’t allow facists to come our nation and force their obscene laws and

beliefs on us. Why don’t you move to China, Russia North Korea or any other nation and write the same article? You would last about two seconds if you were to do that. You see, in the United States, we have free speech. You exercised your right to free speech when you wrote your article in Playboy you uneducated dumb bastard. We conscript people to kill others to protect that right along with our other Constitutional Rights. You can be damn sure I would go to war and kill anyone that tries to take away that right from our citizens.

Why don’t you take your worthless ideals to another nation and see how far you get? I guarantee you would not get far.

This country may not be the best for everyone but it’s the best damn nation in the world you un-American piece of dogshit.

So get over it, we have laws and as long as I can help it, I will kill others who try to take our freedoms away. ,

P.S. You may wonder why I did not include my name or address. It is because Anarchists like to bomb people. You are the “bomb throwers”. Our military bombs people as well, and yes, there are civilian casualties, but you can blame the government of the nation we bombed for that, not the U.S. So go ahead & visit Mr. McVeigh or Mr. Kacinsky in prison and send them my regards, Asshole !

P.S.S. Don’t forget to vote & file your income tax! Also, smoke some dope too. That helps everything. Also if a “free society” wouldn’t be a perfect world, I’d sure like to know what it would be.

Signed, G.I. Joe “The Real American Hero” 2LT US Army.

Take This Advice

Hey, Fred: I’m too young for this, at 54, but I had a knee joint replacement done recently. Doing good, thank you very much, walking pretty much without a cane, and continuing to work on flexion, extension and strengthening.

All this a result of my patriotic duty “serving” in Viet Nam. Had to volunteer all over the place to get there. Enlisted in the Army, volunteered for jump school (paratrooper), volunteered for Special Forces training (Green Beret), taught to be an aidman (medic), then, with time running out, volunteered for Viet Nam.

There, in addition to being battalion medic, I was a company commander (advisor). First Purple Heart was for shrapnel in the face from a rocket propelled grenade that blew apart the heads of two of the three guys I was talking to. The second Purple Heart was from an RPG round exploding so that it broke my leg with a through and through hunk of iron. (Went through the femur one inch above the knee.) Another hunk of iron caught me across the left cheek and lower eyelid.

So, all these years later the osteoarthritis got so bad that I could scarcely walk (forget about stairs), but I worked as a carpenter. Suck it up, whistle to keep from crying and all that.

So I have a new knee, and it was done at the VA. Not an easy road. It took me several years from the time I began asking for evaluation from the orthopedic surgeons before I was referred up to see them. I was told I was too young for a replacement; was told that I wasn’t bad enough, not being in a wheelchair or on crutches. What I did finally just for the referral was to have X-rays done at a private clinic, then to have two independent opinions and evaluations of my knee and the X-rays.

Will spare the details of seeing a different resident each time I went to the clinic, being scheduled for surgery and canceled the day before because it was decided that the femur was too deformed to do a straightforward replacement. Okay, okay; finally it was done, and apparently done well.

I stayed on the VA because that was the deal: I go to your war and you tend to the wounds and their aftermath. A deal’s a deal. It all goes back to the prime mistake which was buying into the notion that our fathers who art in Washington know better than that 19-year-old kid — _me — that it was in our national interest to fight a war in Viet Nam (or anywhere else— Iraq, Yugoslavia, Panama, Korea, Nicaragua, Haiti, Cuba, Philippines, Guatemala, Mexico, ad infinitum). Well, it was in our national business interest, which is to say, none of MY business.

So, all this is to say to the young folks out there: Don’t buy into the military patriotic lie. What you gain isn’t worth it and may not be gained anyway. Killing folks and destroying is what it’s all about, pure and simple. Computer training, college, all that isn’t worth it. Ask yourself if you want to be part of a system that perpetuates killing and the lording it over the world’s people. I hope most of you will think not—and act on that rejection.

I’m a war tax resister—I resist paying taxes because so much of it goes to war, past, present and future— not because of my leg troubles, but because of being an old conscious objector. I’m past the powers-that-be wanting my body, so as far as possible I’ll not pay for some younger body going for the killing machine. .

Cheer up & happy trails.

— David Waters, Birmingham, Alabama.

Thanks for sharing your hard-won insights, my friend.

Try to Enjoy Life While You Have It

Dear Fred: It has been a while since I last wrote. I’ve been getting on with the usual effort of earning a living, finding some time and money to publish a few more editions of “Total Liberty", the latest of which I have just sent to my printer in Stafford. I am luckier than most, as I am able to work part-time and so have enough free time to work the garden, take a few walks in the hills near here and to pursue my other interests of playing music and learning the Welsh language.

Like most of your readers I greatly enjoy your magazine, especially its heart-felt anger at the state of the world and the growing level of authoritarianism. I enclose a few back copies of T.L.

I like your addition of the word “ethical” to the masthead. I have used “evolutionary” myself with the intention of differentiating my journal and my own view of Anarchism from that of mindless confrontation and violence.

My friend Peter Good has been very busy producing his inspired letterpress magazine, ‘The Cunningham Amendment”. He is currently learning binding techniques. I shall be seeing him and some other Anarchist friends in September; we have hired a Yorkshire farmhouse for a get- together (I hope it will be fun).

—Jonathan Simcock, Derbyshire, England.

Thanks very much for the issues of your very lively and interesting Total Liberty. I hope your gathering was indeed pleasant. Wish I could have been there; the closest I could get was setting the type for your letter and this response on the weekend of Sept. 22-23, which I merely guessed was the right one.

For readers who haven’t seen Total Liberty, it’s 12 pages (8.25 x 11.75), containing bookreviews, letters, and commentary including: Co-operative Anarchist Economics, Individualism, Letterpress Revival, Josiah Warren and Modern Times, Science Fiction as Social Criticism, and more. The address is: Box EMAB, 88 Abbey St., Derby DE22 3SQ, England.

Cost of four issues is £8. For information on Peter Good’s letterpress journal, The Cunningham Amendment which Jonathan mentions, see our commentary elsewhere in this issue on publications we’ve received.

People Who Are Afraid of Freedom

Dear Fred: I’ve lately been reading the work of Richard Mitchell. He published a newsletter called “The Underground Grammarian” for many years—setting the type of each issue by hand, no less! In his essays on language and education, he presents language not as just some fancy motor skill that enables us to order a regular coffee or a few gallons of unleaded gasoline, but as a cognitive tool that aids in clear thinking. To Mitchell, muddled language IS muddled thought. This particular point impressed me a great deal, and found a snug fit with my own vague feelings about what good writing is.

Perhaps this helps explain why Anarchism, as articulated in The Match, is so appealing to me. The screeds of the statist (and, sadly, any professed “anarchists”) strike me as muddled, cluttered with jargon, self-contradictory, or downright boring. I have far more

respect for writing that is able to proclaim freedom and liberty desirable absolutes than I do for the preposterous snake-dancing required to select one liberty over another, or get bogged down in a complicated calculus of greater goods and lesser evils.

If the first step to freedom is understanding the MEANING of freedom, Anarchists in this country have a huge job ahead. I often despair when talking to my office colleagues, who, despite their apparently solid education, show little aptitude for defining the term. To them, freedom is license granted for specific things, or discrete allowances of civil rights, or—stranger still— SECURITY in the things from which they are free. Dare I bring up the idea of complete freedom, of total liberty, and they recoil in horror! Far from finding freedom a desirable absolute, they actually seem afraid of it. “What would happen? If there were no government, there would be total chaos!”

Imagine, if you will, some ancient river culture where people could drink delicious water freely, swim in the gentle currents, or fish, wash, and bathe as they liked. Now imagine how that culture might change were the river dammed up. The river culture would fade away as the dam’s walls rose, choking the river off into a trickling stream in a dry channel. Perhaps the people get jobs on the dam, which might pay enough so that they can buy water fortheir families. Unlike an uncorked river, which washes itself clean, the turgid waters of the reservoir would require administration and policing.

After a few generations of work on the big job, with the ruins of their ancient culture submerged out of sight, I see fear in their eyes. They are not afraid of the dam; it is their bulwark against disaster. They do not fear the administrative class that much; they see their job as an important task. What these people are afraid of now is WATER. That is why they find themselves hard at work shoring up the sagging walls, taking feverish eight-hour shifts on the sandbag line, trying to plug any leaks orcracks, and always hoping that the walls can be stronger, higher! Were somebody to propose that the dam should be taken away, perhaps the dambuilders would growl: “You believe that water should just be able to go ANYWHERE? That would be chaos!”

I apologize for this bald parable, but to me, fearing freedom is just about as silly as fearing water. Fearing a sudden flood is reasonable, as are fears of the torrents of rage and reprisal the sudden collapse of the state would leave in its wake; but people seem blinded by fear, and wrongly equate hatred of the dike with love of catastrophe.

...I recently spoke with the curator of the “Gilded Rage’ exhibit at the Queens Library. She seems to be a nice enough kid, though it’s a shame she fell in with the experts, advisors, or “consultants” she did. Her attitude toward my complaints about the exhibit was one of polite tolerance, and I’ve not heard back from her since I sent her a letter and photocopies of selections from The Match.

...The Gilded Rage exhibit presents Anarchism as something that died out before 1920, but that producedcool-lookingcollectibles: old-fashioned swirly lettering, etc. In other words, Anarchism made commodity for modem consumers.

We sent some copies of this publication after getting word that the exhibits promoters pooh- poohed claims that Anarchism still existed; but despite this effort, they wouldn’t give an inch.

However, the curator apparently did know of some plan to “create, at last”, an Anarchist magazine, and from what we’ve been able to find out it largely features a disgusting person who has advocated theft as Anarchism, and promoted an ex-hijacker as a laudable Anarchist militant.

I also did a bit of research on that “new Anarchist magazine’ she mentioned. In fact, a local Anarchist approached me to see if I was interested in getting involved. After seeing one of the names on the “Editorial Board”,needless to say, I declined. (Even the minor contact our Underground Literary Alliance has had with this person has resulted in trouble.) I’m almost ready to make book that the thing will be entitled “The Bombhurler” and will feature red-eyed, drug-fogged fulminations about all the great things we’ll do “after the revolution”, with, of course, a few pieces by academics or ex-Black Panthers thrown in for good measure.

I’m sending you some very disturbing “Anarchist” zines I’ve been assigned for review in “A Reader’s Guide’. One of the very worst features an essay by YOU! You’ll wince when you see it: lovingly reproduced images of Che Guevara and horrible, sub-literate essays spouting leftist dogma about “the masses”. I’m actually starting to long for the days of the Soviet Union when these morons would identify themselves with Communism. One look at their revolutionary pose shows that they never really left that mindset.

— Michael Jackman, New York City.

The essay by me in one of those gutter- zines was ripped off from Playboy, November 2000 issue. Why anybody would like or agree with what I wrote, and also like or agree with the leftist iconism and viciously pro-vandalism graphics of the gutter-zines, is still another big mystery. A couple of examples of the garbage I refer to are printed here to show what I mean when I speak of how violentism tends to lose all sense of decency or ideals after a while.

AN INTERESTING MISTAKE

In the aftermath of the 9/ I I terrorism, The New York Times had, understandably, a rather larger incidence of typographical errors and misspellings in its columns than usual. A different kind of slip-up, however, was this sentence in the issue for Sept. 19, page B-9:

"Kofi Annan, secretary general of the United Nations, said that citizens of 62 companies were among the trade center victims.”

We wonder: How tough are the naturalization requirements?

@@@[[]]

...People who react favorably to gutter material like these two graphics are not anarchists. In fact, they are indistinguishable from Nazis.

It Was The Worst

Hey Fred: I am really glad you have been knocking Zerzan and his merry crew. They (and some of their apologists at Left Bank Books—you are correct to surmise a connection) despise me now for my public criticisms of their WTO antics. It’s not that I object to property damage per se, but what they did was at best one of the great tactical mistakes of protest history ; at worst, an intentional sabotage of historic proportions.

Theirs was an infantile, knee-jerk plan that intentionally upstaged and undercut the far more courageous actions of the so-called peaceful protesters — who are usually ineffective, but who happened this time to be extraordinarily effective. Rather than letting the story of “pathological pacifists” (many of whom were anarchists) shutting down the WTO get out, it became a media frenzy of broken windows and a sicken- ingly distorted media stereotype of anarchism. The corporate state couldn’t have planned it any better.

Tens of millions now not only know what an “anarchist” is (“it’s a terrifying young criminal who riots and breaks windows for no apparent reason”), but are happy to excuse whatever new abuses our police state can connive to control the menace. Any truly effective challenge to the corporate state will result in attempted crackdown, but it doesn’t have to happen with broad popular approval. That’s what Zerzan’s bunch accomplished. It will take decades, at minimum, to undo all the damage, and they’re quite proud of it. Those little fucks deserve all the contempt they have coming to them. And Zerzanthe most, because he sits back and lets young folks who don’t have his experience take all the risks and in some cases wind up ruining their lives through needless entanglements with the legal system. What a profile in courage!

In general, I don’t understand the contempt many young anarchists these days have for people they label “pacifists” — that seems to be anyone who engages in nonviolent resistance. It’s one thing to criticize a tactic, and voluntary arrest can be pretty idiotic at times. But I always thought anarchism REQUIRED pacifism, and vice-versa. After all, what is anarchism but self-rule, and the refusal to rule others? And what is violence but the use of force to make others do your bidding?

Coercive anarchism is an oxymoron. And if you’re a pacifist, how can you justify an inherently violent institution? (The state.) I don’t get why more anarchists aren’t at least political pacifists (personal self-defense is another issue), and why more pacifists aren’t anarchists.

Thanks also for your ongoing clarity regarding “Anarchy” magazine. They’re another example.

All in all, there seem to be a lot of people running around who think “anarchy” means “I can do whatever the fuck I want, no matter how badly it harms you.” In a two-year-old that’s understandable. Adults will have tojo better than that if they ever expect to build a sustainable movement that can help get the corporate jackboot off our necks.

— Geov Parrish, Seattle.

You Misunderstand

Fred Woodworth: We are sorry that you feel the need to pull The Match! from our collective, but frankly the reasons you gave for your decision are misinformed. This is most likely due to miscommunication. “Pulling the Strings” was given away free at our store per your request, as were the Anarchist calendars. We were glad to have them. Since they were donated, we did not sell them via our catalog because we judged they would be gone before our next catalog came out. John Johnson’s publication, “Imagine”, has sat in our “To Review” box as have many other “worthy” publications. This is the unfortunate side effect of a short-staffed, overworked project. With our recent downsizing of the distribution end of our project, we have had especially little time to add new publications to our mail order operation. In fact when we decided to close down our warehouse we completely stopped accepting new titles until after our move. Many great publications did not get our attention due to this transition. Moreover, it is just not true that we have not carried your novel, “Dream World”. Many times we have hand-written you letters with prepayment checks in order to carry your book at our store, and when we have had it in stock it has usually been shelved in our front room on our new arrivals and “staff picks” shelf. You must understand that to send a letter and check each time we run out is virtually impossible with our small staff and work load. The Match! has always been sold in the front of our magazine rack.

We hope that you understand the limits of a small collective project such as ours. We can’t respond to each thing we receive in the mail as elaborated in the paragraph above. If you had called or written us directly about your concerns which you printed in the latest Match! we could have talked about them and saved us all these unfortunate miscommunications. Finally, we sell many different publications here at Left Bank, which each collective member has different feelings about ranging from good to bad to indifferent. The Match! is included in this, along with John Zerzan’s books and even the Unabomb- er Manifesto. We have consistently sold each issue of The Match! over the years and it would be truly unfortunate to see such a fixture in the anarchist community leave our shelves. We hope you understand our situation and reconsider your decision. Sincerely,

The Left Bank Books Collective, 92 Pike Street, Box B, Seattle, WA 98101

In point of fact: I did write you, last year, as soon as I heard it said that you’d refused Johnson’s anarchist magazine, Imagine. Since there was no reply I decided it must be true, and therefore had to stand in solidarity with' this extremely promising new publisher.

Yes, I’m aware that your project has been experiencing some serious problems. I’ve tried to help out in the ways I could. It was my hope, for example, that you would take the pamphlets and calendars I had sent you, and SELL them, keeping the proceeds for your own operating expenses. But perhaps I wasn’t clear about this.

I want you to understand that this is a time of profound doubt, for me, about whether I want to go on calling myself (and this journal) Anarchist after my deadline of issue #100. The reasons have been explained in the past two issues, but mainly revolve about the ghastly abandonment of principles exhibited by coerc ion - advocating persons calling themselves Anarchists. Your Mr. Zerzan is one of those. Therefore, when 1 hear that HIS books and so forth are being vigorously displayed, listed, and sold by you— while almost the only decent, humane journal of explicit Anarchism that has started up in recent years sits endlessly in your TO REVIEW bin, it does not inspire any confidence in me that we are on the same side anymore.

In short, to put a question to you directly: Do Zerzan’s lunatic scribblings and lush praises for the Unabomber get stuck in your pile of tobe-reviewed publications for a year or two at a time? Or are they on the fast-track to your shelves, tables, and catalogues?

You see, I’ve had just enough of being an "‘officially unapproved” person and writer and advocate of non-coercion, within the mainstream society. If that’s the way it’s going to be within the supposedly Anarchistic society as well, I really had better quit identifying myself as an Anarchist, and drop the label altogether.

Frankly, it seems to me that you’ve fallen so hard for Zerzan’s dreck only because he’s a “celebrity”— that is, media attention and interviews on CNN and so on have plumped up this screwy nonentity into a spokesman for all Anarchists. You are letting these deadly enemies of everything that Anarchism ought to stand for regulate who will rise to prominence among the adherents of this supposedly ethical philosophy. This is a point I wish you would soberly cons ider.

As for The Match returning to Left Bank Books, the bottom line is that I will be glad to do so if Imagine is sold there too and given at least the chance of counteracting the dreadful garbage also being sold (some of which, I honestly tell you, has far less promise for human freedom than even the government of the United States).

Finally, regarding our own book, Dream World: I did find record of an order for ten copies from you. That was dated February 16, 1996. Before that the only other order I know of was also for ten, in late 1989. How many of Zerzan’s loving testimonials to a barbaric society have you managed to unload during the same period?

—Fred Woodworth.

Don’t Give In To Them

Dear Fred: I know how disheartening it must be to see the philosophy of Anarchism continually being usurped by the violent and authoritarian pseudo-anarchists. Such usurpation is beneath contempt. However, I do not believe it is enough of a reason to abandon the word Anarchy altogether.

It is still important for The Match to continue using the word, for the simple fact that your journal preserves the real meaning of the word. It was that which first drew my attention to The Match. I don’t want to see Anarchy become completely devoid of its true definition, as the word Liberal became in the early part of the 20th century. As long as your journal continues to use it in its correct sense, the true definition

of Anarchy can never fully be lost.

— Brian Mallett,

@@@484.jpeg][]]

A Written Attempt at Ju-Jitsu

Hi, Fred: I find your reasoning about the illegitimacy of the government’s claim on you to "serve” jury "duty” attractive and compelling. Of course, that philosophy extends to other government institutions as well.

I love your denunciation of the rock-throwing "anarchists” who have romped in various cities. For ethical reasons—and because my study of history leads me to believe that the use of violence never really changes things at their roots —I am committed to nonviolent social change. But is violence justifiable, even in extreme situations? The criteria you use (if there is an emergency, a self-defense situation, or if it will save innocent lives) opens up a can of worms, as you recognize. The criteria are quite similar to the historical basis for just-war theory, which religions (and the governments to which they are parasitically attached) have applied to sanctify all sorts of wars, no matter the death and destruction they bring. I’ve always detested just-war theory because, as you say, its adherents often treat it as an excuse to take off all restraints.

Trying io get inside the heads of the "anarchist” vandals, I wonder whether they might use your criteria to claim their actions are well-founded. I know many of them believe they have the right to throw stones because of the situation we are in. Some may consider every moment a potential emergency, as the fate of the planet rests on a precipice. Human actions are ravaging the environment at a pace where there will soon be little to save. The corporations these activists are targeting are encouraging the consumption driving our depletion of natural resources and the creation of pollution which will lead to immense destruction through global climate change.

There’s also the loss of species habitat, making the offensive on corporations "defensive”

in the minds of these activists and a matter of life or death for non-human animals... Put in these terms, my own choice is to boycott such corporations and encourage the same in other people I know, and to engage in nonviolent campaigns (not just sporadic vandalism) that have the chance to undermine the corporations’ global aims to some degree. But the vandals are fighting a just war — what’s so bad about a few rocks?

—Vincent J. Romano, White Plains, New York.

What’s so bad is that to people looking at such tactics from ’way off, these actions seem to be just variants of any other terrorism, the same way normal people can’t distinguish between the 57 meaningless varieties of Stalinism, Leninism, Trotskyism, etc. (There may be differences, but who the hell cares what they are?)

Another thing that’s even worse than just the loss of sympathy among regular people, is that such tactics lead to isolation of “mere” window smashers in increasingly ultra-radical sects, where growing self-reinforcement pushes them along into still-worse actions against, ultimately, people. It’s similar to how cop-culture propels half-decent people into full-fledged nasty gestapohood.

Power corrupts, and if Anarchists don’t even comprehend this themselves, it’s a huge mystery to me what part of Anarchism they do understand.

More Thoughtful “Help”

Hi, Fred: I’ve been a reader of your publication since 1971. As a matter of fact, The Match is the first explicitly anarchist publication I ever read and it’s thanks to your listing of periodicals that you exchanged with that I found out that the IWW still existed (I lined-up in 1972). As an aside, I might also note that it was Noam Chomsky’s 1969 book, "American Power and the New Mandarins”, that turned me on to anarchism in the first place.

I want to make a few comments on the manifesto denouncing the so-called Seattle "riots” (in terms, I might add, practically indistinguishable from those of then-President Clinton). Now, if it was only a question of opposition to the trashing I could see your point. When I heard about it on the news I was at once delighted that those corporate exploiters got a taste of people’s wrath and, at the same time, certain that the spectacle would give the media the chance to once again depict anarchists as nothing more than violent thugs. So, I have mixed feelings about that whole episode but I definitely don’t think that it was "authoritarian” or "anti-anarchist”. Anarchists are no more wedded to nonviolence than they are wedded to violence. Corporations are powerful institutions in our world whose daily decisions affect the lives of millions of people (both as workers and consumers). If a few broken windows, or picket lines, strikes or boycotts factor into those decisions and help to prevent them from harming people, then why shouldn’t anarchists participate in such activities? (By the way, I don’t think that breaking windows is a very effective tactic.)

As to the question of property: I think you make the mistake of equating personal property (e.g., your car, stereo, house, etc.) with fixed capital (e.g., mines, factories, banks, corporate owned retail outlets, etc.). The targets of the trashers were not mom-and-pop corner grocery stores or cobbler shops: they were banks and outlets for major capitalist corporations who make their money expropriating the product of the actual producers (e.g., 14-year-old girls in Indonesia and middle-aged men in Seattle alike). They have the State and the plute press to defend them. Why should anarchists?

One other point on this matter of the vandals: Your allegation that they were most likely police provocateurs based solely on the 'evidence* that the cops did not arrest any of the trashers. This “evidence* is pretty weak. First of all, isn’t the purpose of agent provocateurs to entrap activists into committing “crimes* so that they can be arrested, tried and jailed?

No, the purpose of provocateurs is to discredit a movement or group. Cops are certainly not limited to getting people jailed; getting the public to HATE protesters and to call for more laws to suppress them gives the whole effort a much- enhanced legitimacy in the long run.

If agent provocateurs did, indeed, instigate the violence I think there would have been some arrests. Don’t you?

The other point I would like to comment on is the declaration’s implicit condemnation of the attempt (successful as it turned out) to prevent the opening meeting of the WTO from taking place as an authoritarian attack on freedom of speech and assembly. If the WTO were simply an association of private citizens getting together to discuss the philosophy of free trade then I could agree with you. But the WTO is not such a free association; it is an institution of World Governance. How can it possibly be authoritarian to stop the STATE from making decisions that will affect the lives of millions of people? Isn’t that what anarchism is all about? I always thought so!

Again the problem is legitimacy: People who claim they believe in free speech and right of assembly look like perfect hypocrites when they trot out contorted justifications for why THEIR abridgements are really okay, but the other guys’ aren’t; for why THEY are great, heroic liberators and the other guys are reactionary, bourgeois oppressors.

Moreover, after they do abridge other people’s rights to some extent for a while, they definitely tend to move on to more substantial denials of others’ freedom in far less limited ways. Already some who took part in Seattle actions are

screaming that any business at all, no matter how small and simple, deserves to be smashed because it IS a business, period.

Soon after that, critics like me will have to be smashed, too, and the reasoning will as always twist and writhe so that the Maoists or Communists still trumpet their ideological righteousness even up to the moment where they execute those who dare to disagree with them.

One last thing: The Match does a great job of exposing the police state but what about the corporate state? Cops abuse and harm people one at a time, but an individual capitalist or corporation exploits wage-slaves on a daily basis and can destroy thousands of lives with the stroke of a pen. Why not expose more of this authoritarian abuse?

— Mike Hargis, Evanston, Illinois.

If you want to edit your own paper, do so. But you’ll get noplace trying to get me to turn this publication into a typical, dreary, “anti-capitalist” leftoid organ.

But now I must address something you said back at the beginning of your letter: that you’d been a reader of this publication since 1971. You did indeed subscribe then. But you got mad when I criticized the IWW in 1975. Shortly thereafter you went off the mailing list. In 1978, during a period when I no longer could get anybody here to print the publication, and was broke and literally starving, you crowed that it was you and the IWW that had finally put an end to The Match.

When I managed to scrape up an old press and figure out how to make it work, and made a comeback, you weren’t there helping. You finally got back on the mailing list many, many years later, but by no stretch of the imagination have you been a supporter of this journal, as you try to make it seem, for thirty years.

Time may pass, but I never forget.

Match Made Their Day

Fred: I work for a moving company here in Richmond, Virginia. Every morning the workers are dispatched into crews and sent out to the jobsite of the day. During one such drivel found myself sharing a truck with two co-workers who unbeknownst to me have as fevered a hatred for law enforcement as I do. We had a long drive to the job that morning and I began reading the Who The Police Beat column from issue 96 aloud to them to break up the monotony of the day. After a while P , a white guy about 50 years old, T , a 19-year-old black guy, and myself, 27 and white, all began sharing our stories of varying degrees of police abuse and mistreatment. P , as it turned out, once served a prison sentence of over two years for failing to comply with financial regulations relating to his now defunct firm. He passionately spoke of making the people who tortured him suffer for what they put him through.

T------ grew up poor in an inner-city neighborhood that was devastated before he was born. By the time he was 16 he was involved in a neighborhood gang; his arms are covered with tattoos. He was beaten by several cops and, at the age of 16, put in the city lockup for almost three months. He can barely speak of what he went through during that time. I then shared my own story of being arrested.

That day at work was one of my best ever, largely due to The Match.

— Greg Wells, Richmond.

Does Mayday Books Control the State?

Dear Fred; Some of us are fans. Especially your dislike of computers and the police. No computers here at Mayday.

But, what about capitalism? Who controls the state, police, military, etc.? Who benefits? Do you have any critique of capitalism?

— Craig P., Mayday Books, Minneapolis, Minn.

Who controls the state, etc.? Lots of people, not just “capitalists”. The religious are an even more enormous reservoir of controlling mania.

I have plenty of critiques of capitalism, but they all boil down to one simple word, which is “big”: anything that is big gets authoritarian. Big newspapers inevitably become authoritarian. Tiny ones generally aren’t. Do you oppose the very concept of newspapers, then? No. Nor do I oppose the concept of business.

YOU are in business; Mayday Books is a business (you sell books). The only difference between you and Barnes & Noble is size — they’re huge and you’re tiny. If you got to their scale you’d behave just exactly the same way they do. If any small zine inflated up to the size of the Arizona Daily Sewer it would turn into the precise equivalent of that hypocritic al, lying, cop worshipping, statist/religionist putrescence.

Left Bank Books, another outfit that, is in business (again, selling books) has put out a pamphlet stating flatly that Anarchists are against all business activity, period. Here the lies and contradictions or hypocrisy have already started, because the truth is that PLENTY of Anarchists do not at all object to the concept of business. I don’t—does that mean I’m not an Anarchist? If so, please tell me quick, as 32 years is more than enough time to waste on advocating a philosophy that excludes oneself.

This Businessman Sure Didn’t Control It

Dear Fred: Don’t drop the A-word. If YOU don’t use it, I have nowhere to point to for a definition.

I sit writing this from a building I now rent that is dripping so badly from a roof leak it looks like it’s raining inside. This is after be

ing forced from a building I OWNED and kept repaired, by a government I don’t respect. It’s not raining on my merchandise now, though; the cops took it again— after raiding me for the sixth time — on charges that they’ve already lost at a jury trial for. This time I’ll sue. Will let you know about my “huge settlement*.

— Gary Elvers, Kokomo, Indiana.

Gary had a small business that sold records and publications, including this one. The STATE smashed his store, raiding it six times in different locations. Whose side are you on, Anarchists? Are you on the side of those who claim that “business controls the State”? If so, how come THIS business couldn’t exert such control and save itself? Are you on the side of Stalinoid window-breakers who’d smash Mr. Elvers’ windows whenever they could get a brick in edgewise between the cops’ raids?

Anarchists: Are you really on the side of the joyful theft advocates who urge everybody to filch anything they can from any store they go into? Can’t you see the destruction of individual rights that such criminal acts will lead to?

Is It A Clockwork Universe?

Dear Fred: The disappeared convict has reappeared. He was vanished when it was time for his evil, dissident Anarchist literature to be given to him. However, when it was time for his 41st trip to the “hole* and 13th inter-prison transfer, then, no problem finding him. What excuse this time? Eating an apple in the factory; asking for a job change; asking how long it took for the trash truck to be filled; having a reddened forehead from applying a hot pack for a sinus headache. Suspicion— suspicion of being suspicious? Oh, a new one conjured up: label him as being an Aryan Brotherhood gang member. Well maybe not a member; he is 70 years old. Call him an Associate— that will do. And it did.

If they prolong my latest lawsuit contesting this last lockup for as long as my previous segregation lawsuit — 24 years — I’m afraid my carcass will collapse before resolution.

A few comments on the last two issues: You wrote that poetry is dreck. No, poetry is to prose as saccharine is to sugar.

H. L. Mencken: “Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.”

Voltaire has a Quaker say in “Dictionaire Philosophique”: “The man who says to me, ‘Believe as I do, or God will damn you,’ will presently say, ‘Believe as I do, or I will assassinate you.’ * Also: “It is forbidden to kill: Therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”

Violence: Yes, it would be a much more pleasant life if we all lived in an anarchist, cooperative, non-violent society. But, given the reality of the real deal—i.e., SWATs breaking many dozens of citizens’ doors at ail hours of

the day and night, killing children and others, stealing their property, etc., is pacifism viable? Yes, I know your views, but I disagree.

I’ve posed this question to folks of pacifist persuasion: With foreknowledge of WWII’s consequences, would you place a bomb in, or acquiesce in its placement, to kill the Nazi party leaders and Hitler in the 1930s? Any comment?

Yes, Ronald; I’ll comment. Your question is a completely idle one because we do NOT know the future and in what way actions will turn out. The reality is that German CULTURE was ripe for Nazism; it wasn’t just one or a few leaders that brought it about, any more than it was just Martin Luther King Jr. who caused the Civil Rights Movement to happen.

OUR culture believes that things only happen because leaders make them happen; but without people on a wide scale being ready for those things to happen, they will in fact not happen at all. Leaders do far less than anybody thinks.

That being said, I think that if someone had blown up Hitler, things would have turned out almost exactly the same. Headline: Germany Mourns: “The Fatherland today is plunged into grief at the untimely death of Herr Adolf Hitler, assassinated at the General Meeting of the N az.i on al soc i al i st Party Congress. Also killed were... (long list follows). Denunciations of the horrid crime came from the mayors of Berlin, Stuttgart, Koln and ., (even longer list here).

“Schools have been closed in mourning, as small children wept uncontrollably at the news of the Fuehrer’s death. From the churches, clergymen denounced the lawless act and called on God to avenge the deaths and to replace the glorious dead who sacrificed their lives for the Fatherland .. .

“United States officials offered condolences and condemned the killings. President Roosevelt expressed hope that the noble ideals of the Nazi Party would ultimately be carried on under new leadership, and he promised that America would do everything possible to.. "

There’s your answer to what your hypothetical act would have resulted in: NO CHANGE.

I also see from the Match that the Humane Society gestapo now use children as informants in order to raid their parents’ homes. Remember the 1950s, when the press used to detail the evil Commie practice of encouraging children to inform on their parents? But now it happens here.

If the Humane Society continues this good work perhaps they too can receive SWAT funds and equipment, as the game wardens have. The magazine *Field and Stream” (hardly a radical journal) recently described a U.S. Fish and Wildlife “Service” forty-man SWAT raid, with helicopters, in Maryland. The principal suspect, arrested in his bed, was charged with possession of undersized, untagged fish, and having a loaded weapon in his car. Twenty-four others

were charged with related offenses. Obviously, with such dangerous criminals as these, SWAT tactics were clearly needed.

Also last issue, mentioning PETA: I recently read that the PETA people collected over one million dollars to protect animals. Of that, 30 to 40 thousand went to the workers in the field, the rest for fund-raising, etc.

Referring to page 27 last issue: Dostoyevsky believed that a country’s civilization could be determined by judging its prison. Read “Prison Legal News,* 2400 NW 80th St. #148, Seattle WA 98117, to gauge our civilization. Or, is it savagery?

So, as I approach my 34th year in these cages while serving my 209-year sentence, I still try to remember Nazim Hikmet’s statement: “Being captured is beside the point. The point is not to surrender.”

P.S. On June 26 The Match #96 was seized in the shakedown as a friend of mine was leaving the mess hall with it. The hack started looking at it and commenting about hate literature. I stepped forward and said it was mine. Then the dutiful, officious officer of law and order that he was, invoked the rule that one inmate can’t have anything belonging to another. I got it back at least; it’s now in my cage; but I can’t let others read it.

@@@485.jpeg][A close-up of a clock AI-generated content may be incorrect.]]

Now here’s an interesting point that may not have occurred to you: Those prison guards think THEY know the future, just like you think you could alter the present by changing the past. It comes down to the old question of whether any agency’s definite knowledge of events to come is compatible with Free Will. This has always taken the form of supposing that for any “god” to exist, he would have to have powers of knowing the future—anything less and he would not qualify as “god” at all, so may as well be ignored since it would be accurate to say that no “god” exists.

BUT, if a “god” did exist and did know exactly what anybody was going to do, long in advance, even, of any person’s birth, then there would be no more latitude for our behavior than there is for the recorded figures inhabiting static

frames on a reel of movie film.

In such a clockwork universe, blowing people up before they’d committed the crimes you knew for certain they were going to commit, or censoring literature because you knew how those reading it were bound to behave thereafter, might make sense, if you were “god”, but the whole business would certainly be the very opposite of freedom for the people locked into existence as film frames.

Clearly, that is absurd. Endless philosophical debate aside, we all know that we have free will (there is no use arguing with the grinning academic disputants who wish to prolong discussion out of deplorably contrarian motives.) And since we all really do know (even those contrarians know it) that we have free will, the excellent statement of Bakunin’s cuts right to the heart of the matter:

“If God exists, man is a slave But man can and must be free. Therefore, God does not exist.”

Any person thinking he or she knows the future (beyond the immediate next few moments), to such a point that authoritarian action is thus “justified”, is essentially nullifying the free decision-making power of other people, and IGNORANTLY so because such “knowledge”— even when subsequently proved to be accidentally accurate, is never really dependably so.

And this is what dooms the controlling actions of pre-emptive violence to rigid classification with actions of governments or gods, not with those of people who “can and must be free.”

A World of Fear

Dear Fred: I wanted to write to you earlier, because I appreciated your comments on animal rights/vegetarianism so much last winter. I was grateful to know that someone like you agrees with the importance of concern with other beings’ rights. I hope a world will come some day where everyone is imaginative enough to wish no visible cruelty on this planet.

It is after the World Trade Center tragedy. I am scared, and stunned to know that the world is not the way it used to be anymore. It used to be a world’that I hated deep inside because of all the sacrifice of the poor, including tortured animals, under the prosperous-look living of ours. But the world I see now is fear. I feel that I am so powerless and nothing is making anything better. War is coming. The poor helpless children and women, the people who will be killed! And our freedom, although it was limited before, will be greatly taken away.

I often wonder why teachers and governments teach children lies. As you grow up, you must forget about beautiful ideals such as helping someone in trouble, being kind to animals, and knowing that war is no good. If such thoughts are bad, why do schools give us such lectures in the first place?

@@@486.jpeg][A drawing of a person and a child in a destroyed city AI-generated content may be incorrect.]]

Please be safe. I doubt a little if this letter will reach you under this extreme situation.

P.S. If you show this letter in the magazine, I feel honored, truly. But I have to say that I want my name anonymous in that case

— Another human being.

Location withheld.

Horrifying Events

Dear Fred: My wife turned on the radio; told me I’d likely not be going in to work. We went out into the back yard and watched the smoke, but could not see downtown through the summer foliage. Turned on the television just in time to see a fireball on live TV. I said at the time: “Get ready for every rat to crawl out of the woodwork and use this tragedy as an excuse for even MORE tragedies.” Sure enough, within hours all the old hawks were on television, angry as hell, but specifically angry at the old Church Commission of the seventies, or at old Executive Order 12333 forbidding the state-sponsored assassination of anybody. I saw George Stephan- opolous comment that people seemed ready to give up a little liberty for security. This was ugly stuff, political hacks grinding their old battle-axes on the morning’s rubble.

A phone call from a friend in lower Manhattan told us he couldn’t go outside, not for fear of any danger but because armed patrols were enforcing a perpetual curfew. Elections have been suspended. A vague state of full terrorism alert exists, although nobody is able to explain what that means.

I wrote before about TWA Flight 800, and I said that it wasn’t important who did it, but it was instructive to see to what uses those in power would put the tragedy. I don’t see much of a difference here.

Particularly unenlightened is today’s editorial from Steve Dunleavy for the New York Post (Sept. 12) entitled *‘Simply Kill These Bastards!” —which doesn’t express any love for Constitutional due process or rule of law. “The response to this unimaginable 21st century Pearl

Harbor should be as simple as it is swift — kill the bastards.”

He goes on: “No, I don’t mean hunt them, arrest them, extradite them and prosecute them in a court of law. I mean a far quicker and neater form of retribution for this cabal of cowards. A gunshot between the eyes, blow them to smithereens, poison them if you have to. President George W. Bush should right now be putting his name to a fresh document— one that rescinds the order stating:

*No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States should engage in assassination or conspire to engage in assassination.”

Dunleavy goes on: “Right for that time (the 1970s), wrong for this time. Train assassins (we’ve done it before), hire mercenaries, put a couple of million bucks up for bounty hunters to get them dead or alive, preferably dead. As for cities or countries that host these worms, bomb them into basketball courts... We should go into the interior (of Afghanistan), hunt down the desert rat and execute him and his followers on the spot. And if Saddam Hussein makes so much as a peep, do him, too. The time has come.”

This guy sounds like a total maniac.

I’m going quiet in a lot of local conversations with people in my neighborhood because of all this hysteria. Let’s face it: I’m not going to make any friends here by pointing out that this sort of TERRORISM is exactly what has happened around the world, sponsored by the United States government. When the state does it, it’s collateral damage; when THEY do it, it’s cowardly evil. Just try telling that to the people in this neighborhood, though; try telling them that the chickens are coming home to roost. It's pointless.

Was what happened ugly? Sure. Was it horrifying? Yes, I am horrified by what I saw. Was it, as so many talking heads have claimed, unprovoked? Absolutely not. But I worry about getting pummeled for heresy. Independent thought and reason could mark a person here, now.

My wife and I gave our phone number to the Yemeni guys who run the corner bodega, just in case any Captain America types try to make trouble. Then I saw them again this morning and they told me that a few people had shouted at them to take the next plane home, or had threatened to kick their asses ...

It’s apparent what trouble rats like Dunleavy are making. Yes, Dunleavy; let’s fuel a Krys- talnacht! They control everything leading up to a catastrophe, and they’re going to solve the problem with — more control.

I hope all’s well at The Match. Here the sirens are wailing and the fighters are thundering. Much of the city is “occupied”. Martial law and the irrational jingoism scare me. How

long before venomous editorialists declare that OTHER people who “make a peep” should be “done” as well?

— Michael Jackman, New York City.

All is well here at The Match, and many thanks to those of you who’ve expressed concern. I’ve mostly just buried myself in work here at the off ice, produc ing this issue of the magazine, and have been careful about going out.

However, I don’t think anarchists are in for much hassle — at least not yet. That could change in a flash, though, particularly if what I dread comes to pass. That is that some vicious police-sponsored “anarchist” publication comes out with a big spread crowing that the 9/11 terrorism was “a glorious victory against capitalism”, and lauds the religion-crazed attackers as models of “revolutionary” spirit.

That could happen. In fact I think every day that it doesn’t happen is a kind of reprieve, and wait for the provocateurs to lower the boom. You can bet that some gutter-zine or other is going to do it eventually — and it won’t be its originators who wind up in jail; it’ll be us.

The instant I get this issue out, I’m going to stash some equipment in another place, so that if the shouting, screaming mob of police kicks in my door and rampages through here destroying machines under the pretext of a search, I’ll still have some apparatus left to restart after a while.

Let’s hope that the merely irresponsible and deluded publications which posture this way will be shamed into silence, while the outright government-financed and cop-written ones will dry up as funding and effort shifts elsewhere.

More Atrocious Discreditation

Mr. Woodworth: Enclosed is a December 17, 2000 story in the San Francisco Chronicle about theLabadie archives that I thought you might find interesting.

Thank you for publishing parts of the Ammon Hennacy autobiography a few issues ago; I really enjoyed it.

— Colin Everett, Massachusetts.

The article Colin sends us is titled Unabomb- er's Gift Makes his Life a Study in Anarchy, and reports the donation of The Ted Kaczynski Papers to the Labadie Collection,, which again is bragging about the acquisition and acting as if this garbage has something to do with real Anarchism.

We mentioned last issue how the Labadie library ballyhooed the acquisition of the papers of police informant Bob Black, comparing him to ethical Anarchists like Emma Goldman and Ammon Hennacy. The library also stocks a lot of authoritarian Black Panther Party material too, and thus this swill gets referred to ultimately as anarchist or related to anarchism.

In protest over the bragging about the Black papers (which, sickeningly, he probably got paid

for), we withdrew The Match’s future issues from the library along with many boxes of other documents we’d hoped to donate to Labadie some day. Now I’m at a loss to figure out what to do with this stuff, but (I hope), I have a while to think it over.

Julie Herrada, curator of the Labadie Collection, responded to my withdrawal of The Match with an arch statement that she can’t let anyone “dictate” what goes into the collection, which exists “to document anarchist history". She also implied that my concerns verge on “censorship”. (That’s interesting; the only publication no longer going into that collection is THIS one.) Herrada also stated that “ours is the only place within many miles where people can read The Match for free,and many do.” Since subscription is free, it seems to me that anybody wanting to continue reading this journal in the vicinity of Ann Arbor Michigan should just request it from me.If people have to be seen frequenting Ted Kaczynski’s shrine in order to read The Match, it’s a disgrace and readership would probably have fallen off anyway.

Incidentally, I have never objected to any library anywhere carrying anything WHATSOEVER.My objection here is the intense publicity given out suggesting to nationwide media that these documents are somehow central to Anarchism. Speaking of the Unabomber, Herrada as reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, said: “He’s the most contemporary and the most notorious person we have here (in the collection)." The most notorious, maybe, but the most contemporary?? This is an insult, and it’s another example of the bragging, the dis gusting prestigevalue placed on an individual who was nothing more than a sickening mass-murderer. There is a value judgment implicit in a statement like that, and made plain it is that real value and interest for modern library patrons springs from notoriety and horrific impact, not decency, idealism, or lasting dedication to a cause.

By that reasoning, it seems to me that the Labadie Collection will next be seeking out any surviving papers from the band of Koranic criminals respons ible for the recent terrorism. Sure, if papers like that exist, they probably ought to be kept someplace where people can examine them, but I don’t want to be linked with them in a common Chamber of Horrors. Do you?

If “Anarchy” and “Social Protest” are exactly the same thing, then publications from the modern Nazis and race-hate groups are going to

@@@487.jpeg][A person with a stick and a dog AI-generated content may be incorrect.]]

wind up on the same shelf. “Documenting Anarchist history,” under those conditions, comes to be code for including anything ghastly and attention-getting, and calling it ANARCHY, an underhanded game that the decent protesters are bound to lose.

Withdrawing from a rigged game doesn’t give one a victory, but it does keep you from losing even worse.

Anarcho, Ergo Sum

Dear Fred: I am an Anarchist. It is the most important thing in my life. It is the essence of who I am. I will never back down from anyone on this. I will put myself up against anyone at any time on any discussion and state my beliefs, thoughts and feelings based on my Anarchist philosophy. And no matter what anyone, anywhere, anytime says or does in the name of anarchy, no matter how ignorant or inaccurate or negative it may be, it won’t cause me to stop saying “I am an Anarchist.”

To me, Anarchy simply means: Without authority. No one has authority over me and, most importantly, I have authority over no one else. Everything else expands from this point.

In discussions with others I sense a disease of their own concept of the ownership of their own lives. This disease is the assumption that authority, in whatever manifestation, must exist. I believe that assumption grows out of fear. All the ways in which people delude themselves into believing that their rights supersede the rights of others are based ultimately in fear. Thus it is important to prove that Anarchy does not mean chaos, violence, vandalism,terrorism or whatever other misconceptions some unfortunately choose to portray. Of course everyone must determine the best way to express his or her views, but one must be wise in word and action. I hope we do not allow the ONE word that says it all — Anarchy — to be taken from us and further demonized.

— Michael Priborsky, Glen Burnie, Maryland.

Free-Market Anarchist

Dear Mr. Woodworth: Heretofore I have much resisted the label of “anarchist* as it’s posed in the negative. But the expression “ethical an­archist* has a more agreeable edge to it. My exposure to the topic of moral philosophy is grounded in the essays of Ayn Rand, and as valuable as that has been, I can still recall how, while reading her essays, I detected her panicked recoil from the obvious conclusion of “anarchy*, and her dodge to settle on that curious beast she called “limited government*. Much like a “limited pregnancy* I feel sure.

I knew that Ms. Rand left questions unanswered, and I sought further. Fortunately, I found the writings of Morris Tannehill and became fully persuaded that a completely free market is the only answer if we are to have a free society. And this matter of “government*

was put in its proper place with the writings of Albert J. Nock. So I ultimately referred to myself as an “enlightened Objectivist.*

Isn’t it a curious thing that the great minds of our time can turn their amazing telescopes on the heavens and discern the most massive objects in the universe and determine what natural laws govern them, and then turn their microscopes on the tiniest particles that make up the world, and determine all the natural laws that govern them— but apparently never turn that keenest instrument of all, a good mind, on homo sapiens and find the natural laws which govern this part of the universe, too? Are we far away from that happy day?

— Frank Mathews, Oregon.

Sorry for Bad Publicity

Dear Fred: I recently finished reading my first copy of The Match. At almost every paragraph I had to stop and nod my head in agreement. Although I have been calling myself an Anarchist for 10 years, my study in Anarchist views is really just beginning.

I am a 22-year-old prisoner; four years ago I was kidnapped and put into this evil place. On the street I was one of those punkrock kids with colored hair and spikes and piercings, that the media take pictures of while we drunkenly do something stupid. We were quick to paint a big circled A onto something, but basically we had no real understanding of what we were talking about. Let me say, for all the idiots of my generation, that I’m sorry for causing this struggle of awareness to take steps backward in the public’s eye.

— Andrew Greer, Columbia, S. Carolina.

Too Bad This Book Costs $125

Dear Fred: Did you know that you are listed in Warren Allen Smith’s 1300-plus pages tome, “Who’s Who In Hell”? You’re on the same page I’m on. The book covers anybody who has been a free-thinker, and goes back hundreds of years. I’ve learned much history from reading in it.

—James E. Wood row,

Michigan.

Well, the title is accurate.

Savant Always Pitches Statist Line

Hey, Fred: I didn’t catch the Marylyn vos Savant column alluded to in the last Match, but I did see a column of hers about four years ago. A reader then asked her if she thought treatment for drug offenders was more effective than criminal prosecution. She asked the reader if he felt the same way about wife beaters.

I wrote a letter to Ms. Savant knowing it would never see the light of day. I pointed out that her giving such a transparently specious answer showed how western civilization’s re

ligious crusade against drugs had an effect even on those who aren’t users or participants.

I hope you’re keeping a close watch on the fuses of your crap-detector machine, as it’s dwarfed by the size of the brainwashing machine it’s going up against (and most middle-Ameri- cans will succumb to a light rinse).

— Hal C. Pattee, New York.

Sign or Die

To The Match: Regarding the Census— I’m in an Iowa prison. Here the so-called Correctional Officers told us all that if we didn’t fill out the Census forms we would be placed in the “hole” as punishment until we decided to “stop acting like stupid convicts and fill out the fucking Census”.

—Victim of arbitrary authority, Iowa.

Invasions By Landlords

Dear Fred: Everyone is getting into privacy intrusions. Companies’ questionnaires for job applicants now are full of personal-life questions. Apartment complexes have “inspections” of the inside of your home, and often when you are not even present. Purpose? No doubt to find drugs, porn, controversial literature, sex toys, etc. (Since you’re not present, the inspectors can steal also.)

I am glad to be living now in a house, where we can refuse to let people in and ignore knocks on the door. And no one else has a key.

-L. S., Southgate, Michigan.

P. S. This system is run by idiots with no common sense or reason. Such a thing cannot last.

A Last Annoying Letter from Musy

Dear Fred: I sympathize with your dislike of banks. The officials make all kinds of promises but later weasel out of everything. They have made errors in bookkeeping, but each time this has happened with my account I have obtained a written letter of apology.

But may I respectfully urge you to reconsider your refusal to use banks. You ought not to cut your nose off to spite your face. I beg you to obtain a no-fee checking account and use it only for deposits, never write a check on it, except occasionally to drain out the cash. Never give out checks if you wish, but make it easy for people to make a donation in safety.

You will publicize your hatred of checks and sooner or later one of your neighbors will think you are receiving cash in the mail and will break into your mailbox. I ran a business through mail for over 30 years and received enormous amounts of mail, with no losses, but if word gets around that you prefer only cash, you are going to be robbed, sooner or later. Competition is strong among banks, and you will be able to find one which is free of charges and which will allow you to open an account which you use only to accept checks. It is okay for you to hate banks, but you are entitled to use them for your benefit, rather than accept the inevitable burglary you will have.

Please reconsider your stand on checks.

—Jacques E. Musy, Valrico, Florida.

Mr. Musy’s letter is the last one we will see from him, as he died a few months ago. Like so many purely Atheist readers, he had no concept at all of what rebelliousness to high-handed commands MEANS. Why should a person have to make use of a go-between or middleman in the case of a simple exchange of small sums of money? .

I was annoyed enough at Musy’s thickheadedness that I sat down and figured out my losses to burglars and banks, respectively. Since 1971:

Lost to burglars— about $900 in possessions.

Lost to banks— about $360 for the decade of of the 1970s (in bank fees). About $600 for the decade of the 1980s; and about $900 for the decade of the 1990s.

This means that the banks have taken at least twice as much as the burglars, and it adds up to more than enough for me to have been able to buy the second-color attachment for my press, the lack of which has cost me more physical drudgery than anyone will ever know. (Also, we are now past the time when that piece of equipment could even be bought at all, so tack of cash at a certain time translates into lack of opportunity FOREVER).

A year and a half ago a bank’s devaluing of $2000 to $20.00 cost me the ability to buy a copier I needed at a bargain I may never find again.

Obviously I’m not taking this writer’s last bit of advice.

An Excellent Fellow

Hi Fred: Enclosed is $50,000.00 cash, I hope those thieving Post Office employees don’t get their mitts on it. You can’t trust those guys the way you can banks.

By the way, you mentioned in a recent issue that you don’t have a copy of a pamphlet on printing you wrote back in the Pleistacene (I’m too lazy to go in the other room and look this word up in the dictionary; never could spell worth a damn; just one more character flaw) Era. It happens that I do if you’re referring to “Offset”, second edition, 1977, from Western World Press. Be glad to send it to you if you’d like.

— Steve Bovee, Bisbee, Arizona.

Wouldn’t you know it? By the time your letter got here those USPS crumbs had removed all except twenty dollars.

I’m a Technophobe/Freedom is Slavery

Dear Fred: I really appreciate your focus on non-violence, and your content is so coherent and positive I am not turned off by the occasional technophobic column or Chomsky-bashing rant. (I feel Noam still contributes greatly to people’s awareness of the evils perpetrated by our country.)

— Ian Latta, Sacramento.

I’m just curious: What would the guy have to say before you’d finally concede that he’s only another inhabitant of the statist spectrum?

Syndicalism Must Mean Loving the Law

Dear Fred: A few people have attacked Chomsky and Zerzan, lumping them together...

Both Chomsky and Zerzan are non-anarchists doing things that are so contradictory and absurd that anyone who can think is bound to object to their posturings.

...One guy gave the typical Ayn Rand-style claim that people like Chomsky and Marcuse are no better than Stalin or Mao. I suppose this makes people like Ayn Rand belong in the same category as Hitler? Right-wing libertarians just don’t get it. Just because someone doesn’t like or agree with capitalism, this does not make them a ‘statist” or authoritarian. There are libertarian socialists who fuse socialism with anti - authoritarianism. Like it or not, they are still anarchists. Letter-writer Nick V. hates Chomsky and Marcuse because they are people who very eloquently pointed out what was so bad about modern capitalism; yet he tries to get everyone else to hate them by putting them in the same category as Stalin or Mao. This is shameful behavior. Nick hates unions, and claims he wants to be ‘left alone”. Does he mean he wants the right to treat his employees like cattle, and to be as authoritarian with them as he wants, with no options available for his workers but losing their jobs if they resist? Unions were supported by the early individualist anarchists: Tucker, Warren, Heywood, etc., who supported the 8- hour day. Yes, modern trade unions like the AFL-CIO are not very good examples of unions, but there are still libertarian unions around like the IWW.

I do not agree with Chomsky’s position defending the welfare state; but look at what he’s saying: he feels that so long as corporations are so powerful in society, the poor and working class need some protections. This is not some evil position to take. It’s hardly “Stalinism”. Get rid of capitalism and you won’t need welfare or OSHA. Chomsky has done an immense amount of work toward spreading anarchist ideas. Yes, he is an anarcho-syndicalist, and he has every right to be. Anarcho-syndicalism is a valid form of anarchism which has been around since Bakunin.

Nick doesn’t want people to complain about East Timor. Well, considering how the East Timorese have been treated, the guy is pretty darn insensitive. Fine, he doesn’t have to care, but some of us ARE interested in the subject, and we have a right to be.

Zerzan is against computers, just like the Match...

What an insult your statement is! The Match doesn’t USE computers. Zerzan and the publications touting him DO. Are you so stupid you just can’t see the difference, or is this only another of the dis ingenuous statements that occur thick and fast throughout your letter?

...but he has also decided he likes theUnabomb- er. He also totally rejects all modern industrialization...

If so, does he actually make any effort to live without electricity, to fabricate his own shelter, or to gather his own food without depending on huge networks of trucking companies and the grow in g/proce s s in g/ c ann ing indus tries ?

...I disagree with him on both these points, but I want to point out that he has come out against terrorism and opposes bombing people for political ends. Zerzan is no statist, no authoritarian, and not a terrorist. He’s just a guy with some ideas that many anarchists disagree with, and he’s recently gotten some popularity. I doubt it will last long.

Zerzan and Chomsky are not the reason anarchism has a bad image. The bad image is mostly the fault of the corporate media, and also the fault of all anarchists who do not work hard to organize and spread real anarchist ideas.

—Jamal Hannah, Cambridge, Mass.

Your pal Chomsky has come out in favor of (1) strengthening the federal government, (2) liking and appreciating the IES, and (3) widening the “rule of law” (see earlier letter, this column).

Chomsky is in the large-scale bookselling business; his huge number of in-print volumes may be found in Borders, B. Dalton Books, Barnes & Noble , and many other undeniably “capitalist” outlets. He himself makes money off such sales, and beyond that he receives a salary from a state-supported university. THAT jibes with being an anti-statist or opponent of “capitalism”??

I think your jab at Nick V. for disdaining to posture in the correct leftist way (“Solidarity with East Timor!”) is still another disingenuous assertion. There’s not one single thing The Match or any other Anarchist publication can do to help the unfortunates in that island, so to posture as if we could, and to print slogans and clenched-fist graphics as I guess you would have us do, would only turn this publication into yet another gutter zine with a quasi-religious do-nothing political correctness. You may want to see empty slogans appear, as they do so many other places, here in The Match—but it isn’t going to happen. If, as you say in reference to the previous letter-writer, “the guy is pretty dam insensitive ...but some of us ARE interested...” then I have to ask, exactly WHAT great action did YOU take to manifest your solidarity with East Timor?

Finally, a word about syndicalism: I hate it. In the past decade I’ve had a lot of opportunity to watch organizational busybodies in action. I have sat quietly through all kinds of “neighborhood” etc. meetings; and what I’ve witnessed convinces me that a certain kind of person REVELS in this kind of thing. If there’s no real issue to tackle, they make up one, and it invariably launches some assault on the self determination or dignity or individuality or right to be let alone, of some person who either isn’t there or is in the minority. Groups that decide are a sickness; everything I believe and stand for revolts against them except in cases where they are very, very tiny. The principle of BIG takes over at even appallingly small scales when it comes to Groups that Decide.

Every time I hear from a so-called syndicalist what I get is a truckload of crap: confused ideas and blatant contradictions, frantic efforts to defend rank statists or other authoritarians, the . ant-hill proposed as a model for human life. I guess you think you can wear me down after a while; keep trying if you want to waste your time.

@@@488.jpeg][A black and white drawing of a rock formation AI-generated content may be incorrect.]]

Sad & Scarey

Dear Fred: I was just reading about U.S. and British governments trading information and monitoring e-mail. That should be very scarey for anyone silly enough to send something via computer.

I’m sorry to hear you’ve pulled out of Left Bank Books in Seattle. That was how I first became aware of The Match, from reading their catalogue. You’re right, they don’t list Dream World in their catalogue. If they carried The Match I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t carry Imagine; I read issues 1 and 2 of Imagine; they were very well done.

The Crap Detection Department was very interesting with the information on “FAT’* (failed attitude test) and *LBP” (lower body part) labels. An old friend of mine became a Chicago cop a couple of years back. Within months he had changed so much I couldn’t stand to be around him. He’d just joke about what he and

his buddies did to motorists he pulled over. Since I’m a “motorist* I didn’t find it funny. This was typical of what he’d joke about. Needless to say it’s been a long while since I’ve seen him.

(Name withheld by editor) Chicago, Illinois.

I’m sorry your friend turned into a thug.

About e-mail: If people want to entrust sensitive communications to a medium broadcasting them to every part of the planet, all the time, then let’s let Evolution operate.

Left Bank Books: We’re not. available there anymore, but at least Imagine now is, so our stand in solidarity had that effect anyhow.

Very Probably

Dear Fred: Thanks for continuing to publish The Match. There is much to disturb one in our only world and time of existence. If the human race along with everything else survives another fifty or one hundred years, what will be left? There are no “new worlds” to ravage and destroy. We are finally up against it. We can no longer sweep our problems under the rug or kick things into a closet. No more denial allowable. But it may be and probably is too late.

— Frank Roemhild, Bayfield, Wisconsin.

They Need to Know Where We Are

Dear Fred: Continue the rage! As a fourthgeneration atheist, at 80 years of age, I for one do not intend going gently into the night.

Please note the involuntary change of my address, even though I haven’t moved, made by the 911 authority to “make it easier to locate” us (in case of “emergency”). Right.

—Marcel Stratton, Massachusetts.

Heartfelt Anarchism

Dear Fred: Sometimes I wonder if Iceland, where I live, may be a place that was brought too fast into “civilization”. Some hundred years ago the heroes of the community were hardworking fishermen, and sometime before that they were Vikings, plundering and raping around Europe. Today we have young, money-making hedonists and media hypes as role models. Consumerism is so overwhelming that I see children as being born as property of the banks and saying their first words into mobile phones. There are people working to destroy the environment and natural wonders of this country with dams for electricity, and aluminum plants. Fundamentalist Christians reap from the drugged and alcoholic youth, and right-wing hate-groups are rearing their ugly heads against increasing immigration of foreigners who are ready to take on the low-paying jobs.

Situation hopeless?

Two years ago we Anarchists in Iceland managed to get together and agree on something long enough to “participate” in the elections for government (it was done mostly to make use of the media hype around the elections to spread the word, but we did get some 1.3% of the votes in the Reykjavik area). There’s been hardly any Anarchist activity after this; no active group, though some of us are spreading the word individually.

The Match is the only Anarchist publication I have read where everything inside interests me. I have been trying to read through some writings of the Anarchist theoreticians but I hardly find anything in there I can relate to. Anarchism comes from the heart in my case. That’s why I am a nurse: because I am an Anarchist.

Best wishes,

— Siggi in Iceland.

@@@489.jpeg][A person and person carrying luggage AI-generated content may be incorrect.]]

Sends Word of Mine Okubo’s Death

Dear Fred: I found the History Corner particularly interesting this time around. Wasn’t at all familiar with Okubo’s book, although I’ve read quite a bit about the relocation camps and the official apology issued in 1989. At the end of his column, Mr. Holbrook wonders “where the young artist went, and what she did, in the 50 years that followed.” Well, Ms. Okubo’s name has just this week turned up in the Los Angeles Times. The news, unfortunately, is not so good. Still, the enclosed clipping might help to answer some questions.

—Xan Karn, Orange, Calif.

Thanks for that clipping, Xan. See the obituary elsewhere in this issue. How strange that she died just days after our long-delayed review of her 50-year-old book.

Modern Concentration Camps

Dear Fred: I just read The Match for the first time, and needed to write to thank you. I did not know that there are people who feel as I do

about our government’s increasing control of every element of our lives.

My own life is controlled completely by authoritarians. I am a victim of the alleged “justice” system of Texas, serving two sentences of 60 years for refusing to testify against myself when a cop wanted me to perform tricks most able-bodied people cannot do on the side of the road, nearly in traffic. The attorney I paid my life savings to quit, and I’ve yet to recover a dime. The state-appointed attorney, well— the name says it all. He would not even object when it came out during trial that the distric attorney gave the cops the witness statements to review.

I was frightened into pleading guilty, in fear of stiffer punishment. My guilty pleas were used to make these Class B misdemeanors (maximum 6 months) 25-years-to-life.

Texas has a law that once a conviction for Driving While Intoxicated becomes 10 years old, it can’t be used against you anymore. Nevertheless, such an old conviction was used to make two other priors felonies. So, I came out with 60 years.

You might be thinking I killed someone or hurt them at least. No. No wreck, no weaving, no drunken behavior of any kind. In Texas you just have to be accused. Texas has a higher number of people in prison than any other state, and most are for non-violent crimes.

— David D. Crowder, Huntsville, Texas.

Mr. Crowder needs help with appeals. If there’s anyone who can assist in any way, please contact this prisoner directly. His address is: David D. Crowder, #890183, Wynne Unit, Huntsville Texas 77349.

(An interesting zipcode for a prison, by the way, since, as every schoolboy used to know, 7734 turned upside-down spells out )

In Slavery

Dear Fred: Being a prisoner, I see and suffer first-hand every day the abuses of those empowered to watch over me. I’ve just finished two months in solitary confinement for writing about the abuses of the system. They claimed I was thus punished for “security concerns”; but they then lost most of my property and paperwork and had me transferred halfway across the country.

I’ve seen prison guards beat, threaten, lie, and refuse to give prisoners food, toilet paper, and all sorts of other things they desperately need. Hardly ever does this get outside of the prison fences. Or, when it occasionally does, it’s written off by most people as just coming from someone who is unhappy they are locked up. Yes, I’m unhappy, but it doesn’t mean my complaints aren’t real! For instance, I’m paid $5.25 a month for working 150 hours. Tell me that’s not slavery. It isn’t even enough to enable me to call home most of the time.

Thanks so much for your free subscription. (Name withheld by editor).

How It Works

Dear Fred: Here’s a look at how sentencing works. In this state at least, one’s institutional record affects the amount of time you’re sentenced to. I thought, for instance, that I was a first-time offender. But no! Suddenly I had about 22 or 23 “prior convictions’. They used past brushes such as “truancy from school”, being an “unruly child”, “truancy from home”, “possession of alcohol”, “harboring an unlicensed dog”, and so on. Boosting a prison sentence because a person skipped school at age 15 !

—Jason Gould,
Marion, Ohio.

Fighting “Our” Own Weapons

The Match: Consider the Clinton administration’s giveaway last year of over 4,000 heavy tanks (some recently rebuilt). Or the USAF’s habit of giving away fighter planes. Later it’s claimed that newer weapons need to be built because threat forces are now modernized.

In all likelihood such weapons will sometime be used against our youth in another pointless war, which we’re robbed to pay for.

More and more, too, we are being forced to pay for services that used to be tax based, yet taxes don’t go down. Go fishing, or visit a park, and you may have to pay if you’re not a member of some privileged group.

One of the local air force bases was given to Sacramento County along with a small lake. The first thing the local government did was build a kiosk, raise a flag, and charge a big fee to picnic or fish. People’s money is spent paying more government employees whose sole job it is to enforce the payment of fees.

Child-support fascism is also rampant here. These gestapo can literally destroy your life.

— David Andre, Sacramento, Calif.

Is Any Reform Permitted?

Dear Fred: You were wondering whether, if legislators could be legally punished for passing laws that were subsequently found unconstitutional, this would actually result in fewer bad laws or merely mean that no law would ever again be found unconstitutional. In my opinion, this would depend on whether the legislature and the Supreme Court were in the hands of the same or opposing parties (or ideological factions). If the Court and the legislature were at odds, such a provision would be a powerful weapon for the former to bludgeon the latter; if they were controlled by like-minded people, then the Court would have that much more reason never to declare any laws unconstitutional. Their ability to do this when they feel so inclined is obviously unlimited; if they can say

that military conscription isn’t “involuntary servitude” or that asset-forfeiture laws don’t violate the Fifth Amendment, they can rule that black is white or that up is downif necessary to uphold a law.

I disagree, however, with the statement that this thought-experiment shows the bankruptcy of ANY reformism. Experience (not theory) shows that reformism has brought improvements in the past in some cases. Not perfection, but improvements.

In any case, considering the millions of lives ruined by the victimless-crime laws, what punishment for such laws’ authors could possibly be sufficient?

The rhetorical tactics you describe being used to neutralize votes that go “the wrong way” (pp. 39-40, issue 96) are being applied here in Oregon right now. A ballot initiative passed which requires the state to compensate property-owners whose property loses value as a result of government regulations. A coalition of local governments is suing to have it overturned, using the same rhetoric that people “didn’t understand what they were voting for”, and so forth.

Another initiative passed in Oregon which reforms the asset-forfeiture laws to require that a person must be convicted of a crime before their property can be seized. (Under the status quo, they can take it without even filing charges.) One county narc squad is suing to have THIS initiative overturned. Also, during the last couple of days before the initiative’s provisions were to go into effect, the Portland cops made a big sweep of East 82nd Avenue (a known prostitute-pickup area) and seized about 20 cars from men they claimed were caught soliciting the services of ladies of the evening. One last big grab before the (possible) lifting of their looting licenses.

Incidentally, just after issue 96 came out I got a letter from a “Socialist Anarchist” in Massachusetts, irate at me for “slandering) what (I) refuse to understand”. It was accompanied by a couple of articles from the internet which I can fairly and accurately describe as... articles from the internet. Same-old same-old. Still, thanks for printing my address—I do hear from interesting people that way.

Looking at your response to my letter on p. 57, you don’t seem to specify which culture you expect to gain ascendancy as America declines, focusing instead on eliminating possible contenders. You expect it will be a country speaking an Indo-European language written with an alphabet, but not a member of the Romance family (stultified by Catholicism), nor Russian (“exhausted”), nor German (an “evolutionary dead end”). All other obvious possibilities thus being ruled out, it sounds as though you are anticipating the resurgence of the British Empire! Seriously, though, based on history I don’t really think that the nature of the language spoken by a country has much impact on its ability to achieve a dominant position; and once it does,

its language tends to spread into subordinated cultures.

Russian is very complex and difficult, yet in Czarist and Soviet times it was widely learned by subjugated Central Asians whose Turkic dialects were unrelated to it. Chinese is unrelated to Korean or Japanese and its sound system is radically alien to theirs, yet it had a huge influence on both. If Japan or China (or Germany or Russia) achieves global pre-eminence in the 21st century, thentheir languages will eventually do the same, regardless of the difficulty. Actually, I think the difficulty of Japanese is much exaggerated; it’s structurally and conceptually alien, but also quite simple, with none of the interminable complexities of case, gender, verb conjugation, etc. which clutter up most IndoEuropean languages. Its pronunciation is also fairly easy for Westerners, unlike that of Chinese. Adaptation of electronic informationstorage systems to easy use of Chinese characters is obviously more difficult than doing the same with an alphabet, but it is being done. Also, I wouldn’t write off German quite so easily. Among Germanic languages it may be something of a living fossil, but it is certainly thriving in its home countries. And Germany, as the world’s third-largest economy and the dominant entity in Europe, would seem quite likely to take on the role of the core state of Western civilization if the US went into terminal decline or became isolationist.

—Jeffrey Deboo, P. O. Box 930, Gresham, OR 97030.

Common Ground

Dear Fred: I don’t agree with you on everything, but I am still an anarchist and we do share a lot of common ground, especially with regard to computers. I read a lot of different publications, and The Match has been one of my favorites for about 12 years now.

Libertarian regards,

-Shell 63, Nightcliff, Australia.

I sure am curious about your name !

Another Change of Address Without Moving

Dear Fred: Thank you for another riveting issue of The Match. I always find an unhoped-for kinship in your fabulous letters column, something that’s usually pretty tough for a misanthrope like me.

Please note my new address.

— Susan Boren, PMB 265, 4230 E. Towne Blvd., Madison, WI 53704.

Susan is a zine-publisher; her best-known publication is “Universe of Truancy”, a back issue of which is, I believe, still available. The Post Office sold her p.o. box to someone else while she was away for a few days, so she lost a lot of mail.

And What Else Will They Check For?

Dear Fred: Enclosed is a mailing I got from the City of Berkeley Ecology Center. Notice the first three points made:

‘Recycling Contest — Here’s How It Works: Each week, one Berkeley residence or an apartment building of nine nine units or less will be picked at random.

“On refuse collection day we will intercept the trash from that address. After getting permission from a resident or manager, we will check the trash for re- cyclables.

‘If no recyclables are found, residents at that address will win $250. If only a few are found (less than 1% by volume) they will win $50. If more than a few are found, they will receive a small in-unit recycling bin and/or a $10 voucher redeemable at local green businesses..."

Note the use of the word ‘intercept" in the second point, and the bit about ‘getting permission from a resident or manager".

I’m not a big fan of census takers, pollsters, or anyone else who wants to stick their nose into my personal life. A notice like this shows that these people are just one neighbor’s “permission" away from digging around in MY trash.

Thanks for The Match. It means a lot to me. I moved to the San Francisco Bay area for its alleged penchant for smart, leftish (if not leftist) variety and was disappointed on all three counts.

— Clint Marsh, Berkeley, CA.

Where Do They Get Our Names?

Fred: In issue #96 you again mention that “it is from voter rolls that lists of potential jurors are supposedly obtained. Then you talk about receiving an “invitation” to become a juror, despite not registering to vote.

I also have never voted, yet I received the same “invitation" a year ago (my first time, at age 52). Possibly they use drivers’ licenses, since, to the best of my knowledge, this is the only way the government knows I am alive and well.

Please do not put my name in the list of donations, or on this note. I would prefer that no one know anything about me. I am • not a “criminal”, just content to live life on my own terms.

— Human Being, New York.

They do conscript jurors through drivers’ license records, but shred your trash, just in case.

Old Issues Still Valid

Fred: I was reading some very old issues of The Match, and your observations and insights

are right on the mark, even years later. As a librarian, I’m frightened by the whole ISBN, LCCN, ISSN etc. attempt to control/regulate what the public can have access to.

Thanks for being a voice of reason.

—Aren G., St. Louis.

Situation, Hopeless (Revisited)

Editor: It seems as though the problem with the new uses of the word “anarchist" have been noticed by others and the consensus is that “Anarchist Expert" is a respectable title, but “anarchist” has had its meaning stripped.

What anarchism needs to avoid this constant problem of definitions (which always occurs in philosophical circles) is a lexicon, an Anarchist Lexicon, to enable people to speak with each other without the need for constant clarification. The Objectivist movement had a lexicon which allowed them to be much more logical and more importantly to share ideas without having to define the same words over and over while debating within the movement. (They were still selfish, inhumane capitalists but they didn’t believe in the use of physical force.) It wouldn’t change the issue of people as a whole misunderstanding us when we use the A-word. The title still may need a new description. I would like to encourage you to continue using the A-word in whatever form fits grammatically. It would be a shame to sacrifice a name to the same political force which has named all the other political parties and groups in such wildly misleading ways. Think of all the oxymoronic titles like Democratic Party, Liberal, and Freedom Fighter. Liberals enslave us with more laws every year; Freedom Fighters kill people; and The Democratic Party has settled for holding office in a government which is somewhere between Parliament and a Republic.

Situation Hopeless hasn’t improved, but I never would have expected to see a great change in my lifetime. I watched a documentary about the history of Christianity which was told by theologists who weren’t overtly zealots, but gave a good account of the rise of the religion in the midst of Paganism, Judaism, and the Roman government. It was a tale of how quickly a new philosophy can spread through a region and become a part of history. (In under a millennium, that is, which is very patience-inspiring.)

...The census people surprised me and got me to answer some questions (she must have been a racial expert because somehow she determined my race for me even though I refused to answer the question). If I had read your column and had rehearsed my ignoring a little I’m sure I would have had her checking a mirror to see if she had become invisible. Maybe you could print up a pamphlet to be distributed in 2010 on the tactics and ethics of evading the U.S. Census.

Regarding fingerprinting: I read recently about a system in California, where finger-

prints had been digitized. It resulted in millions of unreadable prints. Apparently the computer can’t decipher them or reduce the possibilities to a reasonable number. And according to Biometrics, a company using fingerprints to activate such things as doors and guns, 3% of the population has prints that are unreadable by the devices.

The Labadie Collection will suffer a horrible loss as a result of your no longer sending it The Match, but as a result of your mention I went to the website and found thousands of documents which have been carefully scanned by students and librarians. The practice of replacing books with computerized copies is completely crazy, but the practice of copying old fragile books which shouldn’t be handled anymore by converting them to microfilm and digital images is a good way to expand the readership of a rare book. I spent some talking to the people in the Special Collections department and they have microfilmed your magazine collection. I may have a chance to study them all for free.

—Joshua Hutchison, Urbana, Illinois.

Oh, good. Maybe while everyone is there reading The Match for free they’ll want to make a donation to the library to help offset its expenses in paying people like police-informant Riack and Unabomber Kaczynski for their “papers”. Situation Hopeless.

@@@490.jpeg][A drawing of feet in smoke AI-generated content may be incorrect.]]

Events In Anarchism

Dear Fred: Your review of Imagine brought a nice, almost instant flood of requests, including a number of subscriptions. Match readers are far more likely to respond to a recommendation than any other publication’s readers.

Regarding the Labadie Collection, I’m sending you a recent story from the San Francisco Chronicle about the joy with which this Anarchist library has acquired the papers of the contemporary philosopher, Ted K., the Unabomber. After reading it I was so disgusted that I looked up a couple of earlier articles which I’ve also included.

...The San Francisco book fair this year was fun. I shared a table with a Match subscriber, and sold a few Imagines. Mostly I scoured the booths for books. The fair had many more tables this year. The green anarchists from Eugene had a table and lots of Bob Black’s literature. Left Bank did a booming business (our table was next to theirs) and specialized in Zerzan titles. The Anarchy: A Journal of blah- blah had a big table paired with its Alternative Press magazine. They had giant full-color posters of the covers of the latest issues, and tons of back issues. I got to meet the couple behind J. L. Hudson; they were wonderful, inquisitive, happy. They had apples for free and sold lots of seeds. They sold out of the newest Match within a short time of opening. I don’t know if I ever mentioned it but at last year’s fair, Left Bank had zero copies of The Match, and none again this year. Only one other table had any and it had only one copy when I passed by fairly early. I’m not sure who that table was affiliated with, but it may have been Bound Together.

Incidentally, I saw in Any Time Now that you are a contact for getting a British publication called Total Liberty. Is this true?

—John Johnson, Imagine Magazine,

P. O. Box 8145 Reno, Nevada 89507.

No, I think that was a computer glitch at Any Time Now, blending two lines of copy. I do think Total Liberty is a good, actual Anarchist publication, though; its address is listed earlier in this letters column.

About the limited availability at the event you mention: As Anarchism tends to move on toward increas ing authoritarianism and violentism and weird reverence for the Unabomber and returning to a so-called hunter-gatherer existence, the number of places where people will be able to find The Match displayed will likely continue to decline. It’s getting so that specifically Anarchist bookstores that will still carry this journal are the exception and not the rule; and unless the 9/11 terrorism brings the movement back to its senses, it’s clear to me that a split is under way: Ethical Anarchists will go on pretty much as before, though under an increasing variety of names. The refugees from various Communist

sects, reluctant to use the C-word now that it has been so thoroughly discredited by the experience of Russia, China, and other places, will continue to appropriate the term Anarchism and convert it to a doctrinaire anticapitalist street-fighting gang largely feared by ordinary thoughtful people concerned about the incursions of government on everyday life and human rights.

So far, I’ve still managed, each and every issue, to increase the individual reader circulation (the mailing list) enough to offset the loss of outlets, and even to keep up a small overall gain. But any readers who would like to suggest local progress ive bookstores, or who would be willing to try to place some extra copies in possible local outlets, should write to me.

Inc identally, c irculation has now topped two thousand. That means that if I print exactly 2100 copies, I soon get down to just two or three file copies, and have people clamoring for back-issues that are now all gone. Therefore: I can’t supply any issues older than Number 95— and will soon run out of those. For libraries or serious archives, I have perhaps 10 or 15 copies of 94 and 93. Others, only single file copies, so please don't ask.

Thoughtful New Edition

Dear Fred: Here’s my latest, the Shelley translation of Plato’s Banquet. I’ve loved this work since the first time I read it, about 30 years ago — and one afternoon a few months ago decided to publish it since no one else had for over 15 years. The translation has been anthologized a couple of times, but never before by itself in a good readers’ edition.

Whether or not Shelley was an anarchist, he intensely hated tyranny in all its forms, and he despised religion. I just recently read his *notes on Queen Mab”, which contain powerful attacks on religious morality. For example:

In fact, religion and morality, as they now stand, compose a practical code of misery and servitude; the genius of human happiness must tear every leaf from the accursed book of God ere man can read the inscription on his heart. How would morality, dressed up in stiff stays and finery, start from her own disgusting image should she look in the mirror of nature!

And on Christian prayer:

Christianity inculcates the necessity of supplicating the Deity. Prayer may be considered under two points of view:—as an endeavour to change the intentions of God, or as a formal testimony of our obedience. But the former case supposes that the caprices of a limited intelligence can occasionally instruct the Creator of the world how to regulate the universe; and the latter, a certain degree of servility analogous to the loyalty demanded by

earthly tyrants. Obedience indeed is only the pitiful and cowardly egotism of him who thinks that he can do something better than reason.

Anyway, I’ve really appreciated your work over the years. I don’t always agree with you, but you do always make me think. And I strongly agree with your stands on violence and censorship.

—John Lauritsen, 78 Bradford St., Provincetown, MA 02657.

Activity Stops When Computers Down

Hello, Fred: Another example of Better Living Through Computers: Twice a week they have a “Classics by Request” show on the local public radio. Today they don’t have the show because “the computers are down”, so they can’t find any requested CDs. A trivial but typical case.

— Clark Dissmeyer, Riverton, Nebraska.

Clark has lately been publishing a little 32- page pamphlet called The Journal of Discarded Literature. His address is Box 1, Riverton, Nebraska 68972.

Unreliable Systems

Dear Fred: I had to laugh at the letter from Don G., and your response. Let me add my own vote to the debate. I have written two theses, both on computers, “back when” floppy disks held “only” 360 K. I was always careful to print out major changes, etc., and was always happy that I took this precaution as I lost the text files on several occasions due to media failure. Don G.’s space argument is equally spurious— in both cases my thesis fit neatly on a single floppy disk, with room to spare. I’m sure Don G. will rush to point out that “today’s media” are altogether more reliable, etc., to which I say bunk. A simple flex of a CD-R will render it unreadable. Floppy disks in all their incarnations are frail at best. Bang a fixed disk drive a little too hard and it’s gone forever. Write a backup tape without cleaning the tape head, and forget about loading it, etc. The very fact that so many backup copies and so many types of media and so many “solutions’ to this problem are created and sold should indicate how totally unreliable the whole system really is, even when temperature and humidity are carefully controlled. When is the last time somebody needed to “back up’ their copy of The Match, in case they accidentally dropped it?

Don G.’s assertion that those who mistrust computers are those “not in the know" about how they really work is pretty simpleminded. I’ve been using computers since 1984 when dad brought home the first Apple II system, which I programmed in assembler. Today I am employed as a Senior Applications Programmer/ Analyst with years of experience. Friends and

family are calling me on a daily basis for help getting this or that system running, or retrieving some file or whatever. I know a lot about computers — enough to say unequivocally that they are unreliable, vastly expensive, useful for some things, yet indispensable for nothing.

I have a box of letters my great grandfather wrote to my great-grandmother during the 1880s. That old-fashioned pen on paper is still readable today, over 100 years later. Not only that, aside from being personally interesting, the fact that I have 100-year-old documents isn’t even really noteworthy. However, remember those two thesis disks 1 wrote, saved, and backed-up in the early 1990s? I can’t read them today, even supposing the media are still in good shape. They are on an old-fashioned type of media (five-and-a-quarter-inch disks), for an old-fashioned operating system (MS-DOS), and saved in the format of an old-fashioned word processor (WordPerfect 4.1). Less than 10 years old and already they are totally unusable ; had they not been printed off, they would be totally gone.

Please keep up the good work — yours is a truly unique publication, and I think it’s inspiring that you do your own production at all steps; the care you take is obvious in the end-result.

— Clark Timmins, W. Jordan, Utah.

Pushing “E-Books”

Fred: To further prove our already “paranoid” view that books are being done away with, when we recently bought a book the salesperson put on a cunning sales smile and handed us a leaflet about “electronic books”, saying: “Wouldn’tyou rather take one of these with you on vacation instead of a book?” Wouldn’t you want to curl up on a cold winter night with a glowing LCD display instead of one of those musty old books?

Congratulations on the solar power hookups. To get further away from the grips of the beast is a commendable effort.

It was disturbing (and probably more so for you) to read that suicide note from the reader that closed last issue’s letter column. Have you heard anything since? I can understand the depths of despair one can get to. I have to ration how much of the official news I read because if I read too much I get a hopeless feeling— not to equate this with that reader’s pain, however. It is definitely a huge downside to being curious and having a heart: the extent to which one feels pain is greatly increased.

— Tony and Hazel Roehrig, Utah.

I never heard anything else from or about that reader, though I started making inquiries the moment I got the note. A longtime friend of The Match, who lives in the same city the note was sent from, was unable to find out anything. A person who may have been an acquaintance of the reader never responded to our inquiries.

Yes, I was sad, and wished I could have done

@@@491.jpeg][A person reading a book AI-generated content may be incorrect.]]

something, but as you can appreciate I’m sure, I certainly DIDN’T want to set any kind of roaring, authoritarian officialdom in motion to violate that person’s wishes.

Turning to so-called electronic books: An article distributed by librarians in the summer of 2000 pretty clearly trumpeted that real books were on the way out. It wound up by noting that it won’t be possible to pass “e-books” on to children or others in future generations after years pass, because the e-books will probably disappear each time a new technology undermines the storage and reading contrivances they inhabit. Sickeningly, the article closes by quoting some electronic apologist who simpered: “We’re all holding hands and venturing into the future carefully, one step at a time, checking with each other, saying, ‘Does this work for you?"’ (Excuse me for a moment; the Crap Detector is buzzing.)

Yeah, they’re so halting and careful; that’s why they dump millions of actual books every year, and practically point a gun at library users to force them to get involved with computer systems.

Cut, less than a year later, a Portland newspaper editorialized that the hype “has died down...the millions who were going to abandon reading as we know it and flock to e-books instead, have failed to materialize.”

In other words it was just another scam, raking in millions for some grinning cultureless barbarian who has by now moved on to the next racket to be carried out with the inevitable assistance of People Hating Everything Except Computers. (They’re the real luddites.)

True books, made of paper and cloth and cardboard, will still be around eons after Soft Micropenis has been forgotten. Nothing PHEEC says can be believed.

Do Computers Cause Senility?

Dear Mr. Woodworth: I just read a news article that made me think of you. It was from USA Today and was headed: “Computer-Induced Senility?”

“Remember what you had for dinner last night? If not, you might be able to blame it on your PC. New research indicates a growing number of people in their 20s and 30s are suffering severe memory loss... Complaints among

those studied—150 people ages 20-35—include being unable to recall names, written words, and appointments. ...Doctors blame electronic overload from devices such as computers and electronic organizers, which leads to diminished use of the brain to work out problems..."

It could be added that the use of electronic calculators and computers with grammar and spell-checkers reduces the need, and hence the development of young people’s ability to think for themselves.

Since my incarceration nine months ago I have had to get used to typing on a typewriter. I write articles for both Prison Legal News and Justice Denied: the magazine for the wrongly convicted, and I’ve been surprised that my productivity hasn’t seemed to have been hurt by no longer having a computer to use. I can relate to the article, because I’ve almost had to relearn how to spell, after relying on spell checkers for the past 15 years.

You have a loyal following among people who find your single-mindedness inspiring, refreshing and laudatory.

— Hans Sherrer, Sheridan, Oregon.

Computers As Religion

Dear Fred: I find it very discouraging and disheartening when long-time readers of The Match still vote, take the census, acquire loyalty cards, etc. These little decisions indicate a complete lack of resistance and understanding of authoritarian methods and where they lead. I believe you’ve done all you could to instill an anarchistic mindset in your readership; you (we) are up against statist thought processes instilled in everyone since birth.

In last issue’s letter column John Barlow claims he doesn’t understand my reference pertaining to his affection for the police. “This is not something I said or even intimated," he admonishes. Really?! Well, let’s just dig up his exact words and see what he DOES say, then: To Mr. Woodworth he insultingly chides, “I suspect your contempt for these ‘public servants’ has more to do with Tucson, Arizona than anything else.” He glowingly submits: “I get a good feeling when a cop walks in.” Now here’s a revolutionary thought: “Cops tend to see people at their worst." How about this anarchistic bit of wisdom: “This is the frustrating situation the police have to face every day."

I stand more firmly behind my original assessment : This is police apologizing, sympathizing and defending at its most repulsive.

John also states it is not true he possessed an unthinking enthusiasm for store loyalty cards even though he immediately, without thinking, acquired one as soon as he possibly could and even laminated it. The card “seems to act as a coupon”, he enthusiastically relates.

You are indeed, John, not my enemy and I did NOT end my previous letter hoping for the worst for you; nor would I be happy if you’re “beaten to death by a cop on (your) 62nd birthday”. I am not instilled with lightheartedness when informed of cruelty, violence and injustice.

Last issue someone wrote in and jokingly remarked that computers can’t be all bad if they give you free parking (due to the prevalence of malfunctioning computerized parking meters). Careful! In Baltimore it is illegal to park at inoperative meters, and stickers on many of them warn you to that effect. The reader who thinks he may save a few quarters risks fines and possibly being towed. Our goal should be to dispense with these robbing, silent, ubiquitous sentinels permanently. Developing scams and looking for loopholes are merely hacking at a branch. We must strike the root! I hope Cool Hand Luke still has his wheels.

As for computers themselves: By now it should be obvious to anyone that the new opiate of the masses is the computer. Atheism scores no success nor gains any ascendancy if the god pestilence is replaced by the scourge of microcircuitry. A mere metamorphosis of the altar at which one worships is not an enlightened advancement. If humanity sloughs off the yoke of religion and superstition only to burden itself with something equally malevolent and murderous toward freedom and knowledge and the arts, then that transformation is worthless. In short, computer devotees are not the utopian visionaries they so often claim to be. In fact, the young child sitting in front of the very latest computer model is nothing more than a well-worn and decrepit replica of some fossilized relic kneeling in subservience before an icon as old as ignorance.

Those who incessantly and insistently stress that these inhuman contraptions are imbued with anthropocentric qualities and possibilities are fools. One can not,in the midst of backtracking 1,000 paces, take a tentative half-step forward and then insist that observers of this sorry spectacle only notice and comment on the one anomaly in what is, essentially, a funeral march fraught with decay and regression. Any niggardly increment forward has been bleakly overshadowed by this somber requiem. We are witnessing nothing less than the spiralling disintegration of civilization and culture. Modern technology, finding its most appropriate representative and symbol in the compute r/inter- net, is profoundly anti-human. It is exercising diabolical repressiveness and debasement of real and meaningful social interaction and personal relations in its hideous mockery and sneering contempt for genuine creativity and artistic endeavors, in its “dumbing down" and stultification of educational processes, in its all-consuming blatant vandalism and destructiveness toward every historical record and documentation (including works of priceless value) and in its defilement and erosion of language and communication skills.

Sadly, even those I once thought immune to this conformist mania—the great lovers of freedom and proud admirers of scientific in-

quiry — seem to see no conflict or contradiction in cherishing and adoring that which enslaves and deludes. Everything I once thought these people stood for is under attack by this obscene device. With an increasingly active authoritarianism, the Computer Age is displaying an assertive, cunning enmity toward every single ideal of anarchism and atheism.

Don G. (a letter-writer from last issue) and others choose to ignore and pooh-pooh my opinions on computers as they wish to contend that my beliefs stem from FEAR. My beliefs couldn’t be derived from actual familiarity, detached observation and educated speculation, could they? Nope! These people won’t lend any credence to these notions for one second. But it just so happens I am well acquainted with computers and must protest against those who try to dismiss my views as irrational emotion. Don G., your shabby diagnosis reveals much about you and nothing of me.

We’ve all had exposure, unfortunately, to people who can’t converse for more than a few minutes without lapsing into sickening praise of “Jesus’*. Often, informing these misguided souls of one’s status as a Nonbeliever falls vainly on deaf ears— or else it contrarily serves to reinforce their oddly mechanical persistence in “testifying*. Taking his cue from this ancient script, Don G. produces a rebuttal to me in which his speech soon crumbles into the indecipherable Newspeak and singular cant that are prized by those entranced by computers. Thus he gushingly and very rudely informs the last folks on earth (or so it appears) who openly condemn and actively resist this debilitating infection that he is :

“learning Hypertext Markup Language (HTML),* “using Active Server Page (ASP) and Basic Input Output System (BIOS).”

Lavishing such “information* about computers upon those who are known to LOATHE computers perfectly mirrors the zealot who quotes “holy scripture’ to known atheists. I’m prompted to ask, using Don’s own words; “What kind of writing is THIS?* Apparently it’s the kind one must expect from someone completely- wrapped up in and absorbed by computers. Thanks a Jot, Don, for those handy abbreviations! Rest assured I have committed your unsolicited frenzy of inane technical data to memory— right next to all my other fond recollections of exuberant ravings thrown my way by holy rollers and weirdos.

Don babbles: “when I complete work on a piece of work... the work is...” See Don work. Work, work, work! I don’t know or even care how Don G. acquires money, but here’s a newsflash : punching buttons while stupidly staring at a super-nintendo all the livelong day is not work. Manipulating phantasmagoric al will-o’- the-wisps on a souped-up television set is not work. Whittling away hour after hour, day after day, doing nothing constructive (that is, neither

building, producing, creating, manufacturing, fashioning, or crafting) is not work.

These wasteful processes have nothing to do with art, either. Graphics, MADE BY A COMPUTER, do not elevate the status of the chimpanzees who have been trained to depress a series of buttons ending with one stamped “Print*, to the level of artists any more than tapping on a calculator makes one a mathematician. The computer is the artistic equivalent of the paint-by-numbers set; there’s no imagination, talent or inspiration to be found in or behind this pedestrian rubbish.

Defending his beloved computers Don whines: “Certainly no serious person relies solely on floppy disks for primary storage.” I couldn’t agree more! I’d even like to add to that sentiment by proposing that certainly no serious person would find it healthy, enjoyable or wise to piss his life away staring at flickering images in a trance-like stupor. Let me get this straight, Don: you’re telling us that all anyone has to do to avoid the high probability of lost documents (due to using computers) is simply (USING A COMPUTER) to...

“back the information up in multiple places, generally at multiple sites.” It should also be “backed up onto a network server...backed up nightly to tape, using a (sic) incremental backup process that assures that all files are on at least two tapes and one is stored off-site in a ‘salt-mine’ location impervious to fire, (and) stored on your own computer, also on a floppy disk in...a file cabinet.’

What kind of progress is THIS?! I do not have the enormous sums of time required to pore over voluminous rulebooks in a doubtlessly futile attempt to navigate through these labyrinth- ian instructions just to accomplish the most insignificant tasks that I do now in the blink of an eye without any worry at all. Don’s abstruse directions spit in the face of simplicity and reality while insulting the intelligence of those who take a pragmatic approach to a task and follow a logical sequence of processes in order to solve a problem.

These computer creeps have created problems for today where none existed yesterday; then they tell you the only way to cure these ail-

@@@492.jpeg][A person falling off a staircase AI-generated content may be incorrect.]]

@@@493.jpeg]]It’s what we were saying back in 1995. Now it is ruefully recognized that the “dot-coms” — businesses thattried to substitute electronic impulses for reality — were a huge failure. An article in the L A. Times earlier this year moaned:

“How could everyone —the entrepreneurs who founded them, the venture-capitalists who funded them, the investment bankers who took them public,and the media that cheered them on — have been so wrong...?

“ ‘You can hype this e-commerce stuff all you want,' said Patrick Byrne, whose Overstock.com buys excess merchandise from defunct dot-coms, ‘but at the end of the day, reality happens.' ”

@@@494.jpeg]]

ments is through THEIR patented solutions; they create and perpetuate a contrived and false misery, then claim they have a monopoly on the remedies you now require (at a price, of course). Sound familiar?

In a more sane time you merely left your document on your desk and went peacefully away to sleep. You awoke to find no problems. Today, however, you jump through many hoops, are forced to guess at the answers of nonsensical riddles and uncomfortably feel your way across alien landscapes — only to wake up and discover the goddamned document has vanished anyway. But if so, you must not have followed Don’s “new and improved" methods which he so graciously dictated you must follow. The priests of this new religion are never without an answer, are they?

The very fact that Don G. writes in at all to “defend" computers is an enormous statement in and of itself, when one considers that they are everywhere and one hears naught but endless praise from “virtually" every quarter for this plague. It speaks volumes that someone in his lofty position finds my impotent dissent bothersome at all. I mean, look around! Computers in almost every home. Computers in almost every business. Computers in every school. Computers in cafes. Computers in cars. Computers in audio and visual equipment. Computers in exercise gear. Computers in household appliances. Dozens of monthly periodicals in love with computers. Thousands of books all about computers. Libraries ripped to shreds to make way for computers.

(One should really pause a moment and seriously ponder why so much “information" about computers, PRINTED ON PAPER, needs to exist at all if they’re as “user friendly” as we’re constantly told.)

Everywhere you look— computers, computers, computers! Computer chips are being im-

Fad Topic: "THE INFORMATION ECONOMY” ?®"^{dy ana,YSt C}°^{,Umns these da}*^{s are} loaded with ^{ab0Ut how the} "economy”—that the whole system of goods, wealth, trade, and ^Sh?^{9 t0 an} "information b^sis" thinn t ^{provides these} commentators with someS ^SaY' ^{50 that the}* ^{are able} to fill up their nonsense^"^{6 a}"^{d 96t} ^ ^{b? their} P^ublishe^ it is _ A T^{ple se,f}-'^mP°rtantly hovering over computer keyboards are not "the economy™ ecause they are not creating anything. So-called in- elseThaJV °n^,y# [3]"^te₁!^,iSence concerning something J" ^ ^{haVG real material} existence. In this respect the Information Economy" is just a new and fancy label for what used to be called thTnvK ^{rCal econom}y on real inn ⁹t ^f7°^'^f3briCS'^{bu,lding materials}- manufacturing ^lnf°^{rmat,on is not a} commodity in the same ! h V^S s⁰^⁶³™ ^or machine screws, but the people ^! .^ho hype it and convince the effete that they are doing real work as they sit entranced before their i caLX^T' ^8re ^‘H^{9 this} P^r°P^a9a"da be- - cause it sells their own commodity: computers.

— —

planted INSIDE LIVING CREATURES with gleeful abandon by their hellish guardians and stewards without these naive beings’ informed consent or able understanding!

Yet Don has a bone to pick with ME?!

Don, the sheer magnitude of the numerical supremacy behind your position is overwhelming. You’ve won! For all intents and purposes I’m isolated in solitary confinement yet you’re still irritated over nothing more than an ineffectual missive penned by a nobody which a handful of people will glance at, snicker over, toss aside, and forget that very second.

Again the spectre of religion is exposed; seen is gross intolerance for even a single person out of millions who doesn’t toe the approved line of orthodoxy. I’m the tiniest needle of dissent in a suffocating haystack of conformity, but the Inquisitor has found me nonetheless! Give me a break, will you? I have no possible effect on your world. If you allow a highly invisible person like me to rain on your Nuremberg Rally it’s your own fault.

I believe a new dark age is rapidly descending upon us. An ominous centralization and mustering of power is occurring on a scale and in a manner unprecedented. The globe-spanning consolidated authority will know every possible detail of the most minute resistance and rebellion. The insidious methods of constant whereabouts-management have been revealed and are locking securely into place. While the computer has cast a religion-like spell upon the great majority, it is just a means to an end— a “tool”, or more precisely, a weapon— in the hands of those who lust for absolute power.

Just one last thing, Don G.: that entire thesis DID evaporate into thin air just as I said it did. I could list dozens of similar outrages and abuses but I’m sure you’d discount every last one of them, then fly in my face with the treatment for the particular symptom of the whole catastrophic disease you’ve helped spread. I hope you enjoy your new world, Don. You truly deserve it.

—William Jed Orndorff, Baltimore.

Thanks for a fantastic letter. Computer enthusiasts wouldn’t rush to try to stamp out even the few sparks there are of anti-computer sentiment if they didn’t FEAR our expressions. That’s the unconsc ious motive behind their use of the word “technophobe” to dismiss us: they yearn to substitute an irrational mental state (fear, or phobia) for our actual CRITICISM and REJECTION, because it is really THEY who fear US.

I uonder why they fear and hate so much all technology that is not computer technology. Whatever the reason, the overwhelming bulk of all the technology the human race has ever created, is non-computer-related machinery. The great preponderance of apparatus working around us and keeping us from living like the savages of 25,000 years ago, is real-world systems of gears, engines, motors, power transmission, the smelting of metals, and other massive, actual technologies, not digital simulations thereof.

Wide-Ranging Comments

Hi Fred: I was very chillingly impressed with the way you compared the “Cat Collector” story with the old Witch Hunt days. Indeed, as a female, I find that old fear of The Crone pretty scary. You’re dead right: the poor victim in the story was old, female, poor, “crazy* and frightening. Classic “witch*! The human animal can be extremely dangerous when it fears something. The ancient fear of those who are “different* lies just beneath the surface of “civilized* humans.

I really enjoyed the article on Kropotkin, mutual aid, the “Evolution of Morality*. I’ve been reading some anthropology the last couple of years, and expanding my view of the human animal. This article fits right in. Last summer I started to read Kropotkin’s “The Great French Revolution*, but immediately ran across a comment that sort of put me off. Kropotkin claimed that the first State arose out of the French Revolution— which rather discouraged me about the quality of his other observations right at the start. Yes, this was written in the 1920s, but still... If you look back over human history at all, you find that the State (exactly as Kropotkin went on to define it) arose long, long, before the French revolution! Look at Sumeria!

There’s a very interesting book called “Oriental Despotism* by Karl Wittfogel; he was a marxist at the time he wrote the book but nonetheless he has some interesting observations.

It’s a study of “hydrolic societies*— basically how people began to control and use water, and how that affected society, with the control of water leading to immense bureaucracies and despotism. He says the census was originally instated to count up and keep track of ablebodied men for the forced labor needed to maintain and build water control projects.

Then humanity went right into the State: hierarchy, brutal overseers, forced labor. This all happened a LONG TIME ago. Yes, there is mutual aid; but the human race has a horrible tendency to go for coercive societies.

In Mr. Barclay’s article last issue I found the statement a bit odd, that the “great religions’ were trying to expand the concept of mutual aid beyond tribal boundaries. They were in no way trying to foster mutual aid; they were trying to spread their own form of bureaucratic control and hierarchy beyond the boundaries of their own tribes of believers. They simply wanted more control, more power, more followers... and they certainly expanded by COERCION, not by cooperation and mutual aid!

@@@495.jpeg]]I suppose one can see the rise of agriculture, complex trading, and religions, as an expansion of mutual aid—but only if you completely ignore the fundamental coercion that allowed the spread of such societies and religions. A religion —Barclay says—is a way of expanding the concept of “brother’ beyond the kinship group? What about the coercion to convert or die, or become a slave? This is the spreading of mutual aid? The “great religions* were hardly “cap-

tives of the state’—indeed, for thousands of years, religion and state were identical. In places today they are still identical. The idea that religions would have spread the idea of mutual aid and cooperation if they hadn’t somehow been prevented from doing so, is unsupported by history, or by some moments of thoughtful consideration. Religion merely fosters more of the “Us” and “Them” mentality. If it expands the concept of kinship group, it also expands the concept of “other” or “enemy”. Those who are not with us are against us.

I read the Who The Police Beat column with my usual reaction of fear, sorrow and disgust. Then I get to Phyllis Hordin’s letter in the correspondence section, and I’m just astounded. How can a person read the facts of the daily brutality of the cops, and then say “but we can’t condemn them ALL, for just a few Bad Apples”? Jesus Christ On A Stick!! Oh, her partner had a cop give him some gas, did he? Awww, how touching! “What a nice young man,” Ms. Hordin smarms. This rare incident of cops actually behaving like decent human beings, merits allowing them to get away with the horrific brutality and abuse which is documented in every part of the U.S. every damn day?! Appalling!

The final sentence in her postscript is quite telling: “If he hadn’t been cooking meth for ten years, perhaps his family wouldn’t be suffering as a result of his present incarceration.” Say what? How about: If we didn’t have the insane drug laws we have in this country, his family wouldn’t be suffering as a result of his present incarceration? Your reply to her disgusting letter was great.

“Our neighborhood is gang and gun-infested,” she says. “I’m glad the police are here.” Listen, I have friends who live in what is the city with the nation’s worst murder rate, East Palo Alto, California— the poor, black, hispanic ghetto across the freeway from wealthy, anglo, Palo Alto and Stanford University. Gang-infested, gun-infested, drug-infested... you name it. I’ve spent quite a bit of time there, visiting. Let me tell you, in all the years my friends have lived there (20 or so), the only time they ever had a violent confrontation involved cops. Not junkies, not gang-bangers, COPS. It is the COPS who cause the problems, not the poor, the disin- franchised, the addicts, or Vietnam Vets. The most violent, most heavily-armed GANG in the nation is the police.

And now: poetry. Hordin mentions Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Anne Sexton, Robert Frost. She sounds like an English Major all right. What a bunch of lousy poets to name! I like poetry, at least some of it: most is absolutely garbage. I went on a recent kick for Charles Bukowski; now that’s poetry. He hated poets, too, though he was always getting asked to readings along with Ferlinghetti and Jack Kerouac—which Bukowski despised. GOOD poetry, Hordin says, offers “hope and beauty”, huh? Personally I think GOOD poetry offers sorrow and despair.

Well, the famous San Francisco Anarchist Book Fair was last Saturday, and Iwantedto try to give you a little overview of it before the impressions fade. We had two tables this time, and with more room things were much easier to cope with. But the most striking thing was the overall feeling this time: all three of us felt that the day was somehow discouraging. There was no overt reason for this; everybody was happy, everything was fine, yet there seemed to be an underlying tension, some low-level unpleasant feeling which was not there last year.

One thing that struck a slightly sour note right at the beginning was when we heard that the organizers are thinking of limiting tables to “only books* next time. WE could do that, but there are a number of annual venders who sell no books at all, but do have some nice anarchist-message t-shirts, pins, music, etc. I think it might be a mistake to eliminate those people, since it makes the Fair more varied and FUN. There are groups there that have only information; they don’t actually sell anything, like Food Not Bombs (I consider them to be one of the finest true Anarchist organizations; they are really living the concepts of Anarchism).

The second unpleasant thing came soon after they opened the doors to the public. I was down at the end of the table with The Match and other publications; suddenly there is an older man in a shabby red shirt, some mushed-down hat, bad teeth, ranting about your “Atheist Cult” booklet. The gist of his message seemed to be “That guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” He went on: “Madalyn Murray O’Hair did some good things, she got prayer out of the schools! She had a right to be angry!” He was so emotional, I just let him rant and wind down a bit. I hate dealing with volatile characters like that, but I couldn’t let his statements pass without comment, so I said, “Yes, she did some good things. But she treated people so badly; I don’t think there’s any excuse for that.”

To which he astonishingly replied: “Yeah, she did steal all that money... But she HAD A RIGHT to be ANGRY!”

There was no point in arguing with such a determinedly twisted mind, so I just let him rant til he gave up and left. Turns out he was one of two older guys in American Atheists, wandering the Fair. The other one later said he just didn’t “get” the connection between anarchism and atheism. Gad, after running into those two, I begin to see why some people think atheists are nuts!

— Sheri Calkins, La Honda, Calif.

Unlike that religious/atheist imbecile you got accosted by, I saw Madalyn and her unethical behavior up close. Out of absolutely nothing, she fabricated an astonishing allegation and tried to have me imprisoned on federal charges. The senile sycophant you heard ranting is all too sadly typical of the cultist fascists in Madalyn's misnamed American Atheists group.

(Continued)

Those interested in using their powers of reason, rather than ignorantly and ignominiously worshipping this (now defunct) foul person, are invited to read my long presentation, “The Atheist Cult”, which is loaded with documentation and history.

Anyone taking the trouble to behave as an Atheist ought, instead of accepting half-truths and made-up legends about a glorious godlike leader, will quickly discover that Madalyn was long in the habit of trying to intimidate critics (or even just persons she suddenly got mad at) by running to the authorities with made-up legal charges, suing people, and in at least one case, trying to seize someone’s large estate after his death, just because he was an Atheist. If anyone she mailed her publications to ever got any kind of mailing from any other atheistic group, she claimed it was because the other group stole her mailing Usd; and she tried to go to court to prevent such contact, asserting that Atheists were a proprietary client list (i.e., she owned them). She invited people to uproot their lives and move to Texas to work in her “GHQ”; then, when they did so, she made their lives miserable by constant barrages of obscene screaming and racial epithets — and when they’d finally have enough and quit the place, she’d allege in print that they’d been phonies, “Christians in disguise” who were guilty of theft, laziness, or fooling around with young girls.

This is the sort of psychopathic personality Madalyn was. The press loved her, exactly because she WAS such a hideous discreditation of Atheism (which the press and media are always glad to find terrible examples to illustrate).

There are people who will defend Stalin, or Mao Tse Tung. Followers are an obstinate, truculent, and often seemingly brain-damaged or almost hypnotized bunch — in any ease, defective in some important ways. You can’t bother them with the facts; they won’t even read things that criticize or expose their fixated heroes or cultish obsessions. It is a disgusting fact about human susceptibility to such mental illnesses, that not even Atheists, who realize the truth about religion, are immune to this sort of deplorable True Believer syndrome.

More Book Fair, More Computers

Dear Fred: About the Book Fair— first, LAST year’s: a lot of fun, everyone very relaxed, big crowds, etc. Very friendly atmosphere, even with the Zerzan talk. No problems with Zerzan followers. Now THIS year’s fair: same big crowds, same generally friendly atmosphere, but an underlying tension was in the air. Very odd. More nut-cases wandering around, etc. More people arguing about political points, more young people unclear on the concept. Early on a young woman (who frankly looked like hell, or at least like she was on something) came over and engaged me in conversation. She was helping at Zerzan’s table, and didn’t care for my negative remarks about him and the ski-mask

set. I explained how Zerzan’s “back to the Stone Age’ philosophy is identical to stuff that came out of the Third Reich, and that it would necessitate a huge reduction in the human population, etc., and would not be accepted voluntarily by most people — implying either lots of killing or coercion. Her response was jargon about a “total critique”, and they didn’t necessarily have to have a workable plan of how to get there from here. A valid point, I suppose, but hardly novel or constructive. And of course her position was that “there are no real anarchists” speaking at the Book Fair. Of course: Only Zerzan and his followers are “REAL” Anarchists.

It was pretty funny in some ways. Zerzan’s “considerably deepened analysis’ is mostly what I concluded 30 years or more ago, when having high-school fantasies about running away and joining some jungle tribe. The stuff of a boy’s adventure novel, in fact, but quickly seen as impractical once daydreaming stops. Besides, while coercion and authoritarianism may well be built into industrialism, it wasn’t conspicuously ABSENT from agrarianism or huntergatherer groups, either.

Zerzan may well be correct that industrialism is doomed (eventually), but short of some bio-warfare scenario with plague killing off 99% of humanity, the Stone Age is not coming back. It is disingenuous of Zerzan to hold out an Edenic vision to young people without fully apprising them of the fact that THEY won’t see it. Very different from your more honest “Situation Hopeless” and “Message in a Bottle” for

@@@496.jpeg][A black and white drawing of two men AI-generated content may be incorrect.]]

Graphic Used on Book-Fair Literature

the future, along with living Anarchism RIGHT NOW in our own lives.

Anyway, the Zerzan follower went on and on about what REAL Anarchists they are, and how many of them are in jail for various numbers of years. They are proud of that? Shades of Ammon!

I ran down the whole objection to ski masks. I said if it was just to protect their identities, they could wear clown masks. So she said they wanted “to be taken seriously.’

Of course if they REALLY wanted to be taken seriously they would wear suits and ties. A clean-cut guy who looks like a Mormon missionary talking Anarchism would REALLY make people sit up! Maybe I should try to copy that look...

But, talking with lots of people during the day, it seems to me that most Anarchists don’t really take Zerzan and the ski-masks very seriously. One woman who laughed about our little bumper-stickers talked about how the good- hearted Anarchists, who write positive stuff, would be remembered and read long after Zerzan and his crowd are forgotten. She enjoyed our attempt to convey positive anarchist messages with a little humor.

Editor’s note:

Something about the Book Fair that I think was unfort unate, was the leaflet sent out to advertise it. A faux linoleum-engraving used as a decoration on the item depicted a thuggish man and woman, armed with an automatic weapon, staring with delighted express ions at some burning books. Enough people wrote to me wanting to know what I thought of it, and themselves feeling uneasily that it was some kind of paean to Spanish Civil War “anarchist” action, that I think it probably had more of a disturbing or counterproductive effect than otherwise. Was the leaflet suggesting that Anarchists burn books? If not Anarchists, who? Nazis? Why— were THEY going to attend?

Turning to computers: I have such a chance to write —on a typewriter— because I have to sit in front of this piece-of-shit computer, waiting and waiting for it to •install* a program. I really wish I had kept a log of the last two weeks’ computer “use*. It all began when trying to finish up e-mails and postings to this e-mail list I moderate. We have had some impact, but 90% of that impact came from POSTAL MAILINGS we have done. Actual physical pieces of paper, sent by “snail mail* (as the computer pod-people describe it).

Anyway, through the “e-group* we were sent a very serious computer virus which nearly wiped out our data, and even rendered one of our hard disks permanently inoperable. I spent several solid 13 hour days trying to (1) get rid of the virus, (2) fix the damage it had done, and (3) try to get back up and running. Plus spending 4 to 6 hours every evening for that first week and a half, and here it is days later and I’m still working on getting back to square one.

“I could write a chapter on how wacked-out this Internet is. For one thing, when you get e-mail, through another corporation, you’re allotted so much space. They keep track of how much space you’re using— 1500 K, say — except that figure is always changing, as if in a constant state of flux. A short e-mail is maybe 2K. Someone sent me an e-mail of about that size— a few hundred words — but for some reason the e-mail service, “Hotmail” (owned by Gates), recorded it at over 500K! I was already at my limit, and had to delete that message. It’s pure insanity. There is nothing fixed. Send an error-free message, and when you check your copy afterward, letters will suddenly be missing. ‘Did I make those typos?’ you ask. Who knows?”

—C orre s pondent

I’ve spent over $150 on programs to try to fix things and prevent this from happening again. Checking my journal, I’ve spent at least 50 hours in the last twelve days dealing with this.

Computers make life soooo easy and convenient!

Of course the pod-people would say, ‘Serves you right for not updating your anti-virus software weekly! It’s your own fault!* Actually, I’m glad it happened; I’ve learned some valuable lessons. (Hours and hours on the ’phone with my brother, as he walks me through ope ration after operation. He is a computer professional so knows his stuff; can you imagine how long it would have taken me, or how much it would have cost, without his help?)

The whole experience has really changed the way I look at these machines. I have nothing but admiration and respect for the guys who developed the virus. It is extremely clever in the way it works, plus it made me realize that I do not NEED a computer— I can just walk away from the fucker at any time. I said once that before I had a computer, I hated computers, and once I got one, I REALLY hated them. Well, now it has gone ’way beyond that! You know how it is: one of the main reasons for hating computers is the cult-like religiosity of their proponents— it’s like the alien pods got ’em. So of course I’ve always approached computers with extreme caution, all mental shields up; don’t let the pods steal my mind!! Kind of like if you were in a survival situation, wounded, and the only painkiller available was heroin: trying to use it without it GETTING you, turning you into a zombie. The worst is when they actually WORK, and actually DO make some task easier... as long as you don’t count all the hours you spent screwing around with the apparatus, trying to get it to work. You can see the potential...

But this whole virus thing has somehow given me a kind of distance from it all. My hat is off to the creators of the Matrix Virus! Thanks!

I really wish I had kept a log the past 12

days, and had recorded my conversations with my brother— all the details of the hours spent dealing with this piece of crap: 'Okay, now click into the registry... Okay, I’m there... Now go to such-and-such folder, then such-and-such other folder (a couple of times)... Okay... Now do you see an entry such-and-such? No... Okay, try this other subfolder...

Okay, I’ve found it. Okay, what is the number when you click on it?

Such and Such.

Now right click, go to •edit” and change that number to a *2*.

Okay.

Now go to such-and-such, change this...

Okay.

Now shut down the computer and restart it. (Three minutes later:) Now does it work?

No.

Okay. Now we will try

On and on for HOURS. Worse than CB radio babble. It would have made a great couple of pages in The Match, like Roasberry’s log of all the cop crimes during the three-month period. Show the real underbelly of the beast, that no one talks about, at least until you actually get one.

The one single GOOD reason to get a computer is tha all the pod-people finally LEAVE YOU ALONE. It’s like some weird thing like ant pheremones or something. You know how ants always touch antennae to know if the other ant is part of their colony? Once you get one of the damn things you get the pheremone so they no longer see you as NOT OF THE COLONY! DESTROY! DESTROY!

— J. L. Hudson, La Honda, California.

Shut that thing down! Go back to the Linotype! Store info on three-by-five cards! NOTHING can be more ineff ic ient than the wonderland of screw- ups you describe.

Invasive Pests

Dear Fred: Digital television broadcasting started on January first in Victoria, and its only effect so far is to interfere with analogue signals. Equipment for receiving digital TV is almost unobtainable in the shops, so the digital broadcasters are like Swiss or Hungarian admirals.

Your piece on “Animal - Control Nazis” struck a sympathetic chord. I have come across some floridly disturbed people obsessed with “rescuing” animals!

I was puzzled by some of J. L. Hudson’s article on invasive pest species, insofar as it does not square with what I know of Australian environmental problems. The main cause of species loss in recent times in Australia is simple; Homo sapiens. Forest and bush clearance has deprived many native species of habitat, or boxed them up in small, isolated pockets of relict forest. That said, introduced plants and animals are a major problem here.

In this part of southeastern Australia, large areas of forest are being infested at ground level with brambles (blackberries), which grow over everything else. Brambles were introduced (circa 1860) by — here’s a nice one for you! — Victoria’s first state botanist, Baron Ferdinand von Mueller, who thought that blackberries would be handy snacks for lost travelers.

Other major pests are rabbits, cats, foxes, and dogs. Rabbits spread rapidly once successfully introduced in the 1850s or ’60s, and contribute to land erosion. They can live in most non-desert parts of Australia, and where rabbits can go, so can the other three, as rabbits are their staple diet. However, although cats and foxes feed mainly on rabbits, they are more than willing to snack on any small-to-medium native animals they find. The introduction of the dog into Australia sometime during the last 10,000 years was very probably responsible for the disappearance of the thylacine (Tasmaniantiger) and Tasmanian devil from the Australian mainland.

Introduced pest plants (mainly scramblers) are seriously degrading tropicalAustralian forests.

In South Africa, particularly around Table Mountain, introduced Australian plants, notably Hakeas, are causing serious trouble. South African plants such as boneseed and capeweed have become pests in Victoria.

Attempts to “fix” introduced pests can backfire badly. Back in the 1920s the Australian sugarcane industry was being troubled by (I think) a cane-borer beetle. So the “experts” sent off to Hawaii for some cane toads to eat the beetles. The cane toads thrived in tropical Australia and are now a major threat to native wildlife. Cane toads will eat other things besides cane beetles, but creatures that eat frogs and toads die rapidly if they try to eat a cane toad!

I am not trying to suggest that every introduced species is a problem. Foxgloves, for instance, have gone wild in Australia and New Zealand, and although I occasionally come across foxgloves in the bush, they give me no cause for worry. Brambles certainly do.

Also last issue; Thanks for acting as a watchdog on the matter of archivesand records. I liked your latest squib on American Atheists, Incorporated. I am delighted to learn that you are trying vegetarianism again. I have been a vegan since about 1980, mainly because a boycott of the meat-milk industry seems to me to be a practical way of reducing exploitation and cruelty in the world. I also regard the pet trade as another industry to avoid; it reminds me of the slave trade.

I do not agree with everything I read in The Match, but I never find it boring. The magazine certainly stimulates my imagination and reasoning powers, and makes me question all sorts of assumptions.

— Nigel Sinnott, Alexandra, Victoria, Australia.

If the government can put thousands of plants on a banned list because they have existed in a geographical area for only the last thousand years or so, the potential exists for ecological and social catastrophe beyond imagining. The bureaucratization of Life itself will be the result, and doom and brutality will await as crazy federal agents uproot hedges, swamps, lawns and forests in a quest for life-forms that some totalitarian blueprint says aren’t supposed to be there. What makes these wonks so wise? University degrees?

Dr. Richard Kimble

Dear Fred: In regard to your mention of the 1960s television series, The Fugitive, one of the remarkable aspects of that series which you didn’t bring out in your article was that it was only through the constant assistance of strangers that Dr. Kimble was able to stay out of captivity and continue on his quest to find his wife’s killer. While that wasn’t a farfetched idea in the mid-1960s, it is absurd to seriously entertain the idea that in the United States of the year 2001, hundreds of strangers would knowingly assist someone labeled by the law enforcement network as an escaped killer. That is one aspect of American society that has radically changed in the last thirty-plus years.

— Hans Sherrer, Sheridan, Oregon.

Barks’ Anarchistic Ducks

Dear Fred: I read your obituary of Carl Barks and was pleased to see that you think highly of the late, and great, artist. You and I and millions of other youngsters got a lot out of Barks’ work. We knew which stories he wrote, and read them with relish. His drawings had *the shine”, for want of a more scientific phrase. His gift really brought his ducks to life in a way that none of the other Disney artists could imitate, and imbued his creations with brilliance. I really didn’t conceptualize him as having a connection to Anarchy, but now that you mention it I see what you mean.

— Dennis P. Eichhorn, Seattle.

What Happened to This Country?

Dear Fred: Another police crime. A woman is HELD HOSTAGE by Detroit cops to get husband to surrender. She just gave birth to a baby by C-section when police picked her up! Is this a banana republic or something? It’s an outrage! What happened to this country?

— Lisa Schaeffer.

POLICE HOLD WOMAN HOSTAGE

TO FORCE HUSBAND TO SURRENDER

Detroit cops kidnapped a woman and held her for five days (no charges were ever filed or even suggested), in an effort to coerce her husband, a murder suspect, into surrendering

Maribel Franco-Rosario had absolutely nothing to do with any crimes whatsoever, says one of her attorneys, Steven Fishman. “They just held her to get at the husband.” Joel Fuentes, the wanted man, turned himself in and is now in jail awaiting trial.

“Unfortunately,” said the lawyer, this kind of thing happens routinely.”

Hope For The Hopeless

Fred: Hope for a truly free America is a lost cause. Government is like a cancer which only grows and gets worse as time marches on. There is no hope for remission; it is too far gone. I myself am serving 20 years for nonviolent crimes.

But at least here in prison we are, in a sense, experiencing freedoms denied to society. Foremost, we don’t pay taxes; thus we’re not supporting or taking part in government, paying for police or bureaucracy or all the other ways in which taxes uphold the oppression of the people who pay them. Yes, we have petty rules in here, but they go with the territory, and we are NOT subject to the thousands of laws and rules placed on society at large. Sure, we miss the simple freedoms and comforts of home, but there’s a certain amount of pride and a feeling of contentedness in not living in a society you don’t believe in.

—Jason Roten, no. 137209, Gulf Correctional Institution

500 Ike Steel Road Wewahitchca, Florida 32465.

Profound Grief

Fred: Don Holbrook’s history corner speculates that Mine Okubo’s literary style was *...a repressed grief of horrible profundity.” Yes, that’s what it was. I say this because I find it intolerable to write of my own situation with the emotion it deserves. Much better to write and live with all that blocked off. I’m just a nail, small, hard and hammered. I dream of becoming a hammer.

— Paul Jorgenson, Maximum Penitentiary,

ETHICAL ANARCHISM

It's not a form of statism. Ethical Anarchists don t want to impose their value-system on anyone. It's not terrorism. The agent of the government — the cop who wears a gun to scare you into obeying him — is the terrorist. Governments threaten to punish any man or woman who defies state power, and therefore the state really amounts to an institution of terror.

Anarchism — Ethical Anarchism —never relies on fear to accomplish anything, because a person who is afraid is not free.

Here’s what Ethical Anarchists believe:

Government is an unnecessary evil. Human beings, when accustomed to taking responsibility for their own behavior, can cooperate on a basis of mutual trust and helpfulness.

No true reform is possible that leaves government intact. Appeals to a government for a redress of grievances, even when acted upon, only increase the supposed legitimacy of the government’s acts, and add therefore to its amassed power.

Government will be abolished when its subjects cease to grant it legitimacy. Government cannot exist without at least the tacit consent of- the populace. This consent is maintained by keeping people in ignorance of their real power. Voting is not an expression of power, but an admission of powerlessness, since it cannot do otherwise than reaffirm the government’s supposed legitimacy.

Every person must have the right to make all decisions about his or her own life. All moralistic meddling in the private affairs of freely-acting persons is unjustified. Behavior which does not affect uninvolved persons is nobody’s business but the participants’.

We are not bound by constitutions or agreements made by our ancestors. Any constitution, contract, or agreement that purports to bind unborn generations — or in fact anyone other than the actual parties to it — is a despicable and presumptuous fraud. We are free agents liable only for such as we ourselves undertake.

---

All governments survive on theft and extortion, called taxation. All governments force their decrees on the people, and command obedience under threat of punishment.

The principal outrages of history have been committed by governments or the similar authoritarian ideologies, religions, while every advancement of thought, every betterment in the human condition, has come about through the practices of voluntary cooperation and individual initiative. The principle of government, which is force, is opposed to the free exercise of our ability to think, act and cooperate.

Whenever government is established, it causes more harm than it forestalls. Under the guise of protecting populaces from crime and violence, governments not only do not eradicate random, individual crime, but they institutionalize such varieties as censorship and war.

All governments enlarge upon and extend their powers. Under government, the rights of individuals constantly diminish.

ETHICAL ANARCHISM is in favor of a free society organized along lines of cooperation and mutual aid.