Mike Palacek
Well, I was there and I saw what you did,
saw it with my own two eyes.
So you can wipe off that grin,
I know where you’ve been.
It’s all been a pack of lies.
— Phil Collins, In The Air Tonight
Chapter One
An Old Man On A Front Porch
His mother and father said, what a lovely boy
Let’s teach him what we learned,
yes, just what we learned
We’ll dress him up warmly and we’ll send him to school
It’ll teach him how to fight, to be nobody’s fool.
Oh, what a lonely boy.
Oh, what a lonely boy.
Oh, what a lonely boy
— Andrew Gold
“Big girls don’t fly, big girls don’t fly, they don’t fly-i-i, they can’t fly …”
He sat on his front porch, his C harmonica in his lap, slowly rocking forward, then back, the smell of wood smoke peppering the air.
On the railing sat a glass of Grain Belt and a Marlboro burning on a white dinner plate, because he liked the smell of the bar from when he had friends.
“It’s been another long week,” he said out loud, “in my hometown,” because what else was he going to do? His family wasn’t speaking to him, he hadn’t been allowed at Thanksgiving or Christmas, the newspaper would no longer print his letters. His neighbors out on a walk crossed the street when they approached his house.
But sometimes his grandson, when he could, and he could in summer, sit on the steps with the old man, with a notebook, writing down what his grandfather said, because somebody should.
“There once was a man from Nantucket,” said the grinning old man in the cocked grey, rusted railroad cap, then remembering the boy, returned to the story, the narrative.
The grandson was there just because he was, and also because what else could he do. His grandfather was telling the truth, mostly, it seemed and his words were just running down the steps, floating up into the sky and wasted, and so, like his baseball cards and skateboard, some day they might be worth something. So he was collecting them.
His grandfather had told him about a man, a Russian even, maybe from the railroad, who said you only had power over people as long as you don’t take everything from them, but if you take everything from a man, he’s not under you anymore, he’s free.
And that’s why his grandfather did not cry as much, maybe anymore, not much he did anyway. And so the boy was not as sad either. In fact, it was kind of cool, to think of his grandfather as like a bird or something. He could fly.
The rocker began to roll and squeak over the old wooden porch, which meant The Old Man was getting going again.
“Well, there was this group of people, this bunch, you know, who, having just lost all their money on long shots in the last race and having no money for bus or Uber, set off from Canterbury Park in Shakopee, down across the parking lot toward the freeway, all of them, kind of scattered at first, not a bunch, but each was lonely in his own way, so they all kind of kept an eye on each other, and even though they were not shoulder to shoulder, they were still together, the way a man and wife, looking in two different store windows at the mall, are together.
Without speaking, because it was just kind of taken for granted where they were headed, that’s where everyone was and everyone who was not there was headed there, The Minnesota State Fair, the Big Minnesota Get-Together, where the upper crust and lower crust come together kind of.
Because what else was there to do, all signs were pointing that way, and it was never bigger than it was this year, thanks to — like Adam sans Eve, Johnny Appleseed, Sir Newton, that first computer guy, New York City, the Beatles records, not to mention that big Honeycrisp on the teacher’s desk, the Granny Smith bug spray for physicians — at the state fair, The Minnesota State Fair, along with free masks with the new state flag logo design that nobody liked, free shots from Mr. Pfizer himself, Joe Mauer bobbleheads, they were also handing out, for $10.99 a pop, juicy, runny, picaresque, sweet, cinnamony, on a blue Democrat paper plate, thick slices of apple pie, genuine MinnesotaNice Apple Pie, patented, copyrighted, bottom-lined, and trust-funded, made by real Tollefsons, Krebsbachs, Torvelsons, and Bunsens, and handed out by Garrison Keillor himself, the tall man in a white suit, red bowtie, red hightop KEDS, stylish ‘70s commemorative five-day beard, white perfectly urbane-rumpled, straw hat. No socks. That was what made it, all just perfect. And so uniquely, roguishly, passive aggressive resistance Minnesotan. And if you don’t get it, well, we didn’t expect you to anyway. Unique. Classy. One in a million. So sorry (not sorry) how much it sucks to be you. No socks. And the pie.
For a while now, throughout the United States, the only food served was the cheeseburger, chips, Pepsi-no Coke special, anywhere, in the now-traditional USA Today, network news, iHeart Media model.
The problem was, was that when they asked did you leave room for desert, they were still, because of the 1940s laws that went along with the eight-hour day, minimum wage and women’s vote, required to offer blueberry, pumpkin, pecan, peach or cherry along with apple pie.
But that had all been receding, since, oh, probably the ‘60s, Vietnam on TV and those who actually run the country said enough of that shit, but it had been just a bit easier to capture American newspaper, television and radio than it had been to make apple pie the law of the land.
But by now there were not many pecan partisans remaining in the hills. At most backyard suburban summer grill parties, the question of cherry, blueberry or other flaky notions did not come up, would not, could not.
The big promotion at The Minnesota State Fair was being pushed globally, at Cannes, Stanford, by the Aspen Institute, Davos, Rachel Maddow, with the hope that this would at long last drive the final nail in the blueberry bushel basket.
The front page of the Star-Tribune just that morning featured a breath-taking full-color, six-column photo of the banner running the entire length of the entrance to the fair: You Will Eat Only Apple Pie and You Will Like It!
One of the many fair stories in this edition told how the farmland was being bought up by Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the ADL, SPLC, Amazon, with the intent of planting only apple trees, thousands, millions of apple trees, Hipster Johnny Appleseed, with the results of a recent Rand and Lancet study explaining how the trees will save the planet from climate change, which recently was causing so many heart attacks and cancer in young and old alike.
Another sidebar talked about the successes of the Dole Company in Guatemala so many years ago now, and ‘no reason we can’t re-purpose that skill set that we have used for decades in other countries, bring it on home, and put American right back on top, as it were, just substitute apples for bananas.’ Easy peasy.
Chapter Two
The Judge’s Story
The moon landing is essentially the adult version of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. What primarily motivates them is fear. But it is not the lie itself that scares people; it is what that lie says about the world around us and how it really functions. For if NASA was able to pull off such an outrageous hoax before the entire world, and then keep that lie in place for four decades, what does that say about the control of information we receive?— David McGowanThe peripatetic pasty pilgrims had by this time coagulated, glutenized, into a bevy, a congregation, a clot, a clump, making its way across the freeway overpass to a dubious suburban dirt road, keeping the skylines of Minneapolis and Saint Paul as their lodestars.
Someone said, hey, why is nobody talking?
And then somebody else texted that person: STFU/MYOB.
PSGWSP (play stupid games win stupid prizes).
BYOB.
BRB.
LMAO.
WL (writ large).
MDM.
TW.
“It might be fun,” said one of the older people.
“Like charades … or skits.”
“I am so outa here,” said someone.
Why?
You might learn something.
Oh, really.
The Judge stepped into the mix, and offered he would tell a story, his story, parts of his story.
“His-story,” a young woman rolled her eyes.
“I am not stupid,” the Judge began. “In fact, top of my class, all-conference, notable awards, blahblahblah,” he said just at the time that someone said the same thing.
“I understand I am merely a pawn, an interchangeable tool in the factory, player on the bench, actor in a play someone else wrote, someone else is producing and directing, wearing Dumbledore robes that are supposed to make me all-wise, all-knowing, all-powerful, from a raised stage that is really the bow of the Titanic, shouting out with my whole being look at me, I am the king of the world, when actually, and those in the know, know this, I am no way even in control of even my own fate.
“You must understand, surely you must, tell me you can see this.
“The game is rigged, we all know, just as he said, the dice is loaded. Do you see? Of course not. It’s like trying to describe sand to Eskimos. It’s why we are here walking across the county for pie.
“I must follow best practices. I’ve been given my orders. My family and home are in place. They have lives, entertaining activities, routines.
“By whom? Surely you are joking.
“Faced with this defendant, this loser with an idea (at this that very defendant, only a few feet away, raised his hand incredulously to say, I’m right here), carrying this idea in front of him like a shield, who sings, shouts the wonders of cherry pie, knowing virtually nothing of the true arbiters of the truth everywhere around him like Golems, Dementors.
“The law?
“My child, we are waist-deep in post-law, post-democracy society, straight into neo-feudal … the need, the desire for law will fade like photos of Jim Garrison in a textbook.
“The rich, elite, powerful know best. They have a plan, the details of which we learn each morning from the radio, TV, newspaper.
“The plan is the law.”
“Fuck it, let’s go bowling,” someone tried a quip, to no avail.
“Given all of that,” said the Judge, now wearing actual black robes, flipping around with a flourish like an actor on a stage, I have a story, which has been around for a while, to soften our steps, apropos of nothing, but isn’t everything these days? It may take us a ways, away, on our journey.”
I Know You
They killed Paul Wellstone.
I can feel it all around me, like ninety-eight percent humidity, like the feeling there is someone in the house who shouldn’t be there.
They attacked the World Trade Center to put out the Patriot Act, to steal the oil, to rule the world, to impress their long-lost junior high sweethearts, who knows why.
I suddenly realize it and reach behind me into the backseat to snatch the bad guy who I know is there, but all I grab is air. I can still hear it breathing, catch a shadow in the rearview.
They killed the Kennedys and Martin and now we’ve got the books and testimony, but before that all I had to do was walk down to the SuperValue for Mom to buy bread and stand on a milk crate to look into the eyes of the checkout lady as she counted my change.
I might have guessed Vietnam was a lie by the glare in Father Tom’s eye and the way Sister Margaret rushed by, like she was always on her way somewhere to cry.
Someone once said that violence is as American as apple pie and now I know why. Just some small kid from a small town, thinking nothing ever happens here, when actually I was right in the middle of the action.
The baker bombed Iraq. The barber gunned down Bobby. And the four little grandmothers in blue flower dresses and green metal chairs in that row of white porches on Sarah Street sliced the throats of children in El Salvador in their spare time during the summer in the 1980s.
You can see it in their eyes, dull and dead. Not from seeing too much of the world, but too little.
The robins are tweet-tweeting on the front lawn, puffing their red chests into the sun.
Their song: Hang the niggers.
On the days we bombed Iraq, the Farmers Coop Elevator dryers hummed a happy tune. The coffee-drinkers smiled across Formica tables and asked for more cream, please.
And for the ten years in between, while children died from the sanctions from no food or light or heat or love or prayers or Hardee’s — Mr. Johnson and Mr. Smith went to work each day, drove on the right side of the road, smiled, kept their desks in order, and were not considered suspects.
They really, truly stole a presidential election in the United States and our response was to wave at the limousines as they passed by on the TV atop the kitchen counter, next to the toaster.
They shot down or lasered-down Wellstone’s plane and they really did attack their own Pentagon.
I see this and I have zero documentation.
I don’t care.
I have all the proof I need from the glazed look in your eye as you struggle to attach the American flag to your car antenna.
I understand America by watching you.
I know it from growing up in the Midwest of America, from playing baseball and football and riding down the middle of the street with no hands eating an ice cream cone.
The strawberry drips on my white T-shirt and I don’t care.
Mom will wash it, clean it up, just as she rinses the blood of a thousand Chileans from her hands.
A lemony spray makes everything smell fresh.
I see more than I want to in the referee’s face as he prepares the jump-ball toss and the smile of the drive-up teller as she helps another customer.
Would evil men and women kill in order to gain absolute power?
Pretty darn near impossible to believe when they look just like us and sound like us, tell the same tired jokes and watch the same TV shows.
I do know, because I saw it myself over the top of my SuperSize Diet Pepsi — that while children are being bombed to gooey bits — the mail still arrives at our house at ten and the garbage is picked up at one, school dismisses at three-thirty, and Raymond comes on at seven.
I see the banality of evil old Mrs. Schwartz using her tongs to set another fish square into a slot on a lunch tray at St. Mark’s elementary as a child in Baghdad has his nose blown away by a small bomb he thought was a toy.
I do not have a leaked file or a tidbit of information or an inside source.
I know all I need to know from seeing your guilty face staring out into the night while you wash dishes, or leaning out the car window to order an A&W root beer, or chasing your children into the school house with one last admonition.
I don’t need to know Barack Obama or George Bush or Karl Rove.
I know you.
Chapter Three
There Is Good, There Is Evil
Phoenix was, by design, a psychological warfare operation. Its goal was, quite literally, to scare the hell out of the Vietnamese people — to such an extent that their will would be broken and they would accede to the demands of their would-be oppressors. The techniques employed were barbaric. Victims of the program were not merely assassinated; they were frequently raped, tortured, mutilated, dismembered and left posed in grotesque displays for their fellow villagers and family members to find. The crime scenes of the Phoenix Program were, in other words, indistinguishable from the crime scenes of America’s serial killers..... In What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Noam Chomsky described the type of training given to the U.S.-backed Salvadoran death squads, which were modeled after the Phoenix Program’s death squads (which in turn were modeled after the Nazi Einsatzgruppen death squads during World War II):Chomsky described one particularly macabre scene staged by the U.S.-trained Salvadoran National Guard. A peasant woman returned home to “find here three children, her mother and her sister sitting around a table, each with its own decapitated head placed carefully on the table in front of the body, the hands arranged on top, as if each body was stroking its own head.” Finding it hard to keep the head of the woman’s youngest child in place, the assassins had taken the 18-month-old baby’s decapitated head and “nailed the hands onto it. A large plastic bowl filled with blood was tastefully displayed in the center of the table.”— David McGowanThe Old Man lit another cigarette, set it on the plate next to the long ash of the other, lifted the pint beer glass to his face as someone might smell a rose.
With a nod to his grandson he kept going because what else was he to do, there was work to be done, to put these words out there into the universe, for if the truth be allowed to escape like a genie, like toothpaste, it would find a way to do what needs to be done. That he truly believed.
“Malcolm,” he said in a deep, strong voice.
“Write this down.
“There is good, no doubt. There is evil. There is truth and there are lies.
“And, by the time most figure out which is which, it is time to die.
“It takes human beings a long, long time, for some reason, to become a man, Malcolm.
“Not you, though. I’m pretty sure you are gonna be just fine.
“You’re probably already there, and, son, it is my honor and pleasure to be with you today.
“Thank you.”
Chapter Four
The Conspiracy Theorist’s Tale, However Unlikely
... That’s what DHS agents are prepared to do in the U.S. And with advances in technology and 40 years to learn from mistakes, political neutralizations are easier than ever. Consider the anthrax letters mailed to Democratic Senators after 9/11, now recognized as an inside job. It took only a few “black propaganda” terror operations to silence the political opposition’s leadership and its resistance to the Patriot Act.Information management — including official secrecy and false accusations — is the key to pacifying people through implicit terror, while making the internal security apparatus appear legal, moral and popular. This is being done against American citizens through the most ambitious psywar campaign ever waged on planet earth.... destroying the will of the people to fight, that’s what guerilla groups do.— Douglas Valentine“S’pose that means I’m next, right, Judge?
“The Defendant pushed himself up to stand.
“I suppose you have no idea what it’s like sitting there, alone, in your courtroom with you towering above, angry, powerful …”
“I just said …”
“No, you had your turn … those black robes seemingly placed upon your shoulders by Moses, Zeus and God The Father, surrounded by those righteous quotes literally carved in stone all around the building, outside, in the elevator, the hallways, your chambers, presumably, all the fine wood and marble, how could you possibly be in error, on the side of evil, it’s not conceivable, not in this dimension.
“It’s all on purpose, we, you, are right and good because, look we can do this, you are nothing, don’t even try, just as with the massive walls of Leavenworth, Atlanta, Attica, San Quentin.
“Sitting alone, because no attorney ever took the course during years and years of expensive, sweaty study that says risk your life for the truth, with having his or her name associated with a laughing stock, despised advocate of blueberry ice cream.
“And so, I must face the whole Ministry Of Pie, in solitary witness, swim upstream against The Narrative, which has been flowing, advancing inexorably, day and night, for one hundred years until it got to me, and me so very aware that I am only me.
“It’s an allegory for something, I’m sure, if only I were smart enough to understand. Is that the right word? Is America an allegory, a tale, a story, a narrative, a simulation? Or is it real.
“My grandfather, Alois, came here in 1910 from Bohemia, on the ship, the George Washington, arriving in New York City at age 34, with his family gathered close around like ducks in the middle of the freeway, no doubt thinking WTF have I gotten myself into. And then still plowing forward into the abyss, the darkness, the crowds, the gigantic city, all the vibrant and pungent smells, languages, loud and new sounds, on to Chicago, then Minnesota.
“With hardly nary a thought, I venture to guess, of flagging suspicious content, wrestling to the ground unpopular ideas, threat actors, trusted messengers, or whole of society surveillance.
“Given all of that, with my apologies, because we are all on an adventure, this is a sort of yellow brick road, Narnia, the road not taken. We have formed our own temporal tribe here, to survive, even thrive, on our way to the fair, I offer now this story, merely for your entertainment. It’s an old story and it has probably nothing to do with what is happening right here, right now, but today we are brothers and sisters, and this is a beautiful day, and more than that, a beautiful day in Minnesota.”
The altar area smelled of the branches of evergreen curled around the toes of Saint Joseph and Mary on either side of the altar that nobody took down from last Christmas … or the Christmas before.
Well, anywhoo, there was this child I recall, back a hundred years ago, in the past century in nineteen hundred and sixty-three.
This young boy was standing at the green table, still gripping his Flintstones lunch box.
The morning kids had just left. The brand new shiny metal box held his banana and his beads for the Christmas tree. On the blackboard, which covered the whole one side of the room, as big as a bus, his teacher had engraved in new, white chalk:
President John F. Kennedy.
Soon all the children were gathered for the afternoon session. They stood beside their tables for the Pledge of Allegiance.
Just as they had finished, the principal, Sister Mary, came in and talked to Sister George.
The kids remained standing as Sister Mary told the children that President Kennedy had been shot and killed.
The boy felt a warm stream down his leg as his socks became wet and a puddle formed between his feet. …
… WELL NOW … a bit later, years, decades, generations later, that boy was researching the Kennedy assassination and found a tape recording of attorney Jim Garrison being interviewed by Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show. They were talking about the shooting of President Kennedy.
The man felt an affinity for Mr. Carson because his family had long watched the famous man of late night talk television.
He recalled the hot summer nights, with the windows open to let some air through and the faint breath just stirring the curtains.
He recalled walking down the alley to the neighborhood grocery store, which was air conditioned, and stepping into that dark, cool store with the wooden slat floor and the hum of the frozen food machines and the smell of baseball card bubble gum and raspberry-cherry popsicles.
But he also felt an aversion. Because he now realized that while Mr. Carson talked on television and the boy’s parents sat on the sofa and watched with the blue light reflecting off their faces, and the kids scooting over on the floor to get close enough to the screen door to think about asking if they could go out again, terrible things were happening.
Father Ralph filled his chest with air. He let it out, filled it again and held it. He moved his hands to the front of the podium and smiled while he looked around at his audience.
The homily had once been the bogeyman of his seminary training, and he knew it was only by grace that he was able to stand up there in front of all these good people every week without turning around to run away and join the circus.
And the man felt again like a child as he listened to the interview on tiny headphones, just as a child feels when he realizes he has been lied to.
He wrote a letter to Johnny Carson. He wrote to the great Carson at an address in California.
Like a newscaster with nothing left to do, Father Ralph arranged his papers on the podium. He listened for the signs of disgust: coughs spreading like a grass fire or the hymn books being pounded closed.
Ralph held his pause for a count of one-thousand-five.
He let his chin rise. He saw mostly upturned, pleasant faces.
He let a drop of sweat sit on his nose.
Ralph let his black glasses slip and peeked over the top like a soldier over the rim of a trench.
The Great Carsoni could make justice appear, he said, poof! Out of nothingness in the palm of his hand.
He won’t.
It, justice, has appeared on occasions in the past because good men went through the fires of hell to make it happen. They fought the bad guys.
As the song or saying or something goes, the revolution will not be televised. You can’t catch it after work or tape it for later. The revolution is live, and it will not happen unless you … do … something.
The last word hummed like trapped, angry bees inside the microphone.
Ralph pushed on the middle bar of his glasses.
He looked at the back door for the bishop. Out of his peripheral vision he checked both side doors for the troops that would march him from the altar to the city jail.
“If we do nothing. If we shake hands after Mass and agree that all is well, we mean that all is well with us, all is well in our home and on our block and that is all that matters.
And then we are the problem.
He paused again. …
When I lived in that nice neighborhood with the soft breeze and the distant call of the train engine, I was certain I was in a good spot. Without ever really sitting down to think about it, I was absolutely sure, before my feet hit the floor each morning, that things were in place: everything in alphabetical order, counted and blessed.
And I was wrong.
And now, what this country needs more than cheap gas or friendly hometown banking is a Democracy movement. We need someone, some skinny, tired, brave soul, some old man on his way home from Safeway some afternoon willing to sit in Tee-en-a-man Square and say enough is enough.
One person could do something.
For lack of one courageous man on the Warren Commission generations have lived entire lives in a fantasy world of Ferris Wheels and mirrors.
Kennedy was going to bring us out of Vietnam.
Eisenhower before him had warned of the influence of the military-industrial complex, those people who make money from weaponry. And then those forces took Kennedy out as he was making some sort of peace with the Soviet Union as well.
And so tens of thousands of young Americans were slaughtered in Vietnam; thousands of American families with a forever thorn in their side.
And Nixon and Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush were able to continue to make money from war, from death, from a slug of metal formed in a young Iowan’s hands in some small town bullet factory heating the cool morning air making its way into the bone and viscera and brain matter and memories of a young man on “the other side.” …
… Lyndon Johnson did it, didn’t he.
He wanted to be president so bad he could taste it. And then he saw he was shut out of the Kennedy administration and before him he saw four more years of John, and eight each of Robert and Ted. He had to shit now or forever hold it.”
The priest smiled with his slightly buck teeth and wavy hair that made him look for a moment like Bobby Kennedy.
We all know that, but nobody has ever actually uttered those words in America. Not the librarian in Mount Liberty or the produce manager at Super Mart or the superintendent of the Mount Liberty public schools.
Responsible people … we assume.
He squeezed the wood, smiled and looked up at the ceiling fans twirling as he recalled the news that had shattered the quiet so many years ago.
And so I bring up Kennedy, he said matter-of-factly, as a shoe salesman saying that brown was the going color this year.
Well, no, he was not Christ and he was not resurrected. And he certainly was not a saint. He was a sinner, through and through, just like me and just like you.
He was a Catholic, yes. But no big deal. Again, anybody can become a Catholic.
I bring it up because it is what is on my mind.
Many of you do not remember John Kennedy, many of us remember nothing but.
Where do these thoughts of John Kennedy, his brother Robert and Martin Luther King Jr. come from? All mortal men. But in my mind heroes, just as Jesus is a hero of mine.
And to be a hero of mine you have to do one thing.
Ralph put up his crooked right pointer finger, the finger that had been stomped on.
He held it over his head and out toward the congregation.
You have to go and get yourself killed.
He held the finger in the air until it became the focus of the room. Couples with their arms interlocked on the pew behind the heads of their children stared at the finger.
Ralph meant to be pointing straight up, toward the ceiling in exclamation, when actually his broken finger was more of a comma.
You can’t score six touchdowns on one night and be my hero.
Ralph spoke loudly, pausing, turning this way and that, using all of his homiletics textbook skills.
You cannot have twenty-inch biceps and thirty-inch waist and be my hero.
He stopped and estimated three seconds, impatient to keep going.
You cannot go to work each day and pay your bills and keep your kids in college and your wife happy and play errorless third base for the church softball team and be my hero.
He put his hand down as parenthesis.
I see these guys who drive their little cars into the lot at the elevator every morning and leave every night. They do this without fail for ten years, twenty years, thirty years. Maybe forty years!
They drive in each morning at the same time, they leave at the same time. Same route, look the same way before turning, park the car in the same spot at work, same place at home.
Now, to some people that image is one of supreme heroism, the loyalty, the work ethic, the steady nature of the man going to work each day, earning his daily bread for his family, that they may prosper and live and grow and also maintain their routines.
I am weird. I see it as cowardice. I really do, and I know some of you are going to have trouble with that. That’s okay. I see it as immoral, boorish, dull behavior. Because you see, during those years that man is going to work, maintaining a certain lifestyle, people around the world are dying, from poverty, from war, what have you.
And on some of those days that man is going to work and coming home while his country is at war, outright bombing people in other countries and they are dying. And yet. And yet he parks in the same spot, goes home at the same time.
That is nothing unusual. His parents, wife, children and friends expect nothing less. But is it the Christian response? Hardly.
The old priest paused, shoved the finger again into the air, and turned slowly to the right and then to the left.
He put his hand down and gripped the podium.
You have to go and get yourself killed.
So Christ, King and Kennedy … Wellstone …
They did not just die. They had to be killed.
If I can offer one thing to you this fine morning, my brothers and sisters, it is this.
He leaned forward and whispered into the microphone.
Make … the … sons of bitches kill you.
Now Ralph did not care if they liked him.
The bones of his jaws showed like ripples in the water portending a shark below.
He made direct eye contact with three people, as he had been taught, not long enough to confront, but enough to show he was not afraid.
Don’t seek to live so damned long that you finally have to be unplugged.
Make the bastards come get you — make their terrible plans, hunt you down and fill you full of holes, just as they did our Lord Jesus Christ.
And take the chance.
The chance taken by Jesus the skinny guy with no money, no family, no friends, no career — no papers or books published — with only this one full-court desperation shot at the big time, with one card to play that might mean he would ever amount to something. … Take the chance that God is God.
The old priest pushed his papers together, looked up like Walter Cronkite at the end of the newscast, and smiled.
“Now, let us pray.”
Mike Palecek has worked on newspapers in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota. He also produced Penn Magazine, and was a co-founder of Moon Rock Books, along with Jim Fetzer, as well as co-hosting, along with Chuck Gregory, The New American Dream Radio Show. He has written several novels. Now retired after working for twenty years with the disabled, Palecek also served five terms in jail and prison for protests against U.S. military policy, and was the Iowa Democratic Party 5th District candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2000 election, receiving 65,500 votes
(Banned from Canada)
Oh, Canada
(Palecek video presentations)
Freedom of the Press False Flags & Conspiracies Conference 2020
https://www.bitchute.com/video/PBDaf07tMm5K/
Freedom of the Press False Flags & Conspiracies Conference 2021
https://153news.net/watch_video.php?v=WGDSDUSWSM78
Radio interviews, KPFA, Pacifica Berkeley,
with Denny Smithson
https://mikepalecek.newdream.us/radio-interviews/
Archives for The New American Dream Radio Show
[This post is part of a schedule of notices of Mike Palecek books recently renewed to availability on Amazon.com]
