Smoke and Mirrors

When one accepts consciousness, one of the first skills s/he learns is to read into the rhetoric that is amerika's cultural legacy, better known as 'double talk,' or 'telling little white lies.' This cultural heritage is grounded in fairy-tales such as 'amerika is founded on principles of democracy and freedom for all,' 'Thanksgiving' and 'amerikan moral conscience.'

Mythomania pervades every institution of amerikanism from the hypocritical constitution, which includes the laudable words, 'all men are created equal' yet was written at a time when Afrikans were legally and socially considered three-fifths a man, property worth no more than the two hogshead of rum its first president George Washington sold his slaves for.

To its cock and bull political system, which murders hundreds of thousands of innocent poor people worldwide, under the guise of 'delivering democracy' and 'making the world save from WMDs.' Double talk never delivers the promised democracy or safety, but manages to keep the corporate benefactors rich, and the politicians' constituency too busy ducking bullets and falling buildings to turn their guns on them.

These are illusionist times of smoke and mirrors, where the meaning of words disappear like nickels dropped into a magicians' top hat, and reappear from behind the ear of some totally unconvinced spectator who's all too happy to participate in the show and have his/her ego stroked.

Therefore, it comes as no shock that the words 'peace' in the official title for California prison guards (i.e. peace officers) or the recently re-adopted 'rehabilitation' are nothing more than nickels in the hands of the state's greatest illusionists, California Correctional Peace Officers' Association (CCPOA - california's largest and most powerful union).

The facts are

1. The prisoncrats who reap the rewards from the corrections business want peace and rehabilitation like poor people in Louisiana want another hurricane!

2. Amerikan prisons are testing ground for the most egregious and wanton disregard for a person's humanity, where the highest paid and supposedly best trained paramilitary/peace officers in the world [only outdone by the UN's murderous blue helmet peace keeping forces] learn the tricks of the trade.

Every day, captives are forced to endure a sadistic officer's attempts to provoke a violent confrontation. These acts run the gambit, from instigating captive on captive combat, ignorance and cultural insensitivity on their part, to the outright criminally racist and purposeful exploitation of their positions and the power it gives them.

Case in point: i was attempting to attend the law library recently, and undergoing a degrading strip search. Naked, i hold out my hands, palms up, palms down. "Okay," says the guard. Open my mouth, stick out my tongue. "Okay," says the guard. Run my fingers through my hair. "Okay," says the guard. Lift my scrotum, run my hand under. "Okay," says the guard. I turn around. Lift my left foot. "Okay." Right foot. "Okay." Squat, cough and turn back around to retrieve my clothes when he snidely says, "bend over again, touch your toes and point that thang at me!"

How do you respond to such vulgar and disrespectful statements? Think about your vulnerability. You're naked in front of two guards, another lurks above you with a loaded mini-14 assault rifle.

Is it a setup? Are they trying to provoke a response? What do you do? What do you say?

Personally, i refused and was denied my law library privilege and given a disciplinary report, in which said officer failed to mention what he had said to me. So, i followed up with a staff complaint against the officer, which was dismissed by the appeals coordinator, claiming i abused the grievance system and that what the officer said was perfectly respectful and justified. Next, i sent the complaint to the Ombudsman, who responded by basically saying i violated the rules by not following the officers orders to "point that thang at him" and should get over it! i can't help but wonder what she'd have to say if one of her supervisors told her "bend over and point that thang at me!" Sexual harassment perhaps!

So, in trying to figure out why the prisoncrats who regulate the interaction between guard and captive would habitually ostrich-up when they are informed of such potentially volatile actions, I was driven to my Oxford Amerikan dictionary/thesaurus to look up the word 'rehabilitate.' It says
1. restore to effectiveness or normal life by training.
2. restore to former privileges or reputation or a proper condition.

However, the answer didn't fully come to me until i read a proposal given to the administrators here, by some of the elder captives who they've erroneously and vindictively labelled prison gang leaders.

This proposal would have ended the racist violence that plagues california's prisons/jails and has now spread out into the 'free' community with the murder of 14 year old Cheryl Green on December 15th, 2006.

The reality is they don't intend to, nor do they want to stop the violence, much less create or keep any kind of peace in california prisons or poor communities. Why? Because, failing schools, drug addiction, petty criminality, joblessness, homelessness, untreated mental illness etc etc. habilitate people to be violent and/or nonviolent products that lead to the astronomical profits the prison industrial complex makes.

You know the saying, "don't bite the hand that feeds you!" Well the corrections business is feeding a whole lot of people and their children, which reminds me of something a mentor told me before he was moved: "you can't fix this system, because it's not broken! It's working just as it's intended to!"

Double talk, little white lies, myth and all!

push up. push out. push back.
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