I Wander In a Land of Dry Stones

I Wander In a Land of Dry Stones
By John Brand, D.Min., J.D.
YellowTimes.org Columnist (United States)

For days I have hammered on the anvil of my mind seeking words to express the malevolence of our days. Freedom's sun on the horizon is darkened by evil. Amorality blackens bright stars of justice erasing the glowing constellation of Constitutional governance. But no hammer blows sharpen the blade of the sword I seek to fashion.

Then through eyes dimmed by my failure, I saw my Excalibur. A wizard fashioned this exquisite sword. Like King Arthur of old, I approach the boulder of granite holding fast the creation of another. I tug at the sword deeply embedded in the memory of my mind. From the red-hot furnace come the words of T.S. Eliot expressing far more superbly than I ever could the concerns which I seek to articulate.

Thomas Becket, as told in Eliot's "Murder in the Cathedral," has just been brutally hacked to death by knights beset with unspeakable hatred. The townspeople, aware of that dastardly deed, cry out,

"Clear the air! Clean the sky! Wash the wind! Take stone from stone and wash them. The land is foul; the water is foul; our beasts and ourselves defiled with blood. A rain of blood has blinded my eyes. Where is England? Where is Kent? Where is Canterbury?

O far far far far in the past; and I wander in a land of barren boughs: if I break them, they bleed; I wander in a land of dry stones: if I touch them they bleed."

I do not wish to be misunderstood. I am no bleeding heart. My character has been fashioned by the persecution of family and self at Hitler's brutal hands. My idea and ideals crystallized in the fierceness of combat as a rifleman. I have been formed by the terror of the night and the arrow that flies by day. I am no novice to the evil lurking in the hearts of men.

Saddam is an incarnation of iniquity. No litany of the horrors credited to him can ever exhaust the foulness of his deeds. In a fit of maniacal desires, he invaded Kuwait. With singular determination of righteous anger, our forces decimated his troops. For all practical purposes, he has been under house arrest ever since Desert Storm. He is being watched night and day. His slightest misstep is punished by America's eagles patrolling his land and his skies. Should he but lift his little finger in an aggressive mood, an armada of decimating weapons stands ever ready to tear the living heart from his disreputable soul.

But by what twist of perversion has 9/11 been attributed to Saddam? Not a single perpetrator of this day of infamy was an Iraqi. Our intelligence apparatus held bin Laden responsible for this deed. By what distortion of mind was our anger roused against Saddam? To execute a preemptive strike against a force of evil? North Korea has far more capabilities to spew a rain of death upon the planet. Both Pakistan and India have capabilities to bring a nuclear winter to Earth. Israel, Great Britain, and America can wipe out every man, woman, and child on the Blue Planet a hundred times over. Whose index finger poised atop Mars' red button can we trust in a world so drenched with unspeakable horrors and revulsions?

Can we rely on our present leaders to bring democracy to the far corners of the world? Congress passed the Patriot Act. It is legislation granting dictatorial powers to the Executive Branch of the United States. It is reminiscent of powers granted to Hitler by his Reichstag. All civil liberties are suspended when the Attorney General, in his sole opinion, designates someone as a terrorist. No proof is needed. The accused does not have right to counsel or judicial review. The Attorney General can incarcerate the suspect for up to six months without notifying anyone of his action. If after six months, the Attorney General continues to suspect the accused individual, he or she may be incarcerated in six month increments until the person dies. No one has to be notified of the Attorney General's decision.

"I wander in a land of barren boughs: if I break them, they bleed."

The national media has paid scant attention to this Act. Most citizens when asked about the Patriot Act only shrug their shoulders and have no idea what it is all about.

"I wander in a land of dry stones: if I touch them they bleed."

My mind races feverishly. I do not want to accept the image seeking to push itself into my consciousness. Not in bright Technicolor but in the subtle shadings of white, grays, and black I see a deep trench filled with unnumbered corpses. They seem to be no more human than cattle slain in a preemptive effort to stop Mad Cow disease from spreading. At the top of this mass grave, men and women watch the proceedings. They are Germans, creatures of Hitler's propaganda machine, out for an afternoon of "entertainment." Their minds have been brainwashed to believe that these dead are not truly human beings. One onlooker, a woman, is even licking an ice cream cone. When alive, the dead were Jews, political dissidents, mentally retarded, or communists. Although they had eyes, hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, and passions like ours, they were not recognized as members of the body human.

If you prick an Iraqi child, does it not bleed? If you tickle an Iraqi, does she not laugh? If you poison an Iraqi, does he not die? If you wrong an Iraqi, shall he not revenge? (After the Bard, "The Merchant of Venice.")

Within the heart of every human lurks the potential for gross evil. Latent deeds of murder, rape, and torture are still embedded in the human brain. Expressions of falsehood and deceit color our everyday. We all must admit the presence of the dormancy of our brutal behavior.

In the name of Jesus Christ, Inquisitors stretched accused heretics over the rack. In the name of the self-same Prince of Peace, the limbs of those whose sole crime it was to voice an opinion diverging from the official party line were fettered to four horses. These were then whipped to gallop off into different directions, pulling apart the body of the accused. Hordes of other members of our species cheered at this spectacle of blood. It witnessed more to their own brutality than to the guilt of the accused.

What Armageddon-like horror will the Mother of All Bombs inflict on innocents as we stand by and loudly cheer while licking an ice cream cone?

How do we differ from the Prophet Samuel, who in God's name hewed Agag to pieces before the Lord? How do we differ from Phinehas, who in God's name pierced the belly of an Israelite and a Moabite woman? Just because some chronicler 3000 years ago attached God's supposedly righteous anger to these deeds, does not make it so. It did not make it so in the long ago and it does not make it so today. Humans commit acts in the name of God they would never admit to doing in their own names. God serves as a convenient excuse for us to engage in the most brutal and inhumane deeds.

Yet another long forgotten image forces itself into my thoughts. In a German concentration camp, inmates -- former professional musicians -- were assembled into an orchestra. They were forced to play classical music while the murderers went about their business herding masses into the gas chambers. What perversion of our minds seeks to embellish our killing and destruction with the veneer of culture?

Our President is hell-bent on seeking the international stamp of approval on the senseless killings we are about to commit. He wants to assure himself that his command to slaughter has the cultural approval of civilized nations. He wants to hear Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" as he commands his minions to commence the slaughter.

Don't get me wrong, for heaven's sake. Should Saddam's troops invade a neighboring country or should we have hard evidence that he is marshalling his forces to attack, let the full wrath of our might be unloaded on him. However, a "preemptive" strike is just an excuse to express our hatred, our unresolved profound psychological problems, and our unwillingness to see the duplicity of our actions.

One would be rather simple not to assume that Saddam has heinous weapons of destructions hidden away. But other nations, too, have stored up arsenals of death within their borders. Were we to strike down peremptorily all of them, only cockroaches might survive that holocaust.

No one less a staunch Republican than Ron Paul of Texas told the Washington Times that no member of Congress was allowed to read the first Patriot Act that was passed in the heat of 9/11 on October 27, 2001. Neither is the proposed Second Patriot Act subject to public scrutiny.

Alex Jones, Feb. 10, 2003 on www.infowars.com makes this statement: "The second Patriot Act is a mirror image of powers that Julius Caesar and Adolf Hitler gave themselves. Whereas the First Patriot Act only gutted the First, Third, Fourth and Fifth Amendments, and seriously damaged the Seventh and the Tenth, the Second Patriot Act reorganizes the entire Federal Government as well as many areas of state government under the dictatorial control of the Justice Department, the Office of Homeland Security and the FEMA NORTHCVONM military command. The Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, also known as the Second Patriot Act, is by its very structure the definition of dictatorship."

"Every horror had its definition, every sorrow a kind of an end: In life there is not time to grieve long. But this, this is out of life, this is out of time, an instant eternity of evil and wrong. ? Clear the air! Clean the sky! Wash the wind! Take stone from stone, take the skin from the arm, take the muscle from the bone, and wash them. Wash the stone, wash the bone, wash the brain, wash the soul wash them, wash them!" (T.S. Eliot.)

[John Brand is a Purple Heart, Combat Infantry veteran of World War II. He received his Juris Doctor degree at Northwestern University and a Master of Theology and a Doctor of Ministry at Southern Methodist University. He served as a Methodist minister for 19 years, was Vice President, Birkman & Associates, Industrial Psychologists, and concluded his career as Director, Organizational and Human Resources, Warren-King Enterprises, an independent oil and gas company. He is the author of "Shaking the Foundations."]

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