Colonel Crystal's Parallel Universe

by Hufferd, James;

  “Still not convinced? It could be, Jonah, that you just like paying the minimally-contributary, money-sucking offensive military economy lots and lots and lots of taxes? Is that it?”

  “Ho! No!”

  * * *

  “I ask you,” the Colonel continued, “other than what I just said, do you have any idea, Pastor Jules, just how it is that this country of ours, which we both do love, can be so super, amazingly productive economically, year after year, and yet most everybody you and I know – the vast majority of Americans, especially in the more bypassed and depressed areas of the country – are living almost totally hand-to-mouth, and more so every passing year, with most folks scheming and lying awake many nights trying to figure out just how they (we) are going to squeeze by and pay their routine bills without over-drafting? Let alone their taxes? How in God’s name could that possibly be, Jonah? Many bemoan this perplexing turn of affairs, revealed by surveys, and no one, it seems, ever dares to try to explain it, how such a sad and painful paradox could possibly happen. We all just continue wringing our hands in frustration, millions upon millions of us. You know that’s true! So, how could it be?”

  Jonah shook his head and sighed, seemingly baffled.

  “The answer is both simple and sad. A graphic you don’t see often enough is ‘Cost to U.S. taxpayers per life’ (or even ‘young life’) snuffed per economic demand’. And every life taken, just like every piece of propaganda systematically demonizing designated ‘enemies’, much of it outrageous lies, spun, made up or baseless, is repeated endlessly, again costing the taxpayers – us – serious money we shell out to cover the deceitful policy at tax time, and goes straight to the gamut of war industries and financiers. That’s why they’re so interested in keeping these wars and all that unanswered propaganda going! Did you know? They’re cold-hearted s.o.b.s! (Sorry!)

  “Tell me this, Jonah: How is it that there can there be gangs of trained killers – consisting whole-cloth of your and your neighbors’ kids, fortified by civilian mercenary and USG-hired battalions of proven-bloodthirsty al-Qaeda and ISIS thugs, also quietly supported, besmirching, demonizing your good name and mine in the minds of locals everywhere, fanned out across the surface of the earth – trained killing squads – big gangs – which is what our (your) military and special forces, and mercenary allies, mostly are now? Talk about gang violence! Although, again, not all enlistees, by any means, are frontline, or aerial, attack troops themselves. While much of military life is wait, wait, load, unload, drill, wait. And, if they’re not that themselves, their mission is to stand behind them. What kind of role models are such, those designated and trained to murder designated victims for us? Or for our kids? Is it any wonder we…? Well, is it?

  “Not to infer for a minute that others – our designated ‘enemies’ – are necessarily angels, either. But… I mean, what kind of diabolic insanity kills literally and crushes spiritually up to millions of innocents, or anybody, in country after country, and sends hundreds of thousands or millions more packing, homeless, destitute, naked, in terrorized families, on their own, ostensibly to try to oust one single, solitary old, or maybe not-so-old, top man from his job, popular in his country or not? “We’ve pulled that overturning of governments over there at least three times now, in this round. And many more in years past. And we don’t seem to be finished yet. Not neighborly of us at all, do ya think? We despise, condescend, don’t even stop to listen to the rank-and-file people, soldiers and civilians we wipe out, their hopes or dreams – ever! Certainly, it’s not the kind of charitable, loving outcome our supposedly world-changing, profound Judeo-Christian ethics we proudly boast sets us apart are supposed to lead us to embrace! Golden Rule?

  “In that connection, civilian drone casualties in the field alone, officially admitted to some extent, have far and away outnumbered U.S. mass shooting gun violence deaths. Technique protects our soldiers from consequences. Sort of an allegory for our assumptions for the whole, broad regional war policy in that respect, I think. But, why? Mass gangland-type killings for what good purpose? My point is, we’re sadly in need these days of a good, resounding ‘no!’ to the quest of the warmongers for ever more assurance of blood money – ‘no’ to financial and dark, mass-murderous psychic gain! And, all of it’s costing all of us, our regular-person economy the moon as well! Trillions of dollars, or the lost benefit of that we, the nation, now just have to stumble along without! And with what positive result to show? Libya destroyed! Iraq badly crippled! Syria bludgeoned! I ask you! Again, tell me, Jonah! Why?

  Now, tell me, how is all that, any of it, is doing anything – even one iota – ever to protect anyone in this country, to defend our freedom or our own country? Is it all, really, done ‘for the common defense?’ Pastor Jonah Jules, a man of righteousness, shook his head, looked down. He’d had enough, some time ago, and he didn’t know how to answer.

  “I’ll tell you something,” the Colonel said, still wanting to get what was on his chest all out. “Despite all the glorification and threats, propagandizing, trying to hide the worst of it, most people in this country are just sick to death of it all long since and try to block it out. Am I right? Am I? Or is it important enough to not look away for once, to continue discussing? Think! Nobody threatens or attacks us but that we have threatened, assaulted them. I think I’m safe in saying that. Yet, ‘incidents’, threats, cobbled justifications for more and more war, keep coming at us, and the public is suspicious, deep down, very suspicious. Even serious dissenters are scorned and ignored, worst case, systematically or anonymously taken out. But we all need to become dissenters to some extent. Or some little country we bullied, with capable enough hackers, will obliterate our grid.” Pastor Jonah had fallen silent and was sucking in his breath. He looked like a man with possibly a lot to think about. But then, a new wave of revulsion and doubt seemed to come over him “But, Colonel, why are you doing all this now? I thought the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had wound down, that our troops had, mostly or all, been pulled out of there.”

  “I did, too,” Colonel Crystal answered.

  “And in Syria, it’s mostly aerial for us, isn’t it? And clandestine encampments. And haven’t nations and groups, rebels and such, closer by, agreed to take up the slack there now. Are we going to stick around there? Or did I get that wrong?”

  “All of that’s largely true,” Colonel Crystal nodded, “and I don’t know. We’re still not letting it end, I’ll lay you odds. The plan is that we never will. They (we) will come up with more, blow things up again. The so-called ‘neocon’ warmongers will never stop beating the drums for bigger, permanent, sustained, and perpetually guaranteed military engagements. Most of them probably want to go to war with Russia! And, as much to the point, the U.S. can’t credibly condemn another country for being a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’ when it is quietly and mostly clandestinely a major one itself, can it? Do you think, Pastor?

  “They, the perpetual warmongers, simply somehow think the novel, now permanent-war-based extra sector of our economy is necessary to maintain and must be sustained, healthy and growing, to keep our whole economic engine fueled and viable – even while the soaring national debt needed to sustain it always far, far and away outpaces our economic growth rate. The culture of war and more and more war we’ve nurtured, especially since 9/11/’01 is a colossal failure in this vital respect, too.

  “And so, the question becomes, how can we possibly deep-six such a dreadful idea as aggressive, perpetual offensive war fast enough to right ourselves?

  “Fact is, a dramatic partial switch of investment back to positive goods, services, infrastructure, market utilization here at home, applying our resources to better serve our real needs, maybe led by endeavors on the horizon like mining asteroids or some such, in the near future, without more worse than wasting resources on killing and destruction a la carte, is the one way to reverse our fortunes.”

  More words – blah blah blah, blah…

  The Colonel sig
hed. “But, are we, the massive, overwhelming majority, morally free and brave enough to compel a shift in primary purpose of our military – to comport with the Constitution?

  The ex-Colonel paused, then continued still: “The fact is, millions of potentially vibrant lives, homes, and budgets – America’s real viability and vitality over the long-run – are at stake. We did it once, t to end the War in Vietnam! “Let me say one more thing. I’m convinced that, even if perhaps a dozen or a score of American lives are saved that would otherwise be lost, by our trillions-of-dollars of violent and massively terrorizing, deadly and deadening, unasked-for worldwide infestation of American power – which I seriously doubt, by the way, the hundreds of thousands eventually having become untold millions of human lives lost or wrecked past salvaging in the process, make all that manifestly, and spectacularly, not worth it. Unless you’re a psychopath. “I have a question,” Jonah cut in. “With defense only as the policy, how would you prevent a government agency or agencies from quietly planning and launching a covert so-called ‘false-flag op’ to create false provocations to start what would be made to look like a defensive war?”

  “That’s a very good question,” the Colonel answered. “Here’s how: You make an iron-clad law, that if any agency, division or sub-agency is caught planning or doing that, all funding will be pulled, its functions distributed. If done by NGOs or allies, prosecute and punish mercilessly. To do so could save millions of lives, Americans included – if that matters to we the people’s elected representatives. We simply need to quit being offensive!” He paused for a moment to reflect. “Of course, if we ever are actually attacked militarily, then’s the time to seize the offensive – in our own clear national defense, not just due to some irritation, paranoia, economic motive, or control freak syndrome.” “So, what’s your answer those who claim you’re anti-American or anti-military?

  “Ha! Hardly! I’m just pointing out we need to return to the original intent, the Constitutional mandate – for a hundred major valid and credible reasons – and not continue to flagrantly abuse it into a misshapen bogus purpose at the bequest of a few.

  He paused again one last time to catch his breath. “So, what do you think. Jonah? Am I crazy or what?” Jonah smiled, clearly reached, but still doubtful, feeling as if run over, blitzed by a sort of dystopic dyslexia machine. He was trying to process the flagrantly far-more-than-earful he’d heard, as any normal, patriotic American with family responsibilities, a taxpayer would. “O.K,” he sighed. “Let’s just get this trash out of here.” He spoke softly, but with finality

  XLII

  Drifting In and Out

  Out of nowhere, as always, ex-Colonel Alva Crystal had begun dreaming again of the bitterly disputed outcome of some unknown presidential election, presumably in the near future, with the drivers of Republican and Democratic moving vans wrestling on the ground in tuxedos outside the inner gate into the White House delivery depot. First one was on top, then the other, furiously flailing away, with each trying to break free from the other’s grasp to command the right-of-way toward delivery access, as the chief Executive Branch valet and head butler each hooted his preferred man on and kibitzed like crazy from the wide-open delivery entrance.

  This scene faded, replaced quickly by increasingly horrendous others, of U.S. Marine snipers ooching on their bellies through the outskirts of the devastated, smoking man-made chaos and crumbling ruins of Fallujah, and proceeding forthwith door-to-door, gutting and being gutted, flying pieces and parts of human torsos and limbs blasting heavenward, raining blood and bile, extended families eviscerated, heart-rending screams, all within a single second in a sea of jangled and tangled bursts of rat-a-tat-tat and rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat .50 caliber machine-gun fire followed by enormous explosions, high-pitched screaming rockets, ascending and spreading pillars like flying toothpicks, amid an all-engulfing pall of smoke. “Routine stuff,” he muttered ironically and rolled over.

  Early in the morning, Colonel Alva’s neighbor, Peleg Johnson, came to the door to report that the pastor, Jonah-what’s-his-name, said he’d talked with Alva and, on reflection, found him more than a little bit unhinged, and that Eddie Robinson, the sheriff of Taylor County, had called the town constable and told him to keep an eye on Crystal and report any suspicious activity: “You know, comings and goings, things of that nature, odd or belligerent behavior, anything like that. I hope you don’t get in deeper than you can dig yourself out of,” Peleg Johnson warned. “He told me, the pastor, Jonah whatever his name is, that you sold him the strangest bill of goods he’d ever heard in his life and that he was afraid for his family to contradict you.”

  “Are you sure that’s what he said?” Colonel Crystal asked, pensively resting his chin on his hand, eyes reflecting deep worry and sleeplessness.

  “I swear.”

  The Colonel jumped immediately on the phone and rang up the editorial board of the Tallahassee News. He asked to be interviewed to defend himself from what he considered a ham-handed hit piece by Major Darby Dillow that was causing the attacks on him.

  Bill Stargell, the editorial director, told him that his words in his live appearance and on the radio had spoken quite enough for themselves, and they – the board – had no interest in prolonging the controversy, judging that the readers of the paper were unusually pro-military and their sentiment was judged not to be tampered with, lest the paper lose advertising and readership. And that had to be the final word.

  Now what? Alone – Colonel Crystal began to realize for the first time since his awkward early childhood what being lonely, without a single ally, could mean.

  Montmoracy seemed indeed to have all but abandoned the project, undertaken in such high hopes together. On their joint radio appearances as well, he was there, but not really, never emphasizing the central point. The powers, Colonel Alva was beginning to rediscover, had the whole pattern of “individual” thought, at least in the western “free” world, locked down, repelling and freezing out deviant or dissenting impressions and effectively silencing thoughts based on undiluted perception or reasoning instead of spun myths or their narrative. “Psychic imperialism” was not too strong a term.

  And so, he faced the realization that people might not be capable of properly hearing or processing what he knew to be true.

  Yet, another strong argument conveniently occurred to him, pertaining precisely to present events – which was that, even if this or any future North Korea should find itself unable to sufficiently coordinate a long-range delivery system with an effective nuclear payload required to gouge a huge, bloody, smoking hole somewhere in the middle of the United States of America, some pipsqueak country or aggrieved insurgency, not long in the future, surely will succeed at doing just that. If we keep making people angry at us, such will become unavoidable. And, again, we may never even know who it was.

  XLIII

  Dreams, Myths, and Honchos

  Next day in the pre-dawn saw the house quietly pelted and defaced again, with more trash scattered across the yard. After a perfunctory cleanup, he escaped in his boat to what he called his “sunny isle," fourteen acres and miraculously undisturbed, a few hundred yards out from a mangrove shore in a little cove of the Gulf several miles down – and, inexplicably, mosquito-free.

  Once there, he sat alone on the luxuriant grass and sand amid palmetto, cypress, and babassu palms, friendly waves lapping a tiny beach of pebbles three yards away.

  He snoozed and immediately found himself in the cabin of an F-15 on a live training exercise somewhere over Afghanistan. Again, the plane hovered high enough to be invisible from the ground., and he insisted to the slightly jittery bomber trainee, following script, that whatever happened far, far below at the target was not their problem. They’d never know the results, if any, down there; no need to think about it ever again.

  Afterward, his throat tightened up and heavy waves of remorse rolled over him, and he could tell the active trainee was bravely holding back tears. Bo
th wretched a bit into the barf bag.

  Half-awake already, he came to, sweating, guts in a knot, and started, for what must have been the fiftieth time, a mental list he never once had finished, of just how he would classify the top-flight recruits he’d known in the two horrific war zones he was acquainted with.

  Waves lapping and the tide rising, a storm on the horizon far out, he started, as always, with the callow innocents of all races and most classes, up from impoverished, only rarely affluent high schools, somewhat less than half-hardened men. Some were little boys, totally unsuited, and the unit carried them. Very few would ever fully recover from the shock of indoctrination and being lurched out of a status, usually, of polite, or very polite well-meaning, being pitched neck-first, regardless, into primordial savagery. Though, sometimes, life was so dull. A soldier one of these rough changelings might somehow or other make, a whole human being only rarely afterward. These were inevitably and irretrievably morally blighted by war, striving vainly throughout a seer lifetime to come back alive.

  Then, there were the more hardcore, already budding sociopaths – of these, there were, he thought, mercifully, far fewer – to whom flourishing in a world filled with shock-killing seemed to come naturally as a welcome release. War, worse (better) than imagined, was a true calling.

  Unleashed by circumstance to be all that they could be, in terms of brutal sadism, sanctioned killing in war seemed to them a godsend. And the war scene, only heightened by degrees from their experiences on the street, these had comparatively little in the way of shock to recover from. And, once back home, they continued to shatter more lives and, in most cases, got away with murder.

  And then the hyped, supposed super-adrenaline high-school athlete types, just a bit like himself, always daring to hurl themselves headlong to the front, kidding themselves about lacking the fear and regret hidden somewhere within, mouthing “aw shucks” and “yes, Sir! I will, Sir!” without hesitation. The hardest to deploy, because they don’t really harden up, and you don’t know what they’re made of or have hidden away, who or what they really are.