Bra'-ver-y (?), n. [Cf. F. braverie.] Noun: The quality of mind enabling one to face danger or hardship resolutely. spirit, heart, resolution, nerve, courage, fortitude, gallantry, mettle, pluck, valor, courageousness, dauntlessness, fearlessness, intrepidity.

One New Years Eve, Frank Rizzo was Mayor, and I was being attacked by Philadelphia Police. This was not a coincidence. Suddenly, one officer moved away to check an alarm, the other turned to look, after headslamming me into a carHood. I used this moment of lax to plant my foot, and hit him so fucking hard that it knocked out his back left molar. For this act of reckless bravery, I received a beating and legal problems too lengthy for reasonable discussion leaving no sensible or recognizable principle in the end.

My trampish Edgetown conventions, 'harder living through chemistry', reckless demeanor, and life-long preference for big-bore bikes over the automobile offered copious opportunities to show guts, or run the tightwire from Death to Luck, feeling footsteps in the tips of my hairs.

But for me, and all the brothers and sisters I've broken time for, my acts of courage define bravery that is virtually interchangable with the spirit and fiber of the term Stoopidity.

Interchangable

After ruminating on this for awhile, I concluded that acts of courage which are unnecessary, or brave deeds which change nothing in the big picture, bigger than your ego that is, define bravery that is interchangable with stoopidity.

Last week, at St Thomas Univ. , these recordings of Allan Nairn were made by Otis Maclay and Wally James.... I got to meet the guy who had already impressed me as the bravest guy I had never met. The ultimate irony was that he was an American journalist.....'

I've known for a long time that, with a few remarkable exceptions, contemporary American journalism is the global refuge of our useless, unskilled, smarmy gutless bags of self-righteous cowardice . The skum risen to the top of the diaper pail oozing the worst yellow lying bootlickers ever to slide from the American Birth Canal and ride their own infectious afterbirth to the head of a Sales Dept.

In contrast to the BBC or Canadian News Service, US journalism is completely dismissed by the rest of the world as utter hogwash and the standard bearer of the Goebbel Village Network created somewhere in the European '30's.

I can't imagine resisting the impulse to bitchSlap any recognizable American newsWhore I might encounter on the stinking tile floor of a Trailways Men's room, or picking their scabby lips in line at the VD clinic.

I may have NO RIGHT to bitchSlap a congenital buttKisser, but that detail is supersceded by my DUTY to slap the shit out of them for their disgusting slide out through the bottom of the human species..... and why?

Because they haven't had the GUTS to be human.

One might even go so far..
as suspect.....
perhaps....
a lack of the professional integrity we assumed
...... before we started checking the facts elsewhere......

I've been onto 'em for years, they're worse than traitors.

It follows that lacking the guts to break the human baseline, this mutant scab-species could never know Righteous fear or ride the swooning rush that follows only from DANGER passing close by Death. These punks could never know what it's like to be Really Stoopid.....

This summer, the UN oversaw a referendum in E.Timor which overwhelming voted for self-rule after a world-record 98% voter turnout...... the Timorese thinking perhaps: "They can't kill us all" This triggered a premeditated rampage by the occupying Indonesian forces which threatened to do just that. So fierce was the murder and destruction, the UN, Red Cross, all diplomatic persons, and every reporter from every outlet in every Nation fled the country. They left only a handful of straggled workers who failed to escape or chanced to remain behind razor wire at the mercy of armed death squads and forces who would, for the second time, murder or disappear over 30% of the population of East Timor.

Reporting Live from Death, via cell-phone..... Allan Nairn.... hunkered down in the few remaining structures left in the Capitol.

Not because he's stoopid.

This sort of presence is necessary to prevent the denial of these events by the US Mass Media, whose owners supply the military and death squads their arms and instruments of mass murder. Intelligence and hit lists provided by US agencies. Allan's continuous avoidance of capture, and daily reports broadcast by Amy Goodman's Democracy Now, ARE the record of the Indonesian Army displaying the cost of freedom to the surrounding populations.. In the face of these reports, the truth cannot be denied or even left unreported. No debriefings, coverStories or need to dismiss the WILD claims of the 'flaky left-liberal press.'

This sort of reporting often ends in capture, and soon Allan was reporting from the interrogation facility, and then he was silent. When reporter Amy Goodman confirmed the intentions of the Indonesians to imprison Allan, there was a nationwide uproar from every region within earshot of a Pacifica Radio. The phones in Washington rang.

And then he was home.

Even the conclusion of his journey revealed the truth of Nairn's analysis. He's alive because he's a US citizen..... and perhaps the US was not calling shots in this mass slaughter of civilians, but they could have, and they could have Just Say No™, the way they Just Say No™ to Allan's capture. The Pentagon, or Clinton , or who ever the hell is running things, could have made the call early, and saved hundred thousands. Children, nuns, priests, women machined gunned, hacked up, or buried alive.

Maybe WE should have called early, the way we rang the phones when Allan was grabbed..

Maybe we should be calling now to prevent the next E.Timor, El Salvador, Guatemala... ask Alan....you can catch him between slaughterhouse and killing field, not because he's reckless or stoopid or out for glory...

he's there because he has to be.....
someone has to follow our tax dollar down the gun barrels...
               out the muzzles

to see where they land.

and nobody else seems to have the guts...

You would want this if the bullets were tearing into YOUR kid's chest. And Allan always assures us, that if the people of the US knew what they were financing, they would demand an end to it, and it would stop.

He would NEVER endorse the devisive and disparaging rhetoric that drivels from this page.

He thinks you give a fuck, and he's betting his life on it.

I'm not so sure about you...

but you should listen to him and hear what someone with real guts sounds like... and honor REAL Courage and Integrity. The stuff Americans pretend to inherit in their droaning bullshit brags about Liberty and Justice for all.

Hear him now. We aren't going to be here forever, and forever may be alot shorter for some of us.

-scooter


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