"An Ethics Syllabus," in The New York Times, October 14, 2007, New Jersey and the Region, at p. 21.
"Trenton: Corrections Department Criticized," in The New York Times, October 16, 2007, at p. B4.
Norman Mailer, "Introduction," In the Belly of the Beast (New York: Vintage, 1981), pp. ix-xvi.
Amnesty International, The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (New York: Seven Stories, 2000).
Spacing has been affected in this essay and new obstacles as well as "errors" inserted in the text are always anticipated. More harassing phone calls on October 15, 2007 at 11:32 A.M. from 520-124-6246. As of 9:24 P.M. I am unable to access MSN and have been prevented from posting at blogger for hours. I will keep trying. My book is still not being distributed to book sellers. On October 17, 2007 at 6:58 P.M. more annoying calls from 305-375-7280. Florida. CANF? For some reason, my print-out of this essay -- at page three -- is without a page number or an address at the bottom of the page. I wonder why? I am blocking:
http://m1.2mdn.net/viewad/1B2188119-default_1x1.gif (illegal tracking?)
http://ad.N2434.doubleclick,net/a/N2434.msn/B2...
On October 18, 2007 at 9:25 A.M. I was unable to print items from my MSN group. I received only a blank page bearing this address:
http://view.atdmt.com/iview/msnnkhac001728x90xWBCBRB00110msn/direct;wi.728;hi.90/01
On October 21, 2007 at 10:30 A.M. I am unable to print items receiving only a blank page with this address at the top left corner: ngc_728_ihm_initial_SA and at the bottom of the page is this address:
http://view.atdmt.com/MSI/iview/scntcngc0210000048msi/direct/01?click= (National Security Agency? NGC?)
October 23, 2007 at 11:34 A.M. 301-392-8254. I am blocking:
http://view.atdmt.com/iview/msnnkhac001728x90... (Spacing problems continue.)
Access to my MSN account is still being blocked by hackers mysteriously using N.J. government computers. I have decided to spend some time this morning not posting a revised version of my essay on "America's Holocaust," since that is impossible at this time, but discussing once again the sad and ugly spectacle of corruption, malice, racism and hypocrisy among New Jersey's judges and police officials. (Numerous "errors" have been inserted in this text, even in draft form, so I will correct them. I fully anticipate that I will need to do so again in the future.)
"... I was being driven back from a literary event in New York to my home in Princeton," Joyce Carol Oates writes, "by a black driver for a well-known limousine service. At about 11 p.m., somewhere on the turnpike between Newark and New Brunswick, New Jersey state troopers signaled for my driver to pull over. They subjected him to approximately 40 minutes of harsh and repetitive interrogation ('What's your name?' 'Where do you live?' 'Where are you headed?' and so on) for no evident reason."
The reason was skin color. In a similar way, numerous harassment efforts are directed at websites with my writings, from behind the scenes probably, any prospective publishers or opportunities that come my way will be destroyed (if New Jersey authorities, I believe, become aware of them), obstructions to writing efforts on-line, hundreds and even thousands of viruses, illegal spyware, other attacks against my system are routine. These efforts have persisted and will go on for much longer than forty minutes -- for years, in fact, as a kind of "ass covering efffort" to discourage continued criticisms of the Garden State's torture practices, together with denying, ignoring or stonewalling in response to effforts to obtain Tuchin's and Riccioli's secretly prepared and filed reports, along with the truth concerning my life. How many others are tortured and raped, in every sense, by New Jersey authorities we may never know. (See "Even in New Jersey There Comes a Time When Silence is Betrayal.")
"There were two white troopers who demanded to see the driver's and my identification" -- the troopers had no legal right to demand the passenger's identification -- "forced the driver to get out of the car and subjected him to questioning with increased belligerence."
Had Ms. Oates not been a passenger and witness, it is highly likely that her driver would have been struck or severely beaten, then charged with "resisting arrest" and accused of failing to use a turn signal or not wearing a seat belt, or the old stand-by: "warrants for parking tickets." These warrants can be generated any time by friends at headquarters, then shrugged off as a good faith mistake. In the same way, police in some New Jersey cities have illegal guns handy to plant on African-Americans murdered "by mistake" in order to make things look good -- allegedly. I would not be surprised if something similar turns out to have happened in Mumia Abu-Jamal's case. No wonder they want to discourage me from writing. They are concerned about people reading these truths. They should be.
"I was not allowed to know what was going on, and when after about 10 minutes I made a tentative gesture to open the car door, the troopers yelled at me, 'Stay in the car lady!' They then walked the driver about 20 feet away from the limousine, to continue to interrogate or harass him out of earshot."
The troopers will say that persons are kept in their vehicle to protect officers from passengers who will fire at them. This is true, as far as it goes, but the real reason in most instances where troopers know that there is no real danger is to isolate and increase anxiety on their victims-"suspects" (who are inevitably African-Americans). Also, the goal was no doubt to create problems for the driver with his client and employer, since passengers tend not to enjoy being kept waiting for nearly an hour for no reason or being treated like a felon, also for no reason. (A new "error" that is not found in my printed version of this essay was just inserted in the text.) Curiously, torture and rape are even more distressing for victims, regardless of whether these things are said to be for the victim's "own good." (See "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "What is it like to be tortured?")
"I called my husband on my cellphone to explain that I was going to be late returning home, as it looked as if my driver was being 'arrested' for some reason."
For no reason other than race.
"(As the minutes passed, it occurred to me to dial 911 and report this incident, but, with my instinct for irony, I guessed that the police officers who would be notified about the incident would be these very New Jersey state troopers, which would have made them even more angry and belligerent.)"
What they want is homage. They want you to bow, humiliate yourself, grant their superiority and god-like status, then they'll let the average innocent person go. This is something that one might manage on a single occasion -- without being too proud of it -- but unless a man has lost all semblance of dignity and self-esteem, pride is not something that will be surrendered for long and much less for a lifetime.
The unpardonable sin which places some African-American men and women as well as "others" in U.S. prisons -- or even leads to the gas chamber in some cases -- is an unwillingness to accept slavery. To insist on one's human rights and dignity, over a period of years, despite hypnosis, psychological torture, and professional destruction may well constitute a capital offense for minority persons in New Jersey.
"Fortunately for both of us the driver was unfailingly courteous, soft-spoken and obedient. Perhaps he'd been pulled over by New Jersey state troopers before."
Very likely. Such a surrender of a man's dignity, over a period of years will reach the point at which he has no more pride to give, for he has been made into nothing, something sub-human. African-American women understand what has been done to their husbands, fathers, sons in ways that most white women do not. Hence, they have a different measure by which to judge conduct that is incomprehensible for those who cannot imagine such experiences over a lifetime.
They will be repeated -- these rituals of humiliation -- preferably with the assistance of sold out minority persons. There are minorities so broken on this wheel of power that they become its servants at the expense of their brothers and sisters. I have seen homeless men opening doors and performing in public, a kind of hideous caricature-dance of racist stereotypes into which they have been transfomed, like marionettes begging for coins, like the "things" that they have been made into. Some people will die before they accept such a role. Anything that breaks a human being's psyche in such a manner is evil. (More "errors" inserted and corrected.)
You are witnessing daily efforts to destroy these writings (and this writer) for saying unsayable things in America, also for refusing to accept or legitimate, crimes against humanity committed against him and others in New Jersey. I am running my scans. I will persist in the struggle to speak this truth to corrupt officials in New Jersey and the world. Is it possible for you to remain silent and indifferent to what you are seeing?
"There is a paradox at the core of penology," Norman Mailer writes, "and from it derives the thousand ills and afflictions of the prison system. It is that not only the worst of the young are sent to prison, but the best -- that is, the proudest, the bravest, the most daring, the most enterprising, and the most undefeated of the poor. There starts the horror. ... prison is equipped to grind down criminals who are cowards into social submission, but can only break the spirit of brave men [and women] who are criminals, or anneal them until they are harder than the steel that encloses them."
America's future may well depend on whether we understand what is being said in this next paragraph:
"If you can conceive of a society (it is very difficult these days) that is more concerned with the creative potential of violent young men [and women] than with the threat they pose to the suburbs, then a few solutions for future prisons may be there. ... [Young minority persons] are drawn to crime as a positive experience -- because it is more exciting, more meaningful, more mysterious, more transcendental, more religious than any other experience they have known."
This is not to glorify crime or violence -- certainly not violence against women -- such violence is something which has always been impossible for me. No one is saying that crime is a positive experience. Mailer argues that if society dehumanizes men and women -- reducing one group to sexual organs and the other to a capacity for violence -- then decides to break them in pieces for displaying the very qualities demanded of them for survival, then you can be sure that a few of these men and women will prefer death to the surrender of their humanity. America's power-structure and legal system is hardly in a position to caution others about violence. (See "Michel Foucault, Gillian Rose, Angela Davis and the Hermeneutics of Prison.")
That choice between human dignity and torture is only forced on some persons in a society that is afflicted with a serious disease -- a disease called "racism" and social injustice, a disease opposed to the spirit of the U.S. Constitution, a disease against which we must struggle at all times. The fascism witnessed (in a small way) by Ms. Oates has been experienced in not so small ways by many of us for years. This includes a person I love.
"If the police officers hoped to provoke him into 'resisting arrest' so that they could beat him, or worse," Ms. Oates writes, "they must have been disappointed."
They would have beaten him, regardless of whether this African-American driver "resisted arrest," except for the affluent white woman heading home to Princeton. None of this will be on the bar exam, boys and girls. Nonsense concerning "ethics standards" imposed on officials will always be irrelevant to what happens behind-the-scenes in New Jersey. It is also irrelevant to the reality of disappearing funds from the Garden State's prison budgets:
"For the second time in two years, an audit has found that the [New Jersey] State Corrections Department failed to adequately monitor its multimillion dollar contract for inmate dental services. [A lot of inmates received expensive dental care (allegedly), but it seems to have disappeared when the inmates are examined.] In a report released yesterday, Inspector General Mary Jane Cooper concluded that the department could not guarantee that inmates were getting services that were paid for or that the state was not overpaying the contractor, Correctional Medical Services. [Terry Tuchin in "white man's country"?] Spokesmen for the Corrections Department and Correctional Medical Services said they could not comment."
New York Times, October 16, 2007, at p. B4. (Who are New Jersey's thieves and crooks again?)
Much of New Jersey law and adjudication is a transparent lie that some of us refuse to live. Perhaps this is because we are not "gentlemen." Every time I see young African-American children playing in the park or on the streets, I am reminded that one in three of them will end up in prison. Another of the three will be killed. Maybe one out of three will be permitted to struggle through life. The enormity of this horror and loss for all of us -- surgeons, artists, philosophers, scientists thrown away -- brings tears to my eyes. I will not be silenced. This may be the tenth time that I have corrected the same "errors" inserted in this essay. (See "What is it like to be tortured?") Overnight, several new "errors" were inserted in the foregoing paragraph. I have now corrected them, once again. How is the spacing in this essay?
To say this, that I weep for African-American children, is to open myself to the criticism -- usually from the same fascists tormenting that driver and, sadly, also many Latino men -- that I am not "manly" enough. I believe that a willingness to embrace painful emotions is what it means to be adults, for both men and women, who nevertheless refuse to sacrifice all capacity for laughter, play and hope for the sake of their children, those same children who are now so threatened.
"After what seemed like a very long time, they allowed the driver to return to the car and resume the drive back to Princeton."
Guess what happened next?
"I asked him what had been wrong, and he said that they'd claimed he had 'outstanding warrants' of some kind, but they were letting him go so that he could drive me home. Next morning, when I called the limousine service. I was told that the driver did not have 'outstanding warrants' and that he hadn't violated any law that anyone knew of."
Something of that man's spirit was left on a dark stretch of road that night. In the words of Amnesty International, a false death warrant issued to Mumia Abu-Jamal and many others, "is playing politics with a man's life" -- does this ring a bell, Richard J. Codey? Senator Bob? -- "The unnecessary infliction of suffering upon a prisoner by a government official constitutes torture." The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000), p. 53.
Psychological torture is the daily experience of millions of African-American men and women, also of others in our throw-away culture. How do we live with this grotesque reality? Norman Mailer says:
"We do not live ... in a world that tries to solve its prison problems. Even to assume we do is utopian. The underlying horror may be that we all inhabit the swollen tissues of a body politic that is drenched in bad conscience, so bad indeed that the laugh of the hyena reverberates from every TV set, and is in danger of becoming our true national anthem. We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it. The mugger becomes the size of Golgotha and the middle class retires into walled cities [prisons?] with armed guards. Here, the prisons have wall-to-wall carpeting, and the guards address the inmates as 'Sir,' and bow. But they are prisons. The measure of the progressive imprisonment of all society is to be found at the base -- in the penitentiaries themselves. The bad conscience of society comes to focus in the burning lens of the penitentiary."
Think of Foucault and Davis as you read this paragraph:
"That is why we do not speak of improving the prisons -- which is to say, taking them through some mighty transmogrifications -- but only of fortifying law and order. But that is no more feasible than the dream of remission in the cancer patient. ... [W]e won't get law and order without a revolution in the prison system."
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