State
Bruce Hummer speaks
Dear Reader
Cyberspace
Think tanks and tin hat conspiracy theorists
* History as it Happens are settlement-made books of “news” and illustrations.
Contents
MY GOOD BEHAVIOR
PLEASED TO MEET YOU
DANGEROUS GIFT
SOME DAYS ARE DIAMONDS,
SOME DAYS ARE STONES
CUI BONO?
Brianne, tu sais, la vie est dure
(BriannA, you know, life is hard)
BREAD AND ROSES
HERE TO PROTECT
Some say it was 1999.
Some say it was 2000.
One thing for sure,
the years, they do blur.
In those years,
big things
happened in America.
But you never
heard about some of
them. They were erased.
Here’s
the
Story
My Good Behavior
“If I repent of anything it is very likely to be my good behavior.”
Henry David Thoreau
SEPTEMBER
For the preservation of this edifice that holds high what is fine and fair, there can be no being too hard on the threat.
O masters! O lords and ladies of national and transnational finance, State Department, Pentagon, big media, and other vast grasps. You, the majestics of boardrooms, deeper rooms, private jets, mists, seashores, and “lost” memos; lords of strategic worth; gods of this universe! I am your whip, your bulwark, your sword, your Weedwhacker. Proud to serve you.
He leans back, reads. It’s a full three-page, dated feature including photos. Written about wacky people. Very strange. He reads every word. And he stares at and into a face staring back into his brains from a blur of moving and monsterific merry-go-round “horses.” It’s the face of Gordon St. Onge.
This story is a noisy one, my own voice a merest chirp in the roar. But I can say without the vulgarity of pride that though many voices will wrench this story of him into a confusing and grainy spectacle, I am more than any of them your true tour guide.
He is alone down at the old farmplace by the tar road called Heart’s Content Road, as picturesque as its name implies, especially fifteen years ago, when it was still Swett’s Pond Road, picturesque with a capital P.
It is the house and 920 acres where he grew up, an only child, overly adored, and this land, never worked in those years, no tilling, no grazing, just croquet, while the fields were kept mowed by his papa and a neighbor’s borrowed tractor. No barn. That burned long ago. But there are still the old shedways. There is still the ell kitchen, the porch with lathed columns that stand out white in the night from the morose hair-thin glow of the quarter moon. Inside there is still that old dry smell, a house of generations of solemn ghosts.
Yes, it is dark outside now. And inside, too, but for the anemic, yes, thin, single fluorescent old tube light over one of his desks in the officey part of the cluttered kitchen made by taking out the old pantry shed wall. Such thrifty light gives his hands and the opened Fedco catalog the same cold color. He is almost forty and uses old-man reading glasses. He doesn’t flip through this catalog but stares
