CHAPTER 17

Dieter Rivera

Dieter stood on the porch of his converted storefront home supporting himself with a gnarled oak cane.  A white, wide brimmed straw cowboy hat adorned his head.  His white hair cascaded out from under the hat and reached down below his shoulders.  He had a long matching white beard and a handle bar mustache.  He sported a cowboy string tie with a clasp adorned with an Aztec god.  He was slightly overweight which was not beneficial for someone at his advanced age.  His body was frail, but his mind was clear and crisp.

Dieter lived in a densely populated neighborhood typical of Chicago.  Typically also, he didn’t own a car.  He preferred to pay for a taxi rather than spend hours circling the neighborhood searching for a parking spot.  Ideally, he could find someone to chauffeur him to this destination.  

Scot had to double park on the narrow street and wait for Dieter to make the slow, careful walk to his car.  Drivers in other cars waited patiently having resigned themselves to the inconvenience for the privilege of living in a better, safer, but affordable, section of the city.

Dieter was the son of a Mexican-Native American father and German mother.  He had a rebellious streak that told him to adopt his father’s identity in a racially white-biased land.  He inherited his tenacious qualities from his Socialist parents.  Both were Wobblies back when Wobblies were the great threat of the day to the U.S.--to the ruling nobility, that is, Dieter believed.  Scot watched with amused interest as the imminent threat to “American freedom” slowly approached his car.  

"Threats to America seemed more threatening if they have a color associated with them," he liked to say.  “The browning of America.  The red menace.  The yellow peril.  The red scare.  The stimulus-response mind always is alert for potential threats, especially those that disguise themselves but are unable to hide some minor appearance, habit or speech pattern that gives them away.  An unscrupulous leader, preacher or other con man can use those instincts to control and manipulate stimulus-response dominated minds.  For that reason, the majority of Americans will fall for each new contrived threat with the same determination to foil it at any cost and sacrifice."  
     Dieter was aware of those primitive instincts and went to great efforts not to conceal his non-conformity.  "Usually the threat would pass or be replaced by a new one without too much harm to self or imaginary enemy.  The people usually are unable to detect a pattern in the repetition.  That requires a mind capable of linear logic which is absent in the stimulus-response brain.  However, some imagined threats such as the Red Scare can blossom, bloom and grow into the potential for massive or total destruction.  Twentieth century weapons were in the hands of first century men, according to Dieter.  It’s a scenario that would have delighted Niccolo Machiavelli.  Nuclear weapons made it possible for a man to destroy the world, something only God could have done previously.  The Red Scare frenzy reached a level that was given the appropriate acronym MAD, or mutually assured destruction.  Machiavelli’s 'Madman Theory' became a fact, on a worldwide scale.  Americans had been frightened to such a sick and twisted height that they would elect only a president whom they were certain would press the button that would destroy the world.  It was a Gunsmoke shootout writ large, the ultimate triumph of good or evil.  Or perhaps it could be described more appropriately as the triumph of insanity over humanity.  'Better dead than red,' was a common refrain heard from the mouths of the brain addled descendants of Neanderthal man.  But their limbs were functioning and they were a threat to mankind."

Scot got out to help Dieter across the curb and into the car.  Dieter was in his eighties and had difficulty navigating the least obstacle.  However, the Wobbly fighting spirit still was there and burning fiercely.  Only total incapacitation or death would stop him from joining the fray.

“How can sentient, thinking, educated people not see through the scam?” Scot asked Dieter after he had climbed into the car and fastened his seat belt.

“Simple,” responded Dieter, “Propaganda.”

“You can’t propagandize educated, free, people who have access to unlimited information.  In addition, there is a media that keeps a watchful eye on them,” Scot argued playing the devil’s advocate.

      “Educated people are the most susceptible to propaganda,” Dieter asserted.  “They believe they are hearing the truth from their reliable sources, which are monitored and challenged by the other side’s sources.  They are propaganda proof, they believe.  In fact, the U.S. has the most sophisticated propaganda system in the world.  Many people are brain-washed.  Americans are brain-scrubbed.

“Modern propaganda began a century ago in the U.S..  After Presidents Roosevelt and Taft launched their trust-busting campaign, the corporations were determined that that would never happen again.  They poured hundreds of millions of dollars into their primary interest group, the National Association of Manufacturers.  It hired the best propagandists of the day incorporating the most recent psychological discoveries, especially from Sigmund Freud.  The message was: corporations are good, governments and labor unions are bad.  They saturated media, entertainment industry and education systems with the message in blatant, subtle and subconscious ways.  To this day, most Americans don’t know they are the most propagandized people in the world.  America is a neo-Feudal nation which believes it’s an advanced, enlightened democracy.”  

Dieter liked to say: “Fool me once shame on you.  Fool me twice shame on me.  Fool me thrice, a fool I’ll always be.”  Dieter had modified the old saw by adding the last condition.  Sounded even better, Scot believed.  “Unfortunately, the “thrice-fooled” are the vast majority, Dieter declared in resignation.”

“That explains why the thrice-fooled are incapable of learning from past mistakes,” Scot said.  “They will fall for each new scam and believe it just as deeply as they did the last one, even though the last one, two, five or ten before that had proved to be fabrications and/or deceptions.  Their survival instincts bypass the cognitive mind and put the brain into a defensive mode, a fight-or-flight reaction to each new situation.  The survival instinct searches for learned characteristics of an enemy so that it can determine whether it should stay in a defensive posture or can relax.  A child follows the same process when it is told the ‘big bad wolf‘ is the threat, but the hunter always comes to the rescue when the hungry wolf is near and threatening.  It’s not the logic that determines the position.  It’s a total of the synaptic charges striking the fear sector of the brain.  Emotion-generating words or threatening images generate more cortisol and trigger more fear reactions.  There is a speedy ‘friend or foe’ analysis, and ‘fight or flight’ evaluation.  Walter Lippman said people easily can be reduced to a bewildered herd.

“It’s when the enemy continues to loom but can’t be eliminated that people go into a mad frenzy,” Dieter concluded.  “They want to form into a herd or swarm or pack for defense or attack.”

Scot noticed a little red book in Dieter’s hand.  “What is that book?’ he asked.

“It’s the Wobbly song book,” responded Dieter.  “Someone asked for it to see if any of those songs are appropriate for today.  I’m sure some are.  The reasons for today’s protests are nearly the same as those that incited the Wobblies at the turn of the 20th Century.”

“Are Wobblies still around?” Scot asked.  “I remember reading about them in grade school history class, but I got the impression they were gone.”

“No.  Not entirely.  There’s an active chapter here in Chicago on Clark Street.  I’m a member.  The Wobblies were decimated by the Woodrow Wilson Administration after WW I in what became known as the Palmer Raids named after Attorney General Palmer.  President Wilson took advantage of ‘The Sedition Act’ passed during the frenzy leading up to World War I to give special powers to the Executive to deal with subversives and spies in the U.S.” 

Scot was puzzled.  “Wasn’t Wilson a Democrat?  Wobbly was a name for the Industrial Workers of the World as I recall.  Why would a Democrat oppose a workers’ organization?”

“Both parties did and do oppose the working class,”  Dieter responded.  “Both are loyal to the ownership class first, no matter what they claim.  The Wobblies were far ahead of their time.  I believe they still  are far ahead.  They believed in racial and sexual equality 100 years ago.  They believed in democracy and justice, something that still doesn’t exist in the U.S. and won’t in the foreseeable future.”  

“Who do you vote for, if there is no difference?” Scot asked after the car began to move more quickly having turned onto a main traffic artery.

“I never vote,” Dieter exclaimed.  “If voting worked, it would be illegal.”

“Does democracy work anywhere?” Scot inquired.

“No.  Never has!” Dieter responded with a tone of certainty.  “We will need many centuries, if not millennia, of evolutionary advances for that to be possible.  The majority of humans still function on primitive, subconscious instincts, especially in a time of crisis.  We’re still closer to our insect and animal instincts than to civilized human beings.  The problem is, weapons have evolved several millennia.  I’m convinced we’ll destroy ourselves before we reach peace on earth.  Self-destruction is our fate.”

“Can Communism save us?” Scot asked.  

“We were carnivorous animals far too long for us to live in peaceful, total equality,” Dieter asserted.                  "I’m adamantly opposed to a private individual having power over the economic life of any other individual. It’s just slavery in another, more insidious, form.  Capitalism allows the ruling class to kick sick, handicapped or ‘underperforming’ workers into the street to be forgotten.  

“Plantations at least kept and cared for those people some of the time.  They felt a responsibility that Capitalists don’t feel and don’t need to feel.  They can always blame hardship on the individual.  I don’t believe human nature is selfless, altruistic or empathetic enough yet to be compatible with communal life.

“What can we do to prevent annihilation before we reach civilization?” Scot asked.  

Dieter hesitated as if he considered the question so crucial it needed a well thought-out response.  “Some of the Anarchists argue for attacks directly on the autocrats.  When we fight police in the streets, we are fighting our fellow worker, even though that group usually is misguided and unsophisticated.  When we fight wars in a foreign land, we are fighting our fellow foreign worker to the benefit of our and their plutocrats.  First of all, we need to identify the real enemy.  Those who acquire great wealth and power can’t be civilized and do that.  They can’t be human.  Ideally, some Anarchists advocate, elderly people with nothing to live for, would carry out suicide attacks against them.  ‘When you go, take one with you,‘ was one suggested rallying cry.  ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants,’  to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson. That is necessary to achieve and preserve freedom in a pre-civilized world.”

“How old were those Anarchists?”  Scot asked.

“None of those Anarchists was over 30,” Dieter responded.  He seemed to sink into deep thought, as if he were considering if he would be willing to follow that course of action.  

“They probably would see it differently if it were their lives in question,” Scot added.

“How was your reunion last weekend?”  Scot asked, after several minutes of silence.  He assumed Dieter was mulling over the ideas of the Anarchists and comparing them to the radical ideas of his own youth.  

Scot waited a couple minutes.  No answer was forthcoming.  He repeated the question and glanced to his right to make sure Dieter heard the question.  To his surprise, he saw tears in the superannuated eyes.

“It was all I had hoped it would be,” Dieter responded finally.  

“Were your visitors family members?  You said they were coming from Minnesota,”  Scot queried.

“No.  They were comrades who had served in the federal penitentiary in Minnesota, with me.”

That sounded ominous to Scot.  Could he be chauffeuring a murderer?

“You served time in a federal penitentiary?” Scot probed.  His interest was intense.  He thought Dieter was about as moral as a person could be.  How could he have spent time in prison?

Numerous types of crimes passed though Scot’s mind as he itched to find out what Dieter could have done.  

Dieter ended the suspense and volunteered the answer.  “I refused to go and kill my fellow worker,” Dieter asserted.  “Ironic isn’t it?  We’re told all our lives that it’s evil and criminal to kill.  I refused to kill and was punished with two years in prison.”

“Your friends that visited last weekend all served time in the federal prison for refusing to serve in the military?”  Scot pursued.

“Yes,” Dieter said.  His voice quivered slightly with emotion.

Scot decided it would be wise to drop the subject.

“All of us still agree we had done the right thing,” Dieter said suddenly breaking a long silence.  “We paid dearly.  No one would hire us when we got out.  Like me, most were forced to turn to private pursuits such as the arts to survive.  Some of us started painting in prison.  We helped each other if good fortune blessed one of us.”

Dieter fell into silence again.  Scot noticed more tears welling up in his eyes.  He wondered if Dieter was one of the more fortunate of the group.  most of the time.  He owned a respectable home with a huge room in the front that served as his art studio, so he must have had some good luck.

“I’m an alumnus of Kent State University,” Scot heard someone say on the radio.  “Nothing I learned in college contributed to my success.  I was born an ideas man,” the guest continued.  “I had a lot of good ideas, but most people lacked the foresight I had.  They refused to take a chance with me.  Then I founded a Public Relations firm.  I surrounded myself with other ideas people just like me and there was no looking back.  We got a break with a couple government contracts and have been profitable ever since.”

“We are talking to Robert Trainor, Chief Executive Officer of Concepts International, one of the year’s fastest growing international corporations,” the host said with the obligatory reminder to his Public Radio audience.

“That had to be Bob,” Scot thought to himself.  “The wily old fart finally pulled off some scam.  That’s the American dream.” 

Scot stopped at a traffic light.  Dieter rolled down his window and beckoned to a man standing on the corner holding a “Homeless veteran” sign.  Scot wondered if Dieter knew him.  When he reached the car, Dieter gave him two dollars and said: “Good luck, brother.”  Scot noticed that Dieter gave money to the panhandlers every time he had the opportunity.  Scot had chauffeured Dieter nearly a dozen times.  He had managed to help someone out on at least six of those occasions.  Dieter frequently spoke about “hoboes” for whom he seemed to have great reverence.  Raised in a nation that worshipped the wealthy industrialist and held impoverished people in contempt as if they were poor by choice, Dieter held the exact opposite views.  To him, every wealthy industrialist was a crook.  Those industrialists usually claimed to be Christians.  Jesus was the exact opposite of them in social attitudes and practice, Dieter claimed.

“Even considering the revelations of horrible atrocities committed by the Germans and Japanese, do all of you still consider your actions to have been the right ones?  Were they worth it?”  Scot probed further. 

“They did nothing the U.S., British, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Belgians and several other European nations hadn’t done,” Dieter asserted.  “I have native-American blood from my father’s side.  Tales of the barbaric behavior and atrocities by the white man abound in our tribes.  Hitler didn’t do anything worse than what was done to my people by the Spanish and English-Americans.  Hitler was not the exception.  He was the rule.  He was just being European.  His crime was using European behaviors against other Europeans.”  

Scot thought for a second trying to recall if he had encountered anything in his classes that disputed Dieter’s claims.  “A friend at college believed that if Hitler had won World War II, Hitler would be considered a military genius today,” Scot added.  “The Allies had to vilify him to get their soldiers to die fighting fellow white working class Christians.  Then the U.S. was forced to spend the next several decades cleaning up its own racist, sexist, homicidal history to give the illusion that it was better than Nazi Germany.   After the Soviet Union fell in 1991, the U.S. no longer needed to maintain its pseudo-civilized image.  

“When George W. Bush and Dick Cheney launched their wars of aggression, instituted torture, suspended rights, used Weapons of Mass Destruction on civilians and spurned international and national laws, the U.S. merely discarded its fake half-century enlightenment cloak.  It merely resumed the nation’s natural Nazi norm.  The sanctimonious and self-righteous preaching by American leaders was incredible, but it was pure propaganda and most Americans believed it.  The brutal wars in Korea and the hideous tactics practiced in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos proved the U.S. was as morally sick and twisted as it was when it slaughtered 17 million Native-Americans.  No matter how hard it tried to look civilized, it was unable to conceal its craving for murder and genocide.  It also couldn’t disguise its contempt for the law, both international and its own.  Laws imply universal application.  Laws should apply only to the peasant classes, American rulers and their Feudal predecessors believe.

“It seems that an indicator of civilization is how people or nations compete,” Scot continued.  “Civilized nations compete fairly on an even playing field.  They play to win, but that’s not the overriding goal.  Morally unstable nations compete to defeat and humiliate their opponents and will use any advantage no matter how criminal to accomplish that goal.  Lastly are the depraved nations that have a psychological need to crush their opponents.  The nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are examples of the madman competition rules.  In other words, there are no rules or guidelines except winning.  

“The Romans had a policy of decimation, that called for murdering every 10th person of a nation, city or group that rebelled against them.  Americans are willing to murder man, woman and child to get total submission and set an example for others that might entertain the idea of opposing them.  Fire bombing of Dresden and Tokyo are examples of the third level of competition which I call the madman level.  In the 1930s, the U.S. decided that its future policy would include attacking the civilian population.  That would be more humane, the U.S. rationalized in its own twisted way.  Killing the civilian population would reduce the opponents will to fight and end the war sooner.  Of course, the U.S. assumed it would always be the aggressor, and someone else’s families would be the victims.

“In the end, our greatest enemy is ourselves, or more specifically, those who rule us,” Dieter added.  “We merely revert back to our primitive instincts if there is no outside power forcing us to pretend to behave like enlightened human beings.”

If the Jewish claim that there are 36 super righteous men in the world at any one time is correct, Dieter had to be one of them, Scot thought to himself.  He wondered how the mantle was passed on.  Does the righteous one have any input into the succession decision?

“I have a gift for you,” Dieter said.  He opened the canvas bag he always carried with him.  He pulled out one of his works of art.  It already was framed in a simple black frame.  It was a drawing of Eugene Debs giving one of his fiery speeches stating: “Don’t see me as a Moses to lead you out of the wilderness.  If I can lead you out of the wilderness, someone else can lead you back in.”

This was Scot’s favorite quote from Eugene V. Debs.  On the bottom was the name of the artist and his Howling Coyote symbol.  Scot was thrilled beyond words.

On January 19, 2005, Dieter Rivera died.  He was a great man, too great for the Neo-Nazi nation to which he gave so much.  He could have gone to a nation that appreciated his high ethical level, but he chose to stay and try to improve a nation festering in evil habits.  He, like Eugene V. Debs and many other “true patriots” was punished for his ethical purity.  All around him, evil people were rewarded for performing hideous deeds.  Bringing enlightenment to his cruel nation would have to fall on someone else’s shoulders.  “Who received his 36 Righteous Men mantle,” Scot wondered.  Scot felt he had been blessed by knowing this great man.

Dieter Rivera was the exceptional American melting-pot man.  Native American, European, civilized, generous, altruistic.  He was everything America claimed to represent.  America hated Dieter Rivera.