Fuck Your Flag! A Rare Exchange With A Prison Guard (September 2020)

I make a habit of not engaging officials in personal or political conversations. My role is not to “speak truth to power,” but rather to “speak truth to the powerless,” so as to prepare and enable them to seize power. However, on Sept 3, 2020, I ended up in such an exchange with a particularly patriotic prison guard as I was in the process of being transferred between prisons.

I was being “escorted” by two guards from the solitary confinement unit at Indiana’s Pendleton Correctional Facility (PCF) en route to a transport van. As we approached the area where the vehicle was parked, the guards noticed that the daily flag-raising ritual at PCF was underway, and directed me to stop in place out of respect for the event.

I looked at both guards then at the group of prisoners who were solemnly saluting and raising the U.S. flag up a flagpole, and responded almost instinctively, “Man, fuck that flag!”

Both pigs snapped their reddened necks around as if they’d been slapped, to look at me with indignant expressions. I returned their gaze with one of my own, showing how absurd I found their presumption that I might feel some sense of allegiance the U.S. rag. One pig, who had a large “1776” tattoo inside a circle of stars on his elbow, spoke up asking, “Why’d you say that?” “Fuck your flag!” I repeated. “That piece of colored toilet paper stands for nothing but genocide, robbing the entire world (especially people of color) of their labor, wealth and resources, institutionalized rape and every other known crime against humanity.”

He responded, ” No it doesn’t,” and went on to refute only my statement that it stood for slavery. He didn’t bother denying any of the other atrocities I’d mentioned.

I answered, “Amerika was founded as a racialized whites-only society just as the German Nazis tried to create a racialized Aryans-only society. It was built by slavery. Its wealth, its institutions, its Industrial Revolution that ushered in modern technology all were created and fueled by the enslaved labor of my and other Blacks’ ancestors. Also, the First Nations, who were enslaved until the agenda became to displace and exterminate them to take their land, again just as the Nazis attempted to replicate in Europe. Your founding fathers, including the ones who signed the Declaration of Independence, which that date tattooed on your elbow commemorates, were slave owners, including and especially the hypocrite who penned that Declaration, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was not just a cruel slave owner, he was also a pedophile who at nearly 50 years old began molesting a 14-year-old slave girl, Sally Hemings whom he impregnated several times. Your heroes aren’t my heroes. So, yeah, fuck your flag!”

The pig looked bewildered and finding nothing to say in reply, stated, “Well, my ancestors could be slaves too.” “In that case,” I said, “you should be saying ‘fuck that flag’ too.” He replied, “But I served this country and fought to protect us.” “Correction,” I answered, “you were USED by the wealthy and politicians in their pawn who own this country to invade and occupy the lands of innocent people who were forced to fight back against those illegal invasions to protect their communities, homes, and families. Every pretext given for invading every country since WWll has been exposed to be a lie. And every one since the 1950 Korean war (Vietnam, Cambodia, Haiti, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq) was fought against, not any military, but civilians and were in violation of international laws.”

“Would you fight back if, say, China invaded and occupied Amerika in the name of overthrowing your government to effect ‘regime change,’ or to stop Amerika’s proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (the U.S. has the largest nuclear, biological and chemical weapons arsenals in the world, and is the ONLY country to drop nukes on another country, targeting and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians), or that your government or its proxies killed thousands of civilians of another country on their own soil, as Amerika does no less than weekly?” “Of course I would,” he answered. “So would that make you a terrorist or evil insurgent, as you all call people who fight back against your illegal invasions, committed for the same reasons that you just said you’d fight back against if the roles were reversed?” “Well, no,” he replied. “And not a single one of those countries you invaded and occupied posed a single threat to the U.S. So you weren’t ‘defending’ anything,” I said.

“You’re wrong,” he shot back. “What about September 11?”

“What branch of the military were you in?” I asked.

“Marines.”

“Are you familiar with ordnance, explosives, demolition work?”, I asked.

” Yeah sure,” he answered with a puzzled expression. “Why?”

“So you understand building, bridge, and structural demolition work?”

“Well, yeah.”

“If that’s true,” I stated, “you should know if you just think about it, that the three (NOT TWO) World Trade Center (WTC) towers didn’t fall the way they did from being hit by airplanes. Those were controlled demolitions. Go back and look at them. Those buildings each fell perfectly, straight down on their footprints, they didn’t topple to either side. They just collapsed straight down, with no resistance, which can only happen if the steel skeleton running the lengths of the buildings were pulverized by perfectly timed and synchronized split-second internal ignitions and explosions.”

“I remember watching films on urban demolitions when I was in school. We had a course on job careers, one of which was on urban demolition work, where engineers and explosives experts demolish multi-story buildings inside cities so they wouldn’t topple over onto other structures. They had to rig up explosives and incendiaries perfectly timed to go off inside and up and down the buildings in perfect, split-second sequences, so the buildings would collapse straight down onto their own footprint and not break apart or fall sideways and damage nearby structures, EXACTLY like the WTC towers did. I knew the first time I saw the WTC towers collapse that they didn’t fall from the impact of those tiny planes. And how, by the way, do you explain the third tower’s collapse (WTC tower number 7), which wasn’t hit by any planes at all, but suddenly collapsed just like the Twin Towers (towers numbers 1 and 2)?

“Those were high rise buildings with heavy steel-reinforced skeletons. The notion that a plane hitting the tops of them could cause their entire skeletons to essentially vaporize, allowing the buildings to collapse straight down at free-fall speed with no resistance, is as absurd as claiming shooting someone in the head with a pistol could shatter and vaporize their entire skeleton causing their body to collapse like jelly right where they stood and not fall to either side.

“There is no liquid fuel, including jet fuel that burns hot enough to melt steel, and certainly not the intricate steel skeleton of a skyscraper. The ONLY substance that would do that is used in demolitions, called thermite, which is an incendiary that again had to be planted and set off in a controlled series of perfectly times ignitions and attendant explosions—it was a controlled demolition job.”

He looked perplexed for a long moment, obviously thinking on what I’d said, then said in a low voice, “Damn, you’re right.”

I then asked if he’d ever heard of Richard Gage.

“No,” he replied.

“Richard Gage,” I went on, “founded a group called Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. This group of 1000 top of the line U.S. architects and engineers traveled the country doing public talks, calling on the people to pressure the government to allow an independent investigation into the destruction of the WTC towers. These are experts who design, construct, and demolish buildings like the towers. They studied and analyzed footage and data of the 9/11 WTC event, and concluded, just as I recognized, that those buildings didn’t and couldn’t collapse as they did from the airplane impacts. That they were professional demolition jobs. The government persecuted Gage and his group even labeled him a terrorist for contradicting the official 9/11 story. Gage and company never suggested who destroyed the towers, only that they definitely weren’t destroyed as the official story claimed.”

By this point, both guards had vacant expressions and seemed to puzzle over their own thoughts. I went on to add, “I won’t venture to say who bombed the towers either, except it certainly wasn’t some foreign plane hijackers. But I will say there was definitely a motive within the government and corporate circles to create a pretext and to incite public support to invade Afghanistan—and that being accessing the world’s largest untapped natural gas deposits. I can give you names and dates to look up right on your phone. Look up John Marescas, who was the president of UNOCAL. He made an appeal before a Congressional subcommittee on Feb 12, 1998, to build a pipeline across Afghanistan and other Asian countries from the Caspian Sea, the source of that untapped natural gas supply, through to markets in Europe.

“He called for the removal of the Taliban and the establishment of a stable Afghan government to be put in its place, so the pipeline could be built. This scheme was nothing new. Actually, the U.S. government created and enlisted the Taliban originally to control the region so that pipeline could be constructed many years before. Democratic Congressman Jim McDermott admitted this on Sept 2, 2002, on CNN’s ‘Crossfire.'”

For readers, here’s an exact quote of McDermott’s comments from that date. He stated: “But you’ve got to remember that of American policy, we put the Taliban there. We gave the money… We funded the Taliban through the Pakistanis, and all the money—we could have cut off that money and stopped what was going on. We knew what was going on there. All we wanted was a stable, quiet Afghanistan so we could put a pipeline down through there. That’s really what we were up to.”

I’d said enough to silence the guards’ blind patriotism, so I rode the rest of the way to my new place of confinement in silence. When we arrived both guards were markedly polite and wished me well.

My parting response, “Yeah, fuck your flag!”

All Power to the People!