by Tom Baugh
Facing an unpleasant crone through the protective bars, I tried to explain to her that the bill was in error. All my tuition was being paid by the Air Force, I explained, and I was actually due back stipends for a couple of months. She would have none of it, and insisted that they would only discuss the issue after I paid the bill the next window over. I was incensed at her stubborn refusal to even pull my file. So, to repay her lack of concern I flipped her off and walked away to the next window. There, the more helpful clerk at that station pulled my file and promised me that this would be resolved to my satisfaction.
By the time I was done in that office, the crone had called the campus police. Between crone and the bicycle cop, a story was hatched in which I had "insulted the honor of Virginia womanhood", as my lawyer later described it. Also, according to their fevered fantasies, I had also caused a furor which destroyed the peace and tranquility of that fine summer day. Oddly this path of destruction had somehow escaped the notice of the non-crone next door. She had decided to lift a helpful and pleasant finger on my behalf while the campus around us was presumably embroiled in hapless turmoil.
So, unaware that I was now Virginia Tech's Most Wanted, I left the building to go pick up First Wife at the OB. I made it to the steps between Burruss Hall and Norris before I was apprehended by the relentless and efficient lawman in hot pursuit on foot. Barney had himself a case. He demanded my identification, and promised me that he would arrive at my door that afternoon with an arrest warrant. I then drove to retrieve First Wife and we returned home for a nice lunch.
The particulars of the promised arrest are of no consequence for our purpose here. What is important is that First Wife and I were astonished that a simple finger could have such devastating consequences. And so, the guilty party and his accomplices were handcuffed behind my back as I was led to the squad car. I rode to the station in the grasp of the campus cop and his companion from the Blacksburg police, a bicycle insufficient to the task of transporting desperate fugitives.
At the station, the cyclist, then playing the role of my protector, confided in me that it would go better for me if I didn't defend myself. Moments later, the magistrate appeared on closed-circuit TV. Already astonished beyond belief, I took his helpful suggestion as a clear threat against my person if I dared to defy the authorities further. I chose to rely instead on my naive notion that the truth would ultimately prevail.
After my hearing, I rode to the Montgomery County jail in the clutches of the campus cop. He had left my handcuffs on loosely during the ride, presumably hoping I would try to escape or assault so he could use his one bullet. After posting $1500 cash for bail, cash which my pregnant wife had to carry there, I was released later that afternoon. All for a raised finger.
Disgusted by the disproportionate consequences of my rudeness, I immediately withdrew from enrollment from further studies at Virginia Tech. I considered that day's events as a deliberate and premeditated gross violation of the Constitution I had swore to defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic. A document which included rights such as the freedom of speech and expression. Casting my aspirations for a doctorate aside, I refused to further fund that pit of vipers with my taxpayer-funded fellowship. I was determined to never allow them to seek indirect credit for my accomplishments by bearing a doctorate from their inbred hands.
The injustice was clear, and as I pieced the events of the day together in the few weeks which followed I knew that somewhere there was a sworn document which contained a lie. Could I find the proof of this lie, I knew that I might enthusiastically attack my enemies with truth and turn the energy of their prosecution against my perjuring accusers. But, the fragile state of my young family kept me from the full offensive which might have otherwise entertained me and my normally capable bride. In this manner the forces of niceness attack the weaknesses of their victims, devouring their flesh after wounding their prey.
The stress of this case began to mount on my wife, and I worried for the health of the child whom I couldn't bear to describe as a mere fetus. As the weeks wore on, I pleaded with every figure in authority to stop this insanity and drop the charges. Advisors, campus officials, the county prosecutor, the department head all turned a deaf ear. I resorted at last to a plea for the health of my wife and child. As I said these words the bile rose in my throat on the words as I saw their growing eagerness when I uttered them.
And my useless country attorney? His bread was buttered on the same side as theirs. He flatly told me that he wasn't going to stand up and challenge these people whom he depended on for his livelihood. A plea deal was all he would fight for. And in his mind a suit against their overreach was out of the question. In their endless charity, these worshipers of false gods of civility would not budge. I imagined that they felt in their righteous souls that I was someone who must be humbled before them and taught a lesson. The fact the charges were frivolous and my actions were not at all threatening or worthy of prosecution on their own merit made no difference.
But they were right about one thing. I learned a lesson. But not the one they thought they were teaching.
The stress of this unjust prosecution we were unable to escape by even moving away until trial. This restriction, imposed by the magistrate, was almost too much for First Wife to bear. We might have been in the clutches of the Nazis or the Soviets for all the sense this made to her.
This beautiful and sweet creature who saw me off to war to protect the commercial, social, and synthetic moral interests of our oppressors found herself unable to fully rest. Heavily pregnant with our first child, she wondered if the child would be born to a father in prison for merely lifting a finger. This woman of unpregnant strength had watched on cable TV in 1991 the death and destruction I directed from the skies. Now she saw us helpless against the righteous wrath of our tormentors who graced no mercy upon our little budding family. Tormenters who demanded a blood sacrifice for their offended sensibilities.
And for the first time in my life I found myself unable to attack my tormentors, unwilling to risk aggravating her concern further.
Months later, fatigued with stress and helplessness, her worried womb finally gave up the child a month early. The pangs of labor struck her in the early hours of the morning. Clawing the walls and lurching with a struggle which injured her hips to this day, my son was born into my waiting hands amid a rush of blood and fluids. His little mouth gasped for life, the three of us truly alone in a world which sought to destroy us.
The afterbirth would not come, and I knew well enough to not pull it. We had anticipated car trouble during several road-trips we had planned for that fall to take our minds off of this insanity. As a result, we had, fortunately, prepared a kit of the necessary items, including one of those little cord clamps and some sterile scalpels. And so, after clipping the now still cord and severing it with a scalpel, I put the child to her breast. Swaddling them both in a blanket, I drove us the twenty minutes to the Montgomery County Hospital, the child too weak and new to lie in his carrier.
As she was preregistered for delivery, the country staff rushed her to the delivery room. I stood at the door calling to them with the boy bundled in a blanket trying to get them to understand that I now held their patient. Eventually they recognized that the boy had already been born, and removed the placenta from First Wife's womb. My son was then diagnosed with respiratory distress and a lack of proper liver function, both due to his premature delivery. For the first few weeks of his little life, he would spend most of his hours wrapped in a tube of light to assist his liver in processing waste.
And, as I watched my family struggle to stay alive, I planned for contingencies which I prayed would never arrive.
Only one individual from the campus came to check on our progress, my graduate advisor. This was a man who in the preceding months had destroyed every ounce of my respect by turning his back on my unjust persecution at the altar of his god. His mission for the trip was to find out whether I intended to sue the
university. I reassured him that I had no intention to sue, an assurance which he completely misinterpreted. For you see, exhaustion and forgiveness are entirely different things. Having won his assurance, he made his excuses and a belated inquiry as to the health of my wife and child. Having thus betrayed his true mission for the visit, he waddled off to report to his masters, never to be seen by my eyes again. And never again welcome in my sight.
Once the child had been born, I felt my strength begin to return. Suddenly, the system which had in my weakness sought to imprison me, responded to my growing vigor. After my references to a possible legal counterattack should the case be won before a jury, they became more pliable than before. Shortly after my son was born, I accepted an offer of the charges being dropped in exchange for eight hours of community service. I served this time in the school library reformatting Macintosh hard drives. The ordeal now over, I bundled my family off to my new job at McDonnell Douglas in Huntsville. There, I managed to see millions of dollars in Navy power engineering funding directed away from Virginia Tech's grasping, slack-jawed proposals.
A clever reader might argue, as did anyone who heard my story during those months, that I had merely run afoul of an aggressive enforcement of the law. Surely aggressive enforcement was intended to maintain civility in order to protect the students from harm. This would be a reasonable proposition, of course, which even my tormented mind could understand and appreciate. Except for one teensie weensie little inconsistency in that law-and-order theory:
Internet Research
Research the case of BRZONKALA v VPI STATE UNIV from the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. The best reference I could find is at:
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=4th&navby=case& no=961814P As evidenced in the public record, the year before my arrest Christy Brzonkala alleged that two members of the varsity football squad had gang raped her in the dormitory. Virginia Tech, in an academic hearing, determined that this rape had indeed occurred, and punished one of the offenders by, wait for it, suspending him from school for two semesters. Virginia Tech then decided to overturn even this drastic punishment in the summer of 1995. That, of course, was the same season I was being arrested for flipping off an employee of the university safe behind a barred window. In his case, however, Virginia Tech allowed the accused to return to school on a full athletic scholarship that year.
Not even this, however, is the full measure of the story. More importantly, court documents from this case, as referenced above, state as facts that:
"Rape of a female student by a male student is the only violent felony that Virginia Tech authorities do not automatically report to the university or town police."
Read that again. Virginia Tech's policy at the time, and for all I know may still be, was to not report rapes to the police. If you or I performed that kind of obstruction of justice as a matter of policy, what do you think the reasonable response would be?
So, the administration considered my profane expression an inexcusable crime worthy of conviction and imprisonment. But, in the same window of time, this same administration chose to give a full athletic scholarship to an adjudged sexual offender. An offender who raped, excuse me, sexually assaulted a coed on the grounds of their campus shortly after she arrived for her freshman year full of ambition and promise. And, this same law-and-order administration which, as a matter of procedure, routinely chose to not report rapes to the police. For if they did, who would win their super big games for them?
We can't have a university without a top notch football team, now can we? Who would attend those fund-raisers if we just focused on math, science and technology? It only has Polytechnic in the name, don't think that implies anything about the priorities. All we have to do is provide enough perks to top-notch athletes, such as the warmly curved bodies of freshmen women in a clean, consequence-free environment. Just make sure that if you are an actual student you don't flip off any employees. That unforgivable impertinence will get you hauled away and prosecuted. And if possible, put the health of a pregnant woman and her unborn child at risk for the sheer joy of it.
The unique geography of the region makes this sort of feudal arrangement possible, and in fact, unavoidable. Isolated by mountains from even the county seat, Blacksburg's police department is an engineer's stone's throw away from the campus. Most persons in this town owe their livelihood to the university. Accordingly, it is easy to understand why the Blacksburg police were, and perhaps still are, willing to not get involved.
And to not look too closely into allegations of rapes on campus, even if the campus administration had been willing to report them. After all, most of these girls are some far-away rich guy's little brat anyway. It makes one wonder whether it saves the city police the effort of filling out needless paperwork to a sufficient degree that they might consider offering classes to potential rapists. Lesson One? Drag the victims onto campus before consummating the act. Or at least make this claim.
The county government's bread is similarly buttered, Montgomery County itself isolated by more mountains from the civilized world beyond. My personal experience with that authority in Christiansburg, the appropriately named county seat over the mountains from Blacksburg, made me doubt whether the county officials are any better in their pursuit of actual criminals of consequence. It was interesting to find VT paraphernalia littered about the prosecutors' offices as I pled my case there for leniency and truth in the fall of 1995. Paraphernalia which indicted clearly their objectivity in legal matters regarding the university.
So much for the aggressive law-and-order theory.
The explanation for this apparent split personality lies within the nature of modern public, semi-public and charitable institutions and their relationship with government. All of these entities, including government bodies, are entities of, by and for the agents of niceness, and as such are considered as capable of no wrong by their base. The athletes in question represent the agents of this beast, whose true purpose is fund-raising rather than education. Threaten them, and you threaten the entire fund-raising ethic at its core. Like any institution of niceness, however, it must move swiftly and relentlessly to crush any defiance from any other quarter in order to render its victims sheep.
Similarly, Lon Horiuchi is considered guiltless as he merely enforced the rules of compliance and fear for the agencies created by the people for precisely that purpose. And so, the public smiles with favor from their neat little boxes of drywall at the end of their tidy concrete drives. Just as they smiled as the people versus Randy Weaver executed his wife and eldest son for the unforgivable crime of defiance to their will. Just as they smile to twist justice to the collective purpose to ensure compliance.
Virginia Tech, in its isolated mountain compound, is capable of twisting justice to ensure compliance to its purpose to a level which makes our fellow Communist, left or right, red with envy. As such, rather than being unique in its objectives and methods, Virginia Tech is merely a more highly refined version of the same corrosive substance which defines institutions, governments, and increasingly, businesses throughout our society today. It is not an exception, it is merely the prototype. Recall that, in a representative republic, no injustice can stand without the consent of the people and, instead, acts as their primary coercive tool. Injustice also serves the more valuable purpose as a diagnostic instrument capable of ferreting out even the most carefully camouflaged individualist. But how?
The use of injustice as a coercive and diagnostic instrument can best be understood if you consider the natures of the forces of niceness and their prey. As niceness, a super-organism composed of the mass action of its individual actors, has evolved over the centuries the actors themselves respond in concert, but without specific direction or coordination. In concert, but without coordination, much as a flock of birds or school of fish behaves like a single organism. And so, any unit of the niceness organism is free to attack any threat to the whole using any means necessary. As they
attack, they know that the rest of the organism will rally behind it to protect toward the same ends.
Was there a smoke-free room at Virginia Tech which conspired to arrest and punish me for my attitude, or even conspired to seize the opportunity which my raised finger provided? Of course not, no more than the birds or the fish meet in a room to determine the direction in which they move next. In all likelihood, no two persons ever met in passing to coordinate their efforts in this matter, they not needing to.
And yet, the individuals in question, from the clerk to the cop to the acting department head to the magistrate to my advisor to my lawyer and to the president of the university, acted in concert as if they had conspired. In their silent mass action they rested secure in the knowledge that, should they step over the line and perjure in their efforts to destroy the threat, their fellows will move to protect them. And protect them by their own injustices if need be.
Similarly, Lon Horiuchi squeezed the trigger to kill Vicki Weaver comfortably safe in the knowledge that the people, the bloodthirsty nice, would close ranks to protect him. Protect him so long as his victims are those dreaded individualists and their families. As indeed the collective did, and then later placed him in a position where he might do even more harm on their behalf.
Any evolving organism learns over time more efficient means to achieve its ends. Catching fish with one's hands is hard. And so, one learns to stab with a stick or trawl with a net. Eventually, these lead to passive activities such as the use of a weir to trap the prey as they swim in the shallows to feed at high tide. The most efficient gathering of prey involves the use of its own activity and inclinations, saving the predator the effort of the hunt. Even the baited hook is a refinement of this technique.
