Staying sane in a hurricane

We have coped before. We will cope again.

When Donald Trump appeared on a national television program and told “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker that he does not know whether he is compelled as president to uphold the Constitution, America was hit with an unforeseen and unprecedented question: Just how far gone are we as a country?

The answer is, pretty far.

To be certain, it didn’t begin with this man who is at least willing to state out loud his utterly fascist leanings and it is not the first time we have been in this much trouble. We have been in the midst of a hurricane of lawlessness for more than 50 years, going back at least to the Watergate scandal, when another Republican president, Richard Nixon, attempted to steal an election by ordering the break in and bugging of the opposition party, the Democrats, who were in the midst of running a candidate, George McGovern, against him for the presidency.

The lawlessness in the land went far beyond an office burglary in Washington D.C. A secret surveillance operation, COINTELPRO, (acronym for “Counter Intelligence Program”) had been established years earlier by the FBI to surveil and disrupt political organizations that J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI, found to be subversive and unAmerican. The FBI did this in illegal coordination with the CIA, the NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, military intelligence operatives within all the uniformed services and local police forces that provided covert agents as infiltrators. The groups and individuals surveilled would come to include Martin Luther King, the Communist Party USA, civil rights organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panthers, anti-war groups such as Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), leftist groups such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), feminist organizations such as the National Organization for Women (NOW) and even environmental and animal rights groups. Phones were wiretapped, memberships were infiltrated by agents and informers, groups were disrupted using false reports in the media, false documents, false arrests and grand juries charged with investigating leaders and members of groups like the VVAW that led to trumped up indictments, imprisonment of leaders on false charges, and even the killing of radical leaders such as Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, shot dead in his bed during a raid on his Chicago apartment.

People I knew and I, myself, were wiretapped and followed by FBI and military intelligence agents. My FBI file alone is more than an inch thick, and I was never able to get my hands on files kept on me by military intelligence, the CIA and NSA. People I knew were arrested on false charges and imprisoned under inflated bail amounts. One person I knew, a major leader of the anti-war movement and a famed counterculture figure, was purposefully infected with Hepatitis C by a police department which arrested him just so they could falsely require a blood test that was not administered to any other arrestees.

That was just the Nixon administration.

This is an excerpt from my weekly column in Salon. To read the full column, go here:

Staying sane