I volunteer to stand before the Reich Commission

R. F. Laird of Yardarm University

“University of California-Berkeley professor and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich proposed the radical idea for a post-election commission to censor speech and name and shame every public figure who supported President Donald Trump’s rise to power.

He wrote on Twitter over the weekend that “when this nightmare” — or Trump’s presidency — “is over, we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It would erase Trump’s lies, comfort those who have been harmed by his hatefulness, and name every official, politician, executive, and media mogul whose greed and cowardice enabled this catastrophe.”

In response to the tweet, several Twitter followers agreed and even raised the stakes of his proposal.

“I am thinking more of using the postwar Nuremberg Trials as a template,” one Twitter user wrote, speculating that criminal trials should be in order. “Felonies were committed as were treasonous behaviors. The guilty should be arrested, tried, convicted and forced to do time.”

“Prosecute them all,” another said. “The [Justice Department] will hire new attorneys, the media will be fed by the trials, and Biden and his administration can focus on policy and government reform. We are broken and need to be restructured so this can never happen again. Or it’s a lot harder to repeat.”

Another added Supreme Court-packing and the abolition of the Electoral College to the commission’s list of to-dos in order to “ensure that this can never happen again.”

Hmmm.

I have no problem with meeting the Reich Inquisition head-on. I am, as it happens, the last intelligent man in these United States. I wrote the best book in the last half of the 20th century and, as far as I can tell, it’s still the best book of the 21st century. In all I’ve written five masterpieces, in multiple media, including Bibles (four of them), the most complicated modern novel that actually makes sense, a ten year online diary covering every topic you’ve ever heard of, a revelation of the mystery called woman, and of Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary (The Glossary) that tracks word for word with today’s political headlines, and an online graphic experience unparalleled in writing history called Shuteye Town 1999 and its companion piece Shuteye Nation. Plus more than two hundred audio/video files on my YT channel and 20+ other books, including a prescient one about the Obama catastrophe and some others about WWI (two world war vets in my family, one a Captain of Infantry and diarist, one a P-47 fighter pilot), sighthounds, automobiles, poetry, and growing up white surrounded by society folk and people of color. 

Where I received a 19th century elementary education with all the trimmings.

I wasn’t born intelligent but I was born smart, with a 160-ish IQ. I skipped second grade, was offered sophomore standing when I entered prep school at 13 (thankfully refused by my dad), which would have made me 18 rather than 19 when I graduated from Harvard after matriculating there as a sophomore at the height of the radical era which I’d been opposing since the age of 15. I worked for a lawyer, went to an Ivy League business school instead, where I caught up on the math and science I missed studying literature, art, physics, and history/history/history in college by learning Algebra I and II in the first week of pre-enrollment makeup required of liberal arts retards and Calculus the next week before taking the most important course of my life, the Mathematics of Probability Theory, plus micro and macro Economics, computer programming, matrix algebra, and every known flavor of accounting. I left before graduating to go daredevil driving on the backroads of South Jersey, narrowly escaping death at 100+ mph because of mostly dumb luck. Bunch of times really. I tend to blame it on Daddy and the Speedway Sundays. Back in those old days, there was also a 60-ft yacht, a 25 ft steamboat, an airboat, a couple hellish fast Whalers, forklift dodg’ems, and, well, tennis. (Who knew I’d wind up counting clock ticks on South Street in Philly at dicey times?) Sometimes surviving isn’t as much its own reward as interest paid against a humongous debt.

So, after B-school, I drank for a while, wrote most of a novel in secret, and for some reason organized and publicized a large scale reenactment of a Revolutionary War skirmish in my home county, but eventually, pushing 30, quit drinking and rejoined the rat race as a proofreader in the nuclear engineering industry, an editor in the computer publishing world, a competitive analyst during the microprocessor revolution, a corporate player on the top floor inside of a year and a half, a freelance consultant/expert in the Just-in-Time manufacturing movement in 80s Detroit, and an international management consultant during the big globalization movement of the 90s. Won awards, earned big paychecks, got divorced, fell in love with a Mexican stripper, lost everything, drank some, and learned about living hard as a retail clerk and telemarketer surrounded by black women who guarded my earpiece and wanted me to like their potato salad best, because I was the one they liked talking to during smoke breaks. Also got to be a stepdad for the most delightful stage of a young girl’s life, her teenage years. Taught her how to drive, how to throw a left hook, and how to write. Day to day, still hard to figure whether she’s forgiven me or not for any of the above.

Since then, maybe 40 websites about everything you can possibly imagine and an online book, the best one (because funny), about the Trump candidacy, but not before I’d written a print book making fun of Fox News, and also scathing videos of Fox Primetime. And most recently, another online book called “Death of the Republic.” Nobody wants it. I’m cool with that. Not even drinking in sorrow…

You see, I’m kind of ready for the Reich Inquisition. I’m supposed to be a Trump dumbshit. Instead I was learning Latin and French from first grade on, picked up Greek in prep school, and nearly drowned in a hurricane on the most beautiful ocean liner of the day in 1963. In other woids, I waren’t born yestiddy. Probably know more about the climate change controversy, for example, fact and fiction, than any of the inquisitors.

They could torture me, I suppose, deprive me of cigarettes and vodka and starve me, keep me awake with lights burning all the time and loud music. Probably dead ends all. I was a management consultant. Learned how to go without smoking as loooong as necessary. Going without vodka just makes me smarter, meaner, and more silent. I already don’t eat much and feel hungry less. Insomnia is my more or less constant state. I doze only, with lights on and something always playing, music or crime documentaries, to keep the routine nightmares organized. 

I guess they could try to hurt me physically, but every doctor and dentist I’ve ever encountered has noted my extraordinary tolerance for pain, which has been lifelong.

They could threaten me with death. But I’m pushing seventy and I won’t go out of this life on my knees to idiots.

Which is what they are. I know how things work, how organizations work, how cults work, how the Swamp works. I know that the DNC is a cult and a terrorist organization. I know exactly how and why it does what it does better than any of the idiots who report to it and depend on it. 

So. Come arrest me. Just bear in mind, I am way way smarter than all of you put together, and know that when you interrogate me I am interrogating you. For you, I am the abyss that looks back when you think you’re looking in.

Talk to me and I will destroy you. You can take that to the bank. You can kill me, yes, but I’ve lived a life that has no bucket list outstanding. I am content. Except that I am your enemy forever. Or, in more modern terms, bring it on:

Side Note: I never lose arguments with lawyers.

P. S. The smarter among you will realize that this post is a major work unto itself. If you take the links, and the links within links, etc, you are bound to discover that this little scrap of writing is actually a high-tech hyperlinked Proustian autobiography, resonating at numerous levels across the Internet. If you’re meticulous, you might also stumble on the mother lodes of the original Boomer Bible Website (wait for it to load from Wayback Machine), A Deerhound Diary and Instapunk Rules (blow though the two spurious warning screens; it’s only a glitch and you won’t have to do it more than once) where all the rules of writing change or go away altogether. Not to mention dueling with you pigs for more than 10 years on Facebook. Welcome to my world. And I welcome Reich to mine, because I know he can’t swim in my lake…

“Ride the Snake, baby…”

…Or in my other lake.

So if they come and take me away for good, this will be a good place to start remembering me on the sly.

UPDATE 5/11/26: I had occasion to reference this post because Reich is still making noise and acting vindictive. He’s not the only one. The left still thinks it can conquer the enemy by joining every enemy of this nation against the United States. So I thought it was appropriate to verify the hyperlinks in this text and correct any that weren’t working. Because I wouldn’t like the Reichs of the world to think we’re cooling off and not working as hard against them as before. I stand just as ready to take on their reprogramming drones and let them do their worst. I already gave up vodka as part of my private bargaining before the ‘24 election. I’m prepared to give up more than that if need be. We may not win in the end, but we won’t be going gentle into that dead night.

I know how arrogant this old post must sound now. But I don’t care. My contempt for those who turn the privilege of power into a license for criminal despotism is absolute. If a decade is a mile, I’ve got the seven miles of tail the song warns of, and I’ve been in this fight longer than almost everyone I know who’s still alive. I was 13 when I first heard this life-changing song in a boarding school dorm room after lights out in the company of three friends who are not all still with us. One, my closest friend, didn’t make it past 40. Jim Morrison, who foresaw the apocalyptic waves breaking over our generation, died in 1971, one of the earliest casualties of drugs and sex and loss of faith. I have outlived him by 55 years thus far, and I am just as engaged in the struggle to save the west as I ever was. And hearing this particular poem was the exact moment when I learned nothing would ever be the same again.