Allan Weisbecker

 

[Editor's note: the following was written after a near death experience, obviously, and I've made no attempts to clean it up, as it portrays the writer's state of mind.] Near Death “One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small…” Jefferson Airplane I'm leaving ijn the typos as an indirect and constant indication of how I am (in every sense). Normallly I make about one typo for every four sentencnes, before editing and correcting. As you're already aware, I'm not doing that well here, even with my Mac's oautomatic spell correct, which fixis 90% of my fukcups. What all the typos mean is that I'm not 100%, far from it. Way far. I fear that my writing is not going to be what it should be, can be, meaning the voice and the flow. I hven't written anything in a long while. I'm nervous. I've got to do a bit of 'throat clearing,' as Lesley wou;d say. 'And you know you're going to fall…' I almost died recently. Went through an actual 'near death experience' – which is a different concept than 'almost dying.' I'll try to explain. In the early morning hours of July 4th, a surgical team at Southampton Hospital (on Long Island, NY) was squintinng at my innards and asking about living wills and next of kins while my vital signs were getting droopy. (One oif the nurses told me this later, when I was oiut of the woods.) 'And you've just had some kind of mushroom…' After almost dying I then suffered from something formally called Intensive Care Unit (or ICU) Psychosis, which I just recently found out about and then lookd into. Basically means you lose your mind. One in 3 ICU patients suffer from some sform of it. This was not my near death experience, though. Hnag in and I will get around to that. I hope you'll take this the right way, meaning not as boasting: when I lose my mind I don't fuck around. I do it properly. I come up with a whole lunatic narrative. Hrere we go. ICU Psychosis (with typos), ACW style: Reember The Manchurian Candidate, the movie (it was also a greatr book by Richard Condon)? Okay. I spent 17 days in ICU and for about 4 days of that I thought everything – the hospital and the doctors and nurses and even my friendfs who came to visit – were part of a scheme to brainwash me, to turn me into someone else, or to get me to do something I wou;d not do. A nefarious plot was afoot. I wasn't surre about the specific purpose of the plot, of the brainwashing, although, predictably, I came up with some theories. But as with all lunacies, there was a certainb… logic lurking…. I mean if you dig deep enough into the subtext… More to come on that too, along with the neanr death experience. I swear I’ll get around to it. 'And the men on the chessboard get up and tell you where to go…' But holy shit thye'd sure gone to a lot of troublel, these bastards, to fuck with me, with the construction of a phony hospital and training everyone to say the right nursey and doctory things and ask the right questions (to find out what I knew?) -- and maybe plastic surgery to create evil doppelgangers of my visiting buddies. I scrapped the evil doppelganger theory after asking my board shaper/surfbuddy Jim a question only the real jim could've answered – had to do with the stringer arrangment of a surfboard blank I'd ordered. Okay. One lesss thing. Good. But plenty of other weird shit loomed. At first (before I was properly drugged/mesmerized/under control?) they made sure that I could not speak when I had visitors – I had a ventilator tube up my nose and down my throat and which scrwed up my vocal cords. When I decided I had to trust someone – a female surfbuddy, Claire – I tried to ask her to help me get out of there but because of the tube in my gullet nothing came out when I tried to speak. I ddn't know about the tube effect so my level of paranoia soared: they'd struck down my ability to plea for help! How did they do that? (My total lack of eye/hand coordination prevented me from writing notes.) 'Tell them a hookah smoking caterpillar has given you the call…' I repeated to Claire my plea for help in escaping, did so silently like some unhinged, demented mime, pointing and rolling my eyes and hoping she would read my lips, get the idea, but she just smiled, nodded and said I was going to be al right, something like that. But bhind the smile she looked very worried. Okay oksay, I was thinking. Better I keep all this to myself, anyway, while I figure out how to make my break for freedom. I shouldnt trust anyone… …lookinf to my right now and holy shit somehow there's an 8 x 10 of Gerry Lopez getting barreled at The Pipe taped to the wall by my bed. But how didd they know about me and surfing? Huh? (No, I never got to the point where I thought Gerry was in on the plot.) What else did they know about me? Was the photo a sarcastic reference to my 'Surfers Can Do Anything' credo? Like 'Oh, really?' These people were on my case big time. No other patients, either. It was just me in there as far as I could see. How come? Plus our hero is whacked on Dilaudid and maybe doesn't want to miss the next hourly shot. Cunning bastards, they DO know me. Speaking of which, the clocks. 'And the White Knight is talking backwards…' Have you seen those joke clocks where the numbers go the otherway (counterclockwise) and the second hand likewise goes the wrong way, so it actually sort of does tell the right time if your percerption likewise reverses to backasswards? Okay. I could see three wall clocks from my bed, right? (Why so many colocks? I wandered.) I spent hours, no exaggeration, trying to figure if the clocks were moving backwards, going counterclockwise, which would have been proof of…. of I don't know, but of something. I didnt get that far in my thinking – meaning what it would be proof of -- but I truly could not figure clockwise from the other way with those goddamn clocks. Another thing. Remember Kubrick's 2001, when the astronauts would jog around the rotating circular space ship, the centrifugal (or is it centripetal?) force holding them down as would gravity on earth. At one point, looking down the hallway, the 'ICU' or whatever it was looked and felt like that. It was curved upward and rotating like in the flick so I wouldn't float off my bed. This impression was right after a Dilaudid shot though, and didn't last long. I shrugged it off as small stuff. Listen: I remember all this clearly, perfectly so, and how sure I was that I was 'thinking logically,’ inductively, deducing what was real, analyzing my predicament, my option (especially the idea of escape), and so forth. Looking back, this is the scary part, the implications of my surety that I knew real from not real, and that I could figure out everything if I just really concentrated. 'When Logic and proportion have fallen softly dead…' For the three days (out of 17 in ICU) I'm speaking of I didn't believe for a minute that I was in a real hospital (ICUs don't look like normal hospital units: Vegas-like with the no-windows motif; the many wall clocks -- no matter which way they tick -- don't hint at the morning/night issue, which I never got right; all those weird blinking, beeping, buzzing devices, plus the nuclear goddamn gimcracks that can see everything, future progeny be damned, and my nurses kept having conferences, if you get my drift, glancing over at me, sweet smiles gone now, just grim nods, vehement head shakes, arguing my fate between themselves in what sounded like Bulgarian from a distance, although I was not sure about tht. Plus they'd inject me with weird glowy stuff with 6 inch needles. But ahhh, the Dilaudid nurse…. I was in love with the Dilaudid nurse… “Feed your head!” At the peak of my psychosis, which I disguisd with the aplomb of a cagey nonfiction writer who knows how to bullshit, even in the face of the daily grillings – 'Who is president of the United States?', they'd ask, that kind of depressing stuff -- to verify that I was lucid; I played their game well! Wait, where was I? what happened to my train of thought?... Right, the peak of my psychosis… At the peak of my psychosis I thought the ICU, the total massive goddamn locus of my incarceration, was en route to the Middle East. Okay, best I repeat that one in case it blew right by you: for a full day I strongly suspected that the whole Manchurian shebang scenario I was being subjected to was moving, eastbound, I sensed, probably for the Middle East, maybe for one of the 'stans, maybe the one where they boil you alive just for the grins of hearing you howl. '…and the Red Queen's 'Off with her head!' My explanation? They'd somehow loaded the phony ICU onto a ship -- I sensed a gentle oceanic pitch and roll to my surroundings and maybe the rumble of a big diesel far below. So on top of everythjing I was now the victim of some sort of Dubya-ordered extraordinary rendition. Oddly, though, I only founbd this possibility 'interesting.' The specter of waterboarding in Khartoum, let alone the Allan-as-Kurdish-stew-in-a-'stan scenario, did not occur to me. Maybe it was the distraction of the constant pain… …the indignity of others, females, some young and pretty, seeing to my (misfiring) bodily functions (and asking interminal questions about them), the sensory depreivation, the apathy, the night sweats and insomnia… and then, finally, when came fitful sleep awakening to be needle-probed at 4 AM because… no reason given by the cheerful voice announcing the incipient discomfort, just 'a little prick.' In summation, the abject misery and flashes of hopelessness a prolonged hospital stay engenders. I've not gone into that stuff… let's stick to the psycho shit, shall we? 'And if you go chasing rabbits…' Here's the thing, though. If you'd sat down next to me in that ICU and asked, 'Howsit, Allan?' and we carried on a conversation, you'd not have an inkling of what was going on in my head. This too is scary, no? But get a load of this: Larry David kept walking by. I'm not kidding. Larry David. Larry David of Seinfeld and ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm.’ About once a day he'd just walk by my open dooor. Not a guy that looked like Larry David. It was Larry David. 'Go ask Alice, I think she'll know…' If anyone out there knows where Larry David was in early to mid July, please get back to me. Just in case he was wandering around in the Southhampton Hospital ICU; help me clear that one up. (I asked two nurses and a doctor what Larry David was doing there, and they all denied having seen him. I knew enough not to bring up the subject again.) Importnant: This stuff is true. Those four days were as I've written here; what went on in my head. For evidence if not proof, Google 'ICU Psychosis.' (If there's anyone out there who's had a similar experience in ICU, I'd love to hear from you.) Okay. All right. # But what happened? What was my actuNal medical proble,m? Turned out I had an ulcer that kept getting worse until july 3rd, when it sort of exploded, perforated, blew stomach lining and acid and debris into other parts of my body. Caused bacterial pneumonia among other infective difficulties. (Trust me that you don't want your stomach and its contents blown into your lungs.) How it went down: I'd awakened in my Montauk house in the middke of the night, July 3rd, to a pain in my gut that was way off the pain spectrum. Way way off it. Indescribable. (You wanna talk about a writer's queasy gut? Holy shit!). This was from the hole that blew through my stomach lining, spraying acid everywhere. The nearest hospital to Montauk is up the island in Southampton -- it was two hours before an actuall doctor asked me why I was screaming like that while drenched in sweat. He seemed distracted, frowning and looking at his watch and then taking a cell phone call while I literally begged for pain relief. For the control he had over me and for the dumb ass questions he asked (under the circumstances) I wanted to strangle him. I hope he surfs and I run into him in the lineup someday. Next thing I remember is waking up in Post Op. At that time I could not rmember where I was or how I'd gotten there and couldn't ask because of all the tubes. The last few hours, how I got to the hospital and so forth, were lost hours that would come back very gradually. I was told later that I almost died in emergency surgery; I then spent a total of a month in the hospital; as I say, mostly in ICU. First my stomach explosion nearly killed me, then the pneumonia gave it a try. A nurse told me that they'd loaded me up with antibiotics, which had to kick in right away, within a few hours, or I was a goner. None of them, she said, would have bet on my making it. I was released from the hospital two weeks ago. Until now I didn't, couldn't, write a word. I was paralyzed with self-doubt, with fear that I'd not be able to do it, that whatever I had that let me write was gone now, poofed out. What I've written here is not what I wanted to write. I wanted to write something significant. See, some significant thoughts did occur to me while I was laid up in ICU. I don't know if I can do it, explain it meaningfully. The thoughts I had were not in words, which is what we're stuck with here. I'll try, though. You have to give it a shot. The near death experience was real, but delayed; it didn't happen during the 12 hours during which I could have -- by the odds should have -- croaked. It was a day or so later, just before the Psychosis kicked in, along with my extraordinary rendition and Larry David sightings. I was lying there mindlessly waiting for my Dilaudid and suddenly I felt like I was back in the OR, unconscious, maybe going to die and I felt very calm about it, like had I died that would have been okay. This calm I felt, which really swept over me (before the Dilaudid shot, so it wasn't that), is the essence of my near death experience. I'll try to elaborate but I harbor little hope that it's going to work. I don't believe in an afterlife. I'm quite sure (but not positive) that when my candle blows out, that that. I'm not going to see Mom, watch any Giants games with her; I'm not going to clock any more tip time on my surfboard, cop any more tang, none of that. Poof. I don't believe in karma. Karma, in fact, is an awful concept. Hey, do the right thing or the universe will fuck you up? Meaning if there was no karma, you could go ahead and do whatever you want to whomever you want, no problem. That's what karma means, isn't it? Fuck that. How about doing the right thing because it's the right thing? No other reason. Don't expect a fucking reward for it, or a lack of punishment, which is the same thing. I mean Christ, what is with that shit? What goes around comes around? Yes, sure, except when it doesn't. Besides, everyone believes their karma is straight. Everyone believes they are just fine. Your cheating mate, the asshole who dropped in on you during this morning’s surf session (or stole something else from you), Cheney, Bush, Rice, Rove, et al. Bad karma? Nuttin wrong wid any of dem! What, me worrry? Nope, I kne3w it. This isn't working out. Words. How to explain that all this plus a lot more occurred to me without a word being thought? How to explain The Glide, how it feels? Same thing. One more try. We're all going to die. You know it, I know it. Or we think we know it. Do we really? Well, at that moment, I knew it. And it was okay. But since I did not die, I knew I had to redouble my efforts, had to do better at what I'd only been dabbling at. Like in my last book. No. I don't mean 'out' bad or even evil people, although that can be part of it. What I dabbled in in that book – and to my relief, no, joy, a lot of readers picked up on it – was the idea that all the bad stuff of this world is based on the belief in untruths. I've only dabbled, been afraid to dive right in to this. No more dabbling. Gotta grab you, make you want to know What Happens Next, tell you about truth and untruth… I can't get uppity, though, even with the things I know about, I can't get uppity… et-fucking-cetera, but I got to go beyond dabbling. This world, our species, is on the brink. You want to die in peace, knowing it's okay, afterlife or no, karma or no, you have to do something, something that may not be, probably will not be, in your self interest. What that something is will vary, depending on who you really are. But first, you, we, have to get past denial. We have to get past our versions of my ICU Psychosis. We have to give it shot. Okay? All right.

ICU Pshychosis, an Explanation Hi folks, My recent 'Near Death' ramblings got out of hand length-wise; I didn't have the space/time to explain my theory of why my ICU Psychosis went in the direction it did – I refer to the Manchurian Candidate/paranoia motif (with a bit of Alice in Wonderland via Jefferson Airplane on the side). Here we go. A few days before my nocturnal stomach detonation I drove up the island for a consultation with a doctor whom I knew, although not well, from the old days of the birth of surfing on Long Island; I'm talking the early to mid 1960s here. But now is now; there have been many changes in my old circle of friends; the old bud I speak of, call him Doc, and I hadn't communicated in going on half a century. We'd long ago gone our ways, me to Hawaii to pretend to go to school while Doc kicked ass academically right through undergrad and grad school and then med school. He is now a well-known and extremely well respected physician specializing in infectious diseases. Doc is currently devoted to research; but our having been reunited by phone, he agreed to consult on what I thought I had, Lyme disease, which was his specialty during his practicing career. He was doing an old chum a favor. Here's where it gets weird. The PlagueDoc's specialty is now related to bio-terrorism; he's researching a new strain of the plague. Right. The Plague. The Black Death. The disease that killed an estimated 100 million people in its several outbreaks, mostly in the 14th and 17th centuries. This version of The Plague will be airborne, apparently. Say 'Hi' to a buddy or sneeze at him from across the room and… the black bloated boils, the fever, the convulsions… The Big D. Doc is doing this research for the government. The Bush administration. Me being me, I couldn't keep my trap shut on this, both on the phone and then during our physical reunion regarding my possible Lyme disease problem. Doc says he's working on a vaccine. You know, to save lives in case we're attacked by… …but wait, Doc. To develop a vaccine, you have to have the germ, right? You have to diddle with the pathogen itself. Don't you? And you say you're developing new strains? Wait…I'm getting ahead of myself. In my 'Near Death' essay I wrote that the belief in untruths is the root of all that is wrong with the world. I also wrote that I have to quit dabbling and do the right thing in pointing out untruths, give it a shot. Okay. This is where that comes in, although in this case it's untruth by omission… Let me take a breath prior to diving into this… Okay… Oil RigOil. At its root, my worry about Doc's diddling with what may be the most deadly pathogen known to man has to do with oil. Crude oil. Petroleum. (We haven't the space here -- nor you the patience, I suspect -- for me to formally back up what I'll tell you, but at the end of this I'll recommend a couple books and an excellent documentary film, as substantiation. So for now, just trust me; just for the helluvit.) You won't hear any of this from the mainstream media, by the way. God forbid you get upset before the Apocalypse. Media Oil Pundit Media oil pundit There is no serious disagreement among the experts that there are about one trillion barrels of liquid crude oil left below ground. There likewise is no disagreement that all the major fields have been located and are included in the trillion barrel estimate. (You will hear different from certain mainstream media pundits – they have their heads up their asses. Again, trust me for now on this.) Human oil consumption on planet earth is about 85-90 million barrels per day. If you do the math you come up with about 35 years of pumpable, liquid crude oil left for us to burn. (Mostly burn: there are a lot of uses of crude oil besides internal combustion energy production; more about this in a minute.) But there are problems with this number: it assumes that the present rate of consumption remains the same, does not increase. Fact is, however, that it's increasing like a sonofabitch, mostly because of China and India (among other developing nations), how they are bent on becoming First World countries; they want all the modern cool stuff we have, like cars and air conditioners and so forth. And who can blame them? So: There isn't much oil left, plus worldwide crude oil consumption is increasing exponentially. (If you're wondering what worldwide crude oil consumption has to do with Doc and The Black Death, let alone my ICU Psychosis, just hang in for a bit.) My educated estimate is that we have no more than 15 years of crude oil petroleum left. But there's even a problem with this number: As you get closer to the bottom of an oil field, the crude gets harder to suck up from down there. A lot harder. And a lot more expensive. Plus it takes a lot more ENERGY; like when you're drinking from a tall glass with a long straw, you gotta suck harder for the dregs. What happens with the crude is that the law of diminishing returns kicks in before you hit bottom. It's not like a tap that suddenly turns off. So keep this in mind. Also keep in mind that the rising cost of crude is apt to bring a recession, then a depression, which will further exacerbate the extraction problem economically by scathing the infrastructure (all the stuff needed to get the oil, refine it and move it). Speaking of the law of diminishing returns, maybe you've heard about all the shale oil reserves in the American West, Canada and Venezuela. Trillions of barrels, they say. Well, this stuff isn't even oil, and you don't pump it, you mine it; you basically have to strip mine, lay waste to Momma Earth, to get at the stuff. But so what, right? I mean when you gotta have it… and the morons chant, 'Drill baby drill! Drill baby drill!' (Again, do your own googling, but the practical effect of draining what's left of our 2% of the world's remaining oil reserves would be virtually zero. Not a penny saved at the pump [okay, maybe a penny], possibly a few days in delaying the end of oil. Do the math.) Problem is that the stuff you dig up isn't even oil, it's just sticky crud. Among other expensive, complex processes to produce burnable fuel you gotta boil it, and boiling takes what? Right, energy. Diminishing returns again. So you can basically forget shale oil. But what about ALTERNATIVE energy sources, a la T. Boone fuckin-A Pickens? Wind, solar, geothermal, all that cool renewable stuff? And Hydrogen! That stuff is everywhere. Forget it. Too late. If we'd begun working on those sources 30 years ago, maybe. But we didn't. Don't believe me? Fine, but, again, at the end of this I'll direct you to some resources that – assuming you have half an open mind – will back me up. (Lately, T. Boone has been shading his TV commercials toward pitching natural gas. I more or less saw this coming: the man who financed the Swift-boating of John Kerry had to have a personal agenda. Let's get this over with too. Natural gas will not save us from the energy catastrophe. I'll sum up all the research I did with this: "In the United States the demand for natural gas is projected to rise substantially in the coming years, as it is the environmentally preferred fossil fuel and therefore the fossil fuel of choice for new electric power plants... If lower-48 State proved gas reserves are reported to the Department of Energy with reasonable accuracy, ... it will not be possible to increase domestic gas production sufficiently to meet projected additional demand, especially with the addition of the new gas fired power plants...." by Joseph P. Riva [April 2002] (That's from 2002. It's worse now.) Allan Nutso? As I say, if the de facto end of civilization as we know it matters to you, do your own research to see if my head is up my ass. Google, read some books. Besides, if you dig up this stuff on your own, it's more likely to stick. Okay. Here's the thing, and I'm edging my way back to Doc and The Black Death. Crude oil is magical. It's not only what gets us to the beach, near or far – I'm talking Indo, Costa, Biarritz, wherever, via air travel – but it's to a huge degree what feeds us. How many humans do we have on this tired old planet these days? Six billion, give or take a few tens of millions, right? Okay. One thing all these folks have in common is that they have to be fed. Agreed? And most do get fed, if in many cases marginally. Ever hear of the 'Green Revolution'? In simple terms, it refers to the breakthroughs in agriculture that allow 6 billion people to live on the planet without horrendous mass starvation. Know what's needed so that six billion people can get fed? Back to petroleum. Oil. Oil byproducts are needed to make the fertilizers and pesticides and herbicides that are vital in growing enough food to feed everybody. (Almost everybody.) And this doesn't count fueling the internal combustion engines that spread the stuff on the fields, reap the harvest, and so forth, not to mention move the food to the folks who are supposed to eat it. I'm not going to even start a list of the other vital stuff that in some way requires petroleum for its very existence. It would be easier to list the stuff that does NOT involve it. (No kidding.) Okay. I'll mention one thing: surfboards. Aside from the fin screw(s) on your stick, it's all oil. No one has come up with a viable replacement for petroleum in the production of herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizer (and so forth). Point being: No oil and we're back to the 17th century in terms of how many people the planet can feed, even just in theory: Two billion. Assume for a moment that what I've said so far is true: 1. In about fifteen years we're going to run out of petroleum. 2. Consequently, the planet will not be able to feed more than two billion people. If this is true and I know it, who else knows it? Right. The psychopaths that are currently running things – whoever and wherever they are. So: Four billion people are going to die. One way or another. Starvation is not the best way for four billion people to croak, and the domestic order be simultaneously maintained. Starving folks tend to get desperate. They might even figure out that from square one they've been lied to about everything. Then they realize that they have nothing to lose. That can be inconvenient, dangerous even, for the psychopaths running things. The solution: Find a pathogen that will kill billions quickly, make it look like someone else did it (someone, say, who wears a towel on his head), and – this is vital! – have a vaccine ready, for the use of… you get the idea. This, of course, is where Doc comes in, and his tinkering with The Black Death. (One of the bio-weapon projects in the works is one that is race-specific! Helluvan idea!) I didn't get as far with Doc as I have with you all but I got far enough. DOC KNOWS THAT I KNOW WHAT HE'S UP TO!!!! Doc got on his secure line to Homeland Security and… Hence the Manchurian Candidate version of my ICU Psychosis. (The 'We're Off to See the Middle East!' aspect somehow fits too.) See how it all makes sense? No? All right. Hold on. Hang in for a minute more. Let's assume that part of what I've told you is true: The Oil/Black Death Connection. (Again, we'll soon run out of oil and as a consequence four billion people will have to go.) Let's further assume that Doc is in fact working on a Black Death bio weapon that may be used to kill the four billion. (Assume that there are scores of 'Docs' working on various bio-weapons, searching for 'perfection'.) But wait. Doc wouldn't do that. No fucking way. (Neither would the other 'Docs'.) I don't remember him that well but he's a decent guy and a family man and… This is the real problem you have with accepting what I've said, isn't it? People just don't do that sort of thing. Not my friend Doc, nor any of your friends, nor… …Doc wouldn't know what he's doing. He'd believe he's working to save lives… working for Truth, Justice and the American Way. And so would all but a handful of the hundreds of people involved in Project Lifesaver (or whatever 'War is Peace' Orwellian moniker they've come up with). Compartmentalization. Need to know. This is how the Manhattan Project stayed secret for the duration of WWII (much longer, actually); and there were thousands working on that one. Pearl Harbor is another – maybe the best – example. As you know, or should know, for many days ahead of time FDR knew the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and not only did not warn Admiral Kimmel but altered the chain of intelligence dissemination to make sure Kimmel would not be forewarned. Wait. You didn't know that? I guess the media sort of forgot to tell you. The documentation was declassified in 2000. (The best summation is in a book called 'Day of Deceit' by Robert Stinnett; I've read it; good book.) There were scores of people involved in that conspiracy but mostly due to compartmentalization, they never knew what they'd done. If the Pearl Harbor stuff is new to you and you're not in a state of mild shock, it's because of two factors: Time. A lot of time has gone by since the most revered U.S. president since Lincoln committed high treason and as a result directly caused the violent deaths of almost 3,000 Americans. The other factor is the result of FDR's high treason: We did need to get into WWII, which was his motive. But think about how it would have gone had the truth come out then, in 1941… Do a bit of research and you'll find that every war the United States has entered into (in the last, say, hundred years) involved high-level U.S. government deceit. (Google 'Operation Northwoods' for a beaut that didn't quite get off the ground.) Point being though: FDR's high treason was kept a secret for over half a century, mostly due to compartmentalization. One more digression: If history is still being written (and rewritten) in half a century, I predict that Cheney/Bush/et al. will not be so gently let off for 9/11.) Okay, so there you have it. Now we know why my ICU Psychosis went the way it did.     Subscribe to Allan's newsletter at Bandito Books.