In November of 2003, my partner and I committed nonviolent civil disobedience to close the notorious School of the Americas along with ninety-six others: nuns, priests, doctors, and lawyers. We did this because ten of the fourteen dictators who seized power in Latin America from 1958 to the present graduated from this school: it’s been used by the CIA to undermine democratically elected governments in the name of US business interests. Because of our misdemeanor action of cutting the lock on a small pedestrian gate, we served six months in federal prison—me in Terre Haute, IN.
Below are letters, poems, and communiques from my six months in Terre Haute Federal Prison.
Salvation in Ill-Fitting Blue Pants. This is my testimony, written for Geez Magazine, about my conversion in prison…
Read more about Testimony: Conversion in Prison◆
I suppose all of you have heard rumor of amazing spiritual forces at work in dark, sardonic me: a Stretch Armstrong, if you will, caught between the forces of good and evil. For those of you who have recognized my divided nature this may come as no surprise. For some, it is a bearded Marx or Kropotkin sitting on the one shoulder in a posture of buddhist peace -- the picture of the earthly utopian vision, while upon the other shoulder a horde of televangelists twist and writhe in a heaving mass of snakelike coils…
Read more about Letter from Prison | January 5, 2004 | Conversion, Christianity, and Anarchism◆
For the Buddhist, hell is very tangible. The unenlightened life is hell. Souls continually recirculate through hellish life after life until enlightenment, upon which they escape to a state of oneness, infinite compassion, etc. This infinitely repeated cycle of life, death, and birth is called samsara: the Wheel of Suffering…
Read more about Letter from Prison | November 15, 2003 | Hell in Christianity, Samarai Culture, Buddhism, Daoism, and Prison◆
"People think television is a revolutionary invention, but it's also a revolutionary experiment in consciousness that's not all good." -- Thomas Doane-Swanson. It's funny how a concept or idea, once stuck to a thing, clings there with unshakable tenacity and thereafter lends its own peculiarities to the thing itself. I am reminded of the Kabbalists who sought the true name of Yahweh, a talisman more sacred than the Holy Grail…
Read more about Prison Letter: October 28, 2003 | Television, the Name of God, and the Stagnation of Mind◆
"You know what they need to do with them blonde-hair, blue-eye devils? They need to kill 'em right when they drop out they momma ass." --My joy of a bunkie. "See this skin?" A mestizo points to his almost white face. "This white skin is a scar from when your people raped my people." My milk-chocolate colored friend points to his skin, "This skin is from where the master raped a slave…
Read more about Letter from Prison | October 09, 2003 | Race, Arbitrariness of Law, and Vigilante Justice◆
"And I survived because I made a point of forgetting . . . I did not count the days or the weeks or the months. Time is an illusion that only makes us pant. I survived because I forgot even the very notion of time. What I remember are events and encounters and routines, markers that emerged here and there from the ocean of time and imprinted themselves on my memory." -- The Life of Pi…
Read more about Letter from Prison | Early October | Alienated Labor◆
One of those things which incessantly tormented me when I first arrived was the continual feeling of eyes on the back of my head. A cunning authoritarian regime does not use brute vigilance as its preferred method of control. Instead, it enlists volunteer eyes from among those under scrutiny. This has a dual advantage: with proper nourishment, one authoritative eye can cultivate many traitorous eyes, thereby saving skilled labor one-hundred fold. And, it divides the ranks of the watched, fomenting distrust…
Read more about Letter from Prison | Constant Surveillance and Male Anger | September 13, 2003◆
"I still feel funny watching movies without my wife and kids . . ." . . . A child is crying and screaming, dragged by her mother away from the visiting room . . . "I'm going to sleep the day away. Wake me up in two-thousand-six." "Reuben, Reuben! Tell Pachengo about my daughter. Tell him, man! Tell him! She wild, dog, wild…
Read more about Letter from Prison: September 2, 2003◆
I slunk noiselessly candy on my breath past a weeping violin. I tore out my smile and rolled it like a cigarette smoldering gently. He began to smoke and my guilt subsided the smoke caught in his wrinkles and my nakedness chattered. I think I love the night with its wolfish yellow eyes the burn of anti-sleep pacing at my window smelling the rain…
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"'I would like to know which is worse -- to be raped a hundred times by Negro pirates, to have a buttock cut off, run the gauntlet among Bulgarians, be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-te, be dissected, row in the gallies, in short, to undergo all the miseries we have been through -- or to stay here doing nothing.' 'It's a great question', said Candide." -- Voltaire, Candide…
Read more about Letter from Prison: August 25, 2003◆
These are the words which I spoke to the judge just before he sentenced me to six months in prison, a year of probation, and a $1000 fine, in 2003. Your Honor: I am here before you because I violated a law. In front of Fort Benning Georgia I cut a lock and injured federal property…
Read more about Sentencing Statement
