I was born in the mid-20th century (the 1900s). About 1962 I began writing poetry and fiction. About that time Bob Dylan changed songwriting from Doo Wop to something old made new again, a folk filtering of current reality, love and life. He commented on the weirdities of our times, but he didn't mean to change the world; just comment. Mainly, he was just a song and dance man. He's still singing, still dancing, in 2009.

I didn't know it then, but life on planet Earth was changing around us, him, me, you if you were born then. We had gone from about 1 billion humans in 1850 to 2 billion by 1925. Then 3 billion in just 37 more years, 1962. We'd developed an industrial capacity for consuming and dirtying our environment.

President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963 while I was in wood shop at Harding Elementary school, Sciotoville, Ohio. I remember shutting down a saw to listen to the announcement over the loudspeaker. The teacher was out. They told us, played taps or something, and, when it stopped, we all went back to work for about 20 seconds before we stopped, like of one mind, and crowded together in the center of the room, just looking at each other. I don't remember what we said, if anything. We could not conceive what the implications were for our young lives. Kennedy wanted to lead us to the Moon and beyond. The fascists wanted to mislead us to war.I wonder how many of those boys survived the new direction the fascists took us in after killing Kennedy.

They dismissed school. I ran all the way home to 1010 Harding Avenue. I burst in the door. Mom was at the sink in the kitchen.

"Have you had the TV on?" I asked. She hadn't. I told her, "The President's been shot!"

Your history book may not say so. That's the best evidence of conspiracy I've found, that they have the power to erase it from your history books and not teach your children about it. Kids tell me they never heard of it until they got to college. And then it's often the government version, with none of the abundant evidence of doubt.

The Beatles came to America in 1964 and, picking up from Dylan, expanded the possibilities for songwriting in a dozen directions. Anything was possible. Songs could be about love and teen angst, or anything you could tell a story about, any story you could imagine, and sung any way that was interesting to sing it.

I learned to like dancing with girls, holding their hands, kissing, and imagining it all, with the Beatles' tutelage.

Then we moved to New Boston, a few miles geographically, a vast change culturally. While our old home area had traditional families, here there were lots of people being raised by grandparents. The nearby bars and liquor store would be my father's undoing, confusing the rest of us.

About 1965 I worked, tearing down a house where Route 52 was being widened to four lanes, Wheelersburg, Ohio. The $5 or $10 I earned each weekend bought me a Norma guitar ($40) from B&B Loan, Portsmouth, Ohio. I'd wanted to play every since I'd seen my Dad and his brothers play at the old home place on Mt. Olive in Pulaski, Virginia, and my Mom's father play banjo up Bear Creek in Ohio. I was walking along Rt. 52 and found a piece of plastic that resembled a guitar pick and thought, "I'm on my way!" Of course, no one would let a kid touch the instruments. Now I'll let any kid explore my guitar, no matter how young or old. Thinking back, I wish I'd shared my guitar more with my Dad. He had seven kids and a wife. He couldn't afford one. He taught me to play "House Of The Rising Sun." (Am C D F E)

A guy down the street was in The Bare Facts band with a song on the radio called "Georgianna." I began to write songs. They weren't great but had enough merit to keep me playing. I'd play in the morning and be late for school. I'd come home for lunch and be late getting back. I'd play during commercials while I watched TV. I didn't have any device to tune it so it was always either higher or lower than standard pitch, which affected the way I sing to this day. I sing in the key I play in. My brothers got into a tug-of-war over my Norma and broke it.


Back then, black Americans could not vote or even sit beside me in public places in some parts of the country. They were not allowed at Dreamland, a swimming pool open to 'the public' in Portsmouth. I remember some kids put their money on the counter and ran on in. They called the police. There was a newspaper picture of one kid, fully dressed as I recall, jumping past a policeman into the water. It's hard to conceive that, in my lifetime, human beings had to resort to such tactics to be equal in the eyes of American society and the law, right here in river city, just to go swimming! We're a more primitive race of being than we realize. Racism was prevalent and prominent in 2008 as Barack Obama, a black man, ran for President. He won! Idiots in media asked, "Is racism over? Has Dr. King's 'dream' been realized?" Please! Racism is alive and sick. And all you have to do is disagree with racism to be discriminated against, regardless of skin color.

Hell, I couldn't vote either. "You're old enough for war, But too young for votin'," Barry McGuire growls in "Eve of Destruction." We began to question how the government was using us in the American war in southeast Asia. We had no idea. Many still don't. The truth is elusive, and even if you find it you're alone with it.

If you got in trouble with the law in the late 1960's the judge might ask, "Would you rather go to prison or in the Army?" With little concept of what being used for war would be like, many opted for the Army.

If the elite people of your local society who got appointed to your military draft board didn't like your daddy's politics, economic status, skin color, whatever, they had the power to send you to war. It was like Hitler's 'Send me your undesirables' order. They later assigned us all numbers and drafted us by lottery, like Hitler's concentration camps did the 'workable' slaves among the 17 million people they enslaved, the 11 million people they slaughtered. You knew your number would eventually come up even if it was somehow random. And the people went along with it because it was the government and they told us that's what we had to do to preserve America from something called 'Communism.' That was a lie.

In 1965, black Americans made up 20% of the front lines of the American war in Southeast Asia, far out of proportion to their numbers in the US population. The brothers called it 'Soulville' up there. They served for patriotic motives, economic motives, and often as victims of institutionalized racism in their local, state, and national government.

The average age of the fighting man in Vietnam was 19. We were children, fodder for the cannons, meat for the dogs of war. "America is eating its young," Daniel Ellsberg, the guy who exposed the fascists' plan in "The Pentagon Papers" said.

At Glenwood High School, I took an aptitude test. It came back as a graph with a small spike for clerical work. I was literate. But there was a huge spike for the fine arts. I liked things artful, visual, musical, conceptual, words. And that was all. With a little guidance I might have had a career in something like that. But nooooo!

Black leader Malcom Little, calling himself Malcom X to discard his 'slave name,' tried to teach his people not to take 'the white man's drugs.' That was smart. He later realized 'the man' comes in all colors. Brilliant. He was assassinated in 1965. It seems the fascists murder anyone who tries to lead people away from their machinations.

Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968. His dream for humanity is alive still, in 2008 as Barack Obama ran for President, a dream where we judge and are judged by the content of our character, regardless of the color of our skin. Obama paraphrased King's 'Dream' speech in his first speech after his election, reiterating that it was not just for some, but for everyone.

Robert Francis Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968. He too, had a dream for us, one that didn't include wasting us in a drug war in Southeast Asia.

I remember questioning the universe, "What in the hell is going on?"

I had no idea. You probably still don't. It's still going on in 2009.

Life is what happens while you're making plans. Life happened. I was drafted in 1969, in a letter from fascist President Richard Milhous Nixon, "Greetings. Come and be used to some purpose in the American War in Southeast Asia, or else."

The Nazi Big Lie was that it was to stop communism, the 'domino' theory, 'If Viet Nam falls, other countries will topple, like dominoes. Soon we'll be fighting them over here.' Funny how that didn't happen, even though Viet Nam fell to the communists as America and its collaborators pulled out in 1975, having accomplished the fascist goal of taking the drug trade from French organized crime and giving it to American organized crime.

But the government and companies were doing business with the Communists (1940's-1960's), just like the Reagan-Bush people did with Saddam Hussein (1980's). And others are surely doing in 2009, and ever on. They have their money invested in war and foment war to make a profit. Benito Mussolini's definition of fascism was, "...a collusion of government and big companies."

The Big Lie was a lie of the variety damned by God.

But, when your country calls, and you believe in your country, you come.

I didn't find out 'til later "they" weren't my country; I was. I didn't come because I thought it was right. I came because I was afraid of what they did to people who didn't.

They still tell that Big Lie, with the latest updates.

"We're fighting them over there (Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, Iran, Nicaragua, Columbia) so we won't have to fight them over here," the Big Lie said then. That same Big Liie is being used by the fascists to eliminate the Constitution of the United States in 2008-09.

Here's hoping 'they' don't figure out all 'they' would have to do is ignore 'us over there' and come on over here and we'd be at their mercy.

To avoid the inevitables of being drafted into the Army or Marines, which they were doing at the time, I enlisted in the Air Force. I loaded bombs, rockets and missiles and aircraft guns, never making it to the war zone, but a short hop away, in Korea, and with occasional orders to that fate always canceled.

I loaded nuclear weapons too. We kept them ready to go if the President gave the order, that fascist I mentioned, Nixon. One of my jobs would be to pull the safety pin just before the plane took off, opening the electrical circuit, enabling the pilot to arm and drop the bomb if he had that order. That sure made me think, especially as it became apparent fascists had taken over the U. S. government, and the power to give ME that order to pull the pin.

They were exposed in the 1972 Watergate affair. I read about 10 books, consecutively, in the early 21st century about it and it is an astounding crime, much bigger than one break-in at a Washington hotel. Thousands of homes, offices, phones, cars, public places bugged. Infiltration of hundreds of operatives of peace groups, environmental groups, unions, opposition parties, companies. False evidence planted and people jailed based on it. According to one conspirator, murders on orders. Everything they told us to fear from the Communists, they were/are doing.

The cover-up worked. They got away with it, and still do.

I survived mis-leadership of the predations of the fascist military-industrial-political-intelligence-underworld complex which was feeding American teenagers into their undeclared drug-war machine in Southeast Asia. When I got back to the U. S. I reported to my duty station but refused to load bombs anymore.

Looking back, I realize the bastards tried to kill me and my whole generation. They did kill a few hundred thousand of us, and that's just so far. We're still dying from physical wounds, drug addictions,, drug experiments, and tropical diseases, chemical exposures (agents orange, white, pink), and psychological trauma.

I escaped when they said, "What day in April 1974 would you like to get out?"

I said, "April 1st would be cool man!" April Fool's was a fitting end to the farce. They thought it was too cool. I got out some other day that month.

I came home to find the 'drug subculture' I'd left four years earlier was now a 'drug culture.' Not just the young, aspiring hippies, those subject to the whim of their draft boards, but their parents and grandparents were using prescription amphetamines and barbiturates. The fascists were pushing drugs through every doctor in the country. Even older folks were sharing and selling their prescription pills to other people. It seemed to be the intent of fascist government to sedate America so they wouldn't protest, couldn't think through what was being done to them and their children.

The fascists were trafficking in heroin and marijuana, the real purpose of their war in Southeast Asia. A heroin epidemic hit the streets of the world, thanks to fascists using, as Nixon said, 'The apparatus of the federal government to screw our enemies.'

He also said, 'The real war is over here,' meaning we, the people, of the United States, resisting being used by the fascists, were that enemy. Nixon hired Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld hired Dick Cheney, and they began dismantling the Office of Economic Opportunity, which had cut poverty from 22% of Americans to 11%. Poverty is a weapon of fascism. The fascists went to war on us, and have not stopped as of 2009.

In Asia I always wanted to help the people there build something, even work in the fields or rice paddies, something helpful, productive, positive, instead of what I was doing. After I 'escaped,' I went to work in various fields, went to college, ending up in a 32-year career in that small spike I told you about helping juvenile delinquents, rehabilitating homes of the poor, developing employability of young men and women, helping workers disconnected from their jobs to reconnect. In 2008 those bastards robbed me of that ascendancy to a position where I could enact tactics based on my research. Now I deliver meals to elderly people.

The fascists struggled to maintain their status quo but freedom is hard to suppress when the 'free' don't know the fascists are trying to suppress it. They kept a low profile back then. In 2008-09 they're in-your-face about it, emboldened and unchallenged, aided and abetted by organized crime, entrenched in the military-industrial-political-intelligence-underworld complex their puppet President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about as he left. I think he'd just begun to see how he had been used too. He said their 'influence' was 'unsolicited and unwarranted.' And then he looked about nervously. The fascists were there, just off camera, and had VP Nixon waiting to take his place.

Fascism thrives on public ignorance. It's hard to fool people who are well-read. Most people aren't well-read. They're busy trying to keep gas in the car ($4.09 a gallon at one point in the early 21st century), food on the table (milk, $4.39 a gallon) a roof over their heads ($425.73 mortgage), and not be poisoned by the tobacco companies' food takeover (1980's) and the pharmaceutical companies' chemicals; not medicine to cure, just chemicals to get your money until you die. They're busy trying to find a job since the fascists conspired to give companies taxpayers' dollars as an incentive to abandon the American people and take the companies just across the border into Mexico, to China and India, and elsewhere. They deregulated the banks and millions of Americans have lost their homes, foreclosures some places on 1 of every 13 homes in 2009. The social implications of millions of lost jobs, millions trying to find new places to live, are complex and massive. Many of the ills that plague humanity will arise from the misleadership of the American people by the fascists.

Who the hell's got time to study the big picture that's going on around them? Their survival is threatened in the 'little' picture of their personal lives, the lives of their families, friends and neighbors. America is under attack by a domestic enemy, fascism, a collusion of government and big companies. Big pharmaceutical companies write their own laws and make drug war on us. Big energy companies write their own laws and suck money out of our pockets. Big banks rob us of our American Dream of owning our homes. Our government colludes with them; fascism.

Having been pushed out of the little spike and scared by negative possibilities, I suddenly see outside that door, a new world of positive possibilities. It's out there. I'm sure of it. America can be the honest and honored dream you thought it was, but you'll have to work on it. You may have to fight for it. Pay attention. You need to know what the enemy is doing and figure out what you can do to prevent their success.

And now, I have a couple hundred songs to play I didn't have back when I was trying to decide what spike to work in. Wait until you hear them. I hope to upload them and sell them for ninety-nine cents like others do. Let's see; that means, if I sell a million of them...oh well, one day at a time. They're all available if anyone wants to license them for recording or publishing. I could use the money.

Gary E. Andrews
September 2009
Portsmouth, Ohio
Email: garyeandrews@yahoo.com
www.garyeandrews.com