Sarcasm anyone?
By Brandon Astor Jones
"The trouble with the Republican Party is that it has not had a new idea for 30 years." — Woodrow Wilson
America's new speaker of the House of Representatives is also a history professor who writes about seductive German spies and World War II. The book is fiction and has recently gone on the market. I will not mention the title or the publisher's name, because I would not want to be responsible for anyone buying a copy.
Let me share one of that book's passages with you: "She rolled onto him and somehow was sitting athwart his chest, her knees pinning his shoulders. 'Tell me or I will make you do terrible things,' she hissed." Excuse me? Is this the "family values/prayer in school" Newt Gingrich?
Far be it from me to begrudge any man or woman a spate of literary lust, fictional or not. On the other hand I am just a little confused here. Let me explain. The speaker wants to pull most, if not all, of the children who are on welfare out of their homes and place them in "orphanages" — citing his motive as a desire to cut government spending. The speaker is big on states' rights too, so we can assume that those orphanages will be run by state governments.
Most orphanages are very much like prisons, with few exceptions. Far more often than not, they are operated by the same kind of people who are called "staff members" in prisons. They are all politically connected from the top right on down.
You cannot imagine the kind of child abuse that goes on inside some orphanages. At the very least mass emotional demoralisation, and physical and sexual assaults are as common as the sunrise — and not just among the children themselves, but from institutional staff as well.
For proof you need only note the number of state and federal prisoners who were once residents of orphanages, some quite recently.
I should mention too that the state of Georgia is one of the most notorious for prisoners being routinely assaulted both physically and emotionally not only by other prisoners, but also by staff members.
Georgia law provides a prison term of no less than three years for any prison staff member caught engaging in sexual activity with a prisoner (even if it is with the consent of the prisoner). Yet few staff members have been sent to prison, despite having been "caught in the act" by other staff.
The reason that a staffer does not go to prison for his criminal act is that prisons (not unlike the speaker's proposed orphanages would be in Georgia) are big business. One prison can provide a community with hundreds of jobs. What are a few sexual assaults on prisoners compared to hundreds of jobs for an entire community?
Here at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center, not too long ago an assistant warden was allegedly caught in the act of sodomy with a prisoner — a crime that carries a 20-year prison sentence. He was immediately escorted off the prison grounds, but he has never been arrested, paraded before television cameras or sentenced to time in prison. That is how things are done in the highly political prison business in Georgia.
Before I get too far afield here, my point is that the speaker and his robotic cohorts are anti-just-about-everything: sex, abortion rights, funding for the arts and who knows what else. He is extremely tough on crime too; he wants more prisons and tougher sentences to go with them.
Now, the speaker has gone to Washington to whip his followers into a frenzy of assaults upon poor people, starting with their children. When he writes his next book, let us hope it is not titled Orphanage-made Prostitutes or some similar tragedy — because if he has his way in Washington, such a book might not be fiction.
[The writer is a prisoner on death row in the United States. He is happy to receive letters commenting on his columns. He can be written to at: Brandon Astor Jones, EF-122216, G2-51, GD&CC, PO Box 3877, Jackson, GA 30233, USA.]