Disaster Among the Heavens - Don E Peavy Sr (best books for students to read .TXT) 📗

Corps had given me a skill, my first diploma and a fire of hope that burned deep within me and that would forever keep me pressing forward no matter what obstacles I faced.
No wonder then that I felt as if the heavens had parted and a divine light had burst upon me. For if this Son of the South, this keeper of the flame of hope that the South would rise again; if this Southern gentleman with the Western hat could cast off his hooded cloak and burn it on the bonfire of the vanities, then his doing so was the best evidence that the Dream was being realized and the Great Sin had been forgiven and that Great Crevice in the soul of the American land had been bridged -- that finally the Veil had been lifted.
As these thoughts cascaded through my mind, I became aware of a great disturbance in the outer room. Anxiety took hold of me. I feared that the trumpet had sounded and the open policy closed before I could discern answers to the questions that haunted me like the ghosts of Ebenezer Scrooge. Great relief came upon my seeing Joan Baez leading a parade of Members of Congress into the room singing “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” Was this a happy day?
Whether it was a Happy Day
This I could not say.
For happy is as happy does
And I had yet to see what was!
After reading the contents of the box, I replaced the cover and suddenly I was engulfed in a blinding light which emanated from the ceiling as there were no windows in the room. I covered my eyes to protect them when I felt a gentle touch removing my hands from my eyes. It was the Prophet Joseph Smith and his Eight Witnesses who stood around the box. They glared at me approvingly and then the Prophet said, “This is true. Publish it that others may come into the light. Do not fear the critics. Remember, they persecuted me before you and if they persecuted one of their own, imagine what they will do to you!” The Witnesses gave out a deep, Gregorian chant of approval. Though gripped by fear, this chorus of apparitions gave me strength for the task ahead.
Having concluded their testimony, they lifted up toward the ceiling as did the box which was in the midst of them though none of them touched it. Their ascent was slow, methodical, and without the noise, flames and movement that accompanied the Great Spirit as it escaped the doomed Temple and made its way to the distant mountain top. There were no trumpets flaring to herald their departure. No great light burst into the room to usher them to their celestial abode. I gazed toward them until they and the sarcophagus disappeared.
“Young man, why stand you here gazing at the ceiling? Don’t you know that all things will come as they go and go as they come? You must get to the task at hand while it is at hand.”
I turned to face an old man whom I recognized from my Sunday school class as Josephus, the great historian. He was thin, almost frail, for one who had been raised in the household of a Roman Emperor. He still sported his long beard which fell almost to his waist. He wore the garb of a high priest, having been elevated in the afterlife from the mere priestly status he shared during his period of rebellion. His eyes radiated the colour of onyx which contrasted the gold that surrounded the base of his mitre. When he spoke, his voice was like that of many waters. He moved with all the grace of Daniel Dunglas Home, who fascinated members of the aristocracy by levitating in broad daylight.
These appearances and disappearances were playing havoc with my mind. All that I had undergone since my arrival in the Granite City had me confused and bewildered and was too incredible for me to accept calmly. I tried to speak but words failed me. Josephus handed me a golden pen with the words Testimonium Flavianum engraved upon it. As I took hold of the pen, he faded away whispering the word, “Write!”
I was alone once again. I looked at the pen and at each of my hands. The pen vibrated and sent tremors of electricity through my hands. Then I found a stack of legal pads nearby and started to write down the things I had seen, heard, read, and felt; making copious notes while interviewing thousands of persons, both living and dead. Hear then this story of woe. Listen carefully. For those who hear these words and believe will be spared the horror of the eternal darkness. Those who don’t, well, even now the fingers of the abyss are creeping upon you. So listen, and in listening believe. For in believing you will be spared the disaster among the heavens.

. . .


Chapter 2

It was a time of great anxiety for the people of the United States on a hot Sunday morning in July 1966. They sat mesmerized before television screens while live reports from Chicago projected images of a nation suffering from a racial divide which was on the brink of a cataclysmic eruption as evidenced by the violence and destruction of the race riots in Chicago. Details of those riots are well documented in the body of the Kerner Report and are dramatized eloquently in the marvellous work, “The Spook Who Sat By the Door.” Our story begins where those two accounts end as recounted in the Appendix A to the Kerner Report which has not been officially released by the government and now may never be released so as to imbue government officials with deniability.
The riots could not have come at a worse time for a nation already suffering from nightly broadcasts of violence in the South where the Civil Rights Movement was encountering the brutality of a “peculiar institution” that refused to die and continued to reincarnate in ever more horrific forms of oppression.
Ironically, America could sleep at nights with the violence in the South because it could lie to itself that the South was an aberration of life in America – that the veil had been lifted in the North and elsewhere.
For most Americans, their greatest threat came from communism and the Soviet Union was the focal point of their anger and concern. Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield had not yet made the transition from R&B stars to prophets of soul and thus there was hardly anyone outside the Civil Rights movement who could or at least who did call Americans to confront domestic issues of racial inequality and how these boiling issues threatened to explode the melting pot of American culture and civilization. Thus it was that Americans were able to sleep at night – snuggled in their pillows of self deception. That was until the events in Chicago and their aftermath which form the basis of this history and the genesis of the Kerner Commission Report and the never-before-published Appendix A.
Chicago had exploded the quiet dreams of comfort and now Americans had no retreat. Their sleep had been disturbed. They had been awakened by the explosions and gunshots in the streets of Chicago and could no longer bury their heads in their pillows. It is no wonder that Valium would make its appearance during these years and by the time of the Kerner Commission Report, would be the best selling drug in the United States.
Americans had recoiled in horror at the sight of monks setting themselves aflame in Saigon in protest of the Vietnam War and also when they had witnessed Negroes beaten by police and attacked by water hoses and dogs in the South. They had watched these things with anguish but still slept at night because they could distance themselves from those faraway places. Chicago had changed all of that.
Not far from the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, the emancipator of America’s schizophrenia inflicted by its slavery problem, the heart of the Midwest and the gateway to the North, Chicago had prided itself on being a modern metropolis where people lived in racial harmony even though they continued to suffer economic divisions. Yet, as the Kerner Commission found, Chicago, like America in general, was self-deluded. The race riots of 1966’s hot and humid summer was not only Chicago’s wake up call, it acted as a jolt to the mind of a sleeping giant and stirred the hearts of a people who had waxed cold following the carnage of two world wars and two international conflicts in Korea and now Vietnam. Now, Chicago found itself repeating its history as new riots broke out in the summer of 1968 spurred by what the Kerner Commission labelled as "'the so-called 'Black Revolution.'”
In a sense though, Chicago’s self-deception was only natural given that of the country at large. This self-deception is always present right before disaster strikes as history “guffaws in a rose bush.” Before the American Revolution, the nascent nation blamed its race problems on Royalists who were trying to undermine the struggling young colonies. After the American Revolution the country’s race problems were blamed on the North which allegedly was jealous of the genteel society established and enjoyed by the South. After the Civil War, America blamed its race problems on Carpetbaggers and after World War II, communists were to blame. Always and persistently, America found others to blame for a problem it could never face nor resolve. And so the prophetic words of W.E.B. DuBois continued to indict America – its race problem would be America’s greatest problem of the 20th Century and beyond.
And so it was that the race riots in Chicago had another dubious distinction that pricked the hearts and minds of not only the American people but their leaders in the nation’s capital. The precipitator of those riots had been the understudy of head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA): Robert Clanger Landest, III. Consequently, Landest was particularly distressed by the events in Chicago. He had flown there to help quell the riots and to “quiet once and for all” his Former Assistant. In Landest’s mind, he had succeeded on both accounts.
That was why he stared listlessly at the dewdrops falling from the cherry blossoms as his limousine snaked its way through the streets of Washington, D.C. en route to the White House. He rubbed his fingers through his salt and pepper hair which he kept neatly cropped and trimmed. He refused to allow himself the luxury of the emerging cultural trend of sideburns and moustache. His six-foot, two inches fit comfortably in the back seat of the stretched Cadillac. His stare shifted from the cherry blossoms to a film crew from National Geographic which was filming each fall of dew with time lapse-photography for its next special presentation.
Director Landest sat alone in the back seat of the vehicle whose lone front occupant was his Chauffeur. A glass partition between driver and passenger discouraged communication and so they drove and rode in silence -- each consumed by his own thoughts as morning peeked over the distant horizon, checking to make sure it was safe to emerge.
Charles Allen Brown, the chauffeur, inwardly cursed his low standing in the CIA that had resulted in his being “temporarily detailed” as the Director’s chauffeur. He guided the limo effortlessly through the streets of Washington, D.C. which had not yet come alive with tourists and politicians. This lack of traffic afforded him time to reflect which he took full advantage of. He thought about his past life as a