By Don Jolly

The tabernacles of robbers prosper, and they that provoke God are secure

On September 11^th, 2001, three thousand people died in New York and Washington – but in Texas, one life was saved. Jeffery Eugene Tucker’s lethal injection was scheduled to have taken place that day. Governor Rick Perry granted him a temporary reprieve. The closing of federal courts “would not have given Tucker full opportunity … for a last minute appeal,” explained the Hood County News.

In the Summer of 1988, when Rick Perry was still a state representative, and a democrat, Jeffery Eugene Tucker was looking for a way out. He’d been nabbed for marijuana in Collin County, jacked for forged checks in Tarrant, and sent up for auto-theft in Plano Pinto. He was through with Texas.

Allegedly, he made a plan.

Less than a month after being paroled, in the Summer of 1988, he combed through the classifieds in the Fort Worth Star Telegram, circling a few car notices before settling on an ad for a white GMC pickup truck and tan travel trailer. Using an assumed name, he made an appointment with its owners: Wilton and Peggy Humphreys.

The next morning, Tucker stopped in an Arlington pawnshop and bought a .38 caliber pistol. He lied on the necessary paperwork (Federal Form #4473), and paid with a stolen check. There was no waiting period.

Around three, Tucker arrived at the Laguna Tres development outside of Granbury, where the Humphreys lived. The couple had just purchased a recreational vehicle, they told him, making their old truck and trailer redundant. Wilton was a member of the Good Sam Club, an international association of R.V. owners, and a “wagonmaster” in his local chapter. He helped keep the Good Sams’ group camping trips comfortable and organized. After some visiting, and a test drive, Tucker agreed to take the truck. He and Wilton drove off for Granbury, to finalize the paperwork.

Just after four, that day, the body of Wilton J. Humphreys was discovered on Goforth Road in Parker County, Texas, between the towns of Aledo and Whiskey Flats. According to an account that appeared several days later in the Hood County News, penned by staff writers Leland Debusk, Lynna Kirkpatrick and Melissa Howell , he’d “been shot several times and run over repeatedly with some type of vehicle.”

The truck was gone, and so was Tucker.

It was the eleventh of July.

 

O earth, cover not thou my blood, and let my cry have no place

I am in the crowd, behind the police barricades, watching the protesters evangelize. It’s a cool afternoon in September, and I am standing in front of the World Trade Center PATH station, beside the equestrian statue built to commemorate the achievements of Special Forces units in Afghanistan. Behind me, tall fences enclose a wing-like structure of white beams, arching overhead like massive ribs. “Oculus,” Santiago Calatrava’s radical contribution to the WTC transit hub, is still under construction. Huge signs, hung on its surrounding wall, point the way to the memorial fountains. It is Friday, September 11^th, 2015.

The protesters are operating from behind a line of poster boards, spread flat on the asphalt: The WTC Debris Pattern… 9/11 and Iraq: The Elusive Link… EXPLOSIVE EVIDENCE! … Shouldn’t these Questions Have Answers?

A man with shoulder-length gray hair is addressing the crowd: Kevin Canada. “What’s that eyeball doing here?” he demands, indignant, indicating Calatrava’s pavilion. “These buildings are designed that way for a reason!”

“It’s all part of the effort to bring in the Satanic new world order!” he concludes. People hear him out, and a few accept his literature. Other protesters are more technical – they talk about structural engineering problems posed by the “official story,” about the melting point of steel and the physical evidence of thermite. Some are friendly, others intense. Canada, however, speaks casually — and with total conviction. He’s a poet.

“It was raining like crazy, the last two days,” he tells me. “I believe to keep people out of here.” Those in control, he says, have access to advanced nanotechnology and a network of clandestine satellites, capable of emitting dangerous energy. “We’re electromagnetic beings,” he says. “They’ve learned how to tap into our system.”

The signs, he explains, are everywhere. Goats and eyeballs. Satanic hand gestures. It’s in government, civil engineering – even in churches. “Our ministries ain’t what they used to be,” he sighs. “They’re 501cs, part of this illuminati… The C.I.A. has known for a long time that the best way to control people is through religion.”

The world Canada describes might be frightening, but at least it’s definitive. Its secret masters employ clear symbolism, announcing their plots to the public, albeit in elaborate code. “The date, the time – everything about this was significant,” he told me. “These fuckers are lying. They lied about the weapons of mass destruction and they’re lying about this.”

His eyes were steady – even grave. He spoke the truth: “I know we’re in a battle for this country,” he told me. “An epic battle.”

 

My days are passed, my purposes are broken off, even the thoughts of my heart

While I was talking to Canada, Rick Perry was talking to the Eagle Forum in St. Louis. It was there, in a tent erected by a Marriot hotel, that the longest serving governor in Texas history called off his presidential bid.

Ben Carson and Lindsey Graham were there too, but neither one was ready to call it quits. And why would they? Carson is currently riding high in the polls, bolstered by his evangelical constituency. He also bragged about separating conjoined twins in front of Megyn Kelly and God at the first Republican primary debate. That same night, at the runner-up event for low-polling candidates, Graham promised that “ If I am president of the United States, we’re going to send soldiers back to Iraq,” which might be considered a gaffe if anybody, right or left, thought Lindsey Graham had a hope in hell of being president. He and Carson are still “serious” candidates – more or less. Only Rick Perry is considered an embarrassment.

For him, perhaps, the epic battle is over – but victory remains in question. After the expected political biography, Perry turned his remarks to a sentimental journey he undertook with his father: revisiting the old man’s corner of the Second World War. “Dad and I went back to his old air base in England for his first visit in 55 years,” said Perry. “Then we crossed the channel and visited the American cemetery that overlooks the bluffs at Omaha beach.”

“On that peaceful, wind-swept setting, there lie 9,000 graves,” the governor continued. “It struck me as I stood in the midst of those heroes that they look upon us in silent judgment.” What would they think of America today? “Are we worthy of their sacrifice?”

Barack Obama sure ain’t. Perry called him a “divider,” a cheap demagogue who achieved fame by enflaming economic and racial tensions. Again and again, Perry said, Obama has failed us all.

“We were told America needed to improve its reputation abroad. Now we are neither liked nor respected,” he said. Today, ”ISIS has ripped a swath through the Middle East as large as Great Britain,” all the result of “a naïve campaign promise took priority over stability.”

“Naïve policies gave us the Iranian nuclear deal,” Perry argued, calling it “an agreement that fuels Iran’s nuclear ambitions rather than prohibiting them.” Speaking of Obama’s economic policy and his use of executive power, Perry refrained from using “naïve” again. Those missteps, he implied, were the result of something more sinister: a consolidation of power under the federal government, to the detriment of the states.

“Each state should chart its own course,” he said. “I support the right of states to be wrong, like Colorado legalizing pot. I would rather one state get it wrong than the whole country.”

In Texas, under his fourteen-years of leadership, Perry claimed to have already solved the principle problems of the Obama administration. “There are two visions for America,” he said. “The government-run welfare state of Washington, New York and California, and the limited government freedom state pioneered in places like Texas.”

This fight is too important, Perry explained, to be left to any single campaign or personality. “2016 is the most important election of our lifetime,” he said, gravely. “I know we say this every election, but this time it is actually true.” The forces of “freedom” are contesting with the forces of control – and everything hangs in the balance.

In that existential struggle, the governor concluded, the name and reputation of Rick Perry don’t matter all that much – they’re dwarfed by the will of God. “ Today I submit that His will remains a mystery, but some things have become clear,” said Perry. “That is why […] I am suspending my campaign for the presidency of the United States.”

Perry’s “Remarks at the Eagle Forum” have gotten a respectable amount of press. Fittingly, most of it has been about Donald Trump.

Perry thumped the abstruse mogul on the way out the door, they say. And it’s true – the governor did devote some of his speech to chastising Trump for being more “rhetoric” than “record.” He took the frontrunner to task for indulging in “nativist appeals that divide the nation further.” Being from Texas, Perry’s approach to the Mexican border has always been more complicated than Trump’s — it has to be. But he’s still the governor who deployed the National Guard along the border last year, as an upswing of nativist paranoia was catching in the far right…

“Where I come from, talk is cheap,” he said, to the Eagle Forum. “And leadership is not what you say, but what you do.”

Indeed.

 

Should a wise man utter vain knowledge, and fill his belly with the east wind?

I have a theory.

I don’t think Rick Perry dropped out of the race last Friday. I think he redefined the terms of his engagement, especially towards Donald trump. His attacks on the frontrunner were the same ones he’s been making for weeks, and the same ones that have consistently won Perry the few headlines his 2016 campaign has rated. At the Eagle Forum, however, he didn’t mention Trump’s name – but he did mention Obama’s. Perry didn’t couch his resignation in an admission of weakness, but in an assertion of strength. My policies, he said, my experience – these are the only things that can get America back from the black man who stole it. But my name? That doesn’t matter.

Rick Perry and Donald Trump have similar brands. Both of them see America as waning – in decline. And both of them promise a solution – and, primarily, an economic one. For Perry, it’s his record in Texas – For Trump, it’s his record in the private sector. Both of them throw sparks on the subject of the southern border, and both of them have worked to court the far-right without alienating the mainstream.

On August 6^th, when Perry plead his case at Fox’s consolation debate for low-pollers, he concluded with his typical argument – that he’d performed an economic miracle in Texas, and was ready to do so on a larger scale. “Our best days are in front of us,” he said. All we need is “a corporate executive type at the top who’s done it before.”

There’s already a “corporate executive type” at the top of the polls. Then, as now, Perry looked redundant to a lot of people – especially in his former base.

I think things are different, after the Eagle Forum. I think Perry is trying to publically divorce his experience from his political ambitions. He’s applying for a job – maybe the job – in the still unlikely Trump administration.

On Twitter, last Friday, the usually acerbic Trump was unusually respectful. “@GovernorPerry is a terrific guy and I wish him well,” wrote Trump. “I know he will have a great future!”

The signs are everywhere.

It all means something.

 

In whose hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind

When Perry dropped out, I got a call from every Texan friend of mine who cares about politics – a small but meaningful cross section of the people I grew up with. None of us like the guy, exactly – but for fourteen years (the same fourteen years that have passed since the terrorist actions of 2001), Perry has been more than a governor in Texas. He played the state like a fiddle, and redefined his office in the process. When he lost the name of that department on the debate stage in 2011, we lost something too.

Perry, we thought, was a canny operator – the kind of guy capable of putting the entire apparatus of a massive state government under his heel. His policies may have been disastrous, his rhetoric embarrassing – but his skill, we believed, was beyond question. That changed after “oops.”

For brief, blinding instant Texans became aware of two realities: the first, in which Perry is a savvy politico, speaks relatively well of the people he’s manipulated. The second – in which Perry is the kind of ignoramus that leaves the fries out of a McDonalds order – was less complimentary. I’ve been trying to reconcile the two ever since, with little success.

I need my theories. I find the alternative unthinkable.

On Friday, I leave for Texas, to explore the issue further.

 

Thou hast clothed me with skin and flesh, and hast fenced me with bones and sinews

Trauma breeds religion. When the unthinkable arrives on a curtain of flame, or erupts from the barrel of a gun or seeps from the wound of some public embarrassment, people begin rethinking the boundaries and mechanics of reality. In a new cosmography, we hope, our pain can be transformed – or at least avoided.

On August 27^th, 1988, the Hood County News ran a brief story by Kathleen Buxton, recounting a recent outing of the Good Sam club. “Granbury Good Sams held their monthly campout July 21^st-31^st at Comanche Trails R.V. park in Comanche, Texas,” she wrote. “Twenty-one member rigs attended.”

There was barbeque. They played dominoes. “Several members also attended the rodeo in Brownwood.”

“The campout was saddened by the death of a Good Sam member, Wilton Humphreys,” Buxton reported. “In the words of the club members, ‘He was a good man, a good friend and a Good Sam. He will be missed by all who knew him.’”

On Sunday, their chaplain read selections from the Book of Job.

***

Illustrations for Salem 66 this week are by Don Jolly.