Escape from Chaos: The Legend of Dynamite Sam and the Second American Revolution

By Daniel C. Merrill M.D.

The author spins a tale of political intrigue that will keep readers riveted to their chairs.

Dr. Merrills epic novel may hit to close to home for those who are unwilling to face the challenges that we face in our beloved country as the liberals proceed, like a malignant tumor, to devour every vestige of the America our forefathers envisioned for us.

We do not have to follow Greece into the ash heap of history. A few good men can change the course of events as Dynamite Sam and his band of aging revolutionaries demonstrate in this fictional portrayal of the political events in the year 2015.

You will never guess the ending, not in a million years you won't!

After reading this book, you will have to decide whether to condemn the California liberal dingbats for the fools that they are, or sit back, with a glass of scotch, and marvel at their ability too even form words.
-- Bill Frisk

A marvelous description of the sad state of affairs in America today and an inspirational depiction of what it can be if a few good men and women are willing stand up for what they believe in, and fight!
-- Bill Blumenstock

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469195131

Daniel C. Merrill M.D.

Dr. Merrill was raised in rural southern Humboldt County in Northern California. He graduated from the University of California–Berkeley with a degree in physiology in 1959 and received his MD degree from the University of Southern California in 1963. After completing a urology residency and an NIH Special Fellowship in urology at the University of Minnesota Health Sciences in Minneapolis, he returned to Northern California in 1973 and completed his career as chief of urology at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Martinez, California. Dr. Merrill has written extensively on nonmedical as well as medical subjects. His latest book, Gardening the Organic Way, is a reflection of his lifelong interest in sustainable gardening utilizing only inexpensive, readily available, chemical-free fertilizers, many of which are derived, in part, from the castings of earthworms. Dr. Merrill and his wife, Tina, live in Martinez’s Alhambra Valley in the San Francisco East Bay. They have two daughters, Amelia and Ann. Dr. Merrill’s hobbies include writing, gardening, worm farming, winemaking, and fly-fishing.

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Copyright © 2012 by Daniel C. Merrill, M.D.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2012906043

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4691-9512-4

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4691-9511-7

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4691-9513-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Contents

Prologue

Part I

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

Twenty-eight

Twenty-nine

Thirty

Thirty-one

Thirty-two

Thirty-three

Thirty-four

Thirty-five

Thirty six

Thirty-seven

Thirty-eight

Thirty-nine

Part II

Forty

Forty-one

Forty-two

Forty-three

Forty-four

Forty-five

Forty-six

Forty-seven

Forty-eight

Forty-nine

Fifty

Fifty-one

Fifty-two

Fifty-three

Fifty-four

Fifty-five

Fifty-six

Fifty-seven

Fifty-eight

Fifty-nine

Sixty

Sixty-one

Sixty-two

Sixty-three

Sixty-four

Part III

Sixty-five

Sixty-six

Sixty-seven

Sixty-eight

Sixty-nine

Seventy

Seventy-one

Seventy-two

Seventy-three

Seventy-four

Seventy-five

Seventy-six

Seventy-seven

Seventy-eight

Seventy-nine

Eighty

Eighty-one

Eighty-two

Eighty-three

Eighty-four

Eighty-five

Eighty-six

Eighty-seven

Eighty-eight

Part IV

Eighty-nine

Ninety

Epilogue

Dedication

To Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin

Rush Limbaugh. Seldom in the course of human history has one person had such a positive effect on the lives of so many of his fellow citizens. Those of us who strive daily to be the best that we can be are forever in his debt. Thank you, esteemed leader, and God bless!

Mark Levin. Mr. Levin has said that he is the third-best radio talk show host in the world. Many of his faithful followers would disagree. On his better days, Mark is numero uno; no one, not even Rush, can touch him. On his not-so-good days, he is a close second, but never third!

Mr. Levin’s intellect, knowledge of the law and constitution, and his no-nonsense give no quarter approach to politics sets him apart from other wannabe leaders of the modern conservative movement in America. His love for dogs seals the deal. You are our one true leader, oh great one, may you live forever. If not, I hope, one day, to see you in dog heaven.

Prologue

It had been thirty-six months since the reelection of America’s first black president, and things were falling apart in a big way. Gasoline was approaching $10 a gallon, and the rate of inflation had reached 12 percent; worse yet, the financial pundits were predicting that it would soon surpass 18 percent, a rate not seen since the Carter administration.

The published unemployment rate was 12.5 percent, but the true rate of unemployment was closer to 25 percent, if you included prospective workers who had given up looking for a job. In the inner city ghettoes of large cities like Washington, DC, Detroit, and Los Angeles, the jobless rate approached 70 percent.

Under the guise of political expression, the uneducated unemployed inner city masses were rioting and looting everywhere, and at this point, there was precious little left for them to steal.

The downtown areas of the large cities, which in the not-so-distant past had been the backbone of a thriving American culture, were becoming nothing more than a wasteland of burned-out and boarded-up empty buildings. In cities like Detroit, the rubble was being removed from decaying suburbs so that the once valuable but now worthless land could be returned to nature or turned into farmland.

Oakland’s recently refurbished Paramount Theater had been burned to the ground the previous year for no apparent reason, other than it provided a moment of distraction for the arsonists, who set it afire, and the clueless lot that egged them on.

Inner city high school graduation rates had fallen to 34 percent while the incarceration rate for inner city youths was, overall, a staggering 49 percent. The number of older inner city males in one prison or another had risen to 70 percent. It was becoming increasingly more difficult to find a working male of any age in the large metropolitan areas who was not either in prison or on probation.

The workloads for those employed in the probation departments had increased to the point that it was impossible for them to make anything more that a feeble attempt to monitor the parolees, who roamed the streets looking for trouble or anything else that might serve as a temporary distraction from their dismal plight.

Things were not much better in white America, where over 40 percent of the population was on food stamps or some other form of public dole. To complicate matters, 55 percent of those who were fortunate enough to be employed could not make enough from their low-paying jobs to support a family. More often than not, they were forced to rely on the public schools, food stamps, and charitable organizations to feed their families. The numbers of these unfortunates were increasing with each passing day.

The 2012 elections, which had returned the food stamp president and his liberal associates to power, had revealed just how badly the country was divided. Obama, and the liberals who supported him, had won with super majorities in the blue states bordering both coasts and the great lakes in the Midwest.

The Republicans, and their conservative Tea Party base, had prevailed in the red states, although with slimmer majorities. Unfortunately for the Conservatives, there were far more blue than red states and the liberal socialists now controlled all three branches of government. They also had a six-to-three majority in the Supreme Court and a supermajority in the senate.

It seemed likely that both coasts and the Midwest would forever be run by radicalized social liberals who would stop at nothing in their endless efforts to destroy every vestige of American life as the founding fathers and the framers of the constitution envisioned it.

The Republicans had pretty much given up the ship. In fact, after the significance of the 2012 election results had a chance to sink in, seventy-eight senior Republican members of the congress and senate had resigned, refusing to participate in the political shenanigans that were sure to follow.

To make things even worse, only thirty-six conservative members of the Republican Party were willing to step up and run in the campaigns to replace those who had quit.

Even the most optimistic conservative in the land, Rush Limbaugh, who had long since written off California as a lost cause, now conceded that the liberals could not be beaten in either the East or West Coasts, and probably not even in the liberal-dominated Midwest.

It was rumored that Rush, who had once vowed never to retire until he had converted every last liberal to conservatism, was seriously considering retirement. Even he, it seemed, had conceded that the floundering ship of state could not be turned around at the ballot box, no matter how hard he tried or what he did. This, of course, represented significant blow to a humongous ego.

Part I

The Defense of Muir Valley Ranch

One

They were an unlikely and hopelessly undermanned crew of self-styled revolutionaries. It had all started out harmlessly enough, but, on hindsight, the basis for trouble had always been there, lurking in the background like an undiagnosed cancer.

Their fondness for no-limit Texas Hold’em poker had brought them together initially; well, that and their equally strong devotion to well-aged single malt Scotch whiskey. What kept them together, and turned them into a group of deadly revolutionaries, was their hatred for the liberals, who seemed hell-bent on destroying their beloved country and everything it stood for.

In the beginning they meet once a month for a game or two of poker. Their conversations, which invariably became more heated as time went on, usually revolved around the politics of the day and, at least initially, were harmless enough; after all, Jimmy Carter was a simple sap, but he wasn’t around long enough to really upset the applecart in any major sort of way. As such, it seemed enough to belittle the former peanut farmer and his dim-witted socialistic policies and let it go at that.

As time went on, however, and the months became years and the years became decades, things slowly changed, and not for the better. The gang of ten gradually became more disgruntled and more vicious in their verbal attacks on the liberals, who ran the local, state, and federal governments.

Their rancor was not limited to the Bill Clintons, Boxers, and Pelosis of the world, no, not by a long shot! Rhino Republicans like the Bushes, Stupid 1 and Stupider 11, and well-meaning fools like the body builder Schwarzenegger and the hopeless Bob Dole and John McCain also were a target of their vitriol.

At some point, early in 2010, as I recall, the structure of the monthly poker nights began to change. In a relatively short period of time poker was completely dropped from the agenda, and the group seemed to transition, almost seamlessly, into a type of political action committee.

At first, their discussions were centered on methodologies that could be employed to drive the liberals from power at the ballot box. The group’s efforts, which were primarily directed at the state elections in California, were an unmitigated failure in the 2010 midterm elections as the liberals won with significant majorities in both the California House and Senate races, even though Tea Party candidates cleaned many a liberal clock elsewhere in the country.

To make things even worse and to drive one final stake in the heart of conservatism in California, the ancient liberal dinosaur from days long past crawled out of the primeval mud and, once again, became California’s governor. Yes, Governor Moonbeam was back, and the group went berserk.

Well, not literally berserk, but they certainly drank a lot more Scotch that fateful Tuesday election evening in November 2010 than was their usual custom. More importantly, they began to take the predicament they found themselves, and their country, in a lot more seriously.

Sam Williams, the titular head of the group, was a retired academic urologist, best known for his innovative work in the field of impotency and, in particular, his involvement in the development of the Mentor Inflatable penile prosthesis. Sam’s political leanings were somewhere to the far right of Genghis Khan’s.

Sam had retired fifteen years before and spent his retirement developing a vineyard on his property at Muir Valley Ranch in Alhambra valley, a gated community a few miles west of John Muir’s original home in the small town of Martinez. This also was the hometown of Joe DiMaggio, the legendary center fielder of the New York Yankees.

Other members of the gang of ten included his eldest daughter Trina’s forty-year-old German husband, Wilhelm. Wilhelm refused to give up his green card and become an American citizen because he feared that the United States would ultimately collapse under the weight its socialist policies. If that were to happen, he wanted to be able to return with his family to Germany.

Wilhelm was the sharpest nail in the keg and the best poker player of the group. Wilhelm also was somewhat of a conspirator. Among other things, he had been convinced that the modern world, as we knew it, was going to collapse as the clock struck twelve midnight on the first day of the new millennium in the year 2000.

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He turned out to be wrong about that one but, proving once again that every cloud has a silver lining, the possibility of civil unrest at the turn of the century had induced Wilhelm to stockpile a large stash of weapons and ammunition in the garage of his San Jose home—armaments, which could now, fifteen years later, be put to good use by the prospective revolutionaries.

Wilhelm also had become proficient in the use of a variety of different kinds of weapons and had passed these skills along to his sixteen-year-old son, Max. The two of them would form the backbone of Sam’s small revolutionary army.

Jim Hipkins, the oldest member of the gang, was a seventy-five-year-old retired air force colonel. Uncle Jim, as Max called him, had flown twenty-five missions in the Vietnam War. Jim despised the government who, he rightly believed, had refused to recognize the contribution he and his fellow combatants had made during the Vietnam debacle.

Jim had been badly injured when his plane was shot down on his twenty-fifth and last mission over Nam, forty-five years before. Sam, who was in his urology residency at the University of Minnesota Health Sciences Center at the time, helped patch him up. The two had been best friends ever since, and Jim had followed Sam when he and his young family had returned to California in the early 1970s.

Jim opened a private security agency in Walnut Creek and had done quite well providing his services to Nordstrom’s Department Store and several other high-end retailers in the area. All had gone well until the East Bay shoplifters decided to shift their focus from the impoverished cities of Oakland and Richmond to the more prosperous retail outlets in Walnut Creek.

This, of course, was good for the private security guard business, at least initially. All went reasonably well until Jim and his employees busted three inner city blacks who were caught red-handed while leaving Nordstrom’s with several shopping bags full of expensive merchandise, including a $5,000-ladies’ handbag they had not paid for.

The arrest was routine but what followed was not. The defendants pleaded no contest to grand theft and were sentenced to two years’ probation. The prosecutor for Contra Costa County had agreed to the defendants proposed plea bargain because there was no room to house the petty thieves in the Martinez County jail.

The local jails in California were bursting at the seams because Governor Moonbeam decided to return all prisoners, who were deemed to be nonviolent, to the local lockups in the cities and towns where they had committed their crimes.

So far so good; Nordstrom got their expensive merchandise back and the shoplifters got a slap on the wrist—business as usual in twenty-first century America. Jim’s rent-a-cops got a high five for stopping another heist, and with the good publicity the episode generated in the local press, Jim picked up two more clients.

Then things took an unexpected twist to the left, the hard left. It was a quiet Sunday afternoon and, as was their usual custom on Sundays during the spring of each year, Sam and Uncle Jim were sitting on the deck overlooking the serene valley below the house while consuming a couple of adult beverages.

Sam knew something was afoot when his dog, Dukie, who was always by his side, gave a low growl deep in his throat. This was Dukie’s way of telling Sam that someone was coming down the road toward the house.

The next thing they knew, federal agents were at the front door with a warrant for Jim’s arrest. The warrant stated that Jim and his private police force had violated the inner city blacks’ civil rights when they arrested them for shoplifting.

The rest is history. The trial was held in the Federal Courthouse in San Francisco before Federal Judge Susan Puling. Trials by one’s peers in non-homicide cases had been abandoned several years before because of the cost involved in running traditional jury trials.

The federal prosecutor produced court records showing that over the past five years Jim’s private police force had made 562 arrests for shoplifting-related offences. Prosecutor Gonzales went on to demonstrate that the vast majority of those arrested, 96 percent to be exact, were residents from the minority communities of Oakland, Richmond, and Bay Point.

Prosecutor Gonzales argued that the large number of people of color being arrested was evidence per se that the defendant and his colleagues were relying on racial profiling to make their illegal arrests.

Jim’s high-priced lawyer, Samuel Kline, tried to object, contending that there was no evidence, whatsoever, that any innocent person, irrespective of race, had ever been arrested by Jim or any member of his team of security guards. Without a second thought, Judge Puling ruled that Kline was out of order and fined him $500 for, what she said was his trivial attempt to disrupt the proceedings.

The trial was short, if not so sweet, lasting less than an hour. Judge Puling ultimately ruled that, irrespective of the guilt or innocence of the shoplifters Jim and his staff had arrested, they had been illegally detained because he had used racial profiling to select them from a crowd of other prospective shoplifters.

Defense lawyer Kline made one last feeble attempt to defend his client by pointing out that the level of shoplifting by the white residents who lived in Walnut Creek and its surrounding suburbs was too low to be statistically significant.

Thus, Kline argued, with respect to the crime of shoplifting, the whole concept of racial profiling was meaningless. After all, how could his client be expected to arrest locals who lived in these communities if they weren’t inclined to break this particular aspect of the law?

By this time, Judge Puling had had enough; she found Kline in contempt of court and sentenced him to five days in the county jail.

As they handcuffed lawyer Kline and led him to the bus that would take him to the Martinez Jail, the good Judge fined Jim $100,000 and sentenced him to six hundred hours of community service. With that, she slammed down her gavel bringing the proceeding to an end and called for the next case on her calendar.

The verdict in the case, which was ultimately upheld by the Ninth District Circus Court of Appeals in San Francisco as well as the United States Supreme Court, changed the law forever. Before the Puling ruling, it was unlawful to use racial profiling to apprehend suspected lawbreakers.

After the Puling ruling, it became illegal to arrest individuals of a minority group for a crime if the overall percentage arrested for the offence exceeded their rank in the population as a whole.

This was interpreted to mean that, in California, where minorities make up 50 percent of the population, it was evidence per se of racial profiling if more than 50 percent of those arrested for a specific crime were from the minority community.

The states of Washington and Oregon adapted similar anti-discriminatory racial profiling legislation shortly thereafter as did most of the northeastern states. Once again California had led the way, taking judicial lunacy to an entirely new level, and a large segment of the clueless nation had followed.

Six months later, Judge Puling disappeared after she left her home on Russian Hill one foggy Monday morning to drive to the San Francisco Federal Courthouse. No trace of her or her shinny new black Mercedes SUV was ever found; it was like she and her vehicle had disappeared from the face of the earth.

Jim swore that he had no idea what had happened