…the bourgeois order . . . has become a vampire that sucks out its [the smallholding peasantry’s] blood and brains and throws them into the alchemist’s cauldron.
— Karl Marx, 18th Brumaire
This is proportionally one of a 30-part serialization of a life, mine, in 30 segments, or 30 oddly disenfranchising anti-autobiographical parts, as if a significant chunk of my shaky 59 years on earth is being exhumed and sewn together with twine, or cat guts.
It’s one of a hundred things I coulda-shoulda-woulda written as tomes, but alas, the arteriosclerosis of the mind in America while working as a slave wager, in and out of community colleges, on the edge of newspapers and magazines, each inch gained as a “freelancer” or “freeway flyer” drowned in the constant backpedaling this Consumer Capitalism forces some us into.
I’m not whining. Here, Terminal Velocity — A Man Lost of Tribe, over at LA Progressive, and when the thing’s done, well, I’ll stitch it up into one cover to cover book.
For a really dense but whoopdeedoo sort of ride, try the narrative poem which is part three to the chapters, excluding the preface — Dystopia Blues — Who Will Write a Song About Ice Caps Melting When All Music Dies . Take a look at my daughter’s photos as part of that montage of words, images.
For now, the next installment:
*****
Collateral Damage, Spoils of War, In the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time
Proportionality. The rules of engagement. War crimes, perfected in the 20th Century. You know, going way back, genocides in Turkey, hell, way back, hundreds of years in this country’s and the other White Countries’ histories. I remember Don Onate’s story in what is now New Mexico – cutting off the feet of offenders. Imagine, 1598, and this thug Conquistador with guns, germs and steel (Jarrod Diamond’s book title). The Acoma Pueblo Tribe resisted these Spaniards, killed 11, including the dictator’s (governor) nephew. Proportionality, again, 800 villagers killed, including women and children. And, out of the rest, 80 men had one of their feet sawed off.
This is what Empires do, in one form or another, battlefields, or villages, or wedding parties, or open prison Gaza, or, hmm, remember the first assault in the Iraq desert under first Bush. Hands up, surrendering conscripts, poor devils, sidearms and AK-47s thrown into the Persian sand, dehydration and dysentery, and, there you have it – bulldozed alive, in huge tank trenches with tanks outfitted with Caterpillar blades. Thousands, upon thousands surrendering, white cloths in the air, and, Bush I and Cheney the Butcher, and then some crappy colonel, quoted in NYT via LA Times – “This is war. This isn’t a pickup basketball game.”
These henchmen and henchwomen sleep good at night, play with their Doberman pups, take kids to confirmation and watch the Final Four with the neighbors. Proportionality. I have had fist fights with pigs defending murder, defending anything the police or CIA or US military does. Fights for calling these proportionality experts pigs and scum, big fat wimps, as wimpy as a fourth grade educated Trump calling Mexican immigrants rapists, terrorists, murderers, or a flaccid face Mrs. Clinton laughing it all off, those murdered in Libya, Honduras, Iraq. You have that beady eyed CPA Bernie scoffing at decrying the technocrats’ aided by Israel drone murdering, and he is that proportionality expert in supporting the cold hard murder of people in their own land by invaders, religious extremists, known terrorists (err, wasn’t Britain calling those Zionists terrorists?). Indian raids, women, children, grannies and gramps, slaughtered by West Point-led US Calvary. Proportional response, right: General Jackson and the trail of tears. Geronimo chased by 5,000 soldiers of General Pershing. All proportional, these Empire seekers, failing Empires and current Empire – USA – supporters. Imagine, the proportional response to Greenpeace and the Rainbow Warrior blocking whaling vessels sunk by French military. All proportional rationalizations of the war-mongers and economic hit men and their abiders.
Look, my last installment was about Vietnam. The struggle not to sign up, or even go to West Point to learn all the sapper and deep long range Special Forces stuff and then flip the script there, in-country, or back home. What a fool I was to scrap those plans and become a virulent (their words) anti-War/anti-American/anti-Capitalist/anti-White Man’s World and hoofed it south, became a dive bum, a teacher, a fucking journalist, and, well, a few occupations to supplement precarity and sub-standard wages.
No More Wars Like Vietnam
I had Le Ly Hayslip bless my daughter, who is 20, in El Paso, when I invited her as part of a huge 20th Anniversary of the Fall of Vietnam. Slow Walk in a Sad Rain author and former Special Forces Captain, John McAfee. Dan Yen, vice mayor of Saigon, who helped Steinbeck get around for his Life magazine story assignment. Lots of people called it my undying chutzpah without the Yiddish DNA. Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, I got him there. Tommy Lee Jones, the American NCO in Stone’s third of the trilogy, Heaven and Earth, adapted from Hayslip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed Places memoir.
Proportionality, man, Vietnam all the way back to the conquerors of old, the Caesars, the Alexanders . . . Imagine, syphilitic fornicating Americans, throwing around their dollars, their Hershey’s bars (ahh, slavery and chocolate, the proportionality there, too, rules of economic engagement, thank you very much consumers), their needles and bongs and Buds, haunting the shadows, looking for that proportionality by raping the allied (sic) Vietnamese’s cousins, sisters, aunties, mothers.
This blasphemy of French or Belgium shit storms of proportionality. How many died in the rubber plantations under the syphilitic French? How many hearts of darkness in the Congo, through the proportionality of the Belgians, died at the hands of the white demon? God, paranoia, insanity, money counting, Oedipal complex, masturbation with the cross, you name it, we have those great levelers of law and order, the White Class, giving us the laws of Proportional Responses, and what is collateral damage, and what are the combatants and what are the targets. Legitimacy is a term defined by the levelers, takers, those with tanks outfitted with plows for which to bulldoze thousands into trenches so they are buried alive to remind the world that an eye is for a thousand eyes. Structural proportionality.
Fatigued by Compassion?
I was in a Compassion Fatigue workshop in Portland today. You know, people helping the homeless, the addicts, the unemployed while all shit falls down alongside us – gentrification, more social security recipients living out of cars, families in tents, angry solo guys pissing and shooting up along one of Portland’s famous green ways. Neighbors mad, mayors impotent, neighborhood groups pissing in the wind, Windmills and Titling and all of that stuff that is the modern man/woman’s tragedy, in slow motion.
What is the profession, generally defined as social work, when we are in the midst of a constant barrage of bad luck narratives to extremely perverted luck stories? One of the facilitators tried to tell us that we have to look at everyone’s context, to embrace more understanding of the people who are at the top as well as those who are at the bottom – our clients. I get that we need to not judge our clients, but, really, I spoke to the group about how the controllers, the point-one-percent are all about proportionality – they to a tee have no love of the rabble, have little care for the ones that are not up by their bootstraps and throwing in on the money making fun. To be a billionaire is to be a sociopath, someone who funds and invests in destroying communities, individuals and entire countries. Proportionality, really, what are those sets of rules when it comes to missing one mortgage payment or owing on the gym membership?
Fucking employers, corporations, really, hedge funders, these multinational companies who own local enterprises, what do they do? Twenty year background checks, forced pissing and blood donations for testing of drugs, forced credit checks.
Here we were, all social workers, many immigrants from the former Soviet Union, and we do all this good, but in the end, equating all people as people, one in the same, deep down, that is, well, I took issue with it, and these people are beyond criminals with billions – they are self-trained sociopaths.
One example is a fellow who sees me every day working with clients. He works at the fascist place, Subway, and he is now assistant manager, but he’s from Puerto Vallarta, ended up doing an armed robbery because of gang influences (single mother) and he spent two years in prison, and once out, after you supposedly paid dues by giving up your freedom and total rights for two fucking years, the state of proportionality has him for $8 grand in fines. He needs his license back for better jobs, but that takes shyster lawyers and a cool grand or two.
What strikes me about the men I work with or who seek me out is the vast amount of proportionality (tongue in cheek, meaning, disproportionate) the justice (sic) system levels on men, and women, but especially men since when they get into addiction and homelessness, a few acting out violence episodes unfold, and, alas, a person-to-person crime is almost as 86-ing as an SO, sex offense.
This fellow, whose mother lives in Puerto Vallarta, just finishing up her doctorate in English and is teaching, and his aunt runs a tourista kinda place, restaurant, near the malecon. This man misses her, tears up about how hard she worked as a single mother, having him as her only offspring, and, he wants his life turned around, maybe get his CDL, and, alas, move back and take care of his mother.
Structure Violence Taught for MBAs
The systems of disproportionate violence-retribution-recrimination-restitution-reneging are strangling people, cutting lives in half, sometimes cutting into them by two thirds. These policy makers, these jurists, these idiots in the political class, the lobbies for prisons-prisoners, for law and order (sic), for rules and regulations, for compliance from diaper to Depends, it is ugly, for sure.
That Proportional response from that star of David hurling with supersonic accuracy by the hundreds First World missiles when a pipe launched rocket from Palestine comes hurtling into the earth far away from the very Jews and Jewish offspring which are part and parcel of the disproportionate business of expropriation with their legalized rules of engagement, a la disproportion responses.
The fucking proportions of it all – I drove through the demilitarized zone, Highway One, in the 1990s, enough craters to be seen from space, more bombs dropped on Indochina by the proportionality freaks of America than in any other war.
Those 58,000 Americans killed in the “other’s” land, while that other experienced 2 million killed.
Proportionality, as we play the greatest generation ever on National Propaganda Radio or Propaganda Broadcast System, crocodile tears for the 495,000 Americans killed, compared to the proportional 27 million Russians, 10 million Chinese, 6 million Poles, 2 million Yugoslavs killed in the Last Great War (sic).
Those firebombs dropped over Japan, that proportionality, uh, how many were burned to death in Tokyo, Yokohama, Toyama, Nagoya . . . oh, several hundred thousand civilians burned alive, and another million-plus burned/injured. Children at play, mothers lactating, grandparents gardening, families going about their business, immolated by the US of Proportional Responses to their Exceptionalism!
Proportionality, Article 51 of the UN Charter, and additional protocol 1 in 1977
Crimes of war, crimes of structural justice, crimes of economic hit-men.
I was there in Vietnam, in Hanoi, saw the photos of kids and nuns and civilians laid out in the courtyards, and I stepped through the courtyards, imagined the murdered gente, people, by the likes of John McCain and the lovely fly-boys, whoring breed that they are in their proportionality of American Life Over Anything That Moves Who Isn’t.
The Colin Powells, all the Westmorelands, the Schwarzkopfs, all the Little Eichmanns, those bean and bullet counters, the war profiteers, those Agent Orange manufacturers, that proportionality of war, making the jungle bleed blood and death, defoliants, toxins, biological warfare, proportionality, cutting electrical systems, bombing hospitals, embargoing medicines, the proportionality of a country that sits in Lazy Boy comfort and watches the perversions of those president conventions.
The political class, the felons they all are, proportionality, yammering that sicko God-fearing, God-sickening, God-smacked proportionality, are the bottom of the barrel, the most crass, not educated in the finer things, dead culturally, but proportionately, more on the spectrum, the spectrum of sociopath, driven to maximize profit, put in place economies of scale, no matter the product, the eking out of pain, mayhem or madness. The amazing advancement of warped education, misandrists and misogynists and misanthropes.
I was there – Nha Trang, Hue, Hanoi, Vinh, from China to Laos, and with women who were children themselves during the McCain Mighty USA bombing, strafing, automatic fifty caliber madness, proportionate to the hell this Proportionate White Race Unleashing to the rest of the world a proportionate insanity against the other – races, cultures, ethnicities smarter, more cultured, deeply tied to organic and natural systems and more harmonies in nature and civilizing forces than all the loopy Ivy League and Other Misguided Intellectuals could even conjure up.
Proportionality, the invaders of Australia – Bandjalang – ripping the souls from entire tribes, pushing their syphilitic proportionality into the original peoples, going back 125,000 years, as the proportional retribution for being different went through the land, like the Indian Schools of the USA, the proportionality of locking up Canadian and American people of Japanese heritage.
Ever-lasting White Man/Woman’s Crimes — A Teen Learns to Hate Cops
It’s all a war crime when it comes to the empires and the rabble tied to the money changing of empires – the Switzerlands and Israels, all those out of proportion to what they give and should gain from the world . . . when you follow the land, ending up in the highlands of Guatemala, or in the alleys of Hue or the streets of Cuzco, or on the coast of Vancouver Island – Salish Land. These invaders with guns and ledgers, volumes of forked tongue laws, a dead culture of moldy rooms and rotting minds, but steely people coming into the land of the original peoples with disease, diarrhea, dumb ideas, dissecting laws, and disjointed mishmash of culture.
Proportionality, those laws of combat (sic) set forth by military men of the universities and by the typists writing the pages of murder – any military aged man that moves, treaties flipped on their head, arbitration extracted unethically, resources expropriated, stolen, taken with strokes of the pen and the almighty steel of tank cannons and warships, the new wasps of the out of proportion minority holding sway over the land. Any boy that moves, around 12 or 13 years, shoot. Proportional weights of the laws of the suppressors, each blink counted off as a taxation, a levy, penalties, interest pending, fines, deposits for those out of proportion money changers and digital demigods who hold entire countries sway by the shinny-chin-chin of falsified loans and usury sent into seven generations out.
Proportionality and collateral damage, the clunky words of economic, cultural and physical wars, and the invaders are there, holding babies down, forcing primal screams from prisoners, illegally gotten flora and fauna, diggers and takers, extracting the very soul from the planet’s places, names by flights of parrots and the swift feet of Amazonian climbers.
Proportionality. I was 16, long hair, in a muscle shirt, flip-flops and zooming on my motocross 450cc bike, in the gullies of Edward Abbey, Tucson, and lo and behold two county sheriff vehicles gunning for me as I downshifted and jumped berms and cactus.
Proportionality. Guns drawn, all four holding the pistols aimed at my teenager’s tanned and sparingly clothed body.
Thrown to the ground, .357 to my head, one of the motherfuckers calling me a hippie motherfucker who will get his fucking long haired ass shot if he moves . . . on the side of the busy road, these deputies putting boots on my neck and guns drawn for the advance capital offense of driving without a license plate and illegal exhaust pipes.
Proportionality. They had seen my blue motorcycle before, and I had always found some secret gully to get away. All that hate, that white man’s proportionality, broken cops, broken judges, broken bureaucrats, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clintons, Barak Obamas, all those un-men in the Trump-Republican camp, these un-human people, with their proportionate 401-ks, proportionate fancy homes, second homes, retirement stashes, Martha Vineyard wine and scotch afternoons, sunsets out of proportion on their sailboats and their billionaire friends’ yachts.
You gather those steamy miasmas coming from these conventioneers’ mouths, these trite, puckered white people and their supplicants, vying for one disease, gonorrhea (Trump), and the other, leprosy (Clinton). Wave upon wave of insipid people, and when you want to stamp out Trump, the thugs gang up and open carry themselves into Tough Guy Bruce Willis, or when you want to pillory Hillary, the puckering liberals tell you to pipe down, to take it like an adult, quit rebelling.
I remember the proportionality of being thrown to the pavement in El Paso when I was protesting against the religious thugs and some guy who was a Jew for Christ at the Planned Parenthood. Moronic children marched up at the front ramming their picket signs into our crotches.
The El Paso pig saw it, and I went off the proscribed path, the legal protest strip of land these misanthropes called judges, cops, DA’s deem worthy of our right to stop little god-chew thugs from intimidating people coming into the clinic for STD screenings and other OB-GYN stuff.
I took the sign from one of these little scoundrels for going after my balls, and the two triple-chin cops came after me, accusing me of rioting, assault, criminal mischief, child endangerment, terroristic threats, resisting arrest. This is the proportionality of the rulers and their Little Eichmanns and brown shirts and Gestapos. I was proportionately locked up for 27 hours, in their cells of humiliation, as the jailers were sadists, waiting for any excuse to splatter heads into cement walls.
Proportionality. Charged with theft when protesting another illegal war in the Middle East. I absconded with a shopping cart to put all the picket signs in, and the cops came after me, handcuffed me, and charged me with theft. Take me away so another chink in the protest armor might be dinged. Proportionality.
Thrown onto the hood of my car by another bevy of sheriffs, accusing me of cutting them off on the freeway, all plainclothes, and I was not about to fall onto the ground at 5:30 am when they ordered me into some assassination pose, on my knees, fingers locked behind my head. Sure!
I was on my way in a flag raising ceremony for some veteran friends, Vietnam, in El Paso, and lo and behold, proportionality put me in the back of a squad car, resisting arrest, terroristic threats, illegal lane change. Twenty-two hours later, their proportionality stuck like bile in my soul. The proportionality of the pigs throwing me down at 16, shiny six inch barrel shoved into my temple, the grand scheme of proportionality. Their defense always – mean, violent, insane, thugs. Intimidation, power, demons.
Power and Balance
The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
— George S. Patton
When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
Always the imbalance of power, the goading, the out of proportion reaction, excessive force, throw downs, almost a zest for challenging just anyone to challenge their bent up authority, the proportionality of their power overpowering.
The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court reaffirms this by qualifying in Article 8 as a war crime intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities. The use of indiscriminate weapons such as cluster bombs in populated areas is a war crime as well.
As if I couldn’t say it better, a raunchy bit of catharsis that is me, part of my biography to be man living in this house of mirrors and warped fantasies of the controllers. Thanks to Dissident Voice, Five Parts to my evacuation of my intellectual bowels, here, here, here, here, and, here! Just who is the monster eating our souls? Read on:
One, Two, Three, Four, Five