Charles Manson is Donald Trump is Donald Sterling is . . .
Helter skelter, the street is an open wound. Those All-American cul-de-sac suburbs full of $9.99 empties of Cabernet and tasty flavored vodka endgames, spun out and 9 to 5 consumed. Separate those recyclables, rule-following white folk, that $99 a month for garbage pick-up, private shysters dumping those green bins in landfills. Follow all the rules of Empire and Money Elites, every breath you take, Sting, is monetized, broken down in .0001 cents, but boy do those chosen few make multiple millions on the exhales and inhales, snotting children and arthritic hunched-overs profitized, those reapers in rayon and living those box seat lives, single out every balance ledger for every group of gentiles, records and debts kept going on every single one of us bloody living consumers, we the taxable, the levied upon, fined, interest rate hobbled, frozen in the blinding light of repo and bankruptcy. Each transaction another thousand cuts to mother nature, to the planet earth, which is home to us, now, takers, our territory from the bottom of the sea to the end of the galaxy, sucking every last squid into our everlasting bellies, everlasting joy of consume and exhume, defecating the end of every species until Monsanto comes to the rescue, drawing new genetic lines for a world without ecology. Note the sullen middling middle class men and women, with the new leaf blower for every 2.3 kids and 1.9 dogs, and they neatly pile junk, garbage, those “out with the old” stair steppers, baby shit, this and that item of trans-pacific birth, anything good any one of the billions of Third Worlders could use for a hundred years. And that leaf blower, too, one year old, packaged for yesterday’s style, out by the curb, garbage day. By the container ship load, thousands crossing seas, daily, bye-bye conspicuous consumption and hello perceived and planned obsolescence.
Jungle gyms in each backyard, peanut-free kids, blatant On the Spectrum Somewhere Outta Here Boys, girls torn between make-up and downloading all the latest styles, and those hyper active plenitudes, those video games, Facebooking into shame, selfie in between Romper Room high school, this country tis of thee, medicated out, zoned out, full of fun little infantile games, from cradle to grave, and don’t you complain about it, cuz those Indians in Mumbai and Chinese in Shanghai want it all, too – dust busters, a new shower curtain a month, theme park eating, all-you-can-cart-away shopping malls. The world is homo consumopithecus’ giant Walmart, brought to us by Koch-Walton-Bezos-Whole Foods-You-Name-It Buy-Buy-Buy Palace King and Queen, and they raise politically correct kids, aesthetic orthodox, atheist, no matter, their mother ship the invaded Palestine.
Knowing Nothing More is More of Knowing Nothing
The entire nation, except for a few blips in the screen, whatever that radar is, well, we are the clan of the know-nothings, with these white and Zionist intellectuals hording the history, the liberal arts, any sense of how this exploitative and eviscerating economic a la democratic system works. Most favored nation is the Offshore Bank, that Sweatshop Exclusive Economic Zone . . . and if the United States of Israel claims the China Sea, then, goddamnit, then we shall make blood of those claims!
Time and again, I’ve faced off public school kids, kindergarten on up to high school, alternative or honors classes, and without fail, we’ve seen those hoarders at the top, testing dynamos, those Bezos Bosses, the lot of them, whether they are money changers or information manipulators, Admin Class, Insurance Icons, you name it, those Technocratic Digital Demigods, those chosen few who are ramrodding their values into every cultural crevice, each and every download and flip of the app, each and every scroll on those killer iPhones, until school is like some skeleton game, not really in the game, these kids, these teachers, the entire mess of making-money to enjoy when the double knee replacement takes and the Carnival Cruise offers two-for-ones! These people who rule the polluting world, who have a million ways to steal land and bulldoze forests, we are the kings of know nothing, a powerful force of drone captains and poison manufacturers.
School Yard Flight
Belabored minds, heavy with flight or fight, but more the flight, leaving behind codes, codas, smarts, history, a sense of perspective, the precautionary principle and the revolutionary spirit and the rights of man-woman-child-nature. If Dow Chemical says it’s so, then belly up and believe these princes and princesses of darkness. These are their times, the Zero-Point-One Percent’s time, and brother Gates and Brother Dell and Father Koch, well, they must have some inside channel to the Way, the Method to Make Millions from this Madness, Extra-planetary cash registers, and exo-species, selling out entire peoples, for the smile and condo in Florida!
In cahoots with capitalists, these privatizing leaders love each crack in the family code, each new decade where tribal thought and law get bulldozed over like a replay of how slavery made billionaires here, how the Belgian Congo is a metaphor for the bleeding . . . those rejiggered histories, so Palestinians become Zionists, so e pluribus unum a Judaism’s heckling energy – lawyers, CEOs, principals, college prezzes, or gun runners with PhD’s, and drug dealers called docs, Wall Street scions fresh from the MBA-CIA, until every black, brown, Asian, Muslim, anybody-but-Empire Trash at the Top, but even the Empire’s laborers, though, even the Empire’s professional managerial class, gentiles all in one, even they, a billion pounds of flesh that 1.4 percent is wanting — more — wanting! We shall deliver it on a platinum platter, heads severed by the dimwit world we have propped up each and every NFL Sunday! Sit com and Tweet by SUICIDE.
There Will Be More Refugees . . . Homeless . . . Marks One and All
I stumble over leagues of homeless in the streets on my way to work. Portland, that shit-storm bullshit show, Portlandia, another bar/bat mitzvah creation, hipster and so wrong, so TV ugly, so full of cultural chaos, irrelevant, but Jon Stewart Leibowitz sort of har-har-har, set to the music of inside jokes and, well, Jewish Comics Gone Hog Wild Punchlines. Hundreds of homeless, disheveled, battered by the systems those Elites from Somewhere Faraway have concocted, outside eateries, staking out sleep zones, mixing with the bellicose professionals leaving bars, and, oh, those politically corrective-ed sorts, leaving gluten free joints while these shit-faced and completely mental folks, live out Breaking Bad Deluxe on the streets. Cops and mice, cat and mouse, rats, the curbs holding in rivers of hypodermic needles, the flesh and fallen brains of people who once were cradled, once, by someone, even the delivery room nurse, loved as a child, one hour, one day, a year, but people now toothless, they are the children of the Taker Clan, the end product of all this stuff, all those toys and things, why the hoards went clamoring to make money for this scam that is the money-changers’ fire sale. You rebel or revolt, and the lithium drip is proceeded by the corrective class – teacher, counselor, psychologist, bureaucrat, police, lawyer, sociologist, all commentators, one and all.
You don’t need it now, and you can’t even imagine wanting it, but give us a little soft shoe Madison Avenue, let the entire Profiteer Class retrofit, repackage, and reframe, and, bam, you got what you never dreamed you expected to get, and now, pay that bill, 19 percent compounded interest, or else. We are the expression of smoke and mirrors, semblance of sagging tribalism.
I am a worker, social worker – housing-recovery-PTSD-veterans-homeless – out of place, out of time, $17 an hour, caseloads beyond comprehension, working for a non-profit, located in Chinatown, USA, a la Stumptown/Portland.
Uber Teacher, Uber Gynocologist, Kickstarter Army
This is the shitstorm that is a continuing clogging intellectual and cultural toilet that is the U-S-A. Unfriendly, youth giving up to “technology and Uber-this/that and all of that next wave of humanity-penetrating software, has the only value . . . “I want my own personal robot, and then we can work less, do things we like . . . . ” This is the religion of the chosen few running the mind banks – Harvard-Yale-Stanford-Any-Big-Time-State-Research-College – manipulating grants, governments, industry, the entire superstructure of this empire.
Teachers, professors, elitists, stuck in neutral, compliant, radical in a student union kumbaya kind of way, in between classes, but empty of any zeal or guts . . . each new class coming out is burned – until sickness and degeneration and dysfunction and stupidity rule. Sitting in homes, watching the Oscars, the Obamas and Clintons and Bushes sharing mental space, oh gentiles living the life, one burrito party after another. Guacamole, anyone?
I am telling you, at 59, they got my number young – fucking rebuffing the newspaper editors, rebuffing the professors, rebuffing the fucked up political whorehouse, and now, a time of lobotomy, so many of my fellow patriots just giving up, letting the digital-technological-computing-robotics-artificial intelligence “thing” come on like insemination. No stopping it. Something good has to come of it!
Sanity is Spewing Venom at the man
The sane ones are the people yelling and shitting and eating and sleeping on the streets. The ear-buds of this generation are snug in the white boys’ and girls’ ears, hipster retro, Birkenstock now, plaid or ready for Burlesque, these kids try, know nothings past that patina, the scratching of the surface, oh-well-I-guess-everything-causes-cancer-or-is-genetically-modified-or-is-destined-as-software-engineering-new-millennium. The conversations are painful, for me, former college radical teacher, adjunct, almost there, foot-in-the-door, despised by those prissy purists, by the vanguard of footnoting and compliance.
They throw up their hands, and say, well, Hillary is Better Than Trump-Cruz-Bush-Christie; say Bernie is great, old radical, but that old guy can’t win. So many believe that Bernie’s war-mongering B-35 bomber lobbying is aberration, that his support of baby-geriatric-woman bombing of Gaza is Jewish Justified, and he did that old shit storm pushing Vermont’s Yankee irradiated crap to be passed along train rails to my old neck of the woods, West Texas. Nuclear and heavy metal fixed sludge from Vermont.
I work daily to get adults with felonies – possession of controlled substance, petty larceny, assault on some prick jumping them, or whatever the circumstances, we call it “with a background” – jobs, new beginnings, in this fucked up capitalism. Fucking $9 an hour labor jobs, mindless, felony friendly, or, second chance employers. So many balk, so many can’t hire anyone outside their slop thinking. It’s a racket, a fucking monumental mountain to traverse, all those people cycling into the system; i.e., criminal justice (injustice) layer after layer. But when it comes to Bernie and his Thumbs Up to Bombing Kosovo, his Hillary Support of Raping Libya, his Genuflection to Star of Atheist David Cluster Bombs-White Phosphorus-A Stone-for-a-thrown-Stone-Rapid-Automatic High Caliber Metal Penetrating Jewish Justice, well, he’s that lesser of two or two hundred or 20,000 or 2.5 million or 20 million or give or take 70 million EVILS.
You make money at those missile-bomb-illegal-surveillance mills. Each economic cog and software engineering gizmo and PR-packaging impresarios in the military-economic mafia complex, well, that system is greased, and there’s no turning back . . . .
My conversations daily are full of lightening rods – “but how can we change it . . . but what if we really end capitalism . . . Sure, I want to chuck it all, but . . . but . . . but . . . I just want to go home and forget . . . stop thinking all about it.”
Dispossession, Drugs, Insanity, All Those Haves Not, 9.1 billion of Us!
I remind them all that this IS NOT working, that 11 million babies die each year from preventable disease/hunger, that Flint Michigan is that same NOT WORKING scenario as the arsenic bleeds in NW Portland, or how’s that Superfund Hanford working out, with billions spent on mitigating leaking hot containers? How is that information flow working out, boys and girls, someone deemed, Dumbest Generation Ever, The Like Generation, the Google Generation? Nary any idea who any of the real deals are – Malcolm X, Emma Goldman, Joe Hill, Paul Robeson, Howard Zinn, Rachel Carson, fucking forget Pablo Neruda, any of them, Zapatista or Che . . . . How is that Number One in the World thing working out?
Kids who punch in and punch out, fear rebuffing broken systems, fear being put out on the streets, one day from Metro Cool, the next day surfing sofas, and then, bam, living the life in that Subaru Down By the River . . . .
So-called radical talking about which laws are good and which ones bad, under SCOTUS, Scalia, the other warts of mankind and womankind? Imagine these socialists arguing about laws . . . . Law of the Corporate Jungle? Which laws are they, those that keep the food locked up, keep the land no-trespassed upon for rotting projects of capitalism, those that clearly take away family and community unity projects backed by US of A, Zionists, or the department stores into hell? Which laws are they talking about? Rule of Law, Due Process, Impeach or Recall the Fuckers?
Criminals Get Reelected, Reinstated, Retirement Reaching the Moon
You got that criminal Guv of Michigan, and he still walks and struts and mealy-mouths around, and, these so-called radicals argue about how much money should be allocated to the water fixes? No lynching, no gulag, no nothing.
That POTUS is soft-shoeing with the hedge funders, those “green is the new black scam” artists, loving those economics of drones and Israel and supreme Patriot Act Back Door Into All Black-White-Brown-Asian-Native Lives Matter.
How much insanity on a nanosecond level can the world absorb? Imagine, me running a restaurant, for example, and letting a few e coli chunks to pass through, or salmonella or botulism spores, just trying to cut corners? Imagine the shit storm. But, these presidents, CEOs, governors, the entire ruling and Imperial and Economic Mafia Class, they get how many pass jail or never-get-indicted cards?
Illogical rules, and so each new graduating class, each sixth grade test, each first-year college initiation is full of the holes of this Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Disorder Society. Memory is digital is dead.
Young people not wanting a pound of flesh or all systems shut down, no sirree. “Just put those nobodies in jail, assault with a deadly weapon, and that Chipotle, man, that would have been cool, cashing in on that class action, action . . . . Love to love and love-hate those lawyers . . . . We need them, need these laws, need leaders, need bosses, need people at the helm and those stoking the engines with new coal . . . .”
It has always been this way, and people are basically greedy. It’s been this day since day one! So many in my life have defaulted to that huge history scrubbing lie!
A Gorilla, one 12-Year-old, Set Answers to Saving Us
Fuck: Old Books, old ideas about tribalism and Neotribalism, DO WORK in the brain, but not in today’s order of things – Pearson Publishing LLC controlling curriculum, Pop Culture and US State of Fear Surveillance-Policing seeding young and old with perpetual fear, the cortisol of capitalism: if I don’t comply, if I don’t work, if I don’t get mine, if I don’t win that dog-eat-dog gladiator thing, then I will be the very detritus that makes this country the Land of the Fallen Felons!
My Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn. About the gorilla, Ishmael, who has all the answers to the world now and then, and the future, who speaks in mental ESP, and gains new teachers to help pass on the truth about Leaver Culture and the current Taker Culture of 12,000 years. In the book, a 12 year old precocious and intelligent girl – Julie – answers an advertisement to save the world, and she becomes Ishmael’s conduit for this knowledge. Here, Ishmael and Julie conferring through his mental communication. The book, as written by the narrator, is in the first person, written by Julie five years after her encounter with Ishmael. You think high schools are looking for this sort of thing in social studies-history-anthropology 101?
Ishmael — “Of course. In its root sense, wealth isn’t a synonym for money, it’s a synonym for wellness. In terms of products, you are of course fabulously wealthy, but in terms of human wealth, you are pathetically poor. In terms of human wealth, you’re the wretched of the earth. And this is why you shouldn’t focus on giving up things. How can you expect the wretched of the earth to give up anything? That’s impossible. On the contrary, you must absolutely concentrate on getting things — but not more toasters, Julie. Not more radios. Not more television sets. Not more telephones. Not more CD players. Not more playthings. You must concentrate on getting the things you desperately need as human beings. At the moment you’ve given up on all those things, you’ve decided they can’t be had. But my task, Julie, is to show you that this isn’t the case. You don’t have to give up on the things you desperately need as human beings. They’re within your reach — if you know where to look for them. If you know how to look for them. And this is what you came to me to learn.”
Julie – “But how do we do that, Ishmael?”
I – “You’ve got to be more demanding for yourselves, Julie — not less. This where I part company with your religionists, who tend to encourage you to be brave and long-suffering and to expect little from life — and to expect better only in a next life. You need to demand for yourselves the wealth that aboriginal people all over the world are willing to die to defend. You need to demand for yourselves the wealth that humans had from the beginning, that they took for granted for hundreds of thousands of years. You need to demand for yourselves the wealth you threw away in order to make yourselves the rulers of the world. But you can’t demand this from your leaders. Your leaders aren’t withholding it. They don’t have it to give to you. This is how you must differ from revolutionaries of the past, who simply wanted different people to be running things. You can’t solve your problem by putting someone new in charge.”
J -“Yeah, but who do we demand it of if we don’t demand it from our leaders?”
I –“Demand it of yourselves, Julie. Tribal wealth is the energy that tribal members give each other in order to keep the tribe going. This energy is inexhaustible, a completely renewable resource.”
J – I groaned. “You’re still not telling me how to do that.”
I – “Julie, the things that you want as humans are available. This is my message to you over and over and over again. You can have these things. People you despise as ignorant savages have them, so why can’t you have them?”
J –“But how? How do we go about having them?”
I – “First you have to realize that it’s possible to have them. Look, Julie, before you could go to the moon, you first had to realize that it was possible to go to the moon. Before you could build an artificial heart, you first had to realize that it was possible to build an artificial heart. Do you see that?”
J – “Yes.”
I – “At the moment, Julie, how many of you realize that your ancestors had a way of living that worked very well for people? People who lived this way weren’t perpetually struggling with crime, madness, depression, injustice, poverty, and rage. Wealth wasn’t concentrated in the hands of a lucky few. People didn’t live in terror of their neighbors or of the future. People felt secure, and they were secure — in a way that’s almost unimaginable to you. This way of living is still extant, and it still works as well as it ever did, for people — unlike your way, which works very well for business but very badly for people. How many of you realize all this?”
J – “None,” I said. “Or very few.”
I – “Then how can they begin? To go to the moon, you first had to realize that it was possible to go to the moon.”
J – “So what are you saying? That it’s impossible?”
I – Ishmael sighed. “Do you remember what I advertised for?”
J – “Of course. A pupil with an earnest desire to save the world.”
I– “Then presumably you came here because you have that desire. Did you think I was going to hand you a magic wand? Or an automatic weapon with which you could gun down all the evil-doers of the world?”
J– “No.”
I – “Did you think there was nothing to be done? Did you think that you would come here, listen for a while, and then go home and do nothing? Did you think that doing nothing was my idea for saving the world?”
J – “No.”
I – “On the basis of what I’ve been saying here, Julie, what needs to be done? What needs to be done first before people will begin figuring out how to get the wealth they so desperately need?”
J – I shook my head but that wasn’t nearly enough. I popped up out of my chair and windmilled my arms. Ishmael looked at me curiously, as if I might have lost my mind at last. I said to him, “Look! You’re not talking about saving the world. I can’t figure you out! You’re talking about saving us!”
I – Ishmael nodded. “I understand your puzzlement, Julie. But here is how it is. The people of your culture are in the process of rendering this planet uninhabitable to yourselves and millions of other species. If you succeed in doing this, life will certainly continue, but at levels you (in your lofty way) would undoubtedly consider more primitive. When you and I speak of saving the world, we mean saving the world roughly as we know it now — a world populated by elephants, gorillas, kangaroos, bison, elk, eagles, seals, whales, and so on. Do you understand?”
J – “Of course.”
Conversations Blubbering in Mud
I try to have conversations with my fellow workers – good-hearted, for sure, trying to get jobs for homeless, formerly chronic homeless, most of whom have had major life-shattering experiences, or ended up with mental health breakdowns or a combination of that and drug-substance abuse (what the hell would those suburbanites do on the street with bed bugs, thugs, cops, weather, screaming citizens, not knowing where the food or healthcare is coming from?).
It’s amazing how quickly Americans have given up, how they have been colonized by fear, by the policing state, the nanny state, the corporate thuggery state, all those states of un-being-ness. This culture informed by the most uninformed folks, from Politicos to Corporations to Administrators to the Captains of the Fix Is In. 24/7 insanity coming though the computing matrix, all the white noise and background clattering crap.
This is the state of war, the mind broken down by the hedge funders, cracked by the educators, the administrators adding up recriminations, the ferryman and the grave diggers, all in one phalanx against those of us not part of that Taker Elite, the Chosen Tribe, Stripped of Consciousness, tomorrow’s ethics carved out of mud!