It’s the 25th, and I am thinking about my buddy Jacob. He’s 25, riddled with PTSD, Battle of Fallujah, Marines, young spirited, radicalized at boot camp and then in country. It was a big scam, but one that ate at his heart. Scam, lie, bullshit war, and now, another year goes by, and the Gitmo madness of our cognitively sapped politicians, intellectuals, rot-gut CEOs and media moguls.
Inside The City Government Complex (CGC), The Accused languished in his vault. His Last Request: to see his beloved African Violet, Rose, tended by Plantman.
This request created a host of difficulties. Officials were bound to honor the request, but none would allow Plantman to enter the CGC without tending their plants too. Long day ahead. Plantman arrived early, before protesters gathered for and against the execution of the Accused. Rhetoric, megaphones, home-made signs.
It’s that Ebeneezer and Grinch time of year. Hooverville. The great American fat crocodile tear with stories of legless troops getting a bag of groceries and free big screen TV and compact car. All those bags under our collective eyes watching brute felon sports professionals (sic) run by their brutish Mafiosa coaches and owners. We are ready for that extra 15 pounds, those romps in those wonderlands of Consumopithecus Anthropocene union-busting box stores, those nanoseconds looking at the homeless, pennies for their crimes. We will feel good about Tis the Season.
Professor Alterkocher’s office was open to all always — even Summer hours. Room of his own. Read, thought, wrote, dispensed wisdom to The Young.
Plantman met with him one evening after work to discuss his famous new fame. Alterkocher wore his customary suit and running shoes, smoked his pipe. Hair unkempt. Beard-stubble — two days’ worth — gray-white-gray.
“Sit down, sit down,” said Alterkocher out of the pipe-side of his mouth. “Good to see you. Always good.”
“Good to see you, Professor. Long time.”
Precaution. Stop shifting the baseline. Stop mucking around because you have no common sense but plenty of computer engineering ADD-ADHD or what have you, on that autism spectrum. What have you, stop enlisting these money changers and game changers to define community.
Thanks to the East Bay Express and editor Jay Youngdahl for supporting Dissident Voice and allowing us to re-post his piece on the Bay Area. In fact, San Francisco is Seattle is Portland is Phoenix is, well, you get the picture, no?
We had it here, at DV — “Collective Stockholm Syndrome . . . “
As a preface here, as I have done many times as my role as writer for DV, I have to default to the local, as in, where you see fault lines and bright lines in a local situation, you can pretty much make the larger microcosmic statement about many things for a state, region, country, culture, what have you.
The School to Prison Pipeline has been written about many, many times, and my hat goes off to some of those writers:
The ACLU has it on its radar: **
Dusty manual typewriter; messy desk. The Solitary Novelist reclined greasy on his musty couch, meandering mildew of regret.
“Who buys me? Who reads me? What matters if I give away my work?”
Solitary eyes.
“I heard it was, after all, just talk,” he said. “Pursuit of pure talk.”
Solitary thought.
“My life missed in this room. Women, sunlit moments, strolling The Big Park…”
Patient Novelist.
“Occasionally someone is right about something, but EVERYONE is ALWAYS wrong about EVERYTHING.”
Cigarettes, bourbon, tropes, clichés.
those who write the narrative and who win the military and marketing and financial wars . . . .
give us better living through chemistry
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