Incredulous Musings on a Buttered Bandersnatch * * * * * * (the Russians STILL aren't coming)

my dear American-identifying fellow earthlings, enough already
with the 'traitor' stuff!  don't you realize how the dead disrupters
coming into office will use that?  kindly refrain from channeling
McCarthy, and bandying about propaganda for the military monster
long enough to consider the following points that, strangely enough,
are being obscured by the media:

the CIA has YET to supply ANY actual evidence, and their own former
agents are laughing at them.  don't you remember the 'absolute proof'
that Assad used chemical weapons on his own people (which turned out to
be the Turkish president - he that spits knives at the Kurds - scheming
with the ISIS terrorists we and our allies insist on supporting)?  can it
be possible that you've already forgotten where we left all those
invisible weapons of mass destruction?

and for Pete's freakin' sake, it was a LEAK, not a hack!  Julian Assange,
who's actually EARNED a reputation for honesty, and the former ambassador
who received the infamous emails, have both repeatedly stated that the leak
came from within Hillary's camp.  of COURSE the Russians picked up on this.
they're only trying to keep up with us (we, the name-calling pots who spy on
ALL of CREATION, who warped our constitution to 'protect' ourselves, wrote
the book on Cyber Warfare, and have interfered in COUNTLESS elections,
not to mention murdering several Democratically elected presidents, while
crushing the dubious reflection of our "beacon", over and over again).

and even if the Russians were responsible for bringing the leaks to our
attention, so what?  do you really believe that the swing voters experienced
burning bush epiphanies and switched to the Great Strumpet because they
actually read the Podesta emails and became incensed at Hillary's contempt
for Democracy?  and if this unreported, miraculous event occurred, and
these elusive, wide-awake Americans actually reacted, for the first time
in decades, to their leaders betraying them, what then?

the revealing illumination lurking beneath the cries of "treason" is that
someone provided the American People with proof that Wall Street
paid Hillary several small fortunes to privately assure them that she'd
been lying to to us all along, as well as a confirmation that our guesses
were correct, her apparatchiks had indeed stolen the nomination from
Bernie.  would you rather this information had been kept from us?

is that how Democracy works for you?

while the bipartisan gang of unquestioned, unelected Regime-Changers
have made it abundantly clear that Putin is in their sites, the Party
that isn't actually Democratic has broken all its mirrors.  so this
motley band of professional deflectors of everyone else's attention,
along with the usual mis-informants at the Times and the Post
(taking a break from calling the independent voices they haven't
drowned yet "fake news"), and a little last minute help in the
form of a parting slight of projection by our 'Transparency President',
have hit on a way to kill three bedraggled, embarrassing birds with a
single ricocheting stone:

thwarting the anticipated thaw in Cold War II,
shirking the dismal failure of the recent electoral circus,
and diverting and funneling our frail attempts
to focus flighty attention on the blatant internal threats
to our (exceptionally apparent) Democracy
SOMEWHERE the bloody hell ELSE.

- Evan Hawthorn, the 31st of December, 2016

new years present

auspicious felicitations
on the observance of the commencement
of the next arbitrary segment
of the cluttered string
of temporal considerations

appended to the
weighted and mythic,

human perception of the present.

which is to infer,
that was then,

(which isn't),

and this is all that is.

but in this space,
with its limitless potential
for placing bounded things,

where a presence of awareness
finds awareness of the ever present,

a magical possibility resides.

for notwithstanding
distracting illusions and reinforcing delusions,

circumventing conventions and deflections and denials,

the intrusion of insecurities and ricocheting ramifications,

and the fraying disruption of the noise, noise, noise,

it is ever thus:

to try and stay focused on,

endeavour to illuminate,

and fill with living love,

the glimpse that glimmers future,

the treasure beyond measure,

the key that opens everything,

the ever present now.

- Evan Hawthorn, the 30^th of December, 2016

2016

the delusions of denial astonish me.
there are people actually bandying about memes
casting aspersions on something called "2016".

as if the lines on calendars aren't fabrications,
like all the other borders.

as if there's the faintest reason
to expect things to get better
- any day now.

as if seventy years haven't taught us
that we haven't a chance
until we all come together and take it on ourselves:

the Lakotas and Veterans Against the War and Black Lives Matter,
the workers in India and the children under the drones,
the millions in our prisons and the billions in their hunger,
fleeing misery and the rogue regime-changers' path;

for that's what it will take to
defeat the ruling psychopaths
and their zombie army
of corporate operatives the world over,
who prey on the future of life itself.

the sinister implications and revelatory timing of an unequivocal coup de grace

i don't wish to be an alarmist.
but Quasimodo, report to your tower.

"liberal" good-cop Ascending Saint Obama
just pulled Democracy's plug,
enabling,
with a fell stroke of his irony-leaking pen,
and without even the pretense of a comical "debate",
the Great Strutting STrumpet
to "legally" stamp out
all those pesky, unpatriotic
(unregurgitating)
sources of information
that
        "undermine"
                                 "national"
                                                     "security"
                                                                          "interests".

>>>>>>>>>The Hack Who Sought Substance<<<<<<<<< and Other Treasonous Musings

i wonder how many of the mediums

(misleadiums?  we need to come up with a name
for people who WORK in the Media
that would accurately describe what they do.)

but i digress.

how many of these
unconscientious subjectors
masquerading as journalists

so frantically warning us
that the Russians are threatening
our apparency of Democracy

have thrown caution to the winds

and actually perused
the Podesta emails?

for i suspect they're channeling
President Obama's reaction
to Chelsea Manning's revelations.
you may remember,
instead of investigating
their SUBSTANCE,
he put a modern day Paul Revere
in jail for 35 years,
sentenced to abuse and a 'trial'
we weren't allowed to watch.
the only crime he could see
was letting the cat out of the bag.
and when it came to
doing something about War Criminals,
"why think of the past?"
said he.

(this of course was par for the course
for the "transparency" president,

who took suppression of Democracy
to a whole new level,

with his unprecedented hounding of whistleblowers,

haunting us all with
re-awakened espionage laws

aimed at whoever dares to inform the electorate,

notwithstanding the irony
of implicating the American People
as a foreign enemy.)

but what i want to know is,
can these people-who-profit-from-saying-things

on televisions and in newspapers

possibly be aware
of the blatant contempt for Democracy
the emails reveal?

how is it that 'personalities'
so preoccupied with protecting
the virginity of a system
can be so disinterested
in actual proof of its decline?

the SUBSTANCE of these leaks is
SURELY WHAT MATTERS,

if indeed it's Democracy
that lights up our "beacon".

the apparatchiks of the asses' party
dance off the page,

playing their bullied voters
like easy marks at a carnival.

but no one seems to care.

everyone is distracted
by the identity of the messenger,
or deafened by the eternally rumbling

unimpeachable drums.

how nicely this slight-of-projection
by the People's-Party-that's-never-for-the-People
(and recently broke all its mirrors)

fits in with the
clearly advertised intentions
of the snarling gang of
unelected regime-changers,
pulling the bipartisan strings of the

all-violence-all-the-time foreign policy

of our humanity-consuming
military beast.

it's quite as snug
as a self-strangling and fingering glove

stitched by McCarthy himself,

waiting all this time
for rhyming delusions
and willing hands.

"feed our Seymour",
sayith Uncle Sam,

"lest ye be trampled by hysterical hooves.

and woe to thee who wouldst
stand against the tide;
ye feckless flock of impractical idealists,
enablers of evil,
Commies, Toadies,
or Sympathizers, all."

(one or the other, i forget which.
when everyone is sorted
into red, blue, and reds,
'with us' zeroes or 'against us' ones,
disposable "bad guys"
and unquestioning "good" ones,
how could any difference
a phone or drone might notice
possibly exist?)

- Evan Hawthorn, the 16^th of December, 2016

>>>>> an open letter to whomever may be concerned that "we're doing nothing about Aleppo" .......... (or) .......... "Irony, Irony, Everywhere, but Nothing Ever Sinks In."

after all these years of supposedly "fighting ISIS" (that we and the Saudis are actually funding), Russia takes us at our word, and suddenly ISIS actually loses ground.  and,
ever so oddly, after forbidding any pictures to surface of any of our, or our allies'
war crimes for YEARS (ever since the Vietnam "syndrome" proved Americans react
to slaughter) the "terrorists" we've been supporting in a small section of Aleppo are able to make slickly produced videos of suffering kids available to Facebook.  of course they are committing the very same atrocities in the rest of the city, but we're not allowed to see that.  and of course, this pales in comparison to the catastrophe we wrought in places
like Fallujah, where our vengeance for their resistance was worthy of our angry god,
and where there's more deformed babies than there ever were in the Japanese cities we nuked, thanks to our indiscriminate use of depleted uranium.  (as an aside, when the hell do WE go before the UN for using chemical weapons?  or say, for incinerating hundreds of thousands of surrendered, retreating soldiers in a single irremediable day, as Bush the First did, god find his soul.)

but this particular misery in "moderate" "held" Aleppo, THAT we're SUPPOSED to see.
because it will help enable the next round in the ceaseless war for terror, and win acceptance for yet another regime change (which is a fancy US term for invading a sovereign nation because, presumably and presumptively, "we know what's good for these lesser, off-white people.")  i'm not saying i approve of what Assad has done,
or any part of this hideous never-ending crime against humanity.  i just think the irony
of the PR campaign is astonishing, even for a country like America that's practically drowning in the stuff.

and meanwhile, Putin is really beginning to piss off our glorious regime-changers,
here in the stolen "homeland".  first he called Obama's (and our Olympic-caliber irony-slinging Secretary of State's) bluff on the line in the sand.  and if he keeps hemming in ISIS they'll have to cobble together another horrendous boogie man to allow them to continue to meddle in the Middle East.  because in fact, the long range plan is to make the same mess of Syria they've already made of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, etc. etc., (and quite surely intend to make of Iran.)  so that, as oil runs out, the US can maintain their "full spectrum dominance" (per Obama, the primary, overall goal of U.S. foreign policy) and control the access to life-sapping energy of Europe and East Asia,
their actual perceived competitors.  (hence the "pivot".)

and by the way, we're sure as bloody hell NOT doing nothing.  we're killing people there too.  and in the six other countries we're currently bombing.  and our "special forces", hidden from ALL oversight, are now operating in well over a hundred countries, thanks to our Nobel Prize winning precedent setter.  it's not easy keeping large tracts of the planet in a constant uproar, maintaining our standing as number one weapons producer, promoter, spender, and supplier, and coming up with convincing "threats" we can lob our distracting projection at.  notwithstanding how easy it is to pin that label on anyone who gets in our way, and regardless of how none of the current "threatening" nations have armies on other people's far-flung borders, or hundreds of military bases all over the globe (or even, say, ten).  but we have a reputation to keep up.  for, as Martin Luther King pointed out fifty years ago, we are, indeed exceptional.  "the greatest purveyor of terror™" the earth has ever known.  and besides, there must be minutes still remaining
in our "starless midnight of racism and war".
**** ** **** ** **** ** **** ** **** ** **** ** **** ** ****

- Evan Hawthorn, the 14th of December, 2016

no imagined countries

imagination helps, but it's counter-intuitive.
for in fact, there aren't actually any countries.
there's only people, animal cousins,
a spinning earth and a bit of sky.

the borders are what's imaginary.

and only humans can be convinced
that they see them,
these lines in the blowing sand
that supposedly hem in
all the colors and genders
and dreams of creation.

like any perceived limitation,
nations and possessions,
and any other imaginable
particle of dust,
are the stuff of nightmares.
profitable distractions.
the estranging and encroaching,
exponential effects
of a coordinated and covetous,
self-deluded and
numbingly bedazzling,
collective hypnosis.

the shortfalls of mandates

it's easy to forget that half of us didn't vote,
and easy to call them lazy.
but perhaps they've noticed
the establishment's wholly owned subsidiaries
haven't represented us in decades.
perhaps they think
300 million people
choosing their leader from a field of 2,
vetted by billionaires,
in campaigns designed by
the people who sell us toothpaste,
with no actual ISSUES being debated,
turns Democracy
into a sick Orwellian joke.

at any rate,
when you despair that
most people chose the Great Strutting STrumpet,
think of this:
2 million less than half of the half
voted for him.
and many of these were
voting against the War Queen,
or the system itself.
that leaves PERHAPS an eighth.

the country may not be
quite so full of ignoramuses
as the M(isl)edia makes it appear.

it's just that different people
have different responses
to drowning in irony.

patriocy

[the following is my response to a friend of mine telling me that since the election
he is ashamed of being an American for the first time in his life.]
**********************************************
if i believed in artificial, enforced borders,
and accepted the ridiculous conceit that i was
something called an "American",
then i'd have been embarrassed by that fact,
at least since i was nine years old,
and watched the cops shoot at my friends' daddies during the Detroit riots.
by the time i'd become a teenager and learned about the
massacres committed in the nineteenth century,
in detail no functioning heart and stomach could handle,
while i observed the millions of Southeast Asians
being torn to burning bits on my television set,
i already had no illusions about what the society i lived in was all about,
and how its status quo was maintained.

but fortunately, i'm a citizen of the world,
a human being, and an earthling.
and i don't have a smidgen of my sense of self,
of respect, or what people call pride,
invested in a gang of incorporated, arrogant,
myth-spewing, weapon-spreading, misery-profiting,
fear-toting, idiocy-breeding, imperial racists
and bullying gangsters, masquerading as
'the land of the free and the home of the brave'
while excluding almost everyone in my family
from their exceptional un-hyphenated ranks.

it didn't take the election of the Great STrumpet,
the mascot of capitalism,
the next natural step in
Manifest Destiny's retrogression
bleating Ayn Rand's bible,
to open my eyes.

there but for moneyed interests

and just think - if he'd spent his life
serving moneyed interests
while presenting himself as a liberal,
he could have been our president
for the last eight years,
and the "Democrat" apparatchiks
and the dichotomized faithful
with their media-supplied blinders
would be calling for his sainthood.

logic

in exactly the same way that
>>"not all Trump supporters are racist, but all of them decided
that racism isn't a deal breaker.  end of story."<<
is true,
not every Democrat and Republican
is a mass murderer,
but all of them decided
that mass murder isn't a deal breaker.

if people learn the difference
between speeches and actions,
and stop aligning themselves
to the sides of a flipping coin,
we might be able to
change this story,
before it's ended for us.

the ripping of the lid

1 out of every 28 drone victims is the intended
(guilty or innocent) target.  if you had a weapon
that killed 27 extra people every time you fired it,
wouldn't you destroy it?

at what point is such staggering disregard for human life
considered evil?

in a study of 41 drone strikes,
1,147 human beings were killed,
and each of the 41 purported "bad guys"
had been listed as killed on multiple occasions.

how is it people can be so afraid of a Trump presidency,
but not even bat an eyelash
over the inhuman American status quo?

the 22 veterans who commit suicide every day,
but don't even merit a mention in the media,
have probably grasped the implications of this.

and i expect many profiled persons,
"others" in their own "homeland™",
are no more afraid than they were before.

it didn't take the Epitome of the System
ripping off its deluding, distracting lid
to open some of our eyes.

but perhaps, with so many blinders down,
now is the time to come together
and try to establish a representative Democracy.

it would be nice if its "beacon"
actually tried it once.