parable on postcards

"verily, i say unto you,
inasmuch as ye have done it
unto one of
the least of these

my brethren,

ye have done it unto me."

verily he saith unto himself
every night,
and for the rest of his life

"i have done it"

(he could not but see)

"unto the he, and the she,
and the me

that is thee."

That Strange Slanted Focus That Makes America Always Right (a wading upstream through a mainlined narrative)

Vladimir Putin oversaw the resuscitation
of life in orphaned Russia
after the earth-shattering onslaught
of the Western Corporate feeding frenzy and blitzkrieg,
inflicted in a caper
of capitalist collusion
with that inebriated puppet Boris Yeltsin,
crashing life expectancy by over a decade
back in the glory days
of Bill Clinton's immaculate interference
in other peoples' elections.

(of course, no one in America cared.)

(in a related undevelopment,
our Haitian cousins still yearn
for their beloved Aristide.)

there's an actual reason for those
consistently astronomical
donkey in the manger and elephant's eye-goggling
approval ratings
that easily defeats that peculiarly American
ill-informed myopic miasma
peering through exceptional veils
with its utter lack of grasping
that "others" employ logic
of their own.

catch Oliver Stone's
audacious un-American interviews
with this complicated and cosmopolitan, savvy diplomat
before buying in to the
incessant demonization of all things Putin
brought to you
by our abdicated media
and the war machine's right and righter,
preening imperial flanks.

amoungst the many reasons for this
blame-gaming distraction
wherein our 17
unquestioningly trusted
sudden fell sproutings
of assassins and spies
have closed their
constitution-cloaking ranks
with the Party that pretends it's Democratic
in a fresh-yet-stale round
of no holds barred,
Boris Badenov flavoured,
latest-evil-leader-who-must-be-destroyed
relentlessly vicious
bipolar projection

is his astonishing knack for
embarrassing the Demented Beacon's
revolving charlatan "leaders",
taking them at their word
when he doused the rocket's red glare
along Obama's scarlet line

or, showing up by invitation
to turn the tables on ISIS
whilst that eternal unwanted haunt,
"humanity's last hope",
was pretending to fight them
(raking in the billions
from their omni-directional, winking stash
of exponentially proliferating weapons).

on the other slight of hand,
all the fear-spewing dealers
in our "Competing Orwellian Ministries of Truth"*
absolutely hate RT,
which calls them out
for their dearth of ironic forethought
far too often,
and reveals the mockery of Democracy
that informs our "free press".

(as an aside,
Mr. Putin does NOT control Russia's media,
even half so well,
as our homeland-spinning oligarchs control ours.
there's ACTUAL debate
(beyond our narrowly cracked, sliver of window)
on some Russian programs
that puts our boxed-in schlock to shame.)

as far as the Make Our Day Lords of Profit are concerned,
there can be no independent nations on this planet,
especially those who can fight back
and so his days,
and ours,
are numbered.

thanks to a flickering host
of irresolute and inscrutable stars
he's been patiently,
oh! so sanely resisting
the doomsday provocations
incessantly flung across his borders
by our election-immune pack
of rabidly salivating
regime-changing wolves
for a tiresome, exasperating
unhinged string
of red and blue tinged years.

his deliverance of the Russian-speaking populace
in the reboundingly gifted Crimea
from the threatening clutches
of those real modern day nazi-saluting fascists
Hillary's minions brazenly enabled in the Ukraine coup
(before slapping the hands
of their incipient namesakes in America)

was the looked for, heroic response
to an overwhelming referendum
of terrified Crimean residents,
(the sort of thing we acknowledge
when it suits our owners' interests)
making him the apple
of Mother Russia's eye

thus diverging from the coterie
of wholly owned subsidiaries
in the Washington Consensus
of corporate serving
prevaricating interests
once again.

compared to our flagrantly illegal,
preternaturally presumptuous
seven hundredth plague
of smashing intrusion,
it was accomplished
with a swift
and painlessly bloodless
aplomb.

despite his ghoulish catering
to that slow to peter out
humanity-denying and demeaning
religion-ensconced homophobia,

and the obvious fact that,
along with all "World Leaders"
he was vetted by miserly
silver sucking monsters
and bred in humanity's
bottom rung of parasites,

he nevertheless manages to pirouette
diplomatic circles
around our blazing saddle,
addled and paddle-less chorus
of stone-bleeding amnesiacs
and brokered, broken asses.

(a tidy piece of work, that
for such a blunted, stunted brute.)

*****

but i digress
when i should be addressing
America's stumbling
slumbering dreamers...

oh say, can thou yet see?

how wilt thy Commonwealth
ever find itself
while wearing binary blinders?

while crowning "good" on an executioner's hood?

while allowing thy gaze
to be filtered
by Alice-in-Wonderland's
reverse-engineered,
genetically modified looking-glass?

while rummaging through ruses
in Felix the Cat's
focus-poking
stroke us with hocus
redacting sack of distractions?

if it's bandied about
in their papers,

bleated by their talking bubbles,

trumpeted by oilyphants,

or baited with emotion
in righteously braying photo ops
by the recently re-branded
born-again McCarthyists
and CIA-receiving resisters

it's what they want you to think.

always.

every single time.

the usurpers of stolen "homelands",
dapper dispensers
that pander "indispensableness",
thrift shifting inventors of whiteness,
and proselytizing
profit-toting preachers
of the promised land of needing plenty

are entirely capable
of destroying life on earth
and popping hemorrhaging holes
in their "Democracy-loving" delusions
without the least
bit of help
from anybody else.

even if the usual suspect isn't entirely blameless

(and looks a lot
like them.)

and precisely because
humans
are dependably susceptible

to the famed, enameled proclaiming
that inflames the same herds
it's intended to tame;

that compelling,
projected re-framing

of denial-beguiled blame.

* ***** ** **** * ******* * **** ** ***** *

- Evan Hawthorn, the 20^th of October, 2017

*["Competing Orwellian Ministries of Truth" is a fresh setting of a gem i borrowed from the goodly Professor Hamid Dabashi]

* * * * * * * * * * Freedom, American Style * * * * * * * * * * * (the Reeking Wreckage of Raqqa)

this is a still standing
emptied piece of Raqqa.

can you hear the echoes of the children playing?

do patriotic Americans
lull alleged consciences
with "bad guy" phantom soldiers,
imagining no families,
no humans that could possibly matter
lived or cried
in this "comprehensively wrecked" city?

have "we"

"won"

now?

said Ray Gutman of the Daily Beast
back before these
uncountable spirits
were 'liberated':

"whole neighborhoods
are being bombed flat
with little or no regard
for civilians trapped inside.

it's like dropping a nuclear bomb in stages."

what i want to know is,

how do the chosen flocks
manage to
convince themselves

that their murdered shepherd

(this one,

or that one)

will ever be able to forgive them?

* ***** ** **** * ******* * **** ** ***** *

- Evan Hawthorn, the 17^th of October, 2017

{~?~}

enriched by
dimensional differences,
dear Linus and i
go on hatching our patches.

he burns a temporal candle,
howling praises for greatness,
whilst i,
on another, timorous hand,
yearn for an Illuminated Pumpkin.

\ __+_++__ / Drums of War in the Lingering Promised Land of Righteous Delusion _+_

what's that i hear?

leave it to the
right of centre dissembling party
with "Democratic" pretensions,

at a brittle and
fault-ridden
time like this,

to beat the drums
for yet more war.

distractingly
projecting
that it's Russia (of course!)
interfering with "democracies"
and mocking our hypocrisy,

the celebrity identifying icing
for the newly minted
"Committee to Investigate Russia"

(that CIA-front group
and McCarthyist regurgitation,
sporting on its board
a cloak and dagger hoard
of rattling skeletons
spilled from Ayn Rand's
preternaturally presumptuous
Aryan as apple pie closet

where the Who's Who
in the Empire's clutch
of cheerleading checkwriters
sharpen their knives
on the "Council on Foreign Relations")

Morgan Freeman bleats:

"we're at war.

for 241 years,
our
democracy
has been a
shining example to the world
of what we can
all
aspire to."

right.
and just when did those
heaven-blessed years
glitter by,

and how
(in the bloodied hell)
did countless
(uncounted)
dehumanized
and hounded,
native Americans,
Africans,
puertorriqueños,
Filipinos,
Greeks,
Koreans,
cubanos,
Southeast Asians,
Indonesians,
South and Central Americans,
Persians,
Serbs,
Arabs,
Peaceniks,
Black Panthers,
AIM supporters,
equality dreamers,
boycotters of Israeli Apartheid,
Mother Earth protectors,
and the host of other reckless
daredevil citizens
attempting to
exorcise their rights

all manage to miss them?

i expect,
being benighted,
so often tinged
with those
unrestrained colours,
entangled in nooses
and trailing damaged headlights,

the radically impractical,
human-centered masses
weren't looking
in the (whiter than) right
direction.

says Danny Haiphong,
that rare,
clear-eyed journalist
worthy of the name,
narrowing his
heart-stopping litany
of genocidal centuries
to the
recently inflicted 20th:

"the US imperial state managed to murder
somewhere between
twenty to thirty million people
and interfere
in the political processes
of over fifty different nations."

what more "shining example"
could there possibly be
of 'exceptional' mass murder
and contempt for democracy?

(if you can't process this,
thanks to enabling fables
imbibed since birth,

the slanting implanting
of the Times and the Post,

Hollywood's blazing trail
of militant concocting,

the incessant white noise
frazzling the airwaves
stolen from our Commons

atomizing sound bytes
and isolating thought,

blocking the view
beyond that
tragic toxic dearth

residing in those boxes within boxes,

and the fell cloaking stroke
of corporate-brokered brilliance,
that poking and stoking
that's stalking all our clocks

WIlliam Blum's
meticulous documentation
ought to
more than amply
suffice

for those whose eyes yet open
enough to let them see

and while we still have him,
inspiring
the lingering gasp
of independent voices
howling in the wilderness,

Professor Chomsky himself
dots these i's
with his sanely heartening
dashing sarcasm.)

*****

oh! heedless vipers!
assassins and eavesdroppers!
inveterate perjurers
and blithe puppeteers

flinging blinged strings
for those binary-blinded
bubble-headed zombies
invested in thy creed's
insatiable need

taking subtle turns
with the atrophied president's
warn out toy generals

as they trot out their
astonishing array
of goosestepping talking heads...

whilst the greed-infested,
poison-dusted,
want-encrusted
splintering world

shatters frail hopes
for redeeming a human future
before our weary eyes

keep pouring
that patriotic
bantering batter
of tribal delusion
in thy blood-soaked cordial
of fact-redacting,
blinkered
think-tank-tinkering
curdling denial

ye slither-tongued,
prophets of profit,
riveted like weasels
on next quarter's prize,
addicted to conflicting
those confounding
compound "interests"

of the sole rogue
"SuperPower",
indefensible
and unrivaled
dispenser of weapons,
and self-styled
"indispensable" nation,

confined by its designs
of mass-induced violence
and psychotic isolation

trapped by its pact
to unleash the pits of hell

soulless
and friendless
as a solitary oyster

forever on the run
from the echo of its knell.

*****

oh, say, can you see

(or, might "Homeland" Insecurity
divinely intercept)

whether or no
the bombs still rain down
on the other side
of those imagined and merciless,
one-way borders

in the
"Free" World's
relentless "global battlefield"
(where everything
thy coveteth is thine)?

can thy shaded eyes discern
a brother
or a sister
in those 27 innocents
that fall amoungst the wreckage
of a targeted drone?

or perhaps,
if thou hast missed it,
then the aftershock is timed

so hurry up and ponder
as compassion
meets thy gaze
in that angelic guise
of the
unmentionable
ambulance driver

oh never mind, he's gone.

but any unremarkable
cousin will do

for collecting our karma
there's never a shortage of collateral walking dead

dispossessed
yet still seeking
their "dispensable",
disposable dreams

sacrificed en masse
lest they haplessly obstruct

the projected profit margins
of our smirking
and majestic
incorporated owners

(the only apparent "citizens" with any rights at all)

*****

oh, slumbering laborers in the land of illusion

chosen receptors
of exception's own covenant,
showering promised bounty
on the very image
of its righteous projection,
the unconsciously countenanced
Primate Lord
of Convenient Justification

beholden accomplices
of those stridently venerated
"founding" fathers
(the privileged
providential prelates
of that vast pirate horde)

latter day
manifestations
of a vested destiny
in mortal manipulation,
handing down
divisiveness
and a compelling
lethal interest,
that taints its obedient
silent partners

weaned on myth
and blinded by their blinds

swindled by their jingles
and steeped in their indifferent
arrogant ignorance!

awake to the notion
that Democracy
could actually
turn out to be real

topple that bipartisan
trillion dollar raking,
humanity-staking,
painsgiving and taking,
impervious to election
"protection" racket

perceive the unravelling
warping weave of weapons
severing what's left
of thy
natural connections

decline to be
further fodder
for
death-dealing deceit

silence that remorseless din
of hateful,
pummelling drums

and thence, at long last

grasp the chance,
dare i ask

to embrace
estranged relations

profit from forgiveness

hammer out ploughshares

and
bestill
my tattered heart.

* ***** ** **** * ******* * **** ** ***** *

- Evan Hawthorn, the 6^th of October, 2017