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.