Whip Jack Kerouac While I Blog Alone, This Old Man Just Can't Go Home (Again).

Smoking Ruins

As one candidate's followers claim they Withher, the other one proclaims he'll make Amerika Great again, even as neither need bother to address the reality of booties on the ground from dead children blown to bits by US-armed "freedom fighters", nor explain to the American, nay, global, audience, exactly why "Assad must go."

To grasp the frightening extent of the disintegration of American Democracy, and the horrible implications for similar democracies around the world, forcibly built like cookie-cutter governments to mirror that of the US, the "End of History" stares us in the face while we blithely argue with suspect fervor about the presumptuousness of referring to any individual by the wrong pronoun (Well, actually by the correct pronoun, albeit one they reject). This alone implies a state of incipient madness, if not full-blown mental disability.

Because, before GW sent thousands of US soldiers to their death in Iraq, and ordered the heartless destruction of one of the twin stars of Middle East secularism (the other one being Syria), he needed to first send his Secretary of State on a sucker's mission to the UN to demonstrate (with charts that looked like they were drawn up by one of the children to whom our Commander-in-Chief was reading as New York was under attack and a missile, in the form of a human-piloted jet, was on its way to likewise slam into the Pentagon), why we should attack Iraq, while we crowed the triumphant phrase on the road to our cakewalk through Iraq: "Bomb them back into the Stone Age!", just to make sure our real intentions were apparent.

But Obama needed no such theatricks (sic), no one has any idea,  nor do they seem to even care, why "Assad must go". It's simply taken for granted that US citizens should follow and finance and be the international fallguys for any repercussions (as though the US was just a big magic lamp Jews rub to grant the wishes of the Israeli State), so why question their motive for wanting the complete immolation of yet another sovereign state? During the much ballyhooed debate, however, neither Mrs. Clinton, nor Mr. Trump were called on to explain not only what our real objectives there are, nor what they, if elected El Presidente, would do to stop the hemorrhaging in that region.

Such that even so peaceful and simple an act as watching these trumped-up debates in a comfortable chair in a comfortable living room I felt the awful revulsion for everything they were shouting - the insane rantings of Hillary promising to "take out" Assad and "take out" the head of Al Qaeda, as though she were talking about a prom date instead of the illegal targeted assassination of human beings in far off lands that the US has been intent on killing for fifteen years now with nothing to show for it but the promise of more, much more, of not only the same, but far far worse, spreading it across the entire globe, even unto America itself ... no matter, so long as it empowers their tightening grip on power.

The only promise heard is the one to continue doing insane things, horrible enough to make Apollo cry or Atlas shrug off his burden. As they parade their religious "faith" in front of the world, they have no problem that it is in complete contradiction to the continuation of the massacres, purges, hangings, bunker busting or phosphorous bomb manufacturing, to be sold, and indiscriminately dropped. They don't like to disturb our complacency with the reality our indifference brings about of human beings blown, not to smithereens, but to a pink mist, heads crushed, bodies broken, testes smashed, women raped in smoky ruins, heads severed from bodies, children separated from loving parents, animals slaughtered, knives raised, bones crushed, while our own Congressmen smile through their meatjuiced lips that shine and stink like mackerel in the hot sun. Not the humorous Parliament of Whores depicted by PJ O'Rourke, but a nest of Vipers, full of thieves in neckties, thieves in office driving Faustian bargains with thieves in silk as they line up the doomed for the guillotine and burning stake or the firing squad at dawn, and the collaterally damaged are just a mistake, and the mistakes are everywhere, the entire imbroglio leveraged on one mistake after another cascading into a bloody stream of filth and blood reflecting human perversity as it ripples silently past before it crashes against the rocks of an obdurate militancy and overshadows all that is bright and beautiful with the threat of an all-encompassing inundation.

But while the paper shufflers shuffle and the bureaucrats muffle the voice of the people, all said people's candidates can think of responding with are insults that fuel a misplaced rage. One in its turn fed by a self-indulgent self-pity of the most energy-swaddled population in the world. All their dismay is reserved for their own lives, so that the horrors inflicted on others by the invisible hand of our mark-it-for-destruction foreign policy never unsettles the mind enough to awaken us to the terrified nightmares we inflict on others, so we never reel from a hangover caused by the overindulgence of death-as-a-drug fix inflicted as though it's our right to do so, shooting others down so as to shoot ourselves up.

Bang bang, you shot me down bang bang you're in the ground, buried in rubble or heading to a concentration camp for refugees, the gas ovens still there, the showers still ominously silent right down the hall. Barbed wire morphed into razors, atomic missiles poised in "defensive" posture while nuclear submarines stalk so we can watch television murders in peace and  ignore Venezuelan starvation and emerging market disintegration conjured up with easy Central Bank credit that harbors hard times as its "Let them eat cake" surprise creamy filling.

How to live with joy and peace, then? How to write, or make art or enjoy a sunset, knowing all this and more is what is now the heart(less)land of Democracy you see as you roam from State to State each one worse delving deeper into the darkness of the fearful heart? That heart being nothing but a thumping muscularity all delicately murderable with snips of artery and vein, with chambers that open and shut, vesicles that fill and empty until finally someone eats it with the knife and fork of malice, laughing, usually all the way to the bank as hordes of me-first chumps Stump for Trump, because we all know billionaire businessmen have our best interests at heart, even as one claims the system is rigged, which he should know, having rigged it for himself.

So sitting with friends in San Francisco, all I can hope to attain is a peaceful sorrow in a war-torn world. A peaceful sorrow is the best I'll ever be able to offer, in the end, and so I bid the Desolation Angels good-bye and hope such supernaturalists, those who are the most responsible for the intractable nature of our problems, the monotheists represented by Jews Muslims and Christians alike, what they most fervently desire: a quick ascendancy to that realm of their dreams: the everlasting peace they strive for that they insist can only be attained via their own death. For only then can there be any hope of biting into the reality sandwiches of the world and thereby construing that of which they are constructed, providing us with at least a hope of altering their ingredients, and hence enabling us to exist on a more sensible, sustainable diet of peaceful coexistence.