Sunday, August 31, 2008

Why I Heart Sarah Palin

Dear George,

My heart palpitated when John McCain announced Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential choice. What excites me is that, if elected, she will be but a fraction of a heartbeat away from the presidency. At his age, the odds of McCain finishing out two terms are nil.

When she ascends to the Oval Office, she will continue a tradition that you began: The Age of Airhead Leadership.

You are living proof that the ill-equipped and unprepared can lead the free world because all a president has to do is what his corporate employers tell him to do.

By God, if an ex-cheerleader can lead America, then an ex-beauty queen can do the same!

Hats off to McCain for making sure that the Oval Office will never become a hotbed of original thinking.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Saturday, August 30, 2008

Our Innocent Aggression

Dear George,

Ours is the innocence of the child who builds an intricate structure of blocks and squeals with delight as he sends them scattering with swing of his arm. And should a block fall and strike his shin, he blames the block for his injury and not the arc of his arm.

This is the innocence we must preserve at all costs, for our greater the innocence, the greater tour capacity for evil. Because the innocent believe their actions have no consequences, they are afforded a freedom not allowed those held back by their capacity for experiencing guilt.

The innocent remain frozen in time. So they cannot forgive a wrong or conceive of a hurt healing, because the innocent hold a child’s conviction that what is in this moment is for all of eternity.

But beneath the surface, the innocent doubt their innocence, and such a doubt threatens them because it undercuts their naiveté and must be destroyed. It is this fear that gives innocent its capacity for unbridled brutality and makes innocence the catalyst that turns ideologues into savages.

The innocent are never victims of a wrong; they are victims of a moral outrage committed by agents of pure evil. For the innocent, every problem, no matter how small, represents an apocalypse.

In his heart of hearts, the criminal believes himself justified in committing his crime. The innocent are no different.

Some said we lost our innocence on 9/11. Thank God, they were wrong, and we were able to cling to the one quality that has made us a world power—the serene barbarity of the civilized.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Friday, August 29, 2008

Why God Picked You

Dear George,

There are many reasons God made you president. But the one that really tipped the scale in your favor was that He needed a C student to oversee the last hurrah of the Whiteman’s burden.

You are the end product of a process that has been 180 years in the making. From around 1820 to the 1960s, a white, male dominated Protestant church was the de facto state religion of America, and much of the white male bile we see today is a desire to return to the nineteenth century, an age of propriety in a black, woolen suit when “natives’ knew their place and our missionary zeal was bring Christian capitalism to the world with bibles and gunboats.

Today, the megachurch and the beltway have become game preserves for a waning Whiteman’s burden. The only question is whether it will incinerate the earth before it becomes extinct.

This is why God placed you in the White House. As one writer pointed out, “The world is now run by a generation of leaders who have never known global war. Has this dulled their senses?”

Damn straight it has!

The atrophied historical memory looks at yesterday’s carnage and sees the glory of tomorrow’s war.

As another writer puts it:

Unlike other Western countries whose citizens have come (through centuries of bleeding) to view war as a horrible aberration—a failure of rational solidarity—America’s Romantic nationalists embrace the prospect of spending years, decades, and even centuries in the righteous work of fighting the long war to “rid the word of evil.” The “warrior” is fetishized and lifted to a place beyond any possibility of criticism. Implicit in the mantra “Support the Troops” is a hissed addendum: Or else!

You have your marching orders, George. Bring it all back, or go down in flames trying. It’s the apocalypse, and you are death astride a white horse bringing to an end God’s reign on earth.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Thursday, August 28, 2008

The Democrat's Denver Love-In

Dear George,

Talk about a love-in, the Democratic convention being held in the corporatized Pepsi Convention Center makes the Haight-Asbury of the 60s look like a boxing match.

The only ripple was Dennis Kucinich’s rant, but that was kept off prime time so the damage was minimized. The last thing we need is America waking up.

One writer summed it up very nicely when he wrote:

It has been two days since the Democratic Convention started, and not one speaker has come close to expressing the nausea one hopes any decent person would have developed for this administration. Instead, all we hear are hosannas to that persistent Democratic weasel word of conventions past, ‘bipartisanship’.

(Who gives a damn about ‘nausea’ when you’re a unitary executive who has slipped the bounds of constitutional restraint and are soaring in the heady atmosphere of hubric empowerment?)

Bipartisanship is the shit that fertilizes the corporate state. The efficiency of the corporation is made possible because it is an exercise in the totalistic unity of purpose. If the state is to become an extension of corporate power, it must manifest the same unity. Partisanship and corporatism are like oil and water.

Bipartisanship first raised its ugly head at the dawning of the Cold War when Congress decided it would be really patriotic to place questions of foreign policy outside the partisan arena. The result was Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as a gargantuan defense budget. In other words, foreign policy was corporatized.

Now we are on the cusp of the corporatization of domestic policy. Instead of partisanship, the operative word is now politeness (the right wing excluded, of course).

It’s an historic moment, George. What we are seeing is nothing less than the folding of the Democratic Party into the Republican Party. That is the true significance of Biden’s elevation to the vice presidency. If anyone will protect the status quo ante/post it is he. His efforts to shill for your Iraq enterprise were nothing short of heroic.

Blandness in now the word of the day, the blandness of the "suits" who blend so well into the sheet rock as they set into motion the policies that kill and destroy. Decades of upbringing and training have leached the last remnants of decency from their souls, leaving only sterile egos that are deaf to the screams and cries of the maimed and the dying.

So certain are they of their God-ordained mission that they brook neither discussion nor debate. In their place they substitute the bipartisan policies that are rubber stamped by their congressional employees.

It’s efficient, George, beautifully efficient. When one is confronting imaginary threats and enemies, rapid response is essential.

All the while, America sleeps. And should she feel a stirring of unease over the loss of her freedom, she simply pops another pill and all is well again.

Your admire,
Belacqua Jones

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

The Senility of Progress

Dear George,

Progress is a funny thing. We are deluded into thinking that it propels us into the future on a straight, ascending line that is ever moving us towards a utopian dawn breaking somewhere on a far horizon.

The Greeks tell us that the reason for this delusion is that we walk into the future backwards. All we can comprehend is the past. The future contains too many variables for us to be able to predict anything with any degree of accuracy. So as we back into the future, what we think is a straight, linear line is really a curve that begins with an upward sweep before peaking and beginning its descent.

The paradox of progress is that it begins its descent at the very moment it believes it represents the end of history. The decay begins as the sophistication peaks. Medieval armourers suited the knights of old in sophisticated suits of armor at the very moment the crossbow made armor obsolete.

(Sure, the pope said the crossbow could only be used on heathens. But this is what happens with all new weapon systems. When bombing came into its own, civilized and sensitive minds argued that good Christians should only bomb natives. It was considered gauche for a Whiteman to bomb a Whiteman—at least until World War II.)

I bring this up to suggest that you and your minions should think about converting your assets into gold and stashing it in Swiss bank accounts, because corporatism has reached its high-point of sophistication, and we all know what that means.

Citing the collapse of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Doha Round, one writer called it a watershed moment when, “negotiators threw in the towel on their seven fruitless years of trying to expand a particular, corporate-driven set of policies to which the majority of governments has said ‘no’, time and time again.”

Yes, George, it appears that corporatism has entered the long dusk of senility as it finds itself lost and clueless in territory that was once familiar to it. As the “same” propels the world towards financial and environmental disaster, corporatism can only look for more of the same.

In America, our corporatists continue to bleed the country dry in their calls for even more sophisticated weapons system that will be just as useless as existing systems in fighting the insurgent wars of today.

Deregulation is dragging us down the sinkhole of financial ruin, and our corporatists call for more deregulation.

More and more people are going hungry and still our corporatists continue on to subsidize Big Ag, which contributes to the malnutrition brought on by soaring food prices.

And, in a final act of madness, our corporatists continue to destroy the base of the pyramid that supports them. Their efforts have created a surplus population of some one billion people that will never be absorbed by the system. And the numbers keep increasing as corporatism continues to expand by making people irrelevant.

They are mad, George, wonderfully and beautifully mad, and it is a thrill to sit here and watch the system shake itself to pieces.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Tripping Out on Dickens

Dear George,

I love reading Dickens when I’m stoned. His twisted plotting and syntax dances in mad harmony with the convoluted spasms of my brain on its winnowing journey through the cosmos. I lose myself in each of his tightly wrought characters and hold prolonged conversations with them over multiple tankards of stout in Victorian pubs. (Scrooge was so misunderstood! His values were the values that made Great Britain a capitalist powerhouse. It wasn’t the ghosts that transformed him; he’d simply OD’d on laudanum to cure his Christmas Eve cold. He latter regretted his excesses of generosity.)

But, I digress.

Anyhow, I was trying to focus on his Our Mutual Friend last night when I came across a passage that fits you to a tee.

Dickens was sketching a character by the name of Mr. Podsnap. I have no idea who the fuck he was or what part he played in the story. When I read Dickens, each character and every incident exists in complete isolation from the work as a whole. None of them occupy a permanent place in my memory bank. Like the rest of society, I live in the eternal now which means memory is against my religion.

Anyhow, in this chapter, Dickens writes:

As a so eminently respectable man, Mr. Podsnap was sensible of it being required of him to take Providence under his protection. Consequently, he always knew exactly what Providence meant. Inferior and less respectable men might fall short of that mark, but Mr. Podsnap was always up to it. And it was very remarkable (and it must have been very comfortable) that what Providence meant, was invariably what Mr. Podsnap meant.

George, it that you or is that you? (I realize that after reading Camus, you might find the above passage too complex to comprehend. I’m sure Condi would be glad to explain it.)

There is no doubt that you and Providence are in a lip lock so intense that it is downright homicidal. This is why you are remaking the world in your image which is Providence’s image because what you think, He thinks.

So, continue as you are, ignoring the public and the polls and ignoring the fact that you are the most reviled president the country has ever seen. The Greeks believed that whomever the gods blessed they first made mad, or something like that.

George, there is no doubt you are doubly blessed.

Or is it, “Whom the gods would destroy….?”

Whatever.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Monday, August 25, 2008

Happy Misery

Dear George,

Critics who compare your administration to something out of George Orwell’s 1984 miss the point. Your administration is closer to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. 1984 was a police state; Brave New World was a pharmaceutical state where people embraced their oppression by popping Soma.

I mention this because American’s have trouble accepting the fact that life is one big fucking trauma. They continue to buy into the consumerist fantasy that life is a never-ending beach party in which youth is eternal and their complexions remain smooth and unblemished by the ravages of age.

So when they experience sadness, tension or anxiety, they feel something is wrong with them because given all the toys and gadgets that surround them, they should be happy.

Into this breach come the pharmaceuticals with their array of antidepressants and tranquilizers. Like Soma, these drugs are the “opiate of the masses,” carrying out the same function religion once carried out.

Through clever marketing, our children are drugged at a young age because the “experts” have convinced their parents that popped pills improve their performance in school as the drugs transform them into efficient little test-takers.

This drug dependency strengthens the hold of our corporate oligarchy on the masses. During the sixties, our oligarchs made the painful discovery that dance and song can enflame rebellious passions in the young. Oh sure, there were drugs, but none of them were FDA approved. Consequently, their side effects only feed into this rebellious spirit.

It is more conducive to social stability to numb these passions with pills and well-packaged bland music that keeps the young sedated in their misery.

Who needs a gulag when one has psychotropic drugs? Write the right script for a dissident outraged over the social injustices of feral capitalism, and before you can say “pharmaceutical,” you’ve got a happy consumer on your hands.

Pepsi and pills are giving us a new generation of smiling drones. The goal is to enhance productivity while dulling the intellect.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Good Manners and Congress

Dear George,

It is amazing how many people still don’t get it. One of the benefits of living in a Corporatist State is that we have a well mannered Congress. Gone are the barbaric days of destructive debates and brutal canings.

Yesterday, I read an article that failed to appreciate this new Congressional mentality. (At least I think I read it. Yesterday isn’t too well seated in my meth-mashed memory bank.)

Whatever!

The author pointed out that Senate Republicans have consistently filibustered any bill that would subsidize alternative energy initiatives.

As the author pointed out, these days filibuster is used in a highly symbolic way. Traditionally, a filibuster meant that minority senators stood and talked 24/7 until their colleagues became sick and tired of listening to them read from the Washington DC phone book and let them have their way.

The Senate hasn’t seen a real filibuster in forty years.

What really happens is that if the Republicans don’t like a bill because it might do something good, they simply threaten to filibuster and the Democrats bow, pull on their forelocks and return to their desks like the well-behaved children that they are.

The author’s rather radical idea is that the next time an alternative energy bill comes up; Senate Democrats should call the Republican’s bluff and force them into a real filibuster. In an age of 24/7 news coverage the Republicans would come out looking like the Luddite monkeys that they are.

Ah, the innocence of it all!

There are two reasons this idea will never fly. In the forty years since the last real filibuster, Congress has increasingly absorbed the mentality of its corporate handlers. The good corporatist would never rock the boat by doing something as crass as forcing a real filibuster. This would leave the Democrats open to charges of obstructionism, a charge the Democrats equate with being accused of having the clap.

Second, when our corporations say “Shit!!”, Congress squats and asks, “What color?” Now the author correctly points out that alternative energy is a $13 billion a year industry. However, this is chump change to Big Oil, and Big Oil doesn’t want to see alternative energy subsidized until it’s sucked the last drop of oil out of the ground. So, the Republicans oblige Big Oil by threatening to filibuster the bill every time it comes up, and the Democrats oblige Big Oil by not forcing the issue.

It’s so much nicer this way than the bad old days when Congress actually debated issues.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Saturday, August 23, 2008

Jeremiah, Economists and the American Dream

Dear George,

We need a quick rendition, here. We have an economist spinning out of control by attempting to shine a light on the upset apple cart that is the American economy. I am speaking on none less then that Jeremiah of the Dismal Science, Nouriel Roubini.

Listen to the nonsense he is putting out. According to one writer:

In the coming months and years, he warned, the United States was likely to face a once-in-a-lifetime housing bust, an oil shock, sharply declining consumer confidence and, ultimately, a deep recession. He laid out a bleak sequence of events: homeowners defaulting on mortgages, trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities unraveling worldwide and the global financial system shuddering to a halt.

That was in 2006, when the economy was humming along beautifully. Look what happened: the son of a bitch opened his mouth and our house of cards started tumbling down.

An economist has but one function and that is to act as a cheerleader for the economy.

Economists are supposed to spend their time drawing up elaborate schematics composed of arcane mathematical formula that they mistake for reality. They are like the man with a broken television who takes a schematic of the set and convinces himself that the set will start working as soon as he draws a line from Point A to Point B. The only difference between the man with the broken TV and the economist is that a TV is inanimate and can’t be scammed. People can.

Economists don’t scream “Tsunami coming!” They shout, “Surf’s up!”

Make believe only works if people believe it. People have to believe that our economy is outfitted in Prada and Ralph Loren. We can’t have fools like Roubini running around pointing out that our economy is buck-assed naked.

Roubini is a shoo-in for rendition. He’s an Iranian who spent time living in Tehran where he was no doubt indoctrinated by the Ayatollahs, even though he’s Jewish. I think a cozy little cell in Saudi Arabia would do the trick. There he could be reeducated and ultimately returned to polite society as a skilled practitioner of economic boosterism.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Friday, August 22, 2008

Progressive Petards

Dear George,

Look around you. Lean back in your chair and survey the bland sterility of the current presidential campaign. Do you notice that something is missing?

There’s not a wisp of progressive thinking in sight! Nada! All things progressive have been driven from the scene even though polls show that most Americans are partial to many of the progressive positions.

The truth is, George, that progressives have been hoisted by their own petard of ideological prissiness. What we have is not a unified progressive movement but a disparate gaggle of groups, each with its own ideological axe to grind, be it the ethical treatment of animals, peace, reproductive rights, gun control, social justice, obesity or spotted owls. And none of them are willing to compromise their specific principle to advance the overall progressive cause.

Let me give you an example of this. The Green Party is running a couple of street fighters for president and vice president, Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente, both of them radicals to the core.

Now, unmoor your imagination from its vacuous pier and imagine McKinney getting up in front of an audience of Good Ol’ Boys in Tennessee and giving the following speech:

I want to start by saying one thing: keep your guns! We don’t want to take them away. But I ask one favor in return—teach your sons how to hunt.

Hell! Teach your daughters too!

When you bring down a buck, the venison that goes into your freezer is a boon to the environment. That meat was raised with a minimal impact on the environment. And it displaces the beef you might ordinarily buy, beef raised on a factory farm that is an environmental disaster area with its gigantic pools of steer shit, its stench and the danger it presents of contracting Mad Cow Disease.

You know, there’s another way that you and I are on the same page.

I know you don’t want to see the wood where your father taught you to hunt and where you’re teaching your son to hunt bulldozed down to make way for yuppie condos or an upscale shopping mall.

I know you don’t want to see the stream where your father taught you to fish and where you’re teaching your son to fish clogged with silt because some goddamn mine owner decided it would be cheaper to take the top off of a mountain instead of tunneling into it.

Factions within the progressive movement that hate hunting and guns would go absolutely spastic, so the NASCAR demographic would remain as alienated as ever, and the speech, were ever made, would be filled with pale platitudes.

Rest assured that with the Democratic Leadership Council guarding the door, progressives remain homeless waifs huddled in hungry alleys as they wait for someone to toss them a scrap of meat or a bread crumb, just enough to keep their corpse alive, though they will refuse to take it unless it's organic.

But by God, their principles remain pure and unsullied.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Body Odor and Leadership

Dear George,

I mentioned yesterday that fastidiousness is the midwife of oppression. Great leaders realize that there is also an element of sorcery involved in oppression. All a leader need do is have his lapdog media repeat certain incantations over and over, and in short order he has a compliant polity that rarely pays attention to what he does.

The incantations are dust, bad breath, pollen, e-coli, particulates, body odor, mold, salmonella, second-hand smoke, HIV, dandruff, pollutants, fructose, ring around the collar, cellulite, yellow teeth, sagging jowls, nose hairs, dried and flaky skin, toenail fungus, and cholesterol.

In days of yore tyranny needed a combination of brute force and divine right to rule. Now all it needs is an obsession with healthy living.

Tyranny thrives on isolation and fear. What better way is there to encourage these than to flood the media with all of the multitudinous threats to an individual’s health and social standing?

What does a little lost freedom matter if our teeth shine and we are not terminal? Our forefathers depended upon the Constitution for protection; now masses look to antibacterial soap and plastic surgery.

Surrounded by perceived threats they barely understand, the public turns to experts for comfort and succor. What they seek from their experts is not expertise, but strength of conviction. This craving for strength conditions them to not only to expect, but also to demand, a strong, authoritarian political leader.

Hell, George, who needs a secret police when there are twenty different brands of deodorant on the market? The chains of oppression rest easier when you smell nice.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Absolute Relative Values and the Modern State

Dear George,

Moral relativism is the engine that drives the Corporatist State. This engine is all the more efficient because the state believes that its actions are driven by moral absolutes. The more absolute it believes it morals to be, the deadlier is its relativism.

My meth-addled brain vaguely remembers someone, maybe, saying, maybe, that the use of force is evil, which is why it is favored by small children and large corporate nations. Or maybe nobody said it, but who gives a shit!

The Corporate State celebrates life by destroying it just as it celebrates freedom through oppression. It is always does the opposite of what it contends to believe. It touts the virtues of growth through competitive free enterprise even though its reaction to the presence of real competition borders on the phobic.

Corporatism abhors the messy inefficiency of an open bazaar in which small enterprises compete. It would much prefer to buy up the enterprises and corner the marketplace, which it proceeds to bulldoze because it needs the land to build its corporate headquarters. It’s more sanitary that way.

One writer points to the Plunge Protection Team as an example of corporatism’s fastidious approach to free competition. Known officially as the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, its function is to stave off precipitous market plunges. If the market looks like it’s going to take a violent dip, the team springs into action. It has, in place, front companies through which it operates. The Fed releases funds to these companies with which they buy, buy, buy, thus either reversing the downward dip, or at least mitigating it.

What was once called illegal market manipulation is now called legal, and necessary, market stabilization.

Fastidiousness, George, has always been the midwife of oppression. Despots are neat freaks who seek to sanitize life through their oppressive micromanagement. We’re seeing an example of it here with the bans on trans fat and second-hand smoke. Oppression is best marketed a facilitator of healthy living.

Inducing an obsession with individual health is always an effective vehicle for state oppression. The individual who is concerned about the state of their bowels is less likely to be concerned with the misdeeds of the state. People don’t care if their government stinks as long as the people around them smell nice.

Moral relativism makes possible the primitive hypocrisy without which the ship of state would founder on the shoals of decency. So it is that we can go spastic over the Russian defense of South Ossetia while ignoring both our invasion of Iraq and the hissy-fit we through during the Cuban missile crisis. Politicians never lie; they simply shine a new light on the facts as they make them up. It’s called statesmanship.

But it’s not all moral relativism. There are two absolute values the corporatist state lives by: greed and exploitation, two values that have resonated down through history.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Living the Dream

Dear George,

You guys never fail to amaze me! You nimbly skip from lie to lie with all the grace of a drunken rhino, and people still believe you. You went from Iraq’s WMDs to Iran’s nuclear threat and the Democrats followed right after you like a bunch of tom cats following a bitch in heat.

Granted, the one thing the Democrats hate is acting like an opposition party because they are afraid of appearing divisive, but still…

Now you’ve trotted out your latest scam: offshore drilling as the panacea that will bring gasoline prices down. The Democrats could have blown you out of the water on that one simply by pointing out that your own Department of Energy has said it will be ten to twenty years before we’d see any of that oil, and even then, it would have zero effect on gasoline prices.

But this hasn’t stopped McCain from changing his song from “Bomb-Bomb Iran” to “Drill-Drill Offshore.”

One writer caught one of your minions crowing, “Without even realizing it, the GOP drilling offensive has become a new contract with America.” It’s funny how all these “Contracts with America” resemble tubes of K-Y Jelly.

The problem with the Democrats is that they concentrate on issues without realizing that in our age of MTV campaigning, issues are so yesterday. You guys always win because you concentrate on focus groups instead of vision and are more concerned with demographics than governance.

And your favorite demographic is not the soccer mom or the NASCAR dad; it’s the voter whose attention span has been atrophied by the media saturation that surrounds him. Dancing screens flash image after image in rapid succession. Over time, the mind is conditioned to accept rapid change as the norm. Slowly the brain loses the capacity for long-term memory that is the foundation of the ability to concentrate on something for more than five seconds.

Our leaders are constantly invoking the Greatest Generation that came out of the Great Depression to defeat the forces of fascism in World War II. This is the generation that returned home to lead America through the prosperous fifties and sixties.

The Greatest Generation is dying out, and we have a new generation of leaders replacing them—the bored children of prosperity who have never known hardship. They are the Now Generation that has introduced America to a new age of barbaric capitalism.

The Great Depression has faded from their memory and they are convinced they will never see another as long as they keep the quarterly bottom-line looking good by hook or by crook.

Our leaders live in a world of fantasy and are kept in power by an electorate that favors dreams over reality.

McCain shares their dream world, which is why I look forward to his inauguration.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Monday, August 18, 2008

Closing the Class Gap with the Russians

Dear George,

Well, Big Guy, I have some good news and some bad news for you. First, the good news: If you define the middle class, quantitatively, as anyone making between .75 and 1.25 percent of the median income, then the only country with a smaller middle class than us is Russia.

Now for the bad news: We have a class gap with the goddamn Russians, and they’re winning! I ask you, how in the hell could we kick their ass in the Cold War and then let them outgun us in the elimination of the middle class?

Our oligarchy is smarter than their oligarchy. Oh sure, theirs is more brutal than ours-- though we’re slowly closing that gap--but ours practices its nastiness with a smile. The Russian oligarchy rules with an iron fist while ours is skilled­ at marketing oppression and convincing the masses that pain and want are signs of a healthy economy.

The problem is that we have too many vestige of middle class privilege left, vestiges like Social Security, Medicare, private health plans, pensions and access to higher education.

They’ve got to go, George, everyone of them. That’s the only way we’ll catch up with the Russians. Every benefit not jettisoned by the Corporatist State is lost profit and lost prestige.

How can America be a model of feral capitalism if we allow our profit margins to shrink just so we can maintain the illusion of a healthy middle class? The second our oligarchy saw how welfare was sapping our economic strength, they dumped it. It’s time they did the same with the middle class. Those people simply have to learn that in the New Age there’s no free ride.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Creative Destruction and the Renewal of the Earth

Dear George,

Do you ever stop and think about the creative energy unleashed by destruction? It’s awesome! A tornado levels a man’s home, and out of the death and despair, a new and better home arises. A state-of-the-art Jacuzzi stands where the bathtub once stood; a digitalized home entertainment replaces the old TV; the kitchen glows with new appliances. And if a family member or two is no longer present to enjoy the novelty of it all, well, that’s simply the price we pay for progress.

Look at all Katrina is doing for the economic prosperity of New Orleans. It is urban renewal writ large: Out with the ghettoes and in with theme-park condos and malls.

Germany and Japan are world-class economic powerhouses because we fire bombed and nuked them into near oblivion during World War II.

It is axiomatic that there can be no growth without destruction.

We are a teardown society that revels in the “now” of the new as we gleefully erase the relics of the past. It is this destructiveness that has given rise to, and continues to nurture the Corporatist State. The bomber and the bulldozer are the great civilizers of modern times. A dynamic ethos of leveling and paving, burning and blowing up, all come together to reduced the undisciplined fecundity of nature to the straight lines and sharp angles of rational order.

Napalm purifies all that it touches. The charred rubble it leaves in its wake is the sanitized tabula rasa upon which the Corporatist State writes its motet of standardized consumption and conformity.

Destruction wears the mask of the Creator God, incinerating the old with the very same fiery sword that keeps Man away from Eden’s pastoral paradise. God didn’t curse Adam for eating the forbidden fruit; he blessed him by forcing him to become a master builder. It is fitting that Adam’s first tools were the hoe and the axe that would denude and tear up the earth.

We are Adam’s heirs, the only difference being that we have replaced the hoe and the axe with the bomb and the missile. The bored children of prosperity are on the march, rescuing our Earth Mother from the filth-encrusted tentacles of nature as we wrap her in a protective blanket of asphalt and concrete.

Nature gives us chaos; destruction gives us order.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Saving the World to Save Some of Ourselves

Dear George,

The high point of my day is getting off on the National Security Strategy for the United States (NSS). This is the baby that tells the world just how we’re going to fuck with them. It beats porn any day.

The NSS leads with that fundamental biblical truth, “Economic freedom is a moral imperative,” even if some must die so we can protect it. The right to own property is fundamental to human nature (our kind). Economic freedom promotes social stability by keeping the masses so impoverished and weakened that their sole concern is survival, not political agitation.

Free governments govern their states through the marginalization of the poor, which is why the best form of government is Authoritarian Democracy in which a free people freely elect the tyrant of their choice.

America does not attack free nations, which we define as any nation that allows us to shamelessly exploit it. Nations that resist this exploitation are evil and may be attacked preemptively. This is how we protect the American (corporate) people and preserve the American (corporate) way.

The NSS proposes a new Cold War whose aim is to spread Authoritarian Democracy to the world. Condi calls it “transformational democracy.” She elaborates by adding, “The fundamental character of regimes now matters more than the international distribution of power.”

So it’s in with paranoia and out with the balance of power diplomacy that has governed international relations since the Peace of Westphalia. It matters not that the world is against us as long as it’s our kind of world.

We don’t oppress; we partner, just as the hangman partners with the condemned man.

We must muster all of our assets for the struggle to come, from our missiles to our tanks to our prisons to our waterboards to our electrodes. Ours is the noblest mission the world has seen since the Europeans spread Christianity with the rack and the stake.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Friday, August 15, 2008

Linguistic Turn-ons

Dear George,

Language is a painted whore who comes in many guises. She can lift you to new heights of pleasure with one breath, and with the next she can cut your throat. Her words are tiny demons tap dancing across a broken field, their sunny smiles shrouds hiding the rot that decays from within. Words make sweet the stench of decaying corpses with the perfume of platitudes that render death palatable.

Language is in a state of perpetual tension with reality as it struggles to drape a linear mantle across a reality that that is one nonlinear paradox after another.

The words that fall from the mouths of pundits spin intricate webs of deception and distraction like the magician’s sleight of hand as he diverts attention away from the sham that is the heart and soul of his trick.

“Democracy”
“Freedom”
“Prosperity”
“Collateral Damage”
“Our banking system is sound”
“Victory”
“The Surge is working.”
“Change you can believe in.”
“The American Dream”

The words point away from what they aren’t like tiny pods carrying within them the seeds of their own contradictions. Their vapid abstractions are tiny puffs of mist that dissipate before deaths foul breeze, only to be replaced by other puffs that float briefly before fading.

They spread their toxic dew over all that is living, sparkling in the sunlight as that which once lived is blistered and burned until it reduced to a sea of asphalt spreading as far as the eye can see like an amber field of grain gone bad.

As a sage once said,

All I know is what the words know, and that makes a tidy little sum, with a
begining, a midle and an end, like a well-turned phrase or the long sonata of
the dead.

Samuel Becket, Malloy

Language, Big Guy, is the ultimate turn-on.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Gelding the Media: Going Goebbels One Better

Dear George,

One symptom of the Corporatist State’s emasculation of the media is the public’s belief that if a story is heavily covered, it is important, earthshaking and trend setting.

The midterms turned on the size of Mark Foley’s pecker, while the burning issue of this campaign seems to be the Edwards affair (a great story considering that he isn’t even a candidate.) In politics, peckers rule.

Goebbels is in his grave kicking his own ass for not coming up with the sound bite that does more to corrupt a free press than the strictest state censorship: If it bleeds, it leads.

However, the media’s greatest act of trivialization is their breathless willingness to lap up your tall tales. You have given them the one morality play that plays well in Peoria, the Hollywood western, that study in celluloid morality for a celluloid people. Iraq burns, the Constitution dissolves and the Geneva Conventions are “quaint,” while the media sloshes here and there looking for the next trivial Dingleberry they can hold up to the public as if it were a nugget of gold.

Keep the media distracted with celebrity dazzle, with garish weddings, gossip and scandal, and the media will morph into a bloated clone of the supermarket tabloid, while you have a free pass to do whatever you want, as long as the public is properly titillated.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Believing in Belief Absolutely

Dear George,

The best absolute truths are those grounded in make believe. Reality makes for a poor absolute because reality is constantly changing, while make believe remains constant. If I base my belief that the world is flat on a realistic assessment of the actual shape of the word, I will be forced to flip-flop as soon as new data proves me wrong. If, however, I base my belief on divine revelation, then my belief is remains constant, no matter how rabid the ravings of scientists and experts.

Absolutes make for exciting diplomacy because diplomacy is impossible when driven by absolute values. If my belief is absolute, then the compromises required by diplomacy become impossible, and it is only a matter of time before I start bombing the shit out wedding parties in any country that doesn’t share my values.

An example of one of these absolutes is our belief that a symbiotic relationship exists between capitalism and democracy (though we aren’t sure which one is the parasite and which one is the host.) This is an effective absolute because it has no basis in historical reality. Capitalism thrived in America because governors and presidents were quite willing to call out troops and police to beat and shoot striking workers.

Your neocon minions want to see America governed by absolute values such as feral capitalism and religious fundamentalism. This explains why KBR is building all those camps to hold “illegal immigrants.” It is only a matter of time before a country governed by absolutes must “reeducate” any and all who don’t share these absolutes. Often times, this reeducation requires beaming a dissident up to heaven for a fact-to-face sit down with God.

A fervent belief in an absolute truth is symptomatic of madmen, and without madmen, history would be dull and dry. Madness is the dynamic that drives civilization.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Bringing Back the Good Old Days

Dear George,

The Russians are on the move again! God, how I’ve missed them! The international stage just hasn’t been the same since they started behaving themselves in 1991.

I was thrilled to see you give them “what-for” for their “disproportionate” response to Georgia’s attempt to liberate its dissident province of South Ossetia from the iron fist of Russian domination. Putin has got to understand that we hold the patent on Shock and Awe™, and we will not tolerate him violating our intellectual property rights.

It is times like this that a nation must turn to its sages for guidance, and there is no sage sagier than BillyBob Kristol. He sure sounded the clarion call in his New York Times column, yesterday, when he said.

Dictators aren’t moved by the claims of justice unarmed; aggressors aren’t intimidated by diplomacy absent the credible threat of force; fanatics aren’t deterred by the disapproval of men of moderate refinement.

Anyone who doubts the wisdom of BillyBob’s words need only look to Iraq as a proof-positive of their truth.

George, we have a golden opportunity, here, to start Cold War II. Let’s face it; your Eternal War of the Empty Policy is losing its legs. All it’s netted us is two quagmires and an ever growing national debt.

A dicey Cold War is good for the economy and good for cementing your unfettered powers as the nation’s Commander-in-Chief. It gives us a golden opportunity to bloat our defense budget even more. This will contribute to the continued shredding of our social safety net, which will drive even more poor into our armed forces whose upkeep will suck even more money away from social services, which will swell the ranks of our armed forces even more, which means more equipment, which means more oil will be needed to run the equipment they need, which means more imperial wars of conquest to keep the oil flowing freely.

It’s win-win all the way. And the beauty of a Cold War is that we never fight the Big One, but focus our resources on regional quagmires that go on and on without end.

Our symbiotic relationship with the Russians has done much for us. Not only have we learned a great deal from them, but we have improved on many of their techniques. Where Russia used the gulag to control its dissidents, we use the mall.

When Americans revolt, they head for the mall where they are clothed, tattooed and pierced. Having established their bona fides as well-appointed revolutionaries, they return to their rooms to lose themselves in their ramped-up music of rebellion.

For Corporatist dissidents, revolution is not about liberte, egalite, fraternite, but about market share, retail sales, and brand recognition.

Lord knows what heights we’ll scale in Cold War II.

Gotta go, Big Guy. It’s time to start digging a hole for my bomb shelter.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Monday, August 11, 2008

The Honor is Yours

Dear George,

If they ever hand out a Tomas de Torquemada Award for Interrogative Innovation, you will be the first honoree. Once again, you are taking democracy to a new level as your minions go to court to block detainees from talking about their experiences when, and if, they are released. Specifically, you don’t want the worms talking about the “alternative interrogation techniques” that forced them to confess to crimes both real and imagined.

These techniques are among the governments most sensitive national security secrets and their release could play havoc with our war on terror. If terrorists knew what we were going to do to them, they could train to resist it.

I can see it now, a terrorist training camp on the Afghan-Pakistani border. The drill instructor blows his whistle and yells, “Awright trainees! Everybody down to the pool for waterboard drill!” The very thought sends chills up my spine.

It’s true that most of the people we drag in are innocent, so probably would never benefit from this training, but since we don’t know who’s innocent and who’s guilty, we’d best keep this information under wraps.

Liberty is a torch that enlightens the world. Should anyone threaten it, it is fitting that this same torch be held against the soles of their bare feet until they chatter like a monkey.

In this age of fanciful threats, America must wrap herself in a flag stained with the urine, blood and feces of the alternatively interrogated.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Sunday, August 10, 2008

The Eternal Emptiness of the Beautiful Mind

Dear George,

McCain’s going to win! I know everyone is looking for a Democratic sweep, but all of these dire predictions overlook one small fact—stupidity is electable. There are several factors that contribute to its appeal.

First, stupid people are consistent because they are too dumb to change their minds. To change one’s mind, one must be able to look at a complex problem, analyze its constituent elements and, based up on a rational analysis, reach a conclusion that differs from the conclusion one held five minutes ago.

The stupid person can’t be bothered with such nonsense, and the public hates it because it has to pay attention.

The second factor is the public’s shriveled attention span. This is a product of a decades of saturation by a media that has fled the printed word for the fleeting images that flicker across America’s omnipresent screens. Simpletons favor simple statements (“Drill,” “Bomb”) that play well with our comatose minds.

The last intelligent candidate to win the presidency was Clinton. However, his victory had nothing to do with his intelligence and everything to do with his ability to bullshit the public.

So tell your minions to rest easy. Obama’s intellect is the petard upon which he will hoist himself while McCain rides to an easy victory.

Today’s beautiful mind is an empty one.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Saturday, August 9, 2008

Wandering the Darkened Alleys of the Dark Side

Dear George,

The Big Dick likes to remind us that in fighting your Eternal War of the Empty Policy it is often necessary to go to the Dark Side.

In the dull, amoral world of the policymaker where a crushing boredom solidifies his face into a rigid mask of propriety, the Dark Side is a siren song that draws him into the shadowy void where the bitch-whore Power promises him freedom and release as she grabs him by the crotch, for she sucks dry all who couple with her.

You need the Dark Side, George, to conceal the fact that your Eternal War is nothing but a figment of you febrile imagination that has scammed the Democrats into a mindless comparison of “whose is bigger.” The Dark Side is a trash-strewn alley where not even the rats dare ask, “What War?”

It is on the Dark Side that shadows hide your weakness as your power grows and hardens, and you become a giant striding across the earth with all your past failures redeemed by the bitch-whore Power who spreads for all willing to barter their souls away.

In a spasm of power, you have trashed an economy, ruined the middle class and focused their frustrations and fears on all who are brown of skin. Your seed is a cluster bomb that levels the home in which frightened children cling to their soon to be dead mother.

And in the bitch-whore, you see the face of our Savior and rejoice for you are doing Her work, deep, deep in the shadows where none can see.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Friday, August 8, 2008

Food Resource Adjustments and the Ascendancy of the Free Market

Dear George,

When great men face great problems it is time for them to think great thoughts. Well, Big Guy, we’ve got a great problem, so start thinking some great thoughts.

Thanks to the dynamic drive of your neoliberal policies, coupled with the spread of the Washington Consensus, the world now finds itself saddled with about one billion surplus people. These are people who are no longer needed, and there is no way that expanding global prosperity will ever absorb them. And their numbers are expected to increase exponentially.

An unproductive human is a drain on the global economy. To staunch this drain will require some creative thinking.

It all boils down to market dynamics. We know a bear market will eventually go bullish if left alone. The same holds true for population explosions. Once a population outstrips the available food supply the population will go through a period of adjustment until a balance is achieved between people and food.

In the past, this period of adjustment was called a famine. This is not a word that would play well with a focus group, so it would be better to rebrand famine as a period of “food resource adjustment.”

As always, we must look to the wisdom of the ancients for our inspiration. As that sage Ebenezer Scrooge explained, it is better to do nothing and let the surplus population find its natural balance. (Well, he was a sage until he went soft on us!)

This is precisely what our Victorian forefathers did. Between 1876 and 1902 a series of droughts swept the third world that adjusted the surplus population by between 31 million and 61 million, depending on who was doing the counting.[1] Weather played a role, but the deciding factor was the commodification of food that Europe had introduced to the third world. Rather than being horded to feed the starving, grain was shipped overseas to be sold on the free market at prices the starving couldn’t afford.

Here was where capitalism showed its mettle. Instead of a tragedy, our forefathers saw an opportunity for further economic expansion. A starving man is too weak to protest when you steal his land. Writer Mike Davis summed it up when he wrote:

The European empires, together with Japan and the United States, rapaciously exploited the opportunity to wrest new colonies, expropriate communal lands, and tap novel resources of plantation and mine labor. What seemed from a metropolitan perspective the nineteenth century’s final blaze of imperial glory was, from an Asian or African viewpoint, only the hideous light of a giant funeral pyre.

Guess what, George. It’s time for another round of food resource adjustments. We’re seeing the first stirrings of it as food prices go through the roof. With a few creative import/export policy adjustments, we can increase its intensity.

Food resource adjustments have several advantages. First there would be no blood on our imperial hands. These adjustments are simply manifestations impersonal market movements. In time, the market will attain the proper balance as it always does.

Nor do these adjustments outrage the public thanks to the “Africa Syndrome.” Every time the public sees a photograph of an African, he is sick, starving or dead. As a result, we the public is conditioned to think this is a natural state of affairs.

So, let’s take all the grain that is being used to feed the food resource adjusted masses and redirect it to the open market where its productivity can be maximized by converting it into the ethanol that will power the free world’s SUVs.

Food resource adjustments allow us to maximize our return on investment with a minimal negative blowback. Privatize the profits; externalize the costs—that’s what capitalism is all about.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones


[1] Davis, Mike. ”Late Victorian Holocausts.”

Thursday, August 7, 2008

Old Men Rising

Dear George,

Those of us shuffling towards the end of our life-spans with death and senility whispering in our ears love the Big Dick. The man has discovered the Fountain of Youth.

The hardest thing about aging is standing hopelessly by as the bodily fluids slowly dry and turn to dust. The elastic vibrancy of youth becomes dried parchment, too creased and wrinkled to be written on. Thank God, there is a moisturizer that smoothes and softens.

The fluid that keeps the old young is bile, and the Big Dick has made it fashionable again. Bile firms the flesh and hardens the eye; it keeps the heart beating and aids the digestion. Take an old man suffering from an assortment of ailments and let him manifest a mean edge, and before you know it, his ailments are history.

Bile performs an invaluable service to the state because it enables old men to send the young off to die in useless wars. This is a culling of the herd that benefits the state by insuring the survival of the privileged who are able to get endless deferments. Meanwhile, the poor, all of whom are a drain of our social services, are killed, while those maimed or psychologically destroyed can be warehoused or ignored.

There was a time when the old were honored for their wisdom; now they are honored for their bile. For this, America’s seniors own the Big Dick their gratitude.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Punditville on the Potomac

Dear George,

My, how the Beltway has changed. What was once the august capital of a democratic republic is now a Never-Never Land where little boys refuse to grow up and are given free rein to indulge their fantasies of altruistic depravity.

By rights, we should rename Washington D.C. Punditville, because that it is where your minions float their balloons of fetid gas which our pundits keep afloat with the hot air of their pundification. The balloons are gaily colored, resplendent with flashing neon lights and dancing screens upon which dour-faced anchors shill the threat of the day while reassuring passengers that the ship of state is sound even as it lists sharply to starboard.

It is there that the melodramatic fables are spun that reduced the complexities of the world to a Hollywood “B” western in which the hero’s hat never falls off, no matter how violent the fist fight.

But Punditville is more than just a town. Buddhists speak of Indra’s net, which one commentator describes as:

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number…If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring (emphasis mine).

Punditville is like that, but instead of jewels, in each eye of the net is hung a polished turd culled from the daily output of bullshit that flows from its back alleys and cloakrooms, and in each turd can be seen the reflection of all the other turds in this encapsulated universe of make believe.

To believe in nothing is the ultimate utopian act. Life becomes a blank slate upon which can be written the madness of the now in which letters shift and slide, forming and reforming themselves as dreams dies and bubbles pop, giving rise to new dreams and new bubbles as insubstantial as the ones that preceded them, and words become the building blocks of a fortress behind which we curl into our fetal balls of isolation, safe and secure in our fear and anxiety.

God, I love it!

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

American Lit. 101 v.2

Dear George,

Do you know why modern literature is so sterile? It is the lack of hardship. Prosperity is downright boring; too much of it leads to a paralyzing self-absorption that lacks the cloying sentimentality that is the warp and weft of great literature. When was the last time another Dickens appeared on the literary scene?

And let’s be honest; suffering cloys. Who has not been moved to tears by the long, drawn-out, interminable death of Jo the street-crossing sweeper in Dickens’s Bleak House, that unlettered, unwashed, unfed waif who knew “nothink?” Comforted by the noble surgeon, Alan Woodcourt who could do nothing for the kid except walk him through the Lord’s Prayer, Jo’s voice grows weaker and weaker as he repeats each line of the prayer until he finally gasps out, “Hallowed be thy…” and croaks. He was but one of the ragged and hungry waifs that peppered so much of Victorian literature.

O, George! If the poor prosper, whom shall we pity? What is there to write about if you have a nation that is fed and clothed? Authors are reduced to writing about anxiety, unhappy relationships, and life’s nihilistic boredom. Of course life is boring if you don’t have to grub for food and shelter.

But, you are changing all that! You are marching us back to that golden age of filthy slums, unchecked crime, homeless children and twelve-year-old whores. It was an era when the civilized cruelty of Social Darwinism reigned supreme.

Soon, our authors will pen saccharine tomes of impoverished widows and hungry children, their pale, drawn faces pressed against the windows of the privileged, a tear running down their besmirched cheeks as they watch the gaiety and wealth that will be forever beyond their reach.

There is no sentimentality without suffering. And you are supplying ample suffering for which the authors, literary agents and publishing houses of America thank you. You and you alone, are bringing great literature back to the Euromerican world.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Monday, August 4, 2008

Sitting Quietly in the Corner

Dear George,

One simple fact characterizes politics in the United States: there is no viable progressive movement. Progressivism is America’s problem child who is forced by the teacher to sit quietly in the corner. Oh, there are the occasional tantrums, but a quick and vigorous caning is enough to silence them.

Over time, progressives have reached the delusional conclusion that if they sit quietly in their corner, the teacher will notice their good behavior and will reward them by inviting them back to join the rest of the class.

Little do they realize that the teacher has not only forgotten about them, but fully intends to keep them in the corner until class is dismissed.

In a classroom, the teacher frames the issues. Reality is refracted through the cracked lenses in the teacher’s glasses, and should progressives be bold enough to argue, they do so on the teacher’s terms.

The right’s favorite pastime is scamming progressives. The most salutatory effect of the Atwater/Rove approach to electioneering is that both Democrats and progressives have bought into the belief that the American public is both stupid and easily manipulated by lies and deceptions.

Political operatives are fond of pointing to the success of this approach in previous elections. However, they overlook one small detail. Prior campaigns were conducted during an era of fictitious prosperity that concealed the declining political fortunes of America’s middle and lower classes. Rather than stupidity, you had a public that wasn’t paying much attention because it found itself so distracted by all the toys and baubles its plastic could buy.

That little bubble has popped right along with the housing bubble. There’s nothing like a sudden fall off the economic ladder to fire up the public’s attention span. But, as the poet said, habit is a great deadener, and both the right and the left continue to treat America’s citizens like children.

As one writer put it, “As long as progressives continue to teat ‘ordinary’ Americans as stupid and irrelevant, progressives will find themselves largely irrelevant in U.S. politics. And that’s stupid, because it doesn’t have to be that way.”

So, progressives continue to prattle on in terms set by your minions, and in doing so, they kill any chance that they might come up with a viable alternative narrative, one that an anxious and unsettled public is ready to hear.

The above writer elaborates on this when he says, “If too many of the voters are still trapped in simplistic caricatures of patriotism and national security created 40 years ago—or if you fear they are—that’s because no one has offered them an appealing alternative narrative that meets their cultural needs…They’ll abandon one narrative only when another comes along that is more satisfying.

Who would have believed that Obama would fall for the same scam as Kerry and Gore.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Sunday, August 3, 2008

Migrant Family Values

Dear George,

There are times when my stoner brain holds two disparate problems in its whorls and suddenly, like a bolt of lightning turning a mighty oak into a pile of smoldering kindling, a single solution to both problems appears.

So it was last night as I was waiting to be booked for some trivial offense I have long since forgotten. For some reason, both illegal immigration and family values had embedded themselves in my head.

First, there was the problem of what to do about family values. The problem is that we want to strengthen the family even as we geld it. We want a strong family, but not a politically active family. What we are looking for is strength in apathy.

Then there are the twelve million illegals that have poured over our borders, no matter how tall our walls or sophisticated our electronic detection devices. The dilemma is that we don’t want them, but we need their cheap labor to pick our produce.

Then it hit me! As we leach the illegals out of America, we fill the void with migrant family workers of Euromerican descent. Why should millions of pounds of pears and other fruits rot because of a labor shortage when we have a middle class that is tumbling down the economic ladder?

Think about it! What is the best way to build family solidarity? In a word, it’s labor! The family that slaves together stays together. Nothing encourages family closeness like dawn-to-dusk backbreaking labor in the fields before returning to a shack so rustic it is one with nature.

We must shed the 50s image of the well-coiffured family gathered around their Emerson television set. The family of the future is hard of muscle and calloused of hand. Childcare is no longer an issue because the whole family labors together. You solve the problem of childhood obesity because the little buggers will be thin as rails, living as they do on their daily bowl of gruel.

Because it takes a whole family to scrape together a sustenance living, you would effectively put an end to divorce. You can also kiss goodbye to same-sex marriage. The family’s survival will depend on the woman pushing out as many babies as possible. The more hands there are, the more crates of tomatoes can be picked.

George, I see a return to the days of pastoral glory when poets immortalized the peasant starving in his hut. What family in their right mind would refuse a life of hard labor and pastoral beauty?

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Saturday, August 2, 2008

Whew!

Sitemeter and IE seem to have gotten their acts together. Everything is back to normal. Will post again, tomorrow.

--cw

Blog Lockout

Upon logging on to the site, you got a box saying Internet Explorer can't open the page. Don't click on the box. Simply move it to one side and read on.

It appears that many of the sites that subscribe to Sitemeter.com have been blocked. A fuller explanation can be found here:

http://anothermonkey.blogspot.com/2008/08/sitemeter-causing-site-errors-in.html

I could correct the problem by removing Sitemeter, but will wait until this afternoon to see if the problem is resolved.

In another unrelated prolem, Goggle sent out a blurb that it accidentally locked out a number of sites as possible spammers. This is unrelated to the problem with sitemeter, and Google is working to resolve the problem.

Thank God I'm not a paranoid racked with dark suspisions about our Big Brother government blocking out sites it considers subversive otherwise I'd be sitting here in a sweat waiting for hooded government agents to come crashing through my door, cuff me and airfreight me off to one of their multiple black sites.

From somewhere in custody, I remain

Case Wagenvoord

Friday, August 1, 2008

Test

Having trouble logging on to site. Just checking to see if I can post.
--cw

Dancing the Last Dance on the Titanic

Dear George,

We all know that greed is good, even though it turns the brain to mush and shrinks the soul to the size of a dingleberry. But few people understand why it’s not only good, but essential as our world tumbles down around our ears.

One writer approached the answer to this question obliquely when he said:

At one point in his masterful People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn reflects upon the unspeakable carnage wrought by the Conquistadors in South and Central America, all in the pursuit of gold, and wonders at how those obscene riches sustained imperial greatness…for barely a hundred years. All that bloodletting, enslavement, massacres—genocide in places—for a temporary wealth that quickly vanished on the stage of history.

It reminds me of our current oil craze: in one century we have plundered billions of years of stored hydrocarbons, and what do we have to show for it? Fleeting prosperity—one that is hardly shared by all—a highly volatile Middle East, and awesome ecological devastation that will require centuries of recovery.

There is it in a nutshell, George. Time’s running out; the dance is nearly over and the lights are beginning to dim. We’ve got to get it while the getting’s good, ‘cause it ain’t going to be good much longer.

For the last sixty years we’ve shot across the sky like a meteorite, and like most meteorites, we are slowly being reduced to a cinder as we plunge through an atmosphere made rank by our “progress.” We are dancing the last dance of the powerful, with spins and gyrations that become even more frantic as we leap and hop our way closer to the precipice.

We are now little more than the sum total of the myths weaved by our corporate media that highlights the trivial to distract the drones from the walls and foundations that weaken with each passing day.

Greed is the lifeboat that will keep our corporatists afloat while the drones sink beneath the surface, still convinced that they are free even as the water pours into their lungs.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones