haiku 23 Apr 2018

Great power lies in
Sitting still and being vast,
The mind cleared of dross

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

haiku 18 Dec 2017

A boiling ocean
Waves crashing against cold rocks
Great peril abounds

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

science & faith

People today who self-proclaim as faithful seem to be hypocrites. Instead of relying on their god to provide them with nourishment, for example, they go shopping at grocery stores and fill their larders with food; instead of trusting in their god's ability to heal them of sickness, they go to doctors and wash their hands with soap; instead of allowing themselves to waste away so as to reach their promised land that much sooner, they brush their teeth and go for walks and care for their own health. If these people were truly faithful, they would not even think of gathering food for themselves but would only eat what happened to fall dead within earshot, trusting that the Great Magnet would fell enough for their bodies to keep on living; if they truly believed, they would let their physical shells rot, caring not for tooth-ache nor for compound fracture nor for the deepest laceration, in the knowledge that all healing comes from that mystical power that cannot ever be named; if they were wholly pure of heart, they would sit quietly with neither attachment nor aversion as the leaves piled up around their feet and the stars wheeled by, high overhead, upon the vast and inky firmament.

I am among the greatest of offenders in these matters, a humble and worthless whorphan too full of ego and malice to still his soul of greed, too wrapped up in life's shiny trappings to focus on the gentle spirit bursting within his loins, blinded to the subtle majesty of the Universe by desire, selfishness, and discontentment. Some day, I hope to shed myself of this peripheral clutter and bask in the glowing rays of god's own pulsating sphincter, but not today, old boy, and certainly not anytime soon, for my faith is too weak, my ambition is too strong, and my adherence to the false parameters of life and death is greater than my capacity for Total Emptiness, known to the Chinese as wu.

Returning to my original point: To live in a house and to drive a car is to rely on science; a car runs on a liquid called gasoline, which burns at a certain rate if the pressure in an engine's combustion chamber is just right; a house keeps the pounding rain and the slanting sleet of off one's head because it has a sloped roof and see-through windows made of glass and wood. To bathe regularly with soap and to refrigerate food is to believe that science works, that its lessons and warnings are true; soap cleans because it is a mildly caustic mixture of animal fats and lye, and food spoils less quickly when it is stored within an air-tight box and blasted with frigid winds. To wear a coat in winter, moreover, is proof of doubt in the Supreme Deity's ability to keep a body from freezing to death, irrefutable evidence that a down-filled covering trumps the warming knowledge of a personal savior, any day. Therefore, the next time you see someone mount a high horse and start squawking about how pure and righteous is his god, remind him that his house, his cellphone, his car, and his clothes, are all proof of the failure of his personal faith; but beware, for religious fanatics – regardless of their faith, be they Christian, Muslim, or Hindu – are dangerous people best avoided. Mahalo.

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)

president, not king

When the Revolutionary War had ended, and America had gained her freedom, the people of this land were so grateful to George Washington that they wished to make him King For Life. Cognizant of the corrupting effects of power and knowing the dangers inherent to autocratic rule, Mr. Washington turned down the offer, pushing for and succeeding in establishing a presidency limited in its power, an office that once balanced, and that was once balanced by, our other pillars of government, the legislature and the judiciary. And the system worked for a few hundred years, until the 20th Century, most notably during World War Two, during which conflict the president of this Union of American States began to issue great numbers of executive orders, thereby circumventing the balances designed into our system of government, changing our society in vast and lasting ways and effectively ruling the people by whim.

The American system of government is set forth in our founding documents, those being the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Nowhere therein is made mention of the executive order, and neither document grants the president any right to issue or to rule by executive order. All presidents since the Great Patriotic War have used the executive order, including George Walker Bush and Barack Hussein Obama; all presidents since the Allies beat the Axis have brushed aside legally crafted procedures carefully and specifically designed to keep too much power out of the hands of just one person, fundamentally changing the way our government works and destroying the efforts of our founding persons to protect us from tyrannical and despotic rule. Democracy in America is long dead, steamrolled into nothingness by the Patriot Act, which did away with protections contained in the U.S. Constitution; Liberty lies crushed under the smothering mass of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, which made it illegal to consume any drug other than drugs sold by pharmaceutical corporations, beer distributors, and cigarette retailers. With a few, simple pen-strokes, our president could do away with these injustices, which are heaped upon the people daily, just as the president could issue an executive order to cancel all subsequent executive orders, declaring them null and void.

I fear, however, that things have not changed much, here, and that the American people still wish for, pine for, and long to wallow under kingly rule. (Fuck the British queen, by the way, and fuck her jubilee.) Why else do we continue to allow the president to rule as his or her whim and fancy should dictate? Perhaps we let this mockery continue because we deserve not freedom nor Liberty nor a balanced and democratic system of government, only the carbon-copy lives of wage-slaves yolked to materialism and convinced of the inevitability of constant and conspicuous consumption. As long as the blood is warm in our veins, though, it is our duty to fight for Liberty, to reinstate her, and to share her comforting effect with the sovereign peoples of the world. To prove to mankind, however, that our systems are worth emulating, we must reign in presidential power, re-balancing it to the other branches of government, and outlaw such undemocratic and unconstitutional means as the executive order. So stand up, speak out, & fight injustice. Mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

no more BofA

It is done, friends: this lowly whorphan closed his last account with Bank of America (BofA), telling them in the cancellation letter that my reasons for termination included their involvement in causing the ongoing world economic crisis known by some as the Great Recession. The air of freedom is sweet, I tell you, and tinged with victory's acerbic bite; oh how I fill my lungs with it, though, expressing my joy through the majesty of song. While I cannot remember where exactly I read it or from whom I poached the idea – whether it was a sign held by an Occupier or an article on truth-out.org – but somebody was calling upon members of the general public to close their accounts with BofA in order to punish that bank for its rapacious and greed-based policies. Having active accounts with BofA has bugged me day in and day out since seeing that sign; how good it is to have stopped funding one of the most despicable institutions that has ever dared claim to be Of this fine and shining land and Of this industrious and upstanding people. In short, Bank of America is not of us, for us, or by us, but of the shareholder, for the shareholder, by the shareholder; it behooves us to do our business with financial institutions other than one that operates for the benefit of wealthy people-in-the-know.

My decision to close these accounts was founded on more than just a whimsical moral fancy or the passing desire to distance myself from one of the foundational pillars of our equality-destroying, Nature-ravaging, un-American system of consumption-oriented capitalism: I was sick of paying seven dollars in maintenance fees – per month, per account – for the privilege of having a check-book, and I had paid enough overdraft fees and account penalties to finance a brief South Asian border war. Comparatively, my accounts at USAA incur few penalties, and I do not feel guilty for banking with that institution because it takes care of its own without getting too heavily involved in credit-default-swaps or high stakes stock-market gambling. On some level, of course, it is impossible to fully distance oneself from the banks that caused the Great Recession, unless one is dead or 100% self sufficient. Therefore, I am partly to blame for this whole Recession business, because I banked with BofA and because I cannot yet grow all of the food and harvest all of the electricity I need to live and work without undue stress or worry. Guilty with me in this is Congress, the Senate, and the White House, for not punishing the multi-millionaire executive officers of TARP-fund-receiving banks and for allowing the statute of limitations for punishing them to lapse, which means that these crooks stay free and rich while millions of honest and hard-working Americans sit around poor and in debt, their savings and hopes and dreams having vanished into the silken pockets of fat-cat, too-big-to-fail bankers.

Regardless, however, of my complicity in these matters, I feel a great relief that I never have to enter another BofA branch or use another BofA ATM ever again for the rest of my life; now that I am no longer part of the problem, I can become part of the solution. Huzzah for liberty, victory, and justice! Mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on the fade of the recession

A certain coiffure has been sweeping the modern American hair landscape, or hairscape – the Fade of the Recession. Similar to that style favored by persons alive during the Great Depression, our Great Recession's preferred mode is cut very close to skull until perhaps eye-level, at which point it fades quickly into a most unruly patch of long top-hair kept in place with an arresting, spiking, or otherwise binding hair product.

Persons sporting the fade of the recession are more than likely frugal, upright, and self-loathing individuals who have finally come around to notion that their best hope for making it through such global wars as nearly always follow in the wake of world-wide economic turmoil is to start relying on as few people other than themselves to complete simple tasks such as hair-cutting, lawn-mowing, cooking, cleaning, transportation, and self-defense. By affecting such severe cuts to the head-bound chitinous offshoots, these people demonstrate a propensity for self-mockery and lightheartedness that is useful when facing impending physical, emotional, or financial ruin.

The author adopted this particular pompadour after seeing a wild-eyed, chain-smoking gentleman of Chinese ancestry who had exited from the dirt-caked side door of an otherwise nondescript, rundown building in one of America's more bustling cities. The man, himself having surpassed at least the age of forty-five, was wearing an ill-fitting overcoat and staring menacingly at everyone passing him by. The nape of his neck was shaved to the bone, and a wild patch of hair sprouted from the top of his head, but his Recession's Fade stood out because of the violent, severe, and apparently hastily-made cuts that defined the area of the fade itself.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit