happy Monday morning

A thousand pages of truthful speaking get ruined by a single, whispered lie.
Without much ado, a million gentle patriots adopt hard-hearted nationalism.
There’s turmoil on the Potomac, an angry old failure generating headlines.
The voices of doubt and torment grow; they’ll be silenced by eternal sleep only.
And yet the sun keeps spinning, dragging Earth along with it.
Will our living planet rejoice when we let slip the nukes of blinding war?
Maybe - just maybe - she’ll weep for her violent and greedy children...

...they who could not manage to live in harmony, or peace.

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

on blocking DAPL

Warriors allied with the Standing Rock Sioux successfully engaged in peaceful protest thwarted efforts to dig up and otherwise violate some of the lands they hold dear. The pipelines will go in, the oil will flow, but at least the greedy bastards who stand to gain immensely at the expense of this planet’s long-term livability will have to wait a little longer for their already vast fortunes to grow further. The rest of America goes about its business in uncaring ignorance, burning up old sunlight in its cars and getting fat on nutrient-poor food-like products - prepared snacks, fast food, and candy. Some argue that every life is precious, that we must fight to protect even the weakest among us. What about the greedy and the gluttonous, though, those people who just eat and eat and take and take until there is nothing left to eat or take? Those lives are worthwhile too, mostly because they serve as a challenge to those of us who reject the modern economic notion that the fortune of each man is carried solely by the bones in his back and the sweat on his brow. We who reject this notion, who think that humans work best when living in mutually supportive and multi-generational groups that pursue their happiness through artistic expression and ritual celebration, we stand against the isolation and loneliness that manifests when people work all day to afford a home they don’t have time to enjoy, their regular debt-payments enriching the top executives of distant banks. Let us take as an example the various tribes of the Sioux, who were subjugated, tortured, and disenfranchised before being moved into concentration camps in what was then unwanted land. Slowly, the Sioux rebuilt their communities and strengthened their connective bonds with the land and each other to the point that they can now protect their waters from a heavily-armed and militarized police force whose job it is to protect not lives and liberty but the profits of multinational corporations. Let us Americans of European Descent wake up, come together, and join the battle to ensure that all persons the world over can be free, happy, and safe. Mahalo.

© JPR / whorphan / americanifesto / 場黑麥

no se permite

We are fortunate that the author Jack Kerouac lived when he did; if he were alive today, he would be in jail for vagrancy. His was a subtle and unique culture, one we lost when the era of the tramp came to a close, when we Americans came to see people who are perpetually on the move as threatening and dangerous, when we passed laws to outlaw their existence, effectively destroying a unique culture, language, and way of life. Kerouac wrote his book On The Road in the heyday of the vagabond, in that glorious period when hitch-hiking was not illegal, when strangers and transients were looked upon as humans rather than scum, when it was still possible for the auto-less to make their way across our fine continent on conveyances other than corporate-run buses, trains, or airliners. If the author would have attempted to live such a life in our current era, he'd have been marginalized, spat upon, and despised by uncaring people who gladly pay five dollars for an cup of coffee.

The life of the tramp had its inconveniences (bad weather, hunger) and its perils (dogs, floods, robbers), but it was also a deeply American condition, a restless embodiment of the notion that a new life awaits on the other side of this ridge, on the far bank of that river, on the shores of some distant ocean. The tramp trusted in the chalk marks left by of his fellow vagrants, ciphers that alerted him to a hostile town or to one with generous inhabitants, that told him where labor was available for the eager but wanderlustig. It is unlikely that we will ever have another author such as Kerouac, another person able to perambulate across the land in the manner of Herodotus and Pliny before him, absorbing and retelling the stories he heard, a person who has made the way his goal. In this country, we see greed and egocentricity as virtues, when, in my opinion, they are the beginning of folly, cul-de-sacs that nearly always end in mid-life-crises during which the individual lays down his lust for money to pursue something he knew would make himself and the people around him intrinsically Happy.

Today, we are a nation of clones, a people resigned to rigid conformity. We were founded, however, as a nation of Many who shared a common binding purpose: to make of ourselves One, to pursue a common Happiness in a thousand different ways. I fear, however, that we have over-legislated, that we have made so many things illegal in an effort to protect ourselves from potential harm that we may never again know the destructive but necessary process of upheaval. We have made it difficult to wander the land in search of an undefined yet important goal, a goal found neither in the cubicle farms of the corporation nor in the halls of our supermarkets, a goal that eschews materialism for spiritual tranquility. There is no going back – the child-like wonder and inherent purity exhibited by the characters in On The Road have been drowned out by the white noise of the television, supplanted by the ferocity of religious extremism, and paved over by the hatred that hides in an Us Versus Them mentality. Woe be unto us, for we have strayed from the Path and calcified in our ways, blinded to subtlety and humor, convinced that turban-wearing bogeymen lurk in every shadow, and wary of things we do not understand. If more of us cared less, if some of us could but wander for a spell in search of nothing in particular, we might all be better off.

mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥

Liberty, at stake

Liberty, at stake

This picture was created on 25 March 2011, well before the Republic Party in America released the Defense Of Marriage provision in its Romney/Ryan presidential platform, which is a brazen assault on the rights of gay, lesbian, transgender, and bisexual Americans to get married. Fight theocratic rule! Fight injustice! Maintain the separation of church and state! Mahalo. X

declaring independence from...

This year, my proud fellow Americans, our goal is to turn ourselves into persons who live without want for things, who accept all adverse situations as gifts from the Universe, and who have learned to conquer such needs and desires as so often tend to hijack our lives. Among such negative influences as are working upon our lives are materialism as exhibited by our constant tendency to go shopping; sloth as exhibited by our insistence on driving cars everywhere we go; avarice as exhibited by the fact that money has become our One True god, the only thing for which we strive each and every day; dependence as exhibited by our nearly universal refusal to grow or raise our own foodstuffs; ignorance as exhibited by our watching of only one television channel or reading of only one newspaper or blog, which causes our minds to narrow and calcify; foolhardiness as exhibited by our having bought into the convenience culture and its tendency to trick us into thinking that life is or should be somehow easy, and that we deserve to be constantly treating ourselves to nice things; and stupidity as exhibited by our lack of proper flag etiquette, especially on such days upon which we seek to honor and celebrate the founding of our nation by displaying the flag for which it stands, under nothing but Liberty and Justice for all.

The negative realities listed above can be surmounted and counter-acted by ceasing to purchase anything but basic necessities (until such time as such necessities can be made at home or bartered for), by moving one's body around on foot or bicycle, by cultivating one's own person spiritual and emotional worth rather than grubbing after external worth such as cash, by making our communities and households food-independent, by getting our news from sources different from one another and unrelated, by making our own entertainment instead of watching television, by buying back out of the hollow culture of convenience, and by treating the flag of the United States of America as it should be treated, as if it were a human member of the family. To live in the manner that we live today is to go about our daily lives as dumb beasts tied to the yoke of distant corporate overlords, circumstances nearly identical to those of Americans living in the 18th century who toiled under the yoke of distant societal overlords. It appears that we in America have come full circle, changing from sheep to eagles, from eagles to swine, from swine to wolves, and from wolves back into sheep, soiling ourselves mightily along the way. There is another path, oh fellow patriots, a path, however, that does not involve merely stockpiling firearms, lying around watching TV, eating processed foods high in fat and sugar, and living under a perpetual Fear Of The Unknown.

Please, dear reader, cherished friend, declare independence from avaricious self-interest and small-minded laziness by throwing off the last, clinging vestiges of foul consumption-oriented capitalism; free your mind, excite your soul, and become a new Guard for our future Security, today.

場黑麥 mentiri manufactorem fecit

on the pagan power of capitalism

  Capitalism, with all its evil and all its ills, has had one definitely positive affect on American society: to rid our pagan holidays of religious contamination. Neither morality nor meaning matter in the eyes of capitalism – the only thing that matters is making more money. For example: capitalism has freed the ancient holiday of goddess Eostre from the clutches of biblical oppression. As a holiday that once celebrated that goddess who makes women fertile (and the land grow green again), the festival we now know as Easter was high-jacked by religious forces and co-opted for their own narrow uses. In the last half century, however, the ever-grasping paws of capitalistic greed have freed Easter from the Shackles of Scripture, so that we once again celebrate lustful procreation (symbolized by the rabbit) and the return of the teeming things (symbolized by daffodils and other such flowers).

  Similarly, the holiday of the winter solstice, an occasion that has been marked throughout the centuries with lights mounted on pine trees. This holiday was taken hostage by the forces of Christianity, forces that bastardized the logical marking of the passage of time and tied it to the fictitious birth of a fictitious god in a land far removed in time and space. The passing of the winter solstice was only recently liberated by the uncaring hand of capitalism – an emphasis on Santa Claus and the profuse giving of gifts has replaced, thankfully, the (biblically) unspecified day upon which a young lady gave birth, in a (biblically) unspecified structure, in an (biblically) unspecified place, to a male child. (The story of Jesus is a precise retelling of the story of Horus, an Egyptian god born of a virgin who died only to arise from death after three days.) Now, instead of worshiping some stagnant and foreign godhead, during the darkest days of winter we celebrate the coming-together of loved-ones, and shower them with presents as a sign of our affection. Gone are the days of the churchly mandate – capitalism has finally, and for good, removed Christ from Christmas.

  And, most importantly (to me, at least), the uncaring and voracious greed of capitalism has removed any shred of religiosity from the delightfully pagan holiday of Halloween. What started as a heathen ritual to mark the beginning of winter was commandeered by Christian forces, who turned it into All Saint's Day, on which day only the dead of that religion were praised (in effigy). After centuries of suffering under the cruel, stifling blanket of this biblical slavery, Halloween has been dragged from its prison by the ever-hungry maw of monster-capitalism. Gone are the days when Americans celebrated the Christian dead – arrived are the days when we Americans celebrate inventiveness and the ability to take a good scaring, when we shower upon the children of the land many sweet gifts, when we might, for one short night, become someone other than our boring normal selves. (The proliferation of Halloween as a national holiday was made possible by profit-hungry corporations that recognized in it a way to sell cheap, Chinese-made costumes.)

  While I generally abhor capitalism for its tendency to make only a small portion of the American people rich, I celebrate it now for freeing our shared and common history from the clutches of religious oppression. We can ill afford to live according to the rules of a lost tribe of desert people, so it is fitting that the forces of our chosen economic model are wiping our history clean of religious contamination.

  The next time you are carving up a lamb on Easter, remember horny old Eostre, and give your spouse a long, lingering kiss. When you find yourself stringing lights on a tree, remember to go outside and enjoy the longest night of the year. As you are putting the finishing touches on an elaborate and dazzling costume, remember that its job is to scare away the sickness-bringing forces of the impending long cold darkness. Thanks to the religious impartiality of our capitalistic system, you can enjoy these events without being forced to fear the wrath of some jealous, vengeful godhead.

  America is not a Christian nation, nor was it in any way founded upon the Christian faith. Neither easter nor the winter solstice were originally Christian holidays – these pagan rituals were commandeered in order to facilitate the spread of one set of religious teachings. Just how non-Christian is America? We honor the Roman god Saturn on Saturday. On Wednesday, we remember the Norse god Wotan, and on Thursday, his son-brother Thor. In the harbor of New York there stands a large statue of the Roman goddess Libertas (whom we call Lady Liberty), a goddess who holds in one hand the Torch of Progress, in the other a representation of our most treasured of documents, the Declaration of Independence.

  Everywhere in this great land we witness the chaotic jumble of different faiths and systems of belief, all tumbling together and jostling to retain the slightest shred of relevancy. May the uncaring grasp of our institutionalized greed continue to keep American society free of religious one-mindedness! Thank you, lustful and rapacious Capitalism, you old sport, for doing you part to keep America jumbled, confused, and oppression-free.

Spes Mea In Ratio Est - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp