on defining RePaRe

Across the world, brave and honest citizens are fighting oppression. Their earstwhile governmental protectors have abandoned them in favor of corporate kickbacks, corruption thinly-veiled. No longer can we the concerned and forward-thinking persons of this modern age sit back and suck down soda-pop while our constitutional rights are stripped from us as fast as the land is stripped of its bounty. No, we are duty-bound to repair society, to repair the Earth, to repair honor and humility and moderation. We start to repair by deciding to RePaRe, which stands for Real Patriots Resist (or Refuse, Rejoin, Reject, Rescind, Rejoice). We resist restrictive and unnecessary ordinances designed to badger and reduce us under tyranny; we refuse to stand idly by as president Obama and his henchmen destory the Bill of Rights; we reject the notion that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people should be allowed to pass laws that restrict a woman's reproductive rights or keep persons of the same sex from marrying each other; we rescind governmental sovereignty and reclaim that sovereignty for ourselves; and we rejoice at the efforts under way in Brazil, Turkey, Russia, Egypt, and Germany to reoccupy such common areas as have been sold to the lowest bidder by politicains who have forgotten what it means to serve the People. Hats off to all who stand and fight, who put Lives, Fortunes, & sacred Honor on the line to defend those things that government is hellbent on destroing, those things that it was originally designed to protect, foster, and repair. Huzzah.

mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥

occupy the commons

Roads, meadows, highways, bridges, seams of coal and ore, airwaves, forests, streams – all these things and more make up the Commons, meaning that they belong to each person equally, and that persons have the inalienable right to access them in times of need. Under the capitalism-driven corporatization that has of late transformed America into a sterile and desolate place hostile to individuality and intangible value alike, however, these things that were once the common property of all persons are now harvested, packaged, and sold with the purpose of making just a few hundred thousand of the hundreds of millions of citizens who live here rich beyond reckoning.

Fellow lovers of liberty, if we aim to free our common property from the stranglehold of money-lust, making it accessible to all, the way it used to be, we must occupy it with our bodies. Camp out on your local bridge! Ride your bicycle in out in the street, right next to the pitiable fools trapped inside their cars! Fill the radio with static, and jam the television signals! Only by making our presence known can we even begin to effect change, and only by putting our bodies in harm's way can we ever prove to a candid world that we deserve freedom, equality, and justice. Do we we have the guts to stand up in the face of inequality and injustice and demand that things change? Do we dare put down our tablet computers and switch off our cellphones and look around for the first time in a decade and marvel at just how bad things have become for persons who choose not to live the cookie-cutter, debt-fueled, consumption-oriented life?

Recent legislation is turning America into a police state (the Patriot Act, NDAA 2012), and I suspect that talking as I am talking here and examining ways to reclaim the Commons will be viewed by law enforcement as a crime, and that the federal and local police will try to paint me as a rabble-rouser and a corrupter of the minds of the youth. If, however, a love for Nature and an interest in the happiness and well-being of my fellow homo sapiens is a crime, then I am a criminal of the worst and most dastardly sort! Let us fight to keep the Commons the property of all persons equally, reminding the gullible and the television-addled people of this world that they do not have to live their lives under the cruel lash of wage-slavery, a lash that never ceases to strike. If we do not fight, if we do not bring our struggle out into plain view, then the capitalists and their cronies in the world's national banks and national legislatures will have won. They are already effecting their subjugation of liberty, equality, and justice, enveloping average persons in the false comfort of a mass-produced, corporate-designed culture of conspicuous and continuous consumption that rewards executive officers and majority shareholders for exploiting the Commons and selling back to us that which was already ours, all along.

Dear friends, we are not subjects, and we are not slaves – we are proud and self-sufficient people who work hard without complaining much, who come up with new ways to do and to make things, who protect Nature and care for our neighbors, and who know when things have gone too far. And gone too far they have – too far, certainly, to be remedied without massive societal upheaval and lots of bloodshed. If we must reclaim the Commons by force, then let us do just that, take matters into our own hands, and fight. Strassenkampf, Strassenkampf, alle auf die Barrikaden. 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 privileged protesting

In these United States, different types of people protest differently. On the one hand are wealth-backed lobbyists and representatives of special-interests who are invited into the personal chambers of Congresspersons and Senators where they voice their concerns, bitch, moan, and explain their reasons for being aggrieved after having handed over a check for many tens of thousands of dollars. On the other hand are citizens who cannot afford to give elected officials envelopes filled with cash on a monthly or weekly basis and who therefore must stand outside in the elements, holding signs in their chapped and blistered hands and perhaps telephoning once or twice a day with their state representative's personal secretary in the hope that she might allow them to speak – even if only briefly – to the person who is supposed to be their go-to-guy in Washington. Furthermore, in this, our Corporate Republic of America, certain fabulously-rich individuals can hire slick-tongued, crafty motherfuckers to set up vacations at ski lodges in posh resorts, to which Senators and Congresspersons are invited and where they are wined and dined, harangued and harassed, and bought and sold to such an extent that when they return to Capitol Hill they initiate and support legislation favoring the narrow interests of their new corporate overlords rather than pursuing with single purpose the diverse interests of three hundred millions of common and average citizens. This is how things go in America today, a country whose government was once slightly representative but which now exists merely to increase and to protect the profits of a military-industrial complex that demands constant war and corporations that have been allowed to grow so large that they get away with not paying taxes, degrading and destroying our commonly-shared environmental, stealing and mismanaging the investments of millions of hard-working persons, and brainwashing the public via ubiquitous and constant television, radio, and billboard advertising into thinking that all is well with the world.

All is not well with the world, ladies and gentlemen. The economic system known as capitalism is being used to destroy Nature and to shuffle unimaginable riches into the pockets of fewer than a thousand families across the globe. Television is rotting the brains of millions of previously self-respecting and self-reliant individuals, encouraging them to kill themselves slowly by sitting around all day and not getting out for a nice walk, exposing them to the stale crumbs of televised truthiness rather than forcing them to think critically about the bullshit seeping from the mouths of their favorite painted talking heads.

We did not arrive at this state of affairs accidentally – this was engineered by precisely those individuals who run the aforementioned giant corporations. But who is protesting the downfall of democracy and the desecration of Ladies Liberty and Siblinghood? Only a few hundred thousand people are actively battling this unjust state of affairs, among them the members of Occupy, the Indignados, and the Anti-Fascists, or antifa, who are all carrying on the proud tradition of warring against injustice that started back in the late 1840s, when the members of something called the Paris Commune first took up arms against the overreaches of the state, inspiring Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to write a short pamphlet called the Communist Manifesto. And, unlike persons who choose to bribe and to corrupt elected officials to get their way, Occupy and antifa do their protesting out in the street, for all the world to see, eschewing back-door dealings for peaceful marches through tear-gas, pepper-spray, and hails of rubber bullets so as to bring attention to the marginalization of Lady Justice, who cannot easily protect herself, as she must remain blindfolded. So, friends, by rising up, speaking out, and never taking the easy way out, you too can help make this world a better place for all people, not just for the super-rich. Mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on Sallust

I have recently finished reading a Latin-to-English translation from 1920 of the War with Catiline, by Sallust. (I had purchased the book for one dollar during a visit to my alma mater's library.) Beyond the fact that the actual war which this work purports to cover consumed no more than the last few pages of the text (which is scores of pages long), the tale deals primarily with such political corruption, societal decay, and moral downfall as that seems to have set the stage for Catiline's failed rebellion. Moreover, the situations Sallust describes in this book – situations which Catiline appears to have tried to exploit to his own benefit – struck me as eerily similar to situations we face in America, today.

Sallust speaks of the founding of Rome, how the city came to wealth and great fortune, becoming the mother of an empire. But, soon enough, the principles upon which it was founded – industriousness, thriftiness, valor – were supplanted by avarice, sloth, and self-aggrandizement. And, soon enough, in its primary political body, the Senate, “instead of modesty, incorruptibility, and honesty, shamelessness, bribery, and rapacity held sway.” This, I believe, is the trap into which our own Congress and Senate have fallen. The politicians who fill these bodies, while campaigning for election or reelection, champion themselves as honest persons of incorruptible and modest moral fiber only to revert, once they have gained office, to shamelessly selling their time and influence to the highest bidder and to writing such laws as rape the very people they have sworn to protect of their Lives, Liberty, and Property. Sallust speaks that when Rome had grown “great through toil and the practice of justice… savage tribes and mighty people subdued by force of arms… and all the seas and lands were open, then Fortune began to grow cruel and to bring confusion into all our affairs.” This text almost perfectly describes the course America charted from its founding until now, in that this nation was born in perilous circumstances, becoming soon a country dedicated to the preservation of the rule of law, then wiping out whole populations of First People tribes, and finally conquering Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia to leave land and sea our disposal, only to discover, as if we had but recently come to our senses, that our internal affairs were seriously – and perhaps irrevocably – out of alignment.

I am not the first to draw comparisons between the Roman and the American empires, and I am not the first to suggest the inevitability of an empire such as our own to fail, but I am delighted to have found an ancient work that so well supports these points. While there is much solid wisdom to be learned from past writers (I should like to suggest to persons in the Occupy and the Indignados movements to read the aforementioned book, and to prepare for a total lack of positive change), the primary lessons I gleaned from this interesting and worthwhile text are that life seems to follow certain paths inexorably, that politics are intolerably messy and best left alone, that money and influence always corrupt, that people should be trusted about as far as they can be thrown, and that elected officials will only reluctantly and with much kicking and screaming give up such power as to which they have become accustomed. So please, dear reader, fellow Second Sons of Liberty, comrades of the New Guards for our Future Security, please do not despair, for no matter how dark our times may seem, they are sure to get worse before they get better. Mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri manufactorem fecit

work cited: Sallust, page 14, J. C. Rolfe, London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam's Sons, 1920

occupy, sons of liberty

  The Sons of Liberty were active starting in 1765, eleven years before the collective colonial bodies agreed to declare their independence. For eleven years they risked life and limb in order to liberate their fellow citizens from the yoke of oppression. At the time, our forefathers were fighting against an aggressive occupation by a foreign regime that had become blind to, deaf to, and destructive of, the rights and liberties of the people of this land. Now it has come to pass that the government of the USA has become blind to, deaf to, and destructive of, the rights and liberties of the people of this land.


  What would these brave people say about the state of affairs in our current time? I hazard that they would gape in shock at the level of control under which the population is held. I believe they would cry foul of the inordinate rights and privileges granted to private interest (immunity from prosecution, tax breaks, a lopsided economic system that redirects the wealth generated by the labor of all Americans into the pockets of the people who control these private interests). Our founders did not sally valiantly into the night so that we, their Posterity, could eat fast food, get fat, and drive around, lazily, in gas-burning cars because our city planners failed to plan for public transportation. (One such foul and disgusting failure occurred in Los Angeles, when companies such as Dunlop and Goodyear bought that city's extensive public transportation system and dismantled it in order to sell tires, a process repeated in cities throughout the USA.)


  Dig in, comrades of the Occupy movement, and know that our efforts will require time, patience, and sacrifice. It may take us eleven years, and it may take us eleven times eleven years, but we shall prevail!


  Spes Mea In Ratio Est - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp

on slavery by capitalism

  We, the people of America who are not enslaved to watching television or participating in fabricated national shopping rituals, must somehow help the 152 million people who went out to shop on the fake ritual of "Black Friday," a non-holiday that was created to rob the People of their hard-earned greenbacks.

  How do we help these people, and free them from their self-imposed, self-bought slavery?

Ultima Ratio Regum - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp