haiku 12 Mar 2017

Like a house of cards
Built on a bed of wet silt
Each empire crumbles

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

on Ynki overreach

In the aftermath of World War Two, as the British Empire was collapsing under its bloated inefficiencies, it was redrawing borders around the world in sloppy, hasty fashion. These borders still cause tension, primarily where they broke up (or forced together) religious populations, splitting cohesive cultural groups along artificial boundaries. Notable examples of these poorly planned British demarcations of territory can still be found in Asia (Iraq, Pakistan, India) and Africa (Zimbabwe). One area particularly prone to violence and disaffection is the Middle East, where the carving out of a separate Jewish-run state by British planners in an area historically inhabited by Muslims to this day causes war, chaos, and hatred. From a certain point of view, the creation of a Zionist state where no such state previously existed resembles the current attempts by Daesh (i.e. ISIS, ISIL) extremists to establish a quasi-Islamic caliphate in the Levant. When Israel came into being, the local populations fought against its existence, furious that apparent foreigners with strange customs and curious headwear had set up shop within their midst and were enforcing the laws of their religion.

All empires fail, all tyrannies at some point face extinction. As the American Empire reaches its zenith, as Pax Amerikana grinds to its inexorable halt, it is fitting to ponder what could happen in the areas now controlled by the Ynki war machine when it, too, collapses. Will America carve out a portion of its vassal state of Saudi Arabia so that Daesh may settle there? Will one of the Ynki-owned Pacific islands be given to quasi-Islamic religious extremists whose goal is to subject all of humanity to Sharia law? Will the Western powers change their tune and start talking ‘self-determination’ when they realize that their attempts to stop a group of religious extremists from gaining independence cause more problems than they fix? Will the world cry foul at the (supposedly accidental) slaughter of innocents during the military reconquest of Mosul, demanding appeasement for the hardliners in order to limit their brutal oppression to but one contained geopolitical entity?

Using history as a guide, the following is likely to happen. America will hold onto its overseas possessions tenaciously, fighting tooth and nail to make sure money keeps flowing out of foreign economies and into the pockets of indigenous corporate bosses. America will continue its policy of intervention in external affairs, toppling democratically elected governments in countries fighting to be free of its meddling and interference. America will send troops into battle to maintain its authoritarian control over foreign populations yearning to be free. America will use propaganda and counter propaganda to poison the minds of its own people against the world at large, whipping them into a nationalistic frenzy and blinding them to the crimes and injustices being performed in their name. Only after unthinkable atrocities have been committed in the name of ‘liberty and justice’ and countless lives have been sacrificed to the gods of greed and destruction is the Ynki juggernaut likely to fail. For millions of oppressed persons around the world, the downfall of the American Empire will come not a moment too soon. The inevitable approacheth. Sic semper tyrannis!

© JPR / whorphan / americanifesto / 場黑麥

on American imperialism

This author rejects the notion of American exceptionalism. Having read repeatedly the nation’s founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration, he finds in neither of the two texts cause or justification for imperial ambitions. America was not founded as an empire, and yet it is an empire, today. America exhibits sicknesses and discrepancies similar to those found in previous empires: we spend the lion’s share of our budget on keeping and expanding foreign corporate holdings - most often through aggressive war-making - whilst neglecting our domestic economy and infrastructure, allowing them to crumble; we curtail free speech and civil rights at home whilst paying them lip-service abroad; we imagine ourselves mighty because we had the unthinkable gall to use nuclear weapons in anger yet fail to understand that such brazen and inhuman acts compel other nations to arm themselves similarly; we call for the prosecution of foreign leaders who willingly committed crimes against humanity yet hold our own leaders (e.g. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld) exempt from such prosecution even though our own crimes dwarf those of others; we topple legally elected foreign leaders in favor of violent thugs trained by us to subjugate and torture their own people in order to maintain and protect American corporate profits.

Not one of the deplorable conditions mentioned above is called for in the Constitution, this nation’s supposedly highest code of laws, wherefore these conditions are unconstitutional, unjust, and forbidden. There is no justification for America’s imperial ambitions; our acts of war in the interest of short-term corporate profit making violate the Constitutional directives, wherefore they must stop. The America of which we collectively dream - that place where all persons are created equal, where the government acts to protect the Life, Liberty, and Property of all persons instead of merely the financial gains of artificial, immortal entities - that America does not now exist, nor has it ever. We pathetic citizens who demand a return to traditional constitutional values are being ignored, laughed at, and brutally silenced. Woe be unto this nation. Forgive us, world, for we knew what terrible things we were doing, and did them anyway.

© JPR / whorphan / americanifesto / 場黑

on hoarding

For many years – nay, for the entire time I knew him – I considered my father to be a hoarder of goods, not necessarily clinically-obsessive, but more along the lines of a pack-rat. Born in New York City in 1934, his childhood was likely shaped by the shortages and scarcity that so greatly plagued America while she was fighting the German and Japanese Empires; he learned from an early age the need to pick up and store all items of even the slightest utilitarian or financial value, that eleven dimes had to be squeezed out of every dollar, and that such things as could be, would be reused, reworked, and recycled.

And so it was throughout my childhood that I grew up in a household in which broken things were often jury-rigged until they once again worked, in which random nuts and loose bolts were stored in plastic containers just in case they might be needed someday, in which all options were exhausted before one fired up the car and drove to the hardware store. And, so, I am not surprised when I catch myself retrieving stray things-of-worth from busy roadways, waiting for traffic to subside before dashing out to retrieve a somewhat rusty pair of wire-snips or a ½-inch metal hose clamp, items that I refurbish, reuse, or store away.

Until recently, I did not however act in this fashion, preferring the now-standard path that many Americans seem to take of throwing out most everything – even items in perfectly good working condition – certain that, tomorrow, when they actually do need them, they will have enough money to buy brand-new, Chinese-made replacement items (which, especially with specialty items, may be available only when the shop opens in the morning). Until my eyes were re-opened recently to the enormous value of such things as with which my deceased father filled this dacha's basement and out-buildings, I too thought of those things as trash, as superfluous goods, as six decades worth of proof that hoarding was a bad thing. Now, however, after mowing this property's acres with a muscle-powered, cast-iron push-mower, and after spending the last eight months moving my body through space-time on a bicycle (and, incidentally, after hewing more closely to the teachings of Lao Tzu), I find that my estimation of what I once thought of as clutter has changed dramatically.

For example, the pile of old magazines that has sat on a shelf in the barn for the last twenty years turned out to be a few dozen, successive copies of Organic Gardening magazine; since starting to read them, my appreciation for and knowledge of Nature-friendly, low-impact methods for growing edible and pretty things has grown substantially, much as have the crops in my gardens. Also, the various medium-scale farming and landscaping devices that have been hanging around collecting dust all these years turned out to be exactly the types of things one would need to turn this property's best south-facing slope into a productive field, whereupon might grow fuel to run engines, fibers to clothe bodies, and food to fill stomachs. Furthermore, the bamboo that has grown here in abundance after my dad shoved a single shoot of it into the ground in the late 1970s is a plant whose utility knows few bounds; add to these blessings the many fruit and firewood trees that have been allowed to grow as tall as they wanted to grow, and this oddly-shaped little chunk of land fast resembles a perfect place for self-sufficient living. Perfect, that is, for an able-bodied yet otherwise worthless individual looking to make use of piles of heaped-up clutter, such as myself. So, if there is any moral lesson to this article, it is that viewing things from within different frames of mind can often reveal their hidden, secret worth. So open those peepers, elasticize the mind, and keep that head on a swivel. Mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri manufactorem 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