pirates, parties, September

In honor of Septembarrrr, that mooncycle dedicated to All Things Pirate, let us turn our gazes to the Federal Republic of Germany, where the voice of the common man still has power. While in America people upset with Me-First capitalism, Beltway corruption, and an ever-more-menacing police state must resort to standing out in the street getting pepper-sprayed and handcuffed for expressing their political views, Deutschlanders upset with the status-quo may now look for representation from that nation's newest political party, die Piraten (the Pirates). When discussing America's two-party system and the lunacy of having just two organs to represent and address the concerns of over one-hundred-and-fifty-millions of unique voices, people often tell me that our population is simply too large, and that its members have simply too many different opinions, for there to be more than two political parties, an argument which has never made sense to me.

Can just a couple of parties represent the opinions of our massive voting base better than many different parties tailored to each region individually and to its special and unique demands and abilities? They cannot. In fact, the Democratic and the Republican parties in America do such a poor job not just of promoting the general Welfare but also of securing the Blessings of Liberty to all persons equally that it is a wonder our society has not sooner descended into civil war. Such is the failure of our massive, ineffective, easily-corruptible one-party system (because Dems and Reps are basically two sides of the same coin) that, with the efforts undertaken recently by President Obama to enact in this land a police state, our republic hardly resembles the nation it was just a dozen years ago, in the good old days before we threw up our hands in fearful defeat, rescinding our rights (Patriot Act) and allowing President Bush and his puppetmaster Dick Cheney to violate this nation's two-hundred-year-long refusal to torture or mishandle our prisoners of war (see here for link to page involving U.S. torture cells at Abu Gharib prison) and letting them violate due process, personal privacy, the Geneva Convention, and the notion that every human being – American or not, combatant or not – has the right to a swift trial by his or her peers.

Arrrr! I have fallen into a tirade against old man bushes and his triggerhappy boss, losing myself in vile and vituperative rebuke against the forces of bygone evil. Regarding the links posted above, at least the Germans can now vote instead of hurling paving-bricks and fighting small armies to secure their rights; in America, though, we have come to see police officers as persons with ultimate power, as nearly god-like individulas whom we dare not touch, spite, or trust. We have forsaken personal Liberty and self-determination for a state of questionable Safety in which the only reason the cops exist is to punish us for not following the tens of thousands of different laws that we our political leaders have passed. To whom can we turn in this our time of woe? On whom do we rely to secure for us the Blessings of Liberty and to represent the interests of the Commons and of the common man alike? Our two national political parties do not do these things; Republicans and Democrats sit on Capitol hill in plush, tax-payer-financed office suites receiving visits from lobbyists and corporate donors who hand over envelopes stuffed cash. Oh, if we but lived in a democracy; oh, if our supposed representatives would but give up their fat paychecks, cushy pensions, and comprehensive coverage and try living on minimum wage for a while without access to decent health-care. Then, dear friend, then we would see some positive change in this country. I fear, however, that we may have to wait a few years until a person from the Pirate Party of America takes the presidency. Ho hum teedle-dum and a bottle of 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 a SAR lost

Sons of the American Revolution; free-thinking, independent-minded citizens of America; fellow lovers of Liberty; dear few remaining self-sufficient, self-reliant Yankees:

We may have lost, once and for all, a member whom we once thought it possible to save. It was not enough that he allowed himself to be ruled by such fear as was being spoon-fed to the People in the immediate wake of the 9-11-2001 terrorist attacks. It was not enough that he jumped wholly onto the bandwagon of consumption-oriented market capitalism. It was not enough that he has stocked his home with delicate and costly things in direct violation of the teachings of frugality and compassion attributed to his god Jesus Christ. No, dear brothers of Freedom and sisters of Liberty, I have witnessed with my own eyes his full and complete retreat into madness, his obedient adoption of even the most trivial and poorly-thought-out drivel that tends to slither from the mouths of such politicians as Sarah Palin: he has replaced the compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs with which he once reduced his energy consumption with old-school, incandescent bulbs. Also, he has learned from his wife that it is acceptable to leave the outside windows open for long periods of time while the air-conditioning is on full blast, thus proving to the world his nearly complete lack of self-critical thinking and his nearly total abandonment of the lessons of his childhood when making the little decisions that significantly impact not only his own life but also the wellbeing of every single other person alive today. Neither he nor his wife run surgical emergency operating rooms within the home, nor do they do much more with their eyes that use them to watch television (in this case, literally, the idiot-box); therefore, they do not require immediately-available light in order to save lives or to make the world a better place, only to guide their way from the couch to the refrigerator, and back again; (they therefore have no good reason to need the lights in their home to come to an immediately full brightness and can afford to wait a few moments for CFLs to gain full brightness). This our poor brother's mindset is so alien to our cause of personal hardiness and self-sufficient living, so devoid of hubris, so lacking in self-criticism as to have moved him so very close to the brink of the world of lost causes that I cannot see a way to save his soul from slowly rotting away, unused, inside the dank nether-regions of his unplumbed inner depths. We have lost him, dear siblings in Liberty: lost him to the hype; lost him to the Fear; lost him to the siren-call of false convenience; and lost him to such a mindset that tends to push this nation's problems down the road, kicking the can just far enough into the next generation's territory as to keep it out of sight without actually picking up the can and fucking recycling it.

I have tried speaking, I have tried reasoning, I have tried threats both open and thinly-veiled – all to no avail. Dear friends, fellow Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution, if anyone knows how to pull such a fellow as the man described above back from the abyss, back from his blind adherence to the poorly-conceived notions spewing from the suck-holes of our more radical politicians, please contact me or comment on this post, to assist me in my attempts to save this our sibling in Liberty. Please help me, oh dear friends, for I dance with despair, my heart near torn asunder. Mahalo.

場黑麥 menterefecterem fecit