Balinese corn roaster

His name is Muhammad Ali, and he sells roasted corn on the cob. Few people ever think to ask him if he is familiar with his boxing American namesake; the topic rarely comes up.

From around lunchtime until well into the evening he tends his coconut-husk fire, baking corn and selling it to anyone with forty cents to spare. Sometimes, he sticks a ratty beach umbrella into a slot on the side of his pushcart so that customers don’t have to stand in the sun while they wait. He always stands in the sun, though. On his cart are tubs of regular as well as spicy cow’s butter with wood-handled paint brushes sticking out of them. People who desire their roasted corn to be spread with spicy butter say this: mintah panas.

During the Muslim holy month of ramadan, Muhammad Ali travels for a fortnight back to the island of Java, where his family lives, meaning that someone else sells corn in his stead. The other fifty weeks out of the year, however, he stands in the parking lot of Batu Bolong beach selling corn and chain-smoking cigarettes. It’s an honest gig, you see, and someone has to do it. In the Balinese language, one of the slang words for penis is kontol. Therefore, when a pretty white girl says she wants one corn, the joke is to ask her if she wants a big kontol, then jump the eyebrows and crank a secret smile when she says yes.

It’s a funny joke that never gets old.

Muhammad Ali is full of funny jokes.

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

freedom to choose

Some time ago, NPR aired a debate about whether or not Pennsylvania should sell off the liquor stores it owns and operates. During this debate, a woman advocated for the rights of consumers to have access to the best possible selection of booze, saying that choice is freedom and that freedom is the American way. (The author is paraphrasing here). Since 1971, the federal government of the United States of America has waged war on the right of every person under its jurisdiction to choose for himself which drugs to introduce to his body; since passage of the Controlled Substances Act of 1971 (CSA), Liberty has been under constant and incessant attack from local, state, and federal government, the very agents who should have been protecting her, all along.

When the state makes some drugs illegal (weed, coke) while profiting from and promoting the sale of other drugs (alcohol, nicotine), it chooses sides, sending millions of non-violent persons to jail for wanting to do with their bodies as they saw best fit. The XIV amendment to the Constitution was designed to protect against just such governmental overreach, stating: “[no] State shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law[.]” If a person should demonstrate an inability to handle certain drugs without posing a threat to himself or others, he should be banned from consuming those drugs. Individuals, however, who have not been banned by a judge from smoking weed should feel free to do so as often as they wish; no aspect of the Constitution gives any branch of our government the right to infringe upon the common freedom of all individuals living in America by passing a law as destructive to our inalienable and immutable rights as is the tyrannical Controlled Substances Act of 1971.

In the 42 years since adoption of the CSA, the business of punishing and incarcerating non-violent Americans for consuming and possessing their drugs of choice has become big business. Lawyers, judges, parole and police officers, wardens, jail builders, and drug warlords all continue to profit from the ban on certain drugs. We the People must make the right to choose inalienable once more and strike down the prohibitions currently in place; then, the individuals just mentioned would have to go out and get jobs of actual usefulness instead of being allowed to game a system that punishes freedom-loving Americans for pursuing their Happiness as they see best fit. A person's body is the only piece of property he cannot live without; he may do with it as he pleases so long as he is not infringing demonstrably upon the right of any other person to life, liberty, or property. To lock someone up for changing his brain chemistry by smoking weed is no different from locking him up for changing his brain chemistry by eating a large bowl of sugary breakfast cereal. Let us realign ourselves with this nation's founding principles and legalize the freedom to choose by ending the madness that has brutalized Liberty every day for the past 15,330 days. Fight tyranny; act freely; defend Liberty. Mahalo. 

mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥