haiku 15 Aug 2018

Both weigh down the soul

And violate a precept:

Cursing, and lying

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

a standard response

Whilst waging war bodily against the false but deeply entrenched Baltimorean idea that pedestrians do not enjoy the right-of-way while crossing a road using a crosswalk, I have had this standard response hurled frequently my way:

“Get the fuck out of the road, dumbass.”

Regardless of his apparent social or economic class, these tend to be the first words from a driver’s lips when forced (by nothing but my raised hand) to abide by the laws of the state of Maryland and bring his gasoline-powered steel battering-ram to a halt using slight pressure applied to a hinged pedal by one of his feet so as to avoid running headlong into a foot-mobile fellow citizen who is seeking to gain lawfully the other side of a roadway. To protect myself in the event of someone violently violating my pedestrian rights in a premeditated fashion, I have taken to using my cellphone to capture video of oncoming vehicles while negotiating a crosswalk, which seems to have the desired effect of forcing drivers to stop. Otherwise, few people operating automobiles appear to find anything wrong with driving in such a manner as to barely miss hitting me as they race toward the next group of cars stopped at the next red light.

Among the worst offenders are Baltimore city police officers, who as a whole don’t seem to mind breaking state law §21-502, which is but one among many of the laws they swore a sacred oath to uphold.

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

an unconstitutional presidency

A crisis looms; stormclouds are massing. Unless he can sell off his last holdings and put them all into a blind trust, the president-elect will on 20 January 2017, his inauguration day, violate the Constitution. Should he on that day run foul of the emoluments clause, he will have to be impeached immediately. It won’t make much difference, however, if his violations persist. America long ago abandoned the principles upon which it was founded: there is no clause that calls for the Ynki to act as the world’s policeman, doling out punishment or refraining from applying it as he sees fit; nowhere in the Constitution are provisions for a military industrial complex; nowhere does this nation’s supposedly most sacred text propose that America must be constantly at war for its economy to thrive; nowhere does our founding document indicate that non-human corporations should enjoy the same rights as flesh-and-blood people do, or that the wealth created by society as a whole should be given to a few affluent capitalists. We citizens of America have allowed these aberrations to stand; we citizens of America have allowed these violations to continue. As Americans, each and every one of us is responsible for the crimes and injustices our weapons of war visit upon the downtrodden peoples of this world - be they bombs dropped by us or ones loosed by a tyrannical client-regime.

As discussed in an earlier post, the American government now treats its citizens similarly to how we were treated by the British monarchy before declaring our independence. The rule of law applies to some of us, not all of us equally; armed agents of the state kill us without due process or punishment; taxes are imposed upon us without our consent; our seas lie plundered of their bounty, poisoned by industrial run-off; our coasts and forests sit ravaged, their diversity raped for short-term gain. The incoming president will violate the Constitution as soon as he is sworn in, and few of us will give a shit about it. Welcome to America - land of the greedy, home of the enslaved.

JPR / whorphan / americanifesto / 場黑麥

risky political correctness

A dangerous trend has spread throughout these shakily-united States: the trend of political correctness. Damaging to honesty, truthfulness, and the very concept of Liberty itself, a person is being politically correct when, before speaking out loud, he stops to ponder whether or not what he is about to say might or might not offend someone within earshot. Rather than encouraging him to speak his mind freely in the knowledge that he has no – nada, null, zero, zilch – no control over the mental processes of other people nor the ability to control how others will react to whatever he chooses to say or do or sign or write, our society demands that he take everyone else's emotional and mental well-being into consideration and censor himself instead of just coming and saying whatever the deuce he intended to say in the first place.

Political correctness is un-American in that it forces us to be liars, to hide our prejudices and our stereotypes deep within the recesses of our souls, where hatred and malcontent tend to fester; it decreases the Safety of all Americans by allowing the bigot to mingle freely amongst open-minded people, his cruel heart filled with a resentment for people of color and a hatred for All Things Strange; it harms the Safety of all Americans by allowing bigotry and racism to build up in the mind of the sad and confused individual until he can no longer stand it, which makes him more likely to lash out physically against the object of his ire, a person with skin slightly darker than his. During more than one conversation between me, an American of European Descent, and Americans of African or Mixed African and European Descent (i.e. between a white person and brown people), I have heard these humans say that they would rather have their racist right out in public, where he can be tagged and avoided rather than for him to have to pretend to be color-blind when he really could care less if he saw a Negro being chained to a pickup truck and dragged.

Furthermore, political correctness emboldens the nitpickers and busybodies among us to wag their fingers at anyone even toeing the line of impropriety, and to say to them with self-righteous but artificial indignation: It's not nice to say this, and you shouldn't say that, because you might hurt this bunch's feelings, and cause that lot to be sad. There are many views espoused by religious extremists in this country – they who are trying to shut down Planned Parenthood and who want to amend our preciously secular Constitution to define marriage according to their and only their religious text – views I vehemently oppose and risk Life, Fortune, and sacred Honor to combat; yet while standing out in the snow counter-protesting nuns and stoking the ire of entire church parishes, I chose to speak my mind and to say hurtful and offensive things directly to them, right up in their faces, hardly flinching when they called the cops to complain about the public display of the word vagina, which is the medical term for one part of a woman's sex. I shall stop harping on the past and start encouraging the few lovers of Liberty left on these shores to end self-censorship, to encourage clear and open debate, and to fill their hearts with emptiness; together, we can conquer the scourge of political correctness, preferring honesty to deceit, choosing the Truth over lies. So stand up and speak freely – do it now, or forever scold your niece.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

right of way

Recently, NPR aired a show which included mention of efforts undertaken during the first decades of the Twentieth Century to teach the American public to cowtow to the automobile, explaining that Americans had to be trained to think that roads were the domain of cars, the rightful place of automobiles, and that citizens not driving cars had no right to be on them. As a velocipedist – an avid and regular bicyclist – I suffer daily of the affects of this mis-education of my fellow upstanding Yankee, who now sees the car as an almost sacred thing, whereas persons not trapped within the stifling confines of these glass-and-metal prisons are seen as bothersome interlopers upon our tens of thousands of miles of commonly-owned bituminous track.

A car is nothing more than a hunk of steel and glass and plastic with a person or persons sitting on its plush seats and being moved around through space-time by the internal combustion of gasoline, a byproduct of oil, for which our brave brothers and sister pour out their blood and tears in distant and dusty places; oil is a poisonous thing that must be pulled from deep below the earth and refined before it can be used, whereas a bicycle is a few pounds of metal and rubber that allows a person to move himself around through space-time using little more than the muscles rippling beneath his taut and ruddy skin. And yet – daily – I am confronted by at least one person who considers his souped up, gasoline-guzzling shitbox, and his business, to be far more important than the car, conveyance, or business of anyone else.

Just two days ago, in fact, as I was approaching a blind intersection on my way to the local public library, I heard a motor behind me rev up, as if the vehicle's owner intended to pass me in the scant thirty feet that separated us from the stop sign. Putting myself squarely in the lane, I balanced for a moment, waiting for a gap in the approaching vehicles before shooting down a narrow side alley. Riding squarely in the center of the alley, the impatient driver approached to within a few feet of my bicycle's rear wheel, revving his engine and making as if to pass me where there was no room to pass. Flying into the next, two-landed road (the alley ends in a yield, not a stop, sign) and barely making it in front of an approaching car, I had moved to the far right side of the lane and was approaching my next right-hand turn when I heard that same engine rev up behind me. Turning around to see what was the matter, I made eye-contact with the impatient driver, whose vehicle – a black SUV – was so close to the silver Volvo behind me that I could see neither grill nor bumper. Passing the car in front of it, the truck screeched to a halt directly next to me, restricting all north-south traffic by completely Blocking The Box, the man within it staring at me menacingly.

Turning after having made the appropriate hand-signal (I signal all turns, and am loathe to ride at night without running-lights fore and aft), I glanced back again, laughing at the impatient man and giving him a little fare-thee-well hand flick. These egregious actions caused the man to reverse his vehicle very quickly (on a one-way street, into oncoming traffic), whereupon he, with squealing tires, raced down the road toward me, screeching to a halt next to me on the sidewalk where I had taken refuge near a tall brick building. “You're a real tough-guy, eh?” the man said, pushing his finger against some sort of box on his throat. Scrambling to keep moving, I bounced down the sidewalk and started to pedal onward, glancing back and noticing the black car had a Harley-Davidson front plate. The man pulled into a gravel lane, threw open his door, jumped out, and began to stalk toward me, chest puffed up and face fixed in the tortured rictus of a man whose heart is calcified with fearful hatred. Seeing that I had bruised his ego, and knowing the human ego to be one of the most terrifying and murderous of foul things ever to grace the planes of our fair Universe, I kept moving. “You're a real tough guy, eh?” the man said again, to which I responded with a shouted, “Slow down!” The man, of course, shouted back, “You slow down!”, touching a finger to his tracheal collar before speaking, each time.

A number of things became clear to me during yesterday's altercation. First, the man's business was so inconsequential (even though he seemed in a terrible hurry) that he could take time out of his schedule to run down and harass a bicyclist who had dared to retain right of way. Second, the man considered himself more important than anyone else on the road, riding everyone's ass and generally being a poor sport about things. Third, seeing that his belly resembled a beer keg and that his throat was perforated with a plastic speaking-collar, the man had ruined his health and body by eating too much, smoking too much, and drinking too much, which had obviously filled his heart with such frustration and self-loathing as to make him a Danger To Others. And, finally, he had allowed himself to be brainwashed into thinking that roads were made for cars (or, at least, for vehicles with gasoline-combustible engines), and that roads were the domain of nothing else, causing him to menace persons who happened to have left their own homes a few moments before he did, putting them, unwittingly, in his hateful path, riding, of all fucking things, bicycles.

To persons who insist on driving cars everywhere they go (even though, of course, buying gasoline puts cash in the pockets of Saudi Arabians, who use our money to fund terrorist groups such as al-Qaida), please remember that bicyclists are simply persons who have freed themselves from the prison-like confines of internally-combustible vehicles, flinging off the foul fat-folds of sloth and moving their bodies around using only muscle power. So, dear friends, please give other persons the right of way, even if they are not burning as much oil as you are burning while out-and-about; and, of course, please share generously of our common roadways, byways, highways, paths, alleys, lanes, and streets; but, most importantly, keep a smile on your face, a song in your heart, and your head on a fucking swivel. Mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri manufactorem fecit

first to go

As an inconsequential blogger with a limited readership and few people perusing my various sites (except, perhaps, those sites specific to street art), I am today still writing and kicking and living and breathing, but who knows for how long. The executive office of the United States – that run by President Barack Hussein Obama – violates regularly the rights of individuals, removing them to foreign locations and holding them prisoner without trial (in a process known as rendition), in clear violation of national and international laws (see here for a fantastic article re: the Charter of the Forest). The president and his equally-corrupt counterparts in the U.S. Congress and Senate allow large and well-financed companies – known as corporations because they have the same rights and privileges as actual persons but cannot be sent to jail for the crimes they commit – to rape the lands and seas of their vast resources, keeping the American people stupefied and misinformed via elaborate and ubiquitous advertising that allow these corporations to profit immensely from the sale of the Commons, those being things that belong to everyone equally, those being things such as the ore and metals in the ground, the chemical compounds dissolved in the air and in the soil, the clear and running water that each of us needs to stay alive, and living and growing things such as cotton, trees, soybeans, corn, oats, cows, pigs, peppers, wheat, chickens, etc.

Because I speak of these things, writing often about the overreaches and the abuses of our sitting president, his predecessors, and their well-heeled corporate cronies – they who shift from corporate officer to appointed official, and back again, in a never-ending cycle of sycophantic, avaricious nepotism – because I speak of these things, banging the dinner-gong to the tune of my own unraveling, for this reason, I will be among the first to go. When our leaders in Washington decide it is time to round up dissidents such as me and to put us in prisons and into labor and death camps for re-education and to keep the minds of the general population free of any doubt about the validity and sustainability of our current economic and political systems, then it will be clear that my bleating was not merely the bitter moaning of a spoiled little whorphan, but that my attempts to get the people of this land to think critically about their lives and about how much television they watch and about their lack of self-reliance and about their whole-scale adoption of conspicuous-consumption-oriented capitalism were more than self-righteous chest-beating.

The only problem about the previous sentence is that none of these here words will exist once I am black-bagged, detained, and murdered, because they will have been wiped away, removed from the world-wide-web, with a single mouse-click deleted from the annals of history, disappeared into the aetherless void with the swift aplomb of a South American dictator. Except, dear friends, we now have North American dictators, Enemies of Liberty such as all Congresspersons and Senators who were in office during July of the year 2012, and Mr. Obama, who signed NDAA 1540 into law, thus allowing the federal government to detain and hold indefinitely American citizens who defy marshal law. (This piece of legislation, ratified unanimously by the White House and Congress, violates the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America and international treaties, including the Geneva Convention.)

Yes, my brothers and sisters, because I speak out, because I write on americanifesto and liesmith about the downfall of our democracy and the erosion of our constitutional protections and the rape of the Commons, I shall be among the first casualties of the wave of injustice that is even now swamping this once-fair land. It has been my pleasure to be able to write; it has been my pleasure to be able to bang away for a while on the drums of civil discontentment; but, I think things will become much darker here in America after Obama is appointed to another four years, and I think that things will become worse for people such as me far sooner than they will become better. So, my brave, silent readership, if I suddenly stop posting to my eight separate blogs, and if I stay silent for more than a week's time, it means that I was taken by the federal government of the United States of America, tortured by the federal government of the United States of America, and killed by the federal government of the United States of America, and that my lifeless corpse is rotting at the bottom of some forgotten pit at some unnamed military base in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere. C'est la vie, though, and fuck 'em, since I shall gladly die defending the last few remnants of goddesses Liberty and Justice, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

no better than Nazis

in World War Two, we Americans fought bravely alongside Russians and English and Chinese and Frenchmen to conquer the aggressiveness and predatory nature of the Nazis and their allies. then, in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, we became the aggressors, we became the predators, and we invaded the sovereign nations of Iraq and Afghanistan with a ferocity and a disdain for the laws of civility that rivaled the ferocity and the disdain of the Nazis themselves. we Americans started wars of aggression without having declared war on these nations, thus robbing ourselves of the validity necessary to see our actions through, thus violating and invalidating numerous international treaties, thus sacrificing our precious honor for the fleeting promise of safety. America delenda est.

場黑麥 ioanni elymucampus fecit