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     Cable news is all over Hurricane Matthew as it menaces Florida and the Bahamas.  It already hit Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Haiti.  In Haiti, approximately 350,000 people are in dire need of assistance.  Reports from West Palm Beach, Florida, and Nassau, receive more attention.
     I've wondered about what it was like for the inmates at Guantanamo Bay to be in a Category 4 hurricane.  An oubliette is "a secret dungeon with a trapdoor in its ceiling."  The word comes from French, oublier, "to forget."  The forgotten prisoners of Bush and Obama languish in Cuba and elsewhere; Edward Snowden is only steps away from a drone strike.  Haiti, a forgotten country, killed and pummeled by nature and human corruption, faces an election on October 9, the outcome of which will sharply affect its people as they struggle to cope with a hurricane that now endangers Florida mansions.  Rick Scott, the crazy Christian Governor of Florida and Donald Trump supporter, has "three" words for Florida residents: "Evacuate.  Evacuate.  Evacuate."  That's actually one word that ignores those who don't have the means to do so, as in New Orleans in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina stranded thousands in poor neighborhoods and in a football stadium, all of them left by Bush's administration to a purgatory of waiting for a federal government to act on behalf of Black people.
     Apart from the hurricane, the presidential race, and the theft of Kim Kardashian's jewels, the news craze of recent past weeks involves "creepy clowns."  In Greenville, South Carolina, a young boy told his mother he was approached in nearby woods by a clown urging him to go with him to a dilapidated house.  A similar structure is the setting for some of Stephen King's clown-oriented horror novel, It.  That King, as is his talent, created a fearscape involving a clown in that hefty 1986 novel (I've read it, and it weighs, in hardcover, a few pounds), means he helped add to the notion of clowns as creepy, something believed in already by many people.  One "creepy clown" in Alabama (this has become a nationwide nocturnal phenomenon) had a Facebook account, posing in a picture with "blood" covering the upper part of his body and the caption, "I kill people for a living."  This person was apprehended by the police and found to be a woman, which goes to show there's no telling who's wearing the clown suits.  Some communities have banned the wearing of clown suits for the upcoming Halloween, meaning that just as one can't pretend to be a cop, one can't pretend to be a creepy clown.
     A real life creepy clown, Donald John Trump, continues to thrive on the fear of the other he's helped stoke.  Here is a key, I think, to the creepy clown phenomenon, coming as it does, so far into America's experience of the Global War on Terror (which I regard as World War Three).  Three days ago, at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, an alleged creepy clown sighting led to a social media-driven panic, causing students to run pellmell from shadows projected from their minds.  Is this kind of thing not similar to government and news media authorities stimulating fear in the populace about Islamic terrorists?  About Syrian refugees (a frequent Trump bugbear)?  About Mexicans breaching an international boundary?  During the 2012 election, alleged Black Panthers supposedly intimidating White voters, Fox News Channel showing, seemingly endlessly, a clip of precisely two Black men at a voting location, wearing the traditional Panther garb?
     Hurricane Matthew has killed and displaced thousands of Haitians, Bashar al-Assad's war against his countrymen has killed hundreds of thousands, Duterte of the Philippines wages a war on drugs (people, actually), arresting and killing mercilessly, and we have clowns.  And, granted, too many trigger-happy cops.  And a hopelessly corrupt political system driven by greed and power-mongering.
     The fear inspired by the clowns, though, is real, and seems to satirize the Global War on Terror.  Senator Joseph McCarthy, Dick Cheney, Donalds Rumsfeld and Trump, and other "respectable" clowns, have worked and currently work the fear message: they're coming to get you.  Even though it's really American and other first world powers continually striving to "get" the rest of the world and make it conform to lofty plans concealing that most base political condition going back to prehistoric times: whoever chops off the most heads is chief.
     Unlike the Belmont students, we free and democratic peoples don't run from that which legitimately causes fear in this world; we vote, without a wondering thought in our heads, for people who advocate and practice state terrorism.
     The people of Haiti this Sunday have to hope their next leader won't be a useless douchebag.  Many of them have already given up hope that the first world, particularly its primary representative to the north, will do well by them after natural disasters, incompetence, and cupidity have combined, leaving the nation drowning figuratively and literally.

                                                                             Vic Neptune