Pot of gold at end of rainbow stolen.
I wonder if I'll have money when I'm eighty. Memory. It's 1993, I'm cutting across a public space with paved walks and a hillock with a blanket, someone's rolled up possessions, backpack, other items lying out, but who steals from a bum? Capitalists?
The owner of this home on the faded winter green wasn't around. I left three one dollar bills under a macramé hat.
There used to be a poet in my town, self-published two books of verse while homeless, hanging out in the main downtown coffee shop. I had a copy of one of his books which he handed out to me and several other coffee shop patrons. I remember he spelled poem as ploem.
He stepped in front of a train one night. Stopped traffic flow on several avenues for quite a while. Lights from the coppers, the blue and red oscillations, why can't they shut those fucking things off? One requires black curtains shutting out all inside light and preventing outside light from coming in. My friend lived near the death of Robert Kachur by locomotive with tons of rolling steel and the mathematics of inertia behind it. He wore a cloth cap. I've wondered if his cap was the one I left the three dollars in?
With Google's handy Inflation Calculator I find that three dollars in 1993 was the equivalent now of six dollars. Giving a bum a six dollar tip these days would seem extravagant to some.
Six dollars doesn't buy two gallons of gas in my area or any other part of the United States. Two avocados for five dollars at my grocery store. An extra buck added to the cost of peanut butter. A variety of Jif recalled. My car had its airbags replaced. Turns out metal shrapnel can blast a driver and passenger in their faces. Get those bags out of my car! Problem fixed, free of charge, they even had an old man drive me home so I could wait out the surgery on my car, my precious Marilyn, in the comfort of my home. I got a lot done waiting for word of my blue beauty's recovery and readiness to vroom and zoom on pavement wet or dry.
Flash forward ten months. The airbags in my car, I'm informed by letter, contain a defect: metal shrapnel may fly at the faces of the passenger and driver when the airbags deploy. Wow, the manufacturers of that airbag in Japan really didn't figure out how to not explode shrapnel at drivers' and passengers' faces.
The country that produces twenty percent of the world's high grade wheat is a war zone. How will that harvest be affected, resulting in what famines where?
Joe Biden has invaded another country: Somalia. Bombing it, sure, lots of bombs. Trump bombed the shit out of Somalia, but Joe has sent in ground troops to help the Somali military combat al-Shabaab. I'm sure that after twenty years of fighting them, this time will work and won't turn into a quagmire. In the Pentagon they want to avenge the 1993 Blackhawk Down scenario, the U.S. troops dragged dead through Mogadishu's streets. We dismember children with our missile shrapnel but a U.S. soldier dragged dead through a foreign capitol is the worst thing ever.
The problem with America is one of control. Look at your own life. To what extent do you control everything and everyone in your life? Do the people in your life do what you want them to do? Do things always go your way with money? With relationships? Do your fellow citizens not like it when you steal from them and murder them, while pretending there's nothing to be concerned about?
Obvious reasons for why the world is the way it is: Trade relationships, natural resources competition, competing first world powers, chaos generated for profit's sake, greed, long-time foreign policy goals carried out despite Democratic or Republican Party control. Hegemony is America's middle name now. We want to be the Uni-Power, the dominant. It's funny looking at Antony Blinken, Secretary of State and formerly one of Obama's world-wreckers. Blinken looks like Dana Carvey, the Saturday Night Live comedian known for his impression of President George Bush, the first one. Carvey is just a mild-looking slightly built man with a harmless look about him. Blinken, though harmless-looking, is a mass murderer, coup artist, liar, and fomenter of war in Ukraine. A wonderful man, in other words, the Nobel Peace Prize must go to him, because nothing means anything.
And that is the coming legacy, maybe, for Joe Biden's time as President. The era when nothing means anything. We've come through a pandemic during which the CDC and World Health Organization lied repeatedly about Covid-19, about its origins in a laboratory. Fauci, set up as an exemplar by the news media, someone to rely on in a time of uncertainty, the sane voice in the Trump administration, even though no one asked why Fauci didn't have qualms about accepting work from a man like Donald Trump. Nor have they asked why Fauci accepts the same work from Biden. Fauci has no problem being chief medical advisor to mass murdering racists.
The censorship of the Biden era contributes to the nothing means anything scenario. Hunter Biden's laptop was Hunter Biden's laptop, authenticated and written about in Glenn Greenwald's revelatory October 2020 article about Joe Biden, Hunter, and Joe's brother; shady business dealings in Ukraine and the People's Republic of China, pay for play shit because Joe was Veep at the time. The article was attacked in the major press, no one else covered Candidate Biden's influence peddling for personal gain in foreign countries. The New York Times just recently published a story confirming what's been known for a year and a half: the Hunter Biden laptop is Hunter Biden's laptop. No one in major news media will retract their numerous stories about how the Hunter laptop story is Russian propaganda. Russiagate, now proven to have been concocted by the Clinton campaign in 2016 before the election, prepared Americans for a new wave of distrusting Russia, which could lead to nuclear war. In that case, it's not a stretch to say that a major contributor to the end of the world would be Hillary Clinton, "Queen of warmongers," as Tulsi Gabbard dubbed her.
Rain all day where I live. Looking out at it in the place where I work I thought of a moment in a Merchant Ivory film, call it The Waning Moon, strings on the soundtrack, the protagonist looking through the leaded pane, shadows of rainwater traveling across the face. Suddenly it's an Oliver Stone film, car crash, airbag shrapnel in the face, hell on wheels at ninety miles an hour in a thirty-five zone, it's Bonkers McLunatic, Bath Salts Experimenter, starring Nick Cage.
Vic Neptune
No comments:
Post a Comment