This is Chuck Hamilton, a Yank from Chattanooga, Tennessee,
USA, a poet, writer, historian, activist in various causes, and a Scottish
nationalist for as long as I can remember.
Remember what Jean Shepherd said about creeping meatballism
being the passive acquiescence of people who surrender to the demands of the
consumer culture and collaborate in their own manipulation? In the Great Satan back in the 1960s, Abbie
Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and three of their friends founded the
counterculture-oriented Youth International Party whose slogan was “Rise up and
abandon the creeping meatball”. It’s in
the yippie spirit, in fact, that I’m now referring to America as the Great
Satan, certainly not out of any respect for that chicken-fucker Grand Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini, who coined the term.
Uncle Sam may be the more common nickname, but in that guise America is
the uncle comes to your bedroom at your parents’ house at night with its
trousers unzipped.
I remember a story I heard on the radio (remember those), on
National Public Radio, I think, about a couple who had this pet chimpanzee, a
female they’d named Jane. There came a
point when they couldn’t care for her anymore, and thinking she should be with
her own kind, they gave her over to the local zoo. The first time they came to visit her, she
became extremely excited, especially when they gave her a bunch of treats. They came again and did the same, failing to
notice the agitation from the other chimps.
When they returned the third time, Jane wouldn’t come near them, and had
clearly been beaten. Asking the
zookeeper what happened, he explained that they should have brought enough for
all of the group.
There’s a quote going around falsely attributed to Jody
Foster that was actually a computer-generated meme. Maybe machines are not as stupid as we
thought. The quote goes, “Attacking the
rich is not envy; it is self-defense.
The hoarding of wealth is the cause of poverty. The rich aren’t just indifferent to poverty:
they create it and maintain it.” That’s
the end of the so-called quote, but if it had continued, the computer would’ve
added that they maintain it through the power of the political state and
informal means of social control such as the creation of patriotism and making
the poor ashamed of the poverty inflicted upon them in order to maintain the
wealth of the few, as if it is somehow their fault rather than the wankers and
cunts who have thrust it upon them.
Another meme I’ve seen in relation to the suffering visited
upon Greece by the European Union which should make one have second thoughts
about that body, that just because Brexiters were so obnoxiously bigoted does
not mean the EU is a good thing anymore than Donald Trump makes Hillary Clinton
a good thing or Donald Cameron and Theresa May make Tony Blair a good
thing. This meme, describing the chain
of events leading to the crash of 2007 and the ongoing Great Recession, quite
accurately describes austerity.
It goes like this: Rich people cause economic crisis. Rich people demand bail out from state for
causing the crisis. Rich people do
better than ever before. Rich people
demand austerity, which is a fancy word for cutting services for the non-rich,
to pay for bailing out rich people. Rich
people blame poor people for the crisis they themselves have created, and
become angry that poor people think they deserve better, calling for more
sacrifice…sacrifice from the poor, that is.
So, the answer to the age-old question of why is there so
much poverty in the world, as answered by a computer no less, is that there is
poverty because there is wealth. Wealth
is, in fact, is the sole cause of poverty.
Without a greedy few amassing hoards of resources out of the reach of
the rest of humanity, there would be more than enough for all. The needs of the many should outweigh the
greed of the avaricious few.
Much is made of the divide between the basement dwellers who
supported Bernie Sanders and the deplorables who support Donald Trump. The truth is that both sets of us are driven
by the same underlying motivation; less and less available for the many as the
few, the 1%, hoard more and more to themselves.
Like the grassroots of the Occupy movement vis-à-vis the rank-and-file
of the Tea Party movement in its early days.
The differences are superficial and ephemeral, just like the illusory
divide between grassroots supporters of Brexit and grassroots opposers of Brexit. The more we buy into this division which is
as artificial as any national border, the more we collaborate in our own manipulation
and allow the meatball to creep on until it rolls over us like a boulder. We can’t abandon the creeping meatball unless
we first rise up and demand what all of us deserve, a cooperative commonwealth
of the many, by the many, and for the many, even the then formerly wealthy whose
hoards have been more fairly distributed.
I’d like to close out with a poem I wrote back in 1997
during the dark years of the Clinton machine’s first ascension to the throne of
the Empire, which has a liberation theme of sorts. It was one of my most popular on the local
open mike circuit back then. It’s about
emancipation of the mind and the spirit.
It’s called,
Random Thoughts, the day after a really weird night that I spent at
Kilroy's Coffeehouse, and no, I'm not on acid
I don't really care
whether I go to heaven
Or whether I go to hell
Or whether I go to hell
I don't believe in
that version of reality
Somehow I think the
Otherside
If there is one, that
is
Would blow the
fucking minds
Of the purveyors of
guilt and fear
But even if -- and
that's a big IF
The truth does
conform
To their mythological
paranoid psychosexual fantasies
I'd rather burn with
the righteous sinners
Than sing with the
sanctimonious saints
At least the sinners
are honest
About who they are
They're a whole lot
more real
Than the ones who sit
in judgment
Over the rest of us
outside
Worrying about gossip
And what's
"appropriate" and "polite"
Serving the
capitalist Leviathan
And the conformist
Behemoth
With the labor of
their hearts and minds
Buying whatever the
creeping meatball
Tells them they need
Eating vanilla food
and having vanilla sex
Walking the line in
the middle of the road
And getting their
spirits squashed like a grape
Give me spice, give
me pepper
Give me the odd, the
strange, the wonderful
Give me the outrageous
and offensive
Give me the
culturally blasphemous
Give me the really
weird
Give me cookies and
cunnilingus
—oh wait....for me
that's fellatio—
Give me true freedom
and liberty
In all their
anarchic, iconoclastic, orgiastic splendor
And speaking of hell
Since James Dobson is
on such good terms
With the Almighty
Maybe he can tell me
the answer
To a question that's
just come to mind...
(And here,
existing for a moment
In
Never-Never-Land
We have to pretend
That heaven and
hell are real)
This is my question:
Where does God send
sinners who are masochists?
Certainly not to hell
Where await fire and
brimstone
Assorted tortures and
all manner of pain
The ultimate
experience of S&M
An eternal orgasm
stretching to infinity
And speaking of
torture and pain
Brings to my mind the
scourging,
The crowning with
thorns,
And the crucifixion
Certainly Christians
must all be sadists
Since seeing the
crucified victim's agony
Brings them such
orgasmic joy
As they torture
themselves with
Autoerotic shame and
mental emotional pain
Wouldn't it have been
tacky
If the Big Boy
himself had been a masochist
Bottom to Pilate's
top?
And another thing…
If Jesus Christ
really DID take all humanity's sins
Upon himself that day
(And good
GOD....where would he fit THAT load)
Why do Christians
these days
Give Satan such a bum
rap
Laying all their sins
At his feet and at
his door
How would you like to
be the Devil
Hearing what they
say?
A story in the Talmud
teaches
That Satan is God's
most loyal servant
Testing the faith of
his children
By tempting them to
sin
Courting ridicule,
scorn, and outright hatred
And by offering them
a choice
Making real their
gift of free will
Courting ridicule,
scorn, and outright hatred
Like the prostitute
hired by the king
To test his heir and
find out his worth
No, it's not false
witness that they fear
Coming from the
"Father of Lies"
But rather that he'll
tell the truth
So they would condemn
the Accuser
Who holds up the
mirror
Showing them their
true selves
Come on, people, grow
up
Take some fucking
responsibility
Don't scapegoat
another, even Auld Hornie
After all, the
serpent in the Garden
Was the only
one who told the truth
I remember a quote
from Isaiah's Song
"He was despised
and rejected by men
Wounded for our
transgressions
And bruised for our
iniquities"
And I get a way far
out idea
About an intriguing
possibility:
If good and evil are
really the same thing
Created by God when
he formed light and darkness
Since that quote
could apply with equal truth
Though perhaps for
different reasons
To Lucifer, son of
the morning
Or to Jesus, bright
morning star
Maybe, just maybe
They're the same
person
No comments:
Post a Comment