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By Vi Ransel

9/1/07

It’s an ancient tradition derived
from the scapegoat of Leviticus
whereby the wrongs of others
are transferred to an innocent

who’s then sent out alone to die
symbolically bearing others’ sins,
absolving from greed, lust, pride and hate
the community that condemned him.

A corpse is laid out, sin eater employed
to eat bread and salt from its belly
thereby absorbing the corpse’s sins
for the wages of just a few pennies.

Relegated to the wrong side of the tracks
in housing fallen to disrepair
destitute even of hope
a place one stumbles only in error.

The poor clean the toilets, wait the tables,
kill the meat and mow the lawns,
raise the children of the “Upper” Class,
walk their pampered dogs and park their cars.

They assemble the latest electronics,
sew our blue jeans and our wedding gowns.
When we buy cheap Chinese goods at Wal-mart
they’re the “associates” who check us out.

The poor care for other people’s parents
left alone and sad in nursing homes.
They’re the receptionists in upscale spas,
the charming girls in nail salons.

They’re dishwashers who scrape half-full plates
left by those who can afford to go out to eat.
They stock store shelves and work in warehouses
where corporations ship and receive.

They empty bed pans and wipe up vomit.
They’re janitors and maintainence men.
And a lot of them help to build the jails
they’re disproportionately incarcerated in.

The people they serve hardly speak to them
though they provide indispensible services
because they’re living proof of a “lower” calss,
which makes most Americans nervous.

The fact that they exist at all is a slap
in the face of the American polity,
so they’re treated like a shameful excresence
on the ass of American society.

But like the ghetto homelands of South Africa,
America has embarrassing pockets of poverty.
And the economic apartheid we practice,
makes the poor exiles in their own country.

And when the poor are all used up, having been
consumed by predatory corporations,
they’re discarded like so much garbage
for being too old, too sick or disabled.

These castoffs through no fault of their own
are condemned by the corporate supremacists
who looted their pensions and 401Ks
to eke out a long and miserable existence.

It’s gone on so long it seems normal,
and corporate-owned media report it that way.
It’s as if poverty were invsible
and America’s conscience had been mislaid.

So the sin eaters continue to scramble
for scraps from the CORPSE-porations’ table,
bearing the burden of unpardonable sin,
our homegrown, American scapegoats.

And treating the poor as if this is their fault
hides the fact that it is America’s decision
to absolve the criminal perpetrator
and blame the sin-eating victim.

So you’ll never see a T-shirt that says
“Poor and Proud in the U.S.A.”
because in the United States of America
the P.I.A. are M.I.A.

Cyrano’s Journal Online, Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop are initiating a weekly email which will include links to the latest high quality content available on our very diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to JMiller@bestcyrano.org

By Jason Miller

7/25/07

A few days ago, one of my closest friends hit me with a heavily loaded question.

“Are you a Communist?” she queried.

To which I replied:

I do not belong nor militate in any formal communist party in the U.S. Nor do I belong to any other political entity or party. Furthermore, I do not subscribe to a specific doctrine, ideology, or dogma. My allegiance is to my core principles and values, which are premised on honesty, justice, humanity, responsibility, critical thinking, open-mindedness, egalitarianism, compassion, a belief in a Higher Power of my understanding, and many of the teachings of Christ.

My personal beliefs aside, communism is an incredibly loaded word. Our infinitely mendacious educational, social, and media infrastructures begin inculcating reflexive rejection of “all things communist or socialist” into US Americans from the moment they draw their initial breath.

Why is the establishment so desperate to vaccinate us against the “disease” of communism?

Because at its hopelessly rotten core, capitalism, which is manifested most strongly in the United States, is about exploitation, hyper-competitiveness, “rugged individualism”, survival of the fittest, concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, profits above all, property over people, greed, and selfishness. Perhaps worst of all, this pyramid scheme masquerading as a “moral” economic system inevitably leads to wars fueled by its insatiable demands for new markets, more resources, and cheaper labor. Why else would 350 million out of 6.5 billion people spend a trillion dollars a year on a military that has the capacity to destroy our planet thousands of times over, dwarfs the combined firepower of the rest of the world, and plagues over 130 countries with its “benign” occupations? We in the United States maintain a carefully crafted façade as the “benevolent champions of democracy”, but will quickly install ruthless tyrants and commit mass murder (euphemistically labeling our victims as “collateral damage”) if sovereign nations dare to resist our economic rape and plunder.

Continue Reading »

Cyrano’s Journal Online, Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop are initiating a weekly email which will include links to the latest high quality content available on our very diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to JMiller@bestcyrano.org

By Jason Miller

7/15/07

[Warning: Satire Ahead]

“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.”

–John Maynard Keynes

If you’re nodding your head in agreement with Keynes and expecting validation of your opinion as you read this piece, you’re in for a rude awakening.

Forget the humanitarian, bleeding heart nonsense. Let’s reflect on the words of Thomas Sowell instead:

“Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on ‘income distribution,’ the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.”

We live in reality ladies and gentlemen. Not some utopian fantasy dreamt up by the likes of idealistic dreamers like Marx and Engels.

Ours is indeed a cold, cruel world. The sooner each of us accepts our lot, makes the most of it, and moves on, the better off we will all be. The ingenious and industrious Bill Gates deserves every penny he has. By the same token, the dregs of society inhabiting places like Skid Row and eating from dumpsters are reaping their just rewards for their depraved, lazy, and ignorant ways.

Continue Reading »

Cyrano’s Journal Online, Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop are initiating a weekly email which will include links to the latest high quality content available on our very diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to JMiller@bestcyrano.org

“Here There Be Monsters”

Pastel on Paper: “Rapacious Consumption” by Ric Hall and Ron Schmitt

Essay by Jason Miller

7/5/07

“America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

—John Quincy Adams

While it certainly was not his intent, Adams’ assertion serves to remind us of a truth revealed by vast oceans of tears, torrential rivers of blood, and formidable piles of human remains. Leaving murder, mayhem, and misery in its wake, America does “go abroad,” but not, as Adams noted, “in search of monsters to destroy.” What Adams failed to perceive, despite living in the midst of the Native American genocide and the abject evil of chattel slavery, is that America is the monster.

Yet like most monsters that exist outside the boundaries of imagination, the printed word, celluloid, or digital imagery, the United States and its denizens ostensibly appear rather harmless and mundane. In fact, it would probably be more accurate to say that a fair number of people still perceive us as downright heroic, cloaked as we are in our beguiling raiment of freedom and democracy. Continue Reading »

NOTICE TO OUR READERS: The editors will be most grateful for your attention at the end of this feature. Thank you.

Sculpture: “The Id” by TJ Dixon and James Nelson

By Jason Miller

6/24/07

Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.

–Sigmund Freud

Frightening as it may be, the Earth’s fate rests in the hands of children. With incredibly formidable military firepower at its disposal, the United States could catalyze Armageddon at any time. And while they may be adults chronologically, our sociopolitical structure is dominated by emotional infants.

Nietzsche once pronounced God dead. In the United States, we have a more readily demonstrable (and perhaps related) problem. Our collective id has rendered its governing superego impotent, and perhaps dead. Our prevailing moral standards, as inconsequential as they have become, are of the Jerry Falwell variety. They are mean-spirited, self-serving, judgmental, narrow-minded, selfish, and belligerent. As far as US Americans are concerned, Christ may as well have preached the Sermon on the Mount from the lowest recesses of Death Valley.

Recall that our basic drives such as libido, hunger, and aggression flow from the infantile dimension of our psyche known as the id. In terms of psychodynamics, the superego’s role is to counter-balance the irresponsible, amoral, and essentially sociopathic nature of the id with a healthy degree of conscience and guilt. Yet in the United States, we are inculcated with a deep sense of our exceptionalism and entitlement from the moment we emerge from the birth canal, thus crippling our ability to empathize and seriously impeding the development of our superego.

Consequently, conscience, guilt, personal discipline, and delaying gratification are barely extant in the toxic cesspool of our sociocultural environment.

Continue Reading »

By Vi Ransel

6/18/07

After the Great Depression
the Rich had the impression
we were ripe for revolution.
Their solution? A New Deal.

But this “gift” they gave us
was merely to enslave us
temporarily amaze us
’til they could tear that mother down.

After World War Two
they gave us credit.
Did it work on us?
You bet. It’s
worked so well we’re
all in debt up to our ass.

We got little Levitt
mockups of their mansions,
sprawling highway expansion
of veins ready for the oily needle
in the nation’s arm.

And they let us go to
college, but they’re
afraid of knowledge
’cause it’s POWER
(to The People). Can’t
have that! You have a
dream? You just dream on.

Basic education is outdated
on the corporate plantation.
All the world’s remediation
can’t undo the devastation done
by whole word reading and new math.

And this theft of skills
makes a mockery
of participatory democracy,
sending us down the corporate
Manifest Destiny path.

Advertising’s their predation
for our seduction and sedation
so without evaluation
we’ll submit
while they feed on us like jackals,
slap our souls in shackles
and have us branded by age three
with corporate logo loyalty.
Our only future is the next thing that we buy.

Pharmaceuticals push legal drugs
for shyness and bad moods.
Huge conglomerates sing our love songs
to alcohol, SUVs and fried foods.
They’ve tranquilized and supersized us
with material goods
and ubiquitous depictions
of degrading sexual juxtapositions
laid like land mines
in all the media’s neighborhoods.

Yet after all this depredation
we’ve let the corporate plantation
become our American Idol(atry).
We want our ship to come in
so we can be just like them.
Meanwhile we take our place in
the new U.S. “serve us” economy.

Ask not what your country
has done to you, because
there is no remorse. And
don’t you know nobody
knows you when you
down(sized) and out(sourced).

“We can produce slick, television-friendly self-promoters — i.e. Thompson and Obama — but we can’t rebuild New Orleans or devise an exit strategy from Iraq.”

By Phil Rockstroh

6/14/07

Recent news reports have revealed that the Bush Administration has bestowed upon itself the right to grant itself absolute power if “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions” might come to pass.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/05/20070509-12.html 

Actually, the hypothetical catastrophes stated above sound very much like the veritable calamities inflicted upon the nation by the Bush presidency itself. Worse, at present, many of our Democratic representatives are showing their outrage regarding the disastrous policies of the administration — by agitating to bomb Iran.

Regarding such circumstances, Eric Fromme warned, “the destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it.” Ergo, we witness these collective pathologies play out in the perpetual aggression of American foreign policy, the exploitation inherent in our corporate workplaces, marketplaces, and healthcare practices and the exponentially expanding destruction of the environment.

How, then, can we begin to alter these seemingly ineluctable circumstances?

First off, don’t give the elites credit for being more intelligent than they are. Ruthlessness, striving and cunning should not be mistaken for intelligence. The only real accomplishment of the present day ruling class has been to transform their self-justifying lies into a form of performance art.

In reality, they have left private institutions bloated and public ones bankrupt. And left us, as a people, directionless and bereft of hope.

But that is not the totality of the situation: We must muse upon our own complicity in creating this cultural catastrophe. We’ve all been employed as landscapers on this blood-sodden deathscape.

At present, in our alienation and attendant passivity, our plight is analogous to that of so-called “crib babies,” those socially and emotionally arrested, orphaned children who were left to languish in indifferent institutions. Culturally, we seem devoid of the ability to respond to each other, to create a just society — or even envisage one.

Continue Reading »

“The grand jury was silent on whether Rod K. Williams’ seat for Super Bowl XLI was an indictment of our society’s true priorities.”

6/13/07

This is the story of four young men.

They all endure longer than Rod K. Williams. His body was found in a dumpster eight days after he died. Rod’s family and friends say he wanted to play football someday but he was only 14-years-old when he was wrapped in plastic bags and thrown in the garbage. While his body decomposed in the shadow of Dolphins Stadium they played Super Bowl XLI there. The game is described with Roman numerals due to its gravitas. An estimated one billion people watched the game on CBS, part of Viacom’s media empire. Tony Dungy beat Lovie Smith to the Lombardi Trophy and was lauded as the first African-American coach to win a Super Bowl. While Peyton Manning was named the game’s Most Valuable Player many Black athletes on the field made spectacular plays that drew loud cheers from the crowd. The Bears Devin Hester ran back the opening kick-off back 92 yards for a touchdown. Continue Reading »