DONALD TRUMP REFRIGERATOR MAGNET POETRY

    Donny says all of them! Mix & match! Have fun! Melt your brain!

AMERICA FIRST

A TOTAL DISGRACE

EMBARRASSMENT

RADICAL LEFT

THE GREAT STATE OF…

ELECTION FRAUD

US CONSTITUTION

GUTLESS AND CLUELESS

SOCIALIST NIGHTMARE

NEVER GIVE UP

BIG-SHOT

STONE COLD LOSER

FAKE NEWS MEDIA

FRAUDULENT PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2020

BORDER CRIME

PRO-LIFE

BRAVE MILITARY AND VETS

SECOND AMENDMENT

FREEDOM OF SPEECH

GREAT PATRIOTS

GREAT FARMERS AND MANUFACTURERS

GREAT COUNTRY

GREAT NATION

GREAT VACCINES

GREATEST CHAMPIONS FOR FREEDOM

MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN

BIG TIME ENEMIES

CHINA VIRUS

FAKE NEWS CNN

CHINESE SPY

PERFECT PHONE CALL

SO MUCH LOVE THERE

SACRED LANDSLIDE VICTORY

"It Was Worth It" (a monologue)

It was worth it. You know what? Getting Netflix, highways and cars, big houses, grocery stores, a.c., factories, cheap shit from across the world, abundant hamburgers and cold cuts, first person shooter video games, cool personal guns and planet-masticating weapons, streaming porn, cool sneakers, yachts, personal smart phones, and fast planes that can fly you from Milwaukee to Paris for a nice dinner was... worth it... Fuck it. I'm not ashamed to say.

If I had to do a pro/con assessment, I'd have to say, living this way, in this 21st-century "first world" lifestyle has been so great, has been so overwhelmingly blissful, so... almost... celestially blissful, that, yeah... if we go the way of the dodo and if we take a few billion more species down with us and if all that's left of this great ole place in a hundred years is just ash swirling in bubbling, soupy rubble... Then you know what, I still say: It was worth it. God dammit!

Because we lived free. We were free, god dammit. And if the price we had to pay was to end up like the guy who wears a barrel with suspenders who's stuck inside of a wind storm howling through the Oklahoma plains forever... Well then, fuck it. We did it. And if I could coin a phrase from good ole Frank Sinatra... we did it our way.

On Paul Kingsnorth's Recent Ideological Turn

The continuing rightward drift of Paul Kingsnorth (cofounder of The Dark Mountain Project, essayist, novelist and self-described "recovering environmental activist") is interesting to observe. On his Facebook page, he posts articles from conservative magazines such as "Unherd" (my nominee for most sanctimonious publication title in recent years), The Spectator (edited by Boris Johnson from 1999-2005) and The American Conservative, co-founded by Pat Buchanan in 2002 and currently edited by Rob Dreher, who also appears to write most of its articles at this time. Rob Dreher is a conservative who focuses a fair amount of his energy on crusades against gay civil rights (writing apoplectic posts about Chick-fil-A when they agreed to stop funding anti-gay campaigns, as one example among an ongoing list of such work) and writing articles bemoaning the "woke-pocalypse" (my term) and what he considers to be out of control and overzealous people working on behalf of misguided notions of "diversity." Kingsnorth maintains a strong intellectual relationship with Dreher, who recently published an extensive interview with him, as well as a glowing review of his most recent novel, "Alexandria."

Kingsnorth is a smart guy, a very good writer and somebody with views on localism versus capitalist globalization & the destructiveness of the global industrial consumer capitalist economy I agree with. However, upon reading the articles promoted by Kingsnorth on his FB page, I found the substance of them to be reactionary and facile in their analysis of the ongoing cultural crisis of the West. A comment I wrote about one of the articles promoted by Kingsnorth sparked an exchange between myself and him on his Facebook page, which I'll detail below.

Last summer, when Kingsnorth posted an essay by John Gray that dismissed the 2020 anti-police violence uprisings in the US as the unconsidered work of mostly over-educated upper middle class white intellectuals and also stated that he (Kingsnorth) didn't have an opinion on what was driving the protests, I commented. I said that he should take a stance on a basic human rights issue such as police violence against unarmed Black Americans if he were going to promote an article which holds a very contrarian stance on the topic and we had a somewhat heated back-and-forth. Kingsnorth's point was that he should not be required to take public stands on every human rights issue facing the world currently, that such a demand is unreasonable. That is true. But he promoted an article that does take a stand on such an issue.

Responding point by point to the shallow takes I've encountered in pieces by Dreher and stuff Kingsnorth has linked to from Unherd would require a lengthy essay, if not a book. For now, suffice it to say, the angle being peddled by them is that movements for social justice, such as BLM and groups fighting anti-trans bigotry, are not actually responses to long standing oppression and exploitation of disenfranchised people, but are cause célèbres dreamed up by bored, naïve and perpetually adolescent people of upper middle class white status. I don't find much, if any, evidence to support that take. And I find it to be analytically lazy, unsubstantiated and extremely out of touch.

Part 2 - Kingnorth's Christianity & Mine

Kingsnorth identifies the malaise that grips the West as found in our lack of recognition of something greater than ourselves, than the merely human. In Christianity and in certain aspects of conservatism, he believes he has located that something. Indeed, England has a Western pre-capitalist Christian tradition that the US does not and it appears to be from there that he is deriving much of his inspiration. His essay "The Dream of the Rood," goes very deeply into this theme of the culture of "Christendom" in Europe that preceded the Enlightenment.

Having grown up Catholic, my experience of Christianity was radically different than what Kingsnorth is positing. While I did gain capacities for ethical thinking from my Jesuit education, for which I am grateful, I'm not sure that Christianity provided me with a lot of the awe or reverence for the sacredness of the Earth the Kingsnorth claims it does. On the contrary, Catholicism quite often was projecting my thinking into the abstract and the speculative, asking me to initiate a dialogue and build a relationship with an invisible 3-part being whose most important stories occurred 2-3000 years ago in the Middle East - in a landscape that looked nothing like the Wisconsin where I grew up, among people whose history I knew nothing about.

Paul Kingsnorth is on his own journey and I shall not be accompanying him. In his recent essays, there is a portentousness, a feeling of strained naivety and of the authoritatively patriarchal that repels.

Don't Bread Me (10-minute play)

A: It’s all right there. On the flag.

B: On the flag? The yellow one?

A: Yellow like a rose.

B: Or a forbidden love.

A: A what?

B: The flag. The flag shows a coiled snake hissing.

A: And?

B: And?

A: And what is it saying?

B: “Don’t bread me.”

A: “Don’t bread me?”

B: “Don’t bread me. I don’t want to end up in anybody’s skillet.”

A: No, asshole. It says. (Pause) It says: “Don’t tread on me.”

B: Of course. Of course. I know what you’re talking about. I know which flag you’re talking about. For some reason, I was picturing the little triangle-shaped flags that they fly on golf courses… “Don’t tread on me.”

(Beat)

You mean like with a bicycle tire?

A: A bicycle tire?

B: Yeah, like: “Don’t ride your bike over me. I’m trying to catch some rays here!”

A: No. You dick. Dan Bongino explained it. It means don’t fuck with me and I won’t fuck with you. Get it?

B: Got it. So, the idea is that we are each separate snakes coiled and hissing, except for the bicycles, which are piloted by Redcoats or Northerners or Black Lives Matter or Antifa.

A: Uh-huh. Or Momtifa.

B: Right. Or Momtifa. And so, we are a country of coiled and hissing snakes --- in dirt holes, sunning ourselves on rocks, s-ing our way through swamps… well that’s not exactly right because so many Americans swamps were drained to make corn fields or or sugarcane…

OK. So, we are a nation of hissing and venomous snakes coiled around cotton plants and corn stalks and if you fuck with us, individually speaking… the fangs, motherfucker. The fangs, bitch.

A: Basically.

B: So. Then what you don’t do is ride your bicycle over the snakes because the snakes are the good guys. OK. So, my question is: What do you do?

A: “What do you do?”

B: What do you do? What do you do do? If I’m a snake, what do I do… besides wait around to maybe get tread on?

A: Well don’t say it like that.

B: Like what?

A: Like it’s meaningless -- not getting tread on. That’s a big deal. Dan Bongino put it like this… Don’t fu…

B: ... fuck with me and I won’t fuck with you. What I’m saying is that is there anything I’m supposed to do in my not fucking around with you.

(Beat)

I am a snake and I promise not to fuck with you…

A: Unless you fuck with me.

B: Right. Unless you fuck with me… But what else do I do? Building projects? Do I erect a porch on my property? Do I purchase property and then mainly observe it?

A: Sure. That’s fine. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with purchasing and observing property. As long as…

B: As long as long as you don’t fuck with anybody else.

E: Well?

B: That sounds boring.

A: What? What sounds boring? To you?

B: Sitting around looking at my property and not fucking with people and not getting fucked with sounds boring. I’m sorry.

A: It’s not boring! It’s not boring! Not fucking with other people and not getting fucked with by other people is not boring!

B: Ok.

A: And even if it is, it’s the best we got. As soon as you stop vigilance… As soon as you let somebody tread on you, fuck with you, get over on you, run a game on you, con you, fool you, bamboozle, bedazzle, shimmy shake you. Piss on you, ramrod you, regale you with gifts and then fleece you! Limit you… As soon as… As soon as…

B: What?

A: As soon as…

B: As soon as…

A: As soon as you give somebody your trust and they… burn you… well, then you ain’t shit then, Lester, are you?

B: Well. You’re not shit. You’re not not shit. You’re a person.

(Beat)

So, when was it?

A: When was it. When was what?

B: When was it? When did you get taken for a ride?

A: Doesn’t matter.

B: OK. It doesn’t matter.

A: That’s what I said. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what happened. If I got taken for a ride. If somebody ran a game on me. It doesn’t matter.

B: Right. I know. The fangs, motherfucker. The fangs.

A: That’s goddamn right, Charlie! You bet your goddamn ass, the fangs. And I’ll sink them so far into your neck that you may as well be a wax statue when I’m done with you. Put you into a dinner tux and send you off to Madame Tussauds.

B: Who turned you into wax, Jimmy?

A: Nobody.

B: Nobody turned you into wax. It just happened.

A: Yes. It just happened.

B: And who did you bury out over beyond the hill?

A: A bird… I’d been seeing her perched on the post at the end of our road three days running and I came out one day and she was on the ground. It looked like I could see outer space in her eyes. I took her back home. I brought her back to health. I learned what she needed. Mostly she needed care. She needed somebody to take care of her and give her little bugs and worms to eat. She was getting ready to fly away and somebody took her out of the little shoebox with grass that I had put her in. I found her dead outside of our back door.

(Beat)

And so I took her up over the hill and I buried her there and I came back down the hill and I was made out of wax.

B: Did you ever think that maybe you’re a bird and not a rattlesnake?

A: Could be. Could be.

San Jose 2021

 "The lines at Hyatt Guns, his shop in Charlotte, North Carolina, snaked out the door. The deep, green-walled warehouse bills itself as the largest gun shop in America, but even then Hyatt had to stretch to meet the demand. At one point, he dispatched 37 salespeople to man the cash registers. He put up velvet ropes and hired a police officer. He even put a hot dog stand outside. It was just after the Sandy Hook massacre -- and customers were lined up to buy AR-15 semi-automatic rifles, like the one the shooter Adam Lanza used." (David Heath, Elise Hansen and AJ Willingham, CNN, 12/14/2017)

When the archaeologists of the future

(which may or may not come to pass)

Sort through the rubble and come upon

Our Barettas, Brownings, Calico M950s,

Caracal 9x19mm, Parabellums and Colt Commanders,

Colt Delta Elites, Colt Model 1903 Pocket Hammerless, Colt Mustangs,

Dan Wessons, Desert Eagles, Fort 12s, Fort-17s, FN Baby Brownings,

FN 49’s, FN Grand Brownings, FP 45 Liberators,

Gilsenti Model 1910s, Glock 17s, Glock 18s, Glock 19s, Glock 20s

Glock 22 through Glock 39s

Our Guncrafters and Gyrojets

Heckler & Koch HK 4s, HK 45s, MK 23’s and P7’s

Heckler and Koch VP 9s and VP 70s

High point Model JCP’s

High Standard HDMs

Jennings J 22s

JOLO JR’s

Jericho 941s

Don’t let the wall fall down on you

Kaltech P 11s and P 22s

Kimber Aegis, Kimber Custom, Kimber Eclipse

Komodo Element P1 95

Like a dragon made of iron, on the prowl

KRISS KARD, Lancaster, Langenhan

Lewis Automatic Pistol, Lilliput pistol

To put you in the grave

With a lily in your mouth

Llama M 82, the Lugar

Mab Model A, Mab Model D

MAC 10, MAC 11, MAC mag 95

The Makarov, The Mamba Pistol, The Mars Automatic

To shoot your ass into orbit by The Red Planet

Mauser C 96

The Mitchell Alpha 45

The MP 444

The Musgrave pistol

Obregón Pistol

Pardini GT9

Pindad G2

PP 2000, PS silent pistol

QSW06,

Remington R51, Remington rider single shot

Rorbaugh R9s

Ruby pistols, Ruger Hawkeyes, Ruger LCPs

Savage model 1907, Summerlin LM4

Sig P227

Smith and Wesson Model 422s

Starfire, Star M43, Star UltraStar

Tanfoglio Force

Tec 9, Trejo pistol

Type 14 Nambu

UZI

Viper Jaws

Volkpistole

Walther P 22 and P 38

Whitney Wolverine

Zaragoza korlas

Zastava P P Zs

If there are people alive 100 years from now

They’re going to look at each other and say

Who in the ever-loving fuck were these people?

Thank God they are gone

***

AUDIO San Jose 2021

The Haunted Ballads of Robert Hunter

The Grateful Dead are either the most overrated band of all time or the most underrated. I go with the latter. Here is one reason why: You could hate all of their live music and what they were doing with their space jams (I don't... because Jerry Garcia is capable of improvising guitar solos that shimmer in beauty like a mountain valley encountered on a morning walk), and still rate them as brilliant based upon the song collections "American Beauty" and "Workingman's Dead." These are albums of 3 to 4- minute songs with tight arrangements, exquisite but not overindulgent musicianship (unlike much other music of the era), and a marriage of lyric and melody that is among the best in American popular music.

Lyricist Robert Hunter knew how to inhabit the world of the "weird, old America" (to use Greil Marcus' term) -- haunted landscapes described in country blues lyrics and other Ovid-in-America metamorphosis-style tales of the sort featured on experimental filmmaker and 78 rpm record collector Harry Smith's 1952 "Anthology of American Folk Music." Ballads that were weird in Scotland got considerably weirder in their American incarnations. Meanwhile, Delta and Piedmont blues artists were singing about the inexplicability of living in a land, the Jim Crow South, where the apartheid system made everyday living a very unstable affair, where white terror could be lurking around the next corner and the next one. These artists used the knotty irony and wry humor of African folktales and folk wisdom to evoke what felt like permanent exile.

To bring it back to Robert Hunter, the words to his song "Dire Wolf" are striking in how they deposit the listener immeditely, in the first line, into an unsettling zone that feels half-remembered and half-forgotten, half-dreamed and half-lived. The singer/narrator sits down to a game of cards against the 600-pound dire wolf who was grinning at his window. The tale the singer tells takes place in someplace called Fennario - probably a place in Scotland that was mispronounced and ended up staying that way, in the old ballad, "Pretty Peggy-o."

In the timbers of Fennario, the wolves are running round

The winter was so hard and cold, froze ten feet 'neath the ground

Don't murder me, I beg of you, don't murder me

Please, don't murder me

I sat down to my supper, 'twas a bottle of red whisky

I said my prayers and went to bed, that's the last they saw of me

Don't murder me, I beg of you, don't murder me

Please, don't murder me

When I awoke, the Dire Wolf, six hundred pounds of sin

Was grinning at my window, all I said was come on in

Don't murder me, I beg of you, don't murder me

Please, don't murder me

The Wolf came in, I got my cards, we sat down for a game

I cut my deck to the Queen of Spades, but the cards were all the same

Don't murder me, I beg of you, don't murder me

Please, don't murder me

Don't murder me

In the backwash of Fennario, the black and bloody mire

The Dire Wolf collects his dues, while the boys sing 'round the fire

Don't murder me, I beg of you, don't murder me

Please, don't murder me

Don't murder me

I beg of you don't murder me

Please, don't murder me

No no no don't murder me

I beg of you, don't murder me

Please, don't murder me

Please, don't murder me

More Thoughts on The Society of the Hustle

We were born into a society with a reward system that is inverted, ethically speaking. The personality types that are most heavily discouraged and censored in cultures with long-standing wisdom traditions are those that are most lavishly rewarded in this society. To me, this indicates that there is really not all that much to be done to revolutionize (thereby offering some kind of salvation) this system, in the absence of a complete abandonment of its founding system of values — a system of values that historian Morris Berman summarizes as: “the hustle.“ Under a system built around the hustle, the great objective of the individual life is wealth accumulation - generally speaking, by any means necessary. I would like to emphasize the crushing and tragic sadness that I and others experience as a direct consequence of being born into an ethically inverted culture. The value system is a type of hell that thrives upon producing other hells — hells of war, addiction, chronic mental/emotional crisis, mass species extirpation, ecological devastation, human displacement, the vanishing or at least the banishing of the sacred, the monetizing of everything possible.

And it is a society born of a glitch, an aberration. Most people are not as broken and venal as Donald Trump or Jeffrey Bezos, for example. However, as mass scale agriculture took off in the wake of the Neolithic Revolution, such sociopathic personality types made a play and started to amass power built on surplus food and wealth. The remarkable thing is that such people were successful in acculturating others into their own illness. In the case of the Americas, truly demented souls like Chris Columbus crossed the sea, but, most significantly, he and similar British marauders were able to then acculturate others into their value system. It really is a striking achievement, considering the value system assimilated by otherwise normal people is one based on the proliferation of misery – both internal and external. Maybe we will live to see the day when the other story reasserts its power and people leave behind the greatest mistake in human history.