Chickens And Roosters In The Very Same And Empowered Schmucks
Get Back In Line: The So-Called Life of "The Author"
As I sit here at my work desk, while I am slightly behind a schedule I set for myself, I've got to call freedom of speech and the press up for questioning, exactly as I used to ask my friends when befuddled by all the stupid resistance I have received.
"What can I say?"
Apparently, some of us, honest men (and women) should never say. You know: "Don't speak up or we'll hurt you."
Who cares? Be specific. Do you care when people tell you to shut your face?
You're walking through your press rooms or your office space, and some ditz tells you you're "a treasonous bitch". Walk along. Get back in line. Giddy up. And also "git"! Be a git. It's easier than telling the truth.
Of course, there is a time to speak, just as there is a time to remain silent, even as the superior and excellent chance to suck up like a baby drinking dog milk apparently is a temptation some of the most powerful men and women in the U.S. find irresistible.
Six U.S. citizens spoke up, warned the U.S. military and all OUR SOLDIERS--not The Big Oopa Loopa's private "deal" as he, known as "the dealer" whines inside a big gold-spattered crib he seems to think is a casino or a club--yes, spoke up to tell the military not to follow orders that are not only illegal orders but orders explicitly unconstitutional.
Oops! Look. Someone said a no-no....
Where are the GOP hot-doggers and pompously out for absolute power when some geek decides to pardon a turkey, but only uses the chance to be before national attention in a ritual meant to be fun, all to turn it into a vehicle where the geek could tell everyone everywhere how much he's done and how great he is?
No, really. Where were they? Where are they coming from? Busy making ham sandwiches with three slices of Velveeta each, all to parade around a cafeteria as if it too belongs to Jesus?
What can I say?
One friendly, fine retort to my perennial question: "You can recite The Gettisburg Address!" I like that one.
I guess I could try to recite one of the greatest addresses ever made. But...but...
Heck. My short-term memory is cashed. Sort of. I am great with faces and events, but the teeny little words between huge white spaces? Because I use words every single day, well, perhaps the lacuna in my memory is telling me, "Like, give your memory a break."
Events and knowledge? I've got the eagle eye. And I never forget. Even though I am adult enough to know that forgiveness is fine, but I also know that the use of forgiveness as a means to the end of enabling a child is a repudiation of the very word, repent.
For all the "Grand Christians" in both Houses: Forgiveness is pointless if the forgiven do not honestly repent. Why do you always miss that factor? Can't you read your little book? My friends believe that about you. Why so sanctimonious?
Beat your breasts. Bang your heads.
When I was out carousing, drinking, drugging, and causing all kinds of trouble, even from beyond the supposedly-vaunted halls of Dallas' ever-loco mass media, I'd get all kinds of responses to my demonstrably weird question.
The local editor of Dallas Observer, Ken Kirk, became a sort of devotee when I went off on Dallas' "Classic Rock" hegemony in hogging all stations as if ignorance of punk and New Wave would "save the children". KZEW, owned at the time by the same "supervisors of all society everywhere:" who owned the Dallas Morning News, classically hid their intentions in the station designation: We are your zoo, you punked out animals!
Zoos for the suits and oppressors need to be erected in order to fully encompass all side of the question of what music is to be allowed. Boy! I punked out in letters to the Observer. With a couple of pseudonyms: Athena Stickseed and Otto B. Apparanin. I did try impersonating a sort of preacher telling all the punks to disappear, but as I recall (spottily), that didn't go over too well.
Nobody I knew wanted pop or punk or New Wave to be atrophied by Dumbo The Elephant in a corner office where no one could get him (or her, especially the silent women of the Big Duh). We protested. We had fun. A buddy of mine used a white station wagon, perched a red cereal bowl atop as "a siren" as we quoted a Second City comedy skit where Kenny Rogers went to a throat doctor to complain about Bee Gees Disease.
Dissent in good faith is fun when those on the other end of it are manly enough to both listen and bear up with the First Amendment. Like big boys.
"Shhh...!" today's self-appointed and self-aggrandizing critics may say. "Say nothing! We are the security state! We are here to protect you!"
Really? I guess protection rackets like those of auto repos and loan sharks are for forever. OK. I'll be a good boy and echo Taylor Swift: "Amirite?"
Back to "gayologist" Pete Hegseth and his exceptionally fear-based decisions against women and homosexuals in the military. After the absolutely infantile and misogynistic "warrior boy" whose big claim to fame could be expressed by another sort of song, that one a smash comedy hit by the Norwegian duo Ylvis, put his likely anti-American refusal to even think like this:
"What Does The Fox say?"
Ask him. Peter The Wolf Hegseth. Surely he still has three marbles in his head. Maybe. Regardless of the office he does not deserve, it's obvious he remains a spokesperson for a propaganda machine that pretends to be purveying the news. Even as he pretends to know what he's doing after changing the Department of Defense to the Department of War.
Oh, yeah. Big big man.
When accused by his sister-in-law in January, 2025; accused of abusing his second wife to the point an affidavit landed on the desks of U.S. Senators testifying indeed Hegseth is a wife beater, what was his reaction?
Naturally, like most domestic abuse perpetrators, Hegseth denied it all. Like any coward, he allowed an attorney to speak for him.
Right-E-O. Every time someone accuses me of something, I just drag a fairly big fortune of greenbacks out of my wallet to pay "the guy" to defend me.
Secretary of War in hard combat. Like a wombat. Unconscious on a very private bath mat.
But of course! The U.S. Senate let a wife-beater take control of the United States military. Is it possible that literally every single Republican sitting on their duffs in the Senate chambers also hates women?
Certainly looks like it. In contrast, one of the most clever military geniuses in ancient history, a Briton named Boudica, tore one massive hole in Roman defenses in an area with a name that sounds awfully similar to Camelot. What if King Arthur's legendary Round Table is a myth that may or may not speak to Boudica? Who really knows?
Man. She ripped the Romans a new one. A guerrilla fighter. A woman! Imagine! A woman led troops and defeated the Romans!
No! Be polite! Don't speak!
This scardy cat "call to silence is very very strong in the U.S. Senate. Remember how the LGBTQ+ community, in regard to the AIDs epidemic emblemized, "Silence Equals Death!", as a sort of reminder to the ever-so-polite who wanted to keep all the scary facts under the rug?
That kind of silence--both implicit in the US Senate's kowtowing to idiocy, and equally so among those "conservatives" who did not feel like addressing the AIDS crisis in public--that hurts, maims and kills.
Let's allow one possibility surrounding Hegseth's recalcitrance to respect women and the gay community to rise up: Maybe Pete Hegseth's mommy was mean to him. Now he's the embodiment of toxic masculinity.
In college in the early 1970s, we used to troll our friends by suggesting this: "You're LATENT!" Meaning you haven't come out of the closet. Women should ask: What's wrong, Pete, with being a little girl like you?
Rather than making good with the Marine order "Drop your pack and stand at ease!", Hegseth's call to some sort of weird duty is this: "Someone get my pink petticoats and no don't get any mud on the hems!"
While Thomas Paine stated the problem in politeness toward self-assigned divinity with the clarion "These are the times that try men's souls" in 1776's The American Crisis (someone very very important should read the famous essay--that is if he can find one with pictures in it...), in another vein Kristi Noem's ICE posters nevertheless continue in the soiled and anti-American perpetuation of white nationalism.
Remember? She's the former South Dakota governor who was banned from Native American property. Possibly for being tin-eared, tone-deaf and, as is usual with oppressive personalities, absolutely certain she's always on the right side, no matter how dumb she looks--and probably is.
"What can I say?" I might ask her. "Can I read Lincoln's speech?"
"NO! YOU ARE NOT TO RECITE THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS NOT IN MY OFFICE OF HOMELAND SECURITY THE ONE OWNED BY MY BOSS DONNIE!"
Sure, Kristi. It's way easy to forget how many died at Gettysburg. All for what?
Defending the country's U-N-I-T-Y.
I laugh when I watch Southpark episodes that lampoon Noem's alleged use of Botox to keep her "lookin' good!". Her face in the cartoon is melting, yet in reality, Noem's ego is what's turning to protoplasm when "faced" with a flippin' joke. That's funny. Tradition? The US has always enjoyed humorous pokes at the powerful.
Why is that? To remind us all that high-muckety-mucks are simply human beings. High officers of the federal government are R-E-P-R-E-S-E-N-T-A-T-I-V-E of who all of us as citizens are or work towards becoming. It takes a real man (and a real woman) to laugh along with the pokes.
No. Neither Hegseth nor Noem are one of us.
Now. "Enter the dragon"--otherwise known as the push-me-over-OK-I'll-Do-What-You-Want GOP Senate caucus. Who knew Bruce Lee could play such amazing Chop Saki before the TV sets just like the GOP as partisan Senator after Senator expect us to believe that their critiques of slouchy behavior are nothing but hype from people from across a galaxy who want to troll them from the positions of "your typical" UFOs.
"Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights!" Peter Tosh, Jamaican here. A foreigner. A reggae phenomenon. What? Some "furiner" was allowed to speak? The outrage.
"Get up, stand up, don't give up the fight!"
In Jamaica, the powers-that-be allow commoners to say things. Where is the GOP coming from? Sugar plantation ownership? What would that kind of reaction look like to dissenters here?
"Mister? Would you please sit down and shut up?"
Watch them hide when dissenters say no. Sadly, "un-bravery" is increasingly common in a deeply elite way here in the US.
For instance, silencing other people who demonstrate love of country simply because a newspaper-as-product finds honesty a matter of poor demeanor or undiciplined decorum is how democracies die in darkness.
Cowards.
Iggy Pop, "Chairman of the Board":
"'Cause I'm bored
Just another slimy bore
I'm free to bore my well-bought friends
And spend my cash until the end."
And Hegseth: Alcohol-fueled rages; threatening behavior; denial of abuse. What. A. Man. What punk would let him even come close to getting into the club?
I remember how my stomach turned as Hegseth, all big and vain with that greasy kid stuff all over his hair in order to demonstrate for the crowd how good a pet he is for oil barons who want war with Venezuela in order to cash-in on some more "greasy black liquid" lurking beneath the sea.
Of course, that's not the entire story. But it may be closer to the truth once one considers the Speed Bump Administration's attempts to shut-out solar and wind energy. Winning? I can see the headlines now:
THE SPEED BUMP ADMINISTRATION HAS TODAY HAS WON IN A CONTEST WITH ALL LIFE ON EARTH!!! HE IS ALONE ON EARTH BUT TOTALLY VERY VERY STRONG!!!
Put that newsy news in 43-point fonts please.
Chickens and roosters all in one deal.
Last night, searching for a TV show before which I could veg-out after working really hard yesterday, I decided to land on Paramount+--simply to check to see what the locally recommended cowboy movie, "Landman", might be like.
Before the critique, look. I was coerced at age eight to come to Texas. In 1963. There I was, riding in the back seat, and when we hit the Midland-Odessa area, what was I treated to courtesy of the oil and gas industry?
About 45 minutes of what I've later deemed to be dinosaur farts. The stink. Hundreds of oil rigs decorating desert land. As if a sort of prediction of George Floyd's horrible warning to the American people, "I CAN'T BREATHE!", I barely could.
Right. Right. Right. There I sat watching TV character "twang-bots" acting tough, talking about "my land, not your land", shootin' people, blowin' up airplanes, complainin' about them busted tanker trucks, etc, etc, etc.
The moment the lead in the show told his ex-wife not to dress like a call girl in the morning, and then began grousing because his she'd informed him their daughter was infatuated with a football star--all moral-y and stuff--I realized this:
Maybe it's not cool to be a used dirt salesman in league with the Lords Of Texas Lard--all to "win".
Wondrous; is it not? To be a two-legged vulgarian pronouncing for the cameras how morality must rule.
But I had the remote control. Offed it. Then, decidedly, all of me got up and read the introduction to a collection of poems devoted to resistance. Insofar as "Texas family values", I've been a resister since 1963.
And no, I'm not "saved". Saved for what? To be part of a community of real estate and oil bots who will usurp entire neighborhoods in a "of the condos, for the condos, and by the condos" interpretation of the US Constitution--that ain't coffee in my space.
Then there they continue as remnants of hypocrisy, all so reverent and prayin' like no tomorrow in a theater seat at your nearest "non-denominational" mega church--where theater seating, massive HDTVs, incredible stereo systems, cameras, lights, even souvenir shops in "the foyer", and big budgets, and collection plates, and to-the-nines dressed "attendees" means this:
Those poor buggered dominionists are oppressed. Like the Israelites--or weirder, The Chosen.
"We chose ourselves as divine and then told everybody The Good Lord did it for us!"
God as butler. To serve a theocratic war machine.
Finally, we approach another fairly obvious fact that is pertinent to not speaking up, pandering to special interests, letting grifters get through the gatekeepers (of, like, what?) in order to win crap, white nationalist recruitment posters, threats to men who speak out against unconstitutional idiocy:
Newspapers as products. Oh wow. That's just totally. Full stop.
"Here! I own the news! The news is a product! And I sell product!" Nope. Owner of walls, buildings, equipment, and offices. The medium is not a product. The actual information, per the Founders, is not saleable. The vehicles sell. The vehicles exist in either good or bad faith.
Even-Steven? Really? What would be cool in the sale of the greasy kid stuff Hegseth slathers all over the top of his head as if to look stylish and a little too much like Hugh Beaumont of "Leave It To Beaver"?
You know: product. Hair goo.
As a boy, while my family had enough to eat, and daddy could pay the mortgage, keep the old white Dodge station wagon running OK, and worked as a family when pleasurably currying our lawn (that promotes serenity)--sometimes unruly moments practically destroyed us all.
My father lived with so much held-in pain he'd up and get drunk in bars on weeknights, so ashamed of his life he'd not call my mother. That missing chance to do something called "inform those we care about" led my mother into panic attacks. She felt like this:
"Up against the wall, motherfucker!" Her family life, disrupted by carousing and God knows what else, was being destroyed. She'd already lived with enough tragedy. Why so much more of it? Jerry Jeff Walker got away with the M/F word. What's up with not using daily, common speech? Not that I'd suggest vulgarity--even if Hegseth, Noem, the GOP caucus all behave quite vulgarly.
I still don't know any answer to why that question is to be unaddressed actually fits.
What doesn't fit is not fitting in a deeply polite way of respecting those who do not deserve our respect. Doing that is called "enabling malefactors".
My sister: very young: traumatized. My mother: practically wrecked. My father: half-destroyed. And myself? Hurting badly, sometimes crying on the wood floor of my bedroom, I wanted to be Superman, capable of breaking walls with my fists, able to simply fly away.
Some nights I'd imagine I could get off the planet if the UFOs would hurry up and get me out of there.
"Soy un perdetor
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me?
(Double-barrel buckshot)
Soy un perdedor
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me?"
Beck. Nailed it. How does it feel?
A life at age 10. There. A tissue paper bears a union blue inscription. Pinned to my bedroom wall. What does it say?
"Don't give up the ship!"
For the summarily unaware,that is a quote from American Revolutionary Naval warrior John Paul Jones. Who also administered threats to those who'd halt freedom:
"I have not yet begun to fight."
What??? Revolutionary??? That Jones. Total socialist!!!
Right, U.S. Senate. Take all the little words you want literally. Silence those words and connotations you don't happen to desire. Then bang your heads: "Don't speak. Don't stand up to psych ward candidates living it up in the most powerful positions in the U.S.! Please! Would you just shut up???"
Profiles in cowardice. Possibly with an emphasis on "dice". You know: Let's judge all our actions by what the financial district and big shots have to say about this. Their comprehension apparently is now a casino in Jersey.
Final question, ya big babies:
When are you going to take a stand for all of us? Millions of U.S. citizens live here too.
posted by Faceshaker at 8:12 AM
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