Plus 9

It feels like open season on black people in this perverse country. Add nine more to the count for the year. I believe that Black Lives Matter, but they still matter far less than white lives.

The Fox News twist is that the killings were an assault on “Christians.” This is one of the network’s major tropes, repeated and echoed by all their demented celebrity mouthpieces. The white shooter isn’t a terrorist, claim the Fox propagandists, he was defending Christianity from assault by liberals.

If the victims had been white, the shooter black, the media would use words like “thug” and “predator” to describe him; if the victims had been white and the shooter a Muslim, the media would label him a terrorist.

The flag of the old confederacy still flies above the capitol in South Carolina.

President Obama wrings his hands and claims these mass killings must stop, but he will not spend much time arguing with Congress about handgun control; Obama is very busy trying to obtain fast-track approval for the TPP, a payback to his corporate masters. We’ll get some lip service from the White House about gun control, a moving speech or two, some tears, but no action.

Let’s face it, for the foreseeable future crazy people will obtain handguns, and innocent people will be shot. We are a violent nation, at home, and abroad. This isn’t about to change.

Racism in America is reflexive. Dr. King was murdered nearly 50 years ago, and here we are, mourning black victims of a white man with racist demons in his head and his heart.

Chess Pieces

“American foreign policy – like that of most states – is based not on justice but on power.”   Robert Fisk

So, it will take a generation to subdue ISIS, the brutal and sadistic murderers who would not exist if the US had not invaded Iraq in 2003. Pity the people who get in their way, particularly women.

The US will send more “advisors” and build more outposts in Iraq, as if this tactic has any chance of succeeding. We’ve tried it, and it failed, but because we are the essential nation, the world’s global police force, not to mention the biggest badass on the block, we reserve the right to do stupid shit over and over.

Who is the enemy and who are our friends? Who can we trust today, and will we be able to trust them tomorrow? The stupidity of George and Dick tipped the bottle over, released the genie, and Obama has stayed the disastrous course. We’re out, back in, and for what? And this is how it’s going to play for another generation?

When it comes to the Middle East, America is blinded by a deadly combination of ignorance and arrogance.

The US doesn’t understand the Middle East, never has, and most likely never will. We support the monarchs of Saudi Arabia no matter how many of their own people have their heads lopped off in public rituals; we count the dictator of Egypt among our bosom pals; and Israel, darling Israel, can do no wrong in our eyes, even when Israel’s hands are covered with the blood of innocent Palestinian children.

The conditions are perfect for endless war and profitable arms deals.

Writing for the website Counterpunch, John Wight notes that, “In 2015 the parallels between Cambodia and the Middle East are undeniable. The conditions, as mentioned, out of which ISIS has emerged and proliferated were created by the West’s destabilising presence in the region, with the objective of controlling the huge natural resources located there.”

Cambodia paid a horrific price at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. And who made the Khmer Rouge possible? The fingerprints are undeniable.

The average American citizen like myself looks in vain for cooler, wiser heads. We lack the agency to change the course of American foreign policy. Our views and opinions are irrelevant to the ruling class. They want the liquid gold buried in the ground in the Middle East and are willing to kill for it, even if it takes another 25 years.

John Wight again: “Just as with Southeast Asia in the 1970s, in 2015 the world is suffering at the hands of men in expensive suits, sitting in Western capitals, who view the world as a chessboard – with countries and peoples reduced to chess pieces on that board to be moved around and removed at their whim and fancy.”

The Last Laugh

The chosen one waits for her coronation

making speeches, shaking hands, kissing babies

passing herself off as

one of us

another downwardly mobile commoner

toting a list of grievances

Watch what she does, ignore what she says

we’ve seen her kind

before

The best and brightest are relics of Camelot

this is the age of dull and dumb

small and fearful minds

Duopoly party retreads strain to convince

us that they have the answers to

all that ails the nation

What they offer is more of the same

more salt in our wounds

Money has poisoned the landscape

legitimized callousness and cruelty

legalized bribery

turned avarice

from vice to virtue

made ghetto wages

acceptable

Laughing hysterically Karl Marx

watches the capitalists

cannibalize the structures that made

their wealth possible

Pirates of modern finance strip the value

from every useful enterprise

like jackals stripping the flesh

from a carcass

Wealth flows from bottom to top

and the poor are expected to compete

with the wretched of the world for scraps

The nation fails its senior citizens and

children

fails students and workers

fails forests and rivers

But when all is said and done

when the ruins smoke

and hiss

when the sky weeps

toxic tears

the rocks and the dust will have the last laugh