Do presidents, on the first day of office, alight the yellow bus at 1600 Pennsylvania, down socks, defiantly swagger up the driveway, plastic lunchbox replete with jelly sandwich and apple, sidle to the Resolute desk, penknife poised to carve initials in that grand ancient polish, then stand arrested by a sticky note – seeming innocent reminder in Post-it pink – casually .. no, menacingly placed.

Handwriting formal yet loose, style variable but consistently so, pressure light but deep, admits neither control nor abandon. Alarmingly angular, rightward.

Ink still wet.

Inscribed malevolence triggers a dry swallow – eleventh since 1947.

Demands not lunch money. Proviso sans compromise. Cites arrogant Catholic bastard.

There, then, does Earth’s most remorseless plutarchy impassively devour the fresh President?

Generational hope of a nation instant irrelevant road kill. Pulped grinning carcass the cabalmobile’s new  hood ornament?

To imagine such crude possibility, how else might mere peasants fathom our leader’s behavior?

I know only the first statesman in decades – an eloquent intelligent orator selling hope to the unfortunate and change to the passionate – shed his masque of noble aspiration with dispiriting ease.

As rent seekers pause not their pillage.

As residents laze in Guantanamo’s tropical climes, as state kidnapping, rendition, and murder extol new patriotism, as War on Terror annexes homeland, as Warshington drums beat belligerence unrepentant, as citizen detention upon corpse of habeas corpus deftly excises 5th, and TSA groping the 4th, as Beltway Tango sets revolving doors a-spinning, as banks that should fail are bailed, foreclosing homeowners, even nations, as borderless drones bugsplat arbitrary evil, as war upon century of war-as-a-racket feather too-wealthy nests, and lesser nations anxiously queue for rough love by the planet’s most pugnacious empire since .. ever?

As this accelerates on the watch of a fleeting great hope, a “Yes we can” statesman-like Negro, now feckless Oval Office incumbent, minstrel in genuine blackface singing tunes of a noxious oligarchy.

I wish not to denigrate Barack Obama the man, the nation’s first African American president, nor have truck with Repugnican shills. This is questioning, pure and straight, of your office, not your self. By comparison, challenging thus your predecessor was like shaming wiseguys for sidewalk spit.

I can guess, well, imagine, to what you assented in that ascent. Though product of the machine, without personal sacrifice and utmost effort Barack Obama would not be President Obama. Any suit would do. A Chicago player, what loathsome swill came irresistibly your way, insinuating requital for favors foul, pedigrees your curriculum vitae. 

Along the campaign tightrope your political acrobacy expressed infinite finesse in that surreal circus whose final ring is an Oval Office.

Eight futile years mired in some slimy sea of psychopathic egos, emergence scarred by thorny crown of assured humiliation, shamed in broken promises, fully spent from aimless compromise, destiny chartered as Failed Presidents League member forty four. Compensated by faint praise from elites in whose family business you briefly interned. Or not, if obligatory fall guy .. in the nation’s interest, of course.

SO ..

Why does the President now champion (and it chills me to the bone) America’s boastful pursuit and murder of “enemies of the state” aka U.S. citizens; why is he protective of Guantanamo Bay and the kidnapping that fills it; why does he allow killing by telepresence that callously assigns death to a mere ‘probability’ with collateral family and innocents; why does he continue unjust wars of greed and start new ones?

Why are banks too big to fail but not workers, are laws written by corporations, lobbied through Congress for hire, are financial criminals no longer prosecuted, does the Fed issue debt to mitigate debt, destroy the currency, and my savings?

Why does The President renew, not retire, oppressive emergency powers?  Why can a citizen be spied on and tracked with no legal oversight, be arrested and detained without trial, in secret, indefinitely? Why are traveling children searched while elites pass unmolested? Why is citizen protest now terrorism and Internet misdemeanors now cyberwar?

We will never know. So we guess.

Mr. President, the filth and detritus encrusting the soles of your impeccably polished shoes is most telling.

Fetid footprints to and fro that Resolute desk are why America’s greatness is ever its people, never their eternally odious government.

Carpet incessantly shampooed yet bears indelible spoor of elites who think only they can handle the truth.

Ergo, a presidency of suffocating self-righteousness garnished with malign ruse. A malign sway that dulls armed forces’ steely valor, negates honor of Commander in Chief, nulls the constitution’s grand intent, and pales its aspirant freedom, justice, and egality.

Most offensively, these self-serving footprints render vain the deaths of brave hearts who believed in and fought for our flag and democracy’s ideal.

Do you not cringe at ceremonial farce, at vile brazen pig troughs of privilege, at absurd self-parodying motorcades of self-aggrandizement?

Does not warring vague concepts in perpetuity against arbitrary enemies suggest even a mote of burlesque?

The world’s ordinary people, peasants, “folk” your preferred backhander, fear, literally, relentless U.S. global meddling and detest its transparent malevolence.

The United States of America is a joke.

But a particularly feared and healthily respected joke.

Since incinerating two Japanese cities with atomics and numerous others with incendiaries – cities of innocent helpless people – your arms merchants have made unsolicited deliveries to a further 30 countries at your bidding. Prosperous, educated, stable societies with ancient cultures, emergent democracies dawning a new age on Earth, laid waste because their elected leader offended your corporations. Or their psychopathic CIA-sponsored tyrant gave cheek.

Macabre behavior for a nation proclaimed Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, the world’s greatest democracy. Macabre, Mr. President, that “an indicator of our times” is your unashamed power to order death to anyone, anywhere, anytime – like the mafia mobster you thereby become.

So, what is this foolery – the stunting of civilization, the stillbirth of moral humanity? Who does it benefit?

Follow the money.

The money leads me to stolen gold bullion of the second great war, an unaudited Fort Knox, financial terror against fledgling states, collapse and pillage of the USSR, outsourced armed forces, public service privatized for profit, self-serving predatory global corporations with no allegiance to people or nations.

Most startling, the money leads to a destroyed ONI at the Pentagon where a Boeing 757 fully evaporated through a missile-sized hole. The money drove a Boeing 757 just below level 60 of WTC Tower 2, and a second 757 below level 101 of WTC Tower 1. The money inexplicably exploded level 23 of WTC Tower 1, and most peculiarly set fires and imploded by controlled demolition WTC Tower 7.

Disparate targets integral to an investigation of “the money” destroyed by precision flying of barely competent terrorist ‘pilots’ and a plethora of uninvestigated explosions, some occurring before anything struck the towers.

Most tediously, the money always leads to your new found friends. Those you play golf with, back-slap a lot, and give important jobs to.

And others, whose murderous swathe through modern history led us to this dark moment.

Did they write that ominous note?

On your page: http://sheepoverboard.com/olio/testimonials-forgettable/  I noticed this comment:

"I was embarrassed. Friends thought it was yet another website I knocked up over the weekend" … TheSatirist.com

I thought it was very funny.

Kind regards,

Dan Geddes
The Satirist

http://thesatirist.com

——————————–

Hi Dan

First, I’m sorry for the possibly unkind sentiment.

I wrote that around 2004-ish. At the time, starting out, I was comparing my stuff to other ‘personal’ satirists and trying to get attention by mildly teasing them with mention.

Good to see you carrying on the fun after all these years.

Me, I struggle to give my sheep the attention they deserve, but just can’t let go of the old website! Trying now for a ‘literary’ heavy grumbling magazine-look satire. Seem to be losing the playfulness. But love that the Internet let us be so personally expressive.

Kinder Regards, Ed

PS: As a moderately experienced webmaster, one primary lesson learnt is that content trumps appearance. An obsession with design stole time from writing, eventually becoming an addiction. Hence TheSatirist.com is considerably more popular and well-linked on the web than this, and with considerably superior content. Satire is a weak force here. The nearest I get nowadays is .. sarcasm?  Sigh.

When the impenetrable greyness at the end of life is no longer a distant artefact but an enveloping fact, when tendrils of death drag harder on one’s heels .. the denouement of others changes aspect.

Young who should have outlived you see off mortality.

Legends spread their passing across headlines while the frail person next door simply fails to appear one day.

Shrinking contemporariness dispirits aging companions. Siblings age to elders, children to forebears.

At this measure death turns life fully on its head. The pensive burden grows heavier.

Then a distinguished demise breaks the reverie.

So astonishing in circumstance that one’s own chest-clutching facedown in roach-ridden dereliction seems but the falling of a leaf.

Celebration

Are you celebrating the death of Osama Bin Laden, mourning his loss, or just wondering who that is?

Instant hated symbol of New Yorkers in 2001, then, by state vilification, of all Americans, accused of a single brilliant viciously-conceived attack that murdered, cowardly and horribly, 3000 innocents one crisp September morning.

Bin Laden thence endured a decade as the war on terror pin-up.

On both sides.

How can I not celebrate his death. Survivors of 9/11, the rest of the United States, most of whom never grasped the reason for this attack, will despise Bin Laden to their graves.

How can I not mourn him. Countries recipient, over the past century, of US imperialism bear little favor for this nation of sweetly naïve can-do  colonialists.

Tit for tat through mists of history finds – in USA versus the world – the former chief litigant and witting aggravator, an interloper utterly unfazed by imperialism 101: prodding natives with pointy sticks makes them fractious to the point of biting you on sight.

In the lands of Bin Laden ireful Yankee resistance is warrior kudos. But taking revenge not on the US military but on 3000 civilians, a symbolic but too cynical target, demeans their cause to murderously misconceived.

Death by wire

Most stunned by Operation Geronimo were Pakistani military and intelligence. Then acute discomfort foreseeing the entire planet digest with a jaw-drop that a famous terrorist hunted around the world for TEN years by its largest and most ferocious military .. was slumming it at a mansion within pizza-delivery of Islamabad, a refreshing jog from the Pakistan Military Academy.

For who knows how long.

With the derring-do of Apache raiders, armed infidels invade God’s stronghold and murder his apostle. These were brave heathens, however. Unlike their leaders.

The retrospective epitome of Operation Geronimo – aside from a cornfed moniker – was the chilling sight of assembled mission commanders imitating the art of Jack Ryan, pantomiming the most ghoulish of modern inventions: the killing room.

Remotely executing state-declared scum via satellite is one of civilization’s low points.

Publishing it as voyeuristic news violates warrior ethos.

Soldiers stifle the crushing personal shame of taking an enemy life and will not speak of it.

They have no pride in such soul-destroying deeds. Memory of that murder is placed in a mental strongbox and the key flung far from home. But the soldier’s life is forever ruined. No longer a member of his family, he is now the killer who lives among them.

Parading such an unspeakable moment in press imagery is a blunder lost on White House actors.

It showed only the sickening loss of reality afflicting the U.S. administration.

A loss that began with Hiroshima.

Every facet of our species’ brilliant and ever-advancing career finds us, whichever specialty, not quite in control.

With disorder tamed to an acceptable death rate, expertise is claimed.

When un-garbage in equals un-garbage out, design defers to mass production – with mass recall a hair-breadth beyond.

As matters progress quite swimmingly we are proud masters of our domain. But humans being people, a train wreck always looms.

And so, as another paramount year unfurls, the entirety of this planet’s mug punters find their fortunes astride some lurching blindfolded mule, shattered in dismay it’s not the magnificent sure-footed stallion the guy in the suit told them to bet a life’s savings on.

A snowboarder hurled from chopper onto 60 degrees of powdery snow chances life, if not avalanche. Likewise, and with bells, entrusting the world’s inventory of toil, manufacture, plant, and property to a self-serving recursive bubble of avarice begs eversion, if not oblivion.

If democracy is the worst possible system of government, except what follows when it fails, then financial bedlam is the nightmare sequela to a brief flirtation last century with public ownership, to the governance of science and knowledge-based national planning, and even respect (if grudging) for social visionaries and an intellectual elite.

While all stood deluded by concepts of equality, societal perfection, and control of human destiny, economic dogmatists stole the fleeting moment, like the arrogant ignorant greedy thieves they are.

And now these self-congratulating fools, these “Alpha Beings” who would save us from the perils of socialism, nanny states, and utopian pipedreamery, stand revealed in their finest moment as masters of .. that train wreck.

But don’t mind too greatly for their well being, as governments across the globe, having privatized profits of social infrastructure, now nationalize the debt of its gutted carcass. Our captains of gluttony stand, as always, to inherit the skimpy surfeits of dullards like you and me, whichever way the wind blows. It’s the natural order of things. Didn’t they explain this at school?

Well, for we bottom-feeders, as usual, nothing much differs.

Still a world of animal indifference and jungle law from which we imagined struggling through endless millennia to emerge in celebration of human intellect. Still sustained by much day dreaming of equality, religious salvation, social justice, or portentous proletariatizing.

Parting clouds long ago snapped shut on any chance of an efficient, measured, benevolent, and dare I lament ‘spiritual,’ procession to the future. Demented as any religious fundamentalist, free market zealots engendered a tsunami of greed that rolls its selfish deconstruction across the shores of every nation and doorstep of each life, endlessly, mindlessly, and each day more irretrievably.

Ha! Another Utopia rant, you might sneer. And you are right .. except to sneer.

In no corner of science do two eminences agree on nature’s intention – or even if it has one. Moving from cold hard yet disputed facts to softer mental pursuits, like economics, finds but an Armageddon of pseudo-intellectual mayhem to rip the heart of hope from any foolish optimist on this craven little mud ball.

Turning finally to fellow salts-of-the-earth for inspiration, hope, or salvation, finds in their deluded greed-lit faces only the cause of our eternal distress.

What part of moderation do 6 billion opportunists not understand?

Who will concede “I only need this much to live; others have greater need”?

When does social narrative admit our existence and future is predicated on consumptive madness and blind unsustainable growth?

Almost delicious, watching the world’s economic powerhouse unravel in viral greed and utter stupidity.

Except it’s my house, too.

History shows many abuses when government agents can demand your papers” ~ Bill Simpich, Oakland civil rights lawyer

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety   ~ Benjamin Franklin

In the USA, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) searches credit records, previous travel history, criminal records, motor vehicle records, banks, web searches, and companies that collect personal information from consumer transactions.

Your life history is gathered and scanned using secret criteria whenever you book a flight or arrive at an airport.

Airlines, without identifying actual regulations, will prevent you from flying .. following unwritten, frequently changing oral Government secret communiqués.

Headsup! Gilmore -vs- The State: on your behalf

Until Americans have the ability to know the contents of the laws being applied to them, our Republic is in danger”  ~ http://papersplease.org

It’s a curious feeling watching the drift into a civil panopticon, driven, it seems, with our assent to and conformity with technology’s inexorable creepage to surveillance.

The same pressures drive transparency into business process, with an increasingly audited and policy brow-beaten workforce.

Daily it’s less paranoid to see an oncoming dystopia.

Ed: I’ve updated this little Darkside article from the archives because the assault is alive and well. Governments of all persuasions – in typically the most ‘civilized’ and affluent countries – seem determined to squeeze freedom from our lives.

The Internet’s immediacy finds us networked in real time, death presented live while, like members of some electronic herd, we gaze curiously at the unfortunate.

Email is a river of social artifacts, streaming images of amazing impossibilities, wondrous beauty, forbidden dangerous places – and dark threats, destructive viral code, Trojan intruders, impending disk formats at the whim of distant evil.

For nearly two decades email, the Internet’s mindless handmaiden, has born endless pictures, humor and tales, stuffing them unsolicited in our electronic letterboxes.

And what a gallery! Fake, dangerous, hilarious, incredible, and never dull.

Through history recorded intrepid travelers brought home to the meek images, artifacts, and stories of unimaginable beauty or savagery, wonder or horror, renditions of nature’s freaks or mans’ great battles.

As any collector or hoarder knows, this river of electronic life should be sifted and stored – for a purpose unexplained …