Guard the Unendurable Laughter

A sense of humor is sanity’s steam valve.

Shaftesbury, in his Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humor, said humor is the only real test of gravity because “a subject which would not bear raillery was suspicious.”

Put another way, it’s just that cartoonists realize that sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger.

In fact, speech that offends someone is the only speech worth defending. Inoffensive speech is necessarily meaningless, and is never censored.

And why keep the stiletto of ridicule always handy up your sleeve? Because, as Euripides observed, “The laughter of one’s enemies is unendurable.”

The Weed of Tyranny Bears Bitter Fruit

Iraq then, Iran now. All they have to do is change one letter.

'I Was a Racketeer, a Gangster for Capitalism'

“War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

“I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.

“I wouldn'’t go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.

“There isn’t a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its ‘finger men’ to point out enemies, its ‘muscle men’ to destroy enemies, its ‘brain men’ to plan war preparations, and a ‘Big Boss’ Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.

“It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

“I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

“I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

“During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

­ — Excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933 by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC.

I Wish They'd Paid Attention to Superman

The 21st century GOP and the people to whom they pander actually don't believe in equality, which means they actually don't believe in freedom, for all their strenuously broadcast propaganda to the contrary.

You Can Look It Up

I know and understand Bernie's values, which are those of FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt. And those values are precisely what we need now. I will be glad to vote for him, or anyone he endorses.

How to Be Safe in America

For safety's sake, let's stay out of all synagogues and churches, all movie theaters, malls, supermarkets and Walmarts, out of Vegas and Dallas and New York. Let's hide and cower at the approach of every stranger. I'll dash for groceries while you give me covering fire. But above all, let's never do anything about the guns. 

THAT would interfere with our freedom.

Guess Who's Coming to Be Shot?

Trying to pick up his dry cleaning, the 16-year-old black teenager was stranded in a white Miami neighborhood when the buses stopped running.

He was hoping to hitchhike when an unmarked police car pulled up. “See that alley over there, boy?” one of the cops said. “Get your ass up in there. Now.”

He obeyed, and the unmarked police car followed him in.

Alone in an alley with no witnesses, the young man saw a revolver protruding through the car window, pointed at his head. He heard the two police officers talking inside the car.

“What should we do with this boy?”

“Find out what he’s doing here.”

“Should we shoot him here?”

Frightened and furious, the boy explained how he’d ended up where he was. The cop behind the wheel asked him if he could walk all the way back home — the 50 blocks to “colored town” — without looking behind him. The boy said he could.

“Think about it now,” the cop said. “Cause if you look back, just once, we gonna shoot you. Think you can do that?”

He said he could. So the long trek began, with the young man glancing at the reflections in store windows to see that the unmarked car was, in fact, slowly following him all the way. For 50 long blocks. When he reached the corner where he lived with relatives, the police car pulled out and sped away.

“Fifty blocks is a long time to think about what’s happening to you, to stew in the insane injustice of it all,” the boy said later. “But it’s also a good long time to internalize messages such as discipline, independence, the value of character and toughness of mind.”

The year was 1943. The boy’s name was Sidney Poitier, and 21 years later he would win the Academy Award for best actor.

Take a Look at a Real Hero

One tin soldier rides away.

And think how many American and Vietnamese lives would have be saved if any of America's leaders had paid attention to Ali.

Police State, American Style: The 1965 edition

Poet and activist Allen Ginsberg

In 1965, jazz musician Jack Martin was arrested for marijuana possession in New York, and four narcotics agents had a little talk with him.

“(T)hey told him that his bail would be raised from five to ten thousand dollars and that additional charges would be added to his indictment unless he helped them out,” Barry Miles wrote.

“Agent Bruce Jensen acted as their spokesman. ‘We want Ginsberg,’ he said. ‘How would you like to see your wife in jail? … We don’t want you, we want the guy you get it from … Do you know Ginsberg? … Can you get him for us? … Can you set up Allen Ginsberg?’

“To the enforcers, it was inconceivable that Ginsberg would advocate for marijuana (legalization) unless he was somehow involved in its sale and trafficking.” In fact, Martin had never met Ginsberg, who was in California and knew nothing of these events.

Later, at a benefit for a friend, Martin rose and made a speech describing how Jensen had tried to force him to entrap Ginsberg. Three undercover agents in the crowd jumped him, and others — thinking the agents were mere thugs — scuffled with them.

It all ended up in court later, and by then Ginsberg had learned of the matter and appeared there, telling the New York Times: “I feel like the noose of the police state is closing in on me. I’ve had experience of police states in Prague and it’s very similar here.”

How America Was Lied into War

George W. Bush’s CIA lapdog George Tenet admitted that Bush and Cheney lied us into the disastrous Iraq war.

Tenet wrote, “The leaders of a country decide to go to war because of core beliefs, larger geostrategic calculations, ideology and, in the case of Iraq, because of the administration’s largely unarticulated view that the democratic transformation of the Middle East would be worth the price. WMD was, as Paul Wolfowitz was quoted as saying in Vanity Fair in May 2003, something that ‘we settled on’ because it was ‘the one issue that everyone could agree on.’”

Journalist Robert Scheer remarked, “The very idea that this country’s leaders can decide to go to war on the basis of their ‘core beliefs’ which they leave ‘unarticulated' while frightening the public with exaggerated claims makes a mockery of the notion of self-governance. Some would consider it an offense worthy of impeachment. As a tactic, panicking the citizenry with the phantom of Saddam’s WMD in the hands of 9/11-type terrorists is no different than Adolph Hitler blaming international Jewry and foreign communists for the Reichstag fire.”

What They Said He Deserved

At right is movie star Ramon Novarro in 1925. At left are his murderers.

At 69, the former silent film star Ramon Novarro was murdered by two brothers who were male hustlers.

At their murder trial, defense attorney Richard Walton told the jury, “Back in the days of Valentino, this man who set female hearts aflutter was nothing but a queer. There’s no way of calculating how many felonies this man committed over the years, for all his piety. What would have happened if Paul had not gotten drunk on Novarro’s booze, at Novarro’s urging and at Novarro’s behest? What would have happened if Novarro had not been a seducer and traducer of young men? The answers to those questions will determine the issue and degree of guilt of Tom Ferguson and the issue and degree of guilt of Paul Ferguson.”

Paul Ferguson in a "physique" magazine.

Being beaten to death is what an officer of the court felt free to argue that a gay man deserved in 1969, two months after the Stonewall Riots.

When Your Bigotry Blows Up in Your Face

Called out on the pandering “religious freedom” law he proudly signed, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence's instinctive strategy was simply to lie and say that his pro-bigotry law does not favor bigotry. Republicans have been trained to believe that, like Bill O'Reilly, they can lie about the most glaring facts and get away with it.

Given the fact that the First Amendment already fully protects the exercise of religion in this nation, exactly what “religious freedoms” are crying out to be “restored?” The proponents of the Indiana law fall silent on that point — and well they should — because majority religion Christians are not oppressed or even inconvenienced at any place or any time in this country. What they don’t dare say is that the intent of the law, the practical effect of the law, is to embolden fundamentalist Christians to exercise their bigotry in denying American citizens public accommodations. And that’s hatred (rhymes with “sacred”).

Hang Your Head in Shame, America

I must be getting old. I can remember a time when Americans didn't delight in being torturers.
"The sterilization of men because of their political beliefs ... The murder of children... How easily that can happen! There are those in our country today, too, who speak of the 'protection' of the country. Of 'survival.' The answer to that is: 'survival as what?' A country isn't a rock. And it isn't an extension of one's self. It's what it stands for, when standing for something is the most difficult! Before the people of the world — let it now be noted in our decision here that this is what we stand for: justice, truth ... and the value of a single human being!"
— Judge Dan Haywood, "Judgment at Nuremburg"

Ferguson, Not Tinanamen

Public servants have become rulers precisely to the degree that what used to be called “citizens” have become mere “consumers.”
We have conflicting goals in Ferguson, Mo. One side wants to determine, publicly and with certainty, how and why an unarmed man was shot six times by a police officer. The other side just wants the protests to stop.

Gunfight at the Okra in the Produce Aisle

A woman was arrested in July 2014 after she pulled out a gun when asked to slow down in a Rutherford County, Tenn., Walmart parking lot, according to WGNS News.

The woman said it was all right for her to threaten to shoot people because she has a carry permit.

That same week, an Alabama man “accidentally” shot his girlfriend while holding a baby and jumping on a trampoline, Milwaukee County Sheriff’s deputies reported a “running gun battle” between the occupants of a minivan and a Nissan on I-43, a 12-year-old San Antonio boy got shot by a gun kids were playing with, a Georgia GOP congressional candidate announced that he wants Americans to fight the U.S. government with bazookas, a man tried to bring a gun into the U.S. Capitol, a Minnesota man gunned down a 17-year-old girl who had asked him to stop trespassing on his riding mower in her yard, a Texas man shot himself while hitching up his pants in a convenience store, a Tennessee woman slapped and threatened to shoot a Kroger clerk whom she called a n****r, and an “open carry” armed man frightened shoppers away from a Missouri Walmart.

“You don’t want your kids around that,” said shopper George Rolf. “There’s a lot of people out shopping, especially in a place like this.” But in Kansas City, Missouri, the open carry of firearms is legal, because Ammosexual America is insane.

Gated Community, Hated Community

A place with gates isn't a “community.” It's a compound.

As my friend Merri Ferrell put it, “When the gated communities started to spring up all over the US, I knew there was trouble. Enemy of farms (paves and builds over farmland, not just houses but what those idiots think they ‘need’ which are box stores and malls), enemy of cities (hate diversity, hate public services from libraries to transit), hate nature (kids live in car seats shuttled from planned indoor play dates, all controlled, front yard is only a display — no ‘playing’ in a yard or woods, all of which are regarded as the great unknown) and hatred of each other. Fake rock, fake PVC fences, fake sod, vinyl siding, windows that don’t open, no porches for community, no interaction with others, extruded crab meat phoniness and walled-up isolationism. The psychology of these places is horrific but in the 1980s, this was the model for the American family, and the kind of house that became the failed housing market.”

I had that same creepy frisson when the “gated community” phenomenon started to happen. “Gated communities” are the literal expression of the symbolic division of the nation into plutocrats and serfs.

Come to think of it, hell does have gates, doesn’t it?

We've Had This Date From the Beginning

It’s official. Iraq has devolved into civil war and chaos, just as anyone honest who was paying attention said it would a decade ago.

I wrote a newspaper column about Bush and Cheney’s invasion at the time called “History Will Judge Us,” saying the invasion was a terrible mistake and questioning the WMD rationale.

I was called a commie and a traitor by dozens of readers whose goddamn mouths seem to be shut now. I hope they warm themselves by the fire of how they cheered for thousands of U.S. troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to be killed for lies, for nothing but lies the fools wanted to believe.

When Freedom Runs Red

Access to guns everywhere at all times now gives Americans the freedom to murder each other over political crack-pottery, childhood curiosity, getting too many drinks at the bar, getting the wrong hamburger, not liking your teacher, not getting laid enough and not getting the last parking space. The color of freedom is innocent red, and you can see it swirling down the street gutters.

Go Ahead and Tread on Them. Please.

Tea Baggers fresh off the Fox-worshipped Cliven Bundy ranchmarched into a Las Vegas Walmart, murdered two police officers and covered their bodies with a “Don’t Tread on Me’ flag.

As the lid comes off the boiling pot of science-hating, greed-worshipping, ammosexual America, thanks to all the policies Fox News has lied to endorse, the Fox propagandists are going to have to be working overtime to deflect the blame. 
I hope it gives them all heart attacks.

Abnormal is the New Normal in Ammosexual America

"We now have the perfect formula for horror: cut mental health funding, cut education in the arts and everything else that builds empathy and the human spirit, worship a military industrial imperial 'culture' of violence sold as 'defense,' desensitize our young men with violent porn, abandon all gun regulation, accept irony and cynicism as entertainment and 'higher education' and then teach unstable young men to shoot and to glorify violence all round."
"We’re getting so cynical that we probably won’t even care or notice when there is a mass killing a week or a day, instead of 'only' once a month or so. Shoot-the-toddler video games anyone?" — Frank Schaeffer
By the way, Schaeffer wrote that before the American mass shootings were weekly, as they are now. Daily mass murder is coming right up.

“That didn’t take long,” Juan Cole noted. “The Georgia GOP rushed into law an ‘open carry’ provision in April allowing people to tote around guns in bars and churches (apparently these are felt to be complementary institutions in Georgia) and schools (these are apparently felt to be full of expendable if short people in Georgia).

“Then the national GOP and Fox Cable News (the ‘Josef Goebbels Commemorative Propaganda Division of the American Right Wing’) backed Cliven Bundy in his ‘sovereign citizen’ claims that he doesn’t have to pay federal grazing fees.

“So on Saturday a sovereign citizen and former Transportation Department employee (who made his money from the Federal government he hates) showed up outside a Georgia courthouse armed to the teeth with automatic weapons and other munitions and with the clear intent of taking hostages inside the courthouse.  He was open carrying, you see, and standing up against big government.  Or rather standing overtop it with a gun to its head.

“This was a clear act of terrorism, but since it was committed by a white person, no one brought the word up.”