The War Memorial

It was a peaceful day outside of the national cathedral in Washington, DC. The cold, harsh winter had given way to the spring of Cherry blossoms and the ever present yellow of school busses on field trips. To the Smithsonian exhibit of Archie Bunker’s chair and the reflecting pool, ever reflecting the Washington Monument where a weary Richard Nixon once approached Viet Nam war protesters and asked, “What do you people want?”

Inside the cathedral a debate was going on. The moon rock embedded in stained glass looked on dispassionately.

They were discussing a new memorial. A very important and very special memorial for the last, great war. We must commemorate those who gave their best that we should be free. The Society for Preserving History had taken it upon itself to remember this controversial war. Their chairperson, Harper Throws, presided.

Oh, yes. It had been controversial. Most agreed that our cause was just and that the enemy was perverse. They wanted nothing less than to take away our freedoms. Steal our way of life. Invade and conquer. Of course we had to fight to preserve our love of peace.

But some had contested. There always are. The pacifists. The cowards. The traitors. The stooges of the enemy. The scum. Best rid of them.

But that’s not our task now. Best to forget them, failures that they are.

So, the agenda of this gathering was how to build a memorial to the last Great War. Proposals had been made. Ideas hashed about. Finalists chosen and now, a public hearing.

There were artists’ renditions and Power Point Presentations, once the IT guys could make it work. Some spoke. Some questions were asked. Some answers given. Everyone wanted this to succeed. Just everyone had no definition of success.

How about a pyramid? That’s a gazillion years old. A wall? God, done, like, everywhere on earth? A fist coming out of a block of stone? That’s so Soviet Union. Obelisk? Tower? Circle of stones? Why do war memorials always require stone?

Ugh! Politics! She rubbed her eyes at the podium and wished this part didn’t have to happen. Why should we allow the public at public hearings?

A tap came at her arm.

She started.

At her shoulder was someone. A…soldier, by the looks of him, though spent. Long scraggly hair. Unwashed. Dressed in Army surplus fatigues. And his eyes! “Haggard” was coined for those eyes.

“May I speak?” he said.

She was stunned, of course. Flabbergasted. Of all the gasts, this was the most flabbered she had ever felt.

The strange soldier took the podium.

Ladies and gentlemen. I wish to propose a memorial. A war memorial for the most important war in the entire history of Man. The war that was not fought.

I propose a monument not of stone, but of flowers. Let us set aside a slice of sacred land where children will come from local schools and plant these flowers every year, and nurture them and make them grow. And spell out in sacred language, the tribute to this war that did not happen. With daisies, crocus, and violets, let the following verse be spelt.

To the tens of thousands who did not die.

To the children not born of rapes from soldiers who had their better angels beat down by the lust of war.

To the many weapons which did not explode, searing the entrails of gunners on their flanks.

To the women not raped. Not killed. Not torn from their homes.

To the grandfathers who did not sit, their tears falling into their tea, watching their eighteen year old grandsons hypnotized by the lust of war.

To the sweltering gullets of arms manufacturers who did not sell our butter for guns, which they often sold to both sides.

To the many veterans who never came back, shell shocked, and turned mad. To the wives and children who didn’t have to ask, “What happened to Daddy?”

The women and men not ripped from their loved ones or left to care for a wreck of a man or woman who once was.

Veterans not left, broken in mind and body, to sleep on the street, abandoned by the Lords of War.

The wealth of the high and mighty not accumulated in the manufacturing of weapons. To those not grown fat on the marrow of other men’s bones.

To the wives and children not traumatized by the loving husband and father, not given to fits of violence and alcoholism and drug abuse.

To those who are not cold, alone, maimed, homeless, desperate. And those who did not, on a lonely New Year’s Eve, sit in the corner of their cellar, abandoned by all, by country, by Army, by friends. Except for the shotgun in their mouth. To those who did not pull the trigger.

Let us make this monument wide and tall. Plant the tulips and roses in rows. The same rows that do not clutch bodies. Let poppies once more stand for peace, not the indigestion of war.

Let children run between the rows and know not what they mean, as they should not.

I propose this memorial. Let it be built. Let it be funded by the costs of that war not fought. It can pay for a thousand such memorials and the peace and joy of a thousand children in a thousand countries and still be a bargain.

The police arrived right around now and took the mad man away. To a better place, I’m sure.

So they continued talking about marble vs. limestone.

The Dispossessed

 

'Do you understand,' I cried to him, 'that if you have the guillotine in the foreground of your programme and are so enthusiastic about it too, it's simply because nothing's easier than cutting off heads, and nothing's harder than to have an idea. You are lazy! Your flag is a rag, a helplessness. It's those carts, or, what was it? ... “the rumble of the carts carrying bread to humanity“ being more important than the Sistine Madonna, or, what's the saying? . . . an idiocy in this genre? Don't you understand, don't you understand,' I said to him, 'that unhappiness is just as necessary to man as happiness.'

                   The Possessed. Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

 

Liberals in this country don’t want to change things. They certainly don’t want to make things better. That would make them Rachel Maddow sans Trump. Pointless and ridiculous. And without a job. Liberals want to exploit them. They want to keep them right where they are and preferably on their side of the tracks, thank you. Unless your name is Obama. There is a saying I learned as a kid: If you are not a part of the solution then you are a part of the problem.

The US left died in the 1970's, snuffed out during the economic and political blowback of the 60's and finished off by the plain old hunger of inflation and want. I went to college, got married, had a kid, barely made my mortgage and car payments, went to night school, switched careers a couple of times, joined a church, and just got on with it like everybody else.

I knew for sure that liberalism was a corpse when Jerry Rubin became a stock broker in the 1980's, which also saw the emergence of the zombie pilgrim of Political Correctness. This was nothing more than Pharisaic self-righteousness. It has since uneasily morphed into SJW, BLM, Antifa, Alphabet+, and currently Woke under the circus metric of constant razzle-dazzle, bate-and-switch, and changing the social and cultural objectives while you wait.

If you can't make a difference, well, you can at least make a scene out of yourself.

Here is a mongrel. A mongrel, you say? What is a mongrel? A mongrel is one who comes from the many master races of the past, slurred all together, smashed all to die, left all to bake in the sun. The mongrel is the finger painting of history. Yesterday’s ethnicities. Today’s atrocities. Tomorrow’s master races. That’s you. You are the hope of what comes next.

The Self Righteous Woke want a handy little Black in the Box. Something they can play with and use to make themselves seem superior. Something they can wind up in public once in a while or preach about on stage at a Hollywood award ceremony without actually doing anything. 

When needed it can play a little tune, flip its top, and out pop racist riots in every city. Unless they’re January 6, Occupy Wall Street (remember them?) or des Gilets Jaunes, of course. Those are different. 

Dostoyevsky was right about we, the possessed.

 

Civil Peace

The United States is looking at a dire time now. The bad decisions we have been making over the past 30 years are gathering up their storm clouds and forming into a cyclone of consequences. We are rapidly running out of options to forestall the inevitable.

During the American revolutionary war Ben Franklin spent much of his time schmoozing French aristocracy to convince them to supply blankets, uniforms, weapons, and ultimately an armed brigade led by Rochambeau from New England to Virginia to support Washington. France was basically there to poke England in the eye in yet another Anglo-Franco war.

During the US Civil War England supported the Confederacy. They wanted a monopoly on cotton from the agrarian south and to poke the north in the eye. The liberal Russian Emperor Alexander II provided a naval blockade to New York and San Francisco to prevent an English invasion and quite possibly guaranteeing the North’s victory.

In the Syrian civil war Russia only provided assistance to Assad when he demonstrated a significant victory in battle. And we saw what happened recently in Kazakhstan. Why would Russia want to fight another country’s battles if they were not able to show any initiative on their own? Powerful countries want strong partners not parasites.

There seems to be a trend here. Civil wars aren’t really about civilians. There is always some strong backer, foreign power, or a tribal leader with a militant following if nothing else. That doesn’t exist on any grass roots scale in the US today. Buffalo Man doesn’t cut it.

If the US is going to fall apart, as seems inevitable, it will be for the simple reason that it can no longer hold itself together when those nine meals till chaos hits us. It will be organic and chaotic and not at all planned by any Reagan-Gorbachev machinations. It will be horrific, too, but I expect that charismatic leaders will arise to enforce some local control. Crises have a habit of driving out the trash and revealing true leaders.

We are already seeing governors in conservative states simply ignoring mandates from Washington. When Washington realizes that they can’t do anything about it they will just ‘declare victory’ so they don’t have to face the humiliation of admitting being flipped off by the hinterlands.

Regional states like those in New England have had coalitions of governors who get together to coordinate their laws and practices on things like COVID, the environment, and economics for a long time. Some even work with Canada and I assume with Mexico, as well. It is in the interest of all those involved to coordinate with the state (or country) next door. These may become the basis for new geo-political entities in the future with the lip service of a loose federal umbrella.

It’s that or starve, right?

Diplomacy

 

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov met with American Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman on Monday of this week in Geneva, Switzerland. This was at the request of the Russian Federation. The subject of the meeting was simple. NATO forces must cease all hostile activities in the former Soviet republics bordering the Russian Federation as was guaranteed verbally at the end of the cold war some 30 years ago. Since then the United States has been withdrawing from treaties dating back to the Nixon days and moving NATO forces further east in what can only be viewed as a hostile move. Russia has retreated as far as she can while rebuilding herself as a prosperous nation and a respected world power. She can go no further. We are literally on her borders aiming seriously big guns at her heart. Enough, in this case indeed, is enough.

This time the commitment must be in writing, fully guaranteed, with assurances all around, unambiguous and verifiable, like a regular treaty between sovereign nations who respect each other and are willing to put that respect on paper. It’s been 60 years since the Cuban missile crisis and the world does not want a sequel. Russia is not the Soviet Union but America, sadly, is still America: Stuck in the Cold War. Some of us can still remember and relate. Our friends in Russia have a legitimate concern and we here in America have an obligation to respect that concern. In December the Russian government provided two draft treaties to this effect, one for the United States and one for NATO. Sign, please.

I remember 30 years ago when the Soviet Union fell and a more equitable government rose in its place, or so we were told. Like many of my generation, I looked forward to a future of joint projects, scientific advancements, cures to all diseases, Jetson style flying cars and cultural exchange. “Bolshoi on the Potomac!” I thought. “The Met on the Muscva! It will be a World’s Fair every day!” Such was my naivete.

We had just graduated from the Reagan Eighties. Who knew that Mr. ‘Shoot-em-up’ California Cowboy would bring about the geo-political compromise of the century? My Russian grandfather’s pride as he waited in line at Ellis Island ninety years earlier would be satisfied. Second Avenue in lower Manhattan had no more prestigious an occupant in my mind than that Russian immigrant holding hopes for his future. In the seventh grade I wrote a social studies paper about astronauts and cosmonauts working together to explore the moon. Why not? We are the same people, right? I could not understand why we couldn’t work together then or now. It took 25 years but better late than never, right?

30 years on and we are still mucking about in the cold war pig stye as the world passes us by. But now the shit is on the other hoof. Can we not clean ourselves of the Cold War? Can we no longer dread the past but embrace the future? I still have the same hope as ever. The hope I had while writing that essay in a 1967 seventh grade social studies class. Every pig stye has a gate. Every gate has a latch but not a lock.

Release the latch. Open the gate. Come out.

S&G Boutique

 

Or. A Canticle of Christmas.

What’s the difference between an economy and a Ponzi scheme? One hasn’t crashed yet.

Looking for that special gift for that special someone? Can’t afford it on your Great Reset mandated Guaranteed Basic Income? Does your Visa and Master Card melt when you swipe them through the card reader? Do you own nothing and are far from happy about it? Tired of being on the slammy and slashy end of that hammer and sickle? Need a gift for Christmas but can’t afford the luxury items you deserve on your peasant income?

No problem! Here at S&G Boutique our trained specialists excel at finding you the exact bargain you are looking for. They will comb any deserted mall, midtown jewelry district, or unguarded window display, shopping list and gunny sack in hand, and shred every glass case till they make off with whatever expensive geegaw you want.

Need a $6,000.00 diamond tiara for that princess of yours? Just place an order for one on our website, www.FenceSG.com. Will you give a thou for it? Six hundred? Five? Bitcoin only, please. Or hundred dollar bills stuffed in a sock in a back alley. Just clean off the broken glass. And the sock.

Or how about that photography hobby you’ve been wanting to develop? Where else can you get a Hasselblad format camera for five hundred bucks? Selfies never seemed more synesthetic. Looking for a new Mercedes? Sorry. We only specialize in items that can be scooped out of shattered display cases and mad dashed away.

Here are just a few of the many testimonials we wrenched from our satisfied customers:

“It was great,” says one anonymous anarchist eater. “And so easy. The web site walked me through setting up an account. They even let me choose the stores in LA best suited to provide the items I wanted for Christmas or Hannukah or whatever. S&G Boutique sure smashed and grabbed my loyalty!”

“Couldn’t be easier,” says ‘Bugsy on The Rock.’  “It’s a crime! No, seriously. It’s a crime. I was sent up the river for less back when they used to arrest and jail people for shit like this.”

“It’s nice to live on the looting end of a failing society for a change,” says General Consensus. “Defending my country is for losers!”

“I’m a guy. A white guy, at that. And a baby boomer. I’m the trifecta of defecta. Don’t I deserve a lick of the underprivileged looter’s lolly-pop?” says Blue Collar Working White Guy. No. No you don’t, Currently Designated Nigger Guy.

And, “Are you recording me?” from Some Looter on the Street.

If you are into self-preservation, how about an AK-47? Oh, wait. Those stores shoot back. Just. No. Never mind.

Legal fees are never an issue for our field representatives. Or bail for that matter. Not since bleary eyed social redistributionists, non-consequentialists have commandeered the legal system. Void where prohibited and in Red States.

Shop today. The San Franciscan Smash and Grab way! And don’t look behind you.

Merry fin de siècle! Now run.

The Crypto of All Evil

I’ve been looking at crypto currency lately. Yes, I know. It’s the thing of the future. Digital money. Credits and what not. Star Trek Socialism Bucks. I’ve heard everything about it from, ‘It’s the next gold,’ to ‘Wave of the future,’ to ‘It’s a Ponzi scheme!’ Of course it’s a Ponzi scheme. Every economy is, ultimately, a Ponzi scheme. The only question is on which side of it you are: The Ponz side or the zi side? Every economy has ended in ruin. Just give this one time.

I’ve heard that Elon Musk is buying it, and also that he is selling it-not that I listen to someone who thinks he’s Tony Stark. I’ve also heard that China is thinking of banning it. And that they are about to release their own digital Yuan, thereby nationalizing it. Con se com sa.

Economists are a laugh, as per tradition. A self-adoring laugh. They routinely pontificate on the economy while auto-administering proctoscopy exams using their own heads as probes. Dismal science, indeed. Defecating dismal science.

I downloaded the Coinbase app a month ago and set up an account. I had to go through hoops, upload copies of my ID cards, verify a payment method, etc. blah, blah. In the meantime Elon Stark is rumored to be selling Bitcoin, thus depressing the price, China has banned Bitcoin mining, whatever that is, thus dooming their own economy, the economist-proctologists say, and gold has gone up to near $2,000.00 an oz. Several economist heads have shifted rectally. And Charles Schwab is head-swabbing his own colon. Blah, blah…, gloop?

There has to be a way to cash in on this cash grab. C’mon. A fool and his money, after all. This is nothing new. Just new lamps for old. I’m sure they were selling clay tile futures in the market square of Babylonia in the shadow of the Ziggurat.

They say all new technology is immediately used for pornography. Starting with Neolithic Venus statues littered around Europe to frolicking frescoes of satyrs and nymphs on bedroom walls in Pompei to Mr. Daguerre’s Dirty Daguerreotypes to the first phone sex between Belle and Watson. “Come here, Watson. I need you?” Seriously? I’d say it was Platonic, but you know what Plato was into, right?

Sex has a history. A full 69% of the Internet is devoted to it. There’s a shoe shine tip for Mr. Rockefeller. Bet long. Go short. Count on the load in between. And wear protection. Why do you think they call it Wall (Diaphragm) Street? There are no splits but plenty of spread eagles. And always bet on the basest of humans instincts. Sex sells.

Maybe I should market a new sexo-currency. Something from the here and now and whatever is to cum. The Crypto-Epsteinbuck! The obverse can be a picture of Bill Clinton waving a cigar around over a map of Little Saint James Island, how appropriate. The reverse can show the Lolita Express zooming in for a penetration of one of the gaping runways. Choose one token of exchange, they are all the same. Fools will buy what bigger fools will sell. Now we’re talking.

While we’re talking. Let’s talk about crypto money mining, or whatever. They say that crypto currency, money, fiat, whatever, does not exist until somebody ‘mines’ it. Just like gold! That makes it sound legitimate-ey. If I have to dig it out of the ground, it’s shiny, and it’s scarce, people will think it is worth something. Now here’s my shit! It’s worth something, too!

I have to ‘mine’ crypto so I then ‘have’ money which I can then ‘spend’ on ‘things’ as collateral.  Or save or invest or whatever. As long as I can ‘find’ a sucker/partner who accepts that this ‘shit’ means anything. I’m sorry. ‘Means’ anything. Lovely. Well, it’s no different than shells or wampum. Giant blocks of limestone or disks of copper. Imaginary Monopoly money has been around for forever. It has been useful as a tool of accounting for forever. As it has been prone to inflation and abuse for forever. As has been con artistry and Tom foolery. For forever.

In ancient Babylonia there was the concept of a year of jubilee. It was the trendy economic theory of Babylonian economists with their heads up their Bronze Age butts in the second millennia BC and it went like this. Every seventy years or so all debts were cancelled. All obligations negated. Everything was reset. A Great Reset, as it were. Claus Schwab eat your fascist heart out, or whichever of your organs your mouth is currently close to. Someone beat you to it.

There you go. All economic problems solved. All economists unemployed. Two birds. One stone. No more home owner debts. No more business debts. Forget that college loan and cancel that credit card. It was either that or inflate the fucker out of existence. Oh, and as for the fine print, er, the fine cuneiform. Any money somebody might owe to you; a bank account, retirement fund, a jar of pennies in the closet, blah, blah, blah; also gets wiped out along with the rest. Thank you for banking Babylonian Bank and Trust Company. Have a steak knife!

This was an economic holocaust. In capitalism depressions, recessions, downturns, panics, great resets, and all of the other economic wrenches that get tossed into the money gears sort of happen on their own just about every 40 years or so. With the Babylonian school of economics these were engineered into the system. Socialist style state planning is a lot older than we think. Five year plans? Pshaw! We’ve got you beat by a factor of fourteen!

Of course, it also meant it got harder and harder to borrow money the closer to a Depression/Jubilee Year/Great Reset you got, but never bet against the bank.

That’s where the real money is. Faking people into believing that there is something here and then scarfing them of all they are worth for as long as it is worth anything. After which. RESET! JUBILEE! Not to worry! Another generation of suckers is on the way!

Speaking of the Great Reset. And Crypto-Bucks. I decided to buy a gram. Or a shell. Or a Bongo Buck. Bitcoin has been going down drastically lately. From a high of $69,000.00 about ten days ago it is currently selling for $58,199.58 which means it has dropped by over 15% from an all time high. Time to buy, Mr. Warbucks. I slapped down a fifty Paypal bill and was sold $48.01 worth of Bitcoin with a Coinbase transaction fee of  $1.99 for the astounding amount of 0.00082492 of a bitcoin. I’m a ten-thousandth-aire!  

Meh, I would have just blown that half a C-note on trash, anyway. Now I’ve got something virtual to sneeze at. A-Cho! Oops. It’s gone.

So, back to my life’s obsession of unburdening the gullible of their undeserved wealth. What next? Let’s see… Crypto currency mining sounds like something the Wizard of Oz would come up with. Come one! Come all! See the Great Crypto! The economic miracle of the ages. First invented by the ancient Egyptians who used it to build an empire. Borrowed from the Babylonians who first learned of it from the emperors of Cathay in the far Orient. It’s the Wonderous Wurlitzer! Master of Money, Killer of Kingdoms and Elevator of Empires! Void where prohibited.

Why not? I remember when you could download a program, we didn’t call them ‘apps’ back then, which would use the spare cycles on your home computer to crunch through pictures from SETI. I guess the search for extraterrestrial life is awfully computer intensive so they devised a way for enthusiasts to volunteer their otherwise wasted computer time to inspecting radio wave maps of the cosmos searching for signals that could be generated by living planets. (Today that extra processing time is commandeered by Google Hive.)

Shit. My bitcoin account has just gone down by nine cents. I’M RUINED! It’s the suspenders and pickle barrel for me. Once I built a railroad… I made it run… made it race against time…

There must be a Disney Bros Studio in the detritus. There must be a way to make this railroad run again. Fortunes are made when the going it good but empires are made on the ruins of those who go bust.

Crypto-Mine-Ography! With every crypto coin you mine you get a jolt of high voltage neurotransmitter down the genitals of your choice. I mean, come on. That’s what human civilizations is all about, right? Jolts of neurotransmitters down the right brain-chutes?

Nah, that’s not right. Good concept but bad marketing.

Crypto-Mining is a good scam. But what to do with it? I’ve got it. And I call it Mine-Crypto-Pornography! MCP for short because that makes it sound legitimate or important or something. With your shares of MCP at $96,000.00 a share, more if your name is Elon, you can generate obscure mathematical strings of digits that don’t mean anything to anybody. But that can be reduced to an original sequence that resembles a tulip bulb in a JPG format. I’m sorry, Non Fungible Token, which is shorthand for, ‘Give me your money!’ Seriously. I could take a selfie of my gouty big toe, reduce it to a digitized, crypto-circumcised, commoditized string of digits and some fool would buy it. You, my friend, might just be that fool. If you play your cards right…into my hands.

So, with the new Non Fuckable Tokens, you too can own ‘art’ that is indistinguishable from any other garbage on this planet of landfill, but it’s unique! And it’s non-fungible! Try as you may, you cannot ever funge this string of digits! Cash only. All sales are final and non-fungible.

As God is my witness my tooth print will be on every coin I bit.

Brother, can you spare a dime?