haiku 21 Sep 2017

Come sit in my house
I’ll pay you cash to be there
And let out the dogs

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

a fortuitous mugging

An otherwise uneventful visit to Los Angeles by the Jianus family was interrupted recently by armed robbery. “Can you imagine!?” said Hulfu, at 14 years the youngest child and only boy. “All the movies I have ever seen were coming true. There was the man standing with the knife and asking for our wallets. So cool!” The Jianus', a Finnish family, had traveled to America's West Coast to go to Disneyland and learn how to surf, and up until the time of the mugging everything had been running smoothly. “Then, though, Dad decided to save some money by traveling to Venice boardwalk by bus instead of by cab,” said Estra, the middle child, a maiden of 16 years. “We find ourselves deep in East Los Angeles, and as soon as we get off the bus, a dirty man jumps up from where he was lying in a pile of trash. He rips the map from my father's hands and puts a weapon in my mother's face, saying he wants money. My father throws his wallet at him and we all run the other way. Wow. I can't wait to tell my friends back in Oulu.“

“Because none of us were injured, my husband refused to call the police,” said Tilda, the family's matriarch, a lithe woman of 37 years. “I mentioned to the hotel concierge what had happened, and she made the call. I don't think they found the poor man, and I don't expect to recover what money was lost, but I hope our experience will cause other people to be more careful than we were.” The Jianus' have been staying at a hotel in Downtown L.A., the nexus for most city bus lines. “On every block of Broadway, there seem to be three different buses going in six different directions,” said 19 year old Xantha, the eldest daughter. “I feel bad that my father threw his wallet at the man, whose feet were swollen and covered with large blisters and who was obviously a little crazy in the head. Maybe before we leave I go back and give him some hot food and more money.”

Violent crime is relatively rare in Finland; the Jianus' story has been taken up by that country's press corps and reprinted by all of its major news outlets. “Lots of people praise me for relinquishing my wallet and then running, instead of just running,” said Ervost Jianus, age 40. “And anyway, as a seasoned world traveler, I never leave my hotel room with important documents on my person, so the wallet contained only a few hundred dollars in cash. I shall likely be made to sleep on the couch for a few weeks, but that is a price I accept for giving my children an experience they will never forget.” In the week after this story first hit Finnish shores, travel bookings from Helsinki to Los Angeles increased fivefold.

mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥

U.S. legislators stop accepting bribes

Following their ouster on National Public Radio (NPR), which did a segment last week called Forget Stocks Or Bonds, Invest In A Lobbyist (or, How Representatives Sell Out America), this nation's Congresswomen, Congressmen, and Senators have decided – unanimously – to stop being such money-grubbing, re-election-focused whores. Early last Friday morning, in the Capitol rotunda in Washington, D.C., all members of the House and Senate gathered to declare, in unison, “We have seen the error of our ways. We understand that this type of behavior ruins our fledgling democracy, that it tramples upon the voices of those citizens who cannot constantly contribute to our re-election campaigns, and that it destroys everything Americans have fought for, and died for, since the early days of this republic.”

The legislators, who until now had not even tried to hide the fact that they were selling their souls, their voices, and their access to – and influence over – the legislative process to anyone capable of physically handing them a check upwards of thirty-five thousand dollars ($35,000), wept with shame. “We are heartless bastards who have lost sight of our purpose,” said Speaker John Boehner. “Our real job is to speak to the people of our districts directly and to figure out what it is that they need; our job is not to sit around in tax-payer-funded offices and to hold court to see how many checks we can collect in a single day, nor is it to champion legislation such as that favorable merely to big business, to big corporations, our to our most frequent individual cash donors.”

To the amazement of the staff here at Mentiri Factorem Truth-Seeking & Truth-Speaking, it is not illegal for an elected official to sell his or her influence outright, nor do such despicable acts of flagrant corruption legally violate the standards of decency, the rules of common sense, the parameters of the Constitution, or the essence of the Declaration of Independence. Said D.C. occupier Herrold K. Chesterfeld, a computer programmer from a state on the Eastern seaboard, whose job was sold last year to an overseas conglomerate that had paid the Senator from his state a lot of cash-money to sanction the sale, “My great-great-great-great-great grandfather did not die during the Siege of Boston so that some pompous, millionaire official could pad his re-election coffers by selling my job to a group of rich scumbags in South Asia. Legislators are supposed to represent the interests of the individual citizen, individually, but when they cow-tow to persons or corporations that have heaps of money to burn, they prove that they are no better than slaves or truck-stop knob-slobbers. We need jobs in my state, we need health-care, we need reasonably-priced, high-quality, American-made food, shelter, and clothing – this circus, this fiasco, has gone on for long enough.”

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on ambitions in cash

  During a recent conversation about the merits of socialism, my counterpart argued that ambition, ingenuity, and creativity would disappear in the absence of monetary remuneration for labor. In other words, he claimed that people would stop working if they stopped getting paid money to work, that ambition would vanish if the potential for gain were to also vanish. If this theory were true, fathers would stop showing up to coach their kids' little league teams, our interstate hiking trails would become overgrown for a lack of volunteers to keep them cleared of brush, and nothing would transpire within the walls of churches other than those tasks performed by paid clergy.

  Unknowable man-hours of labor are performed every year in the United States for which the laborers are not paid. This labor is performed to satisfy an ideal, to give back to the community, even to calm that deep inner need to do something positive with which the unlucky among are burdened. I believe this zeal to provide for the common good is inherent to all persons (although most of us have it stamped or beaten out of us at one point or other in our lives). I also believe that our current economic system has ensnared this zeal, and subjugated it to the fleeting, hollow satisfaction of conspicuous consumption.

  It is not as if the people are bad, or shiftless, it is that we have unlearned to cherish those things that are precious beyond their monetary value.

Ultima Ratio Regum - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp

daisy cutter

Lady Liberty, tunic askew and breast revealed, stepping inadvertently with right foot on a snake, standing in a clear-cut forest, balances on a shoulder-beam (whose left side is cracked and banded with irons) the symbols of money and war against the symbols of peace and the Declaration of Independence. She is trying to lift the heavy symbols with her left hand, while her right hand has lost its grip. A tiny man (representing the richest 1% of the American population) is sawing through the beam on the right side, thus attempting to cut off the symbols of peace and the Declaration of Independence. Above all the words: DAISY CUTTER

hoarfrost

the minutes grow for time is fleeting

no longer flows the tide of reason

but lies and discord rule the land

while far apart lone hero stands

from treason blight and ballyhoo

through guile and wit and self-denial

he lives to see the end of trials

and swears upon the witness-stand

that none compare when held to you

but all his words are dashed away

when you kick him out one fine day

to travel on your own true course

awash in cash and competence

and leave him there in loneliness

to always wonder what might have been

if your relationship had been less forced

and you had stayed his friend