love slave obtained

Area resident Jacinda Grace Stanton recently purchased a new love slave (to replace the one she’d neglected to death). Though initially excited about being taken from the puppy mill where most of its litter-mates had died, the love slave, whom she named ‘Doggie Dearest,’ is quickly learning that life in its new home is not much better.

Ms. Stanton does not plan to take her newly acquired love slave on four daily walks, feed it properly and at regular intervals, take time to understand its language or moods, respect its right to live a stress-free life, or treat it with the dignity that a sentient being deserves. Instead, she intends to scold it when it voids its bowels inside her home due to lack of access to the out-of-doors, yell at it when it whines about being hungry, complain about having to take it to the vet after letting it suffer a massive skin infection for months, and leave it at home without food for days on end while she engages in multiple new romantic relationships.

Jacinda plans to hug her love slave from time to time, look quizzically at it when it barks, keep it trapped in her bedroom from 9pm until noon of the next day, ignore its needs while manipulating her mobile phone, occasionally lock it outside on a bare concrete pad overnight, and then insist on telling everyone she knows how much she loves animals but never washing out her love slave’s water bowl and only refilling it when it’s completely empty. The nation and state in which Ms. Stanton lives legally defines animals not as living things but as property, however, meaning that she’s not doing anything wrong - technically.

[This is a work of satire. Any reference to a person or persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Please treat living things under your control with the utmost respect and dignity.]

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

foreigners gain liberty

In what some are calling a dire blow to America’s cultural heritage, the White House today approved a controversial deal to sell the property known as Independence National Historical Park to a consortium owned in part by investors from Saudi Arabia and Macau. “We’re excited to maximize the profit potential of our new investment,” said Ibn Faik alMaz’zoud, spokesperson for the consortium, speaking from the steps of the former government property, in downtown Philadelphia. “Entrance fees to the site will rise in accordance with increased security and a shared desire to keep out all but the best and most economically-viable visitors.”

Other historical sites up for sale are the Gettysburg battlefield in central Pennsylvania, George Washington’s birthplace in Virginia, as well as Battery Park in New York City. Various monuments in country’s western states are being considered for increased ore and mineral extraction, to the delight of lobbying groups and mining companies hungry to profit from the sale of soil-bound resources, which since the nation’s inception have belonged to all Americans, equally.

“We can’t have this stuff just sitting around costing America money,” said a White House staffer speaking (leaking) on condition of anonymity. “The more we can shift upkeep, tour guiding, maintenance, hauling, and extraction tasks to corporations - foreign or domestic, it’s all the same - the more cash America will have on hand to do things like launch cruise missile strikes on Syrian villages and give tax breaks to wealthy citizens.”

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

$7 a day

Nanjing – On an otherwise nondescript Wednesday morning earlier this year, 13 year-old Chinese national Zhou Fu Shi changed into a set of worn coveralls and headed to work. Earning the equivalent of seventy U.S. cents an hour, and working ten-hour-long days, Miss Zhou makes roughly seven (7) dollars a day fabricating cellphones and other electrical devices for export to markets in the Europe and America. “I used to spend summers working in my grandparent's rice paddies or tending the local communal forests and gardens with friends from school,” Fu Shi said while sprinting to the bathroom during her single, ten- minute-long daily break. “Things were better then, I think. It is hard to remember, even though it was not that long ago, but I think that despite having less physical money in hand, I was creating bonds with the land, with my family, and with the people in my community.” We continued to speak with Miss Zhou on her way home from work until a pair of censors overtook us, demanding to see our passports and grilling us about our involvement with an innocent factory girl. By the time the censors had left (taking many of our yuan with them), our new friend had vanished into an enormous tenement-housing block.

“I don't want to work, but the state forces me to work,” Fu Shi was saying just before the censors' arrival. “I don't want to work because I don't really need to buy anything. I see the new advertisements, I listen to them on the radio and television, but I don't need any of those useless things. And speaking of useless, who is buying all of the mobile telephones that my fellow workers and I are making? A friend of mine has an illegal, uncensored Internet connection, and he and I were looking up prices for the things that we make, and the phone we are making right now costs almost two hundred American dollars. Two hundred dollars? I assembled one hundred models after lunch today, for which I was paid roughly three dollars and fifty cents. Last week, when a friend was blinded at work by corrosive gases, she was fired, and is now very, very poor. Is there any justice in this world? Somewhere, someone is making a lot of money on the backs my factory-sisters and me.”

Upon reading our story, two American politicians – a Senator and a Congressperson, who both asked to remain anonymous – contacted us, saying derisively that the girls in our story should be happy that they have jobs at all, let alone paying jobs, and that they should see those jobs as stepping-stones of opportunity, and not worry so much about how much they might be getting paid right now, or who might be profiting immensely from their hard and continuous labor.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on easy living

Attention, citizens of America: keep doing that to which you are accustomed; do not alter your ways; do not conserve resources; do not research and implement in your own lives methods for sustainable or self-sufficient living. Let not your minds be filled with worry, nor pay any heed to the fear-mongers spreading false intelligence about environmental degradation, the worldwide depletion of nutrients from the soil, the rapid extinction of species large and small, massive crop failures, algal blooms that suffocate all other sea-life, or reports of a garbage patch the size of continental Europe floating in the Pacific Ocean. You must do nothing to save fair Columbia – she who is our common, tender motherland – or to rejuvenate her paved-over soil, her once-clean rivers, her now-contaminated lakes, her exploited meadows, her clear-cut forests, her mono-cultured fields, or her cities that creep and sprawl like fungi out into their once-abundant surroundings.

Do not plant your own victory garden, do not ride a bicycle, do not turn off lights when they are not needed, do not entertain yourselves, do not criticize your elected officials, do not reduce, reuse, or recycle, do not turn off your car's engine if it should idle longer than thirty seconds, do not close your house's windows when running the air-conditioning, do not gather electricity from the sun, do not mow your lawn using muscle-power, and do not put on a sweater instead of turning on your furnace. All you must do – and all that is expected of you – is to buy food made by someone you shall never meet, to cast your ballot in elections that you are powerless to truly sway, to wave a plastic, Chinese-made American flag when you are told to wave it, to watch TV for more than an hour a day, to shop at stores (the big discount retailers) that cut costs by supporting slavery in Africa, Asia, and South America, to fear foreigners, immigrants, and the phantom threat of terrorism, to relinquish your rights by continuing to support the anti-patriotic, freedom-destroying Patriot Act, to fill your car's tank with terrorism-funding, war-necessitating gasoline, to contract diabetes and other diseases by eating too much food, and to lead a generally leisure-filled, comfortable life that amounts to little more than sloth.

Please, do not worry, citizens of America – because your pastor tells you not to, because your politician tells you not to, because advertisers tell you not to. Do not even try to break the chains and shackles of your self-imposed slavery to conspicuous consumption, to the hollow notion of convenience, and to the idea that someone else is going to fix your problems for you. Do nothing, please, but kick back in your foreign-made recliner, wearing your Bangladeshi-sweatshop-made clothes, sipping from an imported plastic cup a brew of artificial colors mixed with refined corn sugar, and watch as the world burns around you.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit