haiku 8 May 2018

Five fifty and five
Polished stone clawing the sky
A soaring tribute

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

payment also faked

As a nod to a singing performance that Beyoncé Knowles faked, the 2013 Presidential Inauguration Committee decided to fake her payment. “It was immediately obvious that the performer did not sing the song we had hired her to sing, and that, instead, she had payed a sound-recording engineer to play a tape of her singing the song we had hired her to sing with her mouth,” said White House special events coordinator Geraldeen Vorburgwall, in a telephone interview. “Therefore, we have faked the deposit of a fake sum of money into her otherwise massively swollen bank accounts. Fair is fair.“

News of Ms. Knowles' chicanery sparked both praise and indignation. According to 18 year-old Floridian Vehdnu Morangutan, the performer is, “So fabulous, and she wears such nice clothes, and her hair looks so great, and she just sang for the first president of recent African descent, so why y'all trying to hate?” Other individuals with whom we spoke were less kind. “Some people maintain such low levels of self-esteem that they don insufficient clothing in sub-zero weather in order to lie to the American people with extraordinary pomp and bluster,” said unemployed electrician Kazi Ishomuri, 47, of Baton Rouge, LA. “If Beyoncé is incapable of singing even under mildly adverse conditions, if she cannot muster the hubris to risk even a slight mistake whilst supposedly honoring our nation, why the deuce was she hired in the first place? This whole thing is a joke.” Beyond the young lady's deceit, the overall cost of the event stoked ire. “A hundred and seventy millions dollars of good money spent to have a man say something he had already said three times before?” said Oludunda Erak, 24, of Brooklyn, NY. “If Mr. Obama had spent that money on a scholarship for children of fallen American soldiers, or to establish a fund to study and cure the effects of homelessness among veterans, we the People would all be better off. But wasting it on a parade, a singer who doesn't sing, some bleachers, and a band? What the fuck is going on in this country?”

Ms. Knowles scheduled a press conference to address the matter. Instead of showing up and speaking to the assembled reporters, however, she had someone else play a recording of her offering a faked explanation of why she could not sing when Kelly Clarkson could.

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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.”

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