Month: May 2024
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Bacon Boys
Dig this, man. We’re talking way before the robber barons crapped all over everything. Back when Bacon’s boys spooked the Virginia swells something fierce, they ditched those white indentured stiffs for a whole new bag: black chattel. Seems the poor white trash and the Negroes were getting a little too chummy, what with the hightailing, the hooch-fueled rampages, the pilfered swine, and the whole miscegenation…
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The Grand Design
A shadow play, this whole goddamn American hustle. Big men in their smoke-filled rooms, puppeteers with blood-diamond rings, jerking the strings of a nation built on the backs of the tired and yearning. They spin dreams of El Dorados across the briny expanse, luring the huddled masses with snake-oil promises and the glint of illusory…
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In Praise of the Industrious Poor
Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.” – English writer Arthur Young, 18th century 12th April, 1895 A most delightful notion crossed my path today, courtesy of a particularly astute article in The Times. Apparently, a fellow by the name of Arthur Young – a keen…
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Herr Schmidt
Gregor awoke with a jolt, a clammy sweat clinging to him like a shroud. The dream, thankfully, had faded, yet a tendril of unease remained. It was always the same. A cramped, airless office, the walls plastered with maps crisscrossed with nonsensical red lines. His boss, Herr Schmidt, a man perpetually shrouded in an aura of damp wool and stale cigars, stood ranting about purity and Lebensraum. Gregor, however, felt only…
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Non-Euclidean Politics
Trapped in the Symbolic Order: They peddle their ideologies like used cars on a Martian lot – left wing, right wing, all rusted-out Lacaninan signifiers with a Symbolic Order malfunction. Stuck in their pre-Imaginary world, these Euclidean politicians can’t grasp the writhing, pulsating Real of realpolitik. They see the world as a goddamn line graph,…
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Settlers
US: (Slaps a map of the Middle East on the table, points a calloused finger at Israel) Hey you knuckleheads, gather ’round! This here’s how you tame the wild frontier, see? Ain’t no sugar-coating it, that’s how a land gets settled This here’s how you get yourself a piece of the pie, see? None of that…
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Grand Apartheid
A concrete jungle, pulsing, throbbing with white prosperity, stretched across the stolen land. But the white control freaks,twitchy and paranoid, couldn’t stomach the black presence. It was a virus in their sterile system. So the grand scheme,hatched in smoke-filled rooms thick with fear and ideology, began to crawl. A fever dream of segregation, a cartographer of hate redrawing the map with bulldozer blades.…
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Clean Break
I don’t buy that clean break bullshit, man. That’s for squares with lobotomized emotions and hearts stuffed with excelsior. No, the good stuff, the real fallout? That’s a compound fracture, a jagged mess of splintered bone and raw nerve. It throbs with a dull ache that creeps into your dreams, a constant reminder of the…
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Ali’s Flat: The Muezzin’s Howl
The minaret, a concrete needle against the bleached sky. Heat shimmers, distorting the muezzin’s call into a guttural howl. This is the Islam of the bazaar, not the sterile mosques of Wahhabism. Ali, the anthropologist, his eyes like pools of Turkish coffee, lays it out. He spoke of a religious crossroads. Sunni Islam, he rasped,…