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By Adam Engel

9/4/07

Arise Jan, Marcia, Cindy! Arise Greg, Peter, Bobby! Arise Mike, Carol, Alice!

Vbh.X.118: In Country

The soldier in the bush does not forgive. All is not well with us, not always — what do we know from love? To reach informed decisions among fraudulent sources; that momentary rapprochement with the species — after all it is our planet, in some ways, but we are only the people, our leaders, responsible adults, architects of our… the photograph of my mother in a drawer somewhere I never saw again…I know there is a center and I’m walking toward it: union of man and woman for perpetuation of…genocidal tendencies. If only it were simple as fallen cake. Blonde girls, dark boys; the servants ignorant and happy. Tiger lays with the lamb while we devour similar illusions. In love with youth and freaked out by corruption. The judges scratch out every line. “Be fruitful and multiply (but don’t be fruits),” and all this happens over Sitting Bull’s corpse (or some slain Injun under the cement). What we were thinking, that is, we must have known… in the beginning…

Vbh.X.119: Bobby and Cindy Emerge

And love abounds, again, to conquer all together now we’re Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, again, the letter, the word, can tear us apart: missive misconstrued, one must read between the lines, the meaning of the text must be resolved, that is, our children must be protected from the…doors of perception bolted shut. All we wanted was a bond, a union. Nobody cares about us but us, though occasionally a Stranger rides to town, rids us of doubt. We search our pockets for a tip. Pennies later, Silver gallops down the street. Neighbors complain. Manure on the pavement gleaned by complainers for their gardens; minutes dry like raisins under ersatz sun. Divide them evenly among ourselves, chew twenty times in unison, swallow, like a family, for real, this time…

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

By Jason Miller

8/27/07

“It is impossible for capitalism to survive, primarily because the system of capitalism needs some blood to suck. Capitalism used to be like an eagle, but now it’s more like a vulture. It used to be strong enough to go and suck anybody’s blood whether they were strong or not. But now it has become more cowardly, like the vulture, and it can only suck the blood of the helpless. As the nations of the world free themselves, the capitalism has less victims, less to suck, and it becomes weaker and weaker. It’s only a matter of time in my opinion before it will collapse completely.”

–Malcolm X

Striving with the unwavering dedication of true believers and slaves to the grind, those of us who exist within the geographic, social, cultural, economic, and political boundaries of the United States are collectively destroying the Earth.

With dutiful efforts, heavily sedated consciences, and sweet obliviousness to the depth of our depravity, we toil away at our chosen or assigned tasks. After all, predatory plutocrats like “Mitt” Romney would be impotent without his minions—the hundreds of millions of wage slaves exercising their “right to work” (for as small a wage as they desire) while obediently manning the bulwarks of a system so putrid that were it possible to feed it to a pig, our porcine friend would wretch his guts out.

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

By Joe Bageant

8/24/07

On televisions you see police cars surround the car of a “terror suspect.” … When you learn he is a neurosurgeon whose wife and baby were in the car with him, you might think he probably just pulled over when the police seemed to want him to, but only if you were still capable of using your own brain. After all, his name is Mohammed and his wife wears a headscarf. … So maybe you’ll just ignore what your brain was trying to say, which is that neurosurgeons have a lot invested in their careers. … But the media are so hard to ignore. Even when you make a point of ignoring them, they are always there, flickering around the edges, burning impressions you can’t quite get rid of. … But it was all so tidy and comfortable in that TV/mainstream news site world. Meanwhile, though no evidence of guilt has been offered, the discussion zooms ahead. Why can’t everyone else see it?

—Jennifer, in Los Angeles

Needless to say, the Middle Eastern doctors accused of terrorism in Scotland may be guilty as hell. Mohammed Asha may be another one of your standard terror wogs who, as we all know by now, relish the idea of prison or perhaps blowing his wife and baby up for Allah.

But having been in the media business one way or another for almost 40 years, and having watched it increasingly take on a life of its own, I know that nothing of significance in the news is what it appears to be. This is not the result of some media conspiracy, mind you, but rather that the people working in the media have internalized the process so thoroughly they do not even know they are conditioned creatures in a larger corporate/state machine. Put simply, Katie Couric and the dumbshits grinding out your local paper actually believe they are in the news business. In today’s system, everybody is a patsy for the new corporate global order of things — the well-coiffed talking head, the brain dead audience, even the terrorists themselves. All play out their parts in our holographic image and information process.

All Americans, regardless of caste, live in a culture woven of self-referential illusions. Like a holographic simulation, each part refers exclusively back to the whole, and the whole refers exclusively back to the parts. All else is excluded by this simulated reality. Consequently, social realism in this country is a television commercial for America, a simulated republic of eagles and big box stores, a good place to live so long as we never stray outside the hologram. The corporate simulacrum of life has penetrated us so deeply it now dominates the mind’s interior landscape with its celebrities and commercial images. Within the hologram sparkles the culture-generating industry, spinning out our unreality like cotton candy.

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

“…Unfortunately — while the political theatre of US politics is fake as well — in Iraq, the blood isn’t.”

by Phil Rockstroh

8/13/07

Given the nation’s tottering infrastructure, imperial overreach abroad and vandalized constitutional process by a lawless executive branch, what will it take to scare the general public, mainstream press and political classes into immediate action to bring about meaningful change? At this twilight hour of the American republic, there must come a paradigm shift of seismic proportions or else the republic will perish. I’m less than optimistic. Insomuch as, I suspect, that if, during a rare press conference, George W. Bush’s face were to suddenly shed its skin, right on camera, live on national television, on all channels, broadcast and cable, to reveal the countenance of a Gila Monster — the elitist beltway punditry would begin to catalog the merits of his reptilian single-mindedness. Then proceed to an interview with an “expert” from a right-wing funded, zoological think tank, “The American Institute for the Advancement of Predatory Policy,” who would assure us that: “…in an era when evil is as proliferate as flies around the stinking dumpster of the world, Americans will be kept safe by a lizard-faced leader who eats flies for breakfast.” And the general public would only be concerned because the broadcast happened to preempt the finals of American Idol.

To survive as a republic, a great many American idols will have to topple, and not only those inane, fame-obsessed clowns and crooners sharp-elbowing each other on the Fox Network’s televised exercises in Pop Stardom for Dummies. As far as idolatry goes, by far the most pervasive, ruinous, and in need of toppling is the position of unquestioning worship the US military holds in American life. One would think that after the Götterdämmerung of macho folly we’ve witnessed over the past half-decade that the country would have had its fill of self-proclaimed alpha male posturing and adolescent-minded, military hagiography.

The media is rife with right-wing fantasist nonsense about the “feminized” American male, when, in fact, the country has grown outright psychotic from testosterone-induced toxicity (TIT). In the 1960s, hippies were ridiculed for their naive assumptions that life on earth could be magically transformed into an egalitarian paradise of free love, good dope, waterbeds and Lava Lamps for all, if “the straights” could simply be induced to “raise their consciousness” by the engagement in and the utilization of the erotic acts, illicit substances and goofy, counterculture accouterment mentioned above. Accordingly, the current fantasy — that all US soldiers are good, righteous and brave, standing ever vigilant against all threats to the Homeland — could be regarded as a kind of Woodstock Militarism.

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By Jason Miller

7/25/07

A few days ago, one of my closest friends hit me with a heavily loaded question.

“Are you a Communist?” she queried.

To which I replied:

I do not belong nor militate in any formal communist party in the U.S. Nor do I belong to any other political entity or party. Furthermore, I do not subscribe to a specific doctrine, ideology, or dogma. My allegiance is to my core principles and values, which are premised on honesty, justice, humanity, responsibility, critical thinking, open-mindedness, egalitarianism, compassion, a belief in a Higher Power of my understanding, and many of the teachings of Christ.

My personal beliefs aside, communism is an incredibly loaded word. Our infinitely mendacious educational, social, and media infrastructures begin inculcating reflexive rejection of “all things communist or socialist” into US Americans from the moment they draw their initial breath.

Why is the establishment so desperate to vaccinate us against the “disease” of communism?

Because at its hopelessly rotten core, capitalism, which is manifested most strongly in the United States, is about exploitation, hyper-competitiveness, “rugged individualism”, survival of the fittest, concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, profits above all, property over people, greed, and selfishness. Perhaps worst of all, this pyramid scheme masquerading as a “moral” economic system inevitably leads to wars fueled by its insatiable demands for new markets, more resources, and cheaper labor. Why else would 350 million out of 6.5 billion people spend a trillion dollars a year on a military that has the capacity to destroy our planet thousands of times over, dwarfs the combined firepower of the rest of the world, and plagues over 130 countries with its “benign” occupations? We in the United States maintain a carefully crafted façade as the “benevolent champions of democracy”, but will quickly install ruthless tyrants and commit mass murder (euphemistically labeling our victims as “collateral damage”) if sovereign nations dare to resist our economic rape and plunder.

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Sculpture: “The Id” by TJ Dixon and James Nelson

By Jason Miller

6/24/07

Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.

–Sigmund Freud

Frightening as it may be, the Earth’s fate rests in the hands of children. With incredibly formidable military firepower at its disposal, the United States could catalyze Armageddon at any time. And while they may be adults chronologically, our sociopolitical structure is dominated by emotional infants.

Nietzsche once pronounced God dead. In the United States, we have a more readily demonstrable (and perhaps related) problem. Our collective id has rendered its governing superego impotent, and perhaps dead. Our prevailing moral standards, as inconsequential as they have become, are of the Jerry Falwell variety. They are mean-spirited, self-serving, judgmental, narrow-minded, selfish, and belligerent. As far as US Americans are concerned, Christ may as well have preached the Sermon on the Mount from the lowest recesses of Death Valley.

Recall that our basic drives such as libido, hunger, and aggression flow from the infantile dimension of our psyche known as the id. In terms of psychodynamics, the superego’s role is to counter-balance the irresponsible, amoral, and essentially sociopathic nature of the id with a healthy degree of conscience and guilt. Yet in the United States, we are inculcated with a deep sense of our exceptionalism and entitlement from the moment we emerge from the birth canal, thus crippling our ability to empathize and seriously impeding the development of our superego.

Consequently, conscience, guilt, personal discipline, and delaying gratification are barely extant in the toxic cesspool of our sociocultural environment.

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By Vi Ransel

6/18/07

After the Great Depression
the Rich had the impression
we were ripe for revolution.
Their solution? A New Deal.

But this “gift” they gave us
was merely to enslave us
temporarily amaze us
’til they could tear that mother down.

After World War Two
they gave us credit.
Did it work on us?
You bet. It’s
worked so well we’re
all in debt up to our ass.

We got little Levitt
mockups of their mansions,
sprawling highway expansion
of veins ready for the oily needle
in the nation’s arm.

And they let us go to
college, but they’re
afraid of knowledge
’cause it’s POWER
(to The People). Can’t
have that! You have a
dream? You just dream on.

Basic education is outdated
on the corporate plantation.
All the world’s remediation
can’t undo the devastation done
by whole word reading and new math.

And this theft of skills
makes a mockery
of participatory democracy,
sending us down the corporate
Manifest Destiny path.

Advertising’s their predation
for our seduction and sedation
so without evaluation
we’ll submit
while they feed on us like jackals,
slap our souls in shackles
and have us branded by age three
with corporate logo loyalty.
Our only future is the next thing that we buy.

Pharmaceuticals push legal drugs
for shyness and bad moods.
Huge conglomerates sing our love songs
to alcohol, SUVs and fried foods.
They’ve tranquilized and supersized us
with material goods
and ubiquitous depictions
of degrading sexual juxtapositions
laid like land mines
in all the media’s neighborhoods.

Yet after all this depredation
we’ve let the corporate plantation
become our American Idol(atry).
We want our ship to come in
so we can be just like them.
Meanwhile we take our place in
the new U.S. “serve us” economy.

Ask not what your country
has done to you, because
there is no remorse. And
don’t you know nobody
knows you when you
down(sized) and out(sourced).