•TPC•

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By Jason Miller

9/11/07

“The other kids were all into black power,” Oprah told the Tribune in the mid-1980s. But “I wasn’t a dashiki kind of woman … Excellence was the best deterrent to racism and that became my philosophy.”

Excellence indeed. Few would deny that Oprah Winfrey has achieved an extraordinary degree of THAT, at least by our society’s warped standards. Witty, articulate, attractive, beloved by tens of millions, and fabulously wealthy, she is the “I pulled myself up by my bootstraps” queen of a vast media empire. Oprah is a living embodiment of the American Dream. What is perhaps most inspiring to her genuflecting disciples is that Oprah rose to her stratospheric position of wealth and influence from an impoverished start in a socioeconomic hierarchy still largely dominated by white males.

Oprah Winfrey ostensibly possesses the mythical Midas Touch, a generous spirit, deep spiritual wisdom, and, in the eyes of those blinded by their adoration, the credentials of a saint. Yet despite appearing destined for canonization, Oprah injects heavy doses of infectious pus into the already deeply abscessed wound of the American psyche.

How could anyone who’s noted for having said, “Let your light shine. Shine within you so that it can shine on someone else. Let your light shine,” have such a pernicious effect on our culture?

Let’s “count the ways…with a passion put to use.”

To truly understand the depth of the damage Oprah inflicts on our society, we need to step outside of our bourgeois indoctrination and see her for what she truly represents. Manifesting the Horatio Alger Myth on steroids, Oprah is a wet dream come true for our criminal class of ruling elites sometimes referred to as the plutocracy. She provides them with “irrefutable” and ubiquitous anecdotal evidence which “proves” the idiotic delusion that America is a meritocracy where everyone has a realistic chance of getting rich, if they just work hard enough. The reality is that the richest 20% of US Americans own over 80% of the wealth and the long-term trend has been toward an ever increasing concentration of treasure into a smaller number of strong-boxes(1).

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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

“More cruel and more angry, and more addicted to the illusory benefits of a technology that actually has created a dependency on mechanical solutions to even basic problems, and has generated a psychic prison of adumbrated personal choice. When Bush says “they” hate us because of our freedoms, the hidden meaning is that there is a fear “they” will someday have to suffer these same *freedoms*.”

By John Steppling

9/8/07

You know, one of the things that has been interesting about our long dialogue here is that you are *there* and I am *not*. I forget, I think, what it must be like to live in the middle of the madness, of the vast necropolis of the mighty empire. Someone asked me recently if I didn’t miss the US, and in particular Los Angeles (my birthplace). I thought about it and said, “no, I don’t”. And it’s true, I don’t. I miss small things of the culture; Mexican food, good Bar B Q, and of course a lot of my old friends. But I DO NOT miss anything else. Burroughs once said, many many years ago, that whenever he left the US he felt a great weight lifted from his shoulders.

The sense of constant selling is overwhelming. My last visit to the States was several years ago, and the most vivid impression I had was of a populace addicted to buying what they don’t need, arrogance, intellectual hypertrophy, and obesity. The other most vivid impression was that of American television. Let me post this link to Scott Ritter’s latest:

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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 Vi Ransel

8/24/07

Sisyphus, a Corinthian king
of Greek mythology,
was condemned by Olympian gods
to pay a heavy price for his greed

by rolling an enormous stone
to the peak of a steep hill’s crown,
and every time he’d reach the top,
the stone quickly rolled back down.

* * * * * *

Throughout the Dark Ages of Europe
the mass of the medieval population
became the virtual slaves of the Rich
through the process of feudalization.

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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 Vi Ransel

8/23/07

While the game is rigged
in favor of the Rich,
they still depend
on us
to spend enough
to support them in the style
to which we’ve allowed them
to become accustomed.

When we turn around
and make a gift to them
of the wages
we slave so hard to make
by exchanging them
for mindless consumer fluff
we’re saying that it’s OK

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By Emily Spence

8/15/07

In Massachusetts of late, there’s been a recurrent radio commercial. It goes something like this: There are some great deals on foreclosed homes — really GRRREAAT! Someone had a loss and that is sad, but YOU can greatly benefit by the wonderful opportunity. So, please call [telephone number]. You will be happy you did. Imagine how well YOU can make out and win BIG! Boy, do we have a bargain for you!

When I hear this, I’m repulsed and don’t think about how well I could gain off of other people’s tragedies. Instead, I think of the plot of “The House of Sand and Fog,” an account in which an incredible amount of pain and deaths result from, amongst other causes, decent people trying to take advantage of a system gone terribly wrong.

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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 Gary Corseri

8/8/07

“Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.”

–Martin Luther King

“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to my conscience, above all other liberties.”

–John Milton

“Ecraser l’infame!”

–Voltaire

The Romans had a saying: Mole ruit sua. It falls of its own bigness.

They knew a thing or two about Empire, over-extension abroad and decay at home.

Apparently, Americans are still learning. Hence, we’re shocked by a 9/11 event, the devastation wrought by Katrina, the collapse of a bridge over the Mississippi. We don’t understand how our health care system could have deteriorated into the “Sicko” joke of the developed world—and to be a lot less efficient and fair than systems in much poorer countries (Cuba, Venezuela, Costa Rica, for example). Within a few decades, how did we go from putting men on the moon to a nation whose cars can’t compete with Japan and Germany—nations less than half, and a little more than a quarter our size; nations we bombed to smithereens some 60 years ago?

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“I was doing a very good job. I was meticulous,” Eichmann conceded.

By Phil Rockstroh

7/25/07

“All we can do is what folks (a minority) have always done … exile or resistance. In my opinion, both are honorable. The other options are varying degrees of “little Eichmann[ism]” – Ward Churchill’s much scorned, career purge-inducing – but never-the-less accurate phrase…”

In this summer of angst and grim foreboding about what further assaults against common sense and common decency the Bush Administration might inflict upon the people of the world, how many times during the day do those of us — still possessed of mind, heart and conscience — take pause, hoping we’ve seen the worst of it, then, fearing we haven’t yet, attempt to push down the dread rising within us, so that we might simply make it through the day and be able to rest at night? Accordingly, those who have been paying attention are aware that the outward mechanisms of martial law are in place. We shudder knowing that Bush has issued an executive decree that grants him dictatorial power in the event of some nebulously defined national emergency. In addition, the knowledge nettles us that a vast network of internment camps bristle across the length of the U.S., standing at wait for those who might raise objections to the fascistic fury unloosed by the American empire’s version of the Reichstag fire.

Moreover, a closer look would reveal that the inner processes by which an individual begins the act of acceptance of authoritarian excess — the mixture of chronic passivity, boredom, low grade anxiety and unfocused rage inherent in the citizens/consumers of the corporate state that primes an individual for fascism — have been in place for quite some time within the psyches of the American populace, both elites and hoi polloi alike. Although, don’t look for torch-lit processions thronging the nation’s streets and boulevards; rather, look for a Nuremberg Rally of couch-bound brownshirts. Instead of ogling the serried ranks of jut-jawed, SS soldiers, a contemporary Leni Riefenstahl would be forced to film chubby clusters of double-chinned consumers, saluting the new order with their TV remotes. In the contemporary United States, the elation induced by the immersion of one’s individual will to the mindless intoxication of the mob might only be possible, if Bush seized dictatorial control of the state while simultaneously sending out to all citizens gift certificates to Ikea.

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by Phil Rockstroh

7/12/07

At present, George W. Bush is unpopular with the majority of the American public not because of the murderous mayhem he has unloosed in Iraq; rather, his standing has plummeted, due to the fact that he didn’t deliver the goods. Americans are fine with fueling our republic of road rage using the blood of Iraqis (or any other distant and darker people) as long as “the mission” doesn’t drag on too long or reveal too much about ourselves.

How did we come to be a nation of vampires who live by sustaining ourselves on the blood of others? Is our mode of collective being so toxic in the United States that a writer must bandy about metaphors culled from Gothic horror fiction to describe it?

I’m afraid it’s come to that: We are a people whose psyches have grown monstrously distorted from an addiction to imperial power and personal entitlement. (Imagery of Smurfs and Teletubbies won’t rise to the analogy, albeit as terrifying as those demons of hell-bound cuteness are.)

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