Oct 08 2007
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
10/8/07
Cluster B Personality Disorders
1776.0 Americanistic Personality Disorder
The essential features of Americanistic Personality Disorder include pervasive patterns of extreme self-absorption, profound and long-term lapses in empathy, a deep disregard for the well-being of others, a powerful aversion to intellectual honesty and reality, and a grossly exaggerated sense of the importance of one’s self and one’s nation. These patterns emerge in infancy, manifest themselves in nearly all contexts, and often become pathological.
These patterns have also been characterized as sociopathic, or colloquially as the “Ugly American Syndrome.” Note that the latter terminology carries too benign a connotation to accurately describe an individual afflicted with such a dangerous perversion of character.
For this diagnosis to be given, the individual must be deeply immersed in the flag-waving, nationalistic, and militaristic fervor derived primarily from the nearly perpetual barrage of reality warping emanations of the “mainstream media,” most commonly through the medium of television. Typically indoctrinated from birth to believe that they are morally superior, exceptional human beings, these individuals suffer from severe egocentrism, a condition further engendered by the prevalence of the acutely toxic dominant paradigm known as capitalism.
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Oct 07 2007
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
The West and the Islamic world clash not because of religion, but because a Darwinian current has taken hold in the West that reduces life to mere production and consumption, writes Abdel-Wahab Elmessiri
By Abdel-Wahab Elmessiri
10/7/07
In the opening years of this century, the world was presented with a historic confrontation between the West and Islamic and Arab worlds. This confrontation has been used in the pursuit of imperial agendas. American failure in Iraq has left underlying reasons exposed. Can the damage done be repaired?
Our relationship with the West began with Alexander the Great, the founder of the colonialist Ptolemaic Dynasty that ruled Egypt and the Levant for several hundred years. In that distant past there existed a form of parity; a certain give and take, an alternation of victory and defeat between the two sides. Even to today, however, it is possible to point to factors that can as easily form the basis of mutual understanding and cooperation between Islam and the West as they can trigger conflict. For example, we share with some Western nations the border of the Mediterranean, whose importance for trade and maritime wealth should compel neighbours on either side towards closer cooperation, especially in this age of the global village.
Yet that very proximity has also been the source of intense friction because of the lure of land and resources on the other side. In its height, Islamic civilisation expanded geographically at the expense of the West as defined by the ambit of Christian civilisation, and the reverse was also true: the expansion of the West took place at the expense of the Islamic world, and tensions reached a zenith when Western powers moved to partition that world amongst themselves. Conversely, the further removed societies and civilisations are from one another geographically, the lower the potential for conflict between them. At least before the rise of Western colonialism, which staked out the entire world as its field of enterprise, there existed no tension between the West and Thailand, for example, simply because land and resources were so far out of reach.
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Oct 03 2007
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
“Decades ago, in order to field test the economic theories that were formulated by the right wing think tanks at The Chicago School, Friedman and his disciples descended like locusts upon Latin America. The results were devastating: Democratically elected governments were systematically overthrown and brutal dictators friendly to US business interests were installed in their place—all of which were subsidized by US tax dollars with the complicity of the CIA.”
By Charles Sullivan
10/03/07
One can no longer understand US governmental policy on the basis of conventional language or traditional wisdom. Language itself and its long-established meanings were long ago twisted and distorted in order to deceive the people. Now war is peace and terror and occupation is liberation. In order to make sense of what is happening, it is important to understand everything within the context of a specific economic philosophy, and the distorted capitalist system that spawned it.
That ideology was crafted by a diminutive economist named Milton Friedman, at the University of Chicago some five decades ago. The holy trinity of Friedman’s version of capitalism—privatization of the public domain, corporate deregulation, and deep cuts in social spending—has resulted in enormous societal inequity and socio-economic classes. It has given us the haves and the have-nots, the haves and the have-mores.
Friedman and his disciples, collectively known as ‘The Chicago School’ do not believe in a minimum wage—much less a living wage, unions, worker rights, environmental protections, worker safety, or any other kind of restraint imposed upon corporations. In Friedman’s view, the market should rule and profitability should be the guiding principle, the end results always justifying the means.
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Oct 02 2007
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
“…..maze of cubicles where artists, copywriters, and concept men work day and night to define the products of The Nation.”
By Adam Engel
10/2/07
Awakened midnight nobody home. Alone against the music of the Angry Young.
Kid outside screamed poems into a mike. Squat amp dragged behind him on a wagon. Surrounding friends clapped stomped cacophonous. Launched his dithyrambs against The City. Cannonades of sing-song bass.
Josh razed Jericho with song.
“Turn off the NOISE and tune in The VOICE of The Nation.”
That ad from somewhere I remember. Subway maybe. Turned on the stereo. Fight noise with noise. Lonely like I’ve never. Unbearable rip. Inside. Alone me in the middle of the night.
Tried to reach The VOICE myself. Dialed, the line was jammed. WSOS after midnight. The VOICE beseeched by the Sleepless of The Nation.
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Oct 02 2007
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
“George W. Bush — the reigning mascot of this fantasyland of infantile omnipotence and instant gratification”
Addressing the origins of the “who’s is your daddy” nation
By Phil Rockstroh
“We must become the change we want to see.” – Mahatma Gandhi
“In any case, I hate all Iranians.” –Debra Cagan, Deputy Assistant Secretary to Defense Secretary, Robert Gates
How many times do we, the people of the US, have to go around on this queasy-making merry-go-round of propaganda and militarism before we shout — enough! — then shutdown the whole cut-rate carnival and run the scheming carnies who operate it out of town? It is imperative the nation’s citizens begin to apprehend the patterns present in this ceaseless cycle of official deceit and collective pathology. This republic, or any other, cannot survive, inhabited by a populace with such a slow learning curve.
Over the last three decades, the authoritarian right has risen to create the nation they have been longing for since their humbling by the Watergate scandal. After being subdued and humiliated by the mechanisms of a free republic, the right has turned the tables — and subdued and humiliated the republic. If the trend continues, all but unchallenged and unabated, we might as well replace the torch held aloft by Lady Liberty with a taser.
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Oct 01 2007
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
Meanwhile, this week we learned (by the hand of an editorial in The Los Angeles Times) that, “the biggest beneficiary (of the business of war) has been Blackwater USA, a private security firm with powerful political and personnel ties to an administration that has awarded it more than $1 billion in contracts since 2002.”
By Pablo Ouziel
10/1/07
October 2nd will mark the birth anniversary of Human Rights Activist, Mahatma Gandhi and for the first time, the United Nations is officially proclaiming this day to be the International Day of Non-violence. Hopefully, on this day we can all spare a little of our time to reflect on how little we have all understood Mahatma Gandhi’s message; after all everyday we seem to plunge into a worse state of affairs and drift away farther from Gandhi’s respectable message; “I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.”
I wonder what it means to have an International Non-violence day. Does it mean that American soldiers, UN ‘peacekeepers’, NATO Forces, the Israeli military and Blackwater USA will put down their weapons for the day and reflect on the horrors that they are committing in the vague name of an international war on ‘terror’? Does it mean that they will all continue killing as a few peaceful marchers around the world proclaim in total sanity, that the insanity that prevails is making it hard for peace-loving humans to coexist with this madness? Or does it mean that the United Nations will clamp down on the killings perpetrated by the permanent members of its own security council?
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Oct 01 2007
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 Rand Clifford
10/1/07
Imagine…YOU are the legend, William Randolph Hearst. You unleash an old Mexican slang term—an alien, scary and macabre-sounding word, then hype it relentlessly in your national chain of newspapers…creating a monster to threaten civilization with plagues of rape and murder, mass insanity and boundless violence! Domestic terrorism…you must kill competition, protect pretty profits standing in your vast acreage of Mexican timber, pulp the trees into paper with the new environmentally-obscene sulfuric acid process patented by DuPont. His tentacles diddle the very heart of American politics….
Your campaign of sensational disinformation—featuring hysteria spiced with racism—works so amazingly well that generations later, history’s King of crops remains exiled from the most influential nation on Earth. One might say you “ran the table” with your invasion of “marijuana” and “Reefer Madness”. You certainly made out like a bandit from the prohibition of cannabis hemp…wealthy industrialists still make out like bandits from the prohibition. You and DuPont blindsided The People, but did you ever really imagine the majority of Americans over seventy years later, when hearing the term “hemp”, thinking typically and simply of rope, and dope?
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Sep 30 2007
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 Adam Engel
9/30/07
So outside can’t speed
anachronism past
heavier accretion
orders of magnitude
no style but in things
one is born with
no authority thrown
government steeple
shall not
perish for
lack of
consequence subtract
unpleasant minutia from
yesterday’s news print
foul weather no
compromise possible
desirable within
our means punishment
toward those who list
hive camera shot
do-bee/don’t-bee
weather fine vain
owning means
production distro
size medium
new improved
MORE STUFF
to come to
come
Adam Engel is a Contributing Editor for Cyrano’s Journal. Adam has published poetry, fiction, articles, and reviews in several web sites and magazines such as CounterPunch, Dissident Voice, Online Journal, Hudson Review, Accent, The Concord Journal, Beacon, Art World, Ward6 Review, CounterCurrents, LewRockwell.com, Literal Latte, Lummux, POESY, Chronogram, Press Action,and many others. Adam was a featured reader, along with Robert Creeley, Suzanne Pomme Vega, Robert Bly and others at the Woodstock Poetry Festival, August, 2001, where he read from his first book of poetry, “Oil & Water. He can be reached at , or at his partially completed (very partially) website at www.adamengel.com.
Sep 30 2007
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
For Labor had won nothing but a royal reaming from a scheming cabal of Vultures who were succeeding in picking the corpse of the American Working Class clean…..
By Vi Ransel
9/30/07
That craven caricature of freedom, the weekend,
along with the minumum wage
and their insidious partner, the 8-hour day,
which Labor pretends to believe it ripped
from the Vultures of Great Wealth’s
rigor mortis-like grip
and touts as a hard-won victory,
are simply Pyrrhic palliatives of symptoms,
not the cure of the underlying disease.
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Sep 28 2007
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
“One of those biases is Burman’s curious view that the US has only been empirically aggressive under Bush, even with maps of American interventions abroad showing interventions ‘to prevent the spread of communism.’”
Jim Miles Reviews “The State of the American Empire – How the USA Shapes the World” by Stephen Burman
9/28/07
On first perusal my perceptions told me this was my kind of book: lots of graphs, charts, and maps for my visual learning strengths, more akin to the National Geographic where I can glean most of the significant information from the photos and captions as much as I can from the text. But then as I delved into the text that introduces and accompanies the visuals, I realized that this was a bit more than just an atlas – it also made political statements through choice of words and topics.
Unfortunately, that position wavered in front of me, at one time apparently saying this, at another time apparently saying that. The State of the American Empire has a slippery and elusive perspective, but one that finally settles down into a relatively clear theme, perhaps the slippery metaphor being appropriate for American ‘idealism’ as it stands today. Ultimately, the underlying theme to the book, even though it brings forth some very strong criticisms of American actions, is that we, the royal ‘we’, the global ‘we’, need the empire for stability that will bring about the security we need for our energy demands, for our currency markets, for our trade relations.
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