Snooping Around NYC with John Sloan

As published at SubStack, 4/17/24:

[Vung Tau, 4/16/24]

For two days, I’ve been thinking about John Sloan and Grant Wood. Each attempt to start a new article had to be aborted, however. On top of my exhaustion, I had also been subjected to an elaborate sabotage, in the form of dancing women. Living just half a block from Triangle Park, I must walk by there at least twice daily. Nothing is more disorienting than these women dancing, and they’re always dancing. Since many are middle-aged, they can’t possibly wiggle their asses for even 15 minutes, so as soon as I’m out of sight, they collapse. I’m certain there’s a squad garrisoned there overnight, just in case I walk by at, say, 3AM.

Conditions are never perfect. Having mentioned Lafadio Hearn, I thought of the artist as ethnographer, of how much of society, of other people’s lives, he can capture. To do this, he must not only observe those close to him, but goes where he doesn’t belong. The more narcissistic, the less qualified he’s for this task.

At the Philadelphia Art Museum, there’s a smallish canvas by Sloan, Three AM, that’s quietly fascinating, though not particularly well executed. Its very crudeness suggests a sketch, done in haste or by stealth, and that’s its genius. One fully dressed woman is at a table, drinking coffee or tea. Another is in a nightdress, smoking while cooking. One shoulder and much of her bosom are bare, for she’s in a private space, which makes the painter, and us, voyeurs. The title is crucial. What are they doing up at 3AM, eating and smoking?

On 4/28/1909, John Sloan wrote in his journal, “A good day’s work, painting on the subject that has been stewing in my mind for some weeks. I have been watching a curious two room household, two women and, I think, two men, their day begins after midnight, they cook at 3 A.M.” The “I think” means he’s not even sure they lived with two men. Sloan paid that household enough attention to know their day began after midnight. Interesting, too, the fact that Sloane had to stew for weeks to produce something that ended up rejected by several juries for being too scandalous! Nearly all artistic exertion is wasted. Even the best paintings are locked away in private collections or destroyed by men who relish destruction.

There’s a Sloan etching, Man, Wife and Child, that’s also an insertion into private lives. By the beginning of the 20th century, realism made by hand was seriously challenged by photography. This 1905 print, though, was an imagined scene, so could not have been photographed. As with Three AM, Sloan wasn’t there. He knew this family well enough to construct this image of a man and woman dancing rather aggressively, just like lovemaking, with their young daughter looking on. Each detail, spoon in cup, half open middle drawer, pitcher in basin or pant suspenders dangling, had to be imagined.

Born in tiny Lock Haven, PA, Sloan lived in Philadelphia from age 6 to 33, then moved to New York City, where he matured as an artist. Like so many others, Sloan was exhilarated by the world’s most magnificent human zoo. To quote just two lines from Blaise Cendrar’s “Easter in New York” of 1912:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

La rue est dans la nuit comme une déchirure,
Pleine d’or et de sang, de feu et d’épluchures.

[The street at night like an open wound, 
Stuffed with gold and blood, flames and trash.]

In 1935, Grant Wood would write “Revolt Against the City,” to make a strong case that one needs not leave Bumfuck to make art, but Sloan was also a regionalist, of New York City and, to a lesser extent, Santa Fe. If anything, Sloan was more grounded than Wood!

NYC allowed Sloan to peer into many windows, as illustrated by his Night Windows of 1910. Barely visible is a balding man on the verge of falling off a roof. It’s well worth it to catch glimpses of a half naked woman. Sloan’s teacher, Robert Henri, said something about the nude as the most beautiful form. With his porn addiction, the 21st century man fully agrees as he wipes his furry hand. As for oil paintings, you’ve got to be kidding! Even life in the flesh can’t beat what’s found online.

Once, any man could delight in festering and festive streets, such as I have daily in Southeast Asia. The New York as depicted in Sloan’s Hairdresser Window of 1907 is long gone. At Grand Central, a man has just been arrested for punching a nine-year-old girl in the face. Locked inside while staring at a screen, even those in NYC may not be aware of this incident. Who cares, really? On another day, someone is knifed, shot or pushed onto subway tracks, unprovoked. It’s safest and much more enjoyable to get off alone.

With tiny screens conforming to their wishes, many still insist there’s no social degradation, economic collapse or war ruining their pornography. It’s been forever since they’ve looked up or outside.

John Sloan, Three AM, 1909

John Sloan, Man, Woman and Child, 1905

John Sloan, Night Windows, 1910

John Sloan, Hairdresser Window, 1907

Bullshit as Religion

As published at SubStack, 4/23/23:

[Lankham Hotel in Pakse on 4/22/23]

Never home, I still must establish a routine, so wherever I go, the first order of business is to find a congenial place to write. At 5:24AM on 4/23/23, I’m sitting at a long table outside the Lankham Hotel. Dawn is just breaking. Noisily, cars, trucks and motorbikes zoom by.

Across the street, a woman is busy at the noodle with duck joint. I had my $1.74 bowl there yesterday. It won’t open until 7AM. Two doors away, an old woman should come out presently to sit on a chair next to her walker. Looking at traffic is her daily recreation. Though her world is tiny, there’s still plenty going on.

Travel bins would be a great idea, no? Again, send me all your savings for a fantastic return. Locked inside a container just outside his house even, a traveler can peer through slits to marvel at a new world. He’ll also be introduced, perhaps for the first time, to his interior monologue, and maybe even to God.

Denied a continual intercourse with the most ordinary, men lose their common sense or even mind, so it’s no surprise they understand next to nothing.

When I posted two photos of the Boston Marathon Bombing, I thought the bullshit was obvious, yet one reader commented, “The guy in the wheelchair looks like he's gone into shock already. Is that his femoral artery the guy in the cowboy hat has in his hand?”

With two legs just blown off, he should have two femoral arteries gushing blood, but there’s no evidence of that. There’s no blood on his clothing or the ground.

As for the man with his pants shredded but not bleeding, Benedict Tiberius Cato explains that “the type of bomb used there could easily have had that effect of shredding cloth and not flesh.” A most humane bomb, then, a cosmetic bomb.

I never suggested his legs should be as shredded as his trousers. I said, “Whatever cut through his pants stopped at his flesh.”

As for the audio of Betty Ong, Benedict Tiberius Cato and one other say she’s trained to remain calm even as passengers were being stabbed, and people were rushing towards her, “I’m sitting in the back. Somebody’s coming back from business. If you can hold on for one second, they’re coming back.”

There were 92 people on American Airlines Flight 11. Subtracting the “terrorists” and crew, 76 were just ordinary passengers. If anyone was being stabbed at the front, you can bet dozens would be fleeing from such bloody horror, towards relative safety at the back, but we hear no such commotion during the four-minute audio.

People will believe what they want to believe, however.

For pointing out bullshit in an exasperated tone, I must have had someone piss in my food or bed, Benedict Tiberius Cato suggests, but it’s hard to not be vexed at such infinite idiocy.

Granted, we’re bombarded nonstop by propaganda. On 7/29/19, the New York Times had an article exposing Trump’s bullshit about 9/11, so it clarified he was not at Ground Zero, didn’t see anyone jump from the Twin Towers, didn’t supply +100 workers to help with the reconstruction and didn’t follow through on his $10,000 pledge to Twin Towers Fund. It also mocked his false claim that, with the Twin Towers gone, Trump’s 40 Wall Street would be tallest in Lower Manhattan.

What the New York Times didn’t bring up was what Trump got right on 9/11, and, this is most important, Trump never made these points again. As I’ve said all along, Trump is not trying to subvert anything. A most useful tool for the establishment, Trump’s is neck deep in The Swamp.

Well before Trump was elected, I wrote on 6/12/16, “A Trump presidency will temporarily appease restless, lower class whites, while serving as a magnet for liberal anger. This will buy our ruling class time as they continue to wage war abroad while impoverishing Americans back home. Like Obama, Trump won’t fulfill any of his election promises, and this, too, will be blamed on bipartisan politics.”

On 9/11/01, though, Trump the non politician talked straight, in this call to WWOR-TV. Regarding the collapse of the Twin Towers, Trump the builder explained:

Well, it wasn't an architectural defect, the World Trade Center was always known as a very, very strong building. Don't forget that took a big bomb in the basement. Now the basement is the most vulnerable place because it's your foundation and it withstood that. And I got to see that area about three or four days after it took place because one of my structural engineers actually took me for a tour because he did the building and I said I can't believe it.

The building was standing solid and half of the columns were blown out. I mean so this was an unbelievably powerful building. If you don't think about structure it was one of the first buildings that was built from the outside the steel. The reason the World Trade Center had such narrow windows is that in between all the windows you had the steel in the outside and the steel on the outside of the building.

That's why when I first look at you at big heavy, I-beams. When I first look at it I couldn't believe it because there was a hole in the steel and this is steel that was... you remember the width of the windows of the World Trade Center, folks, I think you know if you're ever up there they were quite narrow and in between was just heavy steel. I said how a plane could even a plane even a 767 or a 747 or whatever it might have been.

How could it possibly go through with this deal? I happen to think that they had not only a plane but they had bombs that exploded almost simultaneously because I just can't imagine anything being able to go through that wall. Most buildings are built with the steel is on the inside around the elevator shaft. This one was built from the outside which is the strongest structure you can have. And it was almost just like a can of soup.

I just think that it was a plane with more than just fuel. I think obviously they were very big planes going very rapidly because I was also watching where the plane seemed to be not only going fast it seemed to be coming down into the building so it was getting the speed from going downhill so to speak. It just seemed to me that to do that kind of destruction is even more than a big plane because you're talking about taking out steel. The heaviest caliber steel that was used in the building and these buildings were rock solid.

If the establishment wanted to expose Trump as a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, they could have easily quoted the above, but the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Fox, Amy Goodman, Tucker Carson and the rest never did, and they won’t, because even idiots can see Trump, in this instance, makes perfect sense.

Actually, I take that back. Bullshit faithfuls don’t see anything. They’re braindead.

It’s 7:05 and I haven’t even had a cup of coffee. Since Boulange is reopened, I will stroll down there for a real baguette with real brie and real butter. Real humans need real food, not the most appalling bullshit the world has ever seen.

[Chicago, 4/11/12]

[Cumberland, Maryland on 3/29/12]

[Rudy Dent in Detroit on 2/18/17. Do read my interview with Mr. Dent]

Who Should Be Shot?

As published at Unz Review, Smirking Chimp, OpEd News, TruthSeeker and LewRockwell, 7/12/20:







In a recent article, “Smashing Culture,” I briefly described a scene in Philadelphia from 30+ years ago. Sitting in McGlinchey’s, I was drinking Rolling Rock.

This trivia triggered a most curious yet telling response from a commenter, “Rolling Rock? – really? Were you listening to the Eagles too? Nice street cred attempt, but it’s either ‘While knocking back a few beers’ or ‘While drinking a Guinness’ – Rolling Rock just makes you sound like, well, another pretentious art fag.”

It never occurred to him I was simply telling the truth. To establish “street cred,” I should have come up with something way cooler. It’s all about one’s image, you see.

With social media, everyone is a microscopic celebrity, the undisputed global star on his own cellphone, so online preening has become a universal obsession. Compulsively, they make duck faces while quack quacking bon, not really, mots.

Enjoying such a fabulous virtual life, they miss out on a real one, however, so “street cred” must be established, to mask the fact that they’re never on the streets, even when they’re on the streets.

Occupy Wall Street erupted in New York on September 17th, 2011. Four days later, I took a Chinatown bus from Philly to see what’s going on, and for the duration of this movement, I kept a pretty close eye on it. Besides the Occupy camps in Manhattan and Philly, I also visited those in Harrisburg, Trenton, Atlantic City, Washington, Raleigh, Savannah and Orlando.

Living in tents like urban savages, these protesters suddenly had a tactile and smelly existence inside a community, so despite the cold, rain and absence of indoor plumbing, they were soothed. Night after night, there were no brick walls between their bodies.

Their movement fizzled out, however, because it degenerated into an endless display of narcissistic posturing, with everyone making self-important speeches about his or her pet cause, to an audience of fifty, tops, which is not how a revolution is ever made.

Had Samuel Adams showed up, he would have had to squeeze his truncated speech in between, say, an animal right manifesto and a black reparation sermon.

Still, it was fun to fancy yourself a Mao, Che or Comandante Zero, even if your thundering cosplay was immediately canceled by the next, completely unrelated yet equally forgettable, performance.

Sitting on a striped blanket, a glum, balding guy went on a hunger strike to protest “UNEMPLOYMENT, POVERTY AND CORPORATE GREED.” Ignored by all, he disappeared after a few days, apparently to stuff his face greedily.

Conceived as not just an indictment but siege of Wall Street, Occupy became a sad, stinking and incoherent skit that increasingly annoyed nearly everyone who had to work, do business or transit around their messy camps.

Though government infiltrators undoubtedly helped to fragment Occupy, most protesters gleefully went along with their own gelding, because, to them, it was never about rallying the 99% towards common goals, as they vaguely claimed, but airing minority grievances. Most importantly, they could look cool doing it.

With visual evidence uploaded onto FaceBook, Tumblr and Instagram, etc., soy boys from strip malled subdivisions could accrue street cred.

Since “Occupy Everything, Demand Nothing” became Occupy’s rallying cry, it achieved literally nothing, predictably. A month after all tents were cleared from Zuccotti Park, Time Magazine anointed “The Protester” as Person Of The Year, so for being symbolically homeless for two months, the sans cazzo got a participation lollipop from the bossman.

Since then, unscathed and smirking Wall Street has only amped up its state-of-the-art shell games, punctuated by bailouts. What’s left of the country’s wealth keeps flowing to the top.

Although Occupy Wall Street exposed widespread discontent, it was deftly tamed by the state, without addressing any of the issues raised. Worsened economic malaise is papered over with fake news and statistics. Unable to afford even an efficiency, the young and not so young resignedly or bitterly move back home. I’m sure you know a few.

Beneath each basement, there’s another, even darker and danker, Americans kept discovering, so they just had to suck it up and simmer on, when not overdosing on opioids. It’s the new normal.

Occupy Wall Street protesters were mostly under-35-year-old whites, with at least some college education. Now, the same demographic is back on the streets, but instead of chanting for economic justice and representing, at least in theory, the 99%, they’re fighting Fascism and racism. With their inclusive definitions of such sins, however, they’re warring against most of the country.

It’s never been easier to be tagged as a Fascist. If you don’t think or feel correctly on all woke issues, you’re a Fascist, and of course, you’re a Fascist to the degree that you’re against antifa.

When it comes to sex, binarism is evil, for there’s no male or female, just endlessly calibrated genital transmogrification, if only in your gender fluid, intersexual mind, but with politics, binary thinking is uber kosher. If you’re not up-to-date woke, you’re a Fascist.

On August 14th, 2018, CNN reeducated us, “There is no national antifa group. It is mostly made up of people who are far left of center, who make it their mission to battle Fascists, racists and alt right extremists.” It’s a grassroot, homegrown resistance to hate, that’s all. “Behind the masks are people from all walks of life, artist, mom, ordinary American, as well as anarchist.” Four most gentle faces were shown.

On June 16th, 2020, CNN reemphasized that antifa was a belief system that unified all anti-Fascists, whatever their color, age or background, so how could you be against it, unless you’re a Fascist?! A burly, genial black man explained, “It basically means that you are against Fascism. If you are against Fascism, then you are antifa.”

In a BLACK LIVES MATTER muscle-T, a white wuss added, “Antifa is not a group. It’s not like everybody sits in, like, some basement, talking about how to overthrow the Fascist regime. I walked around picking up trash yesterday, behind the protesters. That’s what antifa looks like.”

Burly black guy, “White people have to be involved in fighting racism, in fighting white supremacy […] But if you are a white ally, remember that you still have to follow the lead of people of color.”

The New York Times and Washington Post have also written sympathetically about antifa. When the corporate media give you a positive spin, it must mean you’re serving the establishment. Mussolini had his Blackshirts, Hitler his Brownshirts and Mao his Red Guards. America’s rulers have antifa.

Far from threatening the 1%, antifa sows dissension among the 99%. Ignoring Wall Street, antifa trashes one Main Street after another.

Zealously branding its enemies as racist or Fascist, antifa generates more racism and Fascism.

Slammed by the economic crisis of 2008, Americans started to look more closely at Wall Street, Goldman Sachs and the Federal Reserve, etc., and they were enlightened by people like Ron Paul and Matt Taibbi.

In Rolling Stone, Taibbi wrote, “The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

Banksters were scrutinized with increasing intensity. It was in this climate that Occupy Wall Street was born.

Not quite nine years later, almost no one is talking about banksters, incredibly, although the country has been plunged into a much worse economic hell, with millions suddenly laid off, and millions of mom and pops permanently ruined. Thanks to another monster bailout, only Wall Street is doing well.

Broke and enraged, mobs swarm American streets, but instead of targeting those who are imploding their society, they pull down statues, break windows, deface walls, loot stores and attack cops or each other.

When your tyrants can’t even be identified, much less found, no coup, uprising or revolution is possible, and it’s pointless to assassinate an American president, since he is but a puppet, so who should be shot?

The month I was born, two presidents were killed. Though Ngo Dinh Diem has often been caricatured as an American puppet, he obviously broke his strings, or he wouldn’t have been shot. Kennedy, too, went off script. His death was a warning. It works.

American elections are cathartic farces. Drawn out and elaborately staged, they’re designed to give false hopes and stoke emotions. With the national mood already so volatile and foul, however, this year’s balloting promises to be a horror show. Unable to aim at their oppressors, Americans will be reduced to shooting each other.






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Pornographic Democracy

As published at Unz Review, Smirking Chimp and TruthSeeker, 7/24/19:





To represent anything is to reduce and deform it, obviously, for even Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is but a stick figure compared to the witty, voluptuous and redolent broad, whose repartees, smiles, jokes and burps, from moment to moment, can only increase her charm and terror, and that’s why man never allowed himself to be engulfed by any medium, be it oil painting, music or literature. After the most satisfying page, he still looked up and walked outside. Traveling vast distances, Chekov discovered heaven in Ceylon and hell in Sakhalin, and Flaubert was only being reductive when he goofed, “The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.” He, too, had plenty of lust for the actual.

Well, a perpetual orgy is certainly here, but it has nothing to do with literature, or even literacy, and it’s not voluntary. If pornography can be understood as a lurid usurpation of the real, then we’re watching an endless pornographic movie. Most democratically, we’re all trapped in this foul theater. An orgy of the virtual has taken over every aspect of our lives.

Pornography multiplies frequency, duration, angles, positions and sexual partners, an endless and eternal sexual buffet, except that none of it is really happening. Similarly, American democracy gives the appearance of boundless participation by all citizens, for they can’t just vote in caucuses and elections, but cheer at conventions, march in protest, write letters to newspapers, comment on the internet and follow, blow by blow, the serial mud wrestling between opposing politicians. Pissed, they can freely curse Bush, Obama or Trump without fearing a midnight knock on the door. Alas, none of their “political activities” actually matters, for Americans don’t influence their government’s policies, much less decide them. It’s all an elaborate spectacle to make each chump think he’s somehow a player, in on the action, when he’s actually all alone, in the dark, to beat his own meat, yet again.

He has railroaded, premasticated opinions on everything, but without the means to act on any of them. Only his impotence is real.

It’s all good. Groomed by the culture, his preteen daughter fancies herself a pornographic starlet. His reeducated son is convinced his assigned manhood is beyond toxic, and must be chopped off at the first opportunity. His transitioning wife can’t wait to fuck him up the ass.

Castrated, he may still “rebel” in sanctioned ways, and none does this more aggressively than the theatrically strident “radical,” who’s most conformist, paradoxically, although there’s a long history of this.

With his red flag, black uniform and covered face, this specimen is a cookie cutter puppet that’s jerked by a totalitarian master, the very state he thinks he’s resisting. Obediently correct, the American radical divides and attacks the masses. Happily domineered, he demands that everyone else becomes as shackled as he is, and since this will never happen, he’s eternally enraged.

His zealotry is not just abject, but dangerous, for he makes an ideal foot soldier for state or deep state-sponsored street violence, against those who should be his allies. Notice how the solidarity of the 99% is no longer evoked by anybody.

The Occupy movement targeted Wall Street, and not the White House, Capitol Hill or Pentagon, so they fingered who really run this country, but they made several crucial mistakes, and the worst was to advertise their intention way ahead of time through social media. That’s why hundreds of cops were there to block off Wall Street, forcing protestors to move to Zuccotti Park, and this became the model for the rest of the country. Occupy Wall Street became a series of temporary tent cities.

I visited Zuccotti Park repeatedly and eight other Occupy camps. In Raleigh, I found them squatting on an empty lot off downtown, with the protesting that day a karaoke session at a nearby bar. “We’ll sing John Lennon’s "Imagine," you know, songs like that,” a middle-aged soccer mom explained. In New York, there was a chirpy ditz with a sign, “REVOLUTION IS FUN.” Worse, there was even “LIBERATE IRAN,” but there was advocacy for every cause under the sun, animal rights, free Falun Gong, on and on. A pudgy, dazed looking dude tried to enlist people into his “FART SMELLER MOVEMENT.” A young woman stripped down to her panties.

Government agents defused the threat by diffusing its message, but the state got plenty of help from clueless, narcissistic clowns who just had to raise their special voice, until hardly anyone knew what the mess was about, and it was a stinking mess. Occupy Philly became an open air toilet around City Hall. “DEMAND NOTHING! OCCUPY EVERYTHING!”

Deploying all sorts of violence, they prop up Gandhi and Martin Luther King, after they’ve shot him in the head, and even Obama preached nonviolent resistance between orders of drone strikes. America’s suavest prez ever even joked about it, “The Jonas Brothers are here; they’re out there somewhere. Sasha and Malia are huge fans. But boys, don’t get any ideas. I have two words for you, ‘predator drones.’ You will never see it coming.”

They sure will, though. America’s 17 intelligence agencies will make sure no serious domestic rebellion can develop, and no coup d’état hatched, but even if there’s a rogue pilot, say, one who’s not afraid to die to make a statement, what should he bomb? Certainly not the Pentagon, for only the Pentagon or its master can send a missile through its wall.

Even columns of tanks converging on the White House won’t change anything.

Any revolution or coup will have to contend with 1.3 million active soldiers, not to mention how many robots and drones? Realizing its mercenaries aren’t all that, the state is increasingly relying on fearless, sleepless machines, and it’s demoralizing to realize the best you can do is break their expensive toys, while they can mangle or kill you while inflicting much pain, or force you to witness your screaming comrade’s last moment. Also, shot drones don’t leave behind the devastatingly bereaved. It takes an army to fight one, and most Americans can’t even organize a bowling team, remember. With guerrilla actions, they can certainly carve out liberated zones, however, so there’s your glimmer of hope.

Occupy was no revolution, but its initial aim of disrupting a key operation of the state was the right idea, for you must hurt your enemy, if only for a day. Imagine Wall Street or nearby Goldman Sachs in flames! This goal was akin to puncturing a pipeline, blowing up an important bridge or assassinating a crucial figure. In America, however, there’s no visible target who’s actually worth killing, for none is indispensable to the state’s criminal function. Those out in the open are just actors. In laying out a much ballyhooed puppet’s mangled cadaver, all you’ll achieve is a symbolic goal, but perhaps it’s worth it after all, for all traitors must pay, and it may even inspire a real revolt.

Revolution sounds cool because it implies a terrible awakening of the masses, to impose their will, exact justice and start a new paradigm, but most revolutions are fake, with many orchestrated by another elite or triggered by a foreign power. Moreover, Americans are too divided and atomized to rebel as a people, so the best you can hope for is to regain independence, freedom and sanity for your state, region or maybe just town.

The first step is to stop thinking of yourself as an American, for there’s no America left to save, much less “make great again,” and there are no Americans left either, for if anybody can be a defacto American just by showing up, then the concept is meaningless. That’s like me landing in Tel Aviv tomorrow and declaring I’m a Jew.

Your average American hardly has a hometown, just a homepage, and his neighbors are the anonymous, pseudonymous, hasbarists and trolls he compulsively chats with. If you don’t even belong to your neighborhood, how are you the citizen of any nation?

To reclaim your street, you must regain your mind, but the porn has gotten so damn good, why would anyone want to leave PornHub, Chaturbate or Illusory Participation, USA?

I was born in 1963, a year of many coup d’états, and you may remember the one in South Vietnam, Guatemala, Ecuador, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Benin, Togo, Iraq or Syria, which actually witnessed two. The most significant happened right in the US of A, however, and like most, it was certainly an inside job.

Like Ngo Dinh Diem, John F. Kennedy wasn’t a good enough puppet, so he had to be expertly brained. Even if Lyndon Johnson wasn’t in on the plot, he served them faithfully afterwards, as has every American president since. They’ve all gotten the message. Similarly, it only takes one academic to be defenestrated from the ivory tower for the rest to toe the line. Americans live in a cowed country. Home of the brave my ass!

Protesting their government, thousands of Americans became symbolically homeless, but their society has only sunk further, with destitution, despair and anger rapidly increasing. As the rank of those who must sleep and defecate outside constantly swells, Washington still doesn’t give a shit, but why should it? They’re getting theirs.

Inside the Beltway may be a swamp, but it’s a gilded one, designed for the most arrogant and smug. Outside, the quicksand ocean keeps on devouring.

Game over, I heave these toss away lines during garbage time, but enough of this, for I must return to my daily tons of garbage. The future is indeed plastic. From the end of the world, I watch various endings.

.

[from 10/6/11, but never posted]



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Back to the USA

As published at OpEd News, Smirking Chimp, Unz Review, Intrepid Report and TruthSeeker, 11/4/17:






To go home, I had to take a taxi to Saigon’s airport, fly to Hanoi, then on to Hong Kong, where during a 5 ½ hour layover I’d take a train to Central to hang out a bit, then back to the airport to fly to JFK, then hop on two trains just to get to Manhattan, then two more to reach Philly’s 30th Street Station, from where I could, finally, take two subways to my South Philadelphia neighborhood. With so many legs to a trip, a thousand things could go wrong.

Riding through Saigon at 3:30AM, I noticed a bunch of restaurants were already open, with people sitting at sidewalk tables, eating noodles or drinking coffee. Tired, I said nothing to the driver. No jokes about a national homosexual policy, strictly enforced for half a century, to reverse the runaway population growth.

Before taking off from Saigon, the Vietnam Airlines stewardess warned us that to open any aircraft door during flight would result in a $880 fine.

A sign at Hanoi’s airport, “NO MOTORBIKES, BICYCLES OR PRIMITIVE MEANS.” During a month of hectic travel through urban and rural Vietnam, I saw just one ox-drawn cart and maybe a dozen pedicabs. SUV sales are surging, however, and there’s also a growing market for Harley Davidsons. They cost $16,000 to $52,000, twice as in the US. In Phan Thiet, I spotted a US Army jeep, meticulously restored, parked outside the ultra-trendy Ocean Coffee.

The express train from the airport to Central Hong Kong runs every 10 minutes from 5:54AM to 12:48AM, and takes but 24 minutes to cover 23 miles. Nearly every world-class city has a direct train to connect its international airport to downtown, but Los Angeles, New York and Washington DC simply don’t, and Americans just don’t give a flying, exploding cockpit! We’re number one!

Since the Washington Metro opened in 1976, politicians have talked about extending it to Dulles. Forty-one years later, it has crept within seven miles of the badly designed, unfriendly and decrepit airport, opened in 1962. It may even get there before the much welcome controlled demolition. In 2014, news.com.au asked of Dulles, “Is this the world’s worst airport?”

Year after year, East Asian top airports rank as the planet’s best, with Seoul’s, Singapore’s, Tokyo’s and Hong Kong’s nearly always in the top five. In Europe, London’s, Amsterdam’s, Frankfurt’s and Zurich’s are also first-rate.

With twice the population density of Saigon’s, Hong Kong’s streets are nowhere nearly as clogged, thanks to its excellent subway system and a vast fleet of private buses. Like Singapore, Hong Kong is also a hundred times cleaner and more orderly than my native city. Most impressively, Hong Kong’s murder rate per 100,000 people was only 0.4 for 2016. With 7.347 million people, it had 28 murders. By contrast, Philadelphia tallied 278 homicides for a population of 1.568 million.

Year after year, American blacks commit murders at roughly seven times the rate of whites, a fact that’s blamed by many on socioeconomic factors, historical resentment and/or ongoing racism, while others attribute it to a low IQ, innate lack of impulse control and/or propensity for violence. A century from now, will blacks still be an underclass in any multicultural societies still existing? How about in five hundred years?

Without a significant black population, East Asian societies don’t have to deal with this debate or problem. I’ve wandered unfamiliar Saigon, Hanoi and Singapore streets in the middle of the night without any fear of being shot or stabbed, and I’ve done the same in many European cities, including Istanbul and war-time Kiev.

In recent years, Africans have started to emigrate to Vietnam, and in Saigon’s Gò Vấp District and on Phạm Ngũ Lão Street, there are even black male prostitutes, a phenomenon that’s particularly pleasing to certain middle-aged Vietnamese women. The Africans’ prices are high for local standards, around $25 for a quickie, $50 for an overnight. A recent police raid brought in 50 Africans for questioning.

Wandering around Hong Kong’s Central, I spotted a graffiti, “DESTROY RACISM.” Nearby, there’s a pretty, young, blonde model on an ad for a high-end real estate firm, Man Hing Hong. A few steps away was another blonde, this one merely a teenager, on an ad for an ordinary hair salon, mina dev’ wil. Noticing racial differences means having racial preferences. We will never be color-blind.

As an adult, I’ve had two 2-year stints away from the US. Living in Saigon from 1999-2001, I missed Mexican food, Seahawks games on TV and some jazz, so I asked a friend, traveling to Saigon with the Philadelphia Orchestra, to bring me Django Reinhardt, and Lester Young accompanying Billie Holliday. Returning to the San Francisco Bay Area, I asked my brother to drive me straight to a Mexican joint. Now, there are good Mexican restaurants in Vietnam, and you can listen to anything on YouTube.

Living in Italy from 2002-2004, I missed decent fried chicken, tolerable Chinese food, bullshitting in bars and watching the Seahawks on TV. The Italian ways were so wonderful, the people so hospitable and sweet, I had several nightmares in which I suddenly found myself back in Philly. Opening my eyes, I discovered, with tremendous relief, that I was still in Italy.

Flying into Dulles, I noticed how wide the freeway medians were. So much space wasted, I thought. The currency exchange girl gave me several hundred dollars too much. Catching her mistake, I returned the cash. “Whoa!” She laughed.

During my month in Vietnam, I checked Seahawks games in progress, answered a few emails from Philly buddies and knew I would be back to eating canned chili, baked beans and clam chowder soon enough.

The flight from Hong Kong to JFK took 15 hours 45 minutes. Most of the passengers were Chinese-Americans, a fact I discovered when all these Cantonese speaking folks took out their blue passports at immigration. On the plane, the stewardess kept speaking Cantonese to me, even though I had answered her in English the last time around. Vietnam’s eternal fear is to be blended into China. Two seats away from me was a young man in a yarmulke. Since he had his earphones on during each waking moment, we never chattered.

Recently in Spain, I met a Norwegian who swore he would never return to the US, “The immigration at JFK was so long, and the agents so unfriendly! After such a long flight, we had to stand in line forever, and there were children and old people. We were all trapped!”

Without a direct train to Manhattan, I took the AirTrain to Howard Beach, then waited at least 20 minutes in the cold for the sluggish A Train. Descending the stairs, I passed a portly black man in a burgundy suit. Staring hard at me, he made a sibilant fart with his mouth. “How are you doing, man?” I answered.

“Get on the A Train,” Ella sang. “Soon, you’ll be on Sugar Hill in Harlem!” Yeah, right. All around me were exhausted passengers with their luggage. After flying for countless eons from Dar es Salaam, Ulaanbaatar or wherever, they stood, shivering.

Unique in the world, the entire New York subway system runs 24/7 all year long, so at night, its stations and trains shelter hundreds of homeless. Well bundled and surrounded by bags, they slump on seats. The average rent for a New York one-bedroom is $2,895. If you think that’s astronomical, it’s $3,500 for San Francisco, thanks to a massive influx of Chinese money. Keep those borders open! No human being is illegal!

Since 9/11, American airports, train stations, bus terminals, buses and subway cars have been plastered with signs advising a cowed populace to report on their fellow citizens. In Cambridge, MA, I saw a 10-foot-tall backpack with this tag, “IT’S NEVER THIS OBVIOUS. Suspicious, unattended items don’t always stand out like this.” A new sign in NYC shows a well-armed, battle ready cop next to an ordinary schmuck, “Officer Greg Elkin is well equipped to keep our region safe. And so is Jason.” Arrows point to Jason’s eyes, ears and cell phone. “Your eyes and ears are some of our most important safety tools. So if you see, hear, or notice something suspicious, speak up.”

It was past 1AM when I finally arrived at Penn Station. Inside were several homeless people who slept while standing up. Had they sat or lay down, they would have been kicked out. I shoved $20 into a ticket machine, but nothing happened, and there was no one at the information desk to complain to. Like a Diebold voting machine, it did what it wanted and could not be held accountable. I had no choice but to try again with plastic and, miracle of miracles, it granted me a passage home.

An electronic ad showed a middle-aged woman sitting on stage, “New 3D holographic technology preserves Holocaust survivor stories in Illinois museum.” Then appeared a South Asian man at a podium, “Google CEO Sundar Pichai makes fixing hamburger emoji to have cheese on top a ‘priority.’” Just about everything an American hears, sees or notices is bullshit or propaganda.

With time to kill, I wandered outside to find a three-story-tall electronic ad for Justice League, a movie featuring a team of American super heroes, “NO ONE CAN SAVE THE WORLD ALONE.” Across the street was a young woman sleeping inside a Bank of America ATM terminal. Seeing several food trucks selling Middle Eastern food, I bought a plate of rice with lamb for only $7. Thank God for Muslims, I thought as I took my food inside to chow down.

Passing a convenience store run by Indians, I noticed the New York Times had a new, unintentionally ironic slogan, “Truth. It’s more important now than ever.” Hellish Rihanna was on the cover of Elle. In Vietnam, I had shown her extremely sadistic “Bitch Better Have My Money” video to a friend. Aghast, he asked, “Why do Americans put up with this?!”

The train ride from Trenton to Philly was so bumpy, I could have sworn I was on an ox cart, but as the familiar skyline came into view in the pale, morning sunlight, I happily reflected that I was only hours away from my Friendly Lounge booze mates. I was home.






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[Penn Station]



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[Penn Station]



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Spooky Sprinkles, Spider, Ghoulish Glazed, Boston Scream, Scary Strawberry, Wicked Chocolate and Purple Potion.



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[Penn Station]



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[Penn Station]



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In Penn Station, three homeless slept while standing. They couldn't sit or lie down or they would be kicked out.



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[inside a Bank of America ATM terminal]



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[entrance to Penn Station]



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Since there's no direct train from JFK to Manhattan, you have to take the AirTrain to Howard Beach or Jamaica Station, where you can catch a very slow train into the city. Above are passengers waiting at least 20 minutes in the cold at Howard Beach Station for the A Train.



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