March 24, 2008

RETURN TO SLAVERY by Johnny Argent

Forward, into the Past
I was thinking about Obama's preacher's rant, and something stood out. It was his mention of how the bogus, useless "Drug War" rolls on while more prisons are built and more Black men are locked up in Hell holes that the people who run things increasingly want to privatize.
When I think about the horror of the inner cities and the millions of people that American Capitalism has failed and the huge numbers of our citizens that we incarcerate, an idea occurs to me that seems less strange the more I think about it. With the economy going South and looking like it could stay down there for who-knows-how-long, I wonder what percentage of prisoners might prefer a return to Slavery with just a few alterations. I'm not trying to be funny or ridiculous.
Let's take a look at what might actually be a few pluses for all involved. 1). In spite of some hard physical labor (which is often done now, by Mexican children in more than a few cases), I'd bet that there are more than a few men who would suffer that in exchange for being out of a concrete cage and into the outdoors. When you look at prisoners, en masse, "pumping iron" for all they're worth in an attempt to be better-equipped to deal with vicious physical attacks that are always a possibility, does picking cotton or anything else seem so incredibly back-breaking or terrifying? In terms of public safety I don't know that you'd have a tougher time with security out in rural settings if you used all the help that today's technology can provide (electric fence, helicopter surveillance, etc.).
It seems like a person could retrieve some of their dignity, manhood, whatever, more easily in an environment of hard but productive work than they can in the horrible context of prison. And it's not entirely unprecedented; we all know about the common practice of prisoners making license plates and doing other tasks and being paid pennies for their work, literally.
I'm sure as hell not here to romanticize Slavery but even slaves had it better in some ways than inhabitants of modern prisons. They had some access to the opposite sex, for example. With all due respect to Gay people in what passes for civilized society, the sexual brutality that results when men are forced into crowded conditions with no outlet for those impulses and often not even enough privacy to relieve themselves is de-humanizing. Then there's the relentless torture of being deprived of any contact with the Natural world. Slaves at least could feel the sun on their faces and the earth under their feet. Even under the harshest conditions there was a little time for rest and even things like practicing folk arts like carving and sketching and playing music. The Blues, which is at the heart of so much of our musical heritage came from what were called "Field hollers."
I wouldn't advocate forcing anyone to work in the fields or shovel dirt all day. But, it seems like it would be less miserable to feel like you're part of a system that's bringing food to peoples' tables or holding floowaters back or improving roads or whatever than it is to sit in a cell surrounded by frustrated, angry potential victimizers.
Let's look at the "moral" aspect. Abraham Lincoln said that he would have freed all of the slaves or none of the slaves if that's what it took to preserve the Union. And, if you take a look at it, almost every culture has something that amounts to a Servant Class; more recently, the double-talkers in this country told us that we'd have to get used to being a "Service Economy" once they saw to it that the unionized manufacturing jobs fled the country. Karl Marx used the term "wage slaves" to describe the people in a Capitalist economy who make just enough to make sure they can return to work the next day/week, etc. We've all heard the terms "paycheck-to-paycheck, up to our eyeballs in debt, working like a dog and spinning our wheels". Sure, the average worker in America has it vastly better, materially, than what anyone would think of as a slave's standard of living, but when your livelihood and home are constantly at risk, aren't lots of us in a prison of sorts?
They say that so many people (mostly Republicans) see "Illegal Immigration" as the prime issue in the next election. I guess you can make the connection there with what I'm saying. Who needs illegal immigrants when you have slaves? And, do I even have to say how happy it woud make American corporations, Agribusiness-related and otherwise to have a source of not cheap but FREE Labor? Let's face it: if you've ever bought anything at WalMart you have things in your home that were produced by what almost anyone would consider slave labor.
Finally, we all know that there have been chain gangs out on the roads and in the fields for centuries. If we brought an ounce of compassion to the process re-instituting Slavery might be an answer to more than one of our problems. My real motivation here, though, is to shock everyone just a little into looking at how far we've fallen when it comes to how we treat our fellow human beings, even as we continue to leap ahead technologically.
it's something to think about.

Posted at 7:12 PM   -   Permalink

           

March 23, 2008

Johnny's Easter Wish

Well, it's that time of the Year when those of us who don't want to be tortured in Hell forever think about how much God loves us. You know, you REALLY have to like somebody a whole big bunch to prove it by letting a sadistic police state torture your only kid to death in public. What an imagination that God has, huh, Gang? That's WAY better than flowers and candy, although those chocolate bunnies always were the true meaning of Easter for me.

I wish I had a shekel for every ancient cult whose mythology involved a superhero who stood up to the bad guys, got killed and then came back to life. They were usually born of a virgin and they invariably went into a scary cave or tomb where shit was hitting big fans and then they came out victorious. Yay! I wonder if The Tunnel of Love was big even back in the earliest Neolithic amusement parks.

I don't want to seem ungrateful for Jesus's huge sacrifice. I thank people like crazy just for getting me from the airport. However, and I hope this doesn't rile up any inbred, banjo-picking, Buybull-thumping, racist, misogynist, hooker-patronizing TV evangelists or their well-meaning lemming-like followers....BUT, what exactly was the huge sacrifice if JC got up 3 days later and got beamed up to Heaven? My dad suffered horribly from Cancer for months and months and then died and had to go into a hole in the ground and stay there. That was after a lifetime of busting his ass every day out in all kinds of weather so that my life could be better than his. He never thought of himself, he had one suit and he got buried in it. And he's still laying there and holding down the fort without bitching about it. And, get this: he never ONCE said to me, "Hey, I sacrificed, you OWE me....BIG TIME!"

Now, THAT'S how a REAL father showed love.

Happy Easter, Everybody.....you know the drill.

Posted at 10:05 AM   -   Permalink

           

March 8, 2008

JOHNNY SAYS:

(the following is the column of John Argent and it doesn't neccessarily reflect the views of the proprietor of this website).

HILARY & "THE MASTER STROKE"
by John Argent
They say that Hilary's brilliant ad (the scary 3 AM phone call with the sleeping children images) made the difference for her and swung enough voters away from Obama to stop his winning streak. Whatever works, I guess.

Remember how a couple of weeks back she sat on the stage with him and said that she was proud to be running against him and that however things turned out, we the people would be alright? That's a far cry from the ad I just mentioned which basically says that your kids lives are in danger if an untested rookie like Obama gets anywhere near the White House. So, she says, the most important issue is who has the most experience when it comes to protecting the country. See where this is going? If keeping us and our children safe is the central issue in this campaign (after all, who needs health insurance or jobs if you've just been beheaded by the Islamo-Fascist hordes waiting to spring out and get us the minute the super-experienced President stops killing or scaring them off sufficiently?)....then wouldn't the only choice by Hilary's reckoning be John McCain? He was learning to kill and scare evildoers when Hilary was in grade school.

There you have it: in one fell swoop, Hilary 1.) has shown Obama to be scary and unfit to be President because it's all about experience with scary people and he has less of that than her 2.) shown herself to be an opportunistic flip-flopper because ten days before that she publicly stated that we'd be just FINE with him as President if that's how the voting goes, and 3.) Basically validated John McCain's assertion that it's all about experience and he's got the most, there, by far.

Wow! You have to give it to the Republicans: who would have guessed that Hilary's slimeball Campaign honcho Mark Penn was working for Karl Rove? McCain can breathe easy and start "walking for President" now and just show Hilary's clips where she's calling Obama "fine" .....then, after two weeks of getting her ass kicked "explaining" how scary it would be for us and our children if that clueless neophyte got anywhere near the White House. Triple play Hilary: Obama BAD, Hilary Flip-Flopper on the most important issue, McCain, the best protector of the three by her reckoning.

Guess I'll be voting for Nader, now. He probably has a better chance than Obama OR Hilary now that she's poisoned the well by saying it IS all about being scared and having experience with scaring scary people. If there's one thing McCain's got the experience edge in it's scaring people worse than they scare us.

And the home............of the.............BRAVE (?)

Posted at 6:49 PM   -   Permalink

           

February 19, 2008

Johnny's take on the news:

I read the Business Section in the paper every morning (Yes, I'M the one) and that's where they hide the really terrifying, sensational, blockbuster news beneath dry headings beyond which they know most people won't read . A Hollywood star's drug overdose holds a lot more interest for the average person who still has beer and movie money than some "boring" crap about the impending collapse of the Dollar or the death of the Oceans. Big Media has us trained. Somebody has to do it...keep us distracted, that is.
I thought I'd drop a few words in here about how the Chinese are just about to start wiping their butts with dollars. That's all...just a few words. Money is not patriotic - Surprise! Oh, by the way, almost half the world is Chinese.
In the spirit of the ever-shrinking attention span, (anybody still with me?). I've crafted the following Economic-Political mini Lesson. It's in the form of a question:
"How long did we figure that less than 5% of the Earth's people could eat HALF the pie while EVERYBODY ELSE watched?"

Citizens of The World: Welcome to the future!

Posted at 11:57 AM   -   Permalink

           

February 13, 2008

johnny's valentine to american politics

I'm the least repulsed and offended by Obama, which is my version of a ringing endorsement. Nobody can pass through the near-endless, cutthroat Capitalist, Fascist Filtration System which is the American Presidential Reality Show and then seriously threaten the Status Quo that the country's proprietors keep firmly in place. Having said that, the prime consideration for me is: which candidate might still have even the faintest memory of NOT being in power. I think that's as close to having a strength as Obama's going to get.
Let's face it, in order to provide or preserve jobs or, for that matter, do much of anything in a system where even God is money's bitch, a politician (or Junior Partner in America, Inc. as I think of it) has to have their head so far up Big Money's ass that they can't see daylight - then the lights are turned out, again, and we can go back to staring at Britney Spears.
Even the voting charade is part of the racket but it IS the part where everybody on the plantation gets to stand up and be counted, usually fraudulently as in recent "elections." Lots of people know it's fixed so they don't bother. The proof? If they gave a $100 bill away to each voter, zillions of disenfranchised people would show up. But they don't...and they don't - which pretty much shows that countless millions know that their vote's not even worth a hundred bucks.
If there was more of a Socialist system in place, things might improve for a lot more people, but that would leave the tiny fraction of Americans who are the most "successful" tragically short of sports cars and ski vacations, and that is utterly unacceptable in our Democracy. The successful people, like the ones in Government only like Socialism when it's time to collect taxes or tell soldiers that it's time to go far away and shoot people for Freedom in countries that we haven't sold weapons of mass destruction lately. We're #1 in weapons sales. (Yay! You can't take THAT away from us!!)
So, yeah...I'm rooting for The Black Guy with the Arab middle name. It won't make tons of difference anytime soon, but the rest of the world might hate us a little less and that's better than nothing. Right?
Anyway, once the new President puts his hand on the book about the man who lived in a whale and swears to uphold what's left of the Constitution, it's only a few months till the next Presidential campaign, so....No worries!
THANKS FOR YOUR TIME - AND, GOOD LUCK, CITIZENS!

Posted at 1:04 PM   -   Permalink

           

January 16, 2008

johnny's thoughts:

New World Odor

Close to home: Arnold S. sweet-talked the voters
about how he would take California to the promised
land but now he says he has to cut money to schools,
old people, parks and all the rest. We already have
half the Latino kids dropping out of high school and
the prisons are bulging. But even the damaged goods
from a failed economy serve their purpose:you can see where the
future soldiers and prisoners and gang members (who
keep the hopeless masses in the inner cities scared
and marginilized) will be coming from, can't you?

In the big picture: Could it be any more obvious
that Bush has to demonize a third-rate military
power like Iran so that he can sell weapons of mass
destruction to the Israelis at one end of the Middle
East and Arabs at the other end? It's almost comical
... almost. Stay tuned...

Posted at 9:09 PM   -   Permalink

           

January 10, 2008

johnny's final thought..."for now"

I said I'd be back with good news or at least a rational, positive perspective. I don't just scorn and condemn, although it IS kind of liberating and justifiable. But, like they say, "Any jackass can kick down a barn...it takes a carpenter to build one." So, here's how I'm seeing it:

We have to shitcan feelings of helplessness or unrelieved negativity. I'm hardly an optimist but I'm not going to borrow a bunch of pre-gloom and fear from the future OR drag my ass back to smell crap from the past. Re-take and hang on to the real estate between your ears, now. Shouldn't we check our prejudices, beliefs, grudges and opinions at the door, now and then, and recognize and respect some real facts about being here, in the present? At the least, we can probably all do something, today, to make our lives and/or somebody else's better and less bleak.

If circumstances feel like they've got you in concrete...get out the jackhammer. If you can't afford a jackhammer get out a mallet and chisel. Everything that isn't negative is positive. We have to require and trash a little less - and nurture and learn a little more - about everything.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said "The stronger the State --the weaker the individual."
He was also pointing to the fact that the opposite is true. It's not just political; it works on every level. It's worth thinking about, don't you think?

Posted at 9:04 PM   -   Permalink

           

johnny says:

The Presidential campaigns and the election process, in general, are a sadly laughable fraud and a scam. So, it all fits in comfortably with our other rotted, whored-out institutions like organized Religion. The only things we know are the things that corporate media tell us, and everything they "report" is slanted and spun in the funhouse mirror of propaganda that passes for information in this country. Two years before the election they tell voters who the "front-runners" are and which candidates shouldn't even bother. I watched radio personality and Fascist tranny-from-Hell Laura Ingraham last night "informing" us that John Edwards, for example, should forget about it and just try for a Cabinet post. The really sick part? You're forced to participate in it all or you're labelled un-patriotic. It's the same way they use our tax dollars to slash and burn other places they want to rape and own and then insist we "support" the whole bloody, wasteful mess. If we look away from it all for a minute, there's The Super Bowl, Britney Spears and all the other glamorous celebrity geeks with their drug "problems" and McMarriages to gawk at. Thank Gawd we have gushing fountains of brilliance like big fat weight loss expert, and judgemental, fake Dr. from Hell, Phil to make sense of it all for us at the end of the day.

Should we feel hopeless in the face of this sick charade? Hell no! As soon as I go throw up I'll be back with some good news.

Posted at 1:43 PM   -   Permalink

           

November 12, 2007

johnny had a lot of coffee this am:

A Friendly Challenge?

Do you think it's time for those who claim to possess some kind of hidden powers, priceless knowledge and earth-shaking messages to put up or shut up? Symbolism and scrolls and secret handshakes and decoder rings are all well and good, but Halloween is over and if you're going to ask us for money to help poor God spread his spooky little message around, you ought to be able to whip something out that's as catchy as the stuff that makes everybody want an iphone or SuperBowl tickets .

I wish we'd take a break from all this strenuous believing and hair-splitting and just start worshipping Common Sense. Do we really need well-meaning, world-weary mensches in dark robes to sit in caves for forty years so they can come out and tell us to beg for peace and make sure there's enough food to go around... and warn us to STOP spending so much time listening to our inner assholes as well as the ones, outside, who boss us around? May I respond briefly? ....Duh - Memo to prophets: "Don't wear yourself out on my account 'revealing' the obvious."

By the way, "prophecy?" What's up with that? How sadistic is Religion? Are we "free' moral agents" who are responsible for our actions... or has somebody laid all our tracks and written the ending in a jar in a cave in a desert, because they know MISTER God, personally, and that's how "HE" does things? Prophecy? Let me guess: "If you let a bunch of self-righteous assholes lead you to destruction...you're going to be destroyed." Wow! Why didn't WE think of that? Look, here's my response to prophecy: Don't fix the big football game and then make me bet everything I have on it. and buy a ticket and stand out in the cold and cheer and moan and drag my kids along so they might turn out to be suckers too. Please.... Here's some prophecy for you: Check this out: If we keep dumping millions of gallons of oil in the Ocean and wasting our money on wars, we're going to be in deep shit!" Hey, look at me......I'm a prophet!

Religious nuts and politicians love to blab on and on about how babies are wonderful, precious, unique beings, but what are they going to tell them when they grow up enough to look around and say, "Hey, what was the idea of signing us up to take a long walk off a short pier, Asshole?"

I'm an equal opportunity challenger : from the Pope to bin Laden to the Hillbilly Ayatollahs like Pat Robertson to the Kaballah honchos......here it is, my brothers.......Whatta ya' got? You have something powerful and meaningful and persuasive and worthy of great respect that transforms hearts and minds? Bring it! If not now....when? I can be patient, but can we at least get an appointment?

Just make it something better than: "Be kind to each other and don't poison the planet ." Even a religion-deficient, by-product of the public schools like me knows that and we've all heard it a million times. It's the real deal and all, BUT: for this plus a ton of fine print you're considered an enlightened being whom the rest of us should herald as "seers" or something? I don't know about you guys, but I don't need a middleman to "translate" my own experience along with everything else for me. Do we have to go to a special god place or talk to a special god person or read a special god book explaining special god stuff when you can see the Infinite and its good intentions... 24/7, all over the place.... in the sky or a kid dancing around for no reason or a dog wagging its tail. Sorry if that sounds corny, but it's true as a son of a bitch. What's the big secret? What are we waiting for? Let's tell these pricks who run everything to get their shit together and stop the separatist instigating and violence.

PS: Out of respect for the millions of hungry kids in the world who don't know what it's like to ever be held and comforted, would you mind, terribly, spaying and neutering yourselves and your kids? Think about it? Or at least let's stop consuming twenty times more resources than everybody else and think that that means we're "successful." Last but not least: Kudos to people who adopt and walk that talk.

Hey, for Christmas, this year - let's all get CLUES."

Thanks for your time!

Posted at 11:40 AM   -   Permalink