Fifty years ago, no self-respecting person on the left would have dreamed of aligning themselves with the FBI or CIA

Things have changed in fifty years.

The FBI and the CIA have been rehabilitated. Comey and Brennan are heroes of the resistance. And, unlike fifty years ago, anything you read in the New York Times is Guaranteed Gospel Truth! Back in the day, your first reaction to mainstream media claims was always skepticism. 

Now, NYT/WaPo/CNN/PBS are the go-to platforms for truth-seeking lefties.

That's not all that's changed. Fifty years ago, the Black Resistance to 350 years of oppression gave rise to inspirational leaders like Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and MLK. Today, Black Resistance to 400 years of oppression is centralized in the corporate-sponsored BLM astro-turf movement.

Fifty years ago, most people still viewed the Democrats as the party of unionized labour. Now it's the party of union-busting hedge-fund billionaires.

Fifty years ago, Republicans were the war party and Democrats were at least more likely to talk peace, if not actually cease and desist from dropping our Paveway instruments of democracy on recalcitrant third world peasants. Today the Democrats are as keen on perpetual war as the old war party ever was.

Sadly, what we have witnessed over the last fifty years, is the wholesale betrayal of the interests of everyday working people, of all ethnicities and creeds, by both parties.

Sooner or later, blowback is coming...

America needs a spiritual re-awakening

People seem to forget that MLK's movement for social justice was very much rooted in the Christian Church.

That's just one of the differences I see in the old civil rights movement and Black Lives Matter. Here's another: MLK didn't have corporate sponsors.

The Christian Church has changed. Instead of MLK, it now has Pence and Pompeo speaking on its behalf. They have corporate sponsors too.

These are tough times in America. Macro-wise, what we're witnessing is the dissolution of the American Empire. In the short term, that's playing out on CNN right now.

In the longer term, we have to hope that there will not be too much collateral damage as the Empire collapses into death spasms. To that end, there needs to be something that can unify the American people, or at least push things in that direction. We know that won't be Trump or Biden.

Now's the time to have a good ole Gospel Tent Revival Tour clear across the country!


Kanye, do you hear The Lord calling you?

Racism then and now

A few years before anyone had heard of Selma and Martin Luther King I was dropped off at Elora Public School to begin my formal education. I was the only kid in the school who didn't speak English. The language that I did speak wasn't always welcome in the homes of my schoolmates barely a decade after the war, so those were lonely years.

Elora was a white-bread tight-assed Presbyterian town at the time. There wasn't a unwhite family in the place, let alone a black kid in the school, so it's no surprise that when my little pure white perfect princess girl classmates went out to skip rope at recess, one of the more popular skipping ditties went like this:

way up north 
where the niggers shovel snow
one shoved a shovel
up the other niggers hole
one called the doctor 
but the doctor couldn't come
so the poor nigger died
with a shovel up his bum


This rhyme today can be neither written or spoken, so read it aloud a few times, and you'll be helping bust  two taboos at once. When the girls went double dutch they'd have to say it twice as fast. Even at the time it was considered somewhat naughty. I recall there were certain stern-faced playground monitors who'd call the children on that one.

Like I said, Elora was all white. White people even ran the corner store. Bird's Variety. One day some catholic kids jumped me on the way to the store and relieved me of my candy money. That was the big cultural divide, catholic vs. protestant. I didn't get it then and I don't get it now. We're all white and we all love Jesus. The only way we knew who was catholic was because the catholic kids went to the catholic school. But it's fucked up Ireland for five hundred years. I'm happy to report that when I got a little bigger I extracted more than an equal share of payback.

In those days you still had guys with no legs nicked-named Stumpy pushing themselves along the sidewalk on mechanic's creepers. War vets. There'd always be a guy like that outside the Iroquois Hotel, sometimes selling pencils, sometimes just with his hat out, sometimes just passed out. Don't know why it was called the Iroquois. They'd got rid of those people a long time before.

We don't see our no-legs war vets sitting on the sidewalk selling pencils anymore. The little girls who sang way up north grew up to be liberals and activists and hippies and feminists. There's even (almost) peace in Ireland, for Christ's sake. We've come a long way baby.

There's a lot of self congratulation going on in America these days. MLK's anniversary and all that, and haven't we come a long way and aren't we great. Why lookie here, we've got a black president don't you know!?

The first black president has become the lame duck president of all time. Why? Because there's a great big slice of middle America that is determined to cut him off at the knees no matter what he does. When Reagan raised taxes or H.W. raised taxes or Clinton raised taxes or when any of those white presidents raised the debt ceiling, middle America might not have been happy about it but life went on.

Not any more. We've got the first black president, don't you know, and there's a great big slice of middle America that just wants to see the nigger fail.