THOMAS PAINE’S CORNER |•

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“In folk stories, when giants are about, drought and famine withers the land and starvation stalks its people. Accordingly, the ruthless giantism inherent to the Corporate/Military/Mass Media state has withered our inner lives, blighted our landscape, and left us powerless before a huge, demeaning system that devours our time, health and humanity.”

by Phil Rockstroh

6/28/07

In microcosmic mimicry of the plight of the besieged middle and laboring classes, my parent’s Atlanta neighborhood, as is the case with many others in the vicinity, is being destroyed, in reality –disappeared — by a blight of upper-class arrogance. The modest, post-war homes of the area are being “scraped” from the landscape as an infestation of bloated mcmansions rises from the tortured soil. These particleboard and Tyvek-choked monstrosities loom over the remaining smaller houses of the area, as oversized and ugly as mindless bullies, as banal as the dreams of petty tyrants.

In the surrounding suburbs, in a similar manner as mcmansions eclipse sunlight, throwing the adjacent houses into half-light, mega-churches eclipse the light of reason, leaving their congregations in an ignorant half-light of dogma and superstition. Of course, these true believer lunatics are wrong about everything, except, perhaps, for their elliptical apprehension regarding the arrival of proliferate cataclysms in the years to come. Oddly: Although they promulgate dire warnings on the subject, they seem gleeful at the prospect of wide-spread suffering.

How could they not be? They’ve seized upon a fantasy that allows them to escape from the tyranny of their own life-suffocating belief system. Attempting to subdue the suffocating dread of their corporately circumscribed lives, they wish for the destruction of the entire planet. Hence, their escapist fantasy, by the necessity of narrative, is huge, outrageous — apocalyptic. The progenitor of their End Time tale is this: The believer’s emotional inflexibility begets a form of ontological giantism — a phenomenon that arises when one’s worldview is too small to explain the larger world. Therefore, a story must be created that contains violence and terror on such a massive scale that it’s unfolding would kill off the entire, problematic world. “That’s right world, there’s not enough room on this planet for both you and my beliefs. One of us has to go.”

Upon the nation’s roadways and interstate highways, the overgrown clown cars of the apocalypse, SUVs, Humvees, and oversized pickup trucks also evince hugeness to compensate for the feelings of those folks inside the grotesque vehicles of being crushed down by alienation and isolation — not only while on the road — but by the realities of an existence within a hapless, oil-dependent empire which is itself powerless against the changing realities of the larger world.

In the ranks of the exploiter class, the fat salaries of CEOs separate them further from the general population of the consumer state (that they take every opportunity to bamboozle) as the American public itself grows fatter and fatter in body mass, vainly attempting to sate an inner emptiness borne of their perceived helplessness before the predation of corporate culture.

Concurrently, in Baghdad, the U.S. embassy, which, when completed, will be the largest “diplomatic” compound on the planet is, in fact, an inadvertent monument to the mindless colossus the U.S.A. has become. The structure is as accurate as the art of architecture can be in its depiction of the spirit of a nation’s people. As big and bloated as our national sense of exceptionalism, it stands in the so-called Green Zone of Baghdad, shielding those who will be bunkered down within it — not only from the murderous madness unfolding outside its highly fortified walls — but from reality itself. A massive emblem of the arrogance of power, the embassy is a testament to how the noxious vapors of cultural self-deception can be made manifest in reinforced concrete, armed watchtowers and razor wire.

Through it all, like some eternally slumbering Hindu deity, we Americans dream these things into existence. Far from blameless, we continue to allow the elites to exploit us; therefore, we enable and sustain their titanic sense of entitlement. In turn, we accept their paltry bribes and, as a result, our banal, selfish dreams have conjured forth George Bush from the zeitgeist. Ergo, Bush is a man whose impenetrable narcissism is so grotesque and ringed with fortifications, that all on his own he constitutes a walking analog of the American embassy in Baghdad.

In addition, we Americans continue to believe our fables of righteous power: Big is good, goes our John Wayne jack-off fantasy. Our leaders must be large: Only Mcmansion-like men, such as Mitt Romney, are acceptable. We believe: Dennis Kucinich is too diminutive in physical stature to be president – with the length of his body being roughly the size of Romney’s head.

In turn, our national landscape is stretched to the breaking point: Cluttered upon it, gigantic islands of garish light torment the night, scouring away the stars, estranging us from imagination, empathy, and Eros, and leaving us only with the insatiable appetites of consumerism. Thus, around the clock, inside enormous, under-inspected, industrial slaughterhouses and meat processing plants, underpaid, benefit-bereft workers ply their gruesome, monstrously cruel trade, then the butchered wares are transported by way of brutal, double and triple-axle trailer, diesel trucks over stygian interstate highways to sepulchral supermarkets and charnel house restaurant chains. Insuring, we flesh-eating zombies are provided with all the water-bloated, steroid-ridden meat and industrially farmed, pesticide-lacquered vegetables and starches — The Cuisines of the Living Dead – we could ever crave … uum, uum, it’s the Thanatotic yumminess of empire’s end. Try our convenient drivethrough window. Would you like us to super-size your order of commodified death?

Hyperbolic ravings, you say. America is not a culture in love with death.

Let’s see. Drawing upon just one example: The corpses of well over half a million dead Iraqis testify otherwise. Moreover, the continuing Iraqi resistance to our occupation speaks volumes as well. Yet still, most of us cannot hear their elegy of outrage over the din created by the parade of killer clowns that we have mistaken for the pageantry of nationhood.

How does one slow this juggernaut of psychosis and curb these acts of murder/suicide being perpetrated on a global scale? Truth is, we might not be able to stop it, because this is what lies beneath our unlimited sense of entitlement and self-defeating arrogance: a death-wish that manifests itself as exceptionalism and may well destroy the nation by means of imperial overreach — which is, of course, the time-established method by which empires dispose of themselves.

Further, this state of affairs is exacerbated by the narcissistic insularity of our media elite. At the end of the day, it’s their tumescent egos that are distorting our societal discourse; their vanities and attendant self-serving pronouncements are little more than steaming cargos of horseshit, carried and delivered by one-trick-jackasses — jackasses endowed with the singular skill of being able to read a teleprompter … Fred Thompson, your agent is calling: You have an important call from Washington, DC.

Notice this: The more permeating the rot becomes within the system’s structure the more huge and pervasive the edifice of media imagery will grow and the more trivial its content will become. The closer we come to systemic collapse the more we will hear about celebrity contretemps. Cretinous heiresses and shit-wit starlets, with shoddy mechanisms of self-restraint, people the public imagination, because they carry our infantilism, embody our collective carelessness, and, in turn, suffer public humiliation, as we desperately attempt to displace, upon them, the humiliation of our own daily existence within the oppressive authoritarianism of the corporate state.

Correspondingly, there is a well-known (by those who care to look) link between fascism and corporatism. To Mussolini, the two terms were interchangeable. According to rumor, we defeated fascism, during the first half of the 20th century. Yet, at present, we spend our days sustaining a liberty-loathing, soul-enervating corporatocracy. To live under corporatism is, in ways large and small, to be a fascist-in-training. Everyday, hour by hour, the exploitive, neo-liberal concept of work devours more and more of our lives. As a consequence, the true self within is crushed to dust and what remains rises as cultural squalls of low-level fear, with its concomitant need for constant distraction. As all the while, the psyches of the well-off (financially, that is) become inflated, gaudy and ugly; in short, internally, they become human versions of mcmansions.

Freedom is a microcosm of the forces of evolution engendered by living in the midst of life — a mode of being that apprehends and is transformed by the beauty, sorrow, and wit of the world. Conversely, authoritarian societies are collectives of accomplished liars and lickspittle ciphers, where one must conceal one’s essential self at all costs and the soul falls into atrophy.

To what extent does authoritarian rule diminish both the individual and a nation? Simply, take a look around you and witness the keening wasteland our nation has become. Furthermore, our emptiness cannot be filled by any amount of wealth or power. This is the reason the obscene amounts of mammon acquired by the privileged classes is never — can never be –enough to satisfy them, for their inner abyss is boundless. In a similar vein, no amount of killing can sate a psychopath’s emptiness. Dick Cheney will scowl all the way to the boneyard, hoping he can ascend to heaven by scaling the mountainous pile of corpses he’s responsible for placing there.

In folk stories, when giants are about, drought and famine withers the land and starvation stalks its people. Accordingly, the ruthless giantism inherent to the Corporate/Military/Mass Media state has withered our inner lives, blighted our landscape, and left us powerless before a huge, demeaning system that devours our time, health and humanity.

The bone-grinding giants of the American corporate and political classes have shot the Golden Goose full of growth hormones, enclosed her in an industrial coop, and hoarded her voluminous output of eggs. Yet, nothing satisfies them.

Meanwhile, online, we struggle in a Jack in the Beanstalk Insurgency, hoping that from things as tiny and seemingly trivial as mere beans — our postings, exchanges and periodic meet-ups — the fall of tyrannical giants might begin.

Phil Rockstroh, a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: philangie2000@yahoo.com

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Sculpture: “The Id” by TJ Dixon and James Nelson

By Jason Miller

6/24/07

Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.

–Sigmund Freud

Frightening as it may be, the Earth’s fate rests in the hands of children. With incredibly formidable military firepower at its disposal, the United States could catalyze Armageddon at any time. And while they may be adults chronologically, our sociopolitical structure is dominated by emotional infants.

Nietzsche once pronounced God dead. In the United States, we have a more readily demonstrable (and perhaps related) problem. Our collective id has rendered its governing superego impotent, and perhaps dead. Our prevailing moral standards, as inconsequential as they have become, are of the Jerry Falwell variety. They are mean-spirited, self-serving, judgmental, narrow-minded, selfish, and belligerent. As far as US Americans are concerned, Christ may as well have preached the Sermon on the Mount from the lowest recesses of Death Valley.

Recall that our basic drives such as libido, hunger, and aggression flow from the infantile dimension of our psyche known as the id. In terms of psychodynamics, the superego’s role is to counter-balance the irresponsible, amoral, and essentially sociopathic nature of the id with a healthy degree of conscience and guilt. Yet in the United States, we are inculcated with a deep sense of our exceptionalism and entitlement from the moment we emerge from the birth canal, thus crippling our ability to empathize and seriously impeding the development of our superego.

Consequently, conscience, guilt, personal discipline, and delaying gratification are barely extant in the toxic cesspool of our sociocultural environment.

Continue Reading »

By Vi Ransel

6/18/07

After the Great Depression
the Rich had the impression
we were ripe for revolution.
Their solution? A New Deal.

But this “gift” they gave us
was merely to enslave us
temporarily amaze us
’til they could tear that mother down.

After World War Two
they gave us credit.
Did it work on us?
You bet. It’s
worked so well we’re
all in debt up to our ass.

We got little Levitt
mockups of their mansions,
sprawling highway expansion
of veins ready for the oily needle
in the nation’s arm.

And they let us go to
college, but they’re
afraid of knowledge
’cause it’s POWER
(to The People). Can’t
have that! You have a
dream? You just dream on.

Basic education is outdated
on the corporate plantation.
All the world’s remediation
can’t undo the devastation done
by whole word reading and new math.

And this theft of skills
makes a mockery
of participatory democracy,
sending us down the corporate
Manifest Destiny path.

Advertising’s their predation
for our seduction and sedation
so without evaluation
we’ll submit
while they feed on us like jackals,
slap our souls in shackles
and have us branded by age three
with corporate logo loyalty.
Our only future is the next thing that we buy.

Pharmaceuticals push legal drugs
for shyness and bad moods.
Huge conglomerates sing our love songs
to alcohol, SUVs and fried foods.
They’ve tranquilized and supersized us
with material goods
and ubiquitous depictions
of degrading sexual juxtapositions
laid like land mines
in all the media’s neighborhoods.

Yet after all this depredation
we’ve let the corporate plantation
become our American Idol(atry).
We want our ship to come in
so we can be just like them.
Meanwhile we take our place in
the new U.S. “serve us” economy.

Ask not what your country
has done to you, because
there is no remorse. And
don’t you know nobody
knows you when you
down(sized) and out(sourced).

“We can produce slick, television-friendly self-promoters — i.e. Thompson and Obama — but we can’t rebuild New Orleans or devise an exit strategy from Iraq.”

By Phil Rockstroh

6/14/07

Recent news reports have revealed that the Bush Administration has bestowed upon itself the right to grant itself absolute power if “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions” might come to pass.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/05/20070509-12.html 

Actually, the hypothetical catastrophes stated above sound very much like the veritable calamities inflicted upon the nation by the Bush presidency itself. Worse, at present, many of our Democratic representatives are showing their outrage regarding the disastrous policies of the administration — by agitating to bomb Iran.

Regarding such circumstances, Eric Fromme warned, “the destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it.” Ergo, we witness these collective pathologies play out in the perpetual aggression of American foreign policy, the exploitation inherent in our corporate workplaces, marketplaces, and healthcare practices and the exponentially expanding destruction of the environment.

How, then, can we begin to alter these seemingly ineluctable circumstances?

First off, don’t give the elites credit for being more intelligent than they are. Ruthlessness, striving and cunning should not be mistaken for intelligence. The only real accomplishment of the present day ruling class has been to transform their self-justifying lies into a form of performance art.

In reality, they have left private institutions bloated and public ones bankrupt. And left us, as a people, directionless and bereft of hope.

But that is not the totality of the situation: We must muse upon our own complicity in creating this cultural catastrophe. We’ve all been employed as landscapers on this blood-sodden deathscape.

At present, in our alienation and attendant passivity, our plight is analogous to that of so-called “crib babies,” those socially and emotionally arrested, orphaned children who were left to languish in indifferent institutions. Culturally, we seem devoid of the ability to respond to each other, to create a just society — or even envisage one.

Continue Reading »

“The grand jury was silent on whether Rod K. Williams’ seat for Super Bowl XLI was an indictment of our society’s true priorities.”

6/13/07

This is the story of four young men.

They all endure longer than Rod K. Williams. His body was found in a dumpster eight days after he died. Rod’s family and friends say he wanted to play football someday but he was only 14-years-old when he was wrapped in plastic bags and thrown in the garbage. While his body decomposed in the shadow of Dolphins Stadium they played Super Bowl XLI there. The game is described with Roman numerals due to its gravitas. An estimated one billion people watched the game on CBS, part of Viacom’s media empire. Tony Dungy beat Lovie Smith to the Lombardi Trophy and was lauded as the first African-American coach to win a Super Bowl. While Peyton Manning was named the game’s Most Valuable Player many Black athletes on the field made spectacular plays that drew loud cheers from the crowd. The Bears Devin Hester ran back the opening kick-off back 92 yards for a touchdown. Continue Reading »

By Jason Miller

6/10/07

Each day untold millions of US Americans unwittingly immerse themselves in an intellectual, social, cultural, economic, political and spiritual cesspool so rancid and toxic that even microbes with the most voracious appetites for human waste, vomit, and inanimate flesh would shun this infinitely repulsive sewer.

Many highly qualified and intelligent researchers, analysts, and authors have written books, essays, and reports documenting the astounding multitude and variety of crimes committed by the United States throughout its history. Since a nation is an entity comprised of numerous elements and dynamics, we can’t simply blame the government, the Republicans, the Religious Right, the Democrats, George Bush, Bill Clinton, or any one particular component. Therefore, nearly all US Americans bear a degree of responsibility. Obviously, some (i.e. Bush and Cheney) are far more culpable than others because they wield such tremendous power and act with a conscienceless, cynical awareness of the suffering they are inflicting on the Earth and its sentient inhabitants.

Continue Reading »

“You say you want a revolution? Well, you know … we’re all doing what we can.”

–John Lennon

“Is This Heaven?”

by Mike Palecek

“Nope.

Iowa.”

Where brown puppies are frisky, U-Turns aren’t risky, and good girls sip their whiskey.

On the road, on my book tour, I was asked a few times, well, then, what should we do?

“I don’t know. … I just don’t know.”

Hey.

The new presidential directive says that in case of emergency George W. Bush has dictatorial powers.

The new presidential directive.

What’s that? What was the old presidential directive? Who said he gets directives?

Did you vote for that?

So. If you don’t like that, what do you do in the United States?

Vote for a Democrat?

Try to figure out whom to shoot?

Speaking of voting. Didn’t we think we did this big thing awhile back when we elected a bunch of Democrats and Nancy Pelosi was the new house mom?

And the first thing she said before she was even the leader was that impeachment was off the table, and now they support Bush.

People also asked me on the tour which candidate I liked. I would like to meet the candidate in a cafe who would pull our troops out of Iraq yesterday, start a real investigation into 911, impeach Bush, and prosecute Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Powell, for crimes against humanity.

If these guys are not criminals, then open the gates of Attica, Leavenworth, Terre Haute, Lewisburg. There are no criminals. There is no such thing.

I did not feel great when I told the people who asked me what to do, that I did not know what to do.

One guy in Madison, Wisconsin asked me if I thought we had come to the point where a revolution was needed.

I told him I didn’t think I could ever kill anyone.

He said he was not talking about taking up the gun.

Oh. Well, maybe that actually says more about me than I wanted to reveal. Not really. I don’t have a gun to take up. Don’t want one. Too cheap to buy one. Won’t happen.

I’m not looking for that kind of commitment. Pick up a gun and you are really into this thing. You aren’t sending off some column over the computer and then going jogging.

The same thing — almost — can be said about someone who goes out and does some sort of civil disobedience and really confronts the evil. Then you get the horn. When you get into the ring with the bull. Do not make direct eye contact. The murderers don’t like that.

But, the whole violent revolution thing, non-violent revolution thing, war thing — well, how can it not be on your mind when you are living in a not-democracy during a time of war?

It’s frustrating, when you really see the need to change things.

But if your life is not really, really being affected, you kind of have a tough time garnering the fire to push up off the couch.

I have been thinking about Alex Jones, Che Guevara, the Weather Underground, Korey Rowe, Abbie Hoffman, Mindy Kleinberg, Jerry Rubin, Helen Woodson, Carl Kabat, Phil Berrigan, Dan Berrigan, Frank Cordaro, Larry Rosebaugh, Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore, Charlie Sheen.

And how things just keep going on: 9-11, stolen elections, warships to Iran, lies from the government, poor people dying.

I suppose that’s always been going on, always will. Anybody seen the new Shrek?

Do you vote Democratic at the Legion hall, slump home, and then set yourself up on the patio with some Old Style on ice, the Cubs playing on the other side of an open window, a Big Mac warming your lap, and “War! Good God Ya’ll!” booming on the tiny white iPod speakers in your big-ass ears?

You, too? Dude, should the term cognitive dissonance mean anything to us?

After 9-11, with Kate Smith blustering all over the dial about God Bless America, I turned the radio to classical and let it blare as I drove to the gym, then over to work, to try to drown it all out and keep my life.

Massive amounts of work goes into putting hundreds of thousands in the streets in major U.S. cities and then it seems to do nothing.

Cindy Sheehan goes home because the Democrats turn out to be just rats.

A whole bunch of dedicated people work their butts off for months for a bunch of candidates who then end up voting to fund the war anyway and taking impeachment “off the table.”

There is no “one answer.”

Isn’t that the safe response?

How about a violent response? Is that on the table?

Well. What if.

What if you did kill a bunch of people and got your very special person up there waving to the masses from a high balcony of the White House. Would that be worth it?

It would be a thrill, a rush.

Boy, we really are fighters, aren’t we. We really did something. We are special, too.

But what about when you turn around and see all the dead people behind you, and their families behind that, crying, wailing.

And then what if your very special person up there doesn’t do just what you think she should? Will you kill her, too?

Or, maybe it’s just totally wrong to kill and let’s not even go there.

I heard on the radio the other day about the anniversary of a bombing at the University of Wisconsin during the Vietnam War in which someone was killed. Some people went to prison for that, and one is still on the run.

What if that were you, still hiding out from the 1960s? There is not one day that goes by that you do not think about the person you killed, or about the life you might have had.

But, you did fight the United States government and its killing of thousands and thousands. And maybe you even stopped thousands more from being killed.

We don’t seem to care if our government kills people in other countries. We vote them into power again. We still stand when they enter the room, wave at their motorcades.

Now what about the American Revolution? Those people shot and killed in order to get the kind of government they wanted. And those people are saints to us. Shout “Founding Fathers” in a crowded nursery and the newborns will struggle to stand.

And the world wars? More saints made by killing millions. We don’t call them whackos or deluded. We don’t make WW II veterans hide out in Dumpsters for forty years.

Can one person’s vote really make a difference?

How about one person with a gun?

Sirhan Sirhan or whoever, Lee Harvey Oswald or whoever, James Earl Ray or whoever, whoever killed Malcolm, whoever killed the young Black Panthers in their beds in Chicago — did those murderers make a difference? Did they change the course of history?

Could a bunch of people with guns, who go to the Appalachians, the Catskills, the Ozarks, the Sierra Nevadas, the Everglades, the Sandhills, make a difference?

What is the difference that we wish to make?

What about the argument that refusing to kill in World War I and II would not have inflicted the amount of damage on the human community as participating and slaughtering millions did?

What about the feeling you get, though, when you fight — that you are at least doing something — that you work up a sweat and it feels good.

And the other feeling you get when you feel you are being run over, just letting things happen?

But Ghandi said you could do both: work up a sweat and also not kill anyone, nuke anyone, drop napalm on anyone, sneak up in the bushes and the mud on your hands and knees with a knife in your teeth and assassinate anyone.

What about Commandante something-something in Mexico?
Castro?
George Washington
Geronimo
The French resistance
Nelson Mandela
AIM
Leonard Peltier
John Brown
Robert E. Lee

Is anyone poor enough in the United States to do that? To go to the hills?

Thou shall not kill.

Yes, Old Testament.

Jesus said pretty much the same thing. Or maybe you are not Christian or don’t believe in God.

Would there be a difference, morally, between someone who bombed a United States bomb factory — today — and someone who might oppose the U.S. on the battlefield?

Would there have been a difference between someone working to assassinate Hitler, perhaps a German citizen — and a soldier in the United States Army fighting in France?

So what do we do?

Things are pretty bad, no matter what you hear at the mall or in the park — the almost total lack of discussion or concern about this government, or how it came to power, or the wars and policies it is undertaking in our names.

Doing nothing is doing something. When tens of millions of us do nothing other than go to work and return each others cell phone calls, don’t tell me that doesn’t have an impact. It is definitely something.

Should we bomb something and kill someone and then run away, change our names, work the drive-through lane at the Ukiah McDonald’s until we are 95, hoping we will never die and have to face God if there is one?

Should we vote for a Democrat who will likely do nothing of substance in his or her lifetime?

Or do we crank up Chopin, fill every second of every day with some sort of violent rushing about, and try not to think about it?

I just don’t know.

Seeya

–Mike

This passage is from my novel “Joe Coffee’s Revolution.”

Joe Coffee is published by Badger Books of Madison, Wisconsin. I wrote it after my run for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000. I was the Iowa Democratic Party nominee for the Fifth District. I received about 67,000 votes in a very conservative district on an anti-military, anti-prison, pro-immigration platform. I received no support from the local, state or national levels of the Democratic Party. I wrote the book to tell my side — to present the story, the what-if, the should-be — of someone, a nobody, running for office in the United States trying to do the right thing, and what he might encounter.

During my campaign I met a lot of people. Some of the most interesting were a handful of scattered farmers — intelligent, hard-working, incredibly pissed off. They seemed willing to fight. Almost.

In this passage we sit down to coffee with a family of farmers — Ray, Sam, Karen, Herb Tinker — talking about fighting, considering revolution.

Sam Tinker: “What’s to say the next headline might say: “Land Revolution Reform in Iowa?

“It happens in El Salvador, twenty families owning most of the shit, and finally the little guys get together and say they want to revisit the issue.

“Happens in Mexico, South America, all over the world. Why would we be any different?”

“Nobody’s hurting bad enough to fight,” said Herbert.

“I think you’re wrong. Everybody knows six guys running six companies sitting in six fancy rooms in six big buildings in six big cities run almost everything.

“I go to about a dozen coffee shops around this county. Everybody’s hurting.

“What we need is a pro-democracy movement in this country, somebody to stand in front of the tanks and say that’s far enough, bud.”

Sam poked Ray’s pad with a finger.

“Tell me what you think of this. Violence to achieve human rights.”

He looked at both of them, then stared at the back of Karen’s head.

“What do you think of that?”

Karen turned around to face them.

“American Revolution,” Sam began, “Vietnam, Gulf War, Kosovo bombing, abortion bombers, John Brown, Chechen rebels.”

Sam turned to his father to gauge how far he had gone, then looked down at the middle of the table and continued to talk.

“It happens. We can’t keep going like this. My family, your family. Every family in the county … won’t be here in ten years … five years … if the rich folks have their way. And let me tell you … they could give a shit. They don’t care about your kids or my kids or if any of ‘em lives or any of ‘em dies. Never have cared about poor folks, never will.”

Karen sat up. Her jaw roiled.

“We are the campesinos of El Salvador and they are us. When you scratch the surface and get to the bone, it’s all the same,” said Sam in a calm, serious, bass voice.

“The only thing we don’t know, is if we will fight.”

Palecek books:

KGB [Killing George Bush], The Truth, Joe Coffee’s Revolution, Terror Nation, The Last Liberal Outlaw, Looking For Bigfoot, Twins, The American Dream.

Mike Palecek website: http://www.iowapeace.com

Contact Mike: mpalecek@rconnect.com

Palecek books are available through local bookstores, Amazon, or by going to cwgpress.com, howlingdogpress.com, badgerbooks.com, newleafbooks.net, essentialbooks.com, mainstaypress.com.