Genocidal
Murder – Whether by Police and Soldiers Who Gun Us Down or by
Politicians and Bureaucrats Who Maliciously Deny Us Medical Care and
Other Life-Sustaining Stipends and Services – Is Now This Nation's Sole
(and Soul) Defining Norm
I
was seeking a vivid metaphor to illustrate the manifest horror the U.S.
has become – the product of Capitalism's inevitable and (since 22
November 1963), unrestrained and oft-accelerated metamorphosis into
fascism. But I had nearly abandoned my quest when someone (most likely
the Muse, as it was the Solstice, and the turns of the year are among
the times she is most powerfully compelling), whispered in my mind's ear
I should consider the deadly Portuguese Man-O'-War,
the biological horror that, as the planet warms, increasingly infests
the global oceans. I knew of the Man-O'-War from the portion of my
childhood I spent in Florida; another child, a girl, a second-grader as I
myself was then, dove off a boat-dock into a Man-O'-War's tentacles and
died shrieking in unspeakable agony soon afterward. I had always
thought of the creature that killed her as an especially venomous
subspecies of jellyfish, but in the Muse-suggested reading linked
immediately above, I learned the Man-O'-War is not a single organism but
a group of microscopic creatures so ingrown “they are unable to survive
independently, and therefore have to work together.” It thus operates
exactly as the Capitalists and their politicians, judges and
functionaries (including soldiers and cops) operate – as separate but
vital parts of an infinitely merciless predatory being.
From this multiple-creatures-as-a-single-being perspective – thank you, O Muse – our present nadir of political hurly-burly
is the consequence of a glaringly apparent sickness in one of these
creatures, say an intestinal equivalent turned so explosively
incontinent it is splattering us all with ruinously infective feces. But
this is not to absolve the being's other parts. Just as the four parts
of the Man-O'-War are co-equals in its toxicity, so are the four parts
of the USian mechanism of Capitalist governance equally guilty in its
own murderousness. The judge who...
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