With Its Killer Cops and Killer Politicians, Today's U.S. Is as Relentlessly Deadly as a Planet-Sized Portuguese Man-O'-War

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

THE WHITE COPS' war against African-American, First Nations and Hispanic peoples and the far broader war by Capitalists to rid the nation of all of us damned as no longer exploitable for profit won't end unless We the People wake up to the fact the targeting of minorities is but a “first-they-came-for-the-Jews” prelude to the targeting of us all. Then – although I doubt it will ever happen – we can maybe find in ourselves the courage to excise the infinite malignancy that has emerged as the defining characteristic of the United States,  whether in its murderous racism and class warfare at home or its increasingly apocalyptic aggression abroad. 

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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