Sunday Stream (39) - [stop]

[mtmynd]

[stop]

“O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free” – [stop] *The United States incarcerates a higher percentage of its people than any other country — more than two million men and women in 2000.* “...and the home of the brave?” [stop] *Statistics show that the United States has 220 million guns, or almost one for every man, woman and child in the country. With less than 5 per cent of the world's population, America harbors one-third of the world's 640 million small arms.* [stop] *Sixty years after the first atomic bomb was tested in the New Mexico desert, the United States still has some 2,000 nuclear weapons on hair trigger alert and is considering new weapons such as earth-penetrating bunker busters.*


[stop] Facts and figures like these make me question some knowledge. Is the knowing of things like these ever a great assist at living? America calls itself, quite proudly, ‘the land of the free” but when that was a rallying cry over 200 years ago democratic societies were far and few between. Times have changed, people have learned. Is England any less free than America? How about Canada, France, Germany, Spain, Denmark, Finland, South Africa... are these countries under the yoke of suppression? How about Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, South Korea...? Brazil, Argentina... the list is pretty long nowadays. How many of the current world’s 260+ countries are not free in any way? Sure, in today’s news we read about unrest in many African countries, but how many of those are unstable due to financial starvation? And isn’t that being at least addressed by others like the G-8?

So why does America, a country with less than 5% of the world’s population, consuming ¼ of the world’s oil, continue talking about freedom? Freedom from what is the question. America is not free from the oil habit. It is not free from guns and violence. It is not free from drugs [stop] * In 2003, an estimated 19.5 million Americans aged 12 or older were current illicit drug users,* [stop] * In 2002, Americans filled 3,340,000,000 (That is three billion, three-hundred and forty million!) outpatient prescriptions, the equivalent of twelve prescriptions for every man, women, and child in America.*

America, the land of the free and the home of the brave is an addictive society – addicted to oil, to guns, to nuclear weapons, to illicit drugs and pharmaceutical ‘legal’ drugs, to food and alcohol. America is not a free as we tend to think. Freedom is not a path to self-destruction.[stop]

America [stop] before it becomes [stop America]


Cecil (w/ many thx to Google)
17 July 2005

[judih]

stop mid thought
stop mid information
stop admitting that we're stopping mid-information

stopping is a hard thing to start
though google helps me begin to start stopping

with thanks to cecil

[Dave The Dov]

Allen Ginsberg said it best!!!!


"America," Allen Ginsberg

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1935 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch
Mother Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody
must have been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.


_________________
Honda CR-X

[Arcadia]

thanks for the stream,

Arcadia

[Artguy]

Stop stopping the stopped up stoppers of stopping stopped.......

Information over stopped......

Violence and prison freedom and guns

It all gives me the runs.......

[stilltrucking]

Civilisation
Nation of flies
You hold the planet
We have the skies
We have the heavens
You have your prison
We find the answers
You eat the lies
All We Have Is Now

America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Thanks Dave, I forgot about that line. He was a true patriot

Cecil very eloquent, I take two prescriptions a month myself for a self-inflicted disease. Type 2 diabetes. You make me feel I should take better care of myself because it is my patriotic duty. Just the mood I am today. Kind of a postpartum depression . My morning glories are starting to bloom.

The bit about the prison and drugs just kind of popped out at me.
Made me think of this poem

Chicken
***

Why did she cross the Road?
She should have stayed in her little cage.
Shat upon by her sisters above her.
Shitting on her sisters below her

Sloshing his way through the water
To throw off the dogs, raising
His arms to starlight to praise
whatever isn’t locked in a cell.

He’ll make it to a farmhouse
Where kind people will feed him.
They’ll bring green beans and bread
home-brewed hops. They’ll bring

the chicken the farmer found
by the side of the road, dazed
from being clipped by a pickup,
whose delicate brain stem

he snapped with a twist
whose asshole his wife stuffed
with rosemary and a lemon wedge
Everything has its fate,

but only God knows what that is.
The spirit of the chicken will enter the convict
Sometimes, in his boxy apartment
listening to his neighbors above him.

annoying his neighbors below him.
he’ll feel a terrible hunger
and an overwhelming urge
to jab his head at the television over and over.
Kim Addonizio
Best American Poetry 2004
Scribner Poetry


Illicit drugs, how many are in prison because of illicit drugs.
How many for illicit pictures
Illicit poetry
Illicit words
Illicit dreams

What's next now that we know what the problem is?
Self loathing has not been much help to me.

stopping is a hard thing to start

Just off the top of my head and unsure of the precise meaning of the word but:
The word Pithy comes to mind, as in a pithy saying. think I will google it and see what it means.
I remember you saying that "google is he best cop" still thinking about that one.
Cecil, we are the most mongrelized nation in the world, every nation has sent its misfits, religous nuts, rebels, criminals and undesirables here. Our melting pot is a witches cauldron of human variables.

[mtmynd]

Thanks to all you re-pliers, spreading my smiles like peanut butter over warm toast.

[Dave The Dov]

Ooooo I love peanut butter!!!!
_________________
financial bailout

[mtmynd]

Ahh, 'dove'... indeed, me too! spread over some wheat bread and if the mood for jelly is there - top it, too.... good eatin'!!

[Dave The Dov]

Ooooo wheat bread I like that as well!!!! I am a jam man when it comes to toast with the most!!!! He He!!!!
_________________
Business overhead expense disability insurance Forum

[mtmynd]

come on, Dave...[stop] this nonsense. hahahahah!!!!

toast in the morning, bread in the afternoon... cookies at night.

[Dave The Dov]

Okay I raise a toast to you then!!!! He He!!!!
_________________
BMW 328

[hester_prynne]

America is you and me. Addicted to having the best. Being the best.
Hoggin it. Not taking turns. Stubborn. Self-entitled. Glue on the wheel. A self made prisoner, America is.

(stop) in the name of love (stop)

H

[mtmynd]

Hes'... wasn't it Oscar Wilde who said "My tastes are simple, just give me the best" or something close to that? Even the best of stuff soon loses its glow.

[Michael]

mtmynd, I have a t-shirt which reads:
NATION OF SHEEP
OWNED BY PIGS
RULED BY WOLVES

The stripes are red, white and black (the t-shirt is black) and there are fifty jet fighters where the stars normally are on a blue field.

It looks something like this, although this likeness doesn’t do it justice.

You can find this and a lot of neat stuff at AK Press.

I hate to be repetitive (it’s an after affect of getting old), but, once again, “You can’t handle the truth” comes to mind.

Then, of course, there's “God Bess America” halfway through most sporting events.

Jingoism at its best.