Anthony St. John, TheWordWarrior

2010-02-01T11:22:00.003+01:00

How I Repelled the Advances of
Roman Catholic Pedophilic Priests

When, in Italy, nonne and nonni are at their wits' ends caring for their grandchildren whose father and mother are at the factory or office, they threaten their little hyperactive ones with this cutting admonition: “If you don't stop misbehaving, we'll call the Germans!” When, in New York, my Irishamerican grandmother or her husband lost their patience with me and my sister and brothers, they discouraged us with these words of caution: “If you don't stop showing bad manners, we'll send you to a school where the Irish Christian Brothers teach!” I often wonder whether it would have been more brainy to smack us on our backsides with a curt jolt to our overactive nervous systems instead of filling our tender sentiments with empty threats (I never studied with overtly sadistic clerics) that had no bases in reality and only occupied our minds with junk ideas—enough of them already! Why not tickling? Wouldn't that have done the trick? My parents and grandparents could have tickled my short-lived aggressiveness out of my nerve endings, and because I would have been in fits of hysterical laughter, I would never had been able to file a cease and desist order against them in juvenile court.

The centuries-old despotic streak of the Roman Catholic church (RCc) is well documented. Whether it be the cruelties authenticated during the Inquisition, or the blessings bestowed on nations stringently promoting colonial and imperialistic evildoing, or the collusion with the atrocious Nazi regime (Bavaria, Hitler's stomping grounds, is a citadel of Roman Catholicism) during World War II, or the gratuitous patronage offered to fascist military dictators in Southamerica, or..., there is no doubt that the RCc serves not always as an eleemosynary spiritual leader bent on encouraging the Christian virtues it so vociferously exacts others to simulate. Nothing and no one is perfect, you might say.

Nevertheless, we have an earnest discrepancy here when we set about finagling a logic which might in some determined fashion legitimize the actions of one of Christianity's most powerful spiritual institutions, and a divergence even its wishy-washy but authoritarian RCc archpriests and women servants married to God cannot contravene. Out of the mouths of pious religionists affiliated with the RCc, which I know best, there oodles a barrage of love, peace and hugs for all of us which does not trip the light fantastic with many of the actions of the RCc carried through during the two long millennia that it has subsisted.

Two direful personal observations taken from my university and military days come right away to my mind and these offer further cogent evidence that bear witness to the megascopic sanctimoniousness of the RCc. The first is its loathsome frame of mind with regard to women. Females are not only deprecated by RCc clerics themselves, the warped dogmas of the church's canons serve to handle women as second-class, docile laborers assigned to cook, clean and, above all, teach little Catholic rascals their catechisms and the Ten Commandments they will so diligently, so relentlessly disobey and then constantly seek forgiveness for their infringements of them. When I attended St. Bonaventure University, I was stunned one day in World History class when an often drunk Franciscan friar, nicknamed “The Spike” for his harshness, instructed the three female students in our class of thirty-five (set in alphabetical order by “The Spike”) to “occupy the front row, cross your legs, and close the Gates of Hell.” All the “Bonnie men” in the room ripped out with huge roars of laughter. The three ladies sat petrified in silence. At St. Bonaventure sadistic pranks were frequently perpetrated not only on female co-eds, even nuns who attended the learning “institution” were victimized by often drunk, childish “Bonnie men” trying desperately to be something they were not. If only James Joyce had attended St. Bonaventure University! His A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man would have enjoyed a slew of additional anecdotes testifying to the stupidity of untested, horny Roman Catholic boys endeavoring to be adult males.

It is late August 1967. I am sitting in a Continental airline's Boeing 707 at Travis Air Force Base, California set for takeoff to Saigon—via Guam and Manila. There is only one “class.” The whole plane is divided into two sections: one and the other of rows of three from forward to aft. Still, officers are at the front of the jet. I'm to the left, seated five or six rows from the front, in the middle. On my left, at the window seat, is a US Army chaplain. Captain. (Captain is the entry rank for lawyers, doctors, dentists and religious types into the US Army—those who have something to say to you and something to ask you to pay for! RHIP. Rank Has Its Privileges!) He tells me he is a Trappist monk on leave from his monastery “so I can go to Vietnam to help the boys.” We talk some in flight, but for the most part, like most of the others in the plane who are not drunk, we remain mostly mum about our feelings and are immersed in thoughts of what might befall us. We are told we are descending and will land at Guam for a fuel stop. As we touch down, I see to my left ranks and ranks of B-52 bombers! The sight is shocking. I give up counting—there are so many! The Trappist monk, to my amazement, is fanning crosses, is blessing the B-52s!

Then there was the Fourth Division's caput chaplain, a full-bird (chicken [sic]) colonel, Irishman from Brooklyn, New York. This person of grotesque appearance was a blustering, overbearing character who made no bones about pushing his Roman Catholicism wherever he visited throughout the Fourth Division's base camp. Every so often, in his freshly-starched fatigues and boots spit-shined by Vietnamese workers who were permitted to work in the BC for $1.00 a day, a polished chopper reserved for high-ranking officers would carry him to the battlefield to give general absolution to the troops. One day when I was jumping up and down with nervousness about an impending combat assault into unknown enemy territory, the chaplain's copter clock-clocked above and spiraled down to meet us at our “saddle up” area. About to be inserted first into a suspect enemy location in waves of three-a-breast Huey choppers, all members of my forward observer party then those of the infantry company to which we were attached were terribly anxious thinking whether or not we would jump into open fields and find ourselves on a “hot” LZ (landing zone). The warriorlike man of the cloth walked over to the largest group, and without saying a word or even asking if there might be any Roman Catholics there, put a purple sash (stole) around his neck and began absolving all in sight their sins—he too fanning crosses over the men! After confession, the colonel returned to base camp to count communion wafers for the next day's mass and then went on a priggish binge pulling Playboy centerfolds off the walls of soldiers' barracks! (Guess the name of the patron/patroness saint of the Artillery!)

A more contemporary transgression—that has caused the declining RCc not only outpourings of protest and has dishonored it irreparably demanding of it astounding accumulations of its wealth—is the scandal of pedophilia that has concerned an abundant number of its brothers and sisters and priests. Throughout the world, high-ranking RCc authorities have scurried to squelch the thousands and thousands of victims' revelations of maltreatment perpetrated by Roman Catholic churchmen and churchwomen. The RCc officials have offered the unfortunate characters monetary compensation if they waiver their legal claims and refuse to accept media coverage which might detail the events of their sexual abuses many of which were suffered at so tender an age, it would take a lifetime for them to come to grips with themselves and finally muster the courage to admit that which they were subjected to by the promiscuous religious associates of the RCc.

Papal crackerjacks of legalese have not been successful in crunching down the outrages caused by decades-old pedophilic dereliction in Ireland and the DisUnited States, but they have had success in France, Italy, Portugal and Spain where the RCc holds powerful sway in the media and political institutions. The “Devil” would need to be interviewed to determine the exact number of RCc clerics involved in sexual abuse among themselves and others not belonging to their religious secret club.
The thought of pedophilia at once brings a sense of repulsion to most individuals. This astonishment very often also provokes the curious to investigate the subject, and today there are innumerable websites where access to unnatural sex acts—even among animals—is casual for those who still do not own pedophilic predilections.

The repugnance for pedophilia is rooted in the notion that an unknowing, ingenuous child (boy or girl) is overwhelmed, seduced by a consenting adult (man or woman) who performs sexual acts that normally are the reserve of willing adults (mature individuals)—only. It is understood that a child is neither prepared nor competent enough emotionally to respond to the sexual inclinations of an adult who is both sexually more sophisticated and indeed more clever about the exigencies of life. In a pedophilic relationship, the child is someone who is initiated abruptly into the sexual rite without having the astuteness to say yes or no. Not only is the child's body invaded, his or her mind is interpenetrated by an individual whose lasciviousness is superimposed on the injured one by means of verbal deceit and trickery which could not have been contended by the minor.

When a priest or brother or sister engages in pedophilic matings, the disapprobation is magnified further. We do not expect those—for example, politicians—who constantly preach to us concerning our manners of performing, to flout the rules established for all of us to obey. We feel betrayed when they do so. We believe we have been duped. (The voting records of Northamericans testifies to the “faith” they hold in their politicians!) Ecclesiastical double crossing has encouraged many Roman Catholics to abandon the RCc, and today the RCc is in a scramble to recoup the religious formidableness it once possessed. (It took the RCc four-hundred years to accept the teachings of Galileo Galilei [1564-1642]! When will it permit gay and non-gay marriages among its spiritual leaders?)

Yet, there is another aspect concerning religious pedophilia which should be mentioned. A youngster who is inveigled by a clergyman or clergywoman is approached by an individual who is a symbol of an institutionalized say-so, dominance. The brother or sister or priest is garbed in those robes which relate to a two-millennia tradition that basks in an almost universal acquiescence. It is often easier for an ecclesiastic, whether male or female, to lure because he or she is propped up with a visible assurance that is spontaneous—as when a police official flashes his badge before us and wants to see our documents or a pregnant woman requests a seat on a bus. A child can be more easily overpowered sexually by a pedophilic reverend than by an old man or woman, with children as their preferred sexual object, sitting on a park bench. Consequently, mothers and fathers of children, who frequent Roman Catholic religious and social activities, must be cautious. Kids are not to be left alone with brothers, nuns and/or priests. Beware of the confessional. Many, many sexual impieties have been committed in confessional boxes.

From when I was a boy of twelve years (1957) to that of being a young adult of twenty-one (1966), I lived the most dramatic and depressing time of my life. For it was during that period that I had to succumb to the pedagogy of the Roman Catholic church dictated to me by priests and an occasional nun. I recall suffering enormously trying to understand why I had to accept various nonsensical precepts—merely obligated to believe them as a matter of faith. This tore at my intellectual faculties strenuously primarily because I felt alone, with no one to sync with my notions. It was a joyous day for me when I was “let out” of St. Bonaventure University's internment camp of Roman Catholic religious dogma. (See St. Bonaventure University: A Gulag of Militaristic, Sexual & Philosophical Indoctrination on www.scribd.com/thewordwarrior.)

I have reported the five Irishamerican Roman Catholic priests, who I believe approached me seeking illicit sexual relations, to Barbara Blaine and David Clohessy of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (www.snapnetwork.org) not because I was victimized by them, I was not, but because my “testimony” might help others who reluctantly could have been their sexual prey. I support the efforts of SNAP, and I am perspicacious enough to know that the RCc does not hold the registered trademark on pedophilia—nevertheless, many of its members are foremost practitioners of sexual perversion in which children are the preferred sexual object.

Why did I not become pedophilic quarry for the priests who were my instructors for almost a decade? There are two main reasons. The first regards the respect for women which, inadvertently, was the norm in my upbringing. My mother, some aunts and older female cousins held positions of authority in public and private organizations in New York, and these “role models” encouraged me, at a very early age, to come to expect that women were, like men, held in high regard by society in general. It was a terrible awakening for me when, in later years, I would come to learn that women did not enjoy the high esteem that many of my family members experienced working as professionals and managers in the not-terribly-so feminist 1950s. However, from 1957 to 1966 I carried with me the idea that gentlewomen were on an even par with gentlemen socially, politically and economically. Therefore, their role and my part to be with them, was what I envisioned for myself as I grew older.

Secondly, my sexual disposition is decidedly focused on females. There are a number of reasons for this. One in particular is the fact that when I was a small boy, five girls, who shared an apartment with their widowed mother and lived directly above my family, took an interest in me and frequently served as my babysitter. I received their affection and goodwill and I recollect best that time when I reflect on a passage from my manuscript, Why I Live Beyond the DisUnited States of Northamerica:

...I was in the back seat of the car with three of the sisters.
The girls were all modestly dressed and wore pants or shifts
over their drying bathing suits. Their lightweight summer wear,
colorful blouses and tee-shirts, let me view their anatomy with
intense interest, and I remember peeking at the depression
between one of the girl's breasts—made visible by her wearing
of a loosely-fitted shirt top—and taking peeps to take in
more of this lass sitting closest to the window on the right
side in the rear of what was, I can only guess now, a Ford
automobile. Or, was it a Chevrolet?
I was fascinated by the mounds of flesh protruding from
the chests of these girl-women. I counted ten “lumps” under
the cotton clothing covering the bosoms of the five sisters.
I would never have dared to make an effort to touch these
enormous, marshmallowy-like protrusions which I did not
even know incorporated—on their tips—protuberances,
lactiferous ducts of the girls' mammary glands, which opened
and from which their milk would one day be drawn to nurture
baby girls and baby boys. I know not why I did not make
real this cogent want. The wish to do so, however, was
embedded obsessively in my boyish desire, and in the years
to come would torment me excruciatingly. My day would
come, but I had to wait for it. I sank back down into the
seat of the car, into a sort of puerile puzzlement. I was too
green indeed to murmur the smooth, silver-tongued word
“Why?”
Overwhelmed in the simplemindedness of my callow
singularity, there was nothing for me to do but absorb the
sensory voluptuousness that spun around me lodged there
in the back part of that Ford—or Chevy. Women's breasts
and pretty dresses and wavy hair were not the only
impressions that landed ingratiatingly on my organ of
thought left there to commingle ultimately with a lifelong
peppering of imprecise feelings which, in toto, would
constitute that what I am.
For instance, there were scents to get a whiff of. Suntan
lotions. Lipsticks. Deodorants. Nail polishes. Makeup.
The odor that swelled out from an opened handbag.
Chewing gum. Hair that had been shampooed at the showers
along the beach. Perfume? I can't remember. But I do recall,
later in life, I could be strolling down a street in Caracas
or Rome and if a woman passed me by, buzzing away
and leaving me in the downdraft of her perfume or makeup
foundation, a precise fragrance, I could be drawn back
twenty—even thirty—years to a place in time and space and
to a woman I desired and loved. I could see her face and
easily summon up the surroundings of a room, a restaurant
where we shared the joy of being together.
As we traveled home to Brooklyn, a myriad of aromas were
fanned about my face, from all directions. From time to time,
they coalesced to create one unique trail of a pleasant
air that swept through my nostrils and stimulated me
into a goofy self-satisfaction. Otherwise, one outstanding
redolence, perhaps a maquillage or a sticky aerosol used
to hold hair in place, would impress me and I would
download this smell into my personal cornucopia where
it rested with the many others—gleeful reminders to me
of the distinctions possessed, I assumed, by whichever
member of the gentle sex.
And Music!!! To this day, I possess almost perfect images
of the radio's speaker with a chromed grill protecting it
and the two black knobs flanking it: one for tuning and
the other for volume/on/off. Under one nub there was a
metal ring that could be manipulated to control the tone
and vary it from high to low. The antenna was on the left
side fender of the car and through it a hodgepodge of
popular music waved through the car to the merriment
of all of us. One girl snapped her fingers. Another kept
time to the Music by tapping her foot. A couple of sisters
sang. One clapped to the beat. When a song faded away,
the girl in the “shotgun” seat immediately turned the
tuning knob searching to come up with another hit record
for us to sing and hum within our ecstasy which was
enclosed in the closed quarters of an automobile and not in
the open space of, for example, a dance floor. I cannot
construct a list of the songs I heard that evening coming
home from the cool beach and then flowing happily into
the sweltering streets of Brooklyn. It surely was not the
rock n' roll era. In those days Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald,
Frankie Lane, Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee,
Louis Armstrong and a host of other post-World War II
musical phenomena held sway in the recording industry.
And today, when I hear the Music of these hall-of-famers,
I wonder if it was their songs we had enjoyed in that car
returning to 310 Devoe Street on a sultry summer's night.
Jerking home—with the shifting of gears—to Brooklyn in the
congested beach traffic and yearning earnestly that I could
remain forever in the bosom of my five-member
sisterhood—all of whom I thralled at my beck and
call!--it would have been preposterous to think that I
could ever have roused in my mind the idea that Woman
and Music would come to be such an integral component
of my essence and abide in my psyche for the rest of
my life. There was no way for me to guess my forthcoming
and I unquestionably could not even have rationalized,
at my tender age, that I, too, would one day flourish to be
as complete as were the five girls with me in the car. I was
a boy being bombarded by bevies of empirical impressions
which I was powerless to categorize or interpret.
The way home was closing the more on Williamsburg.
The mademoiselles were fretting about the swelter,
foreseeing doing something more tantalizing after, and
trying their best to make the time flash by faster. Naturally,
I was delighted with the delay. Nothing in this world had
been before more pleasing to me than being now with my
five young unmarried women. I had it in my heart to stay
in saecula saeculorum in this serendipitous state. I was bent
upon nailing this splendid time to the wall—to keep it there.
I selfishly sought to pickle myself in the juices of this
thrilling companionship trusting that it would be conserved
for my eternity.
Maybe about an hour before getting to our destination—my
sunburnt skin and beginning-to-growl stomach had levied on
me an-end-of-the-day drowsiness and I had perched my
head on the top of the front seat—that inamorata, closest
to the window (was her name Pat?), took me into her arms
and laid my boyishness on the cushioning of her bosom!
I limpened in the tenderness of her geniality. Her smells
enveloped me right off. I was wrapped in that field of
energy that emanated from her flesh and blood, and as
tickled pink as a piglet in a pigpen, I curled up cozily and
every once in a while switched the position of my head
in order to find an even softer place amongst her doughy
front or to sample the texture—to see if it was equal to
the other portions—of another part of her two breasts.
Never once did the desire to quaff upon her cross my
mind. I did not seek nutrients. Eating was the last thing
on my mind. I craved emotional contentment. And I
was filling myself up with barrows of it. There was
nothing that could have made me happier than this
sensation of proximity to a woman. I could not doze off...

There was no way a male religionist—wreaking of cigarette smoke, dressed in black, the sleeves of his cassock snowed upon with chalk dusk, his breath bringing on the smells of beer or whisky, his skin coarse—was going to come so near to me where he might attempt to entice me into joining in with him in the performance of salacious sex acts. Amen!!!

Authored by Anthony St. John
1 February MMX
Calenzano, Italia

* * *

2010-01-01T13:40:00.000+01:00

What I Am
Most Proud Of...

I write well.

I write poetry.

I appreciate Beethoven.

I prize many varieties of music.

I enjoy reading the English version of
Marcel Proust's
A la recherche du temps perdu
translated by G K Scott Moncrieff.

David Hume is my preferred philosopher.

I am indebted to Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell.

I delight in the company of others.

I can make people laugh.

I use public transport exclusively.

I was interviewed by Larry King.

I have not been in the DisUnited States of Northamerica since 31 December 1975.

I am an atheist.

I was born in Brooklyn, New York.

I did not permit the Roman Catholic church to quash me physically
or intellectually.

I have kissed three Italian princesses:
La Principessa Marcella Borghese, La Principessa Giorgiana Corsini, and
La Principessa Fiona Corsini.

I did not murder when I was an artillery officer in Vietnam.

I fight with my words not my fists.
I am TheWordWarrior!

I admire beautiful women.

When I watch a sporting event, I mute the sound.

I renounced my DisUnited States' citizenship.

I am a mitigated Marxist.

My electric bill is the lowest in my apartment building.

I read at least four or five or six or seven books at a time.

I possess a built-in instinct for what is insincere.

I have refused to recognize the three medals I was awarded for service in Vietnam.

I relish cigars.

I survived an airplane crash.

I listen to classical music (www.wqxr.org and www.retetoscanaclassica.it)
every day.

I outlasted two armed robberies.

Every time I encounter an Italian priest or sister,
I ask them if Hell is big enough to accommodate 57,000,000 Italians.

I pulled through two 122mm Chinese rocket attacks on the Cambodian-Laotian borders.

I outlived assorted mortar barrages in Vietnam.

I understand the Venezuelan people.

I have two doctors: Dr Diet & Dr Repose.

I comprehend the Italians.

I am a fan of Roger Federer but hope he has no “stupid” or criminal skeletons in his closet!

I walk as much as I can.

I bicycle for pleasure.

I suggest that young children be disciplined by tickling them—not
slugging them.

I was discharged by the State of Florida's
Division of Family Services because I refused to swindle
Afroamericans living in the ghetto of Fort Lauderdale
where I served as a social worker.

I was a journalist for three newspapers.

I was a copy editor for Venezuela's English-speaking daily.

My sensitivity for people's suffering and the incredulity I possess in watching them do all they can to worsen their condition.

My respect for Nature.

I do not own a motor vehicle.

My will to preserve the natural resources I depend upon.

My hope in the future.

My utilization of the computer and Internet.

The varied work experiences I have had in my life.

The extensive listing of subjects that influence my reading.

I have no respect for Tony Blair, John Bolton, Thomas Friedman, Francis Fukuyama, Al Gore, Stanley Hoffmann, Samuel Huntington, Robert Kagan, John Kerry, Henry Kissinger, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, John McCain, Norman Podhoretz, George Will, Paul Wolfowitz,...and others of this ilk.

I admire Daniel Bell, Fausto Bertinotti, Hugo Chávez, Noam Chomsky, Hillary Clinton, Paul A Cohen, Rodney Dangerfield, Richard Dawkins, Simone de Beauvoir, Barbara Dorris, Vittoria Franco, Eric Hobsbawn, Martin Jacques, Peter Lavelle, Karl Marx, Alain Minc, Robert Reich, Don Rickles, Joan Rivers, Ségolène Royal, Edward W Said, Israel Shamir, Peter Singer, Sun Tzu, Gore Vidal, Oscar Wilde, Howard Zinn,...among others.

Updated: 29 December 2009
Anthony St. John: www.scribd.com/thewordwarrior

* * *

2010-01-01T13:39:00.001+01:00

Lamento per L’Europa

Terra del Sole Calante

Calderone ribollente in famelica disperazione
Per ritrovare i sapori del Passato.
Tu cerchi di proiettarti in avanti
Sull’energia della Tua logica
E di speranze non ancora idealizzate.
Tu invochi la Tua storia
Per rinvigorire le Tue fantasie.
Ti avvinghi stretta al Tuo orgoglioso io
Screpolato e corroso dalle intemperie.
Ti sforzi di far crescere nuovi fiori
Dalla putredine delle Tue tormentate memorie.
I Tuoi giovani, annusati da squadre di cani al guinzaglio,
Violentano-odiano nei Tuoi stadi
Strisciati con allettamenti elettronici
A premere morbidi e colorati bottoni di plastica.
I Tuoi vecchi serpeggiano stancamente verso ministeri della sanità in rovina
Dove i medici si trastullano con i moduli
E riempiono schedine del totocalcio.
I Tuoi vicini dell’Est—
Arroganti, sordidi—
Si aggrappano a Te
Pretendendo rudemente ciò che bramano e credono dovuto.
Tu, Europa, siedi imbalsamata—
Impregnata dei succhi del Tuo spregevole tempo che fu.
I Tuoi politici dilettanti spiegano bandiere
E i loro poteri vergognano—
Vergognano!—
Questo Nostro mondo.

Anthony St. John

2010-01-01T13:37:00.000+01:00

A Lament for Europe

Land of the Setting Sun
Caldron simmering in hungering desperation
To regain the smacks of the Past.
You seek to lunge ahead
On the energy of Your logic
And hopes not yet lionized.
You call upon Your histories
To lend strength to Your phantasies.
You coil up hard on Your proud self
Wrinkled and weather-beaten.
You struggle to nurture new flowers
On the dry rot of Your haunted memories.
Your youth, sniffed upon by strapped canine squads,
Rape-hate in Your stadiums
Striped with electronic rejoinders
To press softly-pliant, gaily-tinged plastic buttons.
Your elderly curl their ways to bankrupt health ministries
Where physicians fool with forms
And fill in football pools.
Your neighbors to the East—
Brazen, sordid—
Yank towards You
Roughly extracting for exacting theirs craved for.
You, Europe, sit pickled—
Soused in the juices of Your scummy heretofore.
Your dabblers in politics set flags unfurled
And their powers shame—
Shame!—
This Our world.

Anthony St. John

2009-12-15T11:07:00.000+01:00

Plastic Flowers for Italians
Butchered in Auto Accidents

Just as in any other Christian, particularly Roman Catholic, nation where religion molds overly the social, economic and political mores of its inhabitants, there is a premium especially, in Italy, on objects that reflect miserableness whether they be crucifixes, hermetically-sealed glass coffins containing dead-for-centuries holy people, statues dripping with blood, priests with holes in their hands, bleeding sacred hearts...ad infinitum. From my perspective, these symbols prompt the Italians I live with to accommodate a unique disposition that induces them to lament. And they do it so well! But what is worse, Italians expect you to join in with them in sharing happenings which, in other cultures, might not be thought of as being edifying. Italians want to be felt sorry for. The “catch-22” here is that if you do commiserate, you are doing yourself a good deed, and for that you should be thankful to the Italians for this blessed opportunity. An Italian will not thank you. You must thank him or her. By giving thanks, you submit. Nothing pleases the racist Italians more than your recognition of their quasi-fascist sense of superiority, their contrived haughtiness. Half of the Italians live in the 1930s; the other half live in the 1960s. These desperate souls are struggling in vain to be something they are not without acknowledging the dreadfully tragic consequences of their actions which are often violent and self-destructive.

It is customary to see plastic containers or milk cartons holding flowers attached to poles or fences near to where an automobile or motorcycle mishap killed an often inebriated or doped Italian causal agent. Years ago there used to be real flowers in these make-shift recipients, but today they are plastic and in some places, where collisions are frequent, ten to fifteen bouquets might be visualized in rows—propped up there sometimes for years, the artificial floral arrangements now blanched by the sun and covered with the soot and grime from passing buses, trucks, cars, scooters and even, on occasion, horse-drawn carriages.

One late morning in Sesto Fiorentino, I approached the bus stop where I was to wait to travel on to Firenze. About four or five metres beyond, I could see a young woman kneeling down and preparing to set up a composition of “live” flowers which laid on the pavement in rolled newspaper pages right next to her. I went over.

“May I ask what you are doing, please?”

She looked up startled and responded compactly, but very softly:

“I'm composing these flowers for my brother.”

“Your brother?” I quizzed.

“Yes. He was killed here four years ago in a motorcycle accident.
I come here every month with flowers for him.”

I told her I was very sorry and she nodded her appreciation very demurely.

She was a comely individual and exceptionally sensitive in the way she expressed herself.

I wanted to do something for her.

I changed the tone of my voice somewhat to express my seriousness.

“Do you really think your brother would want you to be here so sad
commemorating his brutal death again and again and again?
Don't you think he would want you to go on with your life--
to be happy, to be free from the gloominess this tragedy causes you?”

In an instant, she burst out sobbing.

Her face was red as a beet.

I put my hand on her shoulder to soothe her.

Suddenly, she stood up.
Erect.
As if she had been regenerated.
She closed in on me and abruptly hugged me almost violently.
“Thank you.”

She walked away.

The flowers remained on the sidewalk.

I refused to call after her.

When she turned out of sight at the corner,
I picked up the flowers.

I returned to the bus stop.

I waited for a beautiful woman to pass by,
and when one did, I presented the beauties to her.

She was taken aback.

“For me?”

“Of course!”

“But why?”

“You are beautiful!”

Her face was red as a beet, too.

* * *

Authored by Anthony St. John
15 December 2009
Calenzano, Italy

Anthony St. John, TheWordWarrior

2009-12-01T12:37:00.000+01:00

Anthony St. John, TheWordWarrior

2009-12-01T12:30:00.003+01:00

Why I Pity
John McCain, John Kerry &
Al Gore

I was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan, watched games at Ebbets Field, and first baseman Gil Hodges (number 14) was my hero. A mythical being charges you with a sense of hope in some future which you know nothing about except that it is coming. You desire to imitate your hero because his past brought him to a hereafter you might also want to savor. Above all, a hero is doing something appreciated by all, and we look up to him or her with respect and admiration. It is natural to want to be like them.
Of course, there is the allure of the game before us in the stadium, on TV, or on the Internet. The contest gives a sense of security. The regulations are fixed and one cannot contest the umpire or referee. We can cheat on our income tax returns, we can talk a cop out of giving us a ticket, we can lie and call in sick when we are not—but on the field, on the court, the ref is high-and-mighty. At the game, we more or less feel that things will be managed in a logical, fair-and-square manner. Just the opposite of our material lives. And we want our heroes to be not only extraordinary in the ways they entertain us, we also wish that they play by the rules so that they appear impeccable in our phantasy worlds.

It is undignified that we make heroes of sport figures more than we do of writers, scientists, philosophers, physicians, poets or others who might be actually doing more to benefit our time to come than one making a winning jump shot at the buzzer. We are significantly more precarious in our outlooks on life than we are fixed contentedly in them. Sport suffices to fill some inexplicable gap germane to our dire straits.

Naturally, sports are more useful than street fights or warfare. Sports serve to distract us from the tedium of our lives, and when we sit down in a stadium or colosseum to enjoy a sporting event, we enter into the spirits of our heroes and become oblivious to the difficulties we are experiencing at home or in the office. The Greeks were the first to elaborate on this relevancy. Of course, it is not the responsibility of sport to encourage us to read a book or attend a symphony. We should likewise recognize that players are stressing both their bodies and intelligences to limits most of us fail to come near to doing so. This is one of the reasons we applaud them.

In this article, I wish to discuss that which is not heroic. And more, I wish to expand on the consequences of making something larger-than-life out of something crass and perverted: in other words, I want to zero in on an enormous distortion of The Truth that I witnessed during the Vietnam “War” and the consequences of its calamitous aftermath which still haunt the psyches of the citizenry belonging to the DisUnited States of Northamerica.

No military maneuver, whether it be a Brobdingnagian battle or a single incursion, will succeed without a network of an indefinite quantity of materiel backing up its soldiery. Soldiers need to eat, sleep, be medicated, be entertained, be paid... An army that is furnished to the hilt stands a better chance of winning the group action than one which is wanting in giving its troops that what they require. The DisUnited States of Northamerica is an illusionist at offering the world the idea that it is so well-equipped it might dot the globe with its state of the art weaponry and most modern ground forces. There is no doubt that the DUS has been successful in the past (World War I and World War II) in supplying its troops with an adequate amount of provisions to get the war job done, but Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan have corroborated the notion that the most sophisticated armaments and the most galactic dollar investment are not the sure bets they were before. And because the DUS's forces are scattered among almost eight-hundred bases throughout our terrestrial planet, their supply networks today are less efficient and, indeed, less agile when responding on the pickup. (The Art of War by Sun Tzu!)
My case in point, notwithstanding, is the Vietnam “War,” or better said the Vietnam Debacle. From its inception this military police action was haunted with doubt and confusion about its intended purpose and eventual outcome. The DUS was split sometimes violently as the intervention protracted itself for many years. Apart from the deaths (58,209) and wounded (304,704), the emotional scars caused by the conflict are still ostensible today even so two other foolish expeditionary penetrations divide the DUS and stress its financial stability dangerously. There is in the air the horrible idea that a war, whatever one, has to be won in order to “correct” the failure, the defeat, sustained in Vietnam still trivialized by hawkish elements with the repugnant word “Nam.”

But what put one of the many monkeys on the DUS armed forces' back during the Vietnam conflict was the new conception of an air force, army and navy force fed to new recruits and seasoned lifers alike and boosted vigorously by an ex-president of the Ford Motor Company, the Vietnam era's budget-minded paper pusher and corporate plumber Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara. RMcN fought hard to bring DUS forces into the managerial world making them parts of his enormous hydraulic-like system, yet he miscalculated so miserably not only what it meant to be a soldier, he actually envisioned the instauration of a new type of warrior thus opening the door to the creation of the modern electronic fighter—to the delight of anti-DUS guerilla elements located everywhere, naturally. If protesters objected to RMcN's orders, they were quickly flushed down his drain. His pipe dream eventually clogged the entire defence scheme and even today the DUS's military complex is staggering about perplexedly in an embarrassing confusion to the delight of not only ferocious radicals, even old World War II friends are busting their guts laughing at the absurd performance.

Our Southeast Asian forces were so top-heavy with business-like paperwork and administrative rigmarole, soldiers were constricted to do everything but what their mission intended them to accomplish: to soldier! As a junior officer, I was expected to learn something about everything. We were to participate in community affairs near our duty stations. We were encouraged to further our studies by mail at some university if we expected to gain rank. We were assigned to attend courses which had nothing to do with soldiering but did enhance our managerial potential. After Officer Basic Course I was assigned to teach in a missile training battalion, but when I was sent to Vietnam I was attached to a field artillery outfit—with the “guns” as a redleg would say. I had forgotten how to “lay the battery” by the time I was assigned to the Fourth Division in Pleiku by the Divarty full-bird CO, Colonel McAllister. RMcN wanted managerial clones to robotize the Art of Warfare. Being able to bomb the world to smithereens was the armed forces' logic for being superior to all other opponents.

I want to relate something now again that has shocked so many people before who have listened to me say it. It regards the logistical formation of forces in the Fourth Division (Pleiku, Vietnam) when I languished in it from August 1967 to the first part of 1968. At Pleiku was located the Snowflake Division's base camp—on the outskirts of the poverty-stricken Asian city. Citizens from Pleiku lined up each morning to be searched before being admitted to the Bravo Charlie to clean quarters, work in the kitchen, shine boots, run errands, clean tanks and jeeps, etc. The BC was a city in itself. About 20,000 inhabitants or so. The commanding officer of the base camp was a major general, two stars, named Peers. The BC was a beehive of activity as soldiers performed carbon-papered administrative chores, prepared hot meals for the troops on the battlefield, maintained helicopters and aerial observation planes, operated the PX, doctored the sick and wounded...in other words, a BC was the backbone of an organization which existed to execute the Vietnam mission. For every man in the field, there were seven or eight backing him up in BC. Individuals serving in BC were sarcastically called “base camp warriors” because the BC was rarely attacked by an enemy which was largely composed of guerilla forces. General Peers once had to order all arms locked up in BC because drunken Snowflake Division troops were shooting themselves and their comrades so often! A shot in the calf was called The Million Dollar Wound inasmuch as it would keep you out of the field. In Bravo Charlie, then, was the place to be if you had to serve in Vietnam.

The place where supply sergeants could steal left and right. Where stolen guns and rifles could be sent home to National Guard armories and then sold to paramilitary kooks in the DUS. Where Afroamericans, who often comprised 30-40% of infantry companies in the field, could be threatened with battlefield duty if they misbehaved. Where officers connived for their next duty station and higher rank. Where extra R&Rs were bargained for. Where soldiers received care for unheard of strains of syphillis. Where sergeants re-upped two or three times more to pilfer more. Where sergeants from the south of the DUS had cocktail parties for weeks celebrating the deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Where sundry packs for grunts in the field were stolen and sold on the black market. Where division brass were entertained by Vietnamese-French prostitutes flown in from Saigon dressed in Red Cross uniforms. (RHIP: Rank Has Its Privileges!) Where graft and corruption went amuck. BC was such a disgusting pisshole, I preferred to be on the battlefield.

On the field of battle you did not have to shave or take a shower for a week or so. You might find a cobra or a bamboo pit viper in your hootch one morning. You could get malaria in the Central Highlands. If you did not take your anti-malaria pills to get out of field duty, you might end up in a tank filled with huge chunks of ice. Your armpits were bleached white from the salt tablets you were taking. Maybe 40% of your artillery rounds were duds. Your M-16 worked like a piece of junk, and you would wish you had an AK-47 like the LRRPs (Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol scouts). You might go without supplies for a couple of days because helicopters could not land on the mountain top where you were dug in. You might be killed by an errant US Army artillery round or the door-gunner of a Huey helicopter or a 750-pound bomb dropped from a US Air Force jet. You could be drenched by monsoon rains beating down incessantly for eighteen hours a day, and then go to sleep with rain-soaked boots on. You might get a “Dear John” letter. Your feet could ache with jungle rot. Without sundry packs, you could clean your teeth with salt and use leaves instead of toilet paper. Where officers were called by their first names and where they would be murdered later on in the “war” by fraggings. Officers and enlisted ones were not of the same mindset. Humping with the grunts on the battlefield did not endear you to the base camp warriors; no, they just kept thanking their lucky stars they were not in your boots. In the field you could lose your body, but in Bravo Charlie you could lose your soul.

Believe me when I say I never saw a journalist or photographer when I humped with my FO (artillery forward observer) party (recon sergeant and telephone operator) and with the grunts in the jungles bordering Cambodia and Laos. (Artillery types, although they advanced with the grunts, were not entitled to receive the Combat Infantryman's Badge or something analogous to it.) Division SOP (Standard Operating Procedures) prohibited non-combatants from going to the field. If a combat photographer came to the battlefield, he (not “she”!) did it after the smoke had cleared and with permission. In BC you could find reps from print and TV organizations representing the world's media conglomerates. They were carefully controlled and buttered up ridiculously—naturally. The United States Army was fanatically media-conscious in Southeast Asia, had been in the past, and continues to be so today. Horrendous crimes committed by DUS troops against the inhabitants of their host country were swept under the public relations rug with the complaisance of the media.

Al Gore served as an Army photographer. His mother is remembered for whip-cracking the career of her senatorial husband, and when Al was up to the political gainsay himself she coached him so: “Al, SMILE, RELAX & ATTACK!” Those words served the calling of her husband and would suffice for the election campaign of her dearly beloved son when he sought the highest political position existing in the the DisUnited States of Northamerica. AG's mother had as a mission the swearing in of her son as a President of the DisUnited States—that task which she had not been able to accomplish for her husband. Al smiled and smiled and smiled. A good guy. And, oh, don't you forget it, a war veteran—not a Vietnam “War” veteran! AG did not need to brag about his military “service.” There were staff members to remind obeying journalists that AG wore his Army uniform proudly and served his country patriotically—something which the sons of editors of National Review did not! Politicians serving their country had PT-109 on their minds and still remember today how military service blessed JFK's chances of becoming a president. It was rare to see politicians' sons on the battlefield. They served in the logistical rear, base camp, where William F Buckley, Jr—even Gore Vidal—and others of this ilk could once be found. AG got away with not serving in the field but to his credit he did not brag about his Vietnam days inordinately. We cannot call him a hero!
Two-faced John Kerry did. Listen to what this insincere, hollow one said after his tour of duty in Vietnam when he served as leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War: “They...raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up [sic] bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion [sic] reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam.” All of this is true. I can verify that DUS troops in Vietnam on very, very many occasions acted with criminal intent. They disgraced themselves and their country and did not help the DUS to honor its name nor its intentions such as they were. (How long would you trust your child with Lieutenant William Calley?) The worst, nonetheless, was accomplished by B-52 airstrikes that carpet-bombed to their deaths hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Most citizens of the DUS do not want to face up to these facts. They prefer to wrap themselves in their red, white and blue flags and deny historical facts. So be it. I can only say that those who lost their beloved ones in DUS bombings (The Americans are a wonderful people—if they aren't bombing you!) have not forgotten and will never do so. Hypocrites such as John Kerry are out for themselves and not Justice.

Well, then. Double-tongued John Kerry, who once harangued DUS involvement in the Vietnam Debacle, in 2004, accepting the nomination for president at the Democratic National Convention, did not present himself as the leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, but did boast that he was a proud veteran of that war and announced to the crowds, hawkishly, that he was “reporting for duty!” He even had film clips of his Vietnam “War” experiences. How he ever staged that is something that perplexes me. Did he pay the Viet Cong to act out for him? Deceitful JK criticized the Vietnam Debacle and then used it to promote his political fortune. He wanted his cake and wanted to eat it, too! What's wrong with that? Nothing! Would it not be difficult to find an American who did not think his political representatives were two-faced liars! Why should JK be credited with speaking coherently and honestly to his constituents? Citizens of the DUS expect their politicians to lie. Why should we think JK would even consider speaking The Truth to them? JK lost. He is a loser. He looked to wiggle his way to success. Not very elegant. Not in the least uplifting. We cannot call him a hero!
John McCain graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1958. He was ranked 894 out of a class of 899—a perfect tally for anyone wanting to be President of the United States! This Navy brat had a lot to live up to: both his grandfather and father were four-star admirals in the US Navy. JMcC was a hotheaded boozer and party boy at the Academy, and later in flight school, was famous more for the planes he crashed than he was remembered for his flying dexterity. In Vietnam he distinguished himself by accomplishing bombing missions against an enemy that possessed no air force capable of retaliating against him or his confrères. There is no record of him shooting down an enemy aircraft! When he was shot down, he was cared for, cured and eventually returned to the DUS after being used as a bargaining chip with bets being placed on his grandfather and father's high naval rank. He was not slaughtered as he had massacred Vietnamese women and children from the air. JMcC claims he sustained injuries in a Vietnamese POW camp that have remained with him since, yet he was able to pass physicals that returned him to full flight status after his much-publicized incarceration. It would be difficult to prove the extent of JMcC's POW sufferings; he has stated that he was in solitary confinement for two years. Yet it would be equally arduous to believe him because, after all, he is a DUS politician and qualifies himself as being an underhanded pathological prevaricator. And he speaks through his teeth! Not very refined. We cannot call him a hero!

The Truth-O-Meter tells it all! But why are Northamericans so afraid to face the music sounding off against their maliciousness and conceit? Better worded, why would the Northamerican community and their associates vie so vehemently to cultivate reputations of being bullies and self-righteous fanatics? To scare others into submission? Because they possess such a boorish view of human nature and contend with it to dominate and contain it? For the fight per se? Due to the fact that they are overanxious, endangered? Seeing that they lack confidence in themselves, they demur? It is difficult to join a debate which delves into the inner core of the Northamerican psyche. There is trepidation to do so. It is much easier to skirt issues without going all out trying to resolve them. Have you ever heard of a give-and-take entitled “What It Means to Be a Northamerican?” Who would sponsor that? Goldman Sachs?

What is clearer to the observer who does not belong to the Northamerican community than it might be to the Northamericans themselves, is the fact that there exists a huge amount of hostility directed at the DisUnited States, and in recent years it has crystallized beyond anyone's expectations. This has been achieved, in grand part, by the exponential utilization of the electronic communications' revolution now in rapid forward motion. The DUS is regarded as the prima facie of modernity and “progress.” It is alluded to continually as being the most powerful, most influential nation on Earth. As such, granted, it will bear the gratuitous criticism of others for being exaggeratedly proud and self-confident as a res publica even when it might not desire to be so. But those who cannot enjoy the material resources of the DUS and are violent in their attacks against the excessive and unconscionable modus vivendi of many Northamericans, are not uniting under the banner of enviousness but are singling out Northamericans for their human wickedness and abandonment of those ideals—generosity, justice, global fraternity, respect, to name a few—which others who tend to have not see in others who indeed have too much of. For many observers of the Northamerican scene, it appears that Northamericans cheat and steal Mondays through Fridays, and on Saturdays and Sundays ask forgiveness for their sins before beginning all over again on Monday morning. Citizens of the DisUnited States are loathed in all parts of the world, and in their inebriated amour propre, they refuse to perceive this actuality. Rather, they trust, quite remarkably, that their path is the one all should travel and they hold fast to the notion that they should be simulated.

It is therefore quite logical for Al Gore, John Kerry and John McCain to position themselves within the realm of The Untruth instead of The Truth. They feel obliged, as political representatives of their people, to cater to their constituents' weird opinions of themselves, and if a question of morality does spring up, the most convenient alibi is that they must follow the herd's quest, “in this our glorified democracy which abides by the wishes of the people.” Those people, almost most of them, clamored to have the murderer, William Calley, released, pardoned from his guilty conviction for the assassination of innocent children, women and elderly folk during the My Lai massacre. “Rusty,” today, cannot sleep and is haunted by the memories of his killing spree. (Some weeks after the My Lai massacre, I was assigned to the 11th Infantry Brigade [Americal Division] and served as the Brigade Artillery liaison officer for Colonel Oran K Henderson, the commander of the AO in which the butchery befell the innocent Vietnamese villagers. Colonel Henderson, then on the BG [brigadier general] list, was later accused by some of ordering the carnage, but was vindicated in court-martial proceedings. In the mornings, I flew with him in his spic n' span “C&C ship” (Command & Control Huey helicopter) to survey our AO. He was hung over every time and what I remember most about him was his ordering our copter pilots to ascend as quickly as possible to a 3,000-foot altitude so that we could be out of small arms fire! Never once did he offer his C&C ship as a MEDIVAC for infantry troops blown to bits by booby traps [90% of which were US ordnance!] in the heavily mine-infested My Lai AO. Colin Powell, who also served in the same AO, never went to bat to seek Justice for the victims of the My Lai mass murder.)

Might is right? When you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow? The hatred of the Northamerican people has no terminus ad quem. Any faction which disagrees with them is subject to the most vociferous, antagonistic charges, and these intolerable ones, these fanatics stew in the sauces of their self-righteousness and misconception. What hope is there for them.

I feel discomforted for Al Gore, John Kerry and John McCain. They are intellectual cowards. They are pathetic. They possess not the gumption to go beyond. To lead their fellow countrymen to a new order that would bring respect and admiration to them...to cause the DisUnited States to be regarded as a competent, mature real thing throughout the world...to act as beacons of Justice and peace for all the globe to steer towards...to set the pace for the implementation of a world order equitable and worthy of being imitated by others...to be, simply, authentic leaders and not mendacious crowd followers.

Authored by Anthony St. John
1 December 2009
Calenzano, Italia

* * *

2009-11-15T07:59:00.001+01:00

Listen to the Death Rattles of Western Civilization!

The Perfect President
of the DisUnited States of Northamerica

The principal purveyors of cultural, economic, political and social policy extending heavy-handed rule over foreign nations, these Death Rattles of Western Civilization—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, The Netherlands, The DisUnited Kingdom, and their kingpin, The DisUnited States of Northamerica—now find themselves challenged as never before notwithstanding their often turbulent histories. Having lost any sensing of authority and/or authenticity, these Concocters of Consent, their consent!, these Rulers of the Truth, their truth!, these Proponents of Judeo-Christian “Democratic” Capitalism, their capitalism!, now have their backs against the wall. Vicious societal agitation against them, oligarchic socialists (olisocists), is rampant throughout the world. Uncertainty is a certainty. Foreboding is the order of the day. It is as if a grand conflict, a universal war (World War III/Universe War I) is looming in the inner selves of people—still again! Is an Armageddon between The Haves and The Have-Nots in the offing? A super clash, to outdo all others, set on its deleterious course centuries ago? Who is going to redeem Western Civilization? Who is going to pull The Old World out of its nosedive? Who is going to call the tune for The New Europe? Who is going to skipper us through our Sea of Hypocrisy? Superman? Batman? Spiderman?

Why not the striking John Sidney McCain III? (McCain in 2012!) No other Northamerican politician is so in sync with his country’s animating spirit. His curriculum vitae substantiates my assertion. Born 29 August 1936 of Scots-Irish and English ancestry, McCain III boozed his way through the DisUnited States Naval Academy (1958) as did McCain I (grandfather) and McCain II (father)—both four-star DisUnited States' Navy admirals. McCain III graduated almost at the bottom of his class (894/899) thus qualifying himself as a potential Commander-in-Chief of the DisUnited States’ armed forces and manager of the world’s largest bureaucracy, the Pentagon. During his active duty military career, McCain III crashed many DisUnited States' Navy jets yet not one of the enemy's when he served in Vietnam. Nevertheless, like his antecedents, the Navy brat bombed to smithereens an untold number of Asian people, including women and children. Quick-tempered McCain III was held prisoner in the Hanoi Hilton where the erratic hothead dictated the rules to his turnkeys who stood in awe of his family background and even offered him repatriation terms because he had made anti-DisUnited States propaganda confessions. Rank Has Its Priviledges. He is a church-goer, naturally, and switched from Episcopalian to Baptist in a vote-getting scheme set to woo the southern DUS’s constituency. With a pathology of power stirring him on, he divorced his first wife disfigured in an accident, married the heiress to a beer distributing company who bankrolled the political ambitions of this pol with a John McEnroe temperament (he smashes million-dollar Navy jets, not tennis rackets!), and hooked up with Mafia-faced Arizonian shady characters to realize his political illusions.

The DUS’s citizens are privileged to still have the chance to select this time a Presidential Professional Bomber, who talks through his teeth, to represent them all over the world. (The Northamericans are a wonderful people—if they aren’t bombing you!) With his finger on The Button, McCain III, the DUS’s first PPB, with a vendetta on his agenda, would surely bully for the DUS all the way across the globe. He does it his way! Northamericans should not lose this unique opportunity to select a half-pint, semi-psychopath who might turn out to be a bona fide Dr Strangelove.

Have a nice nightmare!

Authored by Anthony St. John in Exile and Sweating in the Sweltering Heat of Tuscany
1 July 2008
Updated 15 November 2009

2009-11-01T07:38:00.001+01:00

Excessive Cheese Intake Obstructing French People's Brain Activity
FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELTS!
Here Comes...
Le Nouveau Moyen Âge!

This gem of wit by the French agent provocateur and philosophical economist Alain Minc very much more than any other quip sums up for me the state of mind of, at least, the world's industrial nations' conglomeration: “Hier, nous avions le droit d'être fatalists par optimisme; nous devons désormais être audacieux par pessimisme.” Or, as the song-poem goes: “Desperation keeps us strong...It's a terrible beauty we've made.” Spandau Ballet. Not even a Jean-Paul Sartre philosophical tractatus could, if it would, salvage this Western “Civilization”--this spent European continent which André Glucksmann declares “doesn't have a brain in its head.”

Voilà! Well now... There certainly was not enough grey matter in France on 6 May 2007 to push Ségolène Royal over the threshold and into the Presidency of the Republic of France (Presidentess of Europe?). We knew so way before the national vote casting: The “Un million de femmes s'énervent” campaign for pledges counted not more than 20,000 signatures (mine included!) only days before the final showdown; then, the vain attempt to secure votes from the third place first ballot winner—that horse breeder's boots bogged down in conciliatory pony dung—proved to be an exercise in futility. We had before us a splendid woman, oozing with dignity, tact and outspoken courage. A femme who rallied against France's electronic neo-fascists; who made a great effort to lift the largest country wholly in Europe out of the post bellum doldrums of its fictitious well-being where it had been marinating for decades; who had no fear of a recalcitrant, desperate Roman Catholic Church waning more and more each day with every passing scientific discovery; who fought tooth and nail against an entrenched olisocism (a Lagardère-Pinault-Arnault troika); who attempted to bring France—this cheesy subgenus of a puny Europe that bounces like a counterfeit coin—before the international community dressed in the overalls of a legitimate nation looking honestly to make friends, not allies, with all peoples throughout the world; and, who pleaded with all French citizens to ask not what France could do for them, but what they could do for France. A truly golden opportunity blown away by the winds of intransigent shenanigans. Merci beaucoup.

It makes no sense that France thinks it has the gumption to cultivate la politique de l'autruche and play political hardball, not soft, on the ever-expanding international scene. Limp-wristed Gaullist status-quoticians want this land area, a little less than the size of Texas, to tighten its belt, turn in on itself, and draw others unto France instead of stimulating bonds with those beyond this realm 16% of which is over 65 years of age. The conservative approach. What for centuries has been the safe methodology. Can France afford to mellow still in the memories of its Past? Can France conjecture that it can chip in to be part of the leadership of the globe when its own turf is rife with dissent, dangerously polarized, hamstrung by the very economic rules and regulations it goes up against in speeches and prayers tended to less fortunate developing populaces, when it talks with a forked tongue basing its legitimacy on standards that only French citizens might comprehend...ad infinitum! Is a France, stuck in the xenophobic, racist rut of its Past, going to impress any others who refuse to kowtow to its haughtiness and are not electrified by France's image of itself smoothly camouflaged with soft skin creams, suntanned-by-lamp youth, and swankily dressed and cutely coiffed political artistes vying for a piece of the ever-dwindling Political Pie?

France sorely wants to give it the medieval stab! And to prove it is not ribbing us, on 16 May 2007 it crowned, as President of France, a tsar puérile, the first French president with a facial tic...El Hombre Macho. A fogeyish braggart who swears he is going to whip France into law and order and bring economic miracles to this Land of Phoney Excellence! France's Number One Cheese Salesman will shuffle a spineless, passionless, hedonistic France and take its GUCCI-PUCCI set for a whirlwind of nationalism and fiscal anal-hoarding. He yearns to achieve what other European politicos were impotent to effectuate: to manage the creation of a post-World War II body politic fit for all European people. (We wish him luck with this Europe which buries Kremlin atheists at solemn high funeral masses and rescinds war orders for princes for “the good of the troops!”) One can just see this King of France on a visit to Africa—to shore up desperately-needed natural resources for his megalomaniacal castles in the air—pleading with Africans to forget those colonial days which even today keep large parts of them in misery and starvation. As would the King of Spain, on a visit to Venezuela to deal for lower oil prices, begging Venezuelans to dismiss from their minds the 14,000,000 Southamerican and Centralamerican natives massacred by Spanish marauders...or the King of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, on a visit to Russia to bargain for cheap gas prices, imploring Russians to stop thinking about their 30,000,000 dead sacrificed during the fight against Fascism and concentrate more on pasta dishes...or the King of Hamburger, on a visit to Japan to secure permission to open fast-food outlets not far from the ground zeroes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, suggesting that the Japanese people not recall the devastating effects of the world's first use of belligerent atom bombs. The President of France can wave all the French flags he so wishes, he can sing La Marseillaise as loud as he desires for as long as he wants, but nothing will change the spirit of the African people who have had to submit to the criminal abuse administered by those French nationals who still today connive to deprive Africans of their basic human rights. The game has changed dramatically and not as the French would have it. And to react to this transformation, this stuck-in-the-mud France, with the personality of a squeezed lemon, has selected to play Bully on the Block! There are Republicans in Washington DC with more brains than that! Am I not right, Professor Glucksmann?

French conservatives have had too much a share of pessimism and negativism to offer. They have grouped together to form palsy-walsy social, cultural, economic and political ties which serve the inclusive general concept that a government should dole out political and civil honors according to wealth. The French conservative is not interested in offering a fair shake to his fellows, and he excludes them from power circles with the justification that life demands a political philosophy which exalts the nation and a select group of individuals above all others, and that severe economic and social regimentation, plus the forcible suppression of the opposition, are necessary measures to exercise stringent control over the masses who are considered inferior to the nobler and more privileged French conservative. I deny this philosophy and its aspects of myopic gloom. I look for programs which show liveliness and interest in good things. Which look with hope to the future. Which signal danger, but communicate love and understanding. “Human behavior leads to make-believe, disequilibrium, frustrations, lies, or, on the contrary, it becomes the source of rewarding experiences, in accordance with its manner of expression in actual living—whether in bad faith, laziness, generosity and freedom,” said Simone de Beauvoir. I wish that all people enjoy their lives in a spirit of unselfishness, lucidity and unsusceptibility and I beg the new President of France to come to his political and human senses and yield to the ideal that all men belong to the same community where equality and justice for all is the common goal.

Authored by Anthony St. John
19 May 2007

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2009-10-01T11:21:00.000+02:00

A Tender-hearted Partial Roster of People
with Whom I Wish to Dine

Roberto Baggio
Daniel Bell
Tony Benn
Fausto Bertinotti
Beyoncé
Jeff Bezos
Clarissa Burt
Aldo Busi
Andrew Carnegie
Leonardo Cemak
Jackie Chan
Hugo Chávez
Noam Chomsky
Michel Classens
Hillary Clinton
Paul A Cohen
Richard Dawkins
Pierre Durand
Jenna Elfman
Elizabeth, Queen of England
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Jean Ziegler
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Howard Zinn
Greta Zografaki

Updated 19 September 2009

2009-09-01T10:59:00.002+02:00

Why the Central Stupidity Agency
Refuses to Reimburse Me
150,000,000 Renminbi
for My Highly-sophisticated
Foreign Affairs' Consultations (Gulp!)

If any one of you reading this letter-essay have ever been tempted to think that the Central Stupidity Agency (CSA) and its Agents of Stupidity (ASs) were indeed intelligent, you will never be enticed to do so once more provided you follow this article to its satisfying finale. You are about to enjoy with me a reassessment of many of my international experiences and the hindsights we may draw from them now and, regrettably, did not do so in the Past. This is not a “I told you so!” lament. It is my way of celebrating my own intelligence. I do not claim to be a genius on the subject of foreign affairs, nor do I affirm, boasting, that I possess an éclaircissement to all the disorderlinesses caused by the misplays and wrongdoings which I have witnessed perpetrated by the CSA and its ASs. In fact, I believe my abilities are directly proportionate to the inabilities of the CSA, and many other normally nimble characters would have reached the same assumptions I have had they only had had the opportunities to have had shared my observations. The beat goes on.

It all began in the autumn of 1975—at a public phone in the lobby of the Gainesville (Florida) Hilton hotel where I called the FBI office in Jacksonville to ask for advice. Lucia and I had decided to leave for Caracas near the end of the year. I knew almost nothing about Venezuela—its language, religion, customs and practices, history, collective memory, the value ascribed to its heritage, public spaces, and specific landscapes. I did know that the Venezuelans had spit upon Richard Nixon long before the Northamericans did and, of course, it was an oil-producing nation—just doomed to be so.

Planning shortly to live happily ever after in the arms of Lucia in The City of Eternal Spring, I asked for some guidance about Venezuela wanting to know if there was anything I should be wise to before heading out. Vaccinations? Visa? Passport? The agent with whom I spoke told me to call the Central Intelligence Agency (sic!) because that “outfit” was updated better on foreign affairs. He gave me a telephone number to call.

A man answered but never identified himself. Nor where he was nor what office he was in. When I enquired who he was he abruptly interrupted and asked me why I was calling. I told him. Then he queried me as to why I was seeking employment. I wasn't. I wanted to know about Venezuela. I related to him that my girlfriend had invited her friend, Pablo, from Caracas to meet me in Gainesville. Pablo was the right-hand man of the minister of the Ministerio del Ambiente y de los Recursos Naturales Renovables, the highest-budgeted ministry in the Venezuelan government at that time. The guy at the other end of the phone then was curious to know if I wished to be “contacted” when I arrived in Caracas. “Who knows...I just might need some help there alone and distant from the United States.” An “insurance agent” would visit with me when I was in Caracas. He did not say when or where.

Being lovestruck, it didn't dawn on me at the time that I was a perfect catch for a CIA recruiting officer fishing for apprentices. I had a university degree in Philosophy. I was an ex-Army officer (on the captain's promotion list) already with a SECRET security clearance. I had served as the S-2 (Intelligence Officer) for the corps of ROTC cadets at my university. I had reported for three newspapers. And I might add, I am a lateral thinker! I was recipient of the “The Wayward Missile Award” and had been called “Loose Cannon” while I served with the field artillery! Most of all, I am an “outside the box” theorist. (“A standard recommendation for reform—one made regularly by people discovering these problems for the first time—is to encourage “outside the box” analyses that challenge conventional wisdom and consider scenarios that appear low in probability but high in consequence. To some, this sort of intellectual shake-up might well have led the intelligence system, rather than Tom Clancy, to anticipate the kamikaze hijacking tactic of September 11.” Reference: Foreign Affairs, January-February 2002, page 49.) But there was a little problem: I'm not a joiner; and it was Vladimir Nabakov who had reminded me that spies get shot.

Even though the Central Stupidity Agency would have been ludicrous not to have desired to have one such as me on their roster, they were not going to ask me to work for them! (Thank goodness!) It was for me to go crawling to them. The CSA hunts for supporters. Believers. Sycophants. It covets minions. Individuals who are predetermined and apprehensive. You must be of an unenthusiastic nature but raring to go to authenticate yourself, to give yourself some legitimacy by devoting your being to a strident cause. This amalgamation requires that a candidate be a conforming non-conformist. A contradiction in terms. A double-bind situation. An aspirant must exhibit exceptional abilities to think tangentially yet be disposed to submit to a last word. Any contestant who reaches beyond the control sphere might be stomached for his or her incomparable flair—if he or she is beyond doubt an important element—but this temperament cannot be remunerated in the context of such a person's career profile. If you want to feel free you should not join the Central Stupidity Agency! You must think pessimistically about everything. You must have an enduring faith in “The Company.” They are Jesuit-like. They know something about everything but nothing about what is obvious. And you better not be an atheist!

No “insurance agent” ever met up with me in Caracas. But that was not necessarily simply because I was surrounded by CSA goofballs where I worked: first, at The Daily Journal newspaper, a bulletin board for government undercovers traipsing through Southamerica; then at the Ministerio de Infomación y Turismo. I must append here a very freaky story I had read in the DJ and which hinted to me that even if an “insurance agent” was to accost me, I could not communicate with him or her about my “dealings” with the CSA. The article stated that the CSA had been infiltrated by “moles”--it was not said who or where they were—and that the CSA was taking precautions to remedy the state of affairs! How could I be sure that an “insurance agent” was a “mole”--or not. I was on my own. I could not believe anyone. It was one of the most liberating, joyous days of my life!

When George Tenet announced his resignation from the Central Stupidity Agency in June 2004, effective 11 July 2004, he made the following statement: “We are not perfect...but we are very, very, very good....” Don't believe him! Look, rather, at the history of the world for the past sixty years and decide for yourself whether or not this planet is a better, safer, calmer place to live on. And please do not offer excuses for the catastrophes that these swivel chair warriors have concocted for millions of innocent people who have had to put up with their often megalomaniac shenanigans. I am going to prove to you how and why the CSA is chock full of dimwitted personages who are doing the DisUnited States of Northamerica more harm than benefit, and I will draw upon my experiences with them in New York, Vietnam, Venezuela and Italy to do so.

The CSA ASs I knew were tense, grim and lived their lives strenuously: playing hard ball at work, but “soft” hard ball when they lightened up. Always the confrontation, the competition, the obsession to control. With the perks they possessed, the ASs had also been given extravagant opportunities to take the Rests & Recuperations that allowed them to regain their composure and verve. But once these breaks were interrupted, they were back again stressing themselves at their sinews convinced they were not only performing a patriotic service, but were also persuaded that they were executing some metaphysical, religious good turn that would reap them rewards not only in this world, but in what they believed to be an afterlife. Dog is their copilot. These Simple Simons do not sustain that the separation of Church and State should be sanctioned.

In this reading, my dear reader, I want to put the spotlight on only three CSA ASs with whom I broke bread: William F Buckley, Jr, editor of National Review, Clem Cohen and John Sullivan. Three pals. Three enormous egos. Three marionettes. Three footboys. Three extremists.
I will speak the least about WFB, Jr because his life is best illustrated by me in another article of mine, William F Buckley, Jr: Profile of a Right-wing Fanatic posted on www.scribd.com/thewordwarrior. Enjoy reading it, and tell me what you think.

Clem Cohen was the most affable of the ASs that I was to meet—and the most pathetic, unfortunately. I would have liked very much to have been his friend, but CC had no time for friends, for life. He was a CSA workaholic and obsessed with the cold-blooded mission set out for him by his Langley superiors.
Clem Cohen was on the masthead of The Daily Journal listed as a “director,” but he was my boss at the Ministerio de Información y Turismo (MIT) to which I had been transferred by the “directors” of the DJ. I had never seen him even once during my six-month stint at the DJ. Clem was from Brooklyn, New York as I was. This did not endear him to me because I had not been to New York since 1968 and Florida had sort of undone some of my New Yorkishness.

CC was very much unsettled with himself. As other ASs were, he, too, was extremely intelligent and fluent in at least four languages and had a knowledge of two others. He was pressured but quick—so nippy as to be on the verge of ill health. One day when I was called to his office to discuss the rewrite of a speech I was editing, he jumped up on his swivel chair, mimicked a monkey, and kidded with me that he was going “bananas.” On different occasions, I tried to help him as best I could to calm him down, although I had no success. People in the office told me he was diabetic, but I possessed no verification of this information concerning his health. It would not have surprised me that he was. CC was always in a hurry. He downed his lunches dashing to return to our offices. He had three or four phones on his desk, and I frequently saw him holding a receiver in each hand while he spoke to two people at the same time. He was a compulsively hard worker to the exclusion of other interests and gave me the impression that his job had control of him rather than he having control of it. He was driven to accomplish yet I never saw the harvest of what he had planted.

CC was Venezuela's “media czar.” Each and every word written about the government of Venezuela passed his scrutiny before being sent out to the world. At MIT, he was always in contact with the DJ. MIT utilized ten telex machines that hummed twenty-four hours a day. Our newsrooms were the most forward-looking I had ever seen with the exception of those at The Miami Herald from where I once reported. All of the people I worked with spoke two or three languages with varying degrees of proficiency. CC had to read all their work before it was transmitted. Articles. Speeches. Press releases. Anything and everything originating from the Venezuelan government were checked and double-checked by the overworked Clem. It was handy for CC to have me in his service because I could spruce up the repeatedly dreadful English copy that he had to deal with. I had no muscle to change any of the contents of that which I edited. CC was paranoid about his mastery over media material. Often, I saw French, Italian, English, Spanish, German or Arabic texts spread across his desk which was constantly in a state of confusion and glutted high. Journalists from all over the world representing important newspaper or television companies passed through Clem's office unceasingly. The place pulsated with excitement and energy. I remember speaking one afternoon with Bernard Shaw of CBS who was one of the most kindhearted journalists I had ever met in my life.
CC was poles apart the other CSA personnel I knew and who were excessively rigid in their opinions and very often uptight, self-righteous and lacking senses of humour. Clem surely could be a hard worker and an extremely difficult boss to work for, yet he never asked his underlings to do things he would not do himself. He was a man you came to respect. He had a kindliness for others that reaped him support and collaboration when he was dealing with those he managed. He would tear out of his office running to a meeting with the ministro of MIT, Diego Arria, screaming final instructions to three or four of us on his way to the elevator. He worked too arduously. Too relentlessly for his physical well-being. It was CC who gave me the idea that the CSA was comprised of a “left wing” and not just the “right wing” (a Hegelian tit for tat?) which had impressed me so much at National Review and The Daily Journal. CC was more open-minded than the doctrinaire parrots of the conservative force, and if I remember correctly, he spoke well of John F Kennedy with me—but not very revealingly. It was not easy to take Clem's mind away from his work which, I had the notion, was creating more discombobulation than it was inventing creative thinking.

Each and every of the ASs I looked at carefully were goaded with a zeal which distinguished their moral fibre. They were high-minded men. Persons with faith not in themselves. Profoundly convinced they were performing a good turn on behalf of their country—right or wrong! They were religious. Practitioners. They entreated, in church or synagogue, to be able to do their best for the United States of America. They sought protection from the enemy during their prayer gatherings. They walked with four eyes checking all angles. Overly attentive. Curious. Intelligent. Thinkers both on their feet and on a bar stool. From their military experiences they grasped the importance of keeping their ties fit properly and their gig lines tidy. They could be conservative dressers toting Samsonite accessories; or, they could be fashion plates decked out in European tailored suits with Italian leather briefcases and luggage. Their watches. Their pens. Their belt buckles. Every bit of them attended to to execute the task delegated to be brought to a conclusion in favour of the United States of America. The zealots, hyped with putting on their best act, squirmed and oiled their ways through the labyrinth of details and enigmas indispensable to their superiors in Langley, Virginia.
John Sullivan was a tall, solidly-built Central Stupidity Agency AS who had as his AO (Area of Operations) the whole of Southamerica. I first met him at MIT after he had had a hushed-up conference with CC. He was not fixed to any duty station. He scrambled about Southamerican capitals using Business Week as his cover. After a brief tête-à-tête, he left me so: “Let's have lunch some day.” He was very sure of himself. Too much so for me to like him. He wore the troubles of the world on his shoulders. He was strained. He had a mission. He was holier-than-thou and a tad arrogant reminding me of William F Buckley, Jr. Was he that “insurance agent?” Was he a mole? Years later we met again at the Tamanaco Hotel, and the trim, decked out with muscles JS looked surprised when he saw me: “You still here?” I responded so: “Yeah, I'm still waiting for you to keep that lunch date!” He was embarrassed. He balked. He told me he had a dinner appointment with a Puertorican lady, but before I could let him off the hook, he caved in and invited me to dine that evening, too. John wanted to give me the impression that he was a man of his word. Like most ASs in the field and not behind a swivel chair, JS also valued the virtue of being precise. When you are meticulous you can count your accomplishments with satisfaction without regretting later that you had left something out; or, if you did, you could remind yourself that you at least had carried through on the most of them! JS was overly scrupulous. Irish Roman Catholic. As we dined, I would get an inkling into why he was so.

John led the conversation for most of the time we three sat together. The lady with us at the hotel's restaurant hardly ever uttered a word, nor did she appear peeved—didn't even, I think, hide any sentiment of being annoyed at my presence—and this caused me to think that she was an employee and not a romantic chum of JS. JS called to mind1 that he was divorced.

“First thing every morning I go to mass and communion....” JS told me it was especially easy to find Roman Catholic churches in the early mornings throughout Southamerica—easier than coming across them in the United States. His revelation made me think immediately of William F Buckley, Jr, and I informed him that I had worked for WFB, Jr's National Review in New York. JS said: “Bill Buckley is a sailing mate of mine!” I reacted surprised. Just imagine! JS gossiped about many things and his speech was rapid fire and obsessive. He was verbalizing at one point when he cited “The Company” as a reference to some fact he had mentioned. “The Company” was not “insurance agent” so I had to remind myself that I could not voice anything about my Gainesville Hilton hotel conversation, but I clandestinely wished JS would eventually, during the meal, come up with those two magical words. He never did. But was he a mole?

Another slip of JS's tongue was this: “The Middle East is going to blow any day now!” That statement would stay put in my cranium for decades, and all through the eighties and nineties hardly a week passed by when I would open up a newspaper or search on the Internet a Canadian, English, French, Northamerican, Spanish or Venezuelan newspaper expecting to discover that World War III had begun in the Middle East exactly where JS had predicted it would that day in the Tamanaco Hotel in Caracas. When the Twin Towers were attacked first in 1991 and ten years later in 2001, JS came to my mind instantaneously.

John Sullivan made another personal “leak”--by now he was under the influence of the one-after-the-other drinks he had imbibed—while we were discussing the food which had been served to us: “I eat on the go. I don't enjoy eating.” When I made a cute “Didn't your mother breast feed you?” aside, I thought JS's date from San Juan would bust a gut trying to hold in her laughter which she did not want to express—thus convincing me further that she was a subordinate and not a person passionate for JS who had given me the idea he could not cultivate a close relationship with anyone, including himself.

After dinner, the Puertorican woman left us and JS accompanied me to the front door of the hotel. It was close to eleven o'clock. He asked me how I was returning home. “Like always,” I said. “By bus.” John let me know, as if I didn't know, that it was not wise to travel on buses late at night in Caracas, hailed a cab for me, and put 15 bolívares in my hand. I thanked him for the evening spent together, and gave him one last chance to utter “insurance agent.” He stood stiffly, robustly. He was doing something he had to do. His frame was solid, athletic. I could see that he had been trained to defend himself with his hands. I shook his hand. He went off. I entered the cab, and as it drove off en route for La Florida where I lived, I had the sensation that my world had crumbled on down on me, and I felt again as lone as I did when I had bereaved the loss of Lucia to cancer. But worse. I had once again been betrayed by my country. As if Vietnam had not been enough! The no show of the “insurance agent” was a very bitter pill for me to swallow, and I have often checked off that infidelity logically reasoning that an administrative mix-up was the root cause. “We Take Care of Our Own” was lost on me. I had been left on my own still again. In Vietnam, my country did not give me the opportunity to be a hero for it; and, in Venezuela, my country did not give me the chance to say “f**k y*u” to it. Nevertheless, from that day on I have never been convinced that CC and/or JS were not one of the Soviet moles The Daily Journal had put its readers to the wise about. Why should I be?

* * *

Having divulged to you three mini psychological profiles of three ASs subservient to the Central Stupidity Agency, three drumbeaters who were permitted to use their political and religious visionary speculations to taint the interpretations of their analyses clouding those deductions with chitchat and muddiness, I wish now to concentrate on three of the gross miscalculations of the CSA that I, personally, have corroborated and, with alarm, reported on attempting to bring to light the misconceptions of these detrimental courses of action:

I

My first revelation was reached with perceptions of the nature of the events I had studied after they had happened—regrettably. When I met Paul Fritz for lunch in Zürich in 1985 (PF, literary agent for Peter Benchley, John Cheever, Stephen King, Mario Puzo, Gore Vidal, Tennesse Williams, Toni Morrison, Norman Mailer, James Michener, Issac Singer, Ian Fleming, et alia, in German-speaking Europe and who died prematurely of a stroke in Florida on vacation) he accosted me with these words: “I read the first 180 pages of your The Hippie Lieutenant manuscript and I know why no one will publish it in the United States!” In fact, some of the most prestigious houses in New York had nixed the work.

The Hippie Lieutenant, my trilogy about the Vietnam “War,” recounts one, of the many, of history's most tragic events, and the three books put into focus the horrible miscalculations of the United States' government that destroyed a large portion of a people's lives and homeland. Further, this Asiatic “police action” ruined the lives of countless millions upon millions of Northamerican soldiers and their families and friends; and, it caused the DisUnited States of Northamerica to lose hope not only in itself and its ideals, but also in the future of its citizenry. The end of this nefarious debacle left the DUS with only one recourse: to adorn itself in the vesture of arrogance and revenge and seek a vindication of its unlawful behavior by any means. Who, in the DUS, would want to read about that!

II

The affable Paul Fritz thought it wise to leave The Hippie Lieutenant in his desk drawer saving it for a more opportune, later date—when hopefully the DUS would have come to its senses.

My trilogy about Venezuela, Men Without Honor, Women Without Love, activated PF's taste buds the more, and with it he made a valiant effort to have it published in Germany on my behalf.

These three tomes hit on still another Northamerican diplomatic fiasco, and they clearly distinguish the Venezuelan “good guys” from the “bad guys” in cahoots with greedy Northamericans and their coterie of Washington governmental officials, sleazy journalists, two-faced university professors, petroleum Robber Barons, corrupt bankers and financial advisers, and all else who had collaborated ignominiously with the Venezuelan oligarchy known as The Twelve Disciples. My production predicts (predicted!), with passion and careful elucidation, that the Venezuelan people would revolt against the insupportable injustice that they were being subjected to. And they did.

A copy of the first segment of Men Without Honor, Women Without Love was consigned to my niece, Bernadette (a DUS naval officer visiting me from the Sigonella Naval Air Station in Italy where she was assigned as protocol officer) with my explicit instructions that the manuscript be hand-delivered to DUS intelligence personnel.

III

I have lived in Italy since 1 May 1983. Here, too, the patterns of stupidity, greed, and corruption run in tandem with those I bore witness to in Vietnam and Venezuela. Each place shares similar spectacular anti-democratic, oligarchic traits that would shock most Northamericans who cherish the tenets of their constitution. Each one is enclothed in a different style, yet each one overlaps the other with their substances of deceit and malfeasance.

Italy is falling apart at its seams. It is more than knee-high in putridness, and a day does not exist—at this writing—that some Italian political pundit will not warn Italians of one threat, or another, that is debilitating Italian democratic values.
Some of my articles about Italy can be found on www.scribd.com/thewordwarrior, and I am collecting, as I have been for many years, notes, clips, newspaper articles and the more so that I can eventually finalize my thoughts in a book that I have tentatively named Italy: A Despairing Frivolity Floundering in Its Chaos of Ignorance.

* * *

The Central Stupidity Agency has miscarried dismally in the execution of its mission. This is so for a number of reasons only three of which I will relate now. The organization is bent of “converting” other nation-states so that they conform to what the CSA regards as the moral utopia of all time: Judeo-Christian “Democratic” Capitalism. This theorization is to be fostered, at all costs, throughout the world whether through the force of economic persuasion or the clout of armed intervention. (The people of the DisUnited States of Northamerica are wonderful—if they are not bombing you!)

In opting to stamp down on the world for “its own good,” the CSA has programmed, falsely, the global extension of its economic, militaristic and political power thus compromising the security of the DUS itself. The DUS's military forces at home are unfortified, and those scattered throughout the globe are threadbare.

The worst, for me, consequence of the CSA's incompetence has been the fact that the DUS has lost so much respect in the eyes of other nation-states it is being taken less seriously the more, day after day. The CSA and its ASs tugged too hard and did not reckon that it would have been best to have treated others as they themselves hoped to be treated. The arrogance of the CSA has assigned the DUS to the dubious position of being in a state of never-ending harm's way.

My dear reader, do you really believe that I am serious about cashing in 150,000,000renminbi in compensation for my intelligent intelligence disclosures? You would be crazy if you did simply because the Central Stupidity Agency would never admit it had gone astray, and inasmuch as the government of the DisUnited States of Northamerica is on the verge of bankruptcy, it could never come up with the funds!

Toodleoo...

And, have a nice nightmare!

Authored by Anthony St. John
1 September 2009
Calenzano, Italy

* * *

2009-08-01T19:51:00.003+02:00

I Am Sick & Tired of the One & the Other
Western Civilizations

I am nauseated. Appalled. Not a day passes that the two Western Civilizations do not fire up my ire. The only solace I embrace is that both WCs (WC I & WC II) are more outraged with themselves than I am with them. I ask myself: How may I be satisfied knowing this? I just cannot. Everywhere my eyes see for me, I am reminded of William Blake's couplet:

A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe,

One should think that with all the attention that is allocated to health, diet and exercise by the proud, greedy and jingoistic, there would be at least some somebodies basking themselves in the sunshine of their lives. But no. Everyone is aflutter. Strained. Running helterskelter. I sense I must break loose...the same sensation that vexed me in Caracas, Venezuela a bit before the city, senseless, careless and hopeless, broke into a bloodcurdling violence that wiped out two thousand people over one weekend. I feel I am smothered by self-serving simpletons who care nothing for the society they pertain to and expect only to gratify—the faster the better—their personal cravings for appointments and trappings. They do not consume to possess; rather, they are possessed to consume and fail to take into account that half the world subsists on subunits each day. When hundreds of millions of earthlings are addicted to such a dog-eat-dog modus vivendi, only this clear-cut conclusion might be drawn: We are living in very dangerous times. (I've got to get out of this place!) Ante bellum?

If any of you reading this essay know what a history book is, you might be fascinated again when you recall that after the fall of the Roman Empire, the Roman Catholic church confined WC I to such a perfect state of betise, five-hundred years, a fourth of its entire existence, were needed before Europeans could come up with an original idea. And when they did, off they went on a binge of study and investigation attempting to stimulate all others to reason and urging them not to kowtow to the ridiculous prescriptions, bombarding and hoodwinking them day in and day out, prescribed by the men of the cloth and their tyrannous churches. Their efforts were often in vain. To refute the fantastic claims of knavish popes and fly-by-night philosophical clerics, a huge measure of intellectual elbow grease would have to be applied. When the Protestant Reformation got under way, when Roman Catholics and Lutherans sought to cut each other's throat, scientists in the north of Europe became more inclined to rebel against Rome. Great scientific, artistic and literary accomplishments were to thrive with the removal of much of the authoritarianism dictated by religious hundred-percenters.

Christianity, the opium of the people, the politically correct panem et circenses, had then kept the world benumbed for five-hundred years, and today it wishes desperately it could only put everyone in quietus once more before the fall of WC I and WC II. Just to calm things down a bit—to give all the opportunity to reflect! To try to recoup! There is no chance for that to hap. We are already experiencing a transitional movement marked this time by an exclusively scientific revival expressed in a flowering of inquiry and scrutiny—a people's front that will make Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Gilbert, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton look like catechumens. The Japanese are realizing the dreams of Leonardo da Vinci. The Northamericans are taking long strides on behalf of biotechnology and electronics' problem solving. The Chinese are revolutionizing their country with their hope for progress. Science is demolishing the fairy tales of religions. Each and every day, the pope must denounce each and every scientific improvement—interpreting scientific discipline as a menace to Rome's sagging potency.

One peril must be thwarted with verve: Science cannot become the domain of individuals who group together to form palsy-walsy social, cultural, economic and political tiers which serve the inclusive general concept that they should dole out political and civil honors according to wealth. Rather, they should be interested in offering a fair shake to their fellows, and ought not to exclude him or her from their scientific power circles with the justification that life demands a philosophy which exalts Science and a select group of individuals (scientists) above all others, and that severe economic and social regimentation, and the forcible suppression of the opposition, are necessary measures to exercise stringent control over the masses who are considered inferior to the nobler and more privileged scientist. Is it highly unlikely that Science will not become a sort of religion?

The pope had a dream. He dreamt that all Christians throughout the world resembled the Italians. That they adored the pope not because he is a Heavenly symbol of Christianity, or religion, but rather for the reason that he is a symbol of Earthly power. An economic potency whose tentacles reach out end-to-end across the globe from its city-state headquarters. He envisaged that his subjugated ones paid homage to him as an extraordinary political and economic influence, and that they, as do the Italians so fervently, would always rally to his side, like blind sheep, regardless of what he dictated from the Vatican HQ. Vatican, Inc, the first global conglomerate, having now kept The Boot simmering in the Age of Darkness Part II, has cultivated a symbiosis between knee-jerking Italians and the whims of an autocratic hierarchy of elderly prelates, mostly Italian, living in sin and the memories of other centuries (laudatores temporis acti). Anti-scientific. Superstitious. High-handed. Italians grovel most accommodatingly for them. They know not what better to do. Why should they? Their schools are the worst in Europe. Their level of instruction between the ages 25-64 is the lowest in Europe. A fourth of the Italian population has an elementary school diploma. Ten percent of the citizenry possesses a university degree. Sixty-six percent of the residents are medium to high illiterates. Only 38 out of 100 read one book a year. Half the homes in the nation do not have a book in them. Ronald Spogli, Bush administration out-going ambassador to Italy said this in his 2009 bitter swan song: “Italy, be careful! You risk economic disaster. You cannot continue in this way and be considered an economic power if your university system continues to be a national tragedy. It is embarrassing that there is not one Italian university in the top two-hundred posts of rated international universities.” Italians are the perfect ones to follow the dictates of senescent, unmarried men dressed in medieval garb. (From Outrageously Offensive Jokes II, by Maude Thickett, Pocket Books, A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc: New York, 1984; pp 81-83. ISBN: 0-671-50362-6: “When the mate of a female gorilla in the Chicago zoo dies suddenly, a replacement is desperately needed. After all attempts to get another male gorilla fail, the zookeeper is frantic. The female's heat is almost over, and it will be months before she can be mated again. Traveling home one day, the zookeeper sees an Italian construction worker without his shirt on. The man is covered with hair. Why not? The zookeeper approaches the construction worker. How would you like to make an easy $10,000 bucks? The Italian asks warily who the zookeeper wants killed? No one. You just got to make it with a gorilla at the zoo. No one would even have to know. What are you fuckin' crazy? Get the hell out of here yells the Italian. Well, if you change your mind, here's my card. When the Italian gets home he is still angry and he tells his wife what happened. Stupid! You know what I could do with an extra $10,000 bucks! Call that nice gentleman up and tell him you'll do the job. Reluctantly he calls the zookeeper. Okay, I'll do it, says the Italian. But I want you to know there are three conditions. The zookeeper is ecstatic. Anything, you name it. One, I'm only doing it once. Fine says the zookeeper. Two, I'm not gonna kiss her. And three, if there are any children, they must be brought up Catholic.”) Italy is floundering in a Chaos of Ignorance. It is no longer a Comedy of Errors (Andrès Glucksmann, French philosopher: “The Italians are the funniest buffoons on a continent without a brain in its head.”)--it is a Tragedy of Errors. Italians illegally build apartment buildings with defective materials in earthquake-prone zones, and when these edifices collapse, they beg for funds throughout the world. Priests, bishops and bankers rub their hands with glee as donations come pouring in. The Italians are the wealthiest mendicants in Europe—not the poor, denigrated, hated, abused ROM peoples. www.transparency.org lists Italy as the most corrupt nation in Western Europe. The New York Times: Italy is a country more used to managing emergencies than plans that might prevent them. Gore Vidal: The Italians have an astonishing ability to cope with disaster which is so perfectly balanced by their absolute inability to deal with success.

It would be nonsensical to reflect on the state of the two Western Civilizations without examining the determinant of religion, particularly Christianity, in particular the Roman Catholic church. And one must not be jumbled so as to think that Italians alone suffer the heavy-handedness of religion. The French, Germans, Greeks, Portuguese, Spanish—many others—are also looped with “theological virtue” meddling in their social, militaristic, economic and political concerns. Perhaps only in the DisUnited States of Northamerica there once existed some sort of limp-wristed attempt to separate church from state—without much success. When we now mull over the disconsolate predicament of Western Civilization I and Western Civilization II, the spectre of religion must be kept in mind as a causal factor accounting for the decline of the Western Civilizations. It would be scoundrelly to do otherwise.

W E S T E R N C I V I L I Z A T I O N I

Loredana, 47-year-old divorced law school graduate obliged to work as a secretary for a multinat in Italy, comes from Naples. She is obese—nervously jovial. Resists pig-headedly to provide for her only child, a 21-year-old university student in Rome. L is Roman Catholic to the bone. Touts a crucifix on a necklace. Like most Italians, she never goes to church. To her way of thinking, the pope is very much more important than Italy's prime minister primarily because the pope's ambit of influence throughout the world is indeed far more efficacious than the puerile antics of any of Italy's political sapheads. The pope is what makes The Boot consequential in the eyes of the world—not a fascist-like Silvio Berlusconi or some other similar clown-like figure. Irrespective of L's mirthful Napolean-like super- patriotism, her rambunctiousness which edges on the rude, and her garlic-smelling breath, I gravitated to her for her intelligence and skittish, conversational wit. Yet, one day, she shocked me in my tracks when she cornered me alone and whispered this: “When are you Americans going to nuke those bastard Muslims?” I wonder which psalm she found that in...?

I tend to think that fifty percent of racist Italy cerebrates the same way but would admit so with a more cautious choice of words, while another ten to twenty percent would concur with L but by keeping their thoughts hush-hush. The preconceptions of the Italians (“We are not racists. We are Italian racists. We hate everyone.”) are a cancer that is metastasizing at an enormous pace now that the global economy is feeble, now that Italy's rock-bottom birthrate has coerced Italians, against their volition, to accept foreign workers to take on the menial jobs Italians (and other European nationalities) decline to assume.

Europe and the British Isles are on the brink. Throughout this continent, there is a malaise consuming the heart and soul of an excessively proud people who for virtually two millennia dominated the arts, the sciences, history, learning, economics and politics—often employing un-Christian-like methods—and lit up a beacon for the world to fix upon. Europe is now flaccid. Almost fagged. It is scrambling to hold out—to stay afloat in the swirl of Science and Progress (contested modernity) that is annihilating its traditions, institutions and...religions.

Three readings of import gauge for us Western Civilization I's descent into obliviousness. The first is WC I's impuissance to reload its shrinking population. It might seem legitimate that a civilization that has endured for just about two thousand years could have learned, by now, how to replenish itself and rest vivacious and prosperous. But no! They just can't. Throughout this continent, without a brain in its head, no notice consumes the least attention of its taxpayers as does the demographic tribulation. The continent itself is super-populated. Most countries in Europe and the British Isles are wearied with water supply depletion, the lack of precious natural resources, and social in-fightings. It is logical that Europe should reduce its population, but it is illogical that it does nothing to stabilize the maturation of its citizenry in order to guarantee that its stock will be steadily, rationally rendered. It is also stunning that transnational resettlements, within this so-called “Union of European Nations,” the European Union, are ridiculously marginal. Uneducated, often desperately poor individuals from Africa, Southamerica and eastern Europe are flooding in to fill the posts that European inhabitants, now once again somewhat prosperous, refuse to occupy. With an immigration which is frequently prey to the depraved lawlessness, injustice and racism of the Europeans, their criminal elements, and pandering, corrupt politicians, Europe's mañana will be fraught with dangerous social unrest and unheard of displacements within the staid social fibres of conservative European institutions still strained from last century's two world wars.

History is another WC I bête noire. The historical baggage that WC I must lug is one that offers no hope to those plugging the holes to keep WC I from plummeting into an abyss of helplessness. There is no stretch in this world where WC I is not famous for its freewheeling depredation and bloodshed. At a time when WC I needs most to join with others beyond its borders in order to cultivate political and economic advantage, doors are being slammed in its face by those whose long memories remember the long rifles of European and British conquerors. The horror perpetrated by European military conquest and colonization for centuries is to this day ingrafted in the psyches of those peoples whose progenitors writhed under the execution of that violence and slaughter.

Thirdly, WC I was not only adept at bringing havoc to those beyond its boundary lines, it distinguished itself in the last century as the foremost suicidal, genocidal element within its own limitations. There is not a nation in Europe, or the British Isles, where you cannot find the blood of centuries squishing under your feet. There are so many war memorials to History's dead, one is led to conclude that there is no use in convincing these war specialists, these nation states, that another possibility exists. Veterans parade the medals of their past atrocities. Politicians laud the battles of the Past. It is as if the people of Europe, expended psychologically and incorporeally, would accept World War III as a natural consequence, as a matter of course, of its bloody history—naturally insisting that the DisUnited States of Northamerica, Western Civilization II, wage its battles for them! Just ask L! Hedonistic Europe—draped in pretty shoes, dresses, gadgets and babble—is so cocooned in itself, struggling to forget its hideous past, that it finds it strenuous to roll over in the morning to go to work. How could it roll over to war, even survival, if it was called upon to defend what little courage and dignity are left to it?

W E S T E R N C I V I L I Z A T I O N I I

Fancy that you are the leading man or woman of a Broadway theatre success that has merited international acclaim. It is five minutes before your next presentation. In your dressing room they are applying the final touches to your make-up and costumery. Your cell squeals. Your mother and father have been killed in a car crash. Three minutes to curtains up. Your manager looks you straight in your eyes and says you will become a theatrical legend when the media learns you still went on knowing about the tragedy. He fills a glass of water. Escorts you to the wings of the stage. Thirty seconds to go... He gives you a pill and tells you to gulp it down. Then he pats you on your back and says: “Just do it!”

Barack Obama, forty-fourth president of the DUS, knows too well too that the show must go on. Of course, he is not alone. His overly-confident demeanour is fused with the backing of a federal police that he thinks is just and efficient, a spy system that he holds to be intelligent, a banking and financial oligarchy he wants reinforced, and a foreign affairs' policy that interferes with governments all over the world and which shakes the hands of Berlusconi and Sarkozy's bagmen. Still, BO is a media publicist's dream. His image reflects the 3-point shot at the buzzer that wins the game. He is an ante-hero with nothing yet to be heroic about! His icon is the symbol of the DUS's desperation to keep the show going on.

But for how long might this hypocritical entertainment proceed? How long can BO fake moves? Pass his ball? How long will we continue to say “Yes we can?” When will we start crying “No we can't?” When 2008 closed its cooked books, it became clear, finally, to most citizens in the DUS and the world, that the Horatio Alger figment of the imagination, The American Dream, was really a nightmare haunted with graft and corruption. That it had been debased for a couple of centuries. That to maintain the wild lifestyles of the richest of the richest, most of the rest of the world had to “kick in” and even remain in their states of destitution and helplessness to keep those richest from getting less rich. With its chums (the other industrialized nations), the DUS cut up the world at whim, established 800 DUS military bases around the globe, overturned governments here and there, wielded the carrot (the Christian Bible and its tenets) and the stick (bombs and missiles), and strongly insisted that the best political and economic system in the world was its own idea: Judeo-Christian “Democratic” Capitalism. The Best and the Brightest? The Worst and the Stupidest. The Central Intelligence Agency? The Central Stupidity Agency. The DUS has done more harm to its fanatically righteous crusade than any enemy might. And it was Plato who promulgated the education of an elite group of leaders! There does not even exist an iota of political prudence (Kant). (With enemies like this, who needs friends?) Left to simmer in its debilitating arrogance, Western Civilization II will implode upon its own con job.

The most stultifying cogent evidence of this is the game plan that has been sketched out on the whiteboard. Already, we can perceive that there exists the formidable urge to nurse the horrific economic flop back from intensive care to where it was before: that is, to restructure it; not do away with it! Substantially, those who prodded the DUS to the muddle it now suffers are the same who have been recruited to rectify the existing, embarrassing financial circumstances. Their minds are out of use. They can go only one way...their way.

There once was economic chat about the cycles of profit and then loss. Remember? “Every sixty years—or so.” Nowadays these time frames have contracted drastically in proportion to the annihilative financial pyramid schemes set in motion by the obsessive amount of avarice and putrescence within the mindset of the political system's components and its bedfellows, the business community. There are wars in progress which no longer can spend the DUS out of its economic miseries. Banks are failing at a brisk rate. The experts are dumbfounded and their fingers are crossed. Politicians are in-brawling within their own lodges but passionately set on placing blame on the opposition. There is no consensus on what best must be done to escape the downward spiralling. Everyone is praying, like the Italians, for a miracle!

When the DUS was King of the World's Economic Mountain, it was indeed far more easy to control the vicissitudes of the DUS's economy, and a great part of the world's that it for so long influenced and so often manipulated. This dream world exists no longer. The uncanny growth of other nations, bent on modernizing their economies and cultures, now confronts the DUS with the incubus of a global, helterskelter competition it not any more is capable of dealing with. An avalanche of maverick capitalism, uncontrollable and ever present, is making of the DUS the recipient of the same medicine it dosed out munificently for decades. The DUS is being swamped with the covetousness and dishonesty that it once meted out itself with its ludicrous sense of superiority and self-righteousness now characterized not as the image of itself as a model that all should imitate, but one for all to put up with or more often than not now...hate.

BO, you don't have a dream. You have a nightmare! You are the leading man in a tragedy whose cast is chock full of imbeciles and criminals. Within the milieu of discord and disgrace in the DUS you are trying to wrangle together the forces that you think will pull back up, by the boot straps, the DUS. But who are these individuals? These schizoid goofballs who attend religious ceremonies on the weekends and cheat and steal as best they can during weekdays? Who are these dimwits who make up your dramatis personae? They are lying lawyers who have born witness to the fact that citizens of the DUS need to pay through their noses to obtain justice...they are stockbrokers and financial “experts” who advise their clients to stash their winnings in secret bank accounts in Europe, the Caribbean, etc...they are mendacious congresspeople and senators most on the take...they are ministers, priests and rabbis who spend more time with their bankers than they do with their flocks...they are ambitious university professors helping the DUS government to invent new weapons of destruction...they are doctors with one hand on the scalpel and the other on their stock reports...and worst of all, they are the millions and millions of DUS citizens who wish they had the same opportunities to pilfer and swindle as do their gangster-faced Robber Baron shining examples!
President Obama, just as E = mc², politics has come, deplorably, to mean Politics = Economy + Religion. You cannot reel around the world preaching honesty, love, honor, and uprightness when everyone outside the DUS knows that the citizens of the DisUnited States of Northamerica are the best rip-off artists in existence. The world is laughing at your slick Pope-like homilies. Nice words. Refreshing bromides. After your platitudes—from high above—have mesmerized your foreign audiences, those same individuals turn their backs on you and the unprincipled DisUnited States of Northamerica. Sorry about that, BO. (Incontrovertible Proof That Citizens of the DisUnited States of Northamerica Are So Sorrowfully, So Sanctimoniously Stupid: www.scribd.com/thewordwarrior.)

BO, I leave you with this quote from Martin Jacques's When China Rules the World, Chapter 8, page 271:

...As a consequence, the rise of China as a global
superpower is likely to lead, over a protracted
period of time, to a profound cultural and racial
reordering of the world in the Chinese image.
As China, draws countries and continents into
its web, as is happening already with Africa,
they will not simply be economic supplicants
of a hugely powerful China but also occupy a
position of cultural and ethnic inferiority in an
increasingly influential Chinese-ordered global
hierarchy...

President Obama (President Carter?), you will not be able to get your act together. I doubt you have either the sophistication or strength to deal with the exterior dramatic collisions that will beset your administration, and simply because the DisUnited States of Northamerica has for far too long disregarded the realities of the world in which it exists.

Authored by Anthony St. John
Calenzano, Italy
1 August 2009

* * *

2009-07-05T08:06:00.002+02:00

Why I Live Beyond
the DisUnited States of
Northamerica

The philosophical psychiatrist, R D Laing, was endowed with immense courage, vision and vigour, and by reason of his unique skills made valuable contributions to psychiatry and caused to come to be events which startled and disrupted long-established analysts of the mind. Laing was a member of that mental health infantry squadron carrying out a mission meant to clear the way for the main body of troops. His insights into schizophrenia, the world’s most debilitating mental disease, will never be forgotten.

Like many illustrious warriors favoured with superhuman eminence, Laing’s first jumps, off the high board into the murky pools of the unconscious, neurosis and psychosis, were belly flops. Heroic in nature, Laing did not return home from battle after his preliminary overthrows. He climbed up far above the ground again, lunged, cut through gloomy waters, and touched bottom where he scraped his skin and bruised his bones yet more. He went back again and again and again and persevered, until his death, searching for something new in the treatment of mental patients.

From page 102 to 104 in Self and Others, Laing’s masterpiece, he talks about a little boy of five who runs to his mother holding a big fat worm in his hand, and says, “Mommy, look what a big fat worm I have got.” She says, “You are filthy—away and clean yourself immediately.”

The mother’s response to the boy is an example of what Ruesch (1958) has called a “tangential response.” In terms of the boy’s feeling, the mother’s response is at a tangent. She does not say, “Oh, yes, what a lovely worm.” She does not say, “What a filthy worm—you mustn’t touch worms like that; throw it away.” In this response there is a failure to endorse what the boy is doing. A state of transitory confusion, anxiety or guilt might be generated in him.

Bateson, Jackson, Haley and Weakland in their article, “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia,” Behavioural Science (1956), discuss this condition and term it the “double-bind” pattern. According to the authors, the likelihood of such a configuration exists when these six elements are present: two or more persons; repeated experience of the state of affairs; a primary negative injunction: “Do not do this. I will punish you if you do;” a secondary injunction conflicting with the first at a more abstract level, and like the first, enforced by punishment or signals which threaten survival: a negative gesture, a tone of voice, a posture, etc; a tertiary negative injunction prohibiting the victim from escaping from the field: false promises of devotion, affection or love; and, the absence of these constituents when the victim learns that his or her universe is composed of, essentially, double-bind patterns.

The victims, in this scenario, are caught in a mesh of contradiction between two conclusions and they cannot decide how to act or react rationally. He or she cannot make a sane choice. The prey is deceived and, to survive, must mislead others to protect himself or herself. They learn to reject what is genuine, and lay blame on what is unreal or real ridiculing as immature what might in fact be responsible. Persons trapped in this double-bind pattern cannot establish a sensation of genuineness with another human being.

When I pranced home from Vietnam in August 1968, I began to enjoy one of the most beautiful times of my life: I had made it home successfully--alive! I was in one piece and had not been seriously wounded or maimed! I had read seventy-two books in Vietnam where I had not wasted one moment! Vietnam had not brought me to the nightmares of mental instability, and if people want to say I am “crazy” nonetheless, I tell them I was the way I am long before my tour in Southeast Asia! Good comes from Bad; Bad comes from Good. Perhaps the most fortuitous souvenir—what I cherish the most—that I hold from the horrible twelve months I passed in the Central Highlands with the Snowflake Division near the Cambodian and Laotian borders (Pleiku, Kontum and Dak To), and in the Chu Lai and My Lai locales of the Americal’s area of operations, is this: My life had been threatened so many times that when I came back to New York and set off to unwind so as to become a normal person all over again, I was so exultant that the tension of combat had been eliminated, I stayed in a secret state of euphoria for months. And from that day, I have valued my life the more—certainly much more because it had been put in jeopardy by elements beyond the expectations of my own wishes.

There were a couple of “Welcome Home from the War” gestures from relatives and friends, and I’ll never forget the doorman at the Essex House who greeted me with a “Welcome home, Lieutenant,” gave me my room number, saluted me, and pointed the way to where I found a complimentary bottle of champagne and a bowl of fruit. After a pair of weeks passed by, I “escaped” to Florida. I had to get out of New York and I followed my plan, formulated in Vietnam, to do so. I did not really comprehend at that time why I had to break away from my much-loved New York. I would understand later on.

It did not take me long to gather that I had achieved the status of having a new unsavoury reputation: Vietnam Veteran. In fact, my relatives were the first to hint to me that my service to my country was of dubious make-up. I was told, flat out: “The Army screwed you, you should screw the Army!” I was dumbfounded when it was suggested that I fake back pain, go to a VA hospital, and obtain a lifelong disability check! I think it was this mind-set which instigated in me the predisposition to reflect at that time upon the level-headedness of the United States of America—and quite seriously so. I had to know why my fellow countrymen and women thought they deserved to have their cake and eat it, too! And I wanted to know why I was being wedged into a double bind state of being.

Outside of closed social circles, Vietnam was not a subject habitually broached with Vietnam veterans, accordingly I had to rummage around the mass media and, in particular, political journals and other outlets of enlightenment which replicated the thoughts of my confreres. I speculated that, in the 1960s and 1970s, about sixty percent of my fellows disapproved of what I represented because I “killed babies,” and forty percent approved of me for doing so. An outlandish emotional rift.

The fact of the matter is that I did not kill in Vietnam. I state this unequivocally and to the best of my knowledge. I soldiered as an artillery 1193 and even though defective projectiles and inaccurate maps frequently complicated, to an inordinate degree, our missions as I “humped” with the grunts on the battlefield, I, personally, cannot refer to an incident in which I was involved killing people with artillery or any other armament. I heard that one erratic artillery shell had slayed nine American soldiers because the Fire Direction Officer had confused an “8” with a “3;” moreover, on my first day out to the field in close proximity to the Fourth Division Base Camp, we were “attacked” by a volley of our own 155mm rounds which set our company into such a state of terror and turmoil that, to my utter amazement, it caused one grunt to fall to the ground—in the foetal position, his M-16discarded—praying with rosary beads wrapped through his fingers. What had I done to merit this lunacy?

The folly did not terminate there for me. Years later I would hear on CNN that during the Vietnam “War” an almost 70% of United States’ military personnel were killed or maimed in Vietnam by mines, and that 90% of these armaments were US military ordnance! And I can believe it. Whenever I was transferred to a different artillery unit, I came into the red leg fold asking: “What’s the dud rate here?” 30%? 40%? 50%? It is certainly true that exceptional meteorological “tricky situations” compromised the accuracy of our FDC calculations, yet no one can deny that the haste—it makes waste—to join in on the economic boom (remember the 1962 recession?) which exemplified the Vietnam “War,” caused projectiles to be manufactured with substandard worth. When these rounds were converted into booby traps by our clever enemy, the results could be sordid. As an artillery battalion liaison officer flying with the battalion CO in his C&C Huey, we often swooped down to a grunt broken into pieces by a booby trap, and then MEDIVACed him to the nearest field hospital where maintenance crews hosed off the blood on the helicopter’s floor before we were able to return for more.

The My Lai area was notorious for the percentage of booby traps it secreted. Imagine. You are marching with your buddy through rice paddies when, in a flash, you see him go flying with members of his body slashed or gone astray. You can’t find a way to embrace a fond affection for the Vietnam people; and, you have to be a finicky person not to want to seek out a vendetta. Nineteen-year-olds cannot be depended upon to discriminate judiciously especially when under pressure. (I was a university graduate, with a degree in philosophy, and it was hard enough for me to weigh up at times these niceties, but not even a ten-star general could have ordered me to kill women and children and old folk—even in a ditch.) I have no condolences for Lieutenant Calley because all of us—arriving in-country—read and signed that we read the Geneva Convention and division memos instructing us how to treat prisoners of war and Vietnamese nationals. The United States’ government and the United States Army commanded us to behave in one way (CYA: Cover Your Ass!), and when we did not, they turned their backs on what was dishonourable and not above-board making out of the Vietnam conflict something that it unquestionably was not: a righteous initiative, one to be satisfied about supporting. A double bind state of mind?

For the Vietnam veteran this forked tonguing was remarkably crass when he or she returned home to the United States. They knew very well the shenanigans that had gone on in Vietnam, and to be thought of as a loser in a war which Americans did not cheer on but made profit of by benefiting from the business enveloping it, was truly more than a let-down. Some veterans could not bear the rebuff that awaited them and they blew away their minds and bodies, or their schizoid fellow citizens, in tragic acts of violence. The history of the Vietnam veteran is well-documented, but I have never seen price estimates for the heart-rending damage he or she caused not only for themselves, but also for the victims of their post-war violence—the divorces they were involved in, the crimes they were sent to prison for, the alcohol and drug abuse their family members suffered with them, and so many other dynamics which enter into the fiscal tabulation of this national calamity. And make no mistake about it, the Vietnam veteran might be loaded down with diagnostic lingo and syndromes and other descriptions of maladaptive behaviour, but no one will ever consider as being mentally unbalanced those who sent him off to that insane police action that did the United States of America more harm than benefit.

When I left the United States for good in 1975, I knew it was on a catastrophic course. I had not the words to say what I wanted to explain. I had to test my premonitions and had to contrast them with the viewpoints of others who were not Americans. I grasped that the United States was ripped in two, although I never then imagined that it would continue to cultivate a “split personality” which would advance it to continually enlarge the chasm that polarized it further and further. Today we have Red States and Blue States, and no one has thought to mix red and blue together to get violet—the colour of wretchedness and introversion. Americans are fighting to be happy and they are so desperate to be so they will even laugh, with a knee-jerk, at the overworked jokes of a David Letterman.

The United States learned not much from Vietnam except how to make sure that the atrocious errors, embarrassing for them, they committed there would not be duplicated in future hostilities. That is why the US Army is a voluntary organization today! It is more martial than it ever was. Its regime is wielded throughout the globe with fear and not the yearning to be respected. (The Americans are a wonderful people—if they aren’t bombing you!) The Yankee is not regarded even as a benevolent dictator, and he is truly hated when his barter ($$$) stops circulating. It does not flabbergast me one iota that Gore Vidal, or anyone else for that matter, could conceive of a book entitled The Decline and Fall of the American Empire. The United States of America is sliding down The Tubes. Northamericans, out of despondency, have become awful losers yet they persist in alleging that they are redoubtable winners. Just another double bind stance—one they are very much accustomed to.

I don’t want to be with a failure—especially one that does not have the courage to penetrate its own limitations. Old Glory is hemmed in. As the years pass, it will draw more and more into itself. The United States is in a pitiable state and has not the expertise to release itself from its own desolation. I want to be happy; I do not want to live with a nation pretending to be so. I refuse to live in the United States of America the more because it did not afford me the chance to become a hero for it when I served it in Vietnam. I feel that I was betrayed. How could I ever stand up erect at a baseball or football game and sing with others “The Star-Spangled Banner?” I would have to wait outside. I can only wish the United States of America a hearty “Good Luck.” It’s going to need it. And I ask the United States of America only one thing: that the renunciation of my citizenship, sitting on the desk of the consulate general in Florence, Italy since 1994, be approved by the Department of State immediately.

Authored by Anthony St. John

2009-06-23T11:28:00.001+02:00

An Open Letter to Paris Hilton
Written During Her Incarceration

I hope this correspondence finds you as well as you might be all through these thorny, for you, times. I see no reason to rejoice about your imprisonment. You have been denuded, both physically and mentally, and set in a chamber which is in total contrariety to the standard of living you have experienced since your childhood. This is traumatic—it would be harrowing for any person regardless of his or her economic standing. Nevertheless, I also wish that your punishment will be used as a “breathing space” prompting you to reflect upon the entirety of your life and not just what has recently emerged concerning it.
As you contemplate, you might come to the very heart-rending realization that you have been manipulated ruthlessly. And not just by the adolescent-minded paps. By a whole nation, and more, which finds some perverse pleasure either in seeing you deprived of your deluxe way of life—something most of us have not—or in revelling in a Fantasyland genuinely desiring it had what you hold. You have been set up to be the sole recipient of a whole society’s guilt complex—one which marinates desperately in a vindictive GroupThink. You now know that the paps would have been even more pruriently comfortable if you had driven your car, in a state of intoxication, into some tunnel where it would have careened off some cement stanchion leaving your body in many broken, bloody pieces. And those indecorous paps, too, would have scurried with their digital cameras to the nearest news room to haggle over the price for the gory details surrounding your death. As a Vietnam veteran, I know well what it means to be the rubbish bin of the vicious collective consciousness of the schizoid citizens of the DisUnited States of Northamerica. You have my sympathy.
I will tell you straight away, Paris, why you are the most fortuitous woman in the DisUnited States. If you mull over your past with vigour, face some exceedingly disgusting facts, and use the innate intelligence I am convinced you retain, you will find yourself in the unique position of being able to formulate a resurfacing and, after, brandish a reprisal worthy of a finally-victorious field commander. The hour has arrived for you to claim your right to be respected as any other human being instead of being gazed at as the whipping girl of a confused, fickle, and sadistic society. That accomplished, you will assume the stature of a woman of dignity and charm and serve, in the future, as an admirable exemplar for all of us to imitate.

“Sail on Silver Girl, sail on high, your time has come to shine,
All your dreams are on their way…”
Bridge over Troubled Waters, Simon & Garfunkel

Your friend,
Tony

Written by Anthony St. John in Calenzano, Italy on the First Day of Summer, 2007

Drugs

2009-06-19T20:16:00.003+02:00

Raymond Hoffenberg, M.D.
President Emeritus of the College of Physicians of London
President Emeritus of Wolfson College in the University of Oxford
One Sherborne House
SHERBORNE GL54 3DZ
England

29 October 2001

By chance, I came upon your “Doctors under Tension,” European Review; Volume 6, May, 1998, in which you state, preposterously, the following: “Only rarely do we find large-scale participation of the medical profession in organized abuse…”

It would take about twenty-five thousand agents of the F.B.I., twenty-five thousand detectives from Scotland Yard, and twenty-five thousand investigators from Interpol to round up all the Italian physicians in collusion with pharmaceutical companies which represent a good number of European countries. Travel expenses for doctors and their wives, computers to read pharmaceutical software, dinners in the best restaurants, et alia, all paid for them, constitute only a part of the corruption running rampant. Every Italian household possesses a mini-pharmacy. Italians show off their medicines and leave expired ones in their small closets to add depth to their status symbols. No Italian comes home from the doctor without three or four prescriptions filled, but most prescriptions are filled without the doctor seeing the patient. It is arcane to see three or four Mercedes-Benz’s or BMW’s lined up outside doctors’ offices with elegantly-dressed drug salesmen—who often are seen by the doctor before the patients are!—toting their black satchels filled with “samples” which doctors use to “hook” patients. Italy is Europe’s top consumer of illicit drugs. What part have these doctors, nurturing for their patients a drug culture that begins at the cradle, in being responsible for the extravagant use of illegal drugs in Italy? How many laundered drug dollars have Italian drug addicts contributed to bin Laden?

About you, Dr. Hoffenberg, I am confounded! Do you own a stock portfolio filled with Italian pharmaceutical investments? Are you a Whitewasher of The Lily-white Medical Profession? Or, are you just a run-of-the-mill imbecile?
Toodleoo…

Anthony St. John

If I Were the United States' Ambassador to Italy...

2009-05-11T11:56:00.004+02:00

If I, Anthony St. John,
Were the United States’ Ambassador to Italy…

I.

I would order immediately—with the consent of the President—all ambassadorial and consulate personnel in Italy to the new United States’ Embassy in Afghanistan.

II.

I would require all personnel attached to my offices throughout Italy to speak the Italian language.

III.

I would demand immediately that all members of the Central Stupidity Agency serving in Italy be returned to Washington for intelligence tests of their brains.

IV.

I would make a compartment of a Ferrovie dello Stato train my ambassadorial office and travel throughout Italy Mondays through Fridays.

V.

I would create a television program, An Afternoon Communicating with the United States’ Ambassador to Italy, to be presented every Saturday from 4 pm-6pm, with phone-in and cultural spots.

VI.

I would apologize to the Italian people on behalf of all previous United States’ ambassadors (cretini!) who served in Italy and did not speak Italian and did not communicate with the
Italian people.

VII.

I would create the United States’ Embassy of the Italian and American Peoples—open to all
without being a clubhouse for representatives of special interest groups.

VIII.

I would seek to open a dialogue—in italiano, finally!—with the Italian people.

IX.

I would seek to bring Italians and Americans together in a spirit of friendship and respect.

X.

I would seek to enhance throughout the world the role of both Italy and the United States of America as examples of peace and goodwill.

1 January 2002

Please distribute this plea to your friends.

Send it to the United States’ Embassy in Roma.
FAX: 06-467.42.623

Anthony St. John,

The Outside the Box Ambassador

The Art of Survival

2009-05-04T21:27:00.002+02:00

The imperative to survive is confronting us more than at any other time in human history. There are very many more people; a haunting vulnerability pervades the air. An unmatched surge in the world’s population is guesstimated to propel humanity to the inconceivable head-count of 8,000,000,000 in 2025 and 10,000,000,000 in 2050. There is the never-ending desire for decent lodging, prosperous employment, low-cost mobility and lifelong wellbeing. Nevertheless, it has been by now substantiated that the Earth’s resources cannot gratify, even partially, the unrelenting yearnings of all of us. Multiplying social, political and economic disproportions are certain to instigate further discontent that in turn will egg on more conflicts and more dislocations upsetting whatever hopes of tranquility we may have aspired to.

Not all people care to survive. Many others care only that they themselves should survive. Individuals might concern themselves about living on and that others belonging to the very same global community of which they are a part will also live on. Although not necessarily infirm, people who are not particularly interested in enduring will do little to allow themselves to endure and generally are not vexed about the continuation of their fellows. They might not look properly after their health, they might “vegetate” their lives away in a slothful passivity, and they are baffling not only in their intimate social circles, they cause difficulties for their superiors and co-workers where they are engaged. They do not have to be criminals. These someones have no zest for life, sound off frequently, and are miserable and apathetic. They merely exist and at length become burdens on society which has to ante up for their untrustworthiness and refusal to exist for the betterment of their confrères. Most people who hate others first loathed themselves.

Then there are those whose individual self-interest is the actual motive of all conscious action, the valid end of their human activity. These types might dominate a close-knit grouping or even an establishment, and they must hold control of the system they superintend manipulating the network's subordinates to satisfy their cravings for power. Their sphere of activity is often constrictive and it is of course based on experience, tradition and more often than not family linkups. These swellheads thrive on what is determinate, and theirs is the exclusive mode to perform during whatever exigence that might emerge. Superficially, these egocentrics induce us to believe that their often sadistic modi operandi serve in fact the methodicalness of the governing body they and their underlings are ranked under, and so doing, their “beneficial” actions come to serve all, are for everyone's gain. They are not.

The third category is that to which this essay is directed, and it is the one from which we may derive a sense of hope—hopefully, too, the means to attain the expectations we are seeking. There are those causal agents to whom we may ascribe attributes unbeknown to the majority of society at large. These subjects need to make a contribution on behalf of others by caring for themselves foremost and subsequently reaching out to assist those with whom they subsist. All sound, forward-looking societies have had these characters to set the stage to set in motion an epoch of progress. These members of society are at the ready to take part, to contribute to the welfare of themselves and those in their company. They understand what it means to survive.

I am a survivor—so far! I have outlasted three 122mm Chinese rocket attacks, three or four mortar blasts, four months with an infantry company in the jungles bordering Laos and Cambodia, a plane crash, two robberies at gunpoint.... Still, I do not consider myself an expert. But I do recognize that I had something to do with my endurance. I have followed definite precepts that were taught to me. Notwithstanding, I have always been gifted with the will to enjoy life. Scito te ipsum!

My introduction to the theory of survival happed upon me when I entered the US Army on active duty as an artillery lieutenant in September 1966. Until that time I had drifted along in life not even thinking I might have to come through one day. In the artillery I was made to make myself self-sufficient and more important, careful. Discipline and anticipation of events were emphasized over and over and over in my training. In Vietnam, along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, our 105mm howitzer artillery batteries could be hoisted into the air by Chinook helicopters, and then planted into some different point many kilometers distant. The routine for us was identical after each and every insertion. We followed the same rules, we erected the indistinguishable battery emplacement, we checked our instruments, secured the area, and were ready to shoot and communicate after being dropped into an often unknown, unfriendly environment. Above all, we could think that we might be transferred again in a matter of hours, or remain fixed in our new location for weeks or months. Maintenance was obligatory although not much appreciated, but it kept disgruntled unit members alert.

Parenthetically, the US Army was not up to sustaining itself in Vietnam, nor did it give its soldiers the motive, and the means, to create a new, propitious set of events. Soldiers were ill-equipped. Undisciplined. Apathetic. Many of them, lacking any hint of patriotism, shot themselves in the calf (The Million Dollar Wound), neglected to take their anti-malaria medication and then winded up in bathtubs filled with chunks of ice, and some even sought to kill themselves by volunteering—deriving pleasure or death from undergoing pain, abuse and cruelty—for hazardous missions: “Lieutenant, I'm not returning home.” The US Army accentuated, very stridently, that they had prepared us to fight in combat. This is not so. Most soldiers refused to trust anyone ranked above them. Disobedience was the norm in Vietnam where I had to hold up against both the “enemy,” whoever and whatever that was, and my own fellow combatants! In Vietnam, the US Army was a contradiction of its own terms and consequently doomed to failure.

My military experience, however insufferable, did inculcate in me a respect for life—my life! It made me appreciate the gift of being alive. That life had almost been taken away from me. Today, I am content to be alive. And I continue to follow the basic rules for survival many of which I learned in the US Army and employ even when I write this essay.
If you have set your heart on surviving, please listen to me. You cannot remain alive more than your family members, friends and colleagues by just wishing to. You must do your utmost to make it become a reality. Above all, you have to respect yourself before you can go on to esteem others. In fact, you are obliged to study, contemplate and seek responses to the uncertainties, about yourself and others, which haunt you.

One of the actions of great consequence to be taken is that one we are already familiar with: anticipation. Think before you act, and reflect habitually. Plan your days, weeks, months.... Set an endpoint you are inclined towards. Understand that victory comes hesitantly and has to be tracked down unswervingly and with adroitness. Do routine tasks as soon as possible to get them out of the way. With the time left over, concentrate on the various more pressing undertakings before you. Always endeavor to judge what is coming next. When you exit a bus, look to the left/right for oncoming vehicles. (I remember when the plane I was in was about to crash about an hour's flight from Caracas, I grabbed to my chest the four-year-old next to me, and realized that in four seconds we might be dead. My body was shaking with fear but I knew we all had to escape immediately when the twin-engine hit the water. In Vietnam, when 122mm rockets were incoming, my body shook convulsively but my voice was steady as a rock on my telephone operator's PRC-9 radio.) Do not go very fast—speed kills and not just on the highway. Sleep enough to be efficient. Eat correctly and be healthy. Without exception imagine that by not doing what is right for yourself and your body and mind, future complications will be caused by your negligence and stupidity.

It is accurate to say that preparedness is crucial to the prolongation of life or existence. In Vietnam, for every soldier on the battlefield, seven were backing him up. Helicopters had to be serviced, admin clerks typed reports, cooks prepared meals, doctors cared for the sick and wounded.... In our ordinary daily lives we must wash, clean our teeth, water the lawn and plants, iron our clothes for work on Monday.... We hold responsibilities that require us to react, and the realization of their success depends on our efficiency and enthusiasm. Being primed in advance is an enormous asset for achieving prosperity and living longer than most others.

To accomplish our mission (survival) we must cultivate the skill of self-discipline. To be in a state of readiness for whatever which might turn up, our attitude has to be set to change state to suit the challenge at hand. Repetition is an ugly word. So is routine. But these two sober-minded “axioms” must be complied with. We cannot secure anything worthwhile without being zealous and steadfast while doing our best to substantiate the meaning of our lives. If we fail to discipline ourselves when we forge ahead on the way to our last stop, we will ripen into very discomfited and discontented individuals.

Learn the meaning of the words “hard” and “strong.” We cannot be hard on ourselves unremittingly while being fervent about getting to our target. This is not clever. A person is strong when he or she knows when to be tenacious and when to be toned down. You ease up to be fit for the next bothersome occasion.

Authored by Anthony St. John
1 May 2009
Calenzano, Italia
www.anthonystjohn.blogspot.com

* * *

History Is Back!

2009-04-06T15:49:00.003+02:00

In 1989 History Came to an End!
In 2009 History Came Back Again!

Once upon a time there was a big ship. It was tall and strong and beautiful. It sailed the seas so stately-so. It visited all the oceans. It withstood storms. Resisted high waves. Broke chunks of ice and tilled on through to its destination. In its wake its friends followed comfortably. They depended on the big ship to open new frontiers for them. For decades everyone was happy. Then the ship stalled. It began to take on water. Will it sink? Will it slurp into the deep and suck along with it the leading industrial nations? Why not?

If one needs evidence that the DisUnited States of Northamerica has lost its stature as the so-called “leader of the world,” it might be wise to visit one of the hundreds upon hundreds of think tanks in existence where muddled “thinktankers,” in disarray and desperate, can be scrutinized. It is as if these intellectual obscurantists have mislaid all sense of reality—theirs! They have been smitten cruelly, and their haughtiness has been placed on a backburner. One of them—who, as did Columbus—presumed the world was flat, that it was finally a level economic playing field for the entire globe, has so much egg on his face, he hesitates to appear before public audiences to avoid being pelted even more.

For twenty years these dabblers, these eradicators of History rode high on their megalomania touting here, there and everywhere that their Northamerican-Anglo dynasty, their Judeo-Christian “Democratic” Capitalism was humankind’s best destined political aspiration, the winner of the tug-of-war between autocracy and democracy, and that the globe would be showered with the manna, from the heavens above, produced by the unselfish efforts of a worldwide oligarchy working night and day for all our benefits. Amen, brothers and sisters, Amen! Amen!! Amen!!!

Listen to once-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, The Little Fat Witch, on 19 February 1998: “We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.” They certainly do! As of today, each and every Northamerican, all 300,000,000 of them, owes Chinese banks $3000! And who knows how many other liabilities Northamericans will have to reimburse in coming decades to pay off their bacchanalia of greed and corruption.

Those Jesuit-like conventionalists, padded with the lovability of their verbal drivel, who had divided the world up among the DUS, Europe and China, are in for another merciless jolt: the free-falling deterioration of respect for Western Civilization and its Judeo-Christian “Democratic” Capitalist hegemony suspected by all on all corners of the globe.

One can observe that the most vociferous proponents of the anti-autocracy crusade are those who have become tyrannical themselves. Very often they are in cahoots with authoritative coteries that influence, flagrantly, the mechanisms of that “democracy” they define as the one which belongs to the people. These elites block the average citizens’ likelihoods of participating in their government by employing economic, legislative and judicial obstacles which serve to wall out qualified political personages in opposition to them. The despots spiel on about the “openness” of their “democratic” system, but, in fact, it is “clubby” and restricted to the few. When elections are held little choice is offered. There is a political echo rebounding throughout the “democratic” domain: “One party is just about the same as another.” Voters do not choose, they ratify. Government is under surveillance. The legal arrangement is used viciously to punish political enemies. For minor political reprobates there are prison stretches often founded on trumped-up charges. The DUS’s detention system is a shameful, shoddy conglomeration of injustice and inequality both of which promote recidivism.

The media too often works hand in hand with this oppressive cabal, and at press conferences queries are posited to accommodate political postures. All journalists know well what questions they dare not ask. Any individual who possesses the minimum inkling as to what is evolving in this world, can predict, sarcastically, the questions noodle-headed penny-a-liners posit at these journalistic jamborees.

The conservation of supremacy has become more critical than the endeavour to manage an economy more resourcefully and fairly for all. That is an obvious imperative. Body guards, super-protected limousines, isolated summit latitudes and longitudes (Bill Gates pronounced that video-conferencing will be the next stage in the electronic evolution) and foodstuff tasters come together to deflect our attention from pertinent issues. The image of a supernatural-like, almost religious happening is screened for us to give the sense that there is in progress some only one of its kind paranormality.

While concentrating on matters considered more important than ones which truly affect the lives of citizens on our planets, politicos have been irresponsible and dangerously naive. Particularly after the Second World War—yet well before that—three crucial life-threatening dilemmas afflicting the human race and the planet upon which it exists were marginalized and discussed, as a rule, with put-off-to-tomorrow expressions of aloofness:

I. The Population Upsurge. In 1961, there were more or less 3,000,000,000 Earthly inhabitants. Today, the world is approaching 7,000,000,000. Modern science has designed agricultural methods which have removed for many the burden of having to grow their own food. As a consequence, people have roamed from rural areas into enormous megatropolis. There they have stressed unimaginably the Earth and the resources it offers us endangering their own lives and those of their neighbours. The strain in the biosphere and the consequent disasters that ensue are corollaries that necessitated consideration at least a century before.

II. The Spectre of Injustice & Inequality. Throughout the world people are outraged and violence, more and more, has become the exclusive outlet for many. Half the world lives on a daily pittance that would buy someone a bag of French fries/chips in an industrially advanced nation. The distribution of wealth is dramatically lopsided. Poor people believe that they are the victims of the industrial world’s voracious appetite for their natural resources, and the historical sense of grievance they bear, exacerbates their condition and goads them on to voice disapproval.

III. The Haves & The Have-Nots. The world is tending to divide itself into two mammoth movements: the “rich” and the poor, those who have and those who have not—if but a little. Already, rage is being foisted upon the Robber Barons of the Judeo-Christian “Democratic” Capitalism, and people, from all socio-economic strata, duped by banks and financial organizations, are rebelling as never before. The situation is so desperate, government leaders are joining forces to plug those gaps left by the horrible debauch of self-indulgence and sleaze now that the party is over.

There is a money factory in Washington, DC. Officially, it is called the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Engraving money is a complicated process which involves more than sixty-five separate and distinct steps. The Money Factory declares that in FY2008 38 million notes/bills were produced each day with a face value of about $629 million. In FY2008, a total of 7.7 billion notes, at a cost of 6.4 cents per note, were delivered. Ninety-five percent of the notes printed each year are used to replace notes both in and out of circulation. (By the way, if you had ten billion $1.00 notes and spent one every second, it would require 317 years for you to go broke. [See http://www.moneyfactory.gov/]).

Well now, where do we go from here? Multiply 7.7 billion by 6.4 cents and see what you come up with! Enough to see the Dow Jones drop another 100 points? Enough to realize that a little more than one note, of differing denominations, is printed for each and every human being on Earth. What does this say about economic planning? What does this mean for Judeo-Christian “Democratic” Capitalism and Socialism?

We are not going to solve the world’s problems printing paper money! What is at stake is very much further from the lone consideration of economic factors. If the world is to survive, it must come to reflect on those basic concerns which affect each and every one of us. People must come together. Governments must encourage the interplay of social and political affairs which reach out to all. President Barack Obama will not be able to “pull it off” because the DUS has not the respect of the rest of the world.

Authored by Anthony St. John
6 April 2009
Calenzano, Italia

The Jews & The Israelis & Me

2009-03-19T15:05:00.004+01:00

When I was a kid—barely a teenager—there were two reasons for me to cross over the Williamsburgh Bridge into Manhattan from my Woodhaven, Queens home: one, to pick up and take home my grandfather, Gramps, from his small grocery store on the Lower East Side’s Rivington Street; or, to look for my father at his workplace in Greenwich Village, the Department of Justice’s Federal Detention Headquarters which all in my family referred to as “FDH.”

The Lower East Side and Greenwich Village were two colourful locales in the early 1950s. Their ambiences aroused in me dominant emotional effects and appeals that remain with me today. I could sense a fervour for life among the people populating these places although I was too youthful to know why I was living or what even for. These areas also suggested an exciting disparity to the rows and rows of Archie Bunker Queens suburban dwellings, victims of urban planning, which populated my neighbourhood. The Hasidic Jews on the Lower East Side and the “crazies” in the village were reasons alone worth making the jaunt into Manhattan.

I did not know it at the time, but the mania of McCarthyism was an important concern of my parents, older family members, and other grown-ups in my circle of acquaintances who were adamant about politics. When I went into Manhattan to dawdle about these places furtively, I did not realize that a lunatic fringe of Northamerican politics was affecting all of us very profoundly, and was, on each trip, tainting my own innocent spirit with hatred, and was impressing on my subconsciousness, by frequent repetition, the painful emotions of humiliating disgrace and disrepute. Those about me did not understand what they detested, and so they feared what they scorned. There is no glory or pride when one loathes. McCarthyism’s distortions fettered freedom so proficiently, my family members were burdened with strong regret, censure and reproach—effects they could not understand were playing havoc with their blind adherence to conservatism and their desire to be happy, productive citizens.

One evening I was with my uncle going over the Williamsburgh Bridge on our way to pick up Gramps. On my lap was The Daily News. I knew very well that the headlines, proclaiming the execution of two Jews (one of whom was a woman) who had been convicted of providing atomic bomb secrets to the Soviets, did not sit very well with my uncle. There was some small connection between my grandfather and these sacrificed Jews. I do not know if Gramps was familiar with them in the neighbourhood, or that he was friendly with some of their relatives, but there was a precise reference to a building across the street and around the corner where people, linked to the event, lived. I was excluded from knowing the exact details of this relationship, but I did surmise that no one was very satisfied about what had happened to these two people at Sing Sing, and my kinship were all silent, afraid concerning the matter. The look on my uncle’s face as we crossed the bridge had been one of resoluteness—not typical of the blustering, swaggering conduct displayed by a 1950s’ surefire conservative. I think he was ashamed. My grandfather was distressed.

In the 1950s and 1960s I enjoyed in New York City the fruits of a location which was truly tolerant—at least the most forbearing of any other city I have known since. The Jews, in particular, for all the narrow-mindedness that has been heaped upon them during their history, could profess their “Jewishness” in the open without fear of being attacked for doing so. Jews mingled freely with the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, Puerto Ricans, Afroamericans and all other ethnic groups (cryptic New Yorkers!) living in The Big Apple. Inter-marriages were common. Most of us would not be ashamed to bring a Jewish friend home. The “spy” story was a blow to many who had Jewish friends, and the horror of McCarthyism was blamed for stirring up the basest of feelings of those who were less charitable than others. Some years later my Jewish girlfriend, who I loved very much, sobbed to me about this tragedy. She was terribly despondent about what had happened to Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and she proclaimed vociferously their innocence to me.

I have often felt comfortable with the movement, on the part of Jews worldwide and Israelis in their home, to “rub the human race’s nose” in the accursed acts perpetrated on Jews, the ROM, gay persons and other factions singled out for destruction during the incomparably atrocious Second World War. While perhaps film footage does not authenticate the “6,000,000” number, it does, nonetheless, confirm acts of violence that demand universal condemnation. The Jewish and Israeli communities do well to harp on these massacres for the benefit of humanity. It is disgusting for political organizations to make reference to this calamity as some sort of Zionist plot to increase Jewish and Israeli economic and political hegemony. And it does not surprise me, as repulsive as it might be, that there are Roman Catholic organizations and even prelates, members of a religious body that offered succour to the Nazi regime during the Second World War, who are willing to make biased hay for the “Holy” Mother Church at the expense of another spiritual entity. How low can they go?

Nevertheless, it can be argued that the Jews and Israelis exaggerated in their efforts to condemn and, out of feelings of intense grief and justified bawlings for rectitude, compromised their own position in light of the political and economic realities of today. Instead of aligning themselves with the protests of other victims of historically-neglected exterminations, the Jews and Israelis went along alone. History itself has not been kind to the victims (200,000,000) of not only the First and Second World Wars, no one ever thinks about the millions and millions of natives purged by the Europeans in the Americas, the Vietnamese bombed to death by the Northamericans, the African slave trade...an ad infinitum inventory of the revulsions committed by men and women throughout the world’s olden times. The Jews and the Israelis gave the world the impression that their reversal was something more special than the staggering blows executed upon others. They possessed the savvy and means, something maybe the Northamerican Indians did not, to put their case before the world and seek its pity. Many of us offered them compassion. It is a terrible shame that History consigned the efforts of the Jews and Israelis to the heap of so many other human-made catastrophes, and permitted the Jewish holocaust to pale and take its ordinary place among them. “The death of one person is a tragedy, the death of millions is History.” Stalin said that.

Our mea culpas for the Jews and Israelis can be grasped still further by analyzing in a more revisionist political sense, not a particularly historically religious one, the post-Second World War dividing up of the spoils of that calamity. Shocked beyond belief, military and political leaders attempted to deal with the catastrophic loss of life and the rubble of bombed-out cities which they surveyed had befallen the European continent. Death and destruction horrified all of us, and still today we carry in our psyches the enormously scarred memories of the deathly twentieth century and the two world wars forever blotting its history. What was to be done? Where was one to begin to reconstruct? Who would have what? How would a continent be rebuilt on the shambles it had twice made of itself? How could it?

One would have to distend his or her imagination quite a long stretch to believe that the United States and the United Kingdom had purely sentimental and honourable objectives in their minds when they guaranteed European Jews not only a safe exodus to their promised land, but even the assurance that they would be protected from any hostility that they might encounter during their settlement activities, attempts to fulfil their religious dreams, and then those expectations of establishing the State of Israel. The Jews had come to stay, and they would be sustained militarily, politically, economically and morally by the victors of the Second World War who enjoyed tremendously to wield their newly-discovered global powers.

As immediately as the Jews and the soon-to-be Israelis comprehended that their religious and chauvinistic stakes in a sliver of terra firma, more or less half the size of Switzerland, was not appreciated by their Mashreq (Middle East) neighbours, those inhabitants similarly, hastily revolted at the notion that several newly invigorated Western nations were to be the determiners, not them, of the Jews and the not yet Israelis in the centuries-old homelands of an awesome amount of Arab-speaking peoples. This was an intolerable state of affairs. Blood was shed. It continues to be.

Having wedged a handful of Hebrews between the Christian world and the Islamic sphere, the exponents of Judeo-Christian “Democratic” Capitalism, shown the way by the soon to be DisUnited Kingdom and the DisUnited States of Northamerica, had put their foot in the entryway of Mashreq, had fortified their turf with a strategy of long duration in mind, and had started in on looking forward to counting on the petroleum reserves in that area which would be needed to fuel their expansionist aspirations brandishing, in one hand, the vicious, dog-eat-dog MBA dogmas of Harvard University and the University of Chicago, and, in the other, the St. James bible. Psychoanalysts describe this as the “double bind” syndrome. Others simply refer to it with the more mundane appellation— two-facedness.

It is often commented—frequently by Jews spread out throughout the world and Israelis and Jews suffering markedly in Israel—that the Jews and Israelis are remarkably bright people. That they have been the victors of a fifth of the Nobel prizes, and that this worldwide group of approximately 13,000,000 people, chosen by God (their god!), individuals very often atheistic, is therefore some kind of “untouchable” ethnic group. Not being necessarily arrogant about their knacks, the Jews and Israelis are quick to explain that their gifts have been forged throughout the ages not on account of any particular pre-eminence, but because their minority complexion has compelled them to be sharp in order to survive. So be it. I doubt that Jews and Israelis are outstandingly quick as a group. We all have known some of them who are not clever—are far from being astute. History is replete with races which were astonishingly sophisticated but are no longer with us. Likewise, the Jews and Israelis look as if they, too, might be in grave difficulty attempting to prolong their lineage. They are not a super people. They are not out to get us. They do not control the world’s financial and media institutions. No one does. We are obligated to be of assistance to the Jews and Israelis. We must help them to continue to exist not because of their religion or nationality, but for the reason that they are human beings as all of us are.

If the Jews and Israelis have won a fifth of the Nobel prizes, this is not evidence of intellectual dominance. The Nobel is not an IQ test. The award is often influenced by political rationales. Jean-Paul Sartre refused it. Henry “The Carpet Bomber” Kissinger and Mother Teresa are Nobel laureates. One Nobel winner (1921), born into a Jewish family, Albert Einstein, regretted very much his part in the invention of the nuclear energy that would eventually massacre tens of thousands at Nagasaki and Hiroshima and terrorize millions in a protracted Cold War. Still another Jew crowned with a Nobel laurel wreath (1976), Milton Friedman, intimidated hundreds of millions of people, bringing too many of them to the brink of destitution—an E=mc² for them—when he concocted a fruitless economic ideology based on the exploitation of individuals’ toil, an absolute, autocratic aversion to government intervention to assist those in need, one that vied for the “perfection” of the marketplace, hinted that eventually some kind of concentration of economic controls and planning in the hands of a highly intelligent group of people is the best of all economic possibilities available, an economic mafia that did what it could to benefit multinational companies, cultivated a creed which encouraged the use of repression to put into operation the Chicago Boys’ economic policies in at least Chile and Indonesia, and viewed a human being as some sort of homo economicus. He was a mentor to Ronald Reagan and the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher. Ironically, he also helped develop a new proximity fuse for anti-aircraft projectiles! A veritable hard-nosed skinflint who set the tone for bankers, financial advisers and stockbrokers to bring the DisUnited States of Northamerica to its knees after an unprecedented spectacle of graft and corruption never recorded in world history previous to nowadays.

All Jews and Israelis must consider the following:

1. Judeo-Christian “Democratic” Capitalism is a lethal fusion of repugnant inanity and unrepentant malfeasance. It has been that now for more than four-hundred years, and will continue to be so until its last gasping breath. Already this more or less spent system of elitism has become the laughingstock of many throughout the world, and it is especially ridiculed by the three billion human beings who live on two dollars a day. A new DUS president, skimming over the top of this reality with a stiff upper lip and repetitive supplications for rectitude, is not going to alter, substantially, the course this economic shipwreck is pursuing. The ship has been brought to a standstill. Still afloat, it is taking on water. It risks sinking into the nethermost depths of the sea. With the loss of the world’s dominant economic power to cover for it, Israel is also treading in an ever more treacherous territory. Contrary to many buoyant prognostications, the DUS will not stay put at the center of the international economy.

2. There are said to be seven hundred DUS military bases scattered throughout the world. While many of these installations seek to cultivate “friendly” rapports within the territories they occupy, the schizoid implication is that, in return, backing for the DUS and its principles is insisted upon. Might is Right! Is it possible that this wide-reaching martial exposure, with military conduits strategically arranged, gives the DUS some tactical gain, or are the DUS’ military forces so spread thin they might be considered by their opponents to be impotent and eventual easy targets? What would happen if Southamerican leaders bonded and again challenged the DisUnited Kingdom over its possession of the Malvinas? Would inebriated Chelsea and Manchester United fans fill up military cruise ships singing “Rule, Britannia!” and sail off towards Southamerica to conquer it? Or, what would happen if hundreds of thousands of Italian left-wingers surrounded Camp Darby in Tuscany, the DUS’s most sizeable deposit of arms outside continental DUS, and chained themselves to railroad tracks to prohibit the delivery of other arms from northern European DUS caches? Would chubby, under the influence “Americans” march off to get the better of Italy again? Or, what would happen if China opted to take back Taiwan? Would pot-smoking “Americans” set off to fight against China’s million plus army? Or, what if all three of these hypothetical incidents occurred at the same time? Or, what about another 9/11? And, will the DUS be able to depend on France, Germany and Italy—hedonistic, arteriosclerotic, marinating in their vulgar hypocrisy, and still shell-shocked from the bloodbaths they participated in during the twentieth century—to rally round the Stars & Stripes’ flagpole? Let’s face it, DUS militarists are mightier bluffers than are DUS capitalists.

To my Jewish and Israeli friends I suggest an exit stratagem. A word to the wise should be sufficient. I implore you all to come to your senses and renounce your lost cause that horrifies each day the global community with blood-letting in Israel and Palestine giving mankind the nightmare that there can be no hope for peace on this planet. Your nation is a focal point of hatred for a billion people, and that detestation has been incubating for at least two-hundred years. In Israel, you are a mere seven million constituting one half of the total worldwide Jewish population. What madness makes you think you can continue to exist with such odds clearly against you? What ethical justification do you possess that justifies your continued confrontation which, in turn, causes so much anguish for individuals who are not even your neighbours? What principled concept entitles you to risk the lives of half your people? If you depart from the “promised land,” (the promise of what?), you will relieve a tremendous tension that threatens the world’s security. Further, this act will cause us to respect you. Your choice to relinquish your homeland for the benefit of humanity will not be regarded as a surrender on your part, but a wise move made considering your own restricted options. Such a feat might just save the Jewish and Israel race in Israel from still another mass butchery this time caused by your recalcitrance and conceit. It is impossible for you to count any longer on the DisUnited Kingdom and the DisUnited States of Northamerica. It is time to cease being their pawn. A posse ad esse.

Authored by Anthony St. John
The Ides of March, MMIX
Calenzano, Italia

Proposal to Augment Employment Prospects & Earnings of the Posteitaliane Group

2009-03-12T17:43:00.004+01:00

A N T H O N Y S T. JOHN
Casella Postale 38
50041 CALENZANO FI
Italia

M E M O R A N D U M

In the interest of: The Honorable Elizabeth Dibble
Deputy Chief of Mission in Charge of

Embassy Affairs During Absence of Ambassador to Italy
The United States’ Embassy
119/A Viale Vittorio Veneto
00187 ROMA RM
Italia

Coming from: ASJ

Date: 15 March 2009

Subject: Posteitaliane

The global economic crisis is affecting the Italian economy more and more. With the failure to realize a Ministero dell’Informazione e Turismo, which would have abetted the organization and consequent efficiency of the drastically declining Italian tourist industry, the nation’s most important commercial concern, higher unemployment figures are about to inflict Italy’s economy even further. To help stem the decline in employment, I wish to make a suggestion to the Posteitaliane which might bring thousands, even tens of thousands, of employment opportunities to suffering Italians: The formation, by the Posteitaliane group, of a franchising business that would lease out the website domains of all Italian zip codes (codici di avviamento postale) to private entrepreneurs who would consequently build their sites, under the auspices of the Posteitaliane, in consideration of the localities where they are positioned throughout the country. The websites would be designed by Posteitaliane and would be their sole property. Franchisers would have the options of boosting their profits via the advertising proceeds they would accumulate from their efforts. Franchisers would also be permitted to include ideas and projects which might enhance the tourism business in their areas. Further, artistic, cultural, social and other events could be published on websites not only for neighboring communities, but also for foreign visitors seeking specific knowledge concerning a particular Italian tourist spot. Posteitaliane, assuming this role, would become a leader not only in affording tourist information, it would also serve as a national unifying force bringing Italian customs and mores not only to other parts of Italy and Europe, but to the entire world.

A Lament for Europe

2009-02-27T21:42:00.000+01:00

A Lament for Europe

Land of the Setting Sun
Caldron simmering in hungering desperation
To regain the smacks of the Past.
You seek to lunge ahead
On the energy of Your logic
And hopes not yet lionized.
You call upon Your histories
To lend strength to Your phantasies.
You coil up hard on Your proud self
Wrinkled and weather-beaten.
You struggle to nurture new flowers
On the dry rot of Your haunted memories.
Your youth, sniffed upon by strapped canine squads,
Rape-hate in Your stadiums
Striped with electronic rejoinders
To press softly-pliant, gaily-tinged plastic buttons.
Your elderly curl their ways to bankrupt health ministries
Where physicians fool with forms
And fill in football pools.
Your neighbors to the East—
Brazen, sordid—
Yank towards You
Roughly extracting for exacting theirs craved for.
You, Europe, sit pickled—
Soused in the juices of Your scummy heretofore.
Your dabblers in politics set flags unfurled
And their powers shame—
Shame!—
This Our world.

Anthony St. John

Complainte pour L'Europe

2009-02-27T21:40:00.000+01:00

Complainte pour L’Europe

Terre du Soleil Couchant
Grande chaudière bouillonnant en désespoir affamé
Pour retrouver les saveurs du Passé.
Tu essaies de Te projeter en avant
Sur l’énergie de Ta logique
Et d’espoirs pas encore idéalisés.
Tu invoques Ton histoire
Pour fortifier Tes fantaisies.
Tu t’accroches serrée à Ton orgueilleux moi
Gercé et corrodé par les intempéries.
Tu t’efforces de faire pousser de nouvelles fleurs
De la putréfaction de Tes mémoires tourmentées.
Tes jeunes, flairés par des équipes de chiens en laisse,
Violent-haïssent dans Tes stades
Trainés avec des allèchements électroniques
A presser de tendres et colorés boutons de plastique.
Tes vieux serpentent avec fatigue vers des ministères de la santé en ruine
Où les médecins s’amusent avec les formulaires
Et remplissent des fiches du loto sportif.
Tes voisins de l’Est—
Arrogants, sordides—
S’agrippent à Toi
En prétendant rudement ce qu’ils convoitent et leur dû.
Toi, Europe, tu es assise embaumée—
Imprégnée des jus de Ton méprisable temps qui fut.
Tes politiciens amateurs déplient des drapeaux
Et leurs pouvoirs font honte—
Font honte !—
A ce monde qui est Nôtre.

Anthony St. John

Lamento per l'Europa

2009-02-27T21:38:00.001+01:00

Lamento per L’Europa

Terra del Sole Calante
Calderone ribollente in famelica disperazione
Per ritrovare i sapori del Passato.
Tu cerchi di proiettarti in avanti
Sull’energia della Tua logica
E di speranze non ancora idealizzate.
Tu invochi la Tua storia
Per rinvigorire le Tue fantasie.
Ti avvinghi stretta al Tuo orgoglioso io
Screpolato e corroso dalle intemperie.
Ti sforzi di far crescere nuovi fiori
Dalla putredine delle Tue tormentate memorie.
I Tuoi giovani, annusati da squadre di cani al guinzaglio,
Violentano-odiano nei Tuoi stadi
Strisciati con allettamenti elettronici
A premere morbidi e colorati bottoni di plastica.
I Tuoi vecchi serpeggiano stancamente verso ministeri della sanità in rovina
Dove i medici si trastullano con i moduli
E riempiono schedine del totocalcio.
I Tuoi vicini dell’Est—
Arroganti, sordidi—
Si aggrappano a Te
Pretendendo rudemente ciò che bramano e credono dovuto.
Tu, Europa, siedi imbalsamata—
Impregnata dei succhi del Tuo spregevole tempo che fu.
I Tuoi politici dilettanti spiegano bandiere
E i loro poteri vergognano—
Vergognano!—
Questo Nostro mondo.

Anthony St. John

Poetry by Me, Anthony 10

2009-02-21T19:41:00.001+01:00

The Death of a Friend

Paul is now dead;
Eats not his bread.
Worms in his head,
Churn to be fed.

Gas bloats his guts;
Ooze muffs his nuts.
Grubs suck his butt,
Down to a scut.

Slime chills his cist;
Stench cuts the mist.
Clenched are his fists;
Spent are his gists.

Paul was my friend;
Now it’s the end.
Sad is my life;
Life and its Strife!

He was to me,
That which was free.
He let me know,
How I should flow.

Paul’s not in sight;
That is my plight.
Even his fame,
Sets low my flame.

25 April 1989

Poetry by Me, Anthony 9

2009-02-21T19:36:00.001+01:00

Adidas ZX 600

A state of the art running shoe,
Absorbing stress as legs strike;
That tenders months of use so true,
And fine feelings nearly dovelike.

Synthetic suedes set the fashion,
And flex points ease curls in tendons;
Pre-moulded supports made of nylon;
Polyfibers clock shock absorptions.

Forefoots designed to give support,
To let the jogger feel comfort;
And padded collars with soft protect,
To offer top runs near perfect.

ADIDAS coils me, springs me tall!
High to the sky, down to the ground!
Zlip-zound, zlip-zound, zlip-zound, zlip-zound—
ZX Six-hundred heeds my call!

17 July 1987

Poetry by Me, Anthony 8

2009-02-21T19:35:00.001+01:00

The Age of the Assassin

Oh pathetic Head of State!
There you faint with head poised straight.
“Superstar”—so you are,
Sober still ‘neath ev’ry star.
You wear the mask of strong emotion,
While causing no real great commotion.
God-like with the Atom Bomb;
Weak-kneed in a woman’s charm.
Perfectly potent is your pose;
Visibly shaken is your prose.
Fake vim stakes your foreign plank,
With hopes that foes clinch bull’s-eyes blank.
Red-faced top chief: The Apocalypse?
Pee-brained ally to Political Pimps.
Your signals set flags unfurled;
Your powers shame this our world.

15 July 1987

Poetry by Me, Anthony 7

2009-02-21T19:34:00.001+01:00

Hip, Hip, Hurrah!
for C. K. Scott Moncrieff

Oh good grief!
Scott Moncrieff!

You raised to the heights
With your lush delights:
Worthy translations!
(Exultations mulled mushy with euphony!)
Wordy mutations!
(Transfigurations spiced with gentility!)

You had no easy chore in store
To cull sweet sense from vulgate forms,
Haughty in speech stretched forth galore;
Blatant high-soundings typed in swarms.

You jostled fashion in your joust
To find the right sound—le mot juste!
When deemed it so, you blue-penned “oust!”
To awkward false friends frank but soused.

From your toughed gut you howled high your roar
To loam firm this thought of Henry Moore:
At ease the soul sings out whole the score,
As knowing it very well before.

Oh good grief!
Scott Moncrieff!

10 July 1987

Poetry by Me, Anthony 6

2009-02-21T19:29:00.002+01:00

Tame Tennis

Beer and Pretzels and Tennis
Loosen tense muscles and senses,
For all to enjoy
With oodles of joy,
Hours of “ping-ponging” sessions.

Conk…Conk…Conk…Conk!

Sets and Aces and Matches
Strengthen thin biceps and triceps,
For flights of delight
With thews oh so tight,
Yet sporting no cuts, no scratches.

Conk…Conk…Conk…Conk!

Nets and Chalked-lines and Outskirts
Contain vain outbursts and outcries,
For frivolous rows
With curtsies and bows,
This slugfest of introverts!

Conk…Conk…Conk…Conk!

Conk, conk!

3 July 1987

Poetry by Me, Anthony 5

2009-02-21T19:28:00.002+01:00

Dead Chickens

Put out your hat
For chicken’s fat
Then watch the cat
Piss where they sat

Hands at the vat
Dip deep, then scat
To bring loud chat
Slacked to a tat

To chrome-hooked racks
To plastic sacks
“Jolly” sad facts
Slip through pat slacks

10 May 1987

Poetry by Me, Anthony 4

2009-02-21T19:24:00.002+01:00

Italian Charnel House

A cloud of gloom
Shrouds Dante’s tomb
And none too soon
Before the Boom
Of cancerous cysts
And psychotic fits
And computer lists
And polluted mists

3 June 1987

Poetry by Me, Anthony 3

2009-02-21T19:24:00.001+01:00

Spring Sprung

Spring has sprung
Among the crud
Of concrete slabs
And slimy waterways

Green life pushes
Through the pall
Of gooey gook
Drooling gloomy
Blobbed globs

Spongy respiratory organs wheeze.
Blood-pumpers rattle on to a deep freeze.
Gray cells slush drugged on all sides at their ease.

2 May 1987

Poetry by Me, Anthony 2

2009-02-21T19:17:00.001+01:00

Sunday Morning

Oh! How I love to mount from my bed—
To move my feet
To stick my nose
To raise my head
In Sunday morning’s pompousness!

Oh! How I love to walk in the sun—
To see the birds
To smell the hay
To feel the fun
In Sunday morning’s gorgeousness!

Oh! How I love to wait on a line—
To eat my food
To break my bread
To drink my wine
In Sunday morning’s stateliness!

25 January 1987

Poetry by Me, Anthony 1

2009-02-21T19:13:00.003+01:00

Emollient Mounds of Flesh
under An Olive Tree

A pudgy pudendum
Sullied with ringlets of silky short black hairs
Blurts out its lush onto the grass.

Pounds of muscle and fat
In rounds and carnal lanknesses
Lay on green ovoid fruit stalks below the mass.

Yellowy greens.
Leathery leaves.
Oily sardines.

A syringe there.
A condom there.
A tissue there.

2 January 1987

COMUNICATO STAMPA: Candidatura Nuovo Ambasciatore USA in Italia

2009-02-16T11:16:00.003+01:00

PRESS RELEASE: Candidancy of Anthony St. John to Fill Post of USA Ambassador in Italy

COMUNICATO STAMPA

Firenze, 16 febbraio 2009
Anthony St. John avanza la sua candidatura come nuovo
Ambasciatore USA in Italia.

Anthony St. John intende presentare la sua candidatura per il ruolo di prossimo ambasciatore USA in Italia. Nato a Brooklyn, New York nel 1944, Mr St John risiede nel nostro paese da più di 25 anni. Laureato in filosofia e specializzato in letteratura inglese e nord-americana ha lasciato gli States poco più che trentenne. Reduce del Vietnam vanta la conoscenza di molte lingue avendo vissuto per più di sei anni in Venezuela. Tra le sue occupazioni anche quella di giornalista, attualmente si dedica alla letteratura come scrittore, ad opere di traduzione ed all’insegnamento.

Presenta un piano programmatico diviso in dieci punti volti a ristrutturare profondamente l’organizzazione dell’apparato di Via Veneto, anche attraverso proposte provocatorie.

Di seguito il programma nelle parole del candidato:

I.

Ordinerei immediatamente—con il consenso del Presidente—a tutto il personale dell’ambasciata e dei consolati degli Stati Uniti in Italia di trasferirsi nell’ambasciata americana in Afghanistan.

II.

Esigerei da tutto il mio nuovo staff di parlare in lingua italiana per aprire un dialogo—in italiano, FINALMENTE!—con il popolo italiano.

III.

Domanderei immediatamente che tutti i membri del CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY operanti in Italia vengano rimandati a Washington per un controllo della loro intelligenza.

IV.

Stabilirei il mio ufficio di ambasciatore nello scompartimento di un treno delle FERROVIE DELLO STATO italiano e con questo mi sposterei attraverso l’Italia dal lunedì al venerdì.

V.

Creerei un programma televisivo “Un Pomeriggio con L’Ambasciatore degli Stati Uniti” in onda ogni sabato dalle 16:00 alle 18:00 con interventi telefonici in diretta e servizi culturali.

VI.

Vorrei chiedere scusa pubblicamente a tutti gli italiani per la stupidità dei precedenti ambasciatori americani in Italia, che non parlavano italiano e non comunicavano con il popolo italiano.

VII.

Vorrei creare L’Ambasciata degli Stati Uniti del Popolo italiano e del Popolo americano aperta a tutti
e non dovrà essere un club esclusivo solo per i rappresentanti che hanno interessi speciali.

VIII.

Vorrei che vivesse quotidianamente come un qualsiasi cittadino italiano.

IX.

Vorrei portare gli italiani e gli americani ad unirsi in uno spirito di amicizia e di rispetto.

X.

Cercherei di innalzare in tutto il mondo il ruolo di entrambi Italia e Stati Uniti d’America, come esempi di pace e buona volontà.

* * *

Ufficio Stampa

Anthony St. John
anthony.st.john1944@gmail.com
335-6047381

President Obama, Please Release Me, Let Me Go! For I Don't Love the DisUnited States of America Anymore!

2009-01-25T09:16:00.003+01:00

Barack Obama
President of the United States
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
WASHINGTON DC 20520
United States

I hope this communication finds you, your wife and your children well.

On 27 March 1994 I reduced to ashes my United States’ passport and mailed a letter renouncing my DisUnited States’ citizenship. The passport had expired that day, and I had set it to flames so that no one could find it: stolen DisUnited States’ passports can fetch a handsome sum on the black market; the possibility—although remote—that mine might wind up in a terrorist’s hand, was not to my liking. It was also my intention, at that time, to make a dramatic gesture that would mirror my antipathy and help myself realize more the seriousness of my action.

At that point in time, I thought erroneously that my connection to the United States—which I had considered breaking for many years before—had become a fait accompli, at least in one authentic mode: I had dealt my own hand. It was not until years later that I would have come to realise that my abnegation was not in any sense “legitimate.” Since 27 March 1994 my swan song to the DisUnited States of America has been true-to-life only for me! When I dwelt at first on the newly-discovered realization, I was genuinely flabbergasted! I guessed then I would have to visit the DisUnited States Consulate in Firenze (Florence, Italy) and submit to bureaucratic rigmarole! I was verily disgusted. I did not even have the democratic right to give up claim to my own citizenship! Worse, now that repudiation depended on dull, foggy-bottomed office workers set, in an aura of an institutionalised paranoia, behind bulletproof glass. I do not like to go to these sterile places. But I had to.

On 30 October 1997, I strolled to the consulate in Firenze and signed first an original of three papers and, after, two copied sets of them documenting my official request to cut the cord which binds me to my DisUnited States’ citizenship. Your subordinates, true to form, did not disappoint me by not acting pettily. When I asked them for photocopies for me of the official papers, they refused to oblige. Very unkind. When I asked them if I was then now “officially” a non-DisUnited States’ citizen, the consul himself replied curtly: “99%.” Very not nice. When I asked him to explain, he told me it depended on whether or not the DisUnited States’ Department of State would be inclined to approve my solicitation; yet, he saw no reason to believe that Washington would not approve the pleading. I was informed that I would “probably” receive Washington’s official sanction in two weeks and it, then, would be dispatched to me by post.

On 16 May 2000, I called the consulate (055-239.82.76) to check on the status of my petition. Maria (“…the one handling your case…”) suggested I should re-submit my beseechment. I propounded that she make a photocopy of the original and send that to Washington: “No.” I must come into the consulate and sign again all the forms! I asked her to look further into the matter. She said “O.K.”; and , on her own, she promised she would call me back with her findings. Still today, no word from Maria.

Why all this delay? Why the false information? False promises? Why am I not allowed to renounce my own citizenship?

* * *

I wish to take this opportunity to elucidate further on the reasons why I have decided—yet not our dauntless Department of State!—to sever my membership in the DisUnited States of America’s community. In fact, I consigned by hand, through the consulate office in Firenze, a 59-page essay, Why I Sat under an Olive Tree in Calenzano, Italy, 27 March 1994, Set to Flames my United States’ Passport, Dried my Eyes, and then Returned Home to Write a Letter to the President of the DisUnited States of America Renouncing my DisUnited States’ Citizenship. (Leslie Gore, 1963: "It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to, cry if I want to, cry if I want to…You’d cry too, President Obama, if it had happened to you!”) I have no reason to believe that the staff in the Firenze consulate would have been so kind as to have sent that photocopied manuscript to the White House. The following ancillary features may be annexed to those of my 59-page theme which, itself, is by no means complete. I would need a work the length of Marcel Proust’s Á la recherché du temps perdu to unravel my disaffection with the DisUnited States of America and its citizenry. The longer you, Mr. President, dillydally to grant me that demission, the more silly you and your cohorts strike me as being. I regret enormously this deadlock, and I think it is very unjust that my “case” has not yet been rubber-stamped “CLOSED.”

Here we go…

Firstly. I have neither love nor respect for many Northamerican people and, in particular, a large part of the ideals they sustain. (A Northamerican bumpersticker: NORTHAMERICA: LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT.)

Secondly. I have not seen the DisUnited States of America since 31 December 1975, and apart from the boundless curiosity I possess to see how much it has changed since I last put eyes on it, nothing else prompts me to go back to it. (I do not have a passport!) I often call up this analogy for myself and others interested in my impasse: the DisUnited States of America is, for me, something which might be paralleled to the loss of a girlfriend once loved very much. Our story has ended; I have no more feelings for the DisUnited States; I wish her well; and, there is nothing emotive in her for me any longer. I embrace many beautiful memories from the thirty-two years when I lived in the DisUnited States. These I cherish fondly. Yet, deep down, that which dominates my sentiments is this: there were too many lies, too many times. It is over. It is finished. I see no good reason to believe why I should continue to assume being a citizen of the DisUnited States of America. I have been trying—actually for years—to obtain the official documents which will corroborate my decision—for one, for all, finally.

Thirdly. I am not anti-DisUnited States of America. On the contrary, I often defend what is the factuality about it trying always to be truthful and faithful to what is unimaginable. I would be a fool if I denied many of the fine things that have been accomplished in the DisUnited States by many brilliant Northamerican citizens. These I respect and always will. (Would I be writing this plea if I thought each and every Northamerican was an imbecile?) They also make me feel proud that once I was a DisUnited States’ inhabitant. I am anti-stupidity, however. And I believe unwaveringly that the purport of that which I once thought to be “American,” has changed inexplicably for the worse. I do not wish to be part of this on-going process. I deny it vigorously. I do not maintain that all Northamericans are “fat” and “stupid” nor do I believe that they are suffering some “moral” crisis of immense proportion. I do not even hold any more the rancor I once did for Northamerican people blaming them for the way they had treated us when we returned from Vietnam. As a matter of fact, one of the most precious memories that has been lodged in my recall is that of the doorman in front of the Essex House in New York, August 1968, who opened my taxi door, saluted me, greeted me and welcomed me home, and had sent me to my room gifted with a bottle of champagne and a bowl of fresh fruit! I felt like a King for a Day! That was all I wanted then. The “war” had been over for me. I was so happy that I had come home in one piece and had not been maimed for life. I was ready to begin a new life. The staff at the Essex House had a feeling for people. They knew very well that whatever those 1968 simpletons in Washington concocted for the worst, there was a heart-rendering story for most soldiers coming home from the battlefield. Reality would set in only a few months later. I would learn quickly enough what many Northamericans thought about Vietnam veterans. For example. A University of Miami law student (What is the difference between a dead dog in the road and a dead lawyer in the road? There are skid marks in front of the dog.) on the dean’s list ( ! ), told me, proudly, this about Vietnam: “I got out of Vietnam by taking a pill to raise my blood pressure!” He laughed. He was cocky about his actions. That lawyer (What do you call one thousand lawyers chained together at the bottom of the sea? A good start.) now defends, for a huge sum, the “rights” ($$$) of his clients. He, like hundreds of thousands of other Northamericans, dodged the draft to keep from going to Vietnam. These double dealing folk slid like cowards through the hoards of anti-war protestors to use them not to object to the “war,” but to aid and abet their own selfish interests. They went their merry ways and today, upholding the military arrogance of the DisUnited States, defy anyone, anywhere in the world, who will not kowtow to DisUnited States militaristic and economic bullying. Peaceniks? I do not want to live with these impostors, Mr. President.

Fourthly. I lay no claims upon the DisUnited States of America. I do not ask for Social Security benefits or aid due me as a veteran of the Vietnam “War.” (When I returned from Vietnam, it was suggested that I go to a Veterans Administration hospital and fake a back pain—an ailment difficult to diagnose. Doing so—so went the logic at the time—I might obtain a medical pension for the rest of my life. The thinking then was this: “The government screwed you by sending you to Vietnam; now it is your turn to screw the government.”) I heard it once said that one DisUnited States president offered Vietnam veterans a $25,000 “bonus” ( ! ). This probably would not have been given to me because at the time I was living in Venezuela. Should it have been proffered, however, I would not have accepted it. Trying to be true to my personal beliefs (not attempting to be boy scoutish), I would have given this reason for my rejection of that money: I heard one time that Frank Sinatra said—and I do not know if it is true or not—that he never had trouble with organized criminals because he never asked them for a favor. This makes sense to me even though I am not sure Frank Sinatra felt that way. I hope he did. The point is that it would be excessively hypocritical on my part to protest so vigorously against the DisUnited States’ government, for so many years, while at the same time take pecuniary assistance to improve my own life—frequently desperate financially. I just feel so good thinking this way, Mr. President! Please release me? I want to go my merry way in Europe; and, I am certain the DisUnited States of America will go its merry way very well without me. It is over.

Fifthly. When I was in the DisUnited States Army in Vietnam and served as Property Book Officer for the Fourth Division in Pleiku, one of the most popular pastimes there then was sending back to the DisUnited States, illegally, through National Guard armories, weapons and other military paraphernalia earmarked for the troops in Vietnam. With tongue in cheek, I called these characters “patriotic arms dealers,” and every time I think of them now, I have to wonder how many of those armaments were used by berserk Vietnam veterans bent on revenge and keen to “zero” Northamerican citizens not appreciative of their service consummated in Southeast Asia. (They are not crazy because they went to Vietnam; those who sent them are crazy!) How many para-military and right-wing and white supremacy and fanatical religious groups are there in the DisUnited States today? How many guns are these kooks toting? How much violence is there beneath the psyches of Northamerican people? For what I have said about the Vietnam “War” in my articles, letters, manuscripts and poetry, I would be afraid to live anywhere in the DisUnited States among these crazed fringes. Would I have to spend the rest of my life wearing a bullet-proof vest if I were to express my ideas? Would I not be a dupe of the mobbing mentality wherever I worked in the DisUnited States? Who is going to give me, born 7 October 1944, a job in the DisUnited States—in the first place? I fail to see how I could live freely and democratically in the DisUnited States with the ideas I possess about it. You cannot imagine how many Northamericans themselves that I have met here in Italy—after I have told them I am a Vietnam veteran who has not returned home for years—explode: “I can’t blame you!” In the DisUnited States I would not be able to speak as openly about the Vietnam “War” as I did in Venezuela and as I do now in Italy. (Would we not have a wonderful, democratic DisUnited States of America if every DisUnited States citizen was paid $25,000 to study the Constitution of the DisUnited States for twenty-five hours!!!) I do not want to live with Northamericans, Mr. President. Can you blame me? They want their cake and they want to eat it, too.

Sixthly. I am from Europe even though I was born in the DisUnited States; I cannot erase my Europeanism. My roots are here. Why not let me be in peace where I am in Europe, Mr. President? The mother and father of my father were born in The Old Soviet Union. My mother’s mother hailed from Ireland. My mother’s father came from France. Every morning I awake in Europe, I feel the energy of Europe flowing through my veins. If I put my ear to the ground, I hear the sounds not only of Italy, I can also listen to the murmurs of all European Voices. (As I copy out this manuscript from the pencilled pages which originated it, I am listening to the Wilhelm Backhaus rendition of Beethoven’s Concerto for piano and orchestra, Number Five, (Imperatore). My education, not only in Europe but all the more in the DisUnited States, is a long list of European philosophers, writers, political scientists, poets, historians, economists, musicians, critics, ad infinitum: Sartre, Russell, Hume, Rousseau, Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Proust, Stendahl, Shakespeare, Keats, Blake, Minc…remember that name, Mr. President: Alain Minc…. These are only some of the geniuses who feed my thought processes and help me to understand the vast and complicated world within which we live. Without them, I would be lost. Many of them are on the nightstand next to my bed, and I often go to sleep with their thoughts revolving in my brain, or with their music floating about me. (I am—and will always be—a fan of Elvis Presley, The Temptations, Little Anthony and the Imperials, Frank Sinatra, Simon and Garfunkel and Marvin Gaye. Rock and roll is here to stay, Mr. President!) Have I not been so lucky as to have had so many wonderful experiences in Northamerica and Southamerica and Europe? Please, Mr. President, let me be with my primogenitors? Let me take in more of this complex continent where I have been fixed for the past seventeen years? Please release me? Let me go!

Seventhly. It has not been frequently easy living outside the DisUnited States what with the terrible reputation Northamericans enjoy—however unjustly—in many of the parts I have visited. Let me give you only two examples:
1. I had once just sat down to drink a cup of coffee in a coffee bar in Caracas, and noticing a beautiful lady next to me, I started to converse with her. While talking, I suddenly received a slap on my right ear that sent me flying to the floor. “Go home, gringo!” shouted the woman’s escort who had just returned from the men’s room. Did he think incorrectly that I was trying to initiate a relationship with her?
2. For years, I have been a client of the Deutsche Bank in Firenze on Via Strozzi. A few months ago, when I went to make a deposit, the teller there, who I have known for years, began lambasting Northamericans thinking, all these years, that I was an Englishman! He told me point-blank: “I hate all Americans.”

These are only two cases. There have been many, many others both in Venezuela and Italy. It must be pointed out, however, that not all Venezuelans or Italians are so violent or unsavory when confronting Northamericans on a one-on-one basis—especially when Northamericans are flashing their dollar bills in the air! I have enjoyed innumerably beautiful and rewarding occasions, naturally. I cannot help to think, nevertheless, that during these not noble situations, if I had had my citizenship renunciation papers in hand, I might have been able to bring them to the attention of any anti-DisUnited States interlocutor and assuage his/her feelings at least towards me! You will be doing me a great favor, Mr. President, if you sign those pages officially documenting the renunciation of my DisUnited States’ citizenship. Thank you.

Eighthly. I am decidedly against the death penalty, and I have been so always. It rattles me enormously that more than seventy percent of Northamerican citizens are proponents of capital punishment. If you do not know why you should be contrary to it, then you are more insensate than I imagined. (There is this “joke” going around Europe: “The dean of the Yale University Law (Why don’t sharks eat lawyers? Out of professional courtesy.) School is addressing the in-coming class. He says that lawyers (It was so cold last week that I saw several lawyers with their hands in their own pockets.), wanting to make politics a career, should not take the Ethics and the Law (How was copper wire invented? Two lawyers were arguing over a penny.) course. You, Mr. President, stand up and say: ‘I’m going to be President of the DisUnited States.’ The dean replies to you: ‘Then you can do whatever you want here.’”) Yet, there is something even worse I have to say to you on this score, and I wish to quote to you from that ever-mind-roaming Newsweek: 12 June 2000; pps. 30-31: “…In January 1992, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton interrupted his presidential campaign to return home to preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a black man convicted of killing a police officer. Rector had lobotomised himself with a bullet to his head; he was so incapacitated that he asked that the pie served at his last meal be saved for “later.” By not preventing the execution of a mentally impaired man, Clinton was sending a strong message to voters: the era of soft-on-crime Democrats was over. Even now, Al Gore doesn’t dare step out front on death-penalty issues.” Here we have something really outrageous. President Clinton, substantially, pandered to the basic instincts of those Northamerican people whom he wanted to vote for him. He used a debilitated individual to better his own self interests and those of his political party, the Democratic Party—long regarded by many as one of the champions of the underdog and the underprivileged. How could he have been so crass? Does he not know that two other rabble-rousers in the last century, Hitler and Mussolini, stooped to similar depraved orchestrations before they went on to killing enfeebled personages en masse? How could he have been so fatuitous? I do not want to live in the same country that he inhabits, Mr President! And I do not want to live with those lame-brained characters who voted for him and were happy to see Mr. Rector executed.

Ninthly. In the autumn of 1967, I was serving as an artillery officer with an infantry company dug-in on the Vietnam-Cambodian border. (For an almost incredible story, read my “How Jacqueline Kennedy Saved My Life,” on the British Broadcasting Corporation’s www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/mycentury. Jackie O went on vacation in Cambodia while we, the troops, were there the same time! Was she a Rhodes’ scholar?) If I am not mistaken, at about the same time, Bill Clinton was studying at Oxford University (as a Rhodes’ scholar!) in England smoking Cuban cigars, banana peelings, and marijuana. Lucky you! When I set off for Vietnam in August, 1967, I did not know whom I should have believed: the hippies; or, the establishment. Bill Clinton knew better whom to believe, obviously. He was a little rascal! And, he was right. The hippies were on the mark, too. I did not wear flowers in my hair when I went to Travis Air Force Base near San Francisco in August, 1967. Bill Clinton did! He was smarter than me. After all, he is a lawyer (What is a difference between God and a lawyer? God does not pretend to be a lawyer.) ! Clinton yelped about peace and civil rights while the likes of Henry Kissinger (Noble Peace Prize winner! Jean-Paul Sartre is right about the Noble Prize!) were carpet-bombing millions of innocent Northvietnamese civilians. Bravo, Bill. He was anti-military, anti-establishment—with a perfect alibi. Today, Secretaries of Defence, say that Vietnam veterans have nothing to be ashamed of for having served in Vietnam! Notwithstanding Clinton’s interesting approach to the nuances of historical reality, there are two knotty nitty-grittyies that perplex me tremendously when I think about Clinton, and I would like to air them here:
1. Who went in his place, President Obama? A nineteen-year-old farm kid? An Afroamerican? A high-school drop-out? A “Do you want to go to jail, or do you want to go to Vietnam?” A Northerner? A Southerner?
2. I will admit, again, that Bill Clinton was faultless about not going to Vietnam. He trod on the heels of the anti-war demonstrators, let his hair grow, hopped on the peace bandwagon…. Great. But I believe, Mr. President, that Bill Clinton climbed too high the heights of pretence ever since he began rallying against the DisUnited States’ intervention in Southeast Asia. For the two terms he served as President of the DisUnited States of America, every wish or whim of Pentagon generals was adhered to by him. As if he was doing everything possible to give the impression that he was not in congruence with his peace-loving Sixties’ days. Had logic gone amuck for him? Come on, Bill, get back on the Peace Train. Is this what they taught you at Yale University Law (Why do they bury lawyers under thirty feet of dirt? Because deep down, they’re really good people.) School? How could he act like such a nincompoop and still be alive? And he called himself a Leader of the Free World! The most powerful individual in the world! This world must be going to the dogs! Could he not see for himself? More than fifty percent of the Northamerican people do not vote! For decades they have been choosing between the “lesser of two evils.” And that is what they are left with now: overbearing tactlessness. Who is going to follow this act? A psychopath? A John McCain? A presidential Oliver North? (Someone worse than Richard Nixon!) Bill Clinton pertains to a long list of presidential featherbrains, and the only thing left for him to do—if he does not go to jail—is to construct a presidential library (Egads! No! Not another presidential library! No! No!! No!!!), filled with computer disks and reams of paper, and pose for pictures with other presidential goofballs—naturally, under the protection of Secret Service agents. God bless Northamerica! God help it! Stop! I want to get off! I refuse to live in the shadows of this crippling speciousness. Mr. President, please sign those papers TODAY before some nitwit is elected again and tries to fry me in one of his Texan electric chairs famous all over the world.

Tenthly. There is one thing I like about Bill CLinton. I will never forget that belly-laugh he “spasmed” for us next to that éminence grise, Boris Yelstin, as they both bantered about before the press in the White House. I guess being a lawyer (What do you have when one-hundred lawyers are buried up to their necks in sand? Not enough sand.) is a sort of compensation. It helps to pal around with other lawyers (What is black and brown and looks good on a lawyer? A Doberman.) and get to meet important political celebrities. I will bet a lawyer (What do lawyers and sperm have in common? One in 3,000,000 has a chance of becoming a human being.) presented Bill to Boris. Bill showed that he had a sense of humor, and this is a wonderful asset.

You hold in your hands just another unfinished chapter in a book of shame about the Vietnam “War”—that tragedy that has blemished the reputation of the DisUnited States perhaps for all time and has guaranteed that all DisUnited States’ foreign policy must be regarded as suspect: under suspicion of being in the interest of the politically and militaristically powerful, untrustworthy for being in the interest of a world economic order that threatens to destabilize millions of workers and bring more misery to millions more destitute people throughout the world, and suspected of being in the interest of an attitude (DisUnited States Army slogans: “Might is Right…A Good Defence is an Offence…Once You’ve got Them by the Balls, Their Hearts and Minds will Follow”) that perpetuates a pervading influence of fear among people who are economically and politically defenceless. No wonder your diplomats must hide behind bullet-proofing wherever they go! They are feared; they are not respected. On this very day, fascists, totalitarians, revanchists, dictators and chauvinists all cluster around one precise conceit: “The DisUnited States is just as depraved as they say we are. In the end, all that counts is that might is right.” DisUnited States’ foreign policy, sadly, has degenerated to this disgusting level. It lacks courage; it is lacklustre.

I ask you, President Obama, to instruct your muddleheaded dependents in the DisUnited States Consulate in Firenze to cease lying to me and quit hiding behind bullet-proof glass. If we must meet again, I will be happy to return to the consulate and sign “new” renunciation documents provided someone promises me that those official papers will be sent to me within thirty (30) days of my signing them. Thank you.

Cordially…

Anthony St. John

1 August 2000

Poetry Italy 10

2009-01-23T21:49:00.001+01:00

Stradivari

Don Stradivari is not with us,
And for his art there’s made faint fuss.
Go to Cremona!
Sniff the aroma!
Of false notes,
Of bank notes.

1 August 1987

Poetry Italy 9

2009-01-23T21:47:00.001+01:00

Italian Charnel House

A cloud of gloom
Shrouds Dante’s tomb
And none too soon
Before the Boom
Of cancerous cysts
And psychotic fits
And computer lists
And polluted mists

3 June 1987

Poetry Italy 8

2009-01-23T21:44:00.001+01:00

Poetry Italy 7

2009-01-23T21:42:00.001+01:00

Emollient Mounds of Flesh
Under an Olive Tree

A pudgy pudendum
Sullied with ringlets of silky short black hairs
Blurts out its lush onto the grass.

Pounds of muscle and fat
In rounds and carnal lanknesses
Lay on green ovoid fruit stalks below the mass.

Yellowy greens.
Leathery leaves.
Oily sardines.

A syringe there.
A condom there.
A tissue there.

2 January 1987

Poetry Italy 6

2009-01-23T21:35:00.002+01:00

I BAMBINI (The Kids)

Son of God...dropped his guard
Sent a child...mild and wild
Hurled to world...curled and furled
Little prune...month of June
Close the shop...a new pop
Gather round...joy abound
Start the feast...call the priest
In his dank...he is swank
Make him vain...let him reign
In his crib...GUCCI bib
Baby made...mother staid
Paper pants...infant rants
Spastic hands...mark demands
Father there...stuck to chair
Mother's mom...orders calm
Mother's dad...looks so glad
Mother's friends...help to cleanse
Little tyke...all alike
Eyes alert...still no hurt
Ecstasy...family

12 December 1986

Poetry Italy 5

2009-01-23T21:28:00.002+01:00

GLI UOMINI (The Men)

Proud and firm...is their sperm
Spurting out...years throughout
Well-dressed men...gold-filled pen
Squeezing dicks...hardened quick
Sticking them...in a gem
Walk on high...eyes to sky
Sport is tops...all else stops
Bet a game...want of fame
Sporting news...offers clues
Ball in hand...book in sand
Mamma's home...got to phone
Wife's the queen...hardly seen
Clean his shoes...he's with blues
Wants to dine...serve his wine
Press his tie...or he'll die
Honor him...cuddle him
He is king...all must sing
Number one...race is won
He is best...by God blessed
Family...Italy

10 December 1986

Poetry Italy 4

2009-01-23T21:20:00.002+01:00

I GIOVANI (The Young)

Past adieu...now is new
Sunday mass...beardless sass
Crumbling stones...button phones
Holy creams...T.V. screens
Brownish monks...fleshy hunks
Sacred dreams...LEVI jeans
On their bikes...no one likes
Speedy cars...ugly scars
Push to start...where's the Art?
Print-out sheets...frozen meats
Dancing late...study hate
Chewing gum...US fun
Modish dress...Psychic stress
Schools of old...very cold
Press to use...Light a fuse
Mom and Dad...all is bad
Soccer match...police catch
Mary Jane...must refrain
Pregnancy...you don't see
Out of school...jobless fool

9 December 1986

Poetry Italy 3

2009-01-23T21:12:00.002+01:00

LE VECCHIE (The Elderly Women)

Called it life...being wife
Look at me...sad to see
Now it's done...it's no fun
Husband's gone...can't go on
Dressed in black...there's a lack
Up the stairs...not in pairs
Hairs in braid...on the fade
Blotchy skin...fingers thin
Shriveled breast... sunken chest
Lacking zest...to digest
To the street...it's a feat
Push the mop...need to stop
Wash a dish...clean a fish
Take a nap...fill a gap
Monthly check...social wreck
Doctor's bill..helps to kill
Little heat...fatty meat
Setting sun...where's my son?
Off to bed...soon I'm dead
Jesus Christ!...Be precise!

5 December 1986

Poetry Italy 2

2009-01-19T11:53:00.002+01:00

LE DONNE (The Women)

Look at them...some like men
Hairs cut short...not for sport
Faces tough...hairy rough
Voices gruff...off the puff
Hallowed eyes...show their cries
Wedding bands...dig their hands
Kitchens clean...for some scene
Furry coats...smelly soaps
Boots that click...with the tick
Leather shoes...leaking glues
Fica wet...take a bet
Children near...there's no fear
With no thought...to abort
Off to church...at a lurch
Touch the Pope...must be hope
Pasta's up...let us sup
Sips of wine...when they dine
Black is white...is their might
Only way...is to stay
Men behind...very kind

3 December 1986

Poetry Italy 1

2009-01-19T11:36:00.002+01:00

I VECCHI (The Old)

There they are...in their bar
Speaking loud...in their crowd
Sipping wine...all the time
Eating cake...without break
Playing cards...without odds
Bragging sports...sagging thoughts
Puffs of smoke...drug these folk
Dressed to kill...some so ill
GUCCI Goo...PUCCI Poo
Taking pills...not for thrills
Watching girls...without curls
Sighing song...for so long
Touching pricks...not big sticks
Blow a fart...it's an art
Not to work...it would hurt
On the dole...without goal
Going home...all alone
Not in search...not to church
All so bored...all's a fraud
Full of shame...Full of blame

1 December 1986

This Morning I Looked at My Feet While I Was Taking a Bath...

2009-01-18T08:45:00.002+01:00

In its conceptual phase...

A Book of Aphorisms by Anthony St. John

2008-12-18T14:42:00.024+01:00

Never argue with a woman cleaning the house during her pre-menstrual tension.

Never marry someone for their money. Marry someone for the money of their father.

Psychoanalysis is an hysterical reaction to history.

Journalism is an exaggeration of an exaggeration.

Tennis is the boxing match of introverts.

The first profession was marriage. Prostitution was created to preserve the idea of love.

I observe many people who believe in many gods; but, I do not see one god who believes in one person.

Better Be Christian at the BBC or you will be beebed by The Beeb.

It is not armed force that will bring us to peace; it is the force of argument that will.

My dearest Queen Elizabeth, I wish to tell you something. You do not see it, I know! But there are enormous cracks in the foundations of democracy in the Disunited Kingdom that are causing much unnecessary suffering for many of your subjects.

The Spanish burn out their frustrations. The Italians cultivate theirs.

How do you un-exist something?

Credit must be given to Europe for being so obstinate so long.

A museum is a reminder to us of how stupid we are.

The tragicomedy of this century is watching startlingly-slow industrialised nations enter the Computer Age.

Northamericans express scientifically their slowness to apprehend. Europeans express theirs artistically.

Stupidity is a safety measure to prevent the immediate escape of intelligence.

I have loved and I do love and I will love individual human beings. Yet I loathe mankind.

Who needs nuclear bombs when we have nuclear reactors?

The only hope we have is that our sons and daughters will be less daft than their fathers and mothers.

Yes, silence can be golden. But, it might also serve as the refuge of censors, bureaucrats and twerps.

The family is an organisation which—like the police—may disturb you early Sunday morning while you are sound asleep.

The Japanese are making real the dreams of Leonardo da Vinci. And the Italians are infuriated!

Electronically-controlled church bells ringing on early Sunday morning will be the eternal vendetta of dead priests.

A toy is a more sophisticated game.

Ernest Hemingway is a bore, but David Leavitt makes him read excitingly.

The most popular holy picture in Italy is green and it has a portrait of George Washington upon it.

If you want to live serenely with a woman, you must learn to stop urinating on the toilet seat.

The mass media cannot be held responsible for the way it tells us what news it tells us, but it is responsible for leaving out what news it has elected to omit.

We are doing something wrong, and we know it!

Is it not strange that we put men who call themselves Napoleon in mental hospitals, but those who claim to be representatives of unseen gods we put in pulpits?

The Vietnam veteran is not crazy because he went to Vietnam. He is crazy because he continues to live in the United States.

Mass media specialists might quicken up the speed of meanings of words and so dilute the previously recognised significance of them, and lead the way to creating a new vocabulary. Overall, unfortunately, they distort more than they create.

Atom bombs are like gods: people who believe in them say they are everywhere; but, no one ever sees them.

The Earth is said to be about 5,000,000,000 years old. We have not found in this time a universal name for a god [spelled backwards: dog!] or even for the measurement of our shoes. The only word I know which has a sense of that pertaining to or affecting the entire world, or all within the world, is the child’s utterance for defecation: pooh-pooh.

If we want to know our true selves, we must despair of us every day.

We will never be perfect, but we must always seek perfection.

The British will laugh at Northamericans for their electronic evangelism. But do not laugh at the British for their BBC evangelism.

The idea of god and churches have made human wisdom seem foolish. When will human wisdom make god and churches seem foolish?

Maybe the only way the Earth might save itself is if it is attacked from Outer Space and Earthlings are forced to unite together against a common enemy—not themselves.

Whenever I meet a very rich person, I ask immediately: “What is the capitalistic system like?” And the immediate response: “Don’t you know?” And I reply: “No, I don’t have enough money to enjoy it.” Then: “Why don’t you work like me and earn some so you can enjoy it.”

Becoming old means learning what dose of sentimentality you can swallow.

I have never met a woman who could clean the bathroom as well as I can. They are always in a hurry to do so many things: raise children, work, cook, clean…

DON’T THINK! You might become intelligent.

Can you cut off the taste of the food in your mouth using the power of your brain?

I have been on this side (capitalism) of the fence for so long that to switch to the other (communism) would be like swapping Christian for Jewish.

What would it be like for a Christian to see through the eyes of a Jew?

Being true to yourself is like shooting painful bulls-eyes.

The biggest business in Italy is not Ferraris or shoes or sweaters. It is Christianity.

A nation is developing when the perforation machines—used to divide individual pieces of toilet paper—are maintained.

I have never had enough money to say that I might have enjoyed the capitalistic system. Have you?

I live nine kilometres from Firenze. It takes twenty minutes to get there by horse and forty-five minutes to get there by bus.

I buy three or four eaux de cologne and mix them together when I get home.

Italians suffer an oral dyslexia.

Certain speakers of Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Provençal, French, Italian, Rhaeto-Romance, and Rumanian have done two very important things for me in my life: they have kept me in a constant, medium to low-high state of justifiable irritation; and, they have taught me to acquire some degree of patience.

Italians are like snow falling to the ground that does not stick.

Italians are the caretakers of the remains of one of the biggest lies in the history of the world.

I am a thinker who dreams and a dreamer who thinks.

Everybody is my friend!

Italians are at their best when they pretend to be happy.

There was a time when you took your date out and asked what book your date was reading. Today, you ask your date if he/she has ever read a book!

Before coming to Italy, I had always wondered why there are so many saints in Italy. Now I know why. You have to be a saint to live in Italy!

In love, in war four things count: you must be awake; you must be afraid; you must have respect; and, you must be assured.

Beethoven has “pushed” me more than anyone.

Capitalism is not working, but people are swearing to their gods that it is.

My economy is simple: All those who have more money than me, are thieves. And, to the rest, I am a thief.

People say they took an aspirin for their headaches. Or they had an operation to remove their cancers. Or they had a tooth extracted to cure their toothache. But never have I heard people say they have been cured of their neuroses or psychoses. Have you?

Is it not amazing that the same nation that drops napalm on children can drop men on the moon?

I snap out at the stupidity of man not because I am anymore intelligent, but because wherever I go for enlightenment, I am laughed at.

The mass media reports the news efficiently, elegantly, and fantastically. What it does not report, disturbs me.

He/she does not want to be in love. He/she wants to be in sex.

I do not want to be published. I want to be immortalised.

There are really only two political parties in the world: that of theism (black) and that of atheism (red).

Journalists and politicians sleep together in the same bed. But the journalists do not get up on the same side on which they entered the bed—after.

Rationalism would be a fantastic philosophy if there were enough rationalists around.

The Northamericans have out-Europed Europe. Old Mother Europe is choking with a feeling of discontent and resentment. She is contemplating the desirable possessions of Northamerica with a strong desire to have them for herself.

Europe is like a one-hundred-year-old on a life support system. Everyone is torn between pulling the plug and facing the inheritance tax music.

I have lived in “democratic” Italy for many years, but I have not yet had the liberty to attend a football match.

The United States and its allies continue to hang chandeliers of exotic weapons all over the world.

Phobias are un-definable reactions to universal insanities.

Mother Europe is going through her menopause.

We invite those who say they represent a god we have never seen, and beg them to fan crosses over the food we will eat.

There is a revolutionary wing in the Roman Catholic Church. After centuries, it is now permitting women to sing Gregorian Chant!

English is synthetic and radical.

I have met many stupid people in my life. Italians are the first to tell me they are proud to be stupid as long as it is Italian stupid.

We look to the past with a sense of superiority, and in museums and churches we come upon a spatial existence that bolsters our egos even more.

Communism did not work. And capitalism does not, either. Why? What are we doing wrong?

Northamericans liberated Italy from the Germans, but they did not liberate Italy from the Italians.

Italy is the richest, poorest country in the world.

Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain are underdeveloped First World Countries.

Are the Germans more dense for building concentration camps, or for continuing to keep them in their memories.

There is an imperative in the world for all people to join in a spirit of community. But, there is not enough capital to permit them to do so.

The ultimate compliment is this: I enjoyed your work, and I learned something from it.

Science is twisting mankind’s arm to believe in itself, and religionists are fuming.

Without doubt there is no intelligence.

Writers are individuals who acquire patience by force.

One must measure carefully one’s dosage of irrationality.

Rationality is like wine. It can help you to digest; or, it can kill you.

Sure I won. But they gave the prize to another.

Italians are playing Russian roulette with a pistol that has one bullet in a chamber with one-thousand bores. They are convinced they will not be shot, and they have forgot the name of the game they are playing.

They are making radios so small you have to blow on them to change the stations.

Divorce is better than murder.

If you live in Italy for a hundred years and you are not Italian, you will never be made to feel Italian.

The easiest place to steal in this world is in a government. And you do not have to carry a gun.

Where are the politicians who can walk amongst their people without bodyguards?

It is more fun to make history than it is to write about it.

Jesus changed water into wine, and Science is changing Jesus into thin air.

We would not be here if we could not be.

Boy Scouts are shoehorned into the army.

There are women who flash their children just as an undercover detective flashes his badge.

Europeans are secure of their existences; Northamericans are insecure of theirs.

An artist does not need a professor. He/she teaches something even when wrong.

You do not hear people saying anymore that the world is going to the dogs. Just about everyone knows now this mess is not even fit for them.

For the most part, people listen to the music of a song; they do not listen so much to its words. Even French people. If they paid close attention to the words of La Marseillaise, it might become the most detested song in France.

I must be getting old. I am starting to listen to what others have to say!

Northamericans have been obtuse for more than two-hundred years. Europeans have been obtuse for more than two-thousand years.

Europe must unite to save itself. But before it does, it must take vitamins.

I do not accept awards—only money.

Walk backwards when you are leaving so I may think you are coming home.

I am an Inductionist. I analyze from Particulars to the General. I am a P(I)G!

Can it be that it is more of a crime to kill an animal which does not think than to kill one which says it can?

I agree with Harry Truman: History is bunk! After all, it should not be the goal of mankind to insist upon reviewing its stupidity. Rather, we should seek to do something about the present state of affairs—and now!

The Bible and the works of Shakespeare have something in common: theists and Englishmen buy them, but they do not read them even though there are miracles to be found in both of them!

Have you ever seen a disabled horse or snake?

Italians are always dressed to go to church—but they never go.

I am ecstatically delighted to know I am not happy.

I’m happy I’m not happy.

The world is distressed and disabled, and two medicines are being prescribed: the witchcraft of capitalism and the witchcraft of communism.

Italian politics is like Italian religion: everyone believes in it—but no one sees it.

He thinks with his penis and fornicates with his brain.

Boxing is proof not so much that the human race is obtuse as much as it is proof that the human race wants to be obtuse.

Architecture is frozen music.

The sad truth of the matter is that Europeans are condemned to become more like Northamericans; and, Northamericans are condemned to become more like Europeans.

Italians are like stamps that do not have glue on their backs. They do not stick.

The nation that gave us hot dogs with sauerkraut and Beethoven cannot be all that bad.

Unlike the Germans and the Japanese, the Italians have still not “recovered” to some extent from their humiliations born during World War II. And just when Italians need to be healthy and strong to confront those European realities that will come after the turn of the twentieth century, they are weak and confused.

A unified Western Europe is just too sophisticated for a people who have never been able to afford safety to their citizens seated in football stadiums.

With all the gods and religions around us, would it not be more honest to say that they have been invented by man?

Democracy is more real when the promises of politicians are fulfilled before election day.

Which god do you believe in? There are so many of them!

The way to a woman’s heart is through her fallopian tubes.

Life is so unjust we are forced to do one of three things: Conform, and pretend we are not stealing; steal, and pretend we are not conforming; or, write poetry and conform and steal at the same time!

An Italian businessman dreams and then looks for money. A Northamerican businessman gets the money and then dreams.

Each hand washes the other and together they shake.

Knowledge derived from study and experience can be invested with that which serves to distinguish one thing from others and gives a result or effect that is intended.

I have loved women without touching them; and, I have touched women without loving them. Better to love and touch in unison!

He said he never had enough money to buy the wife he really wanted.

Children are incomplete adults. And we all know what happens to adults.

I have six billion friends, but I would not waste one minute with 99% of them.

My nation is the world and my nationality is worldly.

The coming battles to unite Europe will do more to strengthen socialism than did the two world wars.

Little facts can be the origins of big lies especially in the hands of journalists and politicians.

Tranquility or Artillery?

There are millions of women in the world who want a baby more than they want a husband. And they will fake taking their birth control pills to get their baby.

Now I know why Victorian men went away to smoke cigars and drink brandy after dinner. They were being kind.

When the family approaches you to ask when you are going “to have a baby,” ask them when they are going to pay for it!

He’s as Northamerican as cocaine!

Chevrolet…Apple pie…Coca-Cola…Mom…Valium…Librium…Marijuana…Cocaina…JUST SAY “No”!!!

He’s not obtuse. He’s frequently ignorant!

Do as I say. Don’t do as I do.

Larry is a lawyer and a liar. Larry is a liar and a lawyer. Larry is a lying lawyer!

No, history does not repeat itself! But human beings can be depended upon to be constantly obtuse.

Behind every great woman there is a baffled man.

Dumas said: “Next to God no one has created more than Shakespeare.” What about Beethoven?

The music of Beethoven has touched me more than the words of any literary genius.

Nations are diseases we must find vaccines for.

I am jumping for joy that Europe has selected Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for its anthem and not some idiotic Gregorian Chant.

The image of a very large wedge.

And to think the United States is self-conscious about Europe!

Managing change means changing management.

The European Union, instead of leading to a utopia of neo-capitalism, will be the stimulus for a revival of neo-Marxism.

I am a rationalistic empiricist who acts on probabilities.

My writings need to be published so that they may find their just reality.

Why should we not save animals? We cannot save ourselves.

One of my passions is to let people know how obtuse they are without telling them.

Breast feeding is vital for the mother, for the child, and for humanity. But, above all, it is vivifying for the breast! It stimulates the prosperous growth of the nipples!

The Earth is billions of years old. What is “god” waiting for?

Simpatico is a word which means that if I stab you in the back you had better not cry, or else I will tell everyone you are not nice.

Our Father who art in heaven—STAY THERE!

There is not life after death. That is why we have inheritance taxes.

All the world is happy Europe is acting out its frustrations on the football field and not on the battlefield.

The problem with some countries in Europe is not that they should be worried about entering the twenty-first century; but, that they should be worried about entering the 1960s.

Maturity is the ability to resist.

They wear their children just as they wear their furs and gold watches.

She is the mother of John, Jr. but the husband of John, Sr..

For the world to have peace, we must confirm one and other. But before we confirm others, we must confirm ourselves. We must connect words and ideas with actions.

Being smart is knowing how ignorant you are. If you want to appear intelligent, tell everyone you think of yourself as being stupid!

Children are acting like adults. Adults are acting like children.

Italians are geniuses of design and fashion, but they are mentally retarded when it comes to selling and marketing.

I’m a capcom! A capitalistic communist.

“It does not make sense—and it should not.”

Although I am not an idiot, it looks as if I am qualified to do idiotic work only.

There is a north-south debate in Western Europe.

Are you politically inclined to the black or to the red? Hurry up and decide!

My blood is red and my heart beats on the left.

I’m not proud to be a human being, so how can I be proud to be a Northamerican or a Venezuelan or an Italian?

Love goes out the door when money comes in through the window.

He spies for the Central Stupidity Agency.

He is drunk, rich, over eighty-five, and lives in Switzerland—the perfect place for him.

Half the mothers of this world should be arrested for child abuse and not sent chocolates and flowers on Mother’s Day.

Northern Europe and Southern Europe are honing their swords.

There are two things to learn from university life: what excellence is and intelligence is not.

My errors serve me. I do not erase them; I cross them out. I want to see them always.

Medicine is the art of poisoning.

Do not be confused. He is not so much intelligent as he is.

New York is too fast for my body and too slow for my mind.

The United States was discovered by Italian journalists five-hundred years after Columbus arrived there.

I am a born leader but no one wants to follow me.

Italy is one big over-worked liver.

I am my best philosopher.

I have relieved myself of the idea of a god; but, I cannot extricate myself from the idea of man.

Does not a shopping mall or a stadium offer more spatial experience than a church or a synagogue?

The purpose of an artist is to tell people just how obtuse they are without offending them.

I came to Europe to meet and know intelligent people. Instead, I found out why Northamericans are so ignorant.

They are buying books the way they buy sweaters and socks. The colors of the dust covers must blend with the living room furniture and must absorb the colored rays of the television set.

I have so little money. The capitalistic system is treating me very badly.

They cannot even manage their own families! How can they manage their businesses? Their governments?

God is not dead enough.

Northamericans and Southamericans believe well in what Europe tells them.

Psychoanalysis is not much better than voodooism.

When will Northamericans wake up to find that they have sown more the seeds of hate and misunderstanding than they have planted seeds of love and understanding?

It is not that I am more intelligent than you are. No! I know how stupid I am and I know how to keep quiet about it.

If you want to take the war temperatures of the European war bodies, go to their football stadiums.

Do you think that an all-powerful, perfect, super-intelligent, pre-eminently righteous god could create two imbeciles such as you—and me?

Violence is not the reason to step out of society to analyse one’s own life situation and then transform it so as to achieve liberation from oppression within.

Is not good fortune traditionally a most unpardonable flaw among those who have not thrived?

Money is the best birth control in the industrialised world.

Something is holding up Europe and it is not the Europeans!

People are not as obtuse as they appear to be. They are waiting for something to catalyse them into action.

A genius is someone who really understands how stupid he/she is and does not pretend to be self-conscious about it.

Of course art should teach and delight. But before it does so it must sell.

Old literary agents never die, they just stop reading manuscripts.

You do not have to be an economist or political scientist to know that the best birth control device is a high cost of living.

Need we remind you again that it was the Northamericans who first dropped the atom bomb on innocent people?

When you believe in something fervently, you will eventually become imprisoned by it.

The more people tell you how happy they are, the more they are sad.

Societies that are disciplined to get what they want become dangerous when they do not get what they want.

Of course it is not his fault that he is a duke or a prince or a king; but, it is his fault to continue calling himself one.

There are people in this world who are proud to be stupid. Can you guess who they are?

In Italy the law is equal for everyone except those who squirm under the courtroom’s crucifix.

An artist is one who sells big with no effort.

An intricately-designed space station is enormously more beautiful than any painting hung over the fireplace. And what is even more attractive is that it has a purpose.

Only an idiot would pay millions for a painting he will hang in his living room.

The most widely-used contraceptive device in the world is not the prophylactic or pill. It is inflation.

People do not have babies not because they do not want them; but, because they cannot afford them.

My mind is sharp, crisp. But I drift in a sea of chaos.

I do not feel lonely. I feel alienated.

The streets of Europe are made for horses—not VOLVOS.

The crisis of our time is the inability of governments to reconcile the inalienable rights of all individuals to personal development with the necessity to diminish the misery of the masses.

Television commercials constitute a looter’s shopping list.

Has anyone correlated the growth of finger nails with life expectancy?

Will someone please tell me why the Queen of England, Elizabeth—perhaps the richest woman in the world—has always an I’ve-just-eaten-a-lemon look on her face?

Getting old means saying out loud what you thought—when young—should be kept quiet.

MEMO TO JOB HUNTERS: Until they start paying you, you have every right to be treated as a human being.

Science fiction is the hope of finding an enemy that is not human. I do not like it at all.

If hunters can hunt animals, why cannot I hunt my mother-in-law?

Art delights and enlightens.

I am a word ecologist: Let us change “elevator” to “lift”; let us change “trousers” to
“pants”; let us change “labour” to “labor”; and, let us change “Mr.” to “Mr”…et cetera.

Please, do not clone my mother-in-law!

In New York you ask first what kind of restaurant you want to eat in.

Few men, when they love and/or sex, will slip a rubber sheath over their penises to reduce the geometrically increasing birth rate in the world. But most will do so to buy a sports car.

Europe in under the political and economical thumb of the United States of America and does not know what to do about it.

Europe is fascism with a capital “F.”

You can lump diplomats, journalists and lawyers in one group and economists, weather forecasters and astrologists in another.

What if it is not what we think it to be?

What if it is the opposite of what we think it is to be?

Did you kiss your child today. No. I did better than that. I never had one.

I loved two Jewish girls in my life. The first told me she could not love me because I was a goy. The second told me she could not love me because I did not have enough money.

31 December 1999!!! Finally, this century of shit is over!

Life is a video cassette that can be rewound fast or very fast.

One regime, headed by a retired general, gave us Elvis Presley. Another regime, headed by the Queen of England, gave us The Beatles.

I am fan of the team which pays my entrance ticket.

Padre Pio is not a saint. He is a multinat business.

Queen Elizabeth, where do you have your hair done? At the Royal Mint?

Queen Elizabeth, who handles your public relations? The Gestapo?

When they are not dropping bombs on anyone, deep down inside the Northamerican people are fine people.

The Italians are the best-dressed bankrupts in the world.

The question is not whether or not women should be allowed to be soldiers. The question is whether or not men should be allowed to be soldiers.

Pettiness is the foundation stone upon which is constructed fortresses of arrogance.

Of course you should marry. Who is going to cut your toe nails when you are old and gray?

Who cuts Queen Elizabeth’s toe nails? Prince Philip?

Modern Italian history reads like exercises in How Not to Do It.

Paul McCartney is the Frank Sinatra of the United Kingdom. He is so nice, nobody likes him.

All is economics and not politics. Politicians enter government because there is the easiest place to steal. You do not even have to carry a gun.

He is a philanthropist. He robs from the poor to give to the poor.

A purely negative effort is doomed to failure.

Anatomy is not destiny. But how we feel about our anatomy can make our destiny.

A good song has to do two things for me: bring chills up and down my spine and bring tears to my eyes.

Spies have a license to kill and lawyers have a license to lie.

Royalty is proof that humanity uses only ten percent of its brain cells.

Jesus Christ was “packaged” much better than Karl Marx.

A lawyer is someone who has discovered that logic does not exist.

Science and technology are out-miracling Jesus Christ.

Thoughts are the fingerprints of our minds.

The relationship between man and woman is based on the desperate hope that one might be better than the other.

A woman knows how to pullulate patience.

Marriage is the only battle in which you sleep with the enemy.

Dizzy as a fly in a pastry shop.

If money does not make you happy you can always give it away.

A unified monetary system is not the only thing Europe lacks. It needs shock therapy, too.

The Roman Catholic Church says that its priests cannot touch other men or women. So then, they are left to touch themselves.

Hitler and Stalin were what their people wanted them to be.

Our future is already our past.

The football stadium is the anus into which the Central Stupidity Agency sticks its thermometer to take the temperature of the violence of Italian society.

Is living with a woman without marrying her worse than living with her married? Of course, if you are not married to her, you cannot divorce her. Then you have to kill her!

Will someone please invent a system where numbers do not have to be stapled to the wool of my sweaters when I take them to be cleaned?

No one likes Northamericans, but everyone likes $$$.

God or money? Money.

I want to dedicate this book to Judith, Majorie, Lucia, Rosa, Maria del Pilar, and Maria Luisa. Without your help I would have had a more enjoyable and more prosperous life.

When you are in love with two women, give each of them a pistol and ask them to have a duel.

It is so much more fun making history than it is writing or reading about it.

Gianni Agnelli did more than anyone else to bring Italy into the European fold. He invented the FIAT. It is such a bad car, Italians were forced to buy foreign cars and communicate with countries beyond their borders.

Democracy means that a nation’s hospitals, schools, post offices, transportation systems and theatres and orchestras are more elegant than its jewelry shops, clothes boutiques, banks and ice cream parlours.

Italy is committing suicide and the pistol of choice is xenophobia.

You are not supposed to enjoy life. You are supposed to survive and try to better things for all individuals.

Besides having five or six extra cheap umbrellas in their homes and tend to lend you one when it has begun suddenly to rain, rich people often smell nice, too.

The best publicity is bad publicity. Q.E.D.: Journalists are imbeciles.

I am a spy. A secret agent. I am 001. I have a license to love.

Should we ground female pilots when they are in the throes of their pre-menstrual tension?

Economy is horoscoping with numbers.

Italians are trying awfully hard to be something they are not.

She is as faithful as a woman on her honeymoon.

Women are the juxtaposition between rationalisation and murder.

The Italians do not have so much a problem with English as they have with Italian.

Italian is a dead language. Deader than Latin.

The rich get richer and the Enrons get bigger. Three cheers for creative destruction.

After two thousand years the Italians are finally learning that a virgin could not give birth to a baby. And that a thirty-three-year old man could not change water into wine, but a middle-aged man from Seattle just might be able to do it.

The medium is not the message. The message is that the medium is not divulging all the message.

The mother of Leonardo da Vinci put bread crusts dunked in wine into the mouth of her child to help with his teething. Today Florentine mothers pop pills into the mouths of their babies.

Italians do not have money to spend on new schools, new transport systems, new hospitals, new irrigation systems…. But they do have money to buy perfumed toilet paper.

Marylin Monroe does not exist. Our collective idea of her does. This idea is so perverse, we do not have the courage to admit what it is. Negating this idea, we continue to enlarge the myth about her. The snowball going down the mountain gets bigger and bigger. Marylin Monroe, and others like her, is the realization of the myth to not know the Truth. We expand this myth with the hope of concealing what The Truth is. Do we really do want to know The Truth?

I do what I do because I could not be a great rock n’ roll singer.

Is it not wonderful that we can commemorate the death of Elvis Presley every 15 August without thinking about the Assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven!

Newspapers are filled every 15 August with stories about Elvis Presley and not the Virgin’s Assumption.

We are progressing!

Let’s compose an Ode to Tuna Fish!

I have opened the brains of the Italians which I found in their tongues.

Italians have micro minds—not macro minds.

Italians have taught me the meaning of democracy by taking it away from me.

The Italians will learn enough English to do business with Northamericans, but not enough English to do politics with the Northamericans.

Italy is the only country in the world where a father can take his son to Mass and Holy communion in the morning, take him to a whore house in the afternoon, and then make him read Marx and Engels in the evening.

The United States of America is a great nation—if it is not bombing you!

Less journalists. More Truth.

Let us thrive on our hypotheses.

More sport. Less religion.

Sometimes I wonder if the United States will have enough money to buy enough printing presses to stamp enough money for its needs.

I oblige think tanks to leak.

When someone calls me on the telephone to ask me to participate in a survey, I tell them I only answer surveys in person. And if someone stops me on the street and asks me to participate in a survey, I tell him or her that I only answer surveys on the telephone.

If you were an animal being transported to the slaughter house by train, truck or plane, would you be grateful to those human beings who were fighting to have legislation passed on your behalf limiting the number of hours you could travel?

Need is the seed of contrivance.

I have consigned my love to the non-intimidating perimeters of my poetry.

Think always the worst. If it arrives you are ready. If it doesn’t you have a reason to party.

Italian women swear by the tenderness of Mozart’s music.

I despise the DisUnited States because it did not give me a chance to be a hero during the Vietnam “War.”

Italian politicians are not politicians. They are a species of economists who do not know how to count.

Politicians seek a consensus. Italian politicians seek a pay raise.

I survived in Venezuela because I was a war veteran and a native of New York. I have survived in Italy because I was a volunteer in two mental hospitals.

Relatives are those individuals who remind you what diseases you will inherit.

Northamericans are the best thieves that there are and they steal for the United States. Italians are pretty good thieves and they steal for Swiss banks.

One of the benefits of the decline of Roman Catholicism is that cleaning personnel can store their cleaning materials in unused confessional boxes.

Will somebody please rip out the typewriter ribbon of Oriana Fallaci’s 1953 manual typewriter?

Passionless women mix water with their wine.

The journalist is a frustrated writer and the lawyer is a frustrated philosopher.

When I served in the United States Army Field Artillery they called me “a loose cannon.” When I served in United States Army Missile Training Battalion they called me “a wayward missile.”

In the Islam world, all women want to put a dog leash around the necks of their husbands. But in the Christian world, all men want to put a dog leash around the necks of their wives.

Why not a marriage license renewable every five years or so?

Relax! The world as we know it has already ended.

The world economic system that is now in place gives money to people to do something they don’t want to do so that they may have money to do something they want to do.

The situation is worse than Thatcher, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, Blair, Chirac and Berlusconi ever could imagine. Why do you think we are stuck with these goofballs?

The Italian national motto is this: How can we suffer more?

He doesn’t accept praise or prizes. Just cash.

Don’t be foolish! Be a pessimist.

I don’t live in the United States because it is not good enough for me.

What is the difference between hard and strong? A hard person is always strong. A strong person knows when to be hard and then soft.

The United States of America was the first nation to use coloured toilet paper.

The Americans have been obtuse for two-hundred years; the Europeans have been obtuse for two-thousand years.

Don’t step on the tail of one billion Islamics! I implore you. (Maurizio Costanzo Show, 19 February 1991.)

You don’t study English anymore. You play with it.

It is not that the Florentines are living in the Past. If that was only so. No! It is worse. They are prisoners of a Past that does not pertain to them any longer. What poor things they are.

One cold Friday in December 2001, I stopped a Parmalat salesman who had been examining the shelves of a Panorama supermarket near my home. I pointed my finger directly in his face and said: “There is a Fiat Panda in your future.” He laughed. We met another couple of times later on, and each time he said: “Professor, there’s a Fiat Panda in my future! There’s a Fiat Panda in my future!! There’s a Fiat Panda in my future!!!” He was kidding with me. On 2 January 2004 I will go to the office of the director of my bank (Banca Toscana) in Calenzano, and I will say to him: “There’s a Fiat Panda in your future!” And I won’t be ribbing him.

Why are the Florentines dying of boredom? Or, are they dying of boredom?

Certainly! They have to crucify Wanna Marchi! She is so much like Silvio Berlusconi. The two of them are extraordinary salespeople. Both are capable of selling the Colosseo. One of them tricked the Italians with a little box filled with seaweed. (Venial Sin). The other hoodwinked the Italians with a trunk of demagoguery. (Mortal Sin). Let us defend the Marchi family from a Bad that no individual—including Silvio Berlusconi—merits: a political lynching. Yet, let us not absolve Wanna and Stefania their foolhardiness.

Cin cin, Florentines!!! You have made a gas chamber out of the cradle of humanism.

Gianfranco Fini is incredible! He declared that Benito Mussolini was the greatest statesman of the twentieth century. Today, 21 December 2004, he has rendered homage at the tomb of Yassir Arafat. Who’s pulling the strings of this marionette? Henry Kissinger?

With so many bookshops in Firenze, an extraterrestrial might be able to deduce—at first sight—that the Florentines are intelligent.

Bye-bye Camp Darby! See you in Albania.

Umberto Bossi: The Green Pitbull.

Saints and Saintesses of Italy! Unite!

I am a man decidedly against the relaxation of the breast, and each day—with passion, intelligence and courage—I fight to maintain all breasts as high as they might be, for all women, in this Universe.

Here work turbocapitalists.

Don’t cry anymore, italiano! Your Parmalat money is in the Vaticano!

Is your English or American accent holding you back in your career? Now you can learn English with a pure international enunciation and enjoy the rounds of applause of the international community.

The Americans liberated Italy from the Germans, but they didn’t liberate Italy from the Italians. N’est pas?

Esso. Sesso. Spesso. Exxon. Sexxon.

My dear Italian manager, the epoch of the smooth look is over. Let’s get to work! Now!

Italy is Argentining.

Is Italy Venezueling?

The Florentines don’t know how to manage a bus line. Quod erat demonstrandum, how can we expect them to be capable of administrating a network of museums?

Let us listen to a Florentine football/soccer player before the microphone, immediately after the usual defeat: “We played perfectly…B-U-T…”

One of the most frequently used expletives used in Firenze is the following: Nulla! (Nothing!)

The Italians continue to believe in God and God continues not to believe in them! An eternal impasse.

After centuries and centuries of “culture,” the Florentines still have not learned to regenerate their own race!

The Italians continue to understand Northamericans through the 1950s’ films honchoed on them by the United States’ Department of State.

The Northamericans are progressivists bending towards the Future. The Italians are entrepreneurs leaning backwards in the direction of the Past. And it is just right here we can get to the focal point of the sado-masochistic relationship between the Northamericans and the Italians. Opposites attract. No?

The Florentines are so stingy that they buy RESET chewing gum (powermint grains) and, before going to bed, attach it to their bedposts so that they can use it over again the next day.

The number one selling car colour in Italy is grey—the same colour of Italy’s medieval buildings and the skies over any polluted Italian city.

Italian food, without a doubt, is one of the finest in the world. It is also true that Verecolene is the number one selling over-the-counter drug in Italy? Buon appetito?

Luca di Montezemolo for President of the Presidents! King of the Presidents?

Italy is forever placed at the top of the worst lists and at the bottom of those best. Why? Why do Italians insist on being the best when no one else thinks of them as such?

Why do subscribers who possess a TIM 335 telephone prefix seem to be always more intelligent and nice?

Italians listen to English songs they don’t understand; and, they sing Italian songs that no one else understands.

Now even Fausto Bertinotti knows that fascists are imbeciles.

Hit the Vatican where it hurts! In its “rich” boxes!

In Italy, you must be rich, or faking it, in order to have a baby.

I am the inconvenient tenant in the grand condominium.

Italy is in a post-tsunami state of mind.

Paul Ginsborg is silly! He’s writing a history of Italy instead of a tragedy.

The Italian national motto: “How can we suffer?”

Children of middle class Chinese families collect books. Italian children collect teddy bears.

Cardinal Michele Giordano, Archbishop of Napoli, is my choice for Pope. (1 January 2004.)

Italians are great for keeping people in poverty: their own!

Even the Italians are beginning to speak badly about the Italians!

It’s not impossible to teach Italians foreign languages. It’s useless.

Note well, Italians! More than one Roman preferred death to exile.

I have a great idea! Let’s have a We’re in Via di Estinzione Party. Now!

My dear fidels and infidels: Please light a candle for the Italian economy.

There are more saints and saintesses in Italy than there are VERECOLONE tablets.

Will someone please tell me once and for all: Are the Italians poor or stingy?

Firenze is a rest home for ostriches.

I don’t know where Italian women go for their male hormones, but I am certain they have overdosed on them.

I, Anthony St. John, officially declare: Italy is a tragedy. Not a comedy.

In Italy, Art serves to channel to some “nowhere” whatever irksomeness is on the horizon.

Italians cannot organize a bus route, but they want you to know that they can sort out a world order.

The biggest problem Italian football is confronted with is this: When Italian teams travel abroad, they have to face real anti-doping tests.

Italians have a sense of themselves. Not an awareness of how they fit in with others.

It is not that Florentines are arrogant. No. It is that they spark you to be more haughty than they—if you can!

Italy is slow-motioning to tragedy.

Italian economists would do Italy and the world a great favour if they put down their Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson textbooks, picked up a Bible, turned to the Ten Commandments, and then referred to Number Seven.

I want to be rich so that I can tip the waiter or waitress the same amount as the bill.

What’s so holy about the Holy Land?

Let’s have a The Most Stupid Journalist of the Year contest. Why not?

What I find amusing about Christmas and New Year is that people actually sustain the notion that they can be nice for a week after a year of backstabbing!

Did it ever occur to you that the human race just might need a swift kick in the ass?

Did you ever visualize the human race being generous and compassionate?

I admit it. I need psychoanalytical advice. The problem is I just cannot find a psychoanalyst who wants to pay me for my sessions.

I could never be a politician. And not because I am modest. It’s just that I would be constantly embarrassed to meet my constituents who were earning less than me.

The bigger the problem the easier the solution.

You do not have to be ashamed of not knowing something particular. But you better be humiliated for not knowing anything.

Modern political philosophy must start out on this premise of Joseph Stalin—a brutal man in a brutal time: The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million men is history.

Do something generous for yourself before you might think you could be munificent to others.

You will never understand your country without seeing it through the eyes of others who live in other nations.

I know I would make a great President of the DisUnited States of America because I would bop down the flight of stairs, hooked up to my Air Force One, without looking at my feet or holding on to the handrail.

The Italian Bluff is being called.

Excessive stupidity caused World War I and World War II. You do not have to possess a PhD from Harvard or Oxford to fathom that. And it will be the cause of World War III.

Western civilization is not consuming to possess, it is possessed to consume.

Take a headshot of your newly-born every month for the rest of his or her life. Then splice them together.

I have two dentists. A man and a woman. One for my upper teeth, one for my lower teeth.

I'm embarrassed! I was born in the DisUnited States and I'm not a thief!

The Italians are desperate to convince the world to forget that they helped the Germans kill tens of millions of people during the Second World War। Don't let them! Who knows? They might want to do it again!

The Italians build houses of sand in earhtquake zones, and as soon as they collapse at the first tremor, the Italians beg the whole world for aid.

Stop the World! I want to get off--at the next red traffic light.

Colin Powell is Uncle Tom's atom bomb.

Watch BBC, CNN, EURONEWS, FOX & SKY--News for people with an IQ under 70!

I don't go to funerals--so, please don't invite me to yours.

Italy is a nation more used to managing emergencies than a plan that looks to the future. Why? Simply because you get a lot more donations when there is an emergency.

Italians are prudent to the point of being pusillanimous; Northamericans are careless to the point of being reckless.

Italian journalists pretend to know something about everything but know nothing about one thing.

The Roman Catholic church sent missionaries (priests) to the Americas to teach the indigenous populations how to use toilet paper and to confess the Spanish soldiers who slaughtered 14,000,000 of the Indians. I am trying to teach a nation with a 2,000 year history, Italy, how to regenerate its race. And without success. The Italians prefer to commit suicide. Why? SImple. They have a horrible, insufferable guilt complex.

Have a nice nightmare!

Did you hug your banker today?

Never trust a man who ties his tie too tightly.

Mozart is dark chocolate for frustrated housewives.

Religious-like European football (soccer) is often violent, racist and more than not perfectly stupid. Yet let's face it: Anything's better than World War III!

Updated 13 February MMX

The Affluent Are Preposterously Stupid--I Have the Evidence!

2008-12-08T11:26:00.005+01:00

The revolution has been fired up! When I showed to Northamerican friends my article, Incontrovertible Proof That Citizens of the DisUnited States of Northamerica Are So Sorrowfully, So Sanctimoniously Stupid (www.anthonystjohn.blogspot.com), I was somewhat disillusioned: they all agreed with me! Northamericans, and their other gang members, have all along known, “subconsciously,” for decades, that they have been doing something wrong, bloody iniquitous, and that one day their stokes of luck would fag out. Their fingers are no longer crossed. Are we approaching some sort of day of reckoning? I doubt it, but there is certainly going to be a considerable measure of “restructuring” to tend with as we are obliged to conform to an entirely new set of criterion. At least à la manière socialiste! The sooner we begin to stop encoding our misfortunes in purely financially viable terminology with spectacular pleas to some Lord Above, the better it will be for all of us. The once powerful DUS, forever the “abroad protectionist,” runs the risk of becoming the “at home isolationist.” Does this mean war?

This “divine revelation” might be attributed to many causes not the least of which is the intense, rather hostile, competitive pressures that are being set against the DUS from the outside world and which are confounding the DUS’s religious belief in itself that it is the globe’s economic and political King of the Mountain. The DUS’s penchant for arrogance has not improved its chances. Northamericans are in for a vulgar testing of their mettle. They, international interlopers and so much akin to such-and-suches such as the DisUnited Kingdom and France, have hardly any global friends. The world’s industrial nations have been living off the sweat and blood of the weak, the disadvantaged—and for far too long to now expect that handouts will win fifs (funny inside feelings) on their behalf. This is not an exclusively ethical issue. It is straightforwardly a matter of being intelligent or imprudent. The DUS and its chums have consistently chosen to be ludicrously obtuse. It is deplorable that during the 2008 DUS presidential campaign, all candidates made diminutive mention of the DUS’s position in the world, and they scarcely made note of other nations, besides their own, presenting the perception that the DUS is unique and omnipotent when most know it is not.

It is important, at this crucial juncture in humankind’s story, to try to identify clearly and distinctly the reasons why we have arrived at this stage of disgusting foolhardiness, and then with some cloudless way of thinking seek to rectify the mess we have created. My fingers are crossed. There are innumerable motives to which we may allude, but in this article I prefer to attack one that is on everyone’s mind, everyday: the wealthy, the elite, the corporatists.
Because the affluent are in the minority, they kindle in us a curiosity and, often, a deviant craving to imitate them for what we think we should have what they possess. The well-heeled have an unjust and extravagant hold on financial power, and they solidify their bases vis-à-vis potent media and communications outlets. Poor people, who Oscar Wilde said were more attached to money than the prosperous because that is all—if very little—they have to hold on to, will even go into debt on occasion to mime the well-off! Therefore, in this essay using deductive reasoning, going from the general to the particular, the line of reasoning will proceed from the very moneyed and then work down, and further, demonstrate that those rolling in it have even distorted those underprivileged below them. I have in mind to make the comfortable look incredibly dim-witted—even wicked, even unwell. It will be easy for you to figure out what I think. And I will bet there are billions in this world now cheering me on!

There are four considerations one should be aware of in the exploration of the topic at hand:

· The rich might be divided into two sweeping categories: those who have inherited their lucre; and, those who have generated (stolen!) it on their own. (These two categories will not be delved into to any great extent in this essay.)
· In this treatise we will deal with “the very rich” and not “the rich.” The Big Rich. Not The Little Rich. I have known personally, even intimately, some fabulously rich individuals—some of them recognized all over the world for their material goods. In Venezuela, I was in the thick of the economic and political corruption, but in Italy I am away from Rome and out of the center of Italy’s self-defeating political “naughtinesses.” Only once did I befriend, in Florence, an Italian political person later to be transferred to Rome to serve as a director of the Italian secret service! Nevertheless, in Tuscany, the headquarters of the world’s first bank, I have encountered many silly Little Rich characters ever on the hunt to be better off and still better off.
· I am not Big Rich or Little Rich. I pride myself in that and consider it an attestation to my intelligence that I am not. I have about €7000 in an Italian bank (I hope!), and I do not possess health insurance or a pension. Nonetheless, I am terribly curious to know that if I were Big Rich, even Little Rich, would I be as stupid as the moneyed “stupids” I have been on familiar terms with…. (Maybe I should sell THE RICH ARE STUPID! T-shirts and become a multi-millionaire!)
· I am a legal citizen of the DisUnited States of America even though I renounced my citizenship and prefer not to return ever again to my birthplace. Wherever I have resided outside the DUS (principally in Venezuela and Italy), I have been considered an ”American.” And that means I have been frequently taken, automatically, for being abounding. A burden I have had to support for decades. The fact that I was a first lieutenant in the DUS Army and am a Vietnam “War” veteran, it is assumed by most people that I possess some kind of stipend for life designated for my DUS military service. I do not.

I would like now, to get started, to refer to John Ruskin and his lecture, The Work of Iron, in Nature, Art, and Policy, delivered at Tunbridge Wells, England, 16 February 1858. JR is known for his defence of individual artistic freedom, and his disgust for the mass-production of art as it was cloned vulgarly all through the Victorian era. He was a stern, extremely moralistic individual, and a brief sampling of his thoughts will now give you an inkling into his meditative processes:

“You must either make a tool of the creature,
or a man of him. You cannot make both…

A happy nation may be defined as one in which
the husband’s hand is on the plough, and the
housewife’s on the needle…

We look with so much indifference upon dishonesty
and cruelty in the pursuit of wealth…

The definite result of all our modern haste to be
rich is assuredly, and constantly, the murder of
a certain number of persons by our hands every year.”

JR lived in another period marked by a distinctive character or reckoned from a fixed point or event. His “first principles” are not those which we adhere to in our own epoch. They belong to a particular set of circumstances just as, for example, Iosif Stalin’s coined first principle about his time declared that “one man’s death is a tragedy, but the death of a million people is history”—a maxim which fit the ethical destitution of his era. Another case in point is Jean-Paul Sartre’s thought-up first principle: “Hell is other people.” J-PS also suffered that horrible stage in the world’s expansion.

There is no way JR could have envisaged, for 2009, that the planet’s population would be coming within reach of 7,000,000,000 people. Just too many ploughs and needles. Today it is astonishing for us to connect JR’s parochial vision of his life with our own. And if we recognize his convictions for what they really are, we are further staggered by the fact that in 1860 there were no more than an estimated 1,300,000,000 individuals living on his orb. JR’s generation was not as complex as ours. Ruskin would be stymied if he could witness how we have survived—for almost 150 years after—with so many people inhabiting the Earth and in such close electronic and physical acquaintance.

Apart from JR’s fanatical religious pretentiousness, we find in him certain confidences which abide even today in our own inner selves. JR is a meat and potatoes fellow. He does not mix his Scotch with water, seltzer, milk or even iced cubes. He shaves with cold water. He takes the bus. If he smokes, he snaps off the filters of his cigarettes. Puts half a teaspoon of sugar in his tea or coffee. Walks a lot. Never puts whipped cream on his strawberries. Turns off the water when he cleans his teeth. Returns his metal coat-hangers to the dry cleaners. Breaks down his packing materials before he places them in rubbish bins. In short, JR is a minimalist. He is seeking to preserve what he possesses. He is not possessed to consume. He does not wish to waste. His feet are on the ground. Ours are not. For these qualities we may admire JR’s enthusiasms.

The first broadside I long to pile into The Big Rich, more than anyone else, is their propensity to accumulate useless items, lots of them, and waste the natural resources we might think, in a civilized society, pertain to all of mankind and not just a finicky cream of the crop. Whether it be land, water, petroleum, electricity, food, precious jewels, et alia, the well-to-do ones are quick to hoard their supplies of these reserves forever in excess of what more often than not a normal individual would require and/or acquire, and they do so outrageously without worry for the requirements of others whether they be deprived or not. They dig extra wells on their land fearful of drought. They illegally hide away currency in foreign banks “just in case.” They give their wives and lovers expensive diamonds and gold “just in case.” They buy three or four cars “just in case.” Everything in glut. Just in case. Sustine et abstine are negative concepts for these pathetic characters. I do not know of any other group that lacks so much conviction in the method that has offered them so much turnover! They advance no loyalty to the money-spinning arrangement that tenders them their cornucopia of material benefits! Confidence is more precious than gold say the Chinese. And even donkeys know they cannot chew on bullion. But not The Big Rich and their confreres, The Little Rich, who often go very far out of their ways to ape The Big Rich. Monkeys see, monkeys do! The Big Rich, The Little Rich and those who emulate them are “running against the walls of their cages,” as Ludwig Wittgenstein would say!

I would think, my dear reader, that “…the murder of a certain number of persons by our hands every year” is still ringing in your head! And it is accurate to agree with that reflection. I could write a book on the injustices that I have caught sight of and which have caused the death—both physical and emotional—of untold unfortunate individuals slaving for the dog-eat-dog economic hierarchy set so overenthusiastically in place in the DUS, Vietnam, Venezuela and Italy—locations I have frequented. I ask myself: What is the purpose of this master-slave routine, this “delicately-distributed suffering” ( JR ) that nowadays is sugar-coated with perks, bonuses, and tie-less Fridays…all cheap gimmicks to keep workers hanging on until the next slowdown, the next massacre of layoffs? Were all of these “scallywags,” these made-redundant-ones under some supernatural illusion when they threw their lives at their corporation’s buoyant promise of an eternity of sustaining profit?

It would not take Charles Dickens very long today to cut through the bogus mesmerising that innocent victims have had to endure especially during, at least, the last fifty years. Only a simpleton—Winston Churchill was not an imbecile, he just might have been drunk or his brain fogged up with Cuban cigar smoke—would have the pluck to unabashedly pronounce that the lesser of two evils we are welded with, Judeo-Christian Democratic Capitalism, is the best at our disposal!

Look at The Big Rich and The Little Rich quoting outrageous minds such as Milton Friedman and the “old” Jeffrey Sachs! They parrot these money-making lords of a funny money plumbing industry, and under their armpits, they carry the notebooks and case histories of University of Chicago and Harvard Business School’s sacred, doctrinaire tenets which have caused more havoc the past century than any other time in the history of this “better than nothing” fraud, this Tyranny of a Minority which benefits the few at the expense of the majority. Are people ever going to wake up and trade in their illusions for some hard facts? Are people ever going to become gutsy? Are people ever going to stand up for their privileges? Why are we feigning to be content with a technique that causes so many so much injustice? Indeed, we are a strange lot!

Oh, I must be crazy! Out of my mind. Rich? How could I have used that word? There are no rich in this world! I swear to it now that I have lost my insanity. I have never known one person who ever called himself or herself rich. They will tell you that what they are worth is only paper! Yes, cash, stocks, bonds, savings accounts and treasury notes! All sheets of nothing! I knew one multi-millionaire who told me he had to borrow $100 from his wife one morning to buy his lunch! Get it? They are just like you and me! They have no money. Just paper. And who is going to buy the titles (paper!) to the lands they own if an economic downturn forces them to become like the rest of us—unfortunate?

I should have qualified more before my definition of The Big Rich. Please excuse me? The Big Rich have armed bodyguards and bullet-proofed and armoured limousines to chauffeur them around. Can you think of anything more repugnant than that? They do not even have the courage to walk alone on a crowded street. Their yachts are manoeuvred and serviced by people they wish they can trust and who are usually lousy cooks. Their airplanes are piloted by who knows who, and when they embark to fly off to some business meeting or rendezvous, they hope the navigator is not drunk or high on cocaine. Their bodyguards usually have not even finished high school, and being thick as mud, they wonder if they will be quick enough to be at the ready to protect their precious assignments. And maids and butlers? You should hear them talk about those humble souls! Behind their backs, they gossip about them as if they were some inferior race. And, woe to him or her who forgot to shine His or Her Majesty’s shoes properly, or missed dusting the bedroom lamp table, or, worse, was late delivering their breakfasts in bed! Life imprisonment!

There is one thing good I can say about the affluent. They change their clothes abnormally, and because the have money to buy expensive perfumes and colognes, they usually smell nice!

Authored by Anthony St. John
Casella Postale 38 50041 CALENZANO FI Italia
5 January 2009

* * *

Poetry Vietnam 10

2008-12-04T17:42:00.002+01:00

Extract from A Book of Vietnam "War" Poetry

A Long String of Green Bras
Being Dried by Breezes off the
South China Sea

There’s a long string of green bras being dried by breezes
off the South China Sea, and I can’t see any panties or stockings.

It’s Thursday. Almost as if it was CLEAN YOUR GREEN BRAS
TODAY, GIRLS—IT’S THURSDAY.

B-cups. C-cups. D-cups.

34’s, 36’s, 38’s and two 40’s; yet, I don’t know if the 40’s belong to
old, obese nurses with sagging breasts, or young, slim ones with firm,
uplifted breasts—indeed very big!

The wind blows on and on.

Some bra cups fill up with balmy air and lunge forward—but for
a sec.

All of them are pinned up uniformly, naturally. Clothespins are all
in the same position.

The bras are each identified. Last names and serial numbers are
written in dark green, indelible ink.

Once which were the white manufacturer’s tags, are now green little
lappets—as required by Division Standard Operating Procedures.

The bras brave the excruciating torrid Asian sun.

Some bras have bolder shades of green than the others.

One or two have faded to dreary green.

The sun has shrunken them a bit; but, soon these sacks will be
stuffed, and their forms will be retained again—with a gentle
force.

My eyes travel down the long row of green, double-cupped flags,
and I imagine each bra’s owner taking her bra and fastening it
behind her back with her two hands.

The camera (my eye) swings to the front, and I see the breasts
in each bra snuggled together with a suntanned valley between
each of them.

Breasts and breasts and breasts.

Some are large enough to bob up and down.
Some are small enough to be thought of as being 60-watt light bulbs.

Some breast skin is thick, hard.
Some breast skin is thin, soft.

I long to slide my hands under the bras’ backs, and then slide
out and unhook them all.

I long to cushion my face on those mounds of breast flesh.

I long to feel the comfort and joy of their softness and care.

I long to be set in moments of abandonment and overwhelming
emotion.

I long to cuddle and find myself in the bosom of tenderness and
love of just two breasts.

17 February 1998

Poetry Vietnam 9

2008-12-04T17:37:00.001+01:00

The Killer Landmine
(Made in USA)

Under a spreading bamboo patch
The killer landmine hides;
The mine—set to go at a snatch—
With prongs at all its sides;
And the powders of its mighty charge
Are cruel as Death itself.

Its shell is hard, and black, and round;
Its form is sleek and sound;
It’s meant to burst and bang and hurt,
So snug it’s in the dirt;
And it waits so long for that step
From which no leg can skirt.

Day in, day out, from light to night,
You sense its presence loom;
You can sense it as it lays in wait,
With fuses set to bloom;
A tinder box under the hot sun,
When at noon broiled sunrays zoom.

And soldiers humping to and fro
Look round and round and round;
They ache to rest their straining eyes,
And drink and breathe their sighs,
And sit on solid ground that’s bald—
Such sites with no place to hide.

It lays all day to have its way
With friends in rows so straight;
It loves to screen the coming troops,
And witness their death’s gait,
The grunts alert and feeling gay,
Know not it’s now too late.

Boom! Boom!! Boom!!! Boom!!!! All’s tossed up high;
You can see some body parts;
You can see the men crouched with sighs,
Some others pumping stopped hearts;
The mine’s no more; the legs no more,
What’s left is just the blood and gore.

12 October 1997

Poetry Vietnam 8

2008-12-04T17:35:00.000+01:00

The Forward Observer:
(Foxtrot Oscar)

I bring the cannon’s roar to score,
To kill, to shock, to slash, to gore.
The woods’ green trees in smithereens,
And fish in streams scream out it seems.
Craters mar the wild’s lush, huge floor;
Faunae scat to hide from still more.
Flowers droop and stoop at swishes;
Rounds pound ground upon my wishes.
Little birds flap fast to shelter,
While snakes and bugs helter-skelter.
Wise owls cease their hoots when I shoot;
Jungle jabber wanes then goes mute.
Pit vipers wiggle from the scene,
And temper the glow of their sheen.
Brazen oxen stamp their tough hooves;
Spiders scurry to their Earth’s grooves.
Tigers! Tigers! All burning bright,
Running from sight from out of fright.
King cobra sways its death brattle,
In vain against the King of Battle.
Babbling baboons bite their big tongues—
Air seeping slowly out their lungs.
Pythons writhe then glide in water,
Safe from Arty’s salvos of slaughter.
Leeches creep fast to deep crannies,
Puckers puckered in blasphemies.
Wild boar heaves swiftly to steep land,
Far-off from the artilleryman.
Chimps and imps scatter on high vines,
Warned by the din of my shells’ chimes.
Bushes bear the blasts of fragments,
Shrapnel pocks without discernment.
Mission ended; wood upended;
Recon teams report the wounded.
I bring the cannon’s roar to score,
To kill, to shock, to slash, to gore.

26 September 1997

Poetry Vietnam 7

2008-12-04T17:33:00.001+01:00

Extract from A Book of Vietnam "War" Poetry

You’re in the Army Now:
You’re Not Behind the Plough

Oh, shit!
I’m not behind the plough;
I’m in the Army now.

All is green and mean;
All is schemed and lean.

Not Air Force blues,
Just like Sue’s.

No Air Force starch,
With range to march.

No toilet bowls,
That flush when told.

No! I’m in the fucking Army now…

All is trudge and mud;
All is spuds and crud.

Not Navy whites,
On cool, soft nights.

No filmed shows,
With drinks iced cold.

No crisp, cleaned clothes,
And bunks to doze.

No! I’m in the fucking Army now…

All is Days to Go;
All is Where’s the Foe?

Not Marine teams:
Battlefield screams.

No hills to take,
And buddies’ wakes.

No gung-ho push,
Through the thick bush.

No! I’m in the fucking Army now…but not in the Marines!

25 May 1997

Poetry Vietnam 6

2008-12-04T17:30:00.000+01:00

Extract from A Book of Vietnam "War" Poetry

Budweiser and Librium

Today we have BUDS and LIBS
To flush away the hopelessness
Of an infantry company.

Today we have BUDS and LIBS
To force along the faithfulness
Of an infantry company.

The maggots of depression are shooed surreptitiously—seemingly simply—with
powdered drugs and liquid suds pulsating through the blood systems of the foot
soldier specialists.

Let’s listen to them…

“Death Defier, man, oh man,
You’re a crazy motherfucker, man!”

“Go fuck yourself, Big Cock!
John Doe’s fucking your wife back in the real world, shithead!”

“Crusader, how many gooks did you zero today, man?
Hey, man!
You’re a gas with that pee-shooter.
Man oh man!”

“Where’s Security Clad?
Bet he’s jerking off again behind those trees.
That little fuckerooooo!
Hey, man, give me another BUD!”

“Atonement, what you gonna do when we get back to the real world?
Fuck all your boyfriends,
You big fucking shithead!”

THESE NINETEEN-YEAR-OLDS SHOULD BE IN SUMMER CAMP—
NOT ARMY CAMP.

1 March 1997

Poetry Vietnam 5

2008-12-04T17:26:00.003+01:00

Extract from A Book of Vietnam "War" Poetry

We Gotta Get Outta This Place

If it’s the last thing we ever do…
We’ve got to get out of this place.

We’ve got to get out,
No doubt,
Out of this place,
We’ve got to get out.

Away from the counting of days all day,
Away from the pining for Kay so gay,
Away from the long nights lonely and lorn,
Away from a rival furled tight with his scorn.

We’ve got to get out of this place.

Far from the dilly and dally of green,
Far from the C.O. so pushy, so mean,
Far from the capsules and needles you’re fed,
Far from the yearning to snuggle in bed.

We’ve got to get out of this place.

Off to where shell swishes are not to fear,
Off to where grenades are not what you hear,
Off to where there are not boots to lace tight,
Off to where there are not snakes in the night.

We’ve got to get out of this place.

Not near the red ooze on the chopper’s floor,
Not near bloodied gauze and the wounded’s roar,
Not near the stench of a body’s burnt flesh,
Not near the gore of a soldier’s slow death.

We’ve got to get out,
No doubt,
Out of this place,
We’ve got to get out.

21 February 1997

Poetry Vietnam 4

2008-12-04T17:24:00.002+01:00

Extract from A Book of Vietnam "War" Poetry

Four-star General and
So-called Venerable

What glory for a warlord fagged out on old days?
--Only nonsensical rows of flushing ribbons.
Only salutes and dues and tokens
Can rub out the thorny terror of his yore.
Still more boring chores; still more whores galore.
The rites of rank salve ferocious brain bustles.
At night, in the dim light, our hero bleats,
And his finger flounces Bible leafs.

What anodyne can we divine to quell his pinings?
Hour sessions housed in the halls of dream teams?

No.

Whisky sours to whist away the wildish traits of his ways?

No.

A tryst, with kisses and caresses, to temper his distress?

No.

No…?

“…Old soldiers never die; they only fade away….”

Yes.

Let him “fade away” through the spectre of his bitterness and hate.

23 August 1996

Poetry Vietnam 3

2008-12-04T17:21:00.002+01:00

Extract from A Book of Vietnam "War" Poetry

Another CA (Combat Assault)

Another C.A. today,
And all we can do is pray.
Hands touch at our taut guts,
And there’s little we can say.
Some vomit up curds and wheys,
For there is no other way.
Some cradle, hunched up in fright,
At sight of the sun’s first ray.
Some jump in place to please nerves;
This might be our last day.

Choppers in three’s hover low,
Green-clad fellows feel their foe.
Twigs and leaves twirl ‘bout at will,
Pilots’ stares so cold and still.
Clock-clockings announce the dawn;
At day’s end souls to mourn.
Flying numbed to the L.Z.,
There’s a zone without one tree.
Down we go with jumps to ground,
Is there contact to be found?

A run with gun to tree line,
No reason yet to swell fine.
Bushes eyed for A.K.’s nose,
Our hearts in fear feel frozed.
Low-bent bodies rush to hide;
Is this the last one to be tried?
A bullet in one’s own self?
Thoughts of those who fly to help.
Safe rock’s reached and down I go;
C.A.’s “cold”; no sound from foe.

10 August 1996

Poetry Vietnam 2

2008-12-04T17:18:00.002+01:00

Extract from A Book of Vietnam "War" Poetry

Bob Hope, The Draft Dodger

Bob Hope ain’t no dope;
Spiels out heaps of hope.
Buys bonds stacked so pat;
Hoards his chicken fat.
Tells jokes to the boys;
Eyes on business ploys.
Flies on safest route,
Far from where they shoot.
Tours with luscious girls;
Sweeps by as do royals.
With his frozen smile,
He’s sent miles and miles.
At home Mom’s heart throbs;
Bob’s made globs from sobs.

On stage bosoms bob;
Right by there’s old Bob.
Smart quips shake the crowd;
Bob smirks as if proud.
R. Welch beats her meat;
Les Brown meets his beat.
HI FOLKS! Held on high;
Moms home mope and cry.
Big brass in front row;
Where’s gone our foe?
Green sea of G.I.’s;
Raquel’s pulled all eyes.
Bob fakes support role,
While she takes calls’ roll.
Raw meat for caged souls;
Bob’s met all his goals.

CRASH! BOOM! The show’s switched,
From nitwits to bomb hits.
Bob’s off and in-flight;
Away with all his might.

7 December 1995

Poetry Vietnam 1

2008-12-04T17:14:00.002+01:00

Extract from A Book of Vietnam "War" Poetry

“I’ve Got Sunshine on a
Cloudy Day"

Medivac with blood-blotched pack,
From the sky in frenzied dive.
Heads upped high with thoughts aside,
Tried green stretcher for last ride.
“Rock of Ages” lades the air,
Greeny soldiers stooped in prayer.
Surgeons in tent stern and fast,
Joust with Death to let Life last.
Burnt green pants ripped off then thrown,
Steel pail brimmed with red-stained gown.
Spurts of blood dart at bright light,
Blood-soaked gauzes once quite white.
Pale face now fixed without life,
Dog tag snatched and sent to wife.
Plastic gray bag zipped and weighed,
Homeward jet: soon…slow…parade.
Doctors, nurses light up butts,
There’s some rest in Quonset huts.
Red guck hosed off chopper’s floor,
Snapping blades twirl round for more.

To my hootch the shout to march:
“Up and at it! F-O-R-W-A-R-D, ‘ARCH!”
Resigned to live, not to die,
I’m shrewd and spry through each eye.
In my head the dead man’s face,
Exhorts me not to act in haste.
Not with friends, I look about,
Noting some on Nature’s Lot.
In the dim of Mors and storms,
There’s a store of Earthly forms.
Wet tree leaves tint morning mist,
Verdant grass fonds in my fist.
Nature lures me ‘long its way,
My sunshine on a cloudy day.

1 October 1995

President-elect Obama, You're No Muhammad Ali...

2008-12-02T20:10:00.002+01:00

30 October 1974 Muhammad Ali overpowered George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire (today the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and won the world heavyweight boxing championship suffering a match that thrilled millions throughout the world. “The Rumble in the Jungle” especially enthused African people electrified by the hoopla focused on their continent, and it inscribed the name Muhammad Ali in the pantheon of the most notable and admired individuals living on our planet. The magnetism of the champ left its mark, and the hearts of millions of Africans beat with joy rejoicing over the occasion which had fetched for them certain fame throughout the globe. No one can talk with an African today without finding a propitious comment uttered about The Lip. Muhammad Ali did more to foster respect and admiration for the DisUnited States of America in Africa, the world’s second-largest and second most-populous continent, than any diplomat or businessman might have ever even dreamed of doing in those days.

Since the election of President-elect Barack Obama on 4 November 2008, I have been speaking to Senegalese, Nigerians, Cameroonians, Gabonese and Southafricans in Tuscany in order to canvass their responses to this out-of-the-ordinary occurrence which has transformed the political atmosphere of the DUS. Most of the individuals with whom I have conversed are, naturally, pleased that an Afroamerican is president. Nevertheless, there does not exist any exceptional fervour for BO whom they regard as a wait and see entity who really still has to explain to us just what he is all about. One Nigerian commented so: “Listen, Obama isn’t even 100% black! He’s a mix of white and black ancestry!” What do Africans think about whites? “Cautious optimism,” obviously! Let it be said that if the DUS’s State Department and Central Stupidity Agency were banking on BO to haul in lots of African fifs (funny inside feelings) for the good of “democracy” and dog-eat-dog capitalism, they had better go back to their global drawing boards and start from scratch.

Africa, with its 61 territories and 53 countries and 1,000,000,000 people, covers 20% of the Earth’s total land area. It is of keen interest to industrial and developing countries bent on making use of Africa’s gold, timber, palm oil, minerals, cocoa, oil, cotton and other natural resources which have always been sought-after commodities. Arab nationalists and European imperial powers in days gone by ravaged the enormous landmass of much of its reserves. In fact, before colonialism Africa, the oldest inhabited territory on Earth and the most polyglot, possessed 90% of the world’s gold. The atrocious Arab and Atlantic slave trade that is said to have imprisoned perhaps up to 50,000,000 Africans, remains fixed indelibly in the hearts and minds of the African people. Today, the place which is said to be the origin of the human species, is the poorest continent on Earth. (What do we mean by poor?)

I am prone to predict that one day, during the BO presidential administration, Africa will come to be referred to—in non-politically correct jargon—as the bête noire of the DUS. That Africa will be so knotty for Northamerican political leaders, it will draw out their utmost aggravations, their repulsion at their own powerlessness to be able to deal with that continent boiling so impetuously for justice and liberty.

For all of us, Africa’s times gone by have been non-edifying—to say the least. During its colonial times, it was hacked up into myriad portions at the whim of, principally, the Belgians, British, French, Germans, Dutch, Italians, Portuguese and Spanish. Cruelty and carnage were the order of the day. European cultural, economic and political powers wielded heavy-handedly, arbitrarily and disproportionately. Africans had little to say concerning their destinies. Besides enduring tropical diseases, slave trade, corrupt European governments, botched central planning, international trade regimes, despotism and illiteracy, they also had to contend with their own quandaries of superstition and tribal and military conflicts which stunted any hope the Africans possessed. Worse—for the most part a pastoral people—they were forced to subscribe to the agricultural techniques of their European marauders who even sometimes performed upon them quasi-scientific eugenic experiments and employed techniques of social engineering to compel Africans to submit to the customs and values of their often bloodthirsty trespassers. The partition of Africa by colonial and imperialist nations today is the inherent cause of much of the civil wars and tribal clashes that continue to rage wrathfully often fuelled by those arms sold to African political factions by the same states that at the start hewed Africa into territorial chunks!

There is no reason for us to suspect that BO is naïve enough to have forgotten that the Berlin Wall tumbled in 1989 after the floodgates were opened to wash away socialism (managed capitalism: Professor James Fulcher), swap it for unmanaged capitalism (Alan Greenspan), and then let it swing wildly in a frenzy of unmanageable capitalism (Professor Milton Friedman; http://www.revoke/miltonfriedmannobelprize.org). At that point in the history of economics, eyes came to be focused more assiduously upon Africa as the mammoth source of natural stores that it is. Kick-ass economies from all over the world, some let loose from the vices of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ regime-like economic guiding principles, scurried to the Dark Continent. Unmanageable capitalism was in its heyday, and global corporations were off to the races.

Harvard Boys and University of Chicago Boys, all genius-like specialists in economics, backed up by DUS military bases dotted all over the African continent, dictated their requirements to fledgling African test-tube economies, and promised them pie-in-the-sky results if their ministers of economy would fall in with the pitiless theorems and arm-twisting guidelines of the University of Chicago’s Friedman and his puerile ones. (Did Milton Friedman’s mother breastfeed him?). The scam managed to hoodwink many high-ranking African political leaders as they fell hook, line and sinker for the guarantees of profit and prosperity, something they had been seeking for millennia, that were now pledged to them by foreign bankers and international fraudsters toting MBA degrees.

The African people—as did others around the world who had been duped by the Harvard and Chicago Boys—reacted ferociously when they comprehended that the radical economic policies foisted upon their often corrupt leaders were, in fact, greedy attempts to force feed them Western economic, political and cultural ideas and mores. A bitter taste was left to savour, and Africa’s plight, by now burdened even more by the AIDS virus rampant throughout its land, appeared dimmer than it did before. These days, Africans think twice and thrice before jumping on the financial bandwagons of slick university professors, their prodigies, and bankers and financial counsellors representing those countries which, often before, set about exploiting their material goods and dignity. In fact, continent-wide unification organizations are taking root ever slowly but surely. Africans are wary of others, understandably, but with the exception of one country that has stood above the fray…

China. If Africa is the grandest developing continent with the largest number of countries, China is the hugest developing country. Sino-African similarities do not terminate there. In 200 BC, the Han Dynasty had contacts with China. Trade and commerce between them is not something new-fangled. Africa and China, “the two birthplaces of mankind,” both have been beset by colonial aggression, and they have engaged in battles against imperialism and exploitation by a stronger country of a weaker one throughout their histories. They have also brawled for national liberation—freedom from the fetters of foreign oppression.

Especially after 1989 China, too, drew more diligently nearer to Africa searching for those natural resources needed to sustain its turbo economy, a strategy wittingly adopted to nourish the West’s addiction to the theory that an increasing consumption of goods is economically beneficial—that presumption which is now debilitating and throwing into disarray most Occidental industrial nations. China approached Africa on a new footing. It pressed the notion of co-development between the two nations. Both of them are attempting to construct what is called “a new kind of equality and mutual support” said to be unparalleled in the history of international relations. China has encouraged Africa to find its own way, make its own choices, and follow the path considered best in the interest of its own populaces. China refuses to palm off any newly-conceived “political model” or one such as the supercilious Western countries’ Judeo-Christian capitalist democracy—a course of action which predisposed many African countries to humiliation after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

What is unique about this pact is that it is not based on any “historically accumulated rancour” which normally stultifies any concordat reached with an African nation say by France or England or any of the other states which traipsed through Africa to purely manipulate it. China and Africa have no chronicles of bloody battles to have to sublimate. They are beginning with a clean slate. They have no grave motivations to have misgivings about one or the other. This atmosphere of cooperation is akin to some all-directional independent diplomacy. The Chinese and Africans are disgruntled with the old Western colonial regimes, and are determined to seek an honourable and evenly balanced international order among all peoples. They realize that bipolar politics (Soviet Union-DisUnited States) belongs to the Past. We live in an age of multi-polarization, and even if there exists one “superpower”—for now!—there are also several big powers occupying the international stage and with which the DUS must now deal with in a more unassuming, open-minded and studied manner. Let us hope.

Already in 1956, China had provided no-strings-attached support for Africa. It is prominent for bringing about the Tanzania-Zambia Railway. The Chinese have bartered for African goods exchanging their textiles, light industrial products, rice, electrical appliances and motorcycles. The Chinese have made available desperately-needed technical assistance in the fields of agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, fishery, manufacturing, and health care. Medicines, medical equipment, recreation and sporting equipment, and agricultural machinery have been dispatched to Africa. Chinese doctors, agricultural experts, physical training coaches, computer teachers and instructors have helped to offer the multi-ethnic, multi-tribe continent a better life. Incredibly to us and Haliburton personnel, experts sent by the Chinese government to Africa must be paid equally as those of the recipient countries they have been sent off to assist!

The point here is that China, with all the disadvantages of language and culture that it possesses when transacting politics and business in Africa, has stated that it is pursuing a policy of peaceful neutrality and nonalignment while strictly respecting the sovereignty of all African nations. Equality, mutual benefit, the relief of the burden of poor countries, and peaceful coexistence are the order of the day, and it only remains for us to see whether these standards will be adhered to vigorously enough or buried forever beneath the Babylonian Weeping Willow of political rhetoric.

Onto this mesmerizing African mainland will be plonked one day the President-elect of the DisUnited States of America, Barack Obama, who will become president on Inauguration Day 20 January 2009. BO will be lugging three dirty laundry bags with him when his Air Force One lands on the world’s most underprivileged continent:

· The Democratic Party. As much as BO thinks his party is the most democratic and viable political force in the DUS, it is not. There is not one. If we go back in modern history, it is easy to assess that the demerits of this cluster are rather extensive. Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt steered the DUS out of the 1929 Depression. He manoeuvred the country through World War II, and some say he was a cause of that conflict. Harry S Truman dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, and he did not seal, by doing so, any harmony of mutual respect between the DUS and The Rising Sun for the years that went after his tenure. HST’s diplomatic blunders also included the Korean War. Democrats John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson piloted the DUS out of the 1962 recession and escalated the Vietnam “War.” Democrat William Clinton baulked on sending troops to quell the slaughter between the Hutus and Tutsis—an act that surely would have won for him the admiration of most African people. Will Democrat Barack Obama be harked back to for his leadership efforts during World War III/Universal War I?
The Democratic Party’s political machine in Chicago is well-known for its opinionated shenanigans and sleaze, and it is the mechanism that pushed JFK over the finish line when he was elected president. Big money is the talk of the town among Democratic Party officials as it is with their opposition, the Republican Party.
BO is a product of the Chicagoans’ politics and served on the faculty of the University of Chicago.
When all is said and done, even if BO is the pristine pure Democrat he claims to be, most Africans are going to look askance at this proud Democrat—if only for his party’s Past.

· Europe. The DUS is a hodgepodge of various European émigrés. BO represents them. The DUS’s ties to Europe are more durable than those with Asia, Oceania (except for Australia and New Zealand) and Southamerica—three regions relations with are nothing to brag about. The DUS’s languages, creeds, customs and practices, history and collective memory, the value it subscribes to its heritage, public spaces and specific landscapes, political and economic inclinations are founded on the literatures, religions, the political theories and the Judeo-Christian democratic capitalist concepts of, particularly, German, Irish, English, and Italian immigrants who still cuddle those ideas and philosophies. Quod erat demonstrandum: Africans are chary of both Europeans and Northamericans. They should be. And they will also be iffy a propos BO.
· The tarnished reputation of the DUS. Would any African person in charge, in his or her right mind, want to do business with a DUS bank? If the citizens of the DUS cannot confide in their own banks, how can anyone expect that others would? The Captains and Robber Barons of Capitalism look ridiculous in their shabby outfits of covetousness and fraud. Still, the DUS’s plunge cannot be measured solely with economic and financial lingo. Examining any other sphere where the DUS might once have been appreciated and respected, one is not going to be very much encouraged. The Leader of the World has turned out to be The Policeman of the World. (Citizens of the DUS are a magnificent people—if they aren’t bombing you!) Which means that the DUS might be feared, but it is respected now barely so. The culpability cannot be placed, exclusively, on Bush I and Bush II and their Republican cohorts, and we will never be gratified and/or proud of their political performances. The blameworthiness must be levied on each and every Northamerican citizen.

Yes, we can join hand in hand with China to help Africa lift itself out of abject poverty! Yes, we can join nations from all over the world and build more hospitals and schools for the African people! Yes, we can demonstrate to the world that the DUS is not keen on only imposing its resolve upon the people of the Dark Continent! Yes, we can start off on an accurate foothold this time and seek fairness and parity for all African people! Yes, we can stop selling arms to African nations! Yes, we can! Alleluia! Alleluia!! Alleluia!!!

R E M A R K S

The Truth-o-Meter

When I think of Afroamericans there comes to my mind two unambiguous cases in point of institutionalised racism—not the kind where a gang of thugs beat up on one Afroamerican, or a bunch of criminals who thrash upon one Northamerican who is not Afroamerican. (I do not use the word “black” anymore to refer to Afroamericans, and I refuse to use the racist “of color” soubriquet.) The first is the United States Army in the late 1960s. In Vietnam, on the battlefield, Afroamericans were frequently superior in number and proportion (12% of the DUS’s population is Afroamerican) to Northamericans who were not Afroamericans, and, at times, the Afroamericans constituted 50% of an infantry company’s roster in attendance in the “boonies.” (15% of the US Army troops serving in Vietnam actually presented themselves at the combat zone. 85% performed backup, maintenance assistance, and other rear-echelon activities including thievery.) Base camp Afroamericans were frequently blackmailed with threats of being sent to the front line. And, one lieutenant-colonel from a southern state in the DUS, briefing me on my promotion opportunities, told me point blank: “If you want to make a career of the US Army, lieutenant, you better stay away from those niggers.” The second occasion for me to witness established racial discrimination was when I functioned as a social worker for the State of Florida in the very late 1960s. Here again the Afroamerican was criminally controlled and kept at bay through the administration of a contrived poverty. Both the US Army and the State of Florida, as many other DUS groupings, have progressed exceptionally well in doing away with intolerance in their organizations, but nevertheless there remains an unhealthy, unpardonable dose of bigotry in the sinews of the Northamerican population.

Be that as it might, I am pleased that an Afroamerican has been elected president of the DUS. I do not intend to say that it is the least of what could have been done for Afroamericans. I wish to declare that citizens of the DUS are somewhat now on the right path to justice and egalitarianism on behalf of the Afroamericans. A very long distance still has to be traversed before we can affirm that an end has finally come to this outrageous Northamerican perfidiousness. Even so, I am not gratified that that individual, that perfunctory representative of Afroamericans, Barack Obama, is the president-elect of the DUS, and I am still further disenchanted that many Northamericans, and their Afroamerican counterparts, voted for BO because he is, above all, an Afroamerican. They voted for the “color” of his skin knowing very well that a green man with yellow stripes could have got rid of the opposition in this see-sawing soap opera’s attempt to hit upon a way to extricate the DUS from the horrible crisis it finds itself bogged down in.

BO is very clever, physically potent, youthful as far as politicians go, deceptively coherent when he deliberates, upbeat, on the move, and fluky. I would like very much to pose the following uncertainties I have about him to him:

1

Who backed you in this gargantuan effort to become
president of the DUS?
The names of these prime movers, please.

2

When did you decide to run for president?
You were sworn in as a DUS senator on 4 January 2005.
You resigned that post 16 November 2008.
You announced your candidacy on 10 February 2007.

3

Where did the financial funding for your effort come from?
Each and every receipt.

4

What might happen if you, or a member of your family, is assassinated?
The DUS is in perhaps the gravest dilemma of its history,
and your elimination would be exceptionally traumatic for the DUS.

5

Why do you think you are qualified to lead the DUS?
Your credentials, your Washington experience,
your knowledge of foreign affairs…please!

Thank you.

Authored by Anthony St. John
Casella Postale 38 50041 CALENZANO FI Italia
1 December 2008
African statistics extrapolated from http://www.wikepedia.org/
The writer wishes to thank Professor He Wenping,
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences,
http://bic.cass.cn/English,
whose article,
“China-Africa Relations Facing the Twenty-first Century,”
27 May 2003,
was referred to for details in the aforesaid essay.

* * *

Are You Sure There Are Atomic Bombs All Over the Place?

2008-12-01T21:03:00.001+01:00

Anthony St. John
Versus
Dora Russell--
Once Wife of
Twentieth-Century
English Philosopher
Bertrand Russell

The Ides of March 1984

The Members of
The Bertrand Russell Society
3802 North Kenneth Avenue
CHICAGO IL 60641
United States

My fellow members of The Bertrand Russell Society of which I hope soon to be a paid-up-in-full distinct offshoot and to which I pray—but not to a god!—one fine day I might be able to donate a sum to help assist
your tireless efforts to disseminate most of the teachings and ideals of Bertrand Russell:

I am writing today to seek your assistance and insight on behalf of the alleviation of a tremendous intellectual woe with which I am afflicted and out of which I endeavor to attain, sincerely, phrenic resuscitation and exactitude in as many matters as I am able to satisfy this my mind’s quest for rationality and truth.

My dilemma concerns itself with my unsettled opinion—when so many more intelligent, wiser individuals surround me with certitude—that not that atomic/hydrogen bombs do not exist, but that tens and tens of thousands of them are poised, on both sides of the enormous ideological fence, to set in motion the repeated overkill of the human race. I sustain my belief with the following notions which perhaps might come to be interpreted by most as proofs:

I.

I have never seen an atomic/hydrogen bomb (to be referred to as “Item[s]” below).

II.

I have known not one individual in my thirty-nine years of life who has admitted—upon request or not—that he or she has seen an Item.

III.

I know not pictures of an Item or Items.

IV.

Not once in one year, when I, a graduate of the United States Army Artillery and Missile School, served as a missile/rocket training officer at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, did I see an Item, nor did I encounter one individual who could hint at where an Item or Items might be deposited or could say that he (no shes!) had even ever seen one! Yet, we were trained to use Items.

V.

If so many Items have existence, why have they not been used again—in more than forty years of their presence—“to thwart the suffering that has obviously arisen from the domination of an enemy whose evil would maybe create a greater spiritual peril than perhaps the physical deaths of the victims of that enemy?” (This is not my reasoning but that purported by those who deem the Items intrinsic to some national security.)

VI.

If such large quantities of Items have being—with so great high-potential attack capability—why has not an Item accident occurred? Are we to trust that the composite intelligence and integrity of the Item Users and Item Threateners (the United States of America has been docketed as the “First Item User”; some Northamerican Item Threateners now clamour for a “No First Item Use”! ) is sufficient to avoid a third real strategic or non-strategic Item Use or Items Use or Accidental Item Use or Accidental Items Use which might annihilate the total population of the world in minutes?

I for one do not trust, for example, the United States Army to possess the intelligence and probity to prevent an Item or Items Accident. I will say why to exasperate my discussion in which I have vented disagreement in the Item debate. Please support my observation from personal experiences?

My two-year service in the United States Army in Fort Sill, Oklahoma and Vietnam, as a missile/rocket training officer and a forward observer and battalion/brigade liaison officer, afforded me one of the grandest invigorations of my life, and I am inclined to believe that of the countless thousands of others who also served in the armed forces of the United States of America: an abrupt suspension of continuity. For me, this was effectuated in the following manner: After one year of working for diehard William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review, after four years of studying philosophy, after twenty-one years of believing that the United States of America was the most principled nation in the world, after four years of studying military science in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, I was thrust into the mainstream of one of Northamerica’s aspects of violence-let-loose: the United States Army. I met men drug-addicted, Jim Beam-addicted, Librium-addicted, Stars & Stripes-addicted, Playboy-centerfold-addicted, Item-addicted, God-addicted, power-addicted, addicted-addicted…. I was ordered to “zero” women and children, and when I refused protesting on behalf of the requirements of the Geneva Convention—which I attested, by signature, that I had read in Pleiku, Southvietnam—I was called a coward. (I waited anxiously to separate myself from the United States Army, and since then I have been utterly ashamed that I ever put on the uniform of that violence-prone, abusive organization.)

It strikes me as totally odd that the many disparate components of the armed forces of the United States of America—for me, extremely unjust in their exercises of power, often drugged, so frequently drunk, and ostentatiously stupid—have been stable enough over the past four decades to avoid an Item Accident. Parenthetically, I am also of the opinion that if so many Items existed, it would take an enormous monetary effort—at least equal to the very cost of the Items to secure the Items; and, it would take a larger military force than that which now exists to protect so many Items—perhaps at a cost of many more billions and billions of offence dollars allocated to insure national security. An enormous effort would have to be made to guarantee the safeguard of the Items from incompetent individuals and pseudo-freedom fighters not in uniform but earning much from the spending on military armament.

VII.

Who tells me Items exist? Political leaders and military strategists and editors at National Review and Harvard University political science professors! Almost fifty percent of the Northamerican people did not vote in the last election—many frustrated with what they often describe as their motive the deceptiveness of United States’ political leaders. Richard M. Nixon, over national television, admitted to me that the Items had, indeed, reality. After his political, emotional and physical downfall, he indicated to me that it was sometimes necessary to lie in politics. Am I being lied to about the Items, too? (Can anyone reveal to me the overall international effect and expense account of the Central Intelligence Agency for those crucial years, let us say, of 1954 or 1967 or 1978?) It is not not possible to assert that our political leaders might be deceptive with us and with others when they say they have already been so. N’est-ce pas?

VIII.

Not all politicians are obtuse even though the argument of common consent (a flaccid first principle!) is tempting in this case, under these circumstances. Suffice it to say that not all politicians are intelligent. But has there ever been a politician of international stature who denied the Item—whether or not he might be considered stupid or intelligent? Mao Tse-Tung (1893-1976) in a talk with Anna Louise Strong, August, 1946:

“The atomic bomb is a paper tiger
which the United States reactionaries
use to scare people. It looks terrible,
but in fact it isn’t…All reactionaries
are paper tigers.”

IX.

I wish to quote from my manuscript, Politically Philosophical and Philosophically Political Writings: A Book of Essays, the following proof against the existence of a god, a supreme being:

“I do not believe in God because there are no facts to prove his existence. I believe in cold winds, headaches, restaurant bills, the need to get up in the morning, work, and the oxygen I breathe. If God existed, it would be ridiculous to deny that he did. Yet many people deny his existence. They do not deny that Paris exists even if they have never visited Paris. God’s existence is not taken for granted just as we take for granted death or love of another person. If God existed, there would be absolutely no doubt about it—as there is no doubt about the largeness of the Atlantic Ocean which is incomprehensible to most. God “exists” in the same way Santa Claus or a witch or the Easter Bunny “exists.” We look for them, but we never come upon them even unexpectedly. We want the spontaneity of invented fantasies. (For children, this might be good.) We want God; but, he does not exist. We once needed God to explain the reasons for night and day, to define our limits in an unknown world, to give reason for our fears and loneliness, and to justify our unchosen entrance into a world whose rules and regulations will decide our unchosen departure. All of these things are now better explained without any reference to God, and the abracadabra of the supernatural. Each day we find more reason to believe in the naturalness of our Earth and the things that surround it. Before, we could only speculate and we contrived reasons which we thought had to be beyond our own comprehension. I am happy to know my life is controlled, for the most part, by forces I know have their bases in reality and fact, and not in causes which I must accept are beyond my reason and understanding. And I know each day brings me closer to knowing more about my world and myself.”

Dear members of The Bertrand Russell Society, has the Item become the new god? Not fabricated in the image of a kind, just Budda or Christ, but made by man to remind us—after, for example, the slayings of World War I and World War II (Where is World War III?)—of the image of Man the Monster? Will the “New God” itself back us into a veritable “shit or get off the pot” reaction to use, what I think are, the very few, if any, Items which are said to exist? I beg your assistance. I beg your clarifications. Forever, I demand, “Where are the Items?”

Cordially…

Anthony St. John
Casella Postale 10
51016 MONTECATINI TERME PT
Italia

* * *

1 August 1984

Anthony St. John
Casella Postale 10
51016 MONTECATINI TERME PT
Italia

Dear Anthony St. John,

I have been long in replying to your letter of 7 June 1984 asking if I have ever seen one of those “Items,” nuclear missiles.

I have thought this matter over very carefully! I think that, in view of what you say about your experiences in the United States Army, these Items possibly do not exist, since, if they did, with such drunken and drug-soaked guardians, one or more of them would have gone off long since. Many women of my country have skilfully, as you may know, stationed themselves at a place known as Greenham Common, for the purpose of observing and of preventing, if necessary, the emergence of one Item—known as a Cruise missile—from its hiding place. At times there emerges a long trail of motor cyclists, followed by a double lorry like two dust carts, within which a long object may be observed, if the lid is lifted. A guard of cars follow this object (Item?) into the shadowed woodlands, chased and mocked by the admirable band of watchful women.

Now what better scheme could be devised for holding the whole world to ransom than for the technological MEN of POWER to proclaim to the world their possession of these Items—holding them, and their guardians, the while, shrouded in utmost secrecy?
You are right—I have never seen one. Two Items fell from the sky at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since then one or two warning flares in the sky to frighten and keep humans in subjection. The rest is secrecy and silence! With occasional pretensions at negotiations to disarm. Perfect, my dear Watson. Good on you, Sherlock Holmes!

Yours sincerely,

Dora Russell
Carn Voel
Porthcurno
Penzance
CORNWALL TR19 6LN
England

* * *

20 August 1984

Dora Russell
Carn Voel
Porthcurno
Penzance
CORNWALL TR19 6LN
England

Dora Russell:

Thank you for replying to my letter of 7 June 1984, for taking so much time to answer it (I received your 1 August 1984 one on 18 August 1984! Fancy that!), and for thinking over very carefully the matter I proposed to you and others of The Bertrand Russell Society. Perhaps you, Dora Russell, should have pondered at greater length?

I wish to make the following comments on your awkward response:

You are unkind and intellectually dishonest to imply that the only reason I offer for my belief is that “such drunken and drug-soaked guardians” as exist in the United States Army would be reason alone for the non-existence of Items. Is this point—the one you have singled out of context—the only you can discuss with me? Do I win my argument on points, alas?
If you scan through your history books, you will notice that men and women, throughout recorded time, have chased and mocked, more than occasionally, after nonexistent entities. They have all too frequently followed the advice of barbarians and representatives of gods who have lead them on to their deaths millions and millions of times over. If you walk in Europe, you slosh in the blood beneath your feet. (Women congregated at Greenham Common to chase things, that exist only in their imaginations, into the shadowed woodlands are Itemhunters, not Witch-hunters.) There are, and have been, schemes devised for holding considerable parts of the whole world to ransom, and, regretfully, they have been rather successful. May I mention even one on the roster of more than seven thousand religions registered—often tax-free!—throughout this Earth? Even the scheme of the English Monarchy plays a significant role in your country, Dora—does it not?—in holding Subjects in Subjection! (The two stamps on your letter to me, with images of The One and Only Queen affixed to them, are overlaid with this royal edict: BE PROPERLY ADDRESSED! Yes, Your Majestic Highness; no, You Great and Royal Sovereign Personage! Does Prince Phillip cut Elizabeth’s toenails, Dora?) Most humans I know are frightened and kept in one form of control or another:

“A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe,”

Two-thirds of the people in the world have not running water in their homes. And even most middle-class creatures are struggling tormentingly to buy their food and pay their rent. (Did you know it costs 12 Swiss francs to go from Orselina to Cardada in an eight minute, return included, funivia?)
Yes, two Items fell from the sky at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (I cannot believe that you believe that this observation makes my thesis essentially self-contradictory!) One has never fallen again because one does not exist. One does not exist in part because two Items, in fact, fell from the sky at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And if thousands and thousands do have being, my dearest Dora Russell, will you kindly point the way for me? Forever I demand: Where are the Items? Dora Russell, I suggest, earnestly, that you start doing the same damn thing yourself!

I am just trying to peel away some onion skins.

Cordially…

Anthony St. John
Casella Postale 38
50041 CALENZANO FI
Italia

Why We Should Learn Another Language

2008-12-01T21:00:00.002+01:00

([Between the
Pulpous Pith of
Parentheses])

I am happily fluent in three languages (English, Spanish and Italian), work on becoming so in another (French), and have “let go” most of still one more (Latin) which I studied for six years in my youth. If I had the time, I would return to translating Cicero doing so con gusto. (Amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis amant.) It irks me that there are thousands of other languages in the world. Worse, peoples and nations do not have a common language to communicate in so as to consider only what is basic for them. I once entered The Rolex Awards for Enterprise competition submitting this project title: “An Artificial, Limited International Medium of Communication.” The ROLEX officials did not even recognize my suggestion in their list of entries, but they were kind enough to send my idea back to me. The Swiss are great!

In my head there are two reasons to explain my penchant for polyglotism. I was born in a city (New York) where more than two hundred languages are spoken on any given day. Where cultures intersect at every corner. Where “getting along” is the unwritten law. Perhaps no other urban sprawl in the world is better at the art of living together. My instincts are programmed to know about the differences people, in general, possess. For the twenty one years I lived in New York, I never said firstly “In what restaurant are we going to eat tonight?” No. I asked: “In what kind of restaurant are we going to eat tonight?” I am, by nature, extraordinarily inquisitive. New York tickles your curiosity bone constantly.

The other rationalization is that the mother and father of my father were born in The Old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The mother of my mother was born in Ireland. The father of my mother came into this world on the French-German border—which side I do not remember. His surname was French, but he was decidedly Prussian in temperament. Alsace-Lorraine? Who cares. Forever, in my home, contrastive dialects echoed off the walls, and even my Irish-by-preference mother often peppered her speech with French language verbal tidbits. Voilà!

Words, their pronunciation, and the methods of combining them used and understood by a community, is for me something primordial, something that creeps around everything I am involved in. I am not a “viva-voce” linguist. I am a “brain” linguist. I will be the first to admit I speak English, Spanish, Italian, French and Latin as unbearably as my mother did when she blurted out, from the kitchen, “Il fait mauvais temps. Il pleut!” In school, I was taught to translate languages—not to speak them. Terrible!

I am a hodgepodge! I buy three different eaux de cologne and mix them up to make my own scent. I can switch from one foreign author to another. (I am reading these days, in French, the works of Alain Minc.) My spectrum of interest in music is really quite unusual: classical, cumbia, 1960s’ songs, jazz, opera, pop, salsa, Gregorian Chant, mariachi, Russian folk songs, Swiss folk music…there is no borderline for me. If it is good, I like it. (I would take Beethoven over all others if I had one choice to make before being sent to a deserted island against my will.) On the shortwave band, I listen to English from the United States, France, England, Switzerland, Austria and Japan. I listen to Spanish on Radio Nacional Espana and an Austrian network. I listen to French on the radio and watch it on Italian television. I listen to Italian on the radio, watch it on TV, and talk it with my friends. (A few years ago I persuaded Bob Holness of the B.B.C. on his “Anything Goes” program to play “Sugar” by The Archies for my sweet Italian wife, Maria Luisa.) Strangely enough, I swear by Cuban cigars, straight whisky, HEWLETT-PACKARD, David Hume, CASIO, ANTINORI wines, razor blades to shave with, tennis, SONY, turtleneck sweaters, DUNHILL 965 pipe mixture, and integral cane sugar from Ecuador. (Can anyone then berate me when here in Italy, where I have lived since 1 May 1983, I respond to an Italian’s “When are you going to become an italiano, americano?” with this rejoinder: “I want to be listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the first one who secured the European passport!” Lucky for me Italian manicomi have been closed for years!)

Back to reality. I must speak about the gratification my multilingualism has provided me with throughout my fifty two years. But—before I do—I have to take two detours: one to Venezuela (Spanish) and one to Italy (Italian).

I arrived in both places without speaking a word of either native tongue. Does not make for an easy adjustment! Yet, it is infinitely more interesting and surely more fun. Anthropologists say you need about three to four years to get into the swing of things. It was easier for me to acclimate to Italy because I had practiced adjusting in Venezuela. (I once spent a year in Vietnam as an artillery first lieutenant, but that sojourn afforded me no chance to get to know the Vietnamese people and their customs. I would have liked to very much so.) Not knowing the common speech at the beginning forces you to scrutinize the faces and gestures of the people, and this offers the possibility—I think—to learn more about them than actually speaking to them when it is necessary to do so!

Spanish in Caracas is not the same language they hablan in the Universidad de Salamanca! Spanish people will be the first—and snootily, too!—to tell you so. Spanish in South America is not homogenized as English is in the United States, Great Britain and Canada, for example. Pina (pineapple [I still have not learned how to Microsoft that accent mark over the “n” in pina!]) can have different meanings in different countries. If you use Spanish Spanish (sic!) as a point of reference in Caracas, you might go crazy. Venezuelans are mostly poor, uneducated individuals. Their schools and cultural institutions are not exceptionally developed due to the fact that in large part there, there is a rampant corruption in government which has little to do with bettering the lives of the underprivileged in Venezuela. (I was robbed three times in Caracas. Two times by pistol.) There are fantastic restaurants in Caracas—some known worldwide. (Try the Costa Vasca.) I could purchase Havana cigars there, too! Caracas was also once the jumping-off point in South America for many classical music concerts of world renown. After six years and four months there, my Caracas Spanish had progressed sufficiently for me to understand very well the political and economic nuances in Venezuela which I gleaned from Spanish-written magazines, newspapers and financial bulletins. Eventually, I had to leave. In 1976, when I arrived, one dollar had cost four bolivares. Today, it is climbing up to seven hundred bolivares (see Global Economic Outlook, Union Bank of Switzerland, 4Q, 1996). Venezuela can make you cry. The more Spanish I learned there, the sadder I got.

Italian in Italy is not the Italian they speak in Italy! You can go fifty meters in any direction and find another way to converse and pronounce the Italian language. Unlike an all-embracing English or a far-reaching Spanish, and not much like a boxed-in French or German which would like to aggrandise, Italian is not an “out-to-conquer” dialect as Latin was before it. I tell my Italian friends—after eating my CHEERIOS!—that more people are learning Latin, nel mondo, than they are contemplating the language of The Boot! (That gets the blood circulating!) Remember this, however: When you put your eyes on Italy you are seeing something really special. You should not have to speak. (It is a shame Italians talk too much!) People come to Italy to look and become overweight. Italy is soothing to the eyes. (Not all of it.) Corruption makes Italy vulnerable to every kind of pecuniary disease and this takes the “charm bite” out of it if you live here long enough. So then, if Venezuela cannot get off the ground because of its depravity, Italy is threatening to collapse under the fardello of its turpitude. Italians are tired, old. Their linguistic stock is filled with regrets and complaints. Sixty percent of the Venezuelan population in 1983 was under eighteen years! Forty percent of the families in Italy have one child, and almost twenty per cent of the habitancy is over sixty five years! Venezuela and Italy are both truly in bad shape, and Venezuelan Spanish and Italian Italian (sic) reflect themselves frequently—as a consequence—in exaggeration and demagoguery. Venezuelans and Italians are running scared. In this lachrymose atmosphere language fails to flourish.

I consider myself lucky (I have been unlucky many times!), nonetheless, to have had the perfect occasions to immerse myself in three divergent ways of life. I could have been bogged down as a junior (senior?) exec in a New York-based multinat drinking and smoking and sweating myself up the “Ladder of Success” unto, maybe, a pension! I chose not to do that, and I took the blows I had coming to me for doing so. No regrets. (I can croon “I Did It My Way!” Can you?)

There are three delights you come into when you speak more than your own language. You are less bored—for sure. There are few things more exhilarating than plopping yourself into a strange country with $5,000.00 (1983) and setting out to live there happily ever after. (When I saw Caracas the first time, I could not wait to leave it. Italy is more calming on the nerves, but getting more unstable even as I write this little essay.) You must relearn the meaning of everything! That is fantastic! You do not have to be a genius to familiarize yourself with the fact that the “C” on the shower faucet is not cold but “caliente,” HOT! The “F” is cold, “frìo.” It is not only language that you must take in, you must feel the “rhythmicity” of the people, their speeds at eating, drinking, working, waiting…. For the first four or five years there is so much to assimilate and decode, you are constantly absorbed in analysing and being stimulated to think your way through to understanding where you are and what you are doing there. (And you better have a good motive or you will be in for a very difficult time!) All of this is a natural process, and I have been lead to believe—over the years—that people are not put together to stay in any one place for more than six or seven years. (Most do, however.) We just want to know more about others and, ultimately, ourselves. (The success of our megalopoles?) Fixed in one place, this urge frustrates itself and we suffer the consequences. In another country you are always kept busy trying to show others that you also can live and think as they do—when necessary. You are always busy learning.

By switching to another parlance you change your mental “channels,” an important benefit which gives an individual a sobering placidity. (Great for writers!) Unfortunately, most people only speak their own language. I can turn on or turn off from one vernacular to another and refresh myself just as one might turn on, or off, the television or flip through the channels to freshen up after a hard day’s work. If I am tired of Italian, I can “zap” easily to English. Whether I select to read a book, enter a conversation, or listen to a radio program, I am sure to have a mental respite. I can always buy a Spanish newspaper or read a French political analysis. There is always a choice for me to make, and I never feel demarcated by my own idiolect. I am never confused in French, Italian or Spanish restaurants. (I wish I could find more foreign restaurants in Italy.) I am always willing and able to digest more of the four languages I have a familiarity with, and these “hobbies” have tended my way a variety of methods to cultivate my tremendous desire to know more and not only in my own language.

In conclusion, one also derives a very grand sense of pride and self-satisfaction. You get happy fifs (Funny Inside Feelings). Before I travel by train, I stop at a kiosk and pick up magazines and newspapers in four different languages, and then I amuse myself watching the expressions of the people in my compartment who appear to be amazed at the amount I am reading and the languages I am reading my editions in. (I do not want to sound arrogant to you, my dear reader. I am not being haughty. I just feel so pleased with myself, I want to share my joy with you! Remember also, please, I had to sacrifice much to arrive at this recompense. In fact, I am truly sorry for those who have not had the pleasure of putting down pat another language.) El Pais, Cambio, Hola! (in Spanish, the exclamation point and the question mark are put before [and after] a word or sentence to prepare the reader—but I cannot find the way to do so on my Windows 98! Can someone help me?), L’Espress, Le Monde Diplomatique (perhaps my most favorite news journal), Wall Street Journal (to know what The Enemy is thinking!), Times Literary Supplement, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, The Nation, La Gazetta dello Sport, La Settimana Enigmistica…. All the years of study and learning come to be remunerated in a train compartment! I feel good about what I have accomplished, and I know most people would also want to share the wonderful experience of being—at least—bi-lingual.

My dear reader, what are you waiting for? You can do it, too! I hope I have presented you with reason enough to get started on the language you have always wanted to speak. (The third and the fourth come even easier—I swear!) Think of the contentment you will derive from conversing to others in their mother tongue. What a stupendous manner to broaden your outlook. To seek communion with your fellows! To establish the bonds that will lead to a globalization—noble
and equal! To bring respect and admiration, for your country, to the people of other nations!

Goodbye!

Hasta luego!

Ciao!

Au revoir!

(Multum…viva vox facit!)

(Parenthetically, it is more readily comprehensible than you think!)

* * *

Extracted from:

Pages on Form-giving Cause as Contrasted with
Potential Existence

Written by:

Anthony St. John
Casella Postale 38
50041 CALENZANO FI
Italia

1 November 1996

Closet Atheists

2008-12-01T20:58:00.002+01:00

“You can bet your sweet §§§ we’re not
closet atheists!”

The formal and customarily repeated act of Christmas-New Year is here with us another time. This year is no different from other years. The routine actions performed with elaborate pomp and circumstances cajole individuals to enjoy that special sensation of warmth which is so often recounted as Christmas-New Year cheer or Christmas-New Year spirit. Eggnog and rum, the scent of pine trees, lavish nourishment, gift-giving and gift-receiving, and merry music narcotise millions of people into a state of euphoria. It is, one is told, the season to be jolly; the time to forget troubles; the time to celebrate for the sake of celebrating.

This December, as I peer beyond my—more or less contented—inner self (I am happy I am not happy!), I find nothing in the unobstructed or complete view of world events to find reason to demonstrate satisfaction by refraining from ordinary business. Moreover, I do not believe that Christmas-New Year might be used as an inducement to make me deck the halls with boughs of holly or find fun riding in a one-horse open sleigh. I see the universe—as it influences me—in a state of inconsolable agitation, and the void which exists between the supposedly established institutions and the realities of the human condition, has already lead, in this century, to the deaths of countless millions of people and the disintegration of millions more personalities. Further. I know very few self-defined Christians who solemnize Christmas with reference to Christ even as an ideal type of humanity. I find it hopeless to rejoice during Christmas, Christ’s Mass, because I believe that the existence of any supreme being or ultimate reality is unknown to me and unknowable. If a supreme being exists, it is a malignantly wicked fiend provoking, difficult, and trying rather than perfect in power, wisdom, and goodness (Sidney Hook). (Listen, my dear reader, to these philosophical arguments against the existence of a supreme being elaborated by Norwood Russell Hanson in his What I Do Not Believe and Other Essays published by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland, 1971:

Russell Hanson begins by showing that few universities help young adults to distinguish positions for which there are good grounds from other positions for which the grounds are not so good. When the theist lets his appeal collapse into faith alone, he concedes that his position rests on no rational grounds at all. An agnostic maintains himself/herself in a state of perfect doubt concerning God’s existence, a position Russell Hanson regards as unsound. The agnostic shifts logical ground. But what is it that Russell Hanson does not believe? First, can you prove that God does not exist when some “cocktail party St. George” says there is no good reason to believe that God does not exist? What are you going to say to him/her? What will you say to an agnostic? “God exists” is not a factual claim but one synthetic. One cannot specify in detail what it would be like to confirm it. Here, the agnostic remains in equipoise. “There is a God” has never been credibly established—not with anything like the universal agreement which supports claims like “there is fire, there is pain, there is suffering.” Any descriptions and accounts of natural phenomena which seem at first to require God’s existence for their explanations, turn out to be scientifically explicable via some alternative account requiring no supernatural reference whatsoever. And that is just an historical remark. Most things which once needed God’s intervention for man’s comprehension of their existence—for examples, lightning, thunder, good fortune, life and death, differences in species, the flight of birds, and the disappearance of dinosaurs—all these are now more profitably discussed in terms untainted with the supernatural. If it has been proved that God exists, it would be as irrational and benighted of one to deny the existence of God, as it would be to deny the existence of fire and of life and death. But this is not so. An atheist may offend in many ways by questioning the existence of God, but he or she is not offending logic by doing so. If looking and not finding does not constitute grounds for denying the existence of God, then looking and not finding does not constitute grounds for denying the existence of goblins, witches, flying saucers, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, et cetera. One of the genuine anomalies of our time consists in the religious enthusiast’s contention that all onus of proof rests on the non-believer to make his case! This must be the neatest trick of the millennium.) It is impossible, therefore, for me to keep something that most people, including myself, do not believe in.

I am suspicious of Christmas-New Year on a number of other grounds. Several years ago I served as a writer of obituaries for The Miami Herald. Those who write notices of a person’s death with a brief biographical sketch know that the Christmas-New Year season brings with it a concomitant rise in deaths. During the months prior to December when I wrote obituaries, the city of Miami experienced—on the average—thirty demises a day. But an appreciable surge was noticed before the Christmas-New Year “festivities.” Seventy to eighty passings away were recorded at a point in the course of the weeks immediately preceding Christmas-New Year. I asked experienced obit writers why this was so, and they speculated that the indulgence in food, wines, spirits and a high degree of loneliness caused more people to draw their last breaths.

I am not convinced that Christmas-New Year is the only time when people pamper themselves excessively with food and drinks; nor, is Christmas-New Year the only time they feel alone. But I think the sadness that comes from being alone has more to do with the aggravation of Christmas-New Year deceases than over-indulgence does.

It is unfortunate that more people are forlorn during Christmas-New Year. But it is deplorable that people are made to be convinced of their isolation. Christmas-New Year is a social event, an episode which prompts formal pressures by those members of human society who believe in the Christmas-New Year liturgy. If one does not participate in the rite, he or she is made to feel vaguely anti-social. This stress is far more evident in the differences one’s economic situation has than in, say, the religious disparities between Christianity and Jewishness. It is not the extent to which one ascribes to that religion—derived from Jesus Christ, based on the Bible as sacred scripture, and professed by Eastern, Roman Catholic, and Protestant bodies—which determines the success or failure of the Christmas-New Year regalements. It is the limit one eventually places on those economic circumstances which are left soporifically in abeyance from the time one signs the credit card slip to payment’s due date. Christmas trees, airline tickets to visit distant relatives or friends, gifts, bottles of whisky and wine, food, clothes, tinsel, candy canes, cards, party napkins and glasses constitute an ever-increasing higher investment in a progressively worsening economic era. As individuals are stripped more and more of their economic dignity or benefice, Christmas-New Year will take on even less importance. An empty pocketbook is a considerably nasty source of loneliness for most. It might even be thought of as un-Chritstian ( ! ) to suffer a dismal Christmas-New Year at the expense of others who unwrap red-ribboned Cadillac Sevilles or participate in other flaunts of luxuriance which cannot be afforded by the massive adherents of Christianity who by others’ standards are inferior in quality or value. But let’s leave economics out of this commentary. There is something to be said about someone who works hard and saves money to buy his wife a Cadillac for Christmas. Let’s not discuss economic loneliness; let’s discuss spiritual loneliness—a trying task in any society which stresses the value of economic goods over the value of intellectual and spiritual ones!

There are hundreds of millions of people throughout the world who are not going to enjoy this Christmas-New Year—with or without money. They are going to sense unhappiness even if they can afford the ecstasies of drunken revelry, partying, and the excessive licentiousness in Christmas-New Year activities—even if the view of the gloomy pile of credit card slips which stares them in the face at the end of January poses no economic burden. I have heard it time and time again: There is no more depressing day than Christmas Day and no greater hung-over day than New Year’s Day. But why depressing? Doubling of the world’s population every thirty years or so, millions of starving children, billions of dollars spent every year for the purchase of arms, the threat of nuclear annihilation? I believe so. Christmas-New Year is an agitating element that brings to the surface of one’s upper level of mental life that creepy stuff which has lain dormant for a long year. This spiritual forsaken state holds a far more tenacious grasp on souls in our Western Civilization than the sadness of being economically cut off. It hints at far greater consequences than the loss of the Christian’s connections with Christ, Christmas and Christianity. It is intimating that Western Civilization is in the grips of losing itself. Christmas-New Year serves only to remind people that they cannot enjoy themselves. The feelings of bleakness or desolation triggered by Christmas-New Year are barometric readings of the fluctuations within individuals who cannot relate to the realities of the world condition. The instrument readings are indeed dismal. Each year more and more people are becoming alienated. And each year people are pulled farther and farther away from the truths of the world which surround them. They are pulled farther and farther away from themselves. Christmas-New Year does nothing to mold one’s destiny nor lead a person compassionately down the steep slope of life through its gloomy evil, much less maintain an individual in psychological homeostasis. But it is to Christmas-New Year that millions of people swirl each year for spiritual oxygen!

I have another reason to believe something is delusory about Christmas-New Year. I sold whisky and wine for a Jacksonville, Florida liquor distributing company, and I know something about alcohol—its good and bad effects. I observed these mannerisms in the rural areas of northcentral Florida. The United States has a serious drinking problem. But I want to know why, in my territory, fifty percent of my annual liquor sales were made during the last six weeks of the sales year? I want to know if the United States’ number-one-selling prescription drug, Valium (1979), also increases dramatically in sales during Christmas-New Year. I want to know the same about heroin, cocaine and marijuana. Is Christmas-New Year such a joyous occasion because everyone is soothed to unconsciousness or unawareness? Why the need to be propelled to enjoy? There is something definitely out of proper working order in the present state of the drinking and drug-taking Christmas-New Year affairs.

I cannot resist mentioning one final facet that makes my wariness about Christmas-New Year intelligible to me. Having been the eldest in a family of four children, I was in a better position than other members of my clan to contemplate the totality of real things and events pertaining to my Christmas-New Years. My father’s frantic hope that the local drunk, who played Santa Claus for my family, would show up on time, the constant vigil to keep my younger brothers from discovering my mother’s Christmas gift hiding place (the trunk of our car), and the absolutely obnoxious hassle of waiting on long lines to pay for gifts or to have presents wrapped, are only a few of the pains I had to endure to help procure, maintain, and transport the Christmas-New Year matériel. The view of my mother—plopped out exhausted on the living room sofa—was the finishing touch which kept me from summoning any pious strength to find ways to participate in the incorporeal nuances of the Christmas-New Year festival which, I was apprised, created testimonials on behalf of the commemoration of the birth of Jesus Christ and told me to hope for a prosperous and, believe it or not! holy New Year! (Has there ever been one world government which sought—as part of its diplomatic ploys—a holy year for its citizens? Has Henry Kissinger ever negotiated with manners characterized by perfection and transcendence commanding absolute adoration and reverence to the Lord God Almighty?)

I would like to stress two things: one, the preposterous influence of Christianity; two, the growing loss of the individual’s contact with his/her psychological environment. (Schizophrenia is, actually, Western Civilization’s number-one mental disease.) In some ways both conditions interrelate, but the second syndrome is far more pernicious, far more extensive.
Christianity’s bluff must be called before people are to arrive at their own beings. There are too many inhibiting Christian forces keeping Christians from themselves. At life’s Card Table a deceiver who many think to be the whole body of Christian believers, cheats his opponents with a bold bet on an inferior hand trying to make his fellow players withdraw their winning cards. The dauntless wager is Christmas: The only time most Christians go to church, the only time they feel obliged to do so.

Christmas is an innocuous medication given to satisfy Christian patients—whether or not Christians want to be soothed or gratified. It is medicine that is not going to cure any Christian’s ills; it is medicine one is told he/she must take. If priest and worshipper seriously opine that practice of a particular liturgy will heal the faithful ones’ ailments, comfort will follow in many instances. This phenomena is ancient. The certainty of being helped has in itself been attributed to the cause of cure or palliation in matters which call for the relaxation of tension and anxiety even when the uneasiness has resulted in actual physical damage. Psychiatrists call it the “placebo effect.” Pink sugar pills work because the patient has the conviction that they work. At Christmas time, the Christian is told to take a spiritualistic sugar pill to assuage his sacred diseases. If he believes he is ill, the attention he places on his trouble immediately sets into action flights of recourse to sources for the amelioration of the affliction. If Christianity promises alleviation, it is to Christianity that homage is paid as the individual waits for the exorcism of his evil spirits, his hurt. At best, the Christmas-New Year placebo is fleeting. In no way does it remedy the spiritual problems of twentieth-century man and woman caught up in a rapidly changing world. In fact, I argue that Christmas-New Year worsens man’s spiritual quandaries.

In conclusion, I believe that the spiritual loneliness of man is his greatest threat at this time and place in history; that spiritual loneliness results from the inability to relate to the self and Nature in a realistic manner; that spiritual loneliness is further acerbated when faith is put in time-honored solemn practices which have no basis in reality; that if man was truly happy with himself he would enjoy other observances during the year, and Christmas-New Year would not be accorded grotesquely unreal powers of rebirth; that spiritual loneliness is a human syndrome that has reached epidemic proportions and gives evidence of posing still greater menace; that the demise of spiritual loneliness can come if man and woman seek a new interpretation of their places in this universe; that spiritual loneliness is intensified by Christmas-New Year because Christmas-New Year is a false overture administered to man by authoritative church groups to help him find his place in a world he feels lost in but a world which has the possibility of enjoyment and abundant opportunities; that the celebration of Christmas-New Year is proof that man and woman’s alienation is so fierce they must take a desperate binge each year to lie to themselves that they are happy.

I call upon all “Christian” men and women to examine their lives in relation to their place in the world and Christianity’s place in that world.

* * *

Written in Caracas, Venezuela

9 November 1979

Original Title:

Christmas-New Year and Spiritual Loneliness

Revised in Calenzano, Italy

15 August 2002

Authored by:

Anthony St. John
Casella Postale 38
50041 CALENZANO FI
ITALIA
055-887.32.28