EMPIRE BURLESQUE

AN INQUIRY INTO POWER

PART ONE: THEN.

Where did they all come from, these crew-cut, imperial loonies, waddling, armoured, gum-chewing, coke-swigging, bellyaching around the world, kicking sand in everybody's face?

Although the United States of America will soon become a black-majority state, the roots of the American Empire lie in our own tribe, within we sorry-assed, white, anglo-saxon, protestant motherfuckers.

New Hampshire, New England, New York, Boston, Virginia, Carolina, Georgetown, the Founding Motherfuckers dressed the New World in the nomenclature of the Old, specifically of Old England and even though they have been augmented by Paddies and Spics and Hermans and po-faced Meinheers, by Chinks and Wops and Dagos and Polacks, it is a boot fashioned on an English last which stands on the world's throat; almost, as inadequates like Milliband might posit, a British empire by proxy. Two nations united by one ruling caste.

Funny how language so very easily masks intent. When Prime Minister Snot, for instance, talks of a moral compass we know that he describes the opposite - ruthless amorality harnessed to the pursuit of political opportunism, vanity, wanton deceit and wickedness at every turn, fair is foul and foul is fair - and yet he continues, is permitted to continue sermonising, skymadeupnewsandfilth reporting faithfully his every fraudulent word, it doesn't matter how scathing is Rupert's barrowboy philosopher, Jeff Randall, after the event; Mr Snot owns the highground of the headline, his words history, Randall's just white noise, just comment, like this. Bizarrely, despite all the evidence that we shouldn't, we permit Uncle Sam, too, up to his nostrils in debt, disease, larceny, blood, atrocity, racism and murder, to write the global catechism. Or some of us do.

I PITY THE POOR IMMIGRANT

When the so-called Pilgrim Fathers, like Pakistanis to Bradford, carried their own mad wee sects across the Atlantic their flight into the unknown was termed as though they were doing not their own will but God's. And so it has remained; the ethnic cleansing of an entire continent, the shackling of millions in slavery, in apartheid; the gang-raping and napalming of Otherness, all this is to God's purpose, America, the last great hope of Mankind; it has been so written and preached now for a couple of centuries at least, the Hollywood machine reinforcing it for one of those centuries. History according to Louis Meyer and John Wayne, Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise. Fuck me, God, we are in trouble.

The industrial-scale warfare of the the twentieth century and the military-industrial complex of today - War Is Prosperity - began in the nineteenth, at Gettysburg and Chickamauga and in the driving from the Plains of the native Americans, the Gatling and the Hotchkiss guns demonstrating the compassion felt by those carrying the White man's burden, the local, the indigenous made villain and slaughtered, the foundries and railroads working overtime; be it the Massacre At Wounded Knee Creek,

A LITTLE ETHNIC CLEANSING

or the Massacre at MyLai, the Torture at Abu Ghraib,

WINNING HEARTS AND MINDS

the Gang-Raping of Fallujah, the Waterboarding at Guantanamo, if Uncle Sam decides that others are sub-human, communist, moslem or some other breed of non profit-making untermenschen then his Momma'sBoy psychobastards can just cut loose, for Democracy, God and Fuhrer.

They've been doing it ever since the nineteenth century, exporting mayhem all over the globe. They don't count Iraqi or Afghani dead, only good injun's a dead injun, Praise the Lord. And pass the ammunition. So far America's crimes have been against the wog, the spic, the nigger, the jap, the slope, the ay-rab, the mex, the cuban and he has not raised his fist or his boot against we white folks - apart from when we were all doing it to Hitler - against his co-religionists, we, from the Old Country; we, meantime, have been reluctant to chastise him, fearful he might smash the crockery, it's what you call a Special Relationship, our Uncle the bullier, we the bullied. We should tell him to fuck off. What's the worst he can do?

IF SOME OTHER FUCKER HAS THEM IT'S DANGEROUS. BUT NOT IF WE HAVE THEM. THEN IT'S REALLY COOL.

ROCK OF AGES CLEFT FOR ME, LET ME HIDE MYSELF IN THEE
AND WHILE THE BOMBERS THUNDER PAST, SHELTER ME FROM BURN AND BLAST
AND THOUGH I KNOW ALL MEN ARE BROTHERS
LET THE FALLOUT FALL ON OTHERS.

a 1960s Armageddon anthem, anon.

The government of the United Rogue States of America has twice detonated nuclear weapons over civilian populations. Good job they were only Japs. Not proper humans. More like Apaches.

A SHITHOUSE NAMED DESIRE.

Holywood and its bastard spawn, Rock'n'Roll, have iconographised the Vietnam Dead Wall, sixty thousand grunts wasted in Indo-China, their names may liveth forevermore, even if they didn't make it past twenty. Yet in one US bombing spree, Operation Rolling Thunder, it is estimated that between sixty and a hundred and sixty thousand Vietnamese civilians died, the devastation and the ongoing deaths from associated toxicity make precise figures impossible; in the US assault of Indo-China, total Vietnamese deaths are estimated to be between three and four million souls, far more munitions rained down on this small country than in the whole of World War Two. And still Uncle Sam fled, hanging from a helicopter, hiding his head up his arse.

DRAFT DODGER SPUNKY BILL AT THE VIETNAM WALL.

MAH FELLOW MOTHERFUCKERS, AH FEEL YO' TITS. BUT LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, IF WE'D A HAD TO PUT UP A WALL FOR ALL THE GOOK SONSABITCHES WE OFFED, ONLY NOT ME, IT'D NEED TO BE FIFTY, SIXTY TIMES THE SIZE O THIS MOTHER, ALL THE WAY OUT THE PARK AND CLEAR ACROSS THE POTOMAC. AIN'T AMERICA WONDERFUL ? VOTE FOR HILLARY NEXT TIME. THAT BITCH'LL SHOW YOU WHAT WAR'S ALL ABOUT.

The entire US political and cultural machine, Infotainment, has somehow erased from history the millions dead, maimed and disfigured abroad and backlit the handful of ghosts at home; everyone from Oliver Stone to Bruce Springsteen, the American Billy Bragg, shifting product to a market of shameless, maudlin, tie-a-yellow-ribbon xenophobia; Oscars and Grammys all round. The maimed vets are still mistreated but Hey, haven't we got some good songs, some great movies, Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket; I never knew Clint Eastwood fought in 'Nam but I'm not surprised, he's a really fit guy for his age; the angry heartbreak of David Morrel's First Blood turned to trash by Sylvester Franchise Stallone, wash away my sins in the blood of the Saviour, John Rambo. The recent past, like the present, made fiction, easier like that; it's the American way.

The Emperors no longer serve. Obama didn't serve, Clinton didn't serve - and his pretend Mrs famously didn't dodge any bullets, either; Bush junior didn't serve, Reagan didn't serve but My, how they do that hand-on-heart shit, I would have served but I was more important at home, being a lawyer, or some other kind of All-American crook.

And the whole obscene Vietnam decade melted into showbusiness and shit journalism, it's reality hi-jacked, here, by cretinous, effete junkies like John and Yoko, to the worthless layabout careers of such as Peter Hain and Tariq Ali and the unspeakable Germaine Greer and in the States to massed choruses of, God spare us, 'sixties protest singers. We Shall Overcome our way to the top of the album charts; Kissinger, McNamara and the rest honoured at home and abroad, only grubby old Nixon copping some shit, and that for burglary, not war crimes.


THE LONG NIGGER HOLOCAUST,


"They're selling postcards of the hanging" is the first line of Mr Bob Dylan's Desolation Row and refers to the factual, printed, celebration of the lynching of an entirely innocent negro fairground worker in Dylan's home town, Hibbing, Minnesota, way up North, on the Canadian border.

Alongside Vietnam, a hundred years after the Civil War and twenty years after Hitler's war ended, a large part of the United States ran its own, good ole boy reich, KKK stormtroopers castrating, tarring-and-feathering and lynching niggers, firebombing their churches, drowning civil rights activists and generally keeping the nigger in his place - or as the Pledge of Allegiance has it :

"I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, .............

........indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.."

Gosh, if only Guido had been active then, those Imperial Wizards wouldna gone short of Pizza.

JFK was a windy, deceitful, golden boy; a vain, gobby, priapic jackanapes, propelled into the presidency by the money and connections of his father, Joe - a Nazi supporter when US Ambassador to the Court of King James in the late thirties - and seized-on by skymadeupnewsandfilth as politics made glamour-product. Whether JFK would have made good on his civil rights rhetoric is unknown but in these matters and most others he and Jacki O were as shallow and frothily insincere as their imitators, Tony and Imelda Blair, and it fell, post-Kennedy, to the apparent redneck, Lyndon Johnson, to ram home to the Deep South what Nuremberg had made clear to les collaborateurs and Quislings and Nazis and Popes in Europe.

The National Guard moved against the segregationists and policed the integration of universities, buses and washrooms; having reluctantly helped defeat fascism abroad, Uncle Sam had been institutionalising it at home , the federal government finally being forced by its wiser citizens to drag the Southern States into the twentieth century. Despite its continuing history of barbarism at home, the US has always felt able to moralise abroad, preaching from a gun barrel, grinding the unGodly beneath tank tracks.

Alone among so-called liberal democracies, Uncle Sam retains, glories in the death penalty, the madder, the sicker, the younger they are, the better. And in the home of God-fearing racism, the nigger tops the bill on Death Row, in mediaeval maximum security lockdown, in frame-ups; is per capita something like twelve times as likely as whitey to do time; despite chained and horsewhipped generations spent creating it, nigger owns an infinitesimal fraction of the national wealth, is far more likely to be unschooled, unemployed, addicted, murdered; never shoulda let them coons off the plantation. America has its own Trevor Phillipses, Keith Vazes, slimeballs, black people gone white, Mr President, suh, being one of them, Preacher Jesse Jackson another, doing very nicely, Uncle Tomming for a living, blethering, in their mansions, on their Tee-Vee shows, about the struggle. Husn now, children, Freedom's coming. Tomorrow. Or the day after. Once we done thrashed these niggers in Afghanistan. And give all yo' money to Wall Street. Jes' like always.

His gangster predecessor having set the Middle East ablaze, the Empire of Obama the First (Black Man To Be...whose DaddyWouldnaGotAJobMowingTheWhiteHouseLawn etc etc) focuses afresh on the wogs in Southern Asia, leading his lambs to the slaughter. Colonel Douglas MacGregor, US Army (retired), an adviser to the Center for Defense Information in Washington, summarizes the hopeless project in South Asia this way:

"Nothing we do will compel 125 million Muslims in Pakistan to make common cause with a United States in league with the two states that are unambiguously anti-Muslim: Israel and India."

Twenty years after the forces of the red army withdrew from Afghanistan in disgrace, the last Russian general to command them, General Boris Gromov, issued his own prediction: disaster, he insisted, will come to the thousands of new forces Obama is sending there, just as it did to the Soviet Union's, which lost some 15,000 soldiers in its own Afghan war. As in Vietnam, America is wasting lives and resources. The British tried for a hundred years to suppress these guys, threw the book at them, bombed them, in the thirties, Saddam-style, with nerve gas, the fuzzy-wuzzies are still there.

A belligerent, bankrupt, stupid empire, greedy, racist and xenophobic, half its citizens believing that God made the world in six days, the other half enslaved to pornography, many spraying one another with bullets, twenty per cent of them without health care, most of them dangerously obese, too many of them lawyers, four per cent of the world's population consuming twenty-six percent of the world's resources - and all because we wouldn't let them pray as they wanted to.

And now they venture into the caves of the world's best genetically-engineered guerilla fighters. When Ahmed isn't fighting a succession of foreign invaders, he's fighting Abdullah Abdullah, his cousin, it's what he does. Obama, the lawyer, thinking that his airy, Ivy League rhetoric and his firm-but-fair, fatuous Sunday School aphorisms will coax Ahmed from his cave is a fool, as well as a knave. Expecting his voters to believe his horseshit is one thing; expecting us to is downright rude of him.

In Part Two: Now. The Imperial Real Estate. How bankrupt America maintains eight hundred lawless military facilities, worldwide. And keeps a straight face.