Surfing the web for the usual rants by Mainstream Americans about "what went wrong with their beloved homeland" and "how it can be fixed," I came across an article by one of my favorite web writers, Mickey Z, "All That's Wrong With America," which address the stuff I've been thinking about recently with a bit more acuity, a bit more venom, than your average "let's agree to disagree" sloshy Republicrat goop.

Besides having the same resentment of cars -- I get especially pissed when I'm walking my dog . . . if Boobus Americanus kills my dog, Bella, I'll take him out for the good of the planet -- I just read a story in a "liberal" (i.e., watered down left) "webzine" about "flag waving" families who lost sons and daughters in Iraq only to be screwed outta hundreds of thousands, such as the one whose daughter stepped on a landmine, leaving behind a kid with someone previous to her current marriage. By "law" the husband/wife gets the $100,000 death pay-off plus $400,000 life insurance (the only time you're worth anything in America is when yer dead).

So, the "liberal" Zine is whining about these poor grandparents who end up having to take care of grandchildren with no money cause it all went to the spouse. First of all, you fuckers SENT your kids to murder strangers for no goddamn reason, now you're forced to live almost as precariously as the black and brown people have lived in your very own beloved USA for the past 40 years (never mind the apartheid state BEFORE the "great society"). Boo-hoo.

SECOND, what does that say about the great "American Unity?" You inherit half a million dollars cause your wife gets blown apart in Iraq and you can't spare half of it for her only kid? Not even $100,000? Fuck these monsters who, if Ares hadn't snagged the occasional Yankee, would be sleeping tight -- have been sleeping tight since 1991 -- in the blissful, willful ignorance that this "thing" they're now "unwillingly" a part of has claimed at least 600,000 Iraqis by 1996, when Madeline Albright admitted the destruction of babies in hospitals was "worth it," not to mention the half a million MURDERED since 2003. Also, grandma had two other children serve in the Navy. Hence, her family's energies had been projected toward the destruction of strangers half a world a way for over a decade until fate caught up with them, and the spouse of their only daughter is too much of an AMERICAN to even give his wife's only child and the parents who'll spend their old age raising her a fraction of the jackpot he won off his wife's death in Yahweh's arid birthplace.

Have I mentioned the spirits of 30 million slain Native Americans reaching through the TV sets to choke Boobus Americanus on his living room sofa? Or the ghosts of 100 million-plus African slaves tearing down the buildings they were forced to erect -- antiques now, worth a bundle -- then ones that is, that weren't destroyed during the Civil War that erupted because the Federal government couldn't bear to let States assert their right to leave the Union and its growing need for wage slaves and taxpayers to replace the antiquated, inefficient slave system?

Just what, exactly, has America ever done FOR me, besides tax, terrorize, and survey me? Just what, exactly, has any Iraqi anywhere, ever done TO me?

Adam Engel can be reached at: bartleby.samsa@verizon.net.  

Other Recent Articles and Poems by Adam Engel

* Google-ized: An Interview with Adam Engel with Kim Petersen
* Carbon Skin
* Tearing Down the Master's House: An Interview With Derrick Jensen
* A Desire Deferred
* The Gray Line
* Free as in Freedom (Part 2): "New Linux"
* Free as in Freedom (Part I): GNU/Linux
* Empire of the Senseless
* Gallipoli for Dummies
* Just Gas
* Subterranean Homeland Blues
* Arbeit Mach Frei
* Parlor Radicals
* Topiary: Call Me Plantman
* 24/7 and Your Dreams
* The Man in the Black Suit: Potentially Dangerous Citizens
* Man in the Black Suit: An Introduction
* Natural Selection
* Revolution and Reform: An Interview with Lenni Brenner
* What?
* What's Left
* I, Clitoris
* Abraham & Sons, LLP
* Enough is Too Much
* Crumblecake and Fish
* Black is Indeed Beautiful: An Interview with Ernest Crichlow
* Pretty Damned Evil: An Interview with Edward S. Herman

* Hall of Hoaxes
* Black and White is Read All Over: An Interview with Tim Wise
* Born Again Republican
* Jew and Me