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  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 11:55 am on May 15, 2015 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: America, , ,   

    R.I.P. Amerika: “They built good roads…” 

    Houston in the broad daylight

    Houston in the broad daylight

    American cities need to lose weight, and waistlines, fat-ass plastic-wrapped white-bread montrosities—monstro-cities—sprawled-out to kingdom come, but kingdom won’t come like this, not on concrete and steel, asphalt and false expectations, extending out to God-only-knows-where there is no limit by statute good taste or common sense just red lights and turning lanes…

    This is democracy gone horribly wrong, one-man one-vote now obsolete one-man one-car the order of the day, red-light districts everywhere now, and no limit to the number of quickie customers just looking for strange anywhere everywhere doing it in the road living lives and dying deaths in mid-lane even homeless people have cars to sleep in the American way, just look for an empty parking-lot and circle the wagons…

    I get it, the new democracy, that is, but I don’t like it: vehiculocracy, vote with your wheels, just drive somewhere else if you don’t like it here; I look at most cities and only see blight, ugliness, the devil’s workshop: truth beauty and goodness selling out to commercial interests and highest bidders, not the city so much but the endless sprawl, America the worst offender reduced to whipping boy for oil interests and poster boy for bank interest, asphalt concrete and steel; lawyers, guns and money-changers…

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 11:44 am on April 29, 2015 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: America, , Dachau, Nazi, Saigon, , , , , WWII   

    On this date in History…. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, G-L-O-R-I-A….. 

    70 years ago: Dachau was liberated, the oldest of the Nazi concentration camps, paradigm for them all, and home and cemetery to many, simply for the fact of being a threat to Hitler’s intents and purposes. This was America’s entry upon the world stage as dominant power, rivalled for many years only by the USSR…

    40 years ago: Saigon was falling (if you’re American or South Vietnamese), or being liberated (if you’re Communist or North Vietnamese), Americans and South Viet sympathizers evacuated by helicopter if they hadn’t left already. This was the USA’s first clear defeat in war, and a clear message about the limits of power…

    What kind of animal are we, killing and wasting beyond our immediate needs for food and shelter, killing and torturing for the sake of misplaced doctrines and misunderstood creeds? Why does our need to believe in something become a need for greed and a penchant for destruction? We have the mutant gene; we are the other ones, the gift of consciousness becomes the curse of violence…

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 10:27 am on December 21, 2014 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: America, , , , ,   

    Christmas Goes Viral: Festivus for the Rest of Us 

    Babel on in Babylon, the Hanging Gardens (as imagined) and the Tower of Babel

    Everything is a caricature of itself now, and entertainment is king. So Christmas in America is when we all get to return to our childhood fantasies, beyond sugar plums and into consumer gluttony—or not. If Thanksgiving morphs simple thanks toward God into thanks for the goods, then Christmas goes beyond celebrating the birth of Christ into celebrating the birth of consumerism. It doesn’t have to be that way.

    George Costanza’s dad on the old ‘Seinfeld’ series made alternative celebrations official, but I’m starting to warm up to the many ‘orphan’ events that now spring up around this time of year to give the rest of us some reason for the season: simple social camaraderie and spiritual communion, nuclear family optional. ‘Nuclear’ can sometimes be dangerous, after all.

    Christmas—and Christianity—is not alone in pushing their holidays to absurd viral proportions, though. Other countries and religions do it, too. Anyone who’s gone to Thailand for the Songkran water fest (read: ‘water fight’) is witnessing the modern spectacle of what started off as a simple dousing of water as a symbol of renewal. And I hear that the daylight fasting that occurs during Islamic Ramadan says nothing about what happens after dark. This is cultural neoteny, the evolutionary regression to childhood (in biology, literally the decreasing age of reproduction). (More …)

     
    • mary's avatar

      mary 9:52 am on December 21, 2014 Permalink | Reply

      and a happy winter solstice to you. no xmas for us-mas. the shortest day of the year-grand, it means they will be getting longer, if that is a good thing or not i am uncertain. pax

      • hardie karges's avatar

        hardie karges 11:28 am on December 21, 2014 Permalink | Reply

        Yes yes yes, it is all good if we want it to be that way and act accordingly…

    • Esther Fabbricante's avatar

      Esther Fabbricante 6:54 am on December 24, 2014 Permalink | Reply

      Family is first with me – 31 members including in-laws and step children..
      Merry Christmas to you.

  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 7:27 pm on January 7, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: America, ,   

    GUNS, GERMANS, AND STEAL: THE FATE OF AMERICAN SOCIETY 

    “Don’t fence me in,”… just give me a gun…

     The current debates over gun control in the US are nothing new, of course, and, in a way, have nothing to do with guns or murders or bullets or magazines.  It has to do with control.  We Americans don’t trust control of any sort, especially when it emanates from above or from the center, the central government, that is.  Nor is this predilection entirely an American thing, though we’ve certainly carried the argument to its logical conclusion.  It should be noted straight away that this is the same debate—not similar, analogous, or metaphorically mellifluous—that operates in any and all discussions of economic, health, welfare and other forms of policy. 

      (More …)

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 11:58 am on April 20, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: America   

    America-bashing is reaching new heights in the Iraq War aftermath. 

    I know why people hate America. That’s obvious, because she’s arrogant. What I’d like to know is: why is everybody, particularly Europeans, so interested in poking around in America’s closet? The national debt, the savings rate, obesity levels, whatever, it’s like foreigners are keeping score or placing bets or something, mostly betting that America will lose, I assume. Americans are in the game also, though they tend to be conspiracy theorists rather than outright anti-American. Conspiracy theorists look for sinister plots and causal connections to explain the evil running rampant in the world. These they will definitely find, though more likely originating in their own imagination, than in some deep dark archives. Get lives, people! Admittedly America has lost her leadership position in the world, but this doesn’t mean everybody gets to take cheap shots whenever they want. Who cares what America’s debt is? If America had no debt, then the rest of the world would have no dollars! It’s not a perfect system, capitalism. Most systems aren’t. The European attitude is obviously disingenuous if not outright jealous. They had their chance to fuck up the world, of course, and did quite a grand job of it, before almost self-destructing in the World Wars. The United States sacrificed her radical roots to police the world and save Europe from the bear grip of Communism from which it might never have emerged. The world is looking increasingly multi-polar with America, China, and Europe jockeying for first rights. Islam is making a play, but I doubt that the world is ready for a new Dark Age. Life’s just too good for most people, giving the lie to conspiracy, and many can still remember the last Dark Age. Of course, it may happen whether we like it or not, literally, if the lights go out when the oil is all gone.

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 8:26 am on July 14, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: America, sitcoms   

    The thing that separates America from the rest of the world, 

    more than Hollywood, more than rock-and-roll, are sitcoms. No one else even comes close to the slices of life that roll off the prime time sandwich line every night at retail for the homies, wholesale for the rest of the world, at least for those who ‘get it’. Most don’t. Most countries that produce their own shows go for news, variety, games, soap operas, even historical dramas, but few can come up with a true sit-com, endless variations on a non-variable context, essentially doing the same show over and over again, always different. Formerly the butt of jokes from the intelligentsia, sitcoms now draw some of Hollywood’s cleverest writers and has truly established itself as an art form to be reckoned with. As an abstract format largely divorced from current events and local issues, they do especially well in rerun and export, forever immortalizing the phrase, “the one where”.

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 9:22 am on July 13, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: America,   

    The American dream is of Chinese trinkets, 

    mass consumption, two cars in every garage and a bird in every oven, Sunday dinner and Christmas presents. As a child I could never sleep on Christmas Eve, not because I was waiting for Santa Claus (nobody believed that shit), but because I couldn’t stand the suspense of waiting to see what would be in my possession by next morning. Possession is 9/10 of the law, remember. Those are the halcyon days of pure memory, pristine and distinct, etched and beveled by space and time to a fine sheen and polish that belies the exigencies of the given situation. By my teens Christmas might be more like hopping in the car to go run off to the lake to watch the early morning stream rise off the water as the steam rises off my brain from some senseless argument. Family is elusive, as is friendship, just because of all the choices involved, I guess. Freedom is dangerous; role-playing is safe; love is always just out of grasp. I think maybe relationships kill the love that otherwise grows wild in vacant lots. The minute you incorporate, the business goes south.

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 11:28 am on July 12, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: America, ,   

    America is the happy hunting ground of myth and legend, 

    milk and honey on the mind’s tongue, horses and camels for the taking, more than that for the leaving. For millennia, the smart money went north and east, following mountains, following seacoasts, following herds, trekking Siberia. The farther they went, the bigger the payoff. When they went as far as they could go, they went even farther. That’s where the big payoff was, on the other side, mammoth and mastodon, bear and deer, buffalo and cows as far as the eye can see. There’s only one problem: you might not get back. That water level’s a bit finicky. On the other hand, you might not want to go back. Happy hunting grounds are nice, if you’re the hunter, not the hunted. The stupid animals act like they’ve never seen a spear before, just standing there, waiting to take it in the gut. Just wait until the summer and wait until the tide’s out and you can walk right across. Then one summer the men had to wade across to get to the animals, since they wouldn’t come across on their own anymore. Then it just kept getting deeper and deeper. On both sides the animals just headed south for the winter and didn’t go back, so the people did the same. They just followed the animals. Domestication of animals was probably accidental. Once big game was cut off from its endless source, the extant stock was probably selectively corralled for future use. One surprising result of this was likely the realization that the animals became tame in captivity. You could even put reins on some of them. The rest is history.

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 8:19 am on July 11, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: America   

    America is the queen bee, bloated and pregnant, 

    laying eggs in the shape of dollars. When the honeycomb is full, then it’s time to expand the line and found new colonies. Bred on royal jelly and raised on traffic jams, she only leaves the hives in swarms, for maximum protection. America thinks she rules the world, but in fact the world rules her. When she’s outlived her usefulness, the worker bees of the world will abandon her like a sinking ship, and find another frisky cow with big tits and big attitude and big hair. The workers win by default, but only as a historical group. Individually they live and die with the frequency of sunrise, constantly occurring at all times somewhere in the world. America is a concept, a role model, playing the role of empire for the sake of history. It’s nasty work, but somebody’s got to do it. If America did not exist, it would be necessary to create it, a bloated self-assured queen bee kept fed and fucked for common benefit, laying the eggs that the rest of the world needs to pay their bills. When the rest of the world doesn’t need her any more, then they’ll start investing elsewhere. They’ll stuff a new lowly commoner with royal jelly until she lets it go to her head and starts acting like a queen, throwing her weight around and printing money that the rest of us can speculate on.

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 7:13 am on July 9, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: America   

    The smile of a sheep-killing dog defines the Bush administration, 

    the look of a pampered pet thinking he’s getting away with something. Hey, it’s hard ruling the world, very hard. It has to be hard for proper penetration. America’s got her hands in too many pies, her fingers in too many tight spots. You can’t control everything everywhere all the time. It’s simply not possible. The harder she tries, simply the more resentment she engenders. It’s always better to lead by example. Truth, beauty, and goodness will always be attractive. Lies, coercion, and evil will never be. The end result will be the same regardless, justice seeking a path to the light, regardless of how much turbulence has to be endured in the process. Injustice is simply not a workable system in the long run. Truth stands there like a monument to the future, a leather-bound book, a cruel teacher with cane in hand ready to force compliance. Still it works, just like good old-fashioned punishment, forcing the unrighteous into submission.

     

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