as a new year approaches and an old one whithers, shrivels and dies it is appropriate to take time to reflect. what has this past year given you? i know that i can answer for myself, and will.

this past year has honed and sharpened my cynicism. banking bailouts, bullshit and boredom. really. we are entrenched in a war against muslims that will never end. we are in debt so high that our grandchildren and their children will never be able to imagine the world our parents lived in. further, thinking that we will be able to have children who can live free is a fallacy. we have been stripped of our freedoms because we are told we need protection. from the boogeyman or from ourselves, who is it? is it both? here in nj we had a guy go to jail (brian aitken) because he had legal weapons that the second amendment granted him. we also had a guy go to jail who had ms and was growing cannabis for personal use. the same crime that cost him 5 yrs and a felony in nj is legal in california. but this is bush league.

the real problem is that there is no hope. right in front of our eyes are horribly painted veneers made to look like everything is goodie gumdrops. but peak up the skirt of reality and you will find a different story. america has a couple years left, if that, before the veil falls. what does this mean, you speak in vagaries? it means we are fucked proper. the middle class has been murdered and soon there will be millions of displaced people with no food in their bellies and no place to live. it is a somber, sober reality that everyone is choosing to ignore.

how can anyone be content anymore with the news of what our politicians are accomplishing. it is all distraction. clever ruse to trick the rubes. obama signed the repeal of dont ask dont tell. wikileaks releases classified cables. tsa this, tsa that. zuckerberg is man of the year. ok BITCHES well what about the death of the north american current. record freezing temperatures in britain and california. all caused by that clusterfuck in the gulf of mexico. what about the giant money funnel called war that robs our families of their fathers and robs the taxpayers of their money. destroyed families. destroyed futures. a giant fucking waste of time. and meanwhile there is a whitehouse press secretary grooming the stories like they groom their puppet before shoving it in our fucking faces. listen, let me level, we know that the situation is a grim motherfucker. but dont paint pansies and posies and posture playful pink ponies and tell us pray for proper promises. dont fucking lie to us. we are in a bad situation that is getting worse you fuckers.

but what is worse. those who deny the fucking shitstorm or those who turn it into rainbows? i dont play well with distractions or deceptions that go against the grain of what i feel. so if the ruse keeps up and they find a way to balance brick buildings on toothpicks until the sun consumes us all then bravo. but i know my soul will not be able to handle living a lie. right now as we speak it is being bent and plied in unnatural poses. something is going to give. and i would rather not be another forgotten sacrifice.

i dont want to hold hands and sing songs. the holidays are just another veneer in a world of veneers. empty. dead. hoping the best for you and yours.

taken from the notebook, jose saramago's foray into the blog world translated and published as a book. following is from 9-18-08, George W. Bush, or the Age of Lies

i wonder why it is that the united states, a country so great in all things, has so often had such small presidents. george w. bush is perhaps the smallest of them all. this man, with his mediocre intelligence, abysmal ignorance, confused communication skills, and constant succumbing to the irresistible temptation of pure nonsense, has presented himself to humanity in the grotesque pose of a cowboy who has inherited the world and mistaken it for a herd of cattle. we don't know what he really thinks, we don't even know if he does think (in the noble sense of the word), we don't know whether he might not be just a badly programmed robot that constantly confuses and switches around the messages it carries around inside it. but to give the man some credit for once in his life, there is one program in the robot george bush, president of the united states, that works to perfection: lying. he knows he's lying, he knows we know he's lying, but being a compulsive liar, he will keep on lying even when he has the most naked truth right there before his eyes--he will keep on lying even after the truth has exploded in his face. he lied to justify waging war in iraq just as he lied about his stormy and questionable past, and with just the same shamelessness. with bush, the lies come from very deep down; they are in his blood. a liar emeritus, he is the high priest of all the other liars who have surrounded him, applauded him, and served him over the past few years.

george bush expelled truth from the world, establishing the age of lies that now flourishes in its place. human society today is contaminated by lies, the worst sort of moral contamination, and he is among those chiefly responsible. the lie circulates everywhere with impunity, and has already turned into a kind of other truth. when a few years ago a portugese prime minister--whose name for charity's sake i will not mention here--stated that "politics is the art of not telling the truth," he could never have imagined that some time later george w. bush would transform this shocking statement into a naive trick of fringe politics, with no real awareness of the value or the significance of the words. for bush, politics is simply one of the levers of business, and perhaps the best one of all--the lie as a weapon, the lie as the advance guard of tanks and cannons, the lie told over the ruins, over the corpses, over humanity's wretched and perpetually frustrated hopes. we cannot be sure that today's world is more secure, but we can have no doubt that it would be much cleaner without imperial and colonial politics of the president of the united states, george walker bush, and of the many--quite aware of the fraud they were perpetrating--who allowed him into the white house. history will hold them to account.

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