Our Modern World

There is a billionaire named Yass

Who told Biden to kiss his ass.

Dear Sir, I most kindly defer

To the man likely to concur

Netanyahu who’ll kiss your side

When he completes his genocide.

Biden, among ungrateful upstarts

You’ve forgotten all your farts

Bill, Dubya, Barack and you

Not to mention that English lark

Blair who made Iraq a filthy stew.

You all got millions to do my will

You made our workers into swill

Plunged us into a fascist dark

Citizens can be killed at will

Zombie police control our state

You brought Trump to seal our fate.

Please dear Sir, You made the armaments

Given to Israel for its bombardments.

You made millions from those sales,

You finance Trump when he fails,

You wont let me  save the kids

Because Israel will hit the skids

Without our taxes to support

Psychopaths that you court

For reasons I find insane,

But I obey just the same.

Look old Joe, I’ll explain.

We rich got full acclaim

By paying politicos the sums

For laws expanding our incomes

To great heights not foreseen.

Our gardens in luscious green.

And kept the people dumb

With crass films and lotto plum,

Till we got a madman on top.

Reforms he’ll see botched

And stomp the unwashed

To make them one big prop.

Dear Sir, you are too cruel

You make us burn fossil fuel

Thousands die from polluted air

Millions starve so you can live

In opulence I can’t forgive.

You gave us 9/11

Plotting for years to get even

And gave us wars without end

So we on your weapons spend.

Don’t you realize

Our heirs will you despise?

Our earthly paradise

Takes on an ugly guise

The animals go extinct

And we are on the brink.

What the fuck do I care

I don’t believe in after-life

I worked hard for my share

The world is full of idiot strife

Best to enjoy what I can

Feed the rest with spam

And screw fools like you

And laugh at what you rue

Cause you are as much at fault

For accepting from my vault

Greedy stuff to be president

Honoured on money bills

In the White House resident.

As sure as I am billionaire Yass

You will kiss my ass.

 local author

DAVID RICHARD BEASLEY

Saturday, June 1, 2024 1:00 - 3:00 p.m. | Simcoe Branch

Meet David Beasley in the National Reading Program. He will share excerpts from his popular books, engage n discussions about his publications, and provide insights while welcoming questions. Mr. Beasley was honoured with the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Medal for his diverse literary works which span various genres.

This reading event was made possible with funding support from the Canada Council for the Arts through The Writers' Union of Canada.

Norfolk County Public Library     ncpl.ca.    519 • 426 • 3506

 

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when 
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

This is the end of April 2024. The university campuses in the United States are flooded with students protesting the genocide perpetrated by the Israelis against the Palestinians in Gaza. They are the only Americans with a conscience. Citizens of the world watch the pictures that can reach TV news of indiscriminate bombing, shooting of defenceless civilians, most of them children but sometimes students, teachers, nurses, grandmothers and especially journalists who try to record the horror that has brought protests into city streets the world over. Meanwhile Jewish students shout anti-semitism, as if that word had some meaning in the present context, as if it were the Jews who were being massacred, as if they had no thought or empathy for the tens of thousands of Palestinians being murdered indiscriminately. 

Worst of all is a man like Mike Johnson, an obscure Republican Congressman made Speaker of the House and thus with responsibility to act with sensitivity and understanding. He gathered a group of Jewish students on the steps of a building of Columbia University in New York City overlooking the mass of protesting students and denounced the protests. Afterwards in a television interview he claimed that Jewish students were being harassed by the protesters, (which later was the opposite), that Hamas, some of whose soldiers attacked Israel to incite the retaliation, killed Israelis and took hostages back to Gaza, were solely responsible for Israel’s War on Gaza. He sounded like a diehard far right Israeli who wanted University Administrators throughout the country to call for police to clear away and imprison the protestors. Johnson is a far right Christian evangelist who wants to pass draconian laws to take the United States back decades to the time when the struggle for liberty and freedom of speech and thought began.To recognize that the Israeli government lies much of the time and that his own government politicians are financed by Jewish interest or are Zionist Jews misinforming the people is beyond his comprehension. He is the exemplar of T.S. Eliot’s the Hollow Man.

The prime example of the Hollow Man is President Joe Biden, christened Genocide Joe because he tied the United States to the Israeli Government that is committing the genocide and sends billions of dollars in arms and aid to that country to continue its killing and thus bring his nation to infamy as complicit in the war crimes. With US military might ready to attack any nation willing to save the Palestinians, Biden, an octogenarian, looking and sounding older than his age, votes against United Nations’ efforts to stop the war. His political career was funded by Jewish oligarchs and like Johnson he is a brain-washed, unimaginative fool lacking the courage to stand up to the mostly Jewish Zionists who have used the United States to build Israeli commerce and weaponry to the detriment of its neighbours while mouthing hypocritically the need for a Palestinian state. Slowly through the changing of laws to give advantages to banks and financial interests, the money-loving men whose aim is to gain power through riches have taken over the mainstream media, the levers of government and inundated the citizens with cries of pity for Jewish sufferings through past ages with such success that a majority of Americans, English and Germans are totally unaware of how they have become mentally and financially enslaved in a financial capitalist economy.

Divide and Rule is a maxim adopted by those who having gained power retain it. Jewish hedge-fund owners and billionaires of any ethnic background backed the political aims of  Donald Trump and Joe Biden and caused such a vicious, hysterical division between those of different political persuasions that the society is crumbling from mass shootings, fanatical storming of capitol buildings, and deadlocks in the legislative branch as well as corruption of the law, begining in the Supreme Court. Few consider the welfare and opinions of those who disagree with them. Civility has been lost. A demagogue like Trump threatens the nation with strong-arm dictatorship and an ambitious Biden is protected from those willing to challenge his leadership by the intrigues of the Democratic Party officials. 

Meanwhile Jewish anti-Zionists protest in vain against the genocide done in their name. The English Jewish directors of the Oscar winning international film featuring the Nazi internment camp pledged to devoid themselves of their Jewishness, which prompted 500 Jewish directors from Hollywood to denounce them and affirm their devotion to Israel and its crimes. The English directors made a courageous and meaningful statement while the Hollywood directors paraded their boorishness and the insignificance of their displeasure. Assuredly Hollywood will never be capable of producing a film of mindful feeling like the one which was awarded the Oscar.

The American government has turned the vast majority of nations against Americans with far greater hatred than the American imperialistic wars had caused. The workers in the White House who left it in anger at Biden’s complicity represent fair-minded Americans. The young students supporting Palestinians threaten to undermine the Democratic vote. But they are just the visible protestors, willing to face beatings and mauling by authoritarian police. There are millions more whose opposition is voiced with neighbours, family and friends. Meanwhile the implacable MAGA millions blindly support the gangster Trump whose administration will be a criminal enterprise. The vulgar, the crooked, the torturer and the gestapo police mixed with a fanatical ignorant army will become the United States for years to come and join the other oligarchies whose aim is greater control through war. A new dark age will settle over the world just as Jane Jacobs predicted in Dark Age Ahead. The five pillars of our society she warned in 2004 were decaying—community and family, higher education, science and technology, governmental representation, and self-regulation of the learned professions—have failed us today. Other books have traced the decline but fewer people read books and the wrong persons in power, the psychopaths, wreak devastation while disarming the ruled with lies and pleasantries.

Classical economists warn that the BRIC nations led by China, Russia, and Brazil by developing economies that lead from the workers to the administrators have greater National Domestic Production than the North American and European nations which have become rentiers where the economies are run by indebtedness to the rich who with compound interest increase their wealth to astronomic amounts while impoverishing the middle and working classes. Imprisoned in a downward spiral after the advice of neo-classical economists who for years fed the nation faery tales and awarded one another Nobel prizes, western nations are doomed to extinction under the control of financial capitalists who have no concerns about global warning or citizens living in tents, cars and doorways. Empty-headed politicians like the American Donald Trump and the Canadian Pierre Poislievre shout warnings, criticisms with demagogic harshness while offering no solutions other than plans to favour the rich. 

The American democratic experiment became a plutocratic sleight-of-hand where hard-right conservatism is a religion, progress is technological and humanism has lost its meaning. Such a condition condones a genocide of unimaginable horror by more than half the population of a nation that one false leader boasted was the shining light upon the hill—a fantasy with devastating consequences.