An Open Letter to My Fellow Americans

To My Family, Friends and Fellow Americans:

Happy New Year. I hope each of you are well during these turbulent times. To anybody who reads this, I hope you are happy, healthy and whole in this early new year and new decade.

In my first Dispatch in 2020, I would like to talk about Iran and about partisanship in America. I do not often post on Facebook, and I rarely write or speak about politics in public. Though war, the devastating effects of war, and the violent sides of American history and American psyche are subjects I’ve long strived to explore in my fiction, I am only now beginning to take them up in nonfiction and examine them in letters to friends and plumb them in literary essays, like this one.

Because the new war that may be beginning in the Middle East affects me and affects us all, and because like many Americans I’ve been struggling to understand what is happening in our country and across the world today and reflecting on current events deeply, wrestling with them in my mind and heart, I’d like to take this moment to meditate together and to add my voice to the conversation.

A Brief Note Before We Begin

For ease of reading, this letter will be divided into several parts, and each part will be posted separately as an individual dispatch. If you prefer to read the essay in its serialized form, you may do so by following the links below. In the serialized dispatches, there are also additional pictures and photograph galleries. If, however, you prefer to read the entire essay together, as one long letter, in a single post, then please read on.

Thank you for reading, for listening and visiting the Land West of Long Mountain. Let’s begin.

An Open Letter to My Fellow Americans

at the Dawn of a New Decade

An Appeal Against Partisanship in America
& Against War with Iran in Asia

A Peace Essay

by The Land West of Long Mountain Project

January-March 2020

-Part I-

The Info War Blues

WAR IS PEACE.
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

1984, By George Orwell.

From what I can see at the start of 2020, it seems we are in the midst of a fierce information war in America. Each day, this info war intensifies in its fervor, grows in its ferocity and balloons in its fury, even as rockets now begin to fly and bombs to fall for real—in the physical world—and the silent long-winged shadows of drones darken our winter days and bring the gravity of war home to all.

Violence is imminent, we’re told—violence is always imminent in America—fear rules our dim muted mornings, anger reigns over our hungry days, bluster fumes up swift as a snow squall and fills our cold gray afternoons, whitening out the world and blotting out the sunlight, dimming the gunmetal light of the brief day as it blows and brays, and all sides are morally bound they say to save face, seek retribution and pursue vengeance like a sinking star to the utmost ends of the earth, even if revenge leaves all the world wasted and all its life maimed, blind, impoverished, homeless, orphaned or dead. At the dawn of a new decade, many feel as if the long, dark night is finally closing in and the world as we know it is ending.

We talk of tit-for-tats and proportionality in our just, lawful and measured response. We speak of terrorists, necessary evils and the lesser of two evils. We talk of truth, liberty, dignity and justice for all, and we swear solemn oaths in the name of the people, before man and in the presence of God. Finally, they promise that when the beautiful clouds of battle cease broiling and the exquisite ashes of war smolder no more and the necessary noise of democracy-building, humanitarian-militarism and freedom-in-the-making finally abates and falls silent that the Free World will be a safer, better, brighter, more liberal and democratic place for us all.

Sound and Fury
& the Irate Rhetoric of Strawmen

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
…
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other kingdom
Remember us – if at all – not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

“The Hollow Men,” by TS Eliot.

The beauty of bombs bursting, the splendor of rockets in white-hot flight, the bedazzling brilliance of battle and the great glory of war ring out from America, singing like the shot heard round the world and bringing peace to all the earth and building rainbows over every nation under the sun.

But these lofty words, so long overused by pundits and politicians who have never set foot within ten-thousand-miles of a war or worn a pair of boots in their pampered and privileged lives, who have never dressed a wound on a battlefield or marched into the brickkiln of combat to pull a buddy out of the furnace, ring hollow as chaff whipped up in the bitter winter wind of dusk and resonate with all the resounding heart of a strawman.

In our 24/7 news cycle, in this furious fight and strident theater of the absurd, in this crazed and chaotic media landscape in which we forever find ourselves living, it’s hard to find a still and quiet place to stand, and it’s tough to find clear and common ground.

In the Info War raging relentlessly and perpetually around us at the seeming speed of light, where slogans reign supreme and group-think rules, one thing for sure is clear at the launch of this new year: in the media’s war to win our hearts and minds, there’s no time and no room for meditation.

Life in the Age of Social Media Warfare

I refrain from posting on Facebook not because like each of us I don’t desire to share things that are meaningful to me and to connect with friends and others, like-minded and unlike-minded alike. I refrain from posting because even a few minutes of scrolling through my news-feed shows me how much tension and conflict there is in our country, even among my family and friends, and how bitterly divided we stand as a nation.

Anger, division, resentment, conflict, infighting, embittered and embattled dialogue, potshots, and the slinging of slurs and personal insults are hard to watch and upsetting to witness, especially among friends and family you love and a country you care for and call home, even when you’re abroad. Some may argue that this is simply the chaotic chorus of democracy and the rabbleous theater of free speech playing out on the great stage of America. Maybe.

Impassioned dialogue inspires me immensely, demagogic rabble-rousing does not. Great drama is a delight to behold, and a Greek chorus, even when tinged with the cacophonic, is pure music to the ears and sublimity to the soul. But is the drama of democracy and the cacophony of free speech really what we’re watching and hearing in our country today, or is something else playing out on the national stage?

The Great Deranged Drama
of American Democracy
(Act I)

“All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.”

Captain Ahab, from Moby Dick, by Herman Melville.

And who/what, we might ask, is offstage, behind the scenes, presiding in the shadowed wings, both to stage-left and stage-right, pulling the puppet strings and making the mad marionettes move and the ventriloquial mannequins sing and dance, even as the Machiavellian muppets scream, and the sideshow freaks from the theme-park circus and the infuriated geeks from the carnival down the street pantomime an altogether different play of their own against the backdrop of a gargantuan American flag streaming in the breeze, blowing its banners of black oil and dripping blood to the crimson wind, high above some desiccated western prairie or Middle Eastern desert, some terrible and alien, moon-like wasteland, the flaming, gold-fringed flag embossed with a colossal cross and superimposed with a fierce-beaked and fiery-eyed bald eagle, wings unfurled, talons splayed, as the majestic and monstrous bird of prey descends like a supersonic drone upon its pixelated quarry, moving in lightning-like for the cold-blooded kill?

All the while, on the dark side of the moon, behind the raven-veiled curtain, the bombs, bombs, bombs fall, fall, fall on Gaza, Gaza, Gaza, O woeful Gaza!, eliciting not a sound of sympathy from the shills and not an iota of pity from the shrilling chorus, and the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen rage on, in between well-heeled and well-needed commercial breaks for the Great Upcoming 2020 Election and the Super Bowl. The long, slow, steady, cold and calculated killing of Gaza may break your heart, as it rends mine, but empathy is a virtue and an emotion apparently in short supply in the USA. Humanity, like freedom, equality, prosperity and justice, is reserved for some, not for all, in America.

So let the bombs fall, fall, fall and the rockets rain, rain, rain down on Gaza, Gaza, Gaza and let the children of Palestine walk barefoot and bleeding into the shrieking and screaming metallic nets of the mad-barking machine guns, let the explosive-bullets blaze and the eagle-eyed snipers reign, let the broken bodies of the children of Gaza mount, mount, mount, no matter, we’ll be all right here in the USA, we’ll be just fine and dandy, living life, enjoying liberty and pursuing happiness, we’ll be merry as the sun is bright, so long as the Super Bowl is a good game, the day warm and bright, no rain, so long as blissful ignorance never breaks, and so long as we never think about the unpleasant fact that Jesus of Nazareth was also once a barefoot, olive-eyed and brown-skinned, hopscotching kid, laughing and playing in sunshine and shade in Palestine, whittling wood in the cool arbor of a fig tree and dreaming up azure angels afire and pearly doves a-flying in his heavenly head, the irate archangels wheeling white-hot swords of terrible wonder above the gold-crowned and bald-faced kingly heads of the world, and the ivory doves and alabaster birds shearing the firmament asunder as they shower shining rainbows of peace and justice down across the earth— we’ll be all right here in the USA, we’ll be just fine and dandy, so long as ignorance remains blissful and we never think about these unpleasant facts or the fact that the bombs and bullets raining down on Gaza, even now, say: “Proudly Made in the USA.”

The Great Demented Drama
of American Democracy
(Act II)

“The Devil does his best work on television.”

Bridget Chiao Clerkin, Writer & Author.

Meanwhile, on a parallel stage to this absurdist play, the Moderate Rebels and the Academy-Award-winning White Helmets cry out by day for no-fly-zones and aerial-bombardment and humane intervention from the West, cry out in the name of God and humanity, even as by night they raise high the onyx-and-alabaster flag of ISIS and march soot-booted with Al-Nusra in their terrible, black-turbaned and obsidian-hooded, jihadi robes, bought by Mossad and paid for by the CIA and designed by Saudi Wahhabis in Riyadh, through the ruined towns and razed cities, from Aleppo to Idlib, Raqqa to Douma and Mosul, going from house-to-house, cutting the throats of the victimized, beheading the brutalized, enslaving the impoverished, torturing the innocent and terrorizing all humanity, while plotting their next sarin attack against the populace, which, they’ve already been assured by their backers, bankers, funders and friends in London, Tel Aviv and Washington, and by the OPCW, MSNBC, BBC, NPR, Fox News and CNN, will be blamed unequivocally on the evil dictator in the high white ivory castle, forever petting his black cat and chanting aloud demonic verses from the Koran, that unholy book of the Devil and that ungodly gospel of Satan—the hated and the hateful dictator and despot forever murdering his own people and striving his most sadistically to preserve his totalitarian regime at all costs and to usher in the messianic end-of-days and to welcome the Anti-Christ to earth.

And if this delirious drama wasn’t already mad enough for you, lo, behold!

Even now, an omni-theater-sized TV drops, emerging deus-ex-machina-like, from the cavernous dark and yawning dome above, the ribbed rafters of the roof leviathan-like, as if the whole theater lay bellied in the bowels of a great white whale. On the TV screen, twenty-nine-thousand candidates for the Highest Office in the Land parade, jumping and hopping, striving to leap through the laser screen into your lap. They pamper their pomaded hair and pander to you; they beseech you to give up your bucks, they beg you to to donate to their heroic campaigns your hard-earned dollas, dollas, dollas—they must have your dollars to keep well-oiled and fatly-fed the insatiable machines of their noble campaigns—and they implore you to vote for them. “VOTE, VOTE, VOTE!” they rant, they rave, they cartwheel and caterwaul. “This is the most important election of our lifetimes!”

And when you work up the courage to humbly and sincerely raise your hand and ask the twenty-nine-thousand candidates what they can do for you and your neighborhood, as if synchronized by some unseen Maestro, they clamber and climb over one another, fighting and vying, clawing eyes, pulling hair, berating both the Incumbent and each other, flipping and flopping in the flying mud, praising the Party without apology, while the bipartisan corporate cheerleaders of the brain-dead Republic root and toot them on, hounding them, bedeviling the crazed candidates, before they, the poor distraught presidential hopefuls, spider-webbed-eyed and strung-out, beleaguered and at the ends of their own mortal ropes, finally fix their suits and straighten their red-and-blue lapel pins and stand on their heads and spit out bright pennies and shiny quarters.

“Oh, we’ll do anything, anything, anything under the running sun,” they answer and declare dutifully. “We’re good whores and fine, red-blooded, God-fearing, patriotic Americans. “Whatever you want is our wish, kiddies, but first you must part with your meager bucks, give us your beloved greenbacks, your hard-won and worth-less federal reserve notes—don’t worry, they’re going to a great cause—so stop asking so many questions, just shut up already and give us your bloody money and your damned VOTE!”

The Terrifying Truth and Mystery
Within the Allegory of the Cave

“I want you to go on to picture the enlightenment or ignorance of our human
condition as follows. Imagine an underground chamber, a great cave…”

“The Parable of the Cave,” Book VII, The Republic, Plato.

Who/what, we must ask, is directing the furious drama and conducting the cacophonic chorus, and why do we, the American people, sitting angrily in the audience, dumbstruck at the confounding drama and perplexed by the bizarre spectacle and absurd charade, feel something is so terribly amiss? Why do we feel as if we’re living in the matrix and our liberty is illusory?

And if the drama of American democracy is so wonderful, why do we wonder if we in fact freely bought these tickets and elected to come to this strange show tonight, or if those shackles padlocked around our ankles and bolted to the bedrock floor mean that we’re not willing participates in this ludicrous play after all, but prisoners held hostage in an insane asylum, detainees straight-jacketed and dungeoned in Plato’s cave and primordial matrix, watching the flickering shadows on the wall rant, rage and rave, and commit unspeakable acts of the absurd—cerebral genocide, the wholesale slaughter of the intellect, self-lobotomy and self-immolation, murder of the mind—while we sit hapless and hopeless, malnourished, hungry for truth and starved for rationality, powerless to turn our heads and behold, face-to-face, the puppeteers and marionettists, the prison masters, whom we are sure are there, as surely as our beating hearts and reasoning minds tell us this cannot be reality, that there is a world of light—lithe, celestial and luminous—where intelligent, rational and free beings walk and breathe cold and clear, rarefied air in radiant upper climes—brave, free and fearless as the day we were born—somewhere above and beyond this dank cave and bleak basement in the subterranean bowels of the Grand Imperial Armada Slave Ship of the World that even today, in our so-called free and modern times, at the rose-dappled and blood-drenched dawn of a new decade, still plunges headlong through the barren salt seas and plumbs the black ghostly oceans of the earth, bound for whatever foreign land lies on the horizon and whatever unexploited country awaits beyond the dark haunted waters with a dollar to be had, a nation to be pillaged, a free people to be enslaved and an ungodly profit to be made?

When the Long, Dark Curtain Falls,
Does the Drama Resonate?

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, when the great deranged drama ends for the day and it’s time for us to get up and go away, until tomorrow, do we leave the theater feeling elevated, enlightened, ennobled and wiser, or do we feel dumbed-down, dejected and depressed, and does the drama resonate in our hearts or leave us disturbed, gutted and hollowed out, distressed, dispirited and sick as a strawman staked in a wind-scoured field on the frontier of the blood meridian at sundown?

When watching or participating in the great drama of American democracy, these are the questions We the People must meditate on and ask ourselves with fearless courage of the heart and ruthless bravery of the mind.

These are some of the critical questions, the existential and exigent mysteries, and perhaps the unspoken truths, that America must plumb and reckon with if America ever truly aspires to be great, free, brave, full of grace and worthy of its praise.

-Part II-

Breaking Through the Blues:
or Waking Up, Tuning In,
Paying Attention and Singing Praise

“Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”

“Sometimes,” by Mary Oliver.

All of this is to say: the great drama of American democracy can be at best a bit bamboozling at times. So? So I flick off the boob tube, nix the idiot box, and I sign back out of Facebook and post nothing. I post nothing because I am unsure of where my voice can fit into the conversation and because I have no desire to sow seeds of discord and plant disinformation and to escalate conflict, intensify contest, and participate in partisanship, especially among family and friends.

Also, I do not want to speak and say anything if I cannot be certain what I’m saying is accurate, factual and informed. As we all know, it is exceedingly challenging today amid our endless info wars, social warfare and our grand democratic theater of the absurd to be sure what we believe we know is accurate, factual and well-informed.

Further, I do not want to speak unless I feel the thing I have to share will help elevate the dialogue and elevate the mind, heart and spirit of my fellow man. If I write or speak, I want my reader or listener to walk away feeling better about him or herself as a human being alive on the earth and more hopeful about life and the world, even if it takes hard work to earn that hope and deep ache and break in the muddled muscle of the heart to behold the beauty of humanity and see the sublime in everything under the sun.

The Act of Speaking Less,
the Practice of Listening More

“And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it
Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin.“

“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” by Bob Dylan.

The grace of this world, the beauty of life, and the perfection of all things are here, ever-present and perfectly-eternal, if we can pay attention and tune into them, into the grace, the beauty and the perfection all around us. Mystery and wonder are here, too, palpable and plentiful, and we can experience them and their joy daily, if only we take the time to wake up each day and if only we have the courage to open the doors of our hearts and let mystery, wonder and joy through.

In short: I refrain from posting because I do not want to stand up and sing until I know my song well. I do not want to speak unless I’ve meditated on my words deeply and truly reflected upon the words and songs of others. For in my humble experience on this earth, I learn best when I speak less and listen more.

Attention Precedes Prayer,
Astonishment is the Gateway to Mystery
and the Doorway to Wonder

“The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed
whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard.

For as the poet Mary Oliver reminds us in so much of her work, as the writer Annie Dillard teaches us in her prose, prayer is not the practice of speaking, but the act of standing in astonishment and paying attention to the natural world. Prayer is the moment of attentive silence that comes before we open our mouths and utter our prayers aloud. Prayer is the attentive silence that rings and resounds in the temple and cathedral of our sacred heart, resonant as a golden bell, piercing and poetic as a psalm, pealing as a crack of thunder out of the gathering winter gloom, yet cool, calm and clear as the tolling waters of a summertime river forever running its singing stream toward the sea.

But really, I feel this is true, too: that there is nothing I or anybody could post on Facebook that would be better for you or me than for each of us to turn off Facebook and go outside for a walk or run, have a friendly conversation in person with our neighbor, set the table and make dinner for our mother, admire a green leaf of golden grass or a golden-and-green grasshopper perched and poised to leap like a world-renowned acrobat from the bow of its brilliant blade of grass into the boundless blue.

There is nothing that any of us can post on Facebook that would be better for us than to stop scrolling and to step outside and stand spellbound in awe and wonder before the bright whinnying warmth of the sun by day, the dark majestic beauty of the star-spangled firmament by night.

There’s nothing on Facebook that’d be better for us than for each of us to simply sit and still our hearts, brew a cup of Kashmiri kahwa, take a deep breath and inhale from our nostrils to our souls and soles the rich aroma of spiced green tea infused with sticks of cinnamon, crushed cardamom, flakes of almond and springs of saffron, before we finally plant our face in a real book and turn each delicate paper page with our hard-worn hands, slowly, deliberately, deliciously, with great thought and deep care, as the flowering tree of astonishment blooms within us and plants its own rich roots deep in the soil of our earthen hearts and cosmic souls, and the book carries us farther and farther away into the world and universe of the story.

Living in the Social Media Age Blues

“Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no social media and sang at their ease:
They weren’t the human race, my dear, they weren’t the human race.”

Master Ma Yonghao-zi, Part-Time Bard of Gansu.
(After W.H. Auden’s Refugee Blues)

Social media, invented to make us happier and more connected, supposedly, is making us anxious, irritable, miserable and leaving us lonely, isolated, and divided. We scroll, we scroll, we scroll. Swipe left, swipe right. Occasionally we click.

Finally, when hunger hits our guts or our urge to piss can’t be pacified any longer, when our eyeballs can no longer bear the electronic brutality of our screens or our poor backs and butts the harshness of our chairs, when our legs begin to atrophy, we put our wretched gadgets down. We sigh a deep breath of relief. And when we hobble up and walk away, waddling into the kitchen or scurrying to the toilet, we often find that instead of feeling inspired and renewed we’re shot through and through with the blues. Gloomy, depressed, dejected. Our souls sink, our hearts hang on the floor.

And so we live, backs bowed, head-down, eyes glued to our gadgets, moping through our lives and the modern world, wondering when on earth the zombie apocalypse is finally going to arrive.

And so we trudge on through the drear cellars and rock-bottom basements of our glum souls, struggling in the depths of our gray days to recall some other world and some other days, that, though we can now only faintly remember them, sing to us from a shining merigold past with an inspired poignancy that stirs our souls and makes us at once want to laugh and to weep, a luminous poignancy so radiant and so palpable that it dazzles our eyes and sends aching ripples of delight through our bodies and bones, until finally we do laugh, aloud and uproarious, the mad din rattling our ribs and gutting our stomach, as we throb and tremble with the pangs of yearning, with the pangs of birth, death and rebirth.

The World Beyond the Window

“Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees, 
the mountain and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.”

“Wild Geese,” by Mary Oliver.

We roar until our bellies ache and our eyes well up and our laughter turns to muddled tears of joy and sorrow; we roar until, finally, our animal bodies can’t bear anymore, and we break.

All the while, outside, in the world beyond our windows, life and the earth go on. The sun shines, rain falls, rivers run, squirrels play in the daffodil and dandelion daylight, even as bumblebees buzz in the flaxen air, floating pollen-like through the ether, alighting on blossom after blossom, doing the work of the world freely, not out of fear of future poverty or the thirst for profit, but out of the bounty of their bumblebee hearts, out of their intrinsic and indelible love for life, yet all the while enriching themselves infinitely, and birds fly through the sapphire sky, winging their wild way home, light-hearted, heavenly and free as the rarefied air through which they fly, weight-less as the air that buoys their feathers and fills their hollow bones.

Who, we might ask ourselves, are the rational, intelligent and civilized ones? And who, we might wonder, better embodies the being of God, a man or a bumblebee?

Praise, Presence and Joy
in the Perfection of Things

“Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”

“Fern Hill,” by Dylan Thomas.
Listen to Dylan Thomas read “Fern Hill” here.

What I’m struggling to say is: our childhoods are gone. We can’t go back. Those long-ago summer days when the leaves of the trees rippled in the breeze and played green and golden in the sunlight live now only in our memories. Our first kisses, first crushes, first loves. They’re all gone, lost. But that doesn’t mean they still don’t resonate, resound and live within us. But this doesn’t mean that the world today is any less full of wonder than it was when we were children, apple-eyed and grass-kneed, fresh and new to the earth.

Back then, in the beginning, all life seemed to shine in an awesome miracle, a strange and wonderful parade and pageant of life. Well, friends, the wonder was never really in the world. The wonder was in us. And there will never be any more or less wonder under the sun than there is now. The miracle of life is ongoing, ever-present and eternal, renewing itself each time a fresh leaf of grass sprouts forth from the cold muddy spring earth to face the sun and the warm windfall light of the new day. The miracle of life on earth is renewed each time a flower blooms and a child is born.

As for us, the parents, our own lives are renewed by the aching joy that wells up in our hearts and fills us to the brim when our babies are born, when we welcome our sparkling children into this world and make a silent vow to love and care for them forever, a vow that is surely a kind of prayer. In this way, we participate in the ritual of being, we play a role in the great drama of existence, and our work, at once common and profound, humble and exalted as the bumblebee’s, lives at the center of creation and at the heart of the ongoing miracle of life on earth.

The Work of the World is Love,
and Our Job is to Follow our Bliss

“If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been
there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is
the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will
open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”

Joseph Campbell, Mythologist, Writer, Teacher.

And for those of us who have no children, our work in the great drama of life is the same. Whenever we love somebody or something more than we love ourselves–whether that someone is a sick spouse or an aging parent, a desperate friend or a lonely neighbor, or whether that something is our vocation or an ideal to which we aspire–we are doing the work of the world and participating in the ritual of giving and receiving, the awesome drama of living and being, and so our lives become both blissful and blessed. A blessing to all those whom we love and to all who love us in return, a present to them, and a blessed gift to ourselves.

The work of the world is love. And our work is to participate and play a role in the great drama of life. Our job is to follow our bliss, and our vocation lies where the world’s great, deep need meets our deep love and great joy. That is: where the world’s hunger and your passion converge is where your work on earth resides, and it is in this holy marriage where you’ll find your bliss and experience what it is to live a rich and meaningful life.

Here and Now,
saith the the World

“Do not dwell on the past, do not dream of the future,
concentrate the mind on the present moment.”

Siddhārtha Gautama, The Buddha.

Here and now, friends. The world beyond the window beckons. Neither rue nor yearn for the past, for the past is gone. Likewise, don’t fret or fantasize about the future, for the future does not exist, and it never will. Praise, presence and joy in the perfection of all things. This is the eternal prayer of the earth and the daily prayer of every wild winged thing that sings in its white-hot flight under the sun or walks with great slow loping grace on its four holy legs upon the earth.

We’d be homo sapiens, wise men, indeed, friends, to hear this wild prayer, heed its holy song, and to love and learn from all of our neighbors on earth.

Breaking Through the Blues

Trouble in mind.
I’m blue, but I won’t be blue always.
The sun’s gonna shine through my backdoor someday,
The wind’s gonna rise and blow my blues away.

“Trouble in Mind,” by Lightnin’ Hopkins, Bluesman.

Social media, created to make us all happier and more connected, they say, is making us all miserable and leaving each of us less connected. Go figure.

But the fact is that social media is merely a medium, and we can use that medium as we choose. As the writer and my friend, Lisa Horiuchi, reminds us, “Your beating heart is the material that is carried through that medium.” This is what is important in social media and this is what matters: our minds, our hearts, our spirits, and the ability to share our unique thoughts, individual yearnings, and original visions of the world with one another. Vanity may always remain, and that’s fine, for good and bad we’re vain creatures, but if we share in this way, there is the real chance of resonance and the awesome possibility of sincere and meaningful connection.

Thankfully, the national conversation going on in our country is not all deranged drama and absurd theater, all sound and fury, inflamed insanity. There are indeed many wise, thoughtful, compassionate, clear-eyed and calm-voiced, determined people in our nation working hard to break through the incessant Info War and Social Warfare and shed some real light on the current events unfolding in our country and throughout the world. For me, these enlightened voices are a source of inspiration and a pealing psalm of clarity and steady stream of lucidity amid the riotous din and the dim, roiling flood of our turbulent times.

Transcending the Info War
& Breaking Free of Social Warfare
and Partisan Politics

Unfortunately, we rarely find these voices in our corporate mainstream media, and we must look elsewhere, far beyond our pundits, politicians and partisans, to the rising independent media movement in our nation, many of whom use social media thoughtfully and beautifully, with intelligence, creativity and humanity, if we truly desire to understand what we’re witnessing in our world today and if we hope to rise up and break free, lotus-like, from the info wars and the societal warfare in which we found ourselves forever mired.

Please hear me: this is not a partisan post. In fact, one of the primary reasons I refrain from commenting on politics in social media is because in January 2020 I’ve come to despise the Democrats and the so-called left in our country as much as I abhor the Republicans and the so-called right.

It is not either party alone I scorn, it is partisan politics that I rebuke. And it is the degrading lie and illusion of partisanship in America to which I would now like to turn a meditative mind and an eviscerating pen.

-Part III-

A Bipartisan American Rebuke

Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren’t the human race, my dear, they weren’t the human race.

“Refugee Blues,” by W.H. Auden.

When I speak of the Democrats and the Republicans, I refer to the elite professional politicians among the ruling class in both parties who reside in Washington, DC. I do not refer to our local and state representatives, who may indeed be sincere and good people trying their best to represent us in our governments, as it is their solemn job and sworn duty to do.

When I speak of the Democrats and the Republicans, I am speaking of our presidents, vice presidents, secretaries of state and defense, and the most prominent senators and congressmen and congresswomen who sit on the Senate’s and House’s most powerful committees and who receive the most traction in our national media and the most funding from our corporations and who are regarded as the people and the powers running our country. All of them reside in the District of Columbia, and my rebuke centers almost wholly on them and on Washington, DC.

Miserable Mongers of Fear
& Wily Peddlers of War

“War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest,
easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.
It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which
the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”

War Is A Racket, by General Smedley D. Butler.

I include Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill and Hillary Clinton and John Kerry in my rebuke as fervently as I do both George Bushes, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, as I include President Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo and Mark Esper, and the specter of John Bolton, as I include Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell, as I include Eisenhower and Carter.

All of these presidents and prominent politicians among DC’s ruling class, both past and present, have been complicit in not only waging our nation’s imperial wars abroad but complicit in US war crimes and in crimes against humanity. All have also helped to undermine the United States Constitution.

In regard to the US’s decades-long war on Iran, many of these people have played a significant role, from overseeing coups to establishing cold wars in the 20th century to imposing cruel sanctions on the Iranian people and laying the groundwork for a hot war with Iran in the 21st century.

And like many Americans, I am fed up, frustrated, infuriated and repulsed by the lies, propaganda and disinformation that is trafficked by and passed off as news and critical analysis from CNN, MSNBC and NPR, as I am fed up by the same bombastic crud and hateful hyperbole we get from Fox News and the so-called conservative media outlets in our country.

All of these corporate news outlets, whether dubbed liberal or conservative, pander to their respective audiences and participate in the fear-mongering and the war-peddling that is keeping us embattled at home, while reaping so much ruin around the world.

The Fourth Estate is Failing Us

“I thought I’d find a few photographs that were harsh in their depiction of
war and capture some of its cost. Yet, I found virtually none that you wouldn’t
be able to swallow easily with your breakfast. It seems like an institutional
policy to choose pictures that you could hang on your living room wall.
Journalism is supposed to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.
The Times does neither.”

David Shields, author of War Is Beautiful:
The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict.

As for our national newspapers and print journalism, it has long been established that the New York Times has played a prominent role in selling US wars to the American people, from Vietnam to Iraq, and that the Washington Post, now owned by CEO of Amazon and billionaire, Jeff Bezos, has a close relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency.

In the lead up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, an action now seen unequivocally as disastrous, fraudulent, immoral and wrong, perhaps the most detrimental decision in modern American history, the New York Times and the liberal left mainstream media were instrumental in promoting the propaganda of the war-hawks in Washington. Tony Judt’s now famous essay from the London Review of Books, “Bush’s Useful Idiots,” speaks to this fact powerfully and poignantly with important implications.

The point of this criticism is to get at an important truth: these wars do not happen by accident. Margaret Atwood, the Canadian novelist, once said that “war is what happens when language fails.” But after a decade of reading and writing about war, I feel it is also accurate, and maybe more so, to say, “War is what happens when language succeeds.”

War is not what happens when words fail, war is what happens when words win. When compassion, commonsense, courage and human decency fail, and propaganda and lies prevail. War’s what happens when we lose faith in love and wed our hearts to hate, our lives to fear, our fortunes to greed, and our sacred honor to savagery.

When Propaganda Prevails
& the Influential Abet the Powerful

The US’s wars in the Greater Middle East today have not happened by chance. They have been carefully crafted and cunningly planned over the course of not days and weeks but months, years and even decades. And when the time comes, late in the game, to finally get the American people on board and to sell these fraudulent wars to us, the masters and architects of the wars turn to their bosom friends and business associates, the mainstream corporate media, the once-celebrated fourth estate.

If it were not for the mainstream media’s often bipartisan work in helping to promote, propagandize and finally sell Washington’s wars to the public, the wars in the Middle East and West Asia and the immense suffering, death and destruction they have wrought upon millions of innocent people may never have been unleashed to begin with.

When I was an English and Journalism major and undergraduate student at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, we were taught that the media in America was the fourth estate and that the ultimate job of the press was to help check the power of the government and to help hold the powerful accountable to the American people. But the truth is that none of the major media corporations in our country today truly serve We the People or work to check our rulers and their often belligerent and barbaric agendas.

In fact, the mainstream media in America, both from the left and the right, often comes together and works bipartisanly to abet the powerful and to promote their militant agendas abroad.

Proud and Self-Avowed
Liars, Cheaters and Stealers

“What’s the cadet motto at West Point? You will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do. I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. (Laughter.) It’s – it was like – we had entire training courses. (Applause.) It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”

“Why Diplomacy Matters,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Texas A&M, April 2019.

President Obama was a good actor and a fine liar with a silver tongue; President Trump is a poor actor and a bad liar with a platinum one. Barack Obama spoke politely, played the game to which he was (s)elected to play, and wore the mask of the empire, keeping the face of the beast veiled. Donald Trump speaks savagely, often refuses to play the presidential game, and he declines to wear the mask, preferring to let the beastly face of the empire go naked, unabashed and unveiled. President Obama was a polite apologist of imperialism, President Trump is wantonly unapologetic of US empire.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is a whole other kind of animal. At a panel with Army ROTC cadets in Rudder Auditorium at Texas A&M in April 2019, he boasted outright and openly, with pride, candor and humor in his voice, to breaking his oath from West Point and being trained in the practice of lying, cheating and stealing while he served as Director of the CIA.

The frank declaration, though not utterly unbelievable, is truly remarkable coming in public from the sitting Secretary of State. What is incredible and deeply disturbing is the mainstream media’s bipartisan failure to call out Secretary of State Pompeo by his own avow and challenge him much more vigorously on his recent testimony about the threat of imminent attacks by Iran and the absolute, unequivocal, urgent necessity for the United States to have assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani.

A Bipartisan Call for Courage and Conviction

“Secretary of State Pompeo. On April 15 at Texas A&M University, before an auditorium full of students, you boasted outright and openly about lying, cheating and stealing while you served as Director of the CIA. Further, you added, smiling, it reminds you of the glory of the American experiment. Secretary Pompeo, my question for you today is how do you assure the American people that you are not lying to them now about Iran and about everything to say?”

The question has never come. Why will the mainstream media never ask the Secretary of State this most obvious and vital of questions outright to his face? Asking such a bold and blunt question to such a man as Mike Pompeo indeed requires tremendous courage, conviction and bravery. But if our media truly aspires to serve as the fourth estate and to work on behalf of the American people, they must have the moral mettle to ask the essential and urgent questions of our day, even as We the People must be brave and possess the same courage, conviction and moral certitude to challenge both our media and our leaders in all that they say and do.

At the dawn of 2020, ruthless skepticism is essential. We must question everything. This is not America-bashing. This is true patriotism. This is our civic duty. Skepticism is sane and rational. Critical thinking is natural, it is intelligent, it’s human. It’s American, too.

Partisanship is a Trap Intended to Keep
We the People Divided & Warring with One Another

Mike Pompeo, along with being an unabashed, unapologetic, bald-faced liar by his own avow is the current head of the US State Department and one of the foremost proponents in waging a new war in the Middle East with Iran. Lawrence Wilkerson has also called Mike Pompeo and his life-long friend at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, “Christian fundamentalists from West Point.” Colonel Wilkerson made this bold and blunt claim because it is well-known in Washington that Mike Pompeo, like Mike Pence, believes in the foreign policy of rapture.

That is, the Secretary of State believes that he and the United States are enacting the policies in the Middle East that will literary help to bring about the Biblical end-times, the apocalypse and the rapture of Jesus Christ. This is Mike Pompeo’s personal faith and his public policy as Secretary of State. To say, therefore, that we the people must be skeptical of everything Secretary Pompeo says and does would be a savage understatement.

The mistake, however, is to read all this and to conclude that Republicans are liars, cheaters, criminals and crazies. Mike Pompeo’s affiliation with the GOP is of far less significance than his powerful positions as Director of the CIA and Secretary of State. The point to deduce is that our public officials and elected representatives and supposed leaders are proud and self-avowed liars, cheaters and stealers. Democrats and Republicans have both occupied these prestigious positions in national defense, diplomacy and intelligence.

In 2020, Don’t Vote “Blue No Matter Who,”
Vote Anti-Establishment No Matter What

The criminality being perpetrated in Washington is bipartisan. It is not Democrats or Republicans who are committing crimes and deceiving us all, it is the United States Government. Not the United States of America—the Union, the Confederation of States, the Constitutional Republic, our country— but the District of Columbia, the headquarters of our rogue federal gov’t. This is why criticism of Washington and the federal government is patriotic. We the People are standing up in defense of our country and Constitution and in defense of the natural, fundamental and universal rights of human beings around the world against a violent and lawless, amoral aggressor.

And the bottom line is this: our government has openly lied through their teeth to us. The administrations of both Donald Trump and Barack Obama have been devastating for many Americans in the US and disastrous to the myriad peoples of the Middle East and West Asia. We the American people have been conned by both of these criminal men and their corrupt parties, and the legacies of each have been largely terrible, even lethal.

In 2020, it is time for us to decry, to stand up and speak out against the criminality of all political parties in the United States. In 2020, they’re going to call upon us to “Vote Blue No Matter Who.” But we must be wiser than that, we must be braver than this. In 2020, we must vote anti-establishment no matter what. Only by standing up to the establishment can we redeem our republic and earn our democracy.

Bipartisan Complicity
in US War Crimes

“There is a bias in this town toward war.”

President Barack Obama as quoted by and in conversation with Lawrence Wilkerson, September 2015, Roosevelt Room, Outside the Oval Office in the White House.
The town to which President Obama was referring is, of course, Washington, DC.

Aaron Mate’s interview with Lawrence Wilkerson can be watched at The Grayzone.

President Barack Obama, a Nobel Peace Laureate, ran on a platform of ending the US’s wars abroad and bringing our troops home. By the end of his eight years in office, the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan had been expanded, troops returned to Iraq, and the US had begun waging new wars in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Africa and Ukraine. President Obama also played a pivotal role in pioneering the use of drone warfare and in extrajudicial assassination abroad, including the assassination of US citizens. President Trump, with his recent assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, has now taken up the mantle and expanded on the policy of Barack Obama.

During the Obama administration, the US was bombing seven countries. Under the Bush administration, we were bombing five countries. Currently, under President Trump’s administration, we’re bombing seven, eight if you include attacks against Iran. George Bush has left his ruinous legacies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Barack Obama has left his in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Ukraine and Somalia. President Trump will now leave his own lethal legacy and violent footprint in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela and Iran.

A comparative table of the countries the US has bombed under each of its three past presidential administrations may be found here. A fact sheet of President Obama’s actions as Commander-in-Chief may be found here. President Trump’s fact sheet is here. All sources are provided by St. Pete for Peace.

The point is simple, and it is this: complicity in US war crimes is bipartisan. Neither party alone is at fault. The US Government is responsible. Washington is to blame, and so are we.

Broken Promises and Purloined Peace

President Trump, like Presidents Bush and Obama before him, ran on a platform of change and a promise to end the US’s wars in the Middle East and to bring our troops home. Like his predecessors, President Trump has failed to do either. But the truth is: no US president in the 21st century, either Democrat or Republican, has brought the change or the peace that the American people yearn for, that We the People demand.

What does this fact mean, and what’re its implications? Does this imply that we’ve been bipartisanly conned by our elected representatives (rulers?), or does it mean that our presidents are not as powerful as we believe and that even the so-called Leader of the Free World has his bosses, his masters, too, and that there are powers and players at work in Washington which we the American public may not always perceive and be privy to?

As Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson’s quote alludes to, and as we shall soon see, the truth and reality may be that it’s both.

Legacies of US War:
Violence, Terror and Slavery

“The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be continuous.”

This quote is attributed to George Orwell. In fact, it seems it may be a paraphrase of a
much longer passage about the aim of war in 1984. If the sentence does not appear
word-for-word in the book, the spirit of the sentence is indeed consistent with 1984
and with Orwell’s work.

It’s a hard thing to say aloud and a tough truth to face for many Americans, but the fact is that one of the key legacies of the first African-American president in United States history may be in helping to bring slavery back to Africa. Today, in Libya, as a direct result of the military action taken and the war waged there by President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, through the proxy force of NATO, there are now open-air slave markets where human beings, black Africans, migrants and refugees, are literally bought and sold in public markets and trafficked by human traffickers.

The slave markets in Libya are one of the saddest, most horrifying, startling, disturbing and tragic ongoing stories of the unintended, but nonetheless barbaric, savage and obscene, consequences of America’s regime-change wars and decades-long War on Terror in the Greater Middle East. A war of terror that continues to this day in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Syria. A war that Washington would now like to expand into Iran.

We wage these wars to dispose of despots and so-called barbaric dictators. We wage these wars under the bright banners of promoting freedom and democracy the world over. We wage these wars to win hearts and minds and to liberate the oppressed. We wage these wars in the great crusade and noble conquest of fighting terror and ridding the world of terrorism.

Yet, when our campaigns cease and we case the colors and come home to America, a privilege our enemies do not have, we often leave in the terrible wake of our regime-change wars everything we claimed to be fighting: despots, fundamentalism, violence, oppression, war, terror and terrorism. Instead of building free and liberal democracies and a united and liberated populace, grateful for American intervention, we often create failed states, totalitarian regimes, armed insurgencies, oppressive theocracies, radical fundamentalists, human traffickers and terrorist groups, and we too often leave in our destructive wake deeply divided and Balkanized peoples and countries, flooded with refugees, refugees, refugees, the displaced and the dispossessed, who now burn with a fresh ire for the United States.

Like the Forever War,
the Refugee Blues Never Ends

This is another lie and illusion that is often peddled to us by our politicians and pundits alike: that they hate us for our freedom. This is a lie because it’s untrue. First, they do not hate us. My own travels in Pakistan and in parts of the Muslim world, along with a wealth of reading and reflection, has taught me this humbling truth. They do not hate us. They criticize the US and stand against our federal government in Washington because our government will not cease meddling in their domestic affairs and waging deadly wars in their countries. The peoples of the Middle East are not against Americans, they’re against US imperial violence in their homelands.

And for all those who wish that refugees and asylum seekers from West Asia and Central and South America would stop trying to come here to the United States, well, the answer is brutally clear: let us, the United States, stop waging war, issuing sanctions, building military bases and fermenting conflict in their homelands. For the truth is that no one on earth aspires to be a refugee or desires to be an asylum seeker. They are driven to it. And it seems a cruel, cruel jest to wage war, incite coups, and impose sanctions in somebody’s homeland for decades on end and then to deny them asylum and sanctuary from the wars, violence, chaos and economic ruin you have helped to ferment in their native lands.

This is the subject matter that journalist Max Blumenthal explores in depth in his book, The Management of Savagery: How America’s National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump.

Watching these wars from afar and examining them together, as a whole, we may begin to wonder at the dawn of 2020 whether they were ever intended to build anything, create security and to be won or whether their intent all along was to destroy everything, spawn sectarianism, create chaos and simply be maintained. Perhaps war, like oil, energy, resources, power and control, is absolutely vital to the wealth, maintenance and perpetuation of empire and hegemony.

If this is true then the USA is indeed waging a world-wide Forever War. If this is true then the wars of the United States are indeed moral obscenities. If this is true then the Orwellian world of 1984 is already here.

The Lie and Illusion of Partisanship
& the Great Danger of Political Parties

“There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic
into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting
measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension,
is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil.” 

John Adams in a Letter to Jonathan Jackson, October 1780.

The human heart, at its best, is a moral lion of courage. We, human beings, at our finest are moral lions. Yet our rulers and overlords are a pack of human hyenas who would tear us limb from limb and run us through their brickkiln just to taste the hot slaughter in their teeth and to tear off and post our lion head on the papered walls in their plush chambers and opulent antechambers high up in their white towers atop Capitol Hill.

My point is this, friends: partisanship in our country is a lie and an illusion. And my two cents is this: do not believe the lie.

Let us not fall prey to partisanship and to party politics. The rot is not in either one of our political parties alone. Both parties are equally corrupt. The Republican Party has no soul, but neither does the Democratic Party. Democrats and Republicans are both liars, criminals, swindlers, cheats and warmongers of equal repugnance and disrepute. And both parties, particularly when it comes to US foreign policy and militancy in the Middle East and around the globe, are far, far more in sync than they would have us believe.

Plumbing the Rot,
Draining the Real Swamp
& Fighting the Alligator

The rot is not in the parties; the rot is in our federal government and in a fraudulent and failing political system in the District of Columbia. The rot is in our mainstream corporate media that peddles their propaganda and that serves as blind stenographers for the state. The rot, and the great danger, is in party politics. Though there may be two political parties in our country, they’re increasingly interchangeable, and there is a single ruling class elite and one agenda in Washington, DC. Both parties have long been caught in the rabid jaws of the great American alligator. War.

In short: the rot is bipartisan. The problem is in American partisan politics. And it is the degrading and distracting lie and illusion of partisanship that We the People must eviscerate and guard our Republic against. As John Adams warned long ago, party politics and partisanship may be the greatest danger and evil we face as a country today.

Simone Weil, French philosopher and political activist, argues similarly about the danger political parties pose to democracy in her 1943 treatise, “On The Abolition of All Political Parties.” In 2020, we’d be wise to take note and to heed the warnings of our learned forebears.

Owned:
Or the Big Club

“If you want real change, change that means something, then mobilize,
mobilize, mobilize, not for one of the two political parties but to rise up and
destroy the corporate structures that ensure our doom.”

“Scum vs. Scum,” by Chris Hedges,
American Journalist, Activist & Author.

And why does the media persist in its peddling and propagandizing?

Because like our professional politicians they are paid handsomely for their unscrupulous work and because they are sponsored, funded, run and literally owned by the same handful of corporations, multinationals, lobbyists, weapons manufacturers, big businesses and minuscule corporate boards of ludicrously rich elites who own our politicians and so-called representatives in DC and who run our so-called free and democratic, sovereign republic.

As the great George Carlin said: “It’s all a big club, and we ain’t in it, folks.”

We the People of the United States of America are not at enmity with one another. Our enemy is our own federal government headquartered in the District of Columbia. Our enemy is not the Democratic or the Republican parties. Our enemy is the Corporate Party, and our war is with the Empire.

This remains another hard truth to hear for many Americans and a tough thing to say out loud. But the reality and the fact is this: the United States is an empire. Our federal government heads an empire. Our nation was founded as a constitutional republic and a republic is what we were intended to be. But a Constitutional Republic is not what we have become today.

Empire on the Mind

“This self-image of the US as a republic is consoling, but it is also costly.
Most of the cost has been paid by those living in the colonies and around the
military bases. The logo map has relegated them to the shadows, which are a
dangerous place to live. At various times, the inhabitants of the US empire
have been shot, shelled, starved, interned, dispossessed, tortured and
experimented on. What they haven’t been, by and large, is seen.”

Daniel Immerwahr, author of How to Hide an Empire:
A Short History of the Greater United States. 

The Empire of the United States, which spans much of the world, but whose headquarters resides in Washington, DC, has hijacked the Republic of these united states of America. The Empire in DC is not our country. The Republic is. The breadth of land that lies between/in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans is our country, from the Redwood forests to the Gulf Stream waters, from California to the New York Island, from Alaska and Hawaii to Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands and the Northern Mariana Islands, Midway Atoll, Palmyra Atoll, Johnston Atoll, Wake Island, Baker Island, Howland Island, Jarvis Island, Kingman Reef, Navassa Island and American Samoa. We the American people are the country.

And it is the US Empire that in January 2020 is waging a new war on Iran. It is the US Empire that has been perpetually at war since September 2001, and in fact even far long before that. Some argue that the United States has been an empire from the beginning. Donald Trump did not create the US Empire, as neither did Barack Obama, but both criminal men have served as puppets, pawns and recent CEOs of the Empire.

Both are imperial stooges in a Game-of-Thrones-like global contest for hegemony and world domination and control of resources, power and the planet that perhaps they themselves do not fully understand. That’s why I don’t hate President Trump and why I didn’t hate President Obama. I pity them. Like us, they’ve been pawned and played for fools in their own ways, too. We believe that the President of the United States is the leader of the free world and the most powerful man on the planet. He is neither.

The President of the United States, though powerful indeed, is ultimately a puppet, a figurehead, a pawn. That is why We the American People must first and foremost always oppose not the president, who comes and goes, but the US Empire, which forever rolls and rages on, permanently there, perpetually barreling our country, faster and faster, toward its ultimate self-destruction and suicide.

The Growing Independent Media
Movement in America

To learn more about the United States Empire today, check out the work being down by Abby Martin at The Empire Files, Max Blumenthal at The Grayzone, Will Griffin at The Peace Report, and Ron Paul and Daniel McAdams at The Liberty Report.

Robert Scheer, Chris Hedges, and Major Danny Sjursen at Truthdig also frequently write and speak about US empire, rabid militarism, corporate capitalism and totalitarianism from a bipartisan perspective that is refreshing, rational and well-informed, as does Kim Iversen. For my Army friends, Major Danny Sjursen and Sergeant Henri Henrikson also host Fortress On A Hill Podcast, which examines American militarism and discusses the issues and experiences of veterans.

If you prefer a comedic take on your American imperial politics, check out The Jimmy Dore Show. For poetic commentary on empire and politics, tune into Benny Wills work. For geopolitics and the Middle East, Jake Morphonios of Blackstone Intelligence Network remains one of the best sources, though his channel has been decimated by YouTube. For suppressed histories and what the media won’t tell you, ReallyGraceful is your girl. Finally, for the current events of the day, and for takes on news stories you won’t hear from the mainstream corporate media, check out Spiro Skouras and Ryan Cristian at The Last American Vagabond.

Each of these journalists are part of a growing movement of independent media and investigate journalism in America. All of them work primarily on the web and are using social media to its highest potential, in ways that are both informed and inspiring. In addition to them, there is a lot of fine, fine work out there about war and empire and untold truths in the world today. We must simply wake up, free our minds from fear and tune into it.

In the new decade ahead, our conscience must be our conviction as American citizens. We must be well-informed, intelligent and enlightened. Knowledge is our strength, ignorance our weakness.

Of the People, by the People, for the People

“And that government of the people, by the people, for the people,
shall not perish from the earth.”

The Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln, 1863.

The Info War raging in our country wants to obliterate our inherent critical intelligence, crush our natural curiosity and quell our human sense of wonder. The wagers of the Info War want to kill our empathy and eradicate our compassion for others, dumb down our brains, poison our hearts with hate and sicken them with fear.

In short: the media wants to own (enslave) our minds. We must not let them succeed. They are miserable mongers of fear and wily peddlers of war, like our rulers in DC, and they are all complicit, Democrats and Republicans, Neocons and Neoliberals, alike. No one president or political party alone is responsible for our problems, but together they are all part of the problem. And one of the primary problems is partisanship.

In conclusion: it is a government of the people, by the people, for the people that We the People must work together to reestablish and reaffirm today, at the dawn of this new decade.

The electorate cannot save us. Only We the People can salvage our country. Only we can save ourselves. But first, we must put an end to partisanship in America.

-Part IV-

The Forever War on Iran

“We’re going to take out seven countries
in five years. Starting with Iraq,
then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia,
Sudan and then finishing off with Iran.”

General Wesley Clark quoting a Pentagon Memo from September 2001.

The truth we’re striving to illustrate is this: neither of our two political parties which are supposed to represent us (not lead us) in Washington, DC truly care about us or have the interests of We the People in their hearts and minds, for both parties in our country have long been corrupted and bought out by the same owners. Partisanship is a lie and an illusion intended to distract us from this truth and to keep our nation divided.

The point is this: it is the US Empire that is leading us toward yet another war in the Middle East; it is the US Empire that has been waging a war on Iran for the past four decades; it is the US Empire that desires to either bring Iran into its fold of control or else annihilate Iran from the face of the earth; it is the US Empire and its twin barbaric allies in the Middle East—Saudi Arabia and Israel—that alone stand to benefit from a war with Iran, not the Republic of these united states and surely not We the People.

Our country, the Republic of the United States of America, has nothing to profit from a war with Iran. A war on Iran is immoral, illegal, unjust and wrong. If we devote even a single day of our lives to learning about the decades-long history between the United States and Iran we will learn the heartbreaking and tragic truth that of all the nations in the Middle East perhaps none is better fit to be our friend and ally in the region than Iran.

The Fight for Freedom
& Independence in Iran

“Yes, my sin—my greater sin and even my greatest sin—is that I
nationalized Iran’s oil industry and discarded the system of political
and economic exploitation by the world’s greatest empire.
With God’s blessing and the will of the people, I fought this savage
and dreadful system of international espionage and colonialism.“

Prime Minister of Iran, Doctor Mohammad Mosaddegh,
defending himself against a charge of treason, December 19, 1953.

The Iranian people do indeed want freedom and democracy, for they once had freedom and democracy. The Iranian people have been working toward and fighting for their own freedom and democracy, independence and sovereignty for over a century. It was formerly the British and now the US Empire that has crushed freedom, democracy and independence in Iran.

It is the District of Columbia and their international banking cabal in New York City and the City of London that does not want the Iranian people to be free and independent of their rule and it is Tel Aviv that is calling for the death of Iran and that in its duplicity is driving Washington toward yet another war of aggression in the Middle East.

The Iranian people want friendship with the American people. Iran admires America and American values and many Iranians like and respect Americans. What Iranians oppose is American militarism and US imperialism in West Asia. What Iranians challenge are the belligerent politics of Washington, DC. What the Iranian people do not want are US bombs falling on their houses and homes and US sanctions devastating their economy and country and crushing their civilization.

Make no mistake about it: sanctions are savage to the teeth. Sanctions are economic warfare. Sanctions are siege warfare. Sanctions hurt civilians and kill innocent people, including women, children, infants, the sick and old. Sanctions are as vicious, cruel, unjust and immoral as wars of aggression are. US unilateral sanctions are illicit and illegal under international law, and they are perpetrated with the premeditated purpose of inspiring chaos and inflicting ruin among the civilian populace.

A Brief History of Iran &
A Celebration of Persian Civilization

“Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.
Be drunk with love, for Love is all that exists.”

Rumi

The history of Iran is the history of human civilization. The history of Iran is one of the world’s great stories and one of the greatest tales ever told. Spanning five thousand years, the history of Iran begins with the Elamites and the Medes, moves to the Achaemenids and the rise of the Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great, includes invasions by Alexander the Great, the Arabs, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane and influence from Europe and Asia, partakes in the glory of the Silk Road, experiences a Constitutional Revolution, finds itself again caught up in the Great Games of the British and Russian Empires, endures both World Wars, survives a coup by the new imperial power on the block and wages an Islamic Revolution in its wake in the late 20th century, before fighting a brutal war with Iraq and fending off a fresh invasion by Saddam Hussein, while all the time, through all the centuries and ages, invasions and attempted conquests and coups, maintaining its great Persian civilization and rich culture and its modern nationhood as Iran.

And to Iranian civilization human civilization owes much of what we love and celebrate today. Iranian inventions and discoveries include: postal service, refrigeration, algebra, sulfuric acid, the guitar, advancements in modern medicine, the bazaar, polo, batteries, backgammon and chess, kerosene lamps, wind towers and wind mills, water irrigation, alcohol, animation, the world’s first monotheistic religion and the concept of human rights.

And poetry, poetry, poetry. Perhaps above all else, for us lovers of literature, of language, of songs and silences, beauty, aesthetic wisdom and ecstatic words aspiring toward the sublime and inspiring wonder in the heart, Iran has given us, the human race, poetry. Persia’s poetry is among the finest on earth and the most sublime under the sun.

In short: Persian civilization has been one of the world’s greatest from the beginning, and humanity owes a mighty debt to Iran and Iranian civilization.

For the purposes of this essay, we’re concerned with the history of modern Iran, from 1953 to today, and with Iran’s relations with England and the United States.

A Coup d’état in Tehran

“As zealots in Washington intensify their preparations for
an American attack on Iran, the story of the CIA’s 1953 coup,
with its many cautionary lessons, is more urgent relevantly than ever.
All the Shah’s Men brings to life the cloak-and-dagger operation
that deposed the only democratic government Iran ever had.”

from All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror,
by Stephen Kinzer.

The short story is this: in 1953, at the behest of the British, the CIA led a coup that overthrew the democratically-elected government of Iran. Doctor Mohammad Mosaddegh was the Prime Minister of Iran, a leader beloved by his people and regarded by many Iranians as the foremost champion of secular democracy and resistance to foreign domination in Iran’s modern history. He has been compared to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Mohandas Gandhi in his commitment to his country, his love for liberty and his courageous fight against British imperialism.

In his personal virtue, his compassion and integrity, his humbleness and kindness, and in his eloquence as a national leader, public speaker, doctor of philosophy and a well-educated intellectual, Mohammad Mosaddegh may in fact surpass these men.

In 1952, a year before the US’s coup, Time Magazine named Mohammad Mosaddegh the “Man of the Year” for 1951. In fact, this was actually Time’s second cover story and feature of the Iranian Prime Minister. In an article from June 1951, entitled, “Challenge of the East,” Time dubbed Mohammad Mosaddegh “The New Menace” and regarded him as merely the most prominent embodiment of a movement toward independence in the third world which they believed presented a “fundamental moral challenge” to the United States and the west.

Along with the growing nationalist movement in Iran, perhaps Time had the rising nationalist movement in Vietnam in mind. But the question remains: what was the Iranian Prime Minister’s great sin that so earned him the ire of England and the imperial west?

Oil and Imperialism,
Power and Hegemony

Prime Minister Mosaddegh’s crime was that in March of 1951 he helped to nationalize Iran’s oil industry. Through nationalization, Prime Minister Mosaddegh and Parliament ensured that the profits of Iran’s oil would now benefit, first and foremost, the nation of Iran and the Iranian people. This was deemed unacceptable, however, by the British Crown.

Up until 1951, Britain had controlled Iran’s oil industry and its profits through its Anglo-Persian Oil Company, allowing Iran ten percent of its own oil revenue, while reserving ninety percent of profits for itself and England. So, once again, we see that much of the conflict in the modern Middle East has its roots in oil and imperialism, in power and hegemony, the old usual suspects forever at play in the geopolitics of West Asia.

When Winston Churchill and the British failed to oust Prime Minster Mosaddegh and carry out their own coup, they enlisted the help of their Anglo ally, the United States, and its newly-minted Central Intelligence Agency. Into the fray came Kermit Roosevelt in the fateful Summer of 1953, and the rest, as they say, is history.

All the Shah’s Men and Overthrow
Remain as Relevant As Ever at the Dawn of 2020

“A fast-paced narrative history of the coups, revolutions, and invasions by
which the United States has toppled fourteen foreign governments—
not always to its own benefit. “Regime change” did not begin with the
administration of George W. Bush, but has been an integral part of U.S.
foreign policy for more than one hundred years. Starting with the overthrow
of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 and continuing through the Spanish-
American War and the Cold War and into our own time, the United States has
not hesitated to overthrow governments that stood in the way of its political
and economic goals. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 is the latest, though perhaps
not the last, example of the dangers inherent in these operations.”

from Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq,
by Stephen Kinzer.

The story of Washington’s 1953 coup in Iran is an extraordinary one, reading at times like a spy-thriller. If you’re interested in learning this important story in its full narrative depth and human detail, a story too few Americans still know, and one which may transform your view of modern Iran, giving you a fresh perspective and a greater empathy for the nation, Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men is perhaps the definite book on the subject.

I’ve been reading it since January, and it is indeed a remarkable book about a remarkable country and truly remarkable man, Mohammad Mosaddegh. A book and a story that remain as relevant today, in early 2020, as ever.

After reading All the Shah’s Men and learning about the US’s first coup détat abroad, and one of its most successful, you can continue with your studies and read Stephen Kinzer’s Overthrow, which chronicles America’s century of regime change, from Hawaii to Iraq. It is as important and compelling a read as All the Shah’s Men, and as vital to understanding the modern history of our country as Howard Zinn’s landmark A People’s History of the United States is vital to understanding the full scope and scale of American history, from 1492 to the present.

The Roots of Iranian-American Conflict

“The coup ushered in a quarter-century of repressive rule under the Shah,
stimulated the rise of Muslim fundamentalism and anti-Americanism through
the Middle East, and exposed the folly of using violence to try to reshape Iran.
All the Shah’s Men is essential reading if you want to place the American
invasion of Iraq in context and prepare for what comes next.”

from All the Shah’s Men, by Stephen Kinzer.

The roots of conflict between the United States and Iran today date to 1953 and the CIA’s coup in Tehran. Out of this coup comes the long, terrible, hateful reign of the Shah. From the US-backed Shah’s brutal reign and regime came the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the Iranian Hostage Crisis that so shocked, enraged and embarrassed the US from November 4, 1979 to January 20, 1981. And from the Hostage Crisis and the downing of Iran Air Flight 655 come much of the bad blood that has endured between the United States and Iran for the past forty years.

In this way, we see, yet again, the often nasty chain of cause-and-effect and the unintended consequences of US violence and US overthrew of sovereign states in the Middle East. Sectarianism does not spark war, we’ve realized. War spawns sectarianism.

Let Iran and Iranians take responsibility for what Iran and Iranians can take responsibility. But as Americans, we must also take responsibility for what we can take. We’re all adults. It’s long past time that we begin acting as adults and as moral and mature, enlightened individuals. The overthrow of Iran’s democratic government in 1953 by Washington is surely a pivotal moment in the history of our nations’ relations, and it’s a violent, unlawful and unjust act which we need to fully own up to and reckon with as Americans.

Reckoning With Our Violent History
& Facing Up to the Reality of American Brutality

“See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt.
He stokes the scullery fire… He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither
read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence.
All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.”

Blood Meridian: or The Evening Redness in the West,
by Cormac McCarthy.

For the broader implications of the act are this:

The 1953 coup in Iran shows that we, as Americans, are not in fact always on the right side of history, and it proves that our government in Washington and our intelligence agencies care more about power, control and profit than they do freedom, democracy, law, human rights and human dignity.

The 1953 coup in Iran serves as evidence that the United States often favors empire, imperialism and dictatorship over democracy, liberty and human decency. Finally, it reveals another indicative and important fact about our country: we often create our own enemies and conflicts through our short-sighted and arrogant actions abroad.

Alongside slavery, genocide, American Exceptionalism and American Innocence, perhaps American Hubris, born of the deadly duo of arrogance and ignorance, should be ranked among the top contenders for our greatest character flaws, original sins and primal crimes as a country born of violence, and violence, and violence, war and violence.

Land of the Free and Home of the Brave vs.
the Land of the Enslaved and the Home of the Forever Fearful

Make no mistake about it, my friends and fellow Americans: we’re a violent nation, from the beginning. We’re a country born out of brutality. We’re an empire born on and out of the frontier of the blood meridian. Though war, violence and brutality are not all we are as Americans, they are indeed a definitive part of who we are as an American nation.

Until we truly reckon with this reality, we’ll never be free, great or courageous as a country. Unlike our fundamental and natural human rights, “the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave” are qualities that were not endowed to us by our Creator at the birth of our country.

The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave must be earned continually. The land of the free and the home of the brave have a moral component alongside its physical one. One way to earn these noble titles is through daring to reckon with who we have been as a country and who we are today as a nation.

Otherwise, without a national moral reckoning, the title of Land of the Enslaved and the Home of the Forever Fearful may be more apt for our country and for us as Americans.

Down With Empire
& No More to Forever War

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought,
but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

Albert Einstein (Attributed)

When we hear all this talk about “Death to America” what the Iranians mean is the same thing American patriots and revolutionaries meant in our country when on July 4, 1776 they proclaimed themselves free and independent of foreign rule and said, “Down with the British Empire!”

The same way we fought for our freedom and independence from imperial rule in the 18^th and 19^th centuries Iranians have been fighting for their freedom, independence and sovereignty in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Once the Iranians fought the British, as we did, now they’re fighting the US, even as they battle their own government, too.

“Death to America” is not a war cry calling for the annihilation of the United States or the death of Americans. “Death to America” means, quite simply, “Damn America. Damn them.” It is a bitter cry of anger, frustration and exasperation, not annihilation, and it is directed at Washington, DC and at our politicians and the belligerent policies of our federal government, not at we the American people. Even Rick Steves has spoken to this truth.

In short: in the United States, there is much that the media won’t tell us about Iran, and what they do tell us is often distorted by fear, propaganda and agenda.

Shared Sentiments and a Call
for Sincere Change in the Capital

In fact, if we think about it, the American people and the Iranian people may share much in this regard and sentiment, in our common frustration with Washington, DC and with the policies of the politicians residing there. Much of the world, it seems, is fed up not with America and Americans, but with Washington and with US militarism, warmongering and imperialism.

In 2020, it’s time for the US government to listen to and act upon the desires and the will of the American people. We the People wield the power. We the People possess the sovereignty. We the People have delegated power to our federal government in Washington, DC for them to represent our interests.

That is their work, their sworn duty, but they have neglected their job, broken their oaths, willfully disobeyed their duties and failed us and our nation. Red and Blue, Democrats and Republicans, alike. They’ve failed us. We the People now need to lead our so-called leaders in DC and demand that they serve the interests of the American people and the Republic of the United States.

It’s Time to End the Forever War on Iran

“The first casualty, when war comes, is truth, and whenever
an individual nation seeks to coerce by force of arms another,
it always acts, and insists that it acts, in self-defense.”

Hiram W. Johnson

To war with Iran, let us please say: “No.” To war on Iran, we must unequivocally say: “No!” It is time for the War on Terror and the Forever War to end. It’s time for the US’s war for the Greater Middle East to end. It’s time to bring our soldiers home. All wars of aggression must end.

The war with Iran is nothing new. The warmongers in Washington have been waging a cold, clandestine war against Iran since 1953. The warmongers in Washington have been hot and horny for and hankering after a hot, all-out war with Iran for decades. We the American people must not give the warmongers their latest war. They lied to us about Vietnam, they lied to us about Iraq, they lie to us about Libya, Syria and Yemen, even as they continue to lie to us about Afghanistan, as the Afghanistan Papers have recently revealed.

Why should we the American people believe them now about Iran when they are proud and self-avowed liars?

Truth Remains the First Casualty of War:
The Blunt Reality of an Extra-Judicial Assassination

We were told by Washington that Iran and Qasem Soleimani were plotting imminent attacks on the United States. But this story has proven to be fabricated, and in the wake of the assassination the truth has emerged.

The truth is that Qasem Soleimani was not a terrorist, he was a Major General in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the commander of its elite Quds Force. In short: he was a soldier, a warrior, a professional military officer.

In Washington’s War on Terror, General Soleimani has also served as an ally of the United States, helping to fight and rout the Taliban in Afghanistan. In the campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, General Soleimani has been perhaps the most effective and significant fighter on the battlefield. As Shia Muslims, Iranians are the mortal enemy of ISIS and Al-Qaeda, both of whom have openly declared their desire to literally annihilate Iran and all Shias from the face of the earth, whom they deem, along with Christians and many others, as infidels.

The fact is that if it were not for General Qasem Soleimani, the obsidian flag of ISIS might well be flying over both Baghdad and Damascus today. Imagine that Middle East, imagine that 21st century world.

Finally, it seems that General Soleimani was on an official state peace delegation, at the invitation of the Prime Minister of Iraq, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, when he was assassinated by an American MQ-9 Reaper drone attack at the Baghdad International Airport, the airport for commercial flights and for civilians in Baghdad, as he traveled freely and openly in public.

In the wake of the assassination, it has also become clear that General Soleimani has been in the cross-hairs of Washington and Tel Aviv for many, many years, now. Past US presidents were either unable to or simply too fearful of the blow-back to illegally and extra-judicially assassinate the Iranian general and former ally of the United States who has been instrumental in defeating ISIS and who has been on the front-lines of the fight against terrorism in the Middle East.

Justifications of the extra-judicial assassination of General Qasem Soleimani based on allegations of Iran killing US troops in Iraq may also be, it seems, a lie and a ploy to justify American aggression and war with Iran.

The World War III Blues

“Some time ago a crazy dream came to me,
I dreamt I was walkin’ into World War Three.”

“Talkin’ World War III Blues,” by Bob Dylan.

No. Their appetite for war is insatiable. Their lust for regime change, for “taking out” countries, is carnal, it’s sick and sadistic. A war with Iran would not be a war but yet another imperial hit job, as General Wesley Clark’s revelation about the September 2001 Pentagon memo revealed. After Iran, do we really believe the hit list will end and that there will be peace in the Middle East and throughout the world?

No way. It’ll be North Korea next, then Russia, before finally moving on to Washington’s true enemy and the greatest prize of them all, China. If World War III hasn’t come to the planet by then, it’ll be here for sure, for sure. No. The Forever War will never end. The Forever War will leave America, and much of the free and civilized world, along with the good green earth, in abject ruin and consummate devastation.

To war with Iran, let us say a resounding: “No.” To war on earth, we the people of the planet must say: “No more!”

For the costs of war are terrible, indeed. So terrible are the costs of war, and so blatantly and brazenly unjust, that We the People of America and the world can afford to suffer them no longer and to justify war no more.

The Great American Con &
the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–
industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power
exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination
endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for
granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper
meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our
peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper.”

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address to the Nation,
January 17, 1961.

In 2020, the reality is this: we’re being had, friends. We’re being conned. We’re being played for pawns, for fools. In this great imperial con and chess game and in this corporate coup d’état and grand American heist, the Democrats are corrupted, complicit and criminal as the Republicans are corrupted, complicit and criminal.

Both parties are bought out by the military-industrial-congressional complex, and neither party is worthy of our unconditional support. Both Team Red and Team Blue are owned by Wall Street and the Ziocon warmongers, and the elites of both parties want to bomb Iran and raze the Middle East. There is indeed a bias in Washington toward war, as both Presidents Obama and Trump have discovered and admitted, one privately, the other publicly.

We cannot kid ourselves: there is indeed a military-industrial complex, and they do like war. They relish it, they live off it, they thrive off of war.

Divide, Conquer
Rule & Control

Together, let us wake up. Let us wise up and pay attention. Do not believe the lie of partisanship and do not fall prey to its insidious trap. “Divide and conquer.” Keep the American people raging at each other, warring with one another, endlessly berating one another. Keep the American people at each other’s jugulars. This is the age-old strategy our rulers are employing against us today.

My friends, it’s a trick, it’s a trap. They believe we are stupid, dumb Americans, crude animals, idiotic sheep, obedient bovines, imperial grunts, slaves too dim-witted to govern ourselves, and they treat us as fools. They doll out their bullshit by the bucket load to us, and they believe that not only will we eat it, but we’ll lap it up, relishing every putrid morsel, and that when we’re through gluttoning ourselves and satiating our base hungers, we’ll ask for more, more, more.

As if we were truly Allen Ginsberg’s insatiable pigs of western civilization. We’re not, friends. We’re no animals. They are. They’re barbaric beasts, they’re moralless warmongers, and they don’t live “over there,” they reside right here, at home, within the walls of the nation, in our corrupt capital, Washington, DC.

The Truth of the American War Machine

“America exists today to make war.”

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson on Democracy Now,
January 13, 2020.

We war with one another, on social media and around our Thanksgiving and Christmas Day dinner tables, and we fight each other in the trash-strewn, crumbling streets and back alleys of our insular neighborhoods, beneath decaying highway overpasses and in our filthy public parks now filled with homeless veterans and our fellow forgotten Americans.

In warring with one another, we perpetually increase our division as countrymen, and we brew bad blood among fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, brothers and sisters, grandparents and grandchildren, neighbors, family members and friends. All the while, we fall prey to the other insidious lie and illusion of race, and forever fail to grasp the one true division in our country: class. Class and power.  

The rich vs. the rest. The ruling class vs. the ruled. The powerful vs. the powerless. They the plantation masters vs. we the forever working slaves. DC vs. America. The Corporation versus the Republic.

This is the real war in our country, and this is the true conflict of our times.

Battling the Beast Within the Walls

“Ever since 9/11, the beasts of the National Security State, the Beast of Endless Wars, the Beast of the Alligator that came out of the swamp and bit Donald Trump just a few days ago is alive and well. America exists today to make war. How else do we interpret nineteen straight years of war and no end in sight?

It’s part of who we are, it’s part of what the American Empire is.

We are going to lie, cheat and steal as Pompeo is doing right now, as Trump is doing right now, as Esper is doing right now, as Lindsey Graham is doing right now, as Tom Cotton is doing right now, and a host of other members of my political party, the Republicans, are doing right now. We’re going to cheat and steal to do whatever it is we have to do to continue this war complex.

That’s the truth of it, and that’s the agony of it.”

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, speaking about US Empire and Endless War, 2020.

The Wanton American Empire
wants War, War, War,
Forever More War

Meanwhile, as we fight among each other, the Empire marches merrily and wantonly along on its barbaric way, conducting business as usual, barreling us headlong toward another brutal foreign war in the Middle East, a war that will only enrich the already uber rich, while impoverishing and devastating the rest of us, here in our home in America and over there in their home in Iran.

Ignorantly and arrogantly parading along to the pseudo-patriotic beat of Uncle Sam’s hypnotic war drum, drum, drum, wanting only war, war, war, the US Empire goes raging along, waging forever war around the world and leaving not freedom and democracy but death and destruction in its savage and obscene wake.

An Appeal for Civility and Sanity
to Save Ourselves & the Planet

“I want to say one other challenge that we face is simply that we must find an
alternative to war and bloodshed. Anyone who feels, and there are still a lot of
people who feel that way, that war can solve the social problems facing
mankind is sleeping through a great revolution. President Kennedy said on
one occasion, ‘Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to
mankind.’ The world must hear this. I pray to God that America will hear this
before it is too late, because today we’re fighting a war.”

“Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,”
Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., March 1968.

My friends, my countrymen, this is no way to win the hearts and minds of our neighbors and fellow men. War is a lie. War is a racket. War is a trillion-dollar business. War for profit is immoral. Wars of aggression are illegal. Imperial war is an obscenity.

If we truly desire to make America great, either for the first time or again, let us begin by doing the right thing this time while we still have the chance. The wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen have been moral obscenities and military failures. If we truly desire to make our country great, let us begin by making America good and great in the heart and spirit and in the moral sense.

No war on Iran! Bring our troops home. Stop the insanity and the savagery while we still can. And if we wish to stand up and fight, let us stand up and fight to win back and redeem the Republic of these United States of America from the Empire that has hijacked our republic and that seems hellbent on obliterating our country and planet, this one earth that we all call home.

The Temple of Mars
& the Clique of Death

For this is another fact and truth that we rarely meditate on as Americans: the United States military is among the greatest polluters on the planet, and war is destroying the ecosystems of the earth and contributing to the ecocide of the planet.

In short: war lays waste to not only human life, but to all sentient life under the sun. And those pundits and politicians who worship War, War, War, who supplicate and sacrifice before the Temple of Mars are sadistic and sociopathic members of a death-cult and cabal who worship death and destruction and abhor life and creation, and they must be stopped before they obliterate the planet and all life under the sun.

King King Lives
& Speaks Eternally

“It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence. The alternative to disarmament, the alternative to a greater suspension of nuclear tests, the alternative to strengthening the United Nations and thereby disarming the whole world, may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation, and our earthly habitat would be transformed into an inferno that even the mind of Dante could not imagine.”

“Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” by Martin Luther King, Jr, a
speech delivered at the National Cathedral, Washington, DC, March 31, 1968.

These words were spoken by Doctor King four days before the Masters of War snuffed out his own life on earth. Thankfully for us, the power of Dr. King’s words remain with us today, resounding and resonating throughout the world, urgent and true as ever, and true words can never be destroyed.

Moral Obscenities
& Military Failures

“And I looked, and behold a white cloud, and upon the cloud
one sat like unto the Son of man, having on his head a golden crown,
and in his hand a sharp sickle.

And another angel came out of the temple, crying with a loud voice to him
that sat on the cloud, Thrust in thy sickle, and reap: for the time is come for
thee to reap; for the harvest of the earth is ripe.

And he that sat on the cloud thrust in his sickle on the earth;
and the earth was reaped.”

The Book of Revelation, 14:14-16, King James Version.

Let us say it again: The United States Empire is bankrupt. Our federal government in the District of Columbia has no money and no morality. The US Empire’s wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Niger, Yemen, Ukraine, Nicaragua, Venezuela and across the globe today are moral obscenities and military failures.

We must not launch yet another morally obscene and militarily futile war in Iran. A war in Iran will reap only ruin for us all. War in Iran is a seed we do not want to sow this winter, for come the spring, summer or fall, when the warm, fine weather and our sanity both return, it’ll be a harvest that we will not want to reap. But if we let DC plant this deadly seed now, we the American people may have no choice but to garner the terrible harvest when the harvest time comes round at last.

An Appeal to Put Aside Partisanship
& Unite for Peace and Justice for All

If we truly support our troops, our soldiers, our servicemen and women, our brave warriors, most of whom fight their muddled wars with a noble heart, let us bring them home from the Middle East and from Washington’s eight hundred military bases girdling the globe. Now.

If we are truly a nation of peace and human decency, if we are really a global force for good, if we are truly a land for freedom and a home for the brave, let us be brave at the dawn of this bold new decade, let us stand up together as Americans and say no more to war, for our sake and for the sake of our family, friends and neighbors.

Let us put aside partisanship and unite to end the Forever War, and let us work toward peace between America and Iran.

-Part V-

In A Murderous Time

“In a murderous time
the heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.
It is necessary to go
through dark and deeper dark
and not to turn.”

“The Testing-Tree,” by Stanley Kunitz

In 2020, let us be bold, let us be brave, let us be free and courageous, but above all let’s let our hearts be fiercely vulnerable. Let’s let our lion hearts be strong, wise, achingly open, free of fear and filled to the brim with compassion, empathy, decency and love for all. Love even for our so-called enemies. In this way, we can indeed make America great. In this way, we can live, prosper, lead, learn and be America the Beautiful, instead of the ugly and dying American empire we have become.

“In a murderous time the heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking,” as the poets teach us. “It is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn.” Reckoning with one’s heart, one’s self and one’s country, is never easy, is never for the faint of heart, for the cowardly and the fearful. It’s a hard, tough, daunting, even terrifying, task, but it’s necessary work.

Above all: reckoning can be liberating, and vulnerability can be not only beautiful but powerful and empowering. To be vulnerable is part of what it is to be human. In 2020, it is time for a moral self-reckoning in our country. If we truly desire to be a force for good in the world, an inspiration to other nations who like us yearn for freedom, democracy, sovereignty and dignity, and if we really want to be on the right side of history, we must first face up to the destructive powers unleashed by us and our federal government across the globe and reckon with our own violent history, past and present.

Struggling to Awake
from the Terrifying Nightmare
of American History

“Our nation was born in genocide.… We are perhaps the only nation which
tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population.
Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade.
Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject
or feel remorse for this shameful episode.”

Why We Can’t Wait, by Martin Luther King, Jr.

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

Ulysses, by James Joyce.

For the truth is this: for many people American history has been a brilliant and beautiful dream come true, while for many others, at home and abroad, American history has been a terrifying nightmare from which they’ve been struggling to awake for five hundred years. It is also a fact that for many human beings across the earth, the United States’ War on Terror has always been a War of Terror. This may be a hard truth for us to face as Americans, but face it and reckon with it we must.

Let Iran and Iranians take responsibility for what Iran and Iranians can take. But we as Americans must also take responsibility for what we can take. It takes two to tango. To be the land of the free and the home of the brave means more than the freedom of physical action and the bravery of facing down bullets on a foreign battlefield. Freedom and bravery first and foremost lie in the heart and the spirit.

Black Elk speaks to us still today: “No good thing can be done by any one man alone. It’s the story of all life that is holy and is good to tell.” Wisdom is in the heart, my friends, and the wise heart of the world resides in your heart and in the heart of you.

In 2020, let us be morally brave. In this way, not only can we be great but we can be truly free. Let us be the unstoppable lions of morality that we are at our finest and our kindest.

Two Truths They Hide from You:
There is No Enemy,
Even as There is No Other

“There is no other.”

Paul Salopek, Out of Eden Walk.

For this is the real secret and the great truth which they work, day and night, to keep from you: You are not poor and powerless. You are not a dumb, disenfranchised and sinful animal who needs the good graces of their benevolent government or church to provide for you and protect you from the barbaric enemy lapping and seething at the gates. You do not need them to give you your freedom. For how can they give you that which you already possess?

This is the truth your rulers hide from you: You were born free. Nobody can give you freedom, for you’ve been free from the day you were born. At their civilized best, your representatives can help to uphold your freedom, but at their savage worst they will plunder you, swindle you, cheat you, rob you blind, they will steal your God-given freedom from you and put you in fetters of iron and in their invisible chains of servitude for the sake of infinitely expanding their own profits.

All the while, they will lie through their teeth to you, swearing to you that everything they do they do because they love you, our country and your freedom. But the truth is these sociopaths have no country, no conscience and no allegiance to anything other than perpetuating their own privilege and profit, their ludicrous wealth and wanton power, their hegemony and their obscene wars, and they are as incapable of love for others as war is incapable of bringing peace to the earth, for they are void of morality.

There is no enemy, my friends, even as there is no other. And if there is an enemy, the enemy is not raging beyond our walls, but within them. The enemy is not outside our borders, the enemy is high atop Capitol Hill.

The Pacific Dreams
of a Violent Nation

“You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.
A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp
and put it under a basket. Instead, they set it on a stand,
and it gives light to all who are in the house.”

Matthew 5:14

Once, in America, we dreamed of building a city on a hill. We dreamed of becoming a beacon for the world, a hope for humanity, a refuge for the oppressed, and we talked of leading by example. Perhaps it was a vain, insane and deranged dream and myth, from the beginning.

But that city of pacific light has long become a violent black hole of darkness, and the dream of leading by example and being an inspiration for the free world has long given way to the reality of American might makes right and to the brutality of our terrible shock and awe, to the twin derangements of American innocence and American exceptionalism, and so we’ve become not a hope and an inspiration, but a horror and terror to much of the civilized world.

Let us say it again, and let’s make no mistake about it: we’re a violent nation, from the beginning. Our country was wrought out of violence, and our nation was born out of bloodshed and barbarism and birthed out of the blood pangs of the Blood Meridian.

Genocide, holocaust, slavery, imperialism, exploration and exploitation, racism, war, violence, terror and terrorism, moral and racial insanity, and hypocrisy, hypocrisy, hypocrisy, have been part of the American experiment and the American experience, from the beginning.

These are not all we are, nor are they the sum and summation of who we are as a nation, anymore than they are the totality of who we are as a race and human species, but they are indeed an integral part of our exceptional American story, from the beginning.

In short: we must remember, celebrate and sing the banks of the river, even as we refuse to avert our eyes from the bloody stream of the river of history. Only in this way can we be whole, complete and free beings, individually and collectively, as peoples and as nations.

A National Moral Reckoning

“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful
and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it,
so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible.”

“A Talk to Teachers,” by James Baldwin.

We’re a violent nation, from the beginning. But that does not mean we have no hope, that resistance is futile, redemption impossible, and that doesn’t mean we can’t change our ways and aspire as a nation to be something better. But first we must reckon with this reality and face this truth of who we have been and who are still. It is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn. Our heart may break, and break, and break, individually and collectively as a nation, but through this breaking, we may live and finally be free.

In this way, reckoning is not about guilt, shame or America-bashing. Reckoning is about responsibility. Reckoning is about justice. Reckoning is about redemption. Reckoning is about liberation. Reckoning is about growing up and becoming an adult.

The enemy is not without. The enemy is within. Our enemy is not Iranians in Iran. Our enemy is our own corporate and corrupt, criminal rulers residing in the District of Columbia and their servile media forever striving to rot our brains, buy our minds, enslave us in fear, shackle us in ignorance, and hide from our eyes and from our visionary hearts the truth.

The enemy is our own fear and ignorance and the hate born from this unwise and unholy, foolish marriage.

The Choice

“Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with
blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing things historians
usually record; while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love,
raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues.
The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks.
Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks of the river.”

Will & Ariel Durant

Finally, let us remember this: in our absurd Partisan Wars at home, even as in our imperial Forever Wars abroad, we’re constantly being berated from both sides and harangued from all directions by every party.

What they scream at us is this: Which side are you on? Step to the left or move to the right. Go farther to the right or move further to the left. Don’t meditate. Move! Choose a side, now. Are you in our party, or theirs? Are you a D or an R, a liberal or a conservative? Are you with us or against us, for us or for them? Which team are you on? What color is your blood, what color is your underwear, red or blue? Don’t pause. Don’t think. Don’t reflect. Choose!

Partisan Wars, Strawmen,
Ranters & Ravers, Leaves of Grass
and the Eternal Star-Sprent Sky

“This is what you shall do:
Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”

Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman.

Choose. This is what they forever cry at you. But what I say to you is this:

When all the world is berating you, when your media is screaming at you to choose a side, pick a party, step to the left or move to the right, go red, go blue or go home—take a deep breath, still your beating heart and simply: look up.

Look to the star-sprent sky above your head, to the good green earth beneath your feet, reach out and run your hands through the brilliant leaves of grass rippling and flowing all around you, look into your heart and into the heart of you. Look to your conscience. Look up, look out. Elevate yourself. Elevate your mind, your heart, your spirit and your consciousness. Don’t fall prey to their lie, to their trap, to their prison of the mind. You do not have to choose, and you do not have two choices alone.

In truth, your choices are unlimited and your possibility boundless, as is your potential. For you are infinite, like the leaves of grass that grow up from the earth, from the god of dirt, from one end of the earth even unto the other.

So do not choose between the lesser of two evils, for this is a false choice, a fallacy and a lie. Choose no evil. Choose freedom—true freedom—choose beauty, choose empathy, choose truth, choose fearlessness, choose wisely, choose compassion, choose courage, be brave, choose kindness, open your heart until it aches, open your heart until it breaks, go through dark and deeper dark, do not turn, and at the end of the long, dark way, choose love, choose light, choose to live, open your heart to the miracle of kindness and choose grace.

And let the crazed cacophony of the fanatical furious cry their seething lungs out, let them rant and rave, for they are indeed nothing but poor players who strut and fret their hour upon the stage and will soon be heard no more, idiots full of sound and fury, windbags brimming and bursting with hot air, spewing rot, signifying nothing, heartless and hollow as strawmen in a wind-ravaged field at sundown.

The Way of the White Clouds

“I hold to no religion or creed,
am neither Eastern nor Western,
Muslim or infidel,
Zoroastrian, Christian, Jew or Gentile.
I come from neither land nor sea,
am not related to those above or below,
was not born nearby or far away,
do not live either in Paradise or on this Earth,
claim decent not from Adam and Eve or the Angels above,
I transcend body and soul.
My home is beyond place and name.
It is with the beloved, in a space beyond space.
I embrace all and am part of all.”

Rumi

They are all of this, while you, my friend, are a meditative mountain of cosmic consciousness, calm, monumental and unmoving, no matter the weather and what the howling gales and whirling winds hurl at you.

They are fanatical warmongers and terrified fearmongers, ignorant peddlers of propaganda and greedy traffickers in hate, while you are a bodhisattva on your middle way—not the centrist way, but the Middle Way, the way of Buddha, Laozi, Krishna, Allah, Christ-Consciousness—walking through this tangled wilderness and turbulent storm of our partisan times, each of your perfect steps determined and firm, as you move lithely, steadily and light-heartedly up the sacred mountain between the twin dueling sides, as you pass between and through all opposing opposites, leaving the warring hordes wonder-struck, bemused and delighted, if not yet united, if not yet awake, in your terrible and beautiful wake, in the radiant aura of your sublime passage, even as you begin to see through the illusion of duality and the illusory nature of war to the interconnected nature and awesome harmony of all things when balance is attained, advancing toward enlightenment and oneness with your true self and with the true nature of all living things.

While they signify nothing, you signify everything there is and everything there will ever be on earth or in heaven. Heaven and earth, earth and heaven. Which you now see, in truth, are here and now, one and the same. Heaven, paradise, enlightenment which you now see with breathtaking clarity and hilarious joy is not somewhere out there over the rainbow and beyond the biosphere, but within you and the heart of you.

For you are infinite awareness. For you are cosmic consciousness. For your potential is infinite, as is your capacity for love, your power for good, and your creative ability to become the beauty you yearn to behold in this one miraculous world. You transcend body and soul, you dwell in a space beyond space, in the pearl that is outside of time, and you embrace all and are part of all. Your tender embrace spans the whole world.

And as for your way? Unlike them, your way is no wayward way of savagery and obscene war. Your way is the way of the white clouds.

We the People
& The Hero’s Journey

“We have not even to risk the adventure alone
for the heroes of all time have gone before us.
The labyrinth is thoroughly known.
We have only to follow the thread of the hero path.
And where we had thought to find an abomination
we shall find a God.
And where we had thought to slay another
we shall slay ourselves.
Where we had thought to travel outwards
we shall come to the center of our own existence.
And where we had thought to be alone,
we shall be with all the world.”

The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell.

Our presidents cannot save us. Congress cannot save us. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans can save us. The electorate cannot save us. Only we the American people can save ourselves. It’s a daunting task, for sure. But the truth is that its formidability lies in our own perception, for we possess the power. The choice is ours.

We can choose whether to see the task as a colossal and terrible burden with a slim shot at victory, or we can choose to see the opportunity as the chance to embark on a great adventure and epic journey together, a heroic quest, in which lies the awesome possibility for us to become our own heroes and the saviors of our own republic.

The Hero’s Journey beckons to us. Do we possess the courage to answer its call?

The Sun that Rises,
the Rain that Falls

And one of the elders of the city said,
“Speak to us of Good and Evil.”
And the prophet answered:
“Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil.
For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?
Verily when good is hungry it seeks food
even in dark caves, and when it thirsts drinks even dead waters.
You are good when you are one with yourself.”

The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran.

To all who read this, my love and best wishes. Much wholeness, too. In 2020, I hope and wish that you become everything you’ve ever dreamed and yearned to be. I hope that your prayers are answered, your dreams achieved and your yearnings fulfilled.

As for me? Peace on earth, and good will between men. This is my desire as an American, my American Dream, and this is my hope and my prayer as a human being alive on earth at the dawn of a new decade.

The poets and the prophets tell us that the sun rises on the good and the evil, even as the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. But we need no prophets or poets to teach us this organic truth of the earth. All we need do is to look to the world beyond our windows.

All we need do is to take a light-hearted walk outside and stand in the warm green light of the golden sun or the cool blue patter of the falling rain to understand that the earth reserves judgment for none, vengeance for nobody and hate for nothing under the sun, and that the sublime light of the sun warms all and the rainwater nurtures everything there is, giving her nourishing life openly and freely to us all.

At the Dawn of a New Decade,
Let us be Fearless and Full of Grace

“Years ago, I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made
up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth.
I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it;
while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison,
I am not free.”

Eugene V. Debs,
Statement to the Court Upon Being Convicted of Violating the Sedition Act

“When I say it’s you I like, I’m talking about that part of you that knows
that life is far more than anything you can ever see or hear or touch.
That deep part of you that allows you to stand for those things without which
humankind cannot survive. Love that conquers hate, peace that rises
triumphant over war, and justice that proves more powerful than greed.”

Fred Rogers

So the choice is ours. Whether we wish to work good or evil in the world, and whether we yearn to be just or unjust in our relationships with our neighbors and fellow men. The choice is ours, and either way the earth will warm us and nurture us all the same, the earth will still love us as we are.

Americans, Iraqis, Iranians, before the brilliant face of the sun we all stand and we’re all warmed the same, even as when we bow our heads, cup our hands and lift a cool pool of water to our lips, the water we drink nourishes us and gives life to us all equally, without prejudice of nation or race. Good and evil, in the presence of the earth, we’re all worthy of life and we’re all the same.

This, my friends, is what we call mercy. This, my fellow loved ones, is what we know as grace. The mercy and grace of the earth is absolute, unending and unconditional. The mercy and grace of the earth are eternal.

In 2020, let us learn from the earth and from the wisdom of creation. In the new decade ahead, let us yearn to be full of mercy and strive to be fearless and full of grace.

The Time Is Now

The god of dirt
came up to me many times and said
so many wise and delectable things, I lay
on the grass listening
to his dog voice,
crow voice,
frog voice; now,
he said, and now,
and never once mentioned forever,
which has nevertheless always been,
like a sharp iron hoof,
at the center of my mind.

One or two things are all you need
to travel over the blue pond…
But to lift the hoof!
For that you need an idea.

For years and years I struggled
just to love my life. And then
the butterfly
rose, weightless, in the wind.
“Don’t love your life
too much,” it said
and vanished
into the world.

“One or Two Things,” by Mary Oliver.

In a murderous time, in a warring age rife with rage and bristling with beauty and barbarism, the time for peace is now. The time is always now.

Peace

“Humanity is but a single Brotherhood:
so make peace with your brethren.”

“Love your neighbor as yourself.”

“Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.”

The Prophet Muhammad and Jesus of Nazareth,
The Quran 49:10, Mark 12:31 & Matthew 5.9.

Let us work for truth, justice, freedom of the heart and mind and human dignity for all. Let us be kind, let us practice compassion and aspire toward courage. Let us work for a peace that is more than the absence of war, a peace rooted deep, deep, deep, deeply in human dignity and justice for all, at home and across the earth. For beauty is the work of the world, but our work is peace and our aspiration grace, even as ecstatic love is surely our deepest yearning and the primal longing of all things that live and sing in wild flight under the golden sun.

Finally, let us come together and stand up to our true enemies, the Masters of War, with not the hate of monsters but the love of humanity in our lion hearts. Let us unite, stand up and fight the Masters of War, before they line us up and march us off, one-by-one-by-one, into the unholy brickkiln of war and the ungodly hell of hate, before they sicken our hearts with fear and deliver us up together like sheep to the slaughter of yet another world war.

Love without prejudice, empathy for the other, fearlessness and freedom from hate, and praise for everything under the star-sprent firmament. Praise, presence and joy in the perfection of all things. In the new decade that now dawns before us, this must be the moral way. This must be the American way. This must be the way of the human race. In a murderous time, in a violent and terrified age, in a warring era and a generation sick with rage, we must have the courage to be compassionate, the moral genius to be empathetic, and the strength of heart to be brave and humane.

Together, as neighbors, as family and friends, as earthlings, as members of the same human race, for the sake of humanity and the preservation of our planet, in the brave new decade that is now here, that is here and now, let us put our great faith and deep belief not in the force of war but in the power of peace.

Peace to you. Peace to all. Peace between partisans in 2020. Peace between America and Iran. Peace on earth and praise to everything under the sun.

Thanks

“God breaks the heart again, and again,
and again until the heart stays open.”

Hazrat Inayat Khan

Thank you for reading this open letter and peace essay and for visiting The Land West of Long Mountain Project.

If you’d like to revisit this essay in its shorter, serialized dispatches, which include more pictures and full photograph galleries, you may do so through the links below. If you’re new to the Long West and would like to learn more about the project, please check out our first dispatch here.

We welcome you again, we welcome you always, to the Land West of Long Mountain. Until then: peace, salam alaykum, and much wholeness to you.

• 

• 

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An Open Letter to My Fellow Americans
at the Dawn of a New Decade

– An Appeal Against Partisanship in America –
& Against War with Iran in Asia

Part I: The Info War Blues
Part II: Breaking Through the Blues
Part III: A Bipartisan American Rebuke
Part IV: The Forever War on Iran
Part V: In A Murderous Time

A Peace Essay by
The Land West of Long Mountain Project.