Every few years we get to play a part in choosing the national Daddy. I see your Tiger mom and raise you an Eagle dad.
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I've held several jobs considered menial or 'jobby-jobs' but one I have never chosen and would never be able to choose is sewing flags. To thread non-wearable fabric in primary colors would give me nightmares of being BLED THROUGH with them.
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They hate us because we use money from China to pay for a children's program featuring a giant bird. We have failed in being nuanced and cautious about how we pay for the televisual sighting of our national birds.
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It is dishonest to call U.S. elections U.S. elections. They are by default world elections. They collapse the concept of 'at home' and 'abroad' in ways that have not even begun to be touched. They are a sizable part of the machinery, along with taxes, lobbyists, mercenary-corporate extraction technologies, and the solitary-confinement-penitentiary system that decide who suffers or dies for what is termed 'the bottom line.'
Everyone is assumed to have a bottom-line issue in American politics: gun control, drugs, abortion, education, healthcare, etc. etc. Let's go all out and say that this bottom-lining singularly defines the 'domestic' American electoral system in ways no other nation-state can claim.
We have given up on so much, compromised sheer human evolutionary potential, for the specter of 'incremental change.'
Death has no incremental change. The radical act of designating oneself the decider of the moment of death, and maximizing this act as a mechanical data output, is part of the American machinery. (This is not an issue but it is also a bottom line.)
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From CAConrad's 'say it with grEEn paint for the comfort and healing of their wounds' (from A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon, 2012):
the babysitter of
empire wants a raisewrite on walls write on court
house sidewalks write on every single mirror you
can find"I MAKE
HOLES IN AFGHAN
FAMILIES EVERY TIME
I PAY MY TAXES!"