You walk into the room with your pencil in your hand
You see somebody naked and you say, “Who is that man?”
You try so hard but you don’t understand
Just what you will say when you get home
Because something is happening here but you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?
You raise up your head and you ask, “Is this where it is?”
And somebody points to you and says, “It’s his”
And you say, “What’s mine?” and somebody else says, “Well, what is?”
And you say, “Oh my God, am I here all alone?”
But something is happening and you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?
You hand in your ticket and you go watch the geek
Who immediately walks up to you when he hears you speak
And says, “How does it feel to be such a freak?”
And you say, “Impossible!” as he hands you a bone
And something is happening here but you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?
You have many contacts among the lumberjacks
To get you facts when someone attacks your imagination
But nobody has any respect, anyway they already expect you to all give a check
To tax-deductible charity organizations
Ah, you’ve been with the professors and they’ve all liked your looks
With great lawyers you have discussed lepers and crooks
You’ve been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books
You’re very well-read, it’s well-known
But something is happening here and you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?
Please read the enclosed portions of Bob Dylan’s great song ‘Ballad of a Thin Ma’ (1965). It expresses, to this writer, the mindset of so many Americans in this the 21st Century. The bottom line is that most of us are simply lost inside this empire, this Military Industrial Empire. Like the citizens of Orwell’s 1984, many of my fellow Americans have either been morally and economically beaten down by this empire and its propaganda, or have become so numb by its power over them. Big Brother in Orwell’s novel is alive and well within this well orchestrated con of the Two Party System. The sin of it is how they all, from politicians to embedded journalists ( ike, duh, 99% of them) keep feeding us the pabulum about our nation being a Democracy. To all you Mr. Jones out there, we have never really been a democracy! The holier than holy ‘Founding Fathers’ were essentially rich and powerful men (never women, not allowed in that club), many of them slaveholders or land and currency speculators. They wrote the rules to protect the few from the ‘Unwashed masses’ who labored to make them so very rich.
Whoever devised the scheme to create the phony battle between two political parties was a genius! Yes, on some issues, like that of slavery, there was a great divide. Yet, even then, take Honest Abe Lincoln if you would, who before obtaining office worked as a lawyer representing the ‘Evil of that era’, the railroads. Remember it was the wonderful (tongue in my cheek) railroads that stole land from so many as they chugged out west. It was the railroads that helped create the phrase ‘Not a china man’s chance’. They needed coolie like labor to lay the tracks down, so they made sure enough Chinese were imported to do the back breaking and deadly work. So many died that the phrase became relevant. And Lincoln was actually a hero compared to the virulent white supremacist Southern politicians who saw the black man (and woman) as a notch below those Chinese coolies. Remember, their capitalist counterparts up North thought of their workers as perhaps one notch above the slave. This is how our empire nourished itself… off of the blood, sweat and tears of those who labored.
So many of my friends, neighbors and coworkers continue to believe in the Big Lie of democracy. They proudly label themselves as Democrats, Republicans or maybe Independents and still support those hypocrites in office. These are the hypocrites who are way beyond the so called 1%. Since many of them, almost all of them, are actually in the ‘Less than 1%’, how in the hell can these people understand what it is to have to struggle for the rent or mortgage money each month? Or to have to worry about missing that needed car payment, or medical insurance premium, or car insurance premium… or actual medical bill? A lady I know passed out while waiting to do the paperwork at an Urgent Care facility, was rushed to the ER by paramedics, and had to pay off a $2000 bill for the ambulance and ER visit. She didn’t even need to get admitted! She was in and out in less than one hour… for $2 grand!
Bottom line: Yes, Donald Trump was an abomination politically. He did all he could to regress us back to a point even worse than we had been before him. The only thing one could say that was complimentary about him, if that is even possible, was that he showed how little he cared for working stiffs and the indigent… with no illusions. He lied so much that even his ‘Trump Thumpers’ got caught up in it all. With Obama, Bush Jr., Clinton, Bush Sr. and on and on, they most likely knew that they were full of ****. Sadly, the suckers… sorry, the voters, followed them down the rabbit hole strictly by party affiliation. It didn’t matter, as it does now with Joe Biden, so long as your guy, your party’s guy, is on top. That is all that matters to many of the unwashed out there. This writer bit his lip and voted for a man who I detested politically for decades, Lunch Box Joe, simply to see the back of the demon with Orange hair. And that is how it is inside this phony democracy.
Ah, you’ve been with the professors and they’ve all liked your looks
With great lawyers you have discussed lepers and crooks
You’ve been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books
You’re very well-read, it’s well-known
But something is happening here and you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?
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