Time Passes
Precisely two years ago today I underwent my last chemotherapy and radiation therapy treatments — on the same day, for chrissakes! By this date, two turns around the sun ago, I could no longer feel the olive pits on either side of my throat. I’d been running my fingers over my neck for weeks — months! — each day and, yep, each day of my treatment the little buggers shrank. Still, who knew what relics of the cancer — squamous cell carcinoma resulting in numerous malignant lymph nodes, occult primary — remained, un-sensed, under my skin. I wouldn’t know for months that I was in remission until the swelling and scarring abated and my oncologist could scan me and palpate me.
I looked so forward to the date, March 21st, the scheduled double finale of the horrible insults my body was receiving, daily and of my own volition. The day came and I rang the tradition “It’s over!” bells both at the radiation center and the infusion center. But my oncology nurse, Mike, told me, “It’s gonna get worse.” He’d said so for weeks already but still, I just knew that minutes after my final treatments I’d feel spry and hale again, ready to eat and drink again, back to goddamned normal again!
Mike was right; I was wrong. The ordeal I’d thought was unbearable in the final weeks of treatment only grew worse in the succeeding weeks.
But I pulled through and — I still can hardly believe it — appear to have survived cancer.
You’ll forgive me if I crow.
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Power Talk
Remember Samantha Power? A name from the recent past (although this particular past seems more like ancient history).
She was the US Ambassador to the United Nations during the second Barack Obama term. I never paid all that much att’n to her. How many of us, really, even know who the various UN ambassadors are or have been? Quick, can you name the current person in that position? It took me a few seconds to remember. And — flat out — I have no idea w/o looking it up who preceded Power.
Anyway, Power was our global diplomat back when this holy land’s leadership was relatively sane and respectable. Check out some of her creds leading up to her nomination to the UN in June 2013:
- BA, Yale University
- JD, Harvard University
- Journalist (war correspondent), covering the Yugoslavia theater in the 1990s
- Author, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction
- Founding executive director, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy
- Time magazine, 100 Most Influential People in the World
- Foreign Policy magazine, Top 100 Global Thinker
- Forbes magazine, World’s 100 Most Powerful Women
- Subject of the documentary,
- Member, US National Security Council
Power
I mean, honestly, has anyone involved with President Gag ever won the Pulitzer Prize? Or even knows what in the hell it is?
Power’s devoted her life to the study and pursuit of human rights and humanitarian aid to godforsaken lands. Again, does any Li’l Duce admin member know what humanitarian aid is? Or, for that matter, what a human is?
Power’s coming to Bloomington later this month, the 28th and 29th, to serve as keynote speaker for the third annual America’s Role in the World conference, sponsored by Indiana University’s School of Global and International Studies. She’ll deliver her address at noon on Thursday the 29th.
I dunno about you, but I’ll be there.
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Worse
With all the recent revelations about how geek corporations in the employ of the Russkies (and quite possibly probably at the behest of the Li’l Duce campaign as well) have mined our Facebook info and then trolled the huge swathe of willfully ignorant in this holy land in order to…
- Throw our election process into chaos, weakening our collective belief in democracy
- Character assassinate Hillary Clinton
- Help a buffoon get elected
- All of the above
… the whole sickening shebang makes me think of some of those stupid personality quizzes and “Do You Remember the 60s?” excruciatingly tedious “fun” interrogatories. I took a scant few of them. I found them unchallenging and often weirdly inaccurate. I also found them to have been written in a style that can only be described as faux-Eastern Bloc Kaos agent-ese straight out of a “Get Smart” episode.
I knew it was all Russian bullshit. I figured it was American corporations subcontracting out to Moscow boiler room operations stuffed with fresh-faced computer experts digging for info so they could target advertise to me. As long as that was the case, I figured, so what.
The case, we’re learning — with more proof tidal-waving in by the day — was is a hell of a lot more malicious than that.
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Perverse Equality
It needs to be said. There are weird and venomous trains of thought circulating around the black American community these days. Proof positive that whites don’t have a monopoly on stupid.
To wit: Washington DC council member Trayon White has stated on Facebook that Jewish financiers control the climate for their own nefarious ends. Then it was learned he said similar things last month at a meeting of local gov’t officials. He said at that time that the Rothschilds, the favorite whipping family of the likes of, oh, Adolf Hitler, control the World Bank, the federal government, and are in the process of taking over the planet’s big cities.
In a separate example of dumbfounding idiocy, Cleveland Cavaliers basketball star Jordan Clarkson appeared on a popular podcast, “Road Trippin’: Richard vs Channing” carried on uninterrupted.com, and said giant humans used to roam the Earth and even kept dinosaurs as pets.
Here’s White on the Jews who, he’s sure, have a stranglehold on the rest of us:
There’s this whole concept with the Rothschilds — control the World Bank, as we all know — infusing dollars into major cities. They really pretty much control the federal government, and now they have this concept called resilient cities in which they are using their money and influence into local cities.
And here’s Clarkson, with podcast host DJ Montage:
Jordan Clarkson: Y’all know how we got dogs and stuff, right? So, I think it was bigger people in the world before us and the dinosaurs was they pets.
DJ Montage: How big were those people?
Clarkson: Oh, you look at a dinosaur. They got to be three times bigger than them.
What’s not generally acknowledged is this brand of non-thinking is bandied about in private enclaves — living rooms, barber shops, bars, and even dorm rooms to an extent that might surprise you. The flat-Earth theory has traction therein as well. These ideas don’t arise in a vacuum.
That famous liberal media we always hear about (and which exists only in the fever dreams of Right Wing ideologues) won’ touch this one. Nor will civilian wits and wags among the folks on my side of the fence. No one gains traction criticizing black Americans (unless their names are Hannity or Bannon, etc.). Hell, black Americans regularly take beatings from the likes of Fox News and other outlets of balderdash so it’s sort of a gentlepeople’s agreement: lay off black people’s stupidity. It would be too much like piling on.
Problems arise when that stupidity becomes dangerous. Anti-semitism and anti-intellectualism are dangerous. Period.
The American black community has been traumatized and defrauded by our schools’ refusal to present American history in a truthful way. In fact, we’ve all been traumatized by this institutionalized obsession with whitewashing this holy land’s past. The South cared nothing about “state’s rights.” They cared only about forcing dark-skinned humans to live in a perpetual condition of inferiority and subservience. Our schools haven’t stressed that reality enough through the years and decades. Martin Luther King, Jr. was despised by white America before he was murdered. Whites here only grudgingly accepted him as an icon after he was safely dead. History class doesn’t reveal what slurs white America called him and how thrilled they were when the first learned he’d been killed. The US Public Health Service’s “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” in which unsuspecting black men with the sexually transmitted disease were left untreated just to see what would happen to them wasn’t, as its very name blatantly proclaims, done on our precious white boys. The subjects of that test were reduced to the level of lab rats. The list of fictions and distortions goes on and on. So, too, does the concealment of the horrors and atrocities.
In school I only learned what a swell guy George Washington Carver was because he concocted a boatload of consumer products out of the peanut. We learned nothing of W.E.B. DuBois. And we certainly never heard the name Pauli Murray breathed even once in our classrooms.
But we’re talking human history here. The kind of embarrassing, crushingly humiliating history that nations and states everywhere try to quash, most effectively through their schools falsifying the past. That’s what we do.
It doesn’t mean every single thing we learned in school is a lie. Plenty is, sure. But plenty isn’t. The world is round. Dinosaurs went extinct millions of years ago. Those are facts. Facts are real. And the Rothschild canard is real only in the minds of sick people.
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