From The Salamander

Lately, I guess as a response to the rhetoric that comes pouring forth every year as Remembrance Day approaches, I have made several critical posts directed against those who find it so easy to don the mantle of patriotism while paying only lip service to the lives lost in war.

In response to one of those posts, the salamander left a poem. With his permission, I am showcasing it here, as I think it very effectively captures some of the motivation behind those who so willingly consign others to the risk of injury or death while fighting wars that hardly serve the purposes their propaganda suggests.

Here it is:

on armchair warriors.. and their ilk ....

--------------------------------- the Theocrats ... assorted aborted Bureaucrats the ethically dead, and marching ants of zombie conservative reform rants

The toxic loutpack ministry of lord Stephan Harper Baird, - Mackay, Oliver and Clement, Kenney, Fantino.. Flattery .. the noisy others

All of them piss-poor pro war hissing cowards sycophant jowly pigmaids in lipstick waiting.. lords of flies, electoral lies and the live and oily robocall

Guided by invisible heavenly white angel noise boot lick back-room - blackberry electro twits and sneery war-room phone call cabin boyz

To their mission-vision calling they must whore.. all wrapped in petro power F-35 bomblet games steeped in wet red dreams of good old fashioned war

And kneeling to their woofing Rapture Beast in Heat in holy Israel.. they inhale their precious time in the trough Wallow Baby.. Wallow.. squeal from your Commons seat

When hobnailed real Canadian boots kick yer stinkin filthy arses high n heavenwards then and only then, will you behold

The filthy Rapture You Deserve.. and Earned

I look forward to hearing much more from the salamander.

And Another Thing ....

When It Comes To Our Veterans

... the Canadian government knows that talk is cheap.

But Would They Be So Enthusiastic

... if they knew anything about their northern neigbour? You decide:

After Cutting Through The Sanctimonious Rhetoric

...it is apparent that, like most governments, the Harper regime has been quite content to recruit, exploit and ultimately abandon those who, in good faith, joined the armed forces to support a 'muscular adventurism' that has both tarnished and diminished Canada's standing in the real (i.e., excluding the U.S.) international community.

Ample evidence of this abandonment is to be found in the words of those veterans and military widows who gathered on Parliament Hill just prior to Remembrance Day, words that paint a stark picture of bureaucratic indifference and red tape that flies in the face of reassurances from the government, which says the care of military families is a top priority.

Retired master corporal Dave Desjardins, who was "proud to serve his country" and is paralyzed from the waist down, had the following to offer:

“What I’m not proud of, however, is how our government officials and senior military leadership can look directly into the camera (and) speak to the Canadian public about honouring our veterans at this time of year with implied conviction when they’ve clearly turned their back on us and continue to demonstrate (that) on a daily basis,” said Desjardins.

He challenged Veterans Affairs Minister Steven Blaney to look him in the eye “and tell me you really care.”

You can read the complete sad story, posted in today's Star, here.

Canadians: Dear Leader Requires Your Uncritical Attention

To absorb and spread this message. Watch, learn, and heed:

Ignore the ugly rumours spread by enemies of the state that Dear Leader advocated this policy in 2008.

As The Republicans Desperately Seek A New Political Religion

...they would be well-advised to read what, in my view (and I know many would disagree) is one of the greatest American novels ever written, John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, the story of dispossessed Mid-West farmers seeking a new life in California. Like all truly significant works, the novel offers penetrating insights into the human condition that the right wing, were it less disdainful of such 'soft' pursuits as the perusal of literature, would do well to heed.

The U.S. Republican Party will soon embark on a necessary process of renewal and the search for a new constituency in its efforts to eventually recapture the White House; as has already been widely reported, those efforts will be grounded in the recognition that their current constituency, thanks to its historically recent capitulation to extremists, largely consists of angry older white men whose numbers and influence are dwindling, thanks both to nature's inexorable course and the growing proportion of Latino voters who, along with other 'minorities,' are strangely unreceptive to the politics of division and disenfranchisement currently peddled by the Republican 'brain trust.'

One of the great strengths of The Grapes of Wrath is its unflinching examination of the dialectic of history. In Chapter 19, Steinbeck offers the following warning to those who refuse to recognize new realities, a message that the privileged few in the U.S. (and elsewhere) would be wise to consider:

Once California belonged to Mexico and its land to Mexicans; and a horde of tattered feverish Americans poured in. And such was their hunger for land that they took the land - stole Sutter's land, Guerrero's land, took the grants and broke them up and growled and quarreled over them, those frantic hungry men; and they guarded with guns the land they had stolen… And as time went on, the business men had the farms, and the farms grew larger, but there were fewer of them.

Now farming became industry, and the owners followed Rome, although they did not know it. They imported slaves, although they did not call them slaves: Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Filipinos. They live on rice and beans, the business men said. They don't need much. They wouldn't know what to do with good wages. Why, look how they live. Why, look what they eat. And if they get funny - deport them.

… And then the dispossessed were drawn west - from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Caravans, carloads, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless - restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do - to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut - anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live…. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land.

... They had hoped to find a home, and they found only hatred. Okies - the owners hated them. And in the town, the storekeepers hated them because they had no money to spend.… The town men, little bankers, hated Okies because there was nothing to gain from them. They had nothing. And the laboring people hated Okies because a hungry man must work, and if he must work, if he has to work, the wage payer automatically gives him less for his work; and then no one can get more. (pp. 315-318, The Grapes of Wrath, Penguin Books, 1992)

While many in Steinbeck's day felt both outraged and threatened by his assertion of revolution's inevitability as a reaction to oppression, his message has never been more relevant. Foolish indeed are those who believe they can ignore the lessons of history.