Barack Requiem

no faith teaches people to massacre innocents"-- our 44th commander rhetorician

Mr. President: When I was growing up, I was a fervent and occasionally rude Roman Catholic, and though Protestant and church fathers differ on textual interpretation, and it is also well known through the midrash  that Hebraic scribes engaged in hyperbole with a fluidity equal to that of their Hellenistic competitors, monotheism nonetheless does indeed justify the slaughter of innocents, particularly when Joshua invaded Canaan to create the state of Israel. Pagans were put to the sword. Does this mean that the twelve tribes engaged in genocide? Probably not on the scale we see today, but griot  is never entirely inaccurate, transcribed even from the distance of the judges to the courts of the corrupt rulers who led Israel into the Diaspora.

In the Gospel, as well, a pair of hypocritical converts drops dead at the feet of either Christ or Peter, or Paul, for that matter, the zealous torturer who conquered Rome. I did not realize James Foley was Catholic. This pierced my eroding conscience briefly, light as a fallen feather of a falcon. There was a tenure, perhaps as briefly past as Clinton's administration, when the barbarism of ISIS would have been equivalent to the showers at Auschwitz, but what has blurred the niceties of this distinction is the inhumanity of the paradigm, couched in fealty to the procedure. A significant percentage of persons gets weighed down by this, and rather than absorbing this unspecified guilty charge like a rat on a ninja course, they become hardened, join ISIS, a militia. 

Unless an extraordinary 2016 candidate emerges, you will be the last President I voted for. Reagan was a liar, and by the time of the Iran Contra testimony, obviously in the early stages of dementia, but he was the last leader in whom decency of conviction made me happy to be an American; now I'm a fascist promising immolation to myself for a hard life in the land of Negrodelphia. I despise Eric Holder, and you, poor fellow, should have been dean of Trinity College. You disappointed everyone, acolytes and adversaries. George Will has pondered whether or not your second term approaches *Carter territory,* but I see your lame duck standing as closer to Woodrow Wilson working himself into that ineffectual stroke.

Richard Basciano

"A smile opens up the whole body!" Danny Aiello

Local newscasts serve up unethical contractors with the same relish that we dig into a pot roast dinner, and undoubtedly, local journalists will investigate construction bosses with renewed vigilance in light of Basciano's malfeasance. The reasons for the consistent malpractice are probably as long  and drawn out as the history of architecture, the ways in which edifice, monuments, churches and palaces are used, instilling grandeur, making statements about imperial might, material efficiency. Boots on the ground may get reconstructed in historical documentaries, but only the designers are treated with iconic status, whether this is through Charlie Rose, and his desire to educate his audience on design as art, or Peter Greenaway engaged in his curious examinations via cinematography. In the art of negativity, however, it also serves up the disintegration of Italian culture that can never be put back together again, even if there was a good deal of luck involved in the rise, the glory, of the Roman city state.

In one of my unfortunate events when I still utilized Paratransit services regularly, my sexual excitement over a male candy sent my driver into Basciano's local smut forum, closed now, some months prior to the Market Street collapse. I gave a fat no nothing black guy with gristled facial hair a hard on, and to this day, carry that episodic guilt, tuning myself to Kafka's abstract disparities. I might have been raped, or led him to get heavy on another client. Greaseball to jig indictment, hand in hand with long standing Mediterranean ambivalence toward North Africa. In these micro narrative terms, Basciano may be a facsimile, an anti-matter image layered on an already corrosive and provincial retraction (the mafia) of what it is to be a member of the meritocracy, the established figurehead in charge, running things, for appearances sake, while skating the lowest common denominator, because serfs are still expendable. Peasants no longer exist in the modern world. Of course not.

I am still in an exasperated stasis over what I did wrong saving my revisions which apparently vanished on my external drive, retyping because I still lack the steady nerve to open my HP and try to rescue my content. In my new found freedom of repose, sinkhole mattress challenging posture and sleep, dismay over my most influential professor's collection leads me to re-examine why I punished myself so badly over my lack of striving to eclipse him.

I never had certain things that make the arc of life worth living, like the joy of falling into a lover. Franz had many of the same problems as his health would gradually necessitate a disability stipend. I was never partial to his genius, of course, though in moments my prism aligns.