We Are a Nation of Yaws*

Now that the City of Detroit is on its receivership knees, now that Interstate highways and bridges are showing signs of metal fatigue, embrittlement, and decay, now that post offices are being shut down all over rural US, now that schools are being privatized, and students forced into life-time indentured servitude, graduating from supposedly “public” universities $150,000 in debt, the nation has come clean with its budgetary priorities: all you groveling folks asking for handouts, listen up. Moving forward, in the interests of preserving US national security, the national budget is gonna prioritize TORTURE. Members of Congress voted 315 to 109 in favor of preserving the torture program, and research has revealed that the winners received twice as much money from “Defense” (Ambrose Bierce “War”) Industries as the losers. But all received their routine Wassermans, which they do every time they vote, keeping them in the streets, plying their trade without transmitting STDs.  Wassermans are how you keep whores healthy.

On July 26, the press revealed that each Guantanamo “detainee” (Ambrose Bierce: torturee) costs you, the groveling taxpayer with your two (or three) minimum wage jobs—that’s if you’re lucky!—exactly 2.7 million. That’s 2,700,000 dollars a year  that you have to fork over to the torture budget. Maybe it’s money that could be put to better use. Just think if instead of applying the water board, we educated these guilty Gitmo wretches, they could each earn exactly 10,800 Ph.D. degrees a year @ $150,000 a pop. Think what a justification for more bombs and more torture they could become! They could graduate from CIA-designed small potatoes underwear bombs to underwear Tomahawks—just the kind of folks we like to recruit.

Or think what the 49,000,000 (that’s forty-nine million) Americans, many of them children, subsisting on food stamps could do with $2,700,000.  Multiply $2,700,000 by the 166 “detainees” held at Guantanamo, and you get a $448,200,000 worth, or ten dollars more a year of healthy eating! That’s the bare minimum when you consider that the humanitarian daily ration is pegged by the US Department of Defense at $39.50 a day.

Or think what splendid funerals the 181 dead Pakistani and Yemeni children (accidentally) dronicided this year by the United States could have had (instead of having their body parts ignominiously separated from those of the sheep or goats they happened to have been tending).  A glorious cortege consisting of funeral wagons, gold Michael Jackson caskets, garlanded camels (where appropriate), weeping townspeople magnificently clothed in funerary garments shot with gold, including a New Orleans Hot Licks second line, envision the perfect funeral at only $17,000 a pop. It could wipe out guilt automatically.

I don’t want to tip my hand here to suggest that the torture budget is way out of line.  These “detainees” have what’s coming to them.  Anyone dumb enough to get on the radar of somebody trying to rack up $5,000 bounties gets their just deserts—by gastric tube if necessary—$2,700,000 worth, or $27,000,000 for the ten-year economy size.  The finest torture money can buy.

*Yaws. A spirochete indistinguishable from the syphilis spirochete

July 29, 2013