Tag: politics

  • The Universal Menu

    The Universal Menu

    Pie-eyed with delight, she orders
    the most decadent cut on the universal menu:

    a thick slice of liberty, velvet red,
    garnished with a plastic bouquet
    of Stars and Stripes.

    Wafts of early promise and easy credit.
    Chocolate-dollar mansions.
    Plush-padded hips christened as progress.

    The celebration sparkles tonight
    like the wake of her first steps—

    or the backwash of an aircraft carrier,
    the flagship listing heavily in the brine.

    Fat and sinking, the girl cannot float.

    She can hardly drag her bronze ankles
    across the tile after the coma sets in,
    drowned in the tallow
    of her own sweet myth.

    Not to worry.

    In another decade
    the main course will be Enlightenment 101
    at university rates,

    provided she hasn’t choked to death
    on the candied gospel
    she taught the rest of the flock to swallow.

    That is the house specialty.
    The parlor trick.

    She is the patron gorge-feeding at the booth.
    She is the prize cattle.
    She is the girl working the drive-thru window,

    smiling through the rot.

    The birthday candles glow
    against the frosted glaze.

    Back in the grease-trap
    the fryers keep themselves hot.

    The deep fury department
    pulls spun-sugar strings
    taut enough to make every shackle dance.

    Nobody has to tell us anymore.

    We already know our order.

  • Gratitude (2025 Edition) By McCarthy, not Cormac, Jamie McCarthy

    Gratitude isn’t a prayer or a posture.

    It’s a scar that still throbs when the weather turns—

    a reminder you’re somehow still here

    while the world keeps finding new ways

    to set itself on fire.

    It’s outliving a son

    and carrying his brilliance like contraband

    through a year that tested everyone’s faith

    in everything.

    It’s knowing the gods are broke,

    the politicians are puppets,

    the prophets are running side hustles,

    and the news is just a fear carousel

    you didn’t buy a ticket for.

    Gratitude doesn’t live there.

    It lives in the cracked places:

    the dog who curls against you

    like she’s guarding what’s left,

    the laugh you didn’t think you had in you,

    the friend who calls before the collapse,

    the night that lets you pass without a toll.

    It lives in the chaos we survived

    and the beauty that somehow survived us.

    Keep it small.

    Keep it sharp.

    Pocket-sized and battle-ready—

    your own stitched-together compass

    for a world that keeps losing north.

    Remember:

    you’ve been broken open,

    but you’re still walking.

    You’re still dangerous.

    You’re still here.

    Mccarthy AKA FATHER SICARIO

  • CIRCUS TRUTH

    The Program

    Circus Truth

    The television pukes in every corner bar,

    anchormen with porcelain teeth,

    their jaws, clacking wind-up dolls,

    selling fear like popcorn at the carnival.

    You don’t pick your truth anymore—

    it’s handed to you, pre-chewed,

    a soggy cigarette butt that’s passed around the alley and back.

    The left bleeds red ink,

    the right bleeds black bile,

    and the middle—

    there is no middle,

    just a beige carpet soaked with the bloody chunder of yesterday’s spin cycle.

    Every headline is a slot machine:

    pull the lever,

    watch the cherries line up to spell

    WAR, ASSASSINATION, PANIC, OUTRAGE, WOKE, UAP’S, THE SIMULATION.

    They give you “choice”

    like a prison cafeteria—

    mystery meat or a misery meet with sauce.

    And you nod,

    mouth full of microwaved narrative,

    because it’s all as good as plastic and BPA going down.

    The anchors smile,

    the podcasters scream,

    the Tik-Tokers beg to be put back in lockers.

    The news ticker scrolls like scripture,

    and the gospel is always the same:

    stay tuned, stay scared,

    stay stupid enough to buy what they’re selling.

    Meanwhile the truth—

    the real thing—

    squeezes into a clown suit,

    red nose, floppy shoes,

    juggling grenades for clicks.

    The crowd boos,

    but keeps buying tickets.

    That’s the joke, kid:

    truth doesn’t matter—

    the circus sells out anyway.

  • JUST NOD

    They sell us hope in paper cups.
    We buy it, tip the priest in the apron.

    A man curses at a parking meter.
    Another shoots drywall into his veins.

    The rats read stock tickers.
    They know more than the professors.

    God skipped town.
    Left his Bible in the Motel trash.

    Politicians grin with teeth like knives.
    We clap while they steal our shoes.

    The absurd thing is—
    we nod.
    Every damn time.

  • Orwellian Strawberry Fields (Part II) by McCarthy(Jamie, not Cormac)

    They tell you to trust the science—
    but only the science
    they’ve sponsored,
    peer-reviewed by the same boys
    on Epstein’s guest list.

    Your phone listens.
    Your fridge judges.
    Your smart TV recommends antidepressants
    after watching you binge ten hours of apocalyptic Netflix
    and a YouTuber who sells conspiracy with a Colgate smile.

    Truth?
    Truth’s a museum piece.
    It’s roped off.
    Guarded by identity politics,
    cancel threats, and
    “terms and conditions apply.”

    We’re post-fact,
    post-shame,
    post-human.
    Everyone’s got a platform,
    but no one’s got a soul.

    The revolution was digitized,
    streamed in 4K,
    and monetized before the first protest sign was dry.

    Even dissent is a brand now.
    Rebellion has a merch line.
    They sell Che Guevara shirts
    at Walmart—
    made by children
    in Bangladesh.

    This isn’t 1984.
    It’s worse.
    It’s 1984 with a rewards program.
    Smile for your social credit score.
    Be kind.
    Be inclusive.
    Be quiet.

    Meanwhile, the architects
    —the real ones—
    the lizard-brained titans in tailored suits—
    don’t pick sides.
    They fund them.
    They keep you fighting over pronouns
    while they print the next bubble
    and buy the next election
    with a wry smirk and a Cayman account.

    They know you’ll scroll.
    They know you’ll share.
    They know you’ll scream at the screen
    while your dinner is delivered
    by a man who can’t afford his insulin
    because the app took 30%.

    Freedom’s just a filter now.
    Choice? A hallucination.
    Welcome to the Strawberry Fields, friend.
    Forever.

  • How to Kill a Country Without Firing a Single Shot (Ode to Ireland)

    It starts not with war drums, but with whispers.

    Not a boot on the shore, but a soft-soled shuffle in the dark.

    No flags, no trumpets.

    Paperwork and policy, and a nod from some pinstriped man who’s never touched mud.

    Ireland—the old girl—she finally crawled out from the ditch they drowned her in,

    scrubbed the famine from her face,

    stitched the flag back together with borrowed thread and native blood.

    She was never perfect, no.

    But she was herself.

    And that’s a rare enough thing these days.

    Now she stands blinking in the fluorescent light of world order—surrounded.

    New rules, gods, and ghosts.

    Her voice is still hoarse from centuries of screaming in silence,

    and before she can clear her throat—someone’s already speaking for her.

    They come with stories.

    While hers are being shelved,

    dusted over by diversity slogans

    and the sound of virtue blinking red.

    And the irony is so fucking rich.

    The United Kingdom, that battered old whore of conquest,

    finally getting bent over by history.

    The colonizer colonized by complacency,

    by the very hunger it once fed across continents.

    It’s a punchline soaked in gin,

    a banquet where the menu’s in twenty languages

    but none of them say “English.”

    But Ireland?

    Ireland never got her empire.

    She got survival.

    She got famine, and flight, and diaspora.

    She got to be the drunk uncle.

    The lucky charm.

    The sob story in Boston bars.

    And just when the scars started to heal—

    when the songs came back, rising from the foggy dew,

    not as mourning but emerald celebration—

    Then, an untitled wave. 

    Not men with muskets this time.

    Not redcoats or landlords.

    Just silence.

    Just slow, unrelenting erasure dressed as virtue.

    And they say:

    “This is progress.”

    “This is compassion.”

    “This is the future.”

    But the future doesn’t speak Gaelic.

    The future doesn’t remember the graves under the hedgerows.

    The future doesn’t give a damn about your grandfather’s boots.

    This isn’t about skin.

    This isn’t about race.

    This is about place—

    and what happens when place gets diluted

    until it tastes like nothing.

    Give her just a few bloody fucking years to breathe.

    To walk her own streets

    without feeling like a stranger in the house her fathers built

    with song and sorrow.

    They call it xenophobic.

    As if love for your land is a crime.

    As if the only history worth keeping is someone else’s.

    This isn’t war.

    No bombs.

    No battles.

    No blood.

    Just replacement.

    And that’s the real trick of it—

    Not a single shot fired.

    The quietest conquest is the one where no one even notices it happening until the flags are different, and the pubs are gone, and your children don’t know the name of the river that runs behind the house where your mother was born.

  • DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

    They always called it a rabbit hole
    like it was some playful spiral,
    a psychedelic slide into harmless madness.
    But this hole stinks.
    Like burned paper and blood on old currency squeezed together by melting rubberbands.
    Like the back alley of a failed empire.

    I didn’t fall —
    I was pushed.
    By smiling men in tailored suits,
    by ads that knew my name before I did,
    by the unblinking god-eye of surveillance wrapped in convenience.
    They called it progress.
    I called it a muzzle with a firmware update.

    The rabbit?
    He was half-rat, half-fed.
    A jittery informant with bugs stitched into his fur.
    He sold me a map in exchange for my fingerprints.
    Told me,
    “You’re not gonna like what you find,
    but you already paid the toll.”

    We passed the Mad Hatter —
    ex-Blackrock, now peddling immortality
    through neural lace and lithium smiles.
    His tea was laced with lithium, too.
    Served in a chipped mug etched with OWN NOTHING. BE HAPPY.
    Said free will was a glitch in the old system,
    and the new patch fixed it.
    “Congratulations. You’re cured of choice.”

    The Cheshire Cat was just teeth.
    Rows and rows of them —
    each one a microphone,
    a camera,
    a contract.
    He spoke in brand slogans and court settlements.
    His grin was sponsored by Pfizer.
    And Meta.
    And Lockheed.

    Deeper still:
    a hallway made of CRT TVs,
    each screen playing a different lie on loop:
    Weapons of mass destruction.
    Flatten the curve.
    Hope and change.
    Trust the science.
    God Bless the Troops.
    Epstein died alone.
    The vote was secure.
    Everything is fine.

    The Queen of Hearts ran an NGO now,
    dressed in recycled virtue-signaling and diversity hires.
    She didn’t shout off with their heads anymore —
    she just clicked shadowban
    and let the algorithm do the killing.

    I found a room.
    Locked.
    Inside:
    documents stamped TOP SECRET in 1965,
    pages soaked in oil and redacted like a priest’s confession.
    Operation Northwoods.
    COINTELPRO.
    Project Stargate.
    And something called “The Adjustment Bureau.”
    No files, just a single line:
    THEY MOVE FASTER THAN YOU CAN THINK.

    And that’s when I saw it —
    not in ink,
    but in code.

    A string of data,
    buried like a landmine:
    Jack McCarthy.
    Snapchat geolocation.
    Aron Miranda.
    Proximity trigger.
    Behavioral prediction confidence: 93.6%.
    Outcome: Fatal.
    Status: Acceptable Risk.

    I stopped breathing.
    Not out of fear,
    but because I finally understood:
    It wasn’t a coincidence.
    It was an execution.
    Sanctioned by silence,
    written by code,
    delivered by convenience.

    This isn’t a rabbit hole.
    It’s Hell’s sewer system.
    A machine that eats your sons
    and calls it a glitch.
    A system that makes you watch,
    and then tells you you’re crazy for screaming.

    I used to call it theory,
    Now I call it murder.

  • THAT WHICH CANNOT BE EXPLAINED

    The earth shrugs, and a fault line splits a city in two.

    A rock, smooth from centuries of wind and rain, decides today is the day it falls, crushing a man who never missed Sunday mass.

    A wildfire starts in the bones of a dead tree, the wind carrying its laughter across acres of homes and history.

    Somewhere in the ocean, something ancient rolls over in its sleep, and the tides rise just enough to erase a coastline.

    No explanation. No reason. Just the universe twitching in its sleep.

    And then there are the other things. The ones written in history books with footnotes that lead nowhere.

    The bodies that vanish.

    The wars that start because someone blinked at the wrong time.

    The lone gunman that wasn’t so alone.

    The flag that was still  there, an anti-gravity, star bangled banner still waving. 

    The numbers that don’t add up, the footage that disappears, the coincidences that stack too neatly to be random but too scattered to be anything else.

    We shake our fists at the sky, but the sky never bothers to look down.

    And then there’s this—the real question, the only one that matters to me. 

    Jack.

    Why Jack?

    Not the dealer, not the smug piece of shit pushing poison for profit.

    Not the ones who make money off of death while dressed in white coats.

    Not the fucking grinning death merchants in boardrooms, approving a new batch of slow, quiet execution.

    But Jack?

    Why him? Why that night?

    Why that second, that breath, that choice?

    The tectonic plates shift and ask questions but they don’t answer.

    The fire roars, but it doesn’t explain.

    The rock doesn’t whisper a reason as it falls.

    I wake up every day, expecting the answer to be written on the ceiling, in the cracks in the paint, in the coffee, in the way the wind moves the leaves.

    Anything.

    I don’t even need it to be the full answer. Just a hint. 

    But all I get is silence.

    And silence is the loudest fucking thing in the world.

    But, somehow today I am temporarily at peace, it may not be the answer, but fuck, at least it’s not another question. 

  • The Only Side

    The channels, the magazines, the sites—they’re all peddling the same poison under different labels, like snake oil in a kaleidoscope. The pundits, the hacks, the echo chambers disguised as platforms of truth: one chorus chants, “Democracy is over,” while the other screams, “They’re coming for your freedom!” Different flags, same battle hymn.

    Some call it the Matrix, a web of manipulation so dense you can’t tell truth from propaganda. But let’s not flatter ourselves with cinematic metaphors. This isn’t some grand sci-fi conspiracy. This is humanity, stripped bare, its truest colors bleeding through like wine stains on cheap carpet. The educated look down on the working class with the smug disdain of someone who’s forgotten who fixes their plumbing or grows their food. And yet, why? Because intelligence without wisdom is just arrogance with better grammar.

    The working class isn’t innocent either—eyes glued to screens, buying into their preferred flavor of outrage. They, too, love a good villain, and they’ll take whatever bogeyman the talking heads serve up.

    And the intellectuals, oh, the intellectuals. They are often intensely stupid. The kind of stupid that comes with thinking you’re immune to manipulation because you’ve read Marx or Hayek or, god help us, a Twitter thread. They call themselves critical thinkers, but their critiques are as hollow as the echo chambers they inhabit.

    What if one had to actually pick a side? Thank god we don’t, because there’s only one side: theirs. And “they” don’t care which team jersey you wear, as long as you’re on the field, playing their game. Democracy? Freedom? Those are just words they use to keep us running laps, convinced we’re winning something while they laugh from the VIP lounge.

    So pick a side, if you must. Red or blue, left or right, Coke or Pepsi. It doesn’t matter. The scoreboard is rigged, the game already decided. And when it’s over, the only winners will be the ones who sold us the tickets. 

  • Uncivil Savages

    Uncivil Savages: The Erosion of Civility in a Savage Age

    Civility, that once-vital lubricant of a functioning society, now teeters precariously on its last legs, kicked aside with all the grace of a drunken reveler who never liked the furniture to begin with. It is no longer simply neglected; it’s actively mocked—dismissed as the sanctuary of the timid, the foppish indulgence of those too weak for the robust sport of perpetual outrage. As we gaze into the murky waters of the next four years, the pertinent question isn’t whether civility will vanish entirely. No, it’s whether we’ll even remember what it looked like in the first place.

    The Savage Within

    The modern savage isn’t wielding a club or grunting in a cave; they’re armed with hashtags, shouting into echo chambers, or gleefully dissecting opposing views with the precision of an online executioner. Today’s weapons of choice are not crude but digital, their reach vast and their anonymity reassuring.

    Social media, initially heralded as a tool for connecting the world, now functions as the coliseum of modern life. Algorithms, bless their little mechanical hearts, work tirelessly to ensure your biases are confirmed, your opponents vilified, and your indignation monetized. The result? A cacophony of tribal warfare where shouting replaces dialogue, and the loudest voice wins—not by merit but sheer decibels.

    Progress? If you squint hard enough, maybe. For now, it looks a lot like shouting into a void where no one is listening.

    The Next Four Years

    Spoiler alert: things will probably get worse before they get better. Expect technology to turbocharge the descent, with AI crafting propaganda so perfectly attuned to your anxieties that you’ll almost thank it for ruining your day. Political leaders, meanwhile, will continue to treat governance as performance art, pandering to their bases with the finesse of carnival barkers.

    Economic inequities, that ever-reliable tinderbox, will grow more pronounced, ensuring we all have someone else to blame for our frustrations. Society will fracture further into opposing camps, each more convinced of the other’s villainy.

    But wait—there’s hope! It’s faint, like a candle in a gale, but hope nonetheless. History has an odd way of veering from the inevitable, often just as we’re about to walk off the cliff. Perhaps the collective fatigue of perpetual division will push us toward something better. Or perhaps not.

    The Case for Civility

    Let’s be clear: civility is not a genteel pat on the head or a spineless retreat from confrontation. True civility is a high-wire act, requiring strength, discipline, and the kind of self-control that feels almost quaint in an age of instant gratification.

    Civility is the ability to wield words with care rather than as cudgels, to see disagreement as an opportunity rather than a threat. It’s not for the faint of heart; it takes guts to stay your hand—or your tweet—when outrage is just a click away.

    Leaders have a part to play, but so do we all. Institutions, for all their flaws, can only do so much. The real work of civility begins at the individual level: in how we speak, how we listen, and—dare I say it—how we hold ourselves accountable for the tone we set.

    A Savage Choice

    “Uncivil savages” isn’t just a turn of phrase; it’s an epitaph in waiting. The choice before us is stark: cling to the transient thrill of division, orinvest in the far more arduous—and infinitely more rewarding—pursuit of shared humanity.

    Civility is not a decorative frill on the tapestry of society; it’s the very thread holding it together. Lose it, and we’ll find ourselves unraveling at a pace that even our most cynical forebears would find alarming.

    Here’s the irony: to rise above our basest instincts, to practice civility in the face of chaos, will require a kind of savagery of its own. The savagery of courage, of restraint, of refusing to give in to the cheap allure of anger.

    Let’s hope we’ve got it in us—because if not, the only thing left to fight for will be the ashes of what could have been.