Jamiemccarthytv

Tag: virtue signaling

  • 🎙️ Ode to Miscast Men

    (Response to misinformed feminist poet)

    Not every shoulder in an airport is a declaration of war.
    Some are just men…
    half-awake,
    burning their tongues on bad coffee,
    late for gate C17,
    thinking about rent,
    or their kid’s soccer game.
    But someone writes a poem,
    and suddenly he’s the businessman —
    the villain.
    The sting without the bee.

    Not every man who said, “I don’t believe in labels,”
    was dodging a leash.
    Some just hated boxes,
    the way words lock living things inside.
    Some of them loved harder without a label
    than others did with rings.
    But nobody writes poems about those men.

    He said he liked her hair another way.
    Maybe it reminded him of his mother,
    the woman who read him bedtime stories
    when the world was falling apart.
    But in the poem, he’s a chauvinist.
    No cross-examination allowed.

    There were men who fixed the leak at midnight.
    Men who held doors,
    held breaths,
    held their tempers while the world baited them.
    But they got folded into the punchline.
    Another “boy” in a list of wrongs.
    Their quiet was mistaken for guilt.
    Their hesitation, for harm.

    Some said “period sex is gross”
    because no one ever taught them otherwise.
    They weren’t gagging at her.
    They were gagging on their fathers’ silence.

    The one who didn’t say I love you fast enough?
    He wasn’t a monster.
    He was terrified.
    Not of love —
    of being written into someone else’s vengeance poem.
    He was standing at the ledge of his heart,
    waiting for a language that wasn’t a trap.

    Not every man who walked away was running.
    Some just got tired
    of opening their mouths
    and hearing the same labels echo back:
    chauvinist.
    toxic.
    boy.
    Their stories were pre-written.
    Their names replaced with archetypes.

    This isn’t some rehab for men.
    This is an ode to the mislabeled.
    The men who walked gently through a world
    that kept calling them wolves,
    even as they were the ones
    building the fences.

    They weren’t saints.
    But they weren’t the villains in your receipts, either.
    They were just men.
    Complicated.
    Flawed.
    Human.
    And maybe,
    just maybe,
    worth a verse of their own

  • 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.

  • THANK YOU, DON LEMON

    A Memo from the Static

    (to whom it may concern — and it should concern you)

    Thank you, Don Lemon —

    for proving charisma is a rental car with the check engine light on.

    Thank you, Joy Behar —

    for reminding us that hysteria in high heels is still just hysteria.

    Thank you, Brian Stelter —

    for being the human form of a shrug wrapped in beige.

    Thank you, Rachel Maddow —

    for delivering panic with the pacing of a bedtime story for insomniacs.

    Thank you, Tucker Carlson —

    for staring into the camera like it owed you child support.

    Thank you, Anderson Cooper —

    for being the ghost of journalism, sipping gin in a silver spoon.

    Thank you, Bill Maher —

    for aging like a bottle of vinegar and thinking it’s wine.

    Thank you, every suit who ever told us what to think —

    while your hands stayed clean and your checks kept clearing.

    Thank you, algorithms —

    for serving us rage with a smile and selling our boredom by the pound.

    Thank you, influencers —

    for dying your hair, your souls, and your timelines until nothing meant anything.

    Thank you, virtue signalers —

    for raising flags you’d never carry into a real fight.

    And finally, thank you, silence —

    for being the only honest sound left in this whole goddamn circus.

    Signed,

    The Static

    (still here, still humming, waiting for the last face to fade)

  • 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.

  • The Shalt Nots

    I went digging for goddamns and found nothing but God’s dam—backing up hypocrisy like a sewer on the verge of bursting. Thought maybe I’d reel in the meaning of that little fish glued to the backs of tan sedans crawling toward mediocrity but turns out it’s just another barnacle clinging to the herd, a bumper sticker with a punchline no one gets. Worse, it’s an acronym—because nothing screams divine wisdom like a secret handshake for suburbanites.

     

    The “shalt nots” were scribbled in dirt while God was out fishing—dreamed up by crackpots, half-cocked in hypocrisy. “In God we trust.” Sounds less like faith, more like a slogan on a war bonds poster peeling off a gas station wall. Maybe God was pickled, tripped over his Birkenstocks into some desert bog, pulled his head out of the sand just long enough to count his fingers and think, “Ten. Yes, ten’s a good number. That’ll keep the peasants from eating each other.”

     

    And so, we got “thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain”—but no asterisk for exceptions. Like, say, strapping a bomb to your chest and screaming God’s name on the way out for an express ticket to 72 virgins who, funny enough, spent eternity dodging exactly this scenario.

     

    But before your fingers can strum a harp in the happy hunting grounds of the untouched, you’ve gotta learn to count—because obedience starts young. One… two… three… TIME OUT. Fear gets baked into you before you can spell your own damn name. But the holy scribes forgot their ABCs when it came to abortion.

     

    A: If you climbed in through the side window, anonymity won’t save you.

    B: Blood on your hands—stillborn or in plain sight, doesn’t matter.

    C: And then, there’s the C. section.

     

    No questions. Just follow the script. The big one? Thou shalt not kill—unless the bastard prays to the wrong God. Then, rape, burn, behead, and while you’re at it, rape again. All glory to one.

     

    Cue the laugh track. Not only do these rules own you here, but once you clock out, guess what still applies? Ignore them?

     

    You shalt not.

     

  • The Church of the Ever-Righteous

    They gather in the town square, mouths full of scripture, hands empty of work.

    Every sentence is a sermon, every action a performance.

    You will believe in their goodness, they will make sure of it.

    They wear their suffering like designer clothes,

    tailored just right,

    sized for engagement,

    hemmed with validation.

    Benevolence, once a quiet thing, is now screamed through megaphones,

    echoing through algorithms,

    pinging off the glass walls of their own reflection.

    They don’t just do good—they need you to see it.

    Their kindness comes with a receipt,

    their outrage is for sale.

    They weep on cue,

    bleed on demand,

    call it a revolution,

    but it’s just another round of applause.

    They kneel in the ashes of causes they do not understand,

    building careers from the rubble,

    raising monuments to their own empathy,

    carved from the bones of whatever is trending.

    They claim to be warriors.

    But their battles are fought from ergonomic chairs,

    their weapons are hashtags,

    their victories are hollow.

    You meet them in the streets, and they are nothing.

    No light behind their eyes,

    no depth to their words,

    just echoes of whatever sells.

    And when the wind shifts,

    they shift with it,

    abandoning the wreckage,

    moving on to the next great cause,

    leaving only footprints in the dust

    and a trail of discarded convictions.

    But oh, how they glow.

    How they shine.

    How they bask in the warmth of their own virtue

    until the next fire needs fuel.

    And maybe, just maybe,

    this whole rant is its own flashing signal.

    Maybe I’ve stitched my own sermon together with rusted nails

    and tacked it to the same town square.

    Maybe my pulpit is just a little lower,

    my righteousness a little filthier.

    But at least I know I’m a sinner,

    and if I had the chance to sin again,

    I’d double down,

    call it an esoteric form of discipline,

    and light a candle for my own damnation.

  • Silence is the killer when you look the other way. (How virtuous)

    the newsreaders smirk behind the desk,

    their teeth polished white,

    their words unpolished and dull.

    the world’s on fire,

    but no one wants to say where the match came from.

    they shuffle papers,

    nod solemnly at the camera,

    and move on.

    next story.

    young girls with broken eyes walk streets that don’t care for them,

    their stories—

    torn, gutted, and stitched with silence.

    a thousand screams swallowed by a fear

    greater than justice,

    greater than truth—

    the fear of being called a name.

    racist. islamophobe.

    Or phrases like Resident Alien.

    they weigh heavier than the suffering of the small,

    the forgotten,

    the torn apart.

    the rapists walk free because the culture has grown soft,

    too soft to call evil by its name.

    and isn’t that convenient?

    for them, I mean.

    they know the game.

    play your cards right—

    and the good people will look the other way.

    good people.

    they don’t want to seem bad,

    don’t want to upset the order,

    don’t want to be labeled.

    better to let the girl bleed in a corner

    than risk being impolite.

    virtue signaling is the new religion.

    you wave the right flag,

    tweet the right slogan,

    kneel at the right altar—

    and you’re forgiven.

    it doesn’t matter what’s behind it:

    indifference,

    ignorance,

    or worse.

    the mask is enough.

    but what about the girls?

    the ones they pretend to care about?

    their bodies are battlegrounds

    for a war no one wants to admit is happening.

    the press won’t write it,

    the cops won’t fight it,

    and the priests of tolerance preach

    their sermons of silence.

    it’s a goddamn joke.

    we scream about progress,

    about justice,

    but only in the ways that won’t cost us anything.

    and the victims pile up in the shadows.

    this world isn’t just ass-backwards—

    it’s in full throttle reverse

    marching proudly backwards into oblivion

    while the banners of virtue flap overhead.

    but you can’t eat banners.

    you can’t heal wounds with hashtags.

    and you sure as hell can’t hide the blood forever.

    eventually,

    the truth crawls out of the dark.

    it always does.

    the question is:

    will anyone be left to give a damn when it does?

    (Remember when the U.K stood for something?)