Author’s Prefeace
There is a level of literacy coupled with a facility with the traditions of writing that allows a reader to do more than scrape the crumbs off a table as waiters do before the coffee and dessert. Do you have such acumen in reading? I have argued a number of times that reading and writing were contingent enterprises, and that one will not be done at a much higher level of achievement than the other, that in this way the facility for one affects the facility for the other, and that any deficiency in one will detract considerably from one’s ability in the other no matter how many times one performs the task of either the reading or the writing. To engage both seriously to elevate them as if there were a hierarchic scale of achievement to be reached is the only way literacy advances. This, of course, cannot be served by toppling or leveling the hierarchy.
Editor’s Preface
Another piece sent to me for my consideration. I have chosen to include it in the review because I know it says something to the current status of political affairs in America. Today, the Conservative Barbarians are at the gate and times will be harder still if we continue our disability at defending democracy, freedom, human rights, and I do not mean by parroting slogans no less insipid;y conceived because they have been formed and repeated in the name of great liberal causes.
Memento Mori
The chickens did come home to roost.
A diatribe from the fiftieth anniversary of JFK’s assassination, a day that should be commemorated by every lover of liberty, but not for the reasons you might imagine. The piece here has been revised in May of 2016 to keep with the currents of disastrous times in and for the history of democracy.
Herein lies the piece:
JFK; or, The Memento Mori of a Pig
The fiftieth anniversary of JFK’s death should also cause us to remember that his “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” was a death knell for democracy in America.
JFK was no old New Dealer with a conscience for service, no. His Presidency marked the beginning of the end of government doing anything for the people, marked the beginning of the end of the People being central to what government is entrusted to do. This has been increasing over the last five decades until we have reached the moment in our history where government barely does anything at all for the Public who are the People in complete service of the State, let alone the People, who must remain separate from their role as a Public in order to remain the counterweight for the State. This is what Kennedy meant by his “Ask not”; he wanted a State that controlled over the People . . . and fuck most of the scum-bag charlatans (and I did have a woman once ask me if it were appropriate to use scum bag as a term of derision for a woman; can a woman be a scum bag; thus, can a man be a bitch; both can be bastards). So, what have I said, Hilary Clinton cannot be a scum bag? Donald Trump is certainly bitchy if he is not or cannot in fact be a bitch. Donald the Bitch?
No sense of service, no dedication to Truth, only corruption and not even a remote idea of what it would mean to do anything for The People–John F. Kennedy; the grand pimp of the White House.
Do we have a sense of what We the People even means? I doubt it. To commemorate his death as if a great champion of freedom had died is a travesty of Democracy, it is an absurdity paramount . . . the barbarians have been let inside the gate by the liberal establishment and a general liberal public that should not be as stupid and semi-literate as they first allowed themselves to be and in effect have enforced others to become.
Kennedy had no moral center—and this is not an outcry from one of the Republican neo-con political-palsiacs. No desire to serve the People. He had contempt for the people; the truly first Media President molded in the image of the image mongers, hawking the wares of their degraded ideas. I had a friend whose father recalled that the first words that passed his lips when he had heard that JFK was dead was “Good!”
I agree–it was good that JFK was shot, very, very good indeed.
Editor’s Epilogue
To confuse the character in the story for the anonymous author of the text is a great fallacy; to confuse either of them for me the editor who has published this as other editors might have included this in their reviews, whether actual or fictional reviews; the former real in the world, the latter a subject in a larger fiction, is itself a fallacy. I am an editor only in as much as my character limits permit me to be so. I am herein a fictional character editor publishing this work of fiction inside a larger work of fiction in a literary review that is itself fictional. To confuse me for the author that has constructed this fiction inside another fiction, or a fiction to embrace the micro-fiction about JFK is certainly a great fallacy, and it only shows you to be a quite limited and even narrow reader, perhaps one of those who erroneously skim pages when the act of reading is what should be performed. You do not want to be thought of by those who a truly literate as someone who is only moderately literate, semi-literate at best, horribly degraded as it has become apparent too many college educated have become and remain. What then must I say?
The end.
The Falling Leaf Review 