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By: Rick Kepler
Dear Diary,
This is not an easy story to tell. But tell it I must, in the hope that one day, in the very near future, this terrible tragedy that has befallen us will be reversed and society will be set aright, and we will restore the glory that was once ours.
Oh, diary, how did we, the good people, the proud people, a people that dreamed the brightest dreams, that climbed the highest peaks, that soared above the eagles, how did we fall from grace and become slaves to the turkeys, the hoi polloi, the wretched of the earth, the proletarian trash that seized power from us and sent us into these ‘re-education camps’. I have only a few moments to bear my soul this morning before the scum start their announcements over the camp’s loudspeaker instructing us on our day’s work and reminding us of who rules in this new dis-United States of America.
Our new plebian rulers, who we once employed and dis-employed at our whim, claimed that we went too far in our subjugation of them. We told them at their so-called ‘People’s Trials’ that it was not our intention to harm them and their families. We told them we were helping their families when we got congress to pass a bill that lowered the age children could work to seven; we convinced them that if there was no minimum wage then more people could find work; we privatized social security and medicare and made billions in fees handling their dwindling individual accounts; likewise, we took two-thirds of their 401k retirement money in handling fees, but hell, we did the paperwork. We completely deregulated the banks, and almost completely destroyed collective bargaining. They screamed at us at trial and said we turned ‘their’ country into a third-world cesspool. We believed we created Shangri-la.
At the trial we tried the Nuremburg defense, that we were just good soldiers following the dictates of the market and the logic of profit-making. We claimed the politicians they elected were the ones responsible for their lot in life, not us. They made the laws, we argued. But the rabble claimed we were the puppet masters and that what we did was a crime against humanity. But diary, I must ask, ARE WE NOT HUMAN TOO? Did we not feel pain when we heard that the unemployment rate went down? Did we not shed tears when the inflation rate inched upward, wiping out millions in our billion dollar portfolios? Did our blue-blood not boil when we ordered our country’s professional military to shoot down the protesters and they refused? Our military, whose number one priority was to protect our vast overseas investments, bit the hand that fed them. Those dirty, betraying privates, sergeants, and corporals defied their own officers’ orders, joined the protesters, and destroyed the tree of liberty militias that we had formed and bankrolled to crush the rebellion.
Attention campers…
Oh diary, this damn, low-class woman’s voice doing the announcements just grates on me.
Good morning all you Mister Misters and Richie Riches. Mail from your wives, mistresses and other loved ones will be delivered at the end of your workday. Know that their re-education is coming along just fine at Camp Mother Jones and Camp Eleanor Roosevelt. Your school-age children are attending good public schools and being tutored by graduates of Saul Alinsky University. You, your wives and children will be reunited once your re-education is completed here at Camp Eugene Debs. Most of you will find out that the ghettos you will be assigned to live in will be ready for you once you successfully complete your re-education. The previous inhabitants of those ghettos are now living in your mansions, guest houses, vacation homes, condos, villas, country clubs, lodges, yachts, and upscale apartments. As you know our country’s economy is doing just fine without you. The people have food, clothing, excellent medical care, great educational opportunities, and work that is rewarding.
We are in the southeast section of the country, the temperature today is near 95˚ and humid as hell, and you are all assigned to pick cotton for the day. Your overseer for today is Malcolm XXX . If Malcolm or his crew catches any of you slacking off, you will be sent to work in the coal mines of Appalachia and your re-education will be extended. After the sun sets and work ends for the day, you will all attend the 12 step program to help you overcome your addiction to greed. Enjoy your work day and try to be more sanitary when using the latrines. The bankers among you that have been assigned to clean out the latrines are complaining that piss and fecal matter are all over the walls and seats. Your half-hour lunch period will begin at noon. Long live the revolution.
Dear Diary, I am back. It is lunch time, and I feel like I have died and gone to hell. Picking cotton sucks, but no one among us wants to go to the coal mines. Word on the grapevine is that the hillbillies from coal country treat us worse than these blacks from the South. God forbid should we be sent to the southwest to pick vegetables. I hear the brown-skinned rabble make us learn to speak their native tongue. Those of us that aren’t sent to the fields have to work as their house cleaners, washerwomen, and gardeners in the homes we once owned. We hear that our people working in the fields hate our people working in the homes. Lousy bastards, turning us against each other. We hear the worst place to be sent are to the reservations we created for the original savages. Word is they make us stand perfectly still all day long in front of cigar stores, wearing tuxedos while the little savages write derogatory signs that they hang on us. We also have heard that they have turned my people into dope addicts, smoking the savage’s peace pipes every night at Camp Crazy Horse.
Oh, diary, how did this come to be. We truly believed we had the masses divided and under control based on race, religion, geography, and class distinction. We had the greatest propaganda system the world has ever seen. We controlled all means of communication. Every movie and television show we created glorified the successful individual. Whenever the masses started feeling uppity and acting like they might do something collectively to improve their miserable lives, we would pick a country to go to war with. We had those pitiful scoundrels seeking refuge in patriotism, waving flags and chanting USA, USA! We shoved sports down their throats like it was a religion and they swallowed it whole. Football was our gladiators in the Coliseum. Our churches were feeding the growing numbers of the hungry and destitute and making them believe a better life awaited them in the afterlife and to accept God’s plan for their being poor and worthless. We gave them bread, circuses, and crosses but still the bottom-feeders rebelled. Christ, this bologna sandwich and grits tastes like shit. They call this lunch!
Alright you bourgeois bitches. Lunch is over. It’s time to go back to the field at the end of this announcement. This morning we only had ten escape attempts. All bankers, all captured, all doing double-duty latrine time, which means when they finish cleaning up your shit we will send them over to clean up the latrines at Camp Jane Fonda. If the bankers think you have shitty latrines, wait till they get a load of the hoity-toity women’s latrines at that camp.
We have great news to share with you. The teabaggers that stood with you during the rebellion are being successfully deprogrammed at Camp Che Guevara. Over 60% of them now believe that 2+2=4. Up to 43% now believe the earth revolves around the sun. Slow but steady progress on that front.
The generals, colonels, captains and other officers that continually waged war against other countries and then ordered our own troops to shoot us down, are doing just fine in Antarctica. The good news for them is hypothermia and severe frostbite rates are way down due to global warming. The bad news is deaths from polar bear attacks are way up. In spite of their pleas, we will not provide them weapons.
In other news, the politicians that sided with you during the uprising have been assigned the job of cleaning up chemical spills, oil spills, nuclear waste dumps, and other environmental disasters that they allowed to happen on their watch. Their passionate pleas for gloves, masks, change of clothes, shovels and motorized equipment to help them in their efforts to clean up these dump sites are being discussed by a committee of the committee, which in turn will give their recommendations to the committee of the whole, who will then table their concerns until such time that the politicians begin to glow from the chemicals that they are exposed to, in which case the committees will reconvene to discuss the issue of gloves but nothing else. We know this process to address their concerns is one that the politicians are very familiar with.
We will have more updates for you at the end of your workday. Malcolm XXX wants me to warn you again that anyone not participating in the age-old Negro spiritual sing-along while you are picking cotton will have their dinner rations reduced. Dinner will be served at the end of your cotton-pickin’ day. Have fun in that sweltering southern sun. Viva la revolucion!
Dear diary, the workday is over, my back is killing me, I’m drenched in sweat and real work sucks. Oh how I miss the day when I ran my own private-equity firm, daily making millions, buying and cannibalizing businesses all over the world. Now I’m picking cotton, being forced to sing old Negro spiritual songs and being yelled at by a big black buck named Malcolm.
Oh diary, where to begin. It started with a meaningless bill that we got the congress to pass, privatizing the work at the White House. We had thousands lined up for those $2 an hour jobs. But those low-life butlers, maids, dishwashers, janitors, and gardeners who were to be replaced defied the laws of our country and had a sit-in at the White House. They called it an occupation of the ‘people’s house’, but it was our house. Every president that sat in that office danced for us, not the plebes. The damn job-seekers, willing to take the jobs of those working in our House, instead joined them in their occupation. Next thing we know there are sit-downs and occupations spreading like wildfire across the entire country. We spent billions militarizing the police but they were unable to overcome the riff-raff who came streaming out of their pitiful hovels to protect the occupiers of our property with their non-violent tactics. We sent provocateurs into their ranks to instigate violence but they were subdued immediately by these street scum. Then the coup-de-gras, the knife in our back, when the combat soldiers defied the orders of their superiors to shoot down the occupiers of our businesses and instead joined the revolting masses. Our right-wing militias, who paraded on their web sites like they were tough, willing-to-die stormtroopers who couldn’t wait to kill anyone not like them, ran like chickenshits when confronted by those unpatriotic soldiers who turned on us. When we, the true patriots, who built this country, tried to leave the country, we couldn’t. They took over the airports, secured the borders and then seized our yachts, private planes and helicopters.
Oh diary, how do I now explain the mass killings that then seized the country? Knowing that the ordinary people now controlled our destiny, and that wealth was no longer considered the pinnacle of success, but common everyday work was now to be extolled and honored, our people gave up. Millions of millionaires jumped out of skyscrapers rather than toil for the swamp people. Billionaires preferred hari-kari. Our sons, who were groomed to rule the people, suffered miserably as those who didn’t jump went into catatonic depressions, while many others donned their grandmother’s bathrobes, shaved their heads and babbled incoherently on street corners, yelling “buy”, “sell”, “where’s my mommy” and other disturbing sounds. Many of our poor wives and mistresses preferred to lay in their canopied, over-sized beds and overdose on their designer drugs. Too many of our damn daughters rebelled and joined the street trash. Oh, dear diary, how did we fail our jet-setting, little princesses. We showered them with diamonds, rubies, Maseratis, Rolls Royces, tanning beds, breast augmentations and butt lifts, and now, horror upon horror, they are copulating with commoners. If their mothers were only alive to see this. Those of us too chicken to take our own lives, those who were once the royalty of the land, now toil like common laborers, being bossed around by blue-collar buffoons in these sweltering, old military barracks that they now call re-education camps.
Good evening campers….
Damn it diary, that voice is like nails on a chalkboard!
You bankrupt Brahmins did such a good job pickin’ cotton that tomorrow you will be cutting down sugar cane. Now, isn’t that sweet. Tomorrow’s sing-along while you work will be songs from Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Bob Marley. Your overseer will be Toussaint L’Ouverture IV. No successful escape attempts were committed this afternoon but the bankers, who thought they could jump into the latrines in order to tunnel out of camp, are still stuck in the muck, so to speak. After your dinner of red beans and rice, and beans and franks, I imagine they will be getting quite a shit-shower. We will pluck them out after everyone has emptied their bowels and they will then be sent to Camp John L. Lewis in Appalachia.
Our building of mass transit for the people is slowly progressing because the intellectuals, professors, college presidents, journalists, authors and reporters who sided with you during the rebellion are becoming more proficient at ditch digging. The overwhelming majority of them had to be taught which side of the rake to use and how to hold a shovel. The hard back-breaking work at Camp Frederick Douglass is proceeding slowly for the males while the females at Camp Sojourner Truth daily outwork those whining, male, sissy eggheads.
The re-education of the religious leaders, who stood with you Mammon worshippers, is not going as well as we hoped. Of course we welcomed into our ranks those who preached liberation theology. The others, who falsely preached about tending to the flock but catered to the well-heeled, have been sent to the people’s farms to tend to flocks of sheep, cattle, pigs, horses, buffalo, and chickens. The smartest of all the farm animals, the pigs, have asked us, on behalf of all the farm animals, if we can house these babbling, religious nuts in a separate barn. They claim their incessant complaining of having to clean out the stables is disturbing the egg production of the chickens. We will take their request under advisement.
On another note, the revolution believes it necessary to squelch rumors, so no it is not true that the elders of the Mormon religion were able to escape on a rocket headed to the planet Kolub , wherever the hell that is, and the leaders of Scientology likewise did not escape to the planet Venus. Also, we did not kill all the lawyers. They are presently housed in the Carlsbad Caverns, safely away from the rest of the population, cleaning up bat shit, along with the judges, prosecutors, and the nine Supremes that sided against the people. Their overseers are the non-violent offenders they wrongly sent to prison for smoking dope, shoplifting food, not paying bills on time, exposing government or corporate wrongdoing, and defaming the rich and powerful. The juridical class will learn that justice at Camp Edward Snowden will not be as blind as those bats in the caves with our formerly incarcerated comrades.
So get moving you declawed fat-cats. You will have 15 minutes to read your mail and then you will attend your 12 step program. I am sorry to have to report that only a couple of you in all the re-education camps have been able to get past Step One. Honest. There, I made a joke for you to end the evening. But really, keep trying and let’s make it a goal to get to Step 2. Once again, after your session and before you retire, everyone will stand and join in for the singing of ‘Solidarity Forever’. Good night and remember, resistance is futile.
Oh dear diary, resistance may be futile but I will never surrender to the collectivism of the rabble. And what do they expect? After a lifetime of lying and deceiving people we former rulers of you riff-raff are all of a sudden supposed to acknowledge honesty. Christ, do these simpletons have any idea of how hard that is. And your joke wasn’t funny, bitch. Now, let me read my letter from my lifelong companion….
“Dear poochykins. I hope this letter finds you well. I must confess that I have come to believe that the rebellion was just and that we were on the wrong side of history. For me the worm has turned and I have been released from Camp Eleanor Roosevelt.”
Oh my god, diary, tell me what I’m reading isn’t so…..
“My poochykins, give my signature a big kiss when you finish reading this .The ink on my signature is a mixture of lysergic diethylamide acid with psilocybin and peyote juices. It will free you poochykins from the capitalist toxins in your system that are retarding your development as a full-human being. You will not need 12 steps but only one lick. If we are ever to be reunited, then take the trip. I beg you poochykins. Kiss my name. Forever yours, Larry-in the Sky-with Diamonds.”
Good God, diary, does he not know that the strongest drug in the world will not make me join those cockroaches. But my body does ache from sixteen hours of picking cotton. Maybe a little lick will help my aching bones. Oh, well, good night my love, and here’s your kiss poochykins……..
Good morning you defrocked peacocks of Camp Eugene Debs.
Oh diary, I did not sleep a wink last night, but yet I feel refreshed and cleansed. Oh, the sweet sound of that woman’s welcoming voice in the morning invigorates me. I cannot wait to tackle the day’s chores. There is dignity in all who labor. I want to do my part to make this a better world, the kind of world that we sung about last night. I feel like singing that song again. I do believe I remember most of the words.
“♫♪When the Union’s inspiration through the worker’s blood shall run, there can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun. ♫”
Oh diary, it’s such a brand new day. ♫♪ In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold, We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old. They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn, but without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.♫♪
Oh poochykins. I will be joining you very, very soon. ♫“Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite, who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with their might Is there anything left to us but to organize and fight.”♪♫
Oh diary, let’s hope we sing this song tonight at camp.♫♪ I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind but now I see.”♪♫
Oh diary, long live the rebellion!!
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