Whatdy’a Want?

Good Grammar?


Or Good Hate?

You start out young.

You try it….because your friends do it. Because there are people in your family who have set a strong example. Because it’s the buccaneery thing to do. Because somehow you've come to believe that

your manhood is at stake.

It burns. It stinks. You’re whole body and a 100,000 years of human instinct revolts against what you are trying to do to yourself, but your pals say it just takes a little practice. Try a little harder; you’ll pick it up.

Or are you some kind of pussy?!


All this time you are lying to yourself, and at some basal level you know it. This is why, as you teach your body not to vomit up the toxins your are forcing it to ingest, you have to make an almost daily recommittment to your Very Bad decision by demanding that your brain to perform ever more complex contortions in order to continue holding yourself willfully ignorant of the true nature of what you are doing and why.

Slowly training yourself to filter out the ocean of evidence that what you are doing is stupid and destructive, and slowing tuning in to only those channels of information that reinforce the carefully honed marketing message that what you are doing is awesome...and you are doing it entirely of your own free will.

After, you know you can quit, right?

Any time.

You just don’t wanna right at the moment, and you find lots of very helpful people who are ever so eager to train you to channel your confusion and fear into a warm, righteous glow of loathing for those fucking nanny-state Socialist busybodies who want to Take Away Your Freedomses!

And you keep this up by keeping yourself at a blissfully ignorant arm’s length from the ugly fact that, right behind your iconoclastic posturing…



…lies a massive, depraved corporation whose immense profits depend entirely on you sucking down more and more of their toxins, and which has spent untold millions of dollars hiring armies of morally-bankrupt strategists

focus groups testers, design specialists, behavioral psychologists and wordsmiths



to crack open your skull and figure out precisely which words and pictures make your ganglia twitch in just such a way that keep you coming back for ever more concentrated doses of their lethal product.

Sure, you’re sorta vaguely aware that some people somewhere are making a fuckload of money off of tarting your most primal fears and fantasies up in Red, White and Blue and selling them back to you, but hey, why not!

This is America!


Besides, that first rush in the morning, or while you’re having a beer, still feels

so damn good!

Years pass.

Your freely-chosen maverick-lifestyle signifier has long since become a full-blown addiction around which you have built your entire waking-eating-drinking-driving


working-praying-sleeping routine.


You’re also now paying far, far, far more dearly for your filthy habit than you ever thought you would back when you started. But thanks to year of relentless reinforcement and conditioning, you still don’t hate the slime (sorry, "Wealth-producers!") who make the poison (Free enterprise!), advertise the poison (Free speech!) or sell you the poison (First markets!)

Instead, you have stoked your contempt for the people who have been trying to tell you that what you are doing is incredibly harmful from a warm, smirky glow to a white-hot furnace of reflexive hatred for Authority (science), Very Evil Gummint, the “common good”, and those Dirty Fucking Hippies who just will not shut the fuck up.

You’ll show ‘em! You’ll double down and consume twice as hard! You’ll blow your smoke right into their eyes and flick your butts right at their rotten, faggy Commie faces!

Bwaahahaha! You’re a rebel! You’re a genius! You a motherfucking patriot God damn it!

And then, of course, the day comes when you


cough up


a lung.


Ruh roh.

And for a fleeting instant you might dimly realize that all of the Big Ass Warning Signs that tried to keep you from fucking up and that you have been assiduously ignoring and mocking your entire life were not put up by freedom hating Nazis after all, but by your decent, average fellow citizens who saw things a little more clearly than you (you know; those evil “Elites”) and who have desperately been trying to keep you and millions like you from making catastrophically bad decisions.

Sadly, all they had on their side were facts, passion, goodwill and Public Service Announcements at 2:00 A.M, and not a billion-dollar marketing campaigns


fronted by flag-wrapped fuck toys.



So before the darkness closes in for good and you finally discover that it really is

“...too late to lose
the weight you used
to need to throw around.”
let me tell you the good news.

It is still not too late. In fact, until they plant you in the cold, cold ground it is never too late to comprehend the world as it actually is and not as the Hate Radio mesmerists conned you into believing it to be.

Never too late to choose walk away from the voracious multi-billion dollar killing machine in which you have been a willing and eager cog, which never gave a shit about you in the first place, and which has moved on and left you behind in search of fresh young idiots to exploit.

Never too late to turn your back on people to whom you have given your money, your votes, your faith and your future, to whom you were never anything but another beeve on the slaughter-line, gullible enough to pay his executioners for the privilege of being stunned and gutted.

Or in the end, are you really just too fucking dumb to save?

Are you so Hell bent on shambling off to your Great Libertarian Utopia in Sky the with your sins and delusions intact that you would rather die stupid and toxic than live in the Real World and help the rest of us with the job of cleaning up the accumulated consequences of all your bad decisions?


In other words, are you so far gone that you still would rather still rather Fight


Than Switch?


(It'd been about five years since I's tootled this particular harmonica, so I figured it was about time.)