The Last Days Of Capitalism

Interview with infrateal:

Dental care. Dental care. He said it would include dental care. He's socializing my teeth. Oh my God, oh my God. I reach into my mouth with both hands and grasp a left lower bicuspid. It feels warm and very hard, with a very slight hint of slimy. I have to stop him. I have to, have to duplicate my teeth.

I grab all of my bowls and plates and mugs, every ceramic thing I own, smash them, and shove the shards into the oven. I crank it to BAKE as high as it will go and start pacing. I've got hard and warm, but not enough. I don't have enough ceramic yet. What if the NKVD comes for my fourth set of teeth? My fifth? My nine thousandth set of homebrew chompers. Beria, Obama, fuck you, these are my teeth. American teeth, red of gum, white of tooth, blue of, of, Colgate. Yeah.

I run down my street to the drainage ditch by the highway. Dig with my hands, pull away clots of grass and bugs, till I find that sweet sweet earthbaby. Protect my latent crops for ten thousand years, man's elemental guardian. Clay. I drag it out of the ground and cuddle it, clumps of it, precious futureteeth. I take off my clothes, make a bindle. Gather that clay. Foil that government.

Blue lights and OOOeeeOOOs. The... the goddamn government! They're here to take my teethfetus. I clutch my mound of clay, shelter it with my naked body. The policemen are talking but I just clench my torso ever tighter, clench my jaw so tight my teethies turn to diamond. They won't take my teeth. My mouthteeth, my oventeeth, my dirtteeth. This clay... I have to make it into teeth...

OBAMA ELECTED TO EIGHTH TERM; MCCAIN AT SEA
By Crion

AP - Senator John McCain left the gulls behind and set his eyes up towards Anchorage, that paid-up outpost of Hell where waitresses won't look at you and demons can't unionize. It's pouring off the Arizona coast, down Baja way, down in the old Spanish lands, in the old dead kingdom California, underwater, hopeless, blue. He paddles. What a fascination he is as he paddles looping circles, unnatural drift sweeping him up to a cold home. "I am here," he says via press release, "because I did not commit myself fully; I did not slave myself properly to the art and cause of driving airplanes into icebergs and lathering napalm onto my wooden hanging frame." He directs all further questions for comment to his Senate office and he paddles, timed by the logic of hidden ebbs; public cruelties; unthought habits; the vices of outside monsters; the sainthood of the dollar. He has no plans to attend the inauguration.

Interview with Santiago3.1

Lem Peterson squinted into the Texas sun. Over the Alamo the Aztlan flag flew smartly against the pastel sky. The sublime moment of morning was shattered as a whip cracked against his back, the lashing from an angry mustachioed Aztlanian in a drooping sombrero who grinned a toothless grin back at his Anglo slave. Lem's mind went back, the way many who slave put their thoughts aside during their labors. It hadn't always been like this. Before He took over and sold off the southwest to cover the debt incurred by repeated bailouts this land had been the pride of Texas.

His family was comfortably middle class, settled into a life filled with soccer practice and mounting debt that would never be paid off. They had two SUVs. SUVs they had sold for their freedom one summer when the nation of Mexico formally changed its name to Aztlan and took control of the latter day states of New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas, not to mention a sizable chunk of California. Those automobiles had been sprayed down with primer, fitted with machine guns and patched into a mobile enforcement squads tasked with rounding up Anglo families who couldn't pay the ever-rising taxes of the Aztlan government.

The next summer their children were taken. Lem's wife had shot herself with the gun they had hidden under the garden walkway afterward. He'd been too weak of a man to follow her and as plea after plea to the United Socialist States of America (the new name penned under His continuing reign) for assistance or admittance went unanswered Lem lost hope. Then he lost his house. And then he lost his freedom.

"If only we had known..." he muttered, putting spade to the rich Texas soil. "Que? Quieres mas castigo, gringo?" A boot planted against Lem's back brought him back to reality as quickly as it dashed him against the hard earth. "If only...If only we had known..." He was crying now. Big sobs wracked his body as he cried out "Obama!" The Aztlanian sighed casually and drew a .38 from his side before putting two rounds in Lem's head before continuing down the chain gang. Not a single slave looked up in the direction of the shots.

As Lem died, he noticed that the sun had never been brighter.

OBAMA CAUSES PALIN PAIN
By Oligopsony

WASILLA - An medical entrepreneur was dragged out of her house yesterday and beaten by government thugs, whom we all fear. She had a small workshop in her room where she made goods and services for people who felt down. They felt good but the Obama people came in, knock knock, dragged her out by the hair, beat her with batons. Her husband could not defend her because he no longer had ten guns. He was only allowed one and so the jacked boots were able to beat his initiative.

"Mom always wanted to patent her technique with Drano and Tylenol," sobbed her son, Levi. "But when they got rid of intellectual property that became impossible. Now nobody wants to invent anything and there's no music I can download." A black tie funeral for the American Dream is being held Tuesday.

OBAMA'S SOCIALIST NIGHTMARE - DOCTORS IN HOSPITALS, TREATING PEOPLE
by Airza

EL PASO - Years into the Presidency of Barrack Obama and his promise of healthcare to everyone in America seems to be going well. But some, like Aaron Smith, seem to express reservations.

"It's sort of a blur." Smith, a 45-year old doctor, said. "My daughter took her first steps into this world. That was in Albany. I don't know where I am."

Smith is one of reportedly thousands of doctors stranded like this. They move in familiar places, the hearth, the store, and the dusty back rooms which go ignored for six days of the seven. But those places slowly twist all wrong and they find themselves in new places. Sick places. Smith finds himself treating diabetic immigrants who, just months ago, would have died foreign and alone in a strange place. But he too is a stranger.

"I speak Spanish now." Smith says, glancing at his watch with darkened eyes. "I don't want to speak [Spanish] anymore." He goes through motions, prodding a dying foot with his rubber hammer.

Accounts of the disappearances are as such: You look away, glance down at your life for a moment, and then your husband is missing. Your wife. He has been spirited away in service. The Congressional Budget Office says that most of the funding for Obama's new health plan has been used for transit- Cars and their ilk to carry lovers to their home. But not all of these stories have a happy ending.

"It's not familiar here." Dana Sioban, a 35-year-old nurse practitioner. "My dog is here and my house is full of messages, but I stay in the yard and my brother must watch me sleep."

Interview with griffith:

I dream -

The Son walked, stalked by shadow through a dream-land staffed by fools and filled with falling towers. Ever present was the Spirit, the Smiling Man, who had led his hand for so long, taking him up to the Mountain and back down again. That One ruled there now, that herald of black magicks with honeyed tongue and silver words that the masses grasp for, desperately, to spend on empty things; the Son trembled at that thought. He knew he was Alexander Reborn; he had never been defeated, only laid low with treachery foul. They had returned to the Father, ever with his kind words and sweet nothings; but even now he announces his other, younger seed. The Son held back the tears; how many friends had abandoned him o'er these past years? The Warrior, tarred by slander; the Herald, his mouth turned Judas; the Moor, seduced by the enemy? Only the Spirit walked with him still, but the Son knew it was not with love, but with lust; lust for the power up on the Mountain that the Spirit alone could never reach. For all feared the Spirit. They say his heart was not of man but of the grey blood of the earth; Death herself shunned his acquaintance.

I saw them speak. I heard their words.

"Why do the people hate me so, Spirit?" asked the Son, "I humbly served them all these years. I was their rock to cling to, their stone to raise up temples on. I led them into glorious battle and righteous conquest. But now I am hated, neither loved nor feared. Now they spit my name."

As they approached the Door-Twixt-Worlds the Spirit turned, his brow furrowed, his mocking lip upturned. Even now I can hear his final word, like iron bells, as he pulled his charge into the breach, and see the horror mark the face of the Son as he realized, finally, his roll as naught but pawn to ancient player:

"So?"

REPORTS FROM THE GREEN ZONE - SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
By Crion

Jacob Gibbons is an integrated systems analyst from Bethesda, Maryland. When asked what he does, he says he works for a private military contractor specializing in performing tasks with various military and security applications. He cannot be more specific. He has been in Iraq for seven months. The farthest he has been from the helipad where he first stepped foot on Iraqi soil is one thousand feet, while pissing on the wall of the American embassy, drunk.

Gibbons says he was born in a "uniquely American" snowstorm, and thinks he will die "somewhere on the moon." When he said it, he thought he was either being funny or revealing. Today is his twenty-third birthday. Yesterday he decided never to change his beliefs again. He read Shakespeare in school, and hated it. He once said Jude the Obscure was "shit" in a book report. He's never read a word of Fitzgerald, and thinks The Great Gatsby is overrated. He plans to write a book about his life someday.

The outcome of his education is unsurprising: he believes in computers more than people. He believes in no God, but admires fundamentalist religion for its organization and strength of purpose. He is a great believer in orthodoxy. He describes himself philosophically as a determinist. When asked about love, he tilts his head to the side and squints, looking like a dog asked to imagine a fourth dimension to the universe. On the subject of his virginity, he is simultaneously evasive and defensive.

His politics are stale and his perspective is trivial. He lacks both context and the means to gain it, and earns six figures before the gracious incentives built into his contract. When he hears "Castor," he thinks of motor oil. When he hears "Pollux," he thinks of a disease for children. When he hears of stadiums filled with lions and tigers and Christians, he recalls a city with a rusted piston heart and name he doesn't know is French, and calls it "ghetto as fuck." One afternoon he asked me if Rome was far away. I told him Rome has never been closer.