Codependent Symbiosis...

Clownfish (Amphiprion) amid sea anemones (Heteractis magnifica), Great Barrier Reef, Australia. The two species protect each other from predators in mutual symbiosis. Britannica

© June 22, 2023, the Griot Poet

 

Sean Hannity complained about “voter turnout.”

A fig leaf for the fact that their ideas aren’t palatable,

The GOP has lost 8 of 9 presidential elections in the popular vote,

The last popular vote “win” was W in 2004!

[This] means that no one is buying their party’s political joke,

 

The party, like the “Lost Cause” narrative,

Is codependent on its [own] victimhood,

They couldn’t admit to losing the Civil War,

Any more than they admitted to losing the 2018, 2020, and 2022 elections.

Expect this scratched record in next year’s presidential,

A mature party practices addition.

Voter suppression is subtraction.

Immature parties don’t bother having a platform or positions.

Eight Republican senators met with Vladimir Putin on July 4, 2018, before the US midterms.

I’m sure that was purely coincidental!

 

In risk of democratic governance working for despised “others,”

The break-glass fail-safe was always insurrection.

They whine about being replaced,

When the only family they’re members of is the human race.

Question:

How can a political construct “disappear” when before 1681, it didn’t exist?

 

The party is codependent on a fantasy that they have effective policies,

Every time they have power in the House or Senate,

And the Executive Branch isn’t their party’s president,

We go into a scripted hostage crisis,

 

Because getting rid of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and SNAP benefits,

Doing absolutely NOTHING about rising temperatures,

Will hurt all those brown “others” they want to offend,

Not realizing that active duty military use those benefits,

Since the ever-increasing military budgets never translate to salary increases,

 

The only time the military gets a bump in pay,

Is when they get orders for temporary duty in a hot LZ,

The worst outcome for the family is their loved one coming home in a flag-draped box,

Or suffering from depression and PTSD,

 

Sean ranting that the problem is all those mean liberals are “rigging the system,”

With early voting and mail-in ballots,

Purposely ignoring the historical record,

The Republican Party used to dominate this space,

Until Orange Orangutan blew it to smithereens!

 

Fun fact: the Republican Party hasn’t had a platform since 2016,

Despite the protest from Mitt Romney,

They removed opposition to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014,

Illegally annexing the Crimean peninsula,

A change at the behest of Paul Manifort,

Legal counsel to Russian oligarchs,

And the Kremlin’s Manchurian Candidate!

 

We are in symbiosis to a grift:

The foundation was the ‘71 Lewis Powell Memo,

Nine years later, Ronald Reagan stole the presidential office using the Iran Hostage Crisis,

A newsman admitted it as Jimmy Carter’s in hospice.

They cut taxes for corporations and the rich,

Knowing full well that “trickledown” is bullshit,

Social Security isn’t solvent because Ronnie stole it!

This GQP is no different.

They made the trillion-dollar bill in the previous administration,

And like people skipping out on their meals, or jewelry thieves, they refused to pay it!

That’s when we get Jon Stewart’s “bullshit mountain” of gaslighting,

 

Ask yourself these questions:

How is banning drag shows helping us with gun violence?

For that matter: How are “thoughts and prayers” working?

How has eliminating bodily autonomy for women ended ectopic pregnancies, rape, or sepsis?

How does banning books and history help us with the climate crisis?

How did going against “woke” in Florida help your upcoming presidential campaign announcement?

(Oh! You lost your state a billion dollars in revenue. So, we should give you the nuclear codes, Sparky?)

 

Being “anti-woke” is a colossal joke,

Rhonda and Casey got MARRIED at Disney (look it up)!

His mini-me sadism is his path to the presidency.

He’s a more efficient fascist than his Orange Sith Lord.

He doesn’t want to “make America great again.”

He wants to make the United States the Rosewood massacre!

 

Codependency disorder results from dysfunctional relationships with others. Therefore, people who struggle with codependency often find it difficult to maintain healthy relationships. Codependency disorder is often referred to as a “relationship addiction.” Due to low self-esteem, each codependent person may feel they cannot be without the other.

 

https://www.newportacademy.com/resources/restoring-families/codependency-disorder/

 

Symbiosis is defined as a close, prolonged association between two or more different biological species. This relationship can be symbiotic (mutualistic), where both parties benefit from the interaction, or parasitic, where one party benefits while the other is harmed.

 

https://www.pbs.org/articles/what-is-symbiosis

 

America is a codependent symbiosis.

We have a dysfunctional relationship with one another.

From its inception,

We have not had a healthy relationship with the land, First Nations people, or the environment.

Yet, we have a symbiotic (mutualistic) and simultaneously parasitic yin and yang going.

 

We’re not Goshen.

We’re not Canaan.

We’re not a “New Heaven or a New Earth.”

We’re not Utopia.

 

We are less “exceptional” but more influential.

Countries mimic us for good or for ill.

Democracy will rise or fall in imitation of ours.

Climate mitigation won’t happen until WE do it!

The survival of the species hinges on us.

 

We’re not perfect, but we can work together in cooperative symbiosis.

Nihilistic Moron...

 

The conservative attorney slammed the former president as a “nihilistic moron" whose undoing could come "for something so stupid and pointless and silly." HuffPost Twitter

© June 9, 2023, the Griot Poet

The first turn of phrase I heard about Donald in front of Trump Tower was, “Oh! Do you mean ‘Dumbo Gambino?’”

 

He’s how poor men think the rich are,

And he thinks he’s a “Teflon Don” mobster.

Trump LLC was so broke,

The Apprentice show runners rented furniture,

Because his office looked like a rat-infested joke.

The Apprentice was a carefully crafted fiction,

For a failed real estate mogul trying to live up to his father’s expectations,

But that was the operative metaphor,

“Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had.”

Professor William T. Kelley, at Penn State’s Wharton School of Business.

“He came in with an incredible amount of arrogance like he knew everything but didn’t.”

So, a malignant narcissist,

Rejected by his family and professor,

Crafts a world away from the hurt of his bruised ego,

Where he is the hero, and he ALWAYS wins!

Even if he must lie, cheat, and steal to make it happen!

 

“Now people will say, you know, he really, in a just world, [he] would go to jail for what he did on Jan. 6, the weeks approaching Jan. 6,” [George] Conway added. “And I kind of agree with that, but for this man who is [basically] a **nihilistic moron,** for him to go to jail potentially for a long time, these Espionage Act charges bring very heavy sentences to potentially go to jail for something so pointless and silly and useless as keeping these documents is actually kind of fitting.”

 

https://www.rawstory.com/donald-trump-indictment-2660998395/

 

George Conway with the mic drop.

All you had to do, Sparky, was return the library books!

 

My fifth-grade librarian, Mr. Halsey, rest in peace and would have charged him eighty-five cents for each day past the return date (a bit of a grip for a 10-year-old back then).

 

“Retention of classified government documents at his Mar-a-Lago home after leaving the White House,

“The charges include false statements, conspiracy to obstruct, and willfully retaining documents violating the Espionage Act.”

 

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/08/trump-says-hes-been-indicted-summoned-to-federal-court-in-miami-next-week.html

 

The Presidential Records Act of 1978, amended in 2014:

 

“Establishes that Presidential records automatically transfer into the legal custody of the Archivist as soon as the President leaves office.

 

“Establishes a process by which the President may restrict, and the public may obtain access to these records after the President leaves office; specifically, the PRA allows for public access to Presidential records through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) beginning five years after the end of the Administration, but allows the President to invoke as many as six specific restrictions to public access for up to twelve years.”

 

https://www.archives.gov/presidential-libraries/laws/1978-act.html 

 

Nowhere in the act or the statute is a clause for telepathic declassification!

 

Because telepathy is right up there with mermaids and Bigfoot: neither exists!

 

After his indictment in West Palm Beach, Florida,

He flew back to Bedminster, New Jersey,

And did what many of his previous lawyers quit him for: He opened his fat mouth and started lying and grifting from his gullible followers.

 

His malignant narcissism doesn’t seem to realize,

Everything he says is admissible!

Jack Smith has an office clerk,

Jotting down every insane utterance,

Every “Truth Storm,” especially when he’s nervous!

 

Eighty percent of Americans think he deserves conviction for stealing classified documents,

 

Except, of course, his moronic cult members,

Who, in the height of heresy and hypocrisy,

Published “Son of Man” on Amazon, alluding that HE is the second coming!

 

News flash: He’s not!

 

He will be indicted again in Washington, DC, for inciting January 6.

He will be indicted again in Fulton County, Atlanta, Georgia, for trying to steal 11,780 votes!

 

He is a criminal and a con man.

His only skill is at picking and exploiting his marks.

He’s torn between going back to his old life as a two-bit criminal that other billionaires chuckled about,

 

In Winston-Salem, North Carolina,

My hometown,

Former New York Mayor, and presidential candidate, Mike Bloomberg was asked how he felt about two billionaires running for President in 2016,

Mike replied without skipping a beat:

“Who’s the other one?”

 

MAGA has a lot of meanings:

“Make America great again,”

First said by the Ku Klux Klan, then Ronald Reagan.

 

It also means:

Morons are governing America,

During our shared four years in hell.

Where he tax cut us into a trillion-dollar deficit and killed one million Americans during the pandemic through stupidity and incompetence,

 

It also means:

Make attorneys get attorneys,

As many are jumping off the Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane Express,

Pretty soon, all he’ll have left are public defenders, and they may not want him!

 

He’s, in southern parlance, “a HOT mess!”

A political party without a platform since 2016,

Reflexively defends him like a chorus jazz riff,

 

As a “nihilistic moron,” he takes his party of lemmings over a cliff!

And I am SO here for it!

LIV Gross...

 

From the Twilight Zone season 3, episode 8, "It's a Good Life." Billy Mumy plays an evil little boy who terrorizes his neighborhood with his magical powers for any slight. Here, he turned a man into a jack-in-the-box.

© June 6, 2023, the Griot Poet

Fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers,

Were from Saudi Arabia,

Yet, the “Green New Deal” is outrageous.

 

Mohammad Bin Salman Al Saud,

Who ordered the bone-saw dismemberment of Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi,

According to the CIA and Director of National Intelligence.

 

Jamal’s remains were likely dissolved in Hydrofluoric Acid not to leave a trace.

“Jamal Khashoggi”: say his name!

This act is as barbarous as you can imagine.

Acid-dissolved bodies can [apparently] be forgotten,

 

After the balm of Gilead in billions of dollars,

And our continued addiction to Saudi and OPEC’s oil products.

The addiction generated viral fistbumps between a demagogue and a president.

 

The PGA - the Professional Golfer’s Association of America,

It started in 1916 at the instigation of Philadelphia businessman Rodman Wanamaker.

With the stated purpose “of promoting interest in professional golf, elevating the standards of the game, and advancing the welfare of its members.”

They, like many sports, had to evolve before Tiger Woods could play the first course,

 

Instead of elevating it, they debased the sport and themselves.

Instead of advancing “the welfare of its members,” “sports washing” is money laundering by another name for its owners.

 

In 2022, the PGA played lip service to the families of 9/11 victims.

In 2023, the PGA sold itself to the devil.

 

The PGA is in bed with a twice-impeached president,

Now indicted for holding classified documents, soon the January 6th insurrection, election interference in Georgia,

Indicted payer-off of Playboy Models and Adult Film Workers,

While his third wife was pregnant with his youngest son.

Convicted of sexual assault and defamation by E. Jean Carroll,

Who’s suing him again for committing the same crime, he lost in court 24 hours before,

And these are the crimes we KNOW about!

 

“Family values,” “personal responsibility,” and integrity have officially left the building and been thrown out the window,

By a fake mob boss, pretend billionaire, malignant narcissist, and psychopath,

He could “shoot someone on 5th Avenue” and not lose ONE of his followers.

 

White Evangelicals:

Crickets populate your churches,

Because your young people are more worried about their student loan payments,

I don’t know if this is a news flash:

But Jesus was NOT a Christian nationalist!

 

Pat Robertson, may he Rest in Sulfur, was the foundation of Christian nationalism.

“Election 2000” was the political foundation for creeping authoritarianism.

“Citizens United” was the legislative framework for American fascism.

 

Corporations are legal fiction(s),

Using the 14th Amendment boondoggle since the era of Robber Barons that companies are equal to persons,

 

Persons are born, not litigated into existence.

Persons have lifespans punctuated by hyphens.

Persons have hopes and dreams,

Persons have aspirations,

Persons have preferences and sexual orientations.

Persons have wombs and bodily autonomy.

Persons are from diverse cultures and nationalities.

 

Persons have families who lost their loved ones on 9/11/2001,

The PGA and Orange Satan could give a damn about them.

 

Saudis:

Buying Formula One, investing in Fox Propaganda, investing in the hulking mass that is Twitter, the World Wrestling Federation doesn’t whitewash treason or murder.

 

“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you are like whitewashed sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and all uncleanness.” Matthew 23:27

 

A castigation of the world’s first performance artist!

 

Woe unto you, hypocrites!

Woe unto you, who project “Family Values” and have nada, zip,

Woe unto you, white evangelicals, with ever-emptying pews,

Woe unto you, refusing to walk in another person’s shoes.

Woe unto you, “whitewashed sepulchers.”

Woe unto you who give “thoughts and prayers” after every gun massacre,

Woe unto you, American Golf:

 

Black Lives (don’t) Matter, and neither do 9/11 victims' families.

 

Once sports leave the playgrounds, oligarchs corrupt them.

 

Money can’t buy love or happiness.

 

I use the whip of my words to turn over the tables in a corrupt temple.

 

Golf courses will start getting noticed as contributors to the climate crisis.

 

Water that could be used to irrigate crops for human consumption,

 

Instead, it’s wasted for rich men to chase white balls around eighteen holes and lie about their averages like they already lie about their sexual conquests or penis sizes!

 

Gross (adjective): (especially of wrongdoing) very obvious and unacceptable; blatant;

 

This golf apostasy is wretched, grotesque: a sick, cosmic joke.

 

LIV Golf’s merger with the PGA might as well be called LIV Gross!

Simply the Best...

© May 24, 2023

Anna Mae Bullock was born in Brownsville, Tennessee.

She began public singing in “Turner’s Kings of Rhythm” in 1957.

She went by “Little Anne” then.

In 1958, she belted out the hit song “Box Top.”

 

Ike & Tina Turner was born as both duet and self-confession with the hit “A Fool in Love.”

More introspection with the lyrics of “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine,”

“River Deep - Mountain High,”

“Proud Mary,”

And “Nutbush City Limits,”

She fled Ike across a Dallas freeway,

After another one of his cocaine binges,

Bloodied and beaten by him,

Blood-soaked clothes wrapped in a coat.

Shades to mask her eyes blacked by fists,

She endured sixteen years of this before running.

Anna Mae [had] had ENOUGH!

Running in the dark with pennies in her pocket,

In the bicentennial year of 1976,

Soon after that act of defiance,

“Ike & Tina Turner” disbanded,

As Anna Mae Bullock declared her independence!

 

Considering the times,

It was standard practice for any woman,

No matter how talented she was to diminish herself for her husband or lover purposely, who, in this case, was also her abuser.

Leaving Ike stymied her career for a moment,

Periodicals labeling her as “washed-up,” a “has-been,” or more diplomatic: “a novelty” whose time had passed,

 

Spousal Abuse wasn’t talked about,

And the idea of a woman taking agency over her career, life, and body was nigh unthinkable then.

“Julia,” with Dianne Carroll, was [only] in reruns on TV.

And before the Mullahs on the Supreme Court nuked precedent, Roe vs. Wade was three years old [then].

 

But Anna Mae Bullock did it!

Suddenly a single mother with four children,

She only had her inner strength and,

Her dreams and talents,

 

No one came to your rescue,

If you called 911, Dispatch or the Police might not save you.

They might have sided with Ike and politely left.

There was no hashtag “me too” movement,

Since there was no Internet,

Harvey Weinstein was “doing his thing.”

To every prospective starlet,

 

Jeffrey Epstein and Orange Satan were frolicking on his underage prisoner island.

 

There were many “Access Hollywood” incidents before the eventual recording,

And E. Jean Carroll’s day in court,

 

But Anna Mae/Tina Turner/“Proud Mary,” like Carolina Panthers, “kept pounding!”

 

If you have never seen her perform “Proud Mary,”

After her split with her abuser,

Anna Mae Bullock was the grandmaster of twerking!

It was an expression of sensuality and freedom.

It was and will always be a dance of emancipation!

Angela Bassett mimicked her gyrations and gymnastics in her biopic.

As a matter of fact,

Angela Bassett should have gotten an Oscar for that!

As a matter of fact,

She expertly did it because Tina Turner coached Angela Bassett on how to do it!

 

From an interview posted by the singer Jody Whatley on Facebook:

 

“When I started as a solo artist, I was a female Black singer in my forties with no money and few prospects for gigs.

“Still, I kept a ‘never give up’ spirit.

“Part of my spiritual practice is to change poison into medicine, to transform roadblocks through positivity.

“The force of my positivity pushed the discriminatory ‘isms’ standing in my way.

“We all have it within our power to make decisions and take actions that elevate us.

“Every day, we express who we are and who we wish to become through our thoughts, words, and deeds.

“Choose the positive path in everything you do.

“Spread positivity and kindness.

“That’s the way.

“My legacy is that I stayed on course, from beginning to the end. Because I believed in something inside of me.”

Her legacy:

The previous holder of the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest paying audience for a solo performer in the UK – 180,000,

12 Grammy Awards, including eight competitive Grammys,

A star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1986,

A star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame in 1991,

Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991 (unfortunately, as a duet),

Recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors in 2005,

President George W. Bush commented on her “natural skill, energy, and sensuality,” saying she had “the most famous legs in show business,”

In tribute:

Melissa Etheridge performed “River Deep – Mountain High,”

Queen Latifah performed “What’s Love Got To Do With It?”

Beyonce performed “Proud Mary,”

And Al Green performed “Let’s Stay Together.”

In 2021, her doppelganger, Angela Bassett, inducted her into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a Solo Artist!

Tributes by Keith Urban and H.E.R. “It’s Only Love,” Mickey Guyton performed “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” Christina Aguilera performed “River Deep – Mountain High,”

Oprah Winfrey stated, “We don’t need another hero. We need more heroines like you, Tina. You make me proud to spell my name w-o-m-a-n.”

Ms. Tina Turner. 1939-2023.

#TinaTurner

 

Rest In Power

“Simply the best.”

Ase’!

Quid Pro Crow...

Clarence Thomas Secretly Sold Mother's Home to Harlan Crow, The Real Deal

© May 4, 2023, the Griot Poet

Twenty-three years ago,

The Supreme Court,

Despite the corruption and debacle of the 2000 election,

Decided 5-4 to give the electoral college victory to George W. Bush by the conservative majority,

That included Clarence Thomas,

 

His noble predecessor,

Thurgood Marshall fought for civil rights,

As an attorney for the NAACP legal defense fund,

He argued and won 29 out of 32 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, eventually becoming the first black Associate Justice.

In the most notable of cases,

Was Brown vs. Board of Education,

To make “separate but equal” constitutional,

Southern states would have to decide to fund all schools equally,

The old South balked at this.

They preferred instead to birth “Christian academies” to avoid being integrated.

Thurgood Marshall won a 9-0 unanimous decision.

He served from 1967 - 1991,

Retiring, because the warrior was tired,

He transitioned two years later.

Asking if he preferred his replacement to be African American,

Thurgood said something that proved to be prescient:

“It doesn’t matter if it’s a black snake or a white snake: a snake is a snake!”

George Herbert Walker Bush looked high and low for his reptilian replacement,

His chosen token was Clarence Thomas:

 

Assistant Secretary of Education for the Office of Civil Rights, June 26, 1981 - May 6, 1982,

Chair of the Equal Opportunity Commission, May 6, 1982 - March 8, 1990,

Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit, March 12, 1990 - October 23, 1991,

 

The first of two Associate Justices credibly accused of sexual misconduct,

Anita Hill was profiled as a woman scorned,

When her file was with all documents about Thomas his legal career and life,

Two other accusers [were] ignored at the hearing,

He survived his confirmation, invoking a visceral image that his hard questions were a “high-tech lynching.”

Thomas didn’t get his first extravagant gift from billionaire Harlan Crow until [after] he survived it.

When he took his seat, Thomas went silent.

For decades, he was a meme for judicial mediocrity,

The lone dissenting voice on things that should have been a layup: Affirmative Action, the KKK, an insurrection involving Ginny (recuse, you idiot).

 

Harlan admitted in the Dallas Morning News that he “doesn’t know if he’d be friends” with Clarence if he weren’t a Supreme Court justice.

 

Friends don’t have conditions.

Friends grow up in the same neighborhood.

Friends go to school together.

Friends are in the same scout troop.

Friends play on the same sports team.

Friends vibe off each other at poetry venues.

Friends have things in common, like “The Golden Girls.”

Clarence and Harlan have none of this,

 

Clarence and Harlan aren’t “simpatico.”

Clarence may be the only black man to admire Harlan’s Hitler memorabilia.

Harlan paid for Clarence and Ginny Thomas’s lavish vacations,

He bought Thomas’s mother’s home and the block she lives on and lets her live rent-free in it,

He paid for a boarding school for Thomas’s grandnephew,

Who’s paying large under-the-table sums to Ginny Thomas?

(Oh! That would be Leonard Leo, a conservative activist in the Federalist Society through Kellyanne Conway.)

In the vernacular of slavery: the Thomas’s are “owned.”

Thomas is [a] flunky for “Quid Pro Crow.”

 

As fast as John Cornyn and “Cancun Cruz” jumped to Crow’s defense,

Texas: ask to see your senators’ tax returns!

And vote for Colin Allred to “repeal and replace” Ted!

 

While we’re at it:

Who bought Neil Gorsuch’s property?

Who paid Brett Kavanaugh’s high debts?

Why is the richest multimillionaire on the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts?

Or, his wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, a ten million-dollar-a-year conservative lobbyist?

(It might explain why he refused to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee under oath voluntarily!)

Why doesn’t the highest court in the land have a board of ethics?

How can you expect them to follow ethics when it’s just nine people spitballing?

How many other billionaires own their own Supreme Court Justices?

 

As the scales fall from our eyes, we have to ask:

 

Did we EVER have the “rule of law?”

Were we ever a federal republic?

 

The “Supreme Court” is neither.

This self-description is gaslighting.

 

Once you accept that they “sit high and look low” to pontificate about how laws can reinforce white supremacy,

They’ve been doing this since Dred Scott and Chief Justice Taney,

Once you accept this,

Everything makes perfect but grim sense.

Clarence Thomas is step-n-fetch in judicial robes,

Uncle Ruckus from “The Boondocks”

Lying about having “reverse vitiligo,”

Working on the desires of his corrupt benefactor, Massa Quid Pro Crow.

Clarence is just a token add-on, and he’s quite happy to fill his role until his last breath.

 

Jim Crow 2.0 is Quid Pro Crow.

IBM gave calculators to Nazis to count the bodies of Jews in concentration camps,

The Koch brothers’ dad sold products in WWII to Nazis and Soviets,

Hitler made Volkswagen,

Coca-Cola made Fanta soda for the Nazis,

Harlan Crow in Dallas, Texas, has Nazi memorabilia and Hitler portraits,

Stop looking for German accents, swastikas, and Hitler mustaches,

Goose steppers are caricatures:

Real fascists have checkbooks!