#America by tim barrus

[timbarrus]

Take notes. After I put my kids on the flight out of America, and all the crying had slightly ebbed, I had to sit in the airport for about an hour because I could not get up. I knew I had done the right thing. America is just not a place to raise kids. Life is giving them whip lash. This piece has little to do with keeping your papers organized. It's insulting that Americans would even think that. It's denial, folks. You do not know how to raise children, and you are leaving them with a toxic planet. Because you do not care. I am autistic and do not understand many of the rules I follow every day. I avoid the police because they will kill me as they are so easily threatened. I have never had so much as a parking ticket. America will not help in protecting my children. If we are going to slide into a civil war, and I think we are doing exactly that, I don't want my children anywhere near the Great American War Machine that focuses on identity. Our public policy is a pornography. Doing away with the Department of Education, or hobbling it, is a great plan to keep the marginalized in their place. Will there still be schools. Or indoctrination centers. The America you fear is coming at you like a trainwreck. I want my kids off the tracks, off the grids, I have already taught them how to fight. I want them educated. I want them to know how hatred runs the world of men. I want them to be able to recognize the power of authority, and to always sit where you can see the door.

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You do not know me. You could never live my life. You would not survive it. I wanted to scratch one big window lined with clawmarks. I wanted him out. You can't have him. He's mine. The States are not safe. I don't give a fuck what you believe. I wanted him out. I got him out. My dime. My discretion. My heart. My ass.

He cannot live in the States. I will not have it. This country is the proverbial shit hole. Active shooter drills suck my big fat white dick.

What next, America. When do the executions start. Who gets the heads.

Our good citizens look the other way, look the other way, look the other way. America is a cunt. Flying and breathing that covid air has to stop. I am inside out with heart failure.

Americans have no idea what is coming. It's on its way like a trainwreck. What have you people done.

Everything you touch turns to pious shit. And I'm the one who is Mister Krazy

The airport was crowded. Kiss me. Hug daddy. I can smell a civil war in my gut. In my gut. Get out if you can. It's coming, and America gets what it so richly deserves. Go quietly. Then run like hell. This is not a drill. -- Tim Barrus

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Truly great literature is written by outsiders—the unorthodox and the nonconformist. When their careers are destroyed before they begin, we all lose. Writers privately tell us that they are concerned about the inevitable literary pablum of the coming decade. It’s already here. 

Take notes. I live in a village in Appalachia. In the summer I am in the treehouse. I can see cerulean blue miles and miles of the Blue Ridge. Another country. Note the we, there is no we. I drive a dirt bike (the only way to get up here). My connection is a phone. I have a horse fence, a barbed wire fence, and a tall concertina fence. All posted. I built Numerous Signs: "No Trespassing. No hunting. No developers. We have shot guns (we don't)." A cherry bomb firecracker is louder than a shotgun. Home buyers and developers run. Developers have ruined your country. "Shoot To Kill." We don't shoot anything. No one on this mountain reads the New York Times. There are folks who live here with dirt floors. In Manhattan, you cannot imagine an entire house with dirt floors. It's inconceivable. We got the big snakes. Do not shoot them in the toilet. No more toilet. Shine as clear as a five in the morning waterfall. I know folks who live in their truck up on cinder blocks. Middle of the deep woods. Imaginative housing. Water when it rains. So take your moral judgements, erase the tape. You’all love to compare what you paid for your houses. We talk about how little we paid. I paid nothing. Gig economy. I'm a card counter, and everyone knows it. I advertise it. I don't participate much. If I did, they would shoot me. Around here, folks leave their shotguns on the table at the door. My presence is intimidating enough. So how big is your big house. I'll take my treehouse any day.

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Take notes. As the middle class slides down the rabbit hole, the middle class will encounter exactly what they think they left. The lower middle class. We welcome you to our hovel. I cannot read articles like this without thinking: Where are the poor in this. In Appalachia, we know how poverty snakes around. The experts have always known more than we do. Where do you find homelessness in this discussion. Americans see the homeless and they look another way. We disappear. We are rendered invisible in this piece, too. And we understand that this invisibility is what saves us from many things. It's our contact with the Normals that we manage. We know a moral issue when we see one. Please, not another think tank paper on poverty. You'all pretend and pretend. You're not willing to talk about poverty and homelessness. Economic politics. As the middle class slides downward, you begin to discover exactly what I mean. Education does not mean us. Banking does not mean us. Elections do not mean us. A roof does not mean us. A job does not mean us. An environment that does not cause cancer would be nice. Our issues are not your issues. Until they are. We have an economy, too. It's called trade. I bake bread in a wood stove. I trade the bread for stuff. Yesterday, nails. The kind you pound. A hammer for five loaves. Three trout for mittens. Three baskets of apples for a Nanny goat. Nanny makes milk. I collect herbs from the forest. I don't want your economy because you all are so mean.

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I am attempting to make a case for publication comments that comments themselves are important for a dialogue to be clear, we have to measure the probability that any issue can even mean us.

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Capitalism and democracy have both failed us. We dance on their graves. It's not about your house. It's not about your job. It's not about your cars. This time, it's about you. Cars. Houses. Your boss you hate but you suck it up. Capitalism works for about three people who are rich anyway. The rest of us get to argue about fiddledeedee. A total lack of imagination. We can avoid responsibility. We did this. I am poor. I have always been poor. I will die poor. Your stuff will save you is ordinary swill. Stuff. More stuff. Oh, maybe we can be the rich, too, if we just work harder. Faster. Faster. The whole idea of Mister Big Boss is a pornography. We made this vile system. We embraced it. And we are going to pay. Pay. And pay. The only question is do you become a suit or do you take another direction in your life. The suits will always be suits because they believe that they can create institutional structures that will pay off. Emptiness. That someday will never arrive. The carrot or the stick. How about both. It's lose, lose. America was interesting but it failed because the rich see more money invested in authority. They want a piece of that, too. Poverty will kill you. They want a piece of that action, too. More children did not eat as much as previous years because we have learned how to limit access. We don't limit the food, we limit access. Social security is next. Medicare pays for nothing. You people are slaves and you do not matter. The culture is rotten to the core.

[timbarrus]

Every piece the New York Times publishes, that is about children, childrens’ rights, the exploitation of children, child trafficking, is done by a writer who at the very least, sounds like a very nervous amateur. It is hardly safe for me to say the Mommy America Suburban Stuff (consumer culture) has had everyone else pussy whipped. Property is everything you need to begin to compete with every other mommie on the block. Our garage only fits two cars and one truck and eight off the road vehicles, and a dirt Bike. We were going to have a pool but then we had a pool. Childhood is relative. It is also a fetish painted nice for another mommy’s smile. I know that look. After all, we live in the same neighborhood.

Childhood becomes a paradigm and there are rules. Your son will be targeted for a concussive event. It’s called piling on. Get the fuck back in that game. That’s childhood. Are they really going to be ballerinas. Some wear diapers. It shows. The New York Times doesn’t know Jack Shit about kids. All of us do not live on Long Island, and some of us, and the children of us, not that unlike the Children of the Vatican you tourists completely ignore which seems to be your answer to everything. Their arrival in America is not their fault. They have landed in a country where everyone hates them. They are more at risk for everything from everyone. There are still children in institutions who were, indeed, ripped from the family’s arms. Those arms cannot be replaced. What we have done with those children is criminal. The middle class guards who physically grabbed those kids – we were just doing our jobs – would not refuse to turn the shower poison on. They would have relished it. Just doing their jobs. Fuck your jobs. And fuck you. These kids will be aging out. Sooner than you think. And then what. How about those prisons still at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center and Torture Chambers. Blaring music. Everyone here needs a shower.

Why did you do it and who do you know.

Who believes those kids are receiving a great education. We are making felons. We do it every day. They will be interrogated, you never know who the communists are. Order in the house. Order in the House. Mr. Chairman, I move that these communist children go take a long shower. It smells bad in here. The South shall raise again. Mr. Chairman, I hold that these charges cannot be real. I did teacher training for Head Start in my abandoned youth. Hundreds of them. All women. Every last one. Suddenly, I go off like a bomb because I am the worst brat in the class and everyone knows it. Horrified and staring. This is not how teacher trainers act. “Give me a name. What is the name of this child. He is in every class. You know him. You hate him. What a verbal and physical mess. No parenting.” This is where the suggestions begin. He’s going to prison. It has been decided. Everyone white nods. I want their names. Raise your hands. They all had names. One girl. She had a name, too. The entire family works the midnight shift at the slaughterhouse. The twelve-year-old pushed blood down a drain. Failing in school. He was crazy. No. We are failing him. I want to know why the mommies don’t deal with this. Deal with this. – Tim Barrus

[timbarrus]

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[timbarrus]

Americans Are The Stupid Monsters of the Planet

Famine. It’s not my fault. Hmmm.

How stupid are they.

You have to literally drift around the world a few times before it hits you like a kick to the testicles. Stupidity and morality are synonymous, evolutionary processes. You can’t have one without the other. Stupidity is the self-inflicted blinders you screw into the skull bones, and morality is the kind of blazing sun that will burn your hissing eyeballs from your steaming head.

We seem to be the only people who are not aware that we are the demons of the universe.

The rest of the world does not mean us. The rest of the world has never meant us. A concentration camp is a concentration camp. We are the concentration camp of the stupid people. The concentration camps we run are concentration camps of children. It’s not my fault. Hmmm.

We have no morality. None. We never have.

None of this is new. What is new is the extent of the denial. Severe drought killed millions of Mayan people in MesoAmerica whose political structures failed as they could not stand the strain. Today, the Bantu are eating the Pygmy and cannibalism still exists. Genocide is the new normal. Nothing new about it. Democracy has rendered itself irrelevant as the white males who have kept the dinosaur afloat. In 1907, we imported African children who were exhibited naked in cages in European zoos and the World’s Fair. Americans wring their sweaty little hands and as they bring Pampers to the Auschwitz doors where the Doctors at Auschwitz say they don’t need them go away. Go away. Go away. And so Americans do as they are told. Like little insects scattering. Infestations.

You elected Hitler. You got Hitler.

We will elect other Hitlers. Hitlers come and go. Denial is forever.

It doesn’t come any more stupid than that. There is no analogous context for it in human history. Americans are breathtakingly ignorant because they want to be.

It’s not my fault. Hmmm. Wait until he has his real mandate.

I am using the photograph above because it represents famine. Americans think they are immune from famine.

But it’s coming.

a time to be born, a time to die/ a time to plant, a time to reap/ a time to kill, a time to heal/ a time to laugh, a time to weep/ there is a season turn, turn turn…

Just like global heating is already here.

Just like Central America is driving drought.

Not migrants from drought. But drought. Itself.

The kid is seven. Not one. He knows what is happening to him. He is aware.

War. Drought. Famine. Death. Suffering and faith. Faith loves suffering.

Americans are in love with hope. They have developed hope as a fetish. America whips itself with hope.

The blood flow is significant. Y won’t cure AIDS. You don’t have the balls or the courage for it. Courage is a risk. You won’t stop the flood of guns. You don’t have the balls or the courage for it. Courage is a risk. You won’t stop mass shootings. You might get shot. You don’t have the courage or the balls for it. Courage is a risk. Not a given. Your democracy will not survive. You can’t even impeach Hitler. You don’t have the courage or the balls for it. Courage is not the default position or the attribute of the old and the useless. You will not make any dents in dealing with mental health or stigma. What you have is dog shit for brains and you can’t figure it out unless you can shovel tens of billions of dollars into the suck hole mouth of Big Pharma. It doesn’t take much courage to realize you will fail because failing is what you do. If you can’t shut a thing down or shut it up with money being poured into the depths of greed, then why are you here.

Why are you here. What is your worth. As a human being. If the sight of dead children who are really seven, and not one, what does that make you. The age of wisdom. The starving boy with the big gut lived in a desert somewhere else.

Indeed, he did. A place that had once sustained itself with crops it raised, was now a thing of dirt, death, and dust. The bug eyes just stare you down.

Quick! Take a numb pill.

Quick! Take a side effect pill.

Quick! Take democracy pill.

Quick! Take a Hitler pill.

Quick! Take a chill pill.

Quick! Get a life.

By the time you are as estranged from the species you were born into as the child in the photograph, you want to die. You pray for it. You want it. You become desperate for it. Dehydration sets in. You die slowly in agony and defeat. He did.

It’s not my fault. How stupid are they.

I have walked and drifted around the planet all of my adult life. I have always said Hitler was coming back. I have always said the world was getting hotter. I have always said there are so many people on the earth, we have no systems, certainly not democracy, that do not lead to the inevitable famines, water shortages, failures of not just crops but entire institutions.

Nothing works. It just gets hotter and hotter. In the end, Hitler himself is irrelevant. It’s so much bigger than him. The planet groans from the weight of us. We live in our own rancid shit. There is no one to blame but ourselves. We did it to ourselves.

It is already far too late. The clock has struck midnight and that means midnight is here. You can pretend all you want that it’s really noon, but it’s not noon, it’s dark out there and it’s getting darker. It’s midnight no matter what you want it to be. A one-year-old turns seven every year. It doesn’t matter that you have grown numb from such images. The big heads. The swollen bellies. The spindly broken bones. As long as it is not us. I am here to tell you I have seen mountains of these corpses flung by men in surgical masks into pits. When the bodies hit the other bodies in the pits, all the bodies bounce. It doesn’t matter what you believe because they are us. What matters is the heat and the refrigerator.

Famine will mean you, too. Wherever there’s famine, there will be migration. Because you gotta move. To where the food is. You’ll leave the people who are terrorizing you in the vast and middle of the night. You will take your babies with you. In 1941 the trains would arrive.

Just like the train arrives in Mexico with the people clinging to it.

The first thing that always happens is that families are separated

They always do that first.

They know what they are doing. Without the identity of your family, what are you. Who are you. Why are you here.

We have arrived to live or die. And there you have it.

We separated slave children from their families. We raped their mothers. We raped their fathers. And we raped them. We separated Native American children from their families. We raped their mothers. We raped their fathers. We raped their land. And we raped them. We took young African-American men off the street. We separated them, we continue to separate them, and we immerse them in the institutional venue of rape, the prison.

And we do not even see it as rape or having anything to do with rape.

Rape is both the roots, the foundations, the beginning, and the end. Rape. Famine. War. Separation.

We now drive the heat that causes the famines and the wars jack built. It’s not coming. Looking back over your shoulder is so yesterday. America has finally arrived. The Planet of the Apes jumps off its horse and screams they did it they did it they did it. Because they did it.

Put your hope away. And one bite of a time. Eat your shoes.

It’s not my fault. Hmmm.

How stupid are they.

[timbarrus]

after wandering

some through

America, land

of the umbilical

alone, you begin

to see fungal family

graveyards infected

in a different light

people just

staring at the

rain in a parking

lot cuz they

were in it

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Every time I get a great source willing to talk to me, they move. In publishing, they move to another job in mainly two days from the last job.

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Tim Barrus in the New York Times

The New York Times is asking young Europeans what they actually know about America. The comments by these young Europeans are astonishing because these people are astonished at what they learn. We are not what people assume we are.

Europeans need to be educated in the facts: America is an ugly place with ugly people. America is a society invested in a vile and endemic hate, cruelty, evil, economic and racial inequality, the lie that aristocracy does not exist in our level playing field, culture wars, religious intolerance, medical illness, and an exhaustive, and self-defeating greed above and beyond any standard of sanity.

Come on over (unless you are Muslim), and watch our infrastructure crumble. Come on over, and recognize that corporations are the real government. Come on over, and watch our country burn. Come on over, and listen to climate deniers drool and spit their venom.

Erase all of this.

Come on over, and know indifference.

Indifference is what drives the great, lumbering machine. What you will begin to understand are the cycles that all institutions designed by our species encounter. Our own demise. It has happened before (certainly in Europe). It will happen again. It is happening now.

We consume with abandon. We reinforce the structures of a class system more instituted and entrenched than any royal throne on the planet.

You will come away with the understanding that when we go, we will take you with us. We will obliterate you. We will not stand by you. We will poison you. We will marginalize you. We will blame you. We will cut your economics open and make you bleed.

We are more ruthless than anything you could possibly know. We are a numb ugliness. We are indifferent.

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Tim Barrus on Hunger

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Tim Barrus