A Column By John Sinclair
Hi everybody, and let me wish you a Happy Bastille Day since it’s July 14 as I write this and it’s the day the French people celebrate annually to commemorate the freeing of prisoners from the city prison back in the days of the French Revolution. Sort of akin to our 4 th of July, but for some of us—particularly those who have been unjustly imprisoned by the state—even better. As Archie Shepp put it, “We celebrated the 4 th on the 14 th —we always did.”
If all goes right, American marijuana prisoners will soon experience a Bastille Day of their own, although it will be staggered from state to state as marijuana legalization continues to spread instead of coming all at once on a national scale, which of course is not going to happen anytime soon because Congress remains convinced that weed is a Schedule I drug subject to severe penalties and prison sentences.
In our present state of affairs it is often difficult for me to understand what sort of reasoning is going on in the executive branch and the Supreme Court, let alone the legislative body known as the United States Congress. These constructs amount to a whole lot of rich old white men who have their heads stuck firmly up their asses and always have had.
These are the same people who wouldn’t allow women or minorities to vote, who considered black Americans “3/5ths of a man,” who dropped the atomic bomb on Japan and poisoned the future of humanity for the rest of time, who have waged wars with bombs dropped from the skies onto people working in their fields and cowering in their dilapidated neighborhoods where people earn less in a year than Americans with jobs make in a week.
Now we’re being gleefully manipulated by an egomaniacal billionaire president who stole the election with the help of the Russians and with 3,000,000 fewer Americans voting for him than his opponent—a dingbat whose exuberant following is drawn from the millions of citizens who watched his number one “reality television” program where he was the Boss every week for ten years. That’s a hard standard to overcome for an actual political candidate who has nothing but his or her beliefs and voting history to run on—along with the millions of dollars all candidates have access to, of course.
Bah, humbug, is what I say to these criminals who run our social order—the political thugs who created the War On Drugs and built up their police state on our backs and with the money they seized from us in the course of persecuting and prosecuting us for the past 80 years. It’s time for the reparations to begin—time to punish these miscreants and make restitution to the millions of citizens whose lives were disrupted by these creeps.
The indications are that several of our states are prepared at least to pardon those marijuana prisoners they have wrongfully incarcerated and to expunge the records of those who were convicted of benevolent acts regarding marijuana such as possessing weed for personal use and providing portions of the sacrament to other weedheads who needed some.
Only the most perverted, scum-of-the-earth types of individuals could characterize these acts as criminal, immoral or wrong and dish out their draconic punishments in a sanctimonious, smug and phony moralistic way. Since the voting citizens have spoken over and over again in state after state to make marijuana legal, the thugs who persecuted us for weed “crimes” haven’t even said they’re sorry, let alone given us any recompense for our suffering and abuse at their hands.
I’m in kind of a bitter mood on Bastille Day because this is when the acting president of the United States has told four Democratic congresswomen that they should go back to the wretched countries they came from and stop telling decent Americans how to conduct themselves. Me, I’m 77 years old and I’ve never heard anything remotely like this from the people in power directed at their immediate peers in the Congress. Our government is swirling around the bottom of the toilet bowl already, but this is really a new low.
How far will we allow this lying sack of shit, this pussy-grabbing, blackmail-paying, imbecilic, know-nothing imposter to take us along his path of shame and degradation? In the immortal words of Richard Pryor, “How long will this bullshit go on?”
You know, I’m a card-carrying Democrat of the Bernie Sanders democratic socialist persuasion, and I’ve had good feelings about only two of the presidents in my lifetime—that would be Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama—but this guy I call Resident Rump makes warmongers like General Eisenhower look like a peacenik, idiots like Richard Nixon (or “that goddamned Nixon” as we used to call him) look like Socrates, the Bush presidents look like the Bobbsey Twins.
What on earth did we do to deserve this sort of treatment? How long are we going to have to take it? The one thing that’s good about being old is that if it keeps going this way, I’ll soon be dead and gone and won’t have to live any longer under a bullshit regime like Resident Rump. But that’s a terrible fate to wish upon my fellow Americans, and it would be so refreshing to see the real Americans step forward and banish this punk and his henchmen and women from government service forever.
While I’m pissing and moaning this month, let me not forget my beefs with the government of the City of Detroit, a collection of former police officers, church officials and social workers that keeps trying to run the city farther into the ground than it already is, which is pretty ugly. This is a city of 139 square miles of which a tiny percentage is up to par and the vast remainder scarred and pitted by thousands of vacant lots where there used to be houses and stores. The redevelopment of a three-mile stretch of Woodward Avenue and surrounding area is regarded as a renaissance in the city, which is a pretty absurd position.
Finally, from my point of view as a lifelong daily newspaper reader, this is a city where it is impossible to obtain copies of both local newspapers each day and very difficult to find a copy of the New York Times. The Free Press and News will deliver papers to my house only on Thursday, Friday and Sunday, and the NYTimes will deliver only its Sunday edition to the downtown area. What kind of nuthouse is this?
In closing, if you think the anti-marijuana forces in the United States are a bunch of maniacs, check out the Justice Minister of Holland, Ferdinand Grapperhaus, who has said that the government needs to “think critically” about whether the Netherlands should continue to hold 1,100 festivals a year.
“People discovered [trying to enter these festivals] with drug quantities considered to be for their ‘own use’,” DutchNews.nl reports, “would not be let into festivals, and those suspected to be dealers would be arrested.”
“If we could police this,” the top lawman concluded, “you’d really see something. The problem is that we have 1,100 festivals in the Netherlands, so should we put our police on this full-time?” Hey, why not? What else have they got to do?
Now this is a place where smokers have been able to buy their weed over the counter and smoke it on the premises day in and day out since 1972. What is this guy smoking?
Free The Weed! Everywhere!
—Detroit
July 14, 2019
© 2019 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
