[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t happens over and over. Your family members or your friends, who you thought were pretty smart, decent people with common sense, kindness and even generosity suddenly turn around and start praising a lying misogynist warmonger like senator McCain as if they are in some sort of a religious trance.
In fact, those people operate within the national cult of naked Uncle Sam running around ruining people’s lives across the globe.
They have crazy myths of liberating people by blowing them up, serving people by putting bullets in their heads, protecting people by imprisoning them and ensuring your freedom by poisoning your food, taking your houses away and so on and so forth.
They have saints who dropped nuclear weapons on cities full of innocent people, who owned slaves or who bragged about being “really good at killing people”.
They worship their flag, which incidentally is a symbol of colonization and massacres for some people, while singing a racist song about hating black people.
They have a ritual of consecrating a man or woman (exclusively rich white men so far), they call it Presidency, who can be blamed for all the crimes committed by rich people and their friends, until all the crimes are forgiven and forgotten when the new one is selected to take on more crimes against humanity of many sorts.
Who came up with a fucked up religion like this? When the country itself is a fucked-up ethnocentric death cult like this, how the hell can people separate church and state? You really can’t. It’s really some sort of a theocracy by definition. That’s why the government is playing God when it insists that you can’t know your crime when you are imprisoned, authoritarianism is prioritized when a democratic discussion can be more useful and humane, or they get to decide which country should be bombed to a crisp.
And please don’t call me a dreamer, an extremist, or an ignorant [fool] based on your fucked-up religious view. I just think things should be good for all people not just for the worshippers of the [national] screwed-up religion.
Have a wonderful day my dear friends.
Hiroyuki Hamada is an artist. He has exhibited throughout the United States and in Europe and is represented by Bookstein Projects. He has been awarded various residencies including those at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Edward F. Albee Foundation/William Flanagan Memorial Creative Person’s Center, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the MacDowell Colony. In 1998 Hamada was the recipient of a Pollock Krasner Foundation grant, and in 2009 and 2016 he was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. He lives and works in New York. 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
“I just think things should be good for all people not just for the worshippers of the [national] screwed-up religion.” – A big -“A-(freaking)-men” to that.