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Paul Edwards

Associate Editor Paul Edwards is a writer and film-maker in Montana. He can be reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net .

STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES

by Paul Edwards Published: July 25, 2026

written by Paul Edwards 5 minutes read

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Paul Edwards

It was Forrest Gump who said it first. My son says there can be nothing Trump does now that will surprise him, a great defense against his lunatic behavior, and I wish I could say it with him.

What prevents me is the conviction that the critical factor in Trump’s stupidity, which he has demonstrated to the world in so many and various ways, is not just the inarguable density of his grossly inferior cognitive equipment, but rather the irredeemable, organic malevolence in it.

You may say that all stupidity is malevolent, which I won’t deny, but the common forms of it are accidentally so, and it is chiefly an introduced quality in America, where elements of cruelty and hatred are cultivated non-stop by what is risibly called Capitalist culture. It seems the toxicity is really in his DNA, since all he does exudes the nasty tang of venom, yet that can’t be true.

Capabilities, susceptibilities, even inclinations, may be genetically determined but behaviors must be instilled and conditioned by life experiences. This means his constant malevolence has to have been a learned and trained compulsion.

One can search, with the best will and intent, across his many executive orders and decrees, proposed laws and policies or their elimination, international acts and commitments or their denunciation and betrayal, and not find one instance that was not fully inspired by revenge or hatred. And he revels in that.

His very plan and slogan is rooted in furious and indiscriminate destruction. Now, admittedly, so much has been deformed and perverted in the body of The Gem of The Ocean, so utterly has the Republic Franklin warned we could lose been mauled and debased by ages of Capitalist infamy, that the great hope of many Americans is now vested in sad, mute, constant yearning for a regeneration they know in their hearts will never come.

He promised a disfigured simulacrum of it, based entirely on his hates and prejudices, which are legion: women, people of color, the educated, scientists, immigrants, environmentalists, activists for civil, economic and political rights; every variety of aspiring, striving humanity that does not prostrate itself to his brainless, guttersnipe sociopathic creed, and kneel to his gross, vulgar will.

In taking an ax to American government, his only loyalty was to the worst, most vicious, anti-democratic Capitalist cabals. He made no effort to disguise it because, in his moral depravity, he prides himself on inflicting ruin on the state and pain on society.

That American government should be dismantled and rebuilt is not in question. Its essential function, at which it has failed utterly, is to promote the general welfare, but capture by the evil, Capitalist cadre that owns it, made it rotten and dysfunctional.

Trump’s intent is not to improve it, but to destroy it, make it more violent, and orders of magnitude worse. He wants it to be the toy of the endless greed of cronies, criminals, and financial vampires.

In his fathomless, anti-human pathology, he is driven to wreck and obliterate all the best in human culture, replacing it with the morality of a bull fight and the polity of a slaughter house.

Because intelligence cannot permit such ethical mayhem, he lusts to obliterate education, history, reason, and science, using them against their purposes in ways fatal to their very existence.

His sinking of America in the nauseating horrors of Ukraine and Gaza, and his looney war on Iran, have choked the world with revulsion, even those vile, cowardly whore nations who genuflect and kowtow to the monster. He has done more in a few years to make us universally hated than eight decades of our arrogant, blatant intimidation and brutalization of the world achieved.

Shown up in geopolitical folly, with Gaza an endless suppurating wound, Ukraine out of his control, and total inability to coerce and break Iran, he indulges in his rhetorical, bullshit chin-music.

He rants about voting subversion by—get this!—Communists. And Chinese, as if they gave a goddam who fronts our sick joke of a country. He will smash political movements to the left of Genghis Khan. He offers nuclear capabilities to the sluttish totalitarian Saudi state. He vilifies Canada for having caught fire. There is no outer boundary to the psychotic’s lunatic behavior.

At home—if America can be called home now—he promotes race hate against dark people, and elevates monstrous Zionist Jews to paramount power, authorizes by fiat the destruction of remaining forests, grasslands, national monuments and parks, rivers and lakes, and the wholesale looting of their resources for the dirtiest, most polluting pirate industries.

His regime, elected by a freakish alliance of giant Capital with the lowest and stupidest hillbilly element of our ignorant people, is engaged in the trashing and firesale of all the physical, mental, and philosophical attributes that defended the American people.

When it is clear as never before in our history that the man at the controls of the ship of state has the instincts and incentive of a Kamikaze pilot, and the cruelty of Attila, The Scourge of God, if any character and courage exist in the people, it must rise to thwart and eliminate this monster that is destroying them.

But there is not. Americans are a passive, torpid, defeated race. We are suppressed and manipulated serfs, damaged, lost souls, devoted to our abuser, cowards beaten into cringing submission.

We prefer to be witnesses to our own eradication rather than to stand up and fight, and die, if necessary, for the liberty we sing of, but will never defend, and we richly deserve our destruction.

Published: July 25, 2026 0 comments

The Wake

by Paul Edwards Published: July 4, 2026

written by Paul Edwards 5 minutes read

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By Paul Edwards

THE WAKE

A wake is a traditional gathering of family and friends held after the death of a loved one and before the funeral. Though it has never yet been held for a dead nation, the time for that has come.

A nation’s death is not physical and instantaneous, but it is the result of similar processes. The germ of debility or disease, the invisible infection, the attrition of vitality, and the final collapse of the life force: they work the same in Man and state.

The Wake we hold now is not due to the brutal, unanticipated shock of a death unforeseen. We know and recognize the onset of the end in a person we love. And we have understood and accepted the same indicators in what we have always called The Land Of The Free. We have watched the spread of fatal toxins that long undermined the health and viability of the Republic.

Most of us are born with a genetic mix that arms us for the long normal journey of life, but there are many who, from birth, carry a pernicious gene that will untimely destroy them. Our nation was born with the virulent, aberrant factors that fated its demise.

An enthusiastically profit oriented enterprise controlled from the beginning by a wealthy elite, it founded itself openly on the reign of capital, and on genocide and human slavery, all the pathogens that were destined to destroy it.

Given the natural, benighted, human vices of avarice and power lust, those fatal elements were disguised and denied by the ruling clique, and left untreated in the body politic. Being the deadly pathogens, the rampant cancers, they are sociologically, they have been steadily metastasizing for two hundred and fifty years.

On this symbolically touted anniversary of our Independence, we are asked by our current rulers to celebrate the nation that their falsity, cynicism and villainy has destroyed. We who recognize death when we see it, cannot comply. But we can mourn.

All life ends in the individual and persists in the mass, in nations as in people, and in both a life is judged on what it verifiably did in its brief mortal span. The function of a wake, and its chief purpose, is to laud the best in the deceased as consistently as possible without denying established fact, and to assuage, to some degree, the grief that is the inevitable result of the loss.

Our nation’s wake must begin with its aspirational intent. There is no doubt that those who designed our foundational document had, in the majority, decent and honorable hopes for its social success, and for a good and worthy outcome for our people.

Though it was crafted with greed, control, and injustice deep in its DNA, that reality was not uppermost in their stated purpose, and it was done virtually unconsciously on the basis of the ruling prejudices of their time. They did not set out to create an engine of exploitation to betray their countrymen. Their prejudices were strongly held, refined by the best liberal thinking of the era and—as we surely are—they were largely selfishly blind to their flaws.

As the founders did what seemed to them their moral best in our enabling act, so throughout our history, the best values have had brave, sincere defenders. They are easily identified because they were strong, lonely voices against the rule of vice, injustice, and cruelty. Inevitably they were few, vilified by the financial power, and forced to make their fights alone. There is nothing unique in this: it is the story of all human history.

To them we owe what small progress has been made in redress of the evils of sex, ethnic, and color persecution, of suppression of labor, of institutionalized poverty, and of denial of indisputable human rights. Their heroic efforts have been violently opposed by the massed forces of Capitalist Power, and their successes relentlessly, systematically diluted, diminished, often eradicated.

As persons can be overwhelmed in life by dark forces that beset them, so with nations, and a wake is where that must be grieved. Abe Lincoln called America ‘the last best hope of earth”, to be ‘nobly won or meanly lost’. To our deep grief it was meanly lost. Our wake today mourns all the promise that might have been.

For, despite the contradictions of our establishment, that loss was not inevitable. Those who struggled for the highest, most generous goals gave America repeated chances to grow ethically toward potential glory. Those, in Stephen Spender’s words, ‘who fought for life, who wore at their heart’s core the fire’s center’, lit and carried, again and again, the moral torch our rulers rejected.

Our country’s death was neither sudden nor surprising. It came in the long, terrible agony that only those who have had to see a loved one stricken randomly with a slow, inexorably fatal affliction ever suffer. It was the culmination of an extended, irresistible invasion and overthrow of all the body politic’s defensive powers and resources until, one by one, they faltered and winked out.

Unlike physical life, a nation that is ethically, politically dead does not cease to exist. It goes on autonomically, operating without reason or purpose beyond maintaining its mechanical function. Robinson Jeffers saw our betrayal and dissolution when it was well under way a hundred years ago, and in his irremediable grief, he wrote, his hail and farewell, “Shine, Perishing Republic”.

The monstrous, mindless, nightmare entity we live in now is not the Republic that Franklin told us that we had if we could keep it. It is an automated remnant, as pathetically dysfunctional as all empires are in the colossal chaos of their implosion. We are like the derelict Voyager, its mission over, wandering blind, lost in infinity.

Men and nations die; ideals, although scorned and abandoned, never. We mourn, and celebrate that.

Published: July 4, 2026 0 comments

LOSER

by Paul Edwards Published: June 17, 2026

written by Paul Edwards 5 minutes read

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3 Paul Edwards

Blow, trumpets! Beat, drums! Sing Hosannas, you Seraphim! The Great Deal is signed. Well, nearly. Friday, it will be. Not that far away. Why postpone the celebration? Let the games begin!

The whole world has just been audience to the most blatant and ludicrous vaudeville burlesque ever perpetrated by a nation. The role Trump played as initiator and victim of his own caper, ranks in absurdity with the French artiste who, on public stages, played The Marseillaise by emitting musical flatulence from his anus.

His asinine posturing and doltish ego lap at the total collapse and surrender of any and all objects the shameless boob may have imagined before he had his ass well and soundly kicked by Iran is unequaled by any act of abject imperial buffoonery in history.

What must the dirty cretin imagine his next move can be? The irony of his humiliation is hugely increased by the fact that, even if anything should come of this charade, which it can’t, his “deal” will be far worse than Obama’s was, and infinitely worse than The Empire’s situation was before his brainless hailmary went down.

To put it most succinctly, what has been agreed to—and we have only the haziest sense of that—is evidently the intent to come to some agreement, on something, at some point. This, to put it generously, is not the stuff of which peace treaties are made.

Perhaps the crowning absurdity of all—though that’s hard to say, among so many—is that no word of substance has been uttered on the key demand Trump made explicitly before his monumental pratfall: his braying fatwa that Iran give up its nuclear material.

To hear the imbecile now, his single great achievement is that he has gotten exactly what he had before gargantuan sums of U.S. money were blown: traffic through Hormuz. And after all his fulminations against Obama’s “worst deal ever”, this putrescent self-blowing horn has the sick gall to pretend to be a hero settling for the empty bag of nothing he hasn’t even signed.

Given that he achieved nothing for The Empire—not a single aim—has he inflicted strategic loss on Iran? He hasn't.

There was pain, damage, and death. Israel, our psycho hitman, murdered their religious leader, Khamenei, and other high military men and many civilians, including nearly three hundred pre-teen schoolgirls, though that was mainly U.S. work. Iran has been hurt, no doubt, but its suffering has consolidated the resolve of the people in a way only such brutal aggression could engender.

It has to be remembered that wild underestimation of enemies is not new in The Empire. Trump and his coven of warlocks was not more wrong believing Iran to be a pushover than JFK and his Best and Brightest were in their take on Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam.

The ruling Exceptionalist mindset only admits to its high councils gutless castrati who recite its hoary dogma against the facts. However potent we are with our War Machine, which specializes in failure—we’ve always been utter boneheads in humint.

You will have noted that whatever the hell is in this ‘deal’, Bozo has not made it public. Not so, in Iran. Their 14 points and redlines have not changed an iota from their first issuance. They consist of demands that Trump and The Empire can not comply with short of de facto surrender.

They include, but are not limited to, refusal to yield, or cease enrichment of, their uranium; full control and management of Hormuz; a total end to war on Gaza and Hezbollah; restitution of billions of stolen sovereign funds; and removal of all U.S. war-making bases from our sycophant princelings in the Gulf.

Try to form a picture of Trump agreeing to any of this. He sealed himself in an Iron Maiden he can’t open. He must admit defeat, which he can never do—national ego won’t permit it—or he will be forced—tomorrow, next month—to commit his unmotivated, inadequate military to re-fight a hopeless war it cannot win.

In the interim he can make pronouncements, and bark, and declare the false and dubious to be certain, but the reality is that he has shot his pathetic wad and the world knows it, though his knuckle-draggers and personal sluts declare otherwise.

Meanwhile, with every boast, brag, and sham, with every queer, demented caper that the contemptible Punch, and punching bag, contrives, with each day and week that passes, Iran’s position is strengthened, reinforced, and solidified. Both its evident, robust resistance to Old Aunt Sam, and its increasing integration and acceptance by its peers as the now major power and player in the region, are unquestioned by the great world.

America, the once Beautiful, has been put, by this stupid, ugly, criminal degenerate, in the hard position of having to confront its second-string performance before the nations. For far too long, our country, the outright possession and toy of a cabal of evil, twisted Capitalist oligarchs who had neither fealty to the nation that made them, nor regard for its people, America was run as a vicious tool of compulsion and dominance over Mankind.

A Willie Nelson lyric says that this land, ‘once fashioned in beauty now stands with scars on her face’. The hideous, irresponsible damage America has inflicted on the whole living world by and for its ruling clique, has now come home in blatant and direct assault on all that remains of the land that Willie sang about.

A deep, unassuageable sadness is our legacy from the chaos made by the blind, evil, Capitalist cancer whose tattered banner is now shakily borne into failure, disgrace, and disaster by the ultimate Loser.

Published: June 17, 2026 2 comments

Proverbs 29:18

by Paul Edwards Published: June 9, 2026

written by Paul Edwards 5 minutes read

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By Paul Edwards

It’s not conditional. Not equivocal. Not obscure. You can’t misunderstand it. “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

The American Empire, founded as empires must be, on cruelty and dominion, is at the apogee of its material power, so its ruling elite contend, though there is a quaver of trepidation now in their strident voices. That claim rests on its boasted military force, assertions that are mutually dependent which, again, is integral to empires. It says, simply, we’re the strongest, so we rule.

As with all known empires since Knossos, while founded on brute power, ours had to offer a justification in righteousness, if only for its central, driving elite. That is, the violence it required had to be sweetened as a promised good, its purposes shown benevolent.

Our American catechism concealed and camouflaged its brutality with a concise summation of enlightened thinking, construed as the most noble of human aspirations. Our founding geniuses—and they were political geniuses—created an ethical framework on which the body of the nation was to have been built. That this did not happen, and was done quite otherwise, was a reality never allowed to interfere with the cut and thrust of empire.

For two hundred fifty years the hypnotic magic of this prosody, so superbly crafted in our inspirational founding documents, held Americans mesmerized in a profound trance convinced, in the marrow of their bones, of its absolute truth. “We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal.”

What was evident in prose was never present in practice, and the country, in which the whole animating drive was to extract profit from our astonishingly rich land, was driven at top speed by the engine of Capitalism to arrogate all its natural bounty to a minute ruling class at the expense of the great mass of working people.

We had a vision, but it was a fiction, false at its core, a cynical burlesque invented to enlist full support of the people it abused and fleeced, and it was astonishingly successful. It continued to be effective because—in addition to the innate need of people to believe in their own goodness and decency—Capitalism had been convicted, over time, for its monstrous cruelty due to the inevitable periodic failures caused by its boundless rapacity.

Those failures, inherent and certain, had, since electoral reform in Victorian England, but especially after the Great Depression, seen Capitalism angrily, grudgingly, forced to yield some small token benefits from its enormous excess profits to the working classes. This concession, forced by the real threat of societal chaos, was what Marx could not foresee that averted the threat of revolution.

In practical economic terms, it ended the era when labor was hardly distinguishable from slavery and, in adopting elements of Socialism—the right to organize, regulation of wages, and some basic social security—it gave workers a small stake in preserving a savage system that thrived by exploiting and denying them.

This brought about the curiously awkward stasis that has allowed the ravenous Capitalist cabal to continue to function in all its flagrant hypocrisy. It has kept feeding the founding bullshit to a public that is less inclined to eat it, while showing its contempt for it by electing the most vacuous, praise-lusting sleazebag in our history to oversee the accelerating disintegration of America.

Trump's obscene second inauguration gathered dozens of plutocrats, making it clear that the US is neither ruled by nor for the people, and never has been.

Trump’s election the second time is the evidence that the huge segment of citizenry which has felt dissed and betrayed by the soft-boiled, woke-worshiping, so-called ‘liberal’ cabal that has owned the government under both parties has broken its hoary hold on usurped power and that its cynical racket is dead.

In disillusion and rage, this small but sufficient plurality of Trump voters rejected the Grand Con of the Capitalist Coalition, not because it understands that our bogus credo is meaningless, but because it insists on reaffirming it. That’s the pathetic magic for the dingbats that buy the MAGA message: they laud and defend the fairy tale that screwed them and put them where they are.

Unwashed Trump backers are blind to the fact that MAGA’s real captains—the money—are billionaire Zionist Jews and cutthroat Libertarians who care nothing for them and their needs, and are happy to mouth the mantras of the outraged underclass so long as they are left free to butcher the nation and consume it.

When have you heard our dummy figureheads urge the nation to ethical achievement? When has one inspired us to higher aims in any terms? When has any said the elevation of our people in all respects must be our goal? When has an example been exalted outside of celebrity in the toxic sewers of money and war? What has been the content and substance of our leaders’ vision?

In a sense a nation, a culture, is like a receptive child: it absorbs what its dominant, parent-figures provide as rules of behavior. When a people is trained by its elite in the evil death cult dogma of Capitalism, it is internalized and results in the spiritual and moral death of that people. They exist physically, and do what conditions force them to do, but they are effectively dead.

The old ruling clique would have you believe the roiling disaster that is American politics and the furious social bear-baiting we live in is due to the ascent of Trump and his band of feral oddities and mangy predators. Not so. It is the hog wallow the Capitalist Parties built for you to suffer under over many previous decades.

In Trump, instead of a bold vision, we have the view of a spoiled, arrested juvenile defective, who in his garish fatuity wants to raise tacky, brummagem monuments to his destructive inadequacy.

This, it seems, is all an ethically dead public deserves.

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Published: June 9, 2026 0 comments

TONKIN AND HORMUZ

by Paul Edwards Published: May 30, 2026

written by Paul Edwards 6 minutes read

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By Paul Edwards

Assessing the sickening slide into chaos the United States has made so rapidly, one hesitates to describe the hot mess while it is still bleeding out and decomposing, but comparing the Gulf of Tonkin incident with the launch and abject failure of Trump’s Pearl Harbor style Iran attack reveals the meltdown that has occurred.

Both involved the deceit by the American government that has always defined its operation, arguably from its inception. That noted, their political contexts differed enormously. It is not a question of one of these acts being justifiable and the other not: both were instances of America creating wars based on lies.

American enmiring in Vietnam occurred not from any particular decision, but as a fumbled, ad hoc decision to stop a plebiscite on unifying North and South Vietnam. Congress never declared war and abrogated its Constitutional responsibility. This most costly, bloody war since WW II was waged without authorization by the only body empowered to do so. It dragged on for years, killing and maiming many thousands of U.S. soldiers and millions of Vietnamese, to a shameful defeat that added gross humiliation to the historic guilt of having perpetrated that useless tragedy.

Johnson took the part of the defeated French in refusing to allow Vietnam to end its colonial status and become a sovereign state under the wise, principled leadership of Ho Chi Minh, who openly revered American ideals, intending to adopt them. In a cynical betrayal of those ideals—typical for America—the U.S. backed the wealthy, elite, landlord class and very soon owned the war.

Americans, in their profound ethical indifference, were mute through decades of their government’s morally indefensible crimes because it described them so nicely.

The great problem for Johnson—in that time of some respect for Constitutional law that is unimaginable now—was that he had no legal basis for waging war in that country. American assistance was wholly based on “stopping Communism”, sold to the the public with the fable that we had to halt it there or all the Asian “dominos” would fall, and Asia would be “lost” to “democracy”.

The fact is that everywhere America ever engaged, it supported wealthy, hated, exploiting classes that gouged and bled their people. That is what Capitalism does: cements, with money and violence, total state control by rich elites who milk and loot their people, just as is done at home in less punitive ways, with our working class bamboozled by heavy indoctrination in the idea that they can improve their status by voting in “free elections”. It’s a sick private joke of parasitic monsters. As Emma Goldman said, ‘If elections changed anything, they’d make them illegal’.

Johnson needed an inflammatory pretext to commit U.S. forces to defend the rich and privileged from their own people they so viciously abused. He made it known, and the required incident occurred. Naval commanders colluded, concocting an imaginary tale of direct attack by North Vietnamese ships, and Johnson took it to Congress, which passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that gave him his war, allowing unlimited deployment of American soldiers. 58,000 of them died in that colossal failure. [Between 2 to 3 million Vietnamese paid with their lives,too, many dying horrific deaths, including at the hands of CIA organised death squads.]

We live in another time, another country. In fifty years much has changed, though to think of the time of Vietnam as a shining era when laws were supreme, government was of and for the people, and America was a moral light to the world is fabulous nonsense. As a political actor, America was as evil and corrupt then as we are today though much less effort goes into camouflaging it now.

Ignoring and violating our Constitution is routine on the part of Presidents and Congress now, but not one of the wars America instigated since WWII was declared. What offends Americans who oppose Trump is not what he does, but what he says about it. In other words, his style. Americans, in their profound ethical indifference, were mute through decades of their government’s morally indefensible crimes because it described them so nicely.

Trump is a horse’s ass of a different color. His failed attack on Iran was made due to his diktat not simply that Iran must not be allowed to have a nuclear bomb, but that it cannot use Uranium for any civil purpose; in short, that it must give up its sovereignty and become a vassal state to America. This it will never do.

His attack achieved nothing, but did result in ruinous damage to the satrapies that enabled it, obliterating of their costly American warning systems, crippling their oil operations, and the closing the Strait of Hormuz. Trump swore to eradicate Iran if it didn’t open it. He couldn’t; and it didn’t. Invasion has been ruled out by his military chiefs, who won’t do it. The Imperial Sap is going to have to fish or cut bait, and he’ll be damaged either way.

The great difference between Hormuz and Tonkin is that the law that hobbled Johnson is not even a matter of serious discussion in our garbage Congress. In spite of our cynical deceit then, there were men of conscience still, whereas both houses now are packed with sleazy jellyfish whores with neither shame nor honor.

Trump is, for practical purposes, a dictator, in that there is no law nor power that restrains him. Will he decide to alter the mid-term election results, or perhaps just declare the process itself invalid? What would prevent him? Our invertebrate Congress..? The Supreme Court, that coven of fascisti warlocks..? The military..? Try to imagine it. What can prevent his continuing as our Fuhrer?

Trump could unravel the mummy of our worthless ‘democracy’, which would not be a bad thing in itself, given how rotten and rank it is. It is far too shot through with poisons to be reformed, even if the will was there, which it is not. Our dizzy plunge into the dysphoria of imperial disintegration is foreordained.

The greatest difference between the two wars is not that our motivation and behavior is more evil now than then, but that the intervening decades have allowed the cancer that has eaten the ethical tissue of our polity to metastasize until it almost demands the elevation of a hideous subhuman like Trump as its master.

Published: May 30, 2026 0 comments