His Speech Obsessed with Oaths, Demons, His Tongue Calling Forth the Foul Fiend

Screenshot from 8:30 last night. No one expected a different outcome, the multiple guilty verdicts. No other outcome was possible, there was never a chance Manning wouldn't spend the rest of his life in jail, something Manning knew when he went to Wikileaks. Military prosecutors dealt striking rebuke? Here's how nuts I am: I suspect the aiding the enemy charge was made so it could be rejected, the resulting See! See! it's not an inhumane system for an Oathbreaker! Fucking Oathbreaker!  conveniently distracting reminders of Manning's previous torture before trial and subsequent miserable life in prison after. Not to mention distracting from what Manning revealed about what this country does. I also believe it entirely possible Power wanted Manning as damned as they could. Yes, I'd bet it's the latter, I've heard the defense that Power is so brutal in its inept execution of will I should stop confusing institutional violence with motive: power means well but oops. Still, I ask you, of those two choices, which is more proof of American decadence?

• Yes: if espionage is illegal then the us government has a variety of huge bureaucracies entirely devoted to felonious activity. well, that's the very essence of state power, its precise center, its central reality: we exempt ourselves from the rules we impose on you. there are huge sprawling ministries of killing people, taking people's stuff without their permission, and so on and on.
• Oathbreaker! Fucking Oathbreaker! Because oaths you swear to power are more inviolable than oaths you swear to yourself. Unless you're James Clapper, whose superiors, yawn, think he kept his oath.
• Collective Stockholm Syndrome.
• Vacuuming everything.
• Cheat-sheet on spying.
• The war you don't see.
• Call me when Ron Wyden risks his political career and criminal charges.
• Unsurprisingly, despicable Democrat fails to mention that NSA surveillance is not about terrorism, unsurprisingly insists it's only about terrorism.
• Mid-County Highway!
• Horror for the codes of creation.
• Crown of creation.
• Sestina d'Bleggalgaze.
• Papal priapic envy!
• Another Prunella playlist!
• Glenn Gould.
• Eno in Manhattan.

FABLE

Tom Sleigh

But where, oh where is the holy idiot,
truth teller and soothsayer, familiar

of spirits, rat eater, unhouseled wanderer
whose garble and babble fill rich and poor,

homeless and housed, with awe and fear?
Is he hiding in the pit of the walkie-talkie,

its grid of holes insatiably hungry,
almost like a baby, sucking in the police

sergeant's quiet voice as he calls in reinforcements?
Oh holy idiot, is that you sniffing the wind

for the warm turd smell on the mounted policemen
backing their horses' quivering, skittish

haunches into the demonstrators' faces?
Oh little village among the villages,

the wild man, the holy Bedlamite is gone,
and nobody, now, knows where to find him...

Lying in mud? lying caked in mud, hair elfed into knots?
Some poor mad Tom roving the heath

for a warm soft place to lie his body down,
his speech obsessed with oaths, demons,

his tongue calling forth the Foul Fiend, Flibbertigibbet
as the horses back slowly, slowly into the crowd

and he eats filth, he crams his ravenous mouth with filth—
and then he sits on his stool in the trampled hay

and deep-rutted mud, he anoints himself
with ashes and clay, he puts on his crown

of fumiter weed and holds his scepter
of a smouldering poker and calls the court to order.