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Now that the tryptophan haze has dissipated it is time for the 5th annual Turkey Shoot. (Or if this event were the Super Bowl, Turkey Shoot V.) We’ll start with the skinny-necked birds and work our way up to bigger game. Kent, hand me the hatchet.
A couple years back we mentioned the connection between some of our loopier white supremacist compatriots and North Korea. Well, that connection has re-emerged but in the oddest fashion. While catching up on back reading, I noticed an item in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report about that golden oldie of the conspiratorially inclined right, the secret FEMA concentration camps being prepared in anticipation of the Obama auto-coup. One bunch of loony tunes actually offered up purported photographic evidence of one such camp, supposedly in rural Wyoming. The photo was indeed of a prison camp, just not one in Wyoming: the camp was in North Korea, photographed as part of David Hawk’s Hidden Gulag report for the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (full disclosure: I am on the HRNK Board). Hey, Kim Jong-un, Barack Obama; Wyoming, Ryanggang; hard to tell ‘em apart.
Someone should whisper the news to Felix Abt. On a Facebook page, the Swiss businessman, last seen bottom fishing in the DPRK, doubled down, fingering Josh Stanton, operator of the always trenchant, One Free Korea website, as an administrator in this archipelago of 600-800 concentration camps that in some fevered minds FEMA is constructing. Hey, who knows, maybe Abt has it right: y’all be nice to Josh and he’ll make sure you get a full set of rations in 2017.
Moving on to bigger game, Ambassador Dennis Rodman, last seen serenading Kim Jong-un on his birthday (if Worm had wanted to do the full Marilyn Monroe he should have dug up one of his old gowns), has endorsed Donald Trump for President. Tom Brady can blame it on incipient chronic traumatic encephalopathy, but what’s Rodman’s excuse? And I dunno how this is going to go down with Worm’s buddies at the Rainbow Coalition. Jeb Bush’s campaign is foundering: maybe he could put his millions to use and shake things up a bit by carpet bombing Iowa and New Hampshire with commercials featuring the Rodman endorsement.
Maybe the reason that the Worm is attracted to the Donald (apart from having a thing for fascists with weird haircuts) is that in the Donald’s own words: Trump is like North Korea—no one talks about him, or the nuclear-armed nation, because there’s no answer for either. One might be tempted to add, both are racist, chauvinistic, and belligerent, but I don’t want to pile on. Hmm, I think I smell a “how is Trump like North Korea” contest in the offing.
One guy who was never like Donald Trump, was Native American poet and activist John Trudell who sadly passed away from cancer earlier this week aged 69. Trudell was a onetime spokesman for, and later national chairman of, the American Indian Movement. For his trouble he lost his wife, his children, and his mother-in-law in a fire that many believe was linked to local law enforcement and the FBI. I won’t try to summarize Trudell’s remarkable life, only to quote his FBI dossier that called him “extremely eloquent and therefore extremely dangerous.” JT went on to become a spoken word musician and actor. For an introduction to his life check out the documentaries Incident at Ogalala or Trudell.
It’s ironic that I note his passing in a post that has its roots in Thanksgiving—a holiday that originated as a celebration of survival by settlers who would commit genocide against the very people who had made their survival possible. I can’t imagine what John would have made of the turkeys reviewed on this page but when contemplating Donald Trump or Kim Jong-un it is worth keeping his words in mind:
“No matter what they ever do to us, we must always act for the love of our people and the earth. We must not react out of hatred against those who have no sense.” —John Trudell, Black Hills Survival gathering, 18 July 1980.
RIP, brother.
