Waiting for Dick Cheney to die? Pull up a Chair! It’s gonna be a while. We all thought he might be dead – months had past without the crooked-mouthed toad on the teevee questioning Obama’s patriotism. And what with the recent pantheon of sociopathic dictators whom everyone wanted dead — Khaddafi, Mubarak, Saddam, Kim Jong-il, Osama, Breitbart….. it’s like God was having a clearance sale and Cheney was next to be rolled onto the showroom floor! It’s a fact that men like this rise to power together, and decline together. If those others died, perhaps Cheney was taken with them in the same satanic pact? Surely The Prime Architect of the Destruction of the American Empire’s fate was sealed when we withdrew our troops from Iraq, leaving the toxic waste barrel containing his soul unguarded….
I wouldn’t have been getting my hopes up if I’d pre-googled “Cheney health problems”. “1978: Cheney’s first heart attack.” 1978. He had his first heart attack the same year “Boogie Oogie Oogie” was #1 on the Billboard charts. Think about that as you read about him reaping the organs of healthy young men and stuffing them into his chest cavity, reminding us that Dick Cheney has been legally dead about a hundred times, and he is also not human.
Dick Cheney absorbed a viable heart just 3 weeks ago, yet the undead did not require recuperation after traumatic heart surgery. He is back in full zombie mode, spewing his rejuvenated hate speech as if he were a thing reborn. Rather than quietly fading into history, the ghastly ghoul of the 21st Century is on his feet and ready to start shooting friends in the face. Face it, humans, a new, strong young heart is now trapped inside Dick Cheney’s body, and it has no choice but to beat and beat and beat.
Say what you want about the ghoul… whether he be the real anti-christ, an emancipated mental patient, or just an insatiably greedy and tragically misguided patriot of croney-capitalism, the dude got himself top-shelf, semi-socialized, bloated, heavily regulated medical treatment via board certified physicians. And on top of VIP taxpayer-funded heart surgery, this Pension Plutocrat draws an annual Federal pension that began in 2009. At the time, The Death Panels projected his lifespan at 84.4 (they had no way of knowing that he would in fact never die), which means he would draw more than $3.25 million in accumulated pension earnings. Not only do we pay for his fucking new heart, but we have to pay for his extended life – possibly forever. Conservatives: you paid for Cheney’s fucking heart, now your children and grandchildren are going to be paying for Dick Cheney’s pension forever.
Last year, pre-new-heart and in the painful and slow motion death throw of congestive heart failure, Cheney went on speaking tours to celebrate torture. A human dying man does not do that. Unless of course he knows that a new organ is waiting for him in a heavily guarded lockbox aka sinewy chest of a healthy young non smoker. Then this past week at a Wyoming GOP confab, the newly reborn Dick chuckled and reminisced about himself. Because that’s what psychopaths do when they get a second chance at life. They publicly belittle the sitting American President and call him an “unmitigated disaster.” That “unmitigated disaster” decided against prosecuting the diseased blob of bitter fat and gristle and plastic for war crimes. That “unmitigated disaster” secured this cretin his Secret Service protection for life, so that normal folks can’t get close enough to him to spit in his twisted face.
Even after destroying the very heart he was born with, rendering it a diseased, useless turd (God didn’t bless Cheney with a weak heart, it was his 20-year smoking habit that caused his own coronary disease), having it ripped from his carcass and replaced with a new one, Cheney still doesn’t give a shit. No heartfelt professions of grateful epiphany. No promises of devotion to serving others. No public utterances about the effects of smoking on the heart. No words of gratitude for the gift of the best medical care tax payer money can buy. No pledge of help for the 50 million uninsured Americans. No, Dick plays God, without censor. Of course, Vlad the Impaler also had no regrets after inviting the ‘unproductive’ members of his society to a feast, then locking them in the Hall of Tirgoviste and burning it to the ground.
Dick’s made it clear that only the loss of his life will stop him in his life’s work of propagating torture, tyranny, and seditious claims that the President is working against the country’s best interests. He takes grim zeal in reliving his glory days fighting the good Manichaean fight against absolute evil – now in the form of our president, who Dick casts as the moral extension of the spector-terrorists he hunted while commandeering the White House. The only plausible explanation is that Cheney was so accustomed to bending to his will the infantine weakling he served under for 8 years that his drubbing of Obama is simply the only way he knows how to relate to a president.
Movies would make us believe that when a villain dies, he waits for the white light to lead him to the hereafter when suddenly those horrible shadowy people start coming for him. Cheney’s preternaturally long evil life — maintained and extended at great cost to U.S. taxpayers — is a testament to its complete lack of supernatural punishment. Maybe if the draft-dodging goblin king who dedicated his thousand year shadow reign of darkness to slaughtering and torturing had been run over by a manure truck about 30 years ago, that would’ve been evidence of the Great Cosmic Wheels of Justice at work, for if such forces existed, they would not be shackled by our puny concepts of Time.
No matter what kind of atrocities he committed, in the eyes of the religious right, the psychopath is a hero. It harkens back to the liberals’ original sin, a transgression as heinous as the murder of one’s own child: FDR’s expansion of government (taxes on the rich). The senseless slaughterhouse of the Iraq war seems to be Cheneys’ way of redressing this. Hard to fathom, if you’re human. Like Marx’s observations on the fetishization of interest-bearing capitol (“moneyfucking”), in banks, the Cheneys equate the life of an American soldier to 60 or 70 thousand dollars earned through military contracts.
To the ghosts of all the humans who were in the wrong place at the wrong time and got greased by this guy, let us pray that when/if death comes for Dick, it is as sickeningly slow and painful as is it were doled out by the Hunger Games muttations – the slow mangling of flesh until he is a pulpy fleshy mass begging for a bullet to the head (followed by a public burial under ten feet of gravel and perforated pipe carrying the urine to a septic tank).
Hunter S. Thompson had some grand plans for Nixon, which I like to read when forced to think about Dick Cheney:
“If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.”
And that’s just Nixon! Dick Cheney, the most successful war profiteer in history, blows away the Felon Nixon both in hypocrisy and lowlife politics. Plus, after he’s recalled to Hades to brainstorm, we still get to hear the shrieking of Cheney’s evil spawn for years to come. Even Nixon didn’t burden us with that.
In my creed, Cheney will be welcomed with open tentacles and escorted to the holodeck where he:
1.receives a heart transplant, so that he can manage to
2. relive the effects of actions as felt by his recipients.
OR:
He loses everything – financial security, respect of his peers, love of his family – and become a total pariah and experience the feeling of total powerlessness and loss. He’ll go from gnarling indignation to hopeless simpering, every day facing a slow descent into irrelevance. OR:
He’s afflicted with a creeping loss of control over bodily functions, his only visits being those of paid orderlies who clean his sullied carcass, a semi conscious burden on his family, lingering on for years so they go crazy and learn to pray for him to die…….But he doesn’t die. He just goes on and on. OR:
Complete paralysis, while his mental faculties remain untouched – for years and years stretching into decades. OR:
He stumbles on in his zombie pattern and lives to see the results of the shitstorms he perpetuated in his noxious, fetus shaped weather/death balloon. The moral shakedown of our culture will invariably show up five years from now (if we have any culture). He’d be a ward of the brutal Chinese aristocracy, or perhaps a pimply, loathsome sex toy to the alien overlords; or at the very least, living in a Randian one-man bunker filled with gold bricks that are completely worthless because there is no food to buy. The elements are so kattywampus that the climate changes every two seconds, and the earth is microwaved and barren of all but the lowest form of ass-cancer causing bacteria and cockroaches and gonorrhea, all of which are his close kin. OR:
He absent-mindedly slips into Canada (a nation that shoots mortal fear into the virus-ridden waste running through Cheney’s veins, as it’s natives intend to remind him he is a war criminal should he ever set foot in their land,) where he is quickly scooped up and handed over to Baltasar Garzón for “systematic programme”. In the Milosevic suite in The Hague he will wallow, while the wheels of the international justice system slowly grind…no day in court.…no chance to spew bilious justifications. Gradually, world opinion shifts from a near universal hatred for the man and a global schadenfreude, to ambivalence, to annoyance at hearing his malodorous name in the press every day, to an Abe Vigoda-like flicker of interest over whether he’s dead yet or not. OR:
From the Oxford English Dictionary:
The condemned man would usually be sentenced to the short drop method of hanging, so that the neck would not break. The man was usually dragged alive to the quartering table, although in some cases men were brought to the table dead or unconscious. A splash of water was usually employed to wake the man if unconscious, then he was laid down on the table. A large cut was made in the gut after removing the genitalia, and the intestines would be spooled out on a device that resembled a dough roller. Each piece of organ would be burned before the sufferer’s eyes, and when he was completely disemboweled, his head would be cut off.
Despite committing everything to untraceable PowerPoint, despite circumventing Google Earth, despite the “TOP SECRET” over-classification of everything including his Viagra prescriptions, the post mortem Cheney chapter will be filled with toe-curling footnotes. And trust me, as soon as he takes his last breath, everything bad that’s ever happened will have been Dick’s fault entirely – poor, dumb W was powerless to stop him. The media machine will carry out its purification of the Bush reputation, because, if nothing else, Republican legislators will need to protect their own institutional authority from future presidential abuse. They know the truth.
Dick Cheney is the guy the founding fathers warned us about.
Nervous little apple James Madison was SO afraid of Future Dick Cheney, that it practically ruined his life: Future Dick Cheney bringing loss of liberty to America in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy with at most a tangential relevance to American security. Future Dick Cheney waging war for trivial and improvident reasons with a political subtext, to silence dissent and elevate his own power. Future Dick Cheney bringing tyranny and oppression to America via pretend danger from abroad. Future Dick Cheney is exactly what Madison predicted would happen as chief executives confronted the limitations contained in the separation of powers established in the Constitution. Future Dick Cheney was the guy that forced Madison to propose excluding the president from the negotiation of peace treaties, on the grounds that he might obstruct a settlement out of a desire to derive “power and importance from a state of war.” James Madison foresaw the tens of thousands of dead U.S. soldiers, the hundreds of billions of dollars wasted, the fundamental civil liberties violated, and the endless government powers expanded at the hands of Future Dick Cheney. About Future Dick Cheney he said:
“War is, in fact, the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. ”
Someone said that all heroes ought to deliver themselves from the world by means of a handy piece of rope, as they are all monsters. The person who thinks he can save the world usually doesn’t ask the world if it wants to be saved, or if it consents to the method, he almost never quits when he is ahead. Cheney is such a monster, unrepentant about his own evil, because he thinks he is a hero, that he alone is right. Morality vs Monster Litmus Test:
“Do you think that you are right, that you alone are right, and that nothing anybody says, nothing that happens, nothing you learn, nothing you experience, can change your mind?” If you said yes to all of the above, you may be a hero, but you’re much more likely a monster.
Like The Chorus of Furies, the entire Cheney family simmers with unholy rage over their authority being questioned by President Obama and Obama’s Age of Reason—the advent of Athena – and the citizens of Athens, promising to lay ruin to the city and fill it with blood. Revenge is the Cheney sustenance, and unbridled fury impels them to pursue Obama relentlessly, to punish him for his crimes against what their hearts know to be true. The Furies – the ancient and the disinherited – refuse to accept a world changed from that when they were in power. Their horror at being marginalized, even mocked, by the new regime stirs up such vindictive poison that they strike without mercy, punishing all who break their rules, even though there their avenging powers are no longer effective. The Furies never stop. The Furies can not be shamed.
There’s a British archaeologist who believes that Stonehenge was a kind of temple to the dead that was visited by ancestors after dumping the ashes of the deceased in the Avon River. The ceremonies were tied to the solar alignments – the cycles of life between summer and winter – a time for worldly blessings, a time for the season of snow and sin to blow like a cloud over a frozen peak, bringing the promise of life renewed. So today, April of 2012, I ponder the fate of Dick Cheney’s soul: like a dark bird that has passed briefly over a sunlit arch, blind and blackening in the moonless air, the fading moon shrinking behind the Earth’s shadow, casting a pale violet light upon the earthscape that has now disappeared in Eros and of dust, into the cold dark night whence it came, we — Wait what? Still alive? Nevermind.
So go outside, feel the sunshine, have some “fun,” drink a Slurpee, yell at your team, whatever we do on Spring days. Because Summer has not yet arrived but is already shrinking, dusk coming a few minutes earlier than yesterday, the long march to Winter’s darkness already underway, rayless and pathless….the world turns, the leaves change color, the ice caps melt and nature quivers, feeble and cold on the horizon of negation and despair. And the mysterious fire of life continues to glow, flicker by flicker, within the shit-husk known as Dick Cheney. Because there ain’t no justice. Or God, neither.