Indignity Vol. 2, No. 90: The Rent is Overdue, on America.

MR. WRONG: Thanksgiving After All the Taking

NOW THAT THE Elections are over and Democracy is secure and we don’t have to think about that crap anymore, I think I am, like many U.S. Americans, starting to wonder about what I am going to eat on Thanksgiving, which, besides Super Bowl, is my favorite Holiday, besides Groundhog Day.

I think about all the food that I traditionally overeat myself to death with, to wit; Mashed Potatoes with butter and gravy and gravy in the butter and on the butter, ohh, I could eat a whole thing of Mashed Potatoes, and I usually do, and then I go and lie on the floor in front of the television, urp!

I also think about how Thanksgiving, when I was a kid, was explained to me very simply. The Indians gave the Pilgrims some corn, and then they all sat around a table and had a feast, and then the Indians went away.

OK! So later on, I learned all about how the Indians—who were here before 1492 Columbus, who never went to Thanksgiving, I am retroactively happy about—all got murdered and their land got stolen. That really changed my Thanksgiving, to think about how I got taught all this non-factual bullshit about North America and stuff. They filled my head with Lies!

Now there’s people running around complaining about teaching Facts to schoolchildren, like all about slavery and all the fucked-up shit that still affects The United States of America, which was in part built on the sweat non-equity of people abducted and loaded into boats and treated like property, or even worse than that because you’d take better care of a non-human object than the way slaves got treated. We can’t teach that stuff in schools because it’s bad, somehow? To learn Facts about brutality and stuff that went on for hundreds of years? Injustice! We can’t teach it in a school for some reason, Jesus Fucking Christ. I mean, I learned about footbinding they used to do in China when I was in the seventh grade, have you ever seen pictures of that shit? It was Oppression of women! It’s a Fact that it happened!

Anyway, I am for teaching Facts in our fucking schools, and I have always been in favor of the only thing you can really do for a bunch of people who got fucked over for hundreds of years: Give them money. That’s what we do in this country! Reparations, I don’t understand how this is so difficult, to have Reparations for the descendants of human beings who were kidnapped and imprisoned and forced to labor their entire lives for nothing! How is this a difficult concept?

There are ads on my teevee every day from lawyers who are reaching out to people who got fucked over! Fucked over by their employers! Fucked over by a hospital! Fucked over by a company that made a faulty medical device-thing that gets installed into your body in a hospital! Fucked over by working in a factory that had asbestos in it! Fucked over by living in a lead-paint painted house owned by a landlord who didn’t give a shit that it was bad to live in a house that was shedding lead dust or had paint chips that little kids might eat! Fucked over by a camp where the United States Marines are stationed because they drank water that was toxic because some chemicals got in it! Fucked over by the Boy Scouts! Priests!

The commercials are basically: Did you get fucked over? We are here to get money for you, because it’s all we got for you, Justice-wise! Cash! This is a well-established principle in America, Justice is made out of Money.

When states in Our Nation other than Nevada and New Jersey were starting to get antsy about having Gambling, which is one of my Religions, made legal, the MR. WRONG column proposed that the descendants of former slaves should get a taste, Reparations-wise, but in my state of residence, Maryland, the Government decided that some of the rake should go for Education, and then somehow, they cut a slice for the Stadium Authority, which I have never fucking supported, to pay for stadiums where millionaires employed by billionaires make money off me, a regular person? Fuck that! I can see setting aside some of my wagering money for the schoolchildren, who are of course in many parts of this country being denied the opportunity to learn about slavery and stuff, but how did that stadium thing happen?!?

Anyway, Thanksgiving is coming up, and I don’t believe any of the stuff about it except: Let’s eat, and while I think about Thanksgiving, I am still interested in Justice, which—it’s all we got—means Money. I have an idea about how to get some for the descendants of the Indigenous people, the tribes that got pushed around and murdered and fucked over, and it’s pretty easy, I think, because pretty much everyone who lives anywhere in The United States of America lives on land that got stolen. The Indigenous didn’t have deeds and titles and property paperwork, they just lived in places and they were their places, right? So they own all the land underbeneath the feet and automobiles and houses and hotels and Casinos and sports stadiums of the citizens of the U.S.A., and they should be paid Rent. There are lotsa Casinos that are on official Indigenous land, and they get some, but there’s way more Casino dough out there doing an end-run.

Again, I live in Maryland, in the city of Baltimore, and I pay rent for the ground that my house is on, it’s called Ground Rent, seriously, and I pay like $96 a year to whoever or whatever owns the actual ground that my house stands on, it’s weird, but that’s how it is. When you buy a house that has Ground Rent  in this city you have the opportunity to purchase the Ground, for a coupla grand, but I never got around to doing it because paperwork gives me a headache in my ass, you know? I’ll just pay, I’m not gonna live here forever, the next person can buy the ground, it’s not even a dollar a day for my rental of the ground, you know? Ground Rent!

Look, let’s have the Government do a thing, a law or whatever, where the acreage of the United States, is recognized to be owned by the people it got stolen from, and then anybody who owns a building or a farm or a compound or an office park or a racetrack or whatever pays Ground Rent. Simple! It’s not even a Tax, because everybody hates Taxes, right? It’s Rent!

So the acreage, according to my Google, is 2.43 billion acres. Google further teaches me:

United States
Country in North America
The U.S. is a country of 50 states covering a vast swath of North America, with Alaska in the northwest and Hawaii extending the nation’s presence into the Pacific Ocean. Major Atlantic Coast cities are New York, a global finance and culture center, and capital Washington, DC. Midwestern metropolis Chicago is known for influential architecture and on the west coast, Los Angeles’ Hollywood is famed for filmmaking.
—Google

I know there’s like Reservations and places nobody claims to own and stuff in that amount of acres, but the thing here is every piece of acre that’s owned by anything or anybody that is not Indigenous, pays their Rent. I don’t know how much, maybe a buck an acre per year? And no bitcoins! This Rent includes Hollywood and Churches and stuff, which is one of my pet peeves, how none of these goddamn Churches pay tax! So it’s not a tax! If Casinos gotta pay, then so do Churches! God Bless America! Thank you.

MR. WRONG is a general-interest column appearing weekly wherever it can appear, which, lately, has been Popula.

THOUGHT DEP’T.

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SANDWICH RECIPE DEP’T.

WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS for the assembly of a select sandwich from the Raleigh Recipe Book, published by the Ladies of Christ Church in 1916, now in the public domain and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.

HOT CHEESE SANDWICHES

1 lb cheese
1/4 lb of butter
1 cup Campbell’s tomato soup
2 eggs
1 teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon mustard
Cayenne pepper

Let butter melt in sauce pan or double boiler, then add grated cheese and tomato soup and seasoning. Cook until smooth, beat the two eggs lightly and stir into ingredients until it thickens sufficiently. Let it cool. Cut bread round and spread the mixture between and put in hot oven to brown. The cheese filling will keep indefinitely in cool place.  
—Mrs. W. E. Manor.

If you decide to prepare and enjoy a sandwich or sandwiches inspired by these offerings, kindly send a picture to us at indignity@indignity.net.

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