The Green Paper

Once upon a time, the American poet, Walt Whitman, presented the decisive difference between two types of paper. One of them was the paper of the dollar, and the other the paper of grass or flowers. Both papers are colored green, but the life of each lies in roots of grass and their death is in dead paper. Of course, these words will appear poetic and romantic to those who turn the dollar into a craven idol like Hubal* and worship it. This is why Whitman and his contemporaries among the vanguard of the American renaissance were somewhat naive, and everything they preached turned into a skillful, pragmatic destruction of ideals, ethical boundaries and justice. Nowhere else in the world are there thinkers and poets who mock their country as they do in the United States, with New York becoming a capital of literary satire. For example, those who curse their luck for being born American include Carson, Cummings, Miller, Jerry Rubin, and Chomsky. Some of them said that the lubricants used to grease the rusty joints of American weapons are the blood of America’s victims, namely the Blacks. When Henri Barbusse visited America and witnessed what it was like there, he decided to speak through the George Washington monument and, as for Rubin, he only used the name of America mockingly and with three additional Ks, so that it became Amerikkka.

Just as the evangelist nation turned the end of colonialism following World War II into a much more violent and harsh colonialism, the paper of the dollar achieved complete victory over the paper of grass. America now exports grain and tyranny hand-in-hand, as if they were American twins. As it happens, that grain was mixed with gunpowder in Afghanistan; the rare American generosity is decorated with wheat, but only truly generous in killing and genocide. The world still remembers the unbelievable moment in which an American soldier in Vietnam rebelled, after his commanding officer told him that the village had to be destroyed in order to save it. The theories of genocide for the sake of salvation, occupation for the sake of liberation, starvation for the sake of relief — these are all uniquely American ideas, invented by [Jerry] Bergman — a white man — for use against colored people of every race. There are American rebels who follow these ideas as if they were commandments, who believe that America is like Ancient Rome opposing the European world, which is like Athens; that is, gunpowder and helmets pitted against philosophy and culture. However, the new Athens does not provide the world with merely philosophy, but also with brutal colonization, and expands outside its borders to suck the life from the world and its people.

No one today compares the green dollar with the paper of grasses and herbs, because the world’s people have starved, become homeless and suffered from debilitating plagues that have killed millions, if not billions. Because capitalism is harsh, at the apex of its cruelty it feeds on itself. Those who watched the American documentary entitled “This is America” were astonished at what they saw: the homeless, hungry masses and the people of the underworld who devour rats in tunnels.

According to the classifications of the most prominent historians (such as Toynbee, Gibbon, Whitehead and Schiller, among others), there are civilizations that impose their concepts and values upon their respective ages. Everything that is American is massive and overpowering or, as they say, “huge”; anything that is not based on direct benefit is worthless. The man of the “American Age” — or “Amerikkkan,” to credit Jerry Rubin — is a slave to the cellular phone, a victim of Facebook, a man who lives his life only virtually, but dies completely and totally. He discovers — after it is too late — that the color green is inherent only in grass and not in the dollar.

*Editor’s note: According to Wikipedia, Hubal was a god that was worshipped in idol form in pre-Islamic Arabia.