The Tracks Are To The Train as The Hole Is To The Shovel

“Most maggots will bury themselves in the soil.”

- Jessica Snyder Sachs

“We all fat creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service- two dishes, but to one table. That’s the end.”

- Hamlet (Act 4, Scene 3)


An unspoken about facet in the putrefaction process is the ability of the republican candidate to speak to a crowd of onlookers and to shrivel the truth down to its most incessant form of decay. Take a photograph of a victim in Kabul and hold it up to the mirror and what do you see? The candidate may see peace on the upswing, but I see a father or a son, a soldier or an activist.
I would like to think that the republican candidate truly believes he sees peace in the photograph but deep down I think he knows the honesty in the image. Politics is a game of one up man’s ship to a degree of causalities, hearings, photo ops and the kind of hatred that will level a village on the other side of the earth to prove an individuals place at the fictional table.
A supposed conversation:

Citizen/Aide: Congressman you must not elevate the level of discourse that now exists in the House.

Congressman: You think I shouldn’t comment on the item in the news that says that bodies won’t be stacked up in the streets of Iraq if we stay in Iraq, but if we pull out anarchy will break out?

Citizen/Aide: Yes sir.

Congressman: You don’t think anarchy has already broken out in Baghdad?

Citizen/Aide: With all due respect sir of course it has.

Congressman: I know it has. We captured a ruthless dictator that was hand delivered to us by his own troops and since then we have managed to drain an entire oil rich country of its natural resources, we have fueled and or created a need for terrorists in a country that hate the very existence of suicide bombers.

Citizen/Aide: But sir…

Congressman: This democracy of ours is set up to fail, without our failure the rest of the world cannot remind us constantly of our worth.”


And so the business of a country, an economy, a judicial system and the contents of a congressman’s heart are due to the fact that the glass is not half empty or half full, the glass is not a glass. Who is the formidable adversary in the room? Greed.


- Chris Mansel