Drugs, Copper & the Hell Brueghel -

This is surely the Christmas of
the Hell Brueghel here in South Florida . . .

"Evening soars down with
silent wingbeats, joining
A velvet Brueghel to this
Brueghel of hell." --Louis Aragon

As you make your way to the convenience store in the evening to replenish some small staple you've unexpectedly run out of, you can hear the moans of the tormented souls sleeping rough in the alleys here. They reach out to grab at your ankles. They haunt your passage in their pain and desperation. They fill not only the alleys, but the parking lots, the parks and hidden courtyards.

Law enforcement authorities here, in the midst of our current financial depression with soaring unemployment, bankruptcies, and foreclosures, have embarked on a new anti-drugs initiative, especially aimed at synthetic opiates. The inexorable result of their crusade will surely be more copper thefts, disrupting all the regular services of telephone, air conditioning, and street lights, etc. As they push forward to cut off supplies of the opiates, they continue to degrade every last shred of the Quality of Life which tenuously remains.

As the habitable housing around us continues to be aggressively demolished so that the real estate can be flipped for profit, they manufacture hundreds more homeless people who have nowhere else to go. Churning the population here and keeping them transient effectively disempowers them by disenfranchising them of their vote, so that this machine can endlessly perpetuate itself and remain in control like a malignant tumor that cannibalizes the body it feeds off.

This is a holiday pageant of torturous Auto-de Fe.

:: Miami Herald :: The Pain Problem ::

...