Dear Dirty America

When Marlin glanced up, he saw me across the busy Wilshire Boulevard. He’d been talking to a short Asian woman wearing a floppy hat.  She held her hat on her head as the bus blew by.

Marlin raised his hand and shouted at me. “Hola, mami!” He thought that was funny, except that a group of three Hispanic girls beside me also turned their heads in his direction. Marlin blew them all kisses. I doubt they were aimed at me, but the girls and me couldn’t tell for sure. I shrugged. How should I know? I said to the tallest one. She had a light mustache that was unflattering in the sunshine. He’s a crazy bum, I said. Avoid him at all costs.

Marlin pounded the pedestrian walk button five times and waited for the light to change. The Asian lady hurried away. She’d probably been sequestered by Marlin’s jabbering fast talk, and hadn’t found an easy escape route until that moment.

We stood in front of the Wiltern and chatted. I hadn’t seen Marlin in many weeks. He had startling news for me. I’d barely read up on the violent protests in Kiev, Ukraine, but I would never have guessed my vagrant friend who haunted the Wilshire / Western intersection in Koreatown would have a connection to the matter.

“Listen, bro,” Marlin said. He looked around, but nobody was paying attention. The glazed eyes of passersby came and went. “Late in December, two men in black pants and jackets and really dark glasses stopped me outside of the health food store. They even knew my name, but I’d never seen them before.”

They’d cornered him by the juice stand, where Marlin usually sipped fresh wheatgrass juice.

“What would you say to making a little money?” one of the men had asked Marlin. “It looks like you could use it.”

Marlin said he took slight offense to that, but I knew what the man was talking about. Marlin’s t-shirts were always stained and stretched at the neck. His solitary tooth didn’t help his image any, either. His blue Dickies pants hung about two inches above the tops of his grungy white sneakers. He often dug through trash cans in search of small valuables. Yet, it was the light in Marlin’s eyes that showed his true wealth. He is not a stupid man, nor is he mean or harmful.

“You’ve got thirty grand waiting for you if you take a trip to Ukraine,” the man told Marlin. “And spend a few weeks there.”

“There are just hardly any women up there,” Marlin told the men, “and the ones who are there are the ruddy kind. The kind thin blonde men like me can’t handle.”

The other man had lowered his dark glasses and put a hard stare on Marlin. “We’ve seen your work. You’re not the first choice. The job is simple. You get trained first. Learn a few phrases in Ukrainian and Russian. We need you in Kiev for one month tops. You get your 30k. Then you’re home.”

Naturally, Marlin asked what the job was, and, more importantly, what kind of work they’d seen him do. “I haven’t been right for any job for over thirty years,” he told the men. “Except part-time at the health food store and collecting welfare checks.”

The stouter man who had not removed his glasses grabbed his upper lip between his thumb and first finger. He let it go and said, “You know how to incite a crowd to its breaking point. We’d like to embed you into the protesters’ camp in Kiev and use your rhetoric to get people going. Get them riled up. We want them to free themselves from the tyranny that is Yanukovych.”

“That’s enough,” the other man said. He replaced his glasses.

“It don’t matter,” the portly one of the two said. “Know one would ever believe him if he told them. Look at him. He’s not an image of credulity. Unless he’s walking around the camp and talking about what a rotten deal Ukraine is getting. You can imagine his hardiness coming across in that crowd. Inspiring, almost. And this one is a talker. ‘Take up your arms,’ he’d be saying. You’d have a script from us,” he said to Marlin.

“Enough,” the other man said. “Are you interested in going to Kiev and whipping up a royal shitstorm?”

Of course Marlin said hell no. He does not look like much, in his ragged clothes and the long strands of hair on his balding head pulled back in a tight, greasy rat’s tail, but he is not one to get involved with the movements of shadowy government forces.

He politely declined. The men left without a hassle. They said they’d be in touch if he changed his mind.

What made them think you’d be good at sparking a riot? I asked. I’m glad you didn’t go. There’s a wicked civil war brewing over there.

“They said they got my name from a source within the LAPD. Because I threw a tin can that time at the riot police when that mob was forming to protest the Hollywood Walk of Fame from giving Charles Manson a star for his contributions in music.”

Marlin took a breath, then continued, “So they’d booked me on that, and apparently I would come in handy in Kiev. But why do they want to start a riot there?” he asked. “I can’t figure that one out, bro, but I’m happy I didn’t go either. You never want to get involved with those forces.”

I wonder if they were CIA, I said, or some other black ops contract group set to cause destruction in Ukraine. It’s the George Soros group, I told him, and the bigger Obama puppeteer syndicate. They are stirring up one king hell clash in Kiev so they can get their hands around Russia’s, and Putin’s, steely balls.

This was the ace in the hole, I said. It was plan B for Obama’s epic failure when he and John Kerry kept attempting to jam and ensnare the US and NATO into Syria’s quagmire. They didn’t get their way in Syria, even after they installed Al Qaeda splinter groups and hired thugs and mercenaries to tear after Assad’s regime.

Now they are determined to get Ukraine to join the European Union, that way NATO can install as many military bases and long range missile sites as they need to tighten the noose on Russia and her allies, like Iran and Syria.

These people are fabulous at causing what are perceived to be organic ‘movements’, I told Marlin. Look at Tunisia. And Egypt. And Libya. The glory for getting the masses to spontaneously rise up and oust their respective Western-backed dictators does not belong to Twitter. Only Americans think that anymore.

It’s painfully obvious these uprisings were sparked by hostile, outside sources that saw the opportunity to light a powder keg when it was in just the right position. And they did it. And it’s happening in Kiev. The CIA. Mossad. MI6. These groups are experts at turning long term disenchantment among the people into full-fledged rebellions against their own governments. Amid the chaos is when the real coup occurs. The president has a civil war on his hands, now, all because he wouldn’t sign deeper ties to the EU, as it was disadvantageous for Ukraine.

Marlin was nodding his head the entire time. “That makes sense,” he said. “They wanted people like me to march up and down that makeshift Maidan camp fortress of protesters in Kiev and whip them into a frenzy. To keep the movement growing and turn it violent, so once the police and government security forces overreacted, the people would lash out even harder.”

And so on, I said. A few bricks fly through the air, and the crackdown begins. Back and forth. Until it turns into such bloodshed that Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych decides to fully integrate into the EU and give up his country’s life force to NATO and the Soros, Obama, UK, New World Order clan. He knows what’s going on. So does Putin. But it can’t be openly talked about.

Take pride in your value, I said, and slapped Marlin on the back. You’re valuable to Uncle Sam! And after all these years we thought you were just a deadbeat bum. But you’ve been recognized! And all because you tossed an empty tin can at a line of police two-stepping along Hollywood Boulevard to quell an uprising over a serial killer who really was, when you think about it, one of the most talented avant-garde artists of the 60s.

Marlin darted away and shouted, “Hola mami!” at a middle-aged Latina who was running to catch the bus. “Catch you later, brother!” he called back to me, and followed her on the bus.

[photo of Kiev riot police and line of protesters by Mstyslav Chernov/Unframe]