Welcome to Mad Cow Culture
Where graphics burn and poetry bites
And politicians who grift and graft
Will get full-on the parody shaft
Right where it’s dark and feels like night.

“Mad Cow Culture” is a metaphor reflecting a period over twenty years ago when Mad Cow disease was an international scare. The root problem occurred when “downer” cows were ground up, mixed with feed, and fed to the rest of the herd. The result was a global spread of a fatal brain disease. In an effort to eradicate the disease, millions of cows were slaughtered.

Current politics, in the U.S. especially, and around the world, is producing a kind of cultural and tribal madness that is affecting the mind and the soul. Mad Cow Culture is focused on the nonsense, lies and pathology that have spread like a virus across our nation.  We are all becoming cannibals, chewing on our collective flesh of anyone we oppose. The whole place is going nuts, and with your help, MC will shine a poetic, insightful, and pictorial lens on this madness.

Below is the description of the history of our madness and for a look at the current perspective of Mad Cow Culture. Visit “Snapshots”, and “Short Poems” to enjoy the broad brushstrokes that make MC Culture the place to be. Please share our offerings widely.

The Mad Cow Culture metaphor leeched into the popular imagination in the late 1990s when downer cows, fed on the remains of their siblings and bone meal from the British dead in the Napoleonic wars, stumbled into the headlines and the jokes from late night comedians. Now over the decades toss into the mix a war or two, add dumb-as-nails politicians and a rank populace fed on a diet of social media hype, led by pedophiles in pizza pots and gods appearing like magic from your local sewer, and a political diet that feeds on ideas born in the wacky corners of a basement culture, infecting the system and psyche of a nation.

To be sure the just discarded Trump was titular head of this bonkers cabal and often proved Mad Cow-like in speech, demeanor and rot, to the intense pleasure of those eager to see someone stumble into the lying pit of his own making. The sound we are hearing now from those with a brain and an ear to the ground is the sound of one hand clapping. It seems the Mad Cow, on his way to feed on bone meal tales from another era, has let loose upon the land a political bowel movement, sometimes referred to as the Republican party, that is sullying everything it touches and stinking—with apologies to the devout—high heaven. The good news is that there are many Christians along for the joy ride down the river Styx and will be there to bless the entourage as it retreats deeper into the pathological depths where the Enlightenment is just another bonfire.

When the cultists are not lighting bonfires, burning Plato, Freud and the New Testament, they get out their weather chart and declare “We are the storm,” using their leader’s sharpie to defy logic, gravity and the National Weather Service, swearing “false flags” are in the vicinity and whatever the map, it will never fit their territory. They go inward to that marsupial layer of their brain, full of smoke and mirrors, rot and scissor, seeing in that rapturous glass, hordes of antifa, like an army of the night, sending shock waves up an absent spine. Madness is afoot.


Mad Cow is now wearing horns. A second-generation beast is born, a Confederate flag and racial rage, plotters now want to turn the page. Pathology right from the animal stem, Mad Cow Culture out of its den, dressed in red, white and blue, a dark pantomime, a deadly brew, far right and very white, Jesus Christ nowhere in sight, they drink the poison, down the pill, meditate on the political kill, but the curtain is closing on this rancid act, born of losers in a pact, liars losing the center stage, lights shined on bankrupt rage, those in Capital tunics are on display, come to daddy, come to pay, welcome to your brain on display. The scalpel is aimed at a sensitive spot, Mad Cow Culture will spot the rot, trial by humor is the thing, bloody the political king, retire the brain-dead creed, and add a sprinkling of tasty barnyard feed. Stuff yourself until you groan, it’s all about your funny bone.