eva hesse, 1962
Flipping through some headlines I see a Baptist preacher in Florida is now calling for assassination publicly, using the Bible for backup. Then there was that yo-yo in Kansas legislature calling for assassination of the president, using the Bible. Get it? Does anybody get it? This is what I mean when I say the Baptist attention given to the dark side they call Satan has now taken over their behavior. Shooting doctors is sanctioned by the religion same as using the Bible to publicly call for assassination of the president. This tells me what I knew back in the last half of the 1950s that the Baptist religion was giving its power to Satan and now I see the results. On tv you have evangelists with hair two feet high on the women and bad, really bad toupees on the men, and covered in gold and gawdy clothes, both men and women, preaching about Jesus, dreaming of gold toilet and bathtub fixtures like Tammy Faye. Now that the Baptists are given the illusion of power by Karl Rove's Tea Party, their colors are showing and they aint pretty. What's going to happen is they will self-consume and be no more. They have gone over to the dark side and that's the end of that. They'll be after political power now that the dark is their light.
I can see now coming to fruition what I saw back then listening to preachers preaching politics, anti-communism, still locked in colonialism, preaching No, Don't and You Better Not. Love? Who ever heard of love? It's a four-letter word, only to be spoken with quotation marks and a disclaimer. Now that ignorance has been unleashed and given political power in the republican party, backed with billions of dollars from pockets of corporate wealth that want to keep the proles ignorant, like Gore Vidal said, "We're out of business." Perry Ferrell's song, Idiot's Rule, especially applies now. It's one of those sayings like It was the best of times and it was the worst of times. It fits any and every time. Idiots rule is as universal as willful ignorance. I have to confess that in the days since the political conventions I've been somewhat concerned about election outcomes. The Supremes unleashed corporate billions to support republicans, knowing that the candidate spending the most money wins consistently. Pray for exceptions? Sure. Go ahead. If those muthas buy Romney in, I'll be all the more glad I'm on the edge looking into the other side.
The night of the Dem convention I talked with Ted Stern on the phone, him in Charleston. I asked if he was watching the convention. No, he laughed, he was watching football. He's 99, what does he care about the next administration, what it turns out to be? I hear Baptists and other right wing minded people I know saying in seriousness that if Obama wins we're going down the drain. Maybe white racism will, that precious institution that defines USA more than apple pie or baseball. I'm cracking up that this election seems to be bringing racism out from under the denial it's been covered by since the Repo party became the racist party. It was the Demos, then the Dixiecrats, then the Repos. In my lifetime. Now racism is out in the open again. Get the nigger! That's the Repo key (unspoken) words this election. Remember, the Repo party does not need to win an election for the Supremes to give it to them. The Supremes brought us the Bush-Cheney-Rummy-Rice Junta against the will of democracy. Cocaine money brought us the Reagan Junta. These two juntas put an end to democracy in America. The sad part for me is seeing how happy the American people are to be done with it.
Why should I care? I don't have a great deal of future left either. I can count on not being subject for very long to whatever comes next. Police state. That's it. With or without Obama, Police state is it. I don't want to live in Police state for very long. Probably won't. If it gets really bad, like bringing troops home and turning them inward on the American people, I really don't care to be a witness to it. I can just stop taking medications. I pray for next lifetime to be someplace else, not Somalia either, please. I'd just as soon be born into a Tibetan refugee village in eastern India as anyplace. I have loved the USofA all my life and happily claim it as home and I believe in doing my part to further its well-being. It turns out this is self-destruct time. Even though I understand the wheel of fortune, what goes up must come down, it hurts to see it fall, undermined by ignorance, like rot at the base of a big oak tree's trunk. USA ran way up in international power at the end of WW2 when the other powers were compromised. Alas, USA, which calls itself a Christian nation, has no ethical foundation to stand on and did not have what it took to sustain power. In its time of power-over the rest of the world, it has only been a tyrant to poor nations of color. If USA is a Christian nation, why does it hate the poor so much? That's not Jesus-sanctioned behavior. I think he'd say, "I know ye not."
Now that ignorance is the theme of our time, there is no telling what we'll be seeing. It gets stranger every day. Not a day goes by that I don't hear something totally outrageous some ignorant American who would do best to learn to keep his mouth shut and pay attention to old country wisdom--keep it shut and nobody will know how ignorant you are. This is the time for ignorance to take voice and soar like the Valkyries in Apocalypse Now, "Scares the hell out of the slopes and my men love it!" This really is the time of the Absurd. Art indeed precedes life by half a century. The works of Pinter, Ionesco, Beckett and others presaged the time we're in now, the time of the Absurd. TV news itself is theater of the Absurd. Most interesting right now it seems like is the break down of systems that hold fast to absolutes, religion. Absolutes as belief system is over. We haven't done absolutes in a long time. These are the last days/years of that kind of thinking. Religion and politics are the holdouts that time is catching up with. It's looking like their time is now. Both have gone off into absurd and find their satisfaction there. Whatever.
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