SATURDAY AFTERNOON RAMBLE

I've been complaining about the weather over the last weeks. Today I must exclaim delight. The temp is up to 65, gentle breeze, enough to keep wind chimes swinging outside the open door picking light tunes, bringing to mind Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu. Wind chimes have an Asian sound to my music ear. Anyway, old world Asian. The new Asia is about like the new West characterized by noise and pollution. I saw a photo a few days ago of pollution in Beijing, at least as bad as Los Angeles  It looked something like the pollution inside a nascar stadium during a race, an upside down bowl of pollution over the bowl of the seats and the track. At a race, it is exhilarating to smell the pollution of fuel, burnt rubber and the roar of forty-some cars louder than an auditorium concert by The Cars. In an urban situation, the same smell and noise is irritating. There again, context. Interpretation according to context. At a race, the noise and the pollution that burns the eyes is thrilling. Standing on a street corner waiting for the light in a fog of exhaust fumes and rubber molecules, eyes burning, it doesn't feel right to live in such conditions.

At the track it's not even noticed, except as one more aspect of the race to be thrilled about. Adults rant at kids about rock music is going to make them deaf, and kids don't care. When I'm at a rock concert, I don't care if it makes me deaf. Remember when parents told kids that watching the tv up close would make you go blind? Now everybody looks at a computer monitor closer than any kid watched tv, and nobody went blind. If I were to go to Beijing I'd complain about the pollution and want to be heard where it matters. At a race track, I say, Git-er-done! What a strange mix the modern world has made of us. I believe there is common agreement that the modern world is getting worse instead of better. Even pre-Reagan when Progress was the guiding beacon, it seemed like worse was the direction of the progress, not better. Turns out, it was better because it was dealing with a quickly increasing international population. Like Garrison Keiler says, Doing what needs to be done. We needed more cars, more highways, more houses, more food, more entertainment, more of everything. We're in an economy that the need for More has created, and now the republicans are shutting down the economy for the working people, punishment for electing to presidential office, twice, somebody who does not figure on the social ladder at all, and a democrat at that. The 1% doesn't care. The more We The People are at odds with each other, the smoke screen obscuring the funnelling of our money we work for into corporate Cayman Island, Bermuda and Swiss tax-free accounts, we keep ourselves busy being mad at each other. They laugh, we lose.

In the future it will be questioned why We The People allowed the 1% to take all our money, keep us in perpetual war with poor, defenseless countries, driving them deeper into poverty, taking their money and leaving the American people in advancing poverty. Corporate television is the greatest propaganda device ever on the face of the earth that keeps us believing the false is true and the true is false. It can be used to make us believe anything, even Ann Coulter and the other Faux news deceivers. What kind of society is it that permits a tv station to give out false information as news every day and thrive from it? The most pathetic part is that Faux news is a republican station spewing the republican party line. It's out in the open. Deception is the nature of the republican party. In the last election, it turned out they deceived themselves and less that 51% of everybody else. I have to say it is doing me good to watch the republican party implode like the twin towers. The republican party has done so much damage to the American people in my lifetime that cannot be undone, I want to see them implode fast and get out of the way. Then the democrats would split and the Joe Lieberman half would become the new republican party. There is no point wishing it away. All I can figure to do is deal with it. William Buckley was perhaps the only intellectual I've seen in my lifetime from the republicans, and he wasn't much. He was irrelevant as he spoke, or wrote. But how could an up-front anti-intelligence party with Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter its philosophes have an intellectual?

The falseness we see boiling to the surface like grease has always been with us. It's coming out into the open now to be released in this cleansing time of life on earth. A couple hundred years into the future, historians will look at this time and think we must have been living in misery all the time. And they'd be right. They'll say we're living in enlightenment too, and they'd be right. We'd be even nuttier than we are without Zoloft, Prozac and the long list of mood-enhancing delights we need now. I take it by living rurally surrounded by Christmas tree fields. This time of year they're mulching culls, the trees they can't sell, getting them out of the way and planting all new seedlings. Last time I saw the owner of the land I was told all bright-eyed that they're taking out all the trees this year, like they're doing it just for me. I know better than to believe anything I'm told by certain people and said, "What's next?" No answer. Distracted suddenly. Later for that. Wait and see. All new seedlings is the answer. One thing about the Christmas tree fields, the maze gives the rabbits a chance escaping coyote pursuers. Living rurally is how I handle it. In 1968 I learned not to get involved in anything political. I can't help paying attention to the foolishness of American government, because I'm seeing the process of the undoing of American Democracy from the inside by corporate rule and racism. I prefer to see the process from outside the whirlwind than from in it. Cities have become places I cannot live. The stress of urban living is something I will not allow myself to live with.


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