GETTING WEIRD

barnett newman

Something really odd is going on in our collective American experiment with democracy, or maybe it is a wave in the flow of the American continuum. I'd guess looking at what the outer planets are doing now, like Uranus the huge ball of gas, and Neptune, would give some insight into how their influences work on us collectively. It feels to me like a time of gestation, something pushing to come through, held back by resistance. The force is a living thing. The resistance, a false belief system that doesn't work anymore, won't be able to hold it back much longer. It is a time in social evolution to make some major adjustments in distribution of resources. The population is growing and the rich are taking everything to themselves, looking to the day when USA has a peasant class and a royalty class, when all work will be without minimum wage a consideration, corporate work like fast-food joints, robots and computers taking care of all but "services." Since the corporate takeover of government, We the People are being legislated against. This has been going on for a very long time, longer than I have lived. Every day is something in the news about the NC government and the Texas government dipping to the bottom of the swill bucket legislating against women with a passion like they're conducting important business. The sick part is that these men want to dominate women by legislation, since they can't dominate women by intelligence. They are showing me what I've seen all along in my life, that too many men really don't like women, and I don't mean gay men. And I'm sure it's the other way around, women who don't like men living with men. It's very complex psychologically. It's too complex.

barnett newman

 

Talking with Joe in Becca's coffee shop the other day, he brought up how weird things are now. We have people in our government the equivalent of Burger King employees, do what you're told people. We have people in government I can only believe were elected because they're brain-dead. Two-thirds of a century into brain-dead nation, America is sinking quickly to the bottom of all the charts, except CEO salaries and benefits. The republican party has become the magnet for the lower intelligence half of our population. Republican politicians have become missionaries of ignorance. No more education, because educated people vote democrat. Shut women down because women vote democrat. I don't think it's that we Americans are any dumber than ever, though statistics say we are, but we're being so subtly manipulated by the entire corporate world around us, it's hard to find a direction to turn. I found my OFF switch years ago. From the start, I refused to live the suburban American lifestyle. I jumped in when I was young, went in way up over my head, came struggling back up for air and turned OFF any motivation or ambition in myself to fall into the groove of making money the only value in my life. I never ever wanted anyone to say of me, Oh, he is money. I've heard that said of a few people, and when I heard it I kind of retched inside. Like, who would want to be money? I would hate it if everybody looking at me saw money and sucked up to me because I was money.

barnett newman

 

Clever Andy Warhol made huge canvases of money, made silkscreens of money. One of the many quips he's famous for saying has to do with art in relationship with money. He said when somebody buys one of his canvases for two hundred thousand, when they look at it and when they show it to their peers, they see two hundred thousand dollars. Warhol suggested putting the money itself on the wall. Warhol was a satirist who ironically made a major fortune satirizing American culture. Quick-draw Elvis. He even made a portrait of Barbie. And Marilyn Monroe as Barbie. Some years ago, I was someplace out of my usual, an early Marilyn movie was on the tv, Don't Bother To Knock. I was probably laughing inside at how bad it was in so many ways, and Marilyn struck a pose for several seconds. It was the pose Warhol used for his Marilyn image. Looking at it long enough to study it, I felt I saw Warhol's attraction to the image. It was a classic Marilyn image like Jackie O in the black veil is a classic Jackie O image. His portraits of the rich and famous are like fashion magazine images. It was his style, like comic book images were Roy Lichtenstein's style and vertical lines were Barnett Newman's style. Warhol was something of an idiot-savant. Somebody destined to be a hairdresser took an art class and something clicked. Intellect he was not. I've read a couple biographies of him, found his life story an interesting tale of somebody who, as he describes himself, is the same as a two-dimensional movie screen. You project onto him what you want him to be.

barnett newman

I've an idea the craziness of making a silkscreen canvas for a hundred thousand dollars seemed so ridiculous to him he could not take art seriously. It was in that zone of not taking art seriously that he became an artist who represented his time like few others. Warhol loved the fame, the glamor, the wealth, the jet set, because he was, by his own assessment, shallow as a movie screen. He was way shallow on the one hand and way deep on the other hand. An enigmatic character in that way. I tend to see USA much like Warhol. Two-dimensionally shallow on the one hand and infinite depth on the other hand. Everything in between. We are the rainbow of the world when it comes to the American people. None of our "humanity" matters to our corporate government that no longer represents our interests, but works against our interest. It was a series of coups that have come to completion by now. First step: divide and conquer. Herein, I suspect, is the beginnings of finding the answer to why this is such a weird, odd, crazy time. A nation that has been about money and money only from the first ship that left Europe unto present cannot develop into much. We had a moment of flash soon after WW2, but it's energy is long expended by now. Something like the way Chinese will light a long string of firecrackers on the ground or hanging in the air, run with fingers in ears and watch in fascination hundreds of firecrackers going off.  

barnett newman

The greatest part of what I suspect is making everything crazy now is we're 33 years advanced along the divide and conquer strategy of our corporate government to set us at odds with each other and make us more manageable by propaganda. The funny part about this time in our history is the fiction of propaganda has become American reality. Our disinformation campaign will be complete when everything the American people believe is false, saith William Casey, Reaganista CIA director, 1981. The word going around among both the left and the right for different reasons is we're screwed. I saw a cartoon a few days ago of a man with a great big screw running through his chest and sticking out his back. His eyes had the look of a man waking up from heart surgery seeing the bill. One of our two political forces is in lockstep set on eliminating democracy. The other political force is in agreement pretending not to be. Democracy is not only in crisis, it's over. Big changes. Not changes we'll like. We'll wake up one morning, individually, and recognize we're in submission mode. We have no choice. Downsize to a cheaper house, used vehicles, sell some land, forget kids going to college, only sweatshop factory jobs and military available with minimum wage made a thing of the past by legislation or supreme court. They want to put black people back to the way they lived in the late nineteenth century, in Third World poverty, shining rich men's shoes and saying, Yowsuh, boss man. Maybe they'll put Amos & Andy back on tv and Disney's Song of the South. A herd of sheep tend to go where they're driven. I'm grateful to God I unplugged from ambition to get mixed up in the money and status game.

barnett newman

 

 

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