VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE IN THE NEWS

The news has become so objectionable with Ebola as something to fear, another in the never-ending list of fears we cannot live without, I can't listen anymore. It's either proving Obama is the cause of Ebola or proving he is not. Cops kill unarmed people across USA daily, yet we're expected to trust the police state and fear a disease that killed one. Fear Isel or Isis, whichever. Fear immigration of poor people of color. It's kind of Old Testament, fear the Lord thy God. I was raised in that paradigm, fear the Father, fear God, fear the Law, fear Church, fear parents, and be hysterically afraid of Satan, cause he's gonna getcha if ya don't be afraid enough. Love was never an issue. Of course we love, cause we're s'posed to. That's understood. But fear comes first in the s'posed-to list and love is last, down there with no consideration at all. The fundamentalism I grew up in, the same as is purported to be Christian now, was all about fear and nothing about love. Love might be misunderstood by the "common" people to be carnal, and that aint it. So we don't go there, while the preacher is screwing this one and that one, saying, Oh God, Oh God, Oh God. The nonsense quoted from fundamentalist politicians is so ridiculous, I can't believe he or she is so free of embarrassment. My estimation of politicians has hit rock bottom and is furiously drilling a hole to take it deeper. Confidence in a politician, a fundamentalist, a cop, is not possible in me anymore. These three have shown themselves incapable of rational thought, which I already knew, but denied, looking to allow for exceptions. Never found any. 

Remember a short time ago the preacher in Kansas screwing a teenage boy to cure him of his homosexuality? Remember the tv evangelist, Jerry Lee Lewis's first cousin, Jimmy Swaggart, he of crocodile tears on tv, who went to whores to peruse and sniff? Talk dirty to me, baby. To touch makes it a sin. Making the people two-fold more children for hell than they, themselves, is not a sin. Nor is hypocrisy. It's tradition. And to complicate the news further, it's election time. The Supremes recently ruled, predictably, lying in a political campaign legal. News? Really? Insurance against lawsuits for republicans. Now white man militias in cammo, carrying assault rifles, are talking of intimidating democrat voters at the polling places, black and tan people, women, profiles, anybody that looks like a Ay-Rab, or appears to be of an IQ above ten. Of course, white men would be free to pass, How y'doin, Bro? In my very most jaundiced thinking pre-1980, I'd have never guessed this would be the nature of the fix we're in during the course of time when everything that never worked became policy. Only thing the news is telling me: This world is not my home, I'm just a-passin through. I had no idea back in 1961 when I turned my attention away from television, how just that separation would separate me so definitively and so distantly from the world I live in. We who read books are the tiniest minority of all, unworthy of notice politically, unfit for consideration socially. I tell myself the absurdity "out there," in DC and Raleigh, is not my world. I don't believe in the entire system anymore. I have no confidence in Capitalism, no confidence in religion, no confidence in police state, no confidence in voting. The Supremes nipped what little confidence I had in voting. That the republican party goes to such ridiculous extremes to inhibit anti-republicans from voting, it makes me think there might be something to it.   

Before 1980, I voted against the worst of the candidates. Only found one to be for in my long history of voting, and he was crucified. Carter. Since 1980, I vote to be one digit that says, I want democracy. Voting has been my act of protest in police state. I know my vote  has no value outside myself. One party or the other, like Ralph Nader said of his direct role in turning the election over to Bush-Cheney, the losers, "the republicans will get us there first." Both parties are marionettes of the billionaires club. The democrat politicians like to pretend they're not in it for the money, we're here for you, while the republican campaign approach is fuck-all-y'all, and it works for them. The entire American political/economic system needs to break down entirely to restructure. As in construction, you want to put up a new building in the place of an old building, the old one must be taken down. Democracy wasn't real democracy before the word was used tongue-in-cheek, anyway. Considering the absence of value in my voting to the point that I fool myself in the act of voting, whatever the justification, I must vote. It is too important to the republican party that I not vote. Like I told the country club woman who said, I bet you voted for o-BA-ma, He's a sharp stick in the republican eye. When I take a moment to vote, it will be motivated only by an opportunity to be a sharp stick in the republican eye, albeit a minuscule grain of beach sand. I doubt the militias will actually appear at the polling sites, taking it for a propaganda sound-bite using the news to inhibit black people from making the effort. I don't even care anymore. I care about like I care who wins a football game. The game was amusing to see, but the outcome is the same, whoever wins, another game tomorrow night. Even though I see it for this is how an Empire crumbles, like reading the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, witnessing history in action, it continues to be distressing. Better to stop listening to the news than to start a Zoloft addiction.  

I wonder how republican politicians think up the stupid things they're saying, and it doesn't take long to find the answer. The Heritage Foundation. The politicians are scripted to appeal to the ignorant. Considering half the population is below average, they have 50% at the start. Strategy. I cannot participate in this belief system, can't listen to it anymore, don't even want to see pictures of the cast members. I've come to a place where I feel envy toward my friends who pay no attention to the news, don't vote, have never heard of Ted Cruz or Ann Coulter, unaware that democracy is over. At the same time, I'm grateful that I've followed our political system unto my own disillusionment. Disillusionment equals enlightenment. In my enlightenment, I look out the window and see my world, the world I live in. I look around this room and see the world I live in. The donkey meadow, the trees of autumn, a nice day with door open, recent paintings drying, Caterpillar outside lying in a patch of sunlight, the ground drying a little bit after five days and nights of rain. The fog that accompanied the rain made my world into a wonderland. Today, the sunlight makes my world into a wonderland, too. I can't see wasting my attention on the intentionally false when a fly just now flew into a spider web in the window's corner, the spider tying it up using Wonder Woman ropes, and the fly broke free. I am that fly. I broke free of the paralyzing power of the false. It has been amusing along the way, but amusing in a dark way. I am pulling my attention inward to my friends I care about who care about me. I will read in the life of van Gogh, paint when I feel it, write in my journal as blog, watch films from around the globe, read the columns of Chris Cox in his new book, The Way We Say Goodbye. The vacancy left by extraction of the false will fill up immediately like the hole left by my hand when I pull it from a bucket of water. I will vote because I believe it is important to vote as an American citizen, whether I believe in the political system or not, just to be a sharp stick in the republican eye.  

photos by tj worthington

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GRUMPY OLD BASTARD AND THE PITCHFORK ARMY OF ONE

georgia o'keefe

This time we're in has my head spinning. On the one hand, it's endlessly interesting; on the other, it puts me to sleep. I think I'm past getting mad about any of it or any of the players until I see a picture of Anthony Scalia and Clarence Thomas, two obvious frauds with conscious fraudulent intent, their treason of the heart very well paid for. Gotta give it to them, they get away with it right out in the open, even Thomas, a black man in America. American black men are afraid for their lives when they see a cop, though he's not. The cops know he's the shoeshine boy for the corporate Mastas. He's a living oxymoron, the republican Negro, the black Sarah Palin with an intelligent adviser who doesn't allow him to talk. He's doing what the East Indian governor of Louisiana, Jindal, says minorities should do, act like white people. Jindal gave it his best; it only made a fool of him, same as it did for Thomas. Thomas sold his soul for white privilege. I mean soul as the core of one's life as well as the soul in soul brother and soul music. Of course, I can see he was put in place at serious cost to the American people, with such intent, to be instrumental in the court toward systematically dismantling democracy. Another way of saying they're pulling the rug out from under us. It's like one of those sleight-of-hand stage tricks pulling the tablecloth out from under the place settings and all else on the table, everything staying in place. I see this going on in my country, and it only one of a vast web of take-over that is already accomplished. This is what I see the W meant under the Mission Accomplished banner. It makes me ashamed that the American people gave away democracy without even noticing. Off in a corner a minuscule minority preferred otherwise, but they don't matter. They don't watch tv; they're not plugged in to the to propaganda of mis- and disinformation. They read books. What do they know? Some of them believe in evolution too. 

georgia o'keefe

I tell myself it didn't used to be like every politician was a functional moron, a bought robot. Along the way, I have grown into maturity, and see them now from a point of view older than they are. If I were to start naming names, the list would never end, of people in our government with a void inside their heads. In my earlier years, they appeared to be more or less intelligent adults who could figure out how to get on a subway in NY the first time. Dan Quayle came on the scene with Bush One, intellectual equals, and seemed like the first really dumb ones. Then I look back to Reagan, the voice of Death Valley Days, as vague between the ears as W himself. Nixon before him. Law and Order Nixon. Survivor of Joe McCarthy's henchmen who unleashed super-psychotic madness, the Rush Limbaugh and Ted Cruz of their time. I'm glad I was a kid then. People I knew later who were adults in that time of a conscientious mind were enraged by the terror Joe McCarthy was. I don't often applaud anyone's prison sentence, but this ex-governor of Virginia sentenced to seventeen years for his conscious fraud gave me a good feeling. I want not to care, but when I see such fraud everywhere, out in the open and proud of it, then one actually meets with justice, it feels good in the heart. Albeit, knowing at the same time his lawyer will appeal, get another judge and come out of it with no time to serve, or maybe a couple years at tennis camp. They won't tell that one to the news. He was merely meat thrown to the dogs, the dogs hungry for justice. Here's one, now get back to yer holes. Then I feel stupid for being taken in by yet another propaganda sleight-of-hand. I look at the ceiling, close my eyes and say to self, Don't give it so much attention. Don't let it clench your heart. When you feel heart's attachment clinging, it's time to let it go, so let it go. Let the feeling of my heart clinging to something I can do nothing about go, like a puff of cigarette smoke in the wind. I can't let fraudulent people have such power over me to influence me to grip my own heart with the claws of false concern. I can't see a picture of Karl Rove without feeling the clench in my heart.

georgia o'keefe

It means I am giving them, the people who put a crimp in my heart, power over me. They keep me a spectator at the mental game directed by propaganda, someone snared to play their illusory drama to. I play audience to a drama that is smokescreen, deception its purpose. I fall for the game and become a mental player. I've been entertaining what to me is a serious question, though at the same time not, for the last few years. I think of joining the half of the American people that vote no confidence by not voting. I do not believe in "the system." By system I mean what Hilary Clinton said to a young black man before a tv camera, "Get with the system and you'll be all right." She meant it. She is a system woman. She climbed the system's ladder from ambitious college student to woman taken seriously around the world. Such counsel to a young black man in a photo-op, dismissing the world of racism the kid lived in since a baby with a veil of denial, dismissed Hilary from my interest. This phony photo-op and her vote of support for the fraudulent Iraq invasion dismissed her from my field of attention. As it turns out, it is the System, itself, I don't believe and don't want to participate in. The whole system of looking like tv news anchormen and women, the system they are modeled on, the system they appeal to, the system that tells me I have to make more money so I can feed the money pipeline to the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the Swiss banks our economy is being diverted through. I've seen someplace in the last few days the multi-billionaires are talking about the rest of us coming after them with pitchforks. I'm all for that. Worthington coat of arms has three pitchforks. Rebel yell. I can operate a pitchfork. I remember KISS Army from the late 1970s, a marketing slogan: Keep It Short and Simple. Now we have Pitchfork Army. I looked it up on google to see if it had been used yet politically. No. Seems like something Occupy would do. I'm not so sure the activists really want to identify with the proles. 

georgia o'keefe

It feels almost immoral not to vote. It feels fooled to the same degree to vote. The Supremes made it clear to us in the year 2000, out in the open, in-yer-face, democracy is over, and gave our government to the mega-billionaires for so cheap it ought to be embarrassing. It's in the adoration of the rich that our "representatives" represent us. It is this tragic flaw in the American character that changed our course from one of Progress to the international corporations pipelining our economy to tax-free numbered bank accounts outside the country, taking our tax base with them. And they continue to rule us by owning our "representatives." I don't believe in voting by way of duty. I vote because I want to. No one I vote for ever wins as I'm in a 75% right wing county and state, but I vote as a way of saying with my one digit, I want democracy. Though I tell myself voting does not matter, I see republicans pulling every kind of chicanery to suppress the vote, to discourage democrat demographics from voting. They've presented it such that voting has become a sharp stick in the republican eye. Therefore, I must vote, just to give the stick a little bit of a twist. The democrats are just as complicit with the international corporation tax dodgers as the republicans. They are just a little better at pretending an interest in the populace. By now, they have all  entered my zone of no confidence. Just about everybody who liked the idea of a black president is disappointed by his absence of interest in the American black people. He is the subject, the target of American racism, and continues to touch the subject with denial. By denial I mean only talks in white man platitudes on the subject, and the Hilary dismissal: get a job. Mitch McConnell will not be defeated because I voted. Nothing will be different if I don't vote from what it will be if I do vote. Only difference, I save a half gallon of gas by not voting. So I spend a dollar seventy-five to go vote. What do I get in return? More propaganda. What do I get if I don't vote? More propaganda.        

georgia o'keefe herself 

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JUST SAYING

 

lucio fontana

Looking at facebook this morning not long after waking, I found a video of a news broadcast in Russia from probably Moscow. It pointed out straight-forwardly as could be presented in a brief time that the Whitehouse and CIA were the aggressors in 9/11, not 19 Arabs with cell phones and box cutters. In about 15 minutes, the Russian news presentation made a case using the most convincing evidence available. The tv production spelled out that it was indeed an "inside job." None of it is new to me. It's new seeing it used in an international propaganda war. First thought: Obama recently disrespected Putin in public internationally. Putin's op-ed in the NY Times was no more than a statement that he fails to see the humor in being disrespected. Putin is a KGB martial artist. Martial arts is about avoidance, KGB martial arts is kill you in three seconds. Martial arts is a mental discipline as well as physical. Obama is a basketball player. Watching the video, I saw in my mind's eye Obama dribbling a basketball trying to get around Putin and Putin kills him. Vladimir Putin is one of the men on earth I would not challenge to a duel of any sort, physical or mental. I see Putin with superior physical and mental control and the soul of a bear. To hit him would be the same as hitting a tree. Except he'd deck you and the tree would just stand there. Whoever you are, Putin could take you out faster than Anderson Silva. Vladimir Putin is for me the image of a Bad Mutha.

 

lucio fontana

 

 

I remember my thought when I saw in the news Obama disrespect Putin like he did. I thought: do not challenge that man. You're a basketball player. He's a killer. W Bush disrespected Putin calling him Pootie-poot. That was Bush, with Cheney and Rummy for backup, saying fuck you, like at a fraternity beer party. Putin knew it. It was Bush Whitehouse/CIA behind 9/11, and Putin knows it. He knows Obama knows it too. Obama's silence on the matter and saying Bush "wasn't such a bad president," makes him complicit, same as the one driving the car in a drive-by.  I'm seeing Putin bring this lump under the rug out in the open. This Russian broadcast went all the way around the world. In a fighting match, I'd score Putin a direct hit, one that would send Obama staggering to catch his balance. Putin solved the Syria problem by convincing al-Assad to comply with turning over chemical agents they bought from USA to the UN. End of story. Then Obama starts publicly taking credit for it and making it into a conflict he won. It must have bent Putin over laughing, might have even spilled his vodka. I'm getting the impression nobody is counseling Obama that Putin has a whole lot more power than the American president. His house is not divided, or anyway not divided like Obama's. Putin has the power to clean Obama's clock, and he'd better start paying attention. To say we have The Bomb, they have it too. Our side pushes the button; while the missiles are in the air the other side pushes the button. End of History.

 

lucio fontana

 

 

That's calling for sensible thinking, which American government does not do. If it ever did, I don't know, but it has not demonstrated sensible thinking in my lifetime. Like in the last weeks Sen John McCain of Arizona is being heard to make a little bit of sense, leading me to believe dementia has taken away his mind, going so far off message. In his right mind, he was a parrot of Reaganism. Now he's saying, "It's not rational." Rational? When did rational become a concern to a republican? His mind is gone. It was bad before Johnson, bad before Nixon, bad before Reagan, then the Reagan Revolution took the American people on the present downhill run to the bottom. To quote Chris Hedges, "Brace yourself. The American Empire is over and the descent is going to be horrifying." I used to hope the Obama presidency might be the beginning of a turnaround from Reaganism, but it's not. Obama, I have seen, is a booster rocket for the downward run to police state. The flush occurred when the republicans stole the 2000 election out in the open, publicly, and said to we who don't like it: fuck you if you don't like it. Police state is here. Police state is now. Get it. Barak Obama gets it. He's using his power as president to assist the republican systematic lockstep dismantling of democracy in front of everybody's face on the evening news, followed by several commercials. Obviously, the American people want police state.

 

lucio fontana

 

 

Police state means white power in a time when democracy favors minorities. Shut down democracy, white man retains control. Obama cares nothing for the black people in America, same as he cares nothing for the white people. He just happens to be very good at passing tests and has a natural charisma that took him far. I'm wondering if he might not be an example of the Peter Principle: advanced to the level of his incompetence and there he stays. On the one hand, I see the republicans acting out racism on him. On the other hand, I see him challenging Putin publicly with disrespect as not an intelligent move. Of course, it's a strategy. He wouldn't do anything if it didn't have strategy behind it. He doesn't appear to have much respect for the Russian Bear is what I'm getting at. I'm curious to see the ripples that arise from this pebble thrown in the water. I would not want to be in the same room with Putin's energy. Nor would I want to be in the same room with Obama's energy. These are high energy egomaniacs whose souls are filling roles I don't want to be anywhere near. If Obama's staff has a video game idea of a Battle of the Titans, this American citizen would recommend not going there. Obama is way too vulnerable and gives me the impression he has not yet noticed. An American basketball player is no contest for a Russian KGB trained killer.

 

lucio fontana

 

 

*

 

 

BELOW THE RADAR

In conversations with people I know, I hear more and more from people who most often don't talk about current events querying how to live now that democracy is gone, recession is turning into depression for the middle class, and everything we hear from government is so obviously false we don't even think about it anymore. The working class has been in depression since 1980. In this time you don't even mention the working class. The ruling class regards working class as the enemy and media keeps a lid on it. You never hear "working class" on the news. It's always middle class. However, when working class gets politically active they want police state and attach teabags to their hats. Challenged for education, the working class is so easy to manipulate they bore republican strategists who laugh at them. Obama has disappointed liberals so much by now they've lost hope for him. Used to be he had liberals for his apologists. Now, there's not much apologizing for his absence of interest in the black people, as Obama evidently identifies with his white half only he is able to see. A black man raised by white people thinks white and talks down to black people. Every time I've heard clips from his speeches to black audiences, he basically tells them to get up off their asses and get a job. Looking at it from his logic, paying any attention to black issues would only go against him. He already has the black vote and he'd lose much of his white base if he gave attention to black issues. As it turns out, he's just another republican in black face.

I and many others believed Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Rice belonged on trial for war crimes, crimes against the American people. Obama is now saying Bush wasn't such a bad president. He apologizes for the Bush-Cheney-Rummy-Rice administration, enforces the fascist constitution, the "patriot act," and is not undoing the police state BCRR set up. He makes police state obvious. It's been under cover creeping up on us. Now that it's here, it's out in the open, and the president is part of it. Everything we grew up being taught in school about our great democracy is false. It's a belief system from the past. The rest of the world is watching the fall of the American Empire, glad to see it go, but quaking because the economies are intertwined. Naturally, the American Empire became the world's police force when the Soviet Union fell. USA is showing itself to be a tyrant declaring pre-emptive wars on powerless poor countries that can't defend themselves---to stop them from destroying America if we don't kill at least a million of their people first, in the name of peace and liberty. US government cannot be serious saying they want to attack Syria because the government there killed a few hundred people. The US government doesn't give a shit about the dead people. They are the smokescreen. The US government is not a moral entity. It's run by corporate mind: money and power.

For some years I've been wondering how to live in this downward spiral created by the Reagan Revolution, seeing that it is not going to reverse any time soon. Not with Obama. Not with democrats. The democrats role in the Reagan Revolution is enabler. It's one party we have, the republican party. I fuss with myself looking for how to live. I have to put democracy out of my mind as an American institution, have to face it squarely that the international corporations took our government by coup, November 22, 1963, and keep us believing democracy is our state in transition to police state. Their propaganda has been so good, they have the American people wanting police state. Now that I know we are in police state and the American people are by citizenship the enemy, how do I live? In my school years I often wondered what it was like in a totalitarian country where people have limited rights. I found Gao Xingjian's ONE MAN'S BIBLE a very clear picture of living under the dark cloud of police state. You watch what you say to anybody. There, they become sheep for self-preservation; here, we become sheep out of indifference to all but the propaganda speaker in the living room, where even the laughter is not spontaneous.

All I know to do is hunker down like living in a house with a tyrant, bear with it and keep what we call a low profile. I think profile here has to do with police records. Meaning: don't attract attention. I'm approaching the end of my life in this body quite naturally, and wouldn't care a great deal if taken out for police state reasons. I recall in a film many years ago a guy about to be shot by Nazis said, "I'd rather die than live in the world you created." No shit. The formula for successful living in this world applies in police state as well as in democracy: no desires. I still have a carry-over in my belief system that the citizen matters. My mind knows better, but I've been trained from childhood to believe it was a naturally imperfect democracy, then watch it through the course of my life become a corporate police state. I still laugh when I think about the Patriot Act of 1,000+ pages, outlined, written, edited, printed, bound, boxed, delivered just in time for 9/11/01. Good timing. Isn't that called serendipity? The title tells you it's the work of scoundrels, in case anybody wondered. In my youth, it looked like great things were ahead for my country. Then the Reaganista coup of 1980 began the dismantling of our court system and democracy itself, laying the ground for police state, consciously with intent. This is not an unforeseen byproduct of the good of the people. The Bush-Cheney-Rummy-Rice coup of 2000 put an end to democracy and set police state in motion. Obama is playing his role like an A+ student trying harder on account of his racial disadvantage. His handlers will have him laughed at yet over the Nobel Peace Prize.

I see he's playing tough guy with Putin. I wouldn't advise him do that. Obama has a good mind. Putin has a better mind. Putin could kick Obama's ass from here to kingdom come, both physically and mentally. Obama is also POTUS. He does not represent himself, and he is conscious of it. When it comes down to living out the rest of my life in police state, it is time to rethink. I'm not one to lie down in front of a tank. I'm more like the Chinese that accept the inevitable and stay out of the way. That's an aspect of living rurally, out of the way, that I really like in this time. Jets and other military planes have been flying over the mountains in profusion the last weeks, more every day, practicing flying below the radar. This happens every time a new war is cranking up. It is telling me the next war is in the works. So I'm looking at an economy going under and the question of whether or not a new quagmire war on the next defenseless poor country in the Middle East that Saudi Arabia wants shut down. With an economy based in war, what does a country do when its economy heads downward. War. What is it good for? Keeping the economy going. Even if this was a democracy, I couldn't change any of it. For one thing I don't have the money for lobbyists and gratuities. The political world is not for me. The best thing I can do is stay at home and not concern myself with democracy or any of that old Enlightenment nonsense. The founding fathers were left wing radicals. Delete.

 

 

*

AFTER HEARING A CHRIS HEDGES INTERVIEW

yves tanguy

Every day for the last weeks I see various respected establishment names, like Jimmy Carter, the latest one, saying out in the open our democracy is gone; the corporate takeover of our government has deleted democracy. People like Gore Vidal, Chris Hedges and Noam Chomsky have been saying it for some time. By the time establishment people are saying it, it's a done deal and has been for a while. I saw an eighteen minute interview with Chris Hedges where he spread out today's political / economic world, explaining the corporate takeover citing evidence of what is happening as he went. The man has a mind to be reckoned with. I like reading his essays. His writing has clarity and is trimmed down to only the necessary words, stylistic frills absent. It's the same with his thinking and speaking. Maybe it could be said he is frugal in his use of language.

yves tanguy

Listening to Hedges talk is music. I follow where he goes rationally. He has no hysteria about him. His straight-faced delivery says he has seen the horror. He can neither recoil nor laugh. When it's funny, it is, but it's not. His recent book, the Death of the Liberal Class, is not what you might think he means by liberal. What we call liberal now is adherence to codes of social behavior that distinguish oneself separate from the working class. The sense of what I picked up that he was saying, America used to have a left wing. It's gone. What we now call the left, liberal, is the left extreme of the right wing, the part of the right closest to the center. The possibility of hope he sees is for more massive demonstrations, not that they do any good for their stated purposes, but they keep government apprehensive of the people. He said the ideal is, like in France, that government be afraid of the people. The Occupy movement has evidently been shut down by police state that is using the mass arrests for practice, for training, foreseeing a surge of massive resistance in the near future.

yves tanguy

At the rate our basic rights are eroding, Obama using the Patriot Act for a guide, tells me nobody in our government is working consciously to the benefit of we the people, unless it might be Elizabeth Warren, unless she turns out to be just a performance. She's somebody who could end up dead in a private plane crash with no indication in the black box of what went wrong. If a run for the presidency is in her future, she will change as Obama has changed. She will be an ongoing target of the republicans, too much of her attention needing to be focused on strategies to nullify republican fake assaults. The republican half of our population is a venal bunch of people come out of the background into the foreground making noise, threats, misspellings on signs. I see in our national and state governments a venality that really does represent the wide stripe that runs through the American people of interest in money only, the attitude of I-want-mine. The corporate CEOs see us not even pawns. I, like Bob Dylan, don't want to be a pawn in their game. I want no part of it.

yves tanguy

Driving by a city on interstate, or driving through a city, I gawk at skyscraper architecture, something like walking through a long room full of Mark Rothko canvases or Richard Serra steel works, Carl Andre's blocks of wood, bricks arranged on the floor. I see an adventurous skyscraper a beautiful thing, like a piece of public art, like a bronze sculpture of Gandhi walking in a public park. I've seen some Giacometti stickman sculptures in skyscraper context, and some Noguchi. They go well together. 20th century sculpture with 20th century architecture. The Reagan Revolution has put to rest what used to be called progress in America, the progress that built the beautiful towers in the cities. The Bank has taken our money to offshore banks that don't pay taxes. The Bank is bleeding us out. Hence the popularity of vampires in pop culture again, drained of our life blood, and zombies, the living dead. It's like we're alive, but cannot afford to do anything but stay home and watch tv. The center is not holding, unless the center is tv. Chris Hedges defined our situation a tinderbox on the verge of self-combusting. Anything could set it off. I'll watch it on live internet.

yves tanguy

 

 

 

*

HANDS OFF IN TEXAS

All of a sudden, half the population of Texas is criminalized, the male half. Masturbation has raised its ante from sin to crime. Two years in prison for it. What's a cowboy gonna do? Gives new meaning to "The eyes of Texas are upon you." Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. Texans are also Americans (sorta), so I suppose the new law will be observed the way we Americans observe the law, don't get caught. Better not be suspected of it either. Like WC Fields might say, Where there's smoke there's fire, boys. Boy Scouts is now a criminal organization in Texas. Will it be the scoutmaster's duty to listen at the tents on field trips in the night? Will boys rat on each other or make it up about somebody? "He beat off. I heard him do it." Will Texas make concentration camps for teenage boys with dormitory lights turned on all night? No, it won't do any of that. When a population becomes criminalized, they turn into a unit unto themselves with a code where nobody rats on anybody. The boys and men of Texas will soon have the criminal code among themselves where rats die. It kinda puts preachers, prosecutors and judges in a position of hypocrisy too, as well as the entire state legislature, given a few intelligent exceptions, women. Them too. The state of Texas is officially a prison. Everybody in the state is a criminal. Australia started as a criminal colony and Texas has evolved (the E word in Texas) into a criminal colony.

The Dixie Chicks come to mind saying at a show in London they were ashamed of being from the same state W Bush was from. The Bush administration of epic scoundrels shut them off the corporate media. Their cds sold all the more and their concerts sold out. I also can see that half the population of Texas is embarrassed by the republican chicanery going on there in full control. Police state is not about majority control, but controlling the majority. Wendy Davis, the woman who kept the filibuster going vs Rick Perry, is now elevated to a degree of respect. She's being pointed at as potential candidate for governor. Obama won his presidency because he was the only democrat who voted against going into Iraq. That elevated him to president. Hilary voting for the invasion was a bleep in her campaign. She let down a great portion of her fan base when she went along with the Bush Junta. She lost my attention altogether. She did it for political expediency and it bit her in the ass. The republicans would likely be more vicious to Hilary than they are to Obama. And Dufus Sarah Palin is back. Now she's quitting the republican party cause it aint dumb enough to her satisfaction. Alaska must not have been dumb enough either. Nor Faux news. She represents us to the rest of the world. They look on and laugh. We non-parrots in America look on and weep. Weep because our country we grew up singing Tis Of Thee over, and want to believe in, has gone to shit before our eyes. We know how and we know why. We know we didn't do it. We know there's nothing we can do about it. Obama has shown us for sure by now that he is not on the side of We The People. The black people have known he was not with them from soon after he started.

That's it for the review of the news as comedy. Maybe I'm paying too much attention to Jon Stewart and Bill Maher. More than likely not enough. They keep me laughing better than any sitcom. They are slap-stick. How else can a day's news be looked at over the last thirty-three years? We don't need Faux news to make it even more ridiculous unto overkill. A few times I've set out to look at a Faux news clip for humor and turn it off every time before the first minute is up. The steady stream of arrogance turns me off right away and the bullshit finishes me off. Can't even listen to their voices. An entire tv network that is openly racist on the one hand, and on the other, a business woman who said nigger 27 years ago is crucified without any regard for freedom of speech, innocent until proven guilty, etc. The most racist nation on earth convicting by way of scandal a Southern woman for saying nigger. What else can we call this but comedy? The comedy of stupid, like Jackass the movie. An openly racist supreme court, no problem. I use the nigger word here in defiance of bullshit correctness, parrotry to television. I'm sympathetic with the black cause and I know they don't give a rat's ass. They call me a white emeffer and the C-word, cracker. Nobody comes down on them. Reverse racism is ok. None of that matters at all. I use the word because I'm told not to for reasons I see are bullshit. I use it knowing it is a key word for instant scanning of online documents, like bomb.

The movie Brazil is the image in my mind for police state. It's not about the country Brazil. It happens in the UK. In the beginning, a man and woman in recliners in their flat watching the telly. A chainsaw cuts a circle in the ceiling, a swat team drops down, binds the man and hauls him out. Whoops. Wrong address. Oh well. Let's get on with it. I must see it again soon. As far as I can see, everything we're told by government and media is false, so predictably that when they tell us something straight up we take it for a smoke screen. All through my lifetime the American people have been called sheep in cartoons and editorials. I used to see the sheep grazing in meadows. Now I see the sheep at the stockyards herded and lined up for their last breath, praising and thanking Jesus for keeping Texas free from masturbation. Masturbation amounts to pre-emptive abortion there. If they can't stop abortions, they'll stop them before they start, forbidding men to spill their seed on the ground or into the toilet, whichever. Abortion of the sperm cell. Too ludicrous to even mention, really. The absurdity is that it's a nineteenth century law in 2013. 2001 is in the past and we're drifting into super-imposed poverty throughout the once prosperous land since the Bank took our resources and control. Our powerlessness is expressed through vampire and zombie movies like in the 1950s during the Eisenhower recessions. At least in this time we're able to see the comedy too, somewhat.

 

 

*

      

RACISM ON THE WANE IN AMERICA

chief propagandist

The Absurdist comic-tragedy of this time has erupted again, boiling over the edge of the pot and sizzling on the electric burner. The only thing the republicans showed us in the campaign was ignorance and lies. The last few days the repubs have been blaming-blaming, every reason they can think up, like in the manner they ran the campaign with every lie they could make up. The one point they haven't yet touched, or at least publicly, is that white Americans are not all racists. They were counting on all white Americans being racists and it didn't work out that way. I laugh when I see their befuddled faces and their lame fantasies of why a campaign of only lies failed. It has worked for Rove twenty-some years. Alas, a little too consistently. His opposition strategists finally caught onto his ways and figured out how to counter him. It felt good to see Rove shut down. Obama has talked about a divide in the repub party that I saw created in the attempt to shut down the democrat party. The democrats stayed back, gathered their strength, honed their strategies and gave the child's riposte, I'm rubber, you're glue, everything you say bounces off me and sticks on you. That's kindergarten for karma. Repubs in their willful ignorance fooled themselves. And by republican definition, by a landslide. LOL

Talking with a friend earlier in the day, she brought up the possibility this might be the end of KKK and a gaggle of other racist points of view, but I had a hard time seeing it having that great a sweep. It might signal the beginning of a process that could lead to their end. That's more in the spirit she meant it, the kick-off. It's far from over and done. We have passed the point in population where people of color now outnumber white people and white people are scared. Some white people. After this campaign that was overtly racist in ways never mentioned but understood front and center, it appears the racism the repubs were whipping into a lather went nowhere, even worked against them. Florida, the dirty tricks capital of the Red States, said no to racism. Adamant CEOs are swearing they'll cut back on employees because we got a president sympathetic to the people again. Who gives a shit? Only the people getting fired, but it's all PR bluff anyway. Nobody is getting fired. Like the right wing exodus that has not yet happened. Going by human nature, I laugh that the CEOs sending memos to their staffs warning against voting for the basketball playing president more than likely inspired low-level execs and mail room employees to vote for Obama more than for Romney. It's our nature to do the opposite of what we're told, esp in the case of a secret ballot. Though it's also our nature to obey.

I thought when the election was over it would be over, but the republican pity party goes on. The surprise evidently took the wind out of their sails, took their breath away. I see them like a dog licking itself after a fight. Obama brought Anderson Silva to mind, his smooth, quick moves. The election results were like the surprise kick to the chin Silva brought Vitor Belfort down with. The republican machine was spinning so many lies that the lies spun in with the non-lies until a tapestry was woven that told a fiction based on true events. In the end, we can't find what is true in the story and what is not. So we either believe the story or don't believe the story. I've been wondering for a number of years how republicans can switch off good sense like religionists. I suppose it's the same as religionism, a belief system they vow themselves to. It looks like the lock-step attempt to shut down the democrats by organized belief systems went to its absurdist extreme and the repubs became satires of themselves. Like the quote from Wm Casey, CIA director under Reagan, 'We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American people believe is false.' It is half way complete. The republican half of the population believes it.

The relief at the end of this election was such that I've never felt after an election. It's always a relief for me when a republican is defeated. This election was not about issues. This one was straight out racism, The White Man's Last Stand: The Sequel To The Sequel. I felt like the results of the election would be a measure of racism in America, where it stands. Whiteness wasn't enough to get 51% of the vote anymore. I heard something about Texas seceding. I hope they do. However, it's just more big-man talk, sentences that start or end, By God! The relief for me is that the dark cabal has been voted out of power. All the power they have left is disruptive power, which they can do in abundance with demonic will. The repubs are looking at becoming irrelevant. Like one of their "pundits" said, America aint what it used to be. Racism is on the wane. It's a new day.

*

JUST SAY NO TO THE NEWS

It does my heart good to see and hear all the post-election republican rant about the country coming to an end under the nigger. It's funny how the big-mouths of fantasy became so self-absorbed they lost touch with everything but their agenda. Cement-heads were bragging they would leave the country if the nigger won again. I've neither seen nor heard of a mass right-wing exodus to---where would they go? Australia is far too liberal for them. Australia has healthcare and other benefits to the people of the land the American wingnuts don't want us to have. They can't go to Israel. Too many Jews. Africa is completely not a consideration. Too many Mohammedan niggers. South America is too Catholic. Austria might be a good place for them. Romania might be good. Albania might be best for them. However, Albania has too many poor people. The American right hates the poor. Europe is off limits. Too liberal. Socialist. Russia and China won't have them. Maybe Arizona is the place. Glen Beck has been telling wingnuts who live among too many liberals to move to a place where it's all republicans. That must be Arizona. Good. Let's hope they all move to Arizona. Then we can flush Arizona into Mexico. When they want to come back we can oppress them as illegal aliens and ship them back to Mexico. Solved.

During the campaign season I wearied of the bullshit from the wingnuts hoping it would die down when the election was over. Now we're hearing continual pity-party of how terrible it is we're sinking fast, the Titanic hit the iceberg again, aint it awful. I need to rethink. I need to quit listening to the news altogether. I was talking with a friend today about something entirely different, but came to note there are certain idiocies going about in the world we don't want in our minds. I don't even listen to Limbaugh to hear what idiocy Karl Rove has him harping on any given day, not even curious to hear it. I don't want his bowel movements in my head. Ann Coulter. She is the living model of all the blond jokes. If I were ever to have reason to be near her cubicle at Fox, I would need to sneak a look at her monitor to see if it might indeed be speckled with white-out splotches. The election brought these people I tend to ignore front and center where they can't be missed. Sometimes I pay attention for the laugh. Unfortunately, the laugh is of derision not humor. I remind myself that these people are the same as a disease---in their cases, syphilis of the mind. I don't want the defecation from their mouths in my mind. They keep me reminded that half the people are below average intelligence. Evidently, the half that votes republican.

Earlier, I read an interesting article assessing the election. The writer had what seemed to me a balanced perspective, but we slightly disagreed at the end. His solution was to get more women candidates and race candidates from the repub party. Sure. Ten Clarence Thomases running for governor all over the country? Ten Phyllis Shlafleys running for Senate? Another Bachman and another Palin? Even one is too many. Republicans are such parrots why not have a bird show for election; vote for the prettiest parrot. I hear the "pundits" talk like Romney really did have a "plan" for this and for that. All I ever heard concerning his plans was a change of subject, attacking Obama for something so ridiculous even republicans laugh, jabbering nonsense. He was the Ken doll of American whiteness. Quintessential white man. Hair cut like he goes to a barber shop once a week. Lies like a white man. Romney was whiteness itself. It's wonderful having him in the past. Yet we still hear of him, like having a website up and running for his acceptance of presidency. I'm glad Karl Rove finally lost. I love it that Ted Nugent identified with his brother in spirit, Donald Trump, calling for revolution and generally being republicans. To take either one of them seriously would be the same as having a bumper sticker that says Nuke Iran.

I was asked yesterday if the election went to suit me. The only answer I gave was, "Some of it did. Some of it didn't." I didn't even ask the same question in return. What didn't suit me was the repubs still have Congress. What did suit me was Obama winning. From the beginning, I've been happy to have a black man for president. You say he's half white, but in America if you have 1/16th black blood, you're black. I've been for black equality with whites since childhood when I knew a few black kids and found them to be people just like me and all the white people of my world. I'm especially glad for Obama's win that young black people are inspired by him. Not necessarily to be another black president, but to have the boost of self-esteem to see that a black man can succeed at his own dream. I realize Obama hasn't done anything visible to help the black people, but I also realize he gets opposition from the repubs for even promoting white interests. They'd crucify him if he were to start taking an interest in black people. We'll see what happens second term. It's a certainty the republicans will obstruct and say no, then blame the democrats for not compromising. The republican reaction to Obama's second term will be a repeat of the first: get the nigger. At least Obama's victory was by such a margin even Rove had to concede. Rove's mind has been the worst influence in American politics in my lifetime, right down there with the Alzheimer president, marching us, a calculated step at a time, toward civil war. Divide and conquer has been their strategy and it has worked very well.

I have to say I'm glad to have lived to see a second term for Obama. I like him as a president and I like him as a man. I like him as a diplomat. People all over the world respect him and respect USA for having an intelligent man for president. They know better than we do how fortunate the entire world is to have Obama representing USA to the world. Not all the rest of the world is white. The rest of the world knows the white American venality toward people of any color. The very oddest thing I've seen is that the republican party has become overtly seditious. Rupert Murdoch keeps that one stirred up with his divisive journalism. He has killed every publication bought for his empire. All my life USA has bragged on itself (patriotism) about democracy and money. We have no more democracy and the Bank has taken our money. It's time for me to stop listening to the news for awhile. The wingnuts will be making drama as much as they can about losing, about the Titanic sinking and woe on nigger-lovers. They'll make losing into winning. In a short time it will be that voting machines were rigged by democrats. I'm glad Obama won, primarily because he appears to me to represent us well internationally and he throws us a bone from time to time, even acts like he takes an interest in our well-being. I like too that he is a sharp stick in the republican dixiecrat eye.

*

2012: THE DAY AFTER

wayne thiebaud

What a good day it has been getting the car upgraded in the morning with new tires, new plugs, new oil. The Catfish has been a pleasure to drive. Immediately after each one of those improvements the car feels better. All three at once made the drive afterward into some kind of heavenly transport, smooth all the way around. I think of the song by Queen, I'm In Love With My Car. I do love my car. 93 Buick Century with the 3300 v-6, an engine classic as the Nova slant-6 that has outlived the car bodies and continues as water pumps in undeveloped parts of the world. This 3300 I'm driving uses little to no oil, maybe half a quart in 3000 miles. My mechanic, Chuck Billings in Glade Valley, keeps it running smoothly. I told him the engine is running just short of perfectly; the occasional miss and the last time I pushed the gas pedal to the floor to pass somebody, it hesitated. I didn't like that. When he took out the plugs, he found the one that was bad. We replaced them all. I like having new plugs and good wires.

The Catfish is now running perfectly again. It felt so good on the road going home, I patted it on the dash and said, "Thank you, my friend." I love driving a car that runs as good as a brand new car, and making no payments. It's so old that replacement parts don't cost a whole lot. With all the clearcoat on the hood, top and trunklid flaked off, a couple of rust places, a couple of little dents, it is a car nobody would steal. I could leave the keys in it and never have a problem, even in Miami. I don't, but could. It's all go and no show. It would make a good car for a smuggler; it's so plain it's invisible. I love its design. It's one of the more beautiful car designs before they all started looking like they were made for wind tunnels---the F15 and the Stealth look. On the drive to Justin's house, on Little Pine Church Road, I see an Oldsmobile of the same period, a classic car body. The owner, like me, can't afford to doll it up with new paint and new trim, but he keeps it well and I have a strong suspicion he appreciates its style same as I appreciate my Buick's body style. It was a beautiful car design when it was new and it is now. I'd really like to lower the Catfish about 4 inches all the way around, but that would not be practical on mountain roads in snow and mud. For that it needs raised about 4 inches. It tells its age, but it doesn't date. It's what might be called a classic design. In my mind's eye I see it flawless and painted a lacquer gunmetal blue, no trim or words on it, just the design itself with chrome grille and red taillight all the way across the back.

Remembering back when I drove the 78 Toyota pickup I named Zen Zero. I called it a Zero because when I bought it the entire interior was stripped down to the metal structure, and a big hole in the seat where I sat required a cushion in it. It reminded me of the Japanese Zeros, the fighter planes of WW2. And I was playing with the O in Zen ink painting too. The driver's door was bad and I replaced it with a red door. The truck was blue. I found a couple of Nissan bucket seats for it that were easy to install, four bolts each. I had a friend at the time, Anna, who drove a Mercedes. One day when I saw her she said, "You still driving that trap?" I said, "I'll race you on the Parkway from Cherry Lane to Laurel Springs at 2 in the morning if you want to see what a trap can do." She could run away from me on an Interstate, but the Parkway's curves don't allow top end. It's like the difference between Talladega and Martinsville in a nascar race. The Toyota pickup had a good center of gravity and ran like a go-cart. Very light weight. On the Parkway the race would be all about maneuvering, and I knew the road a whole lot better than she did. I knew my truck better than she knew her car, too. I didn't say it, however, as a challenge, just using the light humor of exaggeration to say the Zero ran better than it looked. It was then about 12 years old. I loved that truck. Four on the floor and another classic motor, four-cylinder, that outlived the frame and the body.

The news came on the radio just now. Back to hearing about Boner in Congress. I'd hoped against hope the Dems would take the majority in Congress and shut Boner up, expunge his name from the news. McConnell too. But, no good gets done without opposition, so I welcome their opposition. The part I like best about the election results is that it was a sharp stick in the republican eye. Will they go on obstructing? Sure. They've become the New Dixiecrat Party. McConnell is the new Strom Thurmond and Boner the George Wallace. Keepin' the niggers down. Only difference is: the world is watching in the age of hi-tech. The republicans don't care if they're witnessed. After four years of nothing but divisive and disruptive politics, they didn't lose anything by it. Romney lost because he was a non-candidate like McCain. Republicans put Obama in both times by not offering any real opposition, just a couple of hand-puppet parrots. Now Sarah Palin is aghast that "a majority" of Americans would put the nigger in a second time. Donald Trump is calling for revolution. And Bugs Bunny is calling for Daffy Duck to get married in Massachusetts.

*

TO VOTE OR NOT TO VOTE

        no


On the verge of deciding not to vote this time, I'm thinking of joining the left wing, the half of the population that does not vote, the ranks of the indifferent. Everyone deciding not to vote has their own reason for indifference, same as among the voters, each with a reason that inspires the choice made. Mine, before, has been that a democracy requires voting. Voting is the sacred act of democracy. Several years ago, when I saw our American democracy had been subject to a corporate coup, I thought of voting as an act of protest saying: one digit wants democracy. It means nothing as protest the same as it means nothing toward deciding who wins the election, whatever the election. To vote in this time is the same as saying nothing. In a state that is 75% repub and 25% demo, it means nothing, whatever county I vote in. The republicans are rigging voting machines, which won them the 2004 election saving the Supremes the embarrassment of nullifying two elections in a row. They showed us with lucid clarity that we do not have democracy in America, no need to beat it into our heads with a hammer. If we don't get it, all the better.

Vote rigging means nothing, same as voting means nothing. The corporate system of government we have now doesn't care which side wins, both sides are bought and totally controlled. I've been observing with Obama that he has approved the continuation of the "Patriot Act," the constitution of the police state, and in his first two years when he had majority in congress, he conceded to the republicans over and over, Joe Lieberman style, though pretended not to. Gitmo? The Reagan Junta's strategy of divide-and-conquer has grown until the Corporate State put in a black man for president to further divide us. By now, thanks to half a century of propaganda that grows more sophisticated each decade, just about everything we believe politically is false and we've been divided unto maybe likely civil war. While the 99% are divided and focusing on the division, the 1% goes about their business of robbing the working people unnoticed. Investigative reporting is of the past, same as reason. Racial divisions are being used for smokescreen to keep our attention off the Corporate State, keep us pre-occupied. If we don't fall for the smokescreen, prison will take care of it.

American government has become OF, BY and FOR the Corporate entities now called people. We, the actual people made of meat instead of money are being shut down like the Tibetans in western China, regarded the lower class out of sight, the peasant class, in what was once their own world. The Obama administration bailed out the Banks that wrecked the economy and returned to them the resources they lost in overzealous attempts to rob working people. Among the millions of people who lost their own sustenance, thanks to the Bank's ruse, what do they get? It was government supported robbery on a massive scale. One major step toward fading the middle class into the peasantry. The kick that sent the ball between the goal posts. If I were to vote, I'd have to vote for Obama, just because my entire being would not allow pointing my attention to Romney. Yet I know one will give us the illusion he's for "the people," while the other is up front that he's dead set against "the people," the non-corporate people. Any way we vote, we vote against our own interest as human beings. To vote now is to participate in the great deception as a player.

I'm undecided in this way, to vote or not to vote, though I understand that not voting amounts to voting republican. Whenever my mind returns to thinking a vote matters, I remind myself that's how I want it to be, not how it is. I want to vote in local elections, because a vote sometimes matters there. I could vote locally and leave the rest blank for the voting machine to fill in republican. Maybe there will be a libertarian to vote for, but I haven't seen one on a ballot in NC in a very long time. Or maybe I don't notice. How I vote does not matter more than whether I vote. It's as meaningless as saying I don't want my country to be a police state, but that's like saying Dick and Jane ran down the hill. Nothing. Maybe this corporate police state is the karmic payback for the white and black people coming onto the continent uninvited, killing the entire continent of people living here, putting survivors in concentration camps called reservations for over a century. Whites came onto the continent shutting down the cultures and ways of life of a whole continent of people in the most violent way, killing. Americans have become the most murderous people on the planet, far and away the greatest prison population on the planet, and continually creating wars in poor countries. The wave of killing Indians from east coast to west coast kept on going and turned inward where land ended, the white and black populations killing themselves when killing Indians was over.

Our national karmic debt would have to be big. Wiping out an entire continent of people by killing them is no small thing. Now we kill each other. We've had one disastrous civil war and it feels like another is brewing. Evidently, it didn't matter karmically that White man had God on his side. We American white people and black people have been a deadly force against ourselves all along the way. Surely the American appetite for killing one another has its karmic root in the manner of collective takeover of the continent. Whatever the payback, it would have to cover the entire continent and be a mortal danger to ourselves. In this time we see our government turning on us as the enemy. We The People have become the Indians. Targets. Our guns can't save us, like their arrows failed to save them. The only reason I would choose to drop by the Whitehead schoolhouse on Tuesday the 6th would be a social gesture with the people I live among who still believe we have a democracy. I remember in Lillian Hellman's JULIA, early anti-fascists are never understood. So what's the point of attempting to be understood? I can't change anything but my own mind. No need to attempt to do otherwise.


*

WHITE MAN SPEAK WITH FORK-ED TONGUE

         franz kline, palladio

         

Skipped the "debate" last night. Preferred to visit with friends and watch Monday Night Football, anyway the first half. Chicago and Detroit slugged it out. It was a tight game that the score does not indicate. Score looks like Chicago walked all over Detroit, but it appeared to me a well balanced game of back and forth. It's like the so-called debates in that way. What the corporate press tells about polls, saying Obama and Romney are neck and neck in debate scores, when it looks to me Obama walked all over Romney in the "debates," convinces me further that the press is as corporate as Britney Spears. That they give Romney's evasion jibberish any attention at all, let alone take him seriously, is more ridiculous than I can believe. Romney, as usual, lies, accuses with false information, obstructs with interruptions and misleading statements, the Karl Rove way. I'm mostly alarmed that the corporate press takes Romney seriously at all. They talk about him after a "debate" like he "made points," and sparred favorably with Obama, a man who (oh no) reads, even writes books.

I've questioned the use of the word "debate" for a verbal boxing match. Used to think debate was about logic, accurate information, and a given order. The only given order I find in these television "debates" is the American order of interruption as form of conversation. That was the only order I saw to be called consistent, and the mandatory aggressive style required of an American politician. I'm Scott Brown; I drive a truck! Identifying himself a white man. He's there for the white vote, like Romney. Doesn't matter whether he makes good sense or not, he's running against a woman (bitch), like Romney is running against a black man (nigger), and his only selling point is his white maleness. All that matters is that he speak with fork-ed tongue to affirm whiteness.

The odd part of this election year is the indifference to substantive issues by the white man, even smoke-screen issues, indifference to what he says, indifference to lies on his website that have been pointed out over and over, indifference to good sense. He's running as White Man vs Black Man in a land where only about half the people are racist anymore, and less than half of them active racists. Romney's only issue: the alternative to the nigger. The only thing he has going for himself is white skin and snooty wealth the republicans have stuck to as the only issues, because he has nothing else to offer, but interruption and false accusation. He's doing it right. White man does not want to appear too intelligent. That's effete intellectualism, a curse in Nazi Germany, China, the Soviet Union (now Russia) and USA. The act of reading a book in America invites outsider status automatically.

White man acts like a frat jock with a venal arrogance toward the peasants, whatever their race. You might say he's a class-ist in that he is unapologetic about his agenda, all going to the rich, crumbs on the floor left for the peasantry. I laughed out loud sometime recently when he was making it the point that the (Reagan revolution) trickle-down theory of the economy doesn't work and never has worked. A republican stating unequivocally that Reagan was full of monkey feces and sent us on a downward spiral because the people who call the shots found it a convincing enough lie to keep the peasantry fooled at least until the concentration camps were ready to occupy. The camps are now ready, begun by the Bush administration, finished by the Obama administration. Even a republican running for president is saying the "trickle-down" theory never worked and never will work. It amounts to a funnel-up reality. Thirty-two years later, the peasantry is beginning to get it, though still can be persuaded back to believing it by propaganda any time necessary.


*

OBAMA v WANNABE

he done it

It's the day after the so-called debate with Obama and Romney. I was driving home from visiting friends who live a half hour away. I heard it on the radio driving home, laughing much of the time, every time Romney spoke. He is the greatest comedy on the airwaves these days. He makes Bill Maher seem brilliant when I really don't believe he is. I was heartened somewhat to see that Obama was up to the game this time. I'd heard one report of the first "debate" that Denver is a mile above sea level and Obama went there directly from sea level, the air so thin his mind was befuddled. It's the best explanation I've heard for his dazed semi-absence during that hour on the air. I'd imagined Karl Rove would send Romney in with a new strategy the second time besides interrupting and changing the subject, winding Obama up in his own words. Evidently Rove did not have a new strategy for a surprise attack, which I don't get. Like it worked once, it will work again. But it didn't work again this time. Obama and staff realized these debates are not about information. Aggressive style is the debate form, and this time Obama and staff were ready.

I listened to what they were saying while driving and, like I said, laughed much of the time, derisive laughter at republican buffoonery that has become so absurd since 1980 when Reagan strategists stole the election with Central American drug money from CIA drug sales, buying a deal with the Ayatollah in Iran to arrange hostage release after Reagan wins, and not at all if Carter wins. It was outrageous at the time, the same kind of outrageous as the republican supreme court decision to give the win to the loser in 2000 and next to re-define corporations as people. Rove is using these debates to make some advances for Romney by twisting up Obama's words and history with nonsense. Of course, Rove uses nonsense for the trump card, which works consistently. It's Rove's particular style, his signature. Last night Obama was ready for it and countered the nonsense. I'm recalling a moment where Romney meant to trip Obama up accusing him of his record, waited for Obama to react and Obama said something to the effect of, "Proceed, governor." That tripped Romney into gibberish, gobbledy-gook that people fall into on the air when they lose their script. I'm recalling Tom Brokaw ad-libbing during a San Francisco earthquake, "San Francisco is an isthmus in the Pacific island." I don't laugh at him, I laugh at the phenomenon that is consistent. I too would stumble all over my words unscripted on the air.

That was the corner Obama put Romney into, handing him an unscripted moment. Like: Live through this! That, for me, was the cleverest moment in their aggressive verbiage. I noticed Obama made the audience laugh a few times. Lawyers tell me that if you can make the courtroom laugh during a jury trial, you've got it in the bag. The audience laughter told me what I'd already guessed, that Obama was in control this time. I can't really go by what I assess of their back and forth verbiage, because news analysts and republicans say something happened that I never noticed. These "debates" are about snagging "swing voters," the ones not allied to one party or the other. The strategy for both parties is to use these television appearances on prime time to give the appearance of outwitting the other, a kind of verbal boxing match with referee. In American politics, aggression is the winning style. We get to listen to two politicians talk aggressively to each other to suggest to the audience they're in control. Daddy's home. It surely must gall the racist party to see Romney one-upped by the Kenyan-American on national tv. But I doubt they saw it that way.

It was a political experience I suspect everyone who heard it came out of the same as they went into it. Television noise, no dead air. A moment without noise on tv allows the viewer a moment to think, and somebody might think about turning it off. Once I turned it off in the car, I did not turn it back on in the house. I'd heard more than I wanted to hear. I just wanted to get a feel for the nature of their dance around the mental ring in an imitation boxing match. Right away I got it that Obama was trampling Romney, and continued to listen to hear him do it some more. Of course I prefer Obama, because I like having somebody for king of the world who has some intelligence. Obama, Clinton and Carter were the only presidents I've seen with intelligence I admired and felt good that the king of the world had a good mind for decision making. When we had Reagan we were saying this is the bottom for how ignorant a man can handle the white house. Then Bush2 showed us Reagan was not the bottom. Reagan's summing up of his administration at the end was: It could have been worse. W came along and proved him right. Romney is showing us W was not the bottom either. It can get worse. Karl Rove's purpose is to see to it.

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