A GRAIN OF SAND FROM THE BEACH

andy warhol

Yesterday I had lunch with a dozen friends for our monthly BROC meeting. We put on the Hillbilly Show once a year and use ticket sales to help people in the county needing assistance. Every month we pay several electric and fuel bills for people who need a hand to avoid cut-off. None of the money is skimmed off for any reason. We pay for our own lunches. In one way of looking at us, we're people who believe in doing our part to assist people around us who need an assist. It's another form of volunteer Rescue Squad and volunteer firemen. They take care of immediate needs physically, we take care of immediate needs of the mind and spirit, preventing physical need. People living on the edge have to humble themselves way down to go to an office and ask for help. In every case they're grateful for the help that eases worries immensely. Some pass it on later, which seems to be a natural impulse in us humans. 

andy warhol

I had a time so down and out I had to call upon humility to go to the Food Closet and ask for groceries. No questions, sign here. I drove home with enough food for a week, all I needed. Back in motion, a little bit ahead, I gave them a donation to cover the value of the food four times. I had to do it, not even a consideration to question the need. I feel like what we do in our group is further generous behavior by setting it in motion. As one gesture inspires another, and those gestures inspire others, it spreads over time. Maybe very little, maybe a lot, maybe everything in between. It doesn't matter how many, or if one gesture is the end. The gesture itself is what matters. If it inspires others, all to the good. If it does not inspire others, all to the good. I believe it from having seen it so much in self and others that one gesture of generosity creates another. It's the same the other way. Beat down a kid without recourse and the kid will go and, for example, beat down a dog without recourse. Both motivations go on everywhere all the time. I prefer for myself to spread generosity rather than anger. The people in our group are similarly minded without thinking of it in these words, each with his/her own thoughts and motivations. 

andy warhol

I was sitting at the table facing Jack and Linda Joines, two people it warms my heart to think about. The same can be said of everyone at the two tables we occupied at The Pines. Our meetings consist of ordering our meals, having our meeting while the kitchen prepares the food, eating and talking when the meeting is over. While we were eating, I spoke to Jack, asked him if he had yet entered the zone in life where everything is weird. We're the same age. He came to life, animated. It took him home. Lord, yes. He said everything is so weird he doesn't know what to make of it. Linda said a lot of people are talking about how weird things are now. She, too, was seeing it. I ran it by Jack to see if it was something I was feeling or if somebody else had noticed. I felt about Jack that he might feel it. He did. We talked about it a bit, not a whole lot, there isn't much to say. It's so complex and so inter-woven, it would take hours to make a list of the weirdness we see. We make a list, then what? It's so overwhelming that to fix any one item would be the same as picking up a grain of sand from the beach. It doesn't change the beach at all. 

andy warhol

I'm not quite sure what I mean by weird, except what makes sense fails to apply anymore. I see it in an attitude among the people I see. I don't see many, but the ones I see are representative of the ones I don't see, a pie slice. All are tapped into the same source for input. I don't have the fear generated by propaganda through the tv and a headful of misinformation, which I have plenty of, even without getting it directly from tv. I've a feeling the misinformation the CIA has fed us through television at least the last half century has brought us to a place "when everything the American people believe is false." This quote of CIA's stated goal, spoken verbally by then CIA director, Wm Casey, appointed Reaganista, who said, "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American people believe is false." Thus Fake News and corporate media. My sense of what I feel is weird about this time we're in is we're approaching the completion of the disinformation program, if not already there. Our corporate government is about deceiving us, from Fed to State to County. It has come out this week that Exxon is on record knowing about man-made global warming since 1981, and funded political denial ever since. It's so believable, it feels like I knew it without knowing it. I have to live, without recourse, in the reality corporate government has created by way of deception. I'll stay home and let the Highway Patrol meet their quotas giving tickets to other people. Another grain of sand on the beach.
   

andy warhol himself

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COLONIAL DEMOCRACY

         by Tanigami Konan  (1879-1928)                                   

        TAO TE CHING

     # 24

He who stands on tiptoe

doesn't stand firm.

He who rushes ahead

doesn't go far.

He who tries to shine

dims his own light.

He who defines himself

can't know who he really is.

He who has power over others

can't empower himself.

He who clings to his work

will create nothing that endures.

If you want to accord with the Tao,

just do your job, then let go.

            ---tr by Stephen Mitchell

Enjoying documentary films from netflix more and more. Documentary became a genre that has been expanding its horizons over the last several years. Now that corporate newspapers don't have investigative reporting anymore, independent directors are making documentaries investigating a variety of subjects important to our time. Quite a lot of documentaries concerning the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. They are all interesting. It seems like movies where the people are not scripted, where what happens is happening out here in the world, not on stage or film. Of course, there is Michael Moore who has had his character assassinated by the corporate republicans, because he asks hard questions. He makes fascists uncomfortable, gives them press that scares them, like exposing what goes in and out the back door. 

I've seen several documentaries concerning 9/11, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 among the more interesting ones. It's the one that cracked the shell erected around the truth of the matter. Of course, that makes him a conspiracy theorist. In a documentary viewed today on Exxon, called Out Of Balance, the president and CEO of Exxon, Rex Tillerson, said, "Scientific certainty is an oxymoron." Wow. Sounds like Newt Gingrich, or Alleghany county commissioner Gudrow. The point of science is certainty. This is why every discovery has to pass the test so many times until it's consistent. Only then is it accepted fact. Theory is only the second level of conjecture (looks like, smells like, tastes like, must be), merely a question yet to be tested. I couldn't help but think when the CEO spoke party line for truth that oxymoron explains better Exxon commercials. 

Corporate contrarianism has become the rule now that the multi-national corporations have bought our government. In this time when our government only tells lies to we the people, we can count on any information coming out of government being false. That's the only thing we can count on. Another rule of thumb that can be counted on is money makes all decisions in our government. In the year 2000 the Supreme Court let everyone across the breadth and depth of the USA in on the theretofore big top-secret: democracy is dead, we don't do that any more. I hear talk on the news over Lybia and setting up democracy. A corporate police state setting up democracies in African countries doesn't compute. Like colonial missionaries: You have oil, we want it. We kill you and call it making the world safe for democracy.

I saw a cartoon this week by political cartoonist Patrick Chappette of Hilary standing at a Dept of State podium, old glory behind her, saying, "We support the struggle of the people...against the regimes we supported." American history doesn't make sense any more. Grown up, I've become so jaded by our government I have to go to independent documentaries of investigative reporting to find what is hidden by the smokescreen we're told. Like Michael Moore, these investigative reporters by video get their characters assassinated, legal assassination, and they pay the price.

Investigative documentaries such as The Big Buy: Tom DeLay's Stolen Congress, uncovered corruption in Congress of Babylonian proportion. It was good to have him removed. But are they going to undo any of the legislation against the poor and children? No. History reading in school never prepared me for a time when our government would be overwhelmed by contemptible people, low-life, disgusting people like Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, John Ashcroft, and a long list of others. Ronnie Earle, the prosecutor in Texas who took DeLay down, stressed the point in his interviews, "the love of money really is the root of all evil." He also said, "Money is the mother's milk of politics. Money is the devil's brew." That about sums up the American government and the American dream. In the land where money is the only value, we the people amount to nothing but problems to be dealt with by deception.

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