MEDIA DENIES OCCUPY

       annette messager

          

Every day I hear the news and every day I mourn for the human condition. Assad in Syria slaughtering the defenseless Syrian population. Now the population is developing defences and beginning to make some offensive gestures. This is the end of Assad. He has turned his defenseless population on himself by forcing them to defend themselves by striking out at their oppressor. The corporate media in the USA is not allowing any news of the Occupy resistance on the news. Not even NPR, which, again, is not liberal. A tremendously huge number of people gather to protest our citizens' treatment as criminals by our corporate government. The only thing the Occupy movement is accomplishing is individuals involved getting themselves tagged as disobedient. Bad name to have in a police state. Baptists say God sends the disobedient to hell, and we all know corporate government sends the disobedient to jail. How does corporate government arrest so many? We'll soon find out. FEMA camps, hundreds of them around the country, completed, ready to go, are waiting for the 99%. So what if it costs more to keep the peasants in prison. In prison they're contained.

It makes me crazy to see how all races of working men and women in all forms of labor built the USA as a democratic ideal where white men are created equal. Then came the liberation of the black portion of the population, by law only, and the liberation of women, as long as they keep it to themselves, and then the Reagan Revolution rolling back to before these liberation movements when white men ruled absolutely. The Reagan republicans have been systematically undoing every benefit to the human condition that arose since the Depression. The supreme court is stacked in favor of the oppressors of the peasant class, the 99%. It may not be known before justice Roberts publishes his memoirs why he went against his corporate bosses to let something close to reasonable health care happen for the peasants, those loathsome no-neck, thick-fingered, gum-chewing fat-asses without position or status, without taste. I'm ashamed of the American government. I believe Uncle Sam is too. The republican party that represents greed and ignorance has passed now from passive contempt for the peasants to active contempt. Roberts broke rank. He'll pay dearly. Very dearly. He knew it before he made the decision.

Throughout my lifetime any progress toward the good of the peasantry has been beaten back by government, consistently, all along the way. A government for and by the people is completely stacked against the people manipulated into believing their vote decides a matter. When the vote doesn't go predictably with the propaganda, we are shown the voting is just a bunch of shit, by having the supreme court reverse the decision of the popular vote. Lesson learned: we oughta pay closer attention to the propaganda, be less disobedient. We're learning. We're systematically being taught the best thing to do is get over democracy and get comfortable with poverty and martial law. The Robber Banks have impoverished hundreds of thousands of middle class families by robbing all of them overnight. Their money just went away. Makes me suspicious of how well this accident was orchestrated. Right after 911 when propaganda had the whole country ready to kill Ay-rabs, the Patriot Act appeared, a thousand+ page book, already written, already published, already in boxes to be delivered on cue, an emergency that needed to be passed before anyone had a chance to look at it. It was ready to go, waiting for Emergency 911 to kick it off. I wonder how they knew in advance, since it was towel-heads in a cave half way around the world that brought the towers down with cell phones.

Won't it be interesting in history courses of the future, studying the rise and fall of the very brief American Empire. War after war, subduing the poor, killing the defenseless, not even counting the dead. This is what our tax dollars do. Our government is such as to embarrass any person who has any sort of ethical foundation. The people appearing for the Occupy protests are expressions of that embarrassment. Michael Moore is an expression of that embarrassment. The anesthetized populace, happy on prozac, zoloft and a cornucopia of happiness pills, watches the news one night and it has no relation to the news of the night before or the night before that. It's about something new every night. That's why it's called the news. Can't keep up with all of it. It's right to be patriotic. Never question. Never doubt. America number one. Keep your foot on the throttle and your eye on the prize. Go in debt for more junk. It turns out the Bank is our enemy, and has been all along, but what can we do about it? Agree and go on. Our government has turned against us and what can we do about it? We assemble in embarrassingly large numbers and corporate government won't allow news coverage by the corporate press, NPR included. Obama is not in his chair to serve us. What a laugh to even imagine that he might be. He's serving a very few cell phone numbers he has memorized, each with its own ring. And they're not calling from caves in Afghanistan.


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GUNZ

     james rosenquist

Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine has just now ended. I come away from his films in awe every time, in awe that he speaks for me and the other people who have no say. I don't care what the spin from the blockhead arena had to say about Moore. I don't care if he's had a drink or played cards one day in his life. In the time since the Supremes made it clear to us at the turn of the century that we have no more democracy, and the Bush administration set police state in motion, Michael Moore was the only voice speaking for we the people. He was discredited and given the corporate assassination of character treatment, which actually worked very well, briefly. The fiction created to discredit Moore didn't silence him, though it turned a lot of people away, the ones that didn't understand Moore anyway. It shut down the influence the film Sick-O might have had on health care legislation. It was legal assassination. No cadaver. But Moore charges on and I'm grateful to him for his will power. His audience is his own. It is not a "television audience."



He has a website http://www.michaelmoore.com/ where you can see what he's up to today. The thread that ran through Bowling for Columbine was the search by asking several people what it is that makes Americans so free to kill, when in Canada with the same gun ownership freedoms, Canadians choose not to kill. Charlton Heston answered the question with the most educated answer I heard in the film, "American history has a lot of blood on its hands." I have to say I was not with Moore humiliating Charlton Heston in his own home. He was graciously allowed to intrude and was treated very well. My political regard for Heston is opposition. But I still believe it's important to respect him as a man in his own home. Moore has his own dose of American arrogance. I don't know what it would take for me to disrespect a man as Moore did Heston, and filming it, putting it in an Academy Award winning documentary. I can see Moore's revenge thinking, which perhaps overrode his own hesitations where respect was concerned. Maybe the disrespect was his active expression of absence of respect. That's sure how it came across. I still regard Moore a very important influence in the first decade of the 21st century. He did his part.



That karma Heston referenced, blood on our hands, the karma in American History, applies to what the white people did to the Indians from coast to coast, to the black people coast to coast. American foreign policy amounts to overthrowing democracies in third world countries and putting a dictator in charge. It's about money; the canal, United Fruit Co, oil and coca cola, cheap labor. Let alone the serious crimes against nature, like the slaughter of the buffalo to starve the Indians and kill their culture, the concentration camps Indians live in unto this day called reservations. Like calling torture rendition. The people that live in the West around Indians have at least as much racial prejudice toward the Indians as the white people in the South have toward black people, and point the finger at the South for racism. But the people that don't like Indians are ok, because Indians don't even figure for liberals. I pray: May all the Indian reservations have successful casinos where the white people come from all around to give them money. Something else for the file, Theater of the Absurd in Everyday Life.



One karmic pattern I see is the contempt for the poor. As the world's monopoly super power, we have the longest war of our history each time we attack (pre-emptive strike) a defenseless poor country of colored people to take whatever natural resource we want, now oil. What's the point of having power unless you use it. The passion for killing has been an American monopoly since the beginning. The genocide was not just with the Indians, but the natural world of animals and birds as well. The Carolina parakeet went extinct right away because of its colorful plumage, easy to get a bead on, good target practice. America was settled in the belief of self as holy. There was plenty of God religion on Sunday morning, but the rest of the week was about self and money only. The Indians that kept the continent for a few thousand years with clean water and abundant resources lived their association with God every minute. They saw themselves part of God's creation living in God's creation. They were happy with the abundance. Then along came Western Civilization and made a gaping wound of an entire continent in two centuries--want creating want.



As in one individual's inner development, so it goes with the whole. The difference I see between USA and Canada where murder rates with guns are concerned, tells me the issue is not guns, but belief systems, attitudes. I don't believe it's violent movies, either. I heard someone tell a statistic on NPR I believed; on weekends when a big Arnold or Rambo type movie is released, crime rate drops in the cities where the film is showing. It suggests to me sublimation. If these films do sublimate feelings the people that see them are feeling, it tells me a great deal of anger pervades the land. These films sublimate all around the world. They play to the working class male audience. There is, indeed, a great deal of anger running through the working class, expressed best in heavy metal rock. I see teenagers with anger in their eyes, anger due to home situations, wearing death-metal, hard-core tshirts with skulls the primary image. Bob Dylan expressed the anger in the middle-class audience in a non-violent way. Same anger, different expression.



Looking at these films as collective dreams, then analyzing them like dreams, it tells quite a lot about our collective belief systems. Again, like everything else, it cannot be regarded an absolute for all. Some people like action movies overdone with killing. Some people like no killing at tall. Some people like mildly comic relationship stories. We have a seemingly limitless variety of kinds of movies for the seemingly endless range of human interest. Not everybody in America is seething with anger. But an awful lot are. We see them among the people we know. In the land of if-it-feels-good-do-it, acting out anger lethally onto others, most often family, feels good unrestrained by foresight, the American blind spot, until consequences come next.



So many times judges have heard, If I'd a-thought about it before I pulled the trigger, I wouldn' a-done it. If our murder rate by guns is a social consequence of absence of foresight, acting without thinking, the dumbing down of America has brought us to the self-destruction that follows decisions made in ignorance. Instead of looking to see what's behind the anger that has become the prevailing American attitude, hand-in-hand with arrogance, over the last half century, we build more prisons. Next, we'll have to keep the crime rate up to justify the prisons. An economic self-sustaining eco-system. Crime up, jobs up. Sounds great on the evening news.

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RULED BY HYPOCRISY AND LIES

     bullhead from air bellows



As I hear people talk on the radio, journalists largely, and as I talk with friends about what we see taking place in the world we live in, I hear much talk about how it's not government, it's not this, it's not that, it's everything going at once. We've become internationally interdependent through the corporations using cheap labor in Asia, Africa, the poor places where people will work for next to nothing. This, of course, brings our standard of living down, because American jobs have been "out sourced," to sweatshop labor in the poorest parts of the world. What's puzzling me is how it appears everything is crumbling at once, everywhere. I can't help but think of the end of a casino game when it's time to pay up. Credit, hypocrisy and lies have been the order for so very long that the world hypocrisy and lies created is, essentially, a house of cards. It's like the wind blew and the house of cards is falling. I talk with friends and the view from conservative and liberal is that hypocrisy and lies characterize our so-called representative government. Our representatives represent the ruling class, and that's it. They do not represent nor do they recognize the working class.



The Wall Street demonstrations are interesting, but I've seen in the past the corporate power of the press belittle and demonize the demonstrators, ridicule them powerless, infiltrate and arrest. I've heard speculation that these demonstrations, if they continue to grow, could become a political force. Like the demonstrators in the 60s/70s, they're naive, spontaneous, unorganized and easy to manipulate. Like the Indians, whose manner of warfare was individual, unorganized and spontaneous. The organized Army succeeded because the Indians were entirely unorganized. The corporate press and corporate control isn't going to back down from a bunch of completely unorganized non-rich people. They also control the military. They have the concentration camps waiting. Army might not open fire on Tea party activists, but they sure as hell will on Wall St demonstrators. This weekend on one of the comedy weekend shows like Whadayaknow?, somebody young was talking about the demonstrators, what the people were like, what they were about. Somebody my generation said to him for a moment of levity, "They shot us." Laughter of recognition from the audience.



One of the best demonstrations I've known of was the one documented in Michael Moore's FAHRENHEIT 911, the inauguration parade in DC after the Bush Administration coup by judicial fiat. That's the only place I've seen or heard of the demonstrations that day. The people all along the parade route were hostile. Corporate press didn't do much of a job of covering it. Like corporate press ignored the Wall St demonstrations as long as they could. I thank God for Michael Moore. He has put himself out there for character assassination and the very likely possibility of a hit by a "lone gunman," as happens in America. Johnson told the press what to report before the 1968 Vietnam demonstration, and they printed it as he directed. What the corporate press reported had nothing to do with what happened that day. And thank God for Norman Mailer writing THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT where he told what happened at the press conference. He was there. He was independent of the corporate behemoth, even had his own power.



Whatever is happening, a big change is occurring. It's kind of like everybody's hand in a poker game is called at once. Time to pay up. We're in this crazy time of prozac and zoloft and viagra, crystal meth, etc, and our humor is all canned now through television. I've been seeing videos by a French guy, Remi Gaillard, who does something off the wall in public with a video camera watching, a surprise moment that is actually funny. Like doing gymnastics on the overhead rings for passengers to hang onto in the subway. He might snatch something out of somebody's hand and run off with it. It's zany, silly, goofball, everything he does. In one of his videos, Shark Attack, he put on a furry shark outfit like a clown and ran up to a guy fishing and sprayed him with shaving cream. He ran to somebody else standing nearby, squirted shaving cream on him. He ran and the man ran after him.



I've been fascinated by a trend that's been going on quite awhile in the big cities of the world, some people of an artistic mind create public events absolutely devoid of meaning, absurd moments in public for the entertainment of whoever happens to be there at the time. Sometimes they get arrested. A bunch in New York called Improv Everywhere. You can see them on YouTube too. In one, they put somebody dressed like a jockey into a merry go round situation, where he rode one of the horses pretending to be riding in a race. A couple guys had set up a temporary sports announcer spot where two guys called the race on the merry go round. The kids on it and the parents were laughing over what had become of their ride on the merry go round. At the end, they declared the little boy riding the rabbit the winner of the race, gave him roses and a trophy. The kid didn't know what was going on, but recognized it was nutty and fun, and he went with it, played his part.



There is Philippe Petit who stretched a cable between the world trade center towers and walked back and forth on it. He also did impromptu events by surprise in cities. He'd dress in black with a tophat like a mime, and ride a unicycle, especially good for a quick getaway from cops. I saw him once in NY walking around the lip of a fountain in robotic style, a smooth flow, unreal balance. He's as comfortable on a thin line as I am on the ground. I didn't know that was Petit I saw at the fountain until I read in his book MAN ON WIRE that he did things like that in NY. He was arrested regularly. Photographs of him in that time tell me it was him. He puts on a moment of street theater to lift the spirits of a random selection of people by surprise.



I can't help but put the two together, that "the end of the world as we know it" is here, a time when the absurd has meaning. It's like Yeats said at the beginning of his poem, The Second Coming,

     Turning and turning in the widening gyre
     The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
     Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
     Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world;
     The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
     The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
     The best lack all conviction, while the worst
     Are full of passionate intensity.



I like the comedy of people like Remi Gaillard and Charlie Todd of Improv Everywhere. We have so little public art in our cities and towns and so little access to art, and we carry so much time-sensitive matter in our heads it makes us numb to whatever art we might see. Out in the world of other people and suddenly, out of nowhere, a bunch of people start singing and get the attention of all around, a performance, and then it's over. No admission fee. A moment all that witness it will never forget, like I never forgot the Philippe Petit moment. I'm glad civilization has reached a place where we have people who do these things. It had to get so bad we needed comic relief, so I can't say I'm completely glad. But it's the nature of how things are. Like it's cold in winter and warm in summer. I'm grateful to these people with that turn of mind to think up these clever things to do and set them in motion. We don't have street theater in the modern world. Against the law, I suppose. But we have these guerilla street theater artists and we have YouTube at the same time. It's not all bad.



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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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