POWER IN THE NAME

the road ahead

 

A lifetime of habit patterns around looking back on Dec 31 at the year gone by, I woke this morning thinking about what has come to me in the year and what has gone away. I don't remember a time I did not think New Year's Eve anything but another night before another day. Every day is New Year's day. It's like naming a dog. I feel like dog is best without a name, a name being something imposed on dog from outside by the human mind. Yet I don't know if the animals have names for each other. They're not telling. I've seen a gathering of about twenty raccoons in a picture taken by trail camera. I imagine they all knew each other, an extended family. Crows live in extended families unto tribes. They know each other as people in a small community. Surely they know one another by position in the hierarchy, by relationship, and subtleties humans don't see. I'd guess Mama has a crow equivalent. Brother, sister, seems like these relationships being known, they would have an identifying sound or thought for each one. I find behavior in the animal and bird world similar to ours, as it would be, considering evolution.

 

 

 

I've no problem with the word evolution. First, I'm not selling anything and am not a missionary for any agenda. People who have an issue with the word, evolution, don't read. There's the long and the short of it. Somebody who doesn't like a word I use can either tell me about it or not. I've seen contention over word usage all my life. In childhood, black people were known to white people only by nigger and colored, sometimes darkie. Of course, it's all demeaning, coming from a subconscious belief among white people that we're superior in every way, therefore privileged. In the late Fifties, a cry went up for white people to call black people Negroes, while Negroes went on calling each other nigger unto this day. But it's not ok to say it and be white. A white man is outright forbidden to refer to a woman a bitch or a cunt. It's totally ok for women to call men assholes or dicks in coffee shops, in print, on tv and radio.

 

 

Somebody black calls me a white motherfucker and it's ok, but not ok for me to call him a motherfucking nigger. For myself, I approach it with understanding that white man is, historically and present tense, the oppressor of black people, women, etc. White man has traditionally been the privileged demographic. That there are no restrictions on names minorities and women can call white men tells me political correctness is aimed at the white man, to bring white man under control. It's ok because arrogant white man believes himself superior from birth onward, thereby goes along oblivious to names he's called. White man is on a fast downhill run in this time on greased skis and he knows it. White man mind, not all white men, but the mind, has come together in one political party that represents half the population. We have devolved politically, from 1980 unto this year soon completed, 2015, to the clown bus of a dozen white man pretend candidates with a token black man and a token woman spewing white man unreason, strategically appealing to ignorance in the American people with the propaganda of fascism.

 

 

The shocking part is how well it works. The most cynical minds of all thought up this strategy and set it in motion. The republican party today is an illustration of the white male belief system, a branch of the patriarchal belief system, crumbling before our eyes, reduced to denying reason, intelligence, knowledge to maintain power. We're learning upfront that democracy has become a threat to white man. We've already learned through Southern history the white man will happily throw off democracy to hang onto power. I have stopped paying attention to anything to do with the clown bus. They've taught me what they're about, which is of no interest. Curiously, Trump has turned out to be the trump card in the political/media bridge game going on. Throughout my life I have attempted to understand people not me, from foreigners to everyone I know. I am my own political correctness cop open to understanding others the best I'm able, receiving every individual in my life as he or she is within themselves. Another way of saying I go in peace. I don't use any of the disrespectful names, except for the humor of irony with close friends who understand where I'm coming from. Like you. And this comes from a basic ethic to regard others with respect if I want respect in turn. Respect boomerangs. Disrespect boomerangs. It's my choice in every moment of every day. Happy New Year.

 

 

photos by tj worthington

 

 

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LESS COFFEE, MORE TEA

 

cy twombly

Ran into my only pet peeve I do not tolerate a second time. Years ago I was talking with someone who asked me a question. I started answering and he walked away. First time it ever happened to me. Hadn't been in Sparta long by then. Next time it happened, I said I'll give a second chance. Next time around same character, same thing. That day I learned they do it once, they do it a second and third time. After that one, nobody gets a second chance. Somebody talking with me of their own volition, and while I'm speaking walks away, no second chance. I do not tolerate it. It's about the only thing I can think of, besides an assault, that I don't tolerate. It happened today. I've learned it is a certain kind of person that does it, and I don't want such people in my life. At all. I've been in the mountains too long to pass off in-your-face disrespect. Disrespect gets my hillbilly back up. And I can't find any reasons for it not to. It's a matter of boundaries, personal boundaries. You disrespect me, I disrespect you. It tells me the one who does it has no respect for me, so I withdraw my respect for such individual. And I don't mean big-deal respect, but the basic human respect of presence. And when I withdraw my respect, nothing fills the void, like pulling your hand out of a bucket of water, no trace left that a hand had ever been there.

 

cy twombly

 

I went to meet somebody at the coffee shop at lunch time. I don't like going in there anymore, feel alien. When Selma had it, the air was friendly, lively, awake, fun. She passed it on to somebody who sapped the friendly, lively, awake, fun out of the place in one sweep. First thing, it was made undeniably clear to all the local people who went in there, the people I went in there to visit with, they were no longer welcome. I asked one why he never went there anymore. "She doesn't like me." Asked another, "She doesn't like me." Come in the door from Roaring Gap or High Meadows country clubs and the service is close and personal, like in the movies, doesn't get better. Just a little bit of classism going on under the pretense of liberal. I'd told Selma in the beginning, when the right people found the place, I was gone. Because she was Cuban, the right people stayed away. With present management, all the wrong people have been run off, and I see nothing in there anymore but the right people.

 

cy twombly

 

I walk the political correctness coffee house line, don't say words like nigger, fuck and shit, much, obey disapproval to everyone's heart content but my own. Disapproval in a coffee shop is worse than disapproval in church. Disapproval is the reason I stay out of church. The pretend liberal is such that it makes me not want to call myself liberal anymore. All I see liberal means in the decades of political correctness is membership in the club of the cool people quick to disapprove of words forbidden on tv. Not my set. In this time of the life, I don't have time for, or interest in, self-editing to tippie-toe around somebody's, anybody's PC disapproval. Told they don't approve of something said, I'm awfully inclined to say something like, I don't give a shit. You don't approve of it, you don't say it. I'm not responsible to your approval. Pisses them off. A time in the coffee shop I mentioned I like to watch the race and caught a smarty-pants classist remark, "That's just cars running around in a circle!" I replied, "Yes, in the most minimal way you can look at it." In French it would be her bourgeois nose shot straight up and she was out the door. I laughed on the inside until I about cried, and on the outside pretended not to notice.  

 

cy twombly

 

I have fallen into a pattern there. I take a seat at the bar, pick up the paper and occupy self with something while I wait for anyone who works there to notice somebody came in the door, and sat down. They're too busy to notice. Walk by and don't look, back and forth. Eventually someone notices. I get the coffee. Want to speak to one, forget it. And if permitted a moment of wasted time, it's with an attitude, I don't have time for this (bleep). It feels like in a state or federal government office. At any time I want the attention of anyone working there, I have to arrest their attention, make them look up annoyed, what do you want? I tell myself it's the New Sparta, get used to it, get over it or get out of it. I've got used to it, got over it, am on my way out of it. I want to do my part to support the shop, as I believe Sparta benefits with such a place, but since my friends have been run off, and I'm a working class redneck too, why am I the privileged acceptable one? Today they were mocking and laughing about an old local boy, someone I respect so high up I'd stand up  for him before anybody. I withdrew my attention, thinking, I really don't belong in this place.

 

cy twombly himself

 

 

 

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PRETEND AND THE EGO

Something is changing on the inside again. My painting has changed radically in the snap of a finger. Haven't painted in a couple years. The zeal just fell away. Every time I take a break for a few years, which always occurs from boredom doing the same thing over and over, I take up painting in an altogether different manner from before. I've made a leap from figurative to abstract, minimalist. I decided to put out of my mind all thought of selling, thoughts of naming. I wanted to find my own aesthetic without regard for what might sell. I took the punk path. I want to express my own aesthetic. To express it, I needed to find it. I wanted to make something totally mine, according to my own visual aesthetic, without regard for anyone else liking it or not liking it. Minimalism is my favorite period of the Modern era, abstract expressionism too. My art aesthetic is particularly American. Now that I have found my own sense of self-expression that is for myself alone with no ambition to sell, it quite naturally falls into the minimal and the abstract. Something like the place Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly fell in between the two. Each one of the new pieces I find I love more than anything I've done before. There was a time I wanted to do figurative and loved it while doing it, but they didn't quite satisfy what I really wanted to do, abstraction of some sort. I'd thought about selling things before, making them accessible to the people I live among, considering my environment is not urban, but rural, where individuals matter. I wanted to make portraits of individuals, particular individuals, people I know. I only painted people I know. 

7

Now, I don't want to spend so much time painting details. I prepare the surface, then slather on the paint like stucco, one color with palette knife. I like it. It pleases what I want of a work of art. I've actually adopted the punk sensibility into my painting. Punk is doing what you want to do that is your own individual expression, explaining the varieties of hair colors and styles of apparel on punkers. Punk's philosophy is be who you are. Punk as a style has been going on forty years. It was 1975 that I heard my first punk album, Patti Smith's Horses. The show I saw in Charlotte around a month ago of five hard core punk bands lit up my love for punk rock, punk attitude. I've come into a place where I only want to be around people I connect with. I saw a film this afternoon, a documentary about punk graffiti artists who evolved into galleries and museums. It was called Beautiful Losers. Punk attitude ran through everybody featured in the film. I felt I connected with the different artists, with what they were doing. I felt aesthetically free. I loved my new direction with paint all the more. In a way, they were doing what I am doing, just totally different. Also in this time, I'm finding less tolerance for the fake and don't care to be around fake people anymore. What do I mean by fake people? The climbers, the people who see themselves in terms of the asset hierarchy, people whose center is in money and the appearance of money, fickle, people whose identity is in appearance. People a good first impression is important to. They're always disappointments later. They make a pretty package, but when you look inside, it's empty. 

It feels like I'm shifting gears again, turning away from some and towards others. I am letting go of the people I am expected to be cool around. Gotta act cool. Talk cool. Be acceptable. Conform to the social standard of appearance. When Vada is in my life, I don't need somebody around who keeps track of my cool quotient. With Crystal and Justin, I don't have to perform. With other friends, Melvin, Harry, Ross and Zack, Lynn, Carole, Donna, Milly, there is no judgment going on. We all receive each other as we are, dark side with the light side. I'm moving away from people I cannot talk freely with, people I feel the need to self-edit for. Five years of writing these almost-daily journal entries brought me into closer touch with self, better understanding. The writing has become a meditation. I speak freely here, considering whoever looks at it is free to read it or not to read it. When somebody doesn't like what I write, they're free to stop. I've begun to feel that way around others. They're free to pay me no mind. And I'm free to get up and go. It has not always been like this. There was a time I believed it was necessary to make a good impression, conform to the code. Always in uncertainty. Am I cool enough? Am I dressed right? Yesterday's experience with a positive thinking tron showed me the difference between how I am now and used to be in the not very distant past. Then, I'd have tried to show I think positive too, that I'm really a nice guy, know not to say taboo words, a sensitive New Age guy. Now, I am overtaken by an itch to get out of there, away. Instead of unsuccessfully attempting to rescue a dead conversation of niceties that went nowhere, I let it go and ran. By now I've learned that when a song starts out bad, it's not going to get better. 

I feel freer talking with people I don't know than ever before, even freer talking with people I know. Something else that changed recently is tolerance for the fake, for PC. I'm free now when the fake comes up to say to self, I don't need this, and get out of it. I'll stay away from the coffee shop, the vortex of white middle-class pretend. Any way I look at it, there is not a lot of time ahead for this lifetime. I am more jealous of my time than ever before. I don't have time for pretend. Balance is what I'm seeking now. The balance of opposites in duality. Looking at balance, the bad balances the good. Good is not the spiritual path. The good must be balanced by the bad. Acting sweet all the time is not spiritual. Being nice all the time is not spiritual. I'll define what I mean by good and bad. We call it good behavior when the karmic return is to our liking. We call it bad when the return is not to our liking. Pretending to act without ego motivation just backs the ego up like a lake behind a dam, makes it into a powerful force. I am not free of ego, nor was meant to be. I feel like, for balance, it's best to let the ego have its way, its say, in moderation, controlled, not suppressed. Diminishing the ego is the Master's role, not mine. Mine is to live with it, work with it, not against it. Meher Baba said our ego is our ballast, the rocks kept in the bottom of sailing ships for weight to keep the ships upright. The ego keeps us upright in this world of duality where every kind of challenge awaits us, emotional storms, uncontrollable storms bigger than us that come by surprise. I'm zooming in on the shift I'm feeling within having to do with ego. I've been feeling strong ego need for expression over the last few weeks. I don't try to stop it or slow it down. I let it flow, while paying attention, directing it to something constructive or creative if I'm able. I like to get to know my ego. My goal is to mindfully direct the ego rather than let the ego direct me. 

photos by tj worthington

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DRAWN TO BALANCE

robert mangold

Today I participated  in the great American delusion. Voted. And laughed at myself. I only did it because the republican strategy to inhibit voting by non-republicans tells me there must be something to it or it would not be so important to republican strategists for me not to vote. Politically, I am an anti-republican, not a democrat. The only politician in DC I have any use for is Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont, Socialist. He is the only one who speaks for the American people. The democrats suck up to the rich just like the republicans and support the rich for their favors. I can't afford to call a politician and say I want certain legislation passed and you'll have your reward. I cannot afford freedom of speech. I felt like the local elections were somewhat important. Democracy works somewhat on the local level. I vote to vote against republicans. Only. Just to register one unit saying no to the politics of ignorance. My mind returns over and over to CIA director Casey saying in 1981, "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American people believe is false." The CIA's disinformation program is complete. This makes it easier every day for me to live in the world, not of the world. In town today I stopped in the coffee shop for a pound of coffee, saw someone I was happy to see and we engaged briefly in conversation. It wasn't long before I learned I'm expected to talk as if I'm high on Zoloft, everything is pretty, everything is lovely, PC to the max. I encouraged the end of the conversation first chance. I found my spirit is gone from the place. There's no place for me in there anymore. The right people have found it. It's too PC for me. 

robert mangold

I'd rather watch the race with my friends who cuss and drink liquor and smoke cigarettes and laugh at Rodney Carrington humor. After half an hour in the coffee shop, I'm anxious to get with friends for the race Sunday to wipe off exposure to political correctness in its most objectionable form. PC is so incredibly fake I've become intolerant of it. It has been so many months since I've exposed myself to the politically correct ones, the ones who say all the right words, and if you miss one, you're out. They're acting like they're on tv, editing themselves of words not acceptable on television. I take my mental remote and click the power button to off. I'm on the verge of becoming assertive ignoring PC in my language. It's like everybody is a preacher's wife. I used to find them funny, but now I find them severely tiresome. I suppose I'll have to let my taste for Ethiopian coffee fade away. I always have to settle for Kenyan, anyway. Kenyan is just as good, but I prefer Ethiopian. Can I get it? No. I don't like the vibe in there now. It's a vibe of correctness. You have to dress right, talk right, like in a Sunday school class. If political correctness is evidence of being a liberal, I'm not a liberal. They make me ashamed to call myself a liberal. I don't want to be in that company anymore. My friends and I don't judge each other. It's not easy to be in an atmosphere where I'm judged for how I speak. I attempt to speak clearly, but that's not good enough. I don't walk the PC tightrope; therefore, I'm out. I may check one of the other two coffee shops in town to see if I can get some Ethiopian coffee for home. 

robert mangold

The grocery store has some Starbucks coffee in bags, though Sumatran is the closest I can find to what I want. French Roast I've found fairly close. Maybe I'll go back to drinking tea like I did before discovering Ethiopian. Coffee shops are a middle class culture thing, and I am not of middle class culture. If I'm going to give myself over to walking somebody else's line, I'll go to church. It was a strange experience today. I went by Gill's Jeans n Things for a couple pair of sweat pants. Gill and I talked for at least an hour. I enjoy conversation with Gill. He is an intelligent guy with a great range of experience from India to Hong Kong to San Francisco to Sparta. He came here about five years before I did. Married a local girl who was in San Francisco and she brought him home. Gill has been a great addition to the community. We had lively conversation, no judging going on between us. It was especially notable to cross the street after talking so freely with Gill for an hour and feel judged the moment I walk in the door. The atmosphere is so correct. Attempted to talk with someone I'd wanted to talk with for some time, and came away disappointed. PC to the max. Beyond word correctness unto tone of voice correctness, to subject correctness, the list grows longer. I catch myself wanting to say something outrageous like, I'm the lowest down emeffer you'll ever meet. Not my scene when I'm thinking such thoughts. I want to stand up and rap all the forbidden words multiple times apiece. From there, I went to the voting place and made my anti-republican stand. I felt like a subversive at the voting monitor. After filling car with gas, I spent some time not being judged, then spent some time being judged, and went to vote in a state of balance. 

robert mangold

I'm at a time in the life when patience for television mind is dim. I find myself withdrawing from people who live by a checklist of rules and turning my attention to people who are simply themselves with no pretense of being something they're not, just people living our lives. I was overwhelmed somewhat by positive mindlessness. So positive. I was sitting there thinking, balance is what I want, not sweetness and not gloom. I want to be free to flow with positive thinking when I feel it honestly, and go with gloom when I feel it honestly. I'm not afraid of gloom and depression. I've found my times of depression in the past have been very active in learning about self, fulfilling know thyself. I've found that grief lasts six months. It's painful and I don't like it, but I also don't mind it. When a friend dies or a cat dies or a dog dies, I experience grief. I don't shy from it. I embrace it and go with it. I feel it honestly, so I allow it. I never deny it. I still miss Tar Baby every day, five years after. I hope there is something to meeting departed loved ones on the other side. I want to see all my dogs and cats again, and all my friends on the other side. I have so many dear ones over yonder, it makes me anxious to get over there with them. I was spoken to the other day, in a non-judgmental way by a friend, about how casually I talk about dying, leaving the body. I supposed he never knew anyone so casual about it. I couldn't explain why. It's just an attitude that comes from scriptures that know the secrets of life and death. I see the moment of passing out of the body something so wonderful there is no looking back. First, freedom from the weight of carrying this heavy body. I imagine it like carrying two heavy suitcases for hours and finally putting them down, letting go of the handles. What a relief it must be to rise from the body like smoke from a cigarette. I see more and more the saying from Paul, Death, where is thy sting? Sorrow is for the ones left behind. I tell my friends to feel no sorrow for me. I'll be going Home. Nothing to be afraid of. I've come to like it in this world, so I feel no hurry. It is what it is.   

robert mangold himself

*

MY LIFE IN TWO WORLDS

sol lewitt

Two rainy days. It's a light sprinkle at this moment. It comes and goes. An hour or so ago, I heard big thunder. I don't know that I've ever heard thunder in January. If I recall correctly, in the old way, you mark the date on the calendar when it thunders in February, and it will be the day in May of the last frost. We're not even half way into January yet, and it's thundering. My guess is that would indicate warm weather coming on sooner than usual. However, the weather patterns have changed so much over the last half century the old ways of weather prediction have changed. Fogs in August used to tell when it would snow in the winter. The woolyworm as prediction of winter I'm fairly certain came from outsiders. It is too uncertain and it is so obviously not a reliable prediction device that mountain people would never have gone by woolyworms. I asked old man Tom Pruitt about it when he was up in his 70s. He said, "Aint nothin to it." Even though I doubt significance now of thunders in February, it still got my attention hearing thunder in January, even before the middle of January. That is way off from the old pattern. I will happily welcome an early summer, though it bothers me to some extent imagining a long hot summer. When forest fires start, then it gets your attention. Since I've been in the mountains, the summer forest fires have been mostly localized the other side of the Parkway in national forest land. Helicopters carry big tarps full of water they pick up at farm lakes to dump on the fire. My apprehension is that as summers grow hotter, which they have steadily done throughout my time here, the fires will be crossing the Parkway. My house would burn to the ground before fire trucks arrived. The house is all wood sawmilled in the 1920s.

 

sol lewitt

 

Too many people around me hesitate to mention anything about global warming, because republicans deny it. I don't care what they deny. That's their problem. I see it is an obvious fact from year to year. I understand the process of science well enough to tell the difference between somebody who knows what he's talking about and a politician whose allegiance is to oil corporations and the Bank, only. I don't care if they see financial advantage for themselves and deny the obvious for the sake of their own bank accounts. They can think whatever they think, which they do. I don't have to hold myself back from seeing the obvious, because the people in our government who hate the American people want us to believe what only half the population is dumb enough to believe, remembering half the people are below average, the bell curve. Because somebody tells me I'm not afraid enough of Satan, doesn't mean my knees will tremble when I hear the name Christendom has given the ego. I'm not afraid of ego. Ego is our ballast. It keeps us afloat. It needs controlling and training, requires attention, but not fear. We go from saying MINE to learning to share, to eventually learning altruism in some cases. The spiritual path amounts to awareness of the ego, learning to control it, which happens in varying degrees from individual to individual. Up to age 30 is the time of ego development, which is essential to living in this world. From there on, it's a matter of controlling and gradual diminishment of ego, by life experience if nothing else. We learn that my I and somebody else's I are both centers of the universe. We have 7 billion plus centers of the universe on earth. What does that do to me as center of the universe? Makes me one of many, and ultimately makes us all one.

 

sol lewitt

 

I can't help it that some people believe so much in television they restrict themselves to language permissible on tv. Political correctness is nothing but censoring oneself and others by the television standard. It has nothing to do with decency or morality. PC amounts to boutique activism, a pretense, like being an actor. I don't provoke people who talk correctness, believing they mean well and aren't able to see themselves objectively. I observe PC in the coffee shop for the convenience of keeping the priestesses of television-speak out of my face. I don't need that badly to prove I'm a liberal. Sounding like television is not liberal. It's another form of parrotry. I figure if somebody believes they have the right to correct my speech according to television, I have the right to speak as I please. I grew up in "the land of the free" where "freedom of speech" was sacred. It's a hard adjustment to live in a world where adults want to be as conformist as in high school and want me to give up my freedom of speech to conform to their idea of being television. Like with global warming, my attitude is go ahead and restrict your own speech and everybody else's you're able to, but leave me out of it. That's when I drop the N-bomb, the F-bomb, the MF-bomb, and/or the GD-bomb as announcement that I am I, not a reflection of television. The very most vast majority of American population believes in television first. I live in a world of people who believe television. I don't. I don't want to correct them and don't want to be corrected. When I find somebody is committed to PC, they fade away before my eyes due to disappointment. Still, I don't really hold it against them, because this is television world I live in, and they're just doing what they believe they're supposed to do. I believe it is television that led us by the nose into police state and I am not denying my American freedom of speech for somebody who believes television is sacred. If you don't believe tv is sacred, stop watching it for a month.

 

 

sol lewitt

 

PC is never an issue in the working class. In fact, it has become a department of working class (redneck) humor to break all the PC rules. In the company of my redneck friends much of my laughter when we're laughing at a particular incorrectness is about the cultural divide between working class and middle (management) class. Their management status when they move to the mountains is behind the middle-class belief they have to tell working class people how to act right. The attitude in the working class is you don't tell me what to do unless you're paying. Management class takes it for insolence. I have learned here that the middle class looks down on the working class the same as they look down on black people. They talk PC, but they don't act it out. I've told my friend Justin when he was regretting not having the chance to go to college that this is not a time for college. As economy gets worse, the middle class people here who don't know how to do anything but tell other people what to do will need your help. You know how to do things, like plumbing, electrical work, carpentry, roofing, cutting firewood, hunting. Everything he does, he does well. I tell him that he will be ok when times are tough, because he's good at doing practical things middle class people know nothing about. Like Justin knows everything that happens to the water when it goes down the drain in the kitchen sink. For a large number of the middle class people, the drain is the end of it. A problem I have with the working class is the disdain for education. A problem I have with middle class is the disdain for common sense. I believe both are essential. I realized when I finished college I'd lost my common sense. A large part of my motivation to live rurally by manual labor was to get my common sense back. To live with one foot in one world and one foot in the other can be incredibly confusing at times, but I couldn't live any other way. I like shifting back and forth from culture to culture. It provides a great deal of understanding of what it means to be a true human being. I don't know that I'm there yet, but like Pinocchio, I keep on a-keepin on.  

 

sol lewitt himself

 

 

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A NEW YEAR AHEAD

Jessica stockholder

We're into a new annual cycle, and it starting with a new moon. A good time to start new projects. Ruth at the facebook artist group, Daily Creative Practice, asked everyone to make a statement about what we envision for ourselves through the course of 2014. Not a resolution, but what one sees on the horizon, so to speak, the direction one is moving, projects in sight. Intent. Seeing that it's a new moon, it's a good time to address intent. I'm not one to look that far ahead, a year ahead, so this thinking is new for me. I prefer not to think about the future, except to look at the evolution of police state that has trumped American democracy, view changes in the progression of specifically American fascism, and the changing cartography that will go with global warming. I pay attention to it for self-preservation. Like I know not to use the word Be Oh Hem Be. Or Hen Eye Gigi He Are. NSA will nail me with insta-word check for key words. I'll end up in the deepest darkest dungeon under the maximum security prison in Alaska for using forbidden language. YOU CAN'T SAY THAT! I just did. Targeted potential terrorist. He used the B-word. I figure everything I write here is surveilled in a nanosecond when I click on the publish button. That's the internet landscape as I see it, all of it reviewed by NSA with word check. A satellite can see a quarter in my driveway. I don't see this Snowden episode changing anything. It's a surprise speed-bump for the propagandists and no more.  

 

jessica stockholder

 

I saw the young actress Jennifer Lawrence, whose name I only know because I saw her on the Jon Stewart show,  is campaigning with her celebrity influence to eliminate the word FAT from the language. Now we have another forbidden F-word. Issues of forbidden words have been going on in my homeland for several years now. You really have to watch what you say around white middle-class women. I've become so weary of watching what I say around them that I just make it clear when you're around me, you're on your own where handling forbidden language is concerned. I'm not vulgar, but I'm not obedient to priestesses of Political Correctness either. Get in my face and you just might make me laugh. We have an alphabet now of forbidden words that you get fired on television for saying. It's as bad as the preacher's wife syndrome in the old days. The preacher and his old-lady disapproved. Whatever it was, they disapproved. Middle-class women who get bent over the alphabet of forbidden words have fun disapproving of me. I'll never forget a brief conversation with a white middle-class woman I've been acquainted with for several years when she was informing me the N-word needed to be banned from the dictionary, "and while they're at it, they can ban the C-word." I thought: Oh no, another letter of the alphabet with a banned word! I said in jest, "What is it, Cool?" Answer in no uncertain terms, "No! CUNT!!!" I said, "Oh." I did not see that coming. I couldn't imagine what a C-word would be. Colored? Coon?

 

jessica stockholder

 

All this time we're throwing away our freedom of speech as something reprehensible in need of controls, I'm in awe to see the American people, after two-thirds of a century of television, don't want democracy or freedom of speech, these precious aspects of America The Land Of The Free our flag stands for. Not just let fade away, but thrown out like broken children's toys. In the Fifties it was called the Throw-Away Society. We're so far advanced in tossing out that we're spoiled by it like we're spoiled with what we want by Wal-Mart. We've gone from landfills to making mountains of trash. I remember seeing a trash mountain beside I-95 near Stuart, Florida, that was so high the bulldozer on top looked like a matchbox toy. I point to television, because it has rendered the American people collectively unconscious. It's purpose. Crowd control. It worked. Keep the masses ignorant and they vote republican. Like it matters how they vote. It's a game, like a card game, a cyber poker game between propagandists using hate to divide us into Us against Them. Divide and conquer. Because I see how conquered we-the-people are, I can't involve myself in paying attention to politics or the news anymore. I say "paying attention to." I hear it on radio a time or two a day and see internet bits of current events, but will never again let political, religious, or ideological influence clutch at my heart with a pang that says: It hadn't oughta be that way. Maybe it hadn't oughta, but the Titanic hadn't oughta neither.

 

jessica stockholder

 

Because this is how I see the world that is the landscape I live in, I chose to abandon a life of supporting the military machine USA has evolved into. Fear created and cranked up by the tv to a stress level that longs for security. Tv cop shows kill offenders, criminals, the unspeakable word, the enemy. I choose every day not to live in such mind. Even though I am not manipulated by the corporate belief system directly through television, I get it from everybody around me. I live in television culture even though I don't watch it. I see it once a week for a few hours. It reminds me why I care nothing for it. I'm grateful to God every day for landing my parachute on a back road in the Blue Ridge Mountains where I need a gun to take a walk in the woods anymore. I see images of cities around the world in movies and feel claustrophobic. I remember standing on the highest point in London and seeing city to horizon all the way around. It was the reverse of being at sea out of sight of land. The place I'm located geographically and mentally is about as good as, "at sea out of sight of land," as is reasonably accessible. I don't want to live someplace it takes a Land Rover to get to. I'm ok with a road running by the house. I'm ok with neighbors. I need trees desperately. I can't participate in the mind that values only money and the appearance of money. Tv is about money and money only. I don't value money. A guy in a gold-chrome Cherokee wanted to buy my house one day. I told him it's not for sale. He said there is a price I would sell it for. I laughed. Didn't say it because it wouldn't sound the way it was meant, I don't think you know who you're talking to. Our conversation went nowhere.

 

 

 

jessica stockholdeer

 

A month ago I decided to let go of listening to the news in any form. I asked myself one day, Why am I giving attention to people like Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin, Bachman, Boner, Mitch and Paul? Any of them? I have no respect for anyone involved in American government anymore, would cross the street to avoid one. I need to get my mind out of that thinking. I say that's the landscape I live in, but it's not only that. It is that if I turn it on. I have a choice. To turn it on, or not to turn it on. It is my creation. I scroll through the facebook political images that used to amuse me as if they were commercials, which they are, propaganda commercials. The republicans are taking us on a downhill run, I can't stop it, and I don't like to watch it. I see it enough at the grocery store, rising prices and the huff-n-puff swat-team mind of town cops these days. State cracking down on citizens with outrageous fees for everything. Mandatory sentencing and outrageous prison sentences. I'm so paranoid about getting out in the world anymore, I want to stay home all the time. I'm stuck to it and there's nothing I can do but acquiesce, stay at home, draw minimal attention to myself, watch international movies, read international books, pay attention to international art. I can ignore as much as possible, while at the same time not being in denial. I know what it is to my own satisfaction and praise God every day for the insight to get out of that mind. Beyond the writing and the art projects for 2014, I want to separate myself even further from concern about anything to do with American politics. I want to hear American political news with the same dispassion as if it were North Korean news. I want to sit with picture books of Ai Wei Wei, Larry Rivers, Robert Irwin, Robert Mangold, Constantin Brancusi, books in reach of where I sit. I tell myself to look at art more, not corporate mind-rot.     

 

jessica stockholder

 

 

*

 

RACIAL PROFILING WHITE MEN

A question that is lurking in the minds of about everybody I know, a varied pie slice of the social spectrum, is basically, why are we humans so mean to one another? That question is universal and goes all the way back. The question now has more to do with why do so many people dislike other people in America the land of the free. Random shootings that happen somewhere in the US every day are rather poignant expressions of contempt for others. That the shooter is satisfied with random kills, nobody in particular in mind, says the shooter is killing "people." He hates people. There is a lot of that going around, and it looks like the problem is a very real one with white men. White men are freaking out. The rush on AKs by white men all over the country after a school shooting is so alarming that it ought to be setting off alarms. If this is a picture of contemporary white man thinking, I repeat, white men are freaking out. None of our corporate news sources, including NPR, have noticed anything to do with racial profiling these surprise random slayings in public. In a time when war is characterized by terrorism, random slayings of women, children, old people, anybody, dogs, camels, collateral damage, it's looking like white men are mad at the world and everybody in it. If you're in the wrong place at the wrong time then it's your time to go or get a leg or arm blown off, blinded or deaf for life.

American borders are tightly monitored keeping terrorists out. It's looking like we have homeland terrorists. In law enforcement they say they don't know where it will happen next, but they know it will happen. Little towns, big cities. I have friends with children who are anxious for their kids in case a random school killing happens in the classroom with their kids. All the kids are somebody's kids. White men are now a racial profile for terrorism. This will require bringing home all the troops from around the world to shut down armed white men, and they're already traditionally set against the black men and the Latin men. Police state will create more crime and that will lead to something like they do in Africa, armed rebels vs the police and army. I hesitate to go to that extreme in visioning, but it looks more and more inevitable every day. It's got to where seeing it any other way amounts to denial. But that's just looking at it from how it appears now. Everything changes. It may change for the worse or the better. The momentum at present looks like it's toward the worse. My question is what has happened to make white men freak out so incredibly. It doesn't help to say that these are men with mental issues and they snapped. In the whole collective of white men, it would be the mentally weak ones to snap first. That's where the chain breaks, the weakest link.

How long have we had hate radio? Thirty years or almost? It started as a kind of trend that sold ads, sometimes they went too far, and when they did step way over the line of decency, they sold more ads, got call-ins for ads. Reagan kicked off the right wing contempt for liberals, which Limbaugh and the whole Faux News team ran with and got working class white men frothing at the mouth with drama of hate for whatever sensible person it might be at the moment, the "black" president and the educated woman, Hilary. Elizabeth Warren is setting herself up to be the next intelligent woman target from the white male hate machine. It's looking like she has what it takes. These two women are like WW2 bombers flying into enemy territory; they need a lot of fighter escorts, bodyguards, a staff of strategists, ball-turret gunners, fund-raisers and what have you. I believe the Dalai Lama was onto something when he said Western women will be the ones to save us from ourselves. Who knows Western men better than Western women? Western men got us onto this race course to our collective undoing. I suppose what the Dalai Lama said means the women have what we need now. Good. Hilary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren look like a pretty strong front line. The first influential women have to be able to stand up to the men with power, like Warren has exhibited what she can do and does very well, and Hilary has shown her feet on the ground too. And the women don't have so much hate in them. That's a refreshing aspect of women. Women don't carry so much hate, unless for particular reasons that can't be forgiven.

Considering that everybody watches tv daily, uses it for source of information like what flu medicine is the BEST and which car is the BEST and which tire is the BEST and what detergent, what burger, what false eyelashes, an endless list. The news we hear every day is the worst things happening in the world that day. Sometimes on NPR you'll get a day-in-the-life 5 minutes of somebody's real life that isn't anything like on tv, an uplifting moment of people as we are, not as we're falsely represented by MAD Ave. If it bleeds, it leads, the journalist's pocket fortune cookie that works a hundred percent. Syrian army is destroying entire neighborhoods, targeting children, has gone to war on its own people. In Egypt Spring they're finding Mubarak wasn't all that bad. Every day we get our heads filled with these images and sounds of killing from everywhere in the world. That's the "news." If it doesn't bleed, it doesn't lead. Back pages or no room for it. Random assassinations going on all over the country. Hollywood movies are about shutting down the mind. They're lullabies with explosions and guns going off and gun threats, killing like it's the latest hot thing to do. They're hypnotic in the way they put the viewer to sleep and show the story like a dream by hypnotic suggestion. That's the nature of our pop culture in everyone's homes, some more than others.

Seeing what television is doing to the American people makes me really glad, I mean really glad that I do not watch one. I like to see one every once in awhile to see what the people I live among are believing at the moment. I learned long ago that when "everybody" is doing something, like dressing alike, using the same slang terms, like when there is a copy-cat trend to get featured on the evening news killing several people then oneself, the one thing "everybody" is doing is watching television. It's the mind that is coming through the television. It is breaking down all the beliefs in our belief systems. It evidently has enraged white men, the racists among white men. Just because we have laws about equal this and that, and black people are everywhere on tv and acceptable, and gay people are all over the tv and the latest new thing this year, it doesn't mean the racists among the white people have changed. They just don't watch those tv shows and they grimace during the commercials. Something to gripe about. Like Michael Moore said, "If guns keep us safe, America would be the safest country on earth." And Frank Zappa has said, "If pop music influenced people's behavior, we would all love one another."

We're in a time where we like such generalizations about "people," because people are stupid, people are idiots. We're quick to call somebody stupid or an idiot or an asshole in this time. A little too quick for my comfort. We're not allowed to say any of those working class slang terms that are politically incorrect. It's all right, however, to say, He's an idiot, or He's an asshole or He's stupid. It's in the middle class I hear these assessments according to intelligence levels. Working class is more interested in the physical than the mind. The working class talk in anti-political correctness language all the more because the middle class has made a taboo of the long list of forbidden PC words. It's funny for me that one set of people I spend time with get all prune-faced over certain words and another set of people I spend time with use those words to where they make chances to say them. They're hilarious. They're comedy. When I'm with the people that get old-baptist-pious-disapproval over certain key words, I have to laugh inside, because when I'm with my other friends we use all those words as much as we can, laughing like crazy, watching the race on the Faux channel. When it comes to gettin-er-done, them boys know how to do it. My thinking about those cars went way high up when I heard that a racing motorbike doesn't have a chance against one of the nascar racers. I can see it now, but never thought of it before.


*

A CALL FROM THE PAST

 

     ai weiwei

I look at how things are going in this world, the ongoing breakdown of all traditions; even though I feel I have an understanding that the traditions from the Age of Fire need to be eliminated to clear the field for new ways of thinking in the Age of Electricity, I still agonize somewhat seeing the more meaningful traditions go away with the irrelevant ones. Much of the old ways were good, though largely calcified by repetition over centuries unto beliefs that simply don't work anymore. Among my more interesting learnings along the way has been to see how fluid this life is, fluid even more than liquid, fluid like air can be called fluid in the way it flows around objects without apparent resistance, the way it flows through the grid of a screen and flows back together on the other side like nothing happened. Thought is even more fluid than that. Thought is fluid without molecules, or matter. Thought flows like old man river, just keeps on rolling. What is this world we live in but massive interweavings of human thought, an infinite and constantly changing Persian carpet. Thoughts that occurred thousands of years ago, hundreds of years ago, continue to have effect on us today.

Socrates comes to mind first for his thought a few thousand years ago (I paraphrase), "The only thing I know is that I know nothing." The thought is with us today. Not many pay attention to it, but it resonates with me plenty. It will resonate into the Age of Electricity too. Our whole civilization is a conglomeration of thinking that collectively agrees upon certain thoughts as valid and certain ones not. In the time we're in now, the NEW is often a thought regarded invalid until suddenly it is seen valid. "Get you a copper kettle, get you a copper coil," the old-time song had fallen into invalid, from another culture, another time, another way of thinking. Then around 1960 Joan Baez recorded it in a Pete Seegerish way and it became new, continues to resonate as valid. A lot of old songs have been brought into the new mind by singing them a bit differently. Stephen Foster's song, Angelina Baker, a making fun of the darkies kind of song that starts, "Way down on de old plantation, dah's where I was born, I used to beat de whole creation hoein in de corn. Den I work and den I sing, happy all de day." It gets kind of Uncle Remus as a cute romance of a slave boy with his eye on the slave girl, Angelina Baker. It's hardly politically correct in our time. Almost everything about it rings invalid now. Except the tune. The tune is used all over the country at contests of picking traditional acoustic instruments. Angelina Baker has become as hot a fiddle tune as Katy Hill and Sally Gooden. Hardly anyone knows it has words anymore.

A little over thirty years ago someone from Europe asked me how long it will be before homosexuals are acceptable in America. I ventured fifty years, give or take ten. He thought that way too soon. Here it is. All of a sudden this year it is PC to be all for gay everything, marriage, baby adoption, the whole works. BAM. Just like that. It took awhile getting here. Considering that we've had civil rights laws over half a century, yet one of our two political parties is the up front racist party. Those sorts of social changes take a long time, but in this time we're in, these social changes are happening in almost the snap of a finger. It is even looking like Rush Limbaugh mind is fading fast. He doesn't have the power of intimidation he had two years ago. I don't mean to imply we're changing to where everything is sweet and happy devoid of anything we don't like. We are taking a giant step toward allowing the flow. When thought patterns become calcified from habits until they become reality is when they need changing. Thinking, like water, stagnates when it stops flowing.

A phone call last night form a cousin I'd not talked with in several years. We're about the same age, grew up together as friends and then I went my way and he went his way and that was that. I don't encourage him in this time of my life, because he has taken the way of the calcified mind of the American man. At the beginning of our phone conversation last night it was like talking with one of the old men of my grandfather's generation, men that were down on everything, especially niggers and dumb women. Cousin has watched a lifetime of television, so he is not of that old man mind of grandfather's time. But it hasn't changed much from then to now. He started in on me aggressive-like, taking charge, letting me know he's the bigdog in this exchange, bumping me the way dogs do each other, showing me his weight. I bumped him back to say, I'm just as big as you. He let me have it for talking on the telephone all the time. He's been trying to call and my phone is always busy. I knew that was horseshit from the start. My phone is nowhere near always busy. I asked if he called in the mornings. No. I said, I talk with my friend Carole in the mornings anywhere between 9 and 11. Other than that I hardly use the phone at all and it seldom rings. He said, Oh. And he came down off his high horse.

The conversation functioned for me as a measure of how far I have come from where I started out. Cousin Tommy is still there. He hasn't changed at all, except to lock down in that aggressive testosterone stance that has only one purpose, to say, I'm in charge here. It works for him largely. Then he comes up on somebody like me, bumping like a dog, and he has to back down. I didn't get aggressive with him, just stood my ground on firm feet and let him know if he called me to play bigdog, he needs to call somebody else. I'm happy to talk with him, but I'm not going through the dog games just because he needs to see himself in charge. Turns out he was listening challenged as well. Doesn't listen well. While he was telling me about his "dumb" wife, I was thinking, Yeah, sure. He never did tell me why he called. It was a brief reminder that I spent my early years in a world of that kind of mind, the calcified white man mind that Limbaugh parodies so well. I ran from it with all my heart, mind and strength. Tommy starting off that conversation with the bigdog challenge was a reminder of where I came from, and how glad I am to be a long ways from. I had enough of that when I had no recourse. I don't have to take it now. I've heard I get called arrogant for not taking that white man bigdog shit, but that's ok.


*     

UNCONSCIOUS BEHAVIOR IN EVERYDAY LIFE

        ellsworth kelly, white diagonal, 2008

I'm hearing myself grow tired of something I've done for a lifetime and lived in a world of people guilty of it, so much so it's not even noticed. It's concern about other people's business that has nothing to do with my business, approval or disapproval, thinking I know more about it than the ones involved. I'm training myself to remember that whether I approve or not of what somebody else believes, does, thinks, is so neither here nor there as to be no consideration at all. I'm hearing in my head the voice of somebody I once knew, "I don't approve of violence!" There was no being around him without hearing it at least once. I wanted to say, but judged it too disrespectful and never got it said, "Then don't do it." Of course, he was talking about everyone but himself. I hear "they" do this, that and the other, aint it awful. I remember with a good laugh walking in on a preacher and an old farmer, both men I knew in friendly terms, talking about the young today, how they do drugs and commit sin without a thought of the Lord. They looked at me for parenthetical agreement and I said, "It's the way of the world." Like where's the big deal? Approve, disapprove, so what? Approval or disapproval change nothing. They're just egoic ejaculations of opinion based in too little information to pass for knowledge.

All the time hearing things like, I wish them people wouldn't do that! Whatever that may be, whoever them people may be. What it ends up saying is meaningless. They, them, the others; not we, not us, not me. Recalling a time I was told in no uncertain terms that They say and Everybody knows, you this and you that. I was translating in my mind: They was two names. Everybody was those two plus one more, three names. I didn't bring that up as it would have been taken I think I'm smart. More than once I wanted to say, "Cite your sources," but knew my accuser would not have any idea what it meant, and again, I'd have been acting smart. I didn't want to provoke the "conversation" to go on any longer than the shortest possible span of time. It's pretty boring pretending to take seriously somebody talking in the most meaningless generalizations saying nothing at all, and telling me about myself such that I know for certain he does not have any idea what he's talking about. What could I do? I couldn't talk. We obviously spoke two different languages and he was mono-lingual. Evidently I was too.

How many times I have heard, "I wish everybody...." All I can say to that is when everybody does something or has something, then it's nothing. If everybody wore a tshirt with Abercrombie on the front, then it would be the very opposite of a big deal. It would be a uniform. If everybody listened to Britney Spears, then who would listen to the other Barbie in human form, Christina Aguilera? I don't want everybody seeing Lars von Trier's films or Bela Tarr's films; it would cheapen them down to Hollywood. Pearls were expensive rare, then the Japanese farmed them and the value fell way down. Similar story with diamonds. Dollar General flip-flops are the common variety you see everywhere. Then the designer Ralph Lauren flip-flop, expensive, rare, inaccessible to just anybody. If everybody had to have a twenty-five dollar Ramones tshirt, it wouldn't be long before Roses and Walmart would have them for two dollars. Our educational system has pumped sameness into us unconsciously, the people making decisions without any idea what they are doing beyond following guidelines and keeping the paperwork caught up. Commercials are pumping us with sameness, as are the politicians.

I can't help but be amazed at seeing how, in my lifetime, political correctness has become the culture of the middle class. Fortunately, the ruling class and the working class are not bound by PC. I conform to it in the company of the middle class, like at the coffee shop, only because adherents get so self-righteous about their trigger words, which never has to do with meaning. "I can't stand to hear that word!" Bull Shit. Give me a break. It is the same as churchists saying, "I don't approve of that language." All I can say is, "Then don't use that language." It's more of the missionary mind: I'm right--you're wrong--you must conform to my way or I won't like you. Lord have mercy! The threat of not being liked is so incredibly powerful in the American middle class it manipulates without even trying. What will people think? What people? Whoever they are, they'll think what they think. No two will think the same and all will be judgmental, each for different reasons, their own projected reasons. Mystery solved, now go on and don't worry about it any more. It's funny how climbing the ladder is done by selling self continually, smiling all the time, like-me-I'm-nice, I am the product you're looking for. He's such a great guy, never has a down day, up all the time. Ten years later he blows a hole through his head on purpose.

I have to give credit to the mountain people, to mountain culture, for getting myself over these urban and churchly habits of mind, thinking I know better than others how to live their lives. I've been a slow learner in that department. Through the course of my early years I was told from every influence that only authorities know anything--parents, teachers, preachers--and if you're not one of them you better walk the line. I've been seeing my life in retrospect as the first half characterized by hate and the second half characterized by love. Where I came from before in past lifetimes I don't know, but I sure did not have any previous experience to prepare me for this world. However, my parents had no interest in anything beyond church and keeping the bills paid. The preacher was only interested in church. My mother was only interested in church. I was forced to take an interest in school just like church. Duress all the way. This is how Saturn and Uranus conjunct a Sun in Taurus manifest in every day life. I was born into my horoscope. Now there is something everybody does. We all get born into our individual horoscopes. It's so common that few notice.

*

CONFORMITY COP IS BACK

     william wegman

I just now got called on FB by an adult for saying shit. Lord Have Mercy!!! I'm expected to be on tv everywhere I go, and now I'm expected to be on tv at home. The "adult" who made a point of noting it disappoints me. When I was a kid, I was trained to believe by adults that adults are conscious and know what they're doing. I grew up into the adult world and found that belief system as big a fantasy as Santa Claus. It is just adults keeping kids in the dark so they won't see that the adults in their worlds don't have a clue about anything, not even tv. Since I entered the adult world, I've spent most of my time avoiding it. I go out into the world and I'm expected to act like I'm on tv.


Well, I don't do what is expected of me the same as I don't do s'posed-to. I'll do expected if there has been an agreement that includes my thoughts on the matter. Like if I've agreed to meet somebody at a certain place, certain time, that's an expectation I honor. When I'm expected not to speak as myself in the town where I learned the importance of being myself in all occasions, I question present company. I say shit. I'm in a place with a dozen adults around, mostly hair graying to white, I say shit and it's like I'd broke into a daycare center and shouted shit until the police came and arrested me. I have seen the world change immensely. The change I find most retarded, most conformist, most unconscious is political correctness.


In 2012 a middle class white adult male cringes at the sound of the word shit. In 2012 a white adult naked male in Miami ate the face off another white adult naked male in the bicycle lane in the turn to Miami Beach to the east and Liberty City to the west. The guy that found them says he's moving, getting out of that area, can't stand to live in there any more. On the news in 2012 somebody white male opened fire on a random bunch of people. I remember after WW2 it was said the Japanese had no regard for human life. It was said of the Germans too. It looks even worse for us all over the world now. What do Americans do? They kill every kid in a first grade classroom, then kill themselves. No other country in the world has such news. Surely such has happened somewhere else in the world, but people in the rest of the world don't think like Americans. Americans threw away thinking in practical terms many years ago. Anti-intelligence has been the American way from the beginning, but it has grown by now to the point nobody intends to learn anything unless there is money or the promise of money in it. A few centuries of evolving anti-intelligence and we have political correctness taken seriously by educated adults. Incredible.


This is why I stay home much of the time. When educated adults play that silly shit on me, I act out nothing at all like what I'm feeling. I lose respect at the snap of a finger. I cannot respect anyone who corrects me for errors in political correctness. I don't need to tell them anything or argue about it or talk about it. I don't need to do anything. When I lose respect, it's gone. It never comes back. There's nothing to say. Of course, my respect is the same as nothing to the other. But it means something to me. When somebody alienates me with political correctness for political correctness sake, I cannot ever take that person seriously again. And I dislike it when that happens. Invariably it's somebody I thought well of or wanted to. In church we talk church correctness. Outside church the white middle class talks political correctness, which is actually television correctness. When somebody gets in my face about political correctness I realize this person holds television as his/her authority.


I'm not going to get in the way of that. Go right ahead. Leave me out of it. If I'd said feces it would have been humorous, Heh-heh TJ yer so funny. Had I said merde, I'd have been thought cultivated and intelligent knowing French slang. Tra la. I've never seen anything to match PC as a reading of the degree of American middle class unconsciousness. Post WW2 has seen a steady decline in American consciousness to the point we've all lost our democracy while the educated worry about words all children know by the time they're 3. Now that political correctness has put nigger out of the white middle class vocabulary, shit must be the next targeted word. I feel like putting on Patti Smith's punk anthem Rock n Roll Nigger, Outside of society, that's where I wanna be. Baby baby baby I'm a rock n roll nigger. Nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger. I'd like to hack that song into a satellite coffee house radio channel.


Rock is truly rebel music. Patti Smith did her part. Thanks Patti. Pissin in the river, watchin it rise. Rock has been a good pop music for the young to keep a kind of balance the best they can in a world where officially nothing is rational, where you have to adopt official lies as truth and live by them without questioning. Remember to always talk like you're on tv. Won't it be an ideal world when all the girls look like Britney Spears and all the boys like Justin Timberlake. And we'll all talk like the voice in a GPS gadget. Every girl a Barbie, every boy a GI Joe. Ken is Barbie's gay brother, who is sad because he can't get married in North Carolina. His boyfriend's name is Ken, too. They look just alike. We won't need conformity police in this vision of the future, because everyone will be plastic and can't talk and can't move: the ideal. Mickey Mouse rules. The 1% laugh at us, so easy to manipulate.


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