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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DO ABOUT WHAT?

andy warhol

 

What are we going to do about gun violence? A question I hear repeated again and again, every time we have another public attack by somebody frustrated unto suicide, so mad he wants to take everybody/anybody with him. Reading or hearing the question, I answer in a comment box of the mind, Nothing. Nothing at all, according to pattern, tradition. Every time the question pops up, What are we gonna to do about it?, what gets done consistently amounts to nothing. A run of articles, anti-gun people use the moment to advertise their agenda, make a lot of noise. It's like the question of capital punishment that surfaces from time to time is never resolved. The question, whether or not guns, is only answered with blame. Black people in church killed. A white boy done it, blame the whiteman flag. Easy target. This new one, black man killing white woman and white man on tv in Roanoke, looks more like he went postal from the frustration of being let go from a job. They say he had a bad attitude and deserved to be fired. Maybe so. But it's not how he saw it, like the post office employees who "went postal" out of frustration over losing their jobs in a time of republican downsizing post office staff to set USPO up for corporate takeover.

 

andy warhol

 

I tell self it doesn't matter to me, what I think about it is of no relevance to anyone but myself. It is other people's karma someplace far from where I am. The only part that matters to me is hearing the same old question every year of my life, What are we going to do about it? The only thing I've ever seen happen is the next crisis to come along replaces last week's old crisis. The question about guns is forgotten until next made-for-tv slaying by gun. It's talked about by talking heads with renewed urgency for a week, replaced by a smokescreen politician who said something notably stupid. What are we going to do about it? Nothing. What are we going to do about racism? Blame the South. Nothing. Blaming American rednecks and banning a flag increased sales of the flag by double, affirmed the white American working class identity with the flag and recruited for the Klan. Nearly everybody guided by propaganda through television, the tv renders everyday life insignificant, dysfunctional, a waste of time to notice. Homeland terrorist slayings are television. Racism is television. Police brutality is television. Let television settle it with guns and explosions. Television doesn't worry over logic or good sense in settling issues. Guns settle things on tv, the real world in America/Oceania. It naturally follows, guns solve problems in the unreal world of everyday life.

andy warhol

 

"Click and Share if you care." Thus concluded a brief video I saw not knowing what it would be. A white guy in plaid shirt and ball cap on backwards, I felt like it might be at least funny. The occasional redneck rant that appears on facebook is indeed funny. I don't share the politics, but I do understand their point of view and believe it valid. This guy was funny and not. He ranted about guns saying he was being practical about them by teaching his children, a boy and two girls, how to shoot a gun. He had the boy shoot a replica of a movie pistol, an air gun. He was being practical in a gun culture. I felt he was sensible. In the working class, everybody has guns, and I'm with them that it is important to teach the kids about guns before they find one and do something stupid with it. He talked about gun control as teaching the kids to control a gun. I, as myself, think it's nuts, yet I understand we live in a gun culture. When daddy has guns in the house, it is better for the kids to be taught to respect them than it is to label them taboo. I appreciated that he taught the kids with an air gun, comparatively harmless. Though he was a bit much of a Fake news enthusiast for my appreciation, I respected his point of view. I live in a world of people like him and know them to be good people. I could see in him if he lived in my community, he is what I'd call a good man. In the way I call Frank Dillard a good man, Randy Hampton a good man, Joe Willey a good man, three of many, only the first ones to come to mind. He ended his rant, "if you care, click and share." I didn't care enough to share, though I obviously cared enough to think about it after it was over and share my thoughts with you.

andy warhol

Thought about sending it to a friend for its comic value, but it felt too much like demeaning its purpose. The man had something to say, something he had reasoned out for himself, and I felt very well. I could not demean him so. He was doing something about gun violence. He was teaching his kids to be responsible by way of the gun for example. He was doing his part concerning an important issue that can only be dealt with one individual at a time. To see on television one side make noise and the other side make noise, it amounts to no more than a racket. I do my part by not having a gun and not intending to have one. I think they're cool for somebody else, but not for me. I don't like that I like the feel of one in my hand. They fit the hand like a glove, made for the hand. I feel like guns attract guns. They also get stolen. It would not do for somebody, whose aim is to live as close to the heart as can be done, to have at hand an object with only one purpose, to kill. I am not about killing. I don't even want a rabbit running under my tire. My path is love, not fear. I can't deny a gun's necessity to somebody else, anybody else. For myself, I see a gun illegitimate power, power I do not want. As a conscientious human being, I do not allow myself the right to kill, not even the dog that killed my cat.

andy warhol

 

 

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INDECISION THE DANCE

whistler

 

The issue of guns or not-guns has been running all my life. People go into a rage over gun riddance and people go into a rage over having guns. I'm so bored of it, it wears me out to see it still going on, louder than ever, never coming to a solution, like usual. Every time the tv features a mass shooting, gun shops sell out all over the country. Somebody who sees tv a few hours every other week sees the gun featured in cop shows and movies and all kinds of tv shows. Cop shows get more uptight and killer-minded every year. I don't think an American movie is made without a gun popping up somewhere. European films use guns frequently. In countries where people don't kill each other and themselves so much, I rarely see a gun in a film unless it has to do with military. I don't even like to see American films anymore, unless independent, for all the guns and explosions. Explosions characterize American films; loud bangs and billowing flames are more required than tits-n-ass. I dislike most about American films when the whisper scene is making me turn the volume up, I can't turn the volume down fast enough for the next predictable thing, a loud explosion and billowing orange flame. I use subtitles watching American films so I can read the whisper scene while turning the volume down for the blast of noise to follow.

 

 

whistler

 

 

Someone I know, who went to Montana and Alaska to kill big animals with a bow, exhibits a passion for ridding all Americans of their guns. He has been in high blood-pressure frustration for decades that he can't do anything about making other people stop owning guns. Then he had a debilitating stroke. Every time I saw him before, he looked like he was going to blow a gasket in front of me. He could quote statistics from now til tomorrow and make a flawless case, but nobody listened. He was about controlling everybody but himself, failed at controlling anybody and failed himself by putting so much attention on fixing everybody else. Somebody who made his life a commercial and ended up a forgotten jingle. This is another reason I don't go into the coffee shop anymore. Now that the wrong people have been weeded out and only the right people go there, I'll sit peacefully having my coffee and hear over my shoulder, So GOOD to see ya! You needta, you oughta, you gotta, you should! I sit reeling with insistent demands bouncing around in my head, one after the other, as fast as chatter can go. I pretend the best I'm able, "Yeah, I'll do that," though not very well, thinking, Who is paying you? Is this volunteer? Is being a commercial your purpose in life? Go into advertising, make big bucks, leave me out of it.

 

whistler

 

All my life, the question of whether or not the death penalty has popped up as an issue in the news periodically. In fifth grade we were required to write a paragraph to explain why or why not the death penalty. It didn't matter what kids in school thought about it then like it doesn't matter what anybody thinks about it now. It never gets settled as an issue and goes on being a question for kids in school like it's something to take seriously. Whether or not the gun, continues as an issue that never is resolved. And the war on the American people, aka the war on drugs, is never resolved to the point that the war on drugs accelerates the drug business. In earlier years, I believed the guff around varieties of issues, believed the purpose was to settle them, come to agreement, smooth out the rough place. That wasn't it. I was taught democracy like there was something to it in everyday life. The black kids in school and the Mexicans were everyday life evidence to me democracy was white only. I was listening to the black station in high school years where I could hear Slim Harpo, Muddy Waters, Big Maybelle, Bo Diddley, music I could not hear on the white station. I was aware of social differences, how black people were kept down by white people's belief in white superiority. Insufferably arrogant people toward the rest of humanity.

 

whistler

 

We had the civil rights movement and civil rights became law, the trade-off for getting rid of Kennedy. Though it didn't change anything about racism. Racism was swept under the rug of denial, black faces included on tv, and racism failed to change. Obedient press and television glossed it over, never addressing the impolite issue, which continued underground on both sides and grew. The Reagan (John Birch Society) Revolution launched hate radio and tv demonizing black people by way of code to angry white men who spend too much time in front of the television. The right-wing armchair militia is the source of the American white terrorist who shoots up schools, churches and movie theaters. In this time, wars are acts of terrorism, hitting by surprise, killing randomly, going for as many mushrooms as possible. I call this civil war. Thus I say we are in civil war. This has been the purpose of the Reagan Revolution and it is accomplished. At least all the preaching of hate in the name of God has brought  racism to the surface now, where it can be assessed as it is and be dealt with out in the open, the only place it can be worked out. Mustn't forget the most ignorant of them all, whether or not climate change. It's really bad when the obvious is up for question. In America, we don't settle issues. They just go on, underground, subjects not to talk about at the country club. Only radicals speak of such issues.  And they go on talking.

 

whistler by whistler

 

 

 

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TALK ABOUT THE CONFEDERATE FLAG

milton avery

Media interest in pointing the finger of blame at the South over racism has become uber-tiresome. The southwestern quadrant of USA is at least as racist as the southeastern; so is the northwestern and the northeastern. To solve a deep-running issue, NY and LA media want to rid-a-flag they've defined racist. Suppress one, another pops up. In the Soviet time, religion was suppressed. As soon as the Soviet system went away, religion came back. American media is engaged in another frenzy of make-a-law-against. We're so overrun with laws against, we're about painted into a corner. Already, any one of us can be arrested at any moment for something we're doing or have done or conspiracy. Example: the word nigger has been suppressed for the last half century. The working class uses it freely, as does the ruling class. It is only the white middle class that says, "the enword," or uses asterisks between obvious letters. F*t is the same as spelling fat. Saying enword and using asterisks is an act of denial that denies nothing. It's being nice, denying it while saying it. Like it was ok to say shit in front of mommy if I quoted somebody else saying it.

milton avery

I don't mean to be going on like I'm serious about the matter. The flag is too complicated an issue to limit to right or wrong, true or false. Like everything in this phenomenal world we call living, too much is interwoven, experience, thought, beliefs, to call anything or anybody one thing or another. I don't like the way somebody who got drunk and did something stupid that lasted maybe three seconds is called a criminal. I also don't like the way people who have served their time are treated and watched as criminals after their time is served. This is getting into things I have a problem with that I can't do anything about, but I don't have to be that way in my own behavior. Ex-cons I've met along the way, I regard with the same respect as anyone else, with a bit more respect for what they have been through in what I consider an unjust legal system, especially if you're black or any version of non-white, colored, or poor white. Again, nothing I can do about it. I fall back on my boycott of one. Today, I set out to buy a watermelon, wanting to paint one again. I chose to buy it at a roadside stand instead of Food Lion. I can't see giving my five dollars to a corporation that underpays its employees and treats them like shit when I can give somebody an assist who goes into the field early in the morning and selects the produce herself. 

milton avery

I stopped by the welding shop on the way home to visit with Ross and Harry. Milly, Ross's sister, stopped by for a bit and we had a good time sitting and standing in a circle, smoking cigarettes, laughing like the bunch of rednecks we are. These are people I feel at-home free with. We're so close in the heart, I'm about the same as a Richardson. I'm natured a lot like one. Milly and I have been at each other's throats almost with knives, Ross and I have too, and they're my friends I can count on for backup if needed unto the grave. It runs both ways. The subject of the flag came up and we had different thoughts and passions on the matter. Harry most of all. Harry is a retired Army lifer. He said the Confederate flag is treasonous, they fought against the American Army. He called it "you-guys' flag." I said the Civil War was a Yankee invasion. The South defended homeland. Ross said he knows what the flag means. It don't make no differ'nce to him. Milly, the Civil War buff, went off on Yankees and we laughed quite a lot. Except Harry, who identifies Southern, but not with any glorification of the Civil War. It was the Richardson in the rest of us that got us wound up about the South the homeland. 

milton avery

Yesterday, watching the race, Justin told me he was out of sorts with Dale Earnhardt Jr, his favorite driver, for coming out and making a statement that Nascar shouldn't have anything to do with the Confederate flag. I hated to see him so disappointed by a guy he looks up to so personally, like an older brother. He likes Jr's character. I told him Jr is not his own man. I said every time you see him in a commercial, he gets at least hundreds of dollars per showing. He was told by Nascar and corporate sponsors this is what he will do. To say no would cost him hundreds of thousands, millions, maybe his career. I pointed out that television is about money not ethics. Jr is in that world of high-paid celebrities. Once you cross the line into celebrity, your life is no longer your own, you're a product, your name a logo. I wanted to remind him this is a show, this is not real. I knew he knew, just forgot it in a moment of passion. This just a pie-slice of my friends. Very few of them would repeat any other. One can give a hundred reasons for, and another a hundred reasons against, every one of the two hundred reasons valid from some point of view. 

milton avery

The only thing I can see coming of this banning of the flag is a new item in the inventory of underground collectables, flea markets loaded with inflated Confederate flag items, if you know who to ask. Suppression never works and the ones doing the suppressing never get it. We'll have roadside stands selling velvet wall hangings of the flag, tshirts, belt buckles, an infinity of possibilities, just like now. My solution: deal with racism up front and let interest in the flag fade away as it will when nobody cares anymore. I feel like it is healthy for collective American culture to face up to racism as our way of life. Everyone knows it, everyone lives it. We act like we never heard of it. Our racism is rooted deep in our American denial. Which came first, denial or racism? Something like this needs to be brought into awareness collectively, as it does individually, before any real work can be done toward untying the knots of habit patterns that go all the way back to the beginning. It's looking like the Charleston church slayings have brought awareness of pervasive racism in white rule to the surface. If we don't get past blaming the flag, it will have been for naught. I can't imagine television allowing awareness of racism in the white American heart to go beyond blame and punishment, especially not unto self-awareness. 

milton avery

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CONFEDERATE FLAG THE NEW COLLECTABLE

The  public argument around the Confederate battle flag tells me more about the public than the flag. We have people defining what it means, both literally and symbolically. I've learned more about the Confederate flag this week than I ever wanted to know. Jon Stewart continues to make me want to tell him to shut his Yankee mouth. He fails to notice the North invaded the South, not the other way around. Of course, it can be said the South fired the first shot at Ft Sumter. Another Tonkin Gulf story. "He had a gun." My argument with Stewart has to do with him characterizing the South the invader. He doesn't say it, but talks as-if. I tire of his sweep of the hand dismissal of the South and Southerners like his dismissal of the white woman who wanted to be black. He lost credibility for me over his cheap shots at her from his perspective of self-righteous conformity to the social code of the moment calling himself liberal. He's most self-righteous on the subject of racism, quick to point and judge, just like the rest of us. The South is the same to him as a cartoon figure. 

I've lived in the South throughout my adult life. The South I know from the inside is very different from the South Stewart thinks he knows from outside---New York, of all places to point the finger from. I'd like to see him go on about police brutality on black and poor people by NYPD to the same extent he's made fake issues of the South. Of course, he's put himself forward as the model non-racist. He's not the model non-misogynist, but he keeps that under the desk. My argument is not so much with Stewart as with taking such an absolute stance on a matter that goes deeper than good and bad. And I'm not going to be a racism apologist. I grew up in a racist family, near and extended, went to racist church and racist school, outside the South. I started shedding my racism young, knowing some black people, seeing they were not as characterized by white people. I was attracted to black people because they did not do denial. Every black person I knew talked straight, recognized a thing for what it was. I felt black people were refreshing, like clear mountain spring water. I remember the cartoon Indians in cowboy and Indian television of the Fifties saying, "White man speak with forked tongue." As a kid, all white people lied to me. I liked the black people I knew for not lying like white people. 

Evidently, Yankees see the South a two-dimensional caricature, Bugs Bunny in a gray Civil War uniform. The decade I lived in Charleston, SC, deep South, I knew only liberals. The right wing was everywhere, even the majority of the population, but a large percentage of the people are not right wing. In the Blue Ridge, the majority of the population is right wing, though I only mix with people who are liberal or don't care about politics. That's just a social dynamic. People of the right don't like me for not being of the right. It's ok by me. I've come to stay away from white men my age, my peers. One look at the scowl on a white man's face with white hair and I know what tv channel he watches. Yet, exceptions abound. Myself, I hope. People in the South, like people everywhere, are not just one thing, not caricatures. Yankees display a conviction they're better than white Southerners, and certainly better than black Southerners, the way white middle class looks down on white working class, the part in the denial drawer. Racism is more taken for granted in the South than the rest of the country where the white people are racist too, but practice denial. Black people are racist. It's what we humans do. The only solution I can see is to acknowledge racism in self and be conscious of it, aware of it. Awareness is the beginning of addressing change in self. 

I gave up on racism by the time I was out of high school. Black kids went to school and some were my neighbors. They were good people. The people living here from Mexico are good people. As far as I can tell, the only difference between us is culture. Black people have their culture, white people have theirs, and Mexicans have theirs. It is the cultures that make us different. Intolerance of other cultures is a problem. Racism boils down to ego. It amounts to saying, Not me. It is saying, I don't like a given point of view because it's not mine. I used to have a friend I had to stop knowing because he believed his the only true and valid point of view, all others nonsense, especially mine. This is how white people are toward black people, making it clear their whiteness is the only pigmentation and civilization valid. It can be said a general belief among white people that black people have no value. Otherwise, there would be something besides justification coming from white people about cops killing so many unarmed, young black men and women, even children and old people. The greatest justification of all, they kill white people and dogs, too. Racism is too complicated to be dealt with superficially. It can only be dealt with superficially in America. In the land of television, we only deal with social issues superficially, by distraction. This Confederate flag issue is a distraction from something else that matters we're not to know about. As soon as whatever the flag is covering up passes, concerns about the flag will go away with it. 

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REBELLION IN AMERICA

natural man

Kathmandu fell apart, Everest avalanched, cops at war with young black people in Baltimore, Crips and Bloods united in Baltimore to protect black people from the cops. Al Sharpton is going to Baltimore, following the cameras again. At least he has a new hairdo. Follow the news and see shameless people of every variety. Put a camera in front of somebody's face and they'll say anything you want. Seems like it would be a more certain way to get information from detainees than torture. Just aim a camera at them and they'll tell it all. Maybe this only applies to Americans. I'm glad to see rebellion against police brutality by the people the cops are most brutal toward. No matter how much it's justified, American police kill more people than anywhere in the world such that it's beyond shameless. Executioners. Maybe they like this word better than murderers. It looks more every year, and escalating fast, like the American police are at war with the American people. It's been growing since Nixon times "law and order." Next, "war on drugs." I saw something about a cop demanding respect and laughed. Took me way back to childhood, daddy demanding respect. I'd think, show me something I can respect. Didn't dare say it. Saying I'm glad to see the rebellion, I don't mean I'm glad to see the cops rally to an opportunity to beat up and torment young black guys in the zoo. I'm glad to see years of unspoken racial tension come to the surface, racism come forward and be proud. Only on the surface can social or personal issues be settled. It looks like American racism is having its day. The white robes are back, though this time they're blue. 

dogwood

The nature of the police state is racist, so racism is the nature of the police state. White people who still believe we have a democracy are freaking out over the people-of-color population now being 50/50 with whites. From here on, people of color outnumber whites. Democracy was shut down in the South after emancipation; the black people outnumbered the whites. Now, False News buffoon, Ann Coulter, mummy of an old belief system, is calling for literacy tests again for voting. Like voting matters. I have a hard time taking any of it seriously. Manipulation by corporate propaganda through television, by corporate control through legislation and the courts, including the supreme court, is how we live in America now. The land where money has been worshipped from the beginning is now ruled by money for money's interest only. Citizens are now enemies of the state, especially the poor. Fema has empty concentration camps all over the country. They are waiting for social conflict the manipulators know will be created in the near future. The police state is characterized by a dismissive arrogance toward the people, as illustrated by the governors in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Texas, Arizona, Florida and Kansas, to name a few, the entire US Congress, Senate, and the White House. Mammon does not like democracy. Mammon likes police state. Fascists always destroy their own countries. The fall of America is wrapped inside its fascist takeover. Like the old apocaloptimist said, It's gonna get worse before it gets better. The rest of the world will roar with sighs of relief.

bag lady rest area

I cannot offer a solution to what I see, except the momentum must play itself out. It will play itself out and I will stay out of it the best I can. Can't stay out of the economic collapse and can't stay out of manipulated social attitudes. I can be aware, however, of the manipulation enough to recognize it and bypass its influence. My closest friends pay no attention to news, government or history. I applaud them and never encourage them to give current events any mind. The only thing I have to say to them that I feel valid is get out of debt as fast as rationally possible. I tell Justin when hard times are here, you will be all right--you're able to make it without a steady job, by taking whatever job comes up, like house painting, carpentry, auto repair, hunting and much else. You will be helping people who cannot help themselves, the people who have only money, devoid of inner resources. They'll be paying you. Your role, because you have inner resources, will be helping others. Just don't let discouragement take you over. Hard times have a way of ending. Even the Civil War came to an end, whether yankees believe it or not. Younger, I wanted to get involved in social movements, be a part of the change toward democracy, but learned in 1968 the press was complicit with the corporate coup of five years before. The manipulators own the television networks and the press. They rule. Best for me to stay home and not get beat up and tormented by cops or killed without recourse for nothing. Better to stay at home, read a biography of Van Gogh and listen to recordings of Tibetan monks singing.

bridge and shadow

I'll give carrots to donkeys, hold my cat friend, Caterpillar, give sunflower seeds to birds, be a communal food kitchen for my near neighbors. If they eat anything in the christmas tree fields two-thirds of the way around the house and donkey meadow, they die. I suppose that if I give them plenty of what they like, they won't need to explore into the christmas tree fields for something to eat. Keep them close to the woods across the road where they live, away from the bugs coated with herbicides etc that have already killed everything that lives in the water. The world I live in is physical, emotional, mental and spiritual poison. I have no choice but live in it, but I don't have to be of it. Like in childhood under arational control, I'd think, You can control my body, but you can't do shit with my mind. My mind is my own. Of course, quite a lot of warping of the mind occurred that I've spent the rest of my life recovering from and reparenting. My search for innermost self, who I really am, is my spiritual path. I found an affordable (then) little hermitage on a back road to walk my path. I'm here for my own spiritual reasons, none of them social. I like to contribute to my community, though only in meaningful ways with purpose, not the frivolous. Justin told me recently when he was in high school he told his buddies to stay away from that old man on the mountain--he'll shoot your ass--he don't care. He said he did it because he knew them and wanted them to leave me alone. I treat others right, don't draw attention to self. A few days ago I was buying a pack of white paper for the printer at a new corporate store in town, the only place it's available. At the counter I was asked if I had my card. If so, I don't know. Was told to punch my phone number into a key pad. I asked, Why? To see if you have a card. I said, "I don't care. I just want to buy this." She looked at me like she couldn't believe somebody would refuse a three cent discount, if any. I said, "I am not of this world." It actually flowed out of my mouth without thought. There it was. She let it go and rang up the sale.

rock face

photos by tj worthington

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BORED BY WHITE PRIDE

max ernst

Saw a thing on facebook promising this could change the way I think. I couldn't click on it. It looked like something like a hugging contest. Something unexpectedly sweet. I couldn't go there, whatever it was. The intro that it's about changing the way I think did it for me. Not that I reject having the way I think changed. I'm always open to adjusting, fine tuning my thinking. I already know my thinking is based in illusion, mixing details, facts, trends, beliefs I'm unaware of, connecting the dots in my head into a skyscraper of cards. Every card a bit of misinformation, inaccurate details, images arranged into a construction composed by my own attitude toward life. What does some person on facebook who never heard of me know about my thinking? The presumption that I think a certain way is what turned me off. How does that person know I don't already think the way he's making a case for? And what if I don't? I'm half tempted go take a look at what it has to say, but refuse to. It brings to mind somebody saying a sentimental act of common decency restored their faith in humanity. Every time I hear it, I think, but cannot say, If that's all it took to restore your faith in humanity, it must not have taken much to lose it. The American madness to change other people's thinking is totally out of bounds in my way of seeing plain decency. The church I grew up in tried to convince me it was my duty to browbeat everyone I know about changing their way of thinking to the only way, the right way, the way the preacher at the church thought. I wouldn't want to lay that on anybody, God as Fear and Punishment. I had to shed that mind. It took fifteen years by school education and self-education by reading and paying attention to the people I know.  

max ernst

Since childhood, I've wanted through the course of my life to know people from different backgrounds, social circumstances, from the poor to the rich, from religious to non-religious, from pastoral people, who live by supposed-to, to ex-convicts and foreigners, Yankees too. I've been fascinated by the varieties of humanity since as far back as I can remember, always interested in people of different cultures, different nationalities, different races, different languages. I even like knowing cops. I believe our Sparta town police, now, are honorable people. It hadn't always been that way. My best friend through grade school was American-Mexican. He was as American as I was, but he was Mexican. My mother worked sometimes in a TG&Y store as accountant. We'd go pick her up after work. A Mexican girl in high school worked there, Juanita. I loved Juanita. I still love the name. She knew that Mitchell was my friend. I loved the Mexican in her. That she was Catholic fascinated me too. I was like a l dog following her around listening to her talk. I asked her once to say something in Spanish. She asked what I wanted her to say. I couldn't think of anything and we laughed. I had Mexican friends all the way through school. I didn't care that it made me suspect to the other white kids. The Mexicans were far more interesting to me than the white Baptist kids. I also did not like the way they were shut out by the white kids. I extended myself to them, wanting to know them, appreciating them as themselves, liking them especially for being different from the suffocating pride of whiteness. White arrogance toward people I knew to be valid human beings made me ashamed of my white privilege. 

max ernst

In the Navy, my friends were the black guys. I was on an old WW2 destroyer that was sold to Brazil soon after I was released. It could run, and it could ride the waves. It took a 90 degree roll one night and uprighted. I loved how the ship rode the waves. In the very worst times when three-quarters of the crew were out with sea-sickness and and puke was everywhere, I kept on going, thinking to self I'd pay for this ride, and it's paying me. I loved it, walking down a hallway bouncing from wall to wall using upper arms for bumpers, going up steps and stepping down what seemed like three feet to step up to the next step, I didn't like the aroma of puke everywhere, on my clothes too, no avoiding it, but I refused to give in to sea-sickness, because riding the waves was my reason for choosing the Navy to stay out of the Army. I loved riding the ocean. The ship had a dozen or more black guys. I liked them the best and enjoyed social times with them. They were people just like me and the other white guys that called me nigger lover. My closest friend on the ship was Muslim, from Boston. One of the guys on the ship from Texas had a cousin who was going with Joe Tex, then a pop singer on the radio. Going onshore, I always went with my black friends. They were the most fun. The white guys went en masse to the sailor bar to drink as much beer as they could and talk big man talk about pussy. With the black guys I went to jazz clubs. They knew where these places were. Had some great jazz club experiences in Europe along the Mediterranean. My friend, Ameen, played jazz piano on the order of Ahmad Jamal, and jazz vibraphone, vibes. We'd go to a club, enjoy the music by good musicians from all over Europe. During intermission he'd introduce himself to the band, we'd drink with the band and talk. Every time, the piano player asked him to play some tunes. His courtesy was never to play more than two.

max ernst

After being acquainted with a fair variety of people, weary of racial tensions, I committed to a white working class community of mountain people, a real culture. As a white dude, I felt most at home among mountain people. I found my grandmother Worthington in them. From early years in these mountains unto now I feel in the mountains as in grandmother's arms. The attitude was hers, the philosophical mind was hers, the colloquialisms were hers, and the feeling was hers. I didn't learn until I'd been here a quarter century that her parents moved to Kansas from east Kentucky, Pulaski County, not long before she was born. Her older brothers and sisters grew up in Kentucky. She grew up in a mountain home, in Kansas. She married a boy whose parents had just moved to Kansas from Ninemile in eastern Tennessee, Bledsoe County. After living here feeling at home in mountain culture as nowhere else, I learned I've got hillbilly blood, lots of it. It was one of the happiest moments in my life to learn I had hillbilly blood on the Worthington side. Great-great grandpa fought for the Confederacy and survived. One of his brothers didn't make it. I felt closest to grandmother in childhood as to any relative. She was my home base. I had fun telling my sisters in Kansas they had hillbilly blood. Throughout my life, I've regretted the divide between races, religions, nationalities in my country. In the grocery store a couple days ago, a black man I'd never seen before came up behind me in line with two items. I invited him to go ahead of me. He was so surprised he looked suspicious, backing up a step. He declined. I said, Go ahead, I'm in no hurry. He did and spoke his gratitude. Mary at the register said that was nice of me. I said, I can't stand to unload my buggy with somebody behind me who has two items. What's the rush? Then realized it was "nice," unexpected, because he was black. I've done the same for white people and got no notice.  

max ernst himself

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THE SOUTH AND RACISM

mary hourihan lynch

Went and watched the race today, not in a good mood. Not in a bad mood either, just dissatisfied. I need a break from television every Sunday afternoon and evening. Arrived as the race started and left soon after it was over. March Madness, saw Wichita State beat Kansas State, so glad those places are no longer in my life. The only way I can figure my soul found its way to Kansas this time was maybe I saw the movie The Wizard of Oz in last lifetime while having a miserable time of it, dreaming of Judy Garland in Kansas with red shoes, there's no place like home. All my life I've wondered what kind of karmic activity in my past landed me in Kansas and a fundamentalist church to complicate it further. Could I have been drawn to the landscape from lifetimes riding a horse and wearing feathers on the plains following the buffalo? I recall a powerful moment in childhood, some time not long after learning about the Indians from my grandmother, who had an older brother who was said to have traded horses with Sitting Bull. I felt like the Indians were my real people. I got mixed up and born into white skin this time. I remember thinking in childhood, maybe seven or eight, my people will never recognize me. I am the enemy and they can never see me any other way. It was a lonesome feeling, something like lost in space. In childhood play, I only identified with the Indians. In movies and tv westerns, I only pulled for the Indians, knowing they'd lose, but they were my people. I have never felt comfortable white, especially seeing how arrogant white people act toward people of any other pigmentation. I have never felt comfortable with people of other colors, because I can't help it I'm white. I know a lot of other white people who feel the same way. We don't make headlines. We just get called nigger lovers. 

mary hourihan lynch

And that's ok. If it wasn't that, it would be something else. This is human existence. I can't change it anyplace but in myself. Racists I know don't go about hurting black people, as far as I know. Their racism is their concern, not mine. The same as I don't want racists to have a problem with me for not being a racist, I don't have a problem with racists. It's their business. I regret that the corporate takeover of our government is so vehemently racist. It's in the nature of fascism, however, you gotta have a focus for hate. Hate is the wave fascism rides. I find it interesting, not ironic, the people who call them selves Christian cling to fascism and wallow in hate. Ask any Jew who survived the Thirties and Forties in Europe. It was Christians all over Europe killing Jews, not just the German Christians. Again, my only concern is that I do no harm to Jews, black people, Latin American people, even white people. Here, too, applies being in the world not of it. I live in a multi-cultural world. I'm ok with it being multi-cultural. I like that it is multi-cultural. I am in a given race, but I do not have to partake of the arrogance of whiteness. Racism has a place, for sure, in Southern culture, but Southern culture is not entirely racist. Look at the great Southern writers. Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers. They were not racist. Though the politicians and evangelists largely are. It's about the same mix all over the country since the rise of fascist propaganda. Here again, it's the world I live in, but I don't have to be of it, don't have to do what somebody else does. And they don't have to do what I do. My racist friends know where I stand and I know where they stand. No big deal. 

mary hourihan lynch

This is an aspect of the South the people outside the South don't get. Southerners I know tend to be tolerant of people they don't approve of or don't like. Southerners want peace among one another. I don't mean there is no fighting or hate going on, but I have found on the whole Southerners to be peaceable people in their everyday lives. I appreciate Southern culture so much, one aspect that might be objectionable does not diminish the whole. Yankees don't do well in the South, only because of their arrogance toward Southerners. Condescension is obvious from the receiving end. I recall a woman several years ago, here from Connecticut, dissatisfied after a couple years. She was wanting to kick up a fuss over how some man kept his dog. She called herself an animal rescuer. She wanted to force him to take better care of his dog by some kind of idea of justice. She'd got herself into a fix that frightened her. I told her let it rest. You're in the South. You don't tell a man in the South what to do with his property, and to some a dog is property. She couldn't let it rest, it wasn't right. I attempted to explain right has nothing to do with it. I reminded her that in the South she is a foreigner, she has no backup. I recommended she let the dog issue rest. She couldn't do it. It wasn't right. She pursued it, got herself into a heap of trouble by way of threats, freaked out and left the county. She loved it here, but it wasn't enough like where she came from. She could not accept the people around her as themselves. She wanted them to be different. She was so caught up in being right, my talk about letting it go was, itself, not right. She wanted to be right. Ok. Be right. Have a good time.

mary hourihan lynch

I don't have to be every aspect of Southern culture to live happily in the South. For example, I'm not interested in college football games or barbecue. But I do like the Allman Brothers, George Thorogood and the Dirty South Revolutionaries. The South has many sub-cultures, all of them Southern. All have that something special that is Southern. It's an identity with the South, not an ideology or political belief system, nor a religion. The South has Catholic churches and synagogues aplenty, as well as temples of all the religions. There is a Tibetan monastery in Georgia.  We live in peace as Southerners. The greatest characteristic I know of the South is the readiness to allow others to be who they are. Though certain aspects of the belief systems don't necessarily accord with what they claim to believe, it's tradition and that's the end of it. Some years ago a Yankee friend told me it is my responsibility to teach one of my racist friends not to be a racist. I said it is not my responsibility. He believed it was. I maintained it was not. I still believe it is not my responsibility to set out to change anybody's pattern of thinking, not even my right. I woke this morning with the incident in my mind, talking with self about allowing others the autonomy of their own minds. I don't know of another way to live in peace with the people in my world, wherever I live, all the way to rural Thailand. I allow them their own understandings, they allow me mine. I don't like Jehovah's Witnesses coming to my door telling me they're right and I'm wrong. It seems to me basic human decency to allow others their own autonomy. If I expect to be allowed my own, then I allow others their own. For me to tell somebody else their way of thinking is unacceptable and must change, I'm giving somebody down the line permission to do the same to me.  
  

janice lynch schuster and her mother mary hourihan lynch

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HEY WHITEBOY

georgia o'keefe

Changing clothes yesterday before going into town for lunch, I thought I'd go over the face hair with clippers, trim it back. It was ragged, which I liked. Decided to leave some goat beard, shorten it by about half, got carried away with the clippers and mowed all of it. It will grow back. Now I don't have to mess with it for awhile. It is one of the great privileges of retirement that I can let my continually growing hair go and not fool with it. At home, I wear the same things all the time, changing shoes three and four times a day for going outside to feed the donkeys and slip n slide to the mailbox. At times feet become annoyingly frozen, I take the warm ones from the heater and put the cold shoes on the heater toward next change. I prefer not to smell in public like I look. I'm now one of the worst looking people in the grocery store. I'd best stay out of Walmart or my picture will appear online in collections of the freaks sighted in Walmart. Now that I go almost no place, I let appearance go. Laziness. Tired of shaving. I've been tired of shaving since the first time. My daddy lathered his face up with a brush in such excess I dreaded having to shave. He used the Gillette double-edge blades and finished with little dabs of toilet paper stuck to his face. He took time shaving like mother took with makeup. Serious business. I was unable to make such a ritual of shaving, and so glad when the Bic disposable razors came along. I'd take a small amount of lather from the spray can and smear it on my face, go over it with the razor and be done. I missed places and didn't care. I shaved less and less as I grew older. Shaving did not make me feel like a man. That was not the kind of man I wanted to be. I'll call it Obedience Man. I never wanted to be an obedient robot. Took a lot of hell for it in the early years. It just made me worse. 

marcel janco

In childhood play with neighbor kids, we were in the time of cowboys and Indians, before the time of cops and drug dealers. I only played the Indian, could not play cowboy in the early years for the same reasons I could not be a cop grown up and have a hard time not being ashamed of my status as a white man. White man has been an oppressor to people of any shade of any color for multiple centuries. I don't know where it came from in early childhood, but in the company of people of other shades of pigment I feel shame. I thought the Lone Ranger was cool for having an Indian his best friend. I thought Tonto was much cooler than Kimo Sabe. For me, the Lone Ranger was Tonto's sidekick. If I'd seen Dances With Wolves in childhood, I would have dove in, entered the movie and become Kevin Costner. I like Graham Greene the actor in movies. I think I had an identity problem in childhood. I did not feel right about being white. I was not comfortable with white privilege. I knew some Mexican kids and knew some black kids, liked them a lot. My best friend K-6 was Mexican, Mitchell Ledesma. He could not go to Catholic school for a reason I never knew. Maybe parents couldn't afford it. They surely could have. All the Mexican kids went to Catholic school. I had a sense he'd been into some sort of trouble, insubordinate or something. I liked Mitchell. He was a good guy. I didn't know then that the other kids took me for a Mexican-lover, wouldn't have cared if I knew. The other kids didn't have much to do with him, which was ok with me. He was more interesting to me than the others. Catholic school only went to the sixth grade for the Mexican kids. They entered the public school system in the seventh grade. Mitchell and I drifted apart through the seventh grade as he spent more time with his Mexican friends. 

anish kapoor

I never had any problems with the Mexican kids. They all knew I was Mitchell's friend. They were friendly to me. We went into the seventh grade in 1954, the year of school desegregation. All the time before was in the time of overt segregation. The varieties of skin tones lived in their own neighborhoods. My parents were barely tolerant of me having a Mexican friend, more because he was a Catholic than a Mexican, though Mexican was bad enough. To walk to the movie theater a mile and a half to two miles, the longest way was through white neighborhoods. The shortest way was through the Mexican section and the black neighborhood. I wished none of them any ill will and took the shortest way through their neighborhoods feeling safe. There was so much white teenagers beating up black teenagers in the time, a white kid was not safe where the black people lived. I felt no problem. I was not one of the ones bullying them, and they knew it. I did not know it, but they knew who I was and where I lived. They knew I was friendly with the few black people I knew. I walked by a bar I wanted to go inside so badly. It was the time of pomade and men wearing caps made of a woman's stocking during the day to hold the hair down for Friday and Saturday nights. I saw a number of the people there coming and going during my walks to the movie theater on Saturday afternoons, and no one even looked at me with a hint of a threat. Red-headed, freckled Irish-looking kid, ultra-whiteboy. They may have admired the kid's pluck, unafraid of them. I felt no ill toward them in my heart and had a faith it would keep me safe. A few old men sat out front during the days in wooden chairs, men who were not quite right, needed looking after. They were welcome at the bar, a place they could be safe during the day where everybody knew them and saw to it nothing happened to them. 

antoni tapies

Walking by the bar, I'd speak with the old boys leaning back in their wooden chairs against the wall of the bar. They'd smile big and I'd smile big. The time came when I walked through the black section every time, primarily to see the old boys in front of the bar. They recognized me and I recognized them, how you doin? The music on the jukebox was the music I listened to at home on the black AM station where the music was the best, Ivory Joe Hunter, Big Mama Thornton, Slim Harpo, Jimmy Reed, James Brown, The Chantels. It was dark and smoky inside the open doorway. The jukebox played a song I liked every time I passed. It was the time of Ray Charles, Lonely Avenue, and Bill Doggett's Honky Tonk that was number one for a year. I probably would have been safer in there among the grownup black people than anywhere else. The way white people believed, I'd have been killed walking in the door. I believe I could have gone in and bought a coke at the bar and it would have been a friendly time. Though my heart believed I could walk in the door and be ok, my white upbringing told me to be afraid, white culture the only culture I knew, culture the same as reality from the inside. As throughout my life, I had conflicted feelings. My heart and mind said one thing and the culture I lived in said another, most often quite another. I watched Fifties cowboy and Indian tv shows pulling for the Indians, knowing they would lose, they always do, but they were my people, my team I fought with in the neighborhood Indian wars. According to ancestry.com DNA lab results, I'm mostly German, almost as much Irish, then English and Swedish. I'm a whiteboy. And I've never felt right being white. I grew up in a world of white people who looked down on anybody of any race other than white. I never saw any sense in it, yet it became a part of me, a part I shook off when I set out on my own. 

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