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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REBEL REBEL

john marin

Watched a documentary about GMOs, Strange Culture, that left me mortified and at once realizing I've survived somehow. A lifetime of eating manufactured food and I've lived. It wasn't the food so much that took hold of my throat as the absolute violation of human rights by federal law enforcement that took place without recourse. Yesterday the Supremes, we know which five, declared law enforcement no longer needs a warrant to enter my house uninvited and take charge. They didn't anyway, though now it's official. The Confederate flag issue has pushed my buttons more than I thought it would when it started. I'm tired of smug Yankee attitudes toward the South. They've found another easy target, people up front about who they are and what they believe. There is quite a lot about the South that runs in the negative, disdain for education a big one, though American as big pickups. Everything that can be said about the South can be said about all other regions of the country, the whole country. Southerners are Americans first. The flag thing is a redneck identity tag. The people that fly the Confederate flag are Americans first. As Americans, Southern is their culture, their way of life, porch honkies. And the South is poor. American media hates the poor. 

john marin

Now that it's ok to assault white people the same as black people, the poor whites are targets. Now that it's ok for law enforcement to kill poor white people as freely as poor black people, the South is a wide-open barn door target. Ask a Yankee in denial if he's a racist and he'll say, No, I aint no racist. Ask a Southern redneck and he'll say, Hail yeah I'm a racist. What of it? I know, it's not kind, it's not nice, it's hurtful. It is and I regret that about it. I live among Southern rednecks. I love Southern rednecks. They're not all the same. They're individual human beings born without access to much resources, grew up in a world that had no place for them and looks down on them, a world that swindles and lies to them, a world they can't believe in. They're a perfect tinder box for political propaganda appealing to their anger. These are working people who work their asses off all week at labor jobs nobody reading this would take, especially for as little as they work for. They get taken advantage of by management, by government, by the Bank, work like hell and have nothing to show for it but hopefully most of the bills paid every month. Your income pays for less and less until you're working like a mule, your wife leaves and takes the kids. 

john marin

You leave the dog with the kids and put what you have left in a used Harley, attach a Confederate flag to the back of your riding jacket and you're a rebel. Rebel is what the flag is about. You keep your job, but you're a different man. A man develops a give-a-shit attitude, your ex-wife raises the kids to be nothing at all like you. You let your hair grow, let appearance go, conform to the criminal code of watching each other's backs, carry a gun at all times because twenty people want to kill you and four of them mean it, all over stupid shit you did drunk on white liquor and/or on crack. The flag says for him, By God, I'm my own man, take it or leave it. The white Southern working class man is limited to construction work, of which not much is going on now, and factory work, most of which went to Asian sweatshops, and truck driving. Factory work is demeaning. The white working class man has fallen to the same place as the black working class man, nothing available but work that is a personal affront to your manhood and your humanity. These are the people Rush Limbaugh and Fake News target to stir up their anger to take political advantage of them. More redneck boys are popping caps in their own heads and ODing than ever before. They see only hopelessness ahead. It's the same among the black boys.

john marin

The entire working class left to getting by the best they can, both white and black, intense frustration in the air, everybody with guns galore, anything can happen. Anything does happen. Corporate radio and television twists anger into hate, dividing us to conquer us, using the working class for pawns as in war. The conditions that create the disquiet in the working people are not looking to improve any time soon. The conditions for the working people have only devolved in my lifetime. Again, it's beyond my sphere of influence. I deal with it like everybody else deals, do what I can to get by and hang with it. I have no solution. It's too big for a solution. All I know to do is fly below the radar and let other people fight it out. Move inward, pay closer attention to my closest friends, give more attention to Caterpillar the cat, read more, paint more, dwell less in news and more in the people immediately engaged in my life. Pay more attention to God and the way of the spirit. We're in a time that is way out of balance, and my own balance is what I seek. We're always in a time out of balance, no matter where or when. It's the nature of the landscape we live our lives in. When I live in my own balance, it doesn't matter if the world out-there is in or out of balance. It's just a mind game. I live closer to home paying closer attention to the people I interact with in everyday life, the donkeys, the birds, the squirrels, the chipmunks, music and the wildwood flowers. 

john marin

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THE OUTSIDER

grace hartigan

It has been a daily blessing since I clicked the power button *off* to my mental interest in following political nonsense. Simultaneous with turning off that interest came the facebook group, The Daily Creative Practice, brief conversations by way of comment boxes and photographs of varieties of works of art shared, the ones that want to, showing something new. It has brought me new friends, people I'm happy to know and communicate with almost daily. We tap into each other's aesthetic. One, Lee, I feel like we've known each other in lifetimes past. I appreciate about the group that nobody is promoting a given point of view. No games. I was gaping out the window a moment ago at a dove pecking around among last year's pine needle's on the ground, fixed momentarily on the subtle haze of pink on their gray-brown donkey color I can't find a name for. A red squirrel charged in from the right, straight to the dove from behind. The dove fluttered and twittered into space, the squirrel ran to the tree in front of the window, ran around the trunk, then out of sight. Now it is back at the place where it chased off the dove. The squirrel had been seed-hunting there before. A small black and white woodpecker is going over the bark of the white pine out another window. There came a day that I realized how truly ignorant our politicians are. They don't even try to cover up anymore. It's straight up they're in it for the money, they lick the hands that feed them. I asked myself why I was paying so much attention to ignorant people. A waste of my own mental time and space.

 

grace hartigan

 

The Daily Creative Practice has taken the space left over by the sudden vacancy of  my dim-witted drift through the mind-space of below average people. Pay more attention to the books I want to read, the art I want to make, the people I want to interact with. Pull back from media-fed mind to the world of people I live among, the people I care about who care about me. Eliminate the static of media nonsense from my own interior motion picture collage of mind. I want less of that belief system, less of that tone of voice in my head, less of that mind. It's been well over a month since I've paid attention to the vanity of self-centered men on the take. I see a picture of weeping Boner and it makes me laugh like seeing a cartoon, a 2D caricature of complicity with corporate greed. I used to react with a feeling of GAK in my belly. I don't value somebody of that mind, so why pay attention to him even to be disgusted by his Xtreme shamelessness? Why even laugh at cartoons about him? Our political system has become something I cannot support with my attention. I'm considering not participating in the vote later this year as a way of unplugging myself from the corporate media belief system that money is the only purpose. Much as I'd like to feel support for Obama because the racists hate him so much, I can't help but see him a corporate plant. I don't mean a rubber tree. The black people caught on early that he was not with them. He talks to them the way white men talk to them; you needta, you oughta, you better, you should. His white supporters are catching on gradually he's not there for them either.

grace hartigan

My new friends at DCP are a million times more interesting than Machinegun Barbie. At DCP, we have Paleontologist Barbie. I have also learned not to comment on memes I get from places I'd clicked Like on in the past. I got into a brief exchange with a guy involved with Occupy, and he was one hard core activist, the kind that ends up in a deep dark dungeon a political prisoner. Just his attitude made me shudder. It was a friendly exchange. I didn't know what to say. I seem far left in relation to the republican party, but when I have a glimpse of somebody far left, it throws me way back to center. In the face of the two extremes, I'm neither one. I could call myself of the right because I believe the people making ridiculous noise about guns have a right. I don't have a gun, don't want one. Somebody from the apparent "left" gave me all kinds of hell for using the "cruel word," redneck, "you know better," dotted with yellow smiley faces. It threw my mind to kindergarten and refrigerator magnets. I want nothing more to do with the left. I wrote back, "I AM a redneck and proud of it." Unliked the place. Lord have mercy, now I can't even say redneck. Two days ago I saw a thing saying it's not all right for white people to use the enword. I wrote back, "Can I say white emeffer?" I've become a little bit confrontational with those people. I've found some who promote tolerance are as judgmental and intolerant as the most adamantine baptist preacher. The very most intolerant person I know had a sticker on the back window of his car that said Tolerance, and called himself a Buddhist. I figured the sticker on his back window was there to remind himself--albeit in reverse, thinking he's telling everybody else. I seldom let any of them get away with their judgmental statements about the South.

grace hartigan

The liberals who want me tolerant of everything and everybody are severely intolerant of the South. They give more evidence that people outside the South have no idea about the South. I remind them the slavery they're pointing the finger at the South over has been gone over a century and a half, while in American coastal cities is more slavery going on than there ever was in the South. Only difference, the slavery now is Asian, and Asian's aren't cool to wax self-righteous over this year. It's still ok to say the A-word. And the Asian mob, the noise-makers intuit not to provoke that beast. Benign Southern people living in poverty in a trailer by the side of the road, a confederate flag in the bedroom window, did not have slaves, do not have slaves and never seen no damn slave in their life. The only thing the flag means is they drink beer, love the South, and just to be spiteful embrace everything Yankees judge wrong with the South. The South they love is the Lynard Skynard and Allman Brothers South. Southern rock! Hail Yeah! That's something else outsiders don't know about Southern rednecks; they embrace everything Yankees say is wrong with them, because Yankees don't like it. It's comedy. It's I-am-I humor. When I wrote back to the person on facebook saying I am a redneck, it was in place of saying, "Y'all sure are a judgmental bunch." I reminded myself of a saying learned from an aunt, Don't start it if you don't want it started. It's time to pull my mind out of that kind of thinking too. I'll be Unliking some more of them. I will kick into gear an attitude that I like people outside the South looking down on us--it keeps them away. I tell myself, don't educate them, let them believe the highway patrol south of the Mason-Dixon line pulls over every car they see with a Yankee tag. I must let go of my own intolerance of intolerance of intolerance.

grace hartigan herself

 

 

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