THINGS FALL APART

Going by reports I've seen, the march on Washington, the 50th anniversary gathering, amounted to not much but another reason we did not want police state. I found a video of Al Sharpton talking there, but turned it off after half a minute. He grates my nerves. At least he followed some sound counsel on changing his hairdo. He's impossible for me to take seriously after the Tawana Brawley non-incident that occurred several years ago. Young black girl had shit smeared on her and claimed she'd been raped. Sharpton was in on the ruse. Sharpton and his zealots made it up, set the whole thing up and made a big racial issue of it, accusing and ranting. A preacher. I'm surprised to see he evidently has enough credibility for a tv network to pay him to be a news commentator, and he was given a slot to talk at the Washington civil rights march 2013. The police presence was all the way up to military, taking hand-held signs from people handing them out, threatening them with arrest. The first civil rights march in 1963 made a great wave in the ocean of collective human consciousness. This memorial half a century after was not even a ripple in a virtual pond. The reports I read indicated that the speakers only had two or three minutes apiece. Then I saw Al Sharpton had 20 minutes. Whatever.

In Raleigh this weekend, some people who had been feeding the homeless on weekends were told to stop it or be arrested by police. No citing the law or statute or reason. Stop it or you're arrested. Another reason we did not want police state. Our national government is telling third world countries to allow peaceful demonstrations if they want to go on receiving billions in aid from USA. Occupy has been shut down. The people peacefully protesting in North Carolina and Wisconsin are arrested routinely for peaceable protesting. It's on international tv and no one seems to get it. Enforcing democracy on destitute countries while arresting demonstrators in USA acting out democracy makes the same kind of sense as locking up "whistleblowers" while calling this a free society. All I know of that's free about it is the polluted air to breathe. Next we'll be sold oxygen like in Tokyo. We've become like a literal herd of sheep controlled by television, believing uncritically whatever we're told, because we're supposed to. In every herd is one that stays off to itself. It is with the herd, a member of the herd, stays with the herd, but stays apart from the herd to itself. I've been the one to stay off to itself in every herd I've been associated with. I'm with the herd, but like a little space around me.

Because I don't have a head full of commercials and sitcom canned laughter, I don't believe it is necessary to make my life a pipeline between Walmart and the landfill. It's actually kinda creepy being the only one, but for less than a handful of the people of my world who does not partake of the daily propaganda ingestion. I don't mean just political propaganda, though there's plenty of that too. In my lifetime I have seen it shorten the American attention span down to nothing. I remember years ago being alarmed when I saw the people around me had an attention span of a cat. By now, it's not even that. It's nonexistent. Zombies, the living dead, are popular entertainment. In my case, it doesn't matter that I don't watch tv, because the entire culture I live in, the larger American culture, our way of thinking is created by television. I don't mean this show or that commercial. I mean the steady flow of flash, both visual and auditory, vey little of it, if any, anything more than flash, devoid of content except to sell something subliminally. It seems like the people who watch television the most have become televisions. I've known a few people that I think of as televisions.

 

The US Navy took me outside my life for two years. I resented that about the draft. I am not soldier or sailor anything but fodder. The first six months living in barracks broke my television habit cold turkey. My head would clear of television images when the ship was at sea, and then I'd have another extended spell on land with television. At sea, the television images would gradually drift out of my head. On the ship I read as much as I could to use the time for something beneficial to myself since I was bound by involuntary servitude for being born a boy in a militarist society, a militarist civilization, a universal militarist mind set. In childhood I wanted to escape to Tibet where they lived in peace. Then Chinese militarism put an end to that. Who gave a shit? Some did. Some gave a great deal of shit, but not enough to stop the oppression of a people unable to defend themselves militarily. It's like what happened in USA, Australia and Latin America; when the outsiders move in by military or economic force, the local people become the outsiders in their own land. The Tibetans staying behind are regarded by the Chinese like the Indians are regarded on Turtle Island in this time. What's to be done? Go to India, the last place where peaceable people have a chance. India has nukes, and India has military. And India is engaged in perpetual terrorist war with Pakistan like Israel with the entire Arab world.

In the late 1980s, Independence attorney Lorne Campbell would comment on the news from time to time, "It's time to move higher up the mountain." Hearing the news in this time, yesterday, today, tomorrow, gives one a visual and a story that brings to mind a working out of the WB Yeats' poem, The Second Coming, the center does not hold. We don't seem to have a center in this time.

     Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
     the falcon cannot hear the falconer;
     Things fall apart, the center cannot hold;
     Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

Yeats wrote the poem in 1919, at the end of WW1. Here it is again. The center is not holding any longer and things are falling apart. It's a cycle we're going through again. America had it's center in being white dominant middle class in the Fifties, Ozzie and Harriet, whose rock star son died in a plane crash free-basing cocaine. We have on the one hand a television fantasy, and on the other hand the in-person version steps out into our world in a plane crash. The Yeats poem is a  beautifully composed vision of the time around the Second Coming. It tells a cycle so well it reads like prophecy. You can find it googling yeats second coming.  I go about thinking much of the time the center does not hold. Like Campbell, I say to myself, Time to move higher up the mountain. I'm already as high up the mountain as I can go, so that's kinda redundant. My center seems to be holding. Every day I look at the green world outside in gratitude to God that I am not caught up in television mind manipulated unconsciously. I pay attention to current events not by tv news, but by newspaper and magazine articles. I'm not Noam Chomsky. I couldn't read it all, due to not being that interested. I like to follow threads of the unwinding of the world as we knew it and see / witness / observe the new world coming on. It's a head game, totally a head game.   

 

 

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NOTHING WILL BE THE SAME

     brian kenny, flag


I'm of at least two minds about leaving this world, this dimension, whatever it may be. One is I am curious about the other side and sometimes a little alarmingly ready to have a look. On the other hand, it's not like watching a movie for 2 hours and turning the light back on. I have to leave this playground I've taken so seriously for so long, sometimes despised it, overall loved it. It makes me look out the window at the leaves of an oak sapling swaying up and down lightly, home. I think of leaving my friends and baby Vada and I feel sorrow, pre-grief maybe. I know a few of my friends will carry a deep sorrow for some time, as I have done for a few of my friends in the past. It is a great sorrow to lose people important to us, the biggest drama in life. This human existence is a puzzle without end, which makes it so interesting and keeps it interesting. Buddhism says it is a life of suffering. It's true. I see the suffering begin in a baby new to a body, bump head on a chair leg, it hurts. Much more suffering follows. We get used to it. Even if we were meditators we'd have suffering of varying degrees in our lives all the time. We have plenty of the other, joy, for balance. I say "we" when I'm not so sure it is entirely "we." I'm actually seeing it these days like joy is the nature of the soul, our innermost, or real self. All the self-centered focus locks onto suffering and sorrow, gray clouds around the soul, a foggy mountaintop.


A moment stays in my mind from half dozen years ago, opening the inside door to the library, a woman I knew on the inside was going out, she opened the door with an exaggerated welcoming gesture and said, "What have you been doing since your store closed?" I said, thinking as fast as I could to condense several months of experience into a phrase, "Getting some joy back into my life," which was literally what I was doing. Her face fell almost to the floor. She said, "I've never had joy in my life." My heart sank for her. I knew she meant it. I knew her husband, more than likely a model of her daddy; jumped from one frying pan into another. I have felt for her ever since she said that. I did not know what to say at the time. I felt a need to hug her and say, "I'm sorry for you," but didn't know her that well, the entire library staff was watching. I could have hugged her in front of them if I'd known her better, a gray-haired old hippie biker chick. One thing she gave me: she showed me I have a way of taking joy for granted, like it's easily accessed. It had never occurred to me there might be people who knew nothing of joy. So little is as it seems, I wonder why I try to assess or understand anything.


Big Mama Thornton is singing in my head, Let's go get stoned. Why the hell not! After a lifetime of taking everything seriously, I'm seeing there's nothing serious about any of it. The redbird is jumping about in the rhododendron the other side of the window. A crow calls in the trees across the road. Katydids inside my head. That's one of the nice parts of living in the midst of what we call nature. In the city, ringing in the ears can be maddening. In the country you don't notice. It's katydids, treefrogs and crickets outside singing with the ones inside, making me one with nature. I look around my world of the mountains I love thinking about leaving them and feel sorrow, a kind of pre-grief, the anticipation of grief. I have to feel it now, because there won't be any feeling it later. When the angels are leading me up the tunnel of light to music of the Bell Spur String Band, I doubt I'll be looking back and missing the mountains. So I'll miss them now, while I can appreciate them. I have songs in my head, How beautiful heaven must be, sweet home of the happy and free, fair haven of rest for the weary, and Peter Tosh singing, Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. And, farther along we'll know all about it, farther along we'll understand why.


Do I sing these songs to myself to comfort myself? Probably. There are other good songs in my head that are not about the other side, like Peter Tosh's African. Don't care where you come from if you're a black man you are an African. Beautiful song of black identity, black pride, beautifully conceived and Tosh sang it well. I say I look forward to the other side, but when I really think about it, it makes me want to put on some beautiful music I love or a movie I love or read some Chinese poetry. This tells me music, drama and poetry I value most in this world, the stuff my house is full of. I have ingested so much of it into my record of experiences that it has become part of who I am, a big part. For me, living in a world of people informed/educated/led by television is like living in a foreign country with people of another language and another culture. I am a stranger to television culture in that I don't keep up with it. But the fact is, I live in television culture because everybody around me to all coasts are the children of television. Now, grandparents were born in front of the tv.


On the news, at the coffee shop, here and there, everywhere I talk with people, the ongoing paean is what's the matter with this world? Let's start at the beginning. This is television culture. It started 60 years ago and grew into this world where prison construction corporation stocks only rise. Police state looks really secure on tv: arresting niggers with attitudes and no tshirts on COPS. Like the Randy Newman song, Rednecks, keepin the niggers down. Steven Seagal arresting black guys who ask for his autograph in handcuffs. Nobody white with any power or desire for power cares that we have the most outrageous prison system on earth as long as the prison population is mostly black. For the black American man prison has become an initiation into manhood, a bootcamp that develops unbreakable bonds. Like a white man I know said to me, "I can't trust you cause you never been in prison." The black men of America have that kind of a bond in a network all over the land, the convict brotherhood. Pre-television, we were moving toward unity, toward "integration," allowing people their rights. Half a century into the time I think of as Led By Television, division has been the emphasis until we're on the verge of civil war again, this one everybody against everybody. Seen from outside television culture, Americans are going collectively crazy. And they're taking me with them, because I'm one of them; it's their culture, it's our culture, it's my culture.


While we snoozed in corporate entertainment and got fat on corporate fast food, the international corporations that keep their money free of taxes in Cayman Island banks took our government from us, our democracy, our constitution and gave us police state, systematically over a period of 30 years, on tv where all that is fake is real, and all that is real becomes fake. It's a fake belief system. During the time of the African civil wars, it was a truth that whoever held the radio station held the power. Here, it aint none of us hold no tv corporations. We don't even know the people that own them. We couldn't even get a job at their country clubs. You think they give a shit about us? :) Of course you don't. Only as long as we keep the garbage and sewage under control. The excesses of Capitalism foreseen to take it down are happening. Capitalism is undergoing what looks like rising tides due to ice melt splashing against the foundations of skyscrapers built by the economic system that melted the polar caps. Kinda like one of the movies made by the gross now, The Day After Tomorrow or 2012. I'm thinking these movies are symbolic of the self-destruction of Capitalism by greed. That's why it's called a "deadly sin," it leads only to self-destruction.


The country I grew up isn't the country I live in anymore. Probably wasn't then. It was the time of the Ugly American when I was learning about our righteous history of wars where we never tortured prisoners and we gave aid to the colonial world of po' nigras (and kept them in poverty at home). It wasn't long after high school I began to see it wasn't like it was told in school, certainly not like told in church, not like told on tv in any kind of way; a sham, a show, light flickering, pixels changing color, a vapor, a scent on the breeze for a second, illusion within illusion. I came into this body a few months after Pearl Harbor, a time of pulling Americans together into one great cheering squad. It took. A dozen years ago our government imploded the WTC towers, rallied us around terrorism, and now is imploding itself, allied as in wedded to Capitalism. They took down democracy and all our values with it, they being our corporate government, taken by quietly systematic coup under smokescreen while we were watching tv spellbound by pop culture. I'm sorry for my country. I can't say I'm sorry to be leaving it before people like me are rounded up for FEMA camps. I saw the very tail end of the Old South in Charleston, South Carolina, the tail end of the old-time ways in the mountains, and the end of democracy in America in this lifetime. It's been both joyus and sorrowful living in Prozac Nation.


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