CHANGES

sophia in the window

 

Every day I see something on Facebook of somebody wanting change. Seldom does anyone name the change they want, only change. When they do state what changes they want, they're at odds with changes somebody else wants. So many different changes perpetually dissatisfied Americans want, put them all together and the result is chaos, what we already have. I saw a good meme of the appearance of several ventriloquist dummies sitting in a theater. The caption said these are liberals waiting to be told what to think. I thought it would be more to the point if they were in a coffee shop. I've stopped going to any coffee shop from refusal to watch my language for superficial reasons. They want changes in other people, never themselves. I hear John Lennon singing, If you want to change the world, change your mind instead, from the Beatles' song, Revolution. In the time it was new, early 70s, every band was required by social trends to have a song about revolution on a new album that year. Lennon was essentially saying to the pretend call for revolution, bullshit. The song was dismissed by many trend-marionettes as the Beatles sold out.

 

 

It brings to mind in the late 60s a year every band was required to have a song on the new album about Jesus or risk the publicity of so-called Christians burning their records on tv so-called news. The Rolling Stones, like the Beatles later, met the trend requirement with a song, I don't want to talk about Jesus, I just want to see his face. These were the only words to the song, in my imperfect memory, repeated over and over. I thought it clever of the Stones to meet the requirement, yet in a way that says it is bullshit. It doesn't matter if Jagger wanted to see the face of Jesus or not. I thought it a masterful way, as with the Beatles in Revolution, to concede to a social trend and call it nonsense in the concession. The period called the Sixties, 1965-1975, was, indeed, a kind of revolution. It revolutionized the possibilities of an electric guitar. Since then, the length of a guy's hair is a matter of choice. Before, all males were required to be barber shop shorn. Optional long hair did away with barber shops like amazon did away with bookstores. I see redneck guys going to beauty shops for hair cuts. I go to the Cutting Corner to get my hair "done" by Crystal's friend, Morgan, who has a new baby, Emma.  

 

 

Through the years before the hair length revolution, I never liked it that there was no way around a barber's shearing, marching as to war. It was objectionable to a born pacifist. I don't know if mother set me in the pacifist way as a baby from fear during WW2 or if it's from past life experience. Going by where I suspect last lifetime might have been, I can see how that person would return at odds with war and its glorification. If mother inspired pacifism, it was not by intent. It was likely through fear the great motivator. If she had a hand in it. It doesn't matter where it came from, it's that deep. If what I thought mattered beyond myself, the change I would want for "the world" would be no more war. What a radical change it would be. The Arts would flourish unimaginably like entertainment flourishes in a martial society. The human as an individual might have value. Being, itself, might have value. A change I'd like to see and believe will see over several hundred years would be regarding all life forms people, the same as us, just living in different forms. Let them be, let them live as who they are. Learn to communicate with them wordlessly, a language course in school, the inter-species language of silence. Best-selling books, Conversations With Birds At The Feeder. 

 

 

It is fantasy to think I could make a difference that mattered toward no more war. In such light, it is absurd to waste thought time on the matter. Another way of looking at it, change your mind instead, I can bring it home and say I want no more war in my world.  No silent, unsettled disagreements that linger, no arguments with vehemence, no settling scores mentally, no more wars in my mind when somebody pisses me off severely. That's a big one. The trick: don't set somebody up to piss me off. Easy. I can't give any sound advice to myself on the matter. A decade ago I fell into a mental rage that lasted a year, until realizing, finally, the other had done me tremendous service, on a platter with a smile service, and it took a year to see it. One of them times I have a sit-down with self and talk about being a little slow catching on. Could it happen again? Yes. But it is worth being aware of, reminding self when needed, war does not cease outside self before it ceases inside self. Keeps me reminded that war ends inside self first or not at all.  

photos by tj worthington

 

 

 

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PATRIOT DIVIDED

george segal

 

I saw a picture of a cop dressed in orange, charged with sex acts with a two year old. News items tend not to get me emotionally concerned, but sometimes they do, like the Sandra Bland story. It makes me want to be the one to deliver karma in person. Unrealistic thinking.  This guy with the two year old, just seeing his face and the headline caused my whole being inside the ribcage to want to explode in rage. I thought of my baby friend, Vada, who is four now, but I loved her when she was two as well as now. It's a protective and a giving love, not a taking love. I couldn't even say something to Vada to hurt her. I see news photos of a Palestinian daddy carrying his dead baby two years old, him splattered with her blood, and I think, How can you live with this, man? To myself I say this is half way round the globe, another world, another culture, another language, another way of life, none of which I understand, leave it alone, it's not mine. Mine is here where I am, my world. My impotence to help in any way makes me sad and callouses my heart. I see myself carrying baby Vada covered in her blood, dead, age four, and I want to deliver karmic payback with my bare hands.

 

george segal

 

I remember my friend Chad, when he was fifteen, his mama's husband beat her mercilessly, Chad stood him up on his toes and told him if he ever hit his mama again, he would beat him to death with his bare hands. Chad could do it, oppressor knew it, his mama was never hit again. I respect Chad for doing what he had to do, that's a hard decision for a kid. I told him of my respect, congratulated him on having what it took to do it. I don't see Chad a lot, but when I see him, I see somebody I respect in a big way. If a smart-missile from an American military drone in this time of police state were to kill Vada, and me near enough to see it, I would lose it for the rest of my life. I would join the forces that oppose American military involvement in my homeland to become an active enemy with purpose. My life would change that instant. I would be a warrior rebel from that day onward. I imagine a large part of the purpose behind the missiles is to create new enemies and to harden old enemies to keep never-ending war going, corporate profits up, shareholders paying their bills, the politicians in the right country clubs, the stock in mood-enhancers rising steadily.

 

george segal

 

It tears me up, with Vada in my life, to see a child hurt or killed in news photographs. It's what emotional news photographs are meant to do. Nonetheless, I know several people loved that baby with all their hearts the way I love Vada. And they're the people left to bury the baby. I don't like that the government of my country is killing babies all around the globe, even at home, creating such intense misery for corporate profit. It tells me the human condition in this time is the ethics and morality of money, God is dead. Not that God can die, but the American way of life that truly worships money acts as if God were, if not dead, absent. Conscience is something to laugh at now. War is evil. It's obvious. Seems to me a country with an economy rooted in war would, itself, be evil. There is no indifference like the American so-called Christian indifference to the poor and the down and out. None of this is new. It's been like this throughout my lifetime, different faces and names in the news along the way. 
 

george segal

 

American wars are geography lessons in locating the poorest countries on earth with the least defenses, to rob their resources and destroy them further. Shameless is what it is. But it keeps the economy going, the television flickering, the smart-phone charged, the laptop open, our inebriates available, gas in the car. Now it's looking like a necessary evil. Who is going to give up a cell phone, television and computer to stop American jets from bombing more Middle-Eastern defenseless cities? In the poorest parts of the world, my country is known as death from the sky and death squads on the ground. I've not been able to find a way to look at this aspect of America with anything but shame. I can feel pride in American art since the 1950s, pride in American rock n roll, pride in American poetry since Ezra Pound, pride in American writing, in a country where none of it is honored. Maybe it's best that way. Keeps the sentiment in greeting cards and television, where it belongs. I can be nationalistically proud as one of the American people, who are an incredible people. However, our government has turned on we the people, and I can't find nationalist pride in that. This explains why Bernie Sanders appeals to me as a candidate. He appears to have the potential to be a Little David kicking Goliath's ass again. We'll see.  

 

george segal himself

 

 

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FINDING PEACE IN A WORLD OF WAR

This morning I finished reading Chris Hedge's book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. A powerful read. Hedges was a NYTimes war correspondent in Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Rather than give accounts of battles, Hedges covers the lives of survivors, the trauma of war they live through for several years, their memories, losing children, parents, relatives, neighbors, friends, people they don't know. He writes specifically about the difference between the myth of war and the actuality of killing and being shot at. In the myth, killing is the glory of war. In actuality, killing makes the young have nightmares and memories they can't live with for the rest of their lives. Soldiers returning from active duty hear people say, "Thank you for your service," which comes from the myth of war. To the ears of someone back from the actuality of war, it sounds hollow to be thanked for service. Many kill themselves while involved in the military, and later. So many, it's another epidemic in a society that is overrun with epidemics, like cops killing three thousand American citizens a year and beating up multiple thousands more. Soldiers coming home with PTSD and no job prospects become cops, the citizen the enemy. And what do we do? We justify it. Growing up in a martial society is not easy for a kid who wants to live in peace. The war on drugs is a war on the American people who want peace in their lives. I saw a quip from DC chief of police who said arresting people for marijuana use only makes them hate the police. Half a century into the war on the American people, what can I say but: Duh. 

I talk with people I know who have been to prison about the epidemic of cops killing in such excess, the answer comes back, they're scared. Of course. They're scared from half a century of brutalizing peaceable people. They activate peaceable people into protest movements. The NYPD is now trying to make legal protest into an act of terrorism, full reign to kill, maim and arrest peaceable citizens. All the time reading Hedges' book, I was recalling my own feelings subject to the draft, hating being forced by threat of prison to be a part of the killing machine. It comes to a choice of taking my chances as a target or years in prison where I am a target for gangs and guards. I took my chance, fortunately between Korea and Vietnam, a small window. I've thanked God all my life that I've not been forced to take part in killing action. I'm of a mind that I think  I'd rather be killed than kill. The consequences of being killed amount to a shortcut to heaven. The consequences of killing is a lifetime of inner torment, justified by law or not. The problem I wrestled with under military duress was that I did not want to kill or be killed. Guys the same age as me on the other side don't want to kill or be killed. I don't want to kill somebody like myself who does not want to be there, but is there to stay out of prison, like me. I was on a WW2 destroyer in the early 1960s. The ship was sent to patrol the harbor at Santo Domingo. A communist cell was known to be in the city. The ship had orders to blow the hell out of the city if anybody shoots at us. I hated it. I did not want to be a part of the machine that would kill and maim random innocent people, children, people who wanted to live. 

My "general quarters"  role was to load big shells into the elevator that took them to the big gun fired by a young officer just out of officer training school, who had the same ability with one of those guns as I have with a handgun. None. Their targets were the only safe places. I saw them during practice shooting at sea. They hit all around their targets and never the target. It was the same with the big machine guns that fired shells that glow red flying through the air and skipping on the ocean surface like a stone skipped on a lake. They never hit the target. I remember my moral dilemma transferring the big shells from the racks they were stored in to the big gun. I would be as responsible for the damage done to the people and homes of Santo Domingo as the ship itself. I wanted to live a peaceable life and wanted to allow the people of Santo Domingo a peaceable life. The ship running back and forth outside the harbor for a month provided some interesting sights. Look over the side of the ship and see hammerhead sharks and other kinds of sharks, water I did not want to fall into or have the ship sink in. I was fascinated seeing the hammerheads. One time I saw a huge herd of sharks circle a school off bonito in the harbor itself. The ring of sharks closed in on the thrashing circle of bonito that shrank smaller and smaller until the last one stopped thrashing. An amazing event to behold. Not a good place to go in the water at the beach. On lookout duty at night, I watched the movie playing at the drive-in theater. They were playing The King And I, many years after it was new, a movie I never wanted to see, but was fascinated to see it through binoculars from a ship. There was still much child in self at the time, especially the wanting to live aspect of childhood. 

It pissed me off that government, parents, church, every adult in my world wanted me there. What could I think? Fuck all y'all. It felt like the entire society wanted me dead. I had a secret longing to be a communist, anyway. In childhood, daddy said to me out of the blue on one of the unfortunate Saturdays he was home from work, my second least favorite day of the week, Sunday the worst, he said, "If you ever join the Communist Party, I'll kill you." It was the McCarthy era. Of course, he didn't know what he was talking about, but he did understand the threat. This moment made me want to find a way to get with communists. Couldn't find any. In college, after the period of involuntary servitude, I read about communism and took a course in Soviet history. I thought Stalin was cool, because the adults of my world were so freaked out by his name. After a biography of him and learning about his time in power, I thought: shit, he's worse than what we've got. He killed millions of his own people, made the Nazi holocaust look not so bad. No. He's not my leader. American cops have killed well over a million in my lifetime. The latter, however, is hush-hush, so it's not as bad. Growing up, a kid in a world of adults that wanted me dead, I came up without much confidence in the adults around me, certainly not in believers of the myth of war. By the time I finished college and saw I could get a good job I'd probably like, I could not join the world of participation in the myth I did not believe. The time came I found that God, indeed, is, and then I had reason to live beyond automatic self-preservation. I realized I wanted to live in semi-isolation in a place where I  can follow my own light, avoid being swept by social forces not very well thought out. I have found my peace where I can look out the window and see donkeys grazing hay and lying down on it for a siesta in midday sunlight. 

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MEN AND OPINIONS

ellsworth Kelly

I woke this morning entertaining the question of how many centuries it will take for men to heal from several millennia of the male role being about war, killing and being killed. I've always disliked the song Onward Christian Soldiers. Marching as to war does not define the spiritual path for me. Yesterday I saw in some brief video an image of soldiers marching in a parade. Such images disturb me deeply. It tells a belief system I don't believe, can't believe, won't believe, and really don't like being subject to. I especially don't like our time now when our corporate government attacks poverty stricken, defenseless countries for the profits of oil corporations, jet fuel, ship fuel, automobile fuel, keeping the stock market going, then loses the war against people with no allies, using weapons taken from dead American soldiers. It's shameless, but it's how police state functions. The prophesy for our time has been fulfilled like a checklist up to the big war that will make survivors round the globe set the determination to be done with war. That's the day I have waited for all my life. I dread the war that gets us there, but like it's said, All's well that ends well. Maybe. I'm not so sure about that, but it sounds good. Its like saying the end justifies the means. Not necessarily. I take them both for self-serving self-justification. All these old bullshit beliefs about the glory of killing and the glory of being killed will fade into history with nationalism and patriarchy. I celebrate it because it's not far away. It doesn't mean the solution to all problems, but it's a solution to a major problem that creates millions of other problems in its wake.

 

 

alex katz

 

I project that men will heal from a culture of obedience training for men. I ask myself what is the problem with men up in years. It seems like their brains atrophy and they go nuts. But I don't think that's it. From childhood, a boy's mind is atrophied. Little man gotta grow up and be a big man, carry a gun, shoot people, get drunk on power over women and children, define any sensitivity to others feminine, thus unworthy of consideration. In the masculine mind as it has evolved unto today, the feminine is outside consideration, not a concern, stupid because women don't know nothin. Art comes under the feminine. It means paying attention to something besides the crosshairs. Shutting off the feminine ultimately shuts down feeling in oneself. In the soul, we have both, or neither, depending on how you want to look at it. To shut down the validity of half of one's self is ignorant to start with, dumb as hell to carry on and just plain stupid to live with. A man gets up toward 70 and a lifetime of believing in obedience over conscience makes an ideologue of the negative mind; hence, Faux News. I've had to tell a few of my friends over time, Rush Limbaugh is not information. Growing up in a world of boys becoming men, I learned at a certain point, late teens, that it is important to have opinions. I tried it. I've finally come to see that opinions are the same as nothing. Someone who used to be a friend made me so tired of his own opinions being fact and everyone else's opinions nonsense, that I called him one day on his superior attitude, which I'd learned many years before was a defensive mask. He turned, walked away and has had nothing to do with me since. I mentally pumped a fist in the air and said, Yes! It's been over two years and I've not missed him a minute of that time.

 

robert indiana

 

We were both of anti-war mind. I went to the 1968 march on Washington over Viet Nam, like it mattered. The next day I learned it did not matter. That event was the beginning and end of my involvement in anything political. He went to U of Tennessee and was involved in demonstrations there, his moment of glory placing a flower in a National Guardman's rifle barrel. I remembered seeing on the front page of the newspaper in that time a photo of a guy at U Tenn with the same color hair putting a flower in a rifle barrel during a demonstration. I've often wondered if that had been him ten years before I knew him. My figuring is it was the hip, cool thing to do and hundreds of flowers were put in rifle barrels. Hippies thought flowers were so cool. They are, but not used politically. His self definition is, "I'm a revolutionary." It was another moment in life of controlling my face so laughing my ass off inside doesn't show. Our "friendship" was much like the friendship between van Gogh and Gauguin. Watching the film, Lust For Life, with Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn, directed by Vincent Minnelli, 1956, I found van Gogh's issues with Gauguin's arrogance very much the same as mine with friend. His two songs are: Anything you can do I can do better, and Whatever it is I'm against it. I laughed seeing the relationship between van Gogh and Gauguin so familiar it was like a reenactment our story. His opinions of himself are quite out of line with what the people around him observe. As one who never learned to trust opinions, my experience knowing him so many years has trained me to give no value to any opinion. It doesn't mean I don't have opinions aplenty. It means I don't value them. I write opinions here, and I speak opinions talking with friends, but I don't believe them, don't hold them dear as Mine.

 

rufino tamayo

 

Isn't it curious: Mine as possessive, ownership, connected to self, and mine, a deep dark shaft with tunnels under the ground. I'm wondering if the cold dark mine makes an image to define the possessive mine. Among the first things we teach babies is "mine" and the next thing is "share." Does this mean I need a miner's lantern to go into what I mean when I say mine. I see a cd case for Santana I call mine, because I paid for it and I possess it. Is it that the idea of ownership mine could be a root system into my own psychic interior made of dark tunnels? I'm thinking that since they are the same word, there must be some connection. It's awfully easy to make a connection, which makes me suspect I'm bullshitting myself. However, I look at possessive mine the way a baby uses it, holding the blanket close to her heart, "Mine." Those roots go straight to the heart, encase it like a net. Then we grow up into the world of everybody having opinions, and the opinions I hold dear to my heart I call mine. A network of root-like shafts around my heart like a net around a glass ball. Much of our language comes from pre-logical times. whoever called a deep hole in the ground a mine might have seen inside self a deep dark place where memories of experience lurk. Yet, in other languages the words are not the same. For me, that settles it. I'll take it for two different approaches to the word as two separate words for reasons to be found in the evolution of language. Somebody can answer that question easily, like somebody can answer where the lightning comes from. Just a passing curiosity around the nature of the ego, which looks awfully much like a net around the heart.  

 

 

tony smith

 

 

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VICTORY AT SEA

summer flora


Found some cheap video of WW2 film footage, Victory At Sea. It was on tv every day when I was a kid. There was also You Are There. If I remember correctly, it was more land forces than naval forces. I liked to watch both. It told me what the war my daddy was in looked like. This Victory At Sea I watch one or two at a time every once in awhile. Today I watched 4 episodes. They continue to be visually interesting and this time a bit comical. The music is 50s movie music, martial as it can be and still be music. The narration is where the comedy is. The story is told with much affected passion. A lot of words get emphasis, like Japanese and American, the Japanese spoken with a sneer in the voice of disdain for the enemy, American with pumped up pride, our side.



I like about it that it has film footage from the other side too, evidently captured during the war or after. I especially liked that part of it as a kid too, middle 50s, I suppose. It seemed like the young Japanese guys were the same as ours. Their political system they had no say over was just like ours in that way. We got drafted, hoodwinked by propaganda, pumped up to fight a war. When the narrator says the word fight, in any context, it is given full emphasis. I watch bombs fall out of planes over tropical islands obliterating the tropical life everywhere they hit. I've never been able to help but wonder about the animals, fish and birds, monkeys. Collateral damage you're not a man if you think about with any compassion. The word battle gets a great deal of emphasis too. It would be much better without the music.



I see guys just out of high school carried on stretchers in pain that has them in agony. Big V. We won. It's a great 50s package of feel good about ourselves drama. We jump back and forth between the Pacific of the Japanese War and the Atlantic of the German War. More explosions and guns going off than a John Woo Hong Kong men with guns movie. It's orchestras such as this one that give jobs to trombonists. When I look at our boys and their boys, I see guys who would rather be anyplace else. At the same time, when I was incarcerated involuntarily on the wine dark sea, I was surprised to see how gung-ho everybody else was. I couldn't get gung-ho about my life attached to a killing machine against my will. I never wanted to kill somebody who was as much a victim of the political system he lives under as I am, whose system, the same as mine, gives no recourse. They make out like it's a privilege, but it's slavery. I don't have anything against a guy in the same shape I'm in. My grief is with the commanding officers out of harms way orchestrating for medals and advancement, and with the politicians who settle disputes with killing off the younger male population. Thinning it out. Don't have enough jobs for all that many people.



I do have to say WW2, in its way was a righteous war, in that everyone involved believed they had a higher purpose, which they did, shutting down the German war machine and the Japanese war machine, both at the same time. It was a time of national unity behind a potentially overwhelming enemy. Our wars since then have had nothing to do with necessity like in WW2. These wars are about the economy, keeping the economy linked to the war machine going, what Ike called the Military, Industrial, Congressional Complex. Wars keep the economy going. Everybody knows this. It's why it's against the rules to protest any of these pseudo wars. It's good for the economy. Bottom line. Jobs for the many. Billions for the few. It makes me wonder what it will take to make America less a threat to the rest of the world and keep the economy going too.



These are some of the thoughts that run through my head watching film made on battle fields. It's dear to me as an American male, taught from the cradle that nation comes before everything, war is honorable, to die in war glorious. The war experience makes you a man. I doubt, however, that stands very well according to the Afghan War statistics, more soldiers kill themselves than are killed in battle. That doesn't sound very glorious to me. That's every other guy. And what about the other half that has what it takes to bypass suicide and turn into monsters within to survive? They go home and unleash their madness on wives and kids. They bring the war home. Their families become war casualties unnoticed. Men returned from the Civil War with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. They came home and rebuilt their farms or moved on. General Sherman was the atomic bomb of the Civil War. Sherman makes a good case for abortion. After the War he went West and annihilated what was left of the Indians. Making the world safe for suburban sprawl, Walmart and self-worth measured by assets.