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

*

DETACHED WITHOUT IGNORING

etel adnan

Spring is here, on the calendar and in the air. The grass is greening in the donkey meadow. They graze hay part of the day and the fresh green shoots the other part, roaming slowly, heads to the ground. It must be like eating strawberries after a winter of stale bread. I will go on giving them hay while the new grass is growing. The grass has no fiber in it yet. The donkeys will need the fiber of the hay until the grass grows up a ways. I learned this from old man Tom Pruitt working with cows. May have more hay than needed. Don't want any left over. I want to give them all fresh hay next year. I'll see about getting a first-cutting of the hay this time. It will cost more than the second-cutting, but will be worth it. It won't have so many sticks and stickers, stalks and stems. The donkeys like that part. They eat the stalks and stems. I grow weary of nettle splinters in fingers and thumbs from tearing the hay apart to fluff it up for them. Jenny doesn't like for me to wear gloves. The tips break off too deep inside the skin to pry out with a needle. Somebody told me to put a spot of iodine on it daily and the splinter will rise to the surface after several days. She got it from her grandpa. It took a week. In the summer I'll miss taking hay to the donkeys every day. Thinking about taking a folding chair into the meadow this summer to sit in and read, maybe under the dogwood tree, to be present with them in the meadow. They will graze nearby for awhile, and gradually graze about the meadow as usual. I can no longer go sit by the creek in the woods and watch the trout and minnows swim anymore. It's depressing to sit and watch the water, knowing it is poison to life forms. It is symbolic of so much that mountain spring water no longer sustains life. I can go sit in the meadow with the donkeys for the same relaxing focus of attention I found watching the water and the fish before. 

etel adnan

Talking with someone last week, she said it's depressing to look at things the way they are, and asked how I can be happy and still see things the way they are. All I could say was, deal with it. It's not easy for me to live in a country where at least half the population wants fascism. Yet, there is the other half that does not, my half. Where I live it's more like seventy-five percent and twenty-five percent. I don't care about the percentage. I don't even prefer the people of my quarter of the population. I do not care about the politics of anyone I know. A few from both sides are aggressive with their belief systems. I stay away from them, seeing the people who need to advertise their beliefs to be living commercials and little more, another word for missionaries. The church I grew up in taught me to believe I must persuade others to my belief system, which I could not do. Even in childhood I knew other people had their own ways of seeing for their own reasons. Who am I to be telling somebody else my belief system is right and theirs is wrong? I didn't even know what my belief system was, except what I was told it was supposed to be. Who was I to say the Baptist religion was right and the Catholic wrong? Just because I went to one against my will? Among the great benefits to my own mental health was learning to let go of thinking my product was better than anybody else's. I learned in school that I was not the fastest runner, did not make the best grades, didn't care about being a jock, was not and would never be popular  I've learned grown up I am not the one with the fastest, most retentive mind of people I know. I don't read fast. Care nothing for competition of any sort. In fact, have come to reject competition. When I catch self wanting to do something better than somebody else, I ask, Why? That's the end of it. I'm no fun to play games with for caring so little about winning.

etel adnan

I went to my thirtieth class reunion fifteen years ago at the College of Charleston. Everybody was lawyers, judges, doctors, politicians, professors, some in tailored tuxedos, and I was a house painter. In school, nobody wanted to be like their parents. At the reunion, I felt like I was among the parents of the people I went to school with. They were way beyond me in status, income, education. I didn't care. This was not my world. People I crossed paths with for a time. They were looking for success and found it. I was looking for success, too, and found it. My success was in my inner self, consciousness, my attitude toward life. If we'd dressed according to my idea of success, they'd have been a rough looking bunch, as rough looking as I was in the party to their success. I'd become acclimatized to the mountains and this was summer in Charleston. I wore a sport coat, and sweat so bad my shirt was soaked and the jacket was wet. I took napkins from the drinks table, one after the other, mopping the sweat off my face. I felt like a donkey in a herd of horses. Glad I did not turn out like them. Didn't want to then either. It was like they went to the College for job training, to get into medical school or law school. I went to the College for my life. I knew I knew nothing and wanted to learn something. I wanted to go on learning. I wanted to learn about life on earth, how best to live it in ways that are real instead of artificial, to face my life face-on and live as who I am, not what I'm expected to be, not what society looks up to, not what anybody looks up to. I came to the mountains with the last lines of WB Yeats' poem, Among School Children, in my mind, to start where all ladders start, in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

etel adnan

I was grateful when my parachute landed me among the Pruitts, people of no social status, people who worked hard and lived hard, good people content being who they are. Raising cattle to become fast-food burgers seemed a waste, yet valid as work in service to humanity. I felt like house painting was valid work in that the only waste it left was empty paint cans and already discarded rags. It amounted to maintaining what is already here, instead of adding to what we already have too much of. I loved about interiors that paint can make the walls, ceiling and floor in a room of the most modest house look as good as a Manhattan uptown interior. The four walls and ceiling make an empty canvas to add color to, create a space using color. The most beautiful my house has ever been was when it was empty before I moved in. Justin and Crystal bought a modest house with all white walls inside. She painted the rooms different colors, light, beautiful colors. The vibe in the house felt good before, and by now the vibe is remarkably higher. My heart is with the working people. I seldom made more than minimum wage and didn't want more. I wanted to live simply among people who worked hard for little return. It means I live as a reader in a world of people who do not read. It's the same among the professional class. So what's the difference? In one class the people look down their noses at the working class, feeling themselves high up. People on the ground look small from up the ladder. Samuel Beckett's story, The Lost Ones, comes to mind often as a vision of civilization in our time. It plays on the inside of my skull in front fairly often, on the inner drive-in movie screen where I see my thoughts. It seems depressing to share a vision of the world with Beckett, though I deal with it by finding it good practice in detachment, being a passive observer.

etel adnan, herself

*

MY LIFE IN TWO WORLDS

sol lewitt

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

 

sol lewitt

 

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

 

sol lewitt

 

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

 

 

sol lewitt

 

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

 

sol lewitt himself

 

 

*

 

FOCUSING ATTENTION

louise nevelson

 

Something big has changed inside me in the last week. I've seen it coming for quite awhile, without knowing that's what I was seeing. An understanding I've entertained for several years has finally soaked into my head until I got it. It came to me like a minor Eureka experience, maybe what is meant by a peak experience, a moment when multiple observations add up to understanding. Finally, I realized what I already know: our entire system of government from Whitehouse to county commission and town council does not consider the working people of the country or the county in even the breath of a thought except for manipulation by propaganda, marketing targets, and all possible ways to take our money to the Cayman Islands and keep it out of circulation, sinking us deeper every year in poverty quickly. We the working people of America are consciously being pushed into a poverty class of crime and killing each other. Population control. I don't even care to take it any further than that, when the problem is what has already been done, how deep we of the working class are into the process of our own undoing. Unions have been busted in a step by step process of denying us rights. The American working class does not even know itself as a working class, because those words are seldom unto never used in corporate media. Post WW2 the American working class has had its identity and its cohesion as a group force stripped away systematically by the corporate powers funneling the money of the working people up to their tax-free off-shore bank accounts.

louise nevelson

Finally, it has hit me that the ruling class regards the working class the enemy to be controlled by manipulation, by hate radio distracting the working people by inspiring us to hate one another. The right-wing hate machine is about population manipulation, and we fall for it, keep it going by believing it. I have a feeling the atmosphere was something like we have it now in the time before the Civil War. Conservative and Liberal, whatever they were called then, stirred unto hate by money interest of the Bank to manipulate the population to the Bank's will. Keeping the population focused on money as the highest ideal, by way of Manipulation Central, television, has the people of the working class working against themselves in every stitch of work they do. I realized that any attention I give to our political hacks is working against my own interest. My interest being my life. Any attention I give to that system of politics and economics works against my own interests. The Corporatocracy, the ones manipulating the people who work for a living, are bleeding us of our resources the same as they're doing with the surface of the earth. We are left in a slag heap when they're done with us and move on. Bristol Compressors in Sparta, one example of countless many. Moving factories from the South, the lowest paying region of the country, to Asian sweatshops put the South into an unacknowledged Depression.

louise nevelson

In pop culture we see the national popularity of vampires that drain us of our vital resource, blood, symbolizing our other vital resource, money. Zombies are the living dead, completely uninspired by a lifetime in front of television, manipulated without noticing, lullabied into the zone of hypnosis by explosions, gunshots, screaming, murder, killing, nudity, sex and displays of wealth, seductions to debt. Control. If you want to check these observations out by testing them, stop watching television for a year. If you can't do that, then simply pay attention to what is going into your unconsciousness by way of eyes and ears. Get your head out of that world of manipulation telling you to spend more money on things you neither want nor need. The message of television is that ignorance trumps knowledge. This has become the American belief system after two-thirds of a century. The less educated we are, the easier we are to manipulate, the more quickly we give up our resources by way of debt. I've known all this for years and years. The part that stopped my mind was realizing that anything I do that participates in this political / economic system goes against my own interest as a human being, as an American citizen who prefers Democracy, as a drop in the ocean of the working class, as one who mourns seeing cultures replaced by the television belief system that emptiness is fullness, that money is the only reason for being. Religion television sells the same belief system.

louise nevelson

What do I do? For one thing, the corporate web of dependency is so pervasive there is no way out of it. I say I won't want to support big corporations that are destroying our country and the world, but I have to deal in money. I need gas, groceries, shelter, etc. So I don't want my money going to Walmart for a host of reasons. I want to buy locally. I'm of the attitude if I can't get it in Sparta, or by mail, I don't want it. Corporate bookstores have shut down thousands and thousands of small bookstores all over the country. Amazon has the market on books. My spending is down to the minimum. About everything I spend money on is a corporate product. I can't help that. It's the nature of the society I live in, and I must perform at least that minimum for sheer existence. But I don't have to buy the belief system. I already have, to a great extent, but think of it as "rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's." Then as now, Caesar, government, wants our money. Jesus' take on the matter was to let them have it. Money is worthless anyway. I don't need to buy the philosophy or the belief systems. I can give less attention to the serial comic strip called the News, give less attention to wanting new things, put my money, my energy, in the hands of small businesses in my community as much as possible. I will limit the focus of my attention on political machinations in DC and the breakdown of American life, and give more attention to my own world, my community, the people I know and care about. It's not a lot that I have to ask of myself, except just shifting attention from the toxic to the nontoxic.   

 

louise nevelson

 

 

*

 

 

 

  

INTEGRATION IN AMERICA

george grosz

It just now popped into my mind, I love a good race. I mean a race to the finish line, not a biological race. As for the latter, I have come to a place I see only the human race. Skin color is simply a skin color. Some people have long toes, some have short toes, some have blue eyes, some have brown eyes, some have green eyes. I don't think any people from earth have vertical slits for pupils like cats and goats. Even if there were, where's the big deal? Some dogs have spots and some do not. Among dogs, spots are not even a concern, nor are spots on dogs a concern among humans unless attempting to breed a dog without spots and one turns up worthless with spots. It's cultural differences we identify often as racial differences. Like somebody black in Kinshasa, the Congo, who plays keyboard in a band at dance clubs functions in a very different culture from somebody white who plays keyboard in a hard-core punk band in StPetersburg, Russia. Each is shaped by the personality of his/her own culture more than the shade of skin. A black musician can play punk like a white musician. A white musician can play Kinshasa dance music. Cultures are collective personalities. I doubt we'll be able to get along racially in America until it is understood another race is another culture. It is the culture that makes us different. The American passion for sameness creates the problem with skin color.

george grosz

Ever since "Integration," the forced mixing of the races by government decree, recognizes white culture the authentic culture, all others lesser versions of the same culture, the different cultures in our multi-ethnic society have been at odds with each other. White people moving to the mountains consider mountain culture a lesser version of the culture they came from in the suburbs of some city. They look down on the locals, because the new people coming in are white middle class suburban culture, the management class, and the mountain people are working class, to be looked down upon the same as another race, the gum chewers. I see that a generalization can be made that white people all over the earth regard the other races as lesser versions of their own race. I don't know how black people see white people in relation to their culture. I know oatmeal and cracker, but that's not really saying anything. After spending a week in Philadelphia visiting black friends in the black culture there, even went to a service in a mosque, returning to the white world was quite a shock. We white people look like pigs to the other races. That is what I saw, our likeness to pigs, after living with another race for just a week. I suddenly understood Orwell's, Some pigs are more equal than others, in a new way. I got a mental image of Dadaist George Grosz painting between the wars the German big-business men as pigs in suits sometimes. A pig in a suit is pretty much the cartoon image of the rich capitalist. White man.

george grosz

We have black rich capitalists too, but they don't get the attention of white capitalists, because they are from a different culture the white men interpret a lesser version of their own, looked down upon. I believe it's in the corporate offices at the top where racism needs to be dealt with in this slow progression of eliminating racism from the human psyche. It can be done. Racism is also anti-democratic by not allowing another culture to be itself. In school we're trained to have as close to the same personality as we can screw ourselves up to achieve. Cultures not white American culture are regarded the same as nothing in power circles. I believe this is a part of the social dynamic that makes somebody who grew up in a Puerto Rican neighborhood in Brooklyn an outsider anyplace else. The poor and unfortunate in AynRandland are looked down on as poverty, below low class, low class out of sight, the American untouchables. When somebody who grew up in semi-poverty struck it rich overnight, like a Detroit rock star or two or three, they carry their working class culture with them into the new culture they've entered and need to learn the new rules fast, white wealth; in the case of black people, into black wealth. Aint no cross-over in the ruling class. American ruling class is white, period. Ask Thurgood Marshall, Barak Obama, Vernon Jordan. Martin Luther King pointed out that 11 on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week.

george grosz

 

 

We people tend to imitate the class "above" our own, but not the class two steps above, except after it has been processed by the class above ours. The upper middle class aspires to and imitates the ruling class. The middle class aspires to and imitates the upper middle class. The working class aspires to the middle class and imitates. The self-help fashion in the middle class of the 80s and 90s became fashion in the working class in the 00s. Oprah funneled middle class values to the working class, brought the working class a long ways toward adopting middle class culture. And then there are the people like the people I call my friends who are ok with who they are, where they are, how much they have, where they came from and don't aspire to that which they are not. I remember in teenage years boys talking, "If I had a million dollars, it wouldn't change me. I'd be just like I am now." I had to hold my laughter inside. The evidence, even to a teenager, was to the contrary. Guys aspiring to be rock stars say, I'll never be too good for any of you guys if I make it. I'll party with you guys always. Then the members of the band are raising families in gated communities and country clubs. Zup dude, 'member me? Wha'd you say your name was, Bro? I have a problem with the white middle class condescension toward any culture other than their own. I believe it is that way everywhere, other races, other nationalities. It's the nature of money as a measure.

george grosz

 

 

The white middle class culture is right because it imitates upper middle class culture, which imitates ruling class culture, which imitates English ruling class culture, which imitates royalty, which imitates the history of royalty. White middle class culture is decreed by authority as correctness, like grammar. You gotta be white or you aint all right in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Looks like land of the free means for white people, and home of the brave applies to black people, or people of any shade, people of color, or different cultures. The white middle class culture, by my assessment, is hardly a culture at all. Real cultures are found in the working class and in outsiders by nationality or whatever reason. Latin Americans, when they get together, they dance. Old and young can dance together. Ethnic groups tend to live in the same neighborhoods and they carry their culture somewhat, much less after half a century of television and our homogenizing educational system that has us believing only white European history, arts and literature matter. In my American education, African, Asian, Middle-Eastern and Spanish literature were regarded of no interest, the same as non-existent, certainly unimportant. Of course, by now literature means data. Money has become the only value. Even hurricanes are graded by dollar value in destruction. Shopping is the most aesthetic experience of all. Ever took your time walking slowly through the toy aisles at walmart? It's an aesthetic experience as good as any installation gets.

george grosz

 

A WEEK OF LIGHT HEARTED FEELING

all paintings by donald roller wilson

This week I dove whole heartedly into the world of my mountain friends. It's been a good week. It brings to mind in feeling the week I spent delivering a cd I'd made of all Jr Maxwell's known recordings and took copies around to everyone I knew who knew him. It was my gift to them for receiving me into their lives as one of them, with that kind of trust. I had printed 100 copies of the cd and spent the week giving them individually by hand to each one. It was a beautiful week full of love. This has been such a week. Told that I was wasting my time with the mountain people as they are of no consequence, I'd benefit myself better sucking up to the middle class. I've been laughing all week over the presumption that the white suburban middle class has something to offer of interest to me. I've been of at least two minds on the matter, contempt for a meddler's belief that my business is hers and gratitude that the meddler put me into a week so far of review of my mountain friends and neighbors, people I value, people I look up to, the people of my heart. When somebody cuts down my people from ignorance, I stand up for my people as they would stand up for me. If I started going to beach music dances with the white middle class, my friends at home would be asking what got into me. I'd be asking myself the same thing. Who put lsd in my coffee?

 

This week has brought forward my love for the people of these mountains. I can't say I like them all, but I can say I love them all. I feel like a dog adopted after being lost and abandoned. I love the family that adopted me as though they were my birth family. It just happened that my soul found a body originally in southern California, then was transferred to Kansas City, Kansas, American wasteland. I felt out of place all the way around. Didn't know why at the time. My mind was having a difficult time in those years beset by the head rooster in the chicken house, who happened to be undiagnosed insane. That was very difficult to live with, especially when the insane one rules everybody in the house. It was a case of self-centered unto insanity. It was one of those situations like our present Congress. I can't change it, but I don't have to subject myself to it. We never bonded as father and son. I can see from pictures of myself at age 2 with knotted brow and a frown, and I know what it was about. First, drawn to the South to get as far away as possible, to the coast, then to the Southern Appalachians, the Blue Ridge. During my first summer in the mountains, on a Saturday I was in Van Pruitt's car, him driving. We passed a field full of flowering black-eyed susans. I felt that I had passed the point of no return in that moment.

This subject has been in the front of my mind all week long. I have spent the week celebrating the mountain people I know, in my heart and person-to-person. As I visit with each one I note what it is I like and love about them. So they haven't had the educational opportunities of the middle class and the ruling class. The middle class is now getting a taste of being shut out by the ruling class the way the middle class has shut out the working class. What goes around comes around, bay-bee. I don't like the way the ruling class treats the rest of us, so I don't participate. I've learned over time that fickle behavior goes with money. The more money, the more fickle. The middle class has been hysterically upwardly mobile until Reagan (Mammon) they worshipped set them on a downward spiral into the working (peasant) class. I taught myself years ago never to trust anyone of the ruling class or anyone of the middle class. I don't like fickle in people I associate with. Somebody plays fickle on me the first time and I'm gone. Then you have people in the working class longing to get into the middle class. They're fickle too. I like to stay in the bottom ranks of the working class. Don't have much money, but I have true friends. The people I associate with are true. I'm glad the middle class looks down at me. Climbers tend to ignore me as a staircase to nowhere.

During my school years I did like I was told, aspire to money and more money, money only. I don't know where I got it from, but as far back as memory goes I've wanted to live an authentic life, devoid of hypocrisy. I can't say I've made it, because other people could answer better my hypocrisy quotient than I can. Too subjective on my part. I doubt, however, hypocrisy is a word that has meaning in my behavior. I don't try not to be hypocritical. I just deal honestly with everyone I encounter. If my honesty is a problem for somebody, then go find somebody else. I don't do dishonest, but I can be misleading when somebody attempts to make my business theirs. We all have our rights. When somebody crosses that line, they're on their own. It happens rarely unto almost never. But when it does happen, I'll say whatever I feel like saying. If Miss Priss had stuck around for conversation after telling me what her gossip set believed I needed to hear, I'd have fed her a line of shit a mile long. But she got her mission accomplished and was gone. Once, I told a middle class invasive personality that Justin was my grandson and I turned him on to pot when he was 12. My way of saying I'm a crazy emeffer, leave me alone. Like my grandmother used to say, They's more'n one way to skin a cat.

Driving home from the coffee shop in town I was thinking about this wave of joyous feeling that has been with me all week, wondering if an equal spell of feeling down and out, depressed for balance would follow. A spell of joyous feeling in the past has been followed by a spell of depression. I don't see it happening this time. I've approached this time of "good" feeling without attachment, without thinking I'd like this to last forever, without even wanting it. Just happy to accept. Thus, I don't anticipate a spell of doldrums to follow, because when it's gone I won't have the feeling I lost something. It feels like this wave of affirmation that came to me this week happened of its own without ego. Maybe when ego is in it, then the balance needs to occur. I don't know. Will wait and see. I don't recall a period of doldrums after the wave of joyous feeling during the week I took Jr's cd around to his friends. The joyous feeling in that time o'er took me by surprise. I didn't set out to do a good deed. It was a thank you gesture to the people of Jr Maxwell's life for receiving me as one of their own. It's looking like I came into a place where I don't anticipate or expect anymore, but allow whatever happens to be, without criticism or complaint or making a big deal of it. I observe and assess, but try to keep it at that. I look, I listen, I learn.  

 

 

 

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MY HILLBILLY HOME

The last few days have me walking on air within. I feel happy inside all day every day, a heart swelling with love, often tears dripping from joyous feeling, a time when mountain music chokes me up. And it chokes me up to talk with my friend Carole about my hillbilly friends and neighbors. I drove down the mountain to Whitehead to see some of my hillbilly friends and spend some time with people during my process of reviewing my love for them. I know this rush of overwhelming love for the people I think of as my neighbors is not permanent. It's like being a surfer and setting out on a wave. It won't last forever. It's a temporary run. That's what it's about. A review. I want to be with my hillbilly friends right now while I'm in full appreciation. It's like celebration time. In this time I want to see my hillbilly friends and spend some time appreciating them, who they are, as souls having an Earth experience, like me. We're in it together type thing. One thing I can tell you unequivocally, you need help of any kind, a hillbilly will help you out. In this county, if something happens to your car, you're stopped at the side of the road, the first pickup that passes will stop and ask if you need help. If you need to go into town for a can of gas, get in, you're on your way. If it's a mechanical problem, pull the hood latch.

I heard it told how (we'll call him) A went to a kindergarten graduation for one of his kids and saw sitting not far away a guy he has a bead on, has been looking for him, aiming to give him a wallerin (tr: wollowing) about the head with fists or whatever it took. He means for B to hit the ground and not get up. "I'll grab his throat with my left hand and beat his brains out!" His mission is to nail the guy first time he sees him, no matter the circumstances, no hesitation. He sat among his peers, neighbors, relatives, and a lot of people he didn't know, attempting to convince himself he really did not want to mess up his baby's big day, but he almost wanted to. He sat through the performance with one thing in mind: stomping a mud-hole in the emeff's ass and walking it dry, seeing the video in his mind's eye. In the same circumstances, I would be ashamed of myself if I failed to execute the karmic return myself, first moment on sight. A is somebody who would crawl a mile on hot Georgia asphalt to help somebody in real need. He's stout as a tree too, and firm on his feet. He has truly brilliant kids who do well in school. They're good natured and they love their daddy in such a big way it has no name. The kids know they're safe with daddy. His wife lives with the confidence that she is protected by a man who cannot be dominated, and especially that she is loved by her man she's proud of. She looks around the room of parents, looks at her man and says to herself, I got the best one in here. I'm happy for them both and their kids, because I see the love between them is alive in action.

I like the company of the people I know who truly and openly love each other. I'd rather be around people I have a relationship of trust and respect with. Not respect for driving a more expensive car than mine or living in a bigger house on a bigger spot of land. Everybody's car is more expensive than mine. Everybody's house has more value than mine. Keeps me out of the competition. Nobody is going to steal my car. Nobody is going to break into my house for guns, liquor or money. Nobody is going to suck up to me for status or the illusion of money. I have nothing for anyone to envy and nothing for anyone to be jealous of, unless it would be my indifference to money and influence. But I can't imagine who that might be in America. Besides, it's easy to acquire. It keeps me clear on who my real friends are. When social climbing is not a part of the picture, nothing fake is going on. It's only when climbing is the prime consideration or seeking something for self gain. I believe this is what puts the middle class in a state of denial, climbing. The climb is the norm, it's expected, wanting to look like on tv, make a good first impression, talk like on tv, be careful about who you know, because somebody might not have enough status to deserve to be seen with you.

Hillbillies are especially funny when they come into too much money too fast. That's when the Beverly Hillbillies within get shut in the basement by denial. Oh, do they become haughty. Nose in the air. Cadillac pickups. Gold, gold and lotsa gold. The problem is they didn't grow up learning how to be fake. Denial is new to them, so haughty behavior is acting natural. And hillbillies love the hillbilly slapstick shows like Andy Griffith, Beverly Hillbillies, Hee Haw, Dukes of Hazard. It is true hillbilly humor. Early on I thought these shows disrespectful of mountain people, until I found that mountain people like them more than anybody else. It's comedy of their own culture, of what they know, their world. A true hillbilly is not ashamed of it. The ones who shrink from being identified hillbilly, I shrink from. The climb, wanting to be seen owning a Cadillac, sets one to learning how to act out a fake lifestyle. As my only real interest is art, I don't have many people in the working class to talk with about art. It is the very same in the middle class. Except for every once in awhile one meets somebody who majored or minored in art at school, but haven't paid any attention to it since, no money in it. And that's not the kind of art that interests me. I learned when in childhood to keep my art interests to myself. In college, I was drawn to people I could talk art matters with, then after college we all go different directions like birds leaving a nest. Two went to New York, one to Atlanta, one stayed in place and I came to the mountains.

I learned some years later that people I knew before the mountains resented me for not staying in touch with them, never seeing them again. It was a chopping block experience for me, moving to the mountains. I went native right away. I discovered the mountain people and loved them as true human beings. In city life I stayed in search of people who were true (in my subjective way of seeing), not on the climb, not regarding college as job training, not worshipping money and tv. Found several and they became my circle of friends. We left in different directions. I fell so deeply into the mountains after the first years of getting acquainted with people and culture through the people I knew, the world off the mountain became another country. It might have the same name, but it's a different world. Mountain culture became the focus of my study and gradually it flowed into and through me. By now it is my culture, the culture I'm comfortable in. I'm not giving up my mountain friends for fake acquaintances with people who don't want anything to do with hillbillies. That already tells me all I need to know of them. I know I'm not expected to give up my hillbilly friends, but time spent with people I care nothing about, who care nothing about me, keeps me from my hillbilly friends. The last few days I've felt so full of light in my heart for the people of my world I'm grateful for the meddler's advice telling me I'm wasting my time with the wrong people.

 

 

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FREEDOM IS AS FREEDOM DOES

Back in the 1950s when the propaganda concerned Russia and Communism, I wondered sometimes what it would be like living in a country where the people were not "free," compared to living in USA where we are "free." Then I grew up. I now see that living not-free is the same as living free. We have "rights protected" in court, after the fact, and in the uncertainty of the poker game that court in America is. And now we have Sandra Day O'Connor, the retired Supreme Court justice, saying her vote to put in the loser of the 2000 election, because she was placed on the court by a Reaganista republican administration, doing her duty, was a mistake. No shit. My first thought when I saw it was a word I never use, never think, but there it was: Thanks byatch! It was the right tone for my meaning, gangsta. I wonder if she thought she was endearing herself to "the people" by fessing up to her error as a human being. She made my assessment of her as a public figure fall even further than it did when she committed her public act of sedition. Thanks for 9/11, the Patriot Act, destroying the Iraqi people for Halliburton, and then the Afghani people. And most of all, thank you for the Depression among the American working poor and all of rural America for the last 13 years. For many years, before that shameless betrayal of the American people (who are paying you very well, even now in your retirement), I believed that what I believed was important and I had recourse in our land of freedom. I believed we voted our "representatives" into office, and they represented us, just like it says in the text books.

Free. What the hell is free? In the 1980s Reagan arranged a deal with Russia to let go Russians who wanted to emigrate to America for freedom. Very big propaganda deal. Russians leaving the shackles of Communism to come to America for freedom. Not much later, they went back to Russia because life in America was dead; no headlines, a back pages deal, hardly worth mention by corporate press. What's so great about freedom when 30,000 people a year are killed by guns? No telling how many are killed by other means, as well as unknown. The land of the free the murder capital of the world. Free to kill. It doesn't strike me very free when you're harassed constantly by cops without recourse for being black. Taught in school about freedom and how fortunate we are to live in a democracy and have freedom, like nobody else in the world is "free," was parallel church where somebody who had never heard of Jesus goes to hell for eternity. Policy. It's terrible when you're not an insider. Outsiders go to hell. And what's so great about freedom when we have a prison population that is so far out of range with the rest of the world? Even the countries we think of as hopelessly nowhere. We live under the draconian mandatory sentencing of the Reagan Junta, and a legal system that gets its kicks out of putting people in prison and labeling people criminals after they're arrested the first time.

People from outside our American working class culture don't know the sly workings of the laboring class where everybody needs more money just to get by. The working class is where you find the people who end up in prison for being shut out of the economy. People with brilliant minds are born into every society. Somebody with a fast, retentive mind born into the working class, shut out of making enough money to live on, going through school with only hopelessness for a future, you're not very motivated. Education for the sake of itself appeals to a very small percentage of children. It's hard to create initiative for oneself without motivation of some sort, hope. I used to know a guy with a very sharp mind who took to interstate fixing stolen cars with new serial numbers, paint and whatever else they did to sell them. He made good money and had his barely paying job on the side. He got his kicks having the Law snapping at his heels. It turned him on to "outsmart" the law. It worked for awhile. This was a guy if born into the upper middle class could have been a Wall St exec never caught for making great big money on the misfortunes of others. By his example, I remind the younger people I know that they might think they can outsmart the sheriff or the town cops, but there is a rule of thumb in this world: the one with the most advanced technology wins. It works out that way, the Colt 45 for example.

The Law has access to technology a tough guy just out of high school driving a used pickup and listening to Korn never heard of. An entire profession, millions of careers, waiting for the next Senior class to let out. Get drunk, get high, talk big, but don't act on it if you want to challenge an institution that has the backup of SBI, FBI, millions of computers, an entire educational system. You go up against the Law, you get caught. That's why the prison system has become a for-profit business. The prison system is kept going by an economy based in cheap labor. Is that freedom? I don't mean the prison. I mean living in the laboring class in an economy that is based in keeping the labor cheap and the Law tight. What used to be called sweat-shops are now common Asian and African and Latin American factories where some of the people are so poor they'll work more for a lot less than in American sweatshops. The American corporate board looks at a fire that killed hundreds of people working in sweatshops as something insurance will handle. Population control. It will make them have to hire a media-image damage-control consultant out of California for a few million. What a bother. The lawyers will take care of it. Let's have another snort. Then it's no big deal. On to the next Bopal. This cannot sanely be called freedom. It can only be called freedom in advertising with beaches, palm trees and beer at a resort to lure the unawares. The Kiss Of The Spider Woman Lodge. Yes, that's Sonia Braga, in person, at the desk.

sonia braga

In my head I hear Patti Smith shouting, OUTSIDE OF SOCIETY! THAT'S WHERE I WANNA BE! And Lenny Kaye's guitar--rock and roll! Something parents forget when their kids are teenagers, rock and roll is about freedom. It's about breaking loose from the binding chains of a society (parenting) that locks down the human spirit in the worship of Mammon. I don't mean to wax Biblical, but there it is. We bury our dead Egyptian style, living our lives going to church talking about the spirit is important, the body just a shell, and have so many laws and regulations about burying the dead that put money in a string of corporate profits, we can't afford to die. The burden of those expenses go onto the heirs. Heirs to what? He worked in factories. It is illegal to be buried simply in a white shroud without a box, the dirt shoveled in on the corpse. Why is that illegal if to dust our bodies return? This is the world our human spirit grows up into, and by late teens it is so confusing a kid doesn't know what to do but crank up the volume. Norway known for its hard metal bands, makes me wonder about Norwegian Protestantism. My guess is that it is more stifling than Kansas Protestantism of a Swedish mind. The music the kids are needing is subliminal expression of their exploding volcanoes within, having to learn how to go against their human nature, and everything they learned in school, to enter the adult world where Happy Planet does not apply. What kinda job? Uh. I dunno. They pay enough to put gas in yer car at Burger King. And then make a living. Get married--two can live cheaper than one--Not. Then the incredible expense of having a baby when you need to buy cheap hot dogs to have the money to pay the rent on the trailer.

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WATCHING THE RACE WITH THE BOYS

 gettin er done

Saw the race yesterday with three friends. It's fun to drive someplace on Sunday afternoon and see a half dozen pickups parked at a house or a trailer, knowing the guys inside are having a good time big-dogging, drinking beer, eating "wings" and pizza, exclaiming, cussing, guys together feeling like the times when they were in high school before full-time job, full-time wife, full-time kids and full-time payments. Watching the race on Sunday after the bow tournaments feels like freedom a little bit, enough to have value, to make it a big moment of the week. It's a big deal for me and I don't even have all those bills and bow tournaments. I like getting with people I like and watching a race. We all four enjoy the race. I like it that I can ask any question about racing subtleties and somebody will know the answer. None of these guys did so hot in school, but when it comes to races they could all get As on tests. They wouldn't even have to cram for the exam. I can't say because I've had more schooling than they had that I'm smarter than them. They're the ones answering my questions, not the other way around.

It has been a narrow line for me to walk, having more education than most of the people I know and spend time with. From my way of seeing, it just means I've taken more tests than they have, and that alone. I can't do just about everything they can do, like shoot a buck with an arrow so it drops the moment it's hit, nor can I cut one open and skin it, nor can I race at night on mountain roads, nor can I build a house or take a motor apart and put it back together. I'm impressed by much that my friends can do. About all I can do they're impressed by is read books. And that's not too impressive. I did kind of blow their minds the other day when two of them came into my house and said, "Whacha doin?" and I said, "Writing about French poetry before WW1." They double-took on that. It's a part of me that none of my friends here can fathom. I miss having friends I can talk about such subjects with, but would not want to live in a world exclusively of people I could talk academically with. For people I know in an everyday life kind of way, I'll take hillbillies. They don't read, but that makes their knowledge first-hand, experiential.

I appreciate experience as it is billed, the best teacher. I too, can drive a tractor, mow hay, make a chainsaw buzz, work all day for years making minimum wage. I did turn myself over to living as the working poor in a place where more people are looking for work than there is work to be had. I did that because I wanted to share the everyday life fate of working class people. I could not aspire to a desk in an office with my name on the door making unconscionable amounts of money literally on the backs of the working poor. I could not feel fulfilled within seeing such a great difference between my privilege and their actual misfortune of living in an economy that does not appreciate the worker, yet amasses fortunes from their labor while they live in poverty. I respect and appreciate the working people, especially because I know what their lives are like from sharing their experience. I know the experience of working all the time, seeing no end to it, questioning the value of it, seeing self in an endless struggle in what turns out to be a long cave, not a tunnel. Employers don't understand this hopelessness in their employees. They just complain because the help doesn't turn up for work most Mondays.

I think of myself politically a socialist, though when I go to socialist websites and read socialist writings, I say, No, I'm not that. I recall a time I walked by an office of Amnesty International that had glass walls. I had been interested in AI, had sent them a little bit of money in the past, especially appreciate what they do, but when I saw some of the people, they had a serious demeanor that made me say to myself, I'm not that. I like the relaxed European forms of socialism, like Sweden and Finland. I must remind myself these are countries with only one major city, maybe two, and sometimes 3. I can't number the American major cities, which I take to mean USA has numberless problems in relation to European countries. I'd be willing to pay more taxes when a whole lot less goes to military. I'm glad to pay when the tax money goes to the well-being of the American people, even the freeloaders enabled by welfare. The real freeloaders are living in the most expensive parts of the city, their drivers driving BMW sedans. They're heading international corporations that are bleeding the American working people of a livelihood, of a life, and golfing at the Cayman Islands Country Club for American tax dodgers with yachts.

Ethically, I'm with the working people. Maybe it comes under the question of whether I'd rather kill or be killed. The Masters recommend being killed is better. Ego says to kill is better, that is, in a case of self-defense. I'd have a hard time not killing somebody in self-defense. I don't know if my ethical ideals could kick in fast enough to give pause to an instinct of self-preservation. Ethically, I say it is better to be killed than to kill. Where karma is concerned, if I kill, then I will have to be killed somewhere along the way, this lifetime or next. Why set that up? Just go ahead and be killed and be done with it. But I'm not so sure about any of that. If somebody were to hurt my baby Vada really bad, give me a machete. I'd want it up close and personal. I'd want to reach out and touch someone, something you could not hear a mile away, blood I'd have to wash off. That kind of came to nothing. What I'm getting at is I could not feel comfortable in myself, as myself, with privileges and looked up to by the working poor, who are poor because of the system that benefited me. I couldn't live like that. I want to live among the working people as one of them. I can't do anything to change their political condition or make minimum wage a livable wage. I'd rather live in the community of the working poor than isolated in a country club with a gated address. Among the working people is where I find what I call the real. Ralph Stanley for one.

I prefer the company of people who work labor jobs to that of people with management jobs and executive jobs. I want to live as the people I most appreciate live. I most appreciate the people who work hard all the time without hope of things getting better, seeing things only get worse. They're the people with guts. Independence lawyer Lorne Campbell told me the only man he respects is the man who will not rat. He said it is a rare individual, indeed. Campbell, himself, was known as one who did not rat. He even did six months in Wilkes jail around 1930, sentenced for not ratting as the court demanded. As a lawyer, he knows. He liked the old-time mountain people. He respected the old liquor-making men who would go to prison before they would rat on somebody. My bluegrass singing friend Katy Taylor told me her grandpa went to prison for two years because he'd let a friend put a still on his land and wouldn't tell who it was, let it be believed it was his still. That's the kind of man Lorne Campbell respected. Junior Maxwell was such a man. Junior wouldn't rat on somebody if you pulled all his fingernails out. Anybody that knew him would affirm that statement. I like living in a world where this kind of trust is honored. I like living in a world where a man's character is all the business card he needs.


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