THE RULE OF THE ABSURD

        robert longo, black flag

I just now saw a photograph on Yahoo of a white man in Houston TX holding a small poster that says END DOMINATION OF PALESTINIAN WOMEN. That's as bad as my sticker on the car window that says Free Tibet. Totally pointless. That's why I have that sticker on my car window, a small absurdity in a world of big absurdities. I doubt the white man with the poster was ironic. End Domination of Palestinian Women. That is specific. Even though I am on the man's side in the matter, I can't help but look at him and think, "What?" What's he doing for his cause in Houston? Donating money probably. I can't help but think about ending the domination of Mexican women, of Indonesian women, of women all over Africa, Asia and the Middle East. What about them? It's a world of dominated women. If you think American women aren't "dominated," ask Loraine Helmsley and Martha Stewart, a couple of women who were chopped down because they had the wealth to be in the Old Boy's Club and the power. But they were women, forward women, the kind of women the Old Boys don't think so much of. Women are for managing the servants and kids. These two women took a hit for all woman-kind making it clear: no admittance, bitch.

It's the same in New York as it is in Palestine. It's more subtle and acceptable. Israel's right-wing government has been running parallel the American right-wing government since the Reagan Revolution. Britain's right-wing government is in there with them, the triumvirate. Christians and Jews, The Holy Bible. The Holy Bible vs the Koran. The Koran is the Holy Bible with a post script. I've come to see it as the Jerusalem wars where Christians kill Muslims and Muslims kill Christians. It was like the stir in India that Gandhi boiled up between Hindus and Muslims. Killing, mayhem, division. India now is divided into two enemy countries, the bitterest enemies on earth at present. All of it over God. Lord have mercy. Evidently, Muslims aren't any better Christians than the Christians themselves. It's just human beings with opinions about something they can't put their fingers on.

In this time, preachers are getting caught fairly regularly for personal hypocrisies. Like the one in Louisiana witnessed by two different women playing with himself in a car next to a playground with kids in it. He said he was getting treatment. He had a pornography problem. Seems he has a bit of a hypocrite problem too, which he confessed to. Good for him. What else could he say? I can't listen to a preacher who believes his role is to condemn sin. In my experience with Christendom, I have seen nothing to do with a spiritual path outside the Catholic church. They do have an understanding of the path in their monasteries. The rest of it is get saved, join a church, be a missionary for the Lord. Doesn't matter if your only understanding is a few memorized verses. I've been wondering for some time how Christendom is going to survive the overwhelming evidence that other religions are valid.

It's a horse pill to swallow when your belief is absolute. This is why I don't hold with the absolute in anything. It's like to live by a government paycheck you believe the lie and exercise denial regularly. It's not an issue. It's an agreement. It's for the job. It's not to be thought about, but obeyed. Sit. Roll over. Play dead. Good dog. I never could allow myself to work for government or the corporate world that only knows me as a 12-digit number. I can't dedicate my life to being a number. That old deal of be in the world not of it tells me I don't want to be a 12-digit number, which I am whether I like it or not, but I never wanted to identify with my individual bar code. I can identify with a horoscope about who I am while the bar code is about what I am: a long number.

The news goes on about the middle-class, victims of capitalist self-indulgence. They never tell about the working class on the news. Too low class. Also, in a capitalist system the workers are the enemy to be feared. They are to be kept down. Limbaugh's role is to keep the working class divided. He's paid a very great deal to keep the working class in conflict with itself while the Bank drains their accounts and they blame the African Hawaiian American president. It's comical in this time to see the panic in the white men. The population is now half white and half colored. So bizarre that in the Land of the Free this is still an issue. Our racial issues have never been settled. They've just been quieted down. Sure you can buy a house outside the ghetto, if you can afford it. The inequalities that were never addressed have become culture and all the harder to change.

*

EVERYTHING COMES BACK

 

  

Finally I've had to address my mother to put a possible end to the stiff-arm tactic she's used on me all my life, sentences that start, When you gonna ...? or I wish you would.... It's not a form of control, because it does not control me, never has and she knows it. Why does she do it? She goes to a Baptist church that is the only Truth on earth; everything the preacher says is RIGHT and all else WRONG. She has a head full of church cliches. "Jesus died for your sins." What a weird one that is. Jesus is supposed to be immortal, never dies. But he died. What? On account of you! The man that never dies died for you. Don't blame me. I wasn't there. Nor am I a preacher to kill him every Sunday with audience-pleasing parrotry. I don't have a problem with somebody who comes on straight-ahead telling it like it is. To the Pharisees (preachers--church dogma), "You're making the people two-fold more children for hell than you yourselves." There, in a nutshell is the reason I have nothing to do with church of any sort. I have seen so many people so "dead in Christ" (mother's ideal) that they miss everything but Jesus cliches, which have no meaning except for a kind of church slang you have to be a member to get.


It brings to mind a joke from high school years. A man first day in prison is in the cafeteria at lunch. Somebody yelled out a number and everybody laughed. Somebody else called out a number and everybody laughed. A few more times and he asked the guy beside him what was so funny about the numbers. The guy explained that everybody knew the same jokes, so they gave the jokes numbers. Instead of telling the joke everybody has heard, they call out the number and it's funny. He asked if he could try it. Sure. He called out a number. No laughter. He asked the guy next to him why nobody laughed. The guy said, "Some people just can't tell a joke." The next thing after getting saved is your duty to browbeat others about Jesus and church, The number of people you convince they need to be saved adds up and you get a Mary Kay pink Cadillac convertible in heaven so you can ride around in the glory of the Lord all day where night never falls. They have laws against laying rubber on the streets of gold. You better watch out or God's gonna condemn you.


If going to heaven is as stressful a deal as being an olympic athlete, there can't be anything to it. In the olympics you lose. Only one wins. Everybody else loses. You don't really know if you're going to heaven. Even if you're super-Christian of the month, you have no guarantee God really likes you. God knows you lied to your mommy once when you were 6. Every little sin of commission and omission is kept on a list like the register receipt at the grocery store. If you get one too many, that's it. The right wing militarist way of seeing it is "no exceptions." The original purpose of a judge was to sort through the subjectivity of all the evidence and find objectively the problem and rule according to the particulars in the individual case. Then comes the Reagan Revolutions mandatory sentencing. No consideration of context, one of the early American legal ideals. Judges have guidelines to follow, no exceptions, no variations. So what's the point of having judges? Have a trial and refer to the guidelines. Talk about saving taxpayers dollars! Getting rid of all the federal judges would save a very great deal. But the deal is not to get rid of them, but to put in only judges of right wing militarist mind. That way the laws created by corporate lobby to put more black folks in prison don't get watered down by judges who don't believe a black kid stealing maybe $50 from a convenience store deserves ten years in prison. Get rid of "liberal" judges like that, build enough prisons and the nigger problem is fixed. Please don't tell me the corporate world is not racist. It's less sexist than it is racist.


The Bible says "works" have no bearing on God's judgment of you, but Baptist preachers know better. I'm expected to go about believing myself to be a worm in the ground. I can see it in that all forms of consciousness are forms of God, life. I'm the same as a toad in that way, the same as a horse in that way, the same as Julius Caesar in that way, consciousness. At the same time, in this lifetime my consciousness is human being. I have a nervous system a bit more complex than a worm's. I have bones. I live above ground. I have responsibilities and concerns a worm cannot imagine because it cannot experience them. I also don't believe "worm" as low self-esteem is valid. Low self-esteem is self-defeating and depressing. Nobody functions well in their lives repeating self-defeating behavior and bound by depression. God wants us to do well in our lives. I don't mean in material wealth, though that is one of the ways. God wants us to live our lives. I take that to mean God wants us to live our lives. If I want to be a boxer, God says, Go for it, do it well (the best you can). If I want to be a painter, God says, Go for it, do it well. If I want to work as an architect, God says, Go for it, do it well.


This is what I have come to see in the course of my spiritual path in direct relationship with God, not through the kaleidoscope of the human mind religion has become. I've come to understand why the spiritual path is experiential only. Spiritually, reading counts for nothing. Only application works. Since kindergarten I knew that everything comes back. I'm rubber, you're glue, everything you say bounces off me and sticks on you. I'd known about that principle all the way along. Automatically when something we don't like happens to us, we say, "What'd I do? Like we know without knowing it that it must be something come back from something put out there. Everything comes back. We all know that, but how well do we know it? I believed I understood it up until in my fifties. One day I decided to make an "empirical" study of it, something like testing to see if light travels as waves or particles, though not so complex. I'd discovered practical application of spiritual principles. I wanted to pay attention and see what I could find.


I don't recall what I did, but one day I put something out there and the next day it came back. That got my attention. I've watched enough to see that it is not the exact deed, but the same degree of response to it. Like one I recall from just a few years ago. Somebody in my world made me mad unto wishing I could permit myself to contemplate murder. But I see consequences, for starters. I was so furious that I had to get revenge right now. Couldn't wait for karma to handle it. I looked at my thinking and saw it makes a really good case for long years in prison. Do I want to go to prison because this lying MF pissed me off so much it kicked me out of control? That's giving him power over me and he would know it and use it. He wasn't getting power over me, and I knew any reaction on my part would give him that power. Relying on this principle, that everything comes back, I put it out of my mind, thought about it no more, except paying attention, waiting to see what would come back to him. Two weeks later something happened totally unrelated to me but right in front of my face that made him as furious as he'd made me. I thought: I could not have commanded better revenge. It was the same degree of rage triggered by himself the day he made my blood run faster. That day I said to myself never to worry about anything again. As long as I don't be putting crazy shit out into the world, crazy shit won't be coming back.


*

STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES

 

 

 



It's been this way throughout my lifetime listening to Republican-speak. It's been so absurd that their ability to do what they're told keeps me laughing with an attitude of derision, which I don't like to feel; although it is entertaining. Every election year we go through long months of hearing republican-speak, and year-round every year on the news. Misinformation with intent to deceive. When it's an individual person it's called lying. What a politician says is never what the individual says. They have staffs of writers and lawyers directing them. Herein lies the issue. The politicians have to be so careful in every word spoken it takes convolutions of sentences to spin meaning into anti-meaning and nonsense into truth. It's come to the place for me that I already know somebody is a republican before they tell me or I find out some other way. When somebody comes at me completely false in tone of voice and words spoken, or comes on with the false enthusiasm of a self-help guru, or brags about being a Christian, I know automatically. Key word: false. Though the word is never used except against the truth.  


It's not just politicians, either. It's government, how it works. It's religion. Our role is to be good soldiers, do what we're told, don't ask questions. Brings to mind someone I once knew who did CIA work. Some of what he said he did made me think about conscience, don't you have a conscience? You did THAT because you were TOLD to? Do you do everything you're told? Of course he had a mind of his own and a conscience. This was work. At work you do what you're told. Conscience and idealism are ok for them that want it, but not at work, and certainly not in government work. I've spent my entire working life avoiding any work connected with government and corporations. It's not possible in the absolute, because everything is connected in one way or another. When I had my "small business" of selling cds of mountain music, it was the corporate distributor, the corporate labels, corporate credit card operation, government tax laws and regulations.


I've always worked for individuals instead of corporations or government. I've not made much money, but don't want money bad enough to bind myself to government or corporate domination. A job that requires me to put aside conscience, I don't want. For one thing, there's no telling what kind of shit it will get me into, like killing the poor for being potential communists or terrorists or whatever. At the College of Charleston I was happy the school did not have big science laboratories and big sports programs. No government or corporate funding for research toward killing the poor in Vietnam (at the time). The school was too small to be of interest to the Bank or the Pentagon. Out of control. Like Patti Smith says, Outside of society!!! That's where I wanna be!!! I'd rather listen to Lenny Kaye's guitar than to militarists or religionists. Speaking of which, in the course of my lifetime in modern and post-modern America, the only thing I see of any real value in our society is rock n roll. Rock is rebellious because rock speaks truth. Kids talking to each other. Kids have a short fuse when they hear bullshit from another kid. They have to take it from adults, but not from other kids.


I found a wonderful intent of purpose quotation from Reagan's top CIA dog, William Casey, in 1981: "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American people believes is false." Pretty concise statement of purpose. That was in the beginning of the Reagan Junta. Thirty years later the republicans have done a splendid job of bringing about the end of Democracy in America by way of the Reagan Revolution deceptions, like trickle down in republican-speak = vacuum up in practice. Take from the working people and give to the Bank. Now that "the people" are threatening the Bank with the Occupy protests the corporate press refuses to acknowledge (even NPR), I've an idea that when "our troops" come home, their idleness will be occupied rounding up protesters and guarding them in concentration camps. Republican legislation is taking us there in a hurry. Again, Gore Vidal comes to mind, "When the American people are unable to recognize stupid, we're out of business." And I think of WB Yeats, the center does not hold.


Centripetal force has been o'ertaken by centrifugal force. We have collectively no feeling anymore for community or neighbor. "Major Tom, this is ground control," has become the song of our time. Drifted so far from the shore there's no more communication, no more control from "the center," ground control. "Here am I floating in a tin can far above the world." Then there's the double-entendre, "Planet Earth is blue (depressed) and there's nothing I can do." It's easy for politicians to debunk science, because they appeal to people who will believe ANYTHING THEY ARE TOLD, the lower half of the population where natural intelligence is concerned. Ignorance has gone this far in its advance through the collective body of the American people like a spreading cancer. This cancer or dark cabal, whichever, is seriously threatening the rest of us, like the Nazi (right wing) takeover of Germany--the same cancer or dark cabal from within. Evidently the German people don't recognize stupid. The Japanese, another super-intelligent people, don't recognize stupid either. Both were bombed back to the Stone Age for their arrogance. Duh. Can anybody see where this is leading? When the republicans take absolute power, which they are on the very verge of doing, look out America.


In this lifetime I have watched step-by-step the rise of the dark cabal of the republican party, lock-stepping its way to idolatry with a void of a human being, Ronald Reagan ("the Alzheimer's President"), one of the Southern California / Arizona right wing maniacs, Charlton Heston one of them, Barry Goldwater another. These were the people Ayn Rand wrote her fantasies for. Since the 1950s these people have been fervent with the same zeal of Ronald Reagan, Charlton Heston and Richard Nixon, McCarthyites that didn't die with Joe McCarthy, intent on keeping-the-niggers-down while exhibiting a passion for the exclusive power of wealth at the expense of everyone else. Decisions that concern us are made at country clubs without any consideration of us on the outside, except how to keep us uninformed. Misinformation is the key. Alas, it works predictably. Forrest Gump's mother was nobody's fool.  


  *

LANCE ARMSTRONG AND A COUNTRY PREACHER

     robert mangold


Continuing absurdity in the news is the beating Lance Armstrong into the ground with "allegations" about "doping," by somebody who has a passion to strip Armstrong of his medals and everything. It's obviously a hate vendetta, but it's not PC to say that. They're saying because Armstrong is done with being hounded and tested and tested to the point he doesn't care any more, he's guilty. Let them have it all. They want his trophies and winnings so bad, he really doesn't have a choice. Now they're claiming he's admitting guilt by throwing up his hands and saying take it all. He's been tested every race, extensively tested and extensively tested on top of that. Like he, himself, said in his own words, "They have no physical evidence." The entire log of evidence against Armstrong is all hearsay, totally hearsay. Somebody said, I seen him do it. Then it's, OMG Somebody seen him do it! Next they have the guy they put out for doping accusing Armstrong, he too seen him do it. Now they have a line of people that seen him do it, but he has been tested every day along the way and there's no evidence at all.


These allegations badgering Lance Armstrong are something like small town gossip or faculty lounge gossip. He said that she said that he had halitosis. I knew an old-time Regular Baptist preacher, Millard Pruitt, in my first 15 years in the mountains. He was a man of honor. I knew him fairly well, knew some of his brothers and sisters, his wife and daughter, the people of his world, his entire family. I knew him to be a man of integrity. His integrity was between him and God, a direct line. It's true he had a weakness for pretty young girls, appreciated them for their feminine beauty. To say he was flirtatious would have been like saying he was a child molester because he liked little kids and the kids liked him. If there was any man I'd ever known who would not get himself a little something on the side from a girl in his church who was getting a divorce, it was him. No way. I knew the woman too. But the stories that went around the county about him stuck like glue, as those stories do. One absurd woman I knew told me about it to be certain I understood that preacher wasn't what he appeared to be. "I seen em do it!" I didn't allow myself to laugh out loud. I was thinking of dogs in the grocery store parking lot. Just telling me she was there to witness the penetration told me it was a lie.


All the time I knew Millard Pruitt, I knew a man who was incapable, even at the age of 30, to have a one-time liaison in public with a young woman in his church he'd known since she was a child, in the time that she was involved in a traumatic divorce. Not even in private. He was incapable. I knew his brothers and sisters. No matter what kind of sexual typhoon took hold of his crotch, his integrity as a man of honor, leaving the called-to-preach part aside, would not allow him to even entertain the thought if it came to mind, and I'd project that it never did come to mind. I knew he bore no guilt about it before God or his wife or the woman involved with him in the story. I knew him to be the same as a monk in his relationship with his Lord. He was from his beginning. Millard Pruitt lived in the world and was not of it. When he was being called to preach, he resisted the call for a couple years, didn't want to go there. He wanted to play fiddle at dances on weekends and work like a man all week. Called to preach, he had to give up playing fiddle at dances or playing the fiddle at all in public. It had the name the Devil's instrument. He didn't believe that, but that didn't stop everybody else from believing it. The spirit of the Lord won the struggle and Millard never looked back.


Along the way several people have said to me, "You know, Millard has a woman story 'gin him." Then we share our hypotheses on the matter. Some could not see even a remote possibility, and some could make a convincing case. I tended to prefer the individuals who saw Millard as I saw him, a man of such integrity of the spirit he's not going to have a wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am moment with a young woman in his church involved in a traumatic divorce she's seeking spiritual advice over. He wasn't one to take advantage of anybody for any reason, certainly not a woman in her situation. Millard was such a personality that some people loved and some people hated. It was no in-between with Millard. The people that loved Millard paid the story no mind, while the people that hated him embraced the story and kept it going.


Millard's integrity was not self-repression. His integrity was drawn by his love for God. His integrity was open to the spirit. He lived his life in God's light. He valued that light. It was the light of day for him. By light I think I mean along the same line as what I mean when I feel reluctance to do or entertain anything that might knock me off my track, or out of my flow. When I'm in my flow I don't want interruption. My flow includes my everyday life, people I see, all that. It doesn't mean the phone ringing sets me into a state of alarm. And it doesn't mean shutting out the unexpected. I like the unexpected. Not always at the time. An interruption to my flow would be going away for a weekend, leaving Caterpillar. I can't go anyplace anymore, because I want to sleep in my own bed every night. I don't like to cross the county line anymore unless I'll be back by bedtime. When I'm in my flow, I feel like I'm in the light of God. It's best characterized visually by seeing a leaf float down a mountain stream, riding the flow around and over rocks, rollin' down the river. Slowness is the key to happiness. Sometimes I feel like I have slowed down now to a zone where I feel like I can now go slowly through the day and at the same time get a lot done. I feel like I'm sniffing the crack under the door to happiness.


In this time of the life I am able to do what I want to do. It happened by letting go of everything after a life that required me to be someplace else every day. I sat around and watched movies, read, visited friends, slept late, stayed up late, whatever. Passed the days as I felt like it. I foresaw a lengthy transition from being told what to do all the time to being allowed to do whatever I feel like doing. It feels like I'm more productive than ever, simply as a human being. Possibly more accessible in spirit. Maybe? Maybe so. I enjoy the people around me more than ever. In a big way I feel buoyed by the people around me, the people of my world. They are the cast in the play I have a role in too. I really have never cared whether Millard's "woman story" had any validity. If I believed he did, I'd have thought nothing of it. I understand matters of the groin somewhat. Enough to allow a man a lapse in a lifetime. Millard didn't have lapses. His faith didn't have lapses. Millard Pruitt was as much a monk as my monk friend Swami Yogeshananda living in a Hindu monastery in California. Millard Pruitt was a monk in the Regular Baptist branch of Christendom. I respected him as such in the time I knew him because I saw it in him. Millard was an honorable man. I believe Lance Armstrong is an honorable man too. I feel like he's all the more honorable for being able to tell them to shove it.


*