BOYCOTT OF ONE

composition in gray #13

A new statistic came across the radio yesterday. 39% of Americans believe evolution is the process of creation. That means 61% don't. I'd like to see a survey of the percentage of people believing the earth is round. It's good the tyranny of the majority doesn't apply to natural laws. If only 39% of people believed gravity, it would be too low a percentage to allow as a law. We'd all float rapturously into space, freezing to death a few miles up, then crisping like pork rinds. Ignorance really is not bliss. Maybe that has something to do with why we're not such a blissful bunch of people in Prozac Nation. Not much danger of evolution going away due to low approval rating, or the earth flattening like a pancake.

I recall in the 50s when the Russians put up the Sputnik, suddenly we had a rush in America on science and math that lasted a year or 2. Deeply rooted American antipathy toward education wins in the end. During WW2 the intellectuals in Europe came to America, the brain drain, got jobs teaching in universities, raised our educational possibilities, and now those intellectuals are dead of old age and the few that have carried on their legacy do it in private funded by foundations, berated by politicians. They keep quiet. In America we don't kill our intellectuals. We ignore them. When we get an intelligent man in the White House, the forces of ignorance gather round like demons and render him ineffective, or kill him, whichever.

I've been looking at this last election that was something like the white man's last stand, finding it interesting to see it happen in my lifetime. At the same time, I know the white man isn't going to take it lying down. White man has a lot of power, all the big power. Even though things are quiet now, I have a feeling a groundswell, something like a tsunami could be happening in the collective subconscious of white man.

It could rise up suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, and cause quite a problem. The Cheney-Bush administration demonstrated white man foresight doesn't exist. If a lone gunman gets Obama, he better be black. A Clarence Thomas type black man that tap dances for white man could easily be hired to do it. If a white man were to kill Obama, the entire world would come down on American white man. Would he care? Hell no! We got all the nukes we need and multiple thousands more.

I don't believe any of this will happen, mainly because things never happen as bad as a jaundiced projection can make it look. Everything is subject to infinite possibilities of change, so the way something looks now to somebody who listens to the news maybe 15 minutes a week, reads no journals of higher learning, investigates nothing, is even less informed than a recliner quarterback, is certain not to ever be the case. It's how the mind works, drawing lines between dots like in the constellations, making apparent order out of apparent chaos. Trying to figure things out, possibly looking for foundation.

It doesn't work for me to try to figure things out on such a scale as the American Mind or direction or anything. I can't even figure out what's happening in my own present moment, let alone somebody else's or everybody else's. I like to believe the images I make by joining dots with lines are the way things really are, but they are not. Not even close. I'm in a time of my life where I want to draw all my figuring-out mind inward toward my own immediate world and think not at all of anything outside my literal arm's reach.

I won't drink CocaCola because the plant in Columbia hired hit squads to kill union activists and their families. My boycott doesn't hurt CocaCola at all, but I support my own integrity having a DrPepper. I think of it every time I punch the DrPepper button instead of the CocaCola on a drink machine, also realizing every time it makes no difference to anyone but me. It's my own personal thing, the boycott of one.

I doubt I've even been right in my political projections or even how I see the present moment right where I stand, let alone Washington DC or New York, Beijing, West Jefferson, Sparta, even Whitehead. Right now at this moment, TarBaby has his front legs draped over my left arm. Tapo is on the foot stool waiting for TarBaby to get up so she can have the special place.

My mind is focused entirely on Jr and being there in the house with him. It's a cause of a bit of stress in that I can't be 100% and do everything with a smile for him. I have to allow myself my inability to be all-seeing, all-knowing where his condition is concerned. There's a bit of stress in the need to maintain my own life at the house while I'm devoting all my time to Jr's well being. I need my own time, which I take without guilt, that makes it possible for me to spend all the rest of the time with Jr. I like to keep something close to a balance. Sometimes I feel out of balance and sometimes in balance. A wavering thing, a wave.

The news has become a nuisance for me. I turn it on and it's full of silly stuff like a kid in a box in an attic and a fake spaceship balloon. Surrealism has become realism. The absurd is our cultural foundation. Makes it interesting. It's like the art of the 20th Century that was way out there and incomprehensible to the masses, now is our way of life. It's said art precedes life, in that it happens first in art. Drawing lines between dots again.