Rain this morning, sun this afternoon, temperature just above freezing, Caterpillar sitting in the open doorway, open just enough for her to sit and survey the outdoors, watch the snowbirds, anything that moves, especially dogs. She likes to sit and look for awhile before she goes out. The dog may not be in sight now, but may show up from the woods across the road, the back of the house, anywhere but above. That's where the hawks and owls are. When you're cat size, there is an awful lot in this world your size and bigger. Like a cat can pounce on a mouse, an eagle that spots a cat out in an open field can pounce on the cat. Caterpillar learned to be wary outside when she was a kitten. Now that two dogs are just outside the door most days and some nights, Caterpillar only goes out after dark now, well after dark, up in the night. Then she'll go out for quite awhile, half hour or so. The rest of the time she stays in the house. When I'm here, she stays in sight or is off in a sleeping place. She doesn't have much fun since I deconed the mice. She looks for them, but they never appear. She didn't catch them, anyway. Just watched them.
The movie I saw yesterday, THAT EVENING SUN, stays with me, esp the Hal Holbrook character. I see him what I'm becoming, a cantankerous old shit. I don't see myself having a time in a nursing home. Don't see myself going on that long. I see for myself a quick dying, like fainting. Going along, get light-headed, no bed to lie down on, and relax to the ground. I see no problem with it. Only the mess I'm leaving somebody to clean up that I ought to be cleaning up myself. That's the only part that bothers me. I don't want to leave Caterpillar alone. But I could slip away like a bird in flight any moment and be satisfied. It's not like I'm looking forward to it, because I'm kind of used to this life, and have a good one by practical assessment, no major issues, no major complaints except for the direction I've seen USA going over the last 30 years. Nothing I can do about it, but I have the satisfaction that I won't have to live here in the time of post-denial corporate police state when it's out in the open with concentration camps and the US Army aimed at the working class, when the whole country can be called a Penal Colony. That's not another word for penis. Though it has a great deal to do with getting shafted, any place, any time, for any reason. Sexually, it's called rape. Politically, it's called law and order.
Television is the great propaganda machine and everybody, like 99%, is anesthetized by it. I don't see American people rising to anything. Television keeps them glued to the recliners, their history the history as told by propaganda. I mourn continually as the man of constant sorrow seeing my country passing through Aldous Huxley's vision of the future, and now entering George Orwell's vision of the future, 1984---the year Reagan was re-elected. Today I heard Hilary Clinton, Secretary of State, saying they're working toward the kind of democracy in Egypt "we want." Of course, we want. Doesn't matter a bit what the Egyptians want for themselves. That's not democracy. Only democracy enforced by American military will be the kind "we want." Bases. If we can have bases all over Egypt, then they have the kind of democracy "we want." My objection with her is different from the Republican reaction to her. I see her too much a Republican. I see Obama a Republican. I hate it when somebody says to me the Democrats and Republicans are the same. Much as it galls me, I have to agree. They are. Every time the Republicans took a step to the right, the Democrats took the step with them, all along the way.
I don't like thinking about the near future for USA, because I see only one thing: police state, which we already have, just more out in the open. If you're not doing anything wrong, what do you have to worry about? Adam Liptak has a good article in the NY Times, Wed April 23, 2008, US Prison Population Dwarfs That Of Other Nations. He tells it that one in one hundred adults in America is in prison. Where prison population statistics are concerned, we're an embarrassment to the rest of the world, and ought to be to ourselves, but we're not. So what? It's been noted on television several times in different places, but there it's forgotten one second after it's spoken, like everything else.
This is where my mind has dwelled today, seeing the democracy I grew up believing in, systematically rendered unconstitutional by the Reagan-Bush Supreme Court and corporate legislation by lobby dollars. I've outlived my culture, the culture that believed in democracy in America. Since 1968 under Johnson I've been seeing the step-by-step illegalization of democracy over, largely, racism. It's no question by now that this is the most racist country on earth, except for places like Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe, the man with 9 degrees. In the 50s and 60s Progress was the big word; everything and everybody bowed to Progress. Now the only progress I see is toward out in the open police state. And it will be immensely popular, like it is now.
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