yves tanguy
Every day for the last weeks I see various respected establishment names, like Jimmy Carter, the latest one, saying out in the open our democracy is gone; the corporate takeover of our government has deleted democracy. People like Gore Vidal, Chris Hedges and Noam Chomsky have been saying it for some time. By the time establishment people are saying it, it's a done deal and has been for a while. I saw an eighteen minute interview with Chris Hedges where he spread out today's political / economic world, explaining the corporate takeover citing evidence of what is happening as he went. The man has a mind to be reckoned with. I like reading his essays. His writing has clarity and is trimmed down to only the necessary words, stylistic frills absent. It's the same with his thinking and speaking. Maybe it could be said he is frugal in his use of language.
yves tanguy
Listening to Hedges talk is music. I follow where he goes rationally. He has no hysteria about him. His straight-faced delivery says he has seen the horror. He can neither recoil nor laugh. When it's funny, it is, but it's not. His recent book, the Death of the Liberal Class, is not what you might think he means by liberal. What we call liberal now is adherence to codes of social behavior that distinguish oneself separate from the working class. The sense of what I picked up that he was saying, America used to have a left wing. It's gone. What we now call the left, liberal, is the left extreme of the right wing, the part of the right closest to the center. The possibility of hope he sees is for more massive demonstrations, not that they do any good for their stated purposes, but they keep government apprehensive of the people. He said the ideal is, like in France, that government be afraid of the people. The Occupy movement has evidently been shut down by police state that is using the mass arrests for practice, for training, foreseeing a surge of massive resistance in the near future.
yves tanguy
At the rate our basic rights are eroding, Obama using the Patriot Act for a guide, tells me nobody in our government is working consciously to the benefit of we the people, unless it might be Elizabeth Warren, unless she turns out to be just a performance. She's somebody who could end up dead in a private plane crash with no indication in the black box of what went wrong. If a run for the presidency is in her future, she will change as Obama has changed. She will be an ongoing target of the republicans, too much of her attention needing to be focused on strategies to nullify republican fake assaults. The republican half of our population is a venal bunch of people come out of the background into the foreground making noise, threats, misspellings on signs. I see in our national and state governments a venality that really does represent the wide stripe that runs through the American people of interest in money only, the attitude of I-want-mine. The corporate CEOs see us not even pawns. I, like Bob Dylan, don't want to be a pawn in their game. I want no part of it.
yves tanguy
Driving by a city on interstate, or driving through a city, I gawk at skyscraper architecture, something like walking through a long room full of Mark Rothko canvases or Richard Serra steel works, Carl Andre's blocks of wood, bricks arranged on the floor. I see an adventurous skyscraper a beautiful thing, like a piece of public art, like a bronze sculpture of Gandhi walking in a public park. I've seen some Giacometti stickman sculptures in skyscraper context, and some Noguchi. They go well together. 20th century sculpture with 20th century architecture. The Reagan Revolution has put to rest what used to be called progress in America, the progress that built the beautiful towers in the cities. The Bank has taken our money to offshore banks that don't pay taxes. The Bank is bleeding us out. Hence the popularity of vampires in pop culture again, drained of our life blood, and zombies, the living dead. It's like we're alive, but cannot afford to do anything but stay home and watch tv. The center is not holding, unless the center is tv. Chris Hedges defined our situation a tinderbox on the verge of self-combusting. Anything could set it off. I'll watch it on live internet.
yves tanguy
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