TWO VIEWS OF REALITY

This week's laugh in the news is Nuttin-honey-yahoo scheduled to speak to Congress, the cement-heads this side of the Atlantic, bypassing presidential approval. Another news ruse scripted by the Heritage Foundation. Some of the democrats are saying they won't go. Nuttin-yahoo won't show for sure. Three billion a year for military at stake, Mr Nutty will not take the risk. Who cares if he does? We the people are so separated from our government, concerns we have bear no meaning. We are given ruse news by way of corporate control, creation, and production of the ongoing serial of the worst things that happen around the globe in the course of a day. The journalist's creed, if it bleeds it leads, is predictable. And conflict, the stuff of drama. No time left for anything else. It takes gunshots and explosions to keep hands off the remotes. Why do I want to fill my head with the worst events of the day from around the world? It's called keeping up with the real world. Whatever that means. It means my life here at home and the lives of the people around me are not real. What's real is conflict someplace else, much of it created for the news. Reality is always someplace else. It is never where I am. I live in the non-existent working class world unheard of on the news and unacknowledged by government, except as the criminal class. It's either the 1% or the middle class. The talk is of the sinking middle class. Every time I hear it, I think, the working class already sank, been sunk throughout my lifetime. People of the working class are taken advantage of for their modest educations, easy targets for propaganda, guided with a ring in the nose away from their own interests, don't even know what their interests might be.  

I'm happy to report, attention I give to the news is waning fast. I turn it on for five minutes, top of the hour, NPR, a time or two a day. Not that I think NPR is better than the others. It's absence of commercials appeals. I'd rather read the cartoon page of any newspaper than the front page stories. Editorial cartoons are about all I care to see on the editorial pages. It takes a certain kind of clever wit to conceive editorial cartoons. When I had my first computer, discovering the internet, I found sites of editorial cartoons, looked at thousands of them. To tell a story in one picture and a few words comes from a certain kind of thinking I don't have. It's a beautiful art form, concise and clear as a Zen haiku. Sitting at the coffee shop I'll pick up the paper and look at the editorial cartoons, go to the cartoon pages and work the Jumble puzzle. Much more interesting than reading something about what somebody supposes Russia is doing in the Ukraine, WW3 in embryo, or conjecture why Seattle didn't run the ball when they had a human tank. Whatever. I've seen a quote attributed to Mark Twain saying America has wars for geography lessons. This leads me to believe our government was attacking poverty-stricken defenseless countries in his time too. Like whoever heard of Vietnam before USA set out to annihilate its people. Fear of communism. Now we're doing fear of terrorism. Then, our troops were killing slopes and dinks. Now they kill towel-heads, steeping impoverished countries in ongoing war to keep the oil corporations flourishing and American "defense" contractors in the right country clubs. Closer to home, when an interstate route is planned through a city, it goes through the neighborhoods of black and working class white, the people without recourse.

   
Talking with an aunt living in Florida on the telephone a decade or more ago, she asked if I'd heard about Conway Twitty dying that day. I had not yet heard the news. She let me have it for not living in the real world. I was told I need to get out of these mountains and back in the real world. Real world? Conway Twitty? Television? City? What I hear and read in the ruse news tells me the "real world" is evidently the world of media and malls, commercials, the world of money. In this "real world," value amounts to money and money only, like getting a great value at a close-out sale, 50% off, or buying a new car at three thousand dollars off the showroom price. Wow, really saved some money. Saved money by spending twenty thousand. I love the enigma of how I can save by spending money. I get junk mail telling me to throw my money their way for something discounted 10%, and save money. These were the questions that made me crazy in transition from sheltered by parents to figuring out how to be an adult by trial and error. I continue to have a hard time in this "real world" making out what the reality might be behind the deceptive front, whatever that may be, last week immigration, this week immunization. One is about keeping poor people out of the country and the other about killing poor people already in the country to get them out of the way. In that "real world" we have War on Poverty, which increased poverty, and War on Drugs, which increased distribution and funded much of it. These wars on, fill in the blank, criminalize the American people. Now we have police state regarding all of us criminals. This is hard to live with. Real world? I lost faith in the world of commerce as the real world before I withdrew self from the real world to what is evidently known by way of media to be the unreal world.

I looked at the window and saw Jenny with her back end pointing this direction. She raised her tail, opened her back legs and let go an astonishing stream of donkey urine. I thought: what a bladder. She was ready to drop some biscuits when Jack wanted to play neck-wrestle, Jenny preoccupied. She let her tail down and took a few steps toward the meadow. Jack stepped to the spot she'd wet, sniffed and sniffed. He raised his head to the sky with curled upper lip in a kind of goosebump spasm. Jenny walked on into the meadow to graze on the day's hay. Jack watched her, then walked behind her to join her grazing. This is where I find the real world. Out another window, buntings and snowbirds pick up sunflower seeds I threw on the ground for them. A chipmunk fills its cheeks. A red squirrel sits up holding a seed with tiny fingers, biting open the shell for the kernel inside. My real world is about people living their lives, working, having opinions, beliefs, doing what they can to get by the best they know how. My real world is knowing donkeys as conscious beings with minds. My world has no value in the world of commerce I've come to call the unreal world. In that world it is not important who a human being is, or any other conscious entity. Learning the doctor I went to for thirty-five years did not know me at all, it told me he was from the world "out there," the unreal world where who someone is bears no relevance, none whatsoever. The doctor I go to now is from my idea of the real world. He is interested in his own humanity and the humanity of others. He is also interested in lab reports and readings on an EKG or MRI. First doctor told me years ago, "We are chemical machines." My Pee Wee Herman within thought, I know you are, but what am I? I knew he would not get the reference, and thought, A doctor telling me I'm a machine? He lost a great deal of credibility. I understood what he was saying. I had a problem with consciousness left out. He told me I'm a what, not a who, a meat-coated skeleton, a file number.

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