THE VIEW FROM THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING

I see the past going away and the future an open void the ongoing present assigns to the past like shredded grass in a lawnmower's wake. It's a time of the future looking dim, but no dimmer than it has looked all my life. In first grade we crawled under the desk pretending an A-bomb was expected to go off nearby. Even then, age 6, I was thinking, this puny desk isn't going to save me from anything, maybe a flying eraser, but that's it. The school building was made of big granite stones. I thought the building would fly apart like a house of cards. Why make a big deal of hiding from something you can't hide from? And who would want to survive? This was the McCarthy time and J Edgar Hoover time, John Birch time, fear of communism, like today's fear of terrorism. It hasn't changed. It's ongoing fear-of, fill in the blank. It's been about controlling the masses by the propaganda of fear since Pearl Harbor. I can't attest for before. From what I've seen in American history, it goes all the way back. Mark Twain's comments on his time are the same as are said of this time. What's the point of paying my attention to the blatantly fake? Yet, seen in a certain light, the politicians, themselves, are funnier than the cartoons. Journalists, like the politicians, have become like fast food workers, the cash register buttons have pictures instead of words. It doesn't matter who writes the McNews. Investigative journalists don't work for the press anymore. The news has become so bizarre that people I never thought would notice are talking about it.  

I can't attach myself to a sinking ship like Japanese sailors did in WW2 when their ships went down. I have too much American in me to do something like that. I can't reverse the momentum, nor would I. We have used fire for heat and light since prehistoric times. Collectively, the Age of Fire brought us into Reason, self-awareness. The Greek god of foresight, reason, is Prometheus, who Godfather Zeus condemned to be chained to a rock, etc, for giving fire to the humans. His problem was the humans would learn reason from fire and no longer need the gods. Prometheus was patient, knowing Zeus would let him go when he needed to know who was plotting to overthrow his power. Electricity is the the second fire Prometheus gave us, to raise us from reason into intuition. He was cut loose not long before electricity was discovered. Mary Shelley's popular novel became Frankenstein, the sympathetic monster no one understood but a little girl as innocent as he was, newborn into an awkward body by the new electricity. We're in the early phase of learning uses for electricity and ways to generate it. Rapid advances open doors to new, even more rapid advances, until, by now our heads are swimming. The entire civilization that went before in the Age of Fire is going away from us, including democracy. Religion and politics are the last to concede to change, and they will, one way or another. Like Karl Marx wrote, if not by legislation, then by revolution. I feel like what we're seeing in our legislators and religionists is the tail end of something that has already changed, the ones ranting hysterically the last ones to get it. 

It is a universal problem, not just American. It is a problem in that we're learning how to do old things in new ways. Like writing. I  used to write with pencil or ink on paper. Then the typewriter came into my life, then the computer. This is the new world we're moving into. I see it in films from all around the globe, and reading around the globe too. The great drama of our time is adjusting to the new world electricity has opened to us. In a Chinese film, a girl with frizzy hair dyed in psychedelic colors, tattoos, piercings, punk makeup, skimpy outfit, passed out drunk. Her grandmother did not know what to make of her. Both are expressions of the confusion. Our old props are going away with the barns. Old belief systems have to go. It doesn't mean the spirit is gone. Only the calcified belief system around the spirit that immobilized the spirit, corralled it, is fading away, its emphasis on mind lacking the self-sustaining quality of spirit. The new keeps on coming in, pushing the old out. Collectively, we have shaken off the old and are living in the new world carrying moving vans of baggage from the Age of Fire, antiques like books, philosophies, art. We older people are appalled to see the new generation uninterested in anything that went before, attached to everyone they know by cell phone. It appears we need to wipe the slate clean, ultimately, of all that went before, attention held by distractions from one to the next while the changes occur around us. I like what I see of the new social attitudes in the young. I've come to believe the young have an intelligence we of older generations cannot understand. I like that and find it promising for the future.

It doesn't mean the future is Utopian. It means the future will be based in new belief systems. Old belief systems have served for so long they have become unwritten laws. One such unwritten law dominates self-editing. From a lifetime of living in a surveillance nation I know has computers set to lock onto key words, I avoid using such words as b-o-m-b and p-r-o-t-e-s-t, among many others. Right of assembly is not a right anymore, if it ever was. Republicans have been systematically dismantling democracy since the coup in 1963. By 2015, it's a done deal. The fascist constitution, the Patriot Act of 2001, voided the original constitution, making the citizen, already shrunk to consumer and taxpayer, enemy of the state. We can be arrested, beaten, killed without recourse by a cop's whim or mistake. Last year the Supremes made it legal for cops to break down a door, enter somebody's house guns blazing, kill a dog and a seven year old, a mistake, wrong address. Fix your own damn door--tough shit about the kid and the dog. Rights? This is the phase we're in, between democracy and whatever follows. Police state always self-destructs, so I assess the self-destruction of police state is in the very nature of fascism, based in hate. Hate has no staying power, only destructive power. The so-called Christians allying themselves with fascism have already committed their own undoing. What I'm looking at for the future is getting through the destruction of our country like the Germans lived through their own destruction and reconstructed a new world. The new world of reconstructed America, no longer Number One, probably will not use two-thirds of our tax dollars toward killing poor people of small, defenseless countries around the globe. No more the entire UN rising to censure the Land of the Free for police brutality and the penal system. We still have in the future collective humanity rising and saying, No More War, meaning it. It's been said a trillion times, though not yet with the meaning it will take to break through the most resistant stain of the old belief systems.

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TAKING OUT THE TRASH

joe pye weed in the rain

One perspective I have from living to a certain age is seeing social convulsions manifest into phenomena like the tea party, union busting, gun madness.  I have come to see the social evolution, how the various expressions are part of it, instead of separate from it. The issues coming up one-after-the-other in this time have been problems all along. They just hadn't reached the problematic state of concentration they're in now. It's like the mass of floating plastic in the middle of the North Atlantic the size of two Texases. This seems to be a time of clearing out the trash of a few thousand years in the gathering. The republican never-ending harp on abortion is definitely not new. This has been going on all my life. The popular American love for war is not new. The popular rage for police state is not new. In the 1950s the conservatives and liberals were called hawks and doves. The propaganda from then to now has become so sophisticated I look on in awe at today's propaganda techniques. Elections amount to hard core tennis matches between professional propagandists. My early years were the transition time from oratory in front of an audience to sound-bite television propaganda. Years of studying political science have taught the propagandists that one percent is what they need to win. The attention now is on the undecided, the only of the three voting possibilities to work with. Strategists of both parties are equally proficient, keeping them at a 50-50 rating. They don't concern themselves with the committed to either party, only the non-committed.

vada

Elections have become such slick propaganda events that I wonder what's the use of voting when it is so subject to mind control. Knowing, too, that our representatives do not represent us makes me all the more indifferent to voting. Then I think about the beginning of the republic, before television, the time of oratory, man vs man, instead of one man's propaganda team vs another man's propaganda team. The seed was there. Now the candidates are something like race cars on tv. Each car has equal performance capability to all the other cars. The drivers are almost all equal. The drivers look straight ahead while "spotters" and strategists tell them what to do, what lane to get into, when to change lanes, to pass or not to pass, to pit or not to pit. The drivers keep the cars in motion, the strategists tell the driver what to do. The political parties are the same. Candidates watch what they say, because it has to stay in line with the present moment's strategy. Last election, I gave Karl Rove more credit for strategic propaganda than he was due. He failed to get the one percent needed, even lost a few. I thought he might get us another rich moron for president with his ruthless propaganda techniques. Leave out Ralph Nader, Florida's and Ohio's republican party chicanery, the republican supreme court, and Bush lost that first election by at least the margin Romney lost last go-round. Bush lost the second election by vote count too, but Ohio republican mixing of numbers under Karl Rove's direction took care of business.

caterpillar

Even though I don't take the election process seriously, especially since the process itself has nothing to do with democracy and amounts to a smoke screen, I still like to participate in the process. I know it does not matter, in any way you look at it, how I vote or that I vote. I vote as a single digit saying I want democracy. It's a make-believe process I want to believe in, Peter Pan. I was given a bumper sticker I at the Ralph Stanley Museum in Clintwood, Virginia, DR RALPH STANLEY FOR PRESIDENT. I said, "I wouldn't want that for Ralph Stanley. I love him too much to wish hypocrisy and an especially hot seat in hell for him." I would not like to see Ralph Stanley's picture in The Nation on the Timeless Whoppers page with a long, pointed nose. I took the bumper sticker thinking I might cut out the Ralph Stanley and put just his name on car bumper, but I don't want to. I think about it until it comes to picking up the scissors, and then decide not to. It takes a certain "Gimme" personality to be a politician, like it takes to be a preacher, the outstretched hand. Old-time mountain preachers were not paid. They believed the "gift" was received freely and must be passed on freely. The people of the church took care of maintenance. It was their role, not the preacher's. The preacher was one of them. He just happened to have the gift.

geode and ferns

 

It appears one hidden social ill after another is brought up into the light to be dealt with. None of the issues are new. In some cases it's just the first time they've been paid attention to. Like gay marriage. I personally do not care. I'm for the freedom not to get married. Other people can do what they want. I can see the practical side of it from the perspective of a civil society over employee benefits, taxes, insurance, and a great long list of paperwork and money to be saved by not having to file separately on taxes, for example. The telephone just now rang: a computer male voice said, "May I speak to Thomas please." I clicked the END button. It's like issues swept under the rug over the years are coming up for review. Issues buried are surfacing. The preacher in the church I grew up in gave an illustration for, Your sins will find you out. A mother without much money made her daughter a doll and stuffed it with oats. The little girl's brother mad at sister buried her doll behind the barn. In the spring, oats grew up behind the barn where he'd buried it, in the shape of the doll. This seems like a time in our national identity to put to rest old pre-judgments from the time before scientific inquiry, from the Age of Fire. Evidently the Age of Electricity must set aside belief systems from the previous age. Another couple of generations and the slate will be clean of the old ways.

baja rock

 

 

 

 

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A CALL FROM THE PAST

 

     ai weiwei

I look at how things are going in this world, the ongoing breakdown of all traditions; even though I feel I have an understanding that the traditions from the Age of Fire need to be eliminated to clear the field for new ways of thinking in the Age of Electricity, I still agonize somewhat seeing the more meaningful traditions go away with the irrelevant ones. Much of the old ways were good, though largely calcified by repetition over centuries unto beliefs that simply don't work anymore. Among my more interesting learnings along the way has been to see how fluid this life is, fluid even more than liquid, fluid like air can be called fluid in the way it flows around objects without apparent resistance, the way it flows through the grid of a screen and flows back together on the other side like nothing happened. Thought is even more fluid than that. Thought is fluid without molecules, or matter. Thought flows like old man river, just keeps on rolling. What is this world we live in but massive interweavings of human thought, an infinite and constantly changing Persian carpet. Thoughts that occurred thousands of years ago, hundreds of years ago, continue to have effect on us today.

Socrates comes to mind first for his thought a few thousand years ago (I paraphrase), "The only thing I know is that I know nothing." The thought is with us today. Not many pay attention to it, but it resonates with me plenty. It will resonate into the Age of Electricity too. Our whole civilization is a conglomeration of thinking that collectively agrees upon certain thoughts as valid and certain ones not. In the time we're in now, the NEW is often a thought regarded invalid until suddenly it is seen valid. "Get you a copper kettle, get you a copper coil," the old-time song had fallen into invalid, from another culture, another time, another way of thinking. Then around 1960 Joan Baez recorded it in a Pete Seegerish way and it became new, continues to resonate as valid. A lot of old songs have been brought into the new mind by singing them a bit differently. Stephen Foster's song, Angelina Baker, a making fun of the darkies kind of song that starts, "Way down on de old plantation, dah's where I was born, I used to beat de whole creation hoein in de corn. Den I work and den I sing, happy all de day." It gets kind of Uncle Remus as a cute romance of a slave boy with his eye on the slave girl, Angelina Baker. It's hardly politically correct in our time. Almost everything about it rings invalid now. Except the tune. The tune is used all over the country at contests of picking traditional acoustic instruments. Angelina Baker has become as hot a fiddle tune as Katy Hill and Sally Gooden. Hardly anyone knows it has words anymore.

A little over thirty years ago someone from Europe asked me how long it will be before homosexuals are acceptable in America. I ventured fifty years, give or take ten. He thought that way too soon. Here it is. All of a sudden this year it is PC to be all for gay everything, marriage, baby adoption, the whole works. BAM. Just like that. It took awhile getting here. Considering that we've had civil rights laws over half a century, yet one of our two political parties is the up front racist party. Those sorts of social changes take a long time, but in this time we're in, these social changes are happening in almost the snap of a finger. It is even looking like Rush Limbaugh mind is fading fast. He doesn't have the power of intimidation he had two years ago. I don't mean to imply we're changing to where everything is sweet and happy devoid of anything we don't like. We are taking a giant step toward allowing the flow. When thought patterns become calcified from habits until they become reality is when they need changing. Thinking, like water, stagnates when it stops flowing.

A phone call last night form a cousin I'd not talked with in several years. We're about the same age, grew up together as friends and then I went my way and he went his way and that was that. I don't encourage him in this time of my life, because he has taken the way of the calcified mind of the American man. At the beginning of our phone conversation last night it was like talking with one of the old men of my grandfather's generation, men that were down on everything, especially niggers and dumb women. Cousin has watched a lifetime of television, so he is not of that old man mind of grandfather's time. But it hasn't changed much from then to now. He started in on me aggressive-like, taking charge, letting me know he's the bigdog in this exchange, bumping me the way dogs do each other, showing me his weight. I bumped him back to say, I'm just as big as you. He let me have it for talking on the telephone all the time. He's been trying to call and my phone is always busy. I knew that was horseshit from the start. My phone is nowhere near always busy. I asked if he called in the mornings. No. I said, I talk with my friend Carole in the mornings anywhere between 9 and 11. Other than that I hardly use the phone at all and it seldom rings. He said, Oh. And he came down off his high horse.

The conversation functioned for me as a measure of how far I have come from where I started out. Cousin Tommy is still there. He hasn't changed at all, except to lock down in that aggressive testosterone stance that has only one purpose, to say, I'm in charge here. It works for him largely. Then he comes up on somebody like me, bumping like a dog, and he has to back down. I didn't get aggressive with him, just stood my ground on firm feet and let him know if he called me to play bigdog, he needs to call somebody else. I'm happy to talk with him, but I'm not going through the dog games just because he needs to see himself in charge. Turns out he was listening challenged as well. Doesn't listen well. While he was telling me about his "dumb" wife, I was thinking, Yeah, sure. He never did tell me why he called. It was a brief reminder that I spent my early years in a world of that kind of mind, the calcified white man mind that Limbaugh parodies so well. I ran from it with all my heart, mind and strength. Tommy starting off that conversation with the bigdog challenge was a reminder of where I came from, and how glad I am to be a long ways from. I had enough of that when I had no recourse. I don't have to take it now. I've heard I get called arrogant for not taking that white man bigdog shit, but that's ok.


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