HAPPY DAY ~ NEW BATTERY

air bellows drive thru art museum

 

Yesterday I did nothing, yet accomplished a very great deal with the help of others. Took public transportation to Winston-Salem, Wake Forest hospital, to have defibrillator/pacemaker replaced. The battery in the previous one expired. Since they have a new model, the whole thing was replaced. The process of replacing it was perhaps the most relaxing part of the day. Being fussed over relaxes me. Sitting in the barber's chair having hair trimmed relaxes my interior such that I feel a bit wobbly standing up when it's over, like stepping outside in the light after seeing a matinee movie. Before and after, much activity and inactivity. A little over an hour in the van with Larry Cole driving for Alleghany In Motion, so grateful not to be driving, and grateful, too, the driver was someone I know and like, whose woman is someone I have a great deal of respect for. He let me out at the door. Next was morning exercise walking down a long hallway, up a flight of stairs, another hallway, follow the signs to the device clinic. Instructions said go to Admittance, but I had no idea where it was in the infinite labyrinth of white walls and ceilings, gray floors. I was carrying a copy of George Orwell's, 1984, for waiting periods.

 

air bellows drive thru art museum

 

In the elevator, G is the first floor up, M with a star in it is ground floor. Instead of the M button being under the G button, it's over to the side. Two columns of buttons zig-zag back and forth, rather than directly up and down. It has taken me several trips there to get it, thinking I may have got it this time. Though by next time it may have wiggled down the groundhog hole of memory loss, again. At Device Clinic, I was told to go to Admittance. Where? I was given directions, turn left, turn left, turn left, long crooked passageway. By the time I was out into the hallway, the directions were going every which way in my head and I turned left. Turned left again. Took elevator, turned left, long passageway, but it wasn't crooked. I asked a woman who worked there. I was at the far end of the building. She was going that way and led me to it. Thank you. In Admittance, I sat and waited, opened the book, read four pages, rereading a few paragraphs from inability to focus  in a big room with people in motion, people sitting, a tv going. I folded the book. Too much distraction catching my eyes and ears. Decided to sit and watch the activity in this room so huge people in the distance were small.

 

air bellows drive thru art museum

 

A woman my age came to take me to next stop in a wheelchair. I said I'd rather walk. Need the exercise. She weighed half as much as I do. I could not feel right taking the luxury of a wheelchair ride with her pushing it. It was a long walk, we talked, became acquainted pleasantly. Wait. Tried to read Orwell again, but found it hopeless again. Sat and watched the people sitting in the waiting room chairs. The old boy with round belly, plaid shirt, bald head, round face, the corners of his mouth pointing straight down. I thought, head full of anger propaganda from the Fake news network. His daughter was with him. Another man reading a book. He seemed to be having as successful a time as I had. My turn. A good nurse I liked was my guardian over changing into hospital skimpy, wheeled to the operating room, spread out on a comfortable table, legs strapped down, interesting pillow to hold head in place. Doctor had to cut open the pocket opening, take out old device, unplug it, plug in the new device, reinsert it, then patch up the slice in the skin. Local anesthetic, Novocain. The most it ever hurt was like taking a cat claw in the arm when putting Caterpillar down and she hangs on with one claw.

 

air bellows drive thru art museum

 

I was so relaxed throughout the process, it almost felt like on some painkiller. My feeling is the doctor and everyone concerned can do their work better if I'm relaxed with a clear mind. Sometimes it hurt like hell. I stayed calm like a good hillbilly and said to self, I can take it. When it comes to physical pains I've endured, this was nothing. It was better than working in a patch of briers with a scythe, raking one across the face. The pain was never more than a cat claw puncture. From patient etherized upon a table, wheeled to the waiting room where I was to rest connected to a blood pressure and heart rate machine. The nurse in this phase was my favorite, a beautiful, round-featured black woman named Tabitha, a beautiful human being. She was so charming she made this part of the day fun. Everybody, all along the way, made the stay a pleasant one from start to finish. Every one of the nurses was pleasant, fun company, as were the ones I asked for directions. I saw a lot of beautiful black people. Since cell phone videos have exposed police brutality on black people that has been going on all along, my heart opened to every black person I saw and met. I viewed every one with the highest respect. I feel deep empathy toward American black people. I always knew the black experience in America is unpleasant, but did not know, before, that they all have relatives and friends killed and brutalized by police, and fear for their children's lives. I felt happy comfortable with all the black people I saw, because my heart opened and I saw each one with a prayerful compassion. I felt impulse to bow before every black woman, man and child I saw. Justin drove to W-S to give me a ride home. I told him about the joys of the stay. The experience of the whole trip, from leaving home to arriving home, made a joyous day.
 

air bellows drive thru art museum
photos by tj worthington



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CONFEDERATE FLAG THE NEW COLLECTABLE

The  public argument around the Confederate battle flag tells me more about the public than the flag. We have people defining what it means, both literally and symbolically. I've learned more about the Confederate flag this week than I ever wanted to know. Jon Stewart continues to make me want to tell him to shut his Yankee mouth. He fails to notice the North invaded the South, not the other way around. Of course, it can be said the South fired the first shot at Ft Sumter. Another Tonkin Gulf story. "He had a gun." My argument with Stewart has to do with him characterizing the South the invader. He doesn't say it, but talks as-if. I tire of his sweep of the hand dismissal of the South and Southerners like his dismissal of the white woman who wanted to be black. He lost credibility for me over his cheap shots at her from his perspective of self-righteous conformity to the social code of the moment calling himself liberal. He's most self-righteous on the subject of racism, quick to point and judge, just like the rest of us. The South is the same to him as a cartoon figure. 

I've lived in the South throughout my adult life. The South I know from the inside is very different from the South Stewart thinks he knows from outside---New York, of all places to point the finger from. I'd like to see him go on about police brutality on black and poor people by NYPD to the same extent he's made fake issues of the South. Of course, he's put himself forward as the model non-racist. He's not the model non-misogynist, but he keeps that under the desk. My argument is not so much with Stewart as with taking such an absolute stance on a matter that goes deeper than good and bad. And I'm not going to be a racism apologist. I grew up in a racist family, near and extended, went to racist church and racist school, outside the South. I started shedding my racism young, knowing some black people, seeing they were not as characterized by white people. I was attracted to black people because they did not do denial. Every black person I knew talked straight, recognized a thing for what it was. I felt black people were refreshing, like clear mountain spring water. I remember the cartoon Indians in cowboy and Indian television of the Fifties saying, "White man speak with forked tongue." As a kid, all white people lied to me. I liked the black people I knew for not lying like white people. 

Evidently, Yankees see the South a two-dimensional caricature, Bugs Bunny in a gray Civil War uniform. The decade I lived in Charleston, SC, deep South, I knew only liberals. The right wing was everywhere, even the majority of the population, but a large percentage of the people are not right wing. In the Blue Ridge, the majority of the population is right wing, though I only mix with people who are liberal or don't care about politics. That's just a social dynamic. People of the right don't like me for not being of the right. It's ok by me. I've come to stay away from white men my age, my peers. One look at the scowl on a white man's face with white hair and I know what tv channel he watches. Yet, exceptions abound. Myself, I hope. People in the South, like people everywhere, are not just one thing, not caricatures. Yankees display a conviction they're better than white Southerners, and certainly better than black Southerners, the way white middle class looks down on white working class, the part in the denial drawer. Racism is more taken for granted in the South than the rest of the country where the white people are racist too, but practice denial. Black people are racist. It's what we humans do. The only solution I can see is to acknowledge racism in self and be conscious of it, aware of it. Awareness is the beginning of addressing change in self. 

I gave up on racism by the time I was out of high school. Black kids went to school and some were my neighbors. They were good people. The people living here from Mexico are good people. As far as I can tell, the only difference between us is culture. Black people have their culture, white people have theirs, and Mexicans have theirs. It is the cultures that make us different. Intolerance of other cultures is a problem. Racism boils down to ego. It amounts to saying, Not me. It is saying, I don't like a given point of view because it's not mine. I used to have a friend I had to stop knowing because he believed his the only true and valid point of view, all others nonsense, especially mine. This is how white people are toward black people, making it clear their whiteness is the only pigmentation and civilization valid. It can be said a general belief among white people that black people have no value. Otherwise, there would be something besides justification coming from white people about cops killing so many unarmed, young black men and women, even children and old people. The greatest justification of all, they kill white people and dogs, too. Racism is too complicated to be dealt with superficially. It can only be dealt with superficially in America. In the land of television, we only deal with social issues superficially, by distraction. This Confederate flag issue is a distraction from something else that matters we're not to know about. As soon as whatever the flag is covering up passes, concerns about the flag will go away with it. 

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ANOTHER LIFE DISMISSED BY THE MEDIA SPIN MACHINE

richard shelton

The last few days I've seen headlines and pictures of Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who identifies black. I was disposed toward indifference. Not interested in seeing interviews with her. I didn't care about her getting busted for being a wannabe and it working for her. I couldn't help but feel like she was thrown under the bus for smokescreen, to distract attention from something else that matters. This morning I went to an interview with her and found it interesting. Found another and found it equally interesting. I even felt like I understood her. I don't have an inclination to do such a thing, but she did. It's her story, not mine. I was able to pay attention to her once I got it settled it has nothing to do with me or anybody but her. It's her's. I like hearing other people's stories, and took an interest in Rachel's. I see the liberal news talking heads, pundits, in full judgment, belittling her, talking about her like she's a fraud. The white male interviewers attempted to make her story a lie, and she kept saying it's more complex than true or false, right or wrong. Seeing her exasperation with them talking down to her, I felt like she was being true to her meaning. All she said is she identifies black and has felt closeness with blackness since childhood, age five. 

richard shelton

It's at about that age kids sometimes tap into their previous lifetime. Maybe she was black last time and more comfortable living in black culture over white culture. Growing up in northern Idaho seems to me to have a dreariness factor the equal of Kansas. When a child has a passion for making music, picks up an instrument, figures it out and starts playing, it's a good sign the kid played music in the previous lifetime. I wanted to paint as a child, but due to circumstances and a bad case of low self-esteem, I didn't even try it until I turned forty. I already knew what to do and how to do it. Everything about it seemed obvious. This could have something to do with why I don't paint any more than I do. I lose patience with the obvious. It has to do with why I stay away from television, for having raised the obvious to a lucrative art form. Television swallowed up irony the same as it swallows the life spirit. Listening to the interviewers badger Rachel Dolezal, and the pundits making fun of her, it came to me that just a week or two ago they were praising Kaitlyn Jenner for growing up wanting to be a girl and going ahead and doing it. So transgender. So PC. So de rigeuer. So awesome. So cool. Cover of Vanity Fair. The time Jon Stewart slipped up and said Bruce, he instantly apologized, red-faced, hand over mouth. 

richard shelton

This week we have a white woman saying she grew up wanting to be black and one day committed to live as a black woman from then on. She's being called a liar, her motives questioned, her credibility questioned. They give the impression they believe outing her is going to make her go back to being a white woman in shame and defeat. She will go on living as a black woman. She likes black culture, the company of black people, like I like mountain culture and the company of mountain people. Nobody calls me a liar or questions my credibility, that I know of, for adopting a culture for my own that I did not grow up in. I like living among these people. She, too, grew up in a place without a culture and likes living among black people for their culture. The pundits say she can't call herself black. Then I can't call myself a hillbilly. But I do and will, because I am a hillbilly, a working class white guy living in the mountains who has adopted the culture, naturalized. Somebody interviews me and tells me I can't call myself a hillbilly because I grew up in Flatland, how do you tell a television interviewer, who is unable to step beyond the obvious for a thought, "it's more complex than true and false," in words more obvious?

richard shelton

I saw a clip from the women's tv show, The View. They were theorizing about this and that, and Whoopie Goldberg said, if she wants the black woman experience, come on and get it. It's not so popular an experience that white women are lining up to pay admission. I came out of reading a few brief articles and seeing some videos of interviews, including with her parents. sympathetic with Rachel. The comedy for me was seeing the talking heads so righteous about transgender acceptance, gay wedding acceptance, we're just human beings, after all, last week. Then mocking Rachel when she said she's a human being with a deep inner longing to be black, who let herself live as a black woman. Why is Rachel a liar and Kaitlyn Jenner not a liar? He didn't grow up in the girl locker rooms? Not a problem. Tres PC. I saw something saying the black people of Spokane, where she was president of the NAACP, embrace her now as before, like about her that she wants to be black. The community may bond with her like never before. The only problem I saw she had on the television interviews was her attempts to be honest were cut off by presumptions and Joe McCarthy statements in question form, Are you an African-American? I can't see changing racial identity any bigger a deal than changing gender. It's no more than a cultural change. I don't see any of it a big deal, and had the impression Rachel Dolezal didn't see it a big deal either. But she's caught in media spin, the novelty of the week, somebody exposed being true to self in a false world, and shamed for it at will. 

     

richard shelton himself

*

RAINY DAY RAMBLE

foot of somebody's bed

by tj worthington

Woke up in the morning, saw the new project I thought was finished with the white against the blue. Didn't like it at all. I knew in a tenth of a second the original vision I'd rejected was It, afraid it would be too dark. Conceptual vision was all blue. I put the blue I wanted to use on the frame and thought it too dark to make the whole thing such dark blue. None of the other colors worked out that I thought might be better. Two colors somehow trivializes the composition, raises it to its least potential. Even before taking carrots to the donkeys, I took brush and painted blue over all the white, and it sang. The blue was it. I like how the shadows work on the dark blue better than on white. The shadows are black. And the light lightens the blue considerably. The reclining T, the foot of the bed, is outlined with a black line. In dim light across the room, as it is now, it is a dark rectangle with a ghost of the reclining T, and the ghost of the frame's edge. I like how the blue makes such black shadows. Brings to mind the Stones album, Black and Blue, a favorite. It was one of their blues albums. I like how the blue paint changes with the light. This is simple as it gets. I was concerned that two colors on this one might be toeing in a little too close to complex. Needed to step back to original shape and nothing else. All one color and dark, it is subtle. Two colors, it is not subtle at all. This particular one I feel works best subtle. Good to have it settled.

Rain all day today and the forecast says big rain tomorrow with storm. A good time to open the door for Caterpillar to look outside, see the rain, back up and say she's seen enough. She doesn't climb trees or stalk birds anymore. Before, she would go into the woods across the road, sit still until she became a gray rock. Birds paid her no mind, another gray rock. The camouflage gave her the advantage. Now, she sits or lies on the ground where I feed the birds, sits still and watches the birds peck all around her. Her whiskers twitch and she makes involuntary squeaking sounds. She never jumps at them anymore, only watches. She quit hunting five or so years ago. I have seen her leap straight up about four feet and swat at a flying snowbird. The time I saw it, she hit a wing, set the bird to wobbling, but it caught control and flew away. I realized then she was experienced swatting birds out of the air. I didn't like it, but accepted it as the way of nature, advancing the birds to their next lifetime. I never felt right about the cats killing so many birds, but I don't feel right taking so much trash to the dump, either. Maybe a snowbird becomes a nuthatch next time around. Environment consciousness has been an issue with me all my life. It took awhile for our polluted condition to get into corporate news, like it took a long while for the press to dare note police brutality. Propaganda news tells us about Russia and China not being free like we are. They don't have even remotely near as much killing as we in USA have, not near the prison population, not near as many people bullied by cops and killed by cops. The press calls the killer cops rogue. When it is the same all over the country, cop murders turning up daily as randomly as school shootings appeared a few years ago, all giving the same justification, "I feared for my life," it's scripted.

Who speaks Elizabethan English in working class America unless scripted? The attitude is that the cops are at war with the population. They are trained and equipped for war with us. The orders come from on high, and I don't mean Jesus. This is the law enforcement of corporate police state serving prisons for profit, and keepin the niggers scared. He had a gun. He had a knife. He reached for my gun. I appreciate the people making cell phone videos of the mafia style beatings and the killings at their own serious risk. It requires a readiness to take whatever comes next. I see DOJ investigating the Ferguson killing like I see police departments investigating themselves. If DOJ is not where orders come from, DOJ is complicit with where they come from. We had an internal investigation and found everything according to protocol. The protocol must be the problem, not rogue cops. Of course, they're careful only to kill or brutalize the poor, who lack the resources for recourse in court. It is a physical manifestation, a measure of how much the American working class, middle class and ruling class hate the poor. It used to be indifference. In corporate police state, propaganda has turned the indifference to active hatred. And the people wanting them to kill even more niggers call themselves Christians, brag about it aggressively, the fundamentalists who want to force everybody else to worship their vengeful God of racial purity, fear and punishment. They give all other Christians a bad name, the Presbyterians, Methodists, Roman Catholics, Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Lutherans, Episcopalians and other varieties I can't think of. It's something like ISIS usurping the name Islamic State.

It's at this point I don't like to think about it further. It's merely an explanation of how things got this way, and to follow the line of thought from there on drifts into the bog of engagement, which I don't care to commit to. I'm just reading what I see. Yesterday, at the gas station talking with the woman at the register I know to be a False News watcher, which is ok by me. I like her, we have brief conversations when I pay for gas. Two black women came in while I was paying. My heart opened to them with a loving empathy, sorrow for having a glimmer of an idea of the genuine fear they have of the police and white people, growing up and living their whole lives knowing their pigmentation is a target. I felt an impulse to kneel down, touch my forehead to the nearest woman's feet, and bawl in shame. Now that I've seen what police have done to black people all my life that I did not know about, no attention given it by the press, I feel a deep repentance when I see someone black, not for anything I've done, but for the color of my skin. They bring the shame I feel to the surface, identification with my pigmentation for the pain and sorrows "my people" do and have dealt "her people." I can't do anything to change any of it, but I don't have to be it inside myself. I'm grateful to see in myself that I have become someone unable to hate. I don't hate the so-called Christians, because I feel like I understand them to some degree. I came up in the world of people who usurped the word Christian, and ran for my life. So grateful I had what it took to run.    

*

YES TO DIVERSITY

diego rivera

I'm having a drink of half Canada Dry, half Jumex mango nectar and a squirt of lemon juice. The mango nectar is a bit flat; the Canada Dry spritzes it with carbonation, the nectar flavors the ginger ale, and the lemon juice adds a zip. Good drink. I'm glad we have a Mexican aisle in the grocery store. I like black beans and everything else along the aisle. I like seeing Mexicans in the grocery store and around town. I grew up with Mexicans and found them to be as good a people as the Anglo kids. Only the Mexicans did not have in them the arrogance of whiteness; thus, I preferred them. We were segregated then. Anglo kids were afraid of the Mexicans and the Mexicans were afraid of the Anglos. It was commonly understood the Anglo kids were superior in numbers, if no other way. I think I identified with the oppressed races because I was oppressed at home by white man. I knew that the white world would be willing to give me a chance for my whiteness, and if I, the same person, were in Mexican skin, it would not be the same. I did not feel right with the privilege that went with white skin. Never have. By this time in the life, a lifetime of experience seeing how arrogant white people automatically present themselves to black or tan people, I'm embarrassed in the company of someone black or tan. I want to say, "I'm not like that," but know how empty it sounds before saying it. And am not so sure I'm not like that. I only know it from my mind, not from my behavior as seen by someone black or tan. If I'm really not like that, let it show in my actions, the only place it counts.    

diego rivera

I am so tired of racial tension after a lifetime of living with it, in it, aware of it, not in denial, it's become one more of the reasons I left "the world" and came here to Air Bellows Mountain where racial tensions don't apply. Nor does any other sort of tension, except drama for the sake of drama. Plenty of that goes around. I prefer not to think so, but plenty of drama for drama sake goes on inside my head. It's what gossip is about. Even continuous drama on television does not supplant gossip. It seems like gossip is a way of making celebrity of the familiar. I'm recalling my first years in the mountains, listening to old man Tom Pruitt talk about different people, who, in our way of seeing, are just ordinary people, talk about them the same way people who watch movies and television talk about the stars, the celebrities. It struck me curious why, when he talked about a preacher who once lied about something Tom said, his reason he left his church, he talked like he expected me to know who he was talking about. He lost respect. He spoke of the preacher the same way people like Rachel Maddow and Bill Maher talk about lying Republicans. Louie Gohmert said, Joni Ernst said, Ted Cruz said. A celebrity said. Tom's brother, Millard, too, when he talked about the people of his life, I had the same feeling of listening to a celebrity talk about a celebrity I never heard of, but should have. The only television Tom watched was baseball and the news. He didn't get a tv until he was seventy, given to him by a neighbor from Away who believed everybody must have at least one. It's a sight how many used tvs I've been offered, even told in no uncertain terms to take.

It wasn't right, no tv in the house. I need to be connected to what is popularly called the real world, the world I turned my back to as too unreal to sustain life. A human without a tv was unexpected and weird as a rock on a fence post. It's even more now, but I have good camouflage. I bought a tv to watch movies with when so many movies became available on VCR. Netflix sends three movies a week of my choice from a selection of almost everything. One of my major sacrifices coming to the mountain was giving up movies. Had to drive seventy miles for an America movie, a hundred miles to see a foreign film. Now I can have film festivals from almost any country. The tv is not connected to cable, antenna or satellite. The people that freaked out because I don't have a tv in the house are ok about it now. He conformed at least a little bit. He's toeing in. He's slow, but he'll get there. When they put him in a nursing home, he will have no choice but to watch tv, like when he's in a hospital. I suspect the reason I noted how the old people of the old ways talked about each other, is taking it for granted I knew who they were talking about, the way Dick Cheney is mentioned on the evening news, assuming the name needs no introduction. Evidently, before television, people talked about each other the way we talk about celebrities now. We talk about each other and we're talking about people who don't figure as celebrities, what they call on the news, ordinary people. All who are not celebrities, whose names it is taken for granted we do not know, are the ordinary people. We used to be the common people. Now we're the ordinary.

diego rivera

Becoming aware that the people pre-television talked of each other as stars everyone knows, I began to take exception to we who live in the world of non-celebrities, nearly everybody, being reduced to a non-person, a statistic, the viewing audience, ordinary, finding it socially troubling. I watch the people of the world I live in accepting themselves as the ordinary to the point of not even noticing. And I withdraw to home, reminding self I'm not here to change anybody, only self. I want to flow with the living flow of the world I live in. Without wanting to be of it, I have no choice but to be in it. Since I'm in it, I live best flowing with it. My world is three-quarters right-wing statistically. but it doesn't mean a wall is between me and the rest of them. Everyone I know thinks different from how I think. All have opinions different from mine, and very few intersect with my opinions. I don't care, because I assess opinions the same as nothing. Some of my best friends want to bomb Iran and say Obama is a monkey. I don't care. It only tells me what they think about one subject neither of us knows anything about, but what we get from different propaganda sources. No matter where I live in America, I live among people with no interest in art, reading, poetry or foreign films. I talk with people of similar interests, and we never agree where opinions are concerned. One may say Picasso is the great artist of the 20th century, while another says Duchamp. Both for valid reasons. I'm uncomfortable with this time wherein we are expected to be in full check-list agreement with somebody or they don't like you, you get labelled. Whenever I hear somebody describe themselves, very liberal, it puts me on alert to watch everything I say.

diego rivera himself

*

   

BORED BY WHITE PRIDE

max ernst

Saw a thing on facebook promising this could change the way I think. I couldn't click on it. It looked like something like a hugging contest. Something unexpectedly sweet. I couldn't go there, whatever it was. The intro that it's about changing the way I think did it for me. Not that I reject having the way I think changed. I'm always open to adjusting, fine tuning my thinking. I already know my thinking is based in illusion, mixing details, facts, trends, beliefs I'm unaware of, connecting the dots in my head into a skyscraper of cards. Every card a bit of misinformation, inaccurate details, images arranged into a construction composed by my own attitude toward life. What does some person on facebook who never heard of me know about my thinking? The presumption that I think a certain way is what turned me off. How does that person know I don't already think the way he's making a case for? And what if I don't? I'm half tempted go take a look at what it has to say, but refuse to. It brings to mind somebody saying a sentimental act of common decency restored their faith in humanity. Every time I hear it, I think, but cannot say, If that's all it took to restore your faith in humanity, it must not have taken much to lose it. The American madness to change other people's thinking is totally out of bounds in my way of seeing plain decency. The church I grew up in tried to convince me it was my duty to browbeat everyone I know about changing their way of thinking to the only way, the right way, the way the preacher at the church thought. I wouldn't want to lay that on anybody, God as Fear and Punishment. I had to shed that mind. It took fifteen years by school education and self-education by reading and paying attention to the people I know.  

max ernst

Since childhood, I've wanted through the course of my life to know people from different backgrounds, social circumstances, from the poor to the rich, from religious to non-religious, from pastoral people, who live by supposed-to, to ex-convicts and foreigners, Yankees too. I've been fascinated by the varieties of humanity since as far back as I can remember, always interested in people of different cultures, different nationalities, different races, different languages. I even like knowing cops. I believe our Sparta town police, now, are honorable people. It hadn't always been that way. My best friend through grade school was American-Mexican. He was as American as I was, but he was Mexican. My mother worked sometimes in a TG&Y store as accountant. We'd go pick her up after work. A Mexican girl in high school worked there, Juanita. I loved Juanita. I still love the name. She knew that Mitchell was my friend. I loved the Mexican in her. That she was Catholic fascinated me too. I was like a l dog following her around listening to her talk. I asked her once to say something in Spanish. She asked what I wanted her to say. I couldn't think of anything and we laughed. I had Mexican friends all the way through school. I didn't care that it made me suspect to the other white kids. The Mexicans were far more interesting to me than the white Baptist kids. I also did not like the way they were shut out by the white kids. I extended myself to them, wanting to know them, appreciating them as themselves, liking them especially for being different from the suffocating pride of whiteness. White arrogance toward people I knew to be valid human beings made me ashamed of my white privilege. 

max ernst

In the Navy, my friends were the black guys. I was on an old WW2 destroyer that was sold to Brazil soon after I was released. It could run, and it could ride the waves. It took a 90 degree roll one night and uprighted. I loved how the ship rode the waves. In the very worst times when three-quarters of the crew were out with sea-sickness and and puke was everywhere, I kept on going, thinking to self I'd pay for this ride, and it's paying me. I loved it, walking down a hallway bouncing from wall to wall using upper arms for bumpers, going up steps and stepping down what seemed like three feet to step up to the next step, I didn't like the aroma of puke everywhere, on my clothes too, no avoiding it, but I refused to give in to sea-sickness, because riding the waves was my reason for choosing the Navy to stay out of the Army. I loved riding the ocean. The ship had a dozen or more black guys. I liked them the best and enjoyed social times with them. They were people just like me and the other white guys that called me nigger lover. My closest friend on the ship was Muslim, from Boston. One of the guys on the ship from Texas had a cousin who was going with Joe Tex, then a pop singer on the radio. Going onshore, I always went with my black friends. They were the most fun. The white guys went en masse to the sailor bar to drink as much beer as they could and talk big man talk about pussy. With the black guys I went to jazz clubs. They knew where these places were. Had some great jazz club experiences in Europe along the Mediterranean. My friend, Ameen, played jazz piano on the order of Ahmad Jamal, and jazz vibraphone, vibes. We'd go to a club, enjoy the music by good musicians from all over Europe. During intermission he'd introduce himself to the band, we'd drink with the band and talk. Every time, the piano player asked him to play some tunes. His courtesy was never to play more than two.

max ernst

After being acquainted with a fair variety of people, weary of racial tensions, I committed to a white working class community of mountain people, a real culture. As a white dude, I felt most at home among mountain people. I found my grandmother Worthington in them. From early years in these mountains unto now I feel in the mountains as in grandmother's arms. The attitude was hers, the philosophical mind was hers, the colloquialisms were hers, and the feeling was hers. I didn't learn until I'd been here a quarter century that her parents moved to Kansas from east Kentucky, Pulaski County, not long before she was born. Her older brothers and sisters grew up in Kentucky. She grew up in a mountain home, in Kansas. She married a boy whose parents had just moved to Kansas from Ninemile in eastern Tennessee, Bledsoe County. After living here feeling at home in mountain culture as nowhere else, I learned I've got hillbilly blood, lots of it. It was one of the happiest moments in my life to learn I had hillbilly blood on the Worthington side. Great-great grandpa fought for the Confederacy and survived. One of his brothers didn't make it. I felt closest to grandmother in childhood as to any relative. She was my home base. I had fun telling my sisters in Kansas they had hillbilly blood. Throughout my life, I've regretted the divide between races, religions, nationalities in my country. In the grocery store a couple days ago, a black man I'd never seen before came up behind me in line with two items. I invited him to go ahead of me. He was so surprised he looked suspicious, backing up a step. He declined. I said, Go ahead, I'm in no hurry. He did and spoke his gratitude. Mary at the register said that was nice of me. I said, I can't stand to unload my buggy with somebody behind me who has two items. What's the rush? Then realized it was "nice," unexpected, because he was black. I've done the same for white people and got no notice.  

max ernst himself

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HEY WHITEBOY

georgia o'keefe

Changing clothes yesterday before going into town for lunch, I thought I'd go over the face hair with clippers, trim it back. It was ragged, which I liked. Decided to leave some goat beard, shorten it by about half, got carried away with the clippers and mowed all of it. It will grow back. Now I don't have to mess with it for awhile. It is one of the great privileges of retirement that I can let my continually growing hair go and not fool with it. At home, I wear the same things all the time, changing shoes three and four times a day for going outside to feed the donkeys and slip n slide to the mailbox. At times feet become annoyingly frozen, I take the warm ones from the heater and put the cold shoes on the heater toward next change. I prefer not to smell in public like I look. I'm now one of the worst looking people in the grocery store. I'd best stay out of Walmart or my picture will appear online in collections of the freaks sighted in Walmart. Now that I go almost no place, I let appearance go. Laziness. Tired of shaving. I've been tired of shaving since the first time. My daddy lathered his face up with a brush in such excess I dreaded having to shave. He used the Gillette double-edge blades and finished with little dabs of toilet paper stuck to his face. He took time shaving like mother took with makeup. Serious business. I was unable to make such a ritual of shaving, and so glad when the Bic disposable razors came along. I'd take a small amount of lather from the spray can and smear it on my face, go over it with the razor and be done. I missed places and didn't care. I shaved less and less as I grew older. Shaving did not make me feel like a man. That was not the kind of man I wanted to be. I'll call it Obedience Man. I never wanted to be an obedient robot. Took a lot of hell for it in the early years. It just made me worse. 

marcel janco

In childhood play with neighbor kids, we were in the time of cowboys and Indians, before the time of cops and drug dealers. I only played the Indian, could not play cowboy in the early years for the same reasons I could not be a cop grown up and have a hard time not being ashamed of my status as a white man. White man has been an oppressor to people of any shade of any color for multiple centuries. I don't know where it came from in early childhood, but in the company of people of other shades of pigment I feel shame. I thought the Lone Ranger was cool for having an Indian his best friend. I thought Tonto was much cooler than Kimo Sabe. For me, the Lone Ranger was Tonto's sidekick. If I'd seen Dances With Wolves in childhood, I would have dove in, entered the movie and become Kevin Costner. I like Graham Greene the actor in movies. I think I had an identity problem in childhood. I did not feel right about being white. I was not comfortable with white privilege. I knew some Mexican kids and knew some black kids, liked them a lot. My best friend K-6 was Mexican, Mitchell Ledesma. He could not go to Catholic school for a reason I never knew. Maybe parents couldn't afford it. They surely could have. All the Mexican kids went to Catholic school. I had a sense he'd been into some sort of trouble, insubordinate or something. I liked Mitchell. He was a good guy. I didn't know then that the other kids took me for a Mexican-lover, wouldn't have cared if I knew. The other kids didn't have much to do with him, which was ok with me. He was more interesting to me than the others. Catholic school only went to the sixth grade for the Mexican kids. They entered the public school system in the seventh grade. Mitchell and I drifted apart through the seventh grade as he spent more time with his Mexican friends. 

anish kapoor

I never had any problems with the Mexican kids. They all knew I was Mitchell's friend. They were friendly to me. We went into the seventh grade in 1954, the year of school desegregation. All the time before was in the time of overt segregation. The varieties of skin tones lived in their own neighborhoods. My parents were barely tolerant of me having a Mexican friend, more because he was a Catholic than a Mexican, though Mexican was bad enough. To walk to the movie theater a mile and a half to two miles, the longest way was through white neighborhoods. The shortest way was through the Mexican section and the black neighborhood. I wished none of them any ill will and took the shortest way through their neighborhoods feeling safe. There was so much white teenagers beating up black teenagers in the time, a white kid was not safe where the black people lived. I felt no problem. I was not one of the ones bullying them, and they knew it. I did not know it, but they knew who I was and where I lived. They knew I was friendly with the few black people I knew. I walked by a bar I wanted to go inside so badly. It was the time of pomade and men wearing caps made of a woman's stocking during the day to hold the hair down for Friday and Saturday nights. I saw a number of the people there coming and going during my walks to the movie theater on Saturday afternoons, and no one even looked at me with a hint of a threat. Red-headed, freckled Irish-looking kid, ultra-whiteboy. They may have admired the kid's pluck, unafraid of them. I felt no ill toward them in my heart and had a faith it would keep me safe. A few old men sat out front during the days in wooden chairs, men who were not quite right, needed looking after. They were welcome at the bar, a place they could be safe during the day where everybody knew them and saw to it nothing happened to them. 

antoni tapies

Walking by the bar, I'd speak with the old boys leaning back in their wooden chairs against the wall of the bar. They'd smile big and I'd smile big. The time came when I walked through the black section every time, primarily to see the old boys in front of the bar. They recognized me and I recognized them, how you doin? The music on the jukebox was the music I listened to at home on the black AM station where the music was the best, Ivory Joe Hunter, Big Mama Thornton, Slim Harpo, Jimmy Reed, James Brown, The Chantels. It was dark and smoky inside the open doorway. The jukebox played a song I liked every time I passed. It was the time of Ray Charles, Lonely Avenue, and Bill Doggett's Honky Tonk that was number one for a year. I probably would have been safer in there among the grownup black people than anywhere else. The way white people believed, I'd have been killed walking in the door. I believe I could have gone in and bought a coke at the bar and it would have been a friendly time. Though my heart believed I could walk in the door and be ok, my white upbringing told me to be afraid, white culture the only culture I knew, culture the same as reality from the inside. As throughout my life, I had conflicted feelings. My heart and mind said one thing and the culture I lived in said another, most often quite another. I watched Fifties cowboy and Indian tv shows pulling for the Indians, knowing they would lose, they always do, but they were my people, my team I fought with in the neighborhood Indian wars. According to ancestry.com DNA lab results, I'm mostly German, almost as much Irish, then English and Swedish. I'm a whiteboy. And I've never felt right being white. I grew up in a world of white people who looked down on anybody of any race other than white. I never saw any sense in it, yet it became a part of me, a part I shook off when I set out on my own. 

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YES TO DIVERSITY

helen frankenthaler

A few minutes ago I found the saying from Madeleine Albright concerning women, about a special hell for women who don't help other women. I grew up in the generation before women's liberation. I've enjoyed in my lifetime seeing the liberation of women. Government lets women down every step of the way, but outside the reach of government, out here in the world where we live, I've seen a change sweep through women's culture in the younger generations and it took with the older women too. It is a new self-confidence. In childhood I remember thinking a lot of the women that lived in the neighborhood were really neat people, who turned inward to be a housewife to raise kids and stay married, clean house and cook. I see women now asserting themselves creatively in each one's own way. I see women having girl's night out parties. I see women being friends and not slicing each other to ribbons behind one another's backs. Of course, it goes on. It goes on among men too. It's a human thang. No blame. All the way through school I knew a lot of brilliant girls I felt needed a chance to be their human self and deserved the chance the same as men. I never found girls and women less intelligent than boys and men. Our society needs the influence of the feminine in a bad way. And the feminine is coming in. Joan Jett opened the door to women as rock stars. Then there was Heart, then Patti Smith and Nina Hagen, then L7, Courtney Love and the whole spectrum of rock women are doing now. It's not been so much a "movement" as a shift in belief systems in how women see themselves in relation to their own humanity.  

helen frankenthaler

This word humanity doesn't have the meaning it one time had, either. Or maybe I had a youthful stereotype of humanity from nineteenth century salons. I am not disheartened by humanity seeing the greedy doing what they do, seeing what power does to people who have had a taste of it. We do it all, have done it all, always. It's in us each one, individually. Some of us learn to control our automatic desires, and most watch tv learning daily to satisfy desires whatever the cost. Learning to control the automatic desires is the spiritual path I focus on for myself. I don't believe I have a right to hold anyone else to such attention. Meaningful to me does not mean necessarily meaningful for someone else. Like I can read Wallace Stevens' Idea of Order At Key West and have my mind blown every time. Somebody else would say, It's all right. And somebody else wouldn't be able to make heads nor tails of it. And somebody else would tell me I only see it superficially and maybe give me an in-depth lecture on what's really going on with it. And I'd listen with full attention. I feel like this is a benefit of being a reader in a world of people who don't read. You learn definitively that not everybody is interested in the same thing you are. A good learning. Somebody else is interested in making fiddles. It makes an interesting world that we all have our own likes and dislikes. One does not cancel another. All the different interests weave together into humanity. I'm all for a world that allows everyone their own potential at something besides making money. That too, for the people that need it, but not to have it a necessity for everybody. I have a feeling this is the world we are moving toward in our social evolution as humanity. 

helen frankenthaler

We're in a white man backlash now that the people with black hair and women are becoming self-aware. It's unsettling the white man belief system that has been dominant for 6,000 years. We are seeing the tail end of that era and men are freaking out. Their support systems have abandoned them. Hate radio and hate television rub salt in the white man's wound. I tend to see that a good thing, considering wars are about burning off hate. This hate spewing up among white men has been there all long. It's not new because of Limbaugh. The hate created Limbaugh. The hate has to come to the surface where it can be dealt with. I see these trends among the people, not in government. Government being a white man mafia, government will change last, if religion doesn't come in last. I see us moving toward that overused word diversity. I'm glad it's going that way. I found girls smarter than the guys all the way through school. In adult life, I find women, as a rule of thumb, to be far more intelligent than men. Earlier today driving to town, I heard on NPR somebody had made a study that found women are far better workers than men, concluding women deserve more pay than men. It accorded with what I've observed in my experience along the way. I felt it was a shame when Lois Sheets lost the election some years ago running for sheriff. She would have been a good one, and there would not have been any scandals. Donna Shumate, lawyer in Sparta, is among the most brilliant minds I know. Not saying I'm a collector of brilliant minds, but one stands out from time to time. I worked for Donna for six years and came out of the experience respecting her more than I did going into it, and my respect was considerable then. Men don't have to perform in court pregnant. There are some men I know whose minds I respect, but it's mostly in women I find the minds I respect in the deepest way. I don't mean to be going off into generalizations, but can't help it. 

helen frankenthaler

All my life, from childhood to now, I have observed women to be so much more intelligent than men that the difference is remarkable. American boys tradition has been all the way along to stop learning after puberty. Boys are not taught to be sensitive to the feminine, only to conquer. Rape goes so deep in the male psyche, it's good to see rape coming to the surface as a social concern, where it can be dealt with--more evidence white man is losing the reins of power. The ERA not passing failed to slow down the women's movement. Its time was now, whether government noticed or not. Evidently, now is the time for gay rights to surface. It's one of those things I say, Why hasn't it always been thus? It's as self-evident as women deserving at least equal pay with men, as well as equal opportunity. It's something I don't feel is political. I knew black people all the way through school. I did not find them ignorant. I found them intimidated. Girls had to ditch their intelligence when they started wanting to get married. The black kids knew that doing well in school wasn't going to serve them in any kind of way. They were taken for dumb, came to see themselves dumb, and gave up before they could start. I remember a guy in high school. His name was Leon. We were the same weight and had to wrestle in gym class. He always smelled of liquor. Always wanted me to win because he didn't really want to bother. He kept a pint bottle in his locker. He was a good guy, intelligent guy, didn't do shit in school, didn't finish, and I'd guess either crashed and burned or went into the Army or anything except upwardly mobile. He knew as a black man he had no chance but to be a low-paid laborer, working for the man, would never have any respect outside the bar, never honored for being a man. It rendered him without hope from the beginning. I did not feel right being white around him. I didn't want to hold him down, render him without a chance. I didn't want him thinking I was his superior because my skin was white. This at the time in a teenager's mind when the injustices of the world we're on the verge of diving into loom large.   

helen frankenthaler herself

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GRUMPY OLD BASTARD AT LARGE

wayne white

I believed I could get through this Ferguson (St Louis), Missouri, incident without feeling compelled to flip my two pennies onto the gaming table. At first, it was just another white cop kills a black teenage boy, a regular occurrence like young white guy blows away a classroom of kids someplace. It's never certain where it will happen next, but it is certain it will happen. One of the first images to come to mind about the Ferguson incident is the police overzealous SWAT numbers and equipment. Talking heads are saying it looks like police state. We've never seen this before. Boston marathon bombing? Anybody remember that? I was most struck by the immediate appearance of an army of cops that swept Boston like ants on sugar. Where did they all come from? A big SWAT operation with the assistance of tv, them saying people were happy to oblige them to go through their homes a SWAT team with machine guns and grenades. What do you say to a SWAT team at the door saying let us in by opening the door or we break the door down and kill your dog? Genghis Khan and the Mongol Horde comes to mind. They went to medieval walled cities and told them to give the Mongols whatever wealth they had in gold and other valuable treasures. Give it over peaceably and we let you live. Refuse and we kill all of you, take what we want and burn down your city. I see talking head after talking head saying of Ferguson, we've never seen such a display of police state. Statistics coming to the surface now are alarming of SWAT break-in entry for next to nothing, killing people, even white people now, and saying, "He had a gun." Shooting to kill has become such a pattern, it tells on training. I've seen this coming on since the Nixon law and order fear propaganda, the beginning of white corporate backlash soon after the Civil Rights period. 

wayne white

I see "pundits" asking how we can turn this progression into police state around. I can't help but laugh when I hear that. I know they see it. I also know they are subject to corporate restraints by way of producer. MSNBC is as much a business as Faux tv. They just appeal to different markets, the presentation guided by fear. Even Democracy Now and Truthout, that seem to get it, use fear of police state to rally attention around their side of the divide. Our Ferguson protests and police show of force make fabulous tv for white shareholders: keepin the enwords down. Bright lights, smoke, rolling teargas cannisters, reporters muscled and arrested, a SWAT army keeping America safe for the whites. At the risk of blowing your white middle class mind, I've been seeing for some years that the white working class men of USA, coast to coast, border to border, believe "the nigger war" is imminent, the same as the "Christians" believe "the rapture" is near. The black people know this. White working class people know it too. It's what they are arming themselves toward, not to shoot each other. Black people all over the country are in alarm. The decisions made by white public officials have gone toward escalating the police action in Ferguson day by day so consistently the pattern exposes purpose. Even George Wallace did not provoke black people to this degree. Another young black unarmed guy will be shot by a cop with intent to kill, knowing he will get away with it and be a hero among the white brethren in racism. The cops of that community will come out a SWAT army to put down demonstrations, the protests will grow, the SWAT presence will grow. The talking heads will say incredulously, We've never seen anything like this. Black people say, yes we have, yes we have, yes we have, and the interviewer changes the subject. More blame the victim talk from white male authoritarians. 

wayne white

The black people are saying we want to be treated like people instead of zoo animals running loose. The absence of white authorities addressing the issue tells me what they see is a bunch of monkeys down from the trees hooting and screeching in their faces. If one bites you, you might get rabies. Something else I'm seeing, or so I interpret from what I see, the cops are scared shitless. No accidents in their underpants. The hacker collective called Anonymous has struck the Ferguson police hard, and the arch-enemy of white supremacism, the ACLU, is in town. Al Jazeera reporters and cameras. Ay-Rabs. The members of the SWAT force have been listening to Limbaugh for most of their lives and Faux news. My sense is that they feel cornered, not by a bunch of monkeys, but a threat to their own belief system, which is sacred to them all the way to church. Their zeal tells me this is what they believe they are standing guard for. They may be seen in shame on tv, but being on tv is their pride. They do not see human beings. They see the enemy. Their face shields, their bullet proof vests, their machine guns aimed at you, identify themselves the enemy, not people either. This isn't about people, human beings or whatever we're called. It's about belief systems. The police side doesn't seem able to see they are creating a tremendous resistance throughout the tv audience. It's like they're acting as a circle of wagons around the Bank. They're the cavalry in Indian Country. They're acting on orders from Headquarters. They're doing their job. Another wedge in the systematic divide-and-conquer phase of control. Can this be turned around? Not until Headquarters OKs it. It is too obvious a step in a systematic progression. Every day I see this a public relations police action to rally the well-armed white racists behind the police state for holding back a stampede of criminals and white liberals--same differ'nce. I feel like this ongoing standoff is a PR stunt rallying white racists, announcing to us by way of evening "news" we have police state similar to the Supreme Court announcing the end of Democracy overriding the popular vote. 

wayne white 

The step by step divide-and-conquer progression looks awfully much like intent to provoke more such protests in other cities where it is inevitable a cop will kill another unarmed black kid with his hands up saying don't shoot. It's like your girlfriend saying don't shoot and doing it anyway. She provoked it by saying don't. Put down after put down of black protest assures the white people the police have the black people under control. Good press. Good support. The press about the black kid is the same as the press about Trayvon Martin and others; discredit the victim, make him look on tv like white society is better off without him. Job well done, fellers. The indifference to the feelings and concerns of the black people who have lived in police state all their lives is as epidemic now as cops shooting with intent to kill. Six years of a black man in the White House has been enough time for the propagandists to generate so much racial hatred it's become explosive. I was thinking yesterday that if a hole the size of a quarter were to open in the president's security, he's dead as soon as the hole appears. And I remember one of Indira Gandhi's most trusted bodyguards sacrificed his own life to assassinate her in front of the other bodyguards, who immediately shot him down. A black president has been used for the focus of hate by the propagandists of white racism long enough to brew some serious mass hate. Being white rednecks, the cops in St Louis are as aware of the coming "nigger war" as every white working class man I know. A sensible person does not want to see this happen. The people passing orders down the chain of command to the white cops to provoke the black people of Ferguson are visibly not sensible people. They're functioning from a belief system. What color is the problem? Black. What color is the solution? Red. Black people have seen this coming, yet they appear to me to be in collective shock seeing white racism take such a militant stance so quickly, so blatantly, and so without meaningful censure from higher up.

wayne white

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