GRUMPY OLD BASTARD

A little bit ago I took one of those facebook quizzes that supposedly tells you something about yourself, or categorizes or baffles. There is no way the tests can be "scientific." It's pop fun. And that's the spirit I see it in. This one was what kind of an old person you will  be. Some of the questions don't have an answer in the multiple choice selection that I can affirm having to do with me, so I click on anything. This does, however, account for the unknown, which encases everything. Naturally, I got, "Grumpy next door neighbor." It rang so true I had to laugh. I emailed my next door neighbor, Allan, telling him to get ready. I've felt aggressively grumpy in the mind ever since. Looking at various posts on facebook, one of the anti-fascist sites I get memes, articles and cartoons from was saying Sarah Palin said at an NRA gathering she's all for baptizing terrorists by water-boarding. The darling of stupid white men. I started cussing a streak a mile long, out of patience with her public monotony so full of pride and so blatantly ignorant, the superstar of stupid. A bunch of white men pay her a few hundred thousand to talk dirty to them and blow smoke up their asses. The face of police state. I tell myself over and over to let it go, don't fill my mind with other people's stupid. It's a nuisance to see her spacy eyes, somebody who takes clichés for reality. I think I'm still reeling from the disappointment of growing up and seeing what I learned in school about USA and democracy and the supreme court and patriotism was all bunk. It's not anything like we're taught. Not anything like television points out. I've come to see our history as propaganda---the winners of wars write the history books---and what we had in the name of democracy became popular police state, patriotic police state. Hooray for 31,000 gun deaths a year. Hooray for corporate prisons. Hooray for beating the shit out of college students, pepper spray in their eyes in the name of The Law for practicing their constitutional responsibility to protest.

 

 

 

I can't stop laughing at the flag waver in Nevada claiming he does not recognize the US Govt. Maybe somebody needs to tell him he's carrying flag of a non-existent country. He said he recognizes Nevada law, so why isn't he carrying a Nevada flag? Maybe because nobody will know what it is? Not dramatic enough? Requires explanation? It makes me crazy that so much is made of him as a "racist" and a "terrorist." Why not just call it like it is: ignorant. Add a whole lot of ego to a whole lot of ignorance and he's what happens. The part that makes him interesting to me is that he is so perfectly the part White Man. He's a cliché of himself. His ignorance is specifically white man ignorance. He'd make a good movie, though he's on tv enough now a movie could be made from the news clips featuring him. He may be featured along with Palin at NRA rallies to blow smoke up white man's ass. Is he the next American face of ignorance? This list of the many faces is so long by now, he'll fade out of sight. Won't he hate that. Republicans have exploited the popular appeal of ignorance, which has worked very well for them. The party has a case before the Supremes requesting legalization of lying in political campaigns. It's the same as done. I can see it passing, 7 to 2. Political campaigns amount to television commercials now, devoid of substance as a sleeping pill commercial. Talking with a woman I know in the coffee shop, she said, "I'm a con-SER-vative!" I could only think: You embarrass yourself. She said, "What are you?" I knew exactly the gossip circle my answer would be reported to within the hour, and said, "Socialist." I said it to see her jump, but she didn't jump. She looked at me with a glance that said she already knew it. The conservative / liberal divide right now purports volumes of ideologies, but they boil down quite simply to conservative: not caring, and liberal: caring. It's been that way all my life. In the Sixties it was called hawks and doves. Now it's conservatives and liberals, words totally meaningless.

 

 

 

 I remember when Ralph Nader gave his support to the republican coup by judicial fiat saying, the republicans will get us there faster. He meant police state. He's been seeing it come on for several years, since before Nixon times. He saw that both parties, two wings of the Business Party, were marching us into police state, consciously with intent. The democrats are slower taking us into police state. Nader wanted to get on with it. Sooner it starts, the quicker it will be over, or so it looked from there and then to his perspective. I have an idea he was mistaken in his thinking that the American people would have a new revolution. Don't count on it. Maybe a civil war, but no revolution. It is a third-world truth that whoever rules the television stations rules the country. Liberals do not rule USA. Even MSNBC is not liberal. Television has become the beloved propagandist in our midst. It has become the authority, sacred. And I feel very uncomfortable in a world where television is sacred. I've never been comfortable in television world. They talk about red states and blue states in terms of absolutes, like NC a predictably red Southern state, I can live in a red state as well as a blue state. Either side is in relation to television. They are just participating in television. I avoid political talk with everyone, even liberals. Liberals disappoint me when they show parrotry like the republicans. I'm ashamed to identify liberal, so I don't. I am a socialist. It's a scary word to television viewers. Nobody knows what it means because it does not get explained on television. On tv, the only thing it means is enemy. I can go with that. The Lakota tribe of plains Indians became known as the Sioux, their word for enemy. They liked being called the Enemy and adopted the name. A constant reminder to them that they are indeed the enemy. Q: What tribe you from, boy? A: The Enemy.

 

 

 

 

I, myself, have never been the enemy of ways American. They are my own. I saw an article about something like 3,000 people expatriating from USA last year. I gave it some thought in the distant past, never seriously with intent, weighed the benefits and deficits, just a subject to think about. Where would I go? Wherever I might go from New Zealand to Turkey, I'd be "The American." Here, on Waterfall Road, I am an American, but not The American. Problem of being The American would be in getting taken for an apologist for American foreign policy, domestic policy. It would always be, "your people." I'd be called upon to answer why gun stores sell out all over the country the day after a schoolhouse massacre. At home, I'm not expected to be a branch of the State Dept. I would be asked to explain American policy, the supreme court, none of which I even care to think about, certainly not be taken for a representative of. Asked, How do Americans like police state? I could only answer, They love it. Television politics has become the same as television sports, commercials, another television event. I find it curious American democracy went away, like the Ottoman Empire, without a whimper. A very few noticed. The ones that noticed knew it was a fake democracy anyway, so nobody is beating the drum over democracy gone. Makes me wonder if capitalism will fall away like democracy did, television pretending it continues, the television viewer slow to catch on. Possibly this is the nature of transition from one Age to another, from the Age of Fire to the Age of Electricity. There is more to it than the light bulb instead of whale oil lamp. It is a natural process we go through collectively. It is bigger than the participants that keep it going, like the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We focus on the people that keep the belief system going, judge them with praise or blame, missing that it is a process of change, the players filling roles like on a stage.     

 

 

 

 

*

 

 

DONKEY SENSE AND A CAT'S ATTENTION SPAN

jack

 

In the afternoon, I looked out to see where the donkeys were in the meadow. Jack and Jenny were playing chase. They took turns. Jenny chased Jack, then Jack chased Jenny. Eventually, the game of chase got Jack charged up and he jumped onto Jenny's back. She stood still and allowed it. He stepped down and they both went back to grazing. Playing chase and the game turning to serious business, Jenny put her head down and her ears back anticipating Jack biting down on her neck. He followed close by her side, but never made a gesture toward biting her. I am leaving them to work out their relationship without human interference. Every day it is a new feeling between them. I took some sweet grain and some carrots to them a little later. Jack came to me first, braying, wanting to smell my hand to check sight and sound with scent. Jenny walked up for a treat. Jack grunted his growl sound and turned his back end to her. Jenny stopped and stood still. Every time she would attempt to approach me for a bite of carrot, Jack growled at her and she backed off. He kept his rear end pointed at her. His ears were laid back. All the time he was eating carrot and grain, his eye was on Jenny. His muscles were taut. He did not like her approaching me. I threw half a carrot to her and she picked it up off the ground. She couldn't get close enough for me to give her a handful of grain. I poured some grain on the ground for her and some for Jack. Tight tension between them today, mostly coming from Jack. He was wound up, grunting his growl at Jenny every time she came too close to him. He wanted the human to himself today.

 

jenny

 

I was looking at a couple of big books of color photographs by Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher, African Ceremonies. I found some donkeys in a photograph somewhere in Mali. The donkeys were Bethlehem Cross donkeys like Jack and Jenny. I made the mistake of mentioning to a fundamentalist I know that I'd seen someplace they say Jesus rode into Jerusalem on one of these donkeys and forever after, this breed of donkey had a cross on its back. She said it is so, that Jesus riding it put the cross there. All I could say was, "Genetics doesn't work like that." Of course, it didn't mean anything to her, Jesus performed miracles. She told me about the dogwood flower with the petals that have red around the hole at the end of each petal representing holes in his hands. She said he was crucified on a dogwood tree. I couldn't pursue the subject any further. Explaining anything would have glazed her eyes and she'd have balked mentally. I didn't want to go with this, so I changed the subject. That's easy to do in today's America. Span of attention is nonexistent after more than half a century of television, and now cell phone computers. I've found it impossible to keep a conversation going on a given subject for more than a few sentences before an interruption of some sort breaks what little concentration there is. It's become so bad I have lost interest in conversation. Mid-sentence, somebody says, "Hi! How are you!" Jabber, jabber. Gone. Back to the conversation. Forget it. Neither one of us has any recollection.

 

 

I've come to the place that when I'm interrupted I do not allow myself to remember what I was saying that was interrupted. I will not waste mentation trying to hold a conversation together once it has been broken. I refuse to go back to the subject before. Everything has changed. Start talking again, then here comes somebody else. In America it is Rule #1 that we are duty bound to interrupt any two people seen talking. The only way a conversation can be carried on in America is for two people to be isolated from everyone else, no cell phone, relaxed conversation. I despise it in restaurants when I'm in conversation with the other at the table when the waiter says, "Is everything all right?" We have to stop what we're talking about and answer. Every time, I want to pull a Chris Rock on the waiter and say, "Shut the fuck up!" But this is America. We interrupt anecdotes with anecdotes unconsciously. We operate in unconsciousness. The waiters know the etiquette: see two people talking, interrupt them. I go into a restaurant with a friend to have a face-to-face visit, talk about what's important to us at the moment, not to be interrupted repeatedly during conversation. Though it annoys me every time, I'm used to it. Interrupted, I let the last sentence go without any attempt to hang onto it. I refuse to struggle against this cultural trend of unconsciousness. It's the nature of my place and time in the world, so I let it have its way. When the other says, What were we talking about? I answer, I don't remember. Even if I do. Why bother? A new subject of conversation gets started and it will soon be interrupted by the first person to see us talking.

 

 

 

I tend not to talk much of the time, because I dislike being interrupted so much. I've learned to ride the wave of interruptions and take it as the American form of conversation. To an outsider, a television non viewer, I have seen over years the dwindling of the American attention span. It is down to nothing by now. In the 1970s I was seeing the attention span around me about that of a cat's. By now, a cat is a deep thinker compared to an American. It's no wonder our politics has gone off the deep end into unconsciousness to all but money, the American mind. What we have now for government is the result of money being the only. Nothing matters but money. Recalling a statement from a man I know of that mind, "If you're not making money, you're going backwards." The Reagan Revolution created a couple of generations of college graduates unable to make money. Revolutions start in the middle class. We evidently have a revolution of some sort on the horizon. There is so much talk about it, just the talk itself may make it happen. White man is backed into a corner. Democracy was ok as long as white men were the majority. Though still controlling the military, white men are anxious seeing the hold on democracy slipping away. Hence the trend in red states to make laws restricting voting by college students, women, Latins, black people. Doing it out in the open on the evening news and nobody says anything about it of substance. It's like a good idea. The republican collective mind has become so moronic, I've lost respect for everyone I know who is republican. I used to give them the benefit of the doubt. I've learned, give them the benefit of the doubt and watch out.  

 

 

 

I came to the mountains to live a solitary life, though not necessarily solitude. I need the presence of others, friends, people I can count on who can count on me. I need social interactions. I need to talk about subjects of interest with others. I need to hear what others are thinking. I'm drawn to people who like to talk, because I like to listen, though am bored by chatter and can't take much of it. When I'm in conversation with somebody and a chatterer interrupts, taking the stage, I tune out and have even gone so far as to turn my back and start talking with someone else. I understand the impulse to curmudgeon. It's a word that defines me fairly accurately. I don't see any hope for humans to solve any problems created by humans. It's getting close to time for Divine intervention if we are going to make it through this time. I'm curious to see how Divine intervention manifests. It will pass unnoticed by the ones waiting for Jesus to come down from the clouds to wave his magic wand and fix us, heal us of our minds focused on nothingness in the form of numbers, driven by greed for more. We are seeing now that greed built into Capitalism turns out to be the cancer within that grows and destroys the living form. What's next? We will wait and see. Now that Capitalism is challenging Democracy, it might be that a hornet's nest has been disturbed. A whole generation of college graduates with student loan debt and slim resources, seeing their basic American rights eroded unto gone, will not be so easy to dismiss as the working class.  

 

 

 

*

 

AN ALLEGORY

Took a nap this afternoon and woke from it in a mind I've had all my life, a mind I've done very little to settle, to deal with, except avoid thinking about, because it always brings me down. Lying in the bed recently awake, I was looking at why it takes me to my own place of unresolved issues that I've already discovered I don't want to resolve. Given the chance once, I chose not to. Chose not to because I realized I didn't want to. It's like attempting to make friends with somebody you don't like and realizing when it's down to able, you don't want to. Didn't want to because of absence of trust. I don't want somebody for a friend I know I cannot trust, somebody I know with my life I cannot trust. And I don't want somebody for a friend I don't like. All the way along in church I hear, Honor thy father and mother. My ongoing question has been, Why? Somebody hits you every day, berates you every day, beats your self-esteem into the ground in the most vulnerable time of your life, and when you grow up, wants to be your friend. Who ever heard of loving the school bully because he picks on you every day? Or even liking him? Nobody picked on me at school. The only place I was bullied was at home, to the point that home became a place I never wanted to be. Loved going to school, hated going home.

I was lying in the bed looking at the ceiling a little bit ago, considering how odd it is that since I've grown up and left the nest, I'm expected to keep in touch, come to visit, never talk back, and take orders like go to church, one thing or another, whatever mother's obsession with making me mind is entertaining this decade. It felt like, lying there looking at the ceiling, I was of a new mind today. I was lying there in a mild awe of the effrontery of expecting, intending that I forget our history, and spend my life denying it, honor thy father and mother. After age 6, I couldn't honor him any more. After age 10, I couldn't honor her anymore. From then on I was captive by way of childhood vulnerability to living with these people who were my foremost enemy. The only time I heard love was, I hit you because I love you. How do you expect even a child to believe that? I was thinking about my new donkey friend, Jack, how I am easing into getting acquainted and becoming friends with him. I don't become his friend by hitting him, telling him he's a dumb jackass and nobody wants to hear him bray. I don't berate him every minute I'm around him. That's not how I make friends. I treat Jack well, talk to him gently, touch him lightly on his neck and back, showing him by body language, tone of voice and eye contact that I am no threat. I feed him carrots by hand and talk to him like he's somebody I care about.

I can't imagine hitting Jack every day and telling him he's stupid and come out of it after fifteen years his friend. He would be obedient, but only sometimes. Making a friend of him by treating him right and showing I am his friend will gain his absolute obedience without any reservation. I don't want obedience, but use it for an example. I don't want him biting me and kicking me, but he won't. The four-leggeds, like children and adult humans, all return what they receive. If I were pushing Jack around, forcing him, yelling at him, demanding, I know he would kick at me when he had a chance, or bite just for the fun of watching me yell out in pain. But I'm showing Jack that I care about him, I want to know who he is. I am connecting with his consciousness, with his mind, by showing him that my mind is with him, on his side. I bend down and look eye-to-eye talking to him. I tell him I'm happy he's here. He likes that. He likes getting to know me the same as I like getting to know Jack. He's not going to kick me. He would kick somebody who threatened me. This is my idea of how to make friends. Kindness, open-hearted caring. Not threatening and hitting and keeping a child in constant fear---at home. Kinda gives the kid a twisted feeling about what constitutes the word home. Upon leaving them, I never wanted to see them again. But duty intervened. Honor thy father and mother. What? How? This has been the question of my life, How? Forgive? How? Obey? How does one obey insanity without going insane?

I've pretended, pretended all the way along. I was like a vulnerable baby smiling and being cute to be cared for. Cheshire cat grins, acting like I liked living with them, because I was afraid to run away. I knew cops would bring me back and there'd be hell to pay. So I kept myself below the radar as much as possible. I didn't want them knowing anything about my inner self, mainly because the only thing in there was hate for them. Like the time I was told, "I oughta hit you for what you're thinking!" I laughed inside. You don't know what I'm thinking. If you knew what I was thinking, you'd beat me to death with your fists. You wouldn't allow me to live. And then there was the pride in telling a neighbor, "He's my kid! I'll kill him if I want to!" That was mommy speaking. I was thinking, 'She's my mommy. I'll kill her if I want to,' knowing the consequences before being stupid enough to say it. I lived two lives. Around them I learned to keep quiet, tell them nothing, stay out of their way as much as possible. Watch tv. And that didn't always work. It seldom worked. But sometimes it did. It wasn't a problem keeping my inner self under guard, because they didn't want to know anything about who I am, then or any time since. In church they were told to FEAR THE LORD. That's how you love God, be afraid of God. I supposed daddy interpreted that to have something to do with how his kid was supposed to regard him, with fear. As long as he saw fear, I was ok. On the other hand, I had my life at school with the other kids and sensible adults. Also had grandparents who cared. Couldn't have made it without them where love is concerned.

I still laugh at the Saturday morning, age 14, probably 1956, I got out of bed and went to the kitchen for a bowl of cereal. Had to pass through the living room. Saturday was hell day, daddy was home. He was sitting right beside the door I had to pass through looking at the newspaper. That was a funny sight in itself. Him reading was something of an oxymoron, though I didn't know the word. On sight I knew something was up. When I walked by him he said, "If you ever join the Communist Party, I'll kill you!" I thought: Gee, thanks, daddy, you're the most. This is where I learned my irony. Of course, the only thing his wisecrack did to the kid was make me curious about the Communist Party. What is it? Where do I join? And atheist. That sounded so cool. It freaked out all the adults. That was the first day of my curiosity about Communism. I didn't study it, but paid attention to it. By the time I read the Communist Manifesto in college, I was all for it. Bring it on. It wasn't anything like the propaganda about it. Then I took a course in Soviet history. I was turned off by Communism before Lenin died. He turned out to be an emeffer from l'enfer. Stalin was worse. I was thinking: Shit, what's so great about some ego-maniacal testosterone freak for my leader? I think not. Had enough of that at home. I admired Angela Davis in her time of making the news, proclaiming herself a Communist. I started her autobiography, which was interesting by a brilliant woman until she joined the party. It turned into party doctrine and I quit reading. It was like reading Republican parrotry. I lost my interest in Angela Davis the day I closed the book the last time.

Communism failed, which was not real Marxism. Capitalism failed in its own excess. I came to think of Soviet Communism militarist socialism. And I think of American Capitalism as militarist fascism. Neither one is a real ideology because both are militarist first. Like colleges that put the majority of their budget into the sports program, it's their money maker. Our military force is also our corporate government's money-maker. Hence, perpetual war. Defense contracts. Halliburton. Exxon. Suits. Suburbs. Country Clubs. Swimming pools. I went intentionally to a small college that did not have government funds in their budget for research and had no sports program. It was great not to be required to fake team spirit and buy season tickets to something I'd rather watch on tv or not at all, esp the latter. The day of discharge from Navy was the last day of living my life by somebody else's command. Got out on a Friday, started at the college on Monday. It just worked out that way. That weekend was the first days of living by my own command. Went to the beach. Been through a two year marriage. Married daddy in female form. When I saw that, it was like the frog dropped into boiling water. Looking back, from leaving high school to leaving the Navy, a period of about 5 years, this was one dumb shit hobbling around with no idea about anything, a head boiling over with confusion like dry ice in a bucket of water. And that's a self-serving way to say it. Unable to make sense of the circus of the false calling itself the truth blinking and flashing all around me, my heart shut down the best it could.

I rented an apartment and started reading novels from drugstore racks; Peyton Place, A Summer Place, novels from movies, The L-Shaped Room, Ben Hur. Jack Kerouac was coming out in Signet paperbacks at the time. And Grove Press was printing Henry Miller in paperback. This was the beginning of my reading life. I didn't know what was "good" to read or what I was "supposed" to read. I just wanted peace in my mind and it wasn't happening. Today, at this time in the life I feel like peace is the nature of my mind. I don't have anything in my life that is wrenching my heart with guilt, remorse, fear or hate. It's been a long row reading fascinating psychology books, the most helpful being Alice Miller's FOR YOUR OWN GOOD. She blew my mind to smithereens. I'd felt so guilty for so long for hating my oppressor. Alice said, Of course you hate your oppressor. To deny it is neurosis. Uh. That set my guilt adrift like a note in a bottle to ride the waves between sea and sky forever. Alice taught me that what I feel is real, not what I'm supposed to feel. Don't deny it. Start the healing from understanding that it was not the victim's fault. First step. Thank you, Alice Miller. I've wanted to write her to thank her for several years, but inhibited the impulse by knowing in advance the letter would be way too long, take way too many pages, would have to be mailed in a box. I couldn't do that to her. Who wants a long letter of nothing but gaga praise and gratitude for so much the list is endless? By now, I've found the home of my soul in the Blue Ridge Mountains. In the Blue Ridge Mountains I feel the peace of home. Like in Jimmy Arnold's song, The  Rebel Soldier, "Tell me parson, will my soul pass over the Southland?" I'll be asking, Will my soul pass over the Blue Ridge? And when the parson says yes, I'll ask if I can write in the sky over Alleghany County, I love every one of you.

 

 

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AFTER VIETNAM

robert rauschenberg

 

Vietnam has been an enigma in my lifetime. The communist hysteria, the domino theory, all of it propaganda attempting to make popular a war with the intent of keeping the American economy going, an economy created by the boom of WW2. The Cold War kept economy going pretty good with "defense" contracts, making jets that cost multiple millions unto billions. Vietnam came along to keep economy going. It started with a presidential lie on television to the American people, LBJ, one of the great liars of history. He showed me nothing at all where integrity as a man was concerned. His integrity was to the rich only. His only legacy for me is liar, like Reagan and W Bush. Can't leave out Nixon. I don't understand the present urgency of the right wing being in control. I do not know of a time in my lifetime the right wing was not in control. I found the English even further to the right than USA. I found them in 1972 going through the political agony of adopting a health care system that would benefit working people, everybody, even the poor. No way. That's socialism. How will people have incentive to go to medical school to work in socialism? It was the same as here now, only English style instead of American style. They like their healthcare system now and wouldn't have it back the old way.

robert rauschenberg

 

The propaganda in the time of Vietnam had been anti-communist for at least a decade to the point that even today, half a century later, communism is a loaded word. It could make a fun short documentary film to interview different kinds of people asking them questions about communism and hearing all the different explanations of why communism is evil. Evil is where many of the answers would start. We have not had communism yet. It comes after capitalism. Soviet Union's communism I interpreted militarist socialism. And we do militarist capitalism, fascism. This is what I mean by the right wing control in America is not new. I recall fundamentalist preacher harping about communism, atheism, evil, lake of fire forever and ever, eternal agony for being born into one economic system instead of another. It never made a lick of sense to me. In my childhood I wondered in bed at night how it could be that a kid my age born someplace behind the iron curtain was doomed to hell just by where he was born. I thought of the people in the very remotest parts of the world that never saw a Bible or heard of Jesus. It failed to make sense to me that God, omniscient, the knower of our hearts, made such a crazy rule that anybody dies never having opportunity to get saved automatically goes to hell, mandatory sentencing.

robert rauschenberg

Vietnam brought out love-it-or-leave-it. A lot of people left it. It was also the time of Are you a boy or are you a girl? With yer long blond hair you look like a girl. American establishment is not kind to outsiders. It was the time of white college students discovering marijuana realizing they wanted to live their lives, not go kill gooks and get killed too. The San Francisco sound took pop music to a new level. We had a whole generation of the college age white kids divided over Vietnam. The majority was for it. We saw photographs of demonstrations on big campuses. It looked like a lot of people, but the percentage was low. Most of the people in college in that time did not want to endanger the possibility of a career because their picture might appear in the paper with a demonstration against the war. Too, if a corporation were in somebody's sights, that person is careful not to commit to any cause or controversial point of view. Stay away from the controversial. We knew that in the corporate world, the world we were expected to look to for good-paying jobs, disobedience was not held a virtue. Gotta be squeaky clean to be a corporate somebody. I realized young that I would never succeed in this world.

robert rauschenberg

I will not give up my humanity, no matter how self-defeating it may be, to make big money and have big things. I hear Peggy Lee, If that's all there is, my friend, let's keep on dancing. I won't give up my inalienable basic human rights for a job, position or status. I learned early on that the higher I go on the money ladder the farther away I go from my humanity. No, it doesn't have to be that way. It is not ultimately true that war is a force that gives us meaning, either. But in this world, war is a force that gives us meaning. In the time of Vietnam, to commit to being against the war was the same as being against America to everybody who was not a protester. The protesters knew they were acting out of patriotism. They were saying don't send us to a disastrous war that is about big money for some big corporations at our expense, to end up homeless begging on intersections of American cities to get through the days in our later years, Vietnam vet statistics. I had the personal good fortune to slip under the wire, did the limbo, got out of Navy just in time. The ship's next destination was Vietnam. What a joy in my heart it was to leave that Navy base the last time. Then I watched Vietnam happen on the news and watched a great big split happen in America, a major gap between the older people and the younger people. It seemed that the leftover belief systems since WW2 were laid to rest with Vietnam. It kind of summed up what went before, tied up the loose ends and got on with what was next, destabilizing Latin America

robert rauschenberg

 

 

 

*

NO GOOD GETS DONE WITHOUT OPPOSITION

larry rivers

A little bit of thunder in the night, a little breeze to make the wind chime ting one note and another lightly, followed by silence interrupted by a surprise dong-ling-da-ping. Big crack of lightning rent the dark night, rumbled across the sky and fell into the distance. Light rain falling through the leaves of the trees outside the open door, the sound of pure softness, raindrops on leaves. Close my eyes and I see a Japanese paper sliding door from inside, half open, rain dripping off the edge of the roof, banana leaves glossy wet bouncing slightly in the flowing rhythm of the rain. It must be a southern island of Japan. I often think of these Appalachian mountains and the Rocky mountains in the future something like the Japanese islands, which evidently are the upper reaches of an underwater mountain range. Sometimes I think of these mountains a long time in the past, the centuries of people living in tribes all over the continent, hunting by skill instead of power, They didn't fish out the rivers and creeks. They didn't cause massive extinctions. They didn't kill for the thrill except killing white soldiers who had killed their women and kids, mothers and fathers, cousins, aunts and uncles.

larry rivers

I feel a longing to pull in, agitate less mentally over what our stupid republican non-representatives have done and go on doing to us, denying us our rightful status as We the People. Our government has been usurped by corporate money. We the American people have no status, no voice, no influence. Our representatives operate against our interest. They make their decisions according to the will of the highest bidding lobbyists (get the nigger). We the people have no lobbyists, no lobby firm with millions to dine the dumb shits at the top clubs, get them tipsy on Chivas regal, introduce them to important people and flatter them with Nordic babes versed in what a man likes. I'm growing weary of paying attention to such people, having their images in my head, like the crying "agent orange" Boner and McConnell who really does look like a turtle. I will read more and pay less attention to the news and pop culture. We Americans were raised by school in the illusion that we, the American people, are our government, that we matter. Like Yoda says, You must unlearn everything you have learned.

larry rivers

I've actually never known circumstances much different from how they are now. All my life the republican politicians have been the enemies of We the People. I've seen a systematic dismantling of everything in our government that might benefit a nigger. They hate the white poor almost as much as they hate the black poor. Guess what. Racism is unabashedly out in the open in the ruling class. They don't say "the N word" for the real thing. It's only the middle class that says "the N word." When the rich took power by way of the corporations, their intent was to shut down every civil rights "entitlement"(what Scalia calls rights for blacks). Our government, the ruling class, never wanted civil rights for the coloreds, ever. Since Reagan it has been a systematic, step by step, shredding the constitution, taking everything from the "people" and giving to the rich for "off shore" bank accounts where they pay no taxes. It is corporate consensus that the network news not cover the Occupy demonstrations, which are so massive the corporate Darth Vaders don't want them seen. The democrats don't resist. They don't change the laws made to defeat the people when they have the chance, while the republicans systematically shut down the American people by stopping the life blood of the economy. That's called a heart attack when the blood stops flowing. Right now it is severely clogged arteries slowing the blood.

larry rivers

I've never been able to get it out of my head that individual human beings are important in America. We're taught by school that we the American people are individually important in a democracy. LOL. The lol was over using the word democracy like it meant something besides a philosophical ideal of the distant past, a fail. One thing I'm really tired of I've seen all my life is "we the people" blaming ourselves for the major pollution of the earth, stripping the earth of its resources, "fracking," fracturing the Appalachians from one end to the other, fishing the seas empty, increasing extinctions. It is the unstoppable international corporate powers that "we" can't do anything about. I am with the committed people of Greenpeace and the other "radical" groups that are confrontational and hit them back for hitting us without recourse, over and over.

larry rivers

Capitalism has come to its corrupt end, and it's taking the people of the earth with it. Like White Man in America, if he can't have all power to himself then he'll just do like a school shooting, take as many with him as he can, then kill himself. In school, I believed our politicians were competent individuals. In my adult life, I doubt it. Exceptions come to mind, Fulbright of Arkansas, Moynihan of Massachusetts, Clinton of Arkansas, Douglas of the Supreme Court. The Supremes are politicians too. Though the republicans do not represent us politically, they unfortunately are representatives of the American belief systems, racism one of the major ones, all-for-self at the expense of whomever, another major one. The republicans represent the dark side of the American mind, the unselfconsciously self-centered, necessary for balance in duality.

larry rivers

 

 

*

 

JFK: 3 SHOTS THAT CHANGED AMERICA THE MOVIE

Watching a documentary film of the Kennedy assassination, JFK: 3 SHOTS THAT CHANGED AMERICA (2009). Oswald asking for legal representation while the police were pushing him past a group of reporters with cameras and microphones, Oswald: "What's this about? Because I went to Russia? I'm just a patsy." From what I see of Oswald asking over and over for legal representation, he looks and sounds like somebody too slack and too dumb to make three head shots from that distance with a moving target. A little bit earlier a recorded police dispatch was included concerning finding Oswald in the movie theater. "He's supposed to be hiding in the balcony." Curiously, that's where they found him, where he was "supposed to be hiding." Good man, followed orders well. The volume of papers behind the Warren Report, the "truth" about the assassination, is due to be revealed in 2029. I don't think anybody cares what's in it.  By now, historians have found that LBJ "gave the nod," which was the theme of Barbara Garson's play in that time, MAC BIRD!, a modern day MacBeth with LBJ as MacBird and Lady Bird as Lady MacBird. By now, half a century later, I see it a coup, arrived at by the maxim, Follow the money. Jack Ruby was another good man who followed orders well.

The question comes up over and over about "solving" the case. From half a century later, I can say the case has never been solved. Our government shut down any investigation at the start and commissioned the book to tell us what we are to believe. Rush to judgment is the name of this story. We've seen other rush to judgments in the World Trade Center towers, another (follow the money) coup. LBJ and J Edgar put a stop to possible investigations of the assassination. Sounds kinda familiar with WTC instant cleanup of ruins, investigation shut down, the official book produced to tell us what we are expected to believe. A citizen's investigation of the Kennedy assassination in the early years was shut down definitively. Oliver Stone made the film telling the story of the Kevin Costner character in the film JFK, Jim Garrison, who was investigating a little too far and was shut down with serious threats. I read an article he wrote in Esquire magazine back in that time. I wanted to see what more this guy, a New Orleans prosecutor, could uncover. Never heard of him again until a long time later when I saw his story in Stone's film.

Some of the documentaries of either story that point out how they were done and who done it are convincing, yet our government dismisses them, which makes it all the more clear to me no independent investigation is welcome. Must be some reasons why. Johnson (Texas Oil Cartel coup) took power by assassination. Bush W (corporate coup) took power by fraud and judicial fiat. I also find it peculiar that democrat congressmen and senators running for office die in private plane crashes during campaigns where the black box gives no clue to what happened. This has happened several times. It never happens to republicans. So much for law of averages. It's not a matter of one more than the other. It is one and not the other, consistently. Any investigation is discouraged with threats that silence the accusers for life. So many of the details in the 9/11 remains are so obviously not as we were told, yet corporate government and its corporate media call independent investigations subversive "conspiracy theories." By now, this is so obvious it seems redundant to bring it up.

This documentary is made from b&w video and television reporting. Interviews with chief of police, who favored J Edgar Hoover in appearance before the bulldog folds took over his face, made me suspicious just by visual association. He had the look of the profile right-wing block-headed white male Texas racist, who aint got no use for no damn nigger-lover. This was the South in the latter years of the Old South. The New South was yet to be. The right wing at the time was seriously concerned about Kennedy for being a liberal in the time before Reagan made liberal "the L word." Then, it was Hawks and Doves. Now it's conservatives (hawks) and liberals (doves). I was just out of high school a couple years with a head full of confusion. The issue then was rights for black people. The white man again was threatened in a supposed democracy by the black vote. The corporatocracy is white man seizing control "nonviolently." Corporations do not function democratically. The Supremes interpreting corporations "people" was another corporate coup.

Then went Martin and then went Bobby. Who would be next? That was the question at the time. Another coup of corporate power: shredding the Constitutation and replacing it with Patriot Act that miraculously turned up on time, out of nowhere, no questions asked, no time to read it, passed unanimously. Tells me repeatedly our government is not ours. Our government is not FOR the people, OF the people and certainly not BY the people. Corporate people are the only people that count for anything. This surely is the Xtreme of Capitalism with USA cutting edge, getting there first, from which serious change will result. The present moment Xtreme of Capitalism is that the upper 1% has more money than the lower 50%, the people living in poverty, the working class, the working poor. These are the people that say, "I'm only getting $8 an hour. But I have better self-esteem about my work than at Hardees where I enabled the obese." If the change does not come by legislation, it will happen by revolution. Legislation isn't happening, yet. Occupy Wall St has tremendous potential for revolution, the reason the corporate news networks never make any mention of their demonstrations and corporations pass laws to criminalize them. The right wing is calling for revolution. We're at a place where it's no telling what yet will be. I was thinking while watching the film footage of Texas people in the early1960s, how very much cityscapes and fashions have changed, how pop culture has changed, how very different we are now from then. At the same time, we people are the same as then, just different fashions in hair styles, both men and women, and clothes.


*

NOTHING WILL BE THE SAME

     brian kenny, flag


I'm of at least two minds about leaving this world, this dimension, whatever it may be. One is I am curious about the other side and sometimes a little alarmingly ready to have a look. On the other hand, it's not like watching a movie for 2 hours and turning the light back on. I have to leave this playground I've taken so seriously for so long, sometimes despised it, overall loved it. It makes me look out the window at the leaves of an oak sapling swaying up and down lightly, home. I think of leaving my friends and baby Vada and I feel sorrow, pre-grief maybe. I know a few of my friends will carry a deep sorrow for some time, as I have done for a few of my friends in the past. It is a great sorrow to lose people important to us, the biggest drama in life. This human existence is a puzzle without end, which makes it so interesting and keeps it interesting. Buddhism says it is a life of suffering. It's true. I see the suffering begin in a baby new to a body, bump head on a chair leg, it hurts. Much more suffering follows. We get used to it. Even if we were meditators we'd have suffering of varying degrees in our lives all the time. We have plenty of the other, joy, for balance. I say "we" when I'm not so sure it is entirely "we." I'm actually seeing it these days like joy is the nature of the soul, our innermost, or real self. All the self-centered focus locks onto suffering and sorrow, gray clouds around the soul, a foggy mountaintop.


A moment stays in my mind from half dozen years ago, opening the inside door to the library, a woman I knew on the inside was going out, she opened the door with an exaggerated welcoming gesture and said, "What have you been doing since your store closed?" I said, thinking as fast as I could to condense several months of experience into a phrase, "Getting some joy back into my life," which was literally what I was doing. Her face fell almost to the floor. She said, "I've never had joy in my life." My heart sank for her. I knew she meant it. I knew her husband, more than likely a model of her daddy; jumped from one frying pan into another. I have felt for her ever since she said that. I did not know what to say at the time. I felt a need to hug her and say, "I'm sorry for you," but didn't know her that well, the entire library staff was watching. I could have hugged her in front of them if I'd known her better, a gray-haired old hippie biker chick. One thing she gave me: she showed me I have a way of taking joy for granted, like it's easily accessed. It had never occurred to me there might be people who knew nothing of joy. So little is as it seems, I wonder why I try to assess or understand anything.


Big Mama Thornton is singing in my head, Let's go get stoned. Why the hell not! After a lifetime of taking everything seriously, I'm seeing there's nothing serious about any of it. The redbird is jumping about in the rhododendron the other side of the window. A crow calls in the trees across the road. Katydids inside my head. That's one of the nice parts of living in the midst of what we call nature. In the city, ringing in the ears can be maddening. In the country you don't notice. It's katydids, treefrogs and crickets outside singing with the ones inside, making me one with nature. I look around my world of the mountains I love thinking about leaving them and feel sorrow, a kind of pre-grief, the anticipation of grief. I have to feel it now, because there won't be any feeling it later. When the angels are leading me up the tunnel of light to music of the Bell Spur String Band, I doubt I'll be looking back and missing the mountains. So I'll miss them now, while I can appreciate them. I have songs in my head, How beautiful heaven must be, sweet home of the happy and free, fair haven of rest for the weary, and Peter Tosh singing, Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. And, farther along we'll know all about it, farther along we'll understand why.


Do I sing these songs to myself to comfort myself? Probably. There are other good songs in my head that are not about the other side, like Peter Tosh's African. Don't care where you come from if you're a black man you are an African. Beautiful song of black identity, black pride, beautifully conceived and Tosh sang it well. I say I look forward to the other side, but when I really think about it, it makes me want to put on some beautiful music I love or a movie I love or read some Chinese poetry. This tells me music, drama and poetry I value most in this world, the stuff my house is full of. I have ingested so much of it into my record of experiences that it has become part of who I am, a big part. For me, living in a world of people informed/educated/led by television is like living in a foreign country with people of another language and another culture. I am a stranger to television culture in that I don't keep up with it. But the fact is, I live in television culture because everybody around me to all coasts are the children of television. Now, grandparents were born in front of the tv.


On the news, at the coffee shop, here and there, everywhere I talk with people, the ongoing paean is what's the matter with this world? Let's start at the beginning. This is television culture. It started 60 years ago and grew into this world where prison construction corporation stocks only rise. Police state looks really secure on tv: arresting niggers with attitudes and no tshirts on COPS. Like the Randy Newman song, Rednecks, keepin the niggers down. Steven Seagal arresting black guys who ask for his autograph in handcuffs. Nobody white with any power or desire for power cares that we have the most outrageous prison system on earth as long as the prison population is mostly black. For the black American man prison has become an initiation into manhood, a bootcamp that develops unbreakable bonds. Like a white man I know said to me, "I can't trust you cause you never been in prison." The black men of America have that kind of a bond in a network all over the land, the convict brotherhood. Pre-television, we were moving toward unity, toward "integration," allowing people their rights. Half a century into the time I think of as Led By Television, division has been the emphasis until we're on the verge of civil war again, this one everybody against everybody. Seen from outside television culture, Americans are going collectively crazy. And they're taking me with them, because I'm one of them; it's their culture, it's our culture, it's my culture.


While we snoozed in corporate entertainment and got fat on corporate fast food, the international corporations that keep their money free of taxes in Cayman Island banks took our government from us, our democracy, our constitution and gave us police state, systematically over a period of 30 years, on tv where all that is fake is real, and all that is real becomes fake. It's a fake belief system. During the time of the African civil wars, it was a truth that whoever held the radio station held the power. Here, it aint none of us hold no tv corporations. We don't even know the people that own them. We couldn't even get a job at their country clubs. You think they give a shit about us? :) Of course you don't. Only as long as we keep the garbage and sewage under control. The excesses of Capitalism foreseen to take it down are happening. Capitalism is undergoing what looks like rising tides due to ice melt splashing against the foundations of skyscrapers built by the economic system that melted the polar caps. Kinda like one of the movies made by the gross now, The Day After Tomorrow or 2012. I'm thinking these movies are symbolic of the self-destruction of Capitalism by greed. That's why it's called a "deadly sin," it leads only to self-destruction.


The country I grew up isn't the country I live in anymore. Probably wasn't then. It was the time of the Ugly American when I was learning about our righteous history of wars where we never tortured prisoners and we gave aid to the colonial world of po' nigras (and kept them in poverty at home). It wasn't long after high school I began to see it wasn't like it was told in school, certainly not like told in church, not like told on tv in any kind of way; a sham, a show, light flickering, pixels changing color, a vapor, a scent on the breeze for a second, illusion within illusion. I came into this body a few months after Pearl Harbor, a time of pulling Americans together into one great cheering squad. It took. A dozen years ago our government imploded the WTC towers, rallied us around terrorism, and now is imploding itself, allied as in wedded to Capitalism. They took down democracy and all our values with it, they being our corporate government, taken by quietly systematic coup under smokescreen while we were watching tv spellbound by pop culture. I'm sorry for my country. I can't say I'm sorry to be leaving it before people like me are rounded up for FEMA camps. I saw the very tail end of the Old South in Charleston, South Carolina, the tail end of the old-time ways in the mountains, and the end of democracy in America in this lifetime. It's been both joyus and sorrowful living in Prozac Nation.


*

REGRESS ON GREASED SKIS

jeff koons, gargosian waterfall couple

Today the wife of trigger-finger Zimmerman in Florida was arrested for perjury, claiming in court to be broke with a hundred thousand in the freezer or someplace. They took him "back" to prison. I believe he's in prison for his protection, because it looks like the entire country wants him dead. Of course, the Limbaugh people hold him up for a hero. Another good reason to keep him in prison to protect him from them. I've been noticing that a "hoodie" is now a hot fashion item. The suspicious look. Zimmerman does not have a life anymore. His zeal with a gun got him what he might have thought he wanted--a chance to kill somebody and get away with it. Only problem was, he provoked it. Outside police protection he doesn't have a chance of living a month. In prison he could be killed if they let him in among the general population. Outside prison somebody would get him. In a time when racism is under the table, and in a time when black people fully understand the imbalance of how white and black are treated by law enforcement. It was too obvious a case of getting stalked first, then shot for being black. Now that the media has Zimmerman and his wife, they'll live in sorrow from here on.


On the subject of inner peace, he'll not have any inner peace. He doesn't look like somebody who is seeking inner peace, and certainly not acting like somebody on the path. His mind has surely been eaten up with agony since the moment he pulled the trigger. First, fear that he might not get away with it. Then a period of time when it looked like he might get away with it. Nailed. Glad to go to jail for survival. He is learning why one of the 10 commandments was about not killing. It disturbs inner peace. I see video of guys in Iraq and Afghanistan killing people legally in "war," doing the right thing, then PTSD, a wife who doesn't know you anymore, a kid who hates you because you're so far, far away you're mean. We the People who fight the wars for the enrichment of the rich are the ones who have to deal with all that goes with wars, major injuries, crippling, mental derangement, guilt too deep to fathom, death with a flag on your coffin. That's how it has been throughout civilization. I'd guess there's a good chance it came into civilization as a pattern of behavior in the tribal systems.


There is an evolution going on, a process, the raising of collective human consciousness. This is where we are now in our "progress," a word that hasn't been used since Reagan. That's because we're in regress, systematically put there by determination of the dark cabal that is taking everything from We the People so a few live in hyper-luxury and everyone esle "trickles down" into poverty. The trickle-down theory worked as intended, albeit not as propaganda depicted. Like Iraqi Liberation and Mission Accomplished. They mean something very different from the meanings in the words. The military doesn't care about word meanings. That's for poets who don't quite measure up as Men. In the military, things go by numbers or letter and number combinations, nonsense words jammed together like in Surrealist writing, bar codes, and codes to follow. After the coup in 1963, regress has set in. We do not move forward any more as a nation, as a culture. It looks like in our country's cycle on the wheel of fortune, we went over the top at about the end of WW2 and are now on the downward side.


I can't help but think it could be a good thing. Give us a rest from the rat race. The American obsession with money is bound to pop some day, like a balloon over-inflated. Americans don't do poverty well, at all. Maybe we have some learning ahead on how to live in poverty. I say "we" when half the American people are living in poverty. Since the Bush Junta Depression, the upper 10% made money through that time, while the lower 90% lost money. This is why you can count on at least a recession when republicans take power. I find it a shame that the republican strategists, ie Karl Rove, use the functional illiteracy of the working class to trick them into voting against their own interest. Limbaugh is the cheerleader. I can't help but feel sorrow for the people of the working class being used so bald-facedly against themselves. The working people have let their resistance to education defeat them. But hasn't that always been the way? It's the way of Capitalism.


I've been hearing a lot of serious questioning of Capitalism in this time. I've been seeing for some time that the role of the Reagan Junta was to clear Capitalism out of the way, destroy it so what is next can have room to grow. Capitalism has reached its self-consuming apex in America. Like Ralph Nader said justifying being a part of the wave to defeat Al Gore, "The republicans will get us there faster." There being the end of Capitalism and the beginning of an economic system that works for more than just the rich. I'm hearing and seeing interesting ideas on the matter. It's looking like this form of economic system is evolving now into whatever is next. Of course, there will be a big right-wing uproar about communism and supporting lazy people, etc. I've an idea it will happen despite popular uproar, simply because whatever is coming is the next thing. The Joint Chiefs of Staff cannot stop change. Reduce our military by half and we still rule the world. Half our military budget would be a tremendous boon for the taxpayers, the ones putting up the money, for infrastructure and a great deal more.


*

WAR ON POVERTY

     ellsworth kelly, 01


Several days in a row the news report has begun with GI Joe in Afghanistan breaking into apartments in the night and killing everyone inside, 16 civilians. This thing is so out of control and over the top where viciousness is concerned, our penal system and our system of execution are not up to this guy's crime. Our penal system has become so enshrouded in draconian sentencing for negligible crimes that it becomes a question of what to do when a real crime occurs. I'd be for turning him over to the villagers, relatives and friends of the families he killed like a thief in the night, take him to the center of the village handcuffed in the back of a dump truck, dump him and drive off. Let the people who want justice take care of it themselves. The children could find several hours of entertainment with him, the killer of children in their beds at night. The latest I heard was that the "alleged gunman" is afraid for his life and for his family. Duh. A good example of absence of foresight. I'd guess by the time the interrogation boys were done with him, his face looked like it had been run through a meat grinder. Major national security problem, made us look bad. W Bush made us look bad and he's now an evangelist.


It really is time to get out of Afghanistan now. The American attitude has been that we're saving the Afghan people from the Taliban. Now the people want the Taliban to save them from American occupiers. The names of places we hear on the news, like Kandahar, is where USA has a big prison for the people of Afghanistan and other muslims caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. We've totally destroyed Iraq for the thrill of destroying a small, defenseless country. I can't blame the people of Afghanistan for wanting the end of American occupation before their country is completely annihilated. USA doesn't reconstruct after destroying a place, either. We don't have any money. The war took all our money. They're poor anyway, they're used to it. We've got War On Drugs at home from hell; occupying Afghanistan where heroin comes from, the poppy fields are left alone by the occupiers. Farmers making a living. No big deal.


We've gone from the Ugly American to killers of children in my lifetime. the country that worships youth. What do the mothers of Afghanistan, or the entire Middle East, tell their children tucking them in? Say your prayers or an American will kill you in your sleep. The muslim name for USA, The Great Satan, kind of resonates when you look at it from the point of view of the poor. I've an idea our government uses the poor countries of the world for practice with new, hi-tech weaponry, like carving a path through the poor sections of the city for an interstate. When the Mississippi flooded a few years ago, the water was directed away from the cities, the centers of commerce, to the rural areas where the people are poor and have no voice. Looking at what tornadoes do to trailer parks, it gives the appearance God hates the poor, too. Aggressive as the American war on poverty appears, by intent it is benign. Wealth doesn't see poverty. A poor country is the same as a desert, a good place to test bombs and artillery, advanced bootcamp for the troops. Poor people dying and wounded in a building bombed to the ground are justified as collateral damage, because a suspected terrorist cell dwelt in one of the apartments. Smart bombs.


We're so advanced, we're retarded. I am glad to see the waning of capitalism. I realize that the only countries socialism has really worked in amount to one city and the rest of the country exurbs. Capitalism made USA from the ground up, the root of American pragmatism, American individualism, American religion. As an economic system it worked for us, to a point, for some, not for all, until draining the populace of whatever money we can generate for the billionaire bankers corresponds with a few fisheries billionaires fishing the oceans empty. I recall watching evening news with an old Regular Baptist preacher friend, back when the Ayatollah was exercising power in Tehran. The news was showing pictures of hundreds of muslims in prayer. Preacher friend said the solution is to nuke them. That would be the end of it. I suggested it would also be the beginning of something he wouldn't want to be responsible for. Oh yes he would. I said, when nuking becomes the solution to problems and you nuke everybody, you'll be the only one left. He said, That would be all right. The very voice of capitalism itself.



                                           *

TURNING POINT

           by tj worthington



So much is changing so fast now I'm seeing things happen that are new and might be a peephole into the future.Throughout my lifetime the word Capitalism has been the unmentionable, the word so sacred you dared not speak it in vain, which would be to speak it at all. It's been Capitalism (the good--the black horse) vs Communism (the evil--the red horse). And you don't dare say anything good about Communism, because it's the enemy of Capitalism. Really? Then you get the Middle East that is not an economic system, but a religion (death--the pale horse). Capitalism and Communism are religions too. Very serious religions, aggressive like Christendom, the kind that bear arms and kill poor people. What I'm seeing that is unusual is Capitalism being talked about on the news, on talk shows, at all. Capitalism is being questioned for its excesses. As an economic system, it has come to the Sheriff of Nottingham taking from the working people and giving to the rich. Reagan introduced this character of Capitalism as the new republican party in 1980. Sheriff of Nottingham crossed with Darth Vader became the way of the Reagan junta: take from the working people and kill the poor. The Reagan solution to AIDS: let em die. That can be documented.



The Reagan agenda has been enforced by republican zealots, shoved down our throats by the Bush, Cheney, Rummy and Rice administration, put into power by the Reagan court stuffed with people who shouldn't be allowed to practice law, who, for what they've done to the American people, would do well to be kept in a prison cell together for the rest of their lives. Scalia and Thomas I'm thinking of, in particular, people I believe a good case could be made for trying them in real court for treason. Some day the extent of the damage will be known that the Bush etal administration did to the American people, and when that is being assessed, the entire period from 1980 to present will be seen for what it was, capitalism's excesses cut loose. It was like giving fraternities freedom from prosecution, which was done long, long ago. The laws are not written for the privileged. They're about keeping the thick-fingered masses under control. The masses all over the world are so poor now, and the American standard of living taking such a sudden drop due to American corporations using Asian sweat shops, crisis appears inevitable, soon.



When American working class men, aka rednecks, the kind of fellers that drive pickups with a round NRA sticker in the lower left of the back window, and a bumper sticker that says Insured by .357 magnum, when they feel suckered and alienated, look out. Nam already burnt them a blister. These guys have arsenals at home. They have fought in Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan. They are people you do not fuck with. When they get mad and drunk too, you better stand back, because something's about to happen. They salve their wounds with liquor. These are the first people to feel the crunch when economies start to tank, the first ones out of work. Fighting with the old lady over money all the time, kids in the way whining because of money, daddy's lid's about to pop. His purpose in life is his family. When his wife and kids are threatened, the redneck man comes undone. He turns into a tiger and a wolf and whatever else it takes. In his mind's eye, Rambo. Sometimes, they kill themselves. Militias are everywhere. And these are some of the guys that are in them. A government does not want to alienate this aspect of its population, though it already has. Turn the Army against them and we have a civil war without end. When too many working class men cannot keep their families taken care of, something will happen. Tim McVeigh thought he was starting that revolution, but there were not yet enough who saw what he saw.



I hear on the news every once in awhile, kind of like in the back pages, a mention of the process Karl Marx articulated in his writing. This was also the time of Darwin's evolution. Marx was looking at social evolution scientifically. From today's standpoint, the communist countries, USSR, China, Cuba, Vietnam, are not really communist. I tend to think of them as militant socialism. According to the way Marx saw it, we have not had communism yet. Communism is the next system that follows capitalism. Capitalism must run its course, all the way to its excesses consuming itself. Coincidentally, as Limbaugh's own excesses are now consuming him. I'm seeing the Reaganista junta brought us to this place of bank failures, again. The only truth I ever heard W Bush speak was when he was running the first time, "I am the new Ronald Reagan." I thought: no shit. Another puppet representing the Texas Oil Cartel and the Southern California, Arizona John Birch maniacs, Charlton Heston one of them. Reagan cut loose the greed that turned the banks into loan sharks that bankrupted themselves and everybody else.



Death Valley Days is what I call the Reagan period from 1980 to now. The Reagan influence was false from the very beginning, basing its "vision" on novelist Ayn Rand. She wrote about capitalism at its greatest when the rich live underground and in remote places to keep themselves apart from the rabble. Like the Arkansas Waltons of Walmrat. It was about taking from the working people and giving to the rich. Reaganism tried to make bullshit walk, but it doesn't have feet. The attempt at using puppet politicians, people who have no minds of their own about anything, people who can largely be counted on to stick to script, if they can remember script, has come to the "frontrunners" in the ongoing series of republicans on tv and the news every day. The 3 stooges redux. When I listen to news, I turn the radio off when these so-called frontrunners start yammering words, words and more words utterly without meaning. Exquisite cocktail party speak, full of exaggerated fake conviction, signifying nothing.



What I'm watching to see if it turns out as I think it is headed, is the collapse of Reaganism simultaneous with the implosion of capitalism. I'm wrong about so much, I don't dare recommend you go by what I say. This is just one individual's way of connecting the dots. It's looking like Capitalism is in crisis. Reaganism is fading fast, the implosion of Limbaugh going with it. Marx said there would be revolution if the governments did not allow the change. The change is a natural flow, sequence of events, evolving from one economic system to the next. An attempt to stop it would be the same as an attempt to dam a river so no water passes beyond that point. A day will come when the pressure of water volume behind the dam would break it. I would prefer to see the transition gentle. It's kind of looking like we're leaving the holy of holies because it turned out to be a mortal god. According to Marx, real communism comes next in the social evolution as Marx outlined it. I'm hearing talk here and there about the fall of capitalism and evolving into what's next. It's the end of the world as we know it.

I*