THE WAGES OF GREED

air bellows in the fog

 

Last trip to doctor's office, I went to the window to check in before taking a seat in the waiting room. A white-haired white flatlander couple in chairs immediately to my right, I took them for about my age, the woman spoke to a local man older than me sitting directly across the room from her, "Were you in the service?" He affirmed he had been. She said, "Thank you for your service." I thought: Barf! A Fake news enthusiast. My immediate dread was she might ask me the same question. Thought I'd answer I was a draft dodger like Dick Cheney, W Bush and Rummy, but, again, thought better of it: if you don't want it started, don't start it. I acted like I heard nothing, preoccupied with the pretty girl at the window, Winter, whose brother and parents I knew, all of them recently dead, a girl I applaud with all my heart for getting on so well with her life. I about break into tears when I see her, though for Fake news woman I wanted to appear flirtatious so she'd judge me a rake, insurance she'd leave me alone. No television in the waiting room set on the Fake channel, I did not want her focusing her boredom on me. 

 

 

In today's news another mass shooting, this one in San Bernardino at a Social Services office where the purpose is to help the poor. I saw that Bill Moyers posted a statistic this was the second such shooting today in America. This year, 2015, has already produced more mass shootings than days into the year, 355. The 355th day is two weeks yet to be. Every time it happens, every day, big surprise in the news. The shooters fit an obvious pattern, white, right-wing racist republican-minded Christian enthusiasts of Fake news, Donald Trump, Rush Limbaugh, and the host of hate-television, -radio, -internet, -print of a purpose to divide and conquer. It works for them. They have conquered the entire media to the point the 355th shooting this year is a surprise to all corporate tv networks. Oh look, somebody did it again. How did that happen? Buy a new Cadillac, now. Pizza with lots and lotsa cheeZ. Over the last 35 years of watching the increase in hateful attitudes inspired by Fake news, hate-radio and hate-religion, I've come to the place best for me is at home with silence.

 

 

I used to be disposed toward my peers and people older, but so many white men and women my age and older have poisoned their minds by their own potential for hate brought to the surface, the flames fanned by the corporate billionaires to divide and conquer We The People, the haters included, and render us powerless while they make all the legislation against us, take all our money and resources. Who would ever think greed could bleed out an entire population and land mass? Maybe this is why it is listed as one of the deadly sins. Greed has shown itself to be deadly to American Democracy, the American government and the American people. Even a devotee to Fake news sees it, but they've been told from the news desk greed is good, and they're good Americans, they believe what they're told. I have actually heard with my own ears someone say, "I know that for a fact. I heard it on television." 

 

 

In town at the library Monday, picking up art objects from show, standing in front of the display in the glass case of somebody's collection of Star Wars toys, Doug at the desk, we spoke of our appreciation of the Star Wars movies and looking forward to the new one. Our brief conversation segued somehow into him saying he's not seen hate in the air like it is now in his lifetime. I said I've never seen such in my lifetime, either, double his. We came to it must have been something like this in the time leading up to the War Between the States. I mentioned to him I have recently come to see we may be in a civil war. Terrorism is the nature of war now. We have every day occurrences of terrorism from white right-wing racist Christians having convulsions inspired by propaganda from Fake news and Rush Limbaugh, now Carly Fiorina and the whole clown bus, who publicly side with the shooters. They, in their minds, are at war with the rest of us. And we still don't get it.  

 

photos by tj worthington

 

 

*

 

 

 



THE CONFEDERATE FLAG GETS A NEW LIFE

larry rivers

My back goes up and stays up over this new spate of Yankee assaults on working class Southerners for failing to be their intellectual equals, for thinking differently from middle-class white people writing in Boston and New York offices. Insults fly, the air a swarm of arrows, like in a Chinese medieval war movie, arcing over the Mason-Dixon line aimed at cartoon visions of the South, Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam, unrepentant racists. I see quite a lot of it every day without looking for it. I don't comment or make anything of it, because I don't care what they think about the South. Just stay out of the South, stay up North where you belong, read about the South, write about the South and have opinions all you want, but stay home, please. One of my favorite of the slurs is the picture of a white flag said to be the only true confederate flag. I'd be happy to take that flag for my own, the flag of ultimate peace. As for confederate flag a flag of surrender, this only says whoever thought this one up does not know shit about the South or Southerners. My interpretation is they can't handle it that the South is an actual culture separate from their own absence of culture. 

larry rivers

It's the great American story, Be Like Me, going about believing they know more about other people's lives than the people living their own lives. I feel myself charged up inside over these Yankee assaults of blame on the Southern people over their identity around a flag that pisses Yankees off. Nobody in the South is going to say, Aw, poor Yankee got his feelings hurt. Yankees still don't get it the South does not back down. The civil war was an attack of aggression from the North. It was all fought on Southern land by Southern farm boys defending the homeland from a professional military machine. They were saying, and would have to the last man, Hell No, we will not submit. They'll have to defeat us again to make us give up the flag. There's nothing they can do and every redneck in the South knows it. In simple Southernese, they can go fuck theirselves. Aint nothin a bunch of fellers likes better'n self-righteous Yankees stayin at home. One of many things I embrace about the South is that I can get in my car, drive to Tennessee, Mississippi or Alabama, be comfortable and feel at home. My accent says I'm a friendly, part of the family, share the same belief system of what constitutes decent behavior. 

larry rivers

The South is not just a flag that most people in the South don't care about, anyway. A vast majority of Southerners don't care a lick about the flag, but a great many of them would stand firm against a Yankee assault against it. The most this media feeding frenzy on everything Southern has accomplished has been to recruit young white men to the klan. The klan may be the imaginary new confederate army defending the homeland from Yankee assaults, at least a powerful symbol. Nobody stands up for the South outside the South and Southerners mostly don't stand up for the South either, because they don't care what Yankees think of them, as much as Yankees don't care what Canadians think of them. Down here in the South we don't even think about the North except as an irritant that won't go away. We certainly do not entertain any secret desire to be like the North. Arrogance is the most frowned upon, least tolerated of human characteristics in the South. Yankee arrogance grates all the worse from the perspective of people who don't experience it much, left to themselves. 

larry rivers

First thing I saw when the finger-pointing and blame started piling up was a redneck reaction planned to give the Yankees a fit. Yesterday I saw something about an 8-mile long parade of cars and pickups, bikes too, flying the forbidden flag. I forget where. It doesn't matter where. Could be anywhere in the South. Like a school massacre can pop up anywhere in television viewing America. I saw something about amazon selling twice as many of the flags as before. Only historians know about the early 60s association with the flag in the South. Rebel boys, the only ones that make something of it, don't care about that. It is their rally flag, all the more now, identity as Southern rednecks like Hank Williams III and Larry the Cable Guy. Git-er-done. Our humor may not be as sophisticated as Yankee humor, but we don't care. We got better music. If they want to start taking down Southern monuments, they'd better be ready for unpredictable reaction. It's more corporate media stirring division for control, devoid of moral responsibility. This present round of Yankee efforts to shame Southern identity is just drawing us closer together under the canopy of Southern unity, a great big confederate flag that people are rallying to now, who didn't care anything about it before.    

larry rivers by larry rivers

*

TALK ABOUT THE CONFEDERATE FLAG

milton avery

Media interest in pointing the finger of blame at the South over racism has become uber-tiresome. The southwestern quadrant of USA is at least as racist as the southeastern; so is the northwestern and the northeastern. To solve a deep-running issue, NY and LA media want to rid-a-flag they've defined racist. Suppress one, another pops up. In the Soviet time, religion was suppressed. As soon as the Soviet system went away, religion came back. American media is engaged in another frenzy of make-a-law-against. We're so overrun with laws against, we're about painted into a corner. Already, any one of us can be arrested at any moment for something we're doing or have done or conspiracy. Example: the word nigger has been suppressed for the last half century. The working class uses it freely, as does the ruling class. It is only the white middle class that says, "the enword," or uses asterisks between obvious letters. F*t is the same as spelling fat. Saying enword and using asterisks is an act of denial that denies nothing. It's being nice, denying it while saying it. Like it was ok to say shit in front of mommy if I quoted somebody else saying it.

milton avery

I don't mean to be going on like I'm serious about the matter. The flag is too complicated an issue to limit to right or wrong, true or false. Like everything in this phenomenal world we call living, too much is interwoven, experience, thought, beliefs, to call anything or anybody one thing or another. I don't like the way somebody who got drunk and did something stupid that lasted maybe three seconds is called a criminal. I also don't like the way people who have served their time are treated and watched as criminals after their time is served. This is getting into things I have a problem with that I can't do anything about, but I don't have to be that way in my own behavior. Ex-cons I've met along the way, I regard with the same respect as anyone else, with a bit more respect for what they have been through in what I consider an unjust legal system, especially if you're black or any version of non-white, colored, or poor white. Again, nothing I can do about it. I fall back on my boycott of one. Today, I set out to buy a watermelon, wanting to paint one again. I chose to buy it at a roadside stand instead of Food Lion. I can't see giving my five dollars to a corporation that underpays its employees and treats them like shit when I can give somebody an assist who goes into the field early in the morning and selects the produce herself. 

milton avery

I stopped by the welding shop on the way home to visit with Ross and Harry. Milly, Ross's sister, stopped by for a bit and we had a good time sitting and standing in a circle, smoking cigarettes, laughing like the bunch of rednecks we are. These are people I feel at-home free with. We're so close in the heart, I'm about the same as a Richardson. I'm natured a lot like one. Milly and I have been at each other's throats almost with knives, Ross and I have too, and they're my friends I can count on for backup if needed unto the grave. It runs both ways. The subject of the flag came up and we had different thoughts and passions on the matter. Harry most of all. Harry is a retired Army lifer. He said the Confederate flag is treasonous, they fought against the American Army. He called it "you-guys' flag." I said the Civil War was a Yankee invasion. The South defended homeland. Ross said he knows what the flag means. It don't make no differ'nce to him. Milly, the Civil War buff, went off on Yankees and we laughed quite a lot. Except Harry, who identifies Southern, but not with any glorification of the Civil War. It was the Richardson in the rest of us that got us wound up about the South the homeland. 

milton avery

Yesterday, watching the race, Justin told me he was out of sorts with Dale Earnhardt Jr, his favorite driver, for coming out and making a statement that Nascar shouldn't have anything to do with the Confederate flag. I hated to see him so disappointed by a guy he looks up to so personally, like an older brother. He likes Jr's character. I told him Jr is not his own man. I said every time you see him in a commercial, he gets at least hundreds of dollars per showing. He was told by Nascar and corporate sponsors this is what he will do. To say no would cost him hundreds of thousands, millions, maybe his career. I pointed out that television is about money not ethics. Jr is in that world of high-paid celebrities. Once you cross the line into celebrity, your life is no longer your own, you're a product, your name a logo. I wanted to remind him this is a show, this is not real. I knew he knew, just forgot it in a moment of passion. This just a pie-slice of my friends. Very few of them would repeat any other. One can give a hundred reasons for, and another a hundred reasons against, every one of the two hundred reasons valid from some point of view. 

milton avery

The only thing I can see coming of this banning of the flag is a new item in the inventory of underground collectables, flea markets loaded with inflated Confederate flag items, if you know who to ask. Suppression never works and the ones doing the suppressing never get it. We'll have roadside stands selling velvet wall hangings of the flag, tshirts, belt buckles, an infinity of possibilities, just like now. My solution: deal with racism up front and let interest in the flag fade away as it will when nobody cares anymore. I feel like it is healthy for collective American culture to face up to racism as our way of life. Everyone knows it, everyone lives it. We act like we never heard of it. Our racism is rooted deep in our American denial. Which came first, denial or racism? Something like this needs to be brought into awareness collectively, as it does individually, before any real work can be done toward untying the knots of habit patterns that go all the way back to the beginning. It's looking like the Charleston church slayings have brought awareness of pervasive racism in white rule to the surface. If we don't get past blaming the flag, it will have been for naught. I can't imagine television allowing awareness of racism in the white American heart to go beyond blame and punishment, especially not unto self-awareness. 

milton avery

*

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. 

*

A DUNNO-WHAT KINDA DAY

It has been a dunno-what kinda day. Woke up feeling ready to go. Had the day scheduled to go to town for pills, gas and groceries. I know in advance a trip to town means I'll be so exhausted by the time it's all over, I can only take a nap. Today, the nap didn't happen right away. Had the radio going on an afternoon talk show, like Fresh Air, hearing it without paying attention. Up after an hour, then back down for another hour. Woke from that nap feeling at home again. Put on a movie, watched for half an hour and turned it off. Good film, but mind not willing to pay attention. Found a watermelon at the grocery store. I passed by the display thinking I have not painted a watermelon in a long time. I miss painting watermelons. I walked through the whole store thinking I'd like to make a one-day watermelon painting tomorrow. I've been so distracted for so long, I've not made anything to call art. I want to get back into the groove. Found a canvas already stretched, ready to go, one I stretched some years ago. I stopped painting before getting to it. The melon is in the refrigerator and the canvas is ready.

I've put on some Philip Glass music, four pieces, him playing electric organ. The one playing now, Contrary Motion, is solo. The others have accompaniment of piano and soprano sax. They were composed and recorded in the period of time I'm in his memoirs now, early 1970s. He practiced yoga and meditated regularly. He and wife went overland to India, rode trains across India to the Himalayan city, Darjeeling, and into northern India. He was overtaken by a serious interest in Tibetan Buddhism. It could be my suggestible imagination, I feel like I hear Tibetan music in his compositions, a lengthy repetition with variations moving around inside the patterns set up by the repetitions. It is meditative. I follow the sound in mind's eye, recalling the bouncing ball. His repetitions are relaxing as a good massage, like Tibetan chants. I'm vowing to self to play more Glass in the future. I have probably a dozen CDs of his music, all of which I love. It's a bit odd first time hearing it, but it took hold of me right away. I have his Dracula album. It is made as a soundtrack to the original Dracula movie with Bella Lugosi. I might order Dracula from netflix and play the Glass music with it. Good plan. I don't really want to watch the movie, but have a feeling Glass's soundtrack will make it new. 

I saw a clip today of news comic Jon Stewart losing a degree of my regard. Not that it matters to him. Or me. He made some unnecessary repeat swipes at Rebecca Dolezal, the wannabe. I recalled his sentimental show of embracing Kaitlyn Bruce Jenner in his proud of self way for being so piously PC, the champion of tolerance. Then a white woman wanted to be a black woman. He played the white racist role. What white woman in her right mind would want to be a nigger bitch? He can't get over his own dismay that a white chick would want to be black. He can handle a guy wanting to be a chick, sooo liberal, but not a chick wanting to be black. Methinks he might protesteth too much. It makes me never want to identify self liberal again. It strikes me hypocritical from a man quick to point the finger at hypocrisy. Reminds me of the saying that three fingers point back at self when pointing the finger at someone else. He's a bit off on the civil war too. He fails to notice it was a Northern invasion. In the South, it's called the War of Yankee Aggression. The North invaded the South. You don't see historical accounts of any Yankee cities burned to the ground by Southern troops. He's rewriting history too. He's still funny. Stewart has become a disappointment to me in his smug liberalism. He's a show liberal, a very well paid celebrity television comedian. Again, I remind self, the medium, itself, is the message.  

*

TO WALK THE RED ROAD

I feel more every day like I'm understanding the time Herman Melville was in before and while writing Moby Dick. He saw the nation dividing into factions that fell into hating each other unto wanting to kill the other by way of war. Corporate propagandists today have divided us into factions that hate each other. I can't tell if it is getting more intense daily or if I'm just recently aware of it. The division has always been there. It has never been a problem before, under the American belief that each man and woman has a right to their own way of seeing. We have been consciously divided by way of propaganda since 1980, a step at a time. Expressions of racism today have a hard edge of hate out in the open, arrogance. Before, the racism was the same, it was kept to oneself and one's circles. Much as I dislike seeing such vehement hatred out in the open and increasing, I also see that these dark shadows in a culture are the same as dark shadows in individuals--to be dealt with, we need to bring them to the surface to assess how to deal with them. Hatred surfaces, works itself up and needs to be burnt off by way of a fight or a war. War amounts to, essentially, burning off hate. The hate the right-wing media pumps into their audiences appears to me without conscience. Political ideologies don't do conscience. Neither do belief systems, nor corporate coups. I read Moby Dick made aware by Melville himself that hate was swirling in the political air of his time and he saw the American experiment, democracy, in peril. The white whale, white supremacy, broke and sank the ship of state, a democracy of people from all over the world, Captain Ahab dead and tied to the whale's side by harpoon ropes, Ahab a teabagger of the day without compromise.

I tried to read Moby Dick again a few years ago and could not get with it. I found John Huston's 1957 film of Moby Dick with Gregory Peck playing Ahab. It was a remarkable American film. Orson Wells delivered the sermon in the seaman's chapel. It was old-time New England Primitive Baptist style. I felt throughout Melville's story a civil war on its way. I feel the direction American politics has taken in this time is toward civil war. Again, the justification is immigrants of color. I have the division in myself. Last summer I came face to face, not by my choice, with Reaganista Supreme Parrot, the Congress person of my district in NC, who does not represent me in any way, Virginia Foxx. I felt like hell opened up and this presence emerged before my eyes. I backed away automatically. She put out her hand to shake and I could not touch her. I would have had to go straight home and soak my hand in kerosene to exterminate the cooties. I acted like I didn't recognize her, I, a demographic profile of a Fake tv viewer and Limbaugh listener. This angry old white man was angry with her. I could not speak. I froze inside. It was awkward and she handled it well, distracted herself with someone else. The next one paid no attention to the news, cared nothing about politics, had no idea who she was and did not care. She handed me a business card fancy with gold print, which I dropped in the trash soon after. Then took it back out of the trash, thinking it would go good with my collection of things it's really weird for me to have. 

Earlier in the day I was on the phone with my friend Lee, who lives in New Mexico. We talked some about how we both love this period of our lives the best of any other. We both like to stay at home, like being at home, prefer and enjoy the solitary life. In both our cases, we've become comfortable enough with ourselves we don't need to go looking for distraction. I stopped in at the grocery store for some coffee filters I forgot to buy two days before. At the register, from behind, a familiar voice, Hi. We spoke and hugged. She said, "What are you doing?" I would not let self say, Standing in line at the grocery store. Too redundant. I said, "Staying at home." She showed a long face like to say, Bummer. I said, "There is nothing sad about it." She said, "Really?" I said, "There's no place I'd rather be than home." She just accepted it, already knew I was weird. Glad our conversation was cut short by the momentum at the register, I said, Bye, and proceeded on my way. Somebody from the past, from a chapter that ended long ago, a few cycles back. Six years ago I trimmed down the people I see to the people I care about who care about me. In this time of the life, I know who those people are. I've done my time having superficial associations. I don't do it anymore, and don't care who it pisses off. I'm flowing with this cycle, happy with it, staying at home. I don't even like to cross the county line, except knowing I'll be back to sleep in my own bed. I have my purpose for coming to the mountains, which I am still living, and will go on living. This is the place I walk my spiritual path. It is the only reason I'm here. I don't mix socially, never have. Got the name arrogant on account of it, not my concern. 

I did a lot of spiritual reading for a lot of years and came to what all the masters had said, reading is not it. It is in experience. Paying attention to experience, living in the world as it is, allowing others to be themselves, allowing same with self. My spiritual reading in this time of the life has trimmed down to the Tao te Ching. It's all there in beautiful verse form. It's about honoring the god in others. It's about allowing God, not expecting of God. It's about allowing the flow, going with the flow, using the flow to find a tranquil life. And finding a tranquil life, allowing it. I never enter a lottery for fear of winning. I do not want money messing up my life. I'm able to meet expenses and have a little bit of fun too, quiet, at home fun like movies, reading, music, art projects, donkeys, and Caterpillar. The car runs good and all is well. I trouble my mind with news less and less, though continue to be traumatized when I give it any attention, disturbed every day at the rate American cops are killing black people, man, woman or child. It's shameful and shameless. I'm one of few people I know who think anything of it. And what can I do about it? Send a twitter? Leave a comment? I remind myself it's not my world out there on the news. It's not mine until the swat team breaks down my door and blows me away, saying, Whoops, wrong address. Shit happens. As long as my door is still on its hinges, I'll go on staying at home being a detached viewer.         

*

     

THE UGLY AMERICAN

The news and facebook are full of Boston marathon bombs to the point it cannot be ignored. I get it, as far as urban terrorism is concerned, we are in that time. Thirty-plus years of divisive hatred being spewed by the republican party, Rush Limbaugh, the party's philosopher, has kept us seeing a possibility of civil war coming, simply because it takes war to burn off mass hatred. We have a civil war going now in the time of terrorism. Our civil war is carried out by terrorism now instead of farm boys standing in rows shooting at each other with one-shot muskets, burying thousands after every battle. They didn't have bulldozers in that time or backhoes. The graves were dug with shovels. That was a time of low-tech. Now, in the time of high-tech, suicidal individuals can make bombs with directions available on the internet. I say suicidal, not because they blow themselves up, but they always get caught. FBI means business. When they bear down on something with undivided focus, there is no getting away from them. I heard a report today that said several bombs go off every day in cities around the world. This is part of what goes with a "free" society. We have it complicated by the republicans who refuse to allow any kind of help or comfort to the American people, the 99%. They will not permit anything that might make the nigger look good. Their racist purpose is so obvious, you'd think they'd have enough self-awareness to see how they look outside themselves. They can't do that. They can't see themselves from afar. They are right. No two ways about it.

You'd think it would get embarrassing for them as their racist purpose is so up front and out in the open. The republicans just don't get it. They are the self-unaware people, the half of the American people below average. Their saying No to everything is a strategy based in a beginners political truth that when you come out against something, you automatically have 50% of the voters with you. From there, you go for the single percentage that wins 51-49. The republicans are staying against the African-American, keeping their percentage steadily at 50%. Though racism has been declared politically incorrect, PC only applies to the part of the population that went to college who were not young republicans. Because children's tv is about diversity, sports is about diversity, sitcoms are about diversity, does not mean racism has gone away or even diminished. Kids go all through school being told diversity is good, black people are equal to white. Get out of school and the world we go into says white people keep the niggers down, do not give them a break, do not give them a chance, put them in prison. It's different out here in the adult world from the world school prepares us for. School has us believing, "Our government wouldn't do THAT!" We laugh at Roman militarism and decadence in movies--in the future they'll be laughing about American militarism and decadence.

After WW2 much fiction and documentary history was written of Nazi atrocities during the war. I see in the time post-American (pre-emptive) invasions, destroying a poor, defenseless country before they destroy us, the middle-east will have a whole generation of historians, documentary film makers and novelists writing about American atrocities all over the middle east. This will happen as surely as after the oceans have risen as far as they will the surveying business will boom remapping the earth. Our government thinks that mind-control of the American people solves all problems before they start without taking into account that the world is watching. The same will happen in South American history and fiction, revealing North American involvement with death squads and the world of drug trafficking. I'm seeing the USA after this time that we're in carrying the name in the future as evil incarnate like the Nazis and Hitler did since WW2. Our Nazi party is the republican party. That will be known in the future, too. It's known now, but not in the mainstream. None of this is new in the American character. We've been a war dependent economy throughout my lifetime. Our greatest export is Xtreme military weapons, sold to be used against the people of the world, anybody. This has been the case since WW2 for sure. It was so throughout the Fifties, the time of the Ugly American. Maybe all of it is necessary because international intrigue is out of control. In that world, there are no laws, only treaties, and nobody pays attention to treaties in America. Not one treaty with the American Indians has ever been honored, unto present day.

So what do we do? What do I do? I'm the only one I can make decisions for. I don't know what to do but keep on keepin on. That's all I can see. When it comes to power in America, I have none and never wanted any. Money is power in America. I've never wanted money either. I've never wanted to be involved in any level of power intrigues. I want people who strategize for power to look at me as too insignificant to even count as one to notice. Oh, he's nobody. That's right, Nobody, the name Odysseus gave for himself to the Cyclops. I want all the players to see me as one not on the playing field. I'll watch the game, let the players slam bang into each other, fool each other, rob each other, do all the competitive boasting they want, and I'll go on about my business feeding the birds and liking Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart and David Pakman. I see over and over in my mind over the last several years that movie INDEPENDENCE DAY starring Jeff Goldblum. It concerned gigantic space ships from someplace else taking up all the minerals from the surface of the earth. What was left of earth was threatened. This was symbolic of the corporate rape of the earth's surface going on even more since that film than before. Goldblum tried to defeat the big takeover by hi-tech and failed. The mothership was finally destroyed by an alcoholic crop-dusting pilot. And the world was saved. Monsanto, Halliburton, etc, must be stopped if the earth is to have a future. It will happen.


*

GERONIMO

     rain splash by tj worthington

Started reading GERONIMO: His Own Story. I like about it that it is in Geronimo's words, translated. The translation and the writing of it in English was originally published 1906. I'm so glad it was not written in 19th century American written language. I say this because I have seen a great difference between how somebody thinks who has Geronimo's experience and somebody whose experience is schooling and white people urban. Very different ways of thinking and seeing oneself. I like the straight-forward thinking of the American Indians. They lived by the wisdom of generations of first hand spiritual experience. They had shamans who knew the spirit world. They understood that this world runs in line with the spirit world. They understand there is more going on in this life than money. They understood flow. I skipped the lengthy introduction, because I'm not interested in a white man's analysis of someone no white man can understand. I want to go straight to Geronimo's own words, his own way of putting a story together. I like how he started with the Apache creation story. He was a shaman who kept it from white people. They didn't know what that meant anyway. Witch doctor, as they would call it in that time, is so far from what a shaman is, that it has no meaning at all. Like the white men did not understand the spiritual in the Indians, the Indians did not understand the absence of the spiritual in white men.


My admiration for Geronimo is along the lines of admiration for Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and Cochise. These are men who struggled for their people to the very last possible moment. None was afraid of dying. Every one a great warrior. Sitting Bull also a shaman. Crazy Horse was known to have a psychic sense. In childhood I identified with the Indians. I believe it is because of several lifetimes in the past among American Indian tribes. I've come to suspect that people who become "Civil War buffs" were in the Civil War a few lifetimes back. I've been an Indian Wars buff all my life from the Indian side. In the neighborhood as a child, the other boys wanted to play cowboys or cavalry. I was the Indian. All of them against me. When I'd get shot, I fell down and died, got up and was another Indian. I could never play white man; it would have been betrayal of my true people. White man was the enemy. I liked that arrows, spears and tomahawks are silent. I don't recall the age I was, and I don't remember where I first started hearing about Indians. Kids played cowboys and Indians. Possibly it's from automatically being drawn to the Indian side that I took an interest in Indians. Boy Scout interest in Indians I couldn't go with. It was seen from the side of the white man, from the cavalry. Some years ago I bought a book about the Indian Wars, started reading it and found its perspective was from the side of the US Army. Stopped reading. I didn't care about what was behind what they did.

Sherman was as ruthless in the Indian War as he was in the Civil War. My only feeling about Sherman is the shame for humanity that his mother did not have an abortion. He's one of the figures in history I truly revile with what seems to me good reason. Several years ago, in the Nineties, visiting Atlanta, a Vedanta monk from southern California was visiting a friend of mine there, another Vedanta monk. Over lunch we had a pleasant conversation. At one point he mentioned his great grandfather was General Sherman. I fell into shock and could only say, "Don't tell anybody else. This is Atlanta. I wish you hadn't told me." Despite knowing this guy had been in a monastery thirty to forty years and didn't get out much, that he had nothing whatsoever to do with the Indian War or the Civil War, something snapped inside and I couldn't hardly face him anymore. I wouldn't want to be held accountable for any of my great grandfathers' minds. I knew then what I know now, that what he said was no more than an aside. It had nothing to do with him having William Tecumseh's experience or even very much of his blood. But it still got to me and I couldn't stop it. Something flooded over me that was deeper than I was aware of. In Atlanta of all places.

I like about Geronimo's account of his story that he speaks of experience. He didn't get foggy in abstractions, generalizations, ideas, conclusions. He talks like the old mountain people who told their stories by experiences. He is not constrained by denial nor making a good impression. The man asked for his story, here it is. He opened his story with the tale of the beginning of Apache. It is quite a good story. It has an understanding from the spirit world perspective. I'm inclined to take the "myth" for literally how it happened, though from the perspective of spirit world. How it manifests on earth in people and culture is quite different, yet follows the same flow. Like where we are now in Western Civ is in the time of the Revelation near the end of the story. The story is full of devils, dragons, demons, angels and visions. It's the same with the Apache story. It's their story told in the spirit. The Indians were tapped into the spirit world that was shut out in early Old Testament times, all the way back then in the progression we call civilization. The only way I can let go of my regret to be a part of the people that committed genocide with intent is to see it as process in God's unknown ways of raising collective human consciousness. I don't know whose consciousness was raised. I've come to see that in God's view death is the blink of an eye. It's time for souls to change clothes, learn the scientific method, get on with discoveries on the earth, in space and within. Looking at it through God's eye makes even the slaughter of the buffalo something I can come to terms with.


*