THE VIEW FROM THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING

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

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

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

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

*

FINDING PEACE IN A WORLD OF WAR

This morning I finished reading Chris Hedge's book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. A powerful read. Hedges was a NYTimes war correspondent in Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Rather than give accounts of battles, Hedges covers the lives of survivors, the trauma of war they live through for several years, their memories, losing children, parents, relatives, neighbors, friends, people they don't know. He writes specifically about the difference between the myth of war and the actuality of killing and being shot at. In the myth, killing is the glory of war. In actuality, killing makes the young have nightmares and memories they can't live with for the rest of their lives. Soldiers returning from active duty hear people say, "Thank you for your service," which comes from the myth of war. To the ears of someone back from the actuality of war, it sounds hollow to be thanked for service. Many kill themselves while involved in the military, and later. So many, it's another epidemic in a society that is overrun with epidemics, like cops killing three thousand American citizens a year and beating up multiple thousands more. Soldiers coming home with PTSD and no job prospects become cops, the citizen the enemy. And what do we do? We justify it. Growing up in a martial society is not easy for a kid who wants to live in peace. The war on drugs is a war on the American people who want peace in their lives. I saw a quip from DC chief of police who said arresting people for marijuana use only makes them hate the police. Half a century into the war on the American people, what can I say but: Duh. 

I talk with people I know who have been to prison about the epidemic of cops killing in such excess, the answer comes back, they're scared. Of course. They're scared from half a century of brutalizing peaceable people. They activate peaceable people into protest movements. The NYPD is now trying to make legal protest into an act of terrorism, full reign to kill, maim and arrest peaceable citizens. All the time reading Hedges' book, I was recalling my own feelings subject to the draft, hating being forced by threat of prison to be a part of the killing machine. It comes to a choice of taking my chances as a target or years in prison where I am a target for gangs and guards. I took my chance, fortunately between Korea and Vietnam, a small window. I've thanked God all my life that I've not been forced to take part in killing action. I'm of a mind that I think  I'd rather be killed than kill. The consequences of being killed amount to a shortcut to heaven. The consequences of killing is a lifetime of inner torment, justified by law or not. The problem I wrestled with under military duress was that I did not want to kill or be killed. Guys the same age as me on the other side don't want to kill or be killed. I don't want to kill somebody like myself who does not want to be there, but is there to stay out of prison, like me. I was on a WW2 destroyer in the early 1960s. The ship was sent to patrol the harbor at Santo Domingo. A communist cell was known to be in the city. The ship had orders to blow the hell out of the city if anybody shoots at us. I hated it. I did not want to be a part of the machine that would kill and maim random innocent people, children, people who wanted to live. 

My "general quarters"  role was to load big shells into the elevator that took them to the big gun fired by a young officer just out of officer training school, who had the same ability with one of those guns as I have with a handgun. None. Their targets were the only safe places. I saw them during practice shooting at sea. They hit all around their targets and never the target. It was the same with the big machine guns that fired shells that glow red flying through the air and skipping on the ocean surface like a stone skipped on a lake. They never hit the target. I remember my moral dilemma transferring the big shells from the racks they were stored in to the big gun. I would be as responsible for the damage done to the people and homes of Santo Domingo as the ship itself. I wanted to live a peaceable life and wanted to allow the people of Santo Domingo a peaceable life. The ship running back and forth outside the harbor for a month provided some interesting sights. Look over the side of the ship and see hammerhead sharks and other kinds of sharks, water I did not want to fall into or have the ship sink in. I was fascinated seeing the hammerheads. One time I saw a huge herd of sharks circle a school off bonito in the harbor itself. The ring of sharks closed in on the thrashing circle of bonito that shrank smaller and smaller until the last one stopped thrashing. An amazing event to behold. Not a good place to go in the water at the beach. On lookout duty at night, I watched the movie playing at the drive-in theater. They were playing The King And I, many years after it was new, a movie I never wanted to see, but was fascinated to see it through binoculars from a ship. There was still much child in self at the time, especially the wanting to live aspect of childhood. 

It pissed me off that government, parents, church, every adult in my world wanted me there. What could I think? Fuck all y'all. It felt like the entire society wanted me dead. I had a secret longing to be a communist, anyway. In childhood, daddy said to me out of the blue on one of the unfortunate Saturdays he was home from work, my second least favorite day of the week, Sunday the worst, he said, "If you ever join the Communist Party, I'll kill you." It was the McCarthy era. Of course, he didn't know what he was talking about, but he did understand the threat. This moment made me want to find a way to get with communists. Couldn't find any. In college, after the period of involuntary servitude, I read about communism and took a course in Soviet history. I thought Stalin was cool, because the adults of my world were so freaked out by his name. After a biography of him and learning about his time in power, I thought: shit, he's worse than what we've got. He killed millions of his own people, made the Nazi holocaust look not so bad. No. He's not my leader. American cops have killed well over a million in my lifetime. The latter, however, is hush-hush, so it's not as bad. Growing up, a kid in a world of adults that wanted me dead, I came up without much confidence in the adults around me, certainly not in believers of the myth of war. By the time I finished college and saw I could get a good job I'd probably like, I could not join the world of participation in the myth I did not believe. The time came I found that God, indeed, is, and then I had reason to live beyond automatic self-preservation. I realized I wanted to live in semi-isolation in a place where I  can follow my own light, avoid being swept by social forces not very well thought out. I have found my peace where I can look out the window and see donkeys grazing hay and lying down on it for a siesta in midday sunlight. 

*

HOW I DID NOT BECOME A MILLIONAIRE

salvador dali

Henry Miller has been in my mind all day today. I looked at the spines of his books on the shelves, felt drawn to them like they were magnets pulling my mind. I was looking for Colossus of Maroussi, a small Penguin paperback I bought in Athens, April 18, 1965. For some reason that I'm glad of now, I wrote the date on the title page. A few years before, I'd bought book club editions of the Grove Press Tropics. Soon after high school I was reading the paperback of Tropic of Capricorn a friend gave me after he'd read it. Neither of my parents ever exhibited curiosity about anything in a book, except the Bible, "the ONLY book," whatever that means. I left Tropic of Capricorn in the living room one day assuming nobody would touch it for the book cooties. Of course, daddy picked it up and it happened to fall open in his hand to the page I looked at over and over, and he asked where I got it. I said I borrowed it from a friend, was told to give it back. I put it in the glove compartment of my car and read it in parking lots, my introduction to Henry Miller. It was in the time I was discovering Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues. Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind. Joan Baez, beatniks in NY, Bob Dylan. Also reading novels in paperback from drugstore racks movies were made from, A Summer Place, The L-Shaped Room, Peyton Place, Ben Hur, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, the crazy Betty Davis and Joan Crawford thriller. I read the book to try to figure out what was going on in the end of the movie. Started taking an interest in movies a step beyond movies I was used to, out there beyond my grasp. La Dolce Vita by Federico Fellini was the first film to knock my sox off. I didn't feel like I got any of it, would not have done well on a test about it, but I was pushing my way through, learning by practicing. First thing learned after high school, I needed to be able to read with comprehension if I wanted to go to college. First apartment, I stayed home and read as much as possible, wanted everybody to leave me alone.

 

salvador dali

 

I did not want peer pressure, parental pressure, church pressure, think about a career pressure. Nor did I want to look for a way into adult life with adult concerns, money and sex, jump in and find a job to cover expenses. I never wanted to join the hierarchy. I went into adult life knowing only what I did not want to do. I felt ambition, but for nothing. It was just a feeling. I disliked competition. I did my best work at anything where competition was not an issue. I wanted to follow my own light, but my light didn't lead me to anything that would pay the rent. My light pursued reading that paid nothing at all. So I had to work. Work drained the art spirit. I kept work going and read, letting art expression go. During college time, I read more interesting books through the summer than through the school year. Always had a stack waiting for summer. I have followed my own light through adult life, learning history, sociology, habitually self-educating, reading with some comprehension and loving it, reading writers who informed me, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Henry Miller, people who thought about things and wrote their thoughts. In the beginning, I did not know what was "good," so I read more or less by trial and error, looking for what I got the most from. Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti were good introductions to poetry and to reading. They wrote in present day language I understood, and from contemporary mind, which I was a part of by mere existence. They spoke to my rebel spirit, encouraged my inclination to nonconformity, and they articulated American life the television glossed over and ignored. For personal appearance, I chose the look that makes it possible to have a job, a haircut, because I needed the money to get by on. I wanted long hair and to wear Indian kurtas. I wanted to lay about with headphones on listening to Led Zeppelin stoned, but had to work, had to go to school, had to study. My parents did not support me, so I had to give the appearance of conformity to maintain existence.

salvador dali

 

I already knew how to go my own way under the camouflage of clothes that identified me with the world that looked to the ruling class for guidance, instead of looking to beatniks. Ginsberg and Kerouac influenced my first thinking out in the world on my own. Can't leave out Henry David Thoreau, a powerful teacher. I wanted to play bongos and hang at Manhattan coffee shops where Doc Watson and Bob Dylan played. A kid who had nothing about him that could be mistaken for cool connected with the beatnik idea of the cool, and felt cool reading books identified cool. In the late Fifties and into the Sixties cool was very important. To some. A very small percentage. Everybody else kept with the as-seen-on-tv look. I wanted to be a bohemian writer in NYC, a part of the cool scene, uber-cool by association. I didn't want to live like a street bum to be cool, needed to make a living, and was not in NYC. I pretended not to be a rebel at work and in the social life. Had plenty of practice pretending in my life before, with parents. I kept everything about myself a secret from them. The kid was told so many times they were not interested in anything the kid had to say that I finally got it. From then on, the kid went inward on the trail to schizophrenia, but found a way to reverse direction in time. Years before, I had already shut my heart down to them in self-preservation. It took a lot of years to get the heart re-activated. It was in the time, age 17, when mind and heart were both about to blow a gasket, Allen Ginsberg spoke his own paen, HOWL, to my pain. Though I later came to regard Ginsberg the Mr Rogers of poetry, while he was playing that role for me in my subconscious he turned me on to poetry. Just out of the Navy and just into first semester at College of Charleston, I bought the Selected Poems of Robinson Jeffers in a paperback. Thought I'd read a few poems before sleep one night, and never put the book down all night. Read every poem in it multiple times, could not stop. I loved Jeffers' writing, something I'd never seen before, the art in poetry elevated several notches. Loved where his mind was coming from and what he did with it. At the same time, I discovered Salvador Dali and Abstract Expressionism.

salvador dali

These were the doorways that opened the world of art to me mid 20s. Before, I'd only been exposed to Norman Rockwell and Remington as art. I didn't want to go to medical school to study anatomy to be an artist. When I stepped through the doorway to the art world, I went alone, alone in a culture, American television culture that only dealt in the obvious, and dismissed art along with reading, doesn't pay, a waste of time. During and after the McCarthy period, anything incomprehensible to the average television viewer was suspect of subversion, of being labeled with the Scarlet C: communist. Rock n roll was called communist, beatniks were communist, abstract art was communist. Daddy told me when I was 14, "If you ever join the communist party, I'll kill you." Suddenly, I wanted to be a communist. Did not know how to look for communists to join me up. Never found any. As soon as I was out of high school I started a wider search for communists and still couldn't find any. I wanted to be a card-carrying member of the communist party, didn't know anything about it except how to spell Khrushchev. In college I took a course in Soviet History that cured me of wanting to be a commie red pinko. I was disposed to like Stalin, he was Mr Red, himself, the Red Menace, but saw he was a tyrant, who treated his own people worse than the enemy. Lenin I took for just as bad. If Stalin had not had Trotsky killed, Trotsky would have been just like them. Nonetheless, it was an educational search. Communism didn't work, same as capitalism didn't work. Both created a lot of miserable people, a lot of dead people, and a lot of privileged people. I did not want anything to do with any of it, did not want to be another brick in the wall, did not want to give my energy to build and maintain the Death Star, the American Empire. I was not a boy who wanted to grow up to wear a uniform and obey authority. Did not want to be a hippie, either. Just wanted to hunker down out of sight with a book and let the war machine fly overhead. As a non-conformist, I'm no more than the cow in the herd that stays off to itself.    

salvador dali, himself

 

 

*

 

 

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.

 

 

*

HERE COME COWBOYS

australian aboriginal paintings

I heard a sentence on the radio news this afternoon that started, "How can the richest country in the world...?" I was so struck by that opening I missed the subject. It struck me so naïve I wondered where it came from. The richest country in the world? I've heard that all my life. In London a few different people referred to me a rich American. I said I'm not rich. I could afford to fly to London; they can't afford to fly to Disneyworld. Therefore, I'm rich. Therefore, Americans are rich. I saw on the telly one evening a commercial that pictured a boat and its big V wake on a lake in England. The visual zoomed onto the boat to Mrs So&So, "a rich American" who appreciates the English lake country, refinement, taste and so on. Being a rich American, she uses butter. No oleo margarine for the rich American. None of the people I was watching the telly with understood why I was laughing. It was too much to explain. Besides, it had to do with irony, and I really didn't dare attempt explaining irony. I'd been there long enough to have good understanding that my status as an American was way far below the lowest British subjects. I was regarded with an arrogance similar to what American black people get from white Americans. I realized that racism is only one of many varieties of outsider. Nationalism is about another kind of outsider us-them thinking. Be-true-to-your-school is another group for identity where outsiders go to another school.

Americans have been spoiled for a century or so by the people of the rest of the world looking at us in awe because we're rich. American tourists go anywhere in the world and we're welcomed happily, open-handed, Americans have money. I wondered how welcome I would be if I were black, or Malaysian, or from Pakistan. That was in the last years of America being held in respect. Nixon was the president lying to us at the time. Riding the Orient Express, the train, I went through what was then Yugoslavia, now Croatia and Serbia. It was a very different world from the part of Europe we think of as Europe. This southeastern extension of Europe was part of the Ottoman Empire until about half a century before I passed through it. The air smelled of Turkish tobacco. In this time, it was "behind the Iron Curtain," part of the Soviet Union. Signs were in probably Serbo-Croation and Russian. I saw how people lived in police state. Quietly. On the train I passed a group of people of my age, mid to late 20s, and they knew on sight I was American. They seemed slightly threatening. One of them said, "President Nixon," in a derisive tone of voice. They all laughed. I thought: I dislike him more than you do. This was the time of Brezhnev. They probably disliked Brezhnev more than I did. Americans were less appreciated internationally. Young Americans backpacking different places in the world would often fix a Canadian red maple leaf emblem onto the backpack. Less chance of trouble that way. They don't have to answer to American issues we have nothing to do with and can do nothing about.

In Athens, staying in a pension, having meals there, good Greek cooking, several college students from Chile appeared at the table one day. Most of them spoke English. I mentioned Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who was given the Nobel Prize that year. His picture was on the cover of Time the week before. One said, "He's a communist," and they all shut me out at that moment. From then on, I did not exist. It had not entered my mind to note that going to college in Chile with parents able to fly you to Athens could only be of politically right wing families. The communists were the working people. I had no experience with a Latin American country where communism was legal and politically active. Communism has been so eliminated in USA there's not a trace of it that can be taken seriously. In Chile, they keep the local Indians down. One of the odd aspects of racism is white Brits invade the new world colonies, kill out the Indian people, bring in black people for slaves. In the Spanish colonies, they swept away the civilizations, Mayan, Aztec, Toltec, Olmec, etc, an extended civilization, for gold. Too bad for the Indians that they were naïve about the value of gold. A song by the Psychedelic Furs plays in my head, "It gets so hard sometimes, to take it serious. It really gets to be a drag when, all we really need is love. Here come cowboys, here to save the world, here come cowboys, they're so inside the law, here come cowboys, they're no fun at all."

It's bizarre to me how white people took over the lands they discovered, killed the population and moved in. The survivors and descendants of the aboriginal people are regarded by the occupier as the lowest of the social order. In Australia, the white people are even more arrogant to the Aborigines of the continent than white Americans are to the Indians here. We name cities, rivers, mountains and so on after them, but they don't even figure. To the racist mind that looks down on them, the Indians are lower than black. It's the same in New Zealand with the Maoris. The Chinese occupied Tibet, and moved in a new population that regards the native Tibetans as low as Australians regard the Aboriginal people. Israel and the Palestinians. Somebody I knew years ago told me Indians are not human. I said, What? Right, they're not human. That was the first time I'd heard that one. I was maybe 22. From my first memories I identified with the Indian people that lived on this land originally. They were the people of my heart. I didn't know why. I'd never met one. They had a good way of life that kept the water and air clean for quite a number of centuries. Superior white man has turned the rivers to muck, and the air too, with superior knowledge. It's all ego. As long as we have ego, we'll have racism, nationalism, religionism and the other exclusive clubs to differentiate us from them, ultimately self from others.

 

 

 

*

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

 

 

 

*

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*

DEMOCRACY FOR SALE

 Against logic there is no armor like ignorance.
                       ---Lawrence J Peter (1919-1990)          


A few days ago a friend sent me an email telling that TeaPartiers demonstrate with guns and the cops don't bother them. Peaceful protesters from the Wall Street demonstrations get beat up and dragged to jail. Maybe they should carry guns too. The reason Iran wants nukes is because USA doesn't threaten and attack countries that have nukes. I wrote back to friend, the cops ARE the right wing. TeaPartiers with guns is the same as cops with guns. I once read in a dream analysis book that a dream of cops represents angels. Really? I can't say I have personally had a bad experience with a cop. I've never called a cop for any reason. I've had a couple of cops over the years attempt to intimidate me, and I let them believe they did, because once they get a bead on you, you have no recourse. When I was new to the South, a cop came into my apartment threatening me. I told him he's in my place without permission, and I don't have to answer his questions. He said, "By the time we get you to the station, we'll have something on you." This was my first learning about Old South police. I didn't have a Southern accent and certainly did not know the South.



My attitude toward cops came with the realization that they ARE the right wing. I've never appreciated the right wing, because I really do believe in American ideals. The role of cops is to enforce law. It really is. And that's what they do, to some extent. I've seen over the years a lot of them don't know the laws; they go by what they think oughta be a law. In court, their oughta be a law thinking gets cases thrown out of court and cops calling courts liberal. We once had a sheriff's deputy in Alleghany who had a passion for putting young guys in prison. The sheriff's department under that administration passionately set up the young for arrest. Two of the deputies, especially, were wild-eyed about putting local boys in prison. I say "wild-eyed" because they were. Their eyes were wild every time I saw them, wild with the passion of rightness.



One of them got carried away with setting up kids. He got with two kids who were charged with having drugs. He said he'd get them off their charge if they'd sell come cocaine for him out of the evidence locker. The kids were dumb, but not that dumb. They turned him in. One wore a "wire" for use in court. He was put away for 15 years. That was one of the times in the life I've seen justice actually take place in a courtroom, which I tend to think of as the gaming room, poker-faced lawyers attempting to bluff. I had to go to court once for a speeding ticket. It scared hell out of me. I went into the courtroom knowing American law is a "crapshoot." May the best lawyer win. I recently saw the outcome of a case in the paper where a prediction I'd heard came true. A particular lawyer held his case off until a certain judge would be presiding, common legal practice, a judge who always gave this particular lawyer his way in court. It turned out he got his way when it didn't make a bit of sense.



Since the draconian "mandatory sentencing" laws of the Reagan Revolution, and republicans packing courts with right wing judges all over the country for the last 30+ years, especially in this time we're in, I do not trust the police or the courts. When it was my time to stand before the judge, I was mortified. I'd learned about highway patrol quotas and all kinds of things that make our law a poker game. Evidence that everyone knows this is in the common belief that going into court you need the "best" lawyer, the one with the winningest record. It's like picking a team to bet on for the world series. You go for the one you think has the best chance to win. That's the only thing we look for in a lawyer. We pick the one we believe by reputation to have the best chance of winning. Observed courtroom chicanery over the years taught me by this time in the life to be afraid of court. It's like your fate is determined by the flip of a coin.



I'm learning why old people tend to be uninterested in politics and withdraw from much that is around them. It's not because they're old and don't get it anymore. The problem is, they get it. They've lived long enough to see the world they live in is false to the core. Many wouldn't put it like that, but I feel like this is the root, considering my own motivations. I've seen that falseness to the core since childhood. Possibly it was the influence of the Swedish preacher in the non-denominational baptist fundamentalist church where the preacher preached against Godless Communism in the early 1950s, the McCarthy era. The influence that had on me was pretty strong, until the day my dad told me out of the blue on a Saturday when he was in the house, "I'll kill you of you ever join the Communist Party." From then on, I wanted to be a Communist. I wanted to find a Communist Party to join. Communism became a great curiosity for me. Until I got to Stalin, or Dick Cheney with absolute power. He made Communism tremendously unappealing. The assassination of Trotsky in Mexico City. Khrushchev making noise at the UN, banging his shoe. So red around the collar.



Eventually I read the Communist Manifesto, to see what it was. It made a great deal of sense, and I suspect K Marx of visionary status. It had no relation to Communism in action, Russia or China, same as our Capitalism wedded to democracy isn't what it's cracked up to be. One of my learnings in life has been that when the human mind gets hold of something, that's the end of it. The way of the human mind runs counter to the way of the spirit, which is the way of everything living in the world around us, even ourselves. Concoctions of the human mind are, by their limited nature, short-lived. I'd venture around the same time the date for the end of democracy; though the most telling evidence that the supreme court, overruling an election, ended it in the year 2000, is rather compelling. I don't look to see it coming back. Like a precious caged exotic bird, once it gets out the door, it's gone. Won't be long til a hawk catches a good meal.



It's looking like it was mafia that replaced the Soviet government. The gambling casinos of Wall Street hold the power in America now. In our case, it's a legal mafia as they've spent the last half century shaping the laws to their benefit by buying off the "representatives" of "the people" with money and country club memberships from lobbyists. We haven't had any representatives in a very long time. Rational legislation to the benefit of the American working people, the 99%, is defeated by ignorance, with the cheerleading of Limbaugh and the strategies of Karl Rove that trump intelligence with ignorance. It works as surely as assassination works. We have the mafia of heirarchical corporate power. We used to be citizens. Now we are consumers, fires that burn up products. This is the world I have separated myself from in my later years, staying as low under the radar as I can. I'm of the old school of American individualism, and have seen it go away in my lifetime. I've seen in older people the ground of their belief systems go out from under them. I'm seeing it now in myself.  



                                                                                         *

UNCERTAINTY GOING AROUND

bend in the road



The news says the oil leak is capped and stopped. For now. The enormity of it is such that it makes me question what is real and what is unreal. Millions of barrels of oil spewed into the ocean currents, destroying marshes all along the Gulf coast from Louisiana to the everglades, all the marshes and swamps in between. The whole stretch could become a dead zone. I wonder why I think about it since there is nothing I can do but get worked up. It's so vast it dwarfs the digit that I am. It's as far beyond anything I could do about it that it may as well be an earthquake in China, or Haiti, or anywhere. Before news went everywhere instantly, news like the Titanic was put into song, stories of murders were put into songs, "He took her by the golden curls and dragged her round and round," and by the time it got around it was history instead of news. News is always history the next day.



This 4 dvd set I found at Walmart for $5 of USGov promotional films about the war in Vietnam. Never do you see an American soldier shot or plane shot down. Quite a lot of aircraft carriers and jets landing and taking off. Helicopters shooting rockets and machine gun bullets into thick jungle. They show medics treating the people of villages with basic medicine. One of the films on the Montangnards was exceptionally good. Interesting small documentary of the mountain people of Vietnam who were still tribal. The most recent one I've seen had John Wayne narrating. He was the voice for that Southern California Xtreme right wing of the wealthy who think Ayn Rand a visionary. Charleton Heston took John Wayne's role for that voice, and now it looks like Sarah Palin is being dressed for the post-Charleton Heston rallying voice for a certain way of thinking.



John Wayne said Communist and Communism so frequently it was comical. He brought up General Mark Clark to talk and Communist was about every tenth word he said. Another General sang the same song. I remembered the time, late 60s, the news we were getting was no more news than the news we get today. Communist this and Communist that. Tom Pruitt told me back in about 1978 that there were 57 Communists in High Point. I about fell out. Heinz 57. All through the 50s to the 80s Communist was the most loaded word there was. It carried more fear value than the F word and the N word together. I think with shame of how much we the public were manipulated by propaganda using fear of Communism to keep wars going. Good for the economy. USSR returned to Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Chechnya, the -stans from Afghani- to Khazak-. The Silk Road carried the plague from China to Europe and everywhere along the way by fleas on the yaks. The Silk Road of bandits, a caravan needing an army escort, and that was never a certainty. The poorest part of the world in semi-desert, living today as they lived in the time of Genghis Khan whose Mongol hordes destroyed what civilization there was along that region.



I grew up in the world of the Communist threat, huddle down under desk-chairs in First grade, ready for an atomic blast. The building was made of big carved stone. The little desk wouldn't protect me very well if the entire wall of huge stones broke apart and flew a me in a thousandth of a second. It was concluded by all the kids I knew that if the bomb came we're dead. No two ways about it. In the 50s and 60s the Communist threat kept the population afraid not to turn over the tax dollars to equip the Death Star. We didn't know whether or not to believe the government, but were still of the traditional belief that we could count on the government to legislate in our interest. By now such a belief is naive. Now we're kept afraid of Terrorists instead of Communists. The fear of Communism has lifted so much we're not getting any propaganda about China as Communist. They're doing better than we are in the economic arena. I'm not saying this like I want to go live there. No way. Just looking at the landscape around where I stand.



I don't particularly like living in a propaganda-created reality, but I've done it all my life. It's of the mind, a reality created by the mind, a video game inside the head. Creating for us a common enemy to fear, our government corrals us together and keeps us manageable holding our focus on manufactured fear. In a way, it was refreshing to hear John Wayne getting pumped up over the word Communism after several years of it not being an issue and hardly ever used. Refreshing to know how seldom I hear the word any more. Now the Terrorist enemy is hiding in caves in a country with nukes. The reality propaganda has created by repeating lies until they became the truth is one more level of illusion in our lives we tend to think of having substance, when it has none at all. Another mansion in the mind. Another house of cards to fall to the floor when the wind of change whips around the corner. Time to start over. It looks like Democracy done half way breeds enemies within. Communism done half way did too. I suppose every government has to protect itself from its own people vigorously. It's ongoing in Latin America. Might be getting that way here. The youth of the world now are subject to every kind of drug experience there is. They don't care about isms. They just want to get high.

A REALITY OF LIES

composition in gray #20

Who's to say that a lie is always bad

and who's to say that the truth is always good?

You're a fool to wring your neck by searching for the truth.

A character in today's film, The Lower Depths, originally a play by Russian playwright Maxim Gorky. It was made for film by Akira Kurosawa in Japan, 1957, b&w. It became a Japanese story of a dozen or so characters in the slum of a slum. Most interesting to me was the characters who were brought down by their own excesses in our human ways. One man drank so much he ruined his liver and is about to die. A woman who'd lived a particularly rough life died of some slow breakdown. None of them had foresight. They all reacted emotionally to each other instead of responding sensibly. Wranglings among them were going all the time like monkeys in a tree.

A poor traveler dropped in to stay awhile to rest in his travels. It turns out he was something like a wandering monk who would, from time to time, show some compassion, gave them sound advice they didn't understand. He said to them once, lies trump the truth every time. Another name that would work for these characters is lost souls. The wandering monk frequently stopped one from doing or saying something that would be a mistake with disastrous results. But they didn't understand him. He seemed to talk in riddles. They were not people who could comprehend such a concept as lies trumping truth. What? They didn't have tv and they didn't have today's news. Throughout my adult life I've seen over and over that lies do indeed trump truth. The nature of the American judicial system is an attempt to separate truths from lies. Turns out it's a public poker game between two players with the judge a referee.

The way things turn out, by the time the wandering monk is ready to move on, issues erupted between the characters that had been held back too long. It turned out it probably would have been best if he'd never appeared. By the time he was gone the characters were defeated by themselves. He did what he could, but they didn't understand, so they did what they interpreted he said and made things worse. I was watching it thinking this seemed awfully familiar. Like history. Like what went with Christendom after Jesus. What happened to Islam after Mohamed. In our time our Fundamentalist boys and girls want to go to Iraq and Afghanistan for jihad to kill infidels. Muslim Fundamentalists strap dynamite around their waists and kill as many infidels as they can. I call it the Fundamentalist war. The Christians want to kill Muslims and Muslims want to kill Christians over dogma and interpretation and anything else you want to throw in to keep the fire going. It's all there. For both sides it's a religious war. The American Fundamentalists believe they're bringing on Armageddon and the Muslims are calling jihad.

What I don't get is Christendom has for it's foundation Love and love only. Forgive, forget, care, assist, understand, help the poor. Sounds crazy. It's what sounds crazy about those words in relation to American Christendom, Fundamentalism, that made the wandering monk in the movie an enigma to the people. Looks like that's what happened with Jesus too. It looks like it would have been better for humanity if he'd left it alone. But it wouldn't have. They were in a time then like we're in now where decency broke down and, like Wm Butler Yeats put it, the center didn't hold. Divine guidance altered directions and they came through it, all of civilization came through it. One thing I don't get is this enthusiasm I see in young Christian guys to get on with the holy war. Doing it for Jesus. It's a mind I don't understand at all, except that I grew up in Kansas Fundamentalism. Kansas is like the Vatican of Fundamentalism.

It made an unbeliever, like in uncola and unsweet. Like took out what was already there. I had a hard time believing God was behind Joe McCarthy in the early 50s. Later, after growing up a bit, I find out about all the people in DC who jumped out of office windows, homes wrecked, honorable people's lives wrecked so one alcoholic dunce with an IQ right down there with Rush Limbaugh's can commandeer media attention trumping the truth with lies. When I heard the man in the film say, "lies trump the truth every time." I hesitated with the "every time." As a rule, I see it. Especially in politics. Republicans are masters at it. Tell a lie enough times and it becomes true. It's a truth in propaganda that always works. Even as a kid, it didn't seem right to me for a preacher to be telling the people how to vote, praise McCarthy, and come down on Communists because they're unrepentent atheists, the same as dead. Heard on the news today Sarah Palin's back, spinning reality with lies, this time more pumped up than ever. She's been groomed for something to do with the lower depths. We'll be seeing the Party's role for her soon.

My parents believed the preacher's praise of McCarthy, but I didn't. He preached too much about evangelists and his awe for Billy Sunday and Billy Graham, and getting more preaching on television and radio and learning to perform winning body language while talking before a crowd. They were modeling themselves after business, advertising, going for the big bucks. I didn't trust it. The trend created Tammy Faye and Jim Baker, the most obvious frauds of the host of tv evengelists in the 80s who were on the take. Many of them fell with a crash. I found it interesting that Jerry Falwell fell well. I don't know where I got this from unless it was the preacher himself talking about things Jesus said and did. A kid in jr hi, it did not compute with me that church stuff, religion, would do any good modeling itself after business. I could see it only diluting the religion further, making itself secular. I couldn't talk with any of the adults about my thoughts. I'd be heard as something like a barking dog and told by wise crack the preacher knows more than I do or I'd be the one up there preaching. I knew how it would be received before I asked the question, so I didn't ask the question. Figured it out for myself.

I was possibly 14 when I got up on Saturday morning and walked through the living room on the way to the kitchen, daddy sitting on the couch looking at the paper. As I walked by him, he said, "If you ever join the Communist Party, I'll kill you." Gee thanks, Daddy, I think you're expendable, too. Of course, a fascination for communism was conceived that moment. I wanted to be a communist more than anything. Every time I saw pictures or heard on news about Russia and communism, the hammer and sickle that spread terror through the world of Christendom, I'd listen close and see if I could learn something about it. All through the high school years I carried a secret longing to be a communist. In the college years I read about Lenin, Stalin, Mao like they were way high up special great ones.

Then I began to see what treacherous varmints they all were and not one of them gave the first shit about the working people. They were thugs with absolute power. Stalin killed more Russians than Hitler did. These guys were serious egomaniacal despots. I knew I would end up in Siberia or dead if I lived under any of them. I figured that was worse than fundamentalism in Kansas by so many leaps and bounds it made the suburbs look good. I rode a train through Soviet occupied Yugoslavia and Bulgaria in 1971. The men with Soviet green coats that went to the floor and a red star in the center of their caps, were frightening. Spooky to me, but mortifying to the Yugoslavs on the train. The men snapped to attention, addressed them as though they were physical manifestations of absolute power. I was thinking, This isn't it. They were lies told so many times they became the truth.