PIPELINE BLOOZ

 

christo, running fence

It seems like a time of being anesthetized by the news. Corporate news is a soporific anyway. Mayhem and killing and dying day after day. They're saying the surviving "Boston marathon bomber" is answering questions in writing, since he'd been shot in the neck. He got the big ones answered right away--were they by themselves or part of a bigger group? They'll make it into everything it can be made into before they're done. This event is made especially for tv. It is the best tv possible. Law & Order round the clock on CNN and Faux, cops in serious action. Alex Jones and people of his mind are calling it a "false flag" like the JFK assassination and WTC implosion. I suspect it is just them alone because it was so amateurish. If CIA were behind it, the casualty list would have been much higher. I saw an autopsy picture of the dead one. It looks like the tire that ran over him went over his neck, the side of his face and right shoulder. These guys were none too bright. I understand after they set off the bombs they went home and watched the mayhem on tv, evidently thinking no one would come looking for them. Got away with it. Wasn't that slick. Not. They started seeing themselves zeroed in on right away from surveillance cameras everywhere and cell phone cameras. This was a good opportunity to popularize police state. The police were indeed the champions in this event, primarily for not abusing power so openly.

christo, running fence

I see somebody is suing the owner of the fertilizer plant in Texas that exploded. I doubt that will come to much. They'll be up against ivy league corporate lawyers. The science of tracing a fire to its origin is awfully advanced by now, so how the fire started will be as quick to be found as the two Boston bombers with surveillance cameras everywhere. This will justify more and more surveillance in cities. One step closer to popular American police state. It makes me glad I'm getting old and it makes me feel sorrow for my younger friends, looking at what they'll have to live through. I'll have to live through it too in another body, another place, a child. That's why I think I'd like next lifetime to be someplace relatively remote. I like a bridge to civilization. Even though I may never use the bridge, I still like access. I don't understand the passion for city life. It's where one has to be to make money, and that's evidently the draw, except for the people too poor to leave. I made my decision in childhood that I would not care so much for money to create a miserable life for the sake of making money. It struck me early on that money is not worth what it takes to make it in big numbers. All through my working life I've lived on the minimum it took to get by. I chose time over money. I didn't do much with my time, but I've not had the stress that goes with money. I have the opposite attitude toward money as the people around me wherever I am in America. Where others see money a problem solver, I see it creating problems. I never try for the lottery from fear of winning.

christo, running fence

About a quarter century ago a very wealthy man told me after seeing some interior house painting I'd done, "You keep on doing this and you'll get rich." I said, "I'll never get rich working." He looked at me a moment with an eye suspecting I was being a wise-ass with him, but thinking on it a second, he realized I was not. Nobody gets rich working. You get rich juggling numbers. One can, however, get to the stage of juggling numbers through working. I've never cared enough. Money has always been a burden for me, a weight on the back, like I'm a beast of burden, my back loaded down with money concerns, a yak on the Silk Road. Electricity and oil came along, expanding agriculture and industry, increasing the population to the point the whole human population is in peril. The population boom went nearly straight up on a graph, and when something goes straight up, it goes straight down. Looks like what the Revelation calls the Harvest. When we're down to little oil left, provision will of course not be made for what's next, a lot of people will die out from famine and diseases. It will be a sorrowful time. It's time for earth's population to return to what the earth can support without stripping entire mountains like in West Virginia and Kentucky. The corporate mineral eating robot that is consuming the surface of the earth has stripped the continent down to little to no topsoil. Not that topsoil matters in corporate nation.

christo, running fence

The oceans are now too acid for the coral to survive; coral reefs are dying all over the globe. Who cares? Nobody, rather not enough. Humans are pushing other life forms off the planet by continuous extinctions. What we're ending up with is that neighborhood in Arkansas the oil spill flowed through. Oil Ink had it declared "crude" and they only have to clean it up by law if it is "oil." A paper composed by a legal staff and signed by a judge. The people whose property the oil or crude soaked into have no recourse. They can't sell their property. They're stuck living in oil sludge. The oil corporation too big to fail doesn't even say fuck you to the people too small to notice, regards them with the same attention corporate mind gives the ants that lived in the ground. Ground water? Shit happens. The republicans want to run a pipeline down the vertical length of the country parallel the Mississippi River. When that thing blows, according to Murphy's Law it will, the entire plains states, literally the country's "bread basket," wheat fields, corn fields, are in serious danger of waking up one morning and finding a lake of oil. In an age of terrorism, the pipeline will be a target. Nothing but farms, rural communities the entire length of the pipeline. A shit streak through the center of the continent, an open air septic tank left by a few people working the stock market, translating the resources of the earth into money for themselves tax free in the Cayman Islands. This is what the land of the free, home of the brave, has a powerful likelihood of becoming. Ask what have we done to deserve this? Our history is not I Love Lucy. And in a way, it is.

christo, running fence

 

 

*

RULE BY CORPORATE DRONES

I see occasional photo-cartoons ("memes") on facebook concluding with "tell the republicans ___________ (fill in the blank)." Some say, Tell John Boner.... Some say, Tell Mitch McConnell.... Some say, tell Congress. I get a laugh of derision out of them every time I see one. Tell Congress? Congress only listens to money, and I don't have enough money for anybody in Congress to notice. In my lifetime, I've seen legislation go toward the corporations vs the people all the way along. By now, We the People have no more rights. Even the Supreme Court is deciding against us. Obama is snuffing our rights as fast as the Bush-Cheney-Rummy-Rice Junta did, just less straight forwardly. He appears more and more to me a Joe Lieberman in black face, a wolf in black sheep outer wear. I continue to pull for him like I pull for race driver Earnhardt Jr, only because it seems anymore Obama's blackness is a sharp stick in the republican eye. Then again, maybe he's not. Sometimes it seems like he and the republicans are working hand-in-hand, giving appearance of opponents to keep us fooled, players playing out a fixed game. It's like our corporate rulers are the ones making decisions and telling democrats and republicans, both, what to do. For example, the "sequester." Obama's apparent strategies to stop it from happening were voided. It was a coup for the republicans that the sequester happened. Put a hundred thousand people out of work (income) and you have a republican victory. More power to the corporations too big to fail (code for prosecute).


It continues to rankle me that the bailout of the Banks "too big to fail" took billions from the tax base of the working people ("middle class") and funneled it up to the 1%. Another corporate coup. Nothing for the people whose retirement accounts and investments went *poof* as a result of the people on Wall St shifting billions from the middle class to ruling class execs. Hell no. Reward the corporations. Give them even billions more from the working people's taxes. The "bailout," according to press releases, kept the economy from tanking. The working people were already tanked. But they don't count. The working people, from the point of view of Capitalism, are the enemy. This, I believe, is the reason the "working class" is never mentioned in media. It's always "middle class," like the middle class is everybody not ruling class. It's self-defeating and funny in a not-funny way that people of the working class don't like to hear of themselves or think of themselves working class. The way things stand now, and will continue into the future, the working class is politicized against itself due entirely to shortcomings in education, easily manipulated by Karl Rove, presently. However, to the benefit of the working class, they are and will be the cops in police state. We'll have lots of police. There won't be taking any cop to court for false arrest, even with video.


The media is corporate and the News outlets are corporate, too-big-to-fail corporate. The news media of every political persuasion never make reference to the working class. The "economic downturn" pushed the working class deeper into the working poor, while corporate profits went up completely out of range, beyond even unreasonable proportion. I hear corporate news (even NPR) day after day and see facebook telling me to tell Congress and republicans what to do. I roll on the floor laughing my ass off. Tell a republican to make sense? It would be the same as telling a cat to stand up on its back feet. Sure, there is a cat that can do it on utube. And surely there is a republican somewhere who is not a screaming meme, like one I saw of Michelle Bachmann excited like she's in church, a republican rally, shouting hallelujah. In the caption, she's screaming, "Sale on Bibles at Walmart!" To quote Larry the Cable Guy, "Now that's funny." I feel like the guy in the English film, BRAZIL, caught in the Kafka world of police state. He escapes it in the end with his girlfriend, after several dreams of flying away. They find an abandoned truck and drive out of the urban mayhem into the country far from urban civilization. This is what I did 37 years ago.


Urban life was not it for me. In the country, fertile ground is my "environment," my context. In the city, cement, asphalt and artificial lawns are my environmental context. It makes for a very different way of thinking than living in the country among trees, deer, wild turkeys, rabbits, raccoons, possums, birds, sometimes a bear. A walk in the woods starts the other side of the road that runs by the house. I came to the mountains as a "Rural Romantic," intuitively knowing I would think differently and feel immensely better living close to the world of trees. Tree vibes are slower and more even than human vibes. I look at skyscrapers in NYC, every window a different consciousness, a honeycomb with cells of people living out their working lives as drones. I wonder what it would be like to live in a cell completely surrounded by thousands of frenetic spirits of human consciousness in the immediate neighborhood, and millions in the whole. In the mountains, my nearest human neighbors are half a mile away, either direction. We're not crowded (yet). The vibes I feel in my immediate environment are trees and birds. I'd rather look out my window and see rhododendron leaves and now daffodils coming up, birds hopping about looking for leftover seeds, than a used car lot, an urban intersection with several stop lights, fluorescent lights blaring all night. Then, there is the constant noise of never-ending traffic and the cloud of pollution that hovers at the level of everybody's apartment, no matter what floor. Even my horoscope says I cannot live like that.



*

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

     civil ensign of the cayman islands



I have a question that I cannot find an answer for, primarily because I'm not involved in circumstances where I could see it more closely than I do. I have an idea, however, the answer is kind of easy, using the movie detective device, follow the money. The question: Why are the corporations so dead set on destroying American Democracy and the American people? They've already destroyed both. It may not look like it yet to some, but in ten years it will be a documentary on the History channel, The Decline And Fall Of Democracy In America. It was the Southern California / Arizona / Texas right wing cancer / dark cabal that took power from the American people and turned it over to the corporate CEO hierarchy. All our laws are passed with corporate support, never without; mostly, however, with corporate deception. Our government operates by deception and the corporations operate by deception. It tells me straight up they are not interested in our well being at all. Just look at the republican party's agenda. Instead of Up With People, it's Up The People.

Corporations have arranged it so they don't pay taxes and they get billions per in government handouts, what the cartoonists are calling corporate welfare. China has the solution. Tax the corporations and use the money to the well being of the people, health care and other public benefits like infrastructure, military, government employees. Here, we the people pave the way for the corporations to run over us and pass us off as road kill. Collateral damage. Whatever. But the corporations fly the Cayman Islands flag on their yachts, not Old Glory. Those little islands have become something of an Ayn Rand haven off the coast of Cuba. A whole lot of white rich people and a whole lot of poor black servants. It might be fun to look at Cayman Islands on Google Earth, count the golf courses and swimming pools. A woman used to live here, she might still be living, though a widow to a man who drove a new gold Cadillac every year and lived year round at the Cayman Islands, evidently with a mistress, in the stock broker world there, while his wife lived at a country club here where the white people were. She came from South Georgia; she don't think too much of darkies. They made her nervous.

Throughout my lifetime I've had a driving curiosity to know all different kinds of people. Possibly it came from growing up in a world of sameness, church every day it wasn't school, Kansas, Fifties television and pop radio it for "culture." The Ed Sullivan show taught me opera singers sound like dying calves. It wasn't until I heard the beginnings of rock and roll that I felt stirred by an art form. Had no idea of art forms before. I knew there were paintings of Mona Lisa and Impressionists, but thought it beyond reach conceptually and in every other way. It had no reality in my life. Then one day when I was 18 I saw a painting by Dali in the modern art museum in Chicago of giraffes with fire on their necks like manes. That was the first unforgettable work of art that caught my attention and pushed my awe button. I wanted to see more Dali. Found a book of Dali, bought it, was blown away utterly by what I was seeing. At the same time in my life, I discovered the poetry of Robinson Jeffers. The first time I stayed up all night reading was the night of the day I bought the Vintage paperback copy of Robinson Jeffers' Selected Poems. Every one of them spoke to me. No other poet has taken me over to the degree he did.

After discovering Dali, my developing interest in art led me to Pop that was happening then, mid Sixties. Pop and abstract expressionism pulled me into interest in art of the 20th century, going to NY to see museums. Every city I go to I find the modern art museum. It's the only thing I ever want to see in any city. By now, my head is so full of so many incredibly beautiful images in painting and sculpture that I've laid eyes on in person, I feel satisfied by now that I've seen a good bit of modernist painting from Impressionists to Conceptualism (Modern period) and beyond into Post-modern and whatever being done now is called. Salvador Dali was the first artist to reel me in. I have an idea I am not the only one. Several years ago, 36 years, I was showing a book of abstract expressionist paintings to a friend who quit school after 8th grade, knew nothing about any kind of art. Looking at the pictures, he was enchanted, saying frequently, "You mean people are finally painting like this?" I said, "Yeah, he (the artist he was exclaiming over) was painting when Old Man Tom was a kid, the generation of our grandparents. He's dead of old age now." "No way!!!"

This crazy time we're in now makes me want to jump ahead to the future when the time of the Revelations prophecy has run its course. I want to be in that thousand years of peace that follows this nut-case time we're in. No more militarist thinking. What a great leap for the male gender. A chance to develop as conscious human beings instead of obedient warriors marching in lock step for an idea of control. To get that time of peace, the trouble-maker in the world that keeps peace from happening will have to be subdued by the rest of the world, perhaps like Germany and Japan after WW2. Before, they were the aggressors that kept war going wherever their pointed their focus. Now USA is doing the same thing, arm in arm with Israel, backing up Israel's arrogance as big brother. I'm wondering if at the end of this WW3 the USA will be on its knees, not allowed to have a military like Germany and Japan. Guns rounded up by Interpol and Americans as warriors shut down. It's the only way we're going to have any peace in the world. Anyway, that's how it looks. But it looks all kinds of ways. This is just one.

*