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.

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THE SOUTH AND RACISM

mary hourihan lynch

Went and watched the race today, not in a good mood. Not in a bad mood either, just dissatisfied. I need a break from television every Sunday afternoon and evening. Arrived as the race started and left soon after it was over. March Madness, saw Wichita State beat Kansas State, so glad those places are no longer in my life. The only way I can figure my soul found its way to Kansas this time was maybe I saw the movie The Wizard of Oz in last lifetime while having a miserable time of it, dreaming of Judy Garland in Kansas with red shoes, there's no place like home. All my life I've wondered what kind of karmic activity in my past landed me in Kansas and a fundamentalist church to complicate it further. Could I have been drawn to the landscape from lifetimes riding a horse and wearing feathers on the plains following the buffalo? I recall a powerful moment in childhood, some time not long after learning about the Indians from my grandmother, who had an older brother who was said to have traded horses with Sitting Bull. I felt like the Indians were my real people. I got mixed up and born into white skin this time. I remember thinking in childhood, maybe seven or eight, my people will never recognize me. I am the enemy and they can never see me any other way. It was a lonesome feeling, something like lost in space. In childhood play, I only identified with the Indians. In movies and tv westerns, I only pulled for the Indians, knowing they'd lose, but they were my people. I have never felt comfortable white, especially seeing how arrogant white people act toward people of any other pigmentation. I have never felt comfortable with people of other colors, because I can't help it I'm white. I know a lot of other white people who feel the same way. We don't make headlines. We just get called nigger lovers. 

mary hourihan lynch

And that's ok. If it wasn't that, it would be something else. This is human existence. I can't change it anyplace but in myself. Racists I know don't go about hurting black people, as far as I know. Their racism is their concern, not mine. The same as I don't want racists to have a problem with me for not being a racist, I don't have a problem with racists. It's their business. I regret that the corporate takeover of our government is so vehemently racist. It's in the nature of fascism, however, you gotta have a focus for hate. Hate is the wave fascism rides. I find it interesting, not ironic, the people who call them selves Christian cling to fascism and wallow in hate. Ask any Jew who survived the Thirties and Forties in Europe. It was Christians all over Europe killing Jews, not just the German Christians. Again, my only concern is that I do no harm to Jews, black people, Latin American people, even white people. Here, too, applies being in the world not of it. I live in a multi-cultural world. I'm ok with it being multi-cultural. I like that it is multi-cultural. I am in a given race, but I do not have to partake of the arrogance of whiteness. Racism has a place, for sure, in Southern culture, but Southern culture is not entirely racist. Look at the great Southern writers. Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers. They were not racist. Though the politicians and evangelists largely are. It's about the same mix all over the country since the rise of fascist propaganda. Here again, it's the world I live in, but I don't have to be of it, don't have to do what somebody else does. And they don't have to do what I do. My racist friends know where I stand and I know where they stand. No big deal. 

mary hourihan lynch

This is an aspect of the South the people outside the South don't get. Southerners I know tend to be tolerant of people they don't approve of or don't like. Southerners want peace among one another. I don't mean there is no fighting or hate going on, but I have found on the whole Southerners to be peaceable people in their everyday lives. I appreciate Southern culture so much, one aspect that might be objectionable does not diminish the whole. Yankees don't do well in the South, only because of their arrogance toward Southerners. Condescension is obvious from the receiving end. I recall a woman several years ago, here from Connecticut, dissatisfied after a couple years. She was wanting to kick up a fuss over how some man kept his dog. She called herself an animal rescuer. She wanted to force him to take better care of his dog by some kind of idea of justice. She'd got herself into a fix that frightened her. I told her let it rest. You're in the South. You don't tell a man in the South what to do with his property, and to some a dog is property. She couldn't let it rest, it wasn't right. I attempted to explain right has nothing to do with it. I reminded her that in the South she is a foreigner, she has no backup. I recommended she let the dog issue rest. She couldn't do it. It wasn't right. She pursued it, got herself into a heap of trouble by way of threats, freaked out and left the county. She loved it here, but it wasn't enough like where she came from. She could not accept the people around her as themselves. She wanted them to be different. She was so caught up in being right, my talk about letting it go was, itself, not right. She wanted to be right. Ok. Be right. Have a good time.

mary hourihan lynch

I don't have to be every aspect of Southern culture to live happily in the South. For example, I'm not interested in college football games or barbecue. But I do like the Allman Brothers, George Thorogood and the Dirty South Revolutionaries. The South has many sub-cultures, all of them Southern. All have that something special that is Southern. It's an identity with the South, not an ideology or political belief system, nor a religion. The South has Catholic churches and synagogues aplenty, as well as temples of all the religions. There is a Tibetan monastery in Georgia.  We live in peace as Southerners. The greatest characteristic I know of the South is the readiness to allow others to be who they are. Though certain aspects of the belief systems don't necessarily accord with what they claim to believe, it's tradition and that's the end of it. Some years ago a Yankee friend told me it is my responsibility to teach one of my racist friends not to be a racist. I said it is not my responsibility. He believed it was. I maintained it was not. I still believe it is not my responsibility to set out to change anybody's pattern of thinking, not even my right. I woke this morning with the incident in my mind, talking with self about allowing others the autonomy of their own minds. I don't know of another way to live in peace with the people in my world, wherever I live, all the way to rural Thailand. I allow them their own understandings, they allow me mine. I don't like Jehovah's Witnesses coming to my door telling me they're right and I'm wrong. It seems to me basic human decency to allow others their own autonomy. If I expect to be allowed my own, then I allow others their own. For me to tell somebody else their way of thinking is unacceptable and must change, I'm giving somebody down the line permission to do the same to me.  
  

janice lynch schuster and her mother mary hourihan lynch

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THE LAND OF FORBIDDEN WORDS

Have been questioning what to write about. Don't want to bring readers down by being honest and don't want to misrepresent my meaning by pretending to be up when I'm not. My being, from blood vessels to aura, rejects s'posed-to for s'posed-to sake. Comes under grandmother saying, "What will people think?" I want to ask her what people? Everybody will think what they think and it will be about themselves, not me, whatever it is they think. I'm torn between two worlds, one going out and one coming in. The one going out is familiar, the one coming in is not. The police brutality I've been seeing lately disturbs me. It's only new because cellphones with video cameras are new recording the brutality that has always been going on. Ask anyone black. Since the "patriot act," we-the-people is a concept of the past. We the people have no recourse with "law enforcement" invasions or executions. White people subject to police brutality are enraged, while the black people know to take it as the way things are. I did not realize that black people were in the cops' cross-hairs to the degree they are. Every day an unarmed black man, woman or child is killed. He had a gun. I was afraid for my life. Meaning: it was a nigger. That's all the evidence needed to clear the cop of "wrong-doing." It's looking like our judicial system is dead set on eliminating the black people by way of prison or killing. 

Sometimes when I read Cornell West or hear him in an interview, he surprises me, but never shocks me. I did not understand, before the Ferguson, Missouri, murders, how consciously black people are targeted by "law enforcement." That cops kill is now policy. The closest to punishment they're given is a paid vacation--lay low a few weeks until the press forgets about it. White corporate media looks the other way, white people pay it no mind. In the world of white people, black people don't figure at all, except it's unacceptable in white middle class circles to say nigger. Not that black people matter to them. It's a code indicating status. It's about self and has nothing to do with black people. Cornell West surprises me when he reveals what black people are thinking. It's not shocking, because it's what an oppressed people would be thinking. White people keeping black people down is denied in white circles and a way of life in black circles. Black people, rightfully for self-preservation, know to keep their thinking to their own circles. Thus stretching the racial divide even wider. This just one of the many divisions widening in our time. I saw a video clip today from a courtroom where a black woman was in the witness stand talking to and about the cop that shot her granddaughter in the head while sleeping, after breaking into her house, and wrongfully accusing her of resisting the thug invasion. My heart wrung dry for the woman wailing openly in public with a courtroom full of white people looking at her, the stone faces of statues. Totally indifferent. But nobody will say nigger. That's disrespectful. 

If you want to know what the cops are thinking, listen to Rush Limbaugh. Angry. Angry cause the enwords are living on welfare white folks are paying into. Yer taxes is going to pay enwords not to work, make em lazier'n ever. I was thinking in the UK they have a law about hate speech in media, so Rupert Murdoch crossed the sea where corporate control wants hate media. Keeps the masses divided, keeps them hating each other while they all get fleeced. The cops there kill very few. I won't venture that the Brits are less racist than Americans, but they are much less violent about it. Also, they're not a gun culture. I don't want to play the game of one place is better or worse than another. Though we live in the most violent culture on earth, I am able to live my life in peace, except for the violence that comes through the news. I saw a preview, a trailer, of a movie a few days ago with a title I made it a point not to notice, guns pointing, guns shooting, guns threatening, gunshots echoing. Fast forward. I do like the occasional men-with-guns movie, but only as a genre, now and then. The little tv I see a week, Sunday afternoon races, football, basketball, baseball, golf, commercials, does something to my head, especially the commercials, the interruptions by commercials. I see them, but turn them off in my head, a fiction I like to believe for self-justification. After seeing a Burger King commercial, driving through town, seeing the Burger King building, the commercial gives it something of a golden glow. It bothers me to see the fakery of corporate media creating a fake world that gives propaganda reality. "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American people believe is false." Spoken by William Casey, 1981, CIA director. Their program is accomplished. We are there. 

I've been snapping in my mind today at people who want everything to be sweet and lovely, blue skies every day, the bluebird of happiness flying by, perish a negative thought. Positive thinking is only half of it. I'm laughing at self thinking of the Carter Family, Keep On The Sunny Side, and Jimmy Martin's Sunny Side of the Mountain, how I love these songs for their meaning, understanding the sunny side of the mountain is where things grow best. I tell myself to forget about cops killing black people, and white people now too. The only thing it tells me is the police hate us. We read that loud and clear. And they don't like the hate that's coming back at them. Makes them hate us all the more. Justice isn't even a word anymore. I tell myself to quit thinking about such as this. And I do. Yet it lurks in the back of my mind when I'm acting like it's not there. I tell myself it's not my concern, I'm neither black nor a cop. However, what it tells me is when they decide to put me in the cross-hairs, I have no recourse either. To ignore this is to ignore police state. What else can I do? They have the guns and the law literally on their side. In this time, I am a criminal just by being a citizen. I think it's called fascism, another word it's not polite to use in public. The other F-word. This is the north side of the mountain, the part that's in the shade when the sunny side of the mountain is in full sun and I'm thinking it's wonderful. It is. And it's also the other. It's both. It's the yin and yang, balance. Though I like the peace where I am, I still live in this landscape of commerce and state that I live in. It's the broader landscape. I cannot deny it. Have no reason to deny it. The sunny side has no meaning without the dark side. The dark side has no meaning without the sunny side. Sorrow for my black brothers and sisters overwhelms me in a time when this understanding of the racist nature of the justice system is new to me. I knew it was racist before, but not like what I see now. Even the pope can't do anything about it. All I know to do is not be part of the problem. I can't change the justice system. It's the world I live in. I don't have to be of it. I continue to go my own way. 

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HANGING ON TO POWER

 

 

arshile gorky

This has been a good day for laughing at myself. The emotional and mental turmoil of this week past has disturbed my inner peace, my quiet, like jumping off a diving board and doing a cannonball to make water rumble to the other end of the pool and splash on everybody around the pool. This is days later, half a week, and I'm still charged to the nerve endings. It's like I can feel the lines of nerves in the body. The experience with law enforcement leaves me feeling powerless, and that causes in turn the reaction: I'm not giving my power away. It's the Brer Rabbit in me. Some time ago in childhood I saw the Disney feature-length cartoon, Song of the South. The story of Brer Rabbit became my childhood identity. "You can do anything, but please don't throw me in the briar patch." The characters being mean to him took it to be a good idea of what to do with Brer Rabbit. They threw him in the briar patch and he hopped about dancing and singing, "I was born in a briar patch," happy to be home. Even in the Navy where I was never what they called "squared away," my theme song was, I was born in a briar patch. Squared away was an identity I could not accept for myself. In that time, the time between Korean War and Vietnam War, the term "Gung Ho" was relatively new from the Korean War era. Gung Ho meant squared away and inspired to be the best you can be. I was never gung ho either. It was an insult to tell somebody he was gung ho.

 

arshile gorky

 

It is in my horoscope and I see it throughout my life that I react when expected to adhere to false values. I've been careful not to make too much of an issue about hypocrisy in others, it's such a subtle expression it runs through everybody at one time or another. I cannot say I've never been hypocritical. I don't recall, because I never noticed. It's not something we notice in ourselves so easily. I've been careful about the use of the word, because it is so overused by the self-righteous of religious or political belief systems, which are about the same thing anymore. Often hypocrisy a word used to point blame without much attention to the word's meaning. The only way I've found I can live without entertaining false values in the way we are now is to stay at home, certainly never get involved in money dealings. I was told once not many years ago I was a fool for not paying attention to the stock market. I laughed within. I've known too many people who let the stock market rule their mental and emotional life each day. The only time Wall Street matters to me is when they rip off the entire middle class of their retirement savings. What happens then? Wall Street stripped the middle class of its resources and got a pat on the back, well done. I refuse to partake of that world. I saw too many Recessions in the Eisenhower years to endear me to corporations. I vowed to myself in teenage years never to work for a corporation or a factory of any sort.

arshile gorky

 

In the last year of college several corporations sent recruiters to offer jobs to graduates. I didn't go anywhere near them, didn't want them to see me. This was late 1960s. I'd already been through my military obligation (the draft) for being born male in a warrior society. I was ten times the rebel I was before going into the very core of fascism, military. As I see fascism push American democracy aside, it flares my flame of rage deep within. When I feel it clutching my heart and squeezing down on it, I pull back telling myself it's not worth an emotional reaction. I'm powerless against it. It is what the corporate takeover of our government and legal system has given us in the name of freedom and liberty. The best I can do about it is ignore it and live my life.

Not any of those people care anything about me but what money they can get out of me. So why do I care about them? I can't care about them. They work for corporate power that has destroyed the democracy of my country and it's legal system. I can't prevent it, because it's already done. Therefore, I make so little money, and have all my life, that none can be taken away. I have no problem of people hanging onto me because they think my money will rub off. No one rubs up against me for my influence. I have none. That's how I designed it from the beginning. Here, in the time of looking back, I see it has served me well all the way along. It has kept superficial people away. I don't have to avoid them.

 

arshile gorky

 

Just before I started this writing, I was looking for a song by Nina Hagen on YouTube, clicked and the cursor was on a trailer for a movie, Twelve Years a Slave. Early in it, one slave said to a new slave to the plantation, "If you want to survive, do and say as little as possible." That rang my bell. Sound counsel. The recent NSA findings released by whistleblower Snowden confirm it just like in slavery days, we have to watch what we do and say. Some pigs are more equal than others. People who have perceived power are jealous of that power. It can slip away too easily. The power they have is the power of people who give them their own power. I will not give a politician or a corporate exec my power. This brought up a funny memory. One day some people were standing around my mailbox waiting for another car of people to arrive toward a walk to the waterfalls. A man maybe ten years my junior, expensive car, expensive casual clothes, country club sticker on the car. He spoke. We talked briefly. He told me he had once played football for the KC Chiefs. He looked for that excitement in my eyes of being impressed that he had actually been on television and played football. Hot dang. I wished he hadn't said it; I could not summon even a fake version of being impressed. I saw that's what I was called upon to do, to stroke him and give him my power. I had to fess up and tell him I don't watch tv. He would not have been impressed if I had told him I used to paint houses.

 

arshile gorky

 

It cannot be said that I'm becoming an intractable old turd, because I have been for many a year. It's my nature. I like it. I shop locally as much as possible, trying not to need or want anything that can't be found locally. By giving my power, I mean when I feel my heart get involved, that clutching feeling in the heart of commitment. It also means giving someone else authority over my decisions by influence. Sending money to a cause is one way of giving our power. When it comes to giving charity money, I prefer local again. There was a time I sent a little bit of money from time to time to some animal saving outfit based in DC. I got to thinking about the expense of their offices, paying all their employees, my little bit maybe pays for a hundred stamps on fundraising envelopes. That's spread too thin for me. I'd rather give to the local food closet. None of it is skimmed off by bureaucracy. And Alleghany BROC, where every cent given works toward the intended purpose. Because of distaste for corporate chicanery, I keep my power at home as much as possible. I like to save it for my life. I cannot give what little money power I have to politicians or religionists. It has to be something practical that works in the world of people in my home county. Everyplace in the world has people who need help. Why would I send money to help Ugandan orphans when plenty of people in my home county need help? I'm so sympathetic with the Ugandan orphans I realize how helpless I am to help. The same in Sudan, Namibia, Indonesia; every place in the world has heart-wrenching issues people are dealing with. I can't go over there. But I can do a little bit at home for the people of my world. This way I'm not frivolous with my power, in my way of seeing.

self portrait

arshile gorky

 

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