SUBJECTIVE UNIVERSE

joel shapiro

Just now had a brief flash of a concern in childhood I've carried all the way along. I had a hard time talking like other kids. They seemed to flow freely when they talked. I didn't know what to talk about. Subjects that interested me were of no interest to anybody else. I wanted to talk about "deep" stuff, "heavy" stuff, which I took for life. I'm remembering a woman I've known awhile, at a cocktail party talking about every detail of what her children did that day. I had to walk away. I thought, Shit, is this what people talk about? I reminded self, this is why I stay at home. Two-thirds of a century of television. And now we have killer cops as a rule. I'm paranoid about driving on a public road anymore. I stay out of group scenes because I never know what to talk about, and when I do talk, I ask self, why are you talking? You're focusing all your attention on saying the least in the most words. Only way you can be acceptable at a group gathering where everybody stands around in small circles of four or five and talk as fast as they can go getting nothing at all said. I can't exist like that. Since childhood I've been speechless in a group of more than half a dozen people. I'd rather listen, then I get called out for judging everybody. What? Whatever. So I stay home where I belong. It's even tiresome in cocktail parties where everybody reads. It's even more difficult to be in a room of people where nobody reads. That's where I'm really lost. I've taught self how to be comfortable in a world of people that don't read. I'm as comfortable now with people who don't read as well as people who read. It's a major gulf, a grand canyon between the two. Totally different ways of thinking and interpreting. 

joel shapiro

In the city, I worked in a bookstore and my social world was all people who read. Also, nearly everybody I knew was a Democrat. I came to the mountains and know precious few people who read and almost everybody I know is a Republican. The other side of the coin. I meet somebody who reads and it's Tom Clancy. Last year I thought about reading a Clancy novel to see if it would pull me through it, feeling in need of a page-turner. I opened a copy and saw in the front "dedicated to Ronald Reagan." I put the book down like it spontaneously combusted. Somebody that much a Reaganista I don't need in my head. I don't mean to imply I believe readers are more intelligent than nonreaders. I've not found that to be so. I include people who read only the Bible among readers. I feel like when I'm reading somebody's writing, I'm tapping into another perspective of the world I live in as a human being. This can be done, too, just knowing somebody. Knowing somebody is much better than reading what somebody has to say. Knowing somebody, I'm in touch with another perspective, somebody with valuable insights, whoever it is. Reading what somebody has to say is another way of knowing somebody. Reading Henry Miller, I am in touch with someone who has become my friend through reading. It's something like a facebook friend I've never met, though have come to know over a few years that if we were to meet, we'd be friends in the way our minds resonate. I have several facebook friends I'd love a chance to meet, or even better have them in my community, in my immediate world. And people I already know who are facebook friends, the facebook interactions add to our friendship. 

joel shapiro

This blog has become my friend. It's my journal. This is the place where I can open up and flow freely as myself in self-exploration. It's something on the order of the psychotherapist's couch where I look for perspective. I don't concern myself with opening up publicly. It's not "the public" seeing it. I feel like anyone reading any of these journal entries is my friend. It's easy to open up with friends. This journal is also an exercise that started as a discipline and became so much fun that the word discipline has no relevance. I associate discipline with marching, standing at attention, doing something I don't want to do under duress. I wanted to write every day, make myself write every day, even when I don't want to. I allow missing a day or two a week for recharging the battery. To do it every day without a break would be punishment. I don't believe discipline equals punishment. Earlier, I was thinking about skipping today and having a good sleep. I've learned that when I'd rather not write is when I write my best. I like writing in the midnight hour. It's midnight now. A good time to start. I like best writing while most of the people in my time zone are sleeping. It is this journal I go to for meditation. These writings read like I wrote them out in the time it would take to copy one. Each one is a meditation. I approach first sentence with empty mind, no idea of where I want to go, put down a first sentence and see what follows. Something happens. Right away I'm in a groove, one sentence follows another. I go with the wind like a butterfly to see where it takes me. I like flying through the interior landscape. Some of it I like to look at, some of it I don't. Both have equal value. Balance is what I look for, a Taoist balance. 

joel shapiro

The writing is first person subjective experience. I've come to believe the subjective is is where "truth" is to be found better than in the objective. I take objective for scientific method. It works good for documentaries. I'm not writing a documentary. I am limited to my own point of view. I have access to no other, but in reading or knowing somebody. I observe and interpret by way of my own point of view. I look at the variety of comments that come up on various political issues and it makes me glad I don't know any of those people. What I'm getting at is the radical difference of perspective from one to the next. The comments are so adamant they make me distrust my own opinions. I distrust them anyway. I don't recall ever being comfortable having opinions. Of course I have them, even when I don't call them opinions. It boils down to point of view, each of us having our own. I'm writing here as one person in one place in one time. A subjective historical document, a collection of letters. Gore Vidal gave good reason why we have no history. History is written from diaries, journals, autobiography and letters, all of which are self-serving, and newspaper articles we all know are not accurate. He points out for me that what we have for history is subjective. We have access to no other way of seeing, but by data. Then we make sense of the data subjectively. Reason introduces some objective, a good balance for the subjective. I like to weave reason into my subjective point of view for balance. I know I can never be right about anything. I'm in the world of illusion where what I think is going on aint it, whatever it is. I float along the best I can like staying upright in a kayak through white water and calm.

joel shapiro himself

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FANTASY IS REALITY

 

Every day I ask myself why I waste my time and mind paying attention to national and international news. I remind myself often to let it all go, leave it to them that want it. Evidently I want it. I justify interest by believing I like to know the signs of tsunami coming before it reaches my shore. I'm not sure there is anything to that. The news, current events, gives me the illusion in my mental construct of how I imagine "things" are that I understand what is "going on." I get a false report from one place, a false report from another, put them together and conclude I have a true report. I read in one of Gore Vidal's essays years ago that we have no history. History is written from letters, journals, memoirs, all of which are self-serving, and newspaper reports that we all know are incorrect. I recall wondering about this in school, though not nearly so articulately, questioning I had to put aside to pass the tests. The contest between Putin and Obama I look at like I think I have some understanding, but know that I actually have none. They are no more than names and faces for me, both of very different worlds, different minds from my own. I don't even understand my world.

 

 

 

I'm guessing the appeal of keeping up with the news is ongoing alterations and additions to the construct in my mind of "what's going on." A serial, tune-in-tomorrow. We call it "keeping up." Even ones who don't pay attention have a mental construct of what it is they ignore. The most recent news is the Somali terrorist attack on a mall in Nairobi, Kenya. Suddenly it occurred to me what a misfortune it must be to have Somalia share your border in the state Somalia is in now, no law, no government, lotsa guns. It's even more a rogue state than USA. It's what the Teabaggers in America want, but they say, "Not like that." How else? White instead of black? The Wild West has been an idea we in America have longed to go back to, the Golden Age, where we're so free we need to carry guns and ammo everywhere we go to protect ourselves from other free people, and everybody is like in John Wayne movies. What I suspect this really translates to is the 1950s, the television idea of culture with Andy Griffith, Ozzie & Harriet, Father Knows Best and a host of others. Some years ago a woman from the Florida Keys asked me if the people here in the mountains were like on Andy Griffith Show. I said, There's nobody like that anywhere. Made her mad. She wouldn't have any more to do with me. 

 

 

 

 

The Fifties television idea of life in the middle-class suburb was as far off the beam as the television idea of the Wild West. History and contemporary living were idealized unto children's fairy tales and stuck as the character of what we think used to be. That silly thing about the Fonz representing a Fifties hood (hoodlum) is as far-fetched as the white (Syrian) actor, Michael Ansara, playing Cochise the Apache warrior. These are slap-stick representations. Hubert Selby's Last Exit To Brooklyn is a closer representation of the time than any of the tv shows. And it was site specific. It appears that the Fifties television fantasy has set the standard for middle-class American culture. The politicians attempt to apply that Fifties gloss on themselves and pretend to live by the fairy tale as if it were reality itself. These are the hollow people TS Eliot wrote about. I hear George Clinton singing in my head, Fantasy is reality in the world today. It's a fantasy we buy with mental and emotional investment as well as with our money. What kind of fantasy is involved in buying a Cadillac pickup? I'd guess a different fantasy for each buyer.

 

 

 

I want to separate myself from the mind of what makes our news events happen. I'm like a Teabagger where the news is concerned: no news is good news. I could remind myself of that more often. I have a better day in the spirit when I pay no attention to who is killing whom. We make assessments about "this country" from daily news. Surprise people mowing down a bunch of people by surprise is surrealism itself. Can I say this is a surrealist country? Yes. No. The question encompasses a great big land with several cultures, economic levels, belief systems. How can I assess the whole from a few parts? That's what I do. It's the best I can do. It's not much. It's entirely illusion. Maybe I'd do a whole lot better ignoring news events from different places in the world, paying less attention to American political news. At the same time I look at what I believe I know as illusion inside illusion, I remind myself I believe it responsible to pay attention when one lives in a democracy. I know better than to act like we're in democracy, but so what? I don't have a great many years to go. Why spend my last years frustrated watching the decline and fall of the American Empire with so much attachment I get worked up and pist off? I remind myself I'm not in a democracy any more and it doesn't do to pay too much attention in a totalitarian state. I must withdraw further.

 

 

 

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COLIN POWELL EASY TARGET

Colin Powell would do best to stay at home and watch television. I can't imagine how he justifies his participation among republicans that point their racism at him, an easy target. It's like in the Sixties when the Black Panthers were staging evening news events, going into the churches of white liberals and demanding "reparations." I wondered what would happen if they went into a Baptist church toting shotguns and demanding money. I suppose they wondered too, the reason they only picked on liberals. They cracked me up in that time pointing their racism at easy targets, people that appeal to reason and logic before they point fingers. Now the republicans are bashing Colin Powell again for being dumb enough to associate with them. I thought the Cheney-Rummy-Bush triumvirate burned Powell bad enough a blister to keep him out of their circles. He talks like he thinks the republican party has reason tucked away in some out of sight niche, if he continues to talk sense, maybe it will connect with somebody in the party who has some sense. It has never happened for him. Cheney-Rummy-Bush set him up to be the stooge for their lies about WMD and got Powell discredited and out of their way. Powell is now back saying racism and intolerance characterize the republican party. Duh. Now they're all over him running him down, calling him a fool in their third grade tone of voice: So there!

I saw it in a video clip somebody put up on facebook, Americans Against The Republican Party. I went there to see what they had to say, but turned it off 30 sec into it. It's that So there! attitude they spit in your face when they talk about (oh no!) liberals. So there liberals! Being a somewhat rational man, the republican party is no place for Colin Powell. I don't know why he keeps on going back for more unless his publicist is telling him negative attention is better than no attention, or unless he really is not rational. Dems don't want him same as they don't want Joe Lieberman. The republicans shit in Powell's face, he goes back for more, they rub it in and he doesn't get it. He must have more invested in reason and logic as human motivation than I do. I learned many years ago never to expect reason or logic, unless maybe in a test question. I am coming to see that Powell wants reason and logic to be a factor in the world he lives in so much that he goes about acting like they function for him. Maybe he's practicing the principle of being the change he wants to see in the world. Maybe he thinks if he believes enough that republicans can be rational, his belief will make it happen. If so, it failed to work out.

I'm not going to complain about the implosion of the republican party. I'm happy to see the party of lies, assassinations, deception, racism, sexism, hate, contempt for the American people, the party of uneducated white men, the party attempting to turn forward momentum to backward momentum, happy to see the party fade away as do individuals who build their reputations on falsehoods. It works for awhile. Then it doesn't work at all. They're going into the doesn't-work-at-all phase. The funny part is by now their lies and chicanery are not fooling anybody but themselves. Occasionally I'll look at something on youtube from Fox. Every time, I think nobody can believe this but people who want to believe it. They get together convinced they're right and always have been, reinforce each other with agreement and emphatic tones of voice. Like at a Southern Baptist convention where they're expected to believe alike, and pat themselves on the back for it. Sameness confirms rightness. It must be why they're called the Right. They're right about the way they see everything. Being right is very important. It's the foundation of their smarty-pants tones of voice. Laura Ingraham on Fox talks like Ann Coulter, the blond mini-skirted Barbie in highest of all possible heels. I laugh every time I see something of these blond commentators with the camera looking directly between their legs requiring them to keep their legs tightly crossed with hand on miniskirt holding it down. They squirm keeping their legs together, except Ann Coulter. What a riot she is.

Gore Vidal's words ring in my mind, When Americans can't recognize stupid, we're out of business. Not all Americans, by any means. Maybe "out of business" will be localized to republican party, the ones that embrace stupid. Mark Twain has a saying something like, "It's easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled." That's what the republican party and Fox pretend-news knows. And they count on the American attention span being shorter than a cat's. This isn't to say everybody. Just enough to make 51% a challenge. A century and a half of the science of psychology, our people with mental issues are on the streets and in prisons without being charged or tried. The knowledge gained from the science of psychology is used in advertising, propaganda, population manipulation. We're told that gun violence in movies, easy killing, does not influence people who watch it. Maybe not once, but watch it every day of your life and it has some kind of influence. Advertisers pay an awful lot for a half minute to influence your mind. I think they know something the purveyors of killing as entertainment also know. I see the Yeats line, the center does not hold. Centrifugal force without gravity. Interesting time in that way. This is how a belief system flies apart. It can be looked at as sad. It can be looked at as necessary to break down the old calcified belief systems that have become tradition and need changing. They have to go before we can move forward to the next phase of our collective development as Americans and as human beings.


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ELECTION DAY 2012: TRUE OR FALSE

Election day today, I stopped by the Whitehead voting place at the Whitehead Community Center that once was the Whitehead School. I've given this vote much thought, not about who to vote for, but whether or not to vote. I see voting since the so-called Patriot Act, the constitution for police state, a sham used to keep we-the-powerless-meat-people believing we still have democracy, to keep the American Fantasy full of hot air. I came to see voting as a social act in the world of people I live among who continue to believe we have democracy, and I see myself wanting democracy back, so I vote to be one digit that says I want democracy. The thought that set me into action more than any other was thinking if I don't vote I've not cancelled a republican vote, meaning I give the republicans one vote I might have cancelled. You see, I'm not a democrat or libertarian or communist or anything organized. I'm a single-digit anti-republican. Democrats are not anti-republican enough to suit me. I vote democrat because they are the only opposition. A vote for a libertarian is a vote for a republican by not adding one more to the count against the republicans.

The election results are coming in now. In an hour or less the West Coast voting establishments will be closed. I don't want to hear this state and that state and the building of the drama. I'll wait til after midnight and see what they're saying. Then wait til morning to get the news that the republicans are calling on the anti-democracy supreme court to nullify the election results and make the losers the winners again. It's what they packed the court with "wingnuts" for. There will have to be some kind of republican chicanery before the counting is over. I saw Mitch McConnell on 60 Minutes Sunday, not because I was interested to hear what he had to say that was totally predictable, but because I wanted to see him talk. I wanted to see his face when he lied and only lied. I saw a tight-lipped smart-mouth pudgy little brat. I looked at him as someone I was meeting the first time, thinking if he were face-to-face talking to me at the coffee shop, I wouldn't believe a word he said and I'd be feeling to see if my billfold was still in my pocket. Another republican parrot. Willful ignorance out in the open, paraded and bragged upon. The image about Fox News above that I found on facebook tells it best of all the "memes" I've seen that are anti-republican, many of them awfully funny.

Yesterday on YouTube I saw that blond airhead "commentator" from Fox talking with Bill Maher. I don't ever see her, because she talks republican parrotry that is too predictable to be entertaining or interesting in any way. She was retarded. She reminded me of the woman I heard on a call to the 911 phone on YouTube wanting the highway department to move the "deer crossing" signs to places with less traffic. Ann Coulter is her name. I had to go to YouTube and look up the video I saw to get her name. Pathetic where intelligence is concerned. She might have passed a lot of tests and done well in school as a robot student, but it certainly shows she never learned a thing about thinking for oneself. She's the blond parrot. She looked like a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader gone to seed, and struck me the female counterpart of Rush Limbaugh, propagandists to the gullible. That the press takes Romney seriously and half the population does too, brings to mind every time I think about it, Gore Vidal saying, "When Americans don't recognized stupid, we're out of business." Yes, we are indeed out of business. My concern is that it looks more like Americans do recognize stupid. Stupid is what they want in their representatives, at least half of them. Very odd. Half a century of television.

I'm seeing in this year's electioneering process the republican side with no apparent agenda, anything that comes up, no concern about being called continually on lies, blatant obvious lies. Commentators and the television/radio reporters act like Romney is actually speaking with substance, though they never talk about the substance. In the first "debate" Romney trumped Obama with ignorance, the Karl Rove trump card, absence of substance. It rattled Obama like it was intended by the master propagandist to do. The only reason I can find for why the republicans stood by this obvious serial liar Romney is because he was a white man. Liar identified his character a white man, verifying his allegiance to his skin color. The only republican agenda was get-the-nigger. It went completely unsaid throughout the campaign, and understood by all in the white racist party. In their panic at the point where people of color outnumber white people from here on, I'm seeing White Man prefers racism to democracy. The South turned democracy aside after Emancipation because the black folks outnumbered the white folks. A serious threat. White folks aint having no nigras lording it over them. It aint gonna happen in America. Democracy is not that important. As we have seen.

I refuse to let myself get wound up with worry and hope for something I have no control over. I have seen that willful ignorance is what it takes to vote republican. This year's was the most interesting republican strategy I've ever seen. Obstruction by lies and using lies to catch the other off guard by ambush was the only strategy used. Lies and stupid statements were adhered to all the way along the campaign. Because they are lies and stupid. Lies and stupid made a great strategy against a man whose mind republicans can't out-smart, but Karl Rove knew how to trip him up and keep him off balance as much as possible by surprise attacks of stupid and lies. Romney was the perfect puppet to lie and talk stupid. It showed me that the people siding with these open liars, republicans, do recognize stupid when they see it. Stupid is evidently what they want. Gore Vidal thought Americans didn't want stupid, but it really looks like at least half of them actively want it. Even if Romney doesn't win, it's a really bad show that whatever percentage of votes go to Romney is too high a percentage for comfort. Considering however many people voted republican, we have that many people evidently wanting stupid with a passion. It's alarming even to have more than a handful.


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DEMOCRACY WHEN

        christopher wool, untitled

Heard a news report from corporate media via NPR that the US Congress came together in agreement and voted almost unanimously, with 4 against, to make political protest illegal with stiff penalties in prison (of course). Prison is the answer to everything in the land of the free. Serious prison sentence for protesting now. Funny this would come up at the same time Russia is visited by the question of what to do in a police state about people who are out of control. I remember a time when a law made against protesting would be called "Communist," the word in the 50s and 60s for police state, which we so obviously have here that the entire Congress votes to outlaw political protest. Not a whimper of opposition. During the Bush administration protest became illegal, keeping them in cages, and now in the Obama administration protest is officially declared against the law in "the land of the free." It's the end of that phrase ever being used again except as intended irony. I want to be for Obama, but cannot. He has shown me nothing but appealing to the masses with silver-tongued "I'm gonna," and what he delivers is billions of tax dollars from the working people to the corporate greed machine that brought us to Depression. And the billions the people of the middle class were banking on, gone with the wind to the tax-free Cayman Islands.


Obama has shown me nothing over the last four years but giving in to republicans, talking big about what he's doing for We-the-People, but when it comes down to business, we get passed by and the assist goes to the Bank. More of the Reaganista "trickle down" smokescreen, a code word for funnel up. Continuation of taking from the working people and giving to the rich. For us, We-the-People, it is a disgrace that in "the land of the free" there was no outcry, not even a whimper about the travesty of the entire Congress curtaling a basic freedom of the democracy that used to be. I hear talk about Arab countries, getting them involved in democracy. Save a heathen for Christ. The country enforces democracy by pre-emptive strikes that ultimately destroy defenseless countries of colored people in a colonialist will to genocide for their resources. The country playing King of the World has thrown democracy out of its government and goes on preaching democracy around the world. It's like Kansas fundamentalists whose duty it is to browbeat others about Jesus and have no idea what they're talking about. Jesus who really did not die, died for your sins. How can that be? Never mind. Believe it or you'll go to hell. :D


Looking backward at Democracy in America, what used to be, if it ever was, from the time of WW2 truly active democracy, the real thing, has become "radical." Take at look at the tv channel Democracy Now. The people on there look like serious radicals of the 50s. They look like people who read books, even. It cracks me up to see these serious people, who used to have radical left wing socialist ideologies, now are serious about democracy as a losing cause. Democracy is the next new thing, evidently. Like Gore Vidal said in an an interview I saw from Democracy Now, he did not see it coming that the republic was so easy to everthrow, and the public never noticed. He appeared to be a bitter old man in his 80s seeing his precious nation he's studied and loved all his life go down the drain into a corporate police state. In photographs of him in his later years, bitterness had fixed itself in his face. His writing was outraged that the Bush-Cheney-Rummy-Rice Junta took over the government by coup. Obama, like I said, isn't showing me anything at all. He has a charisma in his talk that calls one to come along, but I've never seen what he calls us to of any real benefit to We-the-People, but more subservience to corporate absolute power, which is what he obviously "represents." He sure does not represent We-the-People in any way I read his actions. Words are cheap. He sometimes strikes me a republican in democrat clothes, like Joe Lieberman.


I'm seriously thinking about joining the American left wing, the half of the population that does not vote. Heretofore, I've voted as an act of protest, to say I want democracy. Now that protest is against the law, I think I'll just drop out. That's what the "corporate elite" want me to do. Makes me want to stay in and keep on voting just to defy them. But it's nothing to them if I vote or if I don't. It only matters to me. I feel like I'm participating in democracy by voting, even though I know my vote counts for nothing at all. In 1968 when Johnson hoodwinked the American people (again) by telling the American corporate press what to say of the Vietnam March before the event started. The press faithfully reported the lie. Obviously, it was a lie. I read NY Times, Wash Post, AP, Time, Newsweek, US News, and they all reported the very same story, none of it true. Then, I think it was Nat Hentoff who wrote an article for the Village Voice (before Rupert Murdock bought it to silence it) telling about Johnson's press conference and the truth of what happened at the occasion. Norman Mailer wrote about it Armies Of The Night and he, too, told of the Johnson press conference. I went to the event. I looked at the various news sources the next day. That day I swore off any involvement in politics. Today, Obama is inspiring me to swear off voting. I can't vote for either him or nit-wit Mitt. I can't vote FOR anybody in the election chain of command, top to bottom, have never had the opportunity to vote for anybody. All my voting has been against. I think in French it's je refuse.


Voting is a sham in a police state. We may not have many more years of voting. Another saying from Gore Vidal in the Democracy Now interview, "If the American people can't read stupid, we're out of business." Meaning, we're out of business. The republicans are dead set collectively on destroying our government, out in the open sedition, unto self-destructively dead set against democracy. My hope is they will self-destruct sooner than later. I don't hope anything politically in a police state. Another problem I have with Obama is he has come on to us like he's Mister On-our-side. I see him dancing the jig to get votes, but his allegiance is more to the Bilderberg Group than it is to thee and me. Or so it appears. Given that the republicans control the democrats and have since Reagan times. Republicans move to the right, Democats move to the right. Step by step, the republicans have walked the Democrats all the way over into the right wing, unto the legislation of the last few days, democrats in league with republicans making protest by the electorate illegal. I think I'm done voting. As of now, voting looks denial of police state.


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GORE VIDAL 1925-2012

One of the great minds in American writing has left the body. At 86 Gore Vidal came down with pneumonia, something that afflicts people in their 80s rather often, and now is on the other side. He was in a wheelchair and not looking well in video I've seen of him in recent years. 86 is a good time to go when you're dependent and tired of not being well. Earlier today I was talking with someone I know in the coffee shop who talked about how sad he was over Doc Watson's dying. I was wondering why when he asked how I responded to the news of Doc dying. I said I didn't feel much of anything about it. He asked if I didn't like Doc Watson. I said I like him a lot, but I don't know him, never met him, never talked with him, never shook his hand. I saw him in concert, but I see a lot of people in concert. People are born, people die. I feel sorrow when a friend dies, but not when a celebrity I only know of as a celebrity dies. I'd come closer to mourning Gore Vidal, because I've read a lot of his writing, not anywhere near enough of it to suit me, and I love his writing, I love his mind and appreciate what I know of him as a human being.


American History has been Vidal's intellectual study all the way along. He's written a series of novels of American history, some of which were Burr, Lincoln, 1876, and quite a number of others. One of my favorite of his books is United States: Essays 1952-1992, a collection of his articles for magazines through those 40 years. I've read his autobiography, Palimpsest, which I didn't take for as interesting as his other writing. The man spends about all his time writing and reading. What other life does he have? I don't care. It's his writing, his thinking I like to read. I like the way he thinks. He is straight-forward on every topic of his attention. He seems to me another kind of Noam Chomsky voice, though in his own way that's not anything like Chomsky's. He's an intellectual, a real intellectual, not a fake one, who articulates for us analysis of what government and ruling class are doing to We-the-People and getting away with it because 80% of us are complacent, unaware that democracy requires commitment by We-the-People.

In Vidal's later essays, he was grieved by the end of Democracy under the Reagan Revolution, finished off by the Bush Junta. The later essays came from a place on the order of despair seeing what has happened to his country he's had so much hope for, seeing democracy spiral down the drain directed systematically by the republican party into police state while the American people watched tv. In the time of the Bush take-over by judicial fiat, Vidal, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and Alex Jones were the only active voices of dissent I was aware of. Surely there were others. Where Chomsky writes in a somewhat detached analytical way, Vidal wrote in a personally involved way intellectually. Chomsky is involved too, but he keeps his persona out of his writing more than Vidal does. Vidal's persona is present as the writer, the one putting his thoughts on paper. He writes 3rd person, too, but I feel his presence in his writing more than the others. Vidal was as much a personality as an intellectual. He was something of an historian who made history not only palatable, but interesting, entertaining, funny and realistic, as much a student of human character as history.


He appeared on tv talks shows fairly often, becoming a tv personality, a curmudgeon news analyst who saw things a bit differently from how they're presented by corporate tv. On NPR news when they were telling about Vidal, an interviewer made a comment about him being a famous writer. Vidal interjected that to say "famous writer" in this time is like saying "famous ceramicist." Writers don't have fame in this time. Not many years ago, they did, but not anymore. He was quick to note such trends that pass the rest of us by. That's what he was good for. I've an idea time will regard him one of the great American writers of the 20th century. He wrote the original screenplay for Ben Hur around 1958, which was written over by somebody else. Then he wrote a screenplay for Caligula, 1976, which I ran to the top of my netflix Q to see it possibly Monday. Might even watch Ben Hur some day. It's 4 hours long. I don't know about 4 hours of Charlton Heston. As a senior in high school I could handle it, thought it was a great movie. Motivated me to read the book. Now? I don't know. I believe I'd rather read some Gore Vidal essays.

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DRESSED LIKE ONE, WALKS LIKE ONE

     the eye in the sky

I can't help but think about the Florida man, Zimmerman, what must be going through his head. Not so much the content of his thought, but the never-ending obsession with one moment in his life he would happily erase, undo, be done with, hit reset. Finally charged with second-degree, a charge that has a pretty good chance to stick considering no visual witnesses, no "beyond a shadow of a doubt" pre-meditation. The whole thing is a shame all the way around. I've an idea nobody knows this better than Zimmerman since the moment he pulled the trigger. I see it as one of those moments we regret that can never be taken back, apologized for, forgiven; just have to carry it around the neck like a dead chicken, the dead chicken of fear and uncertainty. Oh God, what have I done? Some people then shoot themselves, unable to live with what they've done. Some try to cover it up and get out of it. Trayvon couldn't be covered up, buried with lime, nothing. There it was, before he could think about it, Zimmerman looking at a corpse and it was his doing, no undoing.

I see him with that law in his mind, wanting to kill somebody and justify it with a law claiming self-defense. Please don't think I'm attempting to read his mind, rather am looking at possibilities my mind comes up with as if it were me or various men I know. It's like when you pay monthly for insurance for years and years, there comes a time you start wanting a return on that investment. Some people become hypochondriacs, wanting something back for all that money they're using to build skyscrapers with and putting swimming pools in the back yards of executives. Won't it be interesting when all the swimming pools in the country are full of rainwater and have become living eco systems, watering holes for the dog packs and herds of roaming cattle in the time of Mad Max and the Road Warriors. We've come into such a hair-raising time for all of us, when the heat is turned up that high for everybody, the weakest links in the chain will break, and they do, over and over.


Gore Vidal came to mind, his book of essays about Tim McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing. Couldn't remember the title. Went to amazon to run through Vidal titles, couldn't find it. Don't know if it's just not there--after 10 pages of Vidal books I got a good education in the obvious fact that he writes every minute of every day. Looking for the title I couldn't remember, I came upon his essays on the American Empire, the United States of Amnesia. Ordered a copy. He says it so well, is direct, lives in the ruling class and has a heart for the peasantry. That's cool with me. There's nobody in the peasantry with Vidal's knowledge and quick-minded intelligence. Like during the Bush Junta, Michael Moore was the only public dissident we had; like him or don't, he's all we had. Gore Vidal has been our Michael Moore of the essay form and his close readings of American history with the blinders of American denial stripped away.


His book of essays on Tim McVeigh show different views from what corporate.gov allows us access to via media. He got it articulately from McVeigh that he was intending to start the revolution. His bombing act was revenge for the ordeal of the FBI killing a small village of white people outside Waco, Texas, a little too close to the Bush ranch, the white people crazies, of course. Ruby Ridge in Idaho or Montana where FBI killed a man's wife with a sniper shot through the kitchen screen door. At home. Vidal tells McVeigh's beliefs and reasons. Evidently, McVeigh misread the timing in the sequence of events. The revolution was not ready to be sparked by a lone dog act. He had help, but it was his baby. All I'm attempting to get at is he misread the times. He thought he was starting the revolution that he perceived to be more pervasive among white men than it turned out to be. No telling what heroic role he saw for himself. Does loser apply here? Seems to me it's the natural next word. Another weak link in the chain that's been popping all over the country in surprise places for a large number of years. It's a curious kind of Surrealist rage. In the time of the French Surrealists, one of them maintained that the ultimate Surrealist act is to stand in a crowd of people with a revolver and shoot anyone at random. The idea was never embraced by the other Surrealists. Whichever one it was who thought it up, he forgot that love was the only theme of Surrealism. 


I didn't mean to digress away from Zimmerman as much as to give him context. I doubt the trial will allow the defense to ask some of the men he worked with if he listened to Limbaugh and how he talked about Limbaugh subjects. There, again, all that's popping is a weak link. I'd venture half the white men in US of Amnesia listen to Limbaugh, and they're not all doing these things, only the weak links. Maybe turning down the heat will help, but that's not going to happen before the whole chain shatters to smithereens. Let's hope the armed white male population doesn't go collectively berzerk in the wake of some incendiary news event, as McVeigh believed he foresaw happening. After half a century and more of throwing off decency generally, throwing off regard for others but as targets to influence; narcissis self cut loose to fall into the mirror and drown in self-indulgence. It's going to be hell to pay when a huge part of the population is urban and everybody has guns and everything goes to shit one day as a result of something on the news. I prefer to think God loves us and wants to give us the easy way through this torrent of the time called the Tribulation. It's a hang on with all your might kind of time. Like centrifugal force that makes things fly off of something that's spinning.


One thing I'm having a hard time with in this Trayvon issue is that it is making Al Sharpton look good, even sound like he has something to say worth hearing. Even though Zimmerman wasn't pure "white," he did a white man thing, a profile killing. Looks like one, walks like one, dresses like one, talks on a cell phone like one, must be one. Pit bull watch dog. Down boy. Down boy. Zimmerman will surely do some time, now that he's been charged. This trial may or may not be an examination of the self-defense law unto its withdrawal, but I really wouldn't put my money on withdrawal. It's a republican law and republican laws never get repealed. Maybe the trial could set a precedent for taking the thrill out of the "stand yer ground" law. The publicity around Zimmerman and his necessary isolation, for self-defense, surely makes him want to be in jail, prison, whatever, for protection. At least in prison, he'll have the Latin gangs at his back, which he won't have outside prison. I am glad I don't have his head right now. Peace of mind he does not have and will not have for a very long time, no matter which way the trial goes.


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