WE

marilyn mao by yu youhan

Much talk on internet about climate change. It's here, it's now, it's disaster: WE can do something about it. WE. WE. We we we all the way home. Am I part of the WE? I don't think I am. I can't do anything about it. I live in a society that is dependent on cars. I am conscious of driving the least I possibly can, have been all my adult life. Pollution and Climate Change are the issues of my lifetime, can't leave out Racism. What can I do? What can anybody do? The mega-billionaires that rule us, whether we like it or not, don't give a shit about WE. WE, to them, amount to the pitchfork squad, the thick-necked proles that drag our knuckles on the ground. They laugh at us. WE are powerless against them, even WE in the form of 300,000 occupying NY for a day is nothing. All it means to THEM is we need more cops and prisons, which can be arranged, easily. Reach in pocket, pull out cell phone, push one button, done. I see cops are wanting to make it illegal to video them. It will happen. I know better, just from basic self-preservation. I saw an incident once that if I'd made video of it and showed it to anybody, I would not have survived the first week. Can't tell you what it was, because it was serious. It involved a murder that was swept out the door. I could have created a major stink with a video, but would not have lived very long. I don't even tell about it because I don't want anyone involved to know I saw anything. Self-preservation is important to me. Justice? There's no justice in America. Evidenced by the common knowledge that when you go to court you need the better of the two lawyers. It's a poker game at the law school graduate club. Since the Reagan Junta's "mandatory sentencing," the judge amounts to a referee. We talk about an American invasion of a new poverty-stricken country as WE did it. I wasn't involved. I am not that WE. 

on the road by he yunkai

I am only that WE because I am subject to a government at war with the world and everybody in it. This government is at war with its own people too; war on drugs is a war on the American people. Cops killing black people. They're killing white people too. That part doesn't make headlines. He had a gun. I am all the less WE by making so little money along the way I paid little to no taxes. I stay out of commerce to the best of my ability. I buy books, cds, computers, groceries, etc., all of which I pay taxes on. A local mechanic fixes my car that is 21 years old, legal. I buy everything locally, unless it's amazon and art supplies. I don't know of an art supply store within 75 miles. I've bought into the System the very least I could get away with along the way. I've believed the more money I make, the less my life is my own. I can't give my life to money. It's expensive even to live poor. Utility corporations bleed us the very most they can. Mandatory car insurance bleeds us further. However, I have no issue with that law. I resent paying it, but if I rear-ended a Cadillac, caved in the back bumper and trunk lid, I could never pay for it on my own, even if it were a third-hand Ford. I don't appreciate what the billionaires club is doing to us. What can I do, break into a rich man's house and steal something? Big deal. Halliburton wants to make 38 billion; they put Dick Cheney in charge of the White House, use him to start a never-ending war, call it WE and WE, everybody else, go ahead and identify with the travesty of murdering, torturing, humiliating Muslim people to keep the munitions corporations looking good on the bottom line. I cannot call myself WE over such as that. I cannot say in conversation, What are we doing in Syria? Who is we? We is police state under billionaire's club. I am not that. I may be subject to them in that they can give the nod to have me offed and never think of it again, but they care not the tiniest speck of gnat shit about me, as long as I pay protection fees. Makes it easy to stay under the radar. 

warriors by yue minjun

In my youth, I hated the draft, hated it that I was required to be involved in military for being born male in America. Hated it. Then they got me. Two years of living in uncut fascism. I hated it. I gave the very least, never made an effort to advance beyond swabbing decks. I bought a book of Mao's writings in a bookstore in Napoli, kept it in my locker with the other books. I never read it, kept it there for inspections. It was legal to have it. I loved it that it freaked out the inspecting officers. Every time. They already knew I was a weird son of a bitch, one of many reasons not to have a draft. I did what I was told to do. No more. I resented the military snatching me out of my life to put me up to kill and/or be killed. I knew it had nothing to do with anything but corporate boom time. The only thing it had to do with me was: sucker. The military was not about protecting my family's interests, nor my neighbors. It was the circle of wagons around the corporate towers. I had a very hard time inside self being a part in the misery and death machine. Only one close call. The ship went to Dominican Republic over a communist cell there. Upon command, we were to blow the hell out of Santo Domingo. I hated being on the ship all the more. The Ensigns operating the big guns couldn't hit a barn from twenty yards. I was thinking if they shoot into the city with this one address for the target, it will be the only thing left standing when the smoke clears. The guys following orders would figure the whole city was commies, so what the hell, punish the red emeffers. Santo Domingo was beautiful from the water. I saw moments of The King and I at a drive-in on the edge of the city through spy glasses on lookout duty one night. I hated being a part of the military machine, never was comfortable. I knew how trigger-happy the Pentagon is, and this was just a few years after Castro's headlines. Communist was the day's word for terrorist. 

by liu dawei

I will edit from my talking references to "we" when I mean the Pentagon operating with weapons manufacturing their purpose, congress and senate in place to produce for the highest bidder. I readily identify myself American. I'd like to see the American people a little kinder to each other. I can't say what it's like in other countries, more than likely the same, each in their own way. I hear that in Costa Rica you can feel it in the air you're in a place without a military. They're able to do it because they have nothing the international corporations want. This is how I have intended to live my life all the way along, have nothing anybody wants. I've seen just from knowing people that I did not want to be somebody with money or position. I pitied Elvis, the people around him drooling for his money and his fame that wrecked his life. I'd rather not know people than have fake relationships, fake friendships, fake acquaintances. I did not want to figure in any hierarchy anywhere but the bottom. Of course, it's said that when you're the bottom of the totem pole the weedeater whacks you in the face. It works out like that too. It's motivation to get on up the totem pole. I don't even want to be on the pole. I'd rather look at it from afar. Upon arriving in the mountains I found my true people. I went to a church in the first fourteen years to bathe my life in true people. No hierarchies of money and status that anybody pays attention to. That's the town people. The country people is just folks. The people held in the highest regard are people fair and honest in their dealings with a a fairly even disposition. I'm remembering telling friend Jr Maxwell, who died five years ago, about a meeting I'd been at in town where the people from Away worked themselves into a state wanting to find a way to get rid of those old rusted tractors in the field out on highway 93 toward Piney Creek. He laughed and said, They'll never do anything about it. Hugh is the best respected man in this county. He sells tractor parts and has every part a man could want. This is the kind of place I want to incorporate into my life, to float free like in a mosh pit and become it. These are the people who have been my teachers in the second half of my life. In the mountains of Alleghany County, North Carolina, is where I identify as WE. 

by ai weiwei

*

RIGHTS

andre derain, the trees, 1906

Just now finished seeing a video of George Carlin on YouTube professing we have no rights. He told it  well. He had to throw in some vulgar language to distinguish that he was not preaching, anyway not religion preaching. He was political preaching. He talked about illusion, breaking down what God-given-rights means. He noted that this country has 10, Britain has 13, Germany has twenty-some. Then he notes most countries recognize no rights. His lesson for the day was that our government does not care about us individually. Does not care at all. Totally true. Maybe it's a surprise to somebody, but all you need to do is think about it half a minute and there it is. And, once you see it, it changes nothing. It's just another way to see something we tend never to think about, which is what he's really after. He went into an examination of swearing on the Bible in court. Like would it take if the Bible were upside down? If he held his left hand up instead of his right, would God object? He breaks it down and looks at it like examining a tradition that has lost it's reason for being, but continues because it's tradition. It's what we do.


In my own life, I've taken the Bill of Rights for granted. Who ever thinks about it? People in law school think about it. Judges think about it. The rest of us could not list our Bill of Rights if asked to name two. It's like Carlin said, he, himself, feels like he has all rights. And we do too. How that works out is consequences of actions, everything comes back. Step on somebody else's rights and yours will be stepped on in turn. I've an idea the Bill of Rights was written and adopted to save us the conflict of learning over and over what other people's rights are and the limits to one's own. Sometimes I get the feeling that the people who make the most noise about freedom want it for themselves, but not for other people. Since the beginnings of women's liberation unto today, black men, as a rule, don't believe women should have certain rights. But black men want liberation for themselves. I've never understood that. It surely has to do with culture, and I know next to nothing of black culture. I can never know black culture, because I don't have the experience. My culture is the privileged race that rarely thinks outside its own box, just like socially it is only looking up the ladder, not down the ladder.


Where the ladder is concerned, my own take on it is to stay away from the ladder. I've avoided work that is structured hierarchically. I've stayed out of social climbing altogether, since childhood where it starts. I will not work in corporate hierarchical structure like in the military. There, you address the rank, not the man. That's bullshit. It makes for good organization, but there are enough people willing to live like that, who want to, they don't need me. Also, in a hierarchical organization, military or corporate, one's rights are restricted. One signs off one's rights endorsing the first paycheck. I've never been interested in working for an employer that tells me how to live my life. Like when I stepped into the art world and became subject to all the s'posed-to mind. I said to myself, I'd rather have a job painting houses, the houses themselves. One individual who was beginning to sell some of my paintings started telling me how and what to paint. I was to paint little nigger kids playing around a schoolhouse, folk art, that's what people want. That was the end of me and her. It wasn't even the racism, but the stupid that got to me. The racism was understood.


I found that everyplace I connected with for selling paintings believed it was their Right to tell me I should paint some way other than what I'm doing. They have the right to say it, and I have the right to pay them no mind. I pulled out of the art-market world, because I'm not interested in my name in lights, not interested in fame or fortune, or climbing the hierarchical ladder in the art world. I'm no big deal as a painter. I make pictures that some people like and some people don't like. I'm ok either way. I'm satisfied that I'm doing what I like doing, what I want to do. I'm not looking to be cutting edge avant-garde, nor am I interested in imitating a certain style that is called mainstream at the moment. Accused of not painting mainstream, I always answer that when a manner of painting is mainstream, it's over. I'm not looking for a place in art history. It suits me better for my paintings to be in the homes of my friends than homes of people I don't know and don't even know who owns the paintings. I don't want my paintings so expensive only the upper-middle-class can afford them, or corporations for offices and lobbies. I want my friends to have them, people I know, people who live in my world. Like I don't like to leave the county, I don't like to sell a painting outside the county. I do, but that's just a rule of thumb preference, not a commandment.


We give up a lot of rights when we pursue money and position. I learned so early on about giving up rights pursuing money and influence, that I never developed an interest in money. I'd rather have a working class job where I can be who I am and not be expected to adjust my thinking to what is acceptable. The way I think is largely not acceptable. I see it in the coffee shop every time I go in there. I refuse to talk political correctness speak, thus get frowned at quite a lot for unacceptable speech. I don't go to church for the same reasons I go to the coffee shop less and less. I'm not submitting to expectation that I think and believe certain ways. I won't do that. I am not dehumanizing myself voluntarily for money. My own humanity is more valuable to me than a big house full of expensive things in the best part of town. I don't want to get so high up that I look down on the lowest people. The people who believe themselves at or near the top of the ladder despise it in me that I don't honor the ladder. I don't shit and grovel when they're around. They hate me to the degree they need to believe themselves high up. None of it has anything to do with me. So I pay it no mind.


*

AIR SPRAY

out the window

Sitting here at the computer with this view out the window to my right, the Christmas tree patch around the house I'm kind of the hole in the donut in the middle of. They go 2/3 of the way around the house. The forest across the road is like a 1/3 chunk bit out of the donut, though it was there before the donut, like the hole. It's a 60 degree day. Good day to keep all windows and doors closed. The sprayer is out on a fairly windy day. It's odorless; therefore, probably deadly. The spray for thousands of trees to the west has already passed through the house earlier, though the western side of the house is pretty well sealed. On the eastern side, the excess taken by the air goes into the woods.

Throughout my adult life I've been pulling for the earth, looking to the day collective humanity will develop a new attitude, one toward people and earth living together. It's like now that our government is owned and operated by corporations and corporate hierarchical mind, it has turned on we the people, the consumers. When we're no longer able to consume because the corporate collaboration called our government has bled us into impotent poverty, we won't be able to support them any more. Maybe this is why the CEOs have been upping their take over the last 30 years, seeing it all comes to an end when the working people have given all their blood and there's nothing left. Then they bale out to the Cayman Islands, Thailand, this place and that place where they have their sweatshops, taking it with them.

There was a time Jr was thinking about selling 18 acres around the house to have some money for old age expenses. One of his friends wanted to buy it, but could only pay to a certain point. Christmas tree growers offered him half again as much. Jr thought about it for 2 years. He chose to sell it to his friend for raising cattle. His reasoning for not selling it to growers at a much higher price was, "I couldn't do that to my neighbors."

I've resigned to it. Not many people think like that, which is why I find someone of Jr's character so rare, and particular to these mountains. That's not to say there's nobody like this outside these mountains. When it comes down to what's Christian, there it is, consideration for neighbors. One day in my store, a man and woman came in and we talked for quite awhile. They asked if I'm a Christian. I told them Christian has become a political party and I'm not a member. Of course, that isn't what they meant. They meant saved. I knew it, just had to say that to let it be known I don't like the subject for conversation. I walk my own path. It is one person wide. There are so many people shouting about being Christians that make me double-take, I'm shy about being around them, like I'm shy about being around people who hang at bars. I don't understand them is all I mean. It's foreign territory.

I'm not one to identify with groups. Every group has its own doctrine and I don't care about doctrines. This is the reason I can't join a church any more. I can't sign myself over to a doctrine, whatever it is. I believe the core of what everyone in the church believes, but not all of what I'm supposed to believe to belong. A lot of it I don't know about, and can't ally myself to that which I don't understand. I will continue to drink liquor, because I like it and can't join a club that won't allow it, the same as I couldn't join a club that required it. I don't abuse it, but if I want to, I will.

Everybody who works someplace now has to go outside to smoke. It's common to see office workers standing outside having a smoke. It's bad fer ya. It's bad. Living in the middle of a Christmas tree patch getting sprayed by everything they spray is good fer ya. It's good. Even the county government thinks it's good fer ya. Lotsa tax dollars they have to get from some place. They're not getting enough from me to pump the water from the river to the subdivision atop Twin Oaks Mountain. They're not getting enough from me to buy the county a new lawnmower. Another hierarchy in which I turn up at the bottom. Home sweet home.