YES TO DIVERSITY

diego rivera

I'm having a drink of half Canada Dry, half Jumex mango nectar and a squirt of lemon juice. The mango nectar is a bit flat; the Canada Dry spritzes it with carbonation, the nectar flavors the ginger ale, and the lemon juice adds a zip. Good drink. I'm glad we have a Mexican aisle in the grocery store. I like black beans and everything else along the aisle. I like seeing Mexicans in the grocery store and around town. I grew up with Mexicans and found them to be as good a people as the Anglo kids. Only the Mexicans did not have in them the arrogance of whiteness; thus, I preferred them. We were segregated then. Anglo kids were afraid of the Mexicans and the Mexicans were afraid of the Anglos. It was commonly understood the Anglo kids were superior in numbers, if no other way. I think I identified with the oppressed races because I was oppressed at home by white man. I knew that the white world would be willing to give me a chance for my whiteness, and if I, the same person, were in Mexican skin, it would not be the same. I did not feel right with the privilege that went with white skin. Never have. By this time in the life, a lifetime of experience seeing how arrogant white people automatically present themselves to black or tan people, I'm embarrassed in the company of someone black or tan. I want to say, "I'm not like that," but know how empty it sounds before saying it. And am not so sure I'm not like that. I only know it from my mind, not from my behavior as seen by someone black or tan. If I'm really not like that, let it show in my actions, the only place it counts.    

diego rivera

I am so tired of racial tension after a lifetime of living with it, in it, aware of it, not in denial, it's become one more of the reasons I left "the world" and came here to Air Bellows Mountain where racial tensions don't apply. Nor does any other sort of tension, except drama for the sake of drama. Plenty of that goes around. I prefer not to think so, but plenty of drama for drama sake goes on inside my head. It's what gossip is about. Even continuous drama on television does not supplant gossip. It seems like gossip is a way of making celebrity of the familiar. I'm recalling my first years in the mountains, listening to old man Tom Pruitt talk about different people, who, in our way of seeing, are just ordinary people, talk about them the same way people who watch movies and television talk about the stars, the celebrities. It struck me curious why, when he talked about a preacher who once lied about something Tom said, his reason he left his church, he talked like he expected me to know who he was talking about. He lost respect. He spoke of the preacher the same way people like Rachel Maddow and Bill Maher talk about lying Republicans. Louie Gohmert said, Joni Ernst said, Ted Cruz said. A celebrity said. Tom's brother, Millard, too, when he talked about the people of his life, I had the same feeling of listening to a celebrity talk about a celebrity I never heard of, but should have. The only television Tom watched was baseball and the news. He didn't get a tv until he was seventy, given to him by a neighbor from Away who believed everybody must have at least one. It's a sight how many used tvs I've been offered, even told in no uncertain terms to take.

It wasn't right, no tv in the house. I need to be connected to what is popularly called the real world, the world I turned my back to as too unreal to sustain life. A human without a tv was unexpected and weird as a rock on a fence post. It's even more now, but I have good camouflage. I bought a tv to watch movies with when so many movies became available on VCR. Netflix sends three movies a week of my choice from a selection of almost everything. One of my major sacrifices coming to the mountain was giving up movies. Had to drive seventy miles for an America movie, a hundred miles to see a foreign film. Now I can have film festivals from almost any country. The tv is not connected to cable, antenna or satellite. The people that freaked out because I don't have a tv in the house are ok about it now. He conformed at least a little bit. He's toeing in. He's slow, but he'll get there. When they put him in a nursing home, he will have no choice but to watch tv, like when he's in a hospital. I suspect the reason I noted how the old people of the old ways talked about each other, is taking it for granted I knew who they were talking about, the way Dick Cheney is mentioned on the evening news, assuming the name needs no introduction. Evidently, before television, people talked about each other the way we talk about celebrities now. We talk about each other and we're talking about people who don't figure as celebrities, what they call on the news, ordinary people. All who are not celebrities, whose names it is taken for granted we do not know, are the ordinary people. We used to be the common people. Now we're the ordinary.

diego rivera

Becoming aware that the people pre-television talked of each other as stars everyone knows, I began to take exception to we who live in the world of non-celebrities, nearly everybody, being reduced to a non-person, a statistic, the viewing audience, ordinary, finding it socially troubling. I watch the people of the world I live in accepting themselves as the ordinary to the point of not even noticing. And I withdraw to home, reminding self I'm not here to change anybody, only self. I want to flow with the living flow of the world I live in. Without wanting to be of it, I have no choice but to be in it. Since I'm in it, I live best flowing with it. My world is three-quarters right-wing statistically. but it doesn't mean a wall is between me and the rest of them. Everyone I know thinks different from how I think. All have opinions different from mine, and very few intersect with my opinions. I don't care, because I assess opinions the same as nothing. Some of my best friends want to bomb Iran and say Obama is a monkey. I don't care. It only tells me what they think about one subject neither of us knows anything about, but what we get from different propaganda sources. No matter where I live in America, I live among people with no interest in art, reading, poetry or foreign films. I talk with people of similar interests, and we never agree where opinions are concerned. One may say Picasso is the great artist of the 20th century, while another says Duchamp. Both for valid reasons. I'm uncomfortable with this time wherein we are expected to be in full check-list agreement with somebody or they don't like you, you get labelled. Whenever I hear somebody describe themselves, very liberal, it puts me on alert to watch everything I say.

diego rivera himself

*

   

GRUMPY OLD BASTARD

A little bit ago I took one of those facebook quizzes that supposedly tells you something about yourself, or categorizes or baffles. There is no way the tests can be "scientific." It's pop fun. And that's the spirit I see it in. This one was what kind of an old person you will  be. Some of the questions don't have an answer in the multiple choice selection that I can affirm having to do with me, so I click on anything. This does, however, account for the unknown, which encases everything. Naturally, I got, "Grumpy next door neighbor." It rang so true I had to laugh. I emailed my next door neighbor, Allan, telling him to get ready. I've felt aggressively grumpy in the mind ever since. Looking at various posts on facebook, one of the anti-fascist sites I get memes, articles and cartoons from was saying Sarah Palin said at an NRA gathering she's all for baptizing terrorists by water-boarding. The darling of stupid white men. I started cussing a streak a mile long, out of patience with her public monotony so full of pride and so blatantly ignorant, the superstar of stupid. A bunch of white men pay her a few hundred thousand to talk dirty to them and blow smoke up their asses. The face of police state. I tell myself over and over to let it go, don't fill my mind with other people's stupid. It's a nuisance to see her spacy eyes, somebody who takes clichés for reality. I think I'm still reeling from the disappointment of growing up and seeing what I learned in school about USA and democracy and the supreme court and patriotism was all bunk. It's not anything like we're taught. Not anything like television points out. I've come to see our history as propaganda---the winners of wars write the history books---and what we had in the name of democracy became popular police state, patriotic police state. Hooray for 31,000 gun deaths a year. Hooray for corporate prisons. Hooray for beating the shit out of college students, pepper spray in their eyes in the name of The Law for practicing their constitutional responsibility to protest.

 

 

 

I can't stop laughing at the flag waver in Nevada claiming he does not recognize the US Govt. Maybe somebody needs to tell him he's carrying flag of a non-existent country. He said he recognizes Nevada law, so why isn't he carrying a Nevada flag? Maybe because nobody will know what it is? Not dramatic enough? Requires explanation? It makes me crazy that so much is made of him as a "racist" and a "terrorist." Why not just call it like it is: ignorant. Add a whole lot of ego to a whole lot of ignorance and he's what happens. The part that makes him interesting to me is that he is so perfectly the part White Man. He's a cliché of himself. His ignorance is specifically white man ignorance. He'd make a good movie, though he's on tv enough now a movie could be made from the news clips featuring him. He may be featured along with Palin at NRA rallies to blow smoke up white man's ass. Is he the next American face of ignorance? This list of the many faces is so long by now, he'll fade out of sight. Won't he hate that. Republicans have exploited the popular appeal of ignorance, which has worked very well for them. The party has a case before the Supremes requesting legalization of lying in political campaigns. It's the same as done. I can see it passing, 7 to 2. Political campaigns amount to television commercials now, devoid of substance as a sleeping pill commercial. Talking with a woman I know in the coffee shop, she said, "I'm a con-SER-vative!" I could only think: You embarrass yourself. She said, "What are you?" I knew exactly the gossip circle my answer would be reported to within the hour, and said, "Socialist." I said it to see her jump, but she didn't jump. She looked at me with a glance that said she already knew it. The conservative / liberal divide right now purports volumes of ideologies, but they boil down quite simply to conservative: not caring, and liberal: caring. It's been that way all my life. In the Sixties it was called hawks and doves. Now it's conservatives and liberals, words totally meaningless.

 

 

 

 I remember when Ralph Nader gave his support to the republican coup by judicial fiat saying, the republicans will get us there faster. He meant police state. He's been seeing it come on for several years, since before Nixon times. He saw that both parties, two wings of the Business Party, were marching us into police state, consciously with intent. The democrats are slower taking us into police state. Nader wanted to get on with it. Sooner it starts, the quicker it will be over, or so it looked from there and then to his perspective. I have an idea he was mistaken in his thinking that the American people would have a new revolution. Don't count on it. Maybe a civil war, but no revolution. It is a third-world truth that whoever rules the television stations rules the country. Liberals do not rule USA. Even MSNBC is not liberal. Television has become the beloved propagandist in our midst. It has become the authority, sacred. And I feel very uncomfortable in a world where television is sacred. I've never been comfortable in television world. They talk about red states and blue states in terms of absolutes, like NC a predictably red Southern state, I can live in a red state as well as a blue state. Either side is in relation to television. They are just participating in television. I avoid political talk with everyone, even liberals. Liberals disappoint me when they show parrotry like the republicans. I'm ashamed to identify liberal, so I don't. I am a socialist. It's a scary word to television viewers. Nobody knows what it means because it does not get explained on television. On tv, the only thing it means is enemy. I can go with that. The Lakota tribe of plains Indians became known as the Sioux, their word for enemy. They liked being called the Enemy and adopted the name. A constant reminder to them that they are indeed the enemy. Q: What tribe you from, boy? A: The Enemy.

 

 

 

 

I, myself, have never been the enemy of ways American. They are my own. I saw an article about something like 3,000 people expatriating from USA last year. I gave it some thought in the distant past, never seriously with intent, weighed the benefits and deficits, just a subject to think about. Where would I go? Wherever I might go from New Zealand to Turkey, I'd be "The American." Here, on Waterfall Road, I am an American, but not The American. Problem of being The American would be in getting taken for an apologist for American foreign policy, domestic policy. It would always be, "your people." I'd be called upon to answer why gun stores sell out all over the country the day after a schoolhouse massacre. At home, I'm not expected to be a branch of the State Dept. I would be asked to explain American policy, the supreme court, none of which I even care to think about, certainly not be taken for a representative of. Asked, How do Americans like police state? I could only answer, They love it. Television politics has become the same as television sports, commercials, another television event. I find it curious American democracy went away, like the Ottoman Empire, without a whimper. A very few noticed. The ones that noticed knew it was a fake democracy anyway, so nobody is beating the drum over democracy gone. Makes me wonder if capitalism will fall away like democracy did, television pretending it continues, the television viewer slow to catch on. Possibly this is the nature of transition from one Age to another, from the Age of Fire to the Age of Electricity. There is more to it than the light bulb instead of whale oil lamp. It is a natural process we go through collectively. It is bigger than the participants that keep it going, like the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We focus on the people that keep the belief system going, judge them with praise or blame, missing that it is a process of change, the players filling roles like on a stage.     

 

 

 

 

*

 

 

THE GIRL HOLDING THE BILLBOARD

I just now saw a video put on facebook by a place called Addicting Info. This was a video made by a guy in front of an abortion clinic someplace, American city, video camera on two women standing in a parking zone holding up signs for people to see driving by on the four-lane. They were anti-abortionist parrots. The man with the camera spent the time accusing the women of making people feel worse than they already do, a valid point, and they argued back, he argued some more, they argued. They pointed out that he was getting on their nerves and he said they were getting on his nerves. He talked shit that ran all over me; accusing, starting sentences, "You...," telling them they're despicable. Before it was over, he was the one despicable. He brought to mind a few people I know, one, who talks self-righteous, in-your-face generalizations that have nothing to do with particulars, just an idea in his head that is righteous because it's in his head. I wanted to get in this guy's face, who was bullying the two women, with a Chris Rock type command: Shut the fuck up! I turned it off before it was over just to stop his mouth.

When it comes to whose side I was on, I went into it on his side, politically. I came out of it still on his side politically, but on the side of the women when it comes to personal issues, like decency. I don't like what the women were doing. They were locked down in a mindset I liberated myself from upon leaving childhood. It is ridiculous to me to stand holding signs up for people passing in cars, missionaries to a given point of view, living billboards. That I view it ridiculous does not deny them the right to do what they gotta do. I believe they would serve their cause better by volunteering twenty hours a week at an orphanage, if we have such places anymore. Don't berate people you don't understand, is what the guy with the camera was saying. Help the people who are the living consequences of other people's mistakes. They say the fetus is holy. If the fetus is holy, then why isn't the kid holy after it's born? These are the only arguments I had with the women, which amounts to no more than mentation. Had I been walking down the sidewalk I would not have said anything to them. If I had been inside the clinic with a wife getting an abortion, like the man with the video camera, I'd have stayed inside. He struck me as a provoking personality, and made me pity his wife, considering this is the tone of voice he uses to berate her. "You're despicable!" It was too easy for him to talk to women in his superior tone of voice. He was getting too much of a kick out of it. A bully, picking on people who can't fight back, making a video to brag on it.

 

He wasn't a teabagger. He was a liberal flaunting it. I dislike it immensely when I hear what liberals say and read what liberals have written coming from a scolding tone of voice, sounding like an old-timey preacher's wife. Some liberals have a smug old-maid side that makes me feel shame by association. Self-righteousness is ugly in every manifestation. It especially gags me the way some liberals wax so smug about racists and people who believe differently from them where gay marriage is concerned. I charge republicans with parrotry freely, and have the same to say of liberals. Liberals tend to political correctness speak, which gets on my nerves to the same degree as a republican with justifications for defunding the post office and education. I used to think liberals were more or less free thinkers. A few are. I'm not turning my back on my own identity as a liberal in the post-Reagan sense of the word. Quite a lot recently I've witnessed in people I know or in reading articles that liberals seem to have become more smug than ever before. Like if you're not with the political correctness agenda, you're a square and you're really nowhere. Line borrowed from 50s pop song, Big Name Button. Beatnik jive talk then.

To say I identify with the liberal side of the American political coin does not mean I totally identify with it. I think it's pathetic that in this time a liberal is somebody who wants democracy. Conservative means corporate police state. It's the self-righteousness on both sides that make them both "despicable." I'm recalling a moment years ago after a church meeting, saying to the preacher's wife, "I'll see you next week." She said, in her stereotype of smug, "We don't have a guarantee of that." I thought: Ho Hum. And said, "Let's act like we do and be surprised if we don't." Which, of course, didn't settle anything--just a young guy being a smart-mouth. It's the same way I feel about the accusations and blame from liberal to conservative and conservative to liberal. The way things are aligned at the moment, the conservatives are the smug ones looking down their noses at the liberals for conforming to the list of correctnesses. By now the liberals are looking down their noses in return at the conservatives, making comedy of their ridiculous claims and transparent nonsense. Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz and several others are making their careers as comedians. The republicans have become comedy unto slapstick.

I'm all for the mental back and forth between right-leaning-toward-middle and far right, How it plays out is usually through an individual's own consciousness, and we're all unique. It's really pointless of me to say a smug liberal stains my respect. I can't say I'm ashamed of being an American because Ted Nugent is shameless. He has nothing to do with me. I've never listened to his guitar. I've heard it, but never wanted to hear it again. I lean more toward artful guitar in rock, like Mick Jones of the Clash, one of many examples, and Lenny Kaye of Patti Smith Group. I'm not saying they're the greatest there ever was, only that they satisfy my ear when Nugent does not. I will make it a point to examine the nature of my identity with liberal. I'm not somebody who would walk around on the beach carrying a sign, Beware Skin Cancer. I am heartened to see that Limbaugh and Hannity are losing their sponsors. Today I spoke in a friendly way with the top dog of the county's republican party. He's a Reaganista parrot. In my years of writing the column in the Alleghany News, every time I wrote something that slighted a republican, he and another republican fired off letters to the editor declaring I don't know what I'm talking about. *I confess* If I cut all the people out of my life who are politically right wing, I wouldn't like what was left. I have no problem with somebody's politics as long as it's possible to know each other as people. The politics is nothing but illusory mentation. Who we are as individuals is what is important, not who agrees and who does not agree with my way of thinking on this artificial issue and that.

 

 

*

INDEPENDENT AS A HOG ON ICE

A couple days ago leaving the grocery store I fell in with someone I knew from the days of the music store, we talked walking out the door, into the parking lot and stopped when we reached my car, stood there and talked quite a long time in increasingly cold wind. Increasingly, because the longer I stood in it, the colder the wind became. He was somebody who is wound up inside and rants when he cuts loose. I don't mean to say I found him objectionable. My first encounter with him years ago was a very much in-yer-face commandment of what I need to do to make a million dollars. Rather than say I don't want a million dollars, I let him talk. It amounted to another city-mind you needa, you gotta, you oughta, you should. He had a good mind and spelled it out for me convincingly. Like I said, the only problem I had with what he was saying was that I did not want a million dollars. I know somebody who came into multiple millions overnight. He lived high, big house, a Mercedes convertible of a different color for every day of the week. His life went to shit. He lost his wife, lost his money, lost his ego. It wasn't but a few years later he landed in prison for habitual drunkenness. One woman I know said, "I believe I could make a million dollars last." My thought: I'd be just like the guy that lost it all and ended up in prison a drunk.

The man in the parking lot who had previously mapped out my path to a million dollars was telling me in the increasingly cold wind that he's not really a Republican (the "not really" perked my ears up wondering what that could be leading to), he's "more of a Teapartyer." I didn't see that coming, but it was the natural next thing. On my instant double-take I saw: of course he's a Teapartyer. His talking amounted to continuous rant, meaning he takes seriously Faux News, Limbaugh and the rest of the white voices stirring up divisive hatred. He was a good guy, though I found his critical mind a bit slack, led by the self-centered corporate notion of all for me, nothing for anybody else, the post-Reagan slant on American individualism. I tend to look at him as the issue itself, not the solution he purported himself to be. Individualism is not the same as egoism. Individualism allows humility and an interest in the well-being of others besides self. I can't help but see it's a better life for the individual to live among people who are getting paid well enough for their work they can live on what they make, than to live underground with prison walls and towers housing men with guns guarding the entrance while everybody else is living in poverty and fighting each other, manipulated by the people living underground.

We were talking as people friendly with each other. I, a liberal, was listening to a teapartyer saying what he had to say. I was thinking, if I told him I am more liberal than he is conservative, that would have been the end of it. This is something I learned from parents. Go along with what they tell me to believe, let them believe I'm with them if they want to, and just let them talk. I knew with parents as with this guy, if I were to bring up my own point of view, which amounts to allowing others their own points of view, I'd be dismissed as stupid and that would be the end of it. I know better than to argue with that mind. I grew up in the Baptist religion where all is absolute black or white with no middle ground for the spectrum that is the fullness of life. They're right. I'm wrong. Simple as that. I don't argue with that mind. The rational does not convince anyone of anything. And why do I want to convince somebody to think like I think? In my way of seeing, that is not allowing the other to be self too. I am not the only self in this world. Every one of us is a center of the universe, and I'm ok with that. It's the nature of existence. I can't tell somebody besides myself what they oughta, needta, should do if they knew what was right. That's saying I know more about your life than you do. And I don't. I'm up front about it. I never start a sentence, "You know what you oughta do?" It's a statement, not a question. It's an intro to I-know-more-than-you-do. My only answer when told that question is, Yes. Then I get accused of being a smart-mouth. So what.

Oddly, the encounter with this man whose name I don't know, though friendly, I knew the whole time could turn to hate the very moment I identified myself a liberal, meaning I don't believe what you believe. I'm totally ok with that. I live in a world of people who don't believe what I believe and I don't believe what they believe. No two of us believe alike, even in the same church. This teapublican mind that has been influenced a bit too much by baptist mind of the absolute, that I am right and you are wrong, allows only stasis. There is no stasis in this changing world. Attempts to enforce stasis of one sort or another are like they say in business--if you stay where you are, you go backwards. We need to be in process of change, ourselves, or we go backwards. Locking down in the apparent culture of the Fifties, I Love Lucy forever, gets nowhere. Though it's easy to say things have become only worse since the Fifties, I maintain there hasn't been anything as bad as I Love Lucy since the Fifties. The cultural delusion that Father Knows Best, having to do with white fathers only, is simply not how it is. It's a belief system, but it's not reality. In today's time, white men are showing themselves to be the biggest bunch of racially demographic fools, not only in this country, but in the world, and blaming everybody else for being the fools. This is evidently the time of the breakdown of white man ruling the world. Coming from inside the world ruled by white men, I'm glad to see it breaking down. Let's give Asians a chance. Let's see if Asians can be more despotic with power than white men have shown themselves to be. We already know that nobody learns from history, but maybe a few scholars.

I was hearing this teapartyer in the parking lot with thoughts like this running through my mind. I was amusing myself seeing him in my mind's eye flipping out that he'd spent so much time talking to an idiot. The odd part for me in encounters such as this, and I have so many they're more the rule than not, is that I am enjoying the individual I'm in conversation with. I care not at all that we disagree politically. I consider politically the least important aspect of our lives when it comes to the individuals we are. I know people I love an awful lot who want police state. It says something about their states of mind in everyday life wanting to control others. People I know are aware that it's pointless to attempt to control me, and they know I don't ever attempt to control them. For me, it's a trade-off. I don't control you; you don't control me. Then we have no issues between us, unless the other is somebody who can't stand to know somebody without being in control. They get real frustrated with me and tend to leave me alone. And that's a good thing. For both of us. Some will hold the frustration in a pressure-cooker situation and then one day they blow. When that happens, we never speak again. I hate it when that happens, but have found that the longer it takes for the explosion to occur, the bigger it is. I've learned to see this propensity in others early on, and have taught myself to absent self from a situation evolving in that direction before it becomes a problem. When it's dealt to me that I obey or else, I pick or else.


*  

THE ONE PERCENT LAUGH

     the donut dangle

I learned this morning that the Commonwealth of Virginia legislature had cut off funding to the NPR stations in the state. First thought: new republican strategy to permanently eliminate NPR. The Reagan Junta chopped NPRs funding in the early 80s in an 8-year assault on anything government funded for the good of the 99%. In the same package, the Reagan Junta cut funding to the Department of the Interior, which alas had for its purpose the benefit of the 99%. At first, when they were transferring budgets from something that benefited we-the-people, it looked like an effort to undo everything having to do with civil rights, for black people. The black people were the first to be targeted in the rush to take our taxpayer money away from us and give it to the military with the purpose to enhance corporate wealth and power with wars to enrich the rich. Thirty years later, NPR is about at its last gasp. The republicans have forced into the format more attention to republican bullshit to balance anything that might make some sense. Thirty years later, the Blue Ridge Parkway needed extensive repairs, major repairs, which Obama "stimulus" money was used to bring the Parkway up to standard over a period of two years. Now the repubs bitch because of "stimulus" money, a spending president.


The republican determination to destroy our democracy has been successful, quite successful, not with a bang but the whimper of a few people nobody pays attention to. It's the time Yeats defined. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. How more concisely could our time be defined? The only thing that made me question Obama's actual intelligence, given Harvard Law as a credential for intelligence, is that he jumped into politics in this time when an intelligent man or woman stays completely away from politics in America. W Bush is more the "leader" of this time, the president that sanctioned the 911 coup to justify martial law and opportunities to kill the poor in the Middle East, and got away with it. The martial law started with the corporate coup in 1963 that Johnson gave the nod to. It was given control by Nixon, and the Reagan Junta stripped the American people, the 99%, of our rights, our money, our homes, our democracy. The repub party has carried the Reagan determination to destroy our nation for its driving energy. This is what Bush meant by Mission Accomplished. The only truth I ever heard W speak was when he said, "I am the new Ronald Reagan." He could have been what Reagan meant in his summation of his administration, "It could have been worse." Yes, W has shown us definitively that it could have been worse.


The best, which I would take to be the people the Reagan Junta trampled, the 99%, gobble up the propaganda from the tv unsuspectingly, in trust, "Our government wouldn't do that." LOL The worst, the Limbaugh mind, is full of passionate intensity. The Reagan Junta mind lies so bald-facedly they're instantly and easily disproven, then it works in favor of the liar. Limbaugh called a working college student a whore, etc., making a fool of himself, which is all he has to work with. After the incident, he is more popular than he was before. These people full of passionate intensity are the worst, the propagandists, the takers, the ones using ignorance for the trump card in the strategic minds of Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney. The bottom feeders. For the last half century, my adult lifetime, American politics, economy, military have been solely about undermining democracy step-by-step until the last tatters of democracy were put to rest by W Bush and cronies, which includes the Supremes, the partisan interpreters of law. Without hesitation, I call them seditious. Twice since the turn of the century they have laughed in our faces and told us directly that we do not have democracy any more by partisan judicial intent.


The best lack all conviction. The rogue elephants full of passionate intensity intimidate the best with their roar and bombast. The best, in this case, I would call people who want democracy in America. These people lack conviction. The noise of the elephants is full of sound and fury like television their medium, signifying nothing, to quote Shakespeare. The part that gives me the shivers is that these noise boxes full of passionate intensity have destroyed our nation, and now are taking us into martial law. It makes me really tired that the "educated" people, liberals, put all their focus on political (television) correctness, worry over somebody saying shit. The ones with passionate intensity have eliminated our democracy under our noses and the "liberals" haven't even noticed. "They wouldn't do tha-at." The Reagan Junta has defined Liberal as anyone with an education. The educated are the ones that lack all conviction. Education in our time teaches against conviction, as it is only opinions that fire passionate intensity. Education tends to undermine opinions, merely by informing them. The liberals lack uneducated intensity. A little bit of knowledge sees easily through opinionated bluster. But the ones of passionate intensity rule the military, the police, the courts, every branch of government, every corporate board, and they have turned their propaganda focus onto we-the-people as the enemy.


I don't see the Occupy people getting much done this summer. This time the military front lines of the Bank are ready with new laws, new forms of enforcement to counter the movement. Last year it was the surprise that made it successful. This year the riot forces are ready to shut them down before they start. I hope I'm deluded, but I can't see the Bank allowing much more shutting down the big cities. The Bank rules the media, the Bank being a branch of our government. It can shut them down easily. Over the winter there was much talk of Occupy strategies for the coming summer. The nature of the game this year is different from last year. Pepper spray in the face simply makes a great photojournalism shot. The cop's reprimand, a two week vacation. Go to the beach, man. Forget about all this. You did the right thing. Find yourself a hula girl with big titties. The corporate (government) media stripped last year's Occupy demonstrations of their power. Occupy was a very interesting idea for one summer, a big exclamation point on a chalk board. Then it was erased.  


*

COFFEE SHOP CONVERSATIONS

     trickle trickle we're in a pickle



Over the last year or so, Selma's coffee shop, Backwoods Bean, has been my pit stop when I go to town. I have to do everything that needs doing before going to Selma's, because an hour or so in there visiting with friends puts me in a spirit such that I don't want to go from there to walk through a grocery store for half an hour. I always go home in a good spirit when Selma's is my last stop. It's not just the coffee. Coffee can be got at Burger King. I know for a certainty if it weren't for the company in Selma's shop, I wouldn't be going in there. I have the coffee I like at home. It's the people that go in there that gives the place its spirit. Selma's spirit attracted all of us, and when we who were initially attracted to Selma found each other, we are now friends with each other. It's like an oasis for us. I like to go in at any time of day and see who's there. Someone I know is always in there.



Joe Allen Delp might go to Selma's every morning. Every morning I go in, he's there. He's one to listen more than to talk. And when he talks, he entertains everybody. He came up in the county in the time of redneck alcoholics. The generation before the first drug generation. Joe Allen came up in the time of V-8 hotrods, night racing, the Pool Room, beer drinkers and hell raisers. When he tells a memory from his hard drinking days, to me it's just another bunch of mountain boys, but to everybody else it's from the same as outer space. They can't believe anybody did like that. For Joe Allen, it was just what a man did. Joe Allen has his place at the bar where he stands that is his own. From there, he can see and hear everybody and not be in anybody's way. Except when somebody comes in from outside and wants to buy a bottle of wine or a cup of coffee to go. He steps aside and lets the transaction take place and he's back in his place. I've been told he visits people in the nursing home.



Joe Bunting was talking yesterday of getting a job teaching someplace else and finding somebody to rent his house. That was a shock. Joe is one of my favorite people in there to talk with. He's from West Virginia and teaches at the local community college extension branch from Wilkes. I think he's teaching history there, or something to do with passing the high school equivalency exam. I believe he'd be a good history teacher. A very good one. He reads serious books, history largely. He pays attention to what's going on around him. Joe will be a sore loss at Selma's. Everyone will miss him. Genuinely miss him, simply for who he is. I don't know that it could be said he's a lively conversationalist. It almost seems like that, but he's more a mindful conversationalist. He thinks as he speaks, or before he speaks. I think of Hazel Dickens singing West Virginia My Home. Beautiful song and she sings it right. You can hear her sing it on YouTube. It's so hillbilly, it makes Flatt & Scruggs' theme of Beverly Hillbillies sound city.



Cynthia, another WCC Alleghany extension branch teacher, is teaching Southern History and Appalachian History, as well as Western Civ. She's a small, wren-like woman, whose hair happens to be wren color, and she seems like she couldn't hold a class's attention more than a minute. That's just the seeming. The woman knows what she's doing. I sat in on one of her Appalachian classes and was impressed by the Cynthia I already knew, but didn't know could be so inspiring in an actually intellectual way. She's the kind of teacher you sign up for at a university hoping the class isn't full by the time you register. She can think up a test question too. She makes the kind of test question that requires some thought to answer. Cynthia sometimes works the coffee bar to give Selma a break or some time off. She, too, is part of the place, part of the spirit of the place. 



Dudley is indeed a lively conversationalist. He gets totally engaged, that includes physically, hands going, moving around, getting lost in a digression, all of it simply Dudley's form of speech. He's a professional radio voice, who made his living in broadcasting. When WCOK here was crippling along, he made commercials for the station. He taught me what I needed to know back when I started the radio show. He taught me a lot more than I needed to know, but it informed what I needed to know, gave it context. What I wanted to do with the radio show was live-on-air and not planning ahead the songs to be played. I found that what I thought I'd like to start the show with at home will often be different from what I'd choose at the station. At the station, I was in touch with my listeners. I liked to select the next song while a song was playing. Dudley helped me get comfortable talking into microphones and watching the clock in relation to songs played. Selma's is always lively when Dudley is in there. He's been away for a few weeks and people were asking, "Where's Dudley?" Now it's, "Dudley's back."



I don't think it's stretching imagination to say we're all open minded. When somebody comes in who is not open minded and some of us are talking as we do, they call us liberals. Eeek! A Liberal! All liberal means is somewhat open minded. I'd rather be a liberal than a blockhead. By blockhead I mean a block of wood carved to look like a head with a face. I'm so damn tired of hearing the republican propaganda about liberals! A liberal is also someone who likes democracy. Of course, now democracy is Left wing to the extreme of nihilism and has little more meaning than the word Peace on a Christmas card. These are the sorts of things we talk about when we talk politics. I doubt if half the people in there regularly would identify themselves politically a liberal, but about all would identify themselves open minded. By open minded, I don't mean open so everything that's in it falls out, the Reaganista definition of an open mind. I mean people who allow that there is something to equality among us human beings.



*