OLD MAN RIVER

Talking with my neighbor Gary this afternoon, we were connecting a battery charger to the battery in my car, trying to figure out how to read the needle. He suggested something and said, "Wouldn't you think?" All I could say was, "I don't know what to think, ever, about anything." Everything in this world is a confusion to me anymore. I've spent my life trying to understand it and have failed. I know less now than when I started wondering. I've come to the Socrates place of saying the only thing I know is that I know nothing. Jesus affirmed Socrates by quoting him when he said, "Know thyself." In one way of looking at it, what else can we know, but ourselves? Our experience is our own, even shared experience. Self is about the most enigmatic subject there is to study. Self-awareness is the beginning of the spiritual path, the path of know thyself. Shedding false selves periodically, moving forward, moving in on the reality of the soul is how I have to characterize the path. No matter how far along the path one is, the goal continues infinitely far ahead, like Ralph Stanley's Great High Mountain. Therein lies the allure for me, even mystique. It's the road that goes ever on. I'm drawn to moving with my own flow. When I get there, when I ride the rhythm of my flow, contact with the world "out there," like bank, grocery store, gas station, can rattle my flow such that I fall down on the bed returning home and don't move for an hour. I lost touch with my flow, going with traffic, driving in parking lots looking all the way around for somebody backing up or no telling what, anything, paranoia about highway patrol--quotas have gone up appreciably in the last couple years. I see scatter-brained behavior everywhere, people with more to do than they can handle trying to keep up, multi-tasking, tweeting, stopping whatever they're doing to answer the cell phone. Conversation in America amounts to interrupting anecdotes with anecdotes. Interruption is the nature of conversation now. Cell phones interrupt with urgency. I've become so weary of interruption as expected conversational etiquette, I'd rather not talk. Now, when interrupted, I let go of everything that went before, intentionally forget it, knowing we're not coming back to it, let it go from mind because it is over. Superficially is the only way I can talk comfortably with anybody in this time. It's an unspoken code in America that when you see two people talking, you are duty bound to interrupt them. It's inescapable.  

 

 

I can't defeat a social trend so pervasive it has become the nature of the American character. And I cannot say this shortening of collective attention span down to nothing is necessarily a bad thing, because I don't know. I don't want to live in another country, so I adjust to the social context of the moment. Americans have become collectively addicted to distraction. The attention span that thirty years ago was about that of a cat is now nonexistent. There is little to no attention span left. Television has been sacred from the beginning. By now it is the holy of holies. I have not paid attention to television since 1961, but for brief spells for a car race and at other people's houses. I call it MBC, Mammon's Broadcasting Corporations. Mammon is a false god, and not a benevolent one, the ultimate trickster. The continuous broadside of sound demanding attention and flashing visuals equally demanding attention makes me crazy after a few hours. Beyond a few hours my head goes numb and I fall into a grumpy mood. I want to be home and hear the birds. A nation of people obsessed with money, where money is the only value, has its foundation in the shifting, whispering sand. Andy Warhol suggested attaching the amount of money somebody paid for one of his paintings to the wall instead of buying the painting. Anyone who sees the painting sees how much it cost. Ah, you have a Warhol!, more impressed by its dollar value than the image. The only thing the painting means on the wall is I-can-afford-it. This has a great deal to do with why I feel it refreshing when I see art on somebody's wall that is an image put there in appreciation, whatever it is. I have friends with a stunning waterfall painting on the wall, a print that came with the frame for maybe ten dollars. It has a waterfall in it that is painted in such a way it pulls the eye closer and closer. The closer you look, the more the waterfall looks like water. It's a gorgeous waterfall painting that looks almost like it's in motion. The image is loved in the home for its subjective aesthetic value instead of its dollar value. They appreciate that they got so much for so little.

Earlier, when I realized the car's battery was dead from trying to start it, I opened the door, turned in the seat with feet on the ground, looking at the bank of wildflowers across the road, thinking: dying really is a solution. One more reason to rejoice when I see it coming. I recall my fear of death falling away some years ago. I've had to watch it ever since, it's so easy to relax into accidents by any of two hundred thousand ways. Before, I had an automatic pilot that took care of self-preservation. Now I have to pay attention to self-preservation and remind self not to be frivolous with this life. It is important to be in the body until this journey is completed and the time is right to move on to what's next. I do it consciously by understanding this lifetime needs to come to its own balance before going on. I don't know when that time is. It's important not to know. It has to be important; nobody knows their time but on death row. I catch myself drifting into thinking not much matters because I don't have a lot of time left. Another mind tells me it matters right up to the last second. I even look for ways to perk myself up, give self incentive, legitimate reason, not fake reason. I think I can distinguish the fake reason as ego, thoughts about legacy. Twice I have been asked by peers what I will leave for my legacy. I answer, Nothing, not even a tombstone. But you have to leave some kind of legacy. Why? The only thing important to me in this lifetime has been my own spiritual path. I take the path for a human path, not a tightrope with hellfire for a net, but a path through a loving universe where the only problem is the human mind, the driver's seat of illusion.

I've characterized the spiritual path in my own vision something like water from a mountain spring flowing on its way to the ocean. I'd call the spring the time of self-awareness, committing to the path. It makes a fast-moving stream that rushes down waterfalls, splashes over rocks, races through rapids, churning, dramatic. The self predominant before, changing fast. Changes happen first on the inside and manifest on the outside in sometimes chaotic, seemingly out of control ways occurring so fast, simultaneously and in succession, it makes the head spin and question one's own authenticity. As a result of understandings and insights, we change first on the inside. Some of the ways of thinking that went before are not practical any longer. They don't work, don't satisfy. People we know and are close to drift away, one at a time, and we wonder what is going wrong. I thought I was becoming a better person and my friends are abandoning me. It's a lonesome period of time until waking one morning and realizing you're in a world of new friends, friends more compatible with the new self than the ones that fell away. The waterfall changes to fast moving creek into fast moving river, and slows its pace at lower elevations, widens with smooth surface, flows into the delta, twists back and forth like a serpent sunning on a rock, turning in on itself, taking its time in slow motion. Closer to the sea it stops and backs up at high tide and flows again with the lowering tide. I feel like I've been through the waterfalls, rapids period and the fast-moving river period that lasted at least 20 years. My path has characterized the second half of this lifetime. I feel like I've gone through the slow-moving river and now am flowing in the delta, slowly, slowly, twisting this way and that, direction changing continually. Meandering is the word. I feel like I've been meandering within over the last few years. I feel honored in this lifetime to have the chance to complete this cycle in the Way from a mountain spring to the sea. I don't believe this is the path of my enlightenment in one lifetime. I see it a  cycle through this lifetime in self-awareness, saying in signs I've done well not to get side-tracked, passing through opportunities for distraction, indulging some and letting them go, returning to the flow, allowing the flow, trusting the flow that just keeps rolling along.       

caterpillar

photos by tj worthington

 

 

*

 

 

 

THE POPE AND THE UGLY PAGANS

Earlier, I set out to watch Kurosawa's 1961 film, Sanjuro, his take on a samurai slasher film. It started putting me to sleep. Took a nap. Watched an hour of it and couldn't handle it anymore. For one thing, maybe I've seen too many samurai slasher films, but that's not it. That just increases my appreciation for a really good one like 13 Assassins by Takashi Miike. I'd seen Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, the films of Kurosawa's samurai series before Sanjuro. This one just didn't click with me. I felt like it would have made a comic stage play with stylized pretend slashing with Star Wars light sabers. I'd like to see that. Sanjuro had too much running and hiding, a bozo bunch of sidekicks with the bold samurai that might have worked in 1961, but it doesn't hold my attention now. I turned it off and went back to bed to get out of the cold. I have heat, but the floor is cold and sometimes I feel like a barefoot Sherpa climbing a Himalayan mountain. I have on some warm sox and some warm houseboots that make a difference. I lay in the warm bed listening to an NPR hour-long show of three people telling experiential stories before audiences. It was an attention-holding hour of three people talking what we call some real shit. Wrapped up in my favorite blanket I thought of a few of my friends I saw earlier in the day, stories they could tell, stories I could tell, everyday life moments that matter for one or several of an infinite number of reasons.

 

O

 

I see trends in our television society that I often find heartening in that they acknowledge our humanity. We have well-intended political correctness as a regimen, the ABCs of popular self-censoring. I've realized the republican strategy of using people like Cruz, Palin, Bachman, and a host of others like them, worms that crawled out of the pit of ignorance to infect others with their disease, is based in the predictable rule of thumb that people of lower intelligence levels vote republican. Their appeal is  their ignorance. They appeal to the people of below average intelligence. It's sad to see, but it's always been that way. It's just that Karl Rove brought it to the surface and used it politically. Of course, Ted Cruz does not appeal to anyone with any sense. It's not what his role is about. He stirs up ignorance. So much activity is from the dark side in the capital of the nation and every state, it gives evidence that the only purpose is money, Mammon is worshipped. The new pope nailed it when he called wealth the new golden calf. He has spoken to the world that American fundamentalism is an illness. It is funny in a time when the police state of the world destroys governments and infrastructures of Latin American countries, impoverishing their people, to keep them under control. It was known at the time, and in all time since, that American's bombed Allende, the popularly elected president of Chile, in his office in Santiago, a bomb from a plane aimed at his office. The world looked the other way. USA put fascist Pinochet in power and destroyed Chile such that it will take decades to a century for it to come back, and killed Nobel Prize poet Pablo Neruda. For corporate interests.

 

 

 

Reading the public words spoken by the new pope, Francis, is so refreshing they make tears run down my face, tears of joy. The contrast with the force that has power over the American people is such that it shows our entire way of life, the American belief system, the American Dream, to be from the dark side, Mammon. The pope has even brought up Mammon. Our American government and media are coming so much from the dark side in this time that speaking the views of Jesus publicly has rich catholics threatening him with leaving the church out of their tax-deductible charitable giving. This pope might say something like, Get behind me Satan,  if pushed to it with such threats. He said that the people who call themselves Christians and accumulate wealth are "ugly pagans." He's sweeping out the trash. I never imagined in my lifetime seeing a pope as anything other than the top dog in the worlds original and greatest bureaucratic hierarchy. This one appears to have read the gospels. He's a pope who inspires with his truth. Whoever heard of such a thing? Every time I see a new quotation from him it takes my breath that someone in a position of international authority is talking anti-fascism. I don't even need to question what American fundamentalists are going through being called by the pope on the evening news an illness. The funny part is that from their point of view, he's the devil himself. For their sakes, would that he were.

 

 

Now he's saying that hell is a concept of the past, that a loving God would not have such a place. He's speaking from papal infallibility, which he actually may be instrumental in changing. It seems like something he'd do. I won't even let my mother talk to me about it. Hearing it would be a repeat of what I already know. It's Satan, himself, talking. That's all. I don't see the American fundamentalists being moved very much by what the pope said about them. They will wear it with pride and  become even more so, because the devil called them an illness. I don't know and don't want to know, but I see them in my mind's eye making this pope out to be the anti-Christ. I don't want to hear the preaching on the subject, because I already can. He says they can't call themselves Christians and continue to refuse to help the poor. He points out that helping the poor is what Christian is about. Not this side of the Atlantic. I don't think it is that side of the Atlantic either. Won't it be fun to see helping the poor American style. Corporate logos everywhere. This box of instant oatmeal brought to you by Calvary Bible Church in association with Exxon, sign here that you've never had an abortion. I've never held the pope up high, as I did not grow up Catholic, but I've paid attention to the papacy because it was so visible and so in free fall in this time. Pope Francis is something like a parachute opening. I'd like to see a world-wide grassroots trend creep into action everywhere of Catholics reaching out to the poor. I would never anticipate American fundamentalists  doing something the pope said is the Christian thing to do. 

 

 

 

*

HILLBILLY BARNYARD WINTER

 

ice in the grass

The day was cold and wet after a night of light rain and fog at 30 degrees that put a coat of thin ice on twigs and leaves. It made the ground slippery covered with last summer's grass and pine needles ice coated. It was only on a slope of the ground that it was slippery. The donkeys had frosted hair tips and their black manes were tipped in silver. I wanted more shelter for them, but they did not seem to be suffering. The two calves go into the shed at night to get out of the weather. It's their toilet. The floor is getting thicker with mashed cow pies. The donkeys don't seem to take an interest in the place. The calves don't even seem to notice. I'd like to clean it out for them, but not every day in the winter. The shed was one of those good ideas that only works in the realm of ideas. Out here in everyday life it doesn't work. In the morning and later in the day I carry an armload of hay out into the meadow to spread around for them to eat with plenty of room for the birds-on-a-wire phenomenon. The birds stay a pecking distance apart and the donkeys eat best out of kicking range. Jenny and Jack are jealous when they eat too close together. They act like children saying, "Mine!" Ears go back and they start kicking. I enjoy feeding them. I like going out in bad weather to take hay and grain to them. I like being with them. I like their personalities. They are very different and at the same time both donkey natured. Though their eyes are exactly alike, they are very different eyes to look into.  

 

frosty manes on the donkeys

 

I go out in the morning to take hay to them. I don't want to put a whole bale out when the weather is so wet. I like to take them enough to last a few hours, then take them some more. They like to stay up close to the fence, the warmest spot in the meadow, sheltered from wind by the house and under a big maple tree, where they can keep an eye on me. It turns into slipping and sliding as soon as I step through the gate. Mud, cow shit, donkey shit, doesn't matter, it's all slippery. I dodged the big lumps first day, but it's nothing anymore. It's just the surface of the earth I have to walk over to get out into the meadow where I can spread the hay on the ground and it not be a toilet. By the Hindu standard, this makes me an untouchable. It's looking like a hillbilly barn lot out there. It's the way farms looked in my early years here when a few farms continued to function. The donkeys are not messy with their droppings, but the calves let it go wherever and whenever. The physical part of feeding them through the winter is good exercise. It gets me out of the house. It gives me a chance to walk a ways, stir my blood, and to visit with the donkeys and the calves. It gives me opportunity to step out into the weather, whatever it is, to feel it for a short time, just enough to get the feel of it. Taking hay to them carries me back to winters feeding the cattle with Tom Pruitt, standing in the back of Tom's pickup, cutting the baling twine with a pocketknife, tossing sections of hay bales off the back of the truck, Tom driving through the meadow and the cows following us in the snow.  

 

hillbilly barn lot

 

I have created a barn lot right here beside the house. Cracks me up. I do like the scent. This is what the air smelled like all over the world in the time before it smelled like petroleum smoke. This new scent in the air of my immediate world is so refreshing I feel as clean as after a shower. This new scent coming into my air space coincides with letting go of concerns about the corporate takeover of my democracy, the cancer in American politics, ignoramuses front and center in the news. I have cut the umbilical cord that connected me to the country club belief system that only money matters. Paying attention to that mind, I carry in myself its belief system. The mind those people represent is the mind that, in fact, worships Mammon, holds money (gold) up the highest of the high, is actively destroying my earth on such a scale I can't do anything to stop it or slow it down. I can only accept that's how it is and watch the logging trucks carry mountains of trees by on the highway. What can I do? Live out on the mountain where I can't see or hear the highway. I see pictures of Obama and think he's president of something that is not my country anymore. He's president of a corporate league, president of the corporations. He and the other politicians are supported by, dined by, talked to on the golf course by, talked to over drinks by corporate execs in high style. Not one of their decisions takes me or anyone I know into consideration. I have no recourse in the court system. Why do I pay attention to people who are only arrogant to me, dismissive? Fake people all the way around, from the soul to the surface. I can do nothing to change their thinking, stop them or get their attention. I have withdrawn my attention and will not give them my power by way of paying them anymore with attention.

 

jack and jen with frosted manes

 

Certainly, I have to participate in all that goes with driving a car, owning a spot of property, eating, and listening to music. It's all corporate. That's the nature of the landscape I live in. I can't help it that Florida grocery stores sell California oranges. I can't help the population explosion. I can't change poverty. I can't stop racism. I can't make any difference to the educational system. Nor do I really want to. The only thing I can do with any actuality is let it all take care of itself like water flowing in pipes and stream beds, trust that the whole game of humanity is being played out on schedule, all the parts in place. The pace is crazy now and what we call reality has become false. I've worked at labor jobs to keep out of work situations where I have to pretend to believe what I don't believe, the belief system of Mammon culture, the Bank, corporate hierarchical mind, identifying with a medium of exchange. It's the same as identifying with the body, an extension of it, branches of it. The body is the frame my consciousness operates like driving a car, the car being my body's tool, this laptop my mind's tool. I have never been able to identify with one thing throughout my entire life. Of course, I can identify with God, when you consider that God is consciousness, which is your very self, my very self, the part of self that sees our dreams, that never sleeps. I can identify with consciousness, and I can identify with mind, not as something accurate, but familiar, where my own customs live. I can identify with the body in that it's the body I'm familiar with that carries my consciousness from place to place, person to person, adventure to adventure, keeps it in motion, tries to prevent consciousness from being too bored.  

 

ice tree 

 

I am happy with my own personal livestock next to the house. I have certain old shoes to wear out there. They used to have a kind of tread on the bottom that is now smooth, the reason I put them aside for newer shoes. Lots of sliding about. And I don't dare fall down. I probably will fall at least once before the end of winter, but it will be a goal every day not to. It makes me laugh to myself at what a surprise from last winter to this winter, two donkeys, two calves, and suddenly the meadow is alive with livestock and I'm playing farm again. I think of the old feller Sherman Scott, who was probably about the age I am now, walking through the herd of his cattle petting them, talking to them, his friends. People who drive up and down the road get a kick out of hearing Jack bray. He cuts loose with one several times a day, three, four or five. Depends on motivation, whatever the motivation may be. Feeding livestock through the winter. It feels good to be shifting my mind from inside my head to outside it at least a little bit. Having animals to take care of is a kind of zookeeper. I saw Marlin Perkins at YouTube a few days ago on his tv show Wild Kingdom from the Chicago zoo. I watched him for years on Zoo Parade, then Wild Kingdom. I watched Marlin Perkins like other people watched Captain Kangaroo. I had forgotten about him until this video I saw of one of his Wild Kingdom tv shows about the Bush people of the Kalahari. Marlin Perkins taught me a great appreciation for animals during my childhood. I had not thought to give him credit for his role in that aspect of my life until I saw him on Wild Kingdom again after so many years he looked to be from another consciousness.  

 

jack

 

 

*

 

JUST SAID NO TO HIERARCHIES

howdy!

I must withdraw my interest in the workings of the world that do not directly play a part in my life. That Obama has shown his hand I can't worry over any of it. I held out with a little confidence in Obama I wanted to have. I trusted him because I wanted to. I forgot, however, that he has to behave as required by the .0001% that rule. When he became president, he became a member of their club.(I'm your puppet.) That's all. I'm disappointed by him. I understand that the republicans are tripping him up in every nit-picky way the lowest mind among them can think up. In the end, he bends over for the republicans. Democrats continue in their spineless ways since the beginning of the Reagan Revolution. Since the beginning of Reaganism (Ayn Randism) democrats have conceded to the right wing unto encouragement, put down the red carpet for them. The democrats are taking us to police state, but like Ralph Nader said in the election campaign of 2000 that the republicans will get us there faster. The republicans are showing it too. The Boston bombings showed me the city police are now trained and practiced in taking charge of urban populations.

air bellows rock formation

I came to the mountains in 1976, a time when the oil corporations were shutting down independent oil companies and gas stations by what they called the Oil Embargo. We are not in the hands of people who make decisions in our interest. That time is long past over, if it ever was. We, the American people, are on our own. Government preys on us, does not protect us. What is labeled Defense is actually Offence. I feel sorry for every poor clod who joins the military believing he's "serving" his country. Going through what they go through in jungle and desert warfare for tax free corporate profiteers is dispiriting to the troops when they finally get it, minus a pair of legs. I did my Navy time in the time of the draft knowing this to be the case before I went in. It was sail the seas and play military for two years or take that much time in prison. I picked the Navy for the ocean. I longed to be on the ocean. I think it really sucks, though, to be born male and have no choice but to go through military. I was one of the examples of why the draft is self-defeating for the military. I don't like living by military rule. Not that I'm afraid of them; I don't like being one of them. I don't like their culture. I don't like adhering to a false belief system because it is expected. It is outside the military too, but the military is the core of that kind of hierarchical thinking learned from the Catholic church, which by now everybody knows aint what it's held itself up to be.

jackson pollock was in whitehead

I've refused to live my life in hierarchical work conditions. In the last year at the College of Charleston corporate recruiters were talking with seniors with job interviews. I didn't even want one of them to see me. I turned my back to that kind of thinking very early in the life, in childhood. I saw the republican recessions in the 50s and saw the advance of corporate influence such that to sign over for a job in a corporation I give up all my rights that are guaranteed an American citizen. I like those rights. I'm not signing over my basic rights and I'm not kissing ass of all the men on the ladder above me, none of whom I respect as an individual human being. From very early on it was a guiding light that I never live by hierarchy. I would live among and work with people I respect. It has been my way of life to work for an individual with a small business. I seldom made anything more than minimum wage, and then temporarily. I chose not to participate in the money making game because I did not want to shut down my self for a job, for money, for Mammon. Not that I think in Mammon terms, but that's the bible name for the god of money. Everybody knows it. And everybody knows Mammon is not a benevolent god. The US of A is on the verge of finding out how fickle Mammon can be. I've spent my life using money as immediate gain for immediate need. Paycheck to paycheck, as they say. How else in the working class? I never worked for a corporation or a factory. Worked for the state of SC for a year and learned all I needed to know about that.

roadside sculpture in sparta

In retrospect I can see I've lived my life as close to person to person, individual to individual as I could, hanging on to that connection with humanity, the other people in my life. Taking a high powered job takes one away from the world of people who appeal to one's heart and forces one into a world of people that don't give a shit about you in any way you look at it, except maybe sexually, until the next one comes along. A world of pretend. A world of continuous climbing. They never get tired of it. It's like their emotional vibration is wound up so tight they can't live without that tension. It takes that degree of tension (stress) to keep the pretend going. It's for the paycheck, and sometimes for the neurosis. In my early job years I had a crappy job and after a couple weeks the boss asked me why I was working there, I said, The money. Response: If that's all, then why don't you leave. OK. It was a moment, like about all moments, when you can't say what you're thinking, I wanted to say, What? But I didn't care. The feeling was mutual, as it usually is. Because I won't work for a factory, system or government, it has kept my job opportunities humble. That's what I wanted for myself. I did not want to be high up over anybody. How else but in the laboring class. I came to the mountains to do hard work, to labor body and mind. I can't even estimate the number of post-holes I've dug with a hand-held post-hole digger and how many miles of barbed wire fence I've stretched. I've done some dangerous tractor commandeering, enough to teach me that when IT happens, it's now, not a ten thousandths of a second from now, but now. By the time you realize what happened, it's in the past. The second experience with IT learnt me. I wasn't going for strike three. End of working with a tractor.

barn windows in whitehead

I was something of a spiritual idealist diving into my own humanity that I'd not valued sufficiently before. I was going by a premise of my own that manual labor would work off the anger within that had been a problem all the way along, to the point that I finally caught on it was in me, not out there. It is said awareness is the first step toward healing, and my experience affirms it so much I take it for granted. To come back around, I think I'm coming into an awareness that it does not serve me, my understanding, my life, my reason for being, my mental health to go on paying so much attention to the fake human beings we call celebrities, both Hollywood and DC. It can be said of DC as David Hockney said of Hollywood  in his film, "Scratch the tinsel in Hollywood and you get brighter tinsel." He laughed from seeing in his mind's eye a simulcast slideshow of several examples of his meaning. Over a period of years in California he gradually drifted away from the tinsel, spending more time at home focusing on the people close to him. He took a step deeper within going back to Yorkshire over a period of three years to stay with his sister and live in the house and neighborhood he grew up in. Going home, you might say. Going within. I'm feeling that impulse to withdraw my attention from the fake people and focus it on the people around me, the people I live among, my friends. That's my "real world." In the first half of my life, I have to say I did not value others. In the second half it's in others that I find value. I learned true values in the mountains.

 

 

    


*

 

FREEDOM IS AS FREEDOM DOES

Back in the 1950s when the propaganda concerned Russia and Communism, I wondered sometimes what it would be like living in a country where the people were not "free," compared to living in USA where we are "free." Then I grew up. I now see that living not-free is the same as living free. We have "rights protected" in court, after the fact, and in the uncertainty of the poker game that court in America is. And now we have Sandra Day O'Connor, the retired Supreme Court justice, saying her vote to put in the loser of the 2000 election, because she was placed on the court by a Reaganista republican administration, doing her duty, was a mistake. No shit. My first thought when I saw it was a word I never use, never think, but there it was: Thanks byatch! It was the right tone for my meaning, gangsta. I wonder if she thought she was endearing herself to "the people" by fessing up to her error as a human being. She made my assessment of her as a public figure fall even further than it did when she committed her public act of sedition. Thanks for 9/11, the Patriot Act, destroying the Iraqi people for Halliburton, and then the Afghani people. And most of all, thank you for the Depression among the American working poor and all of rural America for the last 13 years. For many years, before that shameless betrayal of the American people (who are paying you very well, even now in your retirement), I believed that what I believed was important and I had recourse in our land of freedom. I believed we voted our "representatives" into office, and they represented us, just like it says in the text books.

Free. What the hell is free? In the 1980s Reagan arranged a deal with Russia to let go Russians who wanted to emigrate to America for freedom. Very big propaganda deal. Russians leaving the shackles of Communism to come to America for freedom. Not much later, they went back to Russia because life in America was dead; no headlines, a back pages deal, hardly worth mention by corporate press. What's so great about freedom when 30,000 people a year are killed by guns? No telling how many are killed by other means, as well as unknown. The land of the free the murder capital of the world. Free to kill. It doesn't strike me very free when you're harassed constantly by cops without recourse for being black. Taught in school about freedom and how fortunate we are to live in a democracy and have freedom, like nobody else in the world is "free," was parallel church where somebody who had never heard of Jesus goes to hell for eternity. Policy. It's terrible when you're not an insider. Outsiders go to hell. And what's so great about freedom when we have a prison population that is so far out of range with the rest of the world? Even the countries we think of as hopelessly nowhere. We live under the draconian mandatory sentencing of the Reagan Junta, and a legal system that gets its kicks out of putting people in prison and labeling people criminals after they're arrested the first time.

People from outside our American working class culture don't know the sly workings of the laboring class where everybody needs more money just to get by. The working class is where you find the people who end up in prison for being shut out of the economy. People with brilliant minds are born into every society. Somebody with a fast, retentive mind born into the working class, shut out of making enough money to live on, going through school with only hopelessness for a future, you're not very motivated. Education for the sake of itself appeals to a very small percentage of children. It's hard to create initiative for oneself without motivation of some sort, hope. I used to know a guy with a very sharp mind who took to interstate fixing stolen cars with new serial numbers, paint and whatever else they did to sell them. He made good money and had his barely paying job on the side. He got his kicks having the Law snapping at his heels. It turned him on to "outsmart" the law. It worked for awhile. This was a guy if born into the upper middle class could have been a Wall St exec never caught for making great big money on the misfortunes of others. By his example, I remind the younger people I know that they might think they can outsmart the sheriff or the town cops, but there is a rule of thumb in this world: the one with the most advanced technology wins. It works out that way, the Colt 45 for example.

The Law has access to technology a tough guy just out of high school driving a used pickup and listening to Korn never heard of. An entire profession, millions of careers, waiting for the next Senior class to let out. Get drunk, get high, talk big, but don't act on it if you want to challenge an institution that has the backup of SBI, FBI, millions of computers, an entire educational system. You go up against the Law, you get caught. That's why the prison system has become a for-profit business. The prison system is kept going by an economy based in cheap labor. Is that freedom? I don't mean the prison. I mean living in the laboring class in an economy that is based in keeping the labor cheap and the Law tight. What used to be called sweat-shops are now common Asian and African and Latin American factories where some of the people are so poor they'll work more for a lot less than in American sweatshops. The American corporate board looks at a fire that killed hundreds of people working in sweatshops as something insurance will handle. Population control. It will make them have to hire a media-image damage-control consultant out of California for a few million. What a bother. The lawyers will take care of it. Let's have another snort. Then it's no big deal. On to the next Bopal. This cannot sanely be called freedom. It can only be called freedom in advertising with beaches, palm trees and beer at a resort to lure the unawares. The Kiss Of The Spider Woman Lodge. Yes, that's Sonia Braga, in person, at the desk.

sonia braga

In my head I hear Patti Smith shouting, OUTSIDE OF SOCIETY! THAT'S WHERE I WANNA BE! And Lenny Kaye's guitar--rock and roll! Something parents forget when their kids are teenagers, rock and roll is about freedom. It's about breaking loose from the binding chains of a society (parenting) that locks down the human spirit in the worship of Mammon. I don't mean to wax Biblical, but there it is. We bury our dead Egyptian style, living our lives going to church talking about the spirit is important, the body just a shell, and have so many laws and regulations about burying the dead that put money in a string of corporate profits, we can't afford to die. The burden of those expenses go onto the heirs. Heirs to what? He worked in factories. It is illegal to be buried simply in a white shroud without a box, the dirt shoveled in on the corpse. Why is that illegal if to dust our bodies return? This is the world our human spirit grows up into, and by late teens it is so confusing a kid doesn't know what to do but crank up the volume. Norway known for its hard metal bands, makes me wonder about Norwegian Protestantism. My guess is that it is more stifling than Kansas Protestantism of a Swedish mind. The music the kids are needing is subliminal expression of their exploding volcanoes within, having to learn how to go against their human nature, and everything they learned in school, to enter the adult world where Happy Planet does not apply. What kinda job? Uh. I dunno. They pay enough to put gas in yer car at Burger King. And then make a living. Get married--two can live cheaper than one--Not. Then the incredible expense of having a baby when you need to buy cheap hot dogs to have the money to pay the rent on the trailer.

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AS SEEN ON TV

    found art by tj worthington

Something serious has broken in our American society. Just about every day, someplace in America a young white guy kills several people and himself. It's like the guys with guns are people that want to die, saying, By God, I aint goin down by myself. I'm takin as many with me as I can. It says we have a lot of white men in our country who want to die. The black men are killing each other. White men are killing white children and crowds of white people. Most of it doesn't make the news because there is too much. Husbands killing wives, wives killing husbands, that's yesterday's news. Killing is our disease, not gun madness. A gun is a tool used toward the end of killing. A pipe wrench is a tool. It can very easily be used to kill. Easier than a knife or a pillow. Our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq are killing themselves more than they are being killed in gunfights or by bombs. Something is wrong in America and guns are not it any more than a burning tire around somebody's neck in South Africa is it. Because we have guns we don't do that. Assessing what it is about America in this time when we have a civil war of terrorism going on, this civil war is looking like it is working out as everybody against everybody. Somebody by surprise goes out and kills several people. Going postal. That's not an act of love. It's hate. It's hate for self and it's hate for others.

The people anesthetized by television don't see what somebody who looks at it every once in awhile at somebody's house can see. I'm amazed by what I see. Violence to the most indifferent extreme. Not just violence in killing, but a violent tone of voice that runs through an awful lot of it. Like the reason you need a new Lexus is told in no uncertain terms. The flash, the glitz, demanding attention by sound and by sight; explosions, guns going off, people falling. The anonymous people Arnold kills never have funerals, never have kids, family or anything. They're faceless, nameless entities, like the people in a crowd some shooter lights up with machine gun fire. All my adult life, everybody has said, It's not television. Television is not the problem. And I'm saying, It's sure as hell not guns. I see football games once a week, and what I see around the games in commercials, news items and a lot of talk is the tones of voice and attitudes of aggression. Scripture used to be the glue that held us together in civilization. In America now, what scripture is paid attention to is twisted to political agendas by gross misinterpretation and manipulation.

Television is the American religion. When it comes to looking at causes of our social ills, mention television and the din of the uproar teaches one never to do that again. It's sacred. Everybody I know claims commercials and television attitudes have no effect on them. Then why do multi-national corporations spend so much money on commercials? Big money. Like millions for a Superbowl half minute. They know the power of television to manipulate. Television is even more sacred than guns. I get laughed at and derided whenever I point to tv for influence on behavior. It's the ONLY influence. I don't even dare mention a book for any reason. You want to see faces fall, say something that makes reference to reading a book. Television is the American mind. Period. It is easy to tell when somebody gets their information from Faux News. It's in their attitude, tone of voice and subjects of interest. Rant is often their form of conversation. I see the American span of attention narrowing down to nothing. Get around a bunch of people and silence becomes the dreaded monster. Everybody chattering as fast as they can go, talking over each other, saying nothing, filling in the silence with noise. Like on tv, doesn't matter what the noise is as long as it's noise. We're getting so bad about acting like we're on tv, I see lights on top of heads flashing, ON THE AIR.

In the late 1980s I visited San Diego, where I came into this lifetime. I noticed people were dressed like on tv. I came home and saw the school kids dressed like California kids, walking like them, carrying a skateboard around. People in Sparta live just like people in California, New Jersey, anyplace USA. Television is our ideology that holds us together. Buy this, buy that, pay no attention to your intelligence, go by what you want, let desire run free, indulge yourself, use the tv noise to drown out your thoughts. Tv is the propaganda organ we buy and put in our homes of our own free will. It's subliminal and who notices and who cares? Without the television fix we're blind and searching in a dark room for a black cat that isn't there. The New Normal. Why are zombies so popular in pop culture now? Are the young identifying with the living dead, being dead while alive? There is no life in television. It is a flickering light, Mammon's cathedral. Because tv is sacred we don't hear anything about television in the corporate media-led examination of whether guns kill people or people kill people, or whether more guns will make America a safer place. Anybody who mentions television as an influence is quickly shut down. We are not powerless against television. We have free will. The same button that turns it on turns it off.

Since the early 80s when the Reaganistas lit into our population with the divide and conquer strategy bent on destroying the democrat party, we the people have divided into two camps that have become intolerant of each other and focus attention on each other while the corporate police state positions itself off camera, and how many questions are asked? And so what if questions are asked? Police state rules with guns and propaganda, not logic, reason or popularity. The Patriot Act deleted our Constitution. Where did it come from? Immediately after the imploding of the twin towers on tv, every senator and congressman was given a copy of the Patriot Act so thick even a crew of aides could not have it read through by next morning when the vote on it was scheduled. Again, where did it come from? It was written over several years and strategized over several years as the new constitution for the police state. It was printed, bound, boxed and ready to go. Then guess what happened. EMERGENCY. Hmm. Pretty good timing. Advertising now "targets" us. I'm remembering the time I called Ted Stern the night of the democrat convention. I asked if he was watching the convention. He laughed. "No," he said, "I'm ninety-nine. I don't care who wins." He'd rather watch basketball. And I didn't listen to the convention on the radio.


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