MY LIFE IN TWO WORLDS

sol lewitt

Two rainy days. It's a light sprinkle at this moment. It comes and goes. An hour or so ago, I heard big thunder. I don't know that I've ever heard thunder in January. If I recall correctly, in the old way, you mark the date on the calendar when it thunders in February, and it will be the day in May of the last frost. We're not even half way into January yet, and it's thundering. My guess is that would indicate warm weather coming on sooner than usual. However, the weather patterns have changed so much over the last half century the old ways of weather prediction have changed. Fogs in August used to tell when it would snow in the winter. The woolyworm as prediction of winter I'm fairly certain came from outsiders. It is too uncertain and it is so obviously not a reliable prediction device that mountain people would never have gone by woolyworms. I asked old man Tom Pruitt about it when he was up in his 70s. He said, "Aint nothin to it." Even though I doubt significance now of thunders in February, it still got my attention hearing thunder in January, even before the middle of January. That is way off from the old pattern. I will happily welcome an early summer, though it bothers me to some extent imagining a long hot summer. When forest fires start, then it gets your attention. Since I've been in the mountains, the summer forest fires have been mostly localized the other side of the Parkway in national forest land. Helicopters carry big tarps full of water they pick up at farm lakes to dump on the fire. My apprehension is that as summers grow hotter, which they have steadily done throughout my time here, the fires will be crossing the Parkway. My house would burn to the ground before fire trucks arrived. The house is all wood sawmilled in the 1920s.

 

sol lewitt

 

Too many people around me hesitate to mention anything about global warming, because republicans deny it. I don't care what they deny. That's their problem. I see it is an obvious fact from year to year. I understand the process of science well enough to tell the difference between somebody who knows what he's talking about and a politician whose allegiance is to oil corporations and the Bank, only. I don't care if they see financial advantage for themselves and deny the obvious for the sake of their own bank accounts. They can think whatever they think, which they do. I don't have to hold myself back from seeing the obvious, because the people in our government who hate the American people want us to believe what only half the population is dumb enough to believe, remembering half the people are below average, the bell curve. Because somebody tells me I'm not afraid enough of Satan, doesn't mean my knees will tremble when I hear the name Christendom has given the ego. I'm not afraid of ego. Ego is our ballast. It keeps us afloat. It needs controlling and training, requires attention, but not fear. We go from saying MINE to learning to share, to eventually learning altruism in some cases. The spiritual path amounts to awareness of the ego, learning to control it, which happens in varying degrees from individual to individual. Up to age 30 is the time of ego development, which is essential to living in this world. From there on, it's a matter of controlling and gradual diminishment of ego, by life experience if nothing else. We learn that my I and somebody else's I are both centers of the universe. We have 7 billion plus centers of the universe on earth. What does that do to me as center of the universe? Makes me one of many, and ultimately makes us all one.

 

sol lewitt

 

I can't help it that some people believe so much in television they restrict themselves to language permissible on tv. Political correctness is nothing but censoring oneself and others by the television standard. It has nothing to do with decency or morality. PC amounts to boutique activism, a pretense, like being an actor. I don't provoke people who talk correctness, believing they mean well and aren't able to see themselves objectively. I observe PC in the coffee shop for the convenience of keeping the priestesses of television-speak out of my face. I don't need that badly to prove I'm a liberal. Sounding like television is not liberal. It's another form of parrotry. I figure if somebody believes they have the right to correct my speech according to television, I have the right to speak as I please. I grew up in "the land of the free" where "freedom of speech" was sacred. It's a hard adjustment to live in a world where adults want to be as conformist as in high school and want me to give up my freedom of speech to conform to their idea of being television. Like with global warming, my attitude is go ahead and restrict your own speech and everybody else's you're able to, but leave me out of it. That's when I drop the N-bomb, the F-bomb, the MF-bomb, and/or the GD-bomb as announcement that I am I, not a reflection of television. The very most vast majority of American population believes in television first. I live in a world of people who believe television. I don't. I don't want to correct them and don't want to be corrected. When I find somebody is committed to PC, they fade away before my eyes due to disappointment. Still, I don't really hold it against them, because this is television world I live in, and they're just doing what they believe they're supposed to do. I believe it is television that led us by the nose into police state and I am not denying my American freedom of speech for somebody who believes television is sacred. If you don't believe tv is sacred, stop watching it for a month.

 

 

sol lewitt

 

PC is never an issue in the working class. In fact, it has become a department of working class (redneck) humor to break all the PC rules. In the company of my redneck friends much of my laughter when we're laughing at a particular incorrectness is about the cultural divide between working class and middle (management) class. Their management status when they move to the mountains is behind the middle-class belief they have to tell working class people how to act right. The attitude in the working class is you don't tell me what to do unless you're paying. Management class takes it for insolence. I have learned here that the middle class looks down on the working class the same as they look down on black people. They talk PC, but they don't act it out. I've told my friend Justin when he was regretting not having the chance to go to college that this is not a time for college. As economy gets worse, the middle class people here who don't know how to do anything but tell other people what to do will need your help. You know how to do things, like plumbing, electrical work, carpentry, roofing, cutting firewood, hunting. Everything he does, he does well. I tell him that he will be ok when times are tough, because he's good at doing practical things middle class people know nothing about. Like Justin knows everything that happens to the water when it goes down the drain in the kitchen sink. For a large number of the middle class people, the drain is the end of it. A problem I have with the working class is the disdain for education. A problem I have with middle class is the disdain for common sense. I believe both are essential. I realized when I finished college I'd lost my common sense. A large part of my motivation to live rurally by manual labor was to get my common sense back. To live with one foot in one world and one foot in the other can be incredibly confusing at times, but I couldn't live any other way. I like shifting back and forth from culture to culture. It provides a great deal of understanding of what it means to be a true human being. I don't know that I'm there yet, but like Pinocchio, I keep on a-keepin on.  

 

sol lewitt himself

 

 

*

 

INTEGRATION IN AMERICA

george grosz

It just now popped into my mind, I love a good race. I mean a race to the finish line, not a biological race. As for the latter, I have come to a place I see only the human race. Skin color is simply a skin color. Some people have long toes, some have short toes, some have blue eyes, some have brown eyes, some have green eyes. I don't think any people from earth have vertical slits for pupils like cats and goats. Even if there were, where's the big deal? Some dogs have spots and some do not. Among dogs, spots are not even a concern, nor are spots on dogs a concern among humans unless attempting to breed a dog without spots and one turns up worthless with spots. It's cultural differences we identify often as racial differences. Like somebody black in Kinshasa, the Congo, who plays keyboard in a band at dance clubs functions in a very different culture from somebody white who plays keyboard in a hard-core punk band in StPetersburg, Russia. Each is shaped by the personality of his/her own culture more than the shade of skin. A black musician can play punk like a white musician. A white musician can play Kinshasa dance music. Cultures are collective personalities. I doubt we'll be able to get along racially in America until it is understood another race is another culture. It is the culture that makes us different. The American passion for sameness creates the problem with skin color.

george grosz

Ever since "Integration," the forced mixing of the races by government decree, recognizes white culture the authentic culture, all others lesser versions of the same culture, the different cultures in our multi-ethnic society have been at odds with each other. White people moving to the mountains consider mountain culture a lesser version of the culture they came from in the suburbs of some city. They look down on the locals, because the new people coming in are white middle class suburban culture, the management class, and the mountain people are working class, to be looked down upon the same as another race, the gum chewers. I see that a generalization can be made that white people all over the earth regard the other races as lesser versions of their own race. I don't know how black people see white people in relation to their culture. I know oatmeal and cracker, but that's not really saying anything. After spending a week in Philadelphia visiting black friends in the black culture there, even went to a service in a mosque, returning to the white world was quite a shock. We white people look like pigs to the other races. That is what I saw, our likeness to pigs, after living with another race for just a week. I suddenly understood Orwell's, Some pigs are more equal than others, in a new way. I got a mental image of Dadaist George Grosz painting between the wars the German big-business men as pigs in suits sometimes. A pig in a suit is pretty much the cartoon image of the rich capitalist. White man.

george grosz

We have black rich capitalists too, but they don't get the attention of white capitalists, because they are from a different culture the white men interpret a lesser version of their own, looked down upon. I believe it's in the corporate offices at the top where racism needs to be dealt with in this slow progression of eliminating racism from the human psyche. It can be done. Racism is also anti-democratic by not allowing another culture to be itself. In school we're trained to have as close to the same personality as we can screw ourselves up to achieve. Cultures not white American culture are regarded the same as nothing in power circles. I believe this is a part of the social dynamic that makes somebody who grew up in a Puerto Rican neighborhood in Brooklyn an outsider anyplace else. The poor and unfortunate in AynRandland are looked down on as poverty, below low class, low class out of sight, the American untouchables. When somebody who grew up in semi-poverty struck it rich overnight, like a Detroit rock star or two or three, they carry their working class culture with them into the new culture they've entered and need to learn the new rules fast, white wealth; in the case of black people, into black wealth. Aint no cross-over in the ruling class. American ruling class is white, period. Ask Thurgood Marshall, Barak Obama, Vernon Jordan. Martin Luther King pointed out that 11 on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week.

george grosz

 

 

We people tend to imitate the class "above" our own, but not the class two steps above, except after it has been processed by the class above ours. The upper middle class aspires to and imitates the ruling class. The middle class aspires to and imitates the upper middle class. The working class aspires to the middle class and imitates. The self-help fashion in the middle class of the 80s and 90s became fashion in the working class in the 00s. Oprah funneled middle class values to the working class, brought the working class a long ways toward adopting middle class culture. And then there are the people like the people I call my friends who are ok with who they are, where they are, how much they have, where they came from and don't aspire to that which they are not. I remember in teenage years boys talking, "If I had a million dollars, it wouldn't change me. I'd be just like I am now." I had to hold my laughter inside. The evidence, even to a teenager, was to the contrary. Guys aspiring to be rock stars say, I'll never be too good for any of you guys if I make it. I'll party with you guys always. Then the members of the band are raising families in gated communities and country clubs. Zup dude, 'member me? Wha'd you say your name was, Bro? I have a problem with the white middle class condescension toward any culture other than their own. I believe it is that way everywhere, other races, other nationalities. It's the nature of money as a measure.

george grosz

 

 

The white middle class culture is right because it imitates upper middle class culture, which imitates ruling class culture, which imitates English ruling class culture, which imitates royalty, which imitates the history of royalty. White middle class culture is decreed by authority as correctness, like grammar. You gotta be white or you aint all right in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Looks like land of the free means for white people, and home of the brave applies to black people, or people of any shade, people of color, or different cultures. The white middle class culture, by my assessment, is hardly a culture at all. Real cultures are found in the working class and in outsiders by nationality or whatever reason. Latin Americans, when they get together, they dance. Old and young can dance together. Ethnic groups tend to live in the same neighborhoods and they carry their culture somewhat, much less after half a century of television and our homogenizing educational system that has us believing only white European history, arts and literature matter. In my American education, African, Asian, Middle-Eastern and Spanish literature were regarded of no interest, the same as non-existent, certainly unimportant. Of course, by now literature means data. Money has become the only value. Even hurricanes are graded by dollar value in destruction. Shopping is the most aesthetic experience of all. Ever took your time walking slowly through the toy aisles at walmart? It's an aesthetic experience as good as any installation gets.

george grosz

 

A WEEK OF LIGHT HEARTED FEELING

all paintings by donald roller wilson

This week I dove whole heartedly into the world of my mountain friends. It's been a good week. It brings to mind in feeling the week I spent delivering a cd I'd made of all Jr Maxwell's known recordings and took copies around to everyone I knew who knew him. It was my gift to them for receiving me into their lives as one of them, with that kind of trust. I had printed 100 copies of the cd and spent the week giving them individually by hand to each one. It was a beautiful week full of love. This has been such a week. Told that I was wasting my time with the mountain people as they are of no consequence, I'd benefit myself better sucking up to the middle class. I've been laughing all week over the presumption that the white suburban middle class has something to offer of interest to me. I've been of at least two minds on the matter, contempt for a meddler's belief that my business is hers and gratitude that the meddler put me into a week so far of review of my mountain friends and neighbors, people I value, people I look up to, the people of my heart. When somebody cuts down my people from ignorance, I stand up for my people as they would stand up for me. If I started going to beach music dances with the white middle class, my friends at home would be asking what got into me. I'd be asking myself the same thing. Who put lsd in my coffee?

 

This week has brought forward my love for the people of these mountains. I can't say I like them all, but I can say I love them all. I feel like a dog adopted after being lost and abandoned. I love the family that adopted me as though they were my birth family. It just happened that my soul found a body originally in southern California, then was transferred to Kansas City, Kansas, American wasteland. I felt out of place all the way around. Didn't know why at the time. My mind was having a difficult time in those years beset by the head rooster in the chicken house, who happened to be undiagnosed insane. That was very difficult to live with, especially when the insane one rules everybody in the house. It was a case of self-centered unto insanity. It was one of those situations like our present Congress. I can't change it, but I don't have to subject myself to it. We never bonded as father and son. I can see from pictures of myself at age 2 with knotted brow and a frown, and I know what it was about. First, drawn to the South to get as far away as possible, to the coast, then to the Southern Appalachians, the Blue Ridge. During my first summer in the mountains, on a Saturday I was in Van Pruitt's car, him driving. We passed a field full of flowering black-eyed susans. I felt that I had passed the point of no return in that moment.

This subject has been in the front of my mind all week long. I have spent the week celebrating the mountain people I know, in my heart and person-to-person. As I visit with each one I note what it is I like and love about them. So they haven't had the educational opportunities of the middle class and the ruling class. The middle class is now getting a taste of being shut out by the ruling class the way the middle class has shut out the working class. What goes around comes around, bay-bee. I don't like the way the ruling class treats the rest of us, so I don't participate. I've learned over time that fickle behavior goes with money. The more money, the more fickle. The middle class has been hysterically upwardly mobile until Reagan (Mammon) they worshipped set them on a downward spiral into the working (peasant) class. I taught myself years ago never to trust anyone of the ruling class or anyone of the middle class. I don't like fickle in people I associate with. Somebody plays fickle on me the first time and I'm gone. Then you have people in the working class longing to get into the middle class. They're fickle too. I like to stay in the bottom ranks of the working class. Don't have much money, but I have true friends. The people I associate with are true. I'm glad the middle class looks down at me. Climbers tend to ignore me as a staircase to nowhere.

During my school years I did like I was told, aspire to money and more money, money only. I don't know where I got it from, but as far back as memory goes I've wanted to live an authentic life, devoid of hypocrisy. I can't say I've made it, because other people could answer better my hypocrisy quotient than I can. Too subjective on my part. I doubt, however, hypocrisy is a word that has meaning in my behavior. I don't try not to be hypocritical. I just deal honestly with everyone I encounter. If my honesty is a problem for somebody, then go find somebody else. I don't do dishonest, but I can be misleading when somebody attempts to make my business theirs. We all have our rights. When somebody crosses that line, they're on their own. It happens rarely unto almost never. But when it does happen, I'll say whatever I feel like saying. If Miss Priss had stuck around for conversation after telling me what her gossip set believed I needed to hear, I'd have fed her a line of shit a mile long. But she got her mission accomplished and was gone. Once, I told a middle class invasive personality that Justin was my grandson and I turned him on to pot when he was 12. My way of saying I'm a crazy emeffer, leave me alone. Like my grandmother used to say, They's more'n one way to skin a cat.

Driving home from the coffee shop in town I was thinking about this wave of joyous feeling that has been with me all week, wondering if an equal spell of feeling down and out, depressed for balance would follow. A spell of joyous feeling in the past has been followed by a spell of depression. I don't see it happening this time. I've approached this time of "good" feeling without attachment, without thinking I'd like this to last forever, without even wanting it. Just happy to accept. Thus, I don't anticipate a spell of doldrums to follow, because when it's gone I won't have the feeling I lost something. It feels like this wave of affirmation that came to me this week happened of its own without ego. Maybe when ego is in it, then the balance needs to occur. I don't know. Will wait and see. I don't recall a period of doldrums after the wave of joyous feeling during the week I took Jr's cd around to his friends. The joyous feeling in that time o'er took me by surprise. I didn't set out to do a good deed. It was a thank you gesture to the people of Jr Maxwell's life for receiving me as one of their own. It's looking like I came into a place where I don't anticipate or expect anymore, but allow whatever happens to be, without criticism or complaint or making a big deal of it. I observe and assess, but try to keep it at that. I look, I listen, I learn.  

 

 

 

*

MY HILLBILLY HOME

The last few days have me walking on air within. I feel happy inside all day every day, a heart swelling with love, often tears dripping from joyous feeling, a time when mountain music chokes me up. And it chokes me up to talk with my friend Carole about my hillbilly friends and neighbors. I drove down the mountain to Whitehead to see some of my hillbilly friends and spend some time with people during my process of reviewing my love for them. I know this rush of overwhelming love for the people I think of as my neighbors is not permanent. It's like being a surfer and setting out on a wave. It won't last forever. It's a temporary run. That's what it's about. A review. I want to be with my hillbilly friends right now while I'm in full appreciation. It's like celebration time. In this time I want to see my hillbilly friends and spend some time appreciating them, who they are, as souls having an Earth experience, like me. We're in it together type thing. One thing I can tell you unequivocally, you need help of any kind, a hillbilly will help you out. In this county, if something happens to your car, you're stopped at the side of the road, the first pickup that passes will stop and ask if you need help. If you need to go into town for a can of gas, get in, you're on your way. If it's a mechanical problem, pull the hood latch.

I heard it told how (we'll call him) A went to a kindergarten graduation for one of his kids and saw sitting not far away a guy he has a bead on, has been looking for him, aiming to give him a wallerin (tr: wollowing) about the head with fists or whatever it took. He means for B to hit the ground and not get up. "I'll grab his throat with my left hand and beat his brains out!" His mission is to nail the guy first time he sees him, no matter the circumstances, no hesitation. He sat among his peers, neighbors, relatives, and a lot of people he didn't know, attempting to convince himself he really did not want to mess up his baby's big day, but he almost wanted to. He sat through the performance with one thing in mind: stomping a mud-hole in the emeff's ass and walking it dry, seeing the video in his mind's eye. In the same circumstances, I would be ashamed of myself if I failed to execute the karmic return myself, first moment on sight. A is somebody who would crawl a mile on hot Georgia asphalt to help somebody in real need. He's stout as a tree too, and firm on his feet. He has truly brilliant kids who do well in school. They're good natured and they love their daddy in such a big way it has no name. The kids know they're safe with daddy. His wife lives with the confidence that she is protected by a man who cannot be dominated, and especially that she is loved by her man she's proud of. She looks around the room of parents, looks at her man and says to herself, I got the best one in here. I'm happy for them both and their kids, because I see the love between them is alive in action.

I like the company of the people I know who truly and openly love each other. I'd rather be around people I have a relationship of trust and respect with. Not respect for driving a more expensive car than mine or living in a bigger house on a bigger spot of land. Everybody's car is more expensive than mine. Everybody's house has more value than mine. Keeps me out of the competition. Nobody is going to steal my car. Nobody is going to break into my house for guns, liquor or money. Nobody is going to suck up to me for status or the illusion of money. I have nothing for anyone to envy and nothing for anyone to be jealous of, unless it would be my indifference to money and influence. But I can't imagine who that might be in America. Besides, it's easy to acquire. It keeps me clear on who my real friends are. When social climbing is not a part of the picture, nothing fake is going on. It's only when climbing is the prime consideration or seeking something for self gain. I believe this is what puts the middle class in a state of denial, climbing. The climb is the norm, it's expected, wanting to look like on tv, make a good first impression, talk like on tv, be careful about who you know, because somebody might not have enough status to deserve to be seen with you.

Hillbillies are especially funny when they come into too much money too fast. That's when the Beverly Hillbillies within get shut in the basement by denial. Oh, do they become haughty. Nose in the air. Cadillac pickups. Gold, gold and lotsa gold. The problem is they didn't grow up learning how to be fake. Denial is new to them, so haughty behavior is acting natural. And hillbillies love the hillbilly slapstick shows like Andy Griffith, Beverly Hillbillies, Hee Haw, Dukes of Hazard. It is true hillbilly humor. Early on I thought these shows disrespectful of mountain people, until I found that mountain people like them more than anybody else. It's comedy of their own culture, of what they know, their world. A true hillbilly is not ashamed of it. The ones who shrink from being identified hillbilly, I shrink from. The climb, wanting to be seen owning a Cadillac, sets one to learning how to act out a fake lifestyle. As my only real interest is art, I don't have many people in the working class to talk with about art. It is the very same in the middle class. Except for every once in awhile one meets somebody who majored or minored in art at school, but haven't paid any attention to it since, no money in it. And that's not the kind of art that interests me. I learned when in childhood to keep my art interests to myself. In college, I was drawn to people I could talk art matters with, then after college we all go different directions like birds leaving a nest. Two went to New York, one to Atlanta, one stayed in place and I came to the mountains.

I learned some years later that people I knew before the mountains resented me for not staying in touch with them, never seeing them again. It was a chopping block experience for me, moving to the mountains. I went native right away. I discovered the mountain people and loved them as true human beings. In city life I stayed in search of people who were true (in my subjective way of seeing), not on the climb, not regarding college as job training, not worshipping money and tv. Found several and they became my circle of friends. We left in different directions. I fell so deeply into the mountains after the first years of getting acquainted with people and culture through the people I knew, the world off the mountain became another country. It might have the same name, but it's a different world. Mountain culture became the focus of my study and gradually it flowed into and through me. By now it is my culture, the culture I'm comfortable in. I'm not giving up my mountain friends for fake acquaintances with people who don't want anything to do with hillbillies. That already tells me all I need to know of them. I know I'm not expected to give up my hillbilly friends, but time spent with people I care nothing about, who care nothing about me, keeps me from my hillbilly friends. The last few days I've felt so full of light in my heart for the people of my world I'm grateful for the meddler's advice telling me I'm wasting my time with the wrong people.

 

 

*

UNCONSCIOUS BEHAVIOR IN EVERYDAY LIFE

        ellsworth kelly, white diagonal, 2008

I'm hearing myself grow tired of something I've done for a lifetime and lived in a world of people guilty of it, so much so it's not even noticed. It's concern about other people's business that has nothing to do with my business, approval or disapproval, thinking I know more about it than the ones involved. I'm training myself to remember that whether I approve or not of what somebody else believes, does, thinks, is so neither here nor there as to be no consideration at all. I'm hearing in my head the voice of somebody I once knew, "I don't approve of violence!" There was no being around him without hearing it at least once. I wanted to say, but judged it too disrespectful and never got it said, "Then don't do it." Of course, he was talking about everyone but himself. I hear "they" do this, that and the other, aint it awful. I remember with a good laugh walking in on a preacher and an old farmer, both men I knew in friendly terms, talking about the young today, how they do drugs and commit sin without a thought of the Lord. They looked at me for parenthetical agreement and I said, "It's the way of the world." Like where's the big deal? Approve, disapprove, so what? Approval or disapproval change nothing. They're just egoic ejaculations of opinion based in too little information to pass for knowledge.

All the time hearing things like, I wish them people wouldn't do that! Whatever that may be, whoever them people may be. What it ends up saying is meaningless. They, them, the others; not we, not us, not me. Recalling a time I was told in no uncertain terms that They say and Everybody knows, you this and you that. I was translating in my mind: They was two names. Everybody was those two plus one more, three names. I didn't bring that up as it would have been taken I think I'm smart. More than once I wanted to say, "Cite your sources," but knew my accuser would not have any idea what it meant, and again, I'd have been acting smart. I didn't want to provoke the "conversation" to go on any longer than the shortest possible span of time. It's pretty boring pretending to take seriously somebody talking in the most meaningless generalizations saying nothing at all, and telling me about myself such that I know for certain he does not have any idea what he's talking about. What could I do? I couldn't talk. We obviously spoke two different languages and he was mono-lingual. Evidently I was too.

How many times I have heard, "I wish everybody...." All I can say to that is when everybody does something or has something, then it's nothing. If everybody wore a tshirt with Abercrombie on the front, then it would be the very opposite of a big deal. It would be a uniform. If everybody listened to Britney Spears, then who would listen to the other Barbie in human form, Christina Aguilera? I don't want everybody seeing Lars von Trier's films or Bela Tarr's films; it would cheapen them down to Hollywood. Pearls were expensive rare, then the Japanese farmed them and the value fell way down. Similar story with diamonds. Dollar General flip-flops are the common variety you see everywhere. Then the designer Ralph Lauren flip-flop, expensive, rare, inaccessible to just anybody. If everybody had to have a twenty-five dollar Ramones tshirt, it wouldn't be long before Roses and Walmart would have them for two dollars. Our educational system has pumped sameness into us unconsciously, the people making decisions without any idea what they are doing beyond following guidelines and keeping the paperwork caught up. Commercials are pumping us with sameness, as are the politicians.

I can't help but be amazed at seeing how, in my lifetime, political correctness has become the culture of the middle class. Fortunately, the ruling class and the working class are not bound by PC. I conform to it in the company of the middle class, like at the coffee shop, only because adherents get so self-righteous about their trigger words, which never has to do with meaning. "I can't stand to hear that word!" Bull Shit. Give me a break. It is the same as churchists saying, "I don't approve of that language." All I can say is, "Then don't use that language." It's more of the missionary mind: I'm right--you're wrong--you must conform to my way or I won't like you. Lord have mercy! The threat of not being liked is so incredibly powerful in the American middle class it manipulates without even trying. What will people think? What people? Whoever they are, they'll think what they think. No two will think the same and all will be judgmental, each for different reasons, their own projected reasons. Mystery solved, now go on and don't worry about it any more. It's funny how climbing the ladder is done by selling self continually, smiling all the time, like-me-I'm-nice, I am the product you're looking for. He's such a great guy, never has a down day, up all the time. Ten years later he blows a hole through his head on purpose.

I have to give credit to the mountain people, to mountain culture, for getting myself over these urban and churchly habits of mind, thinking I know better than others how to live their lives. I've been a slow learner in that department. Through the course of my early years I was told from every influence that only authorities know anything--parents, teachers, preachers--and if you're not one of them you better walk the line. I've been seeing my life in retrospect as the first half characterized by hate and the second half characterized by love. Where I came from before in past lifetimes I don't know, but I sure did not have any previous experience to prepare me for this world. However, my parents had no interest in anything beyond church and keeping the bills paid. The preacher was only interested in church. My mother was only interested in church. I was forced to take an interest in school just like church. Duress all the way. This is how Saturn and Uranus conjunct a Sun in Taurus manifest in every day life. I was born into my horoscope. Now there is something everybody does. We all get born into our individual horoscopes. It's so common that few notice.

*

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

sitting bull

I've been hearing on the Charlotte FM station advertising recently for something of a workshop on Respect. The talk that goes with it tells that respect is something gone away from society and we need it back. My thought first time I heard it: Hmm, somebody noticed. I have to agree, in the urban world respect is absent and not missed as if it never had been, though in certain circles rappin gangstas kill each other for "disrespect." The workshop situation is for the white middle class, NPR listeners. In the white working class you still find respect. I'm wondering how much the falling away of respect in middle class mind has to do with the fast fade of old institutions in our time where respect was important. As they go away, respect goes with them, evidently. I'm wondering about the absence of community in the suburban middle class, what a sense of community has has to do with respect. I can say that in my own community in the NC mountains, Whitehead immediately and the whole county generally, a great deal of respect is going around. In what is left of mountain culture, an individual is respected for humility, for honesty, for helping others, and of course, for money. Anybody with money is respected everywhere in America, the world. That's part of the appeal for accumulating money, especially in a world where there's little to no respect for anything else.

People know each other in a rural community. A lot of people complain about the gossip and go to cities to get away from gossip, but they find it there too. I've come to see gossip as a kind of glue that keeps a community aware of the different individuals in the community like they're movie stars. In my first years in the mountains listening to Tom Pruitt tell about his life and people he'd known along the way, I noticed he spoke of the people of his community with the same tone of importance that city people talk about tv and movie stars. He spoke of the people in his world the same as people spoke of celebrities where I came from. I saw the people of his telling in my mind a little bit bigger than life. When I met different ones I'd heard him talk about, his brother Millard, for one, I was struck every time by seeing this is just another person, not a celebrity. They kind of shrank in my mind at first, seeing they were not celebrities. That caused me to adjust my own thinking. I came to see, knowing other mountain people of Tom's generation that this is how people talked about each other before radio, movies and tv started bringing celebrities into our lives. Now, we talk about celebrities with respect, and each other with watered down derision for not being celebrities.

I realized that the tone of voice Tom was using when he told about different people of the community was respect. It took me awhile to get there, because it took me awhile to catch on to respect as not only something valid, but important. When we look up to celebrities, we look at all the people around us, and ourselves, as they call us in the News, the ordinary people. Celebs are special and we're ordinary. My parachute landed me in a world where they hadn't caught on yet that celebrities were important and we were ordinary. I was seeing that the people all around me saw each other and themsleves the same kind of important accorded to celebrtities. A few months ago there was a buzz around that Robert Downey Jr had been to a certain country store in the county. Very big deal! It was like somebody came in from Celebrity Planet and wowed the people of Ordinary Planet. I confess, I was was impressed one of my favorite American actors had been in the county. Several people I know wished they could have met him. All I could think was, what would I say? You're really cool, meaning I'm really not.

It's like passing up a chance to meet Ralph Stanley. The people around him say, "He's just a man," which I already know. He's a country boy from the same generation of several people I've known here. His county, Dickenson in SW Virginia, is much like my county, Alleghany in NC, though he's in coal country and I'm not. That is definitely a difference. I've seen him up close a few times at concerts, like when he was at the table autographing for fans. He was the same size and weight, talked like and even walked the same as Tom's brother Millard, the Regular Baptist preacher who had a voice for singing as hauntingly beautful as Ralph Stanley's. I know he's just a man, and I could speak with him on that level. However, at the same time that he's just a man, he's also Ralph Stanley. I'm in awe of Ralph Stanley and believe my respect for the celebrity would obscure the man himself. I still have the sense that celebrities are beyond the ordinary. I hear an interview with artist Robert Motherwell and listen to every word like it's from Truth itself. I hear a local artist I know talking and it's the same as any other "ordinary" person talking. If I knew Motherwell, I would have been hearing just a man instead of the celebrity great artist.

Respect is one of my great learnings from living in mountain culture. There was a time when I believed the white middle class people moving from the suburbs to the exurbs might take an interest in the fact that a really interesting culture is all around them. I would tell new people I'd meet that you can get along very well with any individual of these mountains by treating them with basic human respect. I didn't realize then that respect outside these mountains was waning down to nothing in the middle class. They didn't care. I was flapping my jaws, barking to hear my head roar. Too many times I got a look like, What? I quit making any attempts to make one small step toward easing off the conscious and unconscious disrespect for the mountain people by the intruders. It's an assets point of view, not a cultural point of view. Mountain people have less assets than the people moving in. According to the law of the money and status ladder, you look up, never down. Respect is not a consideration for somebody living in a trailer and working in a factory. How do you respect somebody wearing work boots? How do you respect somebody in a tshirt that says Guns N Roses? Mammon is not a benevolent god, but a god devoid of compassion, love and understanding. I'll go with the god of love and be so poor I have to look up to everybody.

By the latter years of my life I've found my "place" in the world several years ago and I'm happy with it. I'm recalling my friend Jr Maxwell the time I asked him who he looked up to along the way in his life. He said, "I look up to everybody." I felt like I knew what he meant at the time he said it, though after knowing him as years went by, I saw he was not making up something that sounds good for public persona, which I already knew. That kind of thinking was not in him. He did, indeed, look up to everybody. He regarded everyone, low or high, with respectful attention. When you talked to Jr, he heard you. Everyone he knew, he knew for who the individual was, not the what. He respected the man who made big money and bought the biggest house on the highest hill the same as he respected the man working for him at the sawmill who threw all his money away drinking on the weekends. Jr might have thought it heedlessly self-defeating behavior, but he was a man just the same. Jr regarded people he did not trust the same as people he trusted. He recognized you have to watch out for one and you don't have to watch the other. Both are valid human beings deserving at least basic respect for their humanity. Of all my learnings from mountain people I've known, the one characteristic that every one of them embodies is respect. I'm coming to believe respect holds community together, too. I see where there is no community, respect is just a word on a spelling test.


*     

THE RULE OF THE ABSURD

        robert longo, black flag

I just now saw a photograph on Yahoo of a white man in Houston TX holding a small poster that says END DOMINATION OF PALESTINIAN WOMEN. That's as bad as my sticker on the car window that says Free Tibet. Totally pointless. That's why I have that sticker on my car window, a small absurdity in a world of big absurdities. I doubt the white man with the poster was ironic. End Domination of Palestinian Women. That is specific. Even though I am on the man's side in the matter, I can't help but look at him and think, "What?" What's he doing for his cause in Houston? Donating money probably. I can't help but think about ending the domination of Mexican women, of Indonesian women, of women all over Africa, Asia and the Middle East. What about them? It's a world of dominated women. If you think American women aren't "dominated," ask Loraine Helmsley and Martha Stewart, a couple of women who were chopped down because they had the wealth to be in the Old Boy's Club and the power. But they were women, forward women, the kind of women the Old Boys don't think so much of. Women are for managing the servants and kids. These two women took a hit for all woman-kind making it clear: no admittance, bitch.

It's the same in New York as it is in Palestine. It's more subtle and acceptable. Israel's right-wing government has been running parallel the American right-wing government since the Reagan Revolution. Britain's right-wing government is in there with them, the triumvirate. Christians and Jews, The Holy Bible. The Holy Bible vs the Koran. The Koran is the Holy Bible with a post script. I've come to see it as the Jerusalem wars where Christians kill Muslims and Muslims kill Christians. It was like the stir in India that Gandhi boiled up between Hindus and Muslims. Killing, mayhem, division. India now is divided into two enemy countries, the bitterest enemies on earth at present. All of it over God. Lord have mercy. Evidently, Muslims aren't any better Christians than the Christians themselves. It's just human beings with opinions about something they can't put their fingers on.

In this time, preachers are getting caught fairly regularly for personal hypocrisies. Like the one in Louisiana witnessed by two different women playing with himself in a car next to a playground with kids in it. He said he was getting treatment. He had a pornography problem. Seems he has a bit of a hypocrite problem too, which he confessed to. Good for him. What else could he say? I can't listen to a preacher who believes his role is to condemn sin. In my experience with Christendom, I have seen nothing to do with a spiritual path outside the Catholic church. They do have an understanding of the path in their monasteries. The rest of it is get saved, join a church, be a missionary for the Lord. Doesn't matter if your only understanding is a few memorized verses. I've been wondering for some time how Christendom is going to survive the overwhelming evidence that other religions are valid.

It's a horse pill to swallow when your belief is absolute. This is why I don't hold with the absolute in anything. It's like to live by a government paycheck you believe the lie and exercise denial regularly. It's not an issue. It's an agreement. It's for the job. It's not to be thought about, but obeyed. Sit. Roll over. Play dead. Good dog. I never could allow myself to work for government or the corporate world that only knows me as a 12-digit number. I can't dedicate my life to being a number. That old deal of be in the world not of it tells me I don't want to be a 12-digit number, which I am whether I like it or not, but I never wanted to identify with my individual bar code. I can identify with a horoscope about who I am while the bar code is about what I am: a long number.

The news goes on about the middle-class, victims of capitalist self-indulgence. They never tell about the working class on the news. Too low class. Also, in a capitalist system the workers are the enemy to be feared. They are to be kept down. Limbaugh's role is to keep the working class divided. He's paid a very great deal to keep the working class in conflict with itself while the Bank drains their accounts and they blame the African Hawaiian American president. It's comical in this time to see the panic in the white men. The population is now half white and half colored. So bizarre that in the Land of the Free this is still an issue. Our racial issues have never been settled. They've just been quieted down. Sure you can buy a house outside the ghetto, if you can afford it. The inequalities that were never addressed have become culture and all the harder to change.

*

MIDDLE CLASS BETRAYED

     constantin brancusi, blind, marble, 1916

I've listened to the news all my adult life and to this day have heard little to no evidence we have a working class, the biggest of the American classes. I hear about the middle class, the rich and the poor. Meaning, I suppose, if you're in the working class, you're poor. Everybody in the working class knows that. Interesting that they are calling the working class the poor--it's about the only thing I've ever heard on the news that tells it like it is. And it's a denial of a working class. The working class in America is the poverty class. I have a feeling the words working class are somewhat political as it is the working class the ruling class regards the enemy that must be kept down. When the Reagan Revolution began, the working class was its target, the enemy. It was said in that time the Reagan Revolution was making us into a Third World country, that is the rich vs the poor, the working class. No more middle class. The rich and the peasant class.



We hear hours and hours of concerned talk about the receding middle class. Nobody ever mentions what the "economic downturn" means to the working class. It means something that cannot be said with a smiley face; therefore, it gets glossed over and  ignored. To report on the condition of the working class in America today, not just the white, but Hispanic and black, too, is radical left wing unto communist, the enemy. Evidently, it's as forbidden to say working class in public as to say nigger, except it's more silent, nobody saying, "don't say that word." Hearing "working class" they shudder inside and say nothing. The lefties, the pinkos, the reds, the commies. The working class has bad taste. Prisons are full of the working poor. Middle class goes to a tennis club for prison and ruling class doesn't go to prison at all. The bankers Obama baled out belong in prison. The money given to the banks "too big to fail" (they weren't too big--they did fail) rewarded them for bilking millions of middle class people and the people bilked got nothing but robbed. Not even a kiss my ass. I'm inclined toward Obama, but this one needs some explaining I haven't yet heard. He's no more working toward the benefit of "the people" than Bush was. I hate to say it, but he still looks like a Republican.



When I see some attention given the working class for anything but crime and ignorance, it's told like it's from a foreign country, like French Guiana, and there's no understanding of the culture. The middle class, where the news comes from, looks only up the ladder at the ruling class with envy. When they see someone of the working class they feel superior. This is another thing about America a lot of people like to deny, that we have a very strict class structure. It's the same as denying racism. It sounds optimistic to say we have a classless society, same as it sounds enlightened to say we don't have racism. We have class consciousness and racism covered with the blanket of denial. It's awfully lumpy under there, but practiced denial overlooks the lumps easily.



The greatest problem this thinking creates is the school system. Public schools are about college prep, SAT tests. There are a few "Voc" classes for work training at laying brick, but merely a concession to a check list that requires the schools to have something for working people, a token. The middle class kids are often motivated, heading to college. The working class kids don't have any hope where school is concerned. Their only hope is to find a job that pays better than minimum wage. You don't need trig to drive a dump truck. The schools attempt to keep the working class kids interested in frustration. The school system is geared to middle class culture. Dump truck drivers are necessary. They are part of our world, an active part. Working class culture is the inferior culture, looked down on as hick, thick-fingered, redneck people that know nothing about style. The schools serve the middle class. In the schools they don't know what to do about the unmotivated working class kids. They're not motivated, because nothing is of interest to them. It's all about memorizing details for tests. For somebody who knows he will not / cannot go to college, he has no motivation in high school to prepare for something out of his reach.



I can't say any of the above is absolute, because it's not. It's a problem in varying degrees from school to school. I can't say I have any solutions for the matter. I'd recommend seeing the documentary film, WAITING FOR SUPERMAN. It's an attempt to find why our educational system failed and what can be done to get it going. In the documentary, it was found that the adults in the school system are the problem, not the kids. What little I've seen into the school system, I've found among the adults the sense that the kids are the enemy. I got the image of the teachers as cowboys inside the circle of wagons and wild Indians running all around the wagons yelling like banshees altogether out of control. Of course, that's in denial too.


In my 2nd winter here, I took a temporary job at what was then Glade Valley School, a Methodist supported minimum security prison for kids with problem parents. The teachers kept continual war going with the kids. I was dramatically told off one day by a guy who hated the smile on my face when he told me not to talk to his advisees before he does. I paid as much attention to him as I pay to other people's expectations. One of the teachers, the kind of woman no one likes, officious, snippy, tight-lipped, the kind that grows into a harridan in old age, found a coat on a couch in a place called a lounge--an empty space with some furniture that belonged in the landfill. She went through the pockets (against every civil right there is) and found "CRUMBS" in the corner of one of the pockets. It was on to find Jessica and punish her. Soon thereafter, I saw Jessica. I told her two of the teachers were looking for her. I told her which one went through her pockets and found "crumbs." When Mr Advisor brought it up to her, she said, "Yeah, I know. TJ told me." It took the wind out of his drama sail. His authoritarian demeanor fell flat at Jessica's feet and he was mad, giving TJ the what-for, evidently thinking TJ cared. When he finished I had to let him know I didn't care at all, not by saying it, but with a certain smile that says, What are you gonna do, beat me up?



Much of what the "teachers" there did to the kids was illegal as illegal can be. They knew it too. The day they corralled all the kids into the cafeteria, they told me to stand guard at one of the doors. I said I'm having no part in it. I liked the kids. They locked up the kids and the teachers not assigned to guarding the doors went through all the dorm rooms like police, throwing things out of drawers, tipping mattresses, destroying every room. They found a few kids with weed in their rooms and kicked them out. Half the teachers smoked reefer and punished the kids for it. While the travesty was in motion, I sat in the library with black construction paper and scissors, cutting out black hearts for each of the teachers. They had a wall of mail slots for their mail or bulletins or whatever. I put one heart in each teacher's mail slot. Did that ever get a reaction! It was like they took it for voodoo and it freaked every one of them, some more than others. One of them was so spooked I almost regretted what I'd done. However they interpreted the black heart, my only intent was the obvious: they have black hearts. Not one of them had the least inkling of any kind of integrity. A bunch of college graduates who couldn't get jobs teaching and were hired by this place that took anybody. High turnover.



The president or whatever they called him was a Methodist preacher put out to pasture whose ambitions far exceeded his talent. I heard him in the pulpit once, and it was a joke. He'd married a state senator's daughter thinking it would bring him up in status, but it brought her down. He wanted to be anywhere on earth but where he was. He had the demanor of someone exiled to Siberia. The school shut down after another year, a money hole for the church, and the property was sold. What a sorrowful place it was. I felt sad for the kids, who were as far as I could tell bright kids. Parents were largely middle class alcoholics and drunks who never paid any attention to their kids. Too busy with the social life at the country club. The kids rebelled by slacking off in school, then were sent to the last chance school: Glade Valley. They're regarded problems by the teachers from the first day. By lying to them, cheating them and betraying them, the teachers alienated them and made them into problems, just like the parents did. Punishment is a powerful American passion.



*