TWO VIEWS OF REALITY

This week's laugh in the news is Nuttin-honey-yahoo scheduled to speak to Congress, the cement-heads this side of the Atlantic, bypassing presidential approval. Another news ruse scripted by the Heritage Foundation. Some of the democrats are saying they won't go. Nuttin-yahoo won't show for sure. Three billion a year for military at stake, Mr Nutty will not take the risk. Who cares if he does? We the people are so separated from our government, concerns we have bear no meaning. We are given ruse news by way of corporate control, creation, and production of the ongoing serial of the worst things that happen around the globe in the course of a day. The journalist's creed, if it bleeds it leads, is predictable. And conflict, the stuff of drama. No time left for anything else. It takes gunshots and explosions to keep hands off the remotes. Why do I want to fill my head with the worst events of the day from around the world? It's called keeping up with the real world. Whatever that means. It means my life here at home and the lives of the people around me are not real. What's real is conflict someplace else, much of it created for the news. Reality is always someplace else. It is never where I am. I live in the non-existent working class world unheard of on the news and unacknowledged by government, except as the criminal class. It's either the 1% or the middle class. The talk is of the sinking middle class. Every time I hear it, I think, the working class already sank, been sunk throughout my lifetime. People of the working class are taken advantage of for their modest educations, easy targets for propaganda, guided with a ring in the nose away from their own interests, don't even know what their interests might be.  

I'm happy to report, attention I give to the news is waning fast. I turn it on for five minutes, top of the hour, NPR, a time or two a day. Not that I think NPR is better than the others. It's absence of commercials appeals. I'd rather read the cartoon page of any newspaper than the front page stories. Editorial cartoons are about all I care to see on the editorial pages. It takes a certain kind of clever wit to conceive editorial cartoons. When I had my first computer, discovering the internet, I found sites of editorial cartoons, looked at thousands of them. To tell a story in one picture and a few words comes from a certain kind of thinking I don't have. It's a beautiful art form, concise and clear as a Zen haiku. Sitting at the coffee shop I'll pick up the paper and look at the editorial cartoons, go to the cartoon pages and work the Jumble puzzle. Much more interesting than reading something about what somebody supposes Russia is doing in the Ukraine, WW3 in embryo, or conjecture why Seattle didn't run the ball when they had a human tank. Whatever. I've seen a quote attributed to Mark Twain saying America has wars for geography lessons. This leads me to believe our government was attacking poverty-stricken defenseless countries in his time too. Like whoever heard of Vietnam before USA set out to annihilate its people. Fear of communism. Now we're doing fear of terrorism. Then, our troops were killing slopes and dinks. Now they kill towel-heads, steeping impoverished countries in ongoing war to keep the oil corporations flourishing and American "defense" contractors in the right country clubs. Closer to home, when an interstate route is planned through a city, it goes through the neighborhoods of black and working class white, the people without recourse.

   
Talking with an aunt living in Florida on the telephone a decade or more ago, she asked if I'd heard about Conway Twitty dying that day. I had not yet heard the news. She let me have it for not living in the real world. I was told I need to get out of these mountains and back in the real world. Real world? Conway Twitty? Television? City? What I hear and read in the ruse news tells me the "real world" is evidently the world of media and malls, commercials, the world of money. In this "real world," value amounts to money and money only, like getting a great value at a close-out sale, 50% off, or buying a new car at three thousand dollars off the showroom price. Wow, really saved some money. Saved money by spending twenty thousand. I love the enigma of how I can save by spending money. I get junk mail telling me to throw my money their way for something discounted 10%, and save money. These were the questions that made me crazy in transition from sheltered by parents to figuring out how to be an adult by trial and error. I continue to have a hard time in this "real world" making out what the reality might be behind the deceptive front, whatever that may be, last week immigration, this week immunization. One is about keeping poor people out of the country and the other about killing poor people already in the country to get them out of the way. In that "real world" we have War on Poverty, which increased poverty, and War on Drugs, which increased distribution and funded much of it. These wars on, fill in the blank, criminalize the American people. Now we have police state regarding all of us criminals. This is hard to live with. Real world? I lost faith in the world of commerce as the real world before I withdrew self from the real world to what is evidently known by way of media to be the unreal world.

I looked at the window and saw Jenny with her back end pointing this direction. She raised her tail, opened her back legs and let go an astonishing stream of donkey urine. I thought: what a bladder. She was ready to drop some biscuits when Jack wanted to play neck-wrestle, Jenny preoccupied. She let her tail down and took a few steps toward the meadow. Jack stepped to the spot she'd wet, sniffed and sniffed. He raised his head to the sky with curled upper lip in a kind of goosebump spasm. Jenny walked on into the meadow to graze on the day's hay. Jack watched her, then walked behind her to join her grazing. This is where I find the real world. Out another window, buntings and snowbirds pick up sunflower seeds I threw on the ground for them. A chipmunk fills its cheeks. A red squirrel sits up holding a seed with tiny fingers, biting open the shell for the kernel inside. My real world is about people living their lives, working, having opinions, beliefs, doing what they can to get by the best they know how. My real world is knowing donkeys as conscious beings with minds. My world has no value in the world of commerce I've come to call the unreal world. In that world it is not important who a human being is, or any other conscious entity. Learning the doctor I went to for thirty-five years did not know me at all, it told me he was from the world "out there," the unreal world where who someone is bears no relevance, none whatsoever. The doctor I go to now is from my idea of the real world. He is interested in his own humanity and the humanity of others. He is also interested in lab reports and readings on an EKG or MRI. First doctor told me years ago, "We are chemical machines." My Pee Wee Herman within thought, I know you are, but what am I? I knew he would not get the reference, and thought, A doctor telling me I'm a machine? He lost a great deal of credibility. I understood what he was saying. I had a problem with consciousness left out. He told me I'm a what, not a who, a meat-coated skeleton, a file number.

*

THE TROJAN HORSE AND GLADE VALLEY ROAD

brice marden 

The sky is turning light. The sun is not yet up, but on its way. Mind realizes I've not slept all night and am wider awake than if I had slept. In the bed writing a short story in my mind until telling self I need some sleep. I turned the radio on all night BBC. Most often, the chatter sends me into sleep within two minutes. Not this time. Listened to Putin's popularity rating, republicans continuing attempted murder of Obama care, assassination one of their specialties, smoke-screen news covering up the real news. My interest in the news is waning fast. I've come to see that even the network news that is not the Fake channel gives misleading news. In this time when the Fake channel has made news into absurd fiction, the other channels follow suit wanting to compete for the  most exciting presentation. All of them gloss over and cover up police state. NPR cannot be counted on anymore for news. I listen to NPR, now that the Koch Bros own it, like I watch cartoons. I take what I hear for smokescreen of what I don't hear. Much talk about how terrible it is for the families of the two NY cops shot down. There is never a mention of how terrible it is for families of unarmed young black men killed every day someplace in USA by cops. Their families come up and they're discredited, made to look like jungle bunnies that rob dumpsters. Gradually, I'm learning to pay the news little mind. I like to watch the processes, how things work out, to read the patterns of the political trends. I'm learning to withdraw emotional attachment to one side or the other. I can't involve self with any kind of attachment. 

brice marden

Watched a two and a half hour documentary of Franklin Delano Roosevelt I found to be good history. I was paying attention to how he worked a crowd, his charisma, his intelligence, noting that everything he put in place, the John Birch right wing party, funded by Koch Bros and others of like mind, has fastidiously  been dismantled since the Trojan Horse Reagan of 1980. We the people are now what I've come to think of as citizen criminals. It means, for me, that we are now regarded criminals because we are citizens. Cops have become police state bullies, as always happens with police state. Their role is to serve and protect the rich and the corporations "too big to fail." We the people don't even have a lobbyist. In 2005 this police state Supreme Court declared the police are only about "law enforcement," not to serve and protect. Then why do they still have the fake slogan on their car doors? I don't want to think about this anymore, though when I see it spelled out in front of my face, it's difficult to ignore. I don't want to ignore context and how things work. I'd say this comes under the world we live in the way it is. This is the political world I live in. I have to accept it as the nature of that kind of reality, the way things are, be aware of this fake reality as such and let it go by, not be of it. This has been a problem all my life, how to live in a fake world where denial is the culture of white people.

brice marden

I went to bed after writing the above, too weary to go on. Slept all day. Up now at sunset. Stayed up too late last night, drove home between 12:30 and 1:00, then couldn't sleep. Driving at night has begun to mess with my eyes. Glade Valley road, crooked as as a running snake, mostly has little to no cars. Last night, Christmas, I found at least twenty cars on the way home. Headlights blare in my eyes. Looks like everybody has their brights on. Going into a sharp curve with three cars coming through it the other direction, one after the other with bright lights on, can be disorienting. I watch the white line on my side of the road, focus my attention there unconcerned as possible about the oncoming cars. I tend to want to steer too far to the right to avoid them. I tell self, they have to stay in their lane, like I stay in mine. One of them crosses the center line and plows into me, nothing I can do--I'm in my lane. Air bag. Glade Valley road is not a good one to drive fast on. Surprise curves just over the top of a rise that you can't see until you're in them. The first several times on the road I was hitting the brakes often to stay on the road. I've found a good pace at 30-35 mph where the car can flow with the road at this speed, brake seldom, and glide through the curves with no problem. I feel more relaxed driving at this rate than going up to fifty in a short stretch, then hit the brakes to go through a curve at 20. I've driven GV road in every weather condition by now, including snow and ice. I've learned how to drive the road, making it an easy drive, rolling with the road itself. I resisted the road for quite awhile, until I learned to flow with it instead of attempting to drive it like other roads. Used to think it a hateful road, and now I like driving it, find it relaxing.

brice marden

The kids were happy with their presents. Vada had been center of attention all day, first half with daddy's family, second half with mama's family. I went by after they'd done all the family get-togethers. Vada had been buried in presents. She loved her little earrings. First thing she said after she saw them, "What else do you have for me?" Cheyenne took the back seat all day, was quiet and had gone inward. She loved her dragonfly necklace, put it on immediately. Later, when we had a moment together, I said to her, "The necklace is all yours, only yours, not anybody else's." She said, "What if I come back and it's not in the box?" I said, "You taking it home?" She said, "No, leaving it here." I assured her it will be safe at daddy's house. I felt so deeply for her having to be in the background Christmas day, all attention on Vada. The situation is such I'd like to snap my fingers and make it right for her, but can't do it. I was grateful to Carole for suggesting jewelry. At the end of the day, Cheyenne received her prize. There isn't much I can do for Cheyanne to help her issues. It made my day to give Cheyenne something that meant so much to her. I went into it wanting her to have something she could value, a nice piece of jewelry, of which she has none, By the end, I was almost sorry I'd deepened her sadness, gave her something to worry about somebody taking. I saw that she is working things out for herself. She's learned she has to take care of herself. I'd like her to grow up to be an independent woman. I feel like her experiences in this part of her life are pointing her in that direction. I'd like, in what time I have left, to encourage in Cheyanne her own inclination to look out for herself

brice marden himself

*

  

NO TO HERD-THINK

meher baba

I heard a man talking on a Charlotte NC interview radio talk show with NPR about a religious demographic of people he calls the NONES. These are the people who have a spiritual life, see themselves on the spiritual path, who are not affiliated with a church, religion, by choice. For religion they have none. He has made a church for the people disaffected by religion. I listened to him long enough to find out what he was about. Even continued to listen after I knew he was no interest to me. It got worse until I just turned it off. By worse, I mean not allowing that an individual on one's own path can be valid. I've been told countless times by religionists in my life that I cannot go it alone, I need the support of a church. Support? Like my friend Melvin says, When I want to be judged, I'll go to church. I cannot give the opinions of an ego-maniacal man power-over my decision making. A preacher whose solution to the troubles in the world is nuke-em cannot advise me about anything. He has nothing to teach me. Faux news on the television gives him evidence he's right. A man whose racism is never spoken, because it's understood, has nothing to tell me. Even a preacher who is not racist or sexist and believes religion is the way, still has nothing to say of interest to me. I know a preacher who lives nearby with a church of beautiful loving energy bubbling among the members. I've seen his flock become truly caring, conscious people of integrity. Still, it's for people who need groups. I, personally, do not thrive in groups. In a group, I start looking right away for my own place on the periphery. Every herd has one that stays off to itself. I am that one in the herds I've been associated with. At a cocktail party I'm the lone penguin with drink in hand wandering between the groups of penguins chattering.  

ganesh

I forget the book, chapter and verse, but I've heard a zillion sermons on it's the narrow way, not the broad highway. The preacher meant by "narrow" the straight-and-narrow, the tightrope preachers use to control their flock with guilt, a misinterpretation of strait, a narrow passage to a harbor, which even a child could see. I mentioned the difference to two different preachers, one in childhood, one as an adult, that strait has a very different meaning from straight. No it didn't. Dismissed. A doubter. In hindsight, I am grateful I had such a twisted religious beginning. It was so obviously not what it claimed of itself, it spit me out like the human cannonball, made me a None, a contraction of no one, nobody. The preacher mentioned above starts out with Nobody his name for the people not associated with religion. He likes to have "conversation" with a None over pitchers of beer in a bar where he makes salient points to prove to the other, you're wrong, you're nobody. I think of Odysseus telling the Cyclops his name was Nobody, thinking ahead to the Cyclops screaming in pain with a beam stuck in his eye; the other Cyclopes called to him asking who was doing this to him and he answered, Nobody. They went back to sleep and Odysseus slipped away. The guy talking on the radio was slick, fast with a rebuttal to any point of view. Winning them over, convincing them he's right and they're wrong. Now he has a church of nobodies believing they're somebodies in association with him. Listening to his slick, evangelistic talk was enough in itself to put me off. I'd say he won over the ones looking for what's "right" with his I'm-right-you're-wrong explications. He talked like he was an insurance salesman, your good buddy with your interest at heart. And a little more money in the collection plate helps. The ones looking for what's real are the ones he fails to snare with his slick tongue. He'll never figure out why. The need to be right is the mother of countless atrocities. 

shirdi sai baba

By the time I turned the radio off, I was almost mad at him. The temperature was rising in my boiler and I assessed no need to follow this unto steam blowing out the ears. There came the time I was hearing him a smug Jerry Falwell, who, of the fallen televangelists, actually fell well. The guy on the radio wasn't saying a purple "teletubby" with a triangle on its head in a children's tv show was gay. At least the guy talking on the radio wasn't showing the stupid side of egomaniacism. He was showing the cold, calculating side with a smile of pretend caring in the reassuring voice of an undertaker, thank you very much for the free money you worked your ass off for. Nationwide is on your side. State Farm is there. He has a church of people he has convinced they're nobodies outside his herd; he knows what's right. His presumption got on my nerves to the point I almost started talking back to him, but realized I wanted no kind of conversation with him, not even in my head. For me, he was another voice calling to me to enter a herd, a Siren saying, Join, Be a Member, Belong, No more Lonely Boy, We're there for You. And my immediate response: No you're not. He brings to mind a phenomenon that when you prove somebody's belief about something to be wrong, it hardens them further in their own belief. This is what the Somebody who convinces Nobodies they're wrong did to me. He made me all the more determined in my own way. I believe he has the same right to gather Nobodies unto himself that I have not to accept the name Nobody just because he, for whom being right is important, says so. Pat Robertson is right, too. So was Joe McCarthy. All the great rogues of history were right. I cannot turn my thinking over to any form of rightness. 

sadguru upasni maharaj

Life on earth, everyday life, is too complex, change the only constant, illusion the foundation, for me to nail myself to one thing or another that calls itself or himself or herself right. What's right in one context is not right in another. This way of looking at it takes into consideration something only the individual can see for self. The spiritual path is a path, not a road, not an interstate, not a passenger jet, not a cruise ship. It is individual. Walking in a line on a path gets old fast. In line, the one in front is perky with energy, going onward, charged. The ones behind are overtaken with lethargy such that it becomes a labor to walk. Some of them lag behind and run to catch up. When it is just two, the one behind gets tired first. It doesn't work. Or anyway, it doesn't work well enough to suit me. All arrive at their destination, but only one experienced the path, the way. The others were going along. I feel like Jon Voight in Runaway Train telling Eric Roberts, who wanted to go with him when he escaped from the prison, to keep up; he is not slowing down for him. Roberts had a rough time keeping up. He was following. Voight had a goal, an end, a destiny to chase, while Roberts' motivation was following. Runaway Train is a great film. Clue: Akira Kurosawa wrote the screenplay. The film is a metaphor for the spiritual path on a kundalini fast-track run from locked in a cage to standing on a train engine running full speed, his arms out like a bird, leaning into the wind. He did what he had to do. Some of it was good. Some of it was bad. It didn't matter. He had a trip to make. Let go of stragglers, work through opposition at emergency speed, and get on with it. I liked about this story's characterization of the spiritual path the absence of judgment of anything. It was all bad and it was all good. He did what he had to do, call it good or call it bad. Neither pole mattered. Thus his path. My path meanders like a stream bed with the flow I have chosen for myself, rather the flow that flows best with my temperament. I like to think I'm in the meandering delta of my life. Many, many streams in the delta. This one mine.      

*

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. 

 

 

 

*

EVERY DAY ACQUIESCENCE

banksy

In my own little world the everyday life part of it doesn't seem so crazy. The people I know live their lives like usual. Sparta has less and less business. It feels like Sparta is a waste land. What businesses are open, they're barely getting by and staying open because they can't afford to close. This started in the year 2000, immediately after the Shakespearean usurping of power by the republicans after losing the election. The business activity in Sparta started slowing down right away. Through the 90s Sparta was staying afloat, not thriving, but it was looking like Sparta was a living entity. At the same time, Hong Kong transitioned from British colonial rule to mainland Chinese. It was no big thing looking from the outside. The Hong Kong population acquiesced immediately, overnight, to the new way things would be. From outside, one change I've seen is the Hong Kong men with guns movies had guns shooting from start to finish, bodies dropping one after the other. Since 2000 I see less gun shooting in the men with guns movies. They have gone into mind games between cops and gangsters. They didn't cut out the shooting, but it seems like the newer Hong Kong movies have become more mental than physical. Mainland Chinese films don't have guns, none that I've ever seen, except in wars.

At the time, I found it striking how Hong Kong's character had to change from one belief system to another overnight, and Sparta's character changed overnight too. It was like business was shut down throughout the republican administration usurped by judicial fiat. Everybody knew the election was stolen. It's just that everybody also knew our only recourse was to acquiesce. They destroyed our economy, our legal system, our political system, our way of life, all of it without resistance. All of it done in the face of acquiescence. The republicans by now have the economy so destroyed there probably won't be any coming back. I'm not talking about the stock market economy. It only applies to the takers, aka the rich, like casinos in Europe. The rest of us out here in the world are having our resources stripped from us by the super rich, our labor hardly compensated for at all. The Reagan Revolution has kept income for the working people steady for over 30 years while inflation goes up, up, up, and our resources are funneled into offshore tax free banks. We pay the taxes from our labor to keep a military going that is way out of proportion to sensible, and amounts to a circle of wagons around gated communities. It's for the benefit of the people that don't pay taxes.

antoni tapies

All of us know this is going on, regardless of whether we like it or not politically, and we acquiesce. I hear somebody saying, "What else can we do?" That's exactly what we're supposed to do, acquiesce. It's evidently the natural thing for us to do. I see people up in years who have spent their lives asserting their belief system onto government, like socialists for example, one of many examples, people who spent their lives frustrated and angry that American government is about money only, that it doesn't change. Angry all the time. It's either commit to actively making specific changes in government policy or acquiesce. It's how we keep the peace, we give in. A neighbor's dog has been killing the possums that live under my house, that keep the house free of rodents, snakes, country critters looking for sheltered places to nest. I don't like having my possums killed, but I don't want to kill the dog, and I don't want to make a fuss about it. So I say, to hell with it, and acquiesce. I honestly would like to kill the dog, because it also killed my favorite cat. But I can't allow myself to do it. I've thought of hiring it done, but tell myself it is not somebody else wanting the dog dead, it's me. Therefore, it's mine to be the one to kill the dog, not somebody else. But I can't do it. I once killed a dog over killing my chickens, and told myself I'll never do it again. Though, if the dog were to kill Caterpillar I would kill the dog within a week.

I was hearing somebody talking on NPR today driving to town about new initiatives cities are looking at for pulling the different parts of the urban community together to search for innovative ways to get the economic bloodstream flowing again after lockstep shutting it down by the collective republican party, people who want to shut down We The People because there's too many niggers that might benefit. The republican party is the present day manifestation of the Ku Klux Klan. Like the Mob in the big cities invested in legitimate corporations and disappeared as the Mob. The Klan disappeared as the horseback riding Kaspar the sinister ghost and became legally legitimate with their own political party. It may be the best for the USA to have a black president now, in this phase of the Reagan Revolution. The republicans are going apeshit like hornets after squirting hornet spray into the nest hole, buzzing up a storm. They all have an African American, the real deal, OVER them, excepting the puppeteers pulling his strings and their strings too. Washington DC is on hold with the republican shut down of American life, all but military, shutting down the economy on us, cutting off our blood flow. The state governments are under siege by republican chicanery like national government. The cities are evidently looking at ways to make it without state or national government. The republicans have become such a serious problem in their ongoing efforts to create police state, which they've done systematically unto completion, nullifying the Constitution before our eyes and laughing as we predictably acquiesced. It is the waves of our acquiescence they ride.

I was heartened to hear that some cities are starting to pull together as big communities looking for possibilities for becoming self-sustaining, looking to the good for all concerned. Breaking free from greed thinking. This being a direct consequence of the republican shut down of government for all but military and police, it could be a good thing. It looks like the republican party is on the highway to self-destruction. The arrogance toward the people by the North Carolina legislature right now is classic. This is republicanism at it's most cut loose. It's a Fuck All Y'All attitude to the American people, way beyond a thumb to nose gesture; it's spoken by action, not words. We hear it and see it on the news and acquiesce daily. It's so what we do automatically we don't even notice. It's our way of playing possum. Just flop over and sleep for awhile. When they shredded the Constitution, I scratched my head and acquiesced. What can I do? I can write this that you're reading now, but it doesn't do anything other than give me a chance to explore my own thinking on the matter, which is why I write these daily notations. A few who see it the same way will read it. A few will read it and hate it. I think republicans know better by now than to dip into this well. It doesn't have sugar in it. I like this spontaneous description of self, no sugar in it, the way I like tea and coffee. I'd guess everybody who knows me would agree with that. It would be a fun subject to explore on the psycho-therapist's couch.

 

 

 

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DYLAN: BOTH ENDS OF THE RAINBOW THE MOVIE

earthwork, woodlawn va

Earlier today I watched a documentary of Bob Dylan in the 80s, the years I paid him no mind. It was called Both Ends Of The Rainbow, 1978-1989. I didn't know anything about Dylan's music in that time. In the film I learned that I wasn't the only only one to lose interest in Dylan after his album Saved. I listened to first side and gave it to a "Christian." Dylan had a didactic streak from the start, part of what I liked about him in that time, as I'd recently come out of childhood and teens of didacticism with fundamentalist church. Then it was familiar, sounded like truth. Later, by the time he made that ridiculous album, Saved, I'd lost my attraction to the didactic. Dylan was bad to use the gospel convention of starting a song "You better...." You better, you oughta, you needta, you're supposed to. Up until Slow Train Coming I thought nothing could turn me away from Bob Dylan. It was like he spoke my mind. I didn't know it when I fell away as a fan, a huge portion of his fan base had lost their interest. Dylan was never cliched until he attempted gospel songs. I was surprised at how many albums went by before I started paying attention to him. Next album I bought was Oh Mercy to see what it was like, and that was after reading his book Chronicle, which told the story of recording the album. It's supposed to be one of his better ones. Maybe it is.

The film showed me why I paid Dylan no mind through the 80s. I don't have a problem with Dylan living his life, being who he is, writing the songs and performing them to his own satisfaction like a good artist. His imaginative lyrics went away. The film's perspective was guided by a guy who wrote a biography of Dylan and some others connected with magazines like Rolling Stone. They were saying after he ran off his fan base he had lost his identity as to what kind of music he played. The 80s were disco time, another aspect of the 80s I ignored. Punk came on in 1975 and I started listening to punk that year. It was fresh and new, the next thing. The post-Sixties time of Bon Jovi, Ted Nugent, and religion rock bored me. Corporate music, sequels to the Sixties sound. Dylan was looking like he was growing old ungraciously. In the film they said he had a hard time finding the music to bring his audience back. Nothing he made through the 80s brought anybody back. They were saying his albums during that time didn't even figure in the top 50. He appeared to be attempting pop, which he'd never done before. He tried propping himself up with Mark Knopfler and Tom Petty. Then the Traveling Wilburys happened, bringing Dylan back to favor with much of his fans he'd run off. I never took to Traveling Wilburys. I was off in another world of music, punk and African I'd discovered on Afropop, an NPR show none of the stations I get play anymore.

Through the 80s I wanted to hear Patti Smith, Nina Hagen, the Clash, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Sex Pistols, Generation X, Joy Division, Psychedelic Furs, Lou Reed, Burning Spear, Peter Tosh. If Dylan was going to go into disco and post-Sixties sequels, he was going without me. I figured it was inevitable. Friends tend to grow apart over time as their experiences lead them in different directions, into different worlds of the mind. I figured it was all right to let Bob Dylan go. Once he'd satisfied me mightily. Little Richard too. Little Richard satisfied me totally in my teens; then he made By The Light Of The Silvery Moon and took up preaching. He threw a big diamond ring in a river. I saw Little Richard preach in Winston-Salem in 1977. He was ranting about the devil being behind rock and roll, that while he was singing he was with the devil. Then Jesus saved him. Dylan said the same things in his Jesus time, that rock and roll was of the devil. I suppose it's ok to come back to it when you need the money to live in the manner to which you've become accustomed. Maybe that brings Jesus back into it. Next thing I see Little Richard on tv as has-been rock n roll star complaining because he wasn't getting enough royalty money from his songs. Next he's at a music awards show excited out of his mind he won an award he indeed deserved. It appears in both cases the devil took a back seat to need for recognition and money.

The Dylan that pulled me all the way back was Time Out of Mind, then Love And Theft, Together Through Life, Modern Times, and now apex Dylan, Tempest. I'm back in his fan base as solid as in the early years. On a different level this time. The 80s were a freaky time. Politically, it was a reaction against the freedom of the Sixties. Dylan didn't go with punk, the new underground music not played on radio except at college FM stations. Punk carried on the artistic explorations of the Sixties period after auditorium guitar had been taken as far as it could go. Punk pulled rock back from overdone virtuosity to jamming. I was going to conjecture Dylan might have bypassed his 80s awkwardness turning to punk instead of pop. But that's not for me to say. He has to go with his own karma, his own vision, his own artistic sense. I had a feeling everything went out from under him when the Sixties, the context he came along in, went away replaced by corporate pop, which the folk music he came up in was a reaction against. I'm hearing Modern Times now. It sounds awfully good. It sounds Dylan. Not like early Dylan, but soul of Dylan. I wonder how much being a big pop star doing his own thing, going his own way, pulled him away from his own way into the pop formula that pays so well. It appears to me that's the issue. It disoriented him, he went through a time of diminished creativity, then pulled himself back onto his own track.  


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DISINFORMATION REALITY ON THE AIR

 

It's been ongoing humor to see how the conservative / liberal agendas play out in absolute resistance to each other. The repubs in their 30+ year attempt to destroy, put out of business, the democrat party have failed. They put all their eggs in the Reagan basket, the bottomless pit. I have come to suspect it so much, though still hesitate to say I believe it, but I see it that the republican half of the voting population, or a quarter of the population, given that only half the population votes, are the portion of the American citizenry that has fallen under the spell of what William Casey, CIA director early 80s, said of the American people, "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American people believe is false." There it is. It is an active Disinformation Program going on at least since then. The repubs are now in self-destruct mode. They've had for their agenda destroying the democrat party using false information so long that it has become their momentum. Winning elections with lies, racism and transparent chicanery has evidently run its course. This last election trumped Karl Rove, the cutting edge of the Disinformation Program's propaganda politically. It trumped hairdoo Donald Trump too. And Ted Nugent. What a laugh he has made of himself. As a rocker he has what it takes, but as a mind, never mind.

The part I object to most is what hits me at home. Of course, ongoing inflation and no increase in income for the working people over the last 30+ years is a big one. Mostly, it's that I live in a world of people, wherever I am in America, who have become part of the Disinformation Program by falling for it. Fox tv channel is a very active part of the Disinformation Program. Limbaugh is the out-front spokesperson. I chose to use person instead of man. Where I live, the word man has a bit of respect about it. Person is diverse. Somebody on death row for murder and rape is a person, while not necessarily a man one can respect very well. Like I can't call Limbaugh a pig because I respect a pig more than I do him. He's one that belongs on death row. He stirs hate with rant. Skepticism and questioning are, alas, not American virtues, which Limbaugh as republican philosoph takes advantage of to the hilt, meaning all the way in. Yes, some of us non celebrities do think about things, but if you want to find one, you have to go seeking. What do you go by? A certain alertness that television has not yet turned to slumber. There is a difference from the bright-eyed smiling fake front and true alertness that doesn't necessarily smile all the time or parrot political (television) correctness with enthusiasm. Fake alertness you see everywhere. All the publications Rupert Murdoch "bought" were turned into organs of the Disinformation Program. So are the CEOs and owners of the other networks purveyors of the Disinformation Program. You want corporate government? Here it is, like it or don't.

Though I only see television a few hours a week, mostly football this time of year and racing the rest of the year, I can see the psychological manipulation with a bit more clarity than someone asleep in tv. It's not an anesthetic for me. I can't doze for very long in a state of mental torpor watching commercials of guys in the stands at the football game holding the label of their beer bottles and cans toward the field to work a mojo on the game. It's slightly humorous in a locker room fraternity way the first time. I'm glad to see the big corporations are at least doing more commercials with humor. It's dorky corporate humor, though an attempt nonetheless. I only listen at home to non commercial radio. NPR is not commercial free, but their commercials are shorter and directly to the point about it. Don't think I believe NPR is independent of the Disinformation Program. Initially, I believe they set out to be. Then the Disinformation Program began in earnest, the Reagan Revolution, and repubs have been trying to get NPR off the air, or at least as misrepresentative as Fox, ever since. Reagan sliced NPR's budget down to the bone, like he did everything of benefit to the American people, the 99%. The people at NPR were attempting something like BBC here, which they found unacceptable in the Texas of the world.

I sit here looking out two windows between sentences at an overcast, wet, slightly sprinkling day. It's the kind of wet you can walk to the mailbox and back with slight wetness on hair. The colors are vivid at their very best with light fog in the distant trees. I love how colors come out when rain wets them. It gives them a vivid lightness of being. Rhododendron leaves rich green with white accenting them, the branches dark lines like in a Japanese painting. Every shade of reddish light brown leaves carpets the ground, curled and making a chance collage with pine needles, sticks and twigs that also fell from the trees. I spread two sizes of sunflower seeds over the ground. I've been watching the birds of all sizes pecking peaceably, a red squirrel searching, picking up a seed, biting through the shell and eating the seed inside. The red squirrel then runs and looks for another. A time comes when the squirrel is full and starts tucking the seeds away in pockets it makes with its front feet, tiny hands. It runs to get more and tucks them into a another little pocket called a midden. I will be surprised if sunflowers don't take up from at least some of the places they're tucked away. Birds scratching find a lot of them. It feels good in my spirit to see the snowbirds hopping about, scratching, flying, and the nuthatches, the bluejays, the titmice (titmouses?), a small black and white woodpecker with a red dot on the back of its head. Chickadees and titmice chirp to me from nearby branches when I go out the door in the morning with the day's ration. The birds of my mountain are so much more enjoyable to me than anything on tv that it doesn't feel right using them in the same sentence where tv is mentioned. The difference is that I love my bird friends and I don't love tv. Major difference.


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SURREALISM IN AMERICA 2012

      photo by diane arbus

This particular election year has really been boring, and it's getting worse as it goes along. Romney is even more boring than the guy Obama beat so soundly in 08. Romney's running mate is even a male version of Sarah Palin--big mouth, not much brains. I suppose he's got some kind of smarts, Obama called him the philosopher of the Repubs, the title I thought Limbaugh owned. This guy must be about the equal of Limbaugh. Like I would say Limbaugh doesn't have much brains, except he's generated his stupid mouth into a $4million commodity pumping up white men to hate everything not white male. I hear on NPR now quite a lot of attention given to republicans. It's because the repubs have been breathing down NPR's neck since Reagan, taking money away from them, reducing them to syndicating BBC. Each repub administration threatens NPR a little bit more. And when we have a democrat administration they do nothing to help NPR. The most recent threat is include more news about republicans or lose more money. So they put on news stories about Romney and it's funny how much like dead air time it is when Romney is the subject. When he talks, he takes insincerity to new heights, or lows, whichever.


It seems like Obama is sitting back letting Romney & Co talk and get as much attention as they can, because they're so boring they make Obama look interesting. It's like they're playing Whiteman's Last Stand again. That's all the repubs are doing these days is playing Whiteman's Last Stand. All for the white man, nothing for anybody else. Freedom for the white man, bondage for everybody else. That's been the way of the USA from the start, so who's to say it's going to change now? It won't be long before white man in America is just another minority, albeit the most arrogant minority, the one the others allow the delusion of power because it's so important to white man to be number one. Every time I see Romney it's the same pose, same face, same expression, like the image of George Washington on the dollar bill, always the same any way you look at it. Or like a face on a postage stamp. It's a face. It's always the same. A bland American whiteman face gazing into the distance like in Soviet and Maoist "realism." Like the new Martin Luther King statue in Washington DC designed by a Chinese sculptor who evidently had his foundation in Maoist realism where peasants and soldiers gape at the rising red star.


It's hard to even believe this is an election year. A little bit of bland talk about Romney, then a little bit of an example of his bland talking that goes round and round like a roulette wheel without a marble. He's totally upper middle-class suburban country club, only the best, Mr Niceguy with a benign smile for all. He has the authenticity of Al Gore, the reason nobody much cared that the Bush-Cheney-Rummy-Rice Junta used the Supreme Court to take the election away from Al Gore, the winner despite Ralph Nader making it difficult for him. I have a feeling that people generally get as enthusiastic about Romney as they did about Al Gore. Gore was a bland suburban Ken doll to the soulless max, as is Romney. In the Sixties they'd have been called Plastic People and Nowhere Men. They both were created by the political image machine from the time they were little. They play the role required of anyone in politics in America, a mask with a smile, nothing else. Whoever might be behind the mask has no relevance. Image is everything. Appearance is all. As seen on tv. And I'm told by people who want me to think they know what they're talking about that television is not having any kind of effect on people who watch it. I wonder if we'd have had these random sprays of rapid-fire bullets into anonymous crowds of people before television. No I don't wonder. It did not happen before tv.


Except: Paris in the time of Surrealism (1920s and 1930s); one of the Surrealists, possibly Andre Breton, envisioned the idea that the ultimate Surrealist act would be to walk into a crowd of people and fire a revolver randomly. It was held up as a kind of idea of the ideal, until one day somebody did it and it wasn't funny. I hear on the news about a whiteman taking an AK47 or something into a kindergarten classroom of Vietnamese immigrant children and blowing away the kids, the teacher and himself. How Surrealist is that? Kids shooting up a school. Surrealism. Suddenly, unexpectedly, out of nowhere, not even out of conception, a couple of guys start shooting in the cafeteria, in the library. Son of Korean dry-cleaners walks into a university classroom with an automatic pistol, shoots professor, several kids and self. The ultimate American statement. Maybe this is to say we are in a Surrealist time. When 98% of the population goes around during the day with last night's commercials, sit-coms and sports on television in their heads, there aint much going on but keepin on keepin on. Pantene for chlorine damaged hair. It's a riot how television leads us by imitating us; following the lead of a parrot, another word for the say-what-you're-told politician and reporter.


If you want to see mastery in lying with a straight face, check out Lyndon Johnson on YouTube telling the television audience about the patrol boats shooting at American ships in Tonkin Gulf, knowing it had not happened, that it was a fabrication to fool the American people into believing it was a justified war action taking place to start killing farm families in Vietnam. Before the March on DC in 1968 Johnson called a press conference and told the press what to report, a made up press release that was nothing like the event itself. They all had front row to the event and reported as told. Free press? Free to report as told. Only the Village Voice told about the press conference and told about the event as it happened. Later, Rupert Murdock bought Village Voice to shut it up. Too liberal. Politicians have to be good at lying the way a rock star needs to be good at screaming. I look at Obama when he is talking in so convincing a manner, the come-along-with-me appeal, and I think, What a good liar. He came out of his couple weeks briefing after the election with the FBI and CIA and the other top secret places of dark ops with deer-in-the-headlights in his eyes, up to and including the inauguration, where he so famously made a blooper. From then on, he's been a really good liar. The only reason Bush was busted for lying so much was he was not a good liar. He was just a dumb guy that lied all the time. Obama would be good on Broadway playing America's First Black President. The black man that lies as good as a white man. Electable.


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