OUTSIDE OF SOCIETY

by crystal smith

If you ever wondered what a grumpy old bastard looks like, in case you don't know one, here's one. Cracking up in my favorite tshirt, because I look like an old biker or a Vietnam vet. I'm neither one, nor was meant to be. The only thread I know of that runs through bikers, vets and me is refusal to live a fake life denying true self in order to be obedient to the social hierarchical code. Patti Smith is singing in my head, Outside of society--that's where I wanna be! I believe this explains why I felt so at home, and by home I mean as comfortable as being at home, as I am right now, in the punk club with a hundred or more people of the same mind about the fake society we live in. They were not people shut out of society, but people who can't live in denial and want to separate themselves from the society of climbers, at least on the weekend. The people who have checked out, my people. I didn't know there were so many. I hear Johnny Moss, punk vocalist, telling me when we spoke briefly, "This is the future," referring to the loving spirit of community in the place Saturday night. My intuition felt agreement as he said it. I have felt this to be so. We are in perhaps the darkest time of human history, now. They say it's darkest before dawn, and I can't imagine a time any darker than the time we're in. Dark, I mean, in the human spirit. The 80s were a time of narcissism, though not among the working poor by any means. This time we're in seems best characterized by the word, venality: willingness to do dishonest things in return for money. The venal minded have always been about, but it looks like venality is the nature of our time, from the rich to the poor. It's why we the people cannot take our "representatives" in government seriously. The example they give as "leaders" is socially criminal. They're the kind of people that say punk rockers are a bad example for the young and Muslims worship a fake God. 

between bands

I hear Bob Dylan singing, Something is happening and you don't know what it is. Corrupt to the core, Capitalism has run its course and is fading out of its own excesses, as foreseen. Capitalism has created immense global poverty in the human population while destroying the earth along with our human spirit. Balance will happen. The changing weather patterns is the earth coming back to balance. I'm feeling a groundswell of humanity is rising to say to the Capitalists draining our life energy, You've dampened our spirit too long. We're taking it back. I've lived my life in refusal to submit to control by my desire for more money. Before I started college, I knew I would never use my degree for a job. I wanted education for my life, not as vocational training. The thing that is happening that I don't know what it is, I suspect is social changes with the new generations of the young. From grumpy old bastard's perspective, anybody under 45 is young. I see in the younger people a consciousness of each other as valid individuals, judging being something other people do, accepting and supporting one another. It's not a hundred percent, but I feel like it is characteristic of today's young. I embrace it. In my fifties, I heard self start two sentences, the kids these days. The second time I heard myself say it, I said, this isn't going to happen a third time. I am not going to become a weary old turd that far separated from reality. I talked with myself quite a long time over it, a few years. I decided to go to a rock concert of the day on my 0 birthdays, starting with the 60th. I went to Ziggy's in Winston-Salem and saw Papa Roach, a California punk band, to get in there, shoulder-to-shoulder, jamming to hard-driving punk, the whole crowd as one. In that crowd I found the kids these days were cool. They had a whole lot more on the ball that the kids my days. They were a happy energy to be in the midst of enjoying some dynamite rock and roll. 

dirty south revolutionaries

For seventieth birthday, I went to Charlotte to a small rock club to see Thrice, a hard-core California punk band. They rocked my world. I found a place I assessed the sound the best and stood there with the kids these days all around me loving the music as much as I was. They regarded me with no more nor less respect than they gave each other. It told me I must be a comfortable presence. That I could be everybody's grandpa didn't inhibit anyone. A time or two I felt the urge to say, I'm not a cop, but edited it out, because what it would mean is, I am a cop. One thing I love about white hair is nobody suspects juvenile delinquency of white hair. I get away with a lot. Several years ago a bunch of suburban women become exurban women got together in a club, the Sparta Revitalization committee. I wondered what the Re- was about. I don't know that Sparta had ever been vital, except maybe when they had hangings on the courthouse lawn. The revitalizers took big, ugly, plastic pots, terra-cotta colored, and stuffed a small evergreen in the dirt of each one, putting these in front of shops up and down Main St, known by signage as Highway 21. Half the evergreens died right away. They stayed in the pots dead for a few months. One day I went to the hardware store and got a can of spray paint day-glo orange. I took off my ball cap to show my white hair and walked down the sidewalk, an authority, stopped at the dead ones and sprayed them beautiful orange. It was two weeks before anyone of SRC noticed. Of course, I confessed. First question in great urgency: You didn't paint any of the green ones, did you? First answer: No. Next question: Why did you do it? Next answer: They were ugly and I made them beautiful.

turd/cutter

The dawn coming after this time of darkness will be beautiful. I feel like the experience at the Milestone in Charlotte Saturday night was a peephole into the future. As the old Capitalist model of hierarchical, exclusive social behavior that only values money fades away, this new inclusive attitude toward life is coming on among we the people. What I believe Johnny meant when he said, "This is the future," was the spirit of inclusion, of love, of community, of people looking to the well-being of one another. No more tv anchorwoman hairdos. No more studying war. No more manhood meaning the power to beat down the weak. We humans have been out of balance for so long with our true selves, I'm believing we'll be coming back to balance. I feel like the Occupy movement that recently gathered 300,000 in NYC a week or two ago is a movement toward shifting into balance. Like when I'm standing and lean over a little to far and just about lose balance, catch myself and come back to balance. I feel like love energy is coming on among us and the hate energy of the dark time waning. Much hate is coming to the surface now, stirred by the right-wing propaganda machine. The hate has been there a long time. It needs to come to the surface to burn off and go away, get out of our system like a flu virus. It gives me hope in a dark time to see the younger generation of people carry amongst themselves a sincere regard for one another, inclusive, supportive, coming together around the music they love in common. I regard a punk rock band as valid an art form as a chamber quartet. In a country that does not encourage art, the art spirit springs up anyway. I felt like the Spirit of Art was alive and well, even flourishing Saturday night at the Milestone. I was as much in the presence of art as in the audience of Robert Wilson's Einstein On The Beach. The future looks good to me now. Thank you, Johnny.   

daniel biggins talking between songs

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GRUMPY OLD BASTARD AND THE PITCHFORK ARMY OF ONE

georgia o'keefe

This time we're in has my head spinning. On the one hand, it's endlessly interesting; on the other, it puts me to sleep. I think I'm past getting mad about any of it or any of the players until I see a picture of Anthony Scalia and Clarence Thomas, two obvious frauds with conscious fraudulent intent, their treason of the heart very well paid for. Gotta give it to them, they get away with it right out in the open, even Thomas, a black man in America. American black men are afraid for their lives when they see a cop, though he's not. The cops know he's the shoeshine boy for the corporate Mastas. He's a living oxymoron, the republican Negro, the black Sarah Palin with an intelligent adviser who doesn't allow him to talk. He's doing what the East Indian governor of Louisiana, Jindal, says minorities should do, act like white people. Jindal gave it his best; it only made a fool of him, same as it did for Thomas. Thomas sold his soul for white privilege. I mean soul as the core of one's life as well as the soul in soul brother and soul music. Of course, I can see he was put in place at serious cost to the American people, with such intent, to be instrumental in the court toward systematically dismantling democracy. Another way of saying they're pulling the rug out from under us. It's like one of those sleight-of-hand stage tricks pulling the tablecloth out from under the place settings and all else on the table, everything staying in place. I see this going on in my country, and it only one of a vast web of take-over that is already accomplished. This is what I see the W meant under the Mission Accomplished banner. It makes me ashamed that the American people gave away democracy without even noticing. Off in a corner a minuscule minority preferred otherwise, but they don't matter. They don't watch tv; they're not plugged in to the to propaganda of mis- and disinformation. They read books. What do they know? Some of them believe in evolution too. 

georgia o'keefe

I tell myself it didn't used to be like every politician was a functional moron, a bought robot. Along the way, I have grown into maturity, and see them now from a point of view older than they are. If I were to start naming names, the list would never end, of people in our government with a void inside their heads. In my earlier years, they appeared to be more or less intelligent adults who could figure out how to get on a subway in NY the first time. Dan Quayle came on the scene with Bush One, intellectual equals, and seemed like the first really dumb ones. Then I look back to Reagan, the voice of Death Valley Days, as vague between the ears as W himself. Nixon before him. Law and Order Nixon. Survivor of Joe McCarthy's henchmen who unleashed super-psychotic madness, the Rush Limbaugh and Ted Cruz of their time. I'm glad I was a kid then. People I knew later who were adults in that time of a conscientious mind were enraged by the terror Joe McCarthy was. I don't often applaud anyone's prison sentence, but this ex-governor of Virginia sentenced to seventeen years for his conscious fraud gave me a good feeling. I want not to care, but when I see such fraud everywhere, out in the open and proud of it, then one actually meets with justice, it feels good in the heart. Albeit, knowing at the same time his lawyer will appeal, get another judge and come out of it with no time to serve, or maybe a couple years at tennis camp. They won't tell that one to the news. He was merely meat thrown to the dogs, the dogs hungry for justice. Here's one, now get back to yer holes. Then I feel stupid for being taken in by yet another propaganda sleight-of-hand. I look at the ceiling, close my eyes and say to self, Don't give it so much attention. Don't let it clench your heart. When you feel heart's attachment clinging, it's time to let it go, so let it go. Let the feeling of my heart clinging to something I can do nothing about go, like a puff of cigarette smoke in the wind. I can't let fraudulent people have such power over me to influence me to grip my own heart with the claws of false concern. I can't see a picture of Karl Rove without feeling the clench in my heart.

georgia o'keefe

It means I am giving them, the people who put a crimp in my heart, power over me. They keep me a spectator at the mental game directed by propaganda, someone snared to play their illusory drama to. I play audience to a drama that is smokescreen, deception its purpose. I fall for the game and become a mental player. I've been entertaining what to me is a serious question, though at the same time not, for the last few years. I think of joining the half of the American people that vote no confidence by not voting. I do not believe in "the system." By system I mean what Hilary Clinton said to a young black man before a tv camera, "Get with the system and you'll be all right." She meant it. She is a system woman. She climbed the system's ladder from ambitious college student to woman taken seriously around the world. Such counsel to a young black man in a photo-op, dismissing the world of racism the kid lived in since a baby with a veil of denial, dismissed Hilary from my interest. This phony photo-op and her vote of support for the fraudulent Iraq invasion dismissed her from my field of attention. As it turns out, it is the System, itself, I don't believe and don't want to participate in. The whole system of looking like tv news anchormen and women, the system they are modeled on, the system they appeal to, the system that tells me I have to make more money so I can feed the money pipeline to the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the Swiss banks our economy is being diverted through. I've seen someplace in the last few days the multi-billionaires are talking about the rest of us coming after them with pitchforks. I'm all for that. Worthington coat of arms has three pitchforks. Rebel yell. I can operate a pitchfork. I remember KISS Army from the late 1970s, a marketing slogan: Keep It Short and Simple. Now we have Pitchfork Army. I looked it up on google to see if it had been used yet politically. No. Seems like something Occupy would do. I'm not so sure the activists really want to identify with the proles. 

georgia o'keefe

It feels almost immoral not to vote. It feels fooled to the same degree to vote. The Supremes made it clear to us in the year 2000, out in the open, in-yer-face, democracy is over, and gave our government to the mega-billionaires for so cheap it ought to be embarrassing. It's in the adoration of the rich that our "representatives" represent us. It is this tragic flaw in the American character that changed our course from one of Progress to the international corporations pipelining our economy to tax-free numbered bank accounts outside the country, taking our tax base with them. And they continue to rule us by owning our "representatives." I don't believe in voting by way of duty. I vote because I want to. No one I vote for ever wins as I'm in a 75% right wing county and state, but I vote as a way of saying with my one digit, I want democracy. Though I tell myself voting does not matter, I see republicans pulling every kind of chicanery to suppress the vote, to discourage democrat demographics from voting. They've presented it such that voting has become a sharp stick in the republican eye. Therefore, I must vote, just to give the stick a little bit of a twist. The democrats are just as complicit with the international corporation tax dodgers as the republicans. They are just a little better at pretending an interest in the populace. By now, they have all  entered my zone of no confidence. Just about everybody who liked the idea of a black president is disappointed by his absence of interest in the American black people. He is the subject, the target of American racism, and continues to touch the subject with denial. By denial I mean only talks in white man platitudes on the subject, and the Hilary dismissal: get a job. Mitch McConnell will not be defeated because I voted. Nothing will be different if I don't vote from what it will be if I do vote. Only difference, I save a half gallon of gas by not voting. So I spend a dollar seventy-five to go vote. What do I get in return? More propaganda. What do I get if I don't vote? More propaganda.        

georgia o'keefe herself 

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MEDIA DENIES OCCUPY

       annette messager

          

Every day I hear the news and every day I mourn for the human condition. Assad in Syria slaughtering the defenseless Syrian population. Now the population is developing defences and beginning to make some offensive gestures. This is the end of Assad. He has turned his defenseless population on himself by forcing them to defend themselves by striking out at their oppressor. The corporate media in the USA is not allowing any news of the Occupy resistance on the news. Not even NPR, which, again, is not liberal. A tremendously huge number of people gather to protest our citizens' treatment as criminals by our corporate government. The only thing the Occupy movement is accomplishing is individuals involved getting themselves tagged as disobedient. Bad name to have in a police state. Baptists say God sends the disobedient to hell, and we all know corporate government sends the disobedient to jail. How does corporate government arrest so many? We'll soon find out. FEMA camps, hundreds of them around the country, completed, ready to go, are waiting for the 99%. So what if it costs more to keep the peasants in prison. In prison they're contained.

It makes me crazy to see how all races of working men and women in all forms of labor built the USA as a democratic ideal where white men are created equal. Then came the liberation of the black portion of the population, by law only, and the liberation of women, as long as they keep it to themselves, and then the Reagan Revolution rolling back to before these liberation movements when white men ruled absolutely. The Reagan republicans have been systematically undoing every benefit to the human condition that arose since the Depression. The supreme court is stacked in favor of the oppressors of the peasant class, the 99%. It may not be known before justice Roberts publishes his memoirs why he went against his corporate bosses to let something close to reasonable health care happen for the peasants, those loathsome no-neck, thick-fingered, gum-chewing fat-asses without position or status, without taste. I'm ashamed of the American government. I believe Uncle Sam is too. The republican party that represents greed and ignorance has passed now from passive contempt for the peasants to active contempt. Roberts broke rank. He'll pay dearly. Very dearly. He knew it before he made the decision.

Throughout my lifetime any progress toward the good of the peasantry has been beaten back by government, consistently, all along the way. A government for and by the people is completely stacked against the people manipulated into believing their vote decides a matter. When the vote doesn't go predictably with the propaganda, we are shown the voting is just a bunch of shit, by having the supreme court reverse the decision of the popular vote. Lesson learned: we oughta pay closer attention to the propaganda, be less disobedient. We're learning. We're systematically being taught the best thing to do is get over democracy and get comfortable with poverty and martial law. The Robber Banks have impoverished hundreds of thousands of middle class families by robbing all of them overnight. Their money just went away. Makes me suspicious of how well this accident was orchestrated. Right after 911 when propaganda had the whole country ready to kill Ay-rabs, the Patriot Act appeared, a thousand+ page book, already written, already published, already in boxes to be delivered on cue, an emergency that needed to be passed before anyone had a chance to look at it. It was ready to go, waiting for Emergency 911 to kick it off. I wonder how they knew in advance, since it was towel-heads in a cave half way around the world that brought the towers down with cell phones.

Won't it be interesting in history courses of the future, studying the rise and fall of the very brief American Empire. War after war, subduing the poor, killing the defenseless, not even counting the dead. This is what our tax dollars do. Our government is such as to embarrass any person who has any sort of ethical foundation. The people appearing for the Occupy protests are expressions of that embarrassment. Michael Moore is an expression of that embarrassment. The anesthetized populace, happy on prozac, zoloft and a cornucopia of happiness pills, watches the news one night and it has no relation to the news of the night before or the night before that. It's about something new every night. That's why it's called the news. Can't keep up with all of it. It's right to be patriotic. Never question. Never doubt. America number one. Keep your foot on the throttle and your eye on the prize. Go in debt for more junk. It turns out the Bank is our enemy, and has been all along, but what can we do about it? Agree and go on. Our government has turned against us and what can we do about it? We assemble in embarrassingly large numbers and corporate government won't allow news coverage by the corporate press, NPR included. Obama is not in his chair to serve us. What a laugh to even imagine that he might be. He's serving a very few cell phone numbers he has memorized, each with its own ring. And they're not calling from caves in Afghanistan.


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THE ONE PERCENT LAUGH

     the donut dangle

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


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


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


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


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


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