THE DISINFORMATION CLOWN BUS

Every day I tell self to stop paying attention to politicians, any kind of attention, even disgust. I have good books to read, good movies to watch, magazines, art projects, friends, and much, much more. I see today Lindsay Graham said something else so stupid he made headlines again. Why do I even know his name? Scrolling down facebook, I see Ted Cruz said something marvellously ridiculous again, I stop and look to see what it could be this time. Every pause I remind self I am giving this clown car occupant attention, better to give my attention to skateboard fail videos. I stop scrolling when I see Mitch McConnell, to read or see video of his new stupid for the day. These talking marionettes are one hundred percent predictable to say something with no connection to anything but their own stupid. Rand Paul is receiving a string of attention the last weeks for saying something that gives the appearance on the surface of being not quite so stupid as usual; therefore, noteworthy. A three-year-old can say, E equals emcee squared, but it doesn't mean the kid gets it. The depth of stupid is so bad I wonder if it could be a Heritage Foundation strategy to keep these names and faces on the evening news by saying something outrageously stupid. Propagandists and television producers know content is nothing, name recognition everything. Even if the whole clown bus is scripted, which it is, it takes a vacant, nobody-home robot to spew such ignorance and act proud of it

Another gift that goes on giving from the Cheney-Bush junta is Karl Rove, master propagandist, somebody who belongs in a cell next to Charles Manson. I pay attention to him as well as the others and question self, why? Like the comedy of stupid, Karl Rove wins the award for the malignancy of stupid. He has a brilliant mind, fast and retentive, and the ethics of the corporations that pay and privilege him. Ethics is something we never see in a politician, if there ever was such a thing as an ethical politican who did not walk away from the profession. We see plenty of the pretense of ethics in politicians as in preachers, the same smug attitude, I am  important and you are not. Ethics is not even a consideration in America after two-thirds of a century of television propaganda central, and corporate control. Every day, seeing headlines, faces and obvious bullshit, I think of Reagan's CIA appointee, Wm Casey, saying, "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American people believe is false." False News is the most watched news on tv. I don't know if anybody else sees this, but it says to me, we citizens have been the mass target of a disinformation program by the CIA since before 1981, when it was spoken publicly by a CIA director, and we go on like it's a secret we're expected to deny. 

People like Rachel Maddow, for one, bore me with their pretend naivete about the disinformation coming through the republican think-tanks, the first half of the country to commit to the false. We get disinformation through corporate television news. Like all liars, they tell us what they want us to believe. It works for them. It works so well for them, they deleted democracy by popular will, disinformation through tv. The Patriot Act, conceived, planned, written, edited over several years, was printed, bound and boxed awaiting delivery on time when 9/11 happened, without anybody seeing it coming. Nobody asked where the Patriot Act came from, they already knew. Legislators accepted that it deleted the Constitution, because the Koch Bros bought them into their dream Country Clubs. The republican clown bus audition for Koch sponsorship gives evidence the Kochs do not favor intelligence or ethics. They take us for stupid, buy us stupid representatives, treat us like we're stupid, and we affirm them by supporting them, even by paying attention to them. I'm getting with self quite a lot over paying attention to them, even if only to assess the landscape of a world I live in and have no more say in than in the governance of Monaco.

I pay attention, seeing current events a serial documentary, The Fall of the American Empire. When I read the kindle next lifetime, I'll wonder why it feels so familiar like I was there while knowing I was not. Next lifetime, I will see the crash on the news from another country and join in the international jubilation. Ding-dong, the witch is dead. It will be like a football (soccer) championship match, USA vs All The Rest Of The World, and All The Rest Of The World wins, riotous celebration. Like Abe Lincoln said, America will only be defeated from within. I've been watching the process all my adult life, since the corporate coup of 1963. Going by where I see this process going, I'd suggest to the black brothers and sisters expatriate as fast as you can go, like Jews leaving Europe in the 1930s. The only thing about black lives that matters in American police state is target. Don't go to Africa. US troops are moving into Africa, rare minerals, poverty, statistically defenseless, the new place for the Pentagon's ongoing war to keep war production corporate profits in the billions per. I don't want to expatriate. Whatever the choice of where to go, I'd be "the American." Here, at home, I'm just a Joe, responsible for nothing political, just my own behavior. 

*

  

  

9/11 BLOOZ

diana toma

30"x 48" mixed media on canvas

It has been September 11 all day. It's a day I don't pay attention to the news. It's all 9/ll corporate news-speak. I'm sympathetic in my heart for everyone concerned who survived or left the body by surprise one morning at work. I'm sympathetic with everyone in NY that day and soon after. I have no patriotic feelings around it. I don't believe anything we're told about it. Don't know what happened and will not know in this lifetime. I only see it as first day of American police state. It miraculously gave birth to the Patriot Act, the virus that deleted the Constitution. After WW2, Remember Pearl Harbor justified perpetual war thereafter. Now Remember 9/11 justifies police state and eternal war on poor people around the globe. Keeping Wall Street booming. It's been a major disappointment in my life to see the American people throw away democracy with such a popular zeal. Even in the most jaundiced moments I'd have never seen it coming. In hindsight, it's clear as 1-2-3. 9/11 makes me question why I pay attention to the news at all. I do, however, see certain progressions acting out step-by-step giving a sense of what's coming and explains much of the noxious malaise in the air now. It helps me understand the senselessness that seems to be in the air. It's everywhere. What was bad before, like poverty and prisons, is worse now. I've not seen a single honey bee this year. Have seen some bumblebees, though so much smaller than usual they look unhealthy. A lot of flowers that seed this time of year have no seeds. I saw a relative few butterflies this year. The Joe Pyes in flower used to be covered by shimmering halos of butterflies. This year I'd see one butterfly, sometimes two. We're in serious trouble. The television has kept us asleep while Capitalist excess swept us aside. We'll lose hi-speed internet soon, as Comcast and Time-Warner are spending millions on lobbying to take what democracy is in the internet away from us. It will happen. USofA is about money, not us.

everyman

This is where 9/11 takes me. I can't get any feeling from the incident having to do with flag waving and memorials. It's too serious a matter for me. It's not something to celebrate. I know, three thousand plus. It makes the event all the worse. I don't even want to go into it. It's too dark and murky a place created by mis- and disinfomation. I must let this go, must separate self from concerns about it. I've come to see 9/11 a moment in a country on a downhill run that kicked in the nitrous oxide, NOS. I'm glad to be in the last years of this lifetime. Maybe next time I can turn up in the mountains of Romania with parents who play traditional music of the region, a place that hopefully has nothing America wants. My greatest disappointment with Obama is that he did not charge Bush, Cheney, Rummy and Rice with war crimes. He symbolically accepted their war crimes into American infallible exclusionism. It wasn't like he really had a choice. He, too, is a corporate marionette. I must concede that what I wanted for the USA all along has been its own ideals, the ideals we're taught in school. Like much else we're taught in school, it must be unlearned to function out here in the world, so to speak. I'm naive of what is going on. I live in a world that I see diminished day by day so fast it makes the head swim. On the one hand, I would like to be like my friends who aren't interested in anything on the news, pay no attention to politicians, don't vote, just live their lives at home with the family bringing up kids, work, hunt, grow a garden, have a riding mower and a pickup and ride the economy's ebb step by step. On the other hand, I like having some insight into the "big picture." I didn't realize before today what a gloom 9/11 brings over me. So much died that I thought was good with the falling men and women and others who didn't make it. The planes did not implode the buildings. That's the beginning and the end of it for me.  

photo by constantine manos

Swing down sweet chariot stop and let me ride, Swing down sweet chariot stop and let me ride. I hear George Clinton in my head and see him on stage with the Funkdelics, Swing down sweet chariot stop. The world would not be real without George Clinton and his beautiful song, Fantasy Is Reality In The World Today. Just keep hangin in there, my granddaddy used to say. Something like that. I'm ready to start calling for a chariot to pick me up and take me to what's next, be lifted up like Ezekiel into a ufo and zoom away at light speed to a place where people have evolved past conflict and killing, and die there. Sounds like Costa Rica. I'd rather die on my mountain. I could not leave my mountain. I could not leave my culture or my friends or Caterpillar without dying. The corporate takeover of our government sideshow is in my mind. Lord Have Mercy. Why do I want all that shit in my mind? All I have to do is turn off that channel in my mind, switch channels. I have control. I could change my focus to the Paris Surrealists, look at pictures and read the writings, read books about the Surrealists. Were I to give as much attention to them as I give to our DC government, I'd have something a whole lot more interesting in my mind after a year. Yesterday I ordered a cd by Boubacar Traore, a singer and guitar picker from Mali. It's the lope of the music, the walk of a camel, a long walk on foot, that pulls me to this music now. He's from a city in the desert near the Niger river. His music flows into me from another world, from outside the world of my experience, foreign, exotic to my ear as a one-string violin. Something new. A new musical experience. I could take myself on my own light-speed flight by switching channels of my focus of attention. I could be reading a biography of Constantin Brancusi or the new biography of Vincent van Gogh. Or have a funkathon listening to George Clinton. 

charles ray

I found the picture at the top, the angel painted today, September 11, on facebook by my facebook friend Diana Toma. She said she had been working on it, was dissatisfied, washed the image off and went after it to satisfaction. A friend who saw it said he saw the towers and the scene on the ground. Diana suddenly saw it. She did not know she had painted the towers, nor did she know she'd painted the chaos on the ground. She was painting an angel making no association in her mind with 9/11. She said she felt like she must have channeled it from the energy of the day, but her mind did not see it. I love the image without the association, but its way of happening without the artist knowing it, slipping around conscious mind, gives it a quality that makes it live. Diana's paintings and drawings have the spirit of life in them. As in the angel's face, Diana's faces are living, individual faces. First time I saw the image, I made no connection by association with 9/11. I saw it an angel between two worlds. The instant I saw the facebook comment about the towers, there it was, like a Rauschenberg silkscreen. I can still see it without seeing the towers. I see it back and forth, with and without, and see it both at once. The image on the one hand is independent of the 9/11 association and on the other hand could be a poster for the Oliver Stone movie. The quality of being both at once, yin and yang together in the turning circle, gives it life. In the angel's face I see a child's innocence looking to God in a beseeching prayer for her mother's life. It's a powerful image. Diana's images are so powerful with feeling they have a living presence. She can paint a cat such that I feel the presence of cat. This is her gift, the power of the feeling in her work. It's a feeling in the heart. The faces she paints show an individual face and an individual feeling. She has a website www.artbydianatoma.com. I found a variety of images googling diana toma artist and clicking on images. And there's a photograph of her favoring Grace Slick in the time of Surrealistic Pillow. Diana's angel painting that happened of its own lifted my spirit about the day. It shows such tremendous compassion, you know an angel like this was there.  

diana toma

*

0DD TIMES

alex katz

This afternoon it came to me that maybe what makes politics seem so odd now is that it always has been odd, it's just that now politics is front and center daily serial entertainment. Before internet what happened in the background was unknown. Now, the background is the foreground. We see now that what we suspected before, turned out to be so. Only now, whatever we see is too late. It's history. It's engaged. We're living it. It is said that the transition from this form of economy to the next one will only be by revolution if it does not happen by legislation. In this time, the republicans are only allowing laws having to do with the private parts of women. Maybe somebody needs to show these people some porn sites on the internet. I hear Jimi Hendrix in my head saying, "They can't get no relief." If they didn't alienate their wives with unconscious assholeness, their wives might not have so many headaches.

donald roller wilson

I wonder what the Texas legislators did when they were in high school crossing the border with their buddies to find some Mexican whores. I'd guess they laid on the bed beside their fallen women, stiff as a post, and not their wieners, unable to move, paralyzed by the preacher's voice in their heads condemning them to hell for committing fornication. Naughty boys! Bad! I doubt the Mexican whores hate it too much when they get one of those guys who pays and just lays there feeling guilty. These men are post-Sixties people. They grew up in a time of sexual liberation. They didn't have to cross the border. I thought that old hung-up thing about sex went away after the Sixties. Maybe it only happened for people who went through the Sixties. Of course, in that time perhaps a majority of the people did not get their sexuality liberated while the freeing up was going on. Our politicians, like Al Gore, live their lives squeaky clean as they can without exploding. When they explode, it's often a scandal. They end up Ken dolls, no personality, a toy you can project a personality onto, your own, and he becomes your friend. And their wives at big political gatherings seen on tv look like Barbies with tv anchorlady hairdos. I'd guess their hair is so fixed in place it would not move riding on the back of a rice rocket. They offer themselves as puppets to the rich at country clubs, vowing to do as they're told.

max ernst

Can you beat that for a two-dimensional portrait of people I know nothing about? You'd think I was writing a bad novel about a Central American country by somebody living in Detroit who'd never been south of the border. I'm going by public appearances as seen on tv. In other words, illusion within illusion interpreted in illusion, like one of those heat mirages we see on the highway in summer, waves of heat rising from the pavement in the near distance. Sometimes when I confess to liking action movies, some in particular like, Syriana, that concern the CIA, I get lectured that the movie doesn't show the Company anything like what it really is. How could it be otherwise? Written by a script writer who lives in Los Angeles and makes his living writing screenplays for Hollywood. His knowledge comes from reading, movies and tv. It's fiction. Duh. A fictional story told by a director with a film crew, producers wanting the ultimate payback, making it to hold the interest of people with equivalent of fourth grade knowledge, explosions and gunfire like songs in a musical. I never imagined the CIA played to box-office. Jean Claude van Damme was a ballet dancer before he started being a kick-boxing martial arts actor. Martial arts fights in movies are choreographed. They are dances. Like when I watch a Daffy Duck cartoon, it's not because I believe ducks speak English.

alex katz

Something else about the seeming craziness of this time is that we have a corporate government now run by hierarchy, not democracy, and we're being manipulated by propaganda and bullshit round the clock. When we get bullshit presented daily as news, it goes back to the post-Kennedy assassination disinformation campaign that has reached the place half the people in the country have a belief system based in the false. The other half is right behind them. Then there is the rise of the youth. Occupy has been suppressed so they'll never do massive demonstrations in USA again. They'll come up with something else. The suppression of Occupy so quietly, so behind the scenes, gives me evidence of too sophisticated a police state. I can't help but think it seems like a crazy time because it is a crazy time. The time of the Patriot Act. It's crazier than a junebug inside a lampshade. Every day I thank God in one way or another for making me somebody from the very beginning unable to take the path of position and money. I got my education for my personal benefit, ultimately my spiritual benefit, not corporate job training. The people living the fantasy driven by ambition to get ahead learn to thrive in an unreal world, the world we have to learn to go through in order to get ahead. For somebody who doesn't accept that God is, I'll say it's consciousness I'm extending my gratitude to, for the opportunity to live surrounded by trees. The trees are sane.

alex katz

 

 

*

  

AFTER HEARING A CHRIS HEDGES INTERVIEW

yves tanguy

Every day for the last weeks I see various respected establishment names, like Jimmy Carter, the latest one, saying out in the open our democracy is gone; the corporate takeover of our government has deleted democracy. People like Gore Vidal, Chris Hedges and Noam Chomsky have been saying it for some time. By the time establishment people are saying it, it's a done deal and has been for a while. I saw an eighteen minute interview with Chris Hedges where he spread out today's political / economic world, explaining the corporate takeover citing evidence of what is happening as he went. The man has a mind to be reckoned with. I like reading his essays. His writing has clarity and is trimmed down to only the necessary words, stylistic frills absent. It's the same with his thinking and speaking. Maybe it could be said he is frugal in his use of language.

yves tanguy

Listening to Hedges talk is music. I follow where he goes rationally. He has no hysteria about him. His straight-faced delivery says he has seen the horror. He can neither recoil nor laugh. When it's funny, it is, but it's not. His recent book, the Death of the Liberal Class, is not what you might think he means by liberal. What we call liberal now is adherence to codes of social behavior that distinguish oneself separate from the working class. The sense of what I picked up that he was saying, America used to have a left wing. It's gone. What we now call the left, liberal, is the left extreme of the right wing, the part of the right closest to the center. The possibility of hope he sees is for more massive demonstrations, not that they do any good for their stated purposes, but they keep government apprehensive of the people. He said the ideal is, like in France, that government be afraid of the people. The Occupy movement has evidently been shut down by police state that is using the mass arrests for practice, for training, foreseeing a surge of massive resistance in the near future.

yves tanguy

At the rate our basic rights are eroding, Obama using the Patriot Act for a guide, tells me nobody in our government is working consciously to the benefit of we the people, unless it might be Elizabeth Warren, unless she turns out to be just a performance. She's somebody who could end up dead in a private plane crash with no indication in the black box of what went wrong. If a run for the presidency is in her future, she will change as Obama has changed. She will be an ongoing target of the republicans, too much of her attention needing to be focused on strategies to nullify republican fake assaults. The republican half of our population is a venal bunch of people come out of the background into the foreground making noise, threats, misspellings on signs. I see in our national and state governments a venality that really does represent the wide stripe that runs through the American people of interest in money only, the attitude of I-want-mine. The corporate CEOs see us not even pawns. I, like Bob Dylan, don't want to be a pawn in their game. I want no part of it.

yves tanguy

Driving by a city on interstate, or driving through a city, I gawk at skyscraper architecture, something like walking through a long room full of Mark Rothko canvases or Richard Serra steel works, Carl Andre's blocks of wood, bricks arranged on the floor. I see an adventurous skyscraper a beautiful thing, like a piece of public art, like a bronze sculpture of Gandhi walking in a public park. I've seen some Giacometti stickman sculptures in skyscraper context, and some Noguchi. They go well together. 20th century sculpture with 20th century architecture. The Reagan Revolution has put to rest what used to be called progress in America, the progress that built the beautiful towers in the cities. The Bank has taken our money to offshore banks that don't pay taxes. The Bank is bleeding us out. Hence the popularity of vampires in pop culture again, drained of our life blood, and zombies, the living dead. It's like we're alive, but cannot afford to do anything but stay home and watch tv. The center is not holding, unless the center is tv. Chris Hedges defined our situation a tinderbox on the verge of self-combusting. Anything could set it off. I'll watch it on live internet.

yves tanguy

 

 

 

*

AS SEEN ON TV

    found art by tj worthington

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

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

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

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

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


*