SWEEPING OUT THE TRASH

masahisa fukase

Made a quick round trip to town today. Didn't think to take camera. It's just as well. It's not easy to stop, pull off the side of the road, get out and go to where the picture was I saw, especially when the sides of the road are mounds of snow from the snowplow. It was a beautiful drive. It always is, any season, any time of day. Today the landscape was white with the black lines of bare trees, black cows in white meadow, trails running through the snow, the houses where people live their lives, some of them I know, most I don't. I notice driving by a house of people I know, I see their images in my mind's eye. Now that my life is slowing down, attention slowing down, no worries, mind not held by vain desires, ok with the world and everybody in it, not wanting anything somebody else has, my mind has cleared up remarkably. I've just noticed images in my head like they're new. They've always been there, my mind has been too cluttered with pressing issues. Now I have no pressing issues but to write here every day, but this is fun, it's recess. Here is where I deal with what's important to me, bring something up and examine it. It's much like the psychiatric couch, a place where I open up and let it flow, see where it goes, see what comes up, freewheeling, meandering in all directions like the Mississippi delta. Five years into writing every day, I've found from it the benefits said to go with journaling. I've found my thinking mind now thinks like when I'm writing. It's kind of like I'm writing all the time in my head, and it's fun. I like it a lot. I talk now the way I write. I write as I talk. It runs in a circle. Where therapy is concerned, I'd recommend it to someone seriously wanting to get to know self. I have such a better perspective of who I am since I've written it out nearly every day. Self-esteem has smoothed considerably like a shirt on an ironing board. 

masahisa fukase

Self-consciousness in public does not require approval and has no problem with rejection. Of course, I automatically respond or react to approval or rejection, but the feeling passes and next moment it's gone. A wonderful aspect of awareness I'm in my last years is my response to approval or rejection is so what. I don't have enough time left to waste mental energy concerned with it. I don't have time to have emotional reactions to the corporate marionettes legislating us into police state while we watch every day on the news. We don't need editorial cartoons anymore. I'm glad to see the fall of the American Empire consumed by it's love for money is happening in my last years. I feel like I'm seeing it from afar, like in the last row of the top balcony in a gigantic auditorium. The actors on the stage are ants standing on their back legs, far away, like flying over an interstate, seeing the cars below like ants on their ant trails. It doesn't bother me to know we have no privacy. I don't recall ever believing we did. Phone tapping was a common paranoia in the 1950s. I've been aware of watching what I say on the phone all my life. At the start, I saw the internet snuff what little sense of privacy we had left. I stay out of other people's business and don't worry about somebody seeing my social security number. Anybody who wants to find it, can find it easily knowing where to go online. I like at amazon and netflix they profile me by my purchases and recommend items aimed specifically at what I go there for. Netflix almost never recommends something I want to see. Amazon is better, but not so good either. I only get ads and political articles on facebook that might be of interest to me. I hear the news and repeat what has become a mantra: What do I care? How can I care? Why would I care? 

No longer do I have gut reactions, a wrenching stomach, seeing such ignorance in positions of power, knowing they are well paid puppets with long noses. They only make me laugh anymore. Since the corporate coup, intelligent people don't have the stomach for politics. Nobody with any sense would jump in the ring. It makes me question the ones that give the appearance of good sense. Gives cause for doubt. Appearance is their game. Appearance is what they do. I can't concern myself with them anymore. It has become so reasonable not to give them any attention, I question why I ever did. It's like growing up seeing Hollywood films only, then one day out of the blue, Fellini's La Dolce Vita. It opened a door to another world and I entered. Soon after, I read Camus' The Stranger, another door to a new world. There was no going back. I feel like I've come into a new place since letting go of giving attention to the false. Less of the negative thinking and feeling that goes with it. In another time I could have waxed opinionated about Nothin-yahoo addressing a republican congress to be a sharp stick in the eye of American negotiations with Iran, or whatever else is under the table, where the real action is. My guess is it will be comical in the international arena if Nutty actually does address republican congress. He knows actions have consequences. He's a bit too vulnerable to be snapping at the hand that feeds him. He struts his stuff and crows like a banty rooster, he's little but he's loud. He believes force solves problems to the point force becomes the problem.   

It's more fun seeing them scripted by their "think tanks," following the directions of their strategists. Keeping their names and faces in the news (I don't care what you think of me as long as you remember my name). Such shallow people, shallow as the laptop screen they're projected on. Why give them my attention as anything but the cartoon page in the paper? I can read Chris Hedges and Billy Idol's autobiography and get much more from it, while enjoying it immeasurably more. Seems like my mind took a step toward clarity soon after I shut them out of my attention span. I can't avoid them on facebook and radio news, but they don't make me sick anymore. I just say to self, this is how it is now. It was this way in Will Rogers' time and in Mark Twain's time. It looks kinda ongoing. All the more reason to let them that want it have it. I see a new gaff Sarah Palin made and have to click on it for a laugh, though turn it off soon after she starts. I cannot listen to a full minute of her or Bill O'Reilly. I don't care that he lied about a story. He's scripted. He doesn't know if it's true or not. It's all fiction to him. My sense of O'Reilly is he's so self-involved he doesn't care what he says. It feels better in the inside not to be aggravated by the manipulation by way of propaganda. I see it as such and let it go. I've finally learned the construct in my head made from information picked up over years is made from false information. Poof. So why have a construct? Let it go by as false information and let that be all I need to know. 

masahisa fukase

*

THE BOYCOTT OF ONE

vladimir tatlin

In the Sixties I became politically engaged, not as an activist, rather a hoarder of opinions with a few friends who objected to the perpetual war our government was creating. I was fired up with opinions I thought had foundation and meaning. Went to the 1968 march on the Pentagon over the Vietnam war. It was a big crowd, a couple hundred thousand, spirited speakers like Norman Mailer, Dr Spock among others. Peter, Paul and Mary sang Blowin In The Wind. It was a time of much anti-war pop songs by Bob Dylan and everybody else. Dylan, of course, was not there. The Fugs were there playing on a portable stage in the Pentagon parking lot their anti-war anthem, Kill For Peace. I loved hearing them do that song. I felt like I had arrived at an important place. The energy of the event felt important. I returned home believing I had done something worth while. Next day I looked at the Washington Post, New York Times, AP, and all reported the same story, none of which happened. Everything written was false. It puzzled me that the press got it so wrong when they were all there in the privileged area in front of the stage. How could they miss it? Time, Newsweek and US World all told the same story as the newspapers reported, none of which happened. It was frustrating because I had been there, had seen what it was and could see not one word in the national news was true. I felt quite strange. Here were six "legitimate" witnesses, witnesses that would stand in court. I knew they were all lying, but what could I say? I felt without recourse. I saw very clearly the different organs of corporate press were in league with each other. A few days later the Village Voice came in the mail, which I'm glad I subscribed to then. Nat Hentoff wrote the article in the Voice as one who had been there. He reported that LBJ held a press conference before the event where he told the reporters what to report. Obedient corporate yes-men they reported as told, except Hentoff who reported the press conference as well.

 

vladimir tatlin

 

That day I wrote off the corporate press as a source for information. I'm recalling Gore Vidal's reasoning for why he said we have no history. History is written from diaries, letters, journals and memoirs, all of which are self serving, and newspaper articles, which we all know are not true. Hence, we have no history. Reading the corporate press accounts I was thinking school kids doing research papers in the future will cite these articles and draw their conclusions based on a presidential lie that became fact in the press. The part that ate at me the most was that all but one reported the lie under their own names as witnesses who had been there. Norman Mailer happened to be at the press conference too, and he reported the press conference in his book, The Armies Of The Night. Mailer's account accorded with Hentoff's. That same day I lost my virginity to the corporate press, I gained a respect for Nat Hentoff that is with me to this day. One reporter told it as it happened. I see that Rupert Murdoch now owns Village Voice, so it has no more credibility. In its time the Voice was one of the rare credible papers in the country. It was also the day I looked my own absence of any kind of power as citizen in the eye and dropped political engagement from my mind, from my life. Not many years ago some people here were getting together to demonstrate about the proposed location of a prison in the next county. I was asked to join. I said the only things I have ever seen come of demonstrations was people getting beat up by cops and the hassle of arrest. Like the Rolling Stones song, "I think I'll go down to the demonstration and get my fair share of abuse." I made it clear I have no confidence in demonstrations and could not participate. They were successful. I congratulated them, feeling they deserved it, and apologized for my vote of no confidence. I had resolved myself to zero political involvement and held to it.

 

vladimir tatlin

 

I had learned that I have no voice as a citizen. I learned, too, I have no recourse. I don't see any point in going up against the Death Star for any reason. People with power hold it jealously. I don't want their power. They are going to do what they do and I am going to take it. However, I do have a key in my pocket. I learned seven or eight years ago that Coca Cola Corp was hiring death squads in Columbia to kill union activists and their families. What can I do about it? I quit buying Coke. I can't stop them from doing what they do, but I don't have to do my part to support it. Even if they only get a dollar a year from me, that's more than I'm willing to give. They can't force me to drink Coca-Cola. When I have a soft drink, it's DrPepper. It's probably owned by Coca-Cola Corp. I don't like what Walmart does to communities, to American economy, Asian sweatshops, especially how it treats its employees. I don't go to Walmart except in emergency that so seldom happens I've not been inside one in awhile. My money is my energy and I don't like giving my energy to a corporation that I don't like all the way around. The boycott of one. I like the maxim, never buy anything advertised on tv. I grew up in a church culture where the attitude was if you don't approve of something you have responsibility to browbeat people who are doing whatever it is. It was an unspoken belief that when the preacher's wife disapproves, you better cut it out. It ripples out from churches into the society that we're automatically expected to yield to disapproval. I bought it, of course, at the time, and later learned my way out of that mind. Political correctness is a new form of ruling by disapproval. Adhere to this list of rules and you're cool. If you don't you're not cool. I don't talk back to that thinking, because the people doing it are only disappointing me with their own limitations. But my attitude toward it is I am not cool, have never been cool and cool is not an ambition. Huffing disapproval is not cool either.

 

vladimir tatlin

 

The boycott of one is my own personal form of civil disobedience. I learned before high school that I would never work for a corporation. I have only worked for individuals with small businesses. In the ten years I painted houses, I worked for the house owner who hired me. My attitude with every one was that if we are not friends when job is done, I've failed. I never dripped paint on screens, no drips on decks or rocks or ferns or anything. And cleaned up after myself. I got paid satisfactorily well and had good associations with the people I worked for. I worked alone, because I did not want anybody else doing the work in my name. I never used a roller or spray. Brush only. Walls, everything, except ceiling, though I have painted ceilings by brush. I hated a roller. They splattered and left an ugly texture in the paint. I preferred the texture of a brush, the flow. It was a time in the life when I liked using tools with the least number of parts. An axe was great. Handle and blade. After a few years on the farm fixing broken machinery, the only tools I carried into the field with the tractor was an adjustable wrench and a big screwdriver. Whatever went wrong, I could either fix it with these tools or get it back to the barn where I kept the tools. It was a sign of how much I'd learned in a few years, a kind of report card the first time I went out without the toolbox, just two tools. I never took to power tools. I liked learning to put fence posts in the ground so they'll never wiggle, and stretch the barbed wire so it would stay tight for several years. There are tricks to these skills that need to be learned. I wanted to learn the old ways of farming, liking that my learning was not to make a living at, but to understand by experience. I learned to make a split-rail fence from cutting down the tree, splitting it into rails with an axe, a sledgehammer and two wedges, to putting up the fence. I loved learning something that was totally of the past. It was my link to old-time mountain culture I had the good fortune to see the tail end of and learn farming skills directly from someone of that time. I love it that my knowledge is useless. The interest was not motivated by wanting to be in the past, but for my own historical, cultural curiosity toward appreciating more fully the mountain people.

 

vladimir tatlin himself

 

 

*

 

THE OUTSIDER

grace hartigan

It has been a daily blessing since I clicked the power button *off* to my mental interest in following political nonsense. Simultaneous with turning off that interest came the facebook group, The Daily Creative Practice, brief conversations by way of comment boxes and photographs of varieties of works of art shared, the ones that want to, showing something new. It has brought me new friends, people I'm happy to know and communicate with almost daily. We tap into each other's aesthetic. One, Lee, I feel like we've known each other in lifetimes past. I appreciate about the group that nobody is promoting a given point of view. No games. I was gaping out the window a moment ago at a dove pecking around among last year's pine needle's on the ground, fixed momentarily on the subtle haze of pink on their gray-brown donkey color I can't find a name for. A red squirrel charged in from the right, straight to the dove from behind. The dove fluttered and twittered into space, the squirrel ran to the tree in front of the window, ran around the trunk, then out of sight. Now it is back at the place where it chased off the dove. The squirrel had been seed-hunting there before. A small black and white woodpecker is going over the bark of the white pine out another window. There came a day that I realized how truly ignorant our politicians are. They don't even try to cover up anymore. It's straight up they're in it for the money, they lick the hands that feed them. I asked myself why I was paying so much attention to ignorant people. A waste of my own mental time and space.

 

grace hartigan

 

The Daily Creative Practice has taken the space left over by the sudden vacancy of  my dim-witted drift through the mind-space of below average people. Pay more attention to the books I want to read, the art I want to make, the people I want to interact with. Pull back from media-fed mind to the world of people I live among, the people I care about who care about me. Eliminate the static of media nonsense from my own interior motion picture collage of mind. I want less of that belief system, less of that tone of voice in my head, less of that mind. It's been well over a month since I've paid attention to the vanity of self-centered men on the take. I see a picture of weeping Boner and it makes me laugh like seeing a cartoon, a 2D caricature of complicity with corporate greed. I used to react with a feeling of GAK in my belly. I don't value somebody of that mind, so why pay attention to him even to be disgusted by his Xtreme shamelessness? Why even laugh at cartoons about him? Our political system has become something I cannot support with my attention. I'm considering not participating in the vote later this year as a way of unplugging myself from the corporate media belief system that money is the only purpose. Much as I'd like to feel support for Obama because the racists hate him so much, I can't help but see him a corporate plant. I don't mean a rubber tree. The black people caught on early that he was not with them. He talks to them the way white men talk to them; you needta, you oughta, you better, you should. His white supporters are catching on gradually he's not there for them either.

grace hartigan

My new friends at DCP are a million times more interesting than Machinegun Barbie. At DCP, we have Paleontologist Barbie. I have also learned not to comment on memes I get from places I'd clicked Like on in the past. I got into a brief exchange with a guy involved with Occupy, and he was one hard core activist, the kind that ends up in a deep dark dungeon a political prisoner. Just his attitude made me shudder. It was a friendly exchange. I didn't know what to say. I seem far left in relation to the republican party, but when I have a glimpse of somebody far left, it throws me way back to center. In the face of the two extremes, I'm neither one. I could call myself of the right because I believe the people making ridiculous noise about guns have a right. I don't have a gun, don't want one. Somebody from the apparent "left" gave me all kinds of hell for using the "cruel word," redneck, "you know better," dotted with yellow smiley faces. It threw my mind to kindergarten and refrigerator magnets. I want nothing more to do with the left. I wrote back, "I AM a redneck and proud of it." Unliked the place. Lord have mercy, now I can't even say redneck. Two days ago I saw a thing saying it's not all right for white people to use the enword. I wrote back, "Can I say white emeffer?" I've become a little bit confrontational with those people. I've found some who promote tolerance are as judgmental and intolerant as the most adamantine baptist preacher. The very most intolerant person I know had a sticker on the back window of his car that said Tolerance, and called himself a Buddhist. I figured the sticker on his back window was there to remind himself--albeit in reverse, thinking he's telling everybody else. I seldom let any of them get away with their judgmental statements about the South.

grace hartigan

The liberals who want me tolerant of everything and everybody are severely intolerant of the South. They give more evidence that people outside the South have no idea about the South. I remind them the slavery they're pointing the finger at the South over has been gone over a century and a half, while in American coastal cities is more slavery going on than there ever was in the South. Only difference, the slavery now is Asian, and Asian's aren't cool to wax self-righteous over this year. It's still ok to say the A-word. And the Asian mob, the noise-makers intuit not to provoke that beast. Benign Southern people living in poverty in a trailer by the side of the road, a confederate flag in the bedroom window, did not have slaves, do not have slaves and never seen no damn slave in their life. The only thing the flag means is they drink beer, love the South, and just to be spiteful embrace everything Yankees judge wrong with the South. The South they love is the Lynard Skynard and Allman Brothers South. Southern rock! Hail Yeah! That's something else outsiders don't know about Southern rednecks; they embrace everything Yankees say is wrong with them, because Yankees don't like it. It's comedy. It's I-am-I humor. When I wrote back to the person on facebook saying I am a redneck, it was in place of saying, "Y'all sure are a judgmental bunch." I reminded myself of a saying learned from an aunt, Don't start it if you don't want it started. It's time to pull my mind out of that kind of thinking too. I'll be Unliking some more of them. I will kick into gear an attitude that I like people outside the South looking down on us--it keeps them away. I tell myself, don't educate them, let them believe the highway patrol south of the Mason-Dixon line pulls over every car they see with a Yankee tag. I must let go of my own intolerance of intolerance of intolerance.

grace hartigan herself

 

 

*

 

HILLBILLY BARNYARD WINTER

 

ice in the grass

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

 

frosty manes on the donkeys

 

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

 

hillbilly barn lot

 

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

 

jack and jen with frosted manes

 

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

 

ice tree 

 

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

 

jack

 

 

*

 

THE WORLD WOULD BE A BETTER PLACE IF ONLY

 

 

Yesterday I heard somebody start a statement, "If everybody would (fill in the blank), the world would be a better place." In another context, I saw a meme on facebook that asked for comments on what I'd like to see change in the world. That one threw me. Like nothing is changing? Change is the nature of existence. What would I like to see changed? Racism was the first word that came to mind, but it's changing. Years ago, before I quit talking with anonymous phone calls telling me what to buy, one asked for anything I'd like to change about the evening news. I said that would take going all the way back to the beginning of humanity, too much for me to cover. I can't change it and I wouldn't change it. I think of Jesus saying love one another. Or even liking one another will do. Or even treating each other right . That was 2,100+ years ago, and his zealous fundamentalist devotees are practicing hate, preaching hate, parroting hate. And that was Jesus "commanding" we love one another. His voice has more authority than mine, and his fervent fundamentalist followers have turned to hate. Among his followers love is a four-letter word. It means fornication. Sin. Besides, love is wimpy. Real men don't do that shit. Like the saying, "Real men don't eat quiche," it can be added that real men don't love. My experience throughout childhood and youth in a Southern Baptist (fundamentalist) church in Kansas, the word love was only used in quoting verses, not meaning it. Mention the absence of love as a value, and the answer comes back: Of course we love. What's wrong with you? Supposed-to equals doing it: Of  course we love. We're s'posed-to. God commanded us to love one another.
 

 

A preacher I asked about loving everybody assured me it didn't mean everybody in the world, only "the brothers and sisters in the church." To hear them talk about each other, they didn't even like each other. The thought of loving somebody who does wrong, or loving somebody with more pigment in their skin is unthinkable. We see it in our politics now that the Teabaggers turn out to be American fundamentalism gone political. Their belief system, formerly kept to themselves, except for missionarizing, looks mighty ignorant out in the open. They threaten the rest of us with their venal attitude toward anybody not themselves, their racism, their absolutism. Like Jesus said of the preachers in his time, You make the people twofold more children for hell than you yourselves. They can only live up to it by denial, denying they do not adhere personally to their own absolutist belief system. They call it being imperfect. And they want to hold the rest of us to their folk religion beliefs that have little to nothing to do with love. Now that the republican party is the fundamentalist party, we have police state. I never dreamed American fundamentalism could take over a major political party. The republican party's appeal for ignorance has given us fundamentalism to back up the police state with such a long string of stupid people running for public office that it's unimaginable there are so many people in the country as dumb as they are. I guess stupid people follow party line unquestioning.  Fundamentalists don't question. Doubt is a sin.

 

 

 

 

I've said before that the best definition of evil I've come upon is ignorance. Going by this as the case, the republican party is quick to point the finger at evil. Three fingers point back at themselves. What they are doing consciously with purpose is dismantling American democracy to make police state, which they have already done. The Reagan Revolution was indeed a revolution. They called it that themselves, and to this day few see it. Because it's more interesting to see commercials about things you want, like a new car, new shampoo, new toilet paper, new mouthwash, stuff for the septic tank, stuff for the landfill. I have seen it evolve in this direction over my lifetime, but somehow didn't believe the American people would go all the way to having no values at all but in relation to money. Now it's here. The people who preach moral values do so in relation to money. Politicians can't turn their backs on their corporate owners over something as dumb as principles or ethics. Ethics is a ridiculous word in their world. It's never used. Nobody in that world knows what an ethic is. Also throughout my lifetime I've seen anti-intellectualism go all the way to anti-paying attention. Our educational system cannot work in a society where ignorance is held as the ideal. You think it's not? Take a look around.

 

Several years ago, when I heard somebody make the remark that the world would be a better place if everybody would.... For the first time, it struck me there is nothing that everybody is going to do but the obvious, ingest, evacuate and die. If everybody would love one another. That is out of the question. If everybody would quit smoking. It came to me that my world would improve if I attempted whatever it is I believe the world would be a better place if everybody would do. Even television can't make everybody alike, though it's made a valiant effort. If everybody would treat other people right. Aint gonna happen. However, I can treat other people right. I can function without expressions of racism. It would be a better place if everybody would quit judging each other. LOL. No way. But, I can give non-judgment a go in my own life. The spiritual path is not about making other people toe the line.. It is about finding one's own way a step at a time. That's the only thing it's about. Other people will do whatever they do. I have no control over anyone else, not a great deal of control over myself. Someone I know asked me recently, Why do I want to turn everybody in the world on to what I like? My answer: You're a missionary, a living commercial. It had more to do with his nature than philosophy. After a lifetime of television, he's a commercial for whatever comes up. He spends his life frustrated he can't get other people to be him. You gotta see this tv show, you'll love it! No I won't. You don't know, you haven't seen it. I do know myself well enough to know I will not enjoy a tv show about a serial killer, the good kind, only kills bad guys. Even JFK couldn't make everybody do according to his idea of what was right.

 

  

 

 

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DEMOCRACY FOR SALE

 Against logic there is no armor like ignorance.
                       ---Lawrence J Peter (1919-1990)          


A few days ago a friend sent me an email telling that TeaPartiers demonstrate with guns and the cops don't bother them. Peaceful protesters from the Wall Street demonstrations get beat up and dragged to jail. Maybe they should carry guns too. The reason Iran wants nukes is because USA doesn't threaten and attack countries that have nukes. I wrote back to friend, the cops ARE the right wing. TeaPartiers with guns is the same as cops with guns. I once read in a dream analysis book that a dream of cops represents angels. Really? I can't say I have personally had a bad experience with a cop. I've never called a cop for any reason. I've had a couple of cops over the years attempt to intimidate me, and I let them believe they did, because once they get a bead on you, you have no recourse. When I was new to the South, a cop came into my apartment threatening me. I told him he's in my place without permission, and I don't have to answer his questions. He said, "By the time we get you to the station, we'll have something on you." This was my first learning about Old South police. I didn't have a Southern accent and certainly did not know the South.



My attitude toward cops came with the realization that they ARE the right wing. I've never appreciated the right wing, because I really do believe in American ideals. The role of cops is to enforce law. It really is. And that's what they do, to some extent. I've seen over the years a lot of them don't know the laws; they go by what they think oughta be a law. In court, their oughta be a law thinking gets cases thrown out of court and cops calling courts liberal. We once had a sheriff's deputy in Alleghany who had a passion for putting young guys in prison. The sheriff's department under that administration passionately set up the young for arrest. Two of the deputies, especially, were wild-eyed about putting local boys in prison. I say "wild-eyed" because they were. Their eyes were wild every time I saw them, wild with the passion of rightness.



One of them got carried away with setting up kids. He got with two kids who were charged with having drugs. He said he'd get them off their charge if they'd sell come cocaine for him out of the evidence locker. The kids were dumb, but not that dumb. They turned him in. One wore a "wire" for use in court. He was put away for 15 years. That was one of the times in the life I've seen justice actually take place in a courtroom, which I tend to think of as the gaming room, poker-faced lawyers attempting to bluff. I had to go to court once for a speeding ticket. It scared hell out of me. I went into the courtroom knowing American law is a "crapshoot." May the best lawyer win. I recently saw the outcome of a case in the paper where a prediction I'd heard came true. A particular lawyer held his case off until a certain judge would be presiding, common legal practice, a judge who always gave this particular lawyer his way in court. It turned out he got his way when it didn't make a bit of sense.



Since the draconian "mandatory sentencing" laws of the Reagan Revolution, and republicans packing courts with right wing judges all over the country for the last 30+ years, especially in this time we're in, I do not trust the police or the courts. When it was my time to stand before the judge, I was mortified. I'd learned about highway patrol quotas and all kinds of things that make our law a poker game. Evidence that everyone knows this is in the common belief that going into court you need the "best" lawyer, the one with the winningest record. It's like picking a team to bet on for the world series. You go for the one you think has the best chance to win. That's the only thing we look for in a lawyer. We pick the one we believe by reputation to have the best chance of winning. Observed courtroom chicanery over the years taught me by this time in the life to be afraid of court. It's like your fate is determined by the flip of a coin.



I'm learning why old people tend to be uninterested in politics and withdraw from much that is around them. It's not because they're old and don't get it anymore. The problem is, they get it. They've lived long enough to see the world they live in is false to the core. Many wouldn't put it like that, but I feel like this is the root, considering my own motivations. I've seen that falseness to the core since childhood. Possibly it was the influence of the Swedish preacher in the non-denominational baptist fundamentalist church where the preacher preached against Godless Communism in the early 1950s, the McCarthy era. The influence that had on me was pretty strong, until the day my dad told me out of the blue on a Saturday when he was in the house, "I'll kill you of you ever join the Communist Party." From then on, I wanted to be a Communist. I wanted to find a Communist Party to join. Communism became a great curiosity for me. Until I got to Stalin, or Dick Cheney with absolute power. He made Communism tremendously unappealing. The assassination of Trotsky in Mexico City. Khrushchev making noise at the UN, banging his shoe. So red around the collar.



Eventually I read the Communist Manifesto, to see what it was. It made a great deal of sense, and I suspect K Marx of visionary status. It had no relation to Communism in action, Russia or China, same as our Capitalism wedded to democracy isn't what it's cracked up to be. One of my learnings in life has been that when the human mind gets hold of something, that's the end of it. The way of the human mind runs counter to the way of the spirit, which is the way of everything living in the world around us, even ourselves. Concoctions of the human mind are, by their limited nature, short-lived. I'd venture around the same time the date for the end of democracy; though the most telling evidence that the supreme court, overruling an election, ended it in the year 2000, is rather compelling. I don't look to see it coming back. Like a precious caged exotic bird, once it gets out the door, it's gone. Won't be long til a hawk catches a good meal.



It's looking like it was mafia that replaced the Soviet government. The gambling casinos of Wall Street hold the power in America now. In our case, it's a legal mafia as they've spent the last half century shaping the laws to their benefit by buying off the "representatives" of "the people" with money and country club memberships from lobbyists. We haven't had any representatives in a very long time. Rational legislation to the benefit of the American working people, the 99%, is defeated by ignorance, with the cheerleading of Limbaugh and the strategies of Karl Rove that trump intelligence with ignorance. It works as surely as assassination works. We have the mafia of heirarchical corporate power. We used to be citizens. Now we are consumers, fires that burn up products. This is the world I have separated myself from in my later years, staying as low under the radar as I can. I'm of the old school of American individualism, and have seen it go away in my lifetime. I've seen in older people the ground of their belief systems go out from under them. I'm seeing it now in myself.  



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JIGSAW PUZZLE OF THE MIND

     found art - the tpot museum site - sparta

I'm hearing all kinds of things about what's going on in American political self-interest. A friend who knows more about what's going on politically than I do, said yesterday that in his lifetime this period in DC as it is now is the closest to anarchy he has seen in our political system. I felt like that was well considered and definitely the case. I would say he's neither left nor right, but leans right. Doesn't listen to Limbaugh, so he's not a parrot. He informs my thinking more than I inform his. I actually don't intend to inform anybody's thinking. Sometimes I may speak with such urgency, but still I have no interest in persuading anyone or even informing, because I know how fallible I am. Plus, I know that I think I am better at one thing and another than I really am. I have taken on projects thinking I had what it takes, but when it gets down to business, I don't. It took a long time to learn that, but I've finally caught on. I think, maybe hope.



Even though I see through the filter of my own experience, I don't think it's all inaccurate. We know the republicans are going for absolute police state power. I can't help but see next election giving congress and senate to the republicans, and that will be it. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers may be coming home with nothing to do, but still in the army. If the Wall Street demonstrations continue to grow, the army might be called in. The demonstrators are up against absolute power, the greatest power on earth. I like their chant, "We are the 99%." Of course, that means nothing where power is concerned. The 1% with the money that in America equals power will rule as they will, self-interest foremost and only. They control the Pentagon too. They will go on taking our resources to themselves, as is their purpose, like taking the copper mines of the Congo to themselves. They think nothing of putting a CocaCola plant in an Indian village, take all the water of the region to their own use and allow none for the local people who were doing just fine till the Coke plant came in. But they're making money. Tough shit for the people. In Columbia, the CocaCola corp was exposed a few years ago for hiring death squads to kill union activists and their families. Busy exporting democracy.



I don't know if I would join those demonstrations in the big cities with stock exchanges if I lived in one. I can't help but think of the line from the Rolling Stones, "I think I'll go down to the demonstration, get my fair share of abuse." In my 20s I would have, just to be with what's the cool thing to do of the moment. Today, I'm a bit jaundiced by what I've seen of American political decision making since the Truman/Ike period when I began to become aware of what we called current events at school. Since then, I've been through the brief Kennedy time of something on the order of hope for the American people. The corporate powers took care of that shit. I rate Johnson the first real scoundrel in the White House to turn our government over to the corporate powers. I can't help but see the Kennedy assassination as anything but a coup. When you play follow-the-money, look who and what it benefited. Since corporations now are legally regarded people, I guess it's not a matter of what, corporations not being what anymore, but who. What a bunch of bullshit. Or who a bunch of bullshit. Didn't benefit we-the-people. Then Nixon, even worse in the advance toward police state.



Carter attempted to be a benefit to the American people, but was defeated at every turn by the corporate opposition. Then Reagan came in playing John Wayne and the race was on to make the 99% into a peasant class like Russia in the time of the Czars. He set the progression of regression into motion, cutting loose greed in the entire population, cutting loose the corporate powers legally to swallow us whole, like a snake swallows a rabbit. Ford and BushOne were just benign practitioners of what they were given to do. Then the public assassination of Clinton's character by some of the most low down swine operating in DC. What they're doing to Obama is the same as they did to Clinton, orchestrated by the same mind. I can't be objective. Through the years of my own experience, I've come to see the republican party since 1963 the true enemy of the American people. Communists weren't anywhere near the threat that comes from within, the cancer built into democracy. The cancer was in there from the start. The Civil War was created by the cancer within.



Political cancer has put an end to democracy in America. Obama won't be able to get it back, even if next election gives everything to the democrats. It's been a systematic whittling away of our power as citizenry. By now we have no power of citizenry. Evidently it's true that democracy has a 200 year lifespan. Given that's the case, we're in the time for what comes next. The corporate power will have us in police state, and will allow no other way. CIA, FBI surveillance is on the order of flawless already. Nothing against the State can be organized by more than a few people without an infiltrator, whoever they are are, leading them to their own destruction. The Wall Street demonstrators are already being called hippies, losers, leftists, this and that, just like in the 60s. If they don't settle down soon (this aint the 60s), the empty FEMA concentration camps all over the country will start filling up. That's what they're here for. Civil unrest, which has begun. They've been expecting it, because they set it in motion consciously, knowing what it would lead to. Concentration camps have VACANCY all over their gates. Ready for business. They weren't built as an artist's installations or environmental art.



There, I got it said. This is what has been bugging me. I can't see it any other way. I've seen enough evidence to convince me that something like this is going on. I've seen no reliable evidence to the contrary. I am powerless, don't even want to think of this blog as anything to do with power. It's just sound and fury signifying whatever: nothing. Just putting down one person's way of seeing. All our experiences are our own. I don't know that I'm right. Don't know that I'm wrong. It's all images in the mind, possibly something like a jigsaw puzzle for the mind. This goes here. This goes there. Finding parts that fit into the whole and filing them into their places. One at a time. Throughout a lifetime the jigsaw gets pieced together. By this time in the life, each of these blog entries is a piece in the jigsaw puzzle that tells the story of how this one individual in a given place and a given time assesses experience. I think of it something like an open journal. I can't just write for myself, but I can for somebody else. Here, you know me as my friends know me. And we have to allow for self-serving, which is unavoidable writing of one's own observations. When you're reading any of these, please do it understanding I'm not wanting to persuade you to anything, unless it would be to make your own decisions. And that probably because it turns out to be the lesson of my life to myself.



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STAY AWAY FROM IMPORTANT PEOPLE

richard pettibone, jasper johns flag 1955, 1967

On the news this morning was talk about the two "hikers" released from Iranian prison after a year or so. They were let go as a "humanitarian gesture," for a million dollars. The girl with them was released not long after arrest, again a humanitarian gesture, for half a million. They call it "bail," but everybody knows none of them will return for a trial. Saw a picture of the two guys; they looked like survivors of Wrong Turn 2, red around the eyes, a stark terror in the eyes that will take many years to recede to something they can live with comfortably. You might say they had their eyes opened for them. I doubt either of these guys will return to Iran for any reason. I can't help but think it immensely retarded of them to go hiking in the Iraqi mountains on the border with Iran in this time of war all the way around Iran. Iraq on one side, Afghanistan on the other, both wars are (pre-emptive) American aggression, Iran in the American cross-hairs for the last 30+ years. I'm reminded of the people on a New Age tour to see gorillas in their natural habitat, the Rwandan rain forest, outdoor petting zoo, in the height of the Rwandan killing mayhem. We're white bwanas, we'll be safe. They're only killing each other. Several were killed. I think of someone whose house was washed away by a flood rebuilding on the same site. A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. He had his reasons.



And what an odd blunder in Egypt. A protest, which nobody in an African country was fool enough to believe would overthrow any government. It did. Then what. They got rid of Mubarak. They were not prepared to take over power. They were just protesting. So the military now has "interim" power in Egypt. Then the people in Lybia start thinking a protest will overthrow Khadafy. It didn't work. Since they committed themselves, they have to fight now to keep from being killed when Khadafy comes back. Doesn't look like that will happen, but he has a ruthless mind and he's not out yet. On the news I'm hearing it called "Arab Spring," which strikes me as an American "defense" department sound bite, like "Iraqi Liberation," devoid of meaning. Sounds pretty. Like naming a plane Enola Gay. Yesterday I heard somebody call it the "Arab Uprising," which accords better with my perception of it. It's too soon to be calling it a "Spring." Spring implies Summer and Fall to follow. Arab Spring sounds too much like W Bush's "Mission Accomplished." What mission? Accomplished? The only mission I saw accomplished was the American people hoodwinked by successful propaganda.



On the phone with my friend Carole, she told something from her granddaughter living in Seattle. Granddaughter knew some people in Seattle who had talked about how vulnerable the city is to a particular kind of "terrorism," evidently in the company of the wrong one. A plain clothes FBI agent came along and started talking to them about committing this "terrorist act." They were astonished. They didn't want to do that. A good time to say, "Get behind me Satan," with accurate meaning. All are in prison. USA not a police state? One of the motivations for me to leave Charleston was seeing how vulnerable the city was. I'm reminded of the 50s, during and after the Joe McCarthy American activities of name smearing and causing a large number of suicides. In those days, talking on the phone with friends, we'd frequently say something and then hope "They" weren't listening or missed what we were talking about. It was in the time of J Edgar Hoover wiretapping PinkOs. After the fall of the Wall, which Reagan strangely took credit for, we had less emphasis on communism to keep the population's fear quotient up. We went through the Clinton years without any fear being pumped into us by propaganda, though we had plenty of fear of Kenneth Starr. Then W, Cheney, Rummy and Rice hit the stage with 911 and we started thinking about wiretapping of phones again, even cell phones now. We know this time around that the Supremes will uphold every restriction of We The People's rights.



I think of what Meher Baba recommended: Stay out of politics. Such sound counsel! And I add to that Jr's sayin his daddy, Wiley Sr, passed to him: Stay away from important people. I see important people the same as the word politics, just more inclusive all the way to the impulse to politics. Important people in about all cases I can see are self-important. Ask their wives and kids. Important amounts to posturing, something important people do all the time, like sharks swim all the time to keep from sinking. Other fish can be still in the water without sinking. Posturing is a constant mental activity entirely self-centered. It's what important people do. Want to be important? Start posturing and it won't be long until some people start thinking I'm important; must be, he's posturing. "Get you a guitar and put it in tune--you'll be a-rockin and a-rollin soon." Strangely, in the 1950s American educational system, it was preached to the kids that being a leader is important, not being a follower. Whatever the hell that means. Leaders are important people. Throughout my growing up, the message to the young was be important. In college, it was be great. What a burden. And what bullshit.



The moment Jr told me his daddy's sayin, Stay away from important people, I heard the wisdom in it. Not just intelligence, but wisdom. A truly wise saying. I was already imbued with that thinking, but didn't have it as concisely as in a simple sentence, stay away from important people. About any way you use the word important. Then you don't ever get talked down to, or when you do, you don't receive it. If one of Karl Rove's Tea Party members of congress were to tell me I'm a jerk, I'd roll around on the floor like two fighting cats, laughing til my belly hurt and mark the calendar in red for that day. I'd probably sound like the cats, too. Thank You, Sir; Thank You, Ma'am or Miz. It would be feedback as valuable as somebody saying to me of one of my paintings with a fiddle in it, "I can hear that fiddle." I take "important people" to mean about everyone who thinks of his station in life "a position," the sure sign of a posturer, one who postures. Like everything else I live by, I allow for exceptions, lapses, errors, whatever. I don't take anything that I know of for absolute. There is another meaning of important, that is excepted from the meaning above. Whatever is important to your heart. Posturing is important to the mind, not even noticed by the heart. Important to the heart would be grandma's pinto beans and cornbread.



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SOLVING THE WORLD'S PROBLEMS

by andrea galvani

Syria...outside intervention...Mr Mubarak 83 remained on a stretcher...a pornography site called Dream Board, child pornography...This is a lose-lose-lose situation...Obama trying to make sense to Republicans that don't pay attention to sense, they want dollars. Dollars only.



Five minutes of headline news. I saw a photograph of Mubarak on Yahoo news locked in his cage like a dangerous man. He may have been dangerous with power, but without his power he is humiliated after a lifestyle with the rich and famous of the world, now seen all over the internet and television in a cage at a kangaroo trial. I have to say I'm with going to the source of the problem, not to some low man on the totem pole all the trouble trickles down to. I can't make any kind of judgment about decisions made in northern Africa. I don't have any idea how they think. I only know that it's very different from the way we think in the American South. I've read several novels by Naguib Mahfouz, a writer I like so much I don't have to look up how to spell his name. Life in Cairo is unlike any I've ever known. I've heard from an American who's been there that Cairo smells like an open sewer.



I'm still feeling good from the midday party at Selma's coffee shop with the different people who came in. If there had been a checklist of who I wanted to be there, I'd have picked all of them. It was a good bunch of people I like an awful lot. We get along together like a gang of friends who have known each other several years. Conversation flows freely. Whenever someone speaks, others listen, and it goes around letting everyone speak and be heard whatever they have to say. That, in my way of seeing, is good company. About all of us, as far as I know, were anti-political correctness. Dudley thinks it's great that I'm as irreverent as he is. He likes having someone else irreverent around. I hadn't thought about it before, but we do tend to make irreverent remarks for humor when we're together. Selma has a good time the other side of the bar fixing coffee drinks and listening to what we're talking about. Sometimes she joins in, but mostly listens with a smile of satisfaction on her face. The smile tells me she is happy that her coffee shop generates such conversations as she hears at the bar when Joe, Dudley, Beth, I and others are making sweeping assessments about that which we know nothing. That's ok. We're doing what Americans do best. Talking. Doing our patriotic duty.



It's really curious having such a European atmosphere in a coffee shop in a small mountain town in the American South. The place has a Latin feel about it like it could be anywhere south of the border where Spanish is spoken. I like that Selma has no hesitation about her Cuban heritage. She's wide open with it. She gives Cuba a good name. She's none too crazy about Castro, while at the same time allowing me my own admiration of Castro for standing up to the American War Machine. He can't be too great when people are trying to get to America riding tractor tire inner tubes out into the ocean at night to be shark food. Nobody is riding an inner tube from Florida to Cuba. That tells me a little bit. Selma's husband made 15 unsuccessful attempts to cross and succeeded the 16th try. For each time he didn't make it he had to do 2-3 months in prison. I'd say he was committed. He looks like somebody who can't be defeated. I'd guess the equivalent of three years in prison, perhaps more, he knows how to fight. I wouldn't recommend going up against him. I'd say his woman feels protected.



My friends Lucas and Judy arrived today from Georgia, Conyers, about the last bedroom community exit off I-20 east of Atlanta. Allen Reinhart here in Alleghany, married to Susan Miles, used to manage a TG&Y store in Conyers. They arrived today refreshed to be in a temperature in the 70s instead of the 90s. Judy said it was unbearable. I expect so. I'm glad to see my friends. They don't seem to have enjoyed their recent visits here, but this time they feel happy to be here, enjoying watching the clouds turn pink from the deck after sunset with wine and conversation. We talked about the venality of the seditious Republicans in our government since the Reagan Revolution, the active hatred for the American people, the bottom 99%. I can't help but laugh at the irony, the ones waving the flag, hollering patriotism, are the enemies of the American republic and its people. Our enemies are not outside anymore. They're inside. And they're not the ones we think. They're the ones pointing the self-righteous patriotic finger.



Syrian troops...Mubarak...device attached to teen not bomb...beaten NC boy, 4, had alcohol in system...72 charged in child porn network...Italy going under...Greece going under again. Who knows where the time goes?



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THE END OF DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA

joan mitchell

Last night I wrote my response to the recent news of the Republicans tripping up Congress again, continuing the promise made by Ronald McDonald Reagan during his first run for president to destroy our government. Thirty years later his followers keep the momentum going on this promise. It has been the nature of the Reagan Revolution to take from the working people and give to the rich. The working people pay taxes the corporate rich use for wars to make themselves richer and the people paying for the wars poorer. I have seen steady progression along this line since 1980. One thing that is not going to happen, that seems to me sensible and needs doing, is tax the corporations like individuals since the Supremes declared corporations individuals. Of course, the purpose of the Supreme Court decision was to give the Republicans political advantage, not to increase revenues in the nation they are systematically working to destroy.



One of the more curious phenomena I've seen in my lifetime is the brain-drain from Europe during WW2 when the intellectuals and artists went to America where many of them stayed after the war. They were hired into our universities, raising our standard of education way up during the 50s and 60s. Then the European intellectuals started dying out. As they went away, or standards went downward, until by now we're back in the American groove after an artificial rush of intelligence. Looking at our politicians as people with American college educations, it doesn't say much for our educational system. That added to the Republicans shutting down every funding there is for education, until by now after half a century of only Education majors getting teaching jobs. Where I went to school, the Phys Ed majors said thank God for the Education majors, like South Carolina said thank God for Mississippi.



Last night I wrote out another harangue and deleted it when it was finished. I didn't want to subject you to some more of my political inaccuracies. I hear people on NPR talk shows calling in, like Diane Rehm show, Talk of the Nation and another one or two, telling their opinions and conclusions they've drawn about government this and that. They all sound so ridiculously uninformed, even the seemingly better informed ones. I've taken to hearing people at Selma's talking politics in the same way. I hear myself talk, read what I've written, and it's so incredibly uninformed I don't know why I have to feel compelled to express it. The answer I give myself is everybody has their own way of seeing according to their own experience and their own selective hearing. What I write is my own conclusions drawn from my own interpretations based in nothing but listening to the news all my life. These expressions of how I see the unreality of our political world are mine and mine alone. I don't mean for you to take them for your own, nor do I care for you to attempt to convince me of yours. I offer it for your amusement or even consideration to add to your own thinking, or turn your thinking away from my way of seeing. It's all ok by me. It's not even air to breathe. It's just brain cells sparking and triggering each other, however that works. I'll say it's thin as thought. That's not even one atom thick.



Deleting what I wrote, I felt it pointless to say anything. This morning I drove into town to have Kenyan coffee at Selma's and enjoy some good company with whoever showed up. The old feller Moxley, whose first name I don't know, was there. Then Dudley came in with Cynthia and Andrea, the two women who attended to his wife, Caroline, who died yesterday after a long decline from MS. Beth and Charlie came in. Then Joe came in. By the time Joe arrived we had all been talking our thoughts on the recent news, and it sounded like what I wrote last night. That set me to thinking there might have been something worthwhile in it, simply because it was how one person saw it. We at the coffee bar all saw it from different aspects, some informing others, some not. Conversation was lively. Beth turned out to be the conversation leader simply from being so well informed. She really pays attention. She's good at expressing her thoughts in words. I love it when Beth gets going on one of her topics of interest. She studies and she pays attention. She has a good mind and it seems to me a balanced way of putting it all together for whatever conclusion it leads to. It was a lively 2.5 hours.



Then Roy came in and took the stool to my right. He started coming down on the ACLU for all the Limbaugh reasons. I was having a good time inside, because from my way of seeing, the ACLU is the barbed wire fence between democracy and fascism. Since the Reagan Junta and the Bush-Cheney-Rummy-Rice seizure of power, ACLU, like the truth, has been ridiculed to powerlessness. How do we know the truth when we see/hear it? We have to keep ourselves informed to be able to decipher the truth from a structure made of lies. Also, we all have what I call our "truth center" within that rings something true or false. I don't mean like test questions, but like interpersonal relations. It's subtle, to be sure. We know other people better than we know reading or study. Roy telling me his way of seeing it I found a great deal of fun. I didn't agree with anything he said, but saw no need to tell him. I was interested in what an American could find reprehensible about the ACLU. I didn't learn anything, because he never gave a reason, only that he blames them for what's wrong with our country.



We have a truly dysfunctional government now, thanks to the Reagan Junta's strategy of divide and conquer that has wreaked havoc on the American people ever since. It has conservatives hating liberals so much the liberals hate conservatives in turn. The language charged up by Limbaugh and the Fox network is heading us toward a civil war of some sort that won't be pretty. Like cancer is eating up the American people, cancer is eating up our government, the Southern California / Texas billionaire right wing cancer. I cannot help but see that the American experiment with democracy didn't work. Communism didn't work either.



Maybe in this time of the end of communism and democracy / capitalism something new is brewing. Maybe this is what the 2012 prophecies are about, the end of these belief systems we've collectively adhered to and lived by that worked relentlessly against human interest, the interest of the planet and all its life forms. Historically, as one belief system goes out, another comes in. This could turn out to be a very dynamic time, but the American working people, including the management class, may suffer mightily before a halt comes to the momentum of the corporate rich taking everything from us to themselves, putting it in off-shore accounts, Cayman Islands and others, so they don't have to pay taxes. Dollars among the working poor are like fishes in the sea, diminishing toward extinction in very near future, unless this momentum comes to its end. Ralph Nader saw this coming. He told us about it years ago. Television laughed out loud. A liberal that reads books.

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