POPE FRANCIS HAS LANDED

il papa

 

The pope is in America, riding about in a tiny Fiat in a sea of security in ominous Lincolns. He appears out of place in pictures surrounded by important Americans in expensive clothes, the masses herded behind a barricade. In Cuba he was out walking around greeting people, individually, praying with them. In America he's surrounded by military and power in suits, kept away from the people, a security risk. I saw a video of him walking from one place to another with a parade of security, a crowd of people the other side of an impenetrable fence cheering him. He looked at them, I imagined feeling impotent, like a cow in a stockyard led from gate to gate by the threat of an electric cattle-prod. The other side of the barricade huddled the Americans who interested him. He could not reach them, was not allowed to walk among them. Dangerous. I'm thinking he must feel like he's reading 1984. I feel like his only defense in the world of American power, where false is true and true is false, would be his humility. His center will hold. He is beyond desire, beyond seduction. I'm sure he does not have a sense of humor as jaded as mine, leading me to suspect he will be praying for us when I would be laughing. We need all the prayer we can get.

 

love pope by karl urbach-mallin

 

I can hardly wait til Thursday to see what he has to say to the American congress for the international record. The corporate marionettes will have a great time indulging their propensity for hissy-fits. This is the only thing I can see that's predictable. George Will goes on being a serious disappointment. Even back when he was the new voice of conservative punditry he was as screwed up as he is now in his advanced age. I had not paid him any mind in so long I forgot about him. Then he turned up today in a snit about the pope, writing fundamentalist nonsense, as usual, the reason I've never been able to take him seriously, or even read him. He's a good writer. It's the mind behind the writing I have issues with. Not really issues. I don't take him seriously enough to have issues with him. The republican reaction to the pope, presaged in Wills' prosecutorial accusations, need be of no more interest to me. Wills already spelled it out. 

 

 

Next is seeing it in action for the corporate propaganda show called the news, Meet the Press, jabber, jabber, jabber, Rachel Maddow yelling back at them, pointing the finger. Bill Maher is at risk of jumping into the deep end again. I'll be curious to see what humor he makes of America's encounter with Pope Francis from a proud and provoking gay atheist point of view. This particular pope, Pope Francis, in America in this time of corporate police state that holds Mammon highest, seems so out of place he will make great editorial cartoons, the little humble guy with raging morons on Fake news blaming him. To the pope, I imagine he feels like he stepped into the world of another religion as foreign to his own as Zoroastrianism or Hinduism, even more foreign, and far less gentle. The nearest he will see to gentleness could be the black servants. They would be the people he could connect with, eye to eye, the divine in me greets the divine in you.  

 

 

 

I never imagined in my lifetime I'd see a pope that did not support fascists. This is one of his many aspects that makes him a surprise pope. He will get all kinds of criticism, and of course, he must, as no good gets done without opposition, yet this man will prevail. He is unafraid. He is backed by the gospel. Not even a twisted interpretation of it. The American fundamentalist reaction will be so ridiculous, it won't even be comic. As in life, they do not matter. I'm more interested in what he has to say before congress and of his American experience. He will see much of what he sees in Rome, the rich and the poor and all the in between, American style, which, when you get down in among the people, is a very genuine style. We are a good and a genuine people on the whole, albeit aggressive and obnoxious with a passion for killing. We're complex. Some are this, some are that. We have some who like to get their brains bashed playing football for television and some who play string instruments in symphony orchestras all over the land. The Obamas show him respect. He will have delicious meals. His tour of Babylon will be on a soft cushion surrounded by an assault army.

 

 

 

 

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A LIFETIME WITH BOB DYLAN

The NC folklife center in Chapel Hill put up on facebook a video of Bob Dylan receiving the American hot dog Presidential award. Bob, himself, showed his perfectly predictable let-me-outta-here attitude, dark glasses, rebel rocker in enemy territory. What struck me was Obama standing behind him, much younger, looking at him just maybe a foot away, THE one and only, the real deal Bob Dylan standing there so close to him. Dylan has been Dylan throughout Obama's life. Dylan has always been in his world. The look in Obama's face was one of deep inner reflection, silent awe, a moment inside himself admiring the nearness of the man who began his career as a legend. The actual Bob Dylan. He looked like he was more impressed standing beside Dylan than Dylan looked standing beside the President. Dylan has a history of refusing an invitation to dinner at the Nixon Whitehouse. Dylan, the artist, cultivated a stand-offish presence from the beginning. Probably it is self-defense learned in the beginning. An artist, a true artist, needs his own time and will have it despite all. I don't know that we've had a greater star in my lifetime. Or artist. We have William Faulkner. There was Frank Sinatra and Elvis, the Beatles and the Stones. Dylan as a rocker is there with the Stones and the other remnants of that generation in rock. Dylan as a songwriter is out there by himself the best there ever was and probably ever will be, like Scotty Stoneman on bluegrass fiddle.


I'm glad Bob Dylan was allowed to grow into his 70s. How many book volumes of songs has he written? All of them good. All of them poems with a solid place in American poetry. Dylan is probably more an influence on this present generation of poets than any other single poet. It would be silly to call Dylan a genius. That word is too misused. He seems like an advanced soul who was sent to earth in this lifetime to inspire an awful lot of people in very real ways. I saw his first concert tour at the Omni in Atlanta. He changed the arrangement of every song he sang to eliminate sing alongs. An audience of 10,000 or more singing along would drown him and the band out, no matter how loud they played. Everybody knew all the words. Like many of the older rock stars, Dylan has to keep going to keep the money flowing in to pay for alimony and child support. I don't believe, however, that is his motivation. He is a fountain of music. He's a Mozart of American music with a long life. This is why he was given the award. American pop music and American poetry, and probably American serious music, will look to Dylan as the great one for possibly hundreds of years to come. I believe his songs will eventually be, if they aren't already, considered Traditional American music. I can imagine Dylan would enjoy drinks and conversation with Samuel Barber and Aaron Copeland, privately, artist to artist. And maybe not. I have no way of knowing.


He's always been evasive in interviews and autobiographical writings. Even the pictures on his early albums were out of focus or at an odd angle so you couldn't see his face clearly. His autobiographical writings are evasive about who he is. Considering he writes, spills out who he is probably every day, has a long list of albums full of who he is from first note to last. Like an answer I heard he gave a guy who asked him the meaning of some lines in a given song. Dylan said, paraphrased, It's mine to write them; it's yours to figure them out. He's been so evasive of the territory of who he is, I took it early on that he needed his privacy, he was telling us to allow him himself; he needs his private life too. I quit wondering about his life at a certain point, when I realized what he was saying, it doesn't matter to me. It's not my business. Scorcese's film about him, No Direction Home, showed him overrun in the beginnings of his career as a musician, first, thereabouts, by the folk music world that believed they owned him, and the venom when he set out on his own and went electric. Rock was his independence. I like him as the folk singer and I like him as the rocker. He was a difficult one to have in the rock scene. He was difficult not to write or make music like after hearing him. His style is so much his own that anything inspired by his style sounds like him. He's like Ralph Stanley's banjo; you know it the first three seconds you hear it.


It was a long period of years that I listened to Dylan regularly. He took a new direction frequently, which kept his music fresh. When he made that album Saved, I had to let go. Dylan was didactic enough. Bob Dylan Baptist preacher was over the edge. I listened to one side of it; you better, you oughta, you gotta, you needta, you should, or else. I gave it away to get it out of the house. It was one of the biggest disappointments of my life. Bob Dylan becoming a Baptist preacher. Been there, done that, not going back. I let him go and never looked back. Several years went by, maybe ten years or more before I was able to give him a listen again. I'd bought Blood On The Tracks and Desire, liked them quite a lot, glad he'd outgrown his religious zeal. By then, there was so much Dylan, so many albums, I couldn't process it all. I was listening to punk, the next generation, then discovered mountain music, old-time and bluegrass. Dylan kind of faded to the past, but all the time he was also present. By now, I'm seeing him the grand old man of American music with his radio show I would love to be able to listen to. Dylan, in his Woody Guthrie way, is getting his protest songs adopted for anthems by the people who would have nervous tremors if they knew the origins of some of the songs, like This Land Is Your Land. The songs that were protest songs in their time made children's songs for the next generation of kids. Like Blowin In The Wind, The Times Are A-Changin. And that was half a century ago.

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OBAMAMAN

to the rescue


This evening I listened to the president talk about what's being done to clean up around the stateside edges of the Gulf. I tend not to listen to presidents talk when they have some prime time to address the nation about one thing or another. I couldn't listen to Bush2. It was all lies any child could see through. Same with Bush I, Reagan, Nixon, Johnson. The Party of NO blocked Carter and Clinton from being effective in any way. The Party of NO hates intelligence as much as they hate the poor. I see now with Obamaman the Party of NO is doing the same to him they did with Clinton and Carter, obstructing intelligent legislation, but this time they've come up against somebody who has studied their strategies and found ways to bypass them, hop over them, get on without them and get something done. All the Party of NO really objects to is anything having to do with bettering conditions for the American working poor.



I like about Obama's blackness that he never adopted white American denial. He was evidently raised mostly by his white grandmother, the woman he went to Hawaii to see at a time he should have been some place else for political expediency. He's not one to talk about a major mega oil spill and act like it's nothing to be concerned about. The corporation has it under control. Don't worry about it. Lose a few ducks. No problem. I was told today that Limbaugh is telling it that environmentalists created this oil leak to get people on their side. Sounds about right coming from the Gingrich/Rove strategists. You can be sure Limbaugh gets instructions by email and fax multiple times a day telling him what to rant about. He's not alone. He's too stupid to be acting on his own. He's a hand puppet. Sesame Street for adult white men. C'mon boys, let's go tree us some coons. The funny is how the Party of NO depends for support on white working men, the very people they're dead set against. The consequences of denial?



I like having a president I can trust to address real issues that concern the people of the country, the people who work for a living, the people who pay the taxes, the people who go off to war; the people legislation has gone against throughout the last 30+ years. And they jump up and down for the Party of NO. I like a president who consults highly educated people in particular fields to gather around him the knowledge that can be known to make decisions by. I like believing I can trust Obama not to enrich Haliburton further at our expense by giving them the contract to clean up the Gulf, meaning it would never get done. They'd buy new houses on the Cayman Islands and not pay taxes. I can't help but be heartened to think that we have a president now who has some basic human integrity. It seems out of sorts in a politician, and this guy is a master politician, but his integrity is right up there, the likes of somebody not afraid of the truth. Somebody who looks for the truth and believes it is important to make decisions by what one learns in the search. It seems unprecedented in my lifetime. Maybe Roosevelt had it, but I was a baby in his time. Survived it, so it must have worked out ok.



Johnson was the one to kick me out of taking part in politics in any way but voting. He was such a mega-liar he made W appear a beginner. People believed Johnson. He lied with conviction. I see this video every time I put on the Viet Nam videos, the one it starts with, Johnson standing at the podium with mic like a television evangelist lying out right. It's been proven over and over. It's a known historical fact. It's also known by historians willing to face it, he gave the nod that turned absolute power over to himself, and, of course, Lady Bird. Turned out it's more like Lady MacBeth. I may be way off the beam, and surely am, yet I can't help but be heartened to have someone in the presidency from outside the Texas oil cartel. It makes him an easy target, like Kevin Costner running the gauntlet of a Civil War battlefield, but so far he gives the appearance he's up to it. I like my country being run by a man that brave. Like the Jamaican government couldn't shut Bob Marley up because assassination would martyr him and make him more dangerous to their agenda an immortal saint.



I feel good believing I know the Obama crew is undoing Bush-Cheney assaults on Democracy as fast as they can get it done. I like that he hit the ground running. He's going at it like this is his only term and he knows it in advance. There is much I don't understand. Let me be sure to say that for a certainty. I am not one for you to think I know what he's talking about. I don't. I just sit here watching words appear on the computer screen following my mind simultaneously. Fingers going like Ralph Stanley picking bluegrass banjo. This is my music, transferring thoughts to a form you can read and run your thoughts parallel with, not to be influenced by it, but for the mind dance. Thinking about Obama out loud. I've always liked him. I like his name. I like that when he was a kid he told everybody he didn't want to be Barry any more. He wanted to go by his real name, Barak. In America that was a brave kid. I love it that his other grandmother is in Kenya. They grow good coffee there. The coffee plantation in Isak Dinesen's OUT OF AFRICA was in Kenya. http://www.pasleyscoffee.com/ I tried some Kenyan coffee from curiosity and switched.



I can't help but be apprehensive that the downward momentum of the Reagan/Gingrich Revolution is too long a freight train and going too fast for all the undoing that can be done to change the direction of its Ayn Rand obsession. What if it turns upward just enough to make a ski jump and gives out? Woo-hoo. We'll need a real good ski jumper to lead us through the air to an upright landing farther along. It's a weird time for anybody with intelligence to want to be president. This man is not going to cow tow to the Party of NO. Why should he? All of the Dems did it before him and the Party of NO chopped their heads off. Not the Big O. Both him and his wife post-grad Harvard law school. Getting into Harvard is the nearly insurmountable hurdle. They did something so far beyond anything I'd dare dream about for myself that it would be plain foolish of me to even apply, let alone take 5 or 6 courses at the same time with some of the most hard core faculty on earth. I don't have a mind that can do that. I do have a mind to respect the ones that can.



Finally in my lifetime I've seen a president I can respect. I respect Carter. I respect Clinton. They were defeated by the Texas oil cartel all the way along. Not Obama. He's stepping on thin ice when he stands up to the corporate CEOs. Good this guy with BP is British. Let's see how he does with Exxon. It seems like he's making it clear to them that President trumps CEO. Obama is the first one I've seen who had what it took to stand up to the moneybags. I don't dare presume, so I watch and wait, see results of what's going on behind closed doors with armed guards even Steven Seagal couldn't get through. I feel heartened that we have at least an intelligent man making our decisions and doing what he can to protect us from the big dogs. He's giving us the backbone by example to stand up to them ourselves. Or, anyway it's there if we want it.