THE AIR BELLOWS DRIVE THRU ART MUSEUM

air bellows drive thru art museum

ABDTAM

 

For a number of years I've been making photographs inside the tunnel under the Blue Ridge Parkway at Air Bellows Gap. The walls were plain concrete since the beginning of the Parkway until one day somebody wrote something on a wall with spray paint in the 1980s. Then another and another until the inside was covered with graffiti  by winter. The next season, more writings and images. Then, of course, a middle-class Flatlander objected, called the Parkway office and pled a prosecutorial case about it being offensive. Parkway maintenance painted the walls an ugly brown, covered the beautiful growing abstraction on the two walls, about 30'x10'. I loved it when the new markings began to cover the brown. A few years later, somebody complained to the Parkway office again and they painted it over again. It was covered up in a year. Then came the Reagan Revolution and transferring money from the Dept of Interior budget to the military. Hence, minimal maintenance since the 1980s, large sections of pavement needing repair. They seldom mow along the sides of the road anymore, which is ok by me. I like to see grass grow and go to seed.

 

ABDTAM

 

As a result of the budget cuts, the Parkway painted over the graffiti no more. It grew and became beautiful after some years. Then one of my neighbors caught a kid adding to it. He knew the kid's mother, called her, got the kid in trouble with a zero tolerance mom, who got with the Parkway office and they had the kid paint the interior of the tunnel gray. I was so irritated with my neighbor I never said anything about it, because I could not address the subject without getting red in the face and a bit aggressive in tone of voice. What the hell. A fresh canvas. Nobody has painted over it since. Maybe it has been ten or more years that the colors and lines grow on top of themselves, colors galore. Writing on top of writing such that new things appear on top of everything else, then new words and colors appear on top of that, on and on until colors and lines become an abstract canvas. It has no plan, no design, no unifying anything except the space, itself. The patterns are purest chance. Somebody goes in there with a spray can, chooses a spot, scrawls whatever comes to mind and leaves in a hurry to avoid getting caught.

 

ABDTAM

 

The place seems to me an important spot for the community of the county. Teenagers have no voice in adult society, are paid no attention to. They are nuisances, because adults don't want to be bothered by them, certainly don't want to listen to them. So kids evolve a culture among themselves that concerns offending adults. Pink hair, turquoise hair, tattoos, music adults can't tolerate, graffiti,  slang, sharp sticks in the eye of disapproving adults. I see the impulse to scrawl words and lines on the wall in the tunnel a small gesture of defiance, a rebel gesture, shooting the bird to adult society, the people that look down on them, talk down to them, pay no attention to them, dismiss them as irrelevant. Of course, this is not all the kids. It's largely the outsiders and the ones that feel left out. Only a few can be star jocks and cheerleaders, the only ones with any significance in and outside the school. It's like Miss America. One winner, forty-nine losers. The kids left out listen to hard metal music or punk and wear the most offensive tshirt images they can get away with. The style image is aggressive offensive. The graffiti is another expression of this attitude. Like John Lee Hooker sang in his song, Boogie Chillun, It's in him, it's got to come out. I feel like a localized spot for graffiti functions something like a pressure release valve.

 

ABDTAM

 

Almost two weeks ago I parked off the road outside the tunnel and went inside to get some photographs. Beautiful walls, but I was not satisfied with any of the pictures. I try to compose them by colors and find compositions of lines in relation to the colors, yet am unable to catch what I see, or what I feel. It finally came to me that what I love about the walls is the spontaneous random chance of every jotting, an abstraction created by pure chance. Cy Twombly is good at making a canvas that looks like chance. These two walls are composed by chance itself. No one artist's mind composed it. It simply happened. Finally, it came to me to make photographs in the tunnel by chance. I drove through it yesterday. Opened the camera ready to go, held it pointing out the driver's side window without looking at the image. Driving slowly through the tunnel, I clicked the camera over and over until I came to the end. Got five images. The images are here, from top to bottom in the order they happened. These are the most satisfying images I've recorded in there. Before, I was looking at it with mind. Take mind out of it and I enter the spirit of the thing itself. I do feel like these five images capture the spirit of the place like no other photographs I've made in there. In a way, I feel like I've found the spirit of the place. It has a spirit I feel driving through it, for me a happy spirit. I don't look at it with judgment and desire to punish. I'm happy it is located so close to my home.

 

ABDTAM

 

 

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INDECISION THE DANCE

whistler

 

The issue of guns or not-guns has been running all my life. People go into a rage over gun riddance and people go into a rage over having guns. I'm so bored of it, it wears me out to see it still going on, louder than ever, never coming to a solution, like usual. Every time the tv features a mass shooting, gun shops sell out all over the country. Somebody who sees tv a few hours every other week sees the gun featured in cop shows and movies and all kinds of tv shows. Cop shows get more uptight and killer-minded every year. I don't think an American movie is made without a gun popping up somewhere. European films use guns frequently. In countries where people don't kill each other and themselves so much, I rarely see a gun in a film unless it has to do with military. I don't even like to see American films anymore, unless independent, for all the guns and explosions. Explosions characterize American films; loud bangs and billowing flames are more required than tits-n-ass. I dislike most about American films when the whisper scene is making me turn the volume up, I can't turn the volume down fast enough for the next predictable thing, a loud explosion and billowing orange flame. I use subtitles watching American films so I can read the whisper scene while turning the volume down for the blast of noise to follow.

 

 

whistler

 

 

Someone I know, who went to Montana and Alaska to kill big animals with a bow, exhibits a passion for ridding all Americans of their guns. He has been in high blood-pressure frustration for decades that he can't do anything about making other people stop owning guns. Then he had a debilitating stroke. Every time I saw him before, he looked like he was going to blow a gasket in front of me. He could quote statistics from now til tomorrow and make a flawless case, but nobody listened. He was about controlling everybody but himself, failed at controlling anybody and failed himself by putting so much attention on fixing everybody else. Somebody who made his life a commercial and ended up a forgotten jingle. This is another reason I don't go into the coffee shop anymore. Now that the wrong people have been weeded out and only the right people go there, I'll sit peacefully having my coffee and hear over my shoulder, So GOOD to see ya! You needta, you oughta, you gotta, you should! I sit reeling with insistent demands bouncing around in my head, one after the other, as fast as chatter can go. I pretend the best I'm able, "Yeah, I'll do that," though not very well, thinking, Who is paying you? Is this volunteer? Is being a commercial your purpose in life? Go into advertising, make big bucks, leave me out of it.

 

whistler

 

All my life, the question of whether or not the death penalty has popped up as an issue in the news periodically. In fifth grade we were required to write a paragraph to explain why or why not the death penalty. It didn't matter what kids in school thought about it then like it doesn't matter what anybody thinks about it now. It never gets settled as an issue and goes on being a question for kids in school like it's something to take seriously. Whether or not the gun, continues as an issue that never is resolved. And the war on the American people, aka the war on drugs, is never resolved to the point that the war on drugs accelerates the drug business. In earlier years, I believed the guff around varieties of issues, believed the purpose was to settle them, come to agreement, smooth out the rough place. That wasn't it. I was taught democracy like there was something to it in everyday life. The black kids in school and the Mexicans were everyday life evidence to me democracy was white only. I was listening to the black station in high school years where I could hear Slim Harpo, Muddy Waters, Big Maybelle, Bo Diddley, music I could not hear on the white station. I was aware of social differences, how black people were kept down by white people's belief in white superiority. Insufferably arrogant people toward the rest of humanity.

 

whistler

 

We had the civil rights movement and civil rights became law, the trade-off for getting rid of Kennedy. Though it didn't change anything about racism. Racism was swept under the rug of denial, black faces included on tv, and racism failed to change. Obedient press and television glossed it over, never addressing the impolite issue, which continued underground on both sides and grew. The Reagan (John Birch Society) Revolution launched hate radio and tv demonizing black people by way of code to angry white men who spend too much time in front of the television. The right-wing armchair militia is the source of the American white terrorist who shoots up schools, churches and movie theaters. In this time, wars are acts of terrorism, hitting by surprise, killing randomly, going for as many mushrooms as possible. I call this civil war. Thus I say we are in civil war. This has been the purpose of the Reagan Revolution and it is accomplished. At least all the preaching of hate in the name of God has brought  racism to the surface now, where it can be assessed as it is and be dealt with out in the open, the only place it can be worked out. Mustn't forget the most ignorant of them all, whether or not climate change. It's really bad when the obvious is up for question. In America, we don't settle issues. They just go on, underground, subjects not to talk about at the country club. Only radicals speak of such issues.  And they go on talking.

 

whistler by whistler

 

 

 

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GRUMPY OLD BASTARD FREAKS OUT

georges braque

Every day I see something in internet news items, interviews, about the importance of changing the world. It appears this generation of the young, teens and twenties, is fixed on changing the world. My generation came up believing it was important to change the world for the better. That was the guiding thread that ran through the generations, wanting to make the world a better place. Until 1980 when the political coup shifted our government into reverse. Thirty-four years later the young are now saying again they want to change the world. Possibly this is the wave of the near future. We have six more years of the Reagan Trojan Horse coup that usurped our government, systematically put an end to democracy and our individual rights to control us by police state. Once something like democracy has gone away, it doesn't come back easily. The American television viewing audience is evidently happy to see it go. But now that we've had time to see the difference between democracy and police state, democracy is becoming appealing. Anyway, to the black people. Now the republicans are using redneck militias to intimidate black people who want to vote. It tells me the vote must matter for something or the fascists wouldn't feel so threatened. I have no confidence in voting, re: the Supremes overruling the popular vote in 2000, rulings they've made before and since. I have completely lost confidence in the American government since the Reagan coup. The American pendulum has a forty year swing of progress and reaction. We've been in thirty-four years of reaction to the progress of the Roosevelt era, during which the John Birch Society was hatched. They organized and took the government by coup. In this time of John Birch Society running our government, more and more people are growing in number to make the world a better place after almost forty years of destruction. 

georges braque

The working class was defeated long ago, left without a voice, and when they did get a voice it turned out to be a propaganda-created delusion, the teabaggers. I'm so weary of the mind of Karl Rove, the master propagandist, it's hard for me to respect a republican. A country club woman in the coffee shop was talking in praise of Charles Krauthammer of False News Network. All I could say was, "You embarrass yourself." Last Saturday I came face to face by chance with our congressional "representative," the Bush-Cheney parrot herself, live, in person, Virginia Foxx, in my face, introducing herself, handing me a business card. I froze. I freaked. I realized demons are not mythological creatures, but go among us in human form. Pretended I didn't recognize her. I only wanted her to go away. I was in friend Crystal's tent she put up at Sparta's downtown "festival," The Mountain Heritage Festival, selling her items and advertising her new sign making business. While Virginia was trying to talk to me I pointed at Crystal, "Talk to her," acting like I was Crystal's grandpa hanging out with nothing to do, don't know nothin, don't wanna know nothin. Crystal had never heard of her, knew nothing of her, pays no attention to news or anything in DC, doesn't vote, doesn't care. Virginia handed Crystal a card and received as blank a look as she got from me. She turned and went on to the next tent. She was going up and down the street introducing herself, handing out cards. As soon as she left, I dropped my card into our trash bag. A little later, thinking I might want to use it for a satirical art project, I picked it out of the trash and put it in my pocket. Reckon I could sell it on e-bay?

georges braque

I might write the date on the business card to have a number for one of my most freaky moments in a long time. I felt in the presence of the false, the totally false with intent to be false. Somebody who cannot recognize an honest word, unable, herself, to speak one. I remind myself that souls new to the human form have a hard time understanding something like the earth a ball rolling around the sun. So what does that have to do with a Budweiser commercial? When a parrot from the dark side "represents" me in DC, I am not represented. I sound like a teabagger harping about liberals. Yin and yang. Duality in action. Opinions are like assholes: everybody's got one. That's all I'm doing here is articulating my opinions. I'm not looking to missionarize my opinions, just to bring them up and look at them, confess to them, examine them, change them. I like my opinions to be fluid as water, not locked into place like a cement block. I'd rather not have opinions, but they somehow seem inevitable, simply as point of view. This is how I see a given opinion in relation to my own experience and assessment of experience. I didn't know what an opinion was until I was out of high school a year or two. Had them before, but didn't know that's what they were. Coming up Baptist, I believed my opinions were truth. I didn't see them as opinions, but as truth. God sez. I'm in van Gogh's mid twenties in the biography, feeling like I have an understanding of his thinking, of his spirit. He came up as I did in church with his male parent the church enthusiast. His family did not alienate him, so it was not easy for him to expand his vision beyond the absolute beliefs of father and mother. His spirit was reaching beyond the confines of tradition, though the tradition he lived in held him in its orbit. He was a born free-thinker, did not want to be a rebel, but the need to follow his own light made him an involuntary rebel within. 

georges braque

Books Vincent read expanded his thinking. He was like a kite on a string, wanting to fly up into the sky, but the umbilical cord of a loving family held him to the tradition his spirit needed to fly away from. Vincent's searching mind led him away from the tradition he was expected to perform in as an obedient employee, make a lot of money, property, family, position. He could not do it. He went on long solitary walks into the country. He was a nerd, somebody with zero social skills. He just did not know how to connect with other people. He had no social skills to start with and finding himself so unsuccessful with people, he went within. He read Thomas Carlyle, who was writing at the time, in English. He could get around in four languages. His absence of social skills made keeping a job difficult for him. Family and the others around him saw him a failure, a loser. And they convinced him he was a loser. I suspect he discovered his own mind on his long walks, went on the walks to enjoy his mind. Nobody understood him anyway, and when he started expanding his mind reading non-academically, which he did much of the time he wasn't working or walking, the people around him understood him less. I've seen Dutch countryside and cities. I've seen London where he spent a year or less. I'm sure we walked in some of the same places, saw the same buildings, experienced the English. This gives me a sense of place when I'm with him there, getting by the best he can. The work he loved doing was teaching children. But it didn't pay anything, just a room and meals, and a jerk to work for. No future in that. I'm having a good time watching him soul search, identifying with myself in that time of my life when all I knew was I could not live the rest of my life under the smothering pillow of religion. Vincent sought on his own as I have sought on my own. It even feels like his life was another version of my life in 19th Century Netherlands. The particulars are very different, but the spirit is awfully close. I've never read somebody's life that paralleled my own so much it feels like I'm reading about me. It's uncanny and it's fun. 

georges braque himself

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HOODWINKED

Can't help but laugh today at the two "senators," Mike Lee and Ted Cruz, seen with Sarah Palin at a rally of men angry about national park monuments closed. The two so-called senators were drawing attention to themselves in protest against the government for shutting down. These were the republican tools that created the situation, first degree, with pre-meditated intent in the service of the pipeline billionaires funneling money to republican politicians to make chaos of our democracy, sweep it out of the way for a one-party police state. And the white-haired republican telling the woman working for park service to be ashamed of herself for closing the WW2 memorial. It is beyond redundant to note he was one of the lockstep marionettes that created the situation. The monkeys didn't even know what they did. Cruz's ignorance is popular among republicans. He's the only one considered for a presidential run. He will lose worse than McCain-Palin. This is the Reaganista generation. Dan Quayle was just the beginning. It is alarming to see that these knuckleheads are popular. Even Romney. They could run him again next time as VP with Cruz. These people are showing us that money does not equal intelligence. They are showing us that money equals self-centered ego. Their public spectacle of ignorance makes everybody not a republican laugh. The people of Europe must be considering ways to separate themselves from associations with the American stooges. They are empirical evidence of the dumbing down of America.

 

 

 

Why do I go on concerning myself with these two-dimensional cardboard cut-outs from the dark side? Maybe it's for the drama. The dark side makes good drama. Everything they say is spoken with intent to deceive. Their own personal lives are deceptions too. They lie as freely as somebody else eats potato chips. They don't even respond when called on their lies. Good training from Karl Rove. The pathological lying a Rove signature. This so-called government shut-down is looking more every day like a coup. The republican politicians who cheered the shut-down are obviously not in the market for votes. They're evidently being paid so well by Koch brothers' under the table methods, their loyalty is set. The republican party has abandoned its voters. Of course they would in a police state coup. Who knows how that will manifest? It's weird and getting weirder. The weirdest part is knowing this is planned strategy. This is a takeover of our government by white man. In white man way of thinking, he's taking it back. It's looking bad for a 2014 election. The American Empire is over. From here on, we'll be watching it fall apart. We've been seeing it fall apart over the last 30+ years, the time of the Reagan Revolution, another name for the decline and fall of the American Empire. The downhill run is gaining momentum.

 

 

 

American politics has always been corrupt, crooked and about money only. We the people are the last consideration, not even that. We are the masses to be manipulated by the best propaganda that's ever been in this world. The expanse of American people are plugged into propaganda central, so used to being told what to do by way of subliminal symbols, it's pointless to speak to somebody who believes television is the truth. My mother, "I know it for a fact. I heard it on television." It made my heart ache for her. At the same time, I can't help but think so what if she's hoodwinked. I'm hoodwinked too. I have a different version of reality than she does, but mine is illusion too. So what if I'm right and she's wrong; so what if she's right and I'm wrong. It's the same either way. Nothing. Responding to illusion in our own karmic ways makes for very complex human behavior. The stuff of the forebrain, trying to figure out abstractions, connecting the dots to make constellations in the sky called the heavens. Where we go when we die. Another star in the firmament. In Neolithic times, I imagine the stars in the sky at night were thick. I have seen a few nights where the starlight was so bright I could see without a moon. I'm of the illusion that paying attention to the current events I'll have a better understanding than otherwise. I still believe I do. But don't want to give too much attention to it. Am wanting now to withdraw my attention from it. But won't. It's like paying attention to weather forecasts.    

 

 

 

 

 

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BELOW THE RADAR

In conversations with people I know, I hear more and more from people who most often don't talk about current events querying how to live now that democracy is gone, recession is turning into depression for the middle class, and everything we hear from government is so obviously false we don't even think about it anymore. The working class has been in depression since 1980. In this time you don't even mention the working class. The ruling class regards working class as the enemy and media keeps a lid on it. You never hear "working class" on the news. It's always middle class. However, when working class gets politically active they want police state and attach teabags to their hats. Challenged for education, the working class is so easy to manipulate they bore republican strategists who laugh at them. Obama has disappointed liberals so much by now they've lost hope for him. Used to be he had liberals for his apologists. Now, there's not much apologizing for his absence of interest in the black people, as Obama evidently identifies with his white half only he is able to see. A black man raised by white people thinks white and talks down to black people. Every time I've heard clips from his speeches to black audiences, he basically tells them to get up off their asses and get a job. Looking at it from his logic, paying any attention to black issues would only go against him. He already has the black vote and he'd lose much of his white base if he gave attention to black issues. As it turns out, he's just another republican in black face.

I and many others believed Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Rice belonged on trial for war crimes, crimes against the American people. Obama is now saying Bush wasn't such a bad president. He apologizes for the Bush-Cheney-Rummy-Rice administration, enforces the fascist constitution, the "patriot act," and is not undoing the police state BCRR set up. He makes police state obvious. It's been under cover creeping up on us. Now that it's here, it's out in the open, and the president is part of it. Everything we grew up being taught in school about our great democracy is false. It's a belief system from the past. The rest of the world is watching the fall of the American Empire, glad to see it go, but quaking because the economies are intertwined. Naturally, the American Empire became the world's police force when the Soviet Union fell. USA is showing itself to be a tyrant declaring pre-emptive wars on powerless poor countries that can't defend themselves---to stop them from destroying America if we don't kill at least a million of their people first, in the name of peace and liberty. US government cannot be serious saying they want to attack Syria because the government there killed a few hundred people. The US government doesn't give a shit about the dead people. They are the smokescreen. The US government is not a moral entity. It's run by corporate mind: money and power.

For some years I've been wondering how to live in this downward spiral created by the Reagan Revolution, seeing that it is not going to reverse any time soon. Not with Obama. Not with democrats. The democrats role in the Reagan Revolution is enabler. It's one party we have, the republican party. I fuss with myself looking for how to live. I have to put democracy out of my mind as an American institution, have to face it squarely that the international corporations took our government by coup, November 22, 1963, and keep us believing democracy is our state in transition to police state. Their propaganda has been so good, they have the American people wanting police state. Now that I know we are in police state and the American people are by citizenship the enemy, how do I live? In my school years I often wondered what it was like in a totalitarian country where people have limited rights. I found Gao Xingjian's ONE MAN'S BIBLE a very clear picture of living under the dark cloud of police state. You watch what you say to anybody. There, they become sheep for self-preservation; here, we become sheep out of indifference to all but the propaganda speaker in the living room, where even the laughter is not spontaneous.

All I know to do is hunker down like living in a house with a tyrant, bear with it and keep what we call a low profile. I think profile here has to do with police records. Meaning: don't attract attention. I'm approaching the end of my life in this body quite naturally, and wouldn't care a great deal if taken out for police state reasons. I recall in a film many years ago a guy about to be shot by Nazis said, "I'd rather die than live in the world you created." No shit. The formula for successful living in this world applies in police state as well as in democracy: no desires. I still have a carry-over in my belief system that the citizen matters. My mind knows better, but I've been trained from childhood to believe it was a naturally imperfect democracy, then watch it through the course of my life become a corporate police state. I still laugh when I think about the Patriot Act of 1,000+ pages, outlined, written, edited, printed, bound, boxed, delivered just in time for 9/11/01. Good timing. Isn't that called serendipity? The title tells you it's the work of scoundrels, in case anybody wondered. In my youth, it looked like great things were ahead for my country. Then the Reaganista coup of 1980 began the dismantling of our court system and democracy itself, laying the ground for police state, consciously with intent. This is not an unforeseen byproduct of the good of the people. The Bush-Cheney-Rummy-Rice coup of 2000 put an end to democracy and set police state in motion. Obama is playing his role like an A+ student trying harder on account of his racial disadvantage. His handlers will have him laughed at yet over the Nobel Peace Prize.

I see he's playing tough guy with Putin. I wouldn't advise him do that. Obama has a good mind. Putin has a better mind. Putin could kick Obama's ass from here to kingdom come, both physically and mentally. Obama is also POTUS. He does not represent himself, and he is conscious of it. When it comes down to living out the rest of my life in police state, it is time to rethink. I'm not one to lie down in front of a tank. I'm more like the Chinese that accept the inevitable and stay out of the way. That's an aspect of living rurally, out of the way, that I really like in this time. Jets and other military planes have been flying over the mountains in profusion the last weeks, more every day, practicing flying below the radar. This happens every time a new war is cranking up. It is telling me the next war is in the works. So I'm looking at an economy going under and the question of whether or not a new quagmire war on the next defenseless poor country in the Middle East that Saudi Arabia wants shut down. With an economy based in war, what does a country do when its economy heads downward. War. What is it good for? Keeping the economy going. Even if this was a democracy, I couldn't change any of it. For one thing I don't have the money for lobbyists and gratuities. The political world is not for me. The best thing I can do is stay at home and not concern myself with democracy or any of that old Enlightenment nonsense. The founding fathers were left wing radicals. Delete.

 

 

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RACISM BUBBLES OVER

new york subway

Every day when I look at internet news sites, racism seems to be the key word. Since the Zimmerman shooting, and especially since the trial, the racism in every aspect of it; from the shooting to the trial, to the law, to the courtroom, the explicit racism was front and center. Concern about the enword is even more ridiculous than before. I saw a clip from the tv show The View with some black women and some white women. Everybody was on edge. They all knew they could be fired on the spot if they said the enword. They spent their verbiage dancing around the word they were attempting to talk about. Whoopie Goldberg pointed out that it is a generational matter. Her generation freaks out over the enword, but the younger black people have no problem with it. I saw something else where Oprah remarked that her sensitivity to the enword tells her age. Evidently the hip-hop generation is not so sensitive to the word. Oprah said her problem with the enword is that it's the last word a man heard hanging from a tree. I took that for a showbiz sounds-good rationalization. Hippie times liberated the F-word from the mountain of taboo that went with it. Possibly hip-hop times have liberated the word nigger for their generation, again, by over use. Run it into the ground using it and the power it carries diminishes. Refusal by the white middle class to use the word, as well as the insistence of the black middle class that white people not use the word, have made it into a most ridiculous taboo. The taboo gives the word more power than it ever had on its own.

It brings to mind the time NC senator Jesse Helms made an issue of bumper stickers that said Shit Happens. Children might see them. So it's on the news for over a month every day that Jesse Helms wanted to make shit happens on bumper stickers illegal for the safety of children's delicate minds, like kids don't have experience with shit. Such a big deal made of it, at least a hundred thousand times more kids heard about it on tv than would ever see it on a bumper sticker. For example, I have never seen one. However, one day in that time I was driving on I-77, I think somewhere between Charlotte and Statesville, and came upon a little red Yugo with a wiggling exhaust pipe, a red bumper sticker with white letters: HELMS HAPPENS. Passing it, I saw a young Asian guy, looked Chinese, I took for a college student. The only problem with the S-word is the people of the working class use it freely. Not using the word distinguishes someone of the middle class as not working class, the same way as clothing styles. We don't use that word. It's not nice. Nice is another middle class word that distinguishes the user from the working class. Somebody from the middle class might define somebody as nice when somebody from the working class might say he's a silver-tongued rattlesnake.

One of the women on the View tv show brought up "the B-word." I started imagining a forbidden word for each letter of the alphabet. The A-word for asshole. One day a few months ago I was talking with a white middle class woman I know, who was coming out of the store as I was going in. For some odd reason she went off on the enword and how it ought to be banned from the language. Then, while we're banning words, she added the C-word. Bewildered by another letter with a bad word attached, I said, "Cool?" (The only C-word I could think of that's overused.) She said, "NO! CUNT!" I take them for people who are partially educated, but not enough to get it that making something into a taboo turns up its power potential immeasurably, the opposite of what they want. This is one example of how do-gooding often creates the opposite of the do-gooder's intent. Fixing somebody else's issues comes from ego, and ego can't see somebody else's flow. Fixing somebody else seldom works; by its very nature it is egoic. It's saying, I know more than you do about yourself. The white backlash the republican party has whipped-up over civil rights matters has brought American racism to the surface again. The Reagan revolution kept the black people down while television pretended there was no more racism. We got a black president and the racism in the republican party bubbled to the surface and over the side. The irony about having a black president is that Obama does nothing to help black people, and he, himself, is whiteness itself. He certainly brought republican racism out into the open.

Now preparations are being made for the 50th anniversary civil rights march in Washington DC. Over the last thirty-plus years the black people have watched what rights they'd fought for in the 1950s stripped away systematically by the corporate (white man) takeover of our government. All the way to openly racist supreme court shutting down the voting rights act. I wonder how many black people have used the enword in private conversation regarding Clarence Thomas. I wouldn't want to meet one who has not. Racism never went away, but racism is back with a vengeance at the present moment. It is locked in by corporate decree, by legislation, by court rulings setting precedents. This is the Reformation after the years of the FDR influence in government of helping the poor, government for the good of the people, like standards for education, republicans taking us systematically into a society of a ruling class and a peasant class that will work for as little as in Asian sweat shops. Back in the civil rights days, racism was never really addressed. It addressed wrongs done by racism, but not the matter itself. Half a century later, after a few years of illusion of progress, then 30+ years of regress, racism is alive after years of being whipped up among white men by way of republican hate media. In this time when all manner of stored hatred is bubbling to the surface, racism is one of them that needs examining out in the open. At the same time these hatreds are popping to the surface, they are being examined, talked about, brought out into the open.

 

 

That new over-used T-word, transparency, will ultimately have to be the case. Racism sank into the well of the D-word, denial. It needs bringing up out of denial and examined collectively. Racism's roots run so deep in the white belief system, it will require attitude change and belief change. I don't mean religion belief, but the belief black people are innately inferior to white. Those changes are hard to enforce on others. It's individual and can only be changed by the will of the believer. If a society truly wants to eradicate racism, education is the answer. We've had black studies courses for black students since the Sixties. What about teaching black studies to white kids? The black kids have to study white history. How about letting American history include black history and what Howard Zinn called the people's history, the history of American movements for basic rights. All the way through school, it bored me out of my mind that history amounted to names of generals and dates of wars. Graduated from high school, I wondered why history did not include the invention of the the flush toilet, the discovery of plumbing, changes electricity brought, the changes in music along the way. That such directly relevant looks at American history were missing, the chant through the Sixties was for relevance in education. Nobody quite knew what that meant. Everything schools tried toward being relevant failed. The attempts were cosmetic. The relevant was in front of our faces, too obvious to be seen. My feeling about racism is it is too obvious to be seen. Easy to deny. I respect the people who are openly racist on both sides of the coin, because they're not in denial, at least about the R-word. 

subways of new york

 

 

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PAULA DEEN AINT SO BAD

I think of the Eastern European countries that lived under Soviet rule for half a century when I see the step-by-step transition the Reagan Revolution is taking us through to police state, which is here now. It's even out in the open. Our American freedoms are being shut down, systematically, one at a time, by republican legislation and the republican supreme court. I think of Latvia and Estonia, peaceful countries that fell under the Soviet occupation unto cultural depression. I see that cultural depression occurring in USA as police state moves in, dismantling democracy with a popular zeal. Police state is not rule by intelligence. American white men have proven over the last half century that white men are not intelligent rulers. Neither are any other kind of men. It is time for women to come forward. Though when they do, they get shut down by the white man Old Boy Network. Paula Deen is now experiencing the Martha Stewart treatment and the Loraine Helmsley treatment, what happens in America when a woman gets a little too much money (power). It's time to shut her down. Oprah was not a problem. She was black. No admittance to the Old Boy Network no matter how much money she has. Paula Deen's misfortune is being a hyper successful white woman in America.

I've been seeing articles about her use of the word nigger. I've seen an interview with a black man who has known her well for many years. He told about black people who have worked for her for a long time with responsible positions, regarded with respect and friendship. It's like the time Jimmy the Greek used the enword and was put off the air almost immediately. They wanted rid of him. He had a little bit too much of a working class air about him. He wasn't bland enough. A few days ago I saw a clip from a Bill Maher show where a woman Maher identified as Southern, evidently a liberal journalist, made the remark that anyone who is a racist is evil. I've been seeing/hearing this over and over. Paula Deen said nigger; therefore, she's evil. I have a feeling calling somebody evil for use of a word that has fallen out of media favor is an act, itself, of evil. This woman so proud of identifying herself liberal made me question liberal. The first quarter century of the Reagan Revolution made liberal a word that made liberals shy of owning up to. Then it became a word to be proud of, a reaction. Now that it's an identity to be proud of, the ridiculous surfaces.

If having even the remotest racist thought is evil, then everybody on earth is evil. Back to the Christian square one; we're born in sin, born bad to be made good by beatings and beratings. The Reagan Revolution is about racism. Taking money away from "programs" and benefits to help black people survive in the most racist nation on earth is the character of the Reagan model the republicans of today parrot. He and the Reagan white house staff called MLK, Martin Lucifer Coon. The Supremes have now identified themselves as the Roberts KKKourt racists, which we already knew. We have an evil supreme court. Duh. Don't think any of our white congressmen or senators or their staffs give a shit about African Americans. They represent the racist rich. They pretend for the show, looks bad, and when it comes to legislation, they're racists. The republican party became the racist party in 1954, when the democrat party turned from exclusion to inclusion. The democrat racists of the South turned into republicans overnight. Before, democrat was the racist party. Now that the South is solid republican, it does not mean all Southerners are racist. Most of the people I know are not. Many I know are. One of my racist friends at age 30 is still friends with his black friends he knew all the way through school. He has another black friend he knew as his dad's friend growing up. And I'm not talking step-n-fetch-it friends. I mean equal others. Yet, as a good ol' Southern boy, he don't like niggers. I don't even try to figure it out.

My friend Swami Yogeshananda, who is in his 90s now, living in a Hindu monastery in the southern California mountains, said years ago in conversation that Southerners like the individual, not the race. He said in the North they like the race, not the individual. Whether or not that is a flawless rule of thumb isn't why I'm bringing it up. What I'm getting at is my racist friend, Southern Appalachian bred-and-buttered, likes the individuals he knows, but not the race, an idea. Racism is totally an idea. Race, itself, is totally a learned idea. Of course, how it acts out is another thing. My friend Carole told me of the time she offered a book she'd just finished, a biography of Sidney Poitier, to an elderly woman friend who couldn't even touch the book when she saw the black face on the cover. Didn't want to hear about it, nothing. Carole is every bit as Southern as her friend and has no racism in her. It had never entered her mind the other woman could be so locked down. Many are. Racism is not strictly a white issue. There was a time I worked for a year with a black woman from Baltimore. The racism in her was off-putting for the racism itself, not that I cared she looked down on me for being a cracker. The white people look down on me, too, for not having money, position or status, and especially for being that way by will.

The Paula Deen case brings to mind Patti Smith. If she had a tv show, was making lots and lots of money with a network contract, and somebody pointed out that back in the late 70s she recorded a song that she wrote, Rock n Roll Nigger. "Baby, baby, baby, I'm a rock n roll nigger! Outside of society---that's where I wanna be! Nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger!" She'd be off the air and a scandal from hell. The queen of punk said the enword! OMG. But then, there's the saving grace of punk: punk doesn't give a shit. Same with rap. The comedy of this time in history is that the enword is even more unacceptable in the white middle class than fuck, what used to be the efword. And I'm talking about the South. You can say fuck all you want, except in church and coffee shops. In the working class, the enword and the efword are used at will, primarily in reaction to the middle class, the management class, the bosses, enforcers of political correctness, including not smoking. They're as bad as preachers' wives in the old ways. The ruling class uses the enword freely. They're racists and don't give a shit who knows it.  Hence: the republican party is systematically dismantling democracy in a time when people of color in the electorate now outnumber white. Our entire American way of life is being shut down by white racism, and we can't say the enword. LMAO.

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