JUST SAID NO TO HIERARCHIES

howdy!

I must withdraw my interest in the workings of the world that do not directly play a part in my life. That Obama has shown his hand I can't worry over any of it. I held out with a little confidence in Obama I wanted to have. I trusted him because I wanted to. I forgot, however, that he has to behave as required by the .0001% that rule. When he became president, he became a member of their club.(I'm your puppet.) That's all. I'm disappointed by him. I understand that the republicans are tripping him up in every nit-picky way the lowest mind among them can think up. In the end, he bends over for the republicans. Democrats continue in their spineless ways since the beginning of the Reagan Revolution. Since the beginning of Reaganism (Ayn Randism) democrats have conceded to the right wing unto encouragement, put down the red carpet for them. The democrats are taking us to police state, but like Ralph Nader said in the election campaign of 2000 that the republicans will get us there faster. The republicans are showing it too. The Boston bombings showed me the city police are now trained and practiced in taking charge of urban populations.

air bellows rock formation

I came to the mountains in 1976, a time when the oil corporations were shutting down independent oil companies and gas stations by what they called the Oil Embargo. We are not in the hands of people who make decisions in our interest. That time is long past over, if it ever was. We, the American people, are on our own. Government preys on us, does not protect us. What is labeled Defense is actually Offence. I feel sorry for every poor clod who joins the military believing he's "serving" his country. Going through what they go through in jungle and desert warfare for tax free corporate profiteers is dispiriting to the troops when they finally get it, minus a pair of legs. I did my Navy time in the time of the draft knowing this to be the case before I went in. It was sail the seas and play military for two years or take that much time in prison. I picked the Navy for the ocean. I longed to be on the ocean. I think it really sucks, though, to be born male and have no choice but to go through military. I was one of the examples of why the draft is self-defeating for the military. I don't like living by military rule. Not that I'm afraid of them; I don't like being one of them. I don't like their culture. I don't like adhering to a false belief system because it is expected. It is outside the military too, but the military is the core of that kind of hierarchical thinking learned from the Catholic church, which by now everybody knows aint what it's held itself up to be.

jackson pollock was in whitehead

I've refused to live my life in hierarchical work conditions. In the last year at the College of Charleston corporate recruiters were talking with seniors with job interviews. I didn't even want one of them to see me. I turned my back to that kind of thinking very early in the life, in childhood. I saw the republican recessions in the 50s and saw the advance of corporate influence such that to sign over for a job in a corporation I give up all my rights that are guaranteed an American citizen. I like those rights. I'm not signing over my basic rights and I'm not kissing ass of all the men on the ladder above me, none of whom I respect as an individual human being. From very early on it was a guiding light that I never live by hierarchy. I would live among and work with people I respect. It has been my way of life to work for an individual with a small business. I seldom made anything more than minimum wage, and then temporarily. I chose not to participate in the money making game because I did not want to shut down my self for a job, for money, for Mammon. Not that I think in Mammon terms, but that's the bible name for the god of money. Everybody knows it. And everybody knows Mammon is not a benevolent god. The US of A is on the verge of finding out how fickle Mammon can be. I've spent my life using money as immediate gain for immediate need. Paycheck to paycheck, as they say. How else in the working class? I never worked for a corporation or a factory. Worked for the state of SC for a year and learned all I needed to know about that.

roadside sculpture in sparta

In retrospect I can see I've lived my life as close to person to person, individual to individual as I could, hanging on to that connection with humanity, the other people in my life. Taking a high powered job takes one away from the world of people who appeal to one's heart and forces one into a world of people that don't give a shit about you in any way you look at it, except maybe sexually, until the next one comes along. A world of pretend. A world of continuous climbing. They never get tired of it. It's like their emotional vibration is wound up so tight they can't live without that tension. It takes that degree of tension (stress) to keep the pretend going. It's for the paycheck, and sometimes for the neurosis. In my early job years I had a crappy job and after a couple weeks the boss asked me why I was working there, I said, The money. Response: If that's all, then why don't you leave. OK. It was a moment, like about all moments, when you can't say what you're thinking, I wanted to say, What? But I didn't care. The feeling was mutual, as it usually is. Because I won't work for a factory, system or government, it has kept my job opportunities humble. That's what I wanted for myself. I did not want to be high up over anybody. How else but in the laboring class. I came to the mountains to do hard work, to labor body and mind. I can't even estimate the number of post-holes I've dug with a hand-held post-hole digger and how many miles of barbed wire fence I've stretched. I've done some dangerous tractor commandeering, enough to teach me that when IT happens, it's now, not a ten thousandths of a second from now, but now. By the time you realize what happened, it's in the past. The second experience with IT learnt me. I wasn't going for strike three. End of working with a tractor.

barn windows in whitehead

I was something of a spiritual idealist diving into my own humanity that I'd not valued sufficiently before. I was going by a premise of my own that manual labor would work off the anger within that had been a problem all the way along, to the point that I finally caught on it was in me, not out there. It is said awareness is the first step toward healing, and my experience affirms it so much I take it for granted. To come back around, I think I'm coming into an awareness that it does not serve me, my understanding, my life, my reason for being, my mental health to go on paying so much attention to the fake human beings we call celebrities, both Hollywood and DC. It can be said of DC as David Hockney said of Hollywood  in his film, "Scratch the tinsel in Hollywood and you get brighter tinsel." He laughed from seeing in his mind's eye a simulcast slideshow of several examples of his meaning. Over a period of years in California he gradually drifted away from the tinsel, spending more time at home focusing on the people close to him. He took a step deeper within going back to Yorkshire over a period of three years to stay with his sister and live in the house and neighborhood he grew up in. Going home, you might say. Going within. I'm feeling that impulse to withdraw my attention from the fake people and focus it on the people around me, the people I live among, my friends. That's my "real world." In the first half of my life, I have to say I did not value others. In the second half it's in others that I find value. I learned true values in the mountains.

 

 

    


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CANNED LAUGHTER RAMBLE

This time we're in makes me think of Herman Melville's Moby Dick warning a country that did not read his book when it was new that a civil war brought on by white racism was at hand. It was. We're back there again, a century and a half later, our so-called leaders at odds with each other over Reaganism (another spelling for racism) that I hope to see coming to an end. I was hoping the Obama election would be the end of it. No. It's the continuation of it. Now this "sequester" bashing of our economy consciously by Reaganistas, taking it to that place Boner said in the recent past, "gave us 98% of what we wanted." The Reaganistas let the "sequester" happen because it's what they've been working toward for the last 30 years. They're like the Bush-Cheney-Rummy-Rice Junta that took power by judicial fiat in a Reagan court, they don't care about majority. They have learned how to screw us against our will and us like it. How can we get pregnant from a rape? Isn't it their belief that the trauma of rape shuts down the reproductive system? Why do we even let people like this take over our government? It's obviously not against our will. Stripping us down to police state and one peasant class, talk about equality, is easily done with the propaganda device television.

I don't know why it happened to me and nobody else that I can recall from childhood intent to live my adult life without television. Then, it was because the programming was generic and I didn't feel like generic satisfied me. Reading books I found my own particular entertainment to my liking that was not being seen simultaneously by however many million viewers. No Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha whenever a character says something. Even in my beginnings I did not like canned laughter. The whole concept of it freaks me out. A "studio audience" is instructed to laugh when the LAUGH light flashes on. Why? So we won't feel alone, so we'll feel like other people are watching with us. How discomforting. I suppose today the canned laughter is done by the director, or somebody, pushing a button in the control room. It gives me the creeps when I'm at somebody's house, a sitcom is on and canned laughter happens over and over. I look to see what's funny, and nothing is funny. I look at the level of intelligence of characters in sitcoms and I shudder that this is the art form of choice in the world I live in. I left television when I left parents. Over the years, people who can't stand it I don't watch tv have offered me their throw-away tvs when they buy new ones. I decline and it makes them mad.


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LIES AS PARTY LINE

      alexander liberman, omega


Anyone who can't help but see the world we live in (civilization) falling into chaos is laughing out loud this week at the republicans lining up behind junk science over rape now and women's reproductive organs as political agenda. Again. That's an automatic given. Junk science, absurdity and willful ignorance characterize the republican agenda every time. Every day on the news I think of what Gore Vidal said, "When the American people cannot recognize stupid, we're out of business." Half the voting population indicate over and over, every time a republican is elected, that we're out of business. Stupid is held up high as intelligence. When half the voting population votes republican, we're out of business. Not only does it go unnoticed that stupid has a negative value, who cares? Hearing the pols talking junk science as agenda this week reminds me of a statistic I found a year or so ago that only 10% of scientists are republican. They must be what's left of the pre-Reagan republicans unable to deny the scientific method.


Today I pulled into a parking spot next to a car with Virginia FoXX on the back bumper. I sighed a groan, willful ignorance out in the open. The woman attached to the car came to open the door and saw me, "HI TJ!" Eek, I thought, the second worst Reagan republican I know, the kind that makes my skin crawl the same way the two words der fuhrer make my skin crawl. Even worse, because this is the great American Democracy that Reagan republicans are systematically dismantling unto only the military left, police state. Enemies of the American people is what they are. That's the only way I can see it. Self-destruction is ultimately their preferred direction. OK by me, but why take all the rest of us with you? I appeal to the republicans to go ahead and self-destruct, get out of our world; please don't take us with you. Just go away. I fussed about inside the car, entering an address into the GPS device on the dash, focusing my attention on my new tech device. It's rude to interrupt somebody operating a new tech device. I waited for her to pull away before emerging from the safety of my mobile capsule. Phew.


I'm not like that with other people I know who are republicans. I can't help but see anyone who identifies himself/herself a post-Reagan republican as anything but a parrot. The republican party has become the same as the Baptist religion where you believe what you're told and don't think about it. Recite the verses---book, chapter and numbers to show you really understand. Polly wanna cracker, Ship ahoy! It's like to become a member you have to sign over whatever natural intelligence you might have to the Party Line. In the 1950s "Party Line" was reference to communist countries where they did the same thing; you talk party line to show your loyalty on the one hand and to stay out of trouble on the other. Now the republicans after half a century of McCarthyism have become what they hate. Same as the Baptists are becoming what they declare to hate. An ancient saying comes to mind: be careful what you hate because the hate draws it to you. Hate is a powerful attractive energy like love. This is my argument with my mother and her Baptist parrotry about me needing to focus more attention on Satan. I say, Go ahead, you do it for me. Lord have mercy.


The center doesn't hold any more. This, I suspect, is why people are clustering into hate groups everywhere, the republican party a half-the-population hate group, the people who say NO to the well-being of the working people and YES to the Wall St robber barons. I'm one of the working people who values the democracy republicans have been dismantling since Reagan's first day in office boasting he had a "mandate." 51% thanks to the cooperation of the Ayatollah bought with drug money from involvement in the Central American civil wars created by CIA. It has been increasing republican skulduggery, Kenneth Starr, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, low-down weasel attitudes toward life, worse and worse since Reagan, all referring back to Reagan, W declaring himself, "I'm the new Ronald Reagan." He was. It was the only truth I ever heard him speak. Maybe he thought it was a lie when he spoke it, but it came true. After Reagan, we said, It couldn't get worse. Then it did when the Reagan supreme court placed the loser in the winner's circle. The entire Reagan influence has come from the dark side, characterized by nothing but lies and deception, taking from the working people and giving to the Bank. It's what they do. What we do as human beings in this world defines our character. Lying and deception defines a character I want nothing to do with.


I don't have any problem with somebody lying from feeling threatened, which can be something like stealing food when you're down and out and hungry. As soon as I find somebody is one to lie all the time, I steer myself around them like a leaf floating on the surface of a creek's water flow around a rock and over a rock on its way to someplace else. In a lot of social interaction between people who don't know each other very well much lying will be going on, but it tends to be what I'm coming to think of as fantasy creation. Like driving a car that's just a little bit more expensive than you can afford. Like the identity of your life being the party you went to on Erroll Flynn's yacht when you looked good undressed. That kind of lie I'm cool with. It's something of a logjam when I think of all the directions continuous lies come to us from. It's to the point that now we have the internet which we collectively agree is not necessarily accurate information coming from anywhere. Sometimes it is, but we're never sure. It's the same with the serial fiction called the News. We're probably in pretty good collective agreement that the news is fiction. It's just another tv show, one with commercials for Cadillacs.


It's become fairly clear by now that this house of cards that is the international banking system in sync with the political systems based altogether in lies, in denial, in self-centered unregulated greed siphoning off the top and trickling down the crumbs from the table for the dogs. Kinda like in the French Revolution time, but this time it's all the Western World. The Red Dragon has been here and gone. Destruction is the nature of its wake. I hear a reggae song in my head by Burning Spear, Babylon will fall, repeated as the chorus. Babylon is falling. It has been falling since 1980. Republican agenda has been to advance the fall. Ralph Nader felt no guilt being instrumental in setting up the situation that gave the supreme court the opportunity to show it's true intent to destroy our democracy through the legal system.  He said, "The republicans will get us there first." There, being the total collapse from which we will have to pull ourselves together and set out on a constructive destination, because that negative republican destination took us to destruction. As Ronald Reagan promised he would do in his campaigning. It was a campaign promise he kept.


This and much more is why I am not a republican and have little tolerance for a Reagan republican. I know Babylon must fall and this is the time for it to fall. And Ralph Nader is right, the republicans are taking us there fastest. Like Nader, I'd rather see it sooner than later, while at the same time lament seeing the destruction of an intelligent form of government by massive ignorance. Der fuhrer destroyed Germany's government with ignorance. He was the same destructive energy as the dark cabal the republican party has aligned itself with. The fall is inevitable, it is prophesied, it is process of transition from one level of consciousness, getting the old one out of the way in the past like tearing down a building in a city to put up a new building. The old way doesn't work any more. It has calcified subject to human ignorance for about as long as a government can last in this time. A couple hundred years (1776 - 1980) for an attempt at democracy that got about as near to the ideal as the Soviets came to the communist ideal. I know that the Reagan republicans are doing us a favor tearing down the old democracy as it has to get out of the way for what is next. If the republicans have their way, it will be a formalization of the police state we already have. This is why zealous Reagan republicans give me the creeps. I know it is time for the destruction, but still I don't like watching it unfold. I should thank them, but I can't. I'm not that advanced.   


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TURNING POINT

           by tj worthington



So much is changing so fast now I'm seeing things happen that are new and might be a peephole into the future.Throughout my lifetime the word Capitalism has been the unmentionable, the word so sacred you dared not speak it in vain, which would be to speak it at all. It's been Capitalism (the good--the black horse) vs Communism (the evil--the red horse). And you don't dare say anything good about Communism, because it's the enemy of Capitalism. Really? Then you get the Middle East that is not an economic system, but a religion (death--the pale horse). Capitalism and Communism are religions too. Very serious religions, aggressive like Christendom, the kind that bear arms and kill poor people. What I'm seeing that is unusual is Capitalism being talked about on the news, on talk shows, at all. Capitalism is being questioned for its excesses. As an economic system, it has come to the Sheriff of Nottingham taking from the working people and giving to the rich. Reagan introduced this character of Capitalism as the new republican party in 1980. Sheriff of Nottingham crossed with Darth Vader became the way of the Reagan junta: take from the working people and kill the poor. The Reagan solution to AIDS: let em die. That can be documented.



The Reagan agenda has been enforced by republican zealots, shoved down our throats by the Bush, Cheney, Rummy and Rice administration, put into power by the Reagan court stuffed with people who shouldn't be allowed to practice law, who, for what they've done to the American people, would do well to be kept in a prison cell together for the rest of their lives. Scalia and Thomas I'm thinking of, in particular, people I believe a good case could be made for trying them in real court for treason. Some day the extent of the damage will be known that the Bush etal administration did to the American people, and when that is being assessed, the entire period from 1980 to present will be seen for what it was, capitalism's excesses cut loose. It was like giving fraternities freedom from prosecution, which was done long, long ago. The laws are not written for the privileged. They're about keeping the thick-fingered masses under control. The masses all over the world are so poor now, and the American standard of living taking such a sudden drop due to American corporations using Asian sweat shops, crisis appears inevitable, soon.



When American working class men, aka rednecks, the kind of fellers that drive pickups with a round NRA sticker in the lower left of the back window, and a bumper sticker that says Insured by .357 magnum, when they feel suckered and alienated, look out. Nam already burnt them a blister. These guys have arsenals at home. They have fought in Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan. They are people you do not fuck with. When they get mad and drunk too, you better stand back, because something's about to happen. They salve their wounds with liquor. These are the first people to feel the crunch when economies start to tank, the first ones out of work. Fighting with the old lady over money all the time, kids in the way whining because of money, daddy's lid's about to pop. His purpose in life is his family. When his wife and kids are threatened, the redneck man comes undone. He turns into a tiger and a wolf and whatever else it takes. In his mind's eye, Rambo. Sometimes, they kill themselves. Militias are everywhere. And these are some of the guys that are in them. A government does not want to alienate this aspect of its population, though it already has. Turn the Army against them and we have a civil war without end. When too many working class men cannot keep their families taken care of, something will happen. Tim McVeigh thought he was starting that revolution, but there were not yet enough who saw what he saw.



I hear on the news every once in awhile, kind of like in the back pages, a mention of the process Karl Marx articulated in his writing. This was also the time of Darwin's evolution. Marx was looking at social evolution scientifically. From today's standpoint, the communist countries, USSR, China, Cuba, Vietnam, are not really communist. I tend to think of them as militant socialism. According to the way Marx saw it, we have not had communism yet. Communism is the next system that follows capitalism. Capitalism must run its course, all the way to its excesses consuming itself. Coincidentally, as Limbaugh's own excesses are now consuming him. I'm seeing the Reaganista junta brought us to this place of bank failures, again. The only truth I ever heard W Bush speak was when he was running the first time, "I am the new Ronald Reagan." I thought: no shit. Another puppet representing the Texas Oil Cartel and the Southern California, Arizona John Birch maniacs, Charlton Heston one of them. Reagan cut loose the greed that turned the banks into loan sharks that bankrupted themselves and everybody else.



Death Valley Days is what I call the Reagan period from 1980 to now. The Reagan influence was false from the very beginning, basing its "vision" on novelist Ayn Rand. She wrote about capitalism at its greatest when the rich live underground and in remote places to keep themselves apart from the rabble. Like the Arkansas Waltons of Walmrat. It was about taking from the working people and giving to the rich. Reaganism tried to make bullshit walk, but it doesn't have feet. The attempt at using puppet politicians, people who have no minds of their own about anything, people who can largely be counted on to stick to script, if they can remember script, has come to the "frontrunners" in the ongoing series of republicans on tv and the news every day. The 3 stooges redux. When I listen to news, I turn the radio off when these so-called frontrunners start yammering words, words and more words utterly without meaning. Exquisite cocktail party speak, full of exaggerated fake conviction, signifying nothing.



What I'm watching to see if it turns out as I think it is headed, is the collapse of Reaganism simultaneous with the implosion of capitalism. I'm wrong about so much, I don't dare recommend you go by what I say. This is just one individual's way of connecting the dots. It's looking like Capitalism is in crisis. Reaganism is fading fast, the implosion of Limbaugh going with it. Marx said there would be revolution if the governments did not allow the change. The change is a natural flow, sequence of events, evolving from one economic system to the next. An attempt to stop it would be the same as an attempt to dam a river so no water passes beyond that point. A day will come when the pressure of water volume behind the dam would break it. I would prefer to see the transition gentle. It's kind of looking like we're leaving the holy of holies because it turned out to be a mortal god. According to Marx, real communism comes next in the social evolution as Marx outlined it. I'm hearing talk here and there about the fall of capitalism and evolving into what's next. It's the end of the world as we know it.

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