WOMEN OPENING THE WAY

mary cassatt

I had the good fortune to see the women's soccer, futball, game of America and Japan. They had a tremendous tv audience because the Daytona race was put on hold for rain and wet track. I was at Justin's house to see the race. He switched to the women's game. It was a dynamic game from the start. The women on the American team held our attention for their skill and strength. He changed channels back to the race from time to time to see how track drying was progressing. Evidently, almost everyone who wanted to see the race watched the whole football game. The race did not start til the football game was over. It was like a divine plan. Nascar racing has become the most watched sport on tv, so it was a sizeable television audience watching the game. It would be mostly white men watching, people who care nothing for soccer, especially women's soccer. They had a huge audience. That they held the audience is what matters. Going by people I've talked with who usually watch the race, everybody was enthusiastic about the game, came away with an interest in the game. The women showed such skill and control they impressed everyone who saw them. And they won too. 

mary cassatt

Soccer has recently in years entered the American school system without much attention. I feel like this game opened soccer to an American audience in such a way that it will generate more interest in the game. Maybe teenage boys kicking a ball around will be the next thing to annoy adults after skateboards. I felt like the game with the Japanese was the beginning of an American interest in the game. It has been trying to take hold here for a few decades, but never went much past kids playing it. The kids are grown up now, more kids are playing it, the fan base for the game is growing. Had it not rained at Daytona, the futball game would have been one of the great sports moments without so great a number of viewers. People I've talked with, both men and women, were impressed, feeling a degree of excitement over the unexpected all the way around. A good day for woman pride. I felt like it was a breakthrough into the future of respect for women. I felt a rush of quiet pride run through the women I know. Americans have been focused on the particularly American sports of baseball, football and basketball. Through soccer, futball, we have a sport that all the rest of the world plays. 

mary cassatt

Hillary Clinton is front and center again, advocating for women's rights as she pursues her own political ambition. And we have Bernie Sanders challenging the ruling class and Wall Street, an advocate for the people who work for a living and have no access to lobbyists or representatives. Our representatives in NC obey corporate interests. Sanders is so relentlessly making a case for the working people, I can't help but think of him a paid assassin's target, his private plane going down with no indication in the black box what happened. If he does not survive the campaign run, he will make a great martyr, cause for the ones who want him dead to let him live and go to work on destroying his name and credibility. The likelihood of martyrdom kept Bob Marley alive in Jamaica. Peter Tosh did not have the insurance of a threat of martyrdom and failed to make it. To JFKs assassins he was more of a threat alive than a martyr. I'd suspect Bernie would become a pop culture martyr on tshirts that say I AM BERNIE. I'd like to see him make it. The republican opposition would be dead set against him for being a socialist, and especially for challenging their puppeteers. At the same time they'd be enchanted that he's white, albeit a Jew, at last white. 

mary cassatt

I'm with Bernie. He's a sharp stick in the republican eye. I'm with Obama, too, for the same reason. Recalling a time in the coffee shop talking with a woman I've known to speak to for several years. She said, "I'm a con-SER-vative!" I said, "I'm a SO-cialist!" She said, "I bet you voted for o-BA-ma." I said, "Sure did. He's a sharp stick in the republican eye." Hillary will be a sharp stick in the republican eye, as well. Hillary's influence on liberating and inspiring young women will keep republicans writhing in paroxysms for decades to come. If Hillary and Bernie could run together, they'd be sharp sticks in both republican eyes. The people invested in intolerance could flare into a blinding rage. It could set off a right-wing armed rebellion too. The republican right has become the only terrorist threat in America, could possibly trigger a reaction, martial law. It could get complicated real fast. I tell myself, whatever the problem, it has to play itself out. It will play itself out. I tell myself, observe from afar and stay out of the way of stray bullets. For our society to get on to the next step, we'll have to address our racism, educate ourselves out of it. As long as blame is all that's going on, nothing will be solved. 

mary cassatt by mary cassatt

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THE DISINFORMATION CLOWN BUS

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

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

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

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

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PAULA DEEN EASY TARGET

 

Hearing now about a retired general being "targeted." I heard the news announcer say the general, whose name I don't remember and don't care enough to look up, has been made cognizant that he is now targeted. When I heard, "target," it rang the bell for the word of the day. Targeting is what our government is doing to American citizens now. The media targets people, goes after them in a character assassination way until they are defeated. Republicans have been targeting throughout my lifetime. When one is destroyed, then somebody else gets targeted. Paula Deen was targeted and is being destroyed over an issue of freedom of speech, not racism. Her freedom of speech has been radically denied. She used a key word. The only thing I can make of this media feeding frenzy over the word nigger is we have no freedom of speech anymore. I could date this Paula Deen character assassination as the final announcement that freedom of speech no longer applies in America. We've always known that. I knew it in my teen years back in the Fifties. So did everybody I knew. We didn't know it articulately or politically. It was just in the air understood. Then, communism was the big threat to national security. Next it was terrorism and now it's the word nigger. Any kind of expressed sympathy with Russia was automatically suspect in the Fifties and Sixties. Progressive magazines were always under threat from the right. Now we have a long list of key words computer programs are set to find in any given text. The news about surveillance of the American people has been news all my life.

I'm sensing that I see the beginnings of a backlash. Women of the South Unite! Stand Up With Paula. It is the South that is being targeted in this offense as well as women. Paula Deen is a name and a face. A target. I saw that a publisher of her cookbook is withdrawing it. I saw that amazon is selling her new cookbook like crazy now. Good. I want to see Paula Deen come out of this better than she went into it. The prayers of the women of the South will make a difference. The only thing I have to say to Yankee media is, Leave the South alone; you don't understand anything about the South, don't intend to and cannot be taught. That's like telling a republican to leave off the obsession with debunking science. The media people are laughing at her and having a great time because she breaks down so well on camera and she doesn't really mean it, all that shit they do to targets. I call them the evil ones. Paula Deen is a charming Southern woman. It doesn't mean she has no access to an inner hard core business woman who has had to teach herself how to stand up to a man's face and straighten him out. She's a Southern woman. She's on trial, too, for not conforming to the Yankee code, Yankee political correctness. They'll have a good time with Paula, bashing the South, the Confederacy, women, freedom of speech. They'll probably bring abortion and creationism into the mix before the momentum has exhausted itself and the other story this one is covering up as a smokescreen is settled or forgotten.

One way I can see a measure of change in retrospect is to remember the quotation from CIA director, Wm Casey, Reagan appointee, 1981, "We'll know our disinformation campaign is complete when everything the American people believe is false." Was this not a statement of purpose? And here we are. Corporate media reports what they're told from the top down. Editorials are what they're told to be from the top down. Like tv wrestling. Censored on the inside. No need for government censorship. Our media has no connection to the people of the United States of America because they've all turned into corporate propaganda organs, like television networks. In 1981 when this remark was made by Casey, we knew something dark was up with the Reagan Junta. But it didn't start there. Nixon created a name for himself, Tricky Dick, that simply identified him a republican. He was part of Joe McCarthy's mob with Roy Cohn in the early 1950s, commie hunters, character assassins. The republicans were then as they are today. I'm glad to be able in this time to report the karma of these targeting assassins of the Fifties. Joe McCarthy drank himself to death. Roy Cohn died of AIDS. Nixon went out in historical shame.

photo by ty butler

In the 1950s people were targeted for character assassination by calling them communists. Today Paula Deen is a targeted drone strike out of the blue for exercising freedom of speech in America. Thirty-two years after the statement of purpose by Director Casey, Paula Deen has had her right to freedom of speech excessively violated, tragically violated, herself reviled as a racist, OMG, held for a pariah on all the networks, falsely charged on all counts. I say falsely, because it all comes under freedom of speech. For the world to see, a target. At the Old Boys Club they're raising their drinks to a toast. This is why the rest of the world has come to see Americans insane. I can find no convincing argument to counter it. We've reached the place that everything coming to us through the corporate media is false. This is what characterizes us as Americans in today's international world. A good time to stay at home, get a blankie, crawl under it and go to sleep. What can I do when I wake up? Read Andre Gide, then watch the video of My Dinner With Andre and have some good Ethiopian coffee. That's as good a way as I can think of to start a day.

 

 

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MEANDERING RAMBLE THAT STARTS THERE AND ENDS HERE

red, tj worthington

Talking with my friend Carole this morning, we noted how tired we both are of the word racism, how universal it is, and now Glen Beck calling Obama a racist and Limbaugh losing advertisers. If Boner were not disingenuous in everything he said, I'd laugh at him all the harder now that he wants to pay the US debt to China and stop paying federal employees until the debt is paid. He says that is "sound" reasoning. He gets a government paycheck too, but exceptions are made for the law makers. Maybe it is sound from the point of view of somebody who hates 99% of the American people. The one percent he is working for is not you and me. We're the ones he is working against. It's another stab at Social Security. A pattern I've seen too often is the republican method of chipping away at our democracy, social security, and the constitution, like woodpeckers, getting them out of the way of the corporatocracy: it always works. The democrats let them and never reverse the police state legislation. The "sequester" played into the republican hand. It hit the people who work for a living hard, the intent. Systematically, the republican lock-step defiance of the American people uses the more ignorant (dangerous) half of the population to help in the crusade against the educated, as in dictatorial regimes. First target of authoritarians is predictably the educated (liberals), starting with the intellectuals, the very people a society needs for self-awareness, equally important in a society as in an individual.

pine swamp and glade valley from air bellows, tj worthington

Hitler took the German people's progress and turned it against them, set them back half a century. And I don't mean to be beating the dead horse of comparisons to Hitler too obvious to mention, esp that he was none too brite. Germany in the 1930s was in the foreground of modern art, until the war der Fuhrer lock-step marched the German people into, lured by promises of wealth and power. Artist Max Beckmann and several other German artists of the time exiled themselves to escape the anti-human machine their country had become over money and security. The same happened in the time of ww1. It was the exiles (draft dodgers) who kept the continuum of German art going. In warrior cultures artists are exiles at home, so it is natural for an artist to leave war making to the warrior people that create war because they want war. Artists do not want war nor lean toward racism or nationalism. The most committed artists have no choice but to exile themselves. Max Ernst another one from the ww2 period with Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Andre Breton and plenty of others were run out of Paris by the German invasion, these to America. European artists in the time of ww2 spread over the world like dandelion seed-parachutes sailing on the wind, like Tibetan monks since 1957.

max ernst

Technologically advanced countries periodically run their artists and intellectuals off so the serious game of war can be played at the expense of as many people as possible, population control, enriching wealth the purpose. Weapons manufacturing is the biggest business on earth. The wars need to keep on going to keep the business going. The whole earth is covered with the weaponry of war, from Africa where they use machine guns mounted on the back of Nissan pickups and machetes, to Asian genocides, to American destruction of economies and lives in poverty stricken, defenseless countries without allies. I feel for the retired dictator in Guatemala sentenced for the rest of his life in prison for taking the American lure to destroy his own country from within to make it easier prey for corporate rape, and to make himself some money in the tradition of Latin American dictators. It went flip-flop on him. He was turned upon by the CIA, like Noriega and Pinochet. I doubt he'll be allowed to write a memoir. CIA is even more fickle than people with Money. Fickle behavior I take for absence of the most basic level of moral integrity. This is why I have never wanted money. I've never wanted the illusion of power or wealth, because moral integrity had, for some cluster of reasons, been more important to me in my youth. I don't mean to say in the absolute to the point of preaching, but practical, everyday-life forgiveness for slipping on the tightwire. It's not the straight line that is the Way, anyway. The Way is meandering like a mountain creek and a river, and farther along, the delta. I'm in my delta phase, wildly meandering slow-motion mind. I love it.

joan miro

Am I not a nutcase? Hmm. This could be an opening line in a Pinter play. I'm glad my time on earth overlapped Harold Pinter's time on earth. If I had any brains, I'd be reading Pinter's plays again, seeing them in new light, forty years later, including the experience of seeing a few on stage and film. There is much I'd like to re-read at this time of the life. The times I have tried it, I've been disappointed more than enlightened. Much of the time, it's I liked that? John Berryman's Dream Songs sing to me now. Before, they were obscure. They're still obscure, but now I can ride the flow in them like in music. I can hear the song. It's (distantly) like listening to John Lee Hooker, "One night I was layin down, I heard my papa tell mama, let that boy boogie woogie, it's in him, it's got to come out." I started Moby Dick once to re-read and was bored right away. I saved the big two-volume edition of Proust for my old age. Now that I'm here, I don't want to read it. What do I care about 19th Century pretentious French society? Maybe in a film by Andrzej Wajda, but not to sit and read when I could be enjoying so much more, like Ralph Stanley's memoir, or The Killing of Crazy Horse, or much else I feel like reading now, the Nation magazine, Gide's Journals, or The Way Things Go, Lucas Carpenter's new book of poems. .

Salvador dali

 

 

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ELECTION DAY 2012: TRUE OR FALSE

Election day today, I stopped by the Whitehead voting place at the Whitehead Community Center that once was the Whitehead School. I've given this vote much thought, not about who to vote for, but whether or not to vote. I see voting since the so-called Patriot Act, the constitution for police state, a sham used to keep we-the-powerless-meat-people believing we still have democracy, to keep the American Fantasy full of hot air. I came to see voting as a social act in the world of people I live among who continue to believe we have democracy, and I see myself wanting democracy back, so I vote to be one digit that says I want democracy. The thought that set me into action more than any other was thinking if I don't vote I've not cancelled a republican vote, meaning I give the republicans one vote I might have cancelled. You see, I'm not a democrat or libertarian or communist or anything organized. I'm a single-digit anti-republican. Democrats are not anti-republican enough to suit me. I vote democrat because they are the only opposition. A vote for a libertarian is a vote for a republican by not adding one more to the count against the republicans.

The election results are coming in now. In an hour or less the West Coast voting establishments will be closed. I don't want to hear this state and that state and the building of the drama. I'll wait til after midnight and see what they're saying. Then wait til morning to get the news that the republicans are calling on the anti-democracy supreme court to nullify the election results and make the losers the winners again. It's what they packed the court with "wingnuts" for. There will have to be some kind of republican chicanery before the counting is over. I saw Mitch McConnell on 60 Minutes Sunday, not because I was interested to hear what he had to say that was totally predictable, but because I wanted to see him talk. I wanted to see his face when he lied and only lied. I saw a tight-lipped smart-mouth pudgy little brat. I looked at him as someone I was meeting the first time, thinking if he were face-to-face talking to me at the coffee shop, I wouldn't believe a word he said and I'd be feeling to see if my billfold was still in my pocket. Another republican parrot. Willful ignorance out in the open, paraded and bragged upon. The image about Fox News above that I found on facebook tells it best of all the "memes" I've seen that are anti-republican, many of them awfully funny.

Yesterday on YouTube I saw that blond airhead "commentator" from Fox talking with Bill Maher. I don't ever see her, because she talks republican parrotry that is too predictable to be entertaining or interesting in any way. She was retarded. She reminded me of the woman I heard on a call to the 911 phone on YouTube wanting the highway department to move the "deer crossing" signs to places with less traffic. Ann Coulter is her name. I had to go to YouTube and look up the video I saw to get her name. Pathetic where intelligence is concerned. She might have passed a lot of tests and done well in school as a robot student, but it certainly shows she never learned a thing about thinking for oneself. She's the blond parrot. She looked like a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader gone to seed, and struck me the female counterpart of Rush Limbaugh, propagandists to the gullible. That the press takes Romney seriously and half the population does too, brings to mind every time I think about it, Gore Vidal saying, "When Americans don't recognized stupid, we're out of business." Yes, we are indeed out of business. My concern is that it looks more like Americans do recognize stupid. Stupid is what they want in their representatives, at least half of them. Very odd. Half a century of television.

I'm seeing in this year's electioneering process the republican side with no apparent agenda, anything that comes up, no concern about being called continually on lies, blatant obvious lies. Commentators and the television/radio reporters act like Romney is actually speaking with substance, though they never talk about the substance. In the first "debate" Romney trumped Obama with ignorance, the Karl Rove trump card, absence of substance. It rattled Obama like it was intended by the master propagandist to do. The only reason I can find for why the republicans stood by this obvious serial liar Romney is because he was a white man. Liar identified his character a white man, verifying his allegiance to his skin color. The only republican agenda was get-the-nigger. It went completely unsaid throughout the campaign, and understood by all in the white racist party. In their panic at the point where people of color outnumber white people from here on, I'm seeing White Man prefers racism to democracy. The South turned democracy aside after Emancipation because the black folks outnumbered the white folks. A serious threat. White folks aint having no nigras lording it over them. It aint gonna happen in America. Democracy is not that important. As we have seen.

I refuse to let myself get wound up with worry and hope for something I have no control over. I have seen that willful ignorance is what it takes to vote republican. This year's was the most interesting republican strategy I've ever seen. Obstruction by lies and using lies to catch the other off guard by ambush was the only strategy used. Lies and stupid statements were adhered to all the way along the campaign. Because they are lies and stupid. Lies and stupid made a great strategy against a man whose mind republicans can't out-smart, but Karl Rove knew how to trip him up and keep him off balance as much as possible by surprise attacks of stupid and lies. Romney was the perfect puppet to lie and talk stupid. It showed me that the people siding with these open liars, republicans, do recognize stupid when they see it. Stupid is evidently what they want. Gore Vidal thought Americans didn't want stupid, but it really looks like at least half of them actively want it. Even if Romney doesn't win, it's a really bad show that whatever percentage of votes go to Romney is too high a percentage for comfort. Considering however many people voted republican, we have that many people evidently wanting stupid with a passion. It's alarming even to have more than a handful.


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