VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE IN THE NEWS

The news has become so objectionable with Ebola as something to fear, another in the never-ending list of fears we cannot live without, I can't listen anymore. It's either proving Obama is the cause of Ebola or proving he is not. Cops kill unarmed people across USA daily, yet we're expected to trust the police state and fear a disease that killed one. Fear Isel or Isis, whichever. Fear immigration of poor people of color. It's kind of Old Testament, fear the Lord thy God. I was raised in that paradigm, fear the Father, fear God, fear the Law, fear Church, fear parents, and be hysterically afraid of Satan, cause he's gonna getcha if ya don't be afraid enough. Love was never an issue. Of course we love, cause we're s'posed to. That's understood. But fear comes first in the s'posed-to list and love is last, down there with no consideration at all. The fundamentalism I grew up in, the same as is purported to be Christian now, was all about fear and nothing about love. Love might be misunderstood by the "common" people to be carnal, and that aint it. So we don't go there, while the preacher is screwing this one and that one, saying, Oh God, Oh God, Oh God. The nonsense quoted from fundamentalist politicians is so ridiculous, I can't believe he or she is so free of embarrassment. My estimation of politicians has hit rock bottom and is furiously drilling a hole to take it deeper. Confidence in a politician, a fundamentalist, a cop, is not possible in me anymore. These three have shown themselves incapable of rational thought, which I already knew, but denied, looking to allow for exceptions. Never found any. 

Remember a short time ago the preacher in Kansas screwing a teenage boy to cure him of his homosexuality? Remember the tv evangelist, Jerry Lee Lewis's first cousin, Jimmy Swaggart, he of crocodile tears on tv, who went to whores to peruse and sniff? Talk dirty to me, baby. To touch makes it a sin. Making the people two-fold more children for hell than they, themselves, is not a sin. Nor is hypocrisy. It's tradition. And to complicate the news further, it's election time. The Supremes recently ruled, predictably, lying in a political campaign legal. News? Really? Insurance against lawsuits for republicans. Now white man militias in cammo, carrying assault rifles, are talking of intimidating democrat voters at the polling places, black and tan people, women, profiles, anybody that looks like a Ay-Rab, or appears to be of an IQ above ten. Of course, white men would be free to pass, How y'doin, Bro? In my very most jaundiced thinking pre-1980, I'd have never guessed this would be the nature of the fix we're in during the course of time when everything that never worked became policy. Only thing the news is telling me: This world is not my home, I'm just a-passin through. I had no idea back in 1961 when I turned my attention away from television, how just that separation would separate me so definitively and so distantly from the world I live in. We who read books are the tiniest minority of all, unworthy of notice politically, unfit for consideration socially. I tell myself the absurdity "out there," in DC and Raleigh, is not my world. I don't believe in the entire system anymore. I have no confidence in Capitalism, no confidence in religion, no confidence in police state, no confidence in voting. The Supremes nipped what little confidence I had in voting. That the republican party goes to such ridiculous extremes to inhibit anti-republicans from voting, it makes me think there might be something to it.   

Before 1980, I voted against the worst of the candidates. Only found one to be for in my long history of voting, and he was crucified. Carter. Since 1980, I vote to be one digit that says, I want democracy. Voting has been my act of protest in police state. I know my vote  has no value outside myself. One party or the other, like Ralph Nader said of his direct role in turning the election over to Bush-Cheney, the losers, "the republicans will get us there first." Both parties are marionettes of the billionaires club. The democrat politicians like to pretend they're not in it for the money, we're here for you, while the republican campaign approach is fuck-all-y'all, and it works for them. The entire American political/economic system needs to break down entirely to restructure. As in construction, you want to put up a new building in the place of an old building, the old one must be taken down. Democracy wasn't real democracy before the word was used tongue-in-cheek, anyway. Considering the absence of value in my voting to the point that I fool myself in the act of voting, whatever the justification, I must vote. It is too important to the republican party that I not vote. Like I told the country club woman who said, I bet you voted for o-BA-ma, He's a sharp stick in the republican eye. When I take a moment to vote, it will be motivated only by an opportunity to be a sharp stick in the republican eye, albeit a minuscule grain of beach sand. I doubt the militias will actually appear at the polling sites, taking it for a propaganda sound-bite using the news to inhibit black people from making the effort. I don't even care anymore. I care about like I care who wins a football game. The game was amusing to see, but the outcome is the same, whoever wins, another game tomorrow night. Even though I see it for this is how an Empire crumbles, like reading the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, witnessing history in action, it continues to be distressing. Better to stop listening to the news than to start a Zoloft addiction.  

I wonder how republican politicians think up the stupid things they're saying, and it doesn't take long to find the answer. The Heritage Foundation. The politicians are scripted to appeal to the ignorant. Considering half the population is below average, they have 50% at the start. Strategy. I cannot participate in this belief system, can't listen to it anymore, don't even want to see pictures of the cast members. I've come to a place where I feel envy toward my friends who pay no attention to the news, don't vote, have never heard of Ted Cruz or Ann Coulter, unaware that democracy is over. At the same time, I'm grateful that I've followed our political system unto my own disillusionment. Disillusionment equals enlightenment. In my enlightenment, I look out the window and see my world, the world I live in. I look around this room and see the world I live in. The donkey meadow, the trees of autumn, a nice day with door open, recent paintings drying, Caterpillar outside lying in a patch of sunlight, the ground drying a little bit after five days and nights of rain. The fog that accompanied the rain made my world into a wonderland. Today, the sunlight makes my world into a wonderland, too. I can't see wasting my attention on the intentionally false when a fly just now flew into a spider web in the window's corner, the spider tying it up using Wonder Woman ropes, and the fly broke free. I am that fly. I broke free of the paralyzing power of the false. It has been amusing along the way, but amusing in a dark way. I am pulling my attention inward to my friends I care about who care about me. I will read in the life of van Gogh, paint when I feel it, write in my journal as blog, watch films from around the globe, read the columns of Chris Cox in his new book, The Way We Say Goodbye. The vacancy left by extraction of the false will fill up immediately like the hole left by my hand when I pull it from a bucket of water. I will vote because I believe it is important to vote as an American citizen, whether I believe in the political system or not, just to be a sharp stick in the republican eye.  

photos by tj worthington

*

BUOYED ON THE DENSE MARINE

anselm kiefer, the red sea

Day 8 of blogathon calls for thinking about a red ocean and thinking about a blue ocean. First thing that came to mind for red ocean was this painting by Anslem Kiefer, which I have laid eyes upon. It is disturbing. It's huge. A bathtub of blood. It takes my mind to writer, Jerzy Kosinski, who sliced his wrists in a bathtub when he felt like he had nothing more to say. As we say round here, More power to ya, feller. This is where an ocean of blood takes my mind. Kiefer's paintings had a great deal to say about post-Nazi Germany with the Nazi period looming enormous in the national consciousness. I see in a sea of blood the earth wounded by international corporate indifferent excess, earth's wrists cut, waiting for spirit to rise and go on. I see what the Reagan revolution did to American democracy. I see red ocean an ending. The ocean fished out by corporate fisheries all around the globe. With sonar as advanced as it is now, the last fish will be found. I see the international economic system indifferent to humanity and all other life forms. They are a bloody danger to us. We sit back in the recliner and watch the water turn red, thinking, Cool. Punctuated by commercials. I see a society so deeply and vigorously dedicated to the false in just about everything, I'm reminded of the 1981 quotation from CIA director Wm Casey, appointed first thing by Reagan, "We'll know our disinformation campaign is complete when everything the American people believe is false." The disinformation campaign was successful. Thirty-two years later, I see an ocean of blood. Y'all hadn't oughta sent me down this path. I can go to some dark places and not bat an eye.

 

 

I have a very powerful feeling I don't talk about, because I can't prove anything. I'm going by feeling, that I went out last time by way of a German concentration camp. First, a psychic told me; second I did a regression on my own and saw it. I suspect it has something to do with why I've spent a large part of my life with a major grudge against Germany, never even wanted to fly over the country. In 1954 I was in the 6th grade when Life magazine published the first photographs of the mounds of skeletal corpses, their lives wrecked and them killed by arrogant Christians. Those Christians were about like what has come forward in USA as Christian in our time. It's the reason church attendance in Europe is down to 10 percent, and in USA is shrinking fast. I have strong feelings about that time, shared by nobody around me, ever, except Jews I've known. In that time when the pictures were coming forward from the concentration camps, I became obsessed with the pictures. I remember a poem by Anthony Hecht, powerful poem, powerful as the bathtub of blood, of people digging their graves and being shot. I read that poem over and over, wallowed in it. I used free time on the destroyer in the Navy to read. I found the series of novels that Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone deBeauvoir wrote, each their own series of several long, intense, novels of the French Resistance during WW2. I was in resistance too, involuntarily incarcerated by a fascist government for being born male. I don't do well with authority. It's called ODD, Oppositional Defiance Disorder, a scientific way of saying Taurus. And then to be born and raised up in that very same Christian mind. We become what we hate. I had to experience Christendom from the inside because I hated it so much last time around. Of course I would reject it and run for my life. The red ocean.

 

     

 

Time now to think of a blue ocean. I recall the summer of 1960 with Navy Reserve taking a two week ride on a destroyer with missiles out of San Diego. It was my first time on the ocean. I love riding the ocean. I felt the ocean under me then as I feel the ground under my feet now. I love what Walt Whitman called, the dense marine, and Homer called, the wine dark sea. Seasickness never overtook my belly. In the very worst storms, bad storms, I loved it. I loved it. When belly would start to feel queasy, I'd say to myself, I'd pay for this! I have stood on the top level of the ship where the guys that waved flags operated, hanging onto the rail, watching the front of the ship dive underwater and the whole front end rise up completely out of the water and splash back under, sending a huge wave over the top of the whole ship each time. It gave the sensation the ship went underwater. I held onto that railing taking it in the face like a cowboy in a water rodeo. I loved it. In those two weeks out of San Diego, I saw the Pacific was a gorgeous blue as I would imagine a blue diamond to look. I loved the blue of the Pacific Ocean. I ignored the rules against gawking. Was spoken to a few times about it, but so what. Speaking of blue ocean, I have an unfinished project in the house I've been looking at getting to in the next few days. It is a chunk of cement I picked up at a building site that had somehow fallen to the ground. The print of the grass it landed on is the underside. If its mass were liquid, it might fill two coffee mugs. As it landed it did a slow splash, and folded into itself. I see ocean splashing on a rock. I soaked it in a bucket of aqua blue latex paint, half and half with water, for a week or so. It sits on the square pedestal of half a very old brick so black it looks like it had been in a fire. I'm wanting to take some white oil paint thin on a brush and touch the edges of places that look like spray, give it the suggestion of surf. A still splash.

 

 snoopy and Charlie brown contemplate blue ocean

 

Blue ocean. In those first two weeks on the ocean I was 18. The blue Pacific in my memory has the translucence of wine. Later, I rode the Atlantic, a green ocean. The Pacific Ocean I felt was a majestic unknown. Those first days of my life on the sea, I thought of whalers from before electricity, sailing ships crossing the ocean carrying passengers. pirates. A friend who had some psychic about her told me I was a pirate in the Thirteenth Century along the northern African coast, meaning Mediterranean and open sea. It may have something to do with why I only wanted to dress up as a pirate for Halloween, or an Indian for the same reason. May have had several seafaring lifetimes. I did have a need all through my early years to be on the ocean. I needed to ride the ocean. Not always, at least once. For old times sake. Lord have mercy, it's a sight how I love the ocean. I think of the Pacific and see Gauguin paintings of Tahiti, those beautiful things that look like the light is shining through them from behind. I see Japanese paintings of the Pacific in its beautiful blue. Mount Fuji in the distance. California surfers hanging ten with a great white under them in the wave they're riding. The way I see it, everything in the ocean is looking for something to eat, and my meaty substance amounts to fish bait. I'm a worm with bones instead of a hook. I stay out of the ocean. My mortal frame has evolved for land. When I used to wonder where was my place on earth, I'd start with land. The ocean is so vast, so immensely indifferent to ego. The infinite ocean of love. It's equally immense in its beauty, in its deep translucence. Like in a blue diamond, there is no accounting for where the blue comes from. It's the mysterious blue of distance. Earth, the blue pearl, glows blue seen from out in space. This is our home in the universe, the Blue Pearl.      

the dark spot is the shadow of a moon eclipse

 

*

 

TURNING AWAY FROM THE FALSE

 

Frequently, almost daily, on facebook I see people and organizations with agendas telling me to get angry because the ocean has become a sewer, because the bees are dying, because the trees that make oxygen are being mowed like grass, because we have been hoodwinked into accepting police state in place of democracy. As you know, it's an infinite list. I choose not to get angry. It's the same as cussing at the sky because I didn't get my way. A month or more ago, I resolved to pay less attention to the news and commentary, not as a New Year's resolution, but because I mean it. I hear the news now, but give it no more response than, "Of course." Stupid results from stupid decisions? Of course. I saw "eco warrior" a little bit ago pressing for action to stop polluting the oceans. Like I can stop international corporations from doing anything, or I can stop Japan from shooting whales, or I can stop Florida from legalizing murder, or I can stop China from invading Tibet sixty-some years ago, or I can stop racism in Russia, or I can get democracy back in America. It's not even a matter of powerlessness. That's only perceived. That mind only takes my power when I give it my power. My power is my attention. I withdraw my mind from the false. First thing I do when I want to clear my life of false influences, the news is the most obvious first deletion. I'm not talking about not hearing the news. I mean hearing it with such dispassion I don't even laugh. I hear about another law made by our corporate supreme court, another nail in the lid of democracy's coffin, I receive it the same as hearing Silvio Berlusconi was caught in Italy partaking of the privileges of power.  

 

?

 

 

I mentally embrace Obama because the racists hate him so much. I can tolerate looking at a picture of him about as long as I can tolerate a picture of Dick Cheney, a nanosecond. It's not the news stories themselves or the individuals involved as much as it is the entire belief system they advertise and embody. I'm not of that mind, so why pay attention to it? Why get angry about it? There is never anything in the realm of "the media" that is from happy instead of sorrow. When they do happy, it's false, like Duck Dynasty. I've been questioning myself over the last months for giving attention to the world of mass manipulation by way of media, even just watching it from afar. I can't realistically want anything for the world at large. I can be one of many praying for peace, which I believe works. It's just that the train is so long it takes a very long time for a habit of mind that goes all the way back to pre-civilization to slow its momentum toward stopping some time in the unforeseeable future. The world that the world of media focuses on is not my world. It is a members-only mind that I don't want to be a part of. It's about money, greed, power and the rest of the "seven deadly sins." By which I mean it is simply false, all of it. I don't care to have people like that in my own immediate world of people I know and interact with. So why should I pay attention to them because they have a spot in national news? It's only the false people media pays attention to. I am not attracted to people I think of as climbers, always wanting more money, groveling for it, kissing ass up the ladder. I stay away from those people in my everyday life, so why give the ones on the news my attention? Their world is not my world.

 

 

 

 

An image I saw a week or so ago stays with me symbolic of the false that is the whole media circus. American television pop star basketball egomaniac, Dennis Rodman, drunk, sings Happy Birthday to Kim Jong Un of North Korea, who watches with contempt in his eyes. Nothing but fakery going on. What can I do? What's the point of even having an opinion? Opinions are as nothing as a dream of sugarplum fairies. The best I know to do when I see something like Rodman and Un is laugh and let it go. Beavis and Butthead. A cartoon in everyday life. Dysfunctional people famous for their dysfunction. What do I care? I know someone who puts up links on facebook, several a day, to every sorrowful cause in the world. I think she must google something like sorrowful causes. I knew plenty of sorrow was going around the earth, but nothing like the catalog she's found. Girls and circumcision in Africa, Walmart sweatshops in Asia, are only the most obvious ones to come to mind. How righteous it has become to be for gay marriage; now, for raising the minimum wage; next, for marijuana legalization. It's like the Fifties beatnik slang, Be there or be square, forefingers of both hands indicating a square. If you're not into legalizing this month's pop cause, you're nowhere, definitely uncool. Where did that come from? This pop zeal for getting everybody to think alike. It's new in American conformity. Now evil is being attributed to racists. Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty cannot hold my attention for a minute on his tv show or on the news. What do I care what he said? What do I care what's the latest you-gotta-or-you're-square belief? That's for the people who voluntarily want to pay attention. Whatever it's form of media, it comes with an on/off switch. I have a choice. I don't have to turn it on. My car has an excellent motor I would rather listen to than anything available on the radio, unless Diane Rehm is interviewing Ralph Stanley again.  I listen to the monitor kerosene heater's fan at home. It sounds like crickets in the distance. Or maybe it's the field of crickets between my ears.

 

 

 

None of that is my world. My world is the people I know, the people I interact with, people I see in passing, Whitehead, the grocery store, coffee shop, drugstore, highways and the county line for the outside boundary. That line defines my world. My part of that world is Waterfall Road. In my world, I was driving a tenth of a mile from the house and saw a red-tail hawk cross the road in front of me, sailing like an arrow, as they do. This particular red-tail is Justin's hunting friend. It visits him when he is in his deer stand. It will glide to a branch unnaturally close to him, and sit. He said within a few minutes a deer would walk into his arena. The hawk sat on the branch and watched him shoot the deer. It did not fly away. This has happened so many times with Justin that he has come to see the hawk his hunting companion. The hawk sits on the telephone wire that spans the donkey meadow, scanning for mice. The donkeys and the calf graze the hay, their shadows on the ground beside them. A family of red squirrels live in a white pine behind the house, away from the birdfeeders. The red squirrels use one feeder and a family of gray squirrels from the woods across the road go to the other. They evidently have an agreement worked out. The squirrels crawl around the squirrel guards. The guards only stop the chipmunks. If they could get into the bird feeders, that would be it. The squirrels don't monopolize the feeders. They allow the birds some too. I throw a good bit on the ground to occupy the squirrels so they don't need the feeders. This is my peaceable kingdom. This is my world. I'm at peace with everyone I know inside myself. I don't need that world of mass manipulation to bring me down. The world that is my home has a lot of happy in it.   

 

 

 

 

*